dant

I think the core argument here is that if the majority of the users don't understand the implementation details of the software/hardware they're using, then selling them new stuff might actually involve spelling out the benefits in practical terms that users can relate to. I really can't see the problem with that.

I also can't see why the Car analogy is somehow invalid because cars only do one thing. For years having a car was essential for living in many (not all) modern cities, without a car you couldn't get to work, visit family or buy groceries. It was an essential tool for living in much the same way as computer will be in coming decades. People did not generally understand the inner workings of fuel injection, anti-lock brakes or catalytic converters, but that didn't mean engineers weren't able to introduce those things. They just had to articulate the performance/safety/economy/environmental benefits in terms that people understood and cared about. The same will be true for computers.

You have a contract directly with the borrowers, not with the institution. If the borrowers don't pay up, you loose that money. Zopa doesn't pretend that you have money sitting in a vault somewhere that you can take out whenever you like.

To be fair to banks they don't really try to push that vault myth either, but that is the mental model people still use when interacting with banks.

Birmingham, England

Good point. I think Microsoft have failed to spot that the computer market is going the same way as the car market. You can buy a car very cheaply if you just need to get from A to B. But people who have more money choose to buy BMWs or Mercedes. It's an aspirational purchase.

So what's your point? That the people who want a say in how they're governed shouldn't express a view because the people who don't like to have a say are sick of hearing it?

I don't think the argument is that "you're bad anyway". Regardless of who you are, how you got into that situation and whether the protesters have a point, with a protest movement that big and motivated your options are same: crush the protests, re-run the election or form a unity government. If you choose to crush the protest then you give up the "government by consent of the people" type contract that you have with society. I think it's that fact that will drive western opinion more than the actual legitimacy of the result.

I agree. Facebook's data on me is not of a particularly good quality. Most of my "friends" are former colleagues or school friends. I wouldn't trust any of them to recommend a restarunt any more then I would trust 300 anonymous reviews on an independant restarunt listings site.

True. I'm not passing judgement or using subjective terms like "bad guys", I'm just saying that the OP highlights what a robust monopoly Google has and that the counter arguments that some have offered are wrong.

If true, this strengthens the case that Google's monopoly is dangerous. The defence of Google's market dominance has always been that users are not locked in to Google and would switch the moment something better arrived. If Google have built a brand loyalty that transcends that then they would be virtually impossible to challenge.

Give the guy a break, he clearly does now how to code, he writes well crafted blog entries in which he humbly explains some of the mistake's he's made for the benefit of others. If he's being voted up in news aggregator then a lot of people must appreciate what he's doing. Why is that so bad?

"Smart" in this context means "engineering smart", sounds like they lacked some business smarts... There's more than one way to be smart.

It's all about network effects. I think the hype is bad for Twitter, it makes people aware of the service before any of their friends are on there, so they try it, subscribe to Stephen Fry and Jeff Atwood and then give up.

Me and a few of my friends in the UK .net development world are on there but we go days between tweets because that's what everyone else is doing. There's no conversation for me at the moment. At this point I'm just sitting on my user account and waiting for the network to become worth being a part of.

I think pg has misjudged what stage of the start-up revolution we're in.

He notes that the industrial revolution spread quickly because there were geographical areas with middle class populations and cultures that let people keep the large sums of money they made. He also notes that the culture necessary for large numbers of start-ups is not present in many areas.

IMO, we're no way near the railroad stage of the start-up revolution. I think we're in the early renaissance. The valley is like Venice in the 1400s. It's a very localised concentration of merchant traders and a culture of what we now call "modern values", meanwhile the rest Europe is living in the "dark ages". It wasn't until the plague spread across Europe and gave the surviving working classes more influence that the culture started to change. Even then, it's another 300 years before society really starts to change.

Looking at Europe in the 1400 hundreds you might well have thought that Venetian style modernism would be a very localised revolution and that these new fangled "banks" would only ever be established in small areas.

Start-ups are not the "railroads" of the industrial revolution. They are the "banks" of the industrial revolution.

The amount of wealth in the world is roughly the same, but the perceived value of cash has risen relative to everything else. The "wealth" has gone to the people who happen to be sitting on a lot of cash at the moment while people with lots of Plasma TVs in storage (for example) are finding they're not as wealthy as they thought they were.

I expect our kids are still going to have to work as hard as we did in order to buy those Plasma TVs. Even if they cost less, they'll probably be getting paid less too.

This looks kind of like Powershell, which I've been in awe of for several months now. But being built on a more dynamic runtime this will have the ability to use to extend objects that you get back from the shell so it could be even better.

I'm not surprise this is happening, I expect that it will happen more in future. Windows and IE may have only lost a few percentage points of market share over the past few years, but those few percentage points represent a generation of technology enthusiasts who will, I suspect, have a big impact on the way the internet evolves.

When someone who doesn't run Windows or IE builds a site for their peers who predominately don't run Windows or IE either, then finds that they have to jump through some hoops to support IE, is it any wonder they decide to pass?

I didn't bail out anyone, sometimes more than one institution blows up which seems to give you a better chance of making it to the end before the recession catches you.

Then I realised I was supposed to care about the stock market. Game Over.

I wasn't suggesting that evolution thinks, I was suggesting that we've evolved to produce more males so that there's an optimum 50/50 balance of the number of males and females at around early adulthood. Considering some of the other things that evolution has achieved that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to suggest.

Your explanation of whether certain couples can only produce males or females was pretty interesting though, thanks.

Consensus is clearly 66% or 50% depending on whether you think the GB and BG combinations are the same thing in the context of the question.

But isn't it true that more boys than girls are born (because boys die younger so evolution tries to balance it out a bit)?

Does anyone know if certain fathers can only produce one sex of child? If so then having one girl would increase the chances of having another girl slightly.

You make it sound like that's a bad thing.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to silently hide the posts from everyone except the troll. Now he (or she) has been public outed he'll probably try again with a new set of accounts.

The same thing could happen with people, someone finds an old story but doesn't realise it's old, tells a few people, starts a rumour and then traders sell off stock. At least with an automated system you can improve the algorithms.

I'm a manager in an in-house corporate IT dept. Far from running scared from this kind of thing I'm constantly trying to get the rest of the business to except off the self software for all the little tools that they ask for so that we can focus on the key business differentiators.

Problem is, they're a big company and they want slick corporate branded stuff that integrates with our ActiveDirectory and where the drop downs have sucked values in from other apps so it all just works. Which is fine, only, it costs loads and its in most cases it's not worth it.

I think it'll be hard for a lot of big corporates to accept that it's better (for example) to adjust their business to Zoho CRM than to hire people to adjust SAP CRM to their business. I think a few startups will have to adopt things like Zoho and then grow big, before the incumbents change.

I'd keep files but use tags instead of folders. I like powershell's object based cli, make sure nothing like the windows registry ever existed, the OS would only run byte code, memory would be transactional and grey would not be the default window background color.

It doesn't really say that ebay are doing less auctions than before, just that fixed price are gaining share. I doubt auctions will die off completely.

I'm not sure how seriously to take this, yes its pretty scary but can't help thinking:

* Wouldn't this fall foul of anti-cartel laws, could all the ISPs get together and decide to limit what they sell without the government objecting?

* What's to stop someone starting their own ISP and not restricting access, could the network providers refuse to sell bandwidth to them?

* They're limiting supply to something artificially in order to boost the price. Unless I'm mistaken and it somehow costs less to only serve Facebook and MSN, there's big incentive for one of the ISPs to break ranks and offer unlimited access without it costing extra.

* What about mash-ups? My Google desktop wouldn't work if all the other sites that serve content to it were blocked. How would they explain that to their customers?

What do others think? Is this realistic threat?

It was meant to be a lighted joke about how so many people are proposing ways to fix twitter it reminds me of slashdot a few years ago where people were trying to fix spam and they started responding to each suggestion with a list of flaws with Xs next to the ones that applied in that case. I'm not making a point about erlang, i dont really know anything about erlang, but maybe i touched a nerve so i apologise.

I wonder if slashdot has got a form for this sort of thing yet ;)

Your twitter architecture will fail due to:

  ( ) Database replication issues
  ( ) Inability to prevent spam
  (x) Immaturity of the libraries in your chosen language
  ...

It's quite interesting but seems to lack any actual conclusion. Security costs money, so what?

I'm not sure that unsolicited message scenario will be viable if twitter becomes distributed. How would you stop the spam?