hexis

I hate to be "that guy" and I hope this isn't unbearably naive, but why doesn't free software seem to even be mentioned in this discussion?

Although, you should notice that the bug specifies "only free software".

Why, then, does absolutely no one do that and offer it for free download?

In this case, the opposite of a disorder sounds more like "order" than another disorder.

In the US, at least, people still got famous for being bank robbers back then. The FDIC, which provides limited insurance for bank deposits, started their insurance on January 1, 1934. So, sophistication aside, it's an interesting question what happened to depositors after a bank robbery.

That was a really effective ad for, e.g., Rackspace's hosted email service.

This book was actually the 4th volume of the series.

"What services are safe to invest time and money in using?"

Your own.

"To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos."

That is less clear than saying "We will not sell your photos." It's either a knowingly slippery statement, or they forgot how to not be slippery.

Aside from the web design, they use a weird term in the copy: "Self Learner". I know what it means, but boy is it awkward.

Only in the Shuttleworthian sense of you already trust MSFT with your data.

He's a coder and a businessman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth#Linux_and_FOS...

What's a genpop?

It's easy to see the money they make from ad clicks, but it can be hard to see the money, reputation, and respect they lose to get it.

"maintains no business presence in a state"

Amazon's recently experiences with sales tax collection shows that a motivated government will keep its eye out for "business presence" and then regulate when it becomes politically useful. Freedom's just another word for something too small to bother regulating.

I recoil at Homebrew because it fails to successfully install relatively mainstream software that it claims to support (mysql, in my case). I do not recoil from apt because it regularly and repeatedly both cleanly installs and removes any software it claims to support.

I just sat down and read that article and I didn't get any sort of sense of how important the USPS is. I did get a sense of how badly it's run, how powerful the employees's union is, how quickly (even in 1994) businesses were moving to electronic communication in order to route around the USPS, and how unlikely any sort of improvement is. Franzen even writes, near the end, "The attachement of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia." I have my own nostalgia for post offices of my youth, but the move away from the USPS for important communications has been going on for a long time.

> Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don't expect much.

This applies to life in general, as well.

"Some service in the future is going to curate the top 100,000 or 1,000,000 queries into a list of great, precise results."

So, basically, we'll see the development of yet another hierarchically organized oracle?

The fact is that user control will always be a "security risk" and that there will therefore be a reasonable case to be made that use control should be restricted. A strong response to this line of argument is the Free Software perspective, where user control of a computer is a matter of liberty, not security. Freedom can be messy, it can result in a rootkit, but it's something many people value.

You should plan for your customer to tell you that, but it's complicated when your vendor tells your customer that.

Considering I still haven't seen Psychonauts in the software center, I am prepared to be patient for these new games.

"I remember getting an email from Sequoia asking for my personal presence (ie don't send a VP in your place) to some sort vaguely positioned mandatory meeting."

By what mechanism can an investor in a firm, presumably an investor with less than 50% equity, make attendance at a meeting mandatory for the CEO of said firm?

In fact, "The Well Grounded Rubyist" is a "reworking" of "Ruby for Rails". The author mentions this relationship between the books in his "about this book" section at the beginning of "The Well Grounded Rubyist".

"Apple, the most valuable company in the world, maniacally focuses on product experiences, down to minute details like the experience of unboxing an iPhone."

Sure, they focus on the experience their customers have...using the physical products they just bought from Apple. I thought it was the conventional wisdom, by now, that Apple was a hardware manufacturer and they make money by getting you to buy physical objects. iTunes, iCloud, etc are ways to make their hardware more attractive.

I bet they could have bought the team much more cheaply a few months before Draw Something got popular. I wonder why they didn't...

Are there any tech investors who say there is a bubble right now? Or do we not get to read about that until after the bubble pops and it becomes status-enhancing to have "known all along" that it was a bubble?

Growth is the concern of investors. They want multiples of their investment, and hence want the company to grow.

I had several friends with whom I shared a dozen or so links each day in Google Reader. When Google dropped the sharing feature in Reader, I basically stopped sharing with them and haven't found a replacement. Google+ definitely was not a viable alternative. It was my mistake in relying on Google, in retrospect.

I have trouble with it at the sprightly age of 33.