I'm considering going a step farther and just setting up an Openvpn connection to my Linode server.
740 karma · joined July 27, 2011
That being said, I'm getting the feeling that these bloggers don't understand how these social sites, and the internet actually work. There is a point in time before your story is on reddit or HN where it will eventually get most of it's eyeballs. At this point your content still needs to be discovered. You have only a few options:
1.) I check my RSS feeds and read your story (not necessarily skim - unless it sucks)
2.) You post a headline on twitter (definitely skimming here) AND I happen to be watching the stream the moment you post.
3.) You get lucky and facebook doesn't hide your hard work from me, or you pay facebook to distribute it.
4.) I happen to see the post during my bi-annual checking G+.
From a user perspective, RSS is hands down the most reliable way to keep up with sources that I really care about. Everything else causes me to miss articles from sources that I love all together.
I do hope that Digg can create a simple and fast interface that captures this concept without too much clutter from the more traditional social features.
The real ultimate feature that's missing here though - the one that no one else has and would make go out and buy 3-4 of these things is the ability to sync audio and video playback across multiple devices throughout my house.
Even with the law there's nothing stopping someone from posting illegally captured photos anonymously. The hobbyists will be ones that feel the impact of the law and the more clandestine drone operators that they aim to prevent will continue unabated.
I'm sure that in the not so distant future when any police officer can launch a drone all of these privacy worries will go right out the window.
In the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." The good news here is that thanks to technology, our future is definitely going to be a bright place for all of us whether we like it or not.
The good thing about memorizing passwords this way is that it doesn't matter how random the password is - totally random letters, numbers and symbols or a sentence are the same when it's a keyboard dance.
As long as you have a keyboard anyway...
I have to find a keyboard to figure out half of my passwords when setting up my phone.
Money is not really a resource in and of itself. It's kind of a 'point system' we use to allocate finite resources.
I do think that this is a very important concept that is very difficult for many people to grasp.
If you took 50% of each person's money on the planet and burned it in a fire prices would (eventually) drop by 50% on most products.
If everyone has less money, they buy less things, and so there is a surplus of things. This causes the price of things to drop so that an equilibrium is reached. It will also (ideally) cause a drop in wages, etc so that things are still distributed.
The purchasing power of your money depends on the amount of resources to be allocated and the amount of money the people that want the resource are willing to spend.
So if banks hoard money, it really does not effect your purchasing power negatively until someone tries to spend that money on resources you want.
This is the basic concept, it doesn't mean that there are no consequences to these actions. If you hoard everyone's money (same as burning, but it can come back) you basically get deflation.
Deflation is bad because things like salaries don't scale down easily. People get upset when you dock their pay and most companies would rather just cut hours and lay-off employees rather than upset the entire company.
This is bad because the company is now over-paying (and over-working) workers for their services and there are lots of unemployed that can't find jobs.
So these changes don't happen as easy as the simplified example above, but they are real and very significant effects that need to be taken into account.
The real question has absolutely nothing to do with Siri and everything to do with innovation in general. As long as Google continues to innovate they will be on top. Historically all companies eventually get too large and gunk up their own 'innovation machinery'. It's only a matter of time. Same goes for Apple.
I personally think it would have been smarter to integrate google plus with reader more (even if that involves forking reader) before changing the product and removing sharing.
Now we are stuck with an unusable product for an indeterminate amount of time. Due to Google's notoriously poor communication, most won't wait and the community will move elsewhere.
It seems like a waste to me and I seriously doubt they had the foresight to predict this level of backlash.
I guess we will have to wait an see.
1.) Low fat salad dressing is generally a bad thing. You should add olive oil, butter, or some natural fat source any time you eat vegetables because you can't absorb many of the vitamins in greens without some type of fat in the meal.
2.) Regardless of what many people believe, "Whole grains" are really not that great. The bran of many grains adds nutrients, but when you look at the actual bioavailability of those nutrients it's very low due to things like phytic acid. It adds fiber, but it's mostly insoluble fiber which doesn't have all of the benefits of soluble fiber.
This effectively makes whole grains "empty calories". They aren't completely empty, but there is a low nutrient to calorie ratio, and that's what you need to improve. Meat and vegetables have much higher nutrients compared to calories.
Eliminate grains and sugary items (especially fructose) and eat 'real' foods (veggies, meats, and natural coconut, olive, or animal fats), and you will lose weight without starving yourself or counting calories.
Finally supported a week ago! I'm PUMPED about trying google+. Except there's not a lot going on there and there is no api to integrate it with other social networks. It doesn't really have a purpose.
Then Google completely destroys Google Reader. My absolute favorite website can no longer create an RSS feed for other RSS users making it impossible for users to contribute content to Google reader.
Now I'm just pissed. Gmail is still the best mail service and I like my android phone, but Google has made so many terrible decisions lately - especially around Google plus - I don't care anymore. I'm done. If google decides to right its wrongs I will care about its services again.
If I were google I would drop everything and do the following as quickly as possible: 1.) Release an API for Google+ 2.) integrate google reader with google+. No, I'm not talking about adding a share button. I'm talking about full integration so that Google+ can feed data back into reader.
I doubt that they will be able to accomplish this fast enough to keep Google reader from dying. I'm sure some other service (like Hivemined) will fill the void, but they really need to get moving on that API if they want to save google+.
That is the entire point of sharing in google reader. It's not a 'social network' per se, it's specialization in going through RSS feeds. I find a 'friend' that looks at funny photos all day and he pics out the 10-20 good ones so I don't have to look at funny photos all day. My feeds can be focused around other topics. but this only works if sharing is super easy (like pressing shift + s) and there is some way to get shared content back into my reader.
Without that the social network is completely useless. I might as well be emailing/IMing links to my friends.
I don't mind that they are using google+, but they need to think about this for moment and actually make google+ useful in some way.
This would be roughly analogous to twitter removing hashtags and replies and replacing them with a 'post to Facebook' button. What's the point?
It is true that you will loose weight if you restrict calories, but if you don't fix the root problem you are fighting a very old (leptin resistant) part of the brain that wants its fat back.
We evolved an extremely complex and precise energy regulation mechanism over millions of years (just like all other organisms on earth). So the big question is, what is breaking this system?
The answer (I believe) is rooted in high-calorie low nutrient junk-foods that are now ubiquitous (mainly sugar and grain based foods). The emphasis here is low nutrient by the way, not high calorie.
I dare anyone to gain weight on meat and vegetables alone. If it's even possible, it's not easy to do.
Over a year I lost 60 lbs (27kg) eating fatty meats and butter drenched vegetables and outside of the first two weeks or so, I NEVER starved myself and always ate till I was full.
I feel truly sorry for those that struggle with obesity and try starving themselves and exercising as I did for the first 25 years of my life.
I love plain full-fat yogurt (ex: Fage total or brown cow cream top). Unfortunately non-fat yogurt tastes terrible once you've had the good stuff and is all you can find outside of specialty stores. (I have only ever seen/tried Chobani 0% so I can't rate their 2% fat yogurt)
Anyway, after years of never finding the good stuff I gave up on the system and dropped $30 on a yogurt maker on Amazon. Now Yogurt is $1/half gallon (price of milk) - 2-3 times that price for strained/Greek yogurt since you throw out the whey, it's super-easy to make (pasteurize milk, add culture, let it incubate for 6-12 hrs), and it's always just the way I like it.
The only other valid point in the article is that they haven't handled their PR well.
I guess I am alone here, but I was very impressed that HP was willing to cut it's losses on palm/web OS so quickly.
Also, for better or worse, a publicly traded company needs to grow. If you look at HP's financial report...there is definitely room for growth in enterprise software. I think buying Autonomy (a profitable company) is a good direction for them to go (though I do admit they paid a very high price).
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." --Benjamin Franklin
I would like to throw in a few counterpoints so we can all maintain a proper context.
1.) When companies become as large as Apple and begin purchasing products from vendors. It is not possible for them to guarantee the safety and operation of every vendor. Just as when you go buy oranges at the grocery store, you might know what country or farm it came from, but you don't know working conditions at that farm. Even if you could know you don't have time to dig through that info - you just want an orange. You, like everyone else, just respond to the major media outrages and exposés and blindly avoid Wal-Mart, etc.
Apple has more leverage here since they are a large company, but when it comes down to it, Apple ordered more screens and the vendor made the bad decision to use n-hexane. All Apple can do is lean on the vendor to make it right and not let it happen again. Believe me, even if Apple hates the workers and secretly wants them to die a horrible death for their stock holders, they don't want this bad press and would have avoided it if they could have.
2.) Outsourcing has real costs. It's not just cheaper because labor is cheaper. When you outsource you have to worry about the government, the infrastructure, shipping, recruiting talent etc. If you paid the Chinese workers American wages, it would not be worth the other costs to outsource at all.
3.) You can't compare living and working conditions between countries. As bad as a 3rd world outsourced job is to us 1st worlder's it's still generally BETTER than what they would have otherwise. In fact Apple and other 'outsourcers' are the one and only reason for the breath-taking trend line that is China's per capita growth: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china+income+per+capita
Just read about living in China in the 60s. It's horrifying to even think about and makes China today seem like paradise. In short the Chinese are better with Apple than without.
4.) There are not a fixed number of jobs in the world - there are only a fixed number of resources. If China can make us a product cheaper than we can make it WE benefit. Our resources are free to build other things for China when they want to cash in some of those US Dollars they so graciously accepted from Apple in exchange for real goods. Voluntary trade benefits both parties by its very nature or it doesn't happen.
Also, the US unemployment issue is bit off the main topic of an already lengthy comment, but it has much more to do with sticky wages and our past decisions than it does outsourcing.
5.) Finally you can't not outsource. It's impossible. In this age of globalization everything is from everywhere. You can't even build a toaster by yourself: http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toast...
Of course, that doesn't stop patent trolls (terrorist rent seekers) with no skin in the game, but at least this drama would end.