> Technology can help create newer, more engaging distractions.
Watching how people react to the Occulus, "OMG it's sooo real!" I can't help thinking how badly screwed we are as a species when it goes mainstream. FarmVille addiction, World of Warcraft will look like a walk in the park to Occulus addicts who no longer know or care what reality is. Perhaps I'm just overly pessimistic
As smart creatives I dont think we're the target audience but rather decision makers at established businesses who are seeing their markets getting disrupted.
... but if Apple Pay ( https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/ ) turns into a big success, it could have the potential to unbalance the relationship Apple has with it's customers.
Waaaaiit a second! This "async thing" is not a fad created by node.js but rather the effective conclusion of the C10K problem - http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html - that we could scale up our application servers to handle more requests and that threads alone had failed to get us there.
And sorry anyone who wants to claim that Java's green threads are somehow a better programming model than async IO ala node.js + promises is pretending to write code. Yes async IO is not easy, certainly nowhere near as simple to manage as process / fork but with consistent coding style your can still end up with a system that behaves predicably and most importantly can be reasoned about.
Meanwhile I bitterly regret the days and weeks of my life lost to debugging threaded code. Never again!
How do you know that the app published on the App Store is the same one you have the source code for? Can't I can just give you some source code then release something else entirely?
IMO the silently majority is tired of a panopticon of "look it me now" social services who's main use case is massaging users egos.
Google should start over, Android-first (instead of web -first) and make the phone Addressbook / Google Contacts the focal point for everything social. Look at WhatsApp - it does exactly this - your phone number is your ID and your contacts is your social graph; how you interact with them - who you call, message etc and when / where you do it - these are your circles
Meanwhile if you look at the direction Apple is going, eg new APIs for iCloud eg fingerprint authentication, new APIs for foto management / sharing etc etc. they look about ready to pounce on the whole of social...
But isn't it the case that anything we're capable of measuring here, given the relatively short available sample of data we'd be able to obtain (decades), would be inside any margin of error when comparing that to the age of the universe (13.8 billion years according to Big Bang)?
As we move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, it becomes more about managing our energy as individuals, not how many hours we're putting on the clock
> I just don't understand how it even gets developed in the first place, if they don't have a small team to continue working on it post-release.
From talking to PMs at Google, they have exactly this problem. Engineers are free to pick and choose what they work on.As soon as a product is released, hits "1.0", and the engineers have claimed whatever kudos they can, they move on to the "next big thing", leaving the PM alone with the product. That leads to situations where PMs can't even get basics like localizations to specifics countries / languages.
> Dropbox needs people with international experience to help it at once deal with foreign governments that have blocked its use — China, for example — and as it works to spread a product developed in one country to others that are culturally different.
That seems like a pretty weak reason for hiring her on it's own. Would make more sense to hire her on the grounds of having some clout in Washington so your file sharing service doesn't end up doing a "Megaupload"
For any existng online platform that's already established itself on the web, you're probably seeing 50%+ of your traffic coming from Google and a big chunk of that will be mobile. Some of your userbase may be loyal enough to your brand to want to install your app but the rest will be lost if you don't have a decent mobile web presence.
That's not an entirely healthy example but it does show it is possible to make consumers take topics like security and privacy seriously.
The issue right now is there aren't enough voices telling them how serious these topics are.