ecaradec

I love the 2 years old Emily analogy.

MS should really make constructor pay a premium to be allowed to install all that crap. Given their margins they would think twice. They are jeopardizing the windows platform.

I'm not sure that this what saved Apple. If they were losing billions, 150 millions wouldn't have saved them. It was just a protection measure to buy the trust of the board.

What saved Apple was good products ipod and especially iphone, and an awesome marketing that presented better products under their best light. It's the iphone that changed the game and brought craploads of revenues. I'd love to know the insight that lead them to the iphone.

I worked with the Windows QA of XBox for a while and it was totally awesome to have super detailed information on bugs, where they occured and how often, with core dumps and stacks in case of crashes.

Users and bosses thinks they have done more than their duty when they said you that "it doesn't work", "nothing work" without more details. You have to run after them to get more context and detailed information.

I love QA.

If all you need is to trap a few functions Intel published a paper on how to intercept API call. It can be very useful if you need to fix some function inside a DLL you load, modify it's behavior or log calls for debugging. There is a lot of potential uses and it's a fun technique that teaches you some things about cache control and assembly.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intercepting-system...

The Apple way is to design amazing product, I do own an iphone and an ipad and I really like them. Apple does an incredible job at designing products.

But the Apple way is also to not be at conferences or shows but their own, to forbid developers to talk about the OS and to sue others companies using their patents. I really dislike Apple, if there was some other company that could do as amazing phones and tablets as they do, I would jump in their boat as quickly as possible. As a customer, I have absolutly no loyalty to Apple. Apple is like the crazy captain that is the only one that can pass the "Cap Horn". He is amazing at what he do but if he need to jettison you at anytime, he'll do it. You can't be safe near him.

I wished some PC maker should make a line of designed PC and deliver them with a raw Windows, without any crapware installed. Actually I thought about it so much that I considered doing just that. I talked about it with a friend who is an Apple fan. His opinion was that it couldn't work because PC buyier didn't care, he said they wanted blinking leds and things just like that and that they actually like crapware. I might reconsider my idea seeing comments there.

Also, the $99 pricing got them a lot of good press because it was a very good deal. An average deal would have no press so no sales, the sales are not a linear correlation of the pricing.

To all of those who believe that html5 can replace flash for web games have a look at :

http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush

and some other games on armorgames or kongregate and stop propagating rumors about HTML5 replacing flash for games. The performance of HTML5+JS is not there yet, unless you talk about tic-tac-too games and the like. If flash is going to be replaced by something it would be by unity3d not by HTML5 or might be chrome native client. Adobe would be smart to secure this game thing because ads, video, etc, will probably be less and less. I'd love to see a cheap flash console where indies could publish games and sell games.

That said I'm happy to see flash beeing kicked out of website design, when flash is mixed with html it sucks.

Given what they've done with self driving cars, they could do awesome missiles.

I agree, I was actually surprised that MS didn't approach Firefox with a better offer right now. It makes senses now that I know there is a contract with a expiration. Larger park means more advertiser interest for Bing. It would even be more profitable for Bing than it is for G because they need to conquer some of the G users.

Except if you consider that Branson is actually the CEO of his empire. He seems to draw the line of what products needs to be. Telling the story is the CEO job and he seems to be in charge here. I'm referring to some letter send to the virgin airline lately here.

I agree with you though that the tech world love to believe CEO are useless.

A word of the day would be a very good way to get people enter their email and tip them to come back to the site. I'd leave my email without a thought.

Actually it seems to work for me as a way to learn words because I get the meaning of the word after failing. I don't mind clicking next because I often don't know the words (I only got 8500 at the vocabulary test earlier, so I fail quite often ).

May be the next word button should only display if you don't make a 100% score ?

The app is really useful for me actually.

Just so that anyone lower feel good, I did only 8500, I need to read non tech topics probably and never lived in a english country.

Actually the french is correct, it's more that it's doesn't sound like a good writer.

It has been said a lot of times, but something is perfect not when there is nothing to add but when there is nothing to remove.

G+ is very much like that and this is quite a notable thing that a so large project with so much power is reduced to such a few functionalities. This is actually what makes it bearable otherwise it would be pretty hard to follow. I wonder if they'll be able to keep this nice contraption evoluting, this will be quite a challenge ihmo : things like knowing who see your posts won't be easy to solve without privacy issues.

That's true, but that's a competitive advantage that google can maintain for a long long time.

I learn how bad they were and why from this article :

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/singleton-consider...

That's a good read

I've always felt that it's socially ok to say that you don't understand technical subjects. Might be this is the trace of the nerd thing : people don't really want to be seen understanding technical things because that would require showing interest into it.

It's interesting that we always hear business types (in a very general meaning ) say that technical people are unable to explain things clearly, but never hear them asking how they could understand technical subjects better. Should we really be expert at communication, business, marketing to explain to everyone in it's own jargon ?

The issue is that it has become a political issue before we were sure what the issue was. Now we don't know whether or not we should act, instead of deciding what we should do.

I keep seeing this advice that you can find market by looking at adwords tool. I love the idea, but I've never seen a real example that end up as a real product, only the general tip and I tried but never got interesting results ? Does someone has a real credible example ?

He is very nice to listen to as well. You can find some podcast here and there. I'd wish he talks more often, but he has better to do of course ;)

Agreed and this is something that you can't say you are aware of because banks do not communicate of internal security measure checks. As an example : I paid 1c on my own website via paypal while doing paiement integration test, and the transaction was blocked. I received a text message that told me to call the bank to authorize the paiement. I asked if it would block again for another test, but they have consigns to not answering that kinds of questions and I'm glad they did ;)

As a user I've unfollowed twitter accounts that were developers but as there was sport literally flood my timeline with comments. It's a question of volume thought. I don't care about the occasionnal comments on things that doesn't interess me.

But you don't have to tell that you first customer doesn't pay you ;).

Don't put all your eggs in a basket you know nothing about.

Even if it would be beneficial to the whole internet, but if google did that that would be like giving an advantage to all the google competitors : they wouldn't need to solve the crawling problem. It may not be algorithmically gorgeous but it's still one problem less. Would be fun though, we could buy a tarball of the whole internet ;)

I heartfully agree, revising the joel test, but the first 3 questions smell a bit too much like an agilist guide . Hey I said smell ;). I'm not against agility, actually the point that I had the more difficulty to bare with of the joel test was : 'do you have a spec ?'.

"Do developers trains at office or on their spare time ?" : split this one in two, in the first case you have a proactive company, in the second case you have proactive employees. That's not the same thing.

"Do developers talk with the client is a good one ?" : there might be company where it is appropriate and others not.

I like question 8 though : "Do developers retains the copyright of work they do on their spare time ?" I'd like that companies had a little more clarity on this.

That's the marketing offer. I use lastpass for all my websites, but not for my master email, paypal and banks. I have over 120 accounts here and there for websites I test. Before I had three password one for paypal, one for email and one for everything else, then came the gawker debacle. I completly trust lastpass for my twitter account, facebook, affiliation programs, etc...

Just like startups, anything that displace the silicon valley would probably not be like silicon valley. It'll be something else probably...