Cbasedlifeform

Jesus, this is a dangerous and slippery slope. Yes the various tweets e.g. by Monbiot were suggestive or perhaps insinuating something, but they did not actually allege Lord M was guilty of any crime.

If this goes ahead then Twitter may as well just shut down as any errant or flippant comment about a politician or celebrity could lead to a lawsuit.

For some reason this article doesn't mention the MS soaraway "Kin" mobile phone success ;)

Though I suppose technically speaking that wasn't MS's own hardware, they just bought the company.

My thoughts exactly (but expressed much more eloquently!).

"Least worst option" sums it up.

Your tax dollars at work. Not.

Not sure if this is the right forum to ask this... but here goes: I have a colleague who suggests porting a complex PHP web app (including Spaghetti Code TM) to Play. Anyone have thoughts on how this would compare to using RoR?

Apologies in advance if this is not the right forum.

NYT meet Barbra Steisand...

Makes me sad to read this-- my mother was a devoted 'BAI listener waaaaaaay back in the 60s and 70s so it was a part of my childhood. I knew there have been various scandals and woes over the years. Sigh...

Can anyone confirm this part?

With all that up-and-running, I immediately headed to the Windows Store (the virtual one with apps, not the physical one with Surfaces) to get some apps. Total nightmare. In the ten days I’ve been using the Surface, that Store has either been down or completely unresponsive a large percentage of the time. It just hangs and hangs and hangs, seemingly forever. I restart, re-open and some things work, then it hangs again. I’ve been trying to download one app for days — still no luck. I’m sick of restarting. And the back-button just isn’t working. Joy.

I expect a dirth of apps at the start but this sounds like a PR disaster if true.

Fair enough. I'm not too involved in social media (wrong generation :) apart from twitter, and don't feel the need for such live updates but amny perhaps do. I'd rather make a conscious effort to check info feeds e.g email rather than be distracted. It is alreadybad enough at meals for instance when people are constantly checking their mobile.

Wow. Scathing:

One of the worst aspects of Windows 8 for power users is that the product's very name has become a misnomer. "Windows" no longer supports multiple windows on the screen. Win8 does have an option to temporarily show a second area in a small part of the screen, but none of our test users were able to make this work. Also, the main UI restricts users to a single window, so the product ought to be renamed "Microsoft Window."

I wasn't aware of this "feature"...what a disaster.

Brings back memories of reading Scripting News back in the day. I worked for a certain silicon valley university and we actually had one of the Power Computing boxes. They certainly weren't great in terms of quality but they ran the OS. I also remember Ric Ford getting upset when Steve pulled theplug on the clones. Seems a zillion years ago.

To be clear, I did not knowingly try to spoof or "evade" the URL filter. I'll look out for this issue in the future however.

Please don't accuse me of doing it on purpose, however!

Apologies for that.

I confess I just do not understand those tiles. I don't want to put my phone down on a desk or restaurant table (well I don't do the latter much anyway) and have other people observe photos and social media feeds. And my current iOS device allows for many more available options from the home screen with the small icons. But horses for courses I guess.

A friend of mine who used to live in NY thought it was crazy how much work and time and money was spent sorting mail, loading into bags, put onto trucks and carts, and then delivered by humans and sorted again into individual mailboxes (e.g. in apartment buildings). Probably 80%+ of the material was junk mail that would be thrown away immediately.

I've lived in a few countries and there is a special simple pleasure in having a mailbox where (rarely, it's true) only "real" mail is deposited. The USPS should be renamed the United States Junk Mail Service as that seems to be their primary function.

I needed a first class stamp a few years ago in NY and I asked at the local newsagent if they sold them. The owner said yes, but they cost a few cents more than at the post office. I said "That's fine, it's worth it not to have to go there" and he said "That's what most people say."

The service I have received in e.g. French and Japanese post offices is an order of magnitude more polite and efficient than in the US. I don't know what is going on there, but the USPS is broken. I suppose that's what happens when one spends all day processing junk mail.

From the article:

Trustees at the University of Connecticut’s flagship campus in Storrs, known for its NCAA champion Huskies basketball teams, said last year they were reviewing the level of administrators’ pay. The move followed a controversy over the then campus police chief, who received $256,000 annually -- more than New York City’s police commissioner.

UConn has a $312,000-a-year provost and 13 vice, deputy and associate vice provosts, including one overseeing “engagement” who makes almost $275,000 a year. The university has seven vice presidents and 13 deans. President Susan Herbst, who receives a $500,000 salary, has a $199,000 chief of staff.

Jesus H Christ

Thanks, my bad...

vote with your wallet and your taste buds and your health. All three suffer when you buy Starbucks coffee.

Excellent points. Thank you.

Hear, hear! But mom and pop coffee shops are not making gazillions in profit and syphoning that off in weird accounting schemes to other territories.

Ha ha absolute meltdown in the comments. Methinks this won't go well for Starbucks.

Well to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, "I knew Steve Jobs, and Scott Forstall you're no Steve Jobs..."

Forstall was like Jobs in three key ways Lopp said: he was an asshole, he was successful and no one was sure why. Apple would miss the presence of people who tended to blow up at departmental meetings and swear wildly about small design features, he said

I think most people had some sense of why Jobs was successful. Look at e.g. the early NEXT era videos floating around.

Interesting comments in Mini's post, presumably by real softies.

This one is interesting: I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the EU mess yet. Sinofski was given responsibility by the board for ensuring that MS stayed compliant with the agreement regarding browser choice in Windows. Now, MS is facing a possible 10 BILLION dollar enema by the EU because Sinofski couldn't be bothered by something as trivial as a check box in Windows. Good riddance.

The MS lack of compliance on the EU browser directive was scandalous. If SS was in charge of that he deserves to go.

Can you say "slippery slope"? I thought you could.

Excellent and at times amusing review. Thanks for this.

Microsoft: "Hmmm... this hardware stuff is harder than we thought"

Apple's arrogance on this is really coming back to bite them. I remember the pro-Apple bloggers (gruber cough) who thought the initial "apology" was so clever. This lawsuit is turning into a nightmare.

Hope the app looks better than that data.gov.uk screenshot!

Face it: the global economy sucks. There are various types of crisis in the US, UK, EU, Japan, and China. Every government is desperate to raise money i.e. increase taxes (cf France's various recent disastrous forays in this area). So the point that Apple, Facebook, Google, Starbucks et al may have to pay higher corporate tax is a good one (and let's hope they do).

More importantly for AAPL though is the generational shift, I think. People in their 20s (just), 30s, 40s know about the Apple 'cool' factor but on a recent trip to SE Asia I would guess 60% or more of the teens were using non-iPhones. (And NB smartphone usage in this group in Singapore is probably 90%+). The newspapers had multiple full-page ads every day for Android phones (paid for by the telcos I guess). And needless to say the Androids are far cheaper than the iPhone.

Finally if the iPad mini is "good enough" for most people then it will cannabalise the full iPad sales.

I don't foresee another blockbuster product rollout though I'd love to be surprised.

I used to have some AAPL shares -- I sold at a tidy profit (though not at the peak) and now just observe from the sidelines and sleep better at night :)

I just wish they would improve the working practices in China, or at least pay higher wages and take a bit less in profit.

I guess it was lucky Twitter moved away from RoR ;)

Disclaimer: RoR fan.