> The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot.
however, unlike the PS3, 360 updates tend to take 30 seconds to a minute, except for big things like the NXE and the whatever-the-newest-Dashboard-thing-is-called; PS3 updates can take anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour and a half (literally, that's how long it took my PS3 to patch out-of-box the first time I started it.)
again, even if you're doing the same thing as your competitors, there is a lot of space to do it poorly. :)
"This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point."
yes, but no. saying that silent self-update is table stakes is missing the point: table stakes from your users' perspective is "shipping software that doesn't need to be consciously maintained."
whether you ship rarely and get the bugs out before you do, or ship frequently but have automatic upgrades that don't break things, doesn't matter.
not to ruin it for you, but IE 6 usage is so high in China because China has a bunch of pirated XP SP0/SP1 installs; IE 7/8 is XPSP2+ only, and IE 9 is Vista+ only.
this same piracy is why the Business Software Alliance was originally a SOPA supporter.
the added value of a Windows 8 tablet over a Windows Phone device is that a heavily-encouraged subset of applications will run across those devices and a traditional desktop. Windows Phone will only run desktop Silverlight applications out-of-the-box (and even those require some cajoling.) Windows 8 Metro-style apps will run across desktops and tablets without any additional work.
and 90% of the world still runs Windows on their "traditional" computers, so this is an appealing proposition.
this is either hilarious (if he's just kidding around for PR's sake, and in reality he read the thing and took it to heart) or tragic (if he's really as dismissive as he suggests.)
Roboto may be clumsy, but it's far from a patchwork of existing pieces. (if you look, really look, at those comparison charts, you'll notice that even the "frankensteined" source fonts have significant differences from the Roboto glyphs they inspired, in weight, shape, and proportion. the bar on the capital Q looks nothing alike, for the most blatant example.)
it's not the case that Roboto is a ripoff of an existing face, or even four existing faces (for the special case of "an existing face" == Helvetica, I posted about this at length here at my blog, complete with ranting and bad photoshops: http://http204.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/all-sans-serifs-are-...). it is the case that it's a product of its times and took inspiration from faces which already existed -- because if you create a font from scratch, intentionally trying to do only things which have never been done before, you're likely to end up with something completely unreadable.
that said, to me, it's super unrefined, chunky, and challenging to read -- it's outright broken at small sizes (and, thus, on low-DPI displays) where letters blob out around the edges due to poor hinting.
I'd much rather they just bring back Droid Sans. :(
to some extent, though, this devalues lytro pictures as "photograph-as-artistic-statement" in favor of the much more contemporary "photograph-as-infallible-chronicler-of-the-coffee-you-got-this-morning."
as someone who's tried to use Mono.Cecil, it kind of sucks if you're not already developing on the Mono toolchain (among other things, there's no interoperability between System.Reflection types and Mono.Cecil types, and even if you're on Mono, I don't think you can "vivisect" running Assemblies.) Microsoft has a product called FxCop (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(VS.80).aspx) which does style analysis and linting -- however, the code analysis is all embedded in the FxCop binary and undocumented.
suffice to say, I'm psyched about Roslyn -- more about code transformations than correctness aids.
use PBKDF2 (plus a SHA-family hash function.) use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2.
how do you know that this isn't due to the (small, even if we're being charitable) size of the community rather than a G+ design choice? if it's the former rather than the latter, your days of liking G+ are numbered.
the 1200% number came from "Reportedly, Google+ saw a surge in traffic of over 1200% due to the additional publicity, but the increased user base was only temporary, as was projected in an earlier insights post." and the 60% drop came from "But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state."
but the graph right below that shows Google+ going back (in Chitika's "traffic index", whatever that is) to just about where it was before it was made public. as a result, I don't think those two numbers can be composed, and the "heh, guess 480% doesn't count for anything" smugness I've seen from a couple different places is based on everyone else's misconception of what the numbers mean.
it's not as clear-cut as that -- it's mostly a combination of a traditional "you should work on these things and get better at having X, Y, and Z desirable qualities" conversations with your boss and Microsoft's love of creating systems with jargon that is inscrutable to the outside.
(disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee with about 3 years served.)
it's not "nostalgia" in the sense of old/classic things, or at least that's what I get from his thesis. it's nostalgia in the sense of doing things because, gosh darn it, that's the way we've always done them.
his argument is that the Apple of "the crazy ones, the rebels, the troublemakers" would ignore what's profitable and what the rest of the industry does, and make wide-open systems, humanely -- because Steve would've seen what doesn't work about the current model, thrown it out, and done it his own way.
The Beatles and historical figures are (arguably) timeless classics which don't grow worse with age; walled gardens and overseas manufacturing are (arguably) relics of an era where Apple was struggling to gain a foothold in the industry, and that's what the author claims passes for nostalgia.
no, obviously they went to the trouble for the licensing fees. but they did, as a side effect to the licensing fees, agree to make their invention freely-practicable -- as opposed to the default, where it would be protected by trade secret laws in perpetuity -- after their monopoly period ended.
b) the entire purpose of the patent system is that ideas can be entered into a register and time-limited monopolies granted by the government in exchange for their public release at the end of the monopoly period.
the only weird part about non-practicing entities -- and I say this from the perspective of a Microsoft employee with no patent cubes yet to his name, who works in the same room as people with 15 -- is that they are effectively outsourcing the entire process of reducing their inventions to practice.
among other things, Intellectual Ventures filed an amici curiae brief in Microsoft v. I4I, another piece of patent litigation. on behalf of the respondents.
Intellectual Ventures has no loyalty to anything but its own inventions.
edit: incidentally, the outcome of Microsoft v. i4i (and the parent lawsuit, i4i v. Microsoft) was an out-of-court settlement where Microsoft paid i4i $300 million, at the hazard of an injunction against selling Office in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i
the carryover is significant but you don't get a Windows 8 port for free.