ArchiveJanuary 2015

Taking a compliment

An interesting social experiment where a women decided she’d agree with compliments men gave her. The results are pretty interesting – summary:  she mostly got criticised, called vain, and even abused. The issue is probably not a gender one (eg if the roles had been reversed and men had agreed when getting complimented, they’d likely have gotten similar pushback) but it does...

Google Project Zero = Zero fucks given

Via BBC News: Google’s Project Zero seeks to find bugs in popular software and then give the manufacturers responsible 90 days to fix the problem. This bug, which affects Windows 8.1, was revealed by Google to Microsoft on 13 October 2014. On 11 January, Google publicised the flaw. Microsoft said it had requested that Google wait until it released a patch on 13 January. Read Chris...

Terrorpolitical football

Oh the lols, as reported by the New York Times on a comment by UK Prime Minister David Cameron: Mr. Cameron, who has started to campaign ahead of a national election in Britain in May, said his government, if elected, would ban encrypted online communication tools that could potentially be used by terrorists if the country’s intelligence agencies were not given increased access. and “Are we...

How to survive the robot age

Just spout bullshit: Be a multi-disciplinary, insatiably curious person who knows how to use the tools to model ideas and create prototypes. Possessed of an open mind and few fixed ideas about how things should be done, you nonetheless have a strong conscience and can operate outside of your comfort zone to achieve win-win outcomes. You are known for your integrity and resilience. (via: The...

Facebook and teenagers

While the usual caveats about a post with the opinions of one person (a teenager), that aims to provide insight into a group (US teenagers) apply of course, it’s still really interesting. These points jumped out at me: Facebook: In short, many have nailed this on the head. It’s dead to us. then this: Messaging on Facebook is also extremely popular among our age group, mainly because...

Jeff Bezos will never win

An illuminating article about Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Fire Phone fiasco. Well worth a read. Will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next 5 years. If Amazon do get a future version of the phone right (and all indications are that they are continuing to invest heavily in R&D for it), then this period will be looked back on as being valuable learning, and a tribute to...

Apple Software Quality

Marco’s post is getting a lot of attention at the moment, and for good reason – it eloquently summarises the frustration a lot of Apple users are currently experiencing: We now need to treat Apple’s OS and application releases with the same extreme skepticism and trepidation that conservative Windows IT departments employ. He’s not mentioning anything new of course – the...

Thinking of the customer

When running a business there’s always tension between what’s best for your business versus what’s best for your customer. Dan Counsell’s post on providing access to Mac Apps outside the App Store is a good example of that tension (emphasis mine): Lets take a look at three of the reasons why not limiting the availability of your software to just the Mac App Store is a...

Dan Lyons Bloody Predictions

Hindsight is always easy, which makes the first part of this post pretty lame. But the forward-looking predictions are pretty spot on I think. The closing remarks about the impending crash are what resonate most though: And now the stock market is hitting all-time highs, and Facebook is trading at 72 times earnings, and Twitter has a $20 billion market cap even though it is losing huge amounts...

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