wklauss

Yes, Finland is a great country to live in. Also Sweden, Norway and Denmark. But people start loosing interest the moment you mention taxation.

This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".

My guess is that you cannot replicate that model in US because salary differences between private companies and universities are abysmal. In finland being selected to have the opportunity to become a teacher is an honor and you quality of life will not be much different than the one you'll get if you choose the private sector. In the US being on the top 10% of your college puts you in a really advantageous position for a much better paid job in the private sector.

It actually does. It not only means that, but its one of the outcomes if you are truly open.

I think a bigger problem here is why people think YouTube or Google are "open" to begin with. There are some areas in Google businesses that being more open than the alternatives (note the emphasis on more, sometimes they are just "open" in comparison with Microsoft and Apple policies) serves them well, thats why the do it, but it's not a dogma inside the company and will never be.

Apple also supports USB 3.0. go nuts with it if thats what you want, but they are not madefor the same kind of applications.

For some professional enviroments Apple still considers Thunderbolt to be useful. Its sad that they are the only ones thinking this way becouse it truly is a good solution and having more brands on board will probably push the price of cables and docks down, but if we are going to point fingers I think Intel is the one we should point them to.

There are tradeoffs in every approach and there are steps Google could have taken to make the situation better without mimicking the controlled experience and uniformity of iOS. Unfortunately at this point this is pretty much how it's going to be.

So yeah, it's a "pick your poison" kind of world and theres no easy way out. You deal with it and hope for the best. But that doesn't mean it's not worth pointing it out or that is not a problem for the Android ecosystem in the long run.

> iOS and Windows are fragmenting the market for me. They are not compatible with Android...

By that same logic Android is fragmenting it too.

> When speaking in iOS terms, you can say that 90% of all Android devices get updated once per months or so, when another update for Gmail, Google Voice Search or GCM arrived.

No, as a developer having users in different versions of Android affects the things your app can do. What APIs does it have access to and how. I don't care if the user thinks he's updated because their gmail app looks new. I care that my app needs more hours of coding to make sure it does the same on Android 2.3 than on 4.1.

> ... You can make your app run Holo no matter what Android version is installed on your customer's device.

There are some iOS developers that follow this same route. A lot of services / functions in iOS are not mandatory, you can use your own versions of it if you want to devote the time and skill to rewrite them. Loren Brichter comes to mind as a good example of this. Developers use the Apple route because it's easy and takes out a lot of the workload.

Well, if you are trying to develop a case for transporting individual vegetables you might complain about the fact that they're not same size, weight or have the same consistency or skin resistance.

But on top of that, your analogy doesn't translate vary well to mobile platforms, i think.

There are more mobile developers than desktop developers.

Thanks to twitter and other social tools complaints now get amplified and travel quickly.

There always have been a lot of pain and complaints in windows, macos & linux development, in any case, but we didn't pay much attention to it as we do now.

Problem with Android fragmentation, on top of that, is the frustration that comes when you compare to the competing platform (iOS). I'm not saying iOS development doesn't have its own pains, but it looks tidy and simple compared to the Android ecosystem. If iOS wasn't there Android fragmentation would be accepted as the normal state of affairs.

It is a big deal? Well, it depends on what kind of app you are developing and how much you can get away with. For some developers screen resolution differences are not a big deal, but different processors, memory, etc... are. For others the opposite is true.

Is really that impractical to use stationary WiMax access points instead?

Last time I checked range was around 30 miles, couple of stations will blanket a good area without the hassle these balloons bring (you need to pick them and relaunch every couple of weeks, etc...).

Do you have a window? Problem solved.

Exactly! But coming form traditional media, I can see why some of these bad choices are made. It's not easy to convince this big publishers to adopt a complete new workflow.

Be that as it may, he pulled it off. A lot of journalist have a great following and a brand name these days as well.

Except niche paper magazine have to run through printing and distribution costs. For small digital magazines the traditional way to finance is through advertisement and most of them are vanishing and surviving on the kindness of the contributors or turning into something that resembles a blog.

Marco did something interesting: stick to one platform, play by Apple rules and see what you can build with that scheme. Id say that him being a developer was a huge advantage. Finding a developer for a small project these days is costly. But starting from zero he avoided the trap a lot of magazines fall into, like trying to create a enriched PDF that use the design guidelines we use on paper (multicolumn, etc..).

I read somewhere that his contributors get paid the standard going rate in most big magazines (Time, New Yorker,...) Not a lot of small magazines can say the same. The Magazine did not have ads, so he didn't need to manage/outsource that part of the business.

By no means is this the only way of doing things, of course, and it might not work for everybody but I found it inspiring. It was (is) a tight, lean and simple product.

Hope Glenn keeps up the good work. As a journalist The Magazine has been eye-opening to me. Almost non-existing staff (Glenn and Marco), handpicked contributors and you get a excellent magazine running profitable in less then one month.

Shows how much baggage traditional media carries from the past and how convoluted a news organization can get once you start adding sales, advertising, and other departments that can be avoided now with the proper strategy.

If you find Photostream confusing you don't need to use it. Simple as that. It's not even activated by default, you have to turn it on the first time you try to access it.

If you don't activate it, you phone keeps working the way it used to: you sync to your computer and thats that. There are third party apps that will let you upload to Dropbox and google+ if you prefer those as repository.

Now, the thing is that you want the convenience to have PhotoStream without worrying about space constraints. Ever.

iPhoto automatically creates a folder with all last month's Photostream pictures and I think thats default behavior, unless you purposely turn it off. To me, thats the most "smart" sync can get, unless you want Apple to store every photo you ever took, forever, in their servers. Having around 400 million iOS users worldwide this seems to me a little unrealistic at the moment. Maybe someday.

But for me the key here is just being able to delete your own content. You don't expect the memory card in your camera to last forever, you periodically format it. You don't expect your download folder to hold everything you download forever. Every now and then you go in and clean around. Your phone (ioS, Android or whatever) is no different. Go into that Camera Roll and start cleaning around.

Unless you turn it off the option all the photos are already in iPhoto, ordered by month (something like "Sept XXX Photostream"). If you turned it off, just impoert all the photos before deleting to make sure you don't end up loosing any pics.

I agree on the video, though. Photostream needs to start syncing videos as well.

There are plenty of compact cameras with APS-C CMOS sensors these days.

You can also get amazing images with a point-and-shoot too (search on FLickr for images with an RX100, for example).

Again, he is not recommending you to buy an expensive lens. He's just saying you can find great point-and-shoot cameras or mirrorless with good optics for far less money or get better lenses if you jump to a body+custom lens scenario.

He's just advising not to end up in the middle, which I don't think it's a terrible advice. After using kit lenses for a while I'm giving the same advice now most of the time.

>The photos I get from it are far far better than every point and shoot or smartphone camera I've ever owned

Without knowing what are those cameras is difficult to know the reason. But a good high end compact camera, these days, tend to produce better images than kit lenses. Now, there's nothing wrong about kit lenses. I used one for a year until I was comfortable enough to jump to a better option. But these days I'm giving the same advice Marco does. Unless you have a very specific reason to shoot with an SLR or are willing to buy body and less separately, go for a compact with a good sensor size, manual controls and a good lens.

But it's just an advice, not a law written on stone.

Photographer/photojournalist here as well,

Lets forget for a moment about you unfortunate adjectives and appreciations (I don't care if this guys is a "coffee enthusiast" and nor should you for the purposes of this article. The whole "insecure baldhead attention whores" its even worse, makes me think the insecurity is placed in the wrong person in this situation)

Now here's the thing,

> but he's also being narrow-minded and only looking to one context

Yeah, of course. Its his opinion on a very specific situation and he's not trying to say otherwise. There are kit lenses that are more or less ok but most of them are bad compared to good zoom lenses. Marco's advice in this case is pretty sensible: If you are not going to care about using a very good lens, a cheaper compact camera might give you sharper images.

Compact cameras these days come with a lot of features that will suffice to teach you the basics of photography (aperture priority, shutter speed, manual focus...) and if you later want a better system, its a good backup.

Of course you can create awesome images with a kit lens, and of course sharpness is not the only factor that goes into determining the quality of a picture. But it could be in the context he's mentioning -journalist that take a picture to go with their articles- and journalist in those cases will be better served by a smaller and lighter camera.

Do you want to do art with your images? Go nuts, make a pinhole camera out of a Pringles can, use a 50 year old soviet camera or a kit lens or a compact Chinese 50 dollar digital camera with 8 MB of onboard memory. This is not the people this advice is given to. Artist find their way of expressing themselves with the medium they prefer, without regards -or sometimes thanks to- their limitations.

In this case, by trying to point out the snobbery you think you saw in the advice, you've actually out-snobbered it.

>Social media and on-line communities are more democratic than traditional journalism

Democracy has nothing to do with the editorial process.

Donation will only get you so far and sooner or later the novelty of the idea will wear off.Ebooks seems to be working a little better now, but its still a very niche product.

The thing with blogs/specialist is that they don't cover a big scope and they are not consistent. The job of a journalist is not to write a masterpiece on a subject once in a blue moon, it'ss to write information pieces everyday, on a consistent schedule and focusing of the issues that could have an impact on the readers life. Even if the reader has not heard of them before or care deeply about them. And in order to do that, they usually ask -or should ask- specialists.

Because that's not journalism. You already have that. They are product catalogues. Even if you somehow manage to keep some kind of integrity in the process, that only covers a fraction of the content that a newspaper / magazine generates. What would be the interest of Best Buy in writing about, say, CISPA if theres no related product they can sell to you?

Before jumping the fence and start writing for a newspaper I used to believe tech and business information was really bad in newspapers and magazines. Then I became one of the "bad writers". Truth is those articles are not "bad", they are just not written for you. Someone with a deep knowledge of the insides of Washington, or fashion, or the restaurant business will think the same about the politics, lifestyle and dining sections. I read the NYT daily and, honestly, its hard to find a better example of good journalism these days. Yes, of course not everything is Pulitzer-worthy but journalism is not different that any other endeavor. Your average is far from your best.

I think we got spoiled by an era where we got really amazing examples of journalism (Post-war, Watergate, etc...). Go back a century and you'll see that what was around was not much different that what we have today. Editorial, opinionated...

>"The journalism industry seems to be in trouble. Newspaper revenue has shrunk from $57.4 billion in 2003 to $38.6 billion in 2012."

I think what the article is trying to say is that the printed journalism is in trouble. And it might well be, but there are a lot of other forms of journalism that are rising up.

We might not see something homogeneous resulting from it or a direct substitute/evolution of these printed media formats. Maybe one of the consequences of living on a permanently connected society is that we no longer need a periodical summarization on whats going on in the world.

But as a journalist myself, theres a couple of things I'd like to see, even if they might not be profitable or practical:

1. A big daily newspaper shifting the news producing cycle. Devote the web to last minute, daily news. Create a weekly focused on analysis and long features.

2. A tool to reach different groups of readers with different ages and ways of consuming news pieces.

   2.1 How are teenagers discovering these days whats going on in the world? Through links in 4chan? ok, lets put links in 4chan then.

   2.2 How are 60-somethings engaging with important issues? through long forwarded mail chains with powerpoints attached? Great, lets do that!

3. A way to effectively measure audience, something more useful than pageviews and time spent on a page.

4. An advertising platform that doesn't consider ads something to sell for cents on the click. This has been one of the major disrupting elements in the printed journalism world. We used to sell ads for A LOT of money, even when (or maybe because) there was no way to effectively measure the reaction of the reader.

But mostly what we are seeing is a total transformation of a business and I don't think theres a way to change that or "save" anything. It's similar, in a sense, to what happen to music labels a decade ago.

A. The business structure cannot sustain the current way the people are using the product.

B. People in charge are worried of making big changes that might render them obsolete, therefore they try to maintain the statu quo.

C. Most of the income is gone. Ads are cheaper and people buy less newspapers.

Those cracks where there with Steve Jobs as well. For some reason people tend to forget the bad business decisions he made. But he made plenty. Was the period between the iPod an the iPhone just also coasting on momentum? Because if that was the case, I think they are going to be ok.

> paying taxes on profit is the deal we signed up for by operating businesses in the US.

What happens when you don't sold your product in the US? Why does the profit of Apple selling an iPad in UK have to result in them paying taxes in US instead on UK?

Why does Apple Operating Europe (Cork, Ireland, 100% owned by Apple Inc. but not operated in the US) has to pay them?

I really understand and adhere to the basic idea you are trying to defend but it's just not so simple with multinationals (Apple or any other), especially if the regulatory system leaves enough holes for them to make structures like this.

That's basically it. They are trying to get some tax exemption. And its not only Apple (Google or Amazon are in the exact same position).

My suspicion is that the current "we will manufacture in the US" has to do something with it (Both Google and Apple have announced plans for this), probably some kind of agreement in Washington about capital expenditures being exempt for taxes.

I don't think this is poor planning. International sales grew fest and they found themselves in this situation. If you ask in any other country (esp. in Europe) they'll probably tell you that that money shouldn't be taxed in the US as it was made by selling products on local markets and siphoned away using financial tactics that are frowned upon (selling straight from Ireland, usually).

what should a for-profit company do, then, once its successful?

Is this the start of a decline? Apple too busy playing on the high-end market instead of focusing on the fast growing low-end?

Is this the start of a decline? Apple loosing profit margins instead of focusing on high-margin products?

Is this the start of a decline? Apple too busy with domestic consumers instead of focusing on the pro market?

Is this the start of a decline? Apple too busy with iPad instead of focusing on the iPhone, his best seller?

Is this the start of a decline? Apple too busy on hardware instead of focusing on services?

etc, etc, etc...

I don't get the doom and gloom surrounding Apple lately. As much as I find John Gruber irritating lately I find myself agreeing with this observation: No matter what Apple does, it seems wrong and it's setting the course of its own demise.

And after that rant... Why is this a hint of the company being more interested in the finance games than in products? Seems to me that its just a decision made by the CFO, that, as usual, is being given too much attention because the company behind it.

The problem with Apple is that updates are usually pushed out yearly (with each iOS introduction). With Siri the only new developments/exceptions that have been announced are new language compatibility and minor capability improvements (reservations, ticket buying...).

Now, ¿Does that mean that Siri hasn't evolved at all? Not necessarily. Server-side it might have become more reliable or accurate without Apple promoting it, for example.

Personally I use Siri as a shortcut for some functions that otherwise will require to many taps or navigation. Every day I set up my next day alarm with it "Wake me up at..." and sometimes I set up appointments using it. I might ask her to read me some message if I'm running, too. Some of those things Google Now / Android does not offer in it's current state.

I've never had any reliability problems so for me the service has not improved. Maybe users with thicker accents or that had trouble at the beginning would be able to tell otherwise. This has been the case, for me, with iOS Maps. Not new big banner features since introduction but constant improvements without publicity.

On a side note, another two cents: Siri's buzz didn't have to do with the product itself but with the glimpses of the future it offered. It carried the message that sooner or later our way of interacting with things will be a mix of gestures and voice.

It faced the same problems other speech recognition systems and virtual agents had in the past (including pre-Apple Siri) but the fact that a company that caters to the mass market was ready to give it a push probably caused a significant shift and raised awareness to this technology. Certainly has become a well known feature even by common, non-techie users. My mom or my grandmother knows about it, even if they don't use it. That is a huge step forward, in my opinion. Theres always time to refine and improve.