Obviously, Apple and Microsoft are different companies and looking back 16 years with the benefit of hindsight is a bit unfair.
And yet, even in the announcements, you can see a difference. Apple's is shorter, more direct, bereft of details but not trying to be everything to everyone. Most important is an emphasis on getting back to basics, whereas Microsoft is promising "one strategy, one Microsoft" and then immediately rattling off a laundry list of "core products". When every one of those products is core, it's clear nothing is.
I completely agree with your point, but that's not a problem of renters, per se.
If the city of San Francisco (where my wife and I live) made a committed effort to build a stable stock of rental property that allowed families of 3-5 to rent for less than $3k a month, I guarantee you'd see more families sticking around instead of fleeing to points north or east. Instead, you get mostly young, single (your "bowling alone" category, less likely to show up at those city council meetings) splitting 3 bedrooms four ways and paying $4k for the privilege of all sharing one kitchen and one bathroom.
I'm optimistic that all of the new housing being put up in SOMA will help alleviate this but there needs to be some complementary regulatory structure to help keep those community types (which are often what the young singles become in 5-10 years) around. Otherwise, SF is quickly on a path towards being a place where only the rich, the young, the single, and the poor (via subsidized housing) can afford to live. The middle gets squeezed.
Not to be too glib, here's another impressively depressing stat: 56% of Americans don't have a problem with the recent NSA tracking revelation and a significant plurality would be happy to see it expanded[1]. What do we do when our representative government truly is representative?
This seems like a form of "Tyranny of the Majority" [1]. Apparently there are several ways of dealing with such things including (ahem) a Bill of Rights.
On another note, it's nice to see Nathan Myhrvold getting called out as the patent troll he so clearly is, despite the bogus persona of a modern renaissance man he so carefully cultivates.
Well, he's actually both. I've been a critic of Myhrvold for almost as long as Intellectual Vultures... ahem, Ventures, has existed and I am very against software patents but there is no denying he is very smart, very talented and quite adept as a practitioner of quite a few activities. Him being a patent troll, as distasteful as I find that, doesn't negate the other stuff.
So, the ends justify the means and it's all good because at least his startup got some publicity? Even if the "publicity" turns out to be a net win, what a terrible way to conduct yourself.
Ease off on the rhetoric. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, I don't think anyone did anything illegal and, for what it's worth, I thought the Times' lawyering was dumb and hamfisted at best.
But there was a right way for scroll kit to handle this and there was the wrong, easy way they chose. They could've said "Have you been blown away by features like The New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories? We'd like to show you Scroll Kit." And then put together their own demo video with their own work without a smarmy "it took us an hour to do what the Times did in months".
It's classless and low. But they got the publicity they wanted and seem to have a fan in you. Hoo ray.
I'm not a lawyer and my understanding of fair use seems to be about as poor as everyone's.
What Scrollkit did, though, was tacky, plain and simple. They built an impressive product but are using someone else's work to try to promote it[1]. Is that illegal? I doubt it. But it's tasteless. And the smarmy "we did this in an hour" attitude is not only off-putting, it stretches the truth to the point of breaking. Anyone who's followed a "build a blog in five minutes" demo knows there's more to building something than just scaffolding -- Andre Torrez probably [said it best](http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours...).
There are plenty of ways they could have demonstrated their product without resorting to this kind of shallow mimicry. "Have you been blown away by the incredible work like the New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories? Want to build something similar yourself? We'd like to show you scrollkit." And then do a demo video with your own photography and reporting. Tells the same story without the shiteating grin.
As it stands right now, though, they just look like they're jumping on a trend using someone else's work.
[1] Disclaimer: I have friends who work at the Times, including ones that worked on Snowfall.
And the aggregate affect of a crowd full of people instagramming just about every moment of a concert means I basically watch live shows through the screens of other people's phones these days. Throw in a dozen crummy LED flashes going off for most of the show and the experience is pretty much killed for me.
If there's one development in concert-going over the past decade that I really loathe, more than the consolidation of ticket sellers, the subsequent rise in ticket prices, the steady increase in the cost of beer, my own age and sore back after 4 hours, everyone else's insistence that they need to photograph (or worse, VIDEO) a show has got to be the top of the list.
And while I appreciate your edge case here that Timehop provides, most of those photographs are just being uploaded to Facebook to show off how vastly interesting they are to everyone who's not there. Cultivating other people's FOMO.
Ok, enough of my old man kvetching. I genuinely do think it's cool that Timehop let's you relive those little moments as much as I genuinely regret the loss of my enjoyment of living those moments at the time they are happening.
> most of those photographs are just being uploaded to Facebook to show off how vastly interesting they are to everyone who's not there. Cultivating other people's FOMO.
Too true. I guess it's also a bit of a tragedy of the commons. I don't feel like my 15 seconds of keeping a phone in the air is all that problematic for those around me - but it quickly gets out of hand when the entire audience feels the same way. (And doing it much longer/more frequently than just a single snap once or twice a show.)
This was exactly my big gripe with the story, particularly Swisher's insistence on writing it as "rags to riches" (even using that very well worn cliche verbatim). The fact is, Systrom, like Zuckerberg, was practically guaranteed success in life, starting with his $30k/year prep school. This isn't rags to riches, it's well-off to obscenely rich, or if you prefer, how to go from the 1% to the .1%.
Not that it isn't a story, it sure ain't Horatio Alger, though.
Yes. The authors like CBV's and make a strong case for why you would want to use them.
Like you, I found CBV's to be wanting, particularly generic views, and all but gave up. A combination of updates to the official docs with 1.5 and this book made me reconsider and I'm glad I did.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990128084705/http://product.inf...
Obviously, Apple and Microsoft are different companies and looking back 16 years with the benefit of hindsight is a bit unfair.
And yet, even in the announcements, you can see a difference. Apple's is shorter, more direct, bereft of details but not trying to be everything to everyone. Most important is an emphasis on getting back to basics, whereas Microsoft is promising "one strategy, one Microsoft" and then immediately rattling off a laundry list of "core products". When every one of those products is core, it's clear nothing is.