Regardless of what platform you're on, you want your emoji to be similar enough to those of other platforms so that intent and meaning are transmitted accurately. This is one of the problems with emoji overall - they specify very approximately what visual each keycode should correspond to, which means that you could have two valid implementations that result in very confusing / inaccurate communication between users on each platform, since they're sending one thing and the other side is seeing something quite different.
He's actually writing about the dialer that comes with the device OS (in this case an OTA, I believe, but still, it's the default / 1P dialer. It just happens to be a branded one rather than the "usual" white label dialer a smaller OEM might provide.
It's always been a "telephone app", on smart phones. And in many cases, it's already been somewhat "3rd party" because in reality it's from the ODM who made your phone or the SOC vendor, not the company that branded your phone. The author is only just becoming aware that this is "3P" because he happens to have a branded dialer added on his phone, versus a "white label" dialer that was already there.
I'm fairly certain Wileyfox didn't make the dialer that previously came with his phone, either. (They're a smaller OEM.) They probably just used the one provided by the ODM assembling the device for them.
I don't think it's so much the wealth of the victims as the size of the transaction (ticket price) as well as the total spend. It makes a class action lawsuit (where the lawyers will get a % of the value recovered) attractive, whereas if it was a smaller purchase, with the same number of affected customers, that might not be compelling to lawyers.
My first job in college involved helping them build the first Car Talk web site (it was around 1994). All of the graphics were drawn on paper and scanned in, and I spent hours converting their recordings into (IIRC) RealAudio format so people could livestream them. (Downsampling / compression at the time was far from real-time.)
They were both great guys to work with, who seemed genuinely surprised at their own fame and came to everything with genuine humor, warmth and without the slightest hint of ego. Out of all the notable MIT alumni, they're my favorite and I was really happy when they finally got invited to speak at commencement. (I'd also argue that the guys at Top Gear owe them some credit for pioneering a "show about cars" that's really just entertainment.)
It's a terrible loss, but at least Tom will live on for many years in the form of all those recorded hours of (somewhat auto-related) entertainment. The world is a little less happy and funny today without him, though.
It's well established that high barriers to entry reduce competitive pressures on margin. If nothing else, it discourages outsiders from trying out new business models that drive down prices, because it increases the amount of capital necessary to test out a new approach (and the capital is harder to raise if you're using a new strategy.)
Consider Uber vs taxis - if there were massive entry costs to the cab / private car category, a company like Uber would have trouble raising enough money to get launched. So the existing cabs wouldn't ever experience the competitive pressure from Uber, because it would never enter the market.
This: Google's scale of operation doesn't work well for a free service with a small number of users - the legal, localization and support overhead is disproportionately expensive on a very small service, unless it's a paid one.
> It doesn't matter what Johnny Ive or some product manager at Google are focused on, or what their intentions are.
It seems to matter a lot to you.
If the intentions don't matter, why are you so committed to maligning them? Most users seem pretty happy with the results, and if you don't like them, don't use the products.
Why does manual intervention (per se) make your zero-inbox so effective? This isn't somehow magically processing emails for you, it's just automating how those emails are handled after you decide what to do with them.
IIRC inbox-zero says you should file all of those to a "next week" or "next month" category and then once a week go through that inbox. This effectively removes the need to do that chore, because you can just say "put this back in front of me a week/month from now."
I don't see why this is any less "device agnostic" than any other method. You can use Inbox on mobile or desktop and they stay in sync; in fact, you can use Inbox on mobile and traditional Gmail on desktop (or vice-versa) and they'll stay in sync as well. (And you do in fact konw if the email is unread or not, since that's a separate bit of status info. You can snooze an email without reading it.)
I'm an inbox-zero-er (and Googler) and I love using Inbox for that exact reason - it makes it even easier for me to deal quickly with emails I don't want to touch (e.g. promotional), and snooze emails I can't act on immediately so they'll come back next week or whenever I need to follow up on them.
That means I can have an even more focused inbox that just contains things I need to think about / respond to right now.
In comparison, I still use regular gmail for my work email and I have maybe a dozen emails sitting in there that I don't need to do anything about right now but need to follow up on soon.
IMHO, Inbox basically takes the stuff that inbox-zero folks had to learn to do manually, and makes a lot of it automated. It's particularly great on mobile.
I have to disagree... in particular, the point of reference (absolute) is also all wrong. It's not going to teach you much about how to react to a man-over. There really isn't much substitute for actual drills at sea to simulate the real stress, surprise and difficulty of a MO where you don't have time to switch over to your engine. Anyone who is skippering (and most crew) should be able to handle an MO properly.
This would be more compelling and educational if the controls mapped closer to how the controls you have available on a traditional sailboat work:
* Rudder position controls rate of rotation, not absolute heading, and doesn't work if you're not making way
* Main sheet (sail control) just controls the maximum amount the sail can deviate from the center of the boat, not its absolute angle relative to the boat (and not which side of the centerline it is on.)
"Optimal entertainment choices" is so vague as to be meaningless. If I can spent 25K on a vacation and not feel it hurt my wallet, isn't that an optimal entertainment choice?
Any number of services support ths - I believe Wallet, Venmo, Paypal and Square all offer some form of fee-less peer-to-peer transfer, because it has such a high value for organic growth as people send money to friends.
How does one hope to define "excess" if there's a carveout for "happiness and entertainment"? Beyond our Maslow needs, most of what we spend money on is arguably for "happiness and entertainment", no?
Yeah, but a 12% decline in the stock price of a company worth ~$6bn probably wouldn't rate an NYT story unless there was some additional element to the story (like fraud or scandal.)
Look at the ~10 companies on the NASDAQ between ~6bn and ~6.5bn -- I've only ever even heard of one (Flextronics), much less seen NYT articles about them. (Use Google stock screener, I can't seem to generate a link to the screen.)
It's entirely impractical to expect NY to build collision barriers at every spot where pedestrians get near cars within the city. Unless you want to have raised / underground pedestrian crossings everywhere (which have generally not been found to work very well, and are ugly as hell too), the reality is you're going to have traffic and pedestrians intermixed within the city.
"The goal of improving roads is to increase the throughput of traffic" - that is considered an outdated goal by most planners these days. For one thing, if you increase the capacity of roads, you simply encourage more driving, and things end up congested anyway. In many cases urban planners now actively seek to decrease the throughput of traffic on mixed-use streets in urban areas.
While it might be socially acceptable, we'd all also agree that going 5 over the posted speed limit is "breaking the law", which is exactly the problem - it's encouraging a societal norm of "kind of" following the law, which is extremely problematic (especially when you consider that enforcement is often not applied evenly.)
If you don't speak English, your phone probably isn't set to EN-US or another locale where the voice recognition would accept english. I'm guessing this depends on the voice reco being set to the right locale.
It doesn't make sense for a company that's trying to sell itself to also start making large cuts - it may drive your own price down by signaling that your businesses lack potential. The acquiring company will calculate in the cost (and savings) from the cuts ("synergies", to use the banking term) and just roll them into the purchase price.
So if you're the selling CEO / board, you get to claim you sold the company whole, and if you're the buyer, you just blame the cuts on the increased efficiencies to be gained from combining the companies - it's a sign that the deal is "successful" and you're achieving the synergies you modeled before the purchase.
"Losing up to a million a month" doesn't necessarily mean "using a million in cash a month." The first may be based on accrual accounting, the second is based on cash accounting, and they don't need to equate in any particular time interval.
E.g., if you pre-paid $12M in rent for a warehouse for a year, you might be "losing $1M a month" in accrual accounting (as the prepaid asset gets run down) but using no cash in that same month.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you don't share a photo when you upload it, you can share it any time later. (In particular, that's how auto-upload works.) If you share it, and then you delete the post where it's shared, it goes back to not-shared. That seems pretty straightforward.
It doesn't seem like a surprising UI to follow an upload with a share when you're sending photos to a social network. I'm not even sure Facebook gives you that choice. The two actions don't have to be associated, but they certainly need to be associated when you consider that folks usually upload photos to share them.
I don't think G+ Photos has been advertised as a "persistent store you control". It's a social network that has an auto-upload feature to make it easier to share images and backup shots taken on your phone. "Hosting your own" is not going to be a substitute for 95% of real-world users.
1. That doesn't seem to be actually true - I see three categories associated with Classical in the listing on Songza.com under Genres
2. Songza, in general, isn't so much about browsing narrowly-defined genre categories. You'd be more likely to find specific time periods or styles represented as Channels under Classical than as their own sub-categories.
Play Music sorely needed this - lots of great curated lists in addition to albums and playlists. Can't wait for the integration - I really like Songza for those times I'm working or driving and don't feel like playing close attention to building a playlist.
You can also just upload, and then not share the image (it's a separate flow after the upload that you can skip.) The default setting for an uploaded photo is "not shared".
While much of YouTube is a desert wasteland in terms of community, there are definitely areas (like music and fitness) where it has a great deal of social / community activity. Just given how huge YT is, it wouldn't suprise me if just those niches outgrew Orkut a long time ago. Plus the growth trajectory is probably much better - if you were going to invest in YT community or Orkut, the former probably makes more sense.
Owning a house with central heating / AC that can be controlled by a Nest Thermostat via your household wifi from your smartphone while driving home in your Mercedes is a pretty "first-world" thing.
Especially given that this works best for second homes like a weekend house in Tahoe where it might take a full day to warm up if you left the heat off all week.
Millions of thousands of homes today simply leave their thermostat at the same temperature all the time, failing to optimize for the large portions of the day when nobody is home because it's simpler (and they probably don't have a timed thermostat, or they can't figure out how to set it up.)
Imagine thousands of households doing something smarter.
How are you determining that they're "overpricing" their accommodations? For a lot of property owners, the reserve price may be driven by considerations like (perceived) risk to their personal property and the hassle of managing bookings rather than the price at which they'll maximize revenue.
Generally, the taxes and tolls levied on drivers only pay for ~50% of US road spending - the balance comes out of the general tax pool on both drivers and non-drivers, so it's (arguably) heavily subsidized. (But one could argue that non-drivers benefit from the road system in terms of things delivered to them by truck, etc.)