rbarooah

7 ms·

1.
by rbarooah 14y ago
There's plenty of joking and 'it'll never work' here, but doesn't this worry anyone at all? A system that 'knows you better than you know yourself', means a system that is able to predict your responses to different stimuli more accurately
2.
by rbarooah 14y ago
I don't see anyone saying it's not Google's right to do these things. People are simply saying that it looks as though Google is attacking Microsoft.
3.
by rbarooah 14y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by 'keep the language in their own privileged domain' actually means, but I do agree that it is Apple's strategy to invest in Objective-C above other languages on its own platform, and that they have no investment
4.
by rbarooah 14y ago
This seems like a long way of saying that you don't like Objective-C because it's not cross platform, and that you've decided instead to write all your mobile code in Lua and to maintain your own abstraction layer onto MacOSX, Linux, Window
5.
by rbarooah 14y ago
It's not clear whether you are actually advocating this kind of interpretation of Ayn Rand's position or not. It seems to me that the principle of government being solely to protect individuals from the initiation of force by others is a gr
6.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Those are interesting pieces, and I feel as though my time was well spent reading them. I can't see what they have to do with this argument though. The first one is basically a speculative essay with little to support its ideas, interestin
7.
by rbarooah 14y ago
I commend you for trying to offer an alternative, seriously! Google may not have hand curation, but they do use manual raters as one of their signals. It's also true that new content doesn't have a click history, but the click history as we
8.
by rbarooah 14y ago
I agree with you that Google should be free to have their own editorial voice, and it seems like a really bad idea for that to be interfered with directly by government. However, as you have done, I often see this idea coupled with a quip l
9.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Obviously people can argue for ever over the merits of one design decision over another but as someone who has programmed in Java for more than a decade, and has used Scala and Clojure commercially, I'd say that Objective-C does have some a
10.
by rbarooah 14y ago
There obviously is a trade-off between the strength of the language and the number of people who will click through. Maybe, but I'm not arguing about the 'strength' of the language. I'm arguing about the accuracy of it. The messages are
11.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Presumably you don't judge my second suggestion 'mealy mouthed' otherwise you'd have quoted that instead. So even by your judgement of what is 'mealy mouthed', an effective and accurate warning is clearly possible. You might not have liked
12.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Nobody except you is suggesting a mealy-mouthed warning - that's a straw-man. An accurate and informative statement like: "Google's Scans detected malware <X>, which is known to do harm <Y> within the past <N> hours
13.
by rbarooah 14y ago
The valid argument is that it's generally harder to convince people to pay for web content than it is for content on iOS where this product is already successful, presumably because iOS users are a self-selected group who are more willing t
14.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Sorry, Android is controlled by a single company.
15.
by rbarooah 14y ago
I doubt that would change things. iOS users are not price sensitive and Apple doesn't make any pretense that content is free. People who buy into the Apple world are choosing to buy into an ecosystem where they are going to have to buy con
16.
by rbarooah 14y ago
It's not really my conclusion - it's the conclusion from the TWN piece. That said, even though it's not a controlled experiment, the fact that they didn't have feature parity doesn't completely invalidate their experience. 80-1 is a hig
17.
by rbarooah 14y ago
They offer an optional subscription through in-app purchase on iOS. I imagine they get a lot more support that way than they would if they put it on the web with a 'donate' button, so basically they are putting their effort into the audienc
18.
by rbarooah 14y ago
They did put the effort in to overcome those issues, only to discover that for every 80 iOS users they had 1 Android user, so they concluded that continuing to do the work wasn't justified because there was a lack of demand. If they'd
19.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Clearly you haven't thought this through. Security is sometimes a trade-off but in this case there is no trade-off involved. Google can just as easily block the malware without the potentially defamatory language. The accuracy of the algor
20.
by rbarooah 14y ago
I don't see how you reach that conclusion. Twitpic is part of the Twitter ecosystem and is such is certainly competitive with Google's social and photo sharing efforts (i.e. Google+ and Picasa) Being a known distributor of malware (describe
21.
by rbarooah 14y ago
I doubt you'd consider it a "minor shortlived inconvenience" if Google informed millions of people that your business was a known distributor of malware. Google can perfectly well block the malware without making such an accusatory statemen
22.
by rbarooah 14y ago
If that's what's happening here, then the warning seems good for everyone.. except that the wording is defamatory. Rather than accusing Twitpic of being "a known distributor of malware", it might be better if the message said something like
23.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Google's "advice" in this case is a statement issued to millions of users accusing a competitor of a crime. If it turns out to be true, that's fine. If it's not true, don't you think Google should be held responsible for the damage to thei
24.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Have you actually looked a twitter page that uses Twitpic? The text Chrome produces reads: "Danger: Malware Ahead! Content from twitpic.com, a known malware distributor has been inserted into this page. Visiting this page now is very l
25.
by rbarooah 14y ago
It sounds as though you are now claiming that Google has already turned the Internet into a Walled Garden but are simply nicer in their policies than anyone else. This is the first time I've heard anyone make this claim.
26.
by rbarooah 14y ago
You've actually made my point for me. "Redirecting traffic and subtly punishing users" is far from a walled garden, and would lead to an instant backlash if detected. As I said, they don't have the power to close the internet that you attr
27.
by rbarooah 14y ago
For all the reports that Google is full of idealists, I hear just as many that it's a very 'careerist' place, and it's clearly attractive to people who want to make money as much as it is to those who believe in internet freedom. I agree th
28.
by rbarooah 14y ago
...because Google left the Internet's core like it is and didn't build a walled garden around it. The commenter I was replying to claimed that Google chose not to build a walled garden around the internet because of their good character.
29.
by rbarooah 14y ago
I agree that you don't get my point. The reason Google hasn't built a walled garden around the internet because they simply don't yet have the power to do that. You talk as if it was something they could easily have done but have chosen not
30.
by rbarooah 14y ago
Part of what has put Google in their position as the gatekeeper is that the perception of being balanced and neutral. If search was more overtly biased, Bing would step in as the neutral player. The more they consolidate their power, the l

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