This is probably as much a function of age inequality as much as gender inequality, to be honest. Get a bunch of 21-25 year old men together for long periods of time, and shenanigans of a crass and sexist and possibly misogynistic nature will ensue.
Wow, this reporter was horrible. He reminds me of those clients who when you show them the early stages of their site after a few weeks of work, point out everything that doesn't work as a huge the-sky-is-falling catastrophic event that is proof of the project's eventual demise. This reporter got to sit in a car that is doing things that a few years ago still seemed like science fiction and yet he had these niggling complaints:
For now, at least, the car only drives routes it's been trained to drive.
Google is pretty good at mapping things.
Since the Google car only just got its learner's permit, it drives accordingly
I think this is meant as a literal statement. The car is able to drive of its own accord, but needs an adult present who can take over if needed. But did you just say that the GOOGLE CAR HAS A LEARNER'S PERMIT?? That's amazing!
Then there was the jerking halt on a side street caused by a car that stopped a little abruptly almost two car lengths ahead.
If you don't think the software is going to err on the side of caution for YEARS after widespread usage, you are mistaken. Eventually we will be so used to trusting these cars that we will probably be napping on the way to work, so who cares that the car hits the brakes a few more times than it should?
And eventually I'm sure these cars will be a model of efficiency, with fast moving currents of cars zipping here and there. One step at a time.
Surprisingly, one thing the car can't do all on its own is use the turn signals.
Hey, how come when I click this button on my site does nothing happen??? THIS PROJECT IS A COMPLETE FAILURE!!!
If Google can get there before a major automaker beats them to it, I'll be really impressed.
The most preposterous statement of all. Please get the reporter on the line and let me place a bet of Google vs all the automakers combined on who will release this technology is first. Assuming that Google hasn't locked up all of the pertinent technologies, this wouldn't be a fair fight.
Apple has been an outlier kind of performer under Steve Jobs, because Jobs was an outlier kind of human being. All I take away from that article is that people better start tempering their expectations of this new Apple, because once the product pipeline that Jobs oversaw is depleted, what we have left is merely a "very good" company built on a great foundation.
So much of the article seemed to point out the Tim Cook was friendlier in terms of investor relationships, but who cares about that (from a technologist point of view)? I mean, the biggest indicator of the shift in their priorities is that they took 100 billion dollars in cash and used it for stock buybacks and dividends. Can you imagine Google doing such a thing? They would never dream of this, because they are too busy re-investing their profits with their big-picture potentially world changing research projects.
But hey, kudos for Tim Cook for not trying to be someone he is not, he's a money and operations guy. So money and operations will get looked at at the expensive of innovation. But this is not good for those who are used to miracles from Apple:
"It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine," says Max Paley, a former engineering vice president who worked at Apple for 14 years until late 2011.
"I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority."
Yuck. The geek inside dies a little at reading this.
I couldn't even tell if the video was meant to be serious, and for a second made me think the whole app was a ruse. Frankly, I'm still bewildered by what I saw.
I had the same impression from going to the blog to the site, the line "Earbits is going to change the music industry and that the results we’re producing for bands are unparalleled" made me actually reconsider whether maybe the meeting was a set-up. It's just such an over the top line, and so patently untrue that it made me reconsider the character (or maybe the blinders) of the person writing the blog/founding this company.
And I will say that the design and interactions on thesixtyone.com were much much much nicer (which is especially notable for the two sites being so similar). But I did miss the ability to set up a preferred genre.
I'm going to disagree with them and say that you should trust your instincts, especially if your instincts led you to such a beautiful and intuitive app. Frankly, there is alot of group-think in UI design these days, and I think we need more people out there that are willing to trust themselves and not go with the principle of "lowest common complaints".
If you are building something to make money, then sure go with lean startup principles and A/B it to death. If you are building something as an act of creation, or as a tool that you want to use, and especially if you are building something that has been done 1000x before, trust your own insights and not those of strangers on a talk board.
Being different (not arbitrarily different mind you, but insightfully different) is a huge and uncommon differentiator, and can led you in amazing directions if you stay true to it.
The point of the article is very valid and concerning, but there are alot of factual problems with how this article represents the facts in its main case study.
> For years the Department of Justice had maintained that online gambling was illegal. In a spectacular about turn just before Christmas last year, it said that the law (the Wire Act) only applied to sports betting. They finally recognised the obvious- it takes some skill to win at poker and blackjack. So when it took action against Bodog, it wasn’t for its main activity of online gambling but the relatively smaller one of sports betting.
From someone who has the unique combination of having been a professional poker player for long periods, as well as having worked at Bodog as a software developer I can tell you two things that are very wrong about this paragraph.
1. There isn't any skill in playing blackjack online. The only skill component of playing live is in counting cards, and that doesn't translate online because you are getting a "new deck" with every hand.
2. Sports betting is far and away the most profitable part of their business. In fact, their poker room is nothing but a nuisance to them because it allows professional poker players to swoop in and extract money from the sports betters before Bodog is able to extract it. This is demonstrated by the recent changes to their poker software that make the site very very unattractive to play poker on for any thinking player (ie anonymizing the tables), not to mention their previous rules about limiting the number of tables played at a time.
And then the main point of taking action against the site for the minor crime of sports betting, which is "legal" in Canada. I'm not so sure about that, I know when I worked there that it was common knowledge that the founder of the company hadn't stepped foot in Canada since Bodog had launched. Also, what does it matter if sports betting is the main part of its business or not? If it's illegal to service US customers with an activity that the US government finds illegal, they are obviously going to take action.
Of course I believe online sports betting shouldn't be outlawed, but the US government has always been much more clear about this being illegal when compared to its sometimes wishy-washy stance on poker.
I've been looking for something like this lately, it really fills a need for me!
But you really REALLY need to modify your icon. There are a million bookmarked shaped icons in this world, and for some reason no-one ever incorporates a mark with the bookmark icon so that it can be differentiated. So now on chrome I have 2 bookmark icons that look identical (the other is for 'read it later'), and two other ones that relate to bookmarks but are stars. Great.
Soooooo. Doesn't this open up a whole new realm of privacy concerns? Who cares if Path has my contacts list, I'm more concerned that you guys are watching me surf for porn!
Well, if you get a bunch of nerds talking about javascript MVC frameworks for an hour, there is bound to be some pedanticism. Despite that, I love this podcast.
I think mankind should treat aging as the biggest threat it faces, and pour our every last resource into delivering us from its tyranny. It's like we all have this really slow and really insidious fatal disease (aging) and no one wants to admit that it's beatable.
The downside to immortality is that the wealthy would just keep getting wealthier (since building wealth is at least partly a function of having wealth and having experience accumulating wealth) until eventually they are more important than governments. And the great War of 2188 will be of the nation of Zuckerberg vs the nation of the United States of Buffett, winner gets Earth, loser is expelled to roam space for all time.
A great deal of this article seemed to be concerned more about flexibility than resourcefulness.
"Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions."
"My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so."
This sounds like a testament to the lean-startup movement, where success is more dictated on the ability to iterate on user feedback rather than being stuck in one static idea of what your business is or is meant to be.
I made between 12k-20k a month for a little more than 3 years as an online poker player. And that was only "working" on average between 4 and 5 hours a day.
Sadly I am an American and that is no longer possible.
All men have been there, most men outgrow it.