ja2ke

Android handset makers aren't competing with each other? Even if they aren't right now, or if Android is the one thing they don't publicly compete over, that will change. If the iOS slice of the pie shrinks enough at the expense of the Android slice, don't be surprised if unifying "Android" branding starts disappearing from all handset advertising. They'll all want to talk about how they're unique and better an not the other guys, not about how they're holding hands.

Only Google has the capability to "beat Apple" in the OS/platform game in the context of Android as a platform. Any handset maker has the potential to "beat Apple" by making a handset that outsells the iPhone. You can beat the iPhone without beating the entirety of the iOS platform, for instance. As the below comment points out, that already happened in some places. I don't think Kottke meant his comments as platform war commentary (I think he was talking about products) but not surprisingly HN fully interpreted them that way.

... After they physically seize your phone or home PC, to read this only-locally-stored file, of course.

Is there a single Android handset that competes with the iPhone in terms of units, or is it "Android collectively beats iPad and iPhone collectively?"

I think Kottke was referring to specific one off products like the iphone itself. Google and the rest of the handset world collectively has surpassed iOS usage, but we know that the iOS pie slice consists of just 3 broad models -- iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch -- while Android slice consists of seemingly every other phone under the sun. How does the landscape look if you stop looking at it by collective mobile OS and start looking by handset model line?

I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not to try and prove a point, so if this post sounds smarmy or anything its not deliberate. Culturally, collectively, "Android" seems like it is going toe to toe with iOS, but when you get down to single models, everyone talks about the iPhone and iPad, but not much about specific Android-sporting handsets. Android, in those conversation, always gets abstracted back down (incorrectly) to a nebulous brand/make, or (correctly) a platform.

Mm was nearly fully Sony-funded pre buyout. Sony put a lot in to start that studio and also published LBP1, so it's not horribly surprising that they acquired them once it was revealed that Mm would be more than an indie fluke of a business.

I remember that thing. I'd forgotten about the HP iPod though! The only cross-branded product from that era still thats really left is the Nike+ though.

Even if Apple did that, I imagine they wouldn't share co-branding prominently on the packaging/marketing, which would make it #3.

How many devices have you seen in the last decade which include an Apple logo AND another manufacturer's logo? I can think of one: the Apple/Nike+ http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/ . The Apple logo and the Nike swoosh are cited as two of the most recognized logos in the world. I suspect that's about the only caliber of partnered branding Jobs would allow on an Apple product at this point.

Has the Finder been rewritten yet?

That brought up a weird thought: I wonder how much SoundJam MP code is still in today's iTunes.

When Apple is good at that, I love it. It's depressing when they misstep in this arena and put something out that, below the veneer, doesn't contain much content. On the other hand, something like MacOS X itself is something my mom can use and feel like a pro (while she and my dad frequently get lost and confused with their Windows laptop), but I can also, just one level deeper, use and customize to the fullest extent I need.

It's obviously yet to be proven since this is just a preview announcement, but I don't expect Apple to drop the ball on FCP. Maybe that trust is misguided but the wording between the lines of their presentation seemed to indicate they knew what they were up against. They opened this presentation by listing off the success the app has had in an extremely hardcore and demanding professional community. It sounded like they were trying to very clearly communicate to folks: "We know this app is operated by people who use it to the fullest extent, grinding their top of the line machines into the ground to produce content, and 94% of them already like it the way it is."

So, seeing the comments saying "this just looks like iMovie! They should call it iMovie not Final Cut!" when it looks like what Apple is trying to do is solve problems and add efficiency to the rote surface level tasks of daily FCP use, bum me out.

( and add some we-can't-resist specular shine to the UI chrome, of course)

As the article says, when the content comes to you via traditional TV, there's more money going on there than "more ads," including content and broadcast licensing agreements which bring in additional revenue.

It's not all the same people, though. I mean, maybe within HN/the tech community it's the same people, but I know plenty of people who didn't regularly pirate TV (if at all) but who now watch the large majority of their TV content through Hulu/Netflix.

Maybe it's a Northern California "no I don't have cable TV, puhleeze... but I secretly watch a ton of it online!" thing, I don't know, but I'm often surprised to visit a non-tech-minded friend for the first time in years, and see that they have a Netflix-enabled Blu-Ray player or HDTV, Hulu loaded up on their laptop, and no cable service in sight.

This reeks of insider fear based-decision making. Within the walls of Rolodex headquarters, you figure (probably correctly) that a lot of today's young people don't know what an actual Rolodex looks like, and therefore that they won't understand what the little icon in the logo means. Besides that though, the company isn't even about those old Rolodex address index holders anyway! So much breadth and depth in today's Rolodex, who cares about the core product. Fear, and inside thinking like that end up getting you into "Rolodex: We're more than just the Rolodex!" territory, or worse, the land of "Rolodex: Forget the Rolodex!"

IANAM (I am not a marketer) but the history of a company, especially companies around long enough to have a history, is as important to me as their present when it comes to marketing and how they position themselves. Rebranding to try and move past your history is very frustrating to me as a customer when it's a negative history (eg Philip Morris renaming and refocusing a ton of itself over to the name "Altria") but it's just straight up baffling when its a positive history!

Rolodex made a product which filled a need so successfully that their brand name became a generic noun! And their solution to confidently presenting themselves in the modern world is to erase all record of that success from their branding?

I'd love to know why that is considered a good idea, where the thinking comes from, that genericizing is the solution to your specific success becoming outdated. Specifically for companies who have moved beyond the image in their logo representing a specific product to people.

If your problem as a company is that to MOST people your logo represents something arbitrary (for instance: a Rolodex file, or a tied parcel package in the case of UPS), why is the solution so frequently to start using a logo which represents arbitrary nothingness to ALL people?

If you're going to have a logo made of arbitrary swirly shapes and imagery which mean nothing, why not at least stick with some arbitrary swirly shapes which -- for some people who have been around for a while -- represent a specific past of innovation and cleverness? For the rest of their customers, at least with the old logo they have a clever story of the history of the company ready if asked. Instead, "Rolodex: We make nothing, we stand for nothing. How did we get here? We don't even know." Baffling to me.

Any time the news agency is Fox and the government agency is a public or social service, so, reasonably often.

Given that my name is "Valued Customer," that influx of gift card users would probably fuck my chances of ever getting a validated Quora account.

It seems like her problem was more a constant fear of failure and lack of acceptance, which reared its head to varying degrees over her career. That lack of ambition seems to have blossomed out of the realization that she'd sort of screwed herself over through the fear and self doubt. "Stopping working hard and being unambitions" wasn't the cause, it was the symptom.

The takeaway from this article, for me, was that you can kill your own career by doubting yourself, by not putting yourself out there actively and promoting yourself. Your own fear can close doors that will eventually kill your drive. That's not a foreign idea to me -- slowly recessing into a corner when I ran into something too foreign, or frightening, to easily comprehend and master has led to my engagement dropping off the map and to my becoming mediocre at something I should be excelling at. I've since gotten over that to a large degree (though sometimes "solving" that requires me to put on a false front and be confident and engaging with people I would otherwise avoid or shy away from) but I look back at past jobs I've had that I wish I had done better in, and the roots of my problems and hers ring as related in my head. (Even though I have never "slacked off" to learn an instrument, have babies, or be female.)

Sidenote: I don't know if you intended it or not but your post reads with a pretty contemptuous tone, which I don't think is needed. I think both "tl;dr"s in this thread are slightly offensive, but yours is more offensive. People racking up karma points via a summary always bugs me, regardless, but when its an opinion couched in a summary it's twice as frustrating.

That change is pretty clearly pre- and post-Jobs' return/launch of the iMac. It's kind of crazy that they've maintained such a singular focus and style for so long, especially after the painful decade of constant reinvention and flux that preceded it.

All of those points have made the Mac shareware market a viable one for decades. Something about he Mac OS seems to be less supportive of the types of system tray and popup scanning OS dominating spyware/freeware that pollutes the Windows market, too, so it all ends up "feeling safer" than the usual download.com fodder, as well.

Ah, bummer. I guess the last time I was paying attention to this stuff, I was a student, and it was at a time when there were an increasing number of computers in schools, but no one beyond computer lab admins and tech savvy teachers to tend for them. Didn't stop to think that it was surely fully institutionalized at this point. Duh!

Since you work in education, would you be more likely to be able to call them up and work out a custom license than a business would? I don't really know how that works, but when I was in school it seemed like tech focused educators and other district staff were able to pull off crazy deals and licensing situations at least with some companies.

It's always nice to be able to take a machine apart, see how it works, and put it back together successfully. Language is a tool used every day by everyone, but fewer and fewer people know how it actually works. I wish schools still taught grammar properly. I hardly learned anything about how English (or language in general) worked until I took a foreign language course in high school.

Wouldn't that would be pretty much entirely fixed by login-based wireless sync and cloud storage?

Or are there issues with those services, too?

Your wife can probably make up her own mind.

This behavior always bums me out. Seems like HN of all places should accept and encourage disagreements as long as the resulting conversation is interesting and doesn't devolve. Using the down arrow to try and stifle opposing views is disappointing to see.

"how will the iMac survive without serial, parallel, and ADB ports?"

Except for everyone else who still makes programs for people who create things which aren't just code or the written word... Audio, video, 3D, print and web visual design are all still done on the desktop, and only a slice of that is controlled by Adobe.

You're assuming this is put together by incompetent schlubs or Internet assholes, then? Give people some credit when it's due. I've read a couple issues and found the presentation and curated nature of Hacker Monthly leads to me more fully reading and digesting the content of the articles. When reading them on HN I tend to skim or read them to pass the time. Reading a print edition or PDF on my iPad is such a different experience, the work put into it and the nominal cost, to me, seems justifiable.

It's not just the attributions leaving the main feed. Just a few months ago Twitter was going out of their way to promoting 3rd party clients (in the form of free advertising in the web client, in the space now occupied by Who To Follow). The last few months have seen almost all promotion for 3rd party clients disappear.

Going from attributing every tweet in the main feed and promoting outside clients freely on the sidebar of everyone's account to shunting attributions into a secondary info pane, that's a very large shift.

Windows still uses backspace for going up a directory in file navigation right?

Nothing is more enjoyable than seeing posts on the internet by programmers who look at an idea, then scoff at its simplicity while making a list of all the idea's component parts, pointing out how easy each component is.

In the case of ads, "middle groud" is often a few steps down the slipperiest of slopes.