Haskell

"We did have a Gmail CSRF bug reported to us in September 2007 that we fixed worldwide within 24 hours of private disclosure of the bug details."

What about bugs that aren't disclosed?

I mean: newspapers survived TV.

"Companies as deeply entrenched in obsolete habits as most current print media companies tend not to survive major shifts like the arrival of the Internet."

Wasn't TV a major shift? And yet they did survive.

Not only it scalable as it is the only solution.

See "Good Patterns & procedures to prevent CSRF": http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Reviewing_code_for_Cross-Site...

What is the most active period of the day? I suppose hackers are night creatures.

I am asking this because I am in another timezone and I would like to get a snapshot of HN at the right time.

At least in P2P networks, sharing is going down.

http://www.evidenzia.de/eng_stats_all_releases_line.html

'Having said that, be sure you know your market in and out. You better know who your competitors are ("We don't have any" is not an acceptable answer), the history of the market (What previous companies were similar?...'

At least, both Reddit and TicketStumbler claimed they didn't know who their main competitor was and they were accepted.

So, "We don't have any" _is_ an acceptable answer.

Anyone that have read Wordpress' source code should not be surprised that it is the most exploited piece of software on the web.

It was not created by programmers. It was created by web designers (hence its great visual design).

Wordpress was probably the only company that has migrated from Ruby to PHP (when they purchased Gravatar).

What you want to do is game development. Preferentially for mobile devices, aka iPhone and Android.

Game development can involve all fields of computer science and software engineering, in addition to a considerable amount of Physics, Mathematics, Design, Music and Story Telling. There's nothing more complete and fun than it.

Look at this:

"Calce estimates that he had hacked into perhaps 40 percent of the major universities in the United States, _using attack code that he picked up online_"

and

"_He took denial of service attack code written by_ a hacker named Sinkhole and developed a way to remotely train all of his approximately 200 university networks on the same target simultaneously, he said."

I think some users are confusing Hacker News with Script Kiddies News.

1. Searching in 2001 for: altavista google, the 3rd result is: "AltaVista launches Google competitor"

2. Searching in 2008 for: google facebook, the 3rd result is: Google’s Response to Facebook: "Maka-Maka"

If history can teach something, Google's future is doomed. :)

"Windows was great in that it allowed multiple hardware vendors to compete on hardware..."

Well, that is the "commotitized the complements" part.

The other part of your argument is that it is/was good enough for most users.

But let me put the question this way: If had it been 3x more expensive than the Mac, would have it been successful?

If not, then there's a clear distinction between a great product and a great price.

Remember the 3 Ps (Price, Product, Promotion)? Product and price are different things, specially in the software market, where the price doesn't necessarily reflect the cost.

So if people would not buy a 3x more expensive Windows, great product it not the motive by which it was successful.

I think the most accurate explanation in this case is not that Windows was a great product, but as another commenter said, that it offered a better value proposition for the money invested - and Microsoft had not the better product value, but the better price proposition, so they won that equation:

MacOS had a product value of 10, and a price of 5, so the value proposition was 2.

Windows had a product value of 5, but a price of 1, so the value proposition was 5, for each dollar invested.

I meant their main product - Coke, which has stagnated as a product for as long as I have lived upon this earth, and yet it is the leader in market share.

But you are right that they have not stagnated on Coke's marketing, although those Santa Claus commercials have been pretty repetitive.

I don't think stronger substitutes (Job's better products) are the correct answer - and as you observed, FF has only scratched IE dominance, not eliminated it.

Better product certainlly have some relevancy, because improving IE (IE7/8) will make it good enough that most people will not need to change, but we will never really know how low IE6's marketshare could go if Microsoft had not improved it - maybe it would still be good enough for most users.

At least, Windows was good enough for most users, even with better alternatives along the history - Next, BeOS, OS/2...

Stagnation isn't a good argument if you take Coca-Cola into account.

I don't know if Coca-Cola is a monopoly because Pepsi is a close substitute, but they are a leader in market-share in most continents, and if stagnation is what causes the loss of market-share, they would have been gone long ago.

What amazes me most is that people will trust all their passwords to a piece of software and they don't really know what it is doing.

If you want to install this Password Gorilla thing in your MacOS, how do you know if it isn't trojaned? Where is the checksum for you to verify it?

Do you remember that even an security researcher and openbsd developer got his box hacked and his software trojaned? http://tinyurl.com/3owcj7

Remember what your mother said: Don't accept candy from strangers. So I hope you all are checking the source code and compiling it your selves.

Not that checking the source code would be enough. When was the last time you checked the source code from anything you downloaded?

Ok, so you checked the source code to see that there's no backdoor sending your password over the internet, but do you yet remember the debian SSL vulnerability?

Yes, there could be a similar, subtle, but maliciously introduced flaw in cryptographic algorithm used by the password manager. So it's just a matter of an attacker having access to the cloud storage, not that that would be difficult either (remember the hacked Fedora and Redhat servers?), and "deciphering" all of your passwords.