feelin_googley
Joined 10 years ago
Karma
1,160
Submissions
605
Member since
May 14
Recent submissions
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Its not a duplicate. @mercer suggested the last paragraph should be removed, so thats what I did. Alas, the edit period had expired.
Edit: Notice that youve toned down your original reply, which had statements like "No one cares about your opinions about Google, Apple or Facebook." It seems I have agitated you. I apologise.
Comment · 8 years ago
Its encouraging to be reminded that still not everyone who uses Apple hardware runs MacOS exclusively.
http://www.sacrideo.us/openbsd-on-macbook/
However I have not heard any reports of anyone running an alternative OS on iPhone or iPad hardware.
With every passing year I continue to think it would be interesting to observe how users would choose if Apple hardware and Apple software were sold separately.
Would all users choose Apple software?
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Comments from me that are skeptical of Apple are always downvoted. Complaining is acceptable but doubting is not. I have tested this over the years and it is remarkably consistent. Its both amusing and sad. The clicks can sometimes take a while to come, sometimes days, but they always come. Whether I add something silly acknowedging this phenomenon makes no difference. They come either way. Its just a small price to pay for being irreverent I guess. I have plenty of karma to spare. Well worth it.
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Its encouraging to be reminded that still not everyone who uses Apple hardware runs MacOS exclusively.
http://www.sacrideo.us/openbsd-on-macbook/
However I have not heard any reports of anyone running an alternative OS on iPhone or iPad hardware.
With every passing year I continue to think it would be interesting to observe how users would choose if Apple hardware and Apple software were sold separately.
Would all users choose Apple software?
Expecting to take a little karma subtraction from the thought police for daring to entertain such a nonpermissible idea. Par for the course here and well worth it.
Comment · 8 years ago
"... both incidental and replaceable."
Sometimes it seems like there is an underlying, unspoken presumption that no progress, no innovation making use of the internet could occur unless funding comes from exploiting data gathered from its use.
Sadly it has reached the point where some of that "progress" and "innovation" is simply in the mechanism for gathering more user data, unbeknownst to users. The beast is feeding itself. I have no interest in funding that, either directly or indirectly.
Comment · 8 years ago
This author located in the UK believes FB should be broken up:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/03/26/zuckerberg-m...
He believes that Facebook's board is susceptible to Silicon Valley groupthink and with Thiel there is clear conflict in interest due to Palantir.
He argues the board is "feeble" because Zuckerberg cant be sacked.
The author thinks Zuckerberg has made some "stupid" and "arrogant" moves.
For example last year as an experiment, he cut professionally produced news from the main newsfeed in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia making those countries "beta-testers" for "a political debate free of facts".
He recalls in 2007 he wrote two news stories about FB for a former employer. One was about some software that "connected to Facebook's then-new "social graph" and siphoned off personal information for resale." The other was about an advertiser, Vodafone, who pulled its ads from Facebook because it had been placed on a page promoting the British National Party.
He suggests that because stories like these could easily have been written as recent as last week, it shows how FB's problems are not new and how Zuckerberg has refused to acknowledge them for the last ten years let alone try to "fix" them.
He thinks FB should not be "fixed"; rather, it should be "broken and remade".
Comment · 8 years ago
He has also announced that he now supports the Honest Ads Act.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy/facebook...
Perhaps he will announce next that he supports competition.
Isnt it true that before being acquired by FB, WhatsApp charged users a subscription fee and did not show ads?
Comment · 8 years ago
There really is a feeling of "too little, too late".
Not in the sense FB cannot make improvements. Of course they can.
What is too little, too late is reversing the direction that the Zuckerberg story has taken.
The media can build someone up and they can also destroy someone.
As the recent Rolling Stone article suggested in no uncertain terms, there has been great damage done to media and journalism (and arguably to society) by having FB as a "filter" between the reader and the news source.
They have not managed the relationships well enough it seems.
Have a look at this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/06/mark-zuck...
Anecdotally I have heard Zuckerberg discussed in the ways described in this article. I have no doubt he was trying to carefully craft an image for the American public.
But, today, who can trust this young man who has the personal lives of billions of people on his servers... now that they have seen how he reacts in a crisis? (Perhaps we should say "fails to react".)
There is a certain irony I see in the failure of Zuckerbergs PR team. Someone who has been in PR for many years once explained to me the effect of FB on PR. Needless to say, it wasnt positive. PR traditionally relied on the media and its ability to reach the targeted audience. To a large extent, FB controls this now.
Whether any of this will matter long-term, who knows? Ask Wall Street?
But if and when FB assures us that they have everything under control, I will have doubts. This is an evolving story. We are seeing only the tip of the FB iceberg.
Im just making clear I am not trying to cause agitation. Thats not the intent.
I try to be sparing with opinions. I dislike having to type prefix or postfix statements with "IMO" again and again, but I want to make explicit what is only an opinion versus what are facts or observations because ("IMO") opinions are almost always worthless. I prefer facts and questions.
Most of the volume of posts I made the past few weeks were not opinions but were excerpts and pointers to articles: facts and some journalists opinions.
The truth is I waste too much time "interacting" with this addictive forum. Its a distraction.
If you ban me from ever posting anything ever again on HN, in all honesty, you will probably be doing me a favour.