pedanticfreak

12 ms·

61.
by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Crapware isn't an expense, it's a source of revenue. Think of it like the ads on Google's result page. Just another conduit for commerce the carrier and manufacturer use improve profitability. Deciding to kill a source of revenue, whether i
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Great news. Now how about that mobile hotspot? Will it be free or an extra $20 per month like Verizon's other phones? There seems to be confusion on this point.
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
I want to echo that the AT&T iPhone is hugely disappointing when traveling internationally due to the outrageous cost of AT&T's roaming plans. Data is prohibitively expensive. Think $1 per megabyte (not a typo, mega-byte). That's $2
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Chrome ships with Flash, which is a good thing. Not because Flash is a good thing. But because if you're going to run Flash it might as well be up to date and running as a separate process in a sandbox.
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Interesting. YouTube must be a mess with all of these competing formats it needs to support. I assume it will eventually switch to WebM for both HTML5 and Flash by default and just use h264 for compatibility. Still, it must be horrific.
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
I wouldn't accuse someone of adding no value when clearly the site would not exist if readers did not find it valuable enough to keep coming back. Or if the author didn't find it valuable to keep contributing. Maybe you don't find it valuab
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
If you are guaranteed 20% of the list price, I forsee devs overpricing their apps in the Amazon store to get a higher minimum payout. Additionally, even if the best default price is much lower, it just makes their apps look that much better
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
I think the more appropriate summary is that DuckDuckGo proactively guards your privacy. Google is completely aware of privacy issues, but allows privacy to slip through the sieve by being indecisive about what to do about it.
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
More detail from the above article: [quote] If the malicious script had gone undiscovered, it would have disabled monitoring alerts and all log-ins, deleted the root passwords to the approximately 4,000 Fannie Mae servers, then erased all d
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
For some reason, my brain finds the former to be worse than being unable to lend the book at all. If I can't lend it, it's more like seeing a movie or going to a concert. I paid for the experience and now it's gone. Being only able to lend
71.
by pedanticfreak 16y ago
RIM has been the entrenched market leader. Abandoning all that made it successful would be equivalent to the Digg redesign. Instead of placing bets on RIM's comeback play we'd be analyzing the wreckage of RIM's sudden implosion. Google and
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
I'm not sure Americans are misinformed, per se, but instead I'd sooner say human beings exhibit an equality bias. For example, if you gave a person a choice of two mutual funds, a low risk and a high risk, most people would put 50% in one a
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
You know, this is totally ad hominem but Cato is a free market think tank. They couldn't come up with an article in support of net neutrality if they wanted. It is completely against the free markets holy scripture they have vowed to protec
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Etherpad may actually hinder more than help writer archeology. Would T.S. Eliot's widow have had access to his drafts and correspondence if they were in Google Docs and Gmail, respectively? Or worse, what if they were in the now defunct Eth
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Correction, this is how an engineer does pizza: http://www.robotfoodtech.com/content/pizza/en
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
See, you don't want to have a private jet or have a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport. You want to fly in a private jet and drive a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport. Both are quite a bit more affordable than owning either. People charter private jets al
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
I think you're also missing some of the point though. You don't need a million dollars for any or all of those things you just listed. Add it all up and you're barely breaking a few thousand dollars. Sure you need money. He's not saying you
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
ChromeOS is zero maintenance. As a technical person with a few gadgets, that's one less thing to worry about. For non-technical people I can only imagine it as revolutionary. Android, by comparison, is the Microsoft Windows of mobile operat
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
In reality, most documents today are multi-file archives that hide the complexity from the user anyway. The same goes for applications. The days of managing individual files passed a while ago.
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
The illusion of limited supply makes Gmail accounts appear more valuable even if you're smart enough to realize that's not the case.
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
I was listening to Dan Ariely's podcast a while back and one of the topics was on the hidden benefit of brain drains. The theory goes like this. Only a few highly educated people have the opportunity to emigrate, say 1 out of 10 college gra
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Why doesn't Apple engrave Macbook Pros for free, too?
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Not exactly the same, but the PS2 Linux Kit shipped with GNUstep by default. So at least some people at Sony have always had a soft spot for the platform.
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
I am still not sure what the author means by 'big company.' I have worked at Fortune 100 companies and the intelligence of the IT staff is nothing to brag about from a technical standpoint. In fact most 'big companies' are political quicksa
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
You may laugh, but there is actually research showing people are motivated by recognition more than money. Sure, you need so much money to live. But really we want to be recognized by our peers. Dan Ariely has a short podcast titled "Why pe
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
If you can teach high school students to be decent programmers surely you can teach a intelligent art history or English majors as well. Solution: Hire anyone intelligent to do the job for a fraction of the pay. They learn a new skill and y
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Now we just need to sell our house surplus to the PRC students after they graduate. Two birds, one stone. They're going to work and steal our jobs no matter what. They might as well do it on US soil and pay US taxes.
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
Re: Taxes Keep in mind the polar opposite of the power grid is that everyone keeps a personal generator they build with their own hands and continually feed fuel they gather with their own hands. Sometimes a little ineffiency in one place a
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
#1 People of similar attractiveness do tend to gravitate toward each other. #2 People of all levels of attractiveness are able to measure other people's attractiveness on the same scale with relative accuracy. Dan Ariely has a very good tal
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by pedanticfreak 16y ago
MeeGo is competing with less than free (Android) and at a significant disadvantage. It's worth trying; the stakes are sky high. But man is the deck stacked against them right now.

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