jmcintyre

It's something like being a devil's advocate, plus being a fan. Spreading mistruths actually hurts things. When people say things like "Windows 8 won't boot without secure boot enabled", it's no longer opinion(like "MS sucks and is dying") but an objective fact that can be checked.

It's not effort expended per se, since it's more like debating merits of phone OSes at the water cooler rather than work. If they're paying people to do it, then they're doing quite a shitty job. I don't feel the need to "defend" other companies, because companies like Apple and Google already have plenty of fans who point out inaccuracies in stories or comments even before I even get a chance to comment.

Imagine an article which erroneously claims Windows Phone has "25% of the phone market" and that "Android is declining". Now imagine the HN comments on it and how karma might be distributed on those comments. Do you really think the equivalent to the following comment which is currently on top would still be on top?

programminggeek> "Microsoft has really fallen these last few years."

Or would it be a comment accusing the author of being a "Microsoft shill" ?

The moderation on here is pretty brutal even when pointing out objective facts, I have seen people get hellbanned by getting downvoted for making comments that people don't want others to see, but are true.

No, and never did. I am actually working on NetBeans/PHP/Drupal(gah!) on the other monitor, though I am primarily a C# guy.

And even I did work for MS, how does that invalidate any of my points? If I worked for Microsoft, does that suddenly mean it's okay for ZDNet to claim 25% of all computers being sold are Chromebooks? Interesting that no one is questioning SJVN's ulterior motives, if any! I do believe it's just to garner clicks though, Ed Bott will probably reply with an article debunking this one and ZDNet and its "journalists" will laugh all the way to the bank.

Sorry to reply to myself but I seem to have found a source for the below.

>I find it really hard to believe that quarter of all computer sales are Chromebooks. Does anyone have a source? One would expect Google to announce real shipments if they were that good.

>Web usage metrics from a few months ago showed that Chromebooks are used even less than Windows RT.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/google-chromebook-u...

The relevant statement:

>Chromebooks have in just the past eight months snagged 20 percent to 25 percent of the U.S. market for laptops that cost less than $300, according to NPD Group Inc

So, 20% to 25% of laptop sales costing below $300 became "25% of all computers" ? I don't know if the Intel guy said that in this keynote, or it's SJVN's mistake, but it's just terrible reporting.

>"has seen Chromebooks race to a quarter of all computer sales and one fifth of all new PC school deployments."

Are there any hard numbers on Chromebook sales apart from nebuluous things like "being on top of Amazon" etc.?

I find it really hard to believe that quarter of all computer sales are Chromebooks. Does anyone have a source? One would expect Google to announce real shipments if they were that good.

Web usage metrics from a few months ago showed that Chromebooks are used even less than Windows RT.

http://www.zdnet.com/first-real-world-usage-figures-suggest-...

Also, I find it strange that SJVN likes to promote Chromebooks, which are even less "Free" and open compared to Windows machines and force the user to upload everything to Google's cloud.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/why-th...

One of the SJVN's articles reads like PR straight from CDW and Google.

http://www.zdnet.com/cdw-to-offer-enterprise-chromebook-supp...

Not sure why that is posted in the "Linux and Open Source" ZDNet blog when it is all about taking even more control away from the user.

>Outside of the community, most people don't see Linux's impact. Linux is usually invisible. When you go to any large Web site--Google, Facebook, Twitter--you're using Linux."

>It's not just that even the most die-hard Windows users are invisibly using Linux every day

Does that mean that programmers who claim to have gotten rid of Microsoft/Windows products are really using Windows without knowing it whenever they click on a Stack Overflow link? :)

Also this:

>It’s a little known fact that top contributors to EE got VIP treatment. They were flown to different locations around the world, wined & dined, and got lots of cool swag (computers, tablets, etc). When the experts came to visit us in San Luis Obispo, it was all-out fun for them. Experts on Experts Exchange have the potential to get some sweet perks.

Some of that money could've easily gone into improving the UX and adding features to the site which seemed to be stuck in 1999, or failing which, reducing the price of subscriptions. Throwing expensive swag around when there are better places to put it is a bad idea.

If their crime was only that they ranked highly because of the text in the questions and sold access to answers, I would be okay with that, but EE decided to let Google index the _answers_ too, for SEO purposes, and then hid the answers to non-paying members via various CSS tricks, hiding them below a large wall of boilerplate footer text, etc. The babies analogy is certainly silly though.

Apple stimulates brain's religious responses, claims BBC

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/apple-stimulates-brains-reli...

I guess this isn't true just for Apple, but for other major brands as well.

From http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee.... >In at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her. In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.

I guess there are similar incidents happening at almost all cloud providers, but even if detected by the company, we don't hear about them because they're really bad PR. All they come up with is, "trust us, things are secured". And no one cares anyway because Gmail, Docs and Outlook.com are slick and convenient.

I think the announcement was a setup, but not the person who asked the question. It was pretty obvious that someone was going to ask that question, you could bet on it.

The person writes this:

>Skepticism be damned, I'm actually an actual person who asked an actual question. I saw on Twitter that Outlook.com would be doing an AMA, and nobody asked the IMAP question yet, so I did. I've been a lurker on Reddit for several years.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1m926j/we_are_the_outl...

Now, it's possible it's an employee, but I wouldn't rate it as "most certainly" like you did, it was obvious that someone was going to ask this question.

Wasn't the Moto X supposed to be super configurable like this? It got me excited from the rumors and the hype. At the end it turned out to be just some colors that can be picked.

http://www.talkandroid.com/154586-rumor-upcoming-motorola-x-...

> And finally— the mysterious device(s) will be completely customizable by allowing the device’s color, RAM and internal storage to be completely configurable.

There's also this fee among a lot of other fees while applying:

In 2007, the US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA), reported on two programs, the High Growth Training Initiative and Workforce Innovation Regional Economic Development (WIRED), which have received or will receive $284 million and $260 million, respectively, from H-1B training fees to educate and train US workers. According to the Seattle Times $1 billion from H1-B fees have been distributed by the Labor Department to build up US workforce skills since 2001.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_fees_earmarked_f...

Except that with physical titles it's pretty inconvenient to pass around disks all the time, so there's a natural limit to sharing. With the new kind of sharing, you could share your library with someone on the other side of the country without having to ship disks around. That is a subtle point lost in this debate and the debate around the Xbox One.

It isn't just the colors, the shape and the plastic back look quite similar to the Lumia 620.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lumia+620&tbm=isch&tbo=u

Wasn't there a company that did a similar sentiment analysis on Twitter and wanted to trade the stock exchanges on that information? I wonder what happened to that.