Elepsis

Totally agree that they should be reserving handles on the major services. In addition, it doesn't look like they've registered the .net and .org versions of the domains, which also seems like a no-brainer.

Is your argument that Google should also be taken to court by the Department of Justice and submit to one of the largest antitrust settlements in American history?

Keep in mind that in this case "funding" also equals pre-orders for the actual pens at half the price they intend to eventually sell them for.

How wide would the adoption of Mac OS X be without bundled sales? Yes, Windows as sold to consumers is largely driven by new PC purchases, but I don't think that is in any way indicative of its success or lack thereof, just of how consumers think of computers.

It's interesting because I had the exact same initial reaction: uh-oh, did they change anything about my blog or group?

Personally, I almost never interact with posterous through the dashboard, but this move makes it seem that I'm either very much in the minority of their user base, or that they're no longer interested in serving my use case. Possibly both.

The net result is that where I would likely have used them without hesitation for another project I was planning on before these changes, now I feel like I need to look around and explore alternatives (including possibly reverting to a self-hosted WordPress blog).

Yes, but in this case (at least for IE) the plugin has been installed all the way back since Office 2003. The custom protocol handler would only work in newer versions of Office.

As always, tradeoffs abound.

When you open Office documents from SkyDrive or Sharepoint, the goal is to open the remote copy, not to download it. This enables such niceties as letting multiple people edit the document at the same time, etc. while still using the full Office clients.

1. There is no magical flag that allows all mail sent by anyone at Microsoft to hit your Hotmail inbox: that could easily be abused, and for many users it would defy their expectations. I've sent your post along to the people responsible for spam filtering in Hotmail, though, to take a look at.

2. It looks like you were using Chrome to try to open a document in the OneNote client? For better or worse, you have to have a plugin to do that today; there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC.

The plugin we have gets installed with Office 2010 and works on IE and Firefox. It does not currently work in Chrome, which is probably why you saw the issue.

That's not to say that the metapoint is lost on all of the folks who work on these features, and we try very hard to make flows work with no edge cases. Even for a company like Microsoft shipping often requires tough compromises, though, and unfortunately you hit some of the rough edges in our experience we haven't yet been able to address.

(Disclaimer: If it wasn't clear already, I work on some things related to this flow.)

Isn't the whole problem with patent trolls that defensive patents don't protect you against them? For better or worse, the current system is largely based around mutually assured destruction. The patent trolls don't make any products, so they don't actually have anything to lose from the assertion of these defensive patents against them.

It seems like what Gruber is actually saying is that the patents Google is violating are legitimate, invented and/or owned by companies that are actively making products based on those patents. The fact that some of those companies (Apple, for instance) may choose to then enforce their intellectual rights doesn't make them patent trolls; having your company's sole business be suing people over violations of patents you purchase makes a company a patent troll.

It isn't inconsistent to be opposed to patent trolls without being opposed to patents in general.

Jacking up prices isn't the only potentially-negative consequence of driving its competitors out of business, nor is it a requirement to be considered anti-competitive. The history of Internet Explorer is an interesting illustration of both.

Yeah, I understand the frustration, but it's pretty clear that this customer service rep has nothing to do with the approval process of apps and is simply reflecting the current state of affairs.

It sounds like that approval process is pretty messed up at the moment, though. Two months without word seems to be slower than Apple at its worst, and the fact that this app's developers even tried to reach out to regular customer support instead of developer relations implies some serious disorganization.

Consider giving it another shot (in Chrome, even). Hotmail has gotten a _lot_ faster in the past couple of months.

The justification for doing the work mentioned in the article doesn't make any sense, either. They make it sound like users had to go and download a "Netflix Plugin" with their current system and then deal with updates, when in fact Silverlight already works exactly like they describe in the article, with the control getting retrieved from their servers each time (unless it's cached and there's no newer version available).

Is it really a problem to pay for the software you run when you make more than $1M/year in revenue?

If you seriously don't have a Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL account, but do have a Google account, you really ought to take a step out of Google's back pocket and sign up for one of the other huge services on the internet.

Sony is perhaps the front runner in this, given its large movie studio and music label, but it's not clear that owning these businesses has been a great boon for Sony's electronics or software.

One can also look at the not-that-long-ago "merger" of AOL with Time Warner as another example of a media/tech marriage where the supposed synergy was vastly exaggerated.

I'm not sure I see any reason for another major tech company to leap in to buying huge legacy businesses given the lessons learned by their competitors.

Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that sounds good in theory but leads to a pretty awful experience in practice.

Here's an example for you: You are a private user on the social network. You post on a friend's wall (or equivalent).

Can that friend's other friends see your post? If not, that's going to make it seem like there's no activity on your network. Can that friend's other friends request to add you as a friend? If not, that's going to prevent people from making new friends. But if they can, then you've confirmed your existence on the network every time you've done anything.

It turns out that if you want to be a private person, you don't get a lot of value out of your social network, and the social network doesn't get a lot of value out of you. Your best option is to not join a network at all--and, indeed, if you target your network to users who mainly want privacy, you'll find that is what will happen.

I'm not sure why people assume that Microsoft only makes money on Windows and Office. There were 11 separate businesses within Microsoft that brought in a billion dollars or more in revenue last year: http://techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billion-d...

As most people not on a conspiracy kick guessed: a bug.

This seems like a good moment to remind people that you can flag individual comments by clicking on 'link' to go to their self page.

This would certainly explain the market share of IE in general, but IE 7, 8 and 9 each support ActiveX as well, so I can't imagine that alone is a factor.

NBC actually does broadcast Sunday Night Football on its site for free, at surprisingly decent quality. I do wonder what allows NBC to do that but prevents other broadcasts from being made available, though.

That's incredibly polished for a weekend project. That said, I'm quite confused by the choice of icons on the right of the "Tour" page. The calendar doesn't scream "Test Users" to me, nor do any of the other icons seem to be tied to what they're meant to be describing.

It's really not that hard to find examples of this. Chrome recently broke rounded corners, and they're about to break h.264 video. But it's certainly more fun to attack Microsoft in every post.

Perhaps more experienced Wikipedians can correct me, but my understanding is that the vote for deletion isn't actually a vote. At the end of the day, a Wikipedia admin decides based on the arguments presented, not the number of opinions in either direction.

You mean "a little search" to find a tool that's only available in the +1 version of Chrome? I don't think you should have to trade off stability for the ability to get a warning (or save state) before you nuke your browser.

I wish this article had been submitted under the original headline, as it much better describes the argument.

That said, I was surprised at the contents of the article. When the author described the "Internet Dissent Tax," I don't think he's describing anything new. Controversial materials have always been more costly and challenging to publish--witness Lolita, which didn't find an American publisher for years.

Rather, the dissent tax I find more interesting is the one brought about by 4chan and company--where loosely organized groups of internet users show their general disagreement with the actions of a company by attacking their servers.

It seems like companies doing business on the internet who take some action that could be unpopular with some of the internet's "defenders" must now take into account the "tax" they will pay for that decision, by having to deal with the attacks that could arise. One has to think that Paypal and MasterCard will be taking this risk into consideration in the future.

That itself is an interesting new social dynamic that I don't think we've really seen before, since it goes well beyond boycotts or sit-ins by affecting thousands of "regular" users, not just the companies.

The Amazon button was also the most appealing to me, because it looks the most like my internal notion of what a "Buy now" button should be. I'm so trained by my experience on Amazon that that's what I click to make the purchase that it's the natural place I want to click to buy--even on a different site.

It seems like some of the responses here are missing the point. Sure, we get to play Angry Birds the whole way on a flight to Australia. But countless people in areas where electricity is still hard to come by suddenly gain the ability to use cell phones and computers, while only needing to charge them infrequently.

Given the impact of mobile devices we've seen in Africa so far, this sort of innovation would have a huge impact.

That said, I don't agree that Bill Gates is necessarily the best person to go solve this problem, nor that this would be an obviously more optimal area for him to invest in than those he's chosen so far.