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True, and they did it for OWA. When they realized the consequences of what they had done, they stopped IE development for several years.

It's Dieter Rams, and he's been a big inspiration to a lot of designers (including Jonathan Ive). He actually said "only a few companies", and then mentioned Apple.

There are other companies, but few in the computer / consumer electronics business.

I think the key is that most companies treat design as an afterthought, or an expense. It's completely irrelevant to most users, but look at most PC laptops - they have a nice, glossy lid and front bezel. But the bottom cover seems like a minefield of stickers, covers, fan openings and screws. There is no design there. The design job ended with the obvious, visible parts.

Again, completely irrelevant to most users as they will never look at the bottom cover. But it speaks a lot about how these companies think about design - and why Apple is still the only company with a unibody laptop design.

I think this goes to show just how much thought has been put into small stuff like this. For instance, there is no need for the the sleep indicator to indicate anything when it's off - simply because you know the laptop is alive when the screen is on (the indicator lights up solid white when the screen turns off). However, the battery indicator button combined with a stripe of lights show a function - the level of battery capacity left - so they need to be visible even when they're off.

With the old Powerbooks and MacBook Pros, the hinges on the top of the lid would extend magnetically just before the lid closed. These are the small gems that makes you smile when you're interested in product design.

I haven't found minimalism to impact usability myself, but there's clearly some instances where they have given the user a task of figuring someting out. For instance, a friend of mine never figured out that the top button on his iPhone locked the screen until I told him.

Don't worry, there's still plenty of features that most people don't care about that techies can have mile long threads about.

  - You can't change the battery
  - It doesn't support 3D glasses and 4K cinema resolution
  - No 20MP camera with flash and replacable lens
  - There is no noticeable lag when running applications in the background, so it's actually not "true multitasking". You can't run 100 apps in the background.
  - Can't install apps without jailbreak (or dev license)
  - Doesn't have a nanoSD card
  - No USB port

I think a slightly better comparison is if most other car makers had really lousy automatic transmissions that used 30% of the fuel, and VW waited to announce a car with an automatic transmission until they had one that worked really, really well and was just as efficient as a manual transmission.

All I can say is that I feel sorry for you in the US. In Norway, I get 16MBit DSL at my cottage (yes, half an hours walk from the nearest dirt road). We don't even have any net neutrality laws, and there are only two nationwide DSL providers.

Which is why Safari IS actually multitasking. You can leave it, launch another app, go back to it and be right back where you are. Sometimes Safari doesn't quit and you're back in a millisecond. Other times the OS closes the browser in the background, and you will have to wait a few seconds while Safari reloads the page you were visiting.

It's surprising how few people realize that the built-in apps (Mail, iPod, SMS etc) run perfectly in the background. The lack of multitasking is limited to 3rd party apps, which helps explain why most iPhone users never complain too much about the lack of real multitasking.

I'm not in the US so I can't recommend any particular provider. http://www.voip-info.org/ has a lot of information about both providers and equipment.

- For hosting the PBX yourself without learning Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, I can recommend Askozia PBX, which is based on m0n0wall: http://www.askozia.com/

I've also used FreePBX-based systems like TrixBox CE, which are more full-featured and more customizable, but might take more effort to upgrade.

- For reliable faxing, make sure your VoIP provider supports the T.38 protocol and get an ATA (analogue adapter) that supports it. You can then set up T.38 passthrough in your PBX.

- For equipment, I'd recommend going with one of the "known" brands. I've used Linksys SPA9xx and Snom phones, but read forums to see what people recommend for the PBX you choose. Keep in mind that a lot of the buttons and features on the phone might not work "out of the box", depending on the PBX you choose. I'd stay away from no-name brands unless you have tried them yourself or have very good recommendations.

Yep. I think so. When you get big enough not to care, you inevitably stop caring. At some point, you become evil, and the smartest guys usually don't want to work for the evil company.

That being said, I this is a good thing - other companies may be forced to out-innovate Apple and pay as much attention to detail as they do, and maybe these companies will attract all the talent they need to make it happen.

Exactly right. Life is in fact devoid of meaning except for the meaning you choose to apply to it yourself. This includes playing computer games, spending time on facebook, climbing mountains or a career ladder and having a wife, children and a happy dog.

It's up to you to decide. Go climb a mountain, or go play WoW. In my view the guy's not full of it, he only wants people to be aware of, and make conscious decisions about how they spend their. Some people do, but many people don't. Including me, which is why I'm here at HN writing this comment. :)

He's actually written quite a bit about programming, but over the years he's (naturally) shifted to writing more about the business of software development and how to run a software business. He's clearly opinionated, but his opinions are still valuable.

Fantastically, offensively wrong? Care to give an example? I think a lot of the "he's wrong" reactions stem from knee-jerk reactions. People often miss the point that what he's writing about comes form his own experience. It might not be universally true, but he will still have valid points worthy of consideration.

Then again, people writing angry comments are rarely the kind of people who will take the time to reflect on what they read.

Ah, I didn't know that Proc.new != proc/lambda :)

They both return Proc objects though, so I wonder if it is possible to "convert" them.

>> lambda {} == proc {} => true

Can you shed some light on the difference? I always thought that lambda is simply a synonym for proc - has this changed in more recent versions?

There is no special block or lambda type in Ruby, AFAIK there is just proc and method. The difference is simple, a method is a proc that will be evaluated in the context of its object.

I don't know why you're having a problem passing around foo = lambda {|x,y,z| x+y+z }.

I admit that having to explicitly call a proc using .call or .[] is less pretty than the python equivalent, but it's hardly a big problem.

Having used both Python and Ruby extensively I've concluded that both languages are very nice and usable. They both have their warts and shortcomings, but after Python added closures I really haven't had many "darn, I hate [Ruby|Python] because of shortcoming X".

Edit: As noted elsewhere, there IS in fact a difference between Proc.new and lambda/proc, Though I've personally never used Proc.new.

I think you can trust that any quality problems are quickly identified long before any products leave the factory. Read up on the MicroSD failure blog post on the same blog for an interesting story.

I would guess that a lot of engineers DO care about money. In fact, i would think that MOST do, because most become engineers in order to make a living, and nothing more.

The problem is, I think that in engineering and other skilled work, the ones that are interested in their area of work regardless of whether they get paid well or not tend to be more skilled and do a better job. The same can be said for airline pilots (to put it simply, don't become an airline pilot if you want a safe job with a good salary, become an airline pilot if you LOVE flying).

So for a company looking to hire people, if a candidate will accept more interesting work for a lower salary, that is a good indicator that they CARE about the work they do. Someone who is only more interested in the salary and less interested in what they do _might_ be the ones that are happy with doing the bare minimums.

The other side of the problem is that most people think they are above average intelligent, and therefore most people will feel underpaid if they are not paid above average.

If you really love your job and you can do it by running your own business, that's often the best option. As an employee you are only making other people rich in exchange for some economic stability.

There's nothing about REST that requires you do use GETs for everything, quite the opposite in fact (read up on how the Rails REST API is designed for some inspiration).

Then again, unless you want to make a given function/input combination into a resource, you might be better of with a less RESTy approach.