easyfrag

I'm not sure about Sony's Vaio line but a lot of computing/electronic manufacturers will build specific models for various chain stores, not sure why they do this but I guess it's to head off comparison shopping by consumers.

Apple, of course, refuses to play by the rules of its retailing partners.

I have always referred to them as "Spin Factories", they provide the content that are used in PR and media to spin issues in a manner that is favorable to the sponsor(s).

My problem with /. was that the stories were not voted in on by the community but rather by a select few curators who added editorial content in the headlines.

And they're still using the Bill Gates Borg icon?

I often thought it was Schmidt who needed the supervision, if only when speaking about privacy concerns.

so we're back to plugins, what was the point of the <video> tag again?

I suspected the search results I was getting over the past few months were of a lesser quality but thought it was just an aberration.

Has anyone written a good post-mortem of the Digg v4 debacle yet? An old fashioned expose built on interviews with the people involved, I reckon there's a lot of lessons around building and maintaining a community in there. These "Top X reasons this happened" posts can not do this subject justice.

This is not a problem for the customers who just want their door open.

It's probably because Apple sees itself as a luxury brand and thus its products are deserving of engraving. This is all about product positioning, even if you don't avail of the engraving, the fact that it is offered tells you something about it: that people love this brand/product so much that they choose engrave their names and messages on them.

That and Steve probably likes to give personalized gifts....

I really think the iPad threw a small monkey-wrench into Google's plans for both Android and Chrome OS. When they were both announced there was a clear delineation between mobile OS and Desktop OS; the iPad has blurred the line somewhat though it appears that the keyboard is also what ditinguishes which apple devices get the mobile OS (iPad) from those with the desktop OS (MacBook Air).

Interestingly Microsoft, Apple, and Google all have the same "problem": they each have 2 operating systems when it appears there is an ongoing convergence between "mobile" devices and "desktop" devices.

Just as interesting to me is how the maple leaf on the vehicle came to signal high quality, a notion that then went viral to the point that people tattoo themselves with it.

What a potentially interesting feature: switching countries to see what the same tax amount (converted to local currency) buys in other countries

Personally for me as a user it's because I don't trust Facebook.

I also think it is a bad idea to outsource your authentication mechanism to a single private entity. What happens if your user deletes their account? What if Facebook thinks your site exhibits suspicious behavior and decides to not send along its users' authentication? Probably won't happen but if it does it could be a world of hurt, much like PayPal.

I agree with this, I've worked in health care and programmers have nothing on physicians when it comes to arrogance. I don't know any programmers who would coach a physician on the proper way to design a course of treatment...

I think we need a better definition of innovation, how many releases of systems per period doesn't really cut it. Is a slightly faster clock cycle innovative?

but it does bring a machine to its knees compared to the Microsoft Security Essentials product

Heard an episode of CBC Radio's Ideas show on Hydrogen that had this fascinating aside (I'm paraphrasing):

During the 1970's oil shock buildings in Toronto turned out their lights to save energy, however many buildings had electricity from Hydro-electric resources and were heated via oil-fired generators. The net result was that turning off the lights made the buildings colder and it took more oil energy to heat them up again than if the lights were left on.

This is Apple, no cut&paste on the original iPhone, no USB on iPad. I'm guessing the user experience wasn't what they wanted either with the performance of the playback, or with the speed of the download/streaming of 1080p from the store.

Search is one thing but what I'm uncomfortable with is how much of my personal stuff is stored on Google, stuff like mail, rss feeds (and the current read/unread state), calendars, docs, etc. I was a bit uncomfortable before and the Buzz fiasco and the recent uproar over Net Neutrality hasn't exactly eased my mind.

I would like to run my own servers for the above functionality but don't want the overhead of managing machines and backups. I could be interested in a package of products that runs the software in the cloud and configured to use my own domain name and stores data on my own S3/dropbox. In a perfect world it would be easy to switch providers for the various layers. I'm sure this is technically feasible today but I'm talking about an easy to use setup, ease of use being totally subjective of course.

I wouldn't necessarily object to using Google for one of the above layers or services, I just don't like one company having all of it.

I totally agree and would add SharePoint as a potential victim. Maybe Google was the only company that could invent Wave but it was definitely the wrong company to market and sell it.

Not sure if the pieces of wave that are open-source are enough to build a product but there is definitely a real email problem inside corporations that Wave seems to have potential to solve. Google has very limited interest in products for intranets, their focus is the wider Internet.

The point I'm trying to make to this startup community is that there's money to made solving the corporate email problem. And the second mouse gets the cheese.

I think he meant "dominant" market share, of course a new product needs a plan to create and/or take market share. But Apple (under Jobs anyway) is much more interested in profit share, nowadays they own maybe 5-10% of the computer market but their profit/unit dwarfs any other manufacturer.

On the lock-in I'm with you, but I do think the whole iTunes store/Fairplay was a happy accident that the music companies forced Apple to do. The music companies inadvertently helped Apple lock consumers into the iP*d platform, Apple leveraged it for the app store that pundits/developers were demanding (remember when iPhone first came out and the outrage about having to use web apps?)

Of course you don't have to like it, so vote with your wallet. There is choice in the marketplace whether it be smartphones or inkjet printers.

Depending on your view on the role of government this is not necessarily a bad thing. Canada has had a series of minority governments over the past few years, and that has not been a factor in the recent economic crises.

In the 60's you couldn't prove it

A related side-note: my organization blocks access to Facebook, the iframe with his like button was also blocked by the filter.

More people are aware of iTunes? Plus it seems to offer download and catalog files similar to what you can do to media files in iTunes.

Another headline correction that is needed is that the article doesn't tell us how Visa predicts divorce, just that they can.

Yes a small competent team could build the IT system for a fraction of the time and money. However they would only be successful if the business processes were well defined which I'm willing to bet they were not.

New IT systems often come along with changes in process, a well defined IT project should produce a system that follows and complements those processes. Instead what we often get are "boil the ocean" projects that attempt to fix process issues under the guise of an IT implementation.

Wouldn't you be able to do this via Active Directory group policy?

That pricing model doesn't scale