WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

grbalaffa's comments

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: Four UK men arrested over Silk Road links

Yeah there is more than a little bit of selection bias going on here.

What percentage of criminals are dumb enough to get noticed and/or caught? Well, we don't know how many don't get noticed, so let's call it zero. Bam, 100% get noticed/caught!

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: If It's Important, Don't Hack It

Google+ deserves to wither and die because of the BS they have pulled.

When I'm forced to create a Google+ account just to use some of the basic features of the corporate Google Apps account which my company already paid for, it becomes quite clear there is no one at Google who gives a damn about customers. They are just trying to inflate their numbers at all possible costs.

It will be a great day when companies are finally forced to stop playing the "number of signups" game and start playing the "number of people who actually like our service and use it willingly" game instead (and no, we're not there yet; not even close).

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: Android is for startups

At least I gave an example. "Many things" are not just easier, but "far" easier? Like what? I've got plenty more examples, but I'd really like to hear about these "many" things which are "far" easier than in iOS.

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: Android is for startups

All this talk about process, but not a word about the quality of the SDK itself. Android is quite frankly still very far behind when it comes to really basic things. Here's just one example: iOS has had easy support for custom fonts in native UI elements since the early days, meanwhile here is the situation on Android:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2973270/using-a-custom-ty...

(Yes, the thread was started in 2010, but scroll to the bottom to see more recent comments -- things have scarcely gotten any better.)

Anyone who has actually deployed a non-trivial app on both Android and iOS knows quite well which one is the "better" development environment.

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: Obama, tech executives met to discuss surveillance

Don't worry, they will work it so that there is a very expensive and labyrinthine process for privacy "compliance" for companies operating in the US which will purely by coincidence be so expensive and convoluted that only the big companies will be able to afford it. Just to reiterate, this will be 100% accidental and will in no way reflect an intent on the part of the established players to create a de-facto barrier to entry for potential competitors. You know you can trust them because the meeting was behind closed doors and both they and the president refused to comment on it.

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: Did Frank Lloyd Wright create America's greatest office?

I've actually found the opposite to be the case. I'm much more apt to concentrate and strive to build something great when I'm trapped in a run-down, somewhat distraction-free environment. If I'm in a really nice space, I often spend time just enjoying and admiring the space rather than working.

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: The San Francisco Rent Explosion

Even though it was two years ago, we're still feeling the after effects. There is a considerable lag time between approving new construction and actually getting some built. One bad year (such as 2011) can cause lasting pain for many years afterwards. 2011 still feels very much like the present.

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: Why Is Netflix Secretly Cropping Movies?

HBO and the other "premium" cable channels also do this. Not every single time, but much of the time. Try watching any of the Lord of the Rings movies on HBO or Cinemax for example. They're all 16:9, even though they were 2.39:1 "scope" in the theater.[1]

Forcing everything to be 16:9 has become the new "pan and scan", and it's actually been around for a while.

[1] Some of the time a movie has been filmed in a format which contained extra space on the negative, such as "Super 35", and in some cases the 16:9 might actually be showing more of the image rather than less, but it's very hit-and-miss and requires a custom transfer and master of the movie (which HBO has been known to do in at least some cases).

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: Linux 3.11 Officially Named "Linux For Workgroups"

Both Mac and Windows may lagged behind the various unixes at the time in terms of WAN technologies (such as TCP/IP), but the Mac had fantastic LAN capabilities in the form of AppleTalk. Auto-discoverability and auto-setup was a dream. Just give your Mac a name, enable sharing, and you were off and running! Anyone on the network could find your stuff and share with you. All done with human-readable names and very simple GUI tools.

There was even good cross-subnet capabilities in the form of AppleTalk "zones", although you had to have routers which could speak AppleTalk in order for it to work. But when it did work, man was it nice! Far ahead of Windows at the time, and still superior in many ways when it came to ease of use vs. the zeroconf stuff of today.

grbalaffa | 12 years ago | on: Sequoia Leads $8.5M Investment in Instacart

> The stores themselves will just roll out their own competing services.

Safeway already has their own online ordering & delivery service, however it doesn't allow you to bundle items from other (possibly competing) stores. Instacart allows you to pick (for example) 3 items from Safeway, 2 items from Trader Joe's, 1 item from Costco, and 6 items from Target ... all in the same delivery. It would take a joint venture / agreement among all the major retail chains to make that happen with their own services. Instacart's model is actually safer than it seems at first glance.

page 1
more