rafski

As a child I said the 911 looked ugly, like a squashed frog with bulged eyes. For years I didn't understand the hype that surrounded it (I always favoured the 928). I do like them now but it's a result of decades of societal conditioning...

Same here. 911 to me is an acquired taste. I can appreciate their design now, especially the recent iterations but I remember I said it looked like a squashed frog with bulgy eyes when I first saw one as a kid.

This is an embodiment of the American tourist stereotype to an extent that makes it funny — despite, or maybe because of being a very polite attempt to rationalize it.

Why leave your country when wherever you go, the first step is to look for it again?

There are local coffee shops in every country. In most cases they have a great atmosphere, most of them have wi-fi, most of them will let you charge your phone. All of them have… yes, coffee, often served in local ways — an opportunity to learn something about the culture. They will understand your order, no need to worry about your foreign language skills. Most countries have Starbucks-style coffee shops too these days, blended with a dash of local style.

If you go abroad and go to Starbucks, are you any different to those dreadful low-life tourists spending their holidays abroad in their respective country pubs, drinking their home beer like they never left for holidays in the first place?

Last time I was abroad and went to Starbucks dragged in by friends I felt like a loser. In part I guess, for having uninspiring friends. It could also be because I overpaid roughly by 250-300%, compared with prices in those lovely local cafes in the area.

I appreciate the warm tone of your article, clearly it's coming from a good place. But if you're in a coffee country like Italy and get your coffee at Starbucks, you're dead to me! ;)

Apologies for my patronising tone, it was meant to be somewhat warm too…

I'm amazed with how much response this guy gets. This is nothing new. My mother used Herbalife protein powder back in the 90's and it was packed with nutrients, minerals and vitamins. It was advertised for weight loss but could also be your nutrition base depending on dosage.

I am sure they weren't the only company to offer something like this, there must be plenty.

RSS was a business threat to Google, it allowed people to glance through aricle headers and often read them whole without ads. Google Reader allowed Google to contain this trend, then slowly phase it out as much as they could.

People easily forget ads are Google's main product that provides them he bulk of their revenue.

As someone who never understood the appeal of foursquare/gowalla kind of apps, I do like this one — saving locations just for myself and sharing only if I really want to. Well done using media attention for your benefit, you're handling the "controversy" well. Selling apps is a tough game and every user counts, good luck out there.

It's funny to see a bank holiday used for what it was initially invented for — preventing a bank run.

RSS has always been a threat to Google's core business. From Google's perspective, RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads. Ads are Google's only product business-wise.

They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly out to kill it.

RSS is a way for the audience to access fresh web content without having to visit the original websites. Well, Google is an ad company — it makes money selling ads on those websites. RSS was a threat to Google's core business similar to ad blocking plugins.

Google Reader's role was to contain the fad of ad-free news reading, it also provided rich data about what people read. As soon as they saw the use of RSS fading, they could finally ditch the Reader, hoping it would also further marginalize RSS. They still can mine the Feedburner data, they'll still know what people read.

Did Google also have a role in making RSS unpopular? Would RSS grow bigger if Google didn't come up with the Reader? This would be, ekhmm… a far-fetched hypothesis…

RSS bypasses ads on websites. Google makes money on those ads. It was strange that they supported RSS for so long.

Working as a front-end developer I happen to come across tiny bugs and inconsistencies in Chrome more often than in Firefox, rare as that happens.

Developer tools - Firebug all the way, even the error console is more useful.

My understanding is, it is not just 10 years. Also, I am comparing the USA to most countries out there, not a single country.

American illusion of freedom isn't something easy to grasp for people from "less free" countries who are, for instance, able to travel freely to Cuba.

American expats who moved permanently abroad have to file their taxes with IRS forever. In any European state your last contact with the country's Revenue is for the last year you lived there (unless you still have income in this country). You don't have to file anything, ever. You're free to go.

From that standpoint, Americans are effectively property of their government.

Interesting, it gives Apple nothing and serves to fuel the "post-Jobs Apple turns to shit" buzz.

First reaction - oh cool, this works on my phone!

"Enter to continue" - "Enter" what? Like, a key?

Interestingly, I've never received a default bank pin in Ireland that wouldn't have 2 repeated digits in it. I have a theory they do this to make pins easier to memorise.

Why are they advertising the iPhone?

I always wondered to what extent the official warnings on cigarette packs contributed to the illnesses presented on them actually materializing.

You should be able to plug it into the wall with the old one's removable international plug if that helps.

The story is not really a parable, this is exactly what Communist economy looked like in Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries. Production levels weren't supposed to meet market demand, they were supposed to meet The Plan. As a result, there were shortages of virtually everything but—who would've guessed—vinegar.

Oddly enough Poland revisited central planning idiocy again when it joined the EU with its economic absurdities, e.g. production quotas not allowing farmers to produce more milk or sugar than the plan allows.

A friend of mine living in Poland now told me about a farmer client of hers who visited her company last year with a large truck and a trailer full of cucumbers to give away to employees. The cucumbers were either oddly-shaped or wrong size according to EU norms but perfectly good otherwise. He couldn't legally sell them, was supposed to dump them instead. Not being OK with wasting food he drove around the city to people he knew, trying to give away literally tons of cucumbers...

It's the only way to go for laptops. I swapped a 17" 3 kIlograms MacBook Pro for an Air and I sure am not going back. My only gripe with Air: it's still too heavy.

Unbeknownst to many, Air's SSD is replaceable, you can upgrade it up to 480GB with an Air-only blade from OWC.

Plugins often cause more problems than they solve.

I had way too many situations where a plugin would break after a WordPress update and the author wouldn't support it anymore.

Also, there are malicious plugins on WordPress.org with no direct way to submit report or post a warning. Can you imagine a FaceBook widget that after a while of use starts to promote some rogue site?

A lot of airports they fly to are in main airports for large cities, including capitals like Madrid, Dublin, possibly others.

I am the biggest Ryanair supporter, they are the best airline in Europe: they are cheap and their planes are just as comfortable as city buses but they're always on-time and cheap if you know how to book. They're actually the most punctual airline in Europe.

This said, I just gave up booking a ticket with them after the third captcha. They'll scrap that stuff as soon as they notice the drop in sales.

One catchy infographic, a few opinionated articles and suddenly everyone agrees the fold disappeared.

The state of the industry in a nutshell.

Jobs understood that stylus was a psychological barrier, additional interface between user and screen.

Direct touch gave the biofeedback needed to make operating the device personal. Your touch makes things happen, rather than you touching it with an 8 inch pole.

It seems an irrelevant detail to a logical mind but this was key element to iPhone's success.

There is this good PBS documentary on psychology of marketing. If you don't have the time for the whole thing, fast forward to 0:48 and watch for one minute—it is very representative of the marketing mindset I am talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahw5ODR2Sgs

What's interesting is that BBC airs an opinion that Goldman Sachs, not governments rules the world.

In the end, Paul seems to me just another pawn who doesn't understand the game he's in—not even who's on whose team.

There are two teams in this game: Team Multimillionaires On Their Way To Be Billionaires and team Clueless Minions. Guess which team Mike and Arianna are on?

On second thought, chances are Paul just understood what it was all about and found his way out as a fake kamikaze who gets to leave with all the suicide bomber honours and yet stay alive and well—which I wish him he does.

I find it funny people don't realize Apple sells 18 kinds of iPad 2.

My preference is to scope well, give the client a per-project quote and then charge hourly for out-of-scope work.

This way, the client knows what to expect to pay from the start and if he introduces changes on the way he knows it is going to cost him extra.