FredFredrickson

After looking over the link, I agree. In most of these cases, it's not really comparing the words, but their usage.

For example, when you say something is "fast" you can only mean that its speed is high. If you say it's "stuck fast", fast is being used as a modifier (? my grammar lingo is rusty) of "stuck", and not as the actual descriptor.

I don't know how they pulled it off, but I like that they did. Things like this make the music industry more flexible over time, and is only better for us consumers.

I agree though - I had the same thing happen to me when I logged in today (some music that I bought for others on CD is now "mine" in my cloud library). I also got a bunch more stuff that I had bought for myself though, so overall, I'm happy with it.

This is one of the points I always try to make with other tools... if you can do what you want with it, and it suits the needs of your project, you don't need to "move on" to something else.

Sure, it's good to keep your mind open, investigate other possibilities, and keep your eyes forward... but if you're able to draw the pictures you want and like, it doesn't matter if you're using crayons or oil paints.

I might be wrong about this, but I imagine that even early on, it was also much cheaper to make CD's than cassettes.

Codeacademy is a great site... it makes it fun to brush up on the basics or try out a new language. It helped me learn some Javascript recently, and I really enjoyed the course.

I'd love to see them do something on OAuth / Twitter. I find that stuff very confusing.

Haha, well I'm no industrial designer, so who knows what it ought to look like... but if it looks like this image, you can be sure I won't ever have one sitting next to my TV.

I'm not really interested at this point anyway, but an ugly hardware design virtually seals the deal.

Maybe I'm just dense, but how did Zynga damage Facebook's reputation concerning games? Aren't they really considered (by the general public) one of the premiere game developers for Facebook?

No, you're not the only one. It's awful.

If Valve makes their new platform the only way to play Half-Life 3... that might be the first game in the series that I'll have to skip. I hate to say that, because I don't doubt that it will be an awesome game, but it's just not enough to sell me on a whole new gaming platform.

Shadowmint touched on what I meant by that - other companies make creative software which doesn't directly compete with Adobe's lineup, but which costs 2x - 4x more.

As someone who uses this software and occasionally tries the alternatives, I would say that there isn't really anything better out there than Adobe software. But it's also quite affordable when you put it in perspective with how much you can do with it over time.

That's absolutely it. All it takes is one or two decent jobs and you've paid for your Creative Suite. It's a lot of money overall, but not as much as it appears when you're new to it all.

It's a little regrettable that Adobe maintains so much control over the market, but as a creative professional myself, I can't find much that can actually compete with their software, especially for the price.

Of course they didn't. Mostly because they just wanted to have the story "first", and secondly because most of them either don't have editors / fact-checkers or don't care about them.

It's the price we pay for getting news as fast as we do.

Totally agree.

Also, while we're at it, can we stop referring to these high-density displays by the idiotic marketing term, "Retina"?

Well, like I said, I agree with you, in that I think that the traditional form of work / retirement is out-dated and wrong, at least for me. Life is too short to waste it doing something you dislike, only to try to carve out some small enjoyment at the end, when you might not be physically able to do much (or you might not be around at all!).

As for the rest, I don't think that you are required to work crummy jobs just so you can go out and have experiences in person. And I don't think that personal experiences are all life is about either.

I just think it's important to remember that for all the great things the internet provides us, it is no more a replacement for experiences than television is. It's just one way, among many, to do things. And not the only way.

I guess I see what you mean, and I agree that the world (especially regarding work) has changed / is changing a lot because of the internet. I also believe that the traditional model of working the same job for 40 years and then retiring is pretty much dead for current and future generations.

That said, I don't quite understand how the internet supplies one with the type of enjoyment s/he would get from retirement. Retirement, in the traditional sense, means having some kind of freedom from financial burdens, for many, the ability to travel the world and see things, and time to do other things besides work.

The internet provides many kinds of information and entertainment, but I would never say that it's a substitute for traditional retirement. If you're stuck working a crappy job flipping burgers and spending the rest of your time doing things online, there's nothing wrong with that, but you're going to have to go a long way to convince me that this is a viable alternative to being free from work, able to travel where I want, etc.

I spent high school and college playing video games as well, and I've spent a lot of time online in my life (we got the internet back ~1996), but I see the internet as more of another thing among many things to do, and not really as the only thing there is to do. At the risk of sounding like an old man (I'm 31), I would say, don't underestimate the value of real-world experiences. Watching a YouTube video of a concert, for example, is nothing compared to being there... and even with all the crazy VR tech that will be here in the near future (or even now), we're still a long way away from replacing real experiences with virtual ones.

I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't be content with how things are though. If you like to spend time online doing things, and that's all you want to do, then by all means - have at it. Just adding my own two cents worth here. :)

How many were repeats (deleted from device, then re-downloaded later)? How many were updates to existing apps (or did they count those)?

These numbers are meant to impress people who know nothing about numbers, in my opinion.

Whether you're a thief or not, is it harmful merely to wonder if you might be? I believe not.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. I agree that there are a few small issues with this re-design, but I don't see how Windows 8's "massive UX problems" manifest themselves here. Are you saying that just because the buttons / "tiles" in this design are more chunky than things that you're used to?

I don't understand this logic entirely. If your site is unavailable due to normal, unavoidable probabilities in reasonable uptime, why does it matter if the CDN is hosting your scripts or not? Your site isn't going to be around to access them.

This is exactly my thought on the matter. It's cool that larger sites will host these scripts for you, but why should I make my site dependent on another just for a negligible improvement in speed / caching efficiency?

My feeling is that if you're going to make your site's uptime dependent on another, at least make it for something worthwhile that you can't host yourself, either because it's too demanding or too proprietary.

Capitalism doesn't put an expiration date on companies though. Capitalism, in theory, is always there to provide new life for those who put the work in to make it happen.

Whether or not the current "renaissance" that's happening at Microsoft will be enough for that is hard to say... but to say that they are more-or-less finished and should just close up shop and disband is foolish.

The app argument used to be more of a "thing", but they've made great strides over the years to get competitive there, and as a WP7 user, it's just about at the point where I can feel comfortable recommending it to people without feeling any regrets.

The OS itself has always been pretty great though, in my opinion - they took a lot of lessons from what Apple and Google did and used those to build a platform that does a lot of stuff right out of the box.

I think your comment about the iPhone 4 + case is funny. I see people carrying around these ridiculous brightly colored foamy brick-ish things that are iPhones in cases, and I wonder why they would put up with that. It doesn't matter how beautiful and lightweight the device inside the case is if it can never come out!

Having not used Windows 8 extensively, I can't say much about it, but I have to disagree about Windows Phone. I've been using WP7 for about two years now, and I really like it.

The OS actually has a lot of features built-in that you have to resort to separate apps for on other devices. And after some use, I don't find the icons any more mysterious than those found elsewhere... you can almost always pull the menu up to reveal the textual name for the icons if you need to know what they do, however.

From what I've seen, Windows 8 certainly needs some polish, just like Windows Phone 7 did when it was first released. I don't have any doubts that both products will continue to mature into things that are better, though.

Microsoft's biggest problem, in my opinion, isn't that they do a bad job - it's that they are too quick to bail out if things don't go their way right out of the gate. If they stick with the platforms they have in the market now, I think consumers will pick them up and enjoy them over time.

His point was that the motion of the video doesn't need to look like it's happening in person for the film to be entertaining. Just like the story doesn't have to explain why there are elves, trolls, etc. for you to accept their presence and move on. It's an artistic decision.

It reminds me of video games, in a way. GPU's are constantly being improved, and we get closer and closer to producing real-time photo-realistic graphics every day... and yet there is still plenty of room for games like Super Mario or Team Fortress 2, which don't want or need to look realistic to be fun.

Steam / Big Picture will never be "must-have" for living room use until they can make it compelling and easy for people to use in that environment.

But that goes against the whole reason why they are popular in the first place - the fact that they are primarily a PC game store, and their customers like playing games with the devices typically attached to their computers, like mouse and keyboard.

Newell has a store that is essentially competing with and which will probably feel pressure from the existence of a built-in Windows store. It's a pretty easy logical step to take to assume that he is mostly against it because of these things, and not because of some ephemeral high-mindedness about how things ought to be done morally, which he hasn't exhibited in any other way.

Seems like a janky way to do things, to be honest.

Achievements for productivity software? Seriously.

While I didn't think exactly of Ion Storm, this photo did remind me a bit of the extravagance of that generation of "rock star" developers. Not saying that out of any malice or jealousy of Notch or Mojang - just being honest about my gut, knee-jerk response.

I don't work with these types of people, so I might sound ignorant here, but it seems like glasses like these could add a lot of "noise" to the world of an autistic or disabled adult.

"And that's a damn shame, because given Google's talent, it'll nevertheless be a engineering feat of epic proportion."

You know, I have respect for the people Google employs - they are certainly a very talented bunch. But what has Google ever engineered, at least physically, that has set your expectations so high?