tomflack

Your insistence on saying this goes one way or the other without being able to imagine a million shades of grey means this conversation is going nowhere.

To add to this, four finger swipe up for the multitasking bar or four finger swipe to the left/right to flip between apps. It's not discoverable - as far as I know there isn't even a tutorial - but this is how large-screen devices work best.

You're missing the point entirely.

You don't need to abandon a decade's worth of advances to ask that, for example, the Google IME team all get on the same page (Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese IMEs all work slightly differently and appear different) before implementing say... face unlock.

I'm a big fan of single-purpose tools, but if you tried to have EVERYTHING in your life a single purpose tool, you'd need a shopping trolly to carry it all around with you.

Don't get hung up on "years". I didn't mean that I wish all feature advance had stopped years ago, I meant that for several years now I have been thinking about perfecting one thing before moving on to the next.

Every company is different, every product is different, every user is different. Attempting to speak in absolutes like you are simply doesn't work.

As for your suggestion I forgoe a decade of advance in phones... uhh no. A moderately buggy phone from 2012 is still a thousand times better than your puritan "calls and texts only" ideal phone.

The thing is, it could be much better with a little attention to detail.

You're putting words in my mouth. Nowhere did I draw a line in the sand - you're attempting to do that for me.

And I'm a little unclear why you feel like playing "gotcha" with me here anyway...

Interesting for me is the regional Yahoo (au.yahoo.com) is destined to receive zero benefit from Marissa's reign.

One thing I like about Google is they do have regional variants, but they're all pretty much the same.

Yahoo varies WIDELY with all the weird partnership deals they have struck with local companies over the years.

Contact sync. Application selection.

Currently, a GSM Galaxy Nexus. Previously, an iPhone 4. Various oddball WebOS and the like phones scattered over the past few years.

I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there.

Optimise. Improve.

This is why I was so upset at Sparrow throwing in the towel - they concentrated on one thing, email, and did it better than I'd seen it done before. By specialising they were able to spend the time to get it right.

Why? As a user of Adblock it seems totally fair to me.

Since Marchish this year I've found Naver's LINE to be really unreliable though. Messages delayed days or hours, etc. I'm surprised it's still growing if this is the case for more than just me.

Got any specific examples? I'm having trouble actually caring about any potential backlash. I'd possibly welcome it.

I would find it incredibly difficult to take anyone seriously who jumped on a bandwagon against authors/editors/sites like that.

Why don't sites more often block (or just show a message to) users of Adblock? Is that traffic more valuable than not? Are they hoping visitors will link articles to non-Adblock using people? It seems to me like there is a value in users who don't see your ads, or you'd just block them.

I subscribe to Arstechnica premiere to remove the ads, I have Adblock disabled on overclockers.com.au, The Verge. I subscribe to offtopic.com at a level that removes ads. I contributed to the Penny-Arcade ad-removing kick starter.

Everything else has its ads blocked because you need to prove your worth and trustworthiness to me after two decades of sliding in to the abyss.

If you don't want me, block me. Don't let me see your content.

I wasn't suggesting it was to replace bicycles, just pointing out the absurdity of the parent's comparison to bicycle fatalities.

Simply incorrect that you can get bike like braking safely, even using the described technique.

Edit: I really want to prove this, but the only way I can think of to do it is you buy one of these for $1200, I buy a bike for $1200 and we spend $1200 in airfares to meet somewhere and try it out. Perhaps someone with physics qualifications can weigh in?

"A bicycle cannot stop any faster than it's wheels can hold friction."

Nothing can stop faster than "it's wheels can hold friction". But on a bicycle when you brake hard then momentum is transferred on to the front wheel, which is typically ahead of where the bulk of the weight (the rider) is situated.

"You can stop any type of board-device and stay on, as long as the friction between the board and the rider is greater than the wheels and the road."

On a skateboard, the front wheel is MUCH closer to the center and the centre of gravity is MUCH higher. You'll be flung off if you stop as fast as a bicycle with properly maintained brakes can safely.

What a ridiculous comparison. As anyone who has skateboarded ever in their life knows, a bicycle is a thousand times safer and easier to control. Why don't you address the parent's points - that it is impossible to provide safe and effective braking on a skateboard.

It's impossible to prove, but replace bicycles with skateboards and the fatality rate would shoot up.

I know this is referring to programming, but I went overseas to study for two months this year with only my Galaxy Nexus, so this is my experience:

Yep, to a limited extent you CAN live with only a phone (and be quite productive!). Expect to use a physical notepad a lot too though, as flipping between apps even on Android 4.1 constantly is no fun when you need to keep referring to information.

Battery life is a KILLER. I get a whole day out of my Galaxy Nexus back home, but when using it exclusively as my only technology, it lasted me half a day max. 8am to 1pm if I'm lucky.

A couple of things:

Your friend's assault case - he's not a multi-billion dollar company with a massive investment in the mainland.

Chinese consumers don't simply love him, like they do Apple products. (First-hand experience.)

I notice the Goophone people are based in Hong Kong where the rule of law is quite a bit stronger.

Apple have the money, they have the relationships. This whole thing is clearly grandstanding on the Goophone people's part.

I am willing to put cash money on the line to say it's inconsequential to Apple launching the iPhone 5 on the mainland. There will be a delay - the usual delay for Apple products that mainland China experiences and nothing to do with this knockoff junk.

Apple is a mass-market cult, Xiaomi is Peter-jackson-before-he-was-famous cult-movie cult.

Everyone I have ever asked in China about Xiaomi and Meizu phones brushed them off as "shānzhài iPhone..."

I was expecting a glib reply such as your own and I'm saddened that I'm not disappointed.

Seems like a slam-dunk leaked photos = prior art.

If you're highlighting the quality of, or a specific feature of your smartphone's camera, the advertising brief should have at the very top:

"You will use the product (Nokia Lumia 920 Pureview) to shoot example clips. No other cameras are to be used as a stand-in for the cellphone."

You're insanely incompetent if you can't let your creative agency know this.

Your creative agency is insanely stupid if they think it's okay to pass footage from another camera off as from the product being advertised.

They are, but every app adds 3-4 widgets to that draw. There are so many in there, in variations like small, medium and large size, that I never ever look in it.

What about all the stuff you have to work through that society doesn't want to pay you for* before you can create something that they do? Life isn't a binary "Will I get paid or will I indulge myself with this project?".

*I am extremely loathe to use no payment as a direct indicator of want or value.

When it's fundamentally broken internationally and people start giving it bad reviews when it doesn't work. That's the only case I can think of and even then it's quite weak.

To make the parent comment more relevant, I've taken "product vision" to include the quality of the retail store experience.

> But it isn't Apple that is making them tied to regions, this is a requirement of the record and movie industries who seem to think that price and release discrimination by region makes sense.

It is also a problem for Apps. There are loads of apps available in some countries but not others. It's up to the app developer to make them available globally. I understand not wanting to offer your app in countries where it won't work, but it's super annoying when you visit or move to another country to not be able to access them.

Home servers? I've always used incredibly out-of-date machines as home servers. There has never really been a market for powerful home servers.

I had a Pentium 166 with 80MB of EDO ram and a 1GB hard disk (bought new in 1996 as a P120 with 16MB of ram) until the end of 2005 as a home server, running Windows 2000.