Elepsis

I'm not sure why Zune keeps coming up as an example in these threads. It got rebranded to Xbox Music, but all the servers are still up and anyone who subscribed still has all their music.

An earlier Microsoft DRM that was used by a bunch of services (PlaysForSure) was indeed shut down, but it's not the same thing as Zune.

IAC has basically stopped treating its name as an acronym and now just calls itself IAC, but it originally stood for InterActiveCorp.

Sorry, I was unclear. You're right that they do claim that the impact of drinking is negative, but I don't think they made any actual argument in favor of that viewpoint.

It's worth noting that even if there's no health benefit to regular moderate drinking, there's no argument made here that there's necessarily harm from regular moderate drinking.

So maybe the takeaway is simply that if you choose to drink moderately, don't pat yourself on the back.

OrderAhead is a YC company (Winter 2011): http://blog.ycombinator.com/orderahead-yc-w11-nabs-23m-seed-...

And yes, I can only imagine they're going to get sued very, very hard.

Did you by chance have the opportunity to read his post about doing business in Japan late last year? http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

It's not specific to the questions you ask, but it might answer some of them.

Yep, totally missed that. Thanks for the catch.

They're giving a whole two days of notice to their customers before shutting down--customers who might be on precisely the kind of trip right now where they're relying on their service. I think that might be an impressive new low.

Just curious--I thought all three platforms were committed to essentially matching each other's prices. Has that not been true in your experience? Or is it something specific that's driving up your perceived price of Azure versus the other options?

None of the links you just shared have any mention of Twitter moving away from Scala, which is presumably the question.

As a loyal user of Opera 5-12 (and a grudging user of the new Opera, which I find marginally faster/less full of surprises than Chrome), I love that the article reads like a list of old Opera 12 features that I miss.

At the same time, I'm deeply worried that they believe they have to rebuild everything, including the mail client, to get to their first official release. Opera had a long pattern of rough but innovative releases that took a while to stabilize, and I can't help but believe that with them emphasizing feature completeness first, it's going to be rough for quite some time.

Given the high bar set by modern browsers I'm not sure users--power users especially--will put up with the associated quirks long enough for Vivaldi to gain traction.

The problem is that it's not uncommon for a dev/designer/etc. to not understand some of the reasoning for why a PM is requesting changes be made. We all snicker at the incompetent PM who just wants to "make their mark" on a project, but very often the demand that may appear that way is motivated by entirely legitimate concerns. (And yes, the PM should bring the dev along with them, etc.) If you "add a duck" and the PM ends up missing the legitimate concerns as a result, everyone loses.

The add-a-duck attitude fundamentally assumes that the dev/designer knows what's best for the end product and the customer, and while that happens some of the time, the reason the PM role exists in the first place is because that's not always true. :)

Your 93% market number is perhaps accurate in the entirely hypothetical world where most Android devices actually get swift upgrades to new versions, but not in reality.

OneNote is free, cross platform, syncs pretty well and keeps a local cache of all your notes in any of the desktop versions, which means you can independently back them up. And because of its history as a desktop app first, a backed up notebook can be opened in the app without caring about cloud state at all.

(disclaimer: I work at Microsoft but not on OneNote.)

Pretty much every ad aired this year for the Surface Pro 3 compares it directly to a MacBook Air, not to an iPad. (Literally--the MacBook is on camera alongside the Surface Pro in many of these ads.)

To the extent that you perceive the Surface advertised as iPad++, you're probably thinking more of the original Surface ads one to two years ago (which focused on the regular Surface, which did in fact ship with a free copy of Office).

And that is a choice they get to make because it's their project. They also don't accept mitten donations as far as I know. Are you going to collect mittens from people on their behalf and email every committer to receive their mittens?

TweetDeck falls into the "bought and released a totally redone but worse app under the same name" bucket.

This is actually part of a broader and encouraging trend of non-shitty terms of use and privacy policies. Microsoft and Google actually also write in relatively readable, plain English.

Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-us/windowsservi... (unfortunately the page itself is a bit of an eyesore, though.)

Google - http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

Honestly, it's even simpler than that: it's the default domain in the email address dropdown when you go to sign up for Outlook.com/Hotmail now. The fraudsters aren't bothering to change the value in the dropdown, and they tend to create new email accounts frequently, so you'll see whatever the current domain is overrepresented.

It's worth pointing out that it doesn't leave people with a free migration path, but it is absolutely easy. Windows 7 and 8 both support "anytime upgrade" functionality, where you can pretty trivially upgrade from Home/Home Premium to a higher-level edition of Windows without needing to reinstall anything or move data--just as long as you pay for the more expensive edition.

I wish the article went more in depth on potential causes.

I suspect the dominant factor is the expectations of the largest industries in the city, but that's only mentioned for military towns.

To give an example: as a Seattleite, I was initially surprised to see how much earlier the average starting time is compared to San Francisco or San Jose. However, I think the relatively early start times at, say, Boeing are an effective offset to the later start times at Microsoft and Amazon, and this likely accounts for most of the difference.

The original article points out that Jayden was especially popular among minorities in New York, so I doubt that this particular trend is particularly closely tied to race.

Worth pointing out to American readers that paracetamol is known in the U.S. as acetaminophen, the active ingredient in (most notably) Tylenol.

Most sites that implement infinite scrolling effectively "unload" content that's far enough off the screen, much like they delay-load content that's below your scroll area. The net memory usage shouldn't be dramatically worse.

I really love my experience with Schwab as well, and have been with them for a long time. Last I checked, the major restriction on their checking account is that you also need to open an investment account, but neither one has a minimum deposit so the overhead isn't actually super substantial.

There are some interesting feature gaps in what they let you do on the site, that occasionally mean you might have to send them a physical letter or fax (!), but on the whole I'm pretty content with the functionality there as well.

Zune Pass transparently got rebranded to Xbox Music and still works just fine.

The common Hacker News definition of "innovative" is "company I like."

Wow, the end of an era.

Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.

I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while. But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.

Given that 1 Ruble is worth about $0.03 at current exchange rates, your 2 cents are actually more like 6 cents.

Read up on the "most favored nation" clause Apple demanded from the publishers.