zmimon's comments

So how do you explain the iPhone? The smart phone market was well and truly catered for when Apple entered there. Apple's primary method of business is to price themselves in a tier above everyone else but to provide a (perceived or real) value proposition that makes people buy it anyway.

Point taken. I would say that satisfying point 3 relieves the need to satisfy point 2 (if I can replace it for less than $50 then I can handle the possibility of coffee getting poured on it). So paper works.

It seems to me that the right approach should always have a significant random element, not as a deterrent, but as a check on how well the non-random component is working. The random part will examine in depth to find anything that should have been found in the non-random part but wasn't (say, body searches to find large metal objects making it through the x-ray screen at the airport). Without that you would be blind to defects in the system.

I think the tablet has plenty of uses, but it's the flaws that hold it back. We actually have a tablet at home and it was very useful on the couch and in various other roles. However there are a couple of features that are a must for such a device that I can't see being able to be provided easily:

1. I must be able to drop it from 6ft onto a hard surface and do zero damage

2. I must be able to pour a whole cup of coffee on it with zero ill effect

3. It must be able to be stolen with a cost to me of less than $50

These are the killer problems for me that make it an unsuitable thing for 'casual' use. If I have to treat it with kid gloves, watch it like a hawk whenever I put it down in public, assume a posture of paranoia about food and drink while I'm around it .... then it's just a failure at its main purpose.

Do you have evidence that they are?

I suspect that libraries are filling important niches today that are extremely hard to replace with technology, but their use for some purposes such as repositories for reference information is all but obsolete.

We use our local library intensely - but only to borrow about 20 books a week for our 2 year old. Otherwise I would not have gone there in 10 years.

Nice read, but this is a bit shameless:

>In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in.

Convenient, huh? Open just happens to win except for the part that strategically keeping closed makes Google gazillions of dollars. And claiming search is highly competitive? Google has more than 4 x the market share of their nearest competitor.

The nice thing about Google Calendar is it supports iCal and various other standard protocols to get your calendar out. You can even import it to Windows Calendar. So you are not limited to relying on Google for updates, just set up synching with any service or application that supports iCal and configure that application to give you alerts.

> From what I've read, the new updates default to share with "everyone" only if you have NOT modified your privacy settings in the past.

I have set all my privacy settings to very private settings in the past and my defaults are all to share with everyone. So at least for me, this is NOT the case.

> Most, but not all. When I went through, there was only one option up at the top that was not set to "Friends Only"

I'm staring at the screen in question right now. I hate Facebook and have set it to not let anybody see anything in the past. NOW THE DEFAULTS FOR ALL THE TOP ITEMS ARE SET TO SHARE WITH EVERYONE. ie. Family and Relationships, Work and Education, Posts I Create (includes photos, etc.) and About Me are all set to share with everyone.

I find it disgusting.

50% of users selecting something other than defaults tells me that Facebook did act against the vast majority of it's users wishes and choose default settings that were not appropriate. Considering a substantial percentage would have just clicked through you probably have 2/3 of people NOT wanting the changes they made. How is that ethical?

> I would argue (without data I admit) that the desire for privacy is actually caused by the desire to avoid punishment, ridicule and/or social exclusion. If these could be avoided then I don't believe there would be much of a 'need' for privacy.

I think you deconstruct things far too much. If you removed all those things from society right now people would still "need" privacy because we have been programmed by thousands or millions of years of evolution to need it. We don't need it on a rational basis (although there are plenty of rational arguments one can make for needing it), we need it because our brains evolved that way and we're stuck with it.

If you find a culture that has no privacy and no compensatory substitute for it then I'll readily grant that people in that society don't need privacy and we can qualify "basic human need" to something slightly more constrained. But it won't change the fact that we are stuck in a situation where the vast majority of human beings DO need privacy and it is wrong to take it away from them.

Seems rather silly to say not to build a java application. Surely what matters is what the application does. If your idea will fail purely because of being implemented in Java then I think it must have some other rather serious issues with it. I can only think here he means some specific unstated context, but it sounds rather naive and ignorant as written.

> I believe that the whole notion of 'privacy' is actually a learned social construct

I, and many others, including Schneier think you are wrong. Privacy is a basic human need, a fundamental part of our psychology that is as deeply entrenched as all our other basic needs and emotions. We are not whole, happy, fulfilled human beings without it. I guess one can debate whether this fits the definition of "inherent" or not. But I don't think it's necessary to pursue it beyond this point because it doesn't really matter - once something is a basic human need, taking it away from them is wrong.

Too bad they aren't shipping until January. I would definitely buy one as a present if I knew I could get it for Christmas.

Yes. You can do nearly all this stuff just by hooking into MS's published interfaces. I've done many pieces of it myself, but seeing it tied together like this so comprehensively is amazing.

> I can write a FB app and have it up in a jiffy, that's just not the case with Apple

If FB doesn't like your app they'll have it down in a jiffy too. It's not nearly so clear cut as you make out. Their review process is just reactive instead of front-loaded.

He was much more insightful than that. He acknowledged that Linux itself makes it hard for those vendors to make polished apps by changing and reinventing every damned thing every few years.

Can you say for sure that a good suite of functional tests wouldn't have saved your bacon as well? And they might have been much easier to write and also catch a whole lot broader set of problems at the same time. The post isn't advocating having NO tests. It's not even saying that unit tests don't work. Just that they're not necessarily the best value in every situation.

Yeah, nobody else has mentioned price. Vista is / was expensive! Like half a new computer expensive. Why would anyone buy it for an old PC at that price? Win 7 is too expensive as well. MS just doesn't seem to care about retail sales at all, let alone upgrade. As far as I can tell they actually price products to kill that market and force everyone into OEM sales (where they have no obligations for support).

> certifications are a base level of competence for a job

Unfortunately some of the certified people I've met have been so genuinely awful that I don't think you can even claim that. I tend to be with the article author on this one - people tend to get certified because they are unable to compete in other ways and want to bolster their resume.