rickmb

10 ms·

31.
by rickmb 14y ago
Yes, but not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they have a completely different business model. As someone else already succinctly put it: for Apple, users are customers, for Google they are the product (to be sold to adverti
32.
by rickmb 14y ago
Okay, I'll risk being "that guy" who starts about adblock, but I seriously tend to forget that there even is advertising on the web, let alone that it is still a source of revenue for anyone else but Google. I've always considered it one of
33.
by rickmb 14y ago
I abandoned Last.fm when shortly after the CBS takeover they did a 180 and became the mouthpiece of the record labels instead of a disruptive force. I didn't mind so much that they had to compromise, but the classic recording industry PR-sp
34.
by rickmb 14y ago
RMS is usually correct. Annoying, offensive, unpragmatic, undiplomatic and confrontational, but in the end he's usually right in his basic analyses of the problem. Often well before anyone else even recognizes there is a problem.
35.
by rickmb 14y ago
Your attempt to frame this as "copyright vs tech industry" already gives me a bad taste in my mouth. The copyright debate isn't about one industry against another, it's about an industry versus the rights of individual citizens.
36.
by rickmb 14y ago
Said person may have only been the catalyst. The reality is that company culture changes as it scales up, whether you bring in outsiders or not. It's easy to blame a specific person, but in fact it is perfectly normal for some of "the best"
37.
by rickmb 14y ago
Please note that this "anti-freedom crowd" is also heavily supported by the major telecom corporations from the US and Europe, and the predominantly American copyright lobby also likes to join in the fun. Yes, Western corporations are sidin
38.
by rickmb 14y ago
I would say that an inability to communicate with other developers in the same terms (including in code, because I suspect your code may look very different from others) is a serious barrier to working in a team, no matter how brilliant and
39.
by rickmb 14y ago
For me, IE is like landmines. Built as weapon to break the web rather than to do anything constructive, and then abandoned after the war to create more havoc for years. Maybe MS should have given the new generations of IE a new name. Rebran
40.
by rickmb 14y ago
This isn't just a lack of interest in F1, it's an almost complete lack of modern motorsports in general. Oddly enough, for a country where cars are sacred, the US has barely any capability to develop racing cars of any kind (NASCAR is low t
41.
by rickmb 14y ago
I don't like this legislation, or any other legislation that increases copyright restrictions (especially in favor of clueless dinosaurs), but I also resent the hypocritical way in which Google pretends it's protesting this as a public serv
42.
by rickmb 14y ago
As a citizen of the EU and a country with strong privacy protection, my privacy rights are protected by law, and neither Facebook's terms nor the fact that any other entity can collect certain information from Facebook negates that right. T
43.
by rickmb 14y ago
The great thing about soccer is that even having an actual soccer ball is not a necessity. Empty cans, ragged tennis balls, anything will do. This used to be perfectly fine in the first world country I grew up in, so although this is a grea
44.
by rickmb 14y ago
If they didn't tolerate it, they wouldn't have voting machines in the first place. In many other countries these things are banned because people care .
45.
by rickmb 14y ago
The same applies to the rest of the world. However, the article seems to omit one important factor: career opportunities. Cities with high salaries and high cost of living also offer plenty of opportunities in case the job doesn't work out,
46.
by rickmb 14y ago
Coming from Oracle, "Hello world" feels oddly menacing. Like they're planning another takeover.
47.
by rickmb 14y ago
Sexism aside, marketeers should know better by now than to market innovations to business executives. They are the last people to adopt new technology, and even if it does happen it often comes with a stigma that hinders wider adoption, bec
48.
by rickmb 14y ago
And if people in every field and every community felt that way gender issues would never get discussed, let alone dealt with. Unless you truly believe that there are no issues, this attitude is just intellectual laziness. Whether it comes f
49.
by rickmb 14y ago
This isn't racism. This is bullying, using, amongst many other things, marginally racist remarks as a weapon. That kind of stuff is as much racism as tasteless jokes about wife-beating constitute actual domestic violence. This is clearly a
50.
by rickmb 14y ago
It's not a stereotype, it's a very real an observation. I'm not a particularly "fast moving" cyclist (stereotype much?), I ride at a leisurely pace (Amsterdam, remember?), so I have plenty of time to observe what happens around me. The acce
51.
by rickmb 14y ago
Why do people insist on pretending all of Europe is full of bike lanes? In most inner cities there often isn't room for bike lanes, or the lane is just a line on the asphalt. I bike to work every day in Amsterdam, not a single bike lane on
52.
by rickmb 14y ago
I like it. Especially because theoretically it can be mixed with other, conventional authentication schemes, so it can be made completely optional and used at will, just like sites currently mix password + several OAuth providers. It's pre
53.
by rickmb 14y ago
Using only simple blogs to prove responsive design is unnecessary is like using only nails to prove that powertools are unnecessary and all you need is a hammer...
54.
by rickmb 14y ago
Same story here. Exactly the same date (14 September 2011), haven't heard anything since.
55.
by rickmb 14y ago
This whole flag-waving typical Techcrunch rant is based on the assumption that education only serves to feed the economy. Profit is all that matters. So many of America's social problems can be traced back to a lack of a decent educational
56.
by rickmb 14y ago
Seriously, "wobbing" is now becoming an internationally used term? The word is derived from the acronym WOB, which stands for "Wet Openbaarheid Bestuur", a relatively recent Dutch law that obliges government institutes to make government do
57.
by rickmb 14y ago
Seems to me like the author is very selectively shopping in non-US examples in order to just go on an anti public-transport rant. In most places in Europe costs of mass transit projects are notorious for spiraling out of control, and unlike
58.
by rickmb 14y ago
I've been using computers since the 80's. I haven't used anti-virus software since the 90's. And yes, I have been using Windows until somewhere in the 00's, including Windows 95, which is about as vulnerable as it gets. When I was using ant
59.
by rickmb 14y ago
As a self-taught programmer who started in the '80s, I definitely missed a lot of foundation I had to pick up over the years. However, this was mostly on the architectural level. As far as the more technical stuff is concerned, I was lucky
60.
by rickmb 14y ago
Even though I'm a big Apple fanboy, I have to admit I avoid using Apple's desktop applications . The one exception is Mail.app, but even there I'm always eagerly looking for any possible alternative. iPhoto, Addressbook, iCal, none of thos

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