The Ethics of Publishing Cease-and-Desist Letters - <AUTHOR> http://volokh.com/2011/01/25/the-ethics-of-publishing-cease-and-desist-letters/

<comment><USER2> So the hypothetical situation is this: You get a letter from party X asking you to do Y or suffer consequence Z.

It seems to me that if the threat of consequence Z is really sound, X will not mind if you publish the letter on the Internet or take out billboards to share it. Whereas if they want it kept secret, they must have something to hide, such as the weakness of their position.

Mind you, INAL, so I am merely musing aloud for entertainment purposes only.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with Volokh and most of the commenters that it's ethical to publish a cease-and-desist letter if you get one.

<comment><USER4> I feel this comment to be "right" (i.e., I agree with it), and I've published a received DMCA take-down notice, but I'm curious if there's any precedent for one getting in trouble (having their post regarded as another instance of copyright infringement, etc.) for doing that.

<comment><USER5> There are a lot instances of people _claiming_ that republishing a legal threat they sent constitutes copyright infringement, but I can't find any instances of anyone successfully winning a copyright-infringement suit over it. There's a fairly strong fair-use argument, at least.

<comment><USER6> I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that generally a legal threat letter is not covered by copyright at all. Copyright covers virtually all forms of creative expression, but most letters and certainly most cease and desist letters (which often follow a standard template) are not creative expressions by themselves.

I would also agree, again reiterating that I am not an expert, that even if they were covered under copyright the fair use argument _could_ be enormously strong here, depending on the way and reason it was published. Given that there is no market for cease and desist letters the 2nd and 4th factor in the test under 17 U.S.C. 107 leans towards a fair use finding, and if its publication is for commentary or education (even better if noncommercial) then the 1st factor would also lean towards fair use. Only the the 3rd would lean against fair use since you would have to publish all or substantially all of the letter to be effective. But at least courts have found that use of an entire work can be fair use under the right contexts.

So, it certainly seems to me as a layman that there is no copyright concern in publishing and publicizing your average cease-and-desist letter.

[Edit to fix spelling]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, but the letter was not directed toward Volokh, for one thing. For another, this is not the sort of RFC that the Internet is particularly good at. The proportion of informed opinion to opinion on the matter is unlikely to be large.

<comment><USER8> Why does it matter who the letter was directed to? The recipient of the letter was the one who published it, and Volokh quoted from it (or reprinted it) for commentary purposes. It's not like he snatched it out of the ether en-route or something.</comment></comment>


Source: Groupon Doesn't Have The Cash to Build Its New Data Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/19/source-groupon-doesnt-have-the-cash-to-build-its-new-data-center/ <comment><USER2> I'm genuinely surprised by this. I always figured that Groupon was an expensive business- but that it was because of their army of sales associates, not because of hosting.

What are they doing that <insert name of successful web company here> isn't?

<comment><USER3> Actually,I think your initial impression is right. They are are an expensive business because of their army of sales associates. It is precisely because of this expense that they can't afford the technology they would prefer.

I've always wondered why Groupon didn't just provide a platform for well- connected local people to act as completely independent sales reps who work purely on commission. Why bother with actual outright hires? They're most likely going to have to lay a bunch of them off anyways.

<comment><USER4> What would be their barrier to entry story under this? Why would they need to raise so much capital? How would they scam together an IPO without those two justifications?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This assertion is poorly sourced and sounds like bull. As many have noted, Groupon's processing and bandwidth requirements are relatively low. And are we really to believe "a source familiar with [Groupon's] business"?

ADD: OK, they do send out a lot of emails but even that seems manageable cost- wise with various options short of building your own data center.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. It's headlined as if the situation is some kind of financial failure, but there are no numbers on the premium they're currently paying or the cost of a new center. 1/4 of the piece quotes prospectus boilerplate. No named attributions, nothing from analyst types following the industry.

Not even clear cash is the key here anyway, I would think they could finance a data center with some kind of construction mortgage, and maybe some leasing deal.

Now, pulling things out of my hat, I understand that companies can fully deduct their IT investments made in 2011, that's a huge tax advantage. I don't even know if Groupon can make use of that (are they paying taxes yet?). But if Groupon is missing that window because they _cannot_ get financing in place, _that_ would be a story, one with implications for Groupon, their model, the banks, and bank valuation of corporate IT capital assets.

This, on the other hand, is not a story of any sort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> this just doesn't make sense to me - why would they need such infrastructure? they can't even have that many daily pageviews; backend deal management and CRM wouldn't require huge scale or datacenters...

<comment><USER8> You might be surprised; I know Alexa isn't exactly an infallible oracle, but they list groupon.com as averaging between the 200th and 400th most visited site globally, and 53rd in the US. "ranking.com", whoever they are, says between 150 and 75. I'd feel confident saying they're at least in the top 500, and that requires a fair bit of horsepower. Now, they could probably solve a lot of their problems with smarter engineering before building a data center, but they certainly have traffic.

<comment><USER9> Stackoverflow.com has an Alexa ranking of 108 for the world and 165 for the US. Last I heard they were not using that many servers for their site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They should run a Groupon on data-centers.

<comment><USER11> Joking aside, I think this might be a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You don't need to build a whole data center to get wholesale pricing on power and bandwidth. To me this reads like Groupon has thrown the towel and has deemed it OK to throw more hardware at the problem. Perhaps they've come to the conclusion that buying their way out of the suboptimal backend system is much more cost effective than hiring very capable people.

Regards

</comment><comment><USER13> Could somebody who has knowledge about data centers make a quick estimation how much such a data center might cost?

I am asking since I am not a data center/architecture expert but the Groupon site should not be that complex from my perspective? Also the content should mostly be static, so caching should solve many problems.

<comment><USER14> Depends on the data center of course.

There are four components to a 'data center':

1) The structure. These can be pretty simple, a concrete slab, then 'tilt up' walls tied together by steel joists. Internal structure is 'UPS area' / 'power ingress/conditioning' / 'data area' / 'office area' / 'fire systems area'. If its mostly data operations the bulk will be the 'data area'. The cost of land figures into it as well but you probably try to build it where land is cheap, connectivity is high, and power is cheap.

2) Power and Cooling infrastructure. This stuff is dictated by both the climate around the data center and the municipality. Santa Clara California used to have a bunch of semiconductor fabrication plants (fabs) which have all since closed. That left them with excess power capacity, so lots of folks are building data centers there to get access to the cheaper power. (land is still expensive). Cooling can be one of a number of forms, evaporative works well in the Bay Area generally.

3) Staff - Generally an electrician, a network guy, a security lead (+ some number of contract security personnel)

4) General 'stuff' associated with building a data center (raised floor tiles, sprinkler systems, power conditioners, big switches, UPSes and their batteries, chillers, more big power switches and transformers, generators (back up power), lights, etc.

I would be surprised if it cost less than $5M to build or more than $15M.

I actually put together a plan for a 'pocket' data center (one that could be put into an urban area easily, 1 - 3MW of power) but not surprisingly cannot find a bank to fund it. (its around $10M all up depending on initial land and fiber costs).

<comment><USER15> I was talking to a guy who owns a warehouse in Brooklyn a few weeks back. He said he was turning a relatively small part of it (a few thousand square feet, if I recall) into a residence, and leasing the rest. He started complaining about his prospective tenants, so I, sort of jokingly, suggested he build a small data center, since the lease revenue would be much better, even if the costs rise as well. Too bad you weren't there to close the deal!

<comment><USER14> Heh, timing is everything I guess.

So one 'take' on the cloud meme is public utility compute. I have never been a big fan, but have found the success of EC2 and its equivalents to be reason to doubt my doubt :-)

Back in the way back times the high school I went to shared a mainframe (a Univac) with all the other schools. They used it teach programming and to run various bits of accounting and grading and such. That installation could be an EC2 cluster now. (it isn't but the same reasoning for a shared mainframe would apply to sharing the districts computing tasks into a web2 style cluster.) Every time all the machines get stolen out of a school I think "Gee if they were just terminals and useless without the cluster, they would not be as tasty a target."

Still, not a fan, but like I said the ability to drop in a data center near the center of things in an friendly way, seems like a Useful Thing.

<comment><USER15> I think the target market in Brooklyn is leasing backup/DR cages for big banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Rather than handling website load, which should be trivial for a site like Groupon.. Perhaps they outsource sending of emails to someplace like SendGrid or Constant Contact, and want to build infrastructure to do it all themselves?

</comment><comment><USER17> If this is true does it imply that upper management took too much money out after the last round of funding?

</comment><comment><USER18> Not trying to be snarky but maybe the founders shouldn't have taken so much off the table in the last funding round.

</comment><comment><USER19> They should make a deal like twitter did early on with NTT or another telecom company for equity in exchange for data centers.

<comment><USER20> Are they allowed to do this as a public company? Would their growth be attractive enough for someone to take them up on the offer?

<comment><USER19> Secondary issuance of shares? Or trade options?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That is as it should be. When you are making a new start up the way Groupon is you should be looking at a much higher ROI than the price of borrowing money, so you should throw as much money on growing fast as possible.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why don't they use EC2 instead of building a data center? That way there's no big up-front cost.

<comment><USER2> Don't they already use EC2?

It isn't the answer to everything. In fact, it's the answer to far fewer things than people think. EC2 is great because, as you say, it has no big up- front cost. But when you start scaling it isn't actually very affordable.

<comment><USER23> Yes, this was the impression I got from my source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe they could release some more stock as a 50% off Groupon deal :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Who do they host with now?

<comment><USER26> A recent blog post by Engine Yard claims that they host Groupon's site right now.

[http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/groupon-makes-history- in...](http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/groupon-makes-history-in-more-ways- than- one/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+engineyard+%28Engine+Yard%29)

<comment><USER27> Completely off-topic here, but the coffee house mentioned in this Engine Yard article (Intelligentsia) is really the best coffee in Chicago--if not the US.

Also, there is no way that Groupon needs a data center--how can they be spending millions on hosting each month? Something doesn't add up...

<comment><USER28> Coffee comment seconded.

<comment><USER24> About to pull a few shots of Black Cat right now...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visual Studio 2017 Release Notes - <AUTHOR> https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes <comment><USER2> Very excited to see the improvements contained in this product. I swear they are taking a page out of the VS Code team playbook. I just updated from RC to RTM with ZERO issues and the update was done within 20 minutes.</comment>


Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/ <comment><USER3> The biggest problem with touchbar is that Apple intentionally made non- touchbar model inferior in terms of hardware and the amount of USB-C ports to make sure ppl buy touchbar. This is truly infuriating and I'm sure, was done for purely marketing reasons.

I'd buy a non-touchbar model if it had the same hardware as a touchbar model in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget the huge price hike "because of the touchbar" that included the non-touchbar model.

<comment><USER5> That's their "because we know you'll buy it anyway" factor.

<comment><USER4> I know I'm just one guy, but I was planning on an upgrade before they released it and I did not, in fact, buy it anyway.

<comment><USER5> Good. :) The touch bar would be why - as opposed to price, right?

<comment><USER4> I have been using exclusivly Apple computers for about 25 years. I have been an iOS developer for about 8 of those. The Mac Pro debacle is a whole different rant, but there were three factors related to their new laptops (many other complaints related to developer support, tooling, and so on. again, different rant) that made me decide to stop purchasing my computers from Apple and transition away from iOS development.

First, they introduced the touchbar, which is a feature that is _clearly_ not designed for me (programmer, vim, etc.). In fact it isn't just useless for me; it interferes with the way I work.

Second, using the touchbar as justification, they raised the price to nearly $3000 if you want a 15" screen and a 500G hard drive. Upgrading every 3 or 4 years becomes incredibly expensive.

And third, they deliberately crippled the non-touchbar version of the macbook and _will not_ let you spec it high enough to be competitive with the touchbar versions. You can't even get it with a dedicated graphics card. If the touchbar is so compelling then it should be a feature people choose. Intentionally crippling the machine to force people into an upsell is just maddening. Especially when I'm a developer that contributes to their ecosystem and what they're trying to upsell is completely irrelevant to me.

Not only am I no longer in their target market; they won't even accommodate my needs.

<comment><USER6> Pretty much same boat. I'm still on a pre-touchbar MB Pro, and it's hard to imagine any circumstances under which I'd buy another Apple machine (maybe if I needed to do native iOS work for some reason). I've held off buying another MB largely because switching habits/software to another OS always seems like something I'd like to shelve. I've managed to keep my current ageing machine viable by offloading increasing amounts of work to AWS, Linode, Raspberry Pis, etc. But this won't go on for ever, and Apple's current laptop line is completely irrelevant to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have the MacBook Pro 2017 edition and this is by far the worst upgrade I've experienced for such a high-end, luxury item.

It's all USB-C. Virtually nobody else supports USB-C, not even Apple. Oh, you want HDMI? €100 please.

I also have an iPhone 8 which is on the Lightning connector. The audio jack is gone and guess what, there's no Lightning connector on the MacBook, so you'll need 2 pairs of headsets or an adapter.

The glowing logo is gone. And the Touch Bar is a clusterfuck. In an ironic touch, the default Touch Bar setup shows the Siri button at all times. I guess if you have multiple clusterfucks you make them link to one another.

I still have the 2015 at home. I think that was the best MacBook Pro made thus far and looking at the differences I'm now contemplating a move to a Linux laptop — not the same polish, but it won't be this expensive either and I won't feel bad about supporting a company that's getting increasingly hostile towards work laptops and touch typists.

<comment><USER8> I feel like USB-C is on the rise. Nintendo Switch uses it and there's a whole bunch of new android phones starting to use come with it. I bet in a year or two, most new devices (e-book readers, phones, tablets) are going to be USB-C, probably with Apple (ironically) being the only exception. It's neat to be able to charge my Switch from my MacBook charger and vice versa (though the Switch charger barely charges the MacBook)

I don't mind so much being part of the forefront here. It's a pain to dongle, but that's the price of progress, dammit!

<comment><USER9> Careful with the USB-C on the Switch as its current implementation is not compliant. (Still agree its adoption is on the rise).

[https://plus.google.com/102612254593917101378/posts/2CUPZ5yV...](https://plus.google.com/102612254593917101378/posts/2CUPZ5yVTRT)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803)

<comment><USER10> This seems to be one of the problems with USB-C implementations, barely any of them seem truly compliant? I remember this comment from a week ago[0]:

> In watching the evolution of USB-C over the last few years, it seems like > it's extremely hard to implement correctly with the huge number of modes, > alternate modes, and power delivery in the spec. > When you connect two > USB-C devices today, you have almost no idea what is actually going to > happen, which device is the master, and which way power will flow.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Touchbar has been mostly a dud for me, and I don't miss it when using my older MBP. I have customized by touch bar to include my favorite actions such as locking the screen, but it is otherwise static.

My 2 biggest issues are:

\- It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions away.

\- No haptic feedback. Even having the trackpad click would be useful, since it can be felt throughout the Macbook.

<comment><USER12> Primary reason it turns off is because its oled, and leaving it on would cause burn-in.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like a great application for an e-ink display. No burn-in, low power, and can always emit as much light as the keys on the keyboard do (by front- illuminating the bar when the keyboard backlight is on).

<comment><USER14> The 2014 ThinkPad X1 Carbon had an e-ink touch strip instead of an F-row (exactly like the MBP does). It didn't work very well: poor display contrast, hard to see in bright daylight, can't feel for keys, slow response time, etc. They switched back to real keys for the 2015 model release.

...that's why Apple's adoption of it surprised me the most: I saw how it on the ThinkPad added no value, and while Apple has greater integration and will undoubtedly encourage third-party devs to use it - it will still be too fiddly and complicated.

I think Apple's too proud to kill it off in just one project cycle - but I can't see Apple's management justifying continued investment of time into maintaining it. The fact they didn't include it in their latest desktop keyboard (for a Pro users no-less!) says something.

<comment><USER15> > hard to see in bright daylight

Huh? One of the defining features of e-ink is that it's _easier_ to read in bright light, compared to a regular screen...

<comment><USER14> It had a smooth plastic window over it without any matte-finish or anti- reflective coating. Couple that with how the keyboard area is often in the shade made it hard to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I started remapping the Caps Lock key to the Escape command when I got my tbMBP, and now it's the very first thing I do on every single computer I start using, touch bar or not. MacOS even now offers this as a 1st party option in system preferences, it works phenomenally. I even love, at a visceral level, the balanced symmetry of ESC and ENTER being opposite each other.

<comment><USER17> If you're a Vimmer this is invaluable. ctrl-c and esc feel terrible after that.

<comment><USER18> I get bye with capslock remapped as control and using ctrl-[, which is the pinky of each hand and requires minimal movement. Control in general is useful for everything, escape not as often.

<comment><USER19> Ctrl-C is another option that works the same as Escape and is easier to activate with one hand.

<comment><USER20> Not quite. If you want to append or insert characters using blockwise visual mode in vim, it won't work with Ctrl-C. It will work with Ctrl-[ or Esc.

<comment><USER21> That's true for the default behaviour. Ctrl-C also won't call autocommands (like InsertLeave).

But - you can always map <C-c> to <ESC>, so that it'll work exactly the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a non-tech savvy person who happens to work in tech. I find the touch bar very useful.

This is what I believe: the touchbar is for people like me... people who never learned to use the F keys, people who aren't obsessive about shortcuts but appreciate them when discovered. In short, it's for the 90% of software users that float between general public and pro users. It works.

<comment><USER23> > In short, it's for the 90% of software users that float between general > public and pro users. It works.

Then they should have not called it a "MacBook pro" there is nothing "pro" about touch bar, it's something useless that I have to pay extra for and I don't need it at all.

<comment><USER24> The only time I touch my Touch Bar is to hit the Escape key.

Because I use vi.

Because I am a professional and theoretically the target audience of $3,000 premium quality laptops.

<comment><USER25> Funny that you need a $3000 laptop to run vi. Funny in a sad way.

<comment><USER26> Just because they work in vi as their text editor does not mean they do not run other software on the same laptop. There are fields of software development where performance of your development environment matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article:

> As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch > Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had > implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone > would forget about it in a couple of days.

At least Siri doesn't get in the way of productivity.

> Once again. I hate sliders on Touch Bar. Changing them to buttons was the > first thing I did. Now I can tap them blindly. Guess, even my stress level > significantly dropped when I stopped trying to put the sliders in the > desired position. It was same to adjusting hot water in a shower — you're > never gonna get it without burning yourself.

Those sliders are the worst, now requiring TWO high precision taps, while looking at the keyboard, to tweak the volume. I find myself reaching for the physical volume controls on my headset more often.

> Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the > system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every > ad that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't > understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient.

Unreliable play/pause button, very annoying.

> Imagine, you want to drag a picture to a browser to upload. You click the > Finder, but instead opening a new window at the same screen, it carries you > away somewhere. Just because there's another Finder window opened there. And > it's fucking impossible to fix that with standard MacOS tools.

Not related to the TouchBar, but I don't understand why Apple won't improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.

<comment><USER28> You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. I find it is much quicker and more accurate to use the sliders on the touch bar as a result of this. You don't even need to pause after the tap with your finger down, just tap and slide your finger around and the slider is there.

<comment><USER29> > You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the > brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button > morphs into a slider.

Yes, this is actually one of the few things I actively like about the touch bar.

I love that Apple is trying something new with laptops, but sadly it's been mostly a dud for me too. I'd take Face ID + a T2 chip (like iMac Pro) any day. The fundamental problem is you don't tend to look at the keyboard when you're using a computer; there isn't enough incentive to do so, so it always feels a bit like a chore to use.

I think there's a kernel of a good idea here, but the current implementation isn't it.

Edit: Reading this article, I've realized all I really want from the touch bar is a permanent Dock. The Dock is important enough to always be on your screen, and it'd be really useful to have at a touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am really "worried" about two features coming out of Apple the past few years: The touch bar mentioned here and the "3D touch" feature of the iPhone 7+.

These are "obviously" bad interaction designs yet they come out of a company having almost infinite resources when it comes to design. What is going on here?

Is it the marketing department taking over? Is it "we have created this chip and now we have to use it somewhere otherwise the money is lost"? Is it particular individuals whoes silly ideas are promoted beyond their merits like the anecdote that the paper clip got in Windows because the project was run by Bill Gates' wife?

<comment><USER31> Have you actually used 3D touch? Because I use it just about every day, so much so that it's one of the biggest things I miss when using phones that don't have it. It also isn't touted as a major selling point anymore -- it just quietly exists, serving an extremely useful purpose as a better "right click" for touch screens.

The touch bar I agree is major marketing hype.

<comment><USER32> Have you seen non-technical people using their devices, particularly older people? Every button press they make is a force touch and if that doesn't do what's expected they'll press harder. It's hard enough getting them not to long press or double click and now the company known for making things easy to use is making things even more confusing for lay people.

<comment><USER33> The number of "non-technical" people is only shrinking every single day. Why would they continue to design hardware for everyone just to cater to a constantly shrinking minority demographic?

<comment><USER32> It's not shrinking and it's the majority demographic.

I'd say it's growing in fact, younger people growing up with the internals of their devices more hidden from them than ever, they will have less technical literacy than their older peers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been living with a touchbar machine for about two months now, and the only useful thing about it for me is the touchid spot.

Escape, slow as hell. Brushing the touchbar and bringing up the man app on some random argument, useless and annoying.

It's gotten a lot better now that I've switched it from context to function keys, and am using an external keyboard 95% of the time.

It's really my third favorite laptop to use in the house, behind a 2012 MBA and a Thinkpad t410.

<comment><USER35> I can live with all of the half-baked features of the latest MBPs (I have one for work, my home one is much older) but the false recognition of the overly large touchpad drives me crazy.

It's bad enough that I have to disable tap-to-click (which I greatly preferred - much more elegant) and it still mis-clicks if I rest my hands on it.

I used to think the MBP trackpads were a cut above everything else - <USER2> they're too big and the palm rejection is not good enough.

<comment><USER36> I'm glad to hear other people have issues with the enormous trackpad. The number of times I incorrectly type my password in has increased like 10x on the new MBP. Unfortunately I can't use Touch ID to login due to an employer policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I refuse to buy the new MBPs for corporate use. Just keep buying the older model. The new one is an unmitigated, overreaching, disaster. Oh and BTW, if Apple discontinues the older MBP, I will NEVER buy a MBP with a Touch Bar. Utterly ridiculous. I look forward to reading about what a stupid technology blunder this was years from now in a listicle of tech mistakes.

<comment><USER37> And don't get me started about removing the glowing apple logo on the back of the screen. No reason for it -- now the back of the MBP looks just as shitty and cheap as every other craptop on the market.

<comment><USER38> Found the choice of mirror material awful, looks like the surface of a child's plastic play mirror you'd find in a dollar store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As far as I'm concerned, the Touch Bar is not useful and will never be useful. I need the physical tactile ESC and F-keys back.

There isn't even an option to make it emulate a standard keyboard row of ESC & F-Keys permanently (with the alternative functionality when you hit Fn, like on a Magic Keyboard).

This "feature" alone has sealed the fate of Apple computer hardware for me. I will not buy another Mac until it has a full developer-level set of features and a full keyboard, one that doesn't cost $700 and five days to repair when it keeps breaking.

I literally don't use my MacBook Pros anymore (one personal, one work) without an external keyboard except when simply impossible. I will literally put a magic keyboard on top of the internal keyboard when that is the only option I have.

<comment><USER40> Somebody should build a row of physical ESC+F-Keys that you could stick to your touchbar, + software fix that would make the touchbar display the appropriate keys. Kind of like those analog controllers you can stick to a smartphone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The big problem I see is that my laptop is hooked up to a display half the time, lid closed. It wouldn't be useful for showing anything that isn't also on the main display. And it can't have a set of bar-only controls (if Apple were serious about that use, they would have released an external keyboard with Touch Bar by now).

<comment><USER42> If you have an iPad, you can use duet to simulate the touchbar on the bottom of the display. This makes it all the more useful if you're using your iPad to see chat messages or monitor the status of a terminal since it also takes advantage of the touchscreen

<comment><USER41> Yes, surely; Apple _already had_ superior touch devices supporting Handoff, etc. It would have made way more sense to extend Handoff and let the larger, more capable touch screens of iOS devices interact with Macs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> ...and sadly, Apple will never admit the mistake, and give us back the nice keyboard of the 2013 model. All in the quest to save a millimeter or two of height.

My Late 2013 15" MBP is starting to fall apart in its old age - its battery is broken, its feet are starting to come off, it's got a ding in the display... it's just barely sufferable, but not for much longer. At this point, I don't see myself replacing it with a Mac. There's _nothing_ compelling about these Touchbar machines.

However, I'd buy this same machine again if they updated the processor (maybe one of those six core i9s that Intel just rolled out) and bumped the RAM to at least 32GB. More local storage would be nice-to-have, but these days I just don't have much locally on my laptop - it's all on NASes/Desktops. I don't care at all about Thunderbolt and probably can go another 5 years without caring too much about USB-C given how slow peripheral redesign cycles are now. So that's it. That's the only two (or three) upgrades I'd care about. All of the rest would be superfluous to me.

Sadly, I don't see that happening. I'll probably break down and replace the battery in this machine and try my damnest to ride this machine out of the decade...

<comment><USER44> Replace parts. It's surprisingly affordable. I got my top case, battery, and display changed through a combination of defect repairs and just paying out to go the extra mile for 500 bucks. Machine feels brand new. Still plenty fast. Everything I touch is shiny again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> from the article :

> the Touch Bar still remains the useless shit and there is no hope Apple will > fix it.

> As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch > Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had > implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone > would forget about it in a couple of days.

> The reason is simple — that's how you see your laptop 99% of the time:

This is exactly how I feel about the Touch Bar.

If it had been an additional row I would not have minded. I don't dislike sliders to change the volume and I would prefer to see track title there than as notification (notifications create a pavlovian response where I think they are alert for something important, so it is very unpleasant for me to see one popping up for play music).

However, since it is taking away the functions key that I use all the time and replace them with a screen, I strongly prefer using my 2015 MBP over the more recent one.

<comment><USER39> "If it had been an additional row I would not have minded."

Exactly. I would have configured it to be blank, stay off, and remain off. Give me my physical ESC and F-keys.

<comment><USER46> I only want my ESC back, F-keys are not needed on macOS. They should have made the TouchBar smaller and kept ESC

<comment><USER45> To use the OS; indeed

For some software like Intellij IDEs, function keys are used very often. Since that where I spend 90% of my time on my work MBP; it makes the Touch Bar very painful.

ESC is still my top button there; but just getting it back would not be enough for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think we are going to look back on this as a dark age of human interfaces.

too much touch, not enough tactile

<comment><USER48> I definitely disagree. I think we're at a great balancing point with touchscreen laptops, the keyboards aren't perfect but they get the job done, and the touchscreen augments that wonderfully. Phones are inherently limited by size, and while I miss physical keyboards, the flexibility of on-screen keyboards more than makes up for it.

<comment> gray_-_wolf tbh I don't really understand why that's needed... I still think milestone2 was best phone ever made control-wise. Great construction, solid keyboard... shame things like that are not made anymore

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dylan-m I always find it amusing how developers flock to MacOS saying things like "you don't need to configure it like Linux; it just works", and then there are articles like this containing myriads of workarounds for its problems :b This is cool, though. I'm somewhat envious of the shiny thing. The conky screenshots are fun, since this is quite reminiscent of it, except done somewhat usefully. It's a shame that it's tied to a little laptop keyboard that you definitely shouldn't be using full time if you value your wrists and your spine, but, it's a start.

(Now, please please please don't do all of your programming on a MacBook).

<comment><USER49> I find comments like these amusing.

First, you don't _need_ to spend hours configuring the Touch Bar for it to be a functional machine, like you would trying to run Linux on a laptop... But some people do, because it's there. The Touch Bar works just fine without this article.

Second, having a myriad of workarounds for its problems is a positive not a negative. Everything has problems; I'll take the platform that has a myriad of workarounds over the one that has a handful.

Be my guest to use something else for all of your programming. I'll keep using my MacBook Pro.

<comment> dylan-m Heh, I'm mostly bitter because most of the places I've interviewed at lately just give everyone a Macbook Pro and that's the end of it, and I'm sick of cursing at their window manager and then running Linux on the things. (Missing webcam driver makes me grumpy when the XPS 13 I normally use supports everything perfectly).

Anyway, I don't mean to rag on anyone's preferred OS. More just taking an opportunity to grumble pointlessly about a particular unconvincing argument people like to use for it. (Unfortunately, that argument _is_ convincing for the people who buy the hardware I have to put up with at work).

Also to remind people about ergonomics, because we mustn't forget these things. Please don't be too drawn to the shiny touchbar, it is still attached to a keyboard which encourages squishy hand position and which is attached to a screen that is not at eye level.

<comment><USER49> I totally get that, but in a lot of cases it _is_ easier to use MacOS than to run Linux (like not having to worry about hardware drivers pretty much at all).

Also, those are characteristics of laptops... Not specifically Macs... And I do need a mobile computer...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The default touch bar was pretty useless to me, mostly because the buttons keep moving around on every app and I never remember what it can do. But a few tweaks and it's useful again:

In System Preferences > Touchbar I manually added all the applications I normally use into the "always show Fn keys" mode, so now the touchbar basically always shows Esc and the Fn keys.

Then, add Apptivate to tie each Fn key to my most used apps (F1 = Finder, F2 = Slack, F3 = Chrome, F4 = Sublime, etc), and I can easily switch among my most used applications. It's not quite touch-typeable like with hardware fn keys, but close enough.

I briefly looked around for a utility but didn't find one, but basically my goal is this: a static touch bar that never changes, which switches to or launches a set of specified apps. Is that possible?

</comment><comment><USER51> I went out of my way to buy a 2016 macbook without the touchbar as my new machine. I have a macbook pro with touchbar as my work machine and I hate it. The build quality is garbage, the keyboard is a huge step down, and the touchbar is incredibly fucking annoying. Why would they take away quick access to critical functionality like display brightness and volume?

</comment><comment><USER52> The touch bar is absolutely atrocious, and shows that Apple is either completely out of touch or doesn't give a crap about it's users. There is absolutely no reason to force those who want the latest hardware with a dedicated graphics card to have that touchbar keyboard. They could've offered the touchbar keyboard alongside standard keyboard models, giving users the option to choose what keyboard they want while also giving Apple valuable A/B testing data to see what the public prefers.

I really hope another company out there makes a superior laptop. Apple has too much of a monopoly on the dev laptop market, and they clearly don't have the competency to be trusted with it.

<comment><USER53> Even with the bad parts the Macbook pro is still the most capable all-rounder available - it's durable, the build quality is excellent, the hardware is (apart from memory) as good as you can get in any portable laptop...

It's really sad that Lenovo for some reason refuses to make laptops that actually match the macbooks; they are either huge or lack a proper GPU. And others just aren't of comparable build quality in the first place.

<comment><USER52> From the little that I've looked at the Microsoft Surface, I've been impressed. Almost looks and feels like a Macbook Pro.

Biggest advantage Macbooks have had until now in my opinion is the trackpad. Shouldn't be that tough for competitors to match.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> To me, the touch bar is a deal-breaker.

Here is what they could have done:

Right hand side: a regular power button that doubles as finger-print.

Left hand side: a regular esc key.

Replace F keys with a touch oled screen.

I could actually live with that.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is where things get very awkward, I find, because those of us who say 'the older generation was better' are frequently derided by those who adopt the newer with comparisons to being dinosaurs or luddites. The answer is that we're neither - we just want devices that are _usable_.

Apple seem to be going out of their way to break the usability of their devices. All the Touch Bar seems to do (and the Apple guidelines themselves demand, which this article deliberately tears up) is replicate keyboard shortcuts. Things that most existing users have by now memorised. It creates a distraction and makes it harder to interact with your computer.

It's not just hardware, but software too - one thing that really stuck out at me in this article is this:

>Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every ad that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient.

Why would you do that? On every platform, the media keys control the current media player application. Opening it up to a web browser too is asking for exactly this kind of trouble - breaking the usability of media applications by something completely unrelated hooking into previous functionality.

The best reasoning I can come up with is the iPad. It's often touted that even your great-grandmother can pick up an iPad and learn to use email, Facebook and search for things online. That same person would panic (I know my grandmother does) if you ask her to try using a laptop. It seems like they're trying to market these phenominally expensive machines to a small subset in the hopes of turning them into a new market, at the great expense of their existing user base. Rather than an already heavily-marked-up iPad, they would reap the profits from even greater markup on their laptops, which the target market would use for exactly the same things as the tablet, but with a considerably greater repair bill when the cat accidentally knocks it off the table...

I got a 2014 Retina machine this year. That's usable. It has buttons. It has ports. It does exactly what it appears it will do. People would happily call me a dinosaur for rejecting the current lineup and getting one of these instead. Thankfully, I could not care less.

</comment><comment><USER56> I bought a Dell XPS for less than half the price and better specs. No regrets.

Apple hardware isn't that amazing, and even if it is, who cares. "Build quality" is just an excuse to spend more money on a luxury designer laptop that is becoming more and more hostile to its end users.

I dont need a thinner laptop or a dumb touch bar or a"minimalist" os design. I need decent Docker impl and ports to plug my phone and monitor into and to not spend $3k on a computer with mediocre specs.

The OS everyone loves to harp on about isn't as revolutionary as people like to pretend. Windows has better Docker support and that is a huge win in my book. Also windows doesn't make me enter payment info when I'm trying to install tools I need to compile my code.

For a few years I worked for a consulting firm. The laptop I chose was a $500 Lenovo with a decent processor and 1080p screen. I bought 32 gigs of RAM and an SSD and upgraded it. The cost of a comparable Mac is laughable.

Installed Linux on it. Used it for years, never had any issues, even with external monitors. The thing is still running to this day, though now I have it sitting under my TV as a media PC.

#itsjustoverpriced

</comment><comment><USER57> > I decided to steal this feature and make the "coffee break" button. It locks > the laptop and switches the screen off.

Ctrl+cmd+q = lock screen. Display will dim/sleep shortly after that. (Found this out myself not too long ago, I think because of HN).

Incidentally, I just switched the touch bar to the standard function key display with fn switching to the buttons just like the keyboards of old. I found I almost never look at the touch bar and there's absolutely nothing I found that it added that I couldn't already do with the old setup. I hate that the escape key is no longer where it used to be (fully left-aligned). I also hate on the new keyboards that the left and right arrow keys are so big. I use the space on the smaller keys of my old keyboard as a tactile indicator of where my hands are (perhaps it's finally time for vim?).

<comment><USER39> Ctrl-Cmd-Q does nothing for me on my tbMBP using the external Magic Keyboard (because I refuse to use the ESC-less, painful, loud internal keyboard) on macOS 10.12.

<comment><USER58> I believe this is a High Sierra addition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Touch Bar had made me consider abandoning MacBooks altogether and move to Linux.

<comment><USER60> I took this exact path, and so far I'm quite happy with it. I used a touch bar MBP 13" for over a year, hated it, and came to the realization that I was no longer in the target group for these machines, or OS X, and couldn't really rely on any future updates not making things even worse.

I decided I'd rather have a larger degree of control over the machine I use for work, so I took the plunge and installed Linux on a ThinkPad. It took some tinkering, but I don't really miss anything from my Mac now. Also, I can finally run a proper tiling window manager!

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Thanks, I have been dreading the upcoming time when my pre-touchbar macbook pro is too old and I will check out these tips when it does.

One bit of feedback:

> RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural.

A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine.

The issue is that your indicator needs to show you not just "how much is used vs free", which is indeed useless. It needs to show you the breakdown of wired, active, and inactive memory. This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.

I use [https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/](https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/)

<comment><USER62> > This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge > amount.

And how often does that actually happen anymore, really? Yes, Chrome and friends are memory hogs, but a constant RAM indicator? If a MacBook (or any other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.

<comment><USER63> > And how often does that actually happen anymore, really

Pretty often, especially if you open an app that decides to allocate a lot of memory very quickly (Xcode, VirtualBox) or when you switch to an app that causes a lot of memory to be swapped in.

<comment><USER64> But if I just started up one of those apps, I'm _wanting_ (and expecting) it to allocate a lot of memory because that's what those apps do. So I don't really see what actionable information an always-visible meter does for me. But I don't begrudge those who like them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> The only thing genuinely useful on the touchbar is the fingerprint reader, after you enable the PAM module. Well technically the reader isn't part of the touchbar, so I guess that doesn't count now that I think about it.

<comment><USER39> I dislike the fingerprint reader and don't use it on my tbMBP. Someone could physically force me to use the fingerprint reader, or might just cut off my finger to use it, which is even worse.

I wish macOS had a built in TOTP system.

<comment><USER66> > Someone could physically force me to use the fingerprint reader, or might > just cut off my finger to use it, which is even worse.

If that's your threat model, move to a safer country. No authentication system in this class will protect against coercion and for 99.999999% of people the risk is much lower than the risk of not locking their device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I'll install this plugin and pay $5 just to avoid tapping the dot durn brightness buttons by accident or instead of escape. Happens many times every day. Even though I'm trying not to. Can't remove it from the touch bar.

</comment><comment><USER68> The structure of this article is weird. I just gave up reading it because it was too annoying to keep up. Or is it just me?

<comment><USER69> No. Both the writing style and the page breaks lead the reader to think the article has "finished" several times before it ends. While I completely agree with a lot of this article's recommendations, it's funny that an article criticizing Apple's design would be designed so poorly itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I wonder if haptics will ever be good enough that we'll have a purely touchscreen keyboard that doesn't suck.

<comment><USER63> > a purely touchscreen keyboard that doesn't suck

Many people would consider an iPhone keyboard to be this…

<comment><USER71> You can pry my model m from my cold dead fingers. Haptics is no substitute for actual physical feedback.

<comment><USER63> Have you tried pressing the home button on iPhone 7 or 8, or clicking a trackpad on a recent MacBook Pro?

<comment><USER72> Yes. Still, you can pry my mechanical keyboard from my cold, dead hands.

The home button on the new iphones feels _weird_, almost as if there's this strange, unnatural delay to the click actually occurring. For something that purports to be "just like real life" it does a poor job.

The click on the mbp trackpads is not too bad though.

<comment><USER73> Huh I actually thinks home button is pretty much not recognizable that its not a hardware one. My wife couldn't even believe me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Counter point: I have a 2017 Pro with the Touch Bar, and it's pretty nice. I got used to the escape key in a couple of days, and I've found that it tends to keep me away from the trackpad more. Some of the UI on it is great – trimming clips in Quicktime feels lovely, and scoping searches in Dash. Some of it isn't as useful, like tab switching in Safari, but I never find that it gets in the way at all.

Honestly I'm not sure what problems people are generally having with it.

<comment><USER75> We are touch typists ;)

Seriously though, I don't look at my keyboard and therefore have no idea what is on touchbar at any moment. I am not offended as some by its existence, but I also don't find it useful except touchid bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> They missed a much simpler solution that will solve the issue. A nice cheap roll of electrical tape. Cover that sucker up and never look back.

</comment><comment><USER77> They should make the touchbar have tactile feedback so you can feel where the areas begin and end.

Then tbh they could just fix the areas to make it cheaper, so it's always say 15 equally sized tactile button areas.

And further, they could really just skip the dynamic display bit and just put fixed labels on them such as F1...F12 and let the user remember what button does what.

Oh wait

</comment><comment><USER78> It's really amazing how little insight Apple showed with their latest moves.

They removed all ports, replaced keyboard with a noisy one that stops working unless you clean it daily, reduced battery life to make the thing a few millimeters thinner.

The touchbar is the worst part: a solution in search for a problem.

So sad.

</comment><comment><USER79> I was upset about the touch bar because of the esc key since I am a heavy vim user. Then someone recommended I switch my esc and caps lock keys, now it doesn't bug me anymore. The caps lock key is in a much more convenient position for the esc function anyways.

<comment><USER46> What annoys me is that this esc capslock swapping option only shows up on macs with touch bar. If I should get used to it I need it on all of my machines.

<comment><USER80> That's not true, it started showing up in Sierra when the MBP's with touchbar were released. But every mac gets the option.

Source: I also made the switch to capslock-as-esc when I got the TB MBP and it made me decide to switch the keyboard on my other two macs as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Slightly off topic. But I always hated AppleScript. I first started trying to play with it in 1992 with System 7 and it always fell in the uncanny valley of being almost a natural language but not really. What's strange is that I did like HyperTalk with Hypercard

<comment><USER82> These days you can use JavaScript for anything that has an AppleScript interface, and you can use automation (either language) from a shell script. For applications that support it, automation is pretty nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I actually like using the sliders for changing brightness and volume. Although you nailed it, the new media play/pause functionality is absolute garbage.

I've been meaning to get the status line from Atom and have it displayed in the touchbar.

</comment><comment><USER83> The Touch Bar is great for one reason: I can put a Do Not Disturb button right on my keyboard to silence the damn OS update notifications when it occasionally ignores my Do Not Disturb settings.

Anti-feature vs. anti-feature!

</comment><comment><USER84> Reading this, I realised another fatal flaw in the Touch Bar: if you're using a laptop stand with an external keyboard & mouse (as one would do in an office or at home), then having to reach out and hit the Touch Bar would be a huge annoyance, and might even knock the laptop off of its stand.

What with this, the mouse which cannot be used while charging, removing the headphone jack, AirPods &c., one wonders if Apple computers are made to be actually _used_ or just win design awards.

</comment><comment><USER85> I agree with this article. The Touch Bar is a useless gimmick. Not only that, but it removed the actually useful Esc and F-Keys. Oh, and it made MacBook Pros more expensive.

I admire the author for finding ways to make the Touch Bar somewhat useful, but to me it's just too much work and just reminds me how stupid and ill conceived it is. When you remove useful things and replace them with useless crap, it will make people angry. Don't get me started with the port situation.

</comment><comment><USER86> > What else do we have? Ubuntu? To use Photoshop in Wine? To watch Plasma > crashes like in good old days? No, thanks.

The best experience I've had is Fedora with Gnome. Red Hat employs many developers working on desktop Linux, and most of them are working on Fedora.

That being said, you'll have a better time with macOS if Photoshop is one of your requirements.

</comment><comment><USER87> I'm pretty happy with Caps Lock remapped as Escape key.

I think it's super useful to do this with any keyboard if you use vim.

</comment><comment><USER88> I've used BetterTouchTool to create named touchbar buttons for some of the functions I use semi-frequently in Jet brains IDEs. Things where I don't have the keyboard shortcuts memorized. So I have "Declaration", "Find Usages", "Rename", etc... I find that quite useful.

</comment><comment><USER89> That actually seems pretty useful. On that row I only use escape and f12 (quake-style terminal) without the fn-button (with which I control volume and brightness). The occasional keyboard macro recording and replaying in emacs I can just as well bind to something else.

</comment><comment><USER90> Is the "Call Jony Ive" in the header picture a subtle stab at Apple? If so, well done.

</comment><comment><USER91> It forever puzzles me, how come modern keyboards don't have dedicate buttons for COPY and PASTE. Average user or pro, we use the silly combination of two keys much more often than maybe 5 other least used dedicated keys, ON TOP of the F keys.

<comment> cup-of-tea Why is a two key combination silly? Only normal typing characters need to have a dedicated key. For everything else there are control keys. Some of those control keys I use far more frequently than copy and paste, believe it or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> If some interesting we write alternative btt with the same functional and more battery frendly [https://github.com/Toxblh/MTMR](https://github.com/Toxblh/MTMR)

</comment><comment><USER93> The biggest problem with the TouchBar is that it's inaccessible inside my closed laptop. I need to it to be on the external keyboard where I can use it when I'm working.

Does anyone actually _work_ with their laptop on their lap?

<comment><USER94> I do when I work from home. I stay more focused than at my desk for some reason. Although I guess it isn't directly on my lap, typically it's on a thin, firm pillow that's on my lap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I absolutely loved this. Might be the lateness of the hour here, but I actually giggled when I got to the "Fine, I'm gonna code my own BetterTouchTool. With blackjack!" bit.

</comment><comment><USER96> This article makes me really glad I custom-configured the most powerful Macbook Pro possible that _didn 't_ have the Touch Bar.

</comment><comment><USER97> I find it amusing that they label the product that removes the actual touch buttons, a touch bar.

</comment><comment><USER98> I use BetterTouchTool to remap § to ESC on touchbar MBRO. It solves any ESC problems.

<comment><USER99> You can do that with a simple terminal command as well, btw.

[https://gist.github.com/lauri/84674ab22aafc4e0f398a52a53cfd7...](https://gist.github.com/lauri/84674ab22aafc4e0f398a52a53cfd7ec)

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> I would have bought a Macbook Pro last winter, but given the abomination that is the Touchbar, I refused to buy one. If the next iteration of the Macbook Pro doesn't get rid of it, I'm going to just get a Windows laptop instead.

<comment> X-Istence Go buy a Windows laptop instead. I don't think Apple is going to do away with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> I wish every ui would just show the the same buttons

</comment><comment><USER102> How do you use a computer without function keys?

<comment><USER103> Normally? The only program I use regularly which needs function keys is htop. The only other I can think of is gitk, and I try to avoid that thing.

MacOS/OSX doesn't really have a history of using function keys, so pretty much the only software which does is stuff which was "ported" from other unices where relying on function keys is more standard.

<comment><USER6> Xcode (a macOS exclusive) uses function keys by default (for debugging). Cross-platform apps (not just ports) very commonly use F keys (eg. JetBrains stuff).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> How about abandoning the Touch Bar instead?

Apple should ditch it entirely, or at least make it optional on all MacBook Pro models.

<comment><USER105> I'm sure I don't matter to Apple anymore, but the touchbar is the reason I haven't upgraded my laptop yet.

I enjoy having an Apple laptop to complement my Windows and Linux desktops, but if the touchpad doesn't go away by the time I decide not to wait any longer, I'll probably grab something else. Maybe a Chromebook with a replacement OS, maybe an Ubuntu or Fedora laptop. Probably not Windows as it's mainly for games and hobby game development for me. But whatever it is, it won't have a touchbar.

<comment><USER12> You know they sell a version without touchbar right?

<comment><USER106> Only in the smaller lower performance bracket models. They do not make a 15 inch macbook pro without a touchbar.

EDIT: In fact I didn't realize that it's significantly different spec wise to the 13 inch with touch bar. Only going to a 2.5Ghz base clock speed on the non-touch bar. And this is with only intel integrated graphics and a dual core cpu only, compared to the 15 inch models. This can be a big deal for anyone who wants to do even basic video editing or many other content creation type activities.

[https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/](https://www.apple.com/macbook- pro/specs/)

<comment><USER12> Huh, I just assumed it was the same specs just without touchbar. That blows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> I generally dislike Apple products, but holy shit, AppleScript is awesome! We NEED this on Linux!

</comment><comment><USER63> > Things got even worse when Apple "reinvented" the Play/Pause button in High > Sierra.

Actually, this was introduced midway through macOS Sierra; [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mediaplayer](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mediaplayer) is available in macOS 10.12.1+.

> Buttons rock. It's always faster to tap, not slide.

If you press Fn, the slider will go away and the "normal" function buttons will appear.

> I want to have instant access to Finder, anywhere. Default Touch Bar can't > do that. Weird.

Why is this weird? Finder is _always_ in the Dock for every user.

> E.g., the eyedropper tool, to take the hex color code from the screen.

/Application/Utilities/Digital Color Meter.app

> Standard Touch Bar will never support the most useful feature — to display > the name of track playing.

Slide out Notification Center.

> Would be cool to display the name of the YouTube video on the Touch Bar, > right?

See above.

> You have a script running once in 20 seconds, and praying it won't overload > the CPU.

Don't do this. Use AppleScript to watch for changes, instead of polling.

> I decided to steal this feature and make the "coffee break" button. It locks > the laptop and switches the screen off.

Press the power button.

Not offense, and I'm sure you enjoy your setup, but I really think it would do you well to learn a bit more about _why_ your computer was designed that way rather than writing a rant online and spending time making it "just right".

EDIT: it looks like this comment is pretty controversial, since it's flip- flopping between ±5 points rapidly. Let me give a more detailed response.

Personally, I don't have a computer with a Touch Bar. I have, however, used one a borrowed one for a couple days. Personally, I would be fine switching (there are other issues with the MacBook Pro that are preventing me, but that's a story for another day).

I don't use the function keys _that_ often, so I don't feel as if I'm "losing out" on them. Many of the supposed grievances that I normally hear are easily solvable ("oh, I didn't know I could control the volume slider without lifting my finger", "I didn't know I could add sleep to the Touch Bar"). Really, I think the main issue with the Touch Bar is people view it as a second screen rather than an extra set of controls as it's supposed to be. The Touch Bar is meant as a place to have surface extra controls that would be nice to have at your fingertips; what it is _not_ is a place to show you data or be a Dock or menu bar or Notification Center or Activity Monitor. Why? Because you're not always looking down at it. There's no point putting any significant information there.

That being said, Touch Bar is not perfect, of course. It's a nice idea, but it could be improved if it provided more tactile feedback (e.g. haptic feedback, some sort of dynamic change in texture). And given that it's new, Apple's guidelines, while good, may end up changing as real-world usage influences them. Overall, though, I feel that much of the Touch Bar criticism is based on knee-jerk reactions or issues that are not difficult to resolve. Yes, there are some deeper issues, as I've outlined above, but I think the concept as a whole is interesting.

<comment><USER108> > Press the power button.

Where is this power button? I've been searching for it since I got this laptop.

Edit: Wow thanks, don't know how I missed that.

<comment><USER109> Lol Apple made it impossible to understand how to turn on and off the laptop and removed the startup sound leaving you with zero feedback when you start the laptop for an eternity.

Awesome work.

<comment><USER63> > Apple made it impossible to understand how to turn on and off the laptop

Open the lid.

> leaving you with zero feedback when you start the laptop for an eternity

1\. Startup doesn't take long.

2\. There's a progress bar when booting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> cyberpunk linux desktop in 2007? What a newb.

</comment><comment><USER111> Best part of the touch bar is emojis....in some applications like Evernote

</comment><comment><USER112> I'd rather just buy decent hardware to begin with and not gimmicky crap like a 1280x80 pixel screen jammed onto an arm chip on a laptop. Nope. I heard its especially fun if you have to reinstall - you need both firmwares or the machine goes in frowny mac mode.

I'd much rather put time in a decent Linux desktop. You don't need neuromancer-syle cyberpunk interfaces to make a really nice Linux system. And you can pretty much do whatever you want, rather than have to break Apple's "standards" for something that doesn't resemble brushed aluminum dogshit.

(psst, look at username. I'm even somewhat OK with Windows, given some of my 3d design workflow is there. My last job was a linux shop with Macs.. Hated the macs every second.)</comment>


WebMynd (YC 08) launches RedesignGoogle Contest. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/redesigngoogle-a-contest-to-revamp-the-worlds-most-popular-search-engine/

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if the thumbnail previews expanded when you click them. I don't use Firefox so I'm not going to install these, but I'd like to view them in more detail.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is brilliant, and kudos on 1) getting the <http://www.RedesignGoogle.com> domain name and 2) getting TC on board as a judge.

I do wish I could test redesigns without having to install another plugin (I already have WebMynd installed), but hey, the screenshots are pretty good, since you can't really change too much about the mechanics of the site. It'll be interesting to see which ones make it into the main WebMynd plugin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well I was bored so I created one: <http://www.webmynd.com/look/designs/by_id/126>

</comment><comment><USER5> a) Why? (PR Stunt?) b) Is anyone truly happy with WebMynd's plugin?

<comment><USER6> I uninstalled their plugin after a few minutes.

Covering Googles advertising seems a bit unethical to me. At least have an _option_ to put it somewhere else like above in a toolbar.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't cover the advertising; it just pushes it down. There isn't enough room to go three wide (Google, WebMynd, and ads), so it's clearly the best balance of user experience/not being evil I can think of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> yes, and there's already a design with boobs!

<comment><USER8> Which is quite aptly named "Go ogle".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Impressed more with their ability to get the word out about the stunt than the stunt itself.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ughhh..... I apologize in advance to any who may have designed a custom Google theme but I'm not impressed by any of them. None of the themes were anywhere near as clean and ergonomic as the plain Google theme. Give me plain text any day. Fancy pictures just slow page load times and strange background and text colors just make it hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well now I know who webmynd is.

Nice stunt with some big names in the mix.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Well, this is a bit arrogant isn't it?

"We've decided that your site design stinks, and we've decided that we will fix it for you - in a way that brings attention to us. "</comment>


Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46918859 <comment><USER2> Just my own opinion, but at this point I think it's prudent to assume that pretty much anything you send out into the digital network world is public. If it's not something you would want the world knowing you said, don't put it out there. Security breaches happen. Bugs happen. Sometimes law enforcement just comes by and says, "Give me everything that user X has ever done." In short, sh!t happens.

"Everything I do on the net can be authoritatively attributed to me personally."

That's the thought we should all have in our heads before we send any post, or send any text, or send any email, or send any photo, or etc etc etc. We shouldn't rely on some company, that's using us to make money, to protect our privacy.

<comment><USER3> Eric Schmidt: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

People have taken this different ways, but personally I think it's sage advice. We've lost our ability to keep secrets. Information wants to be free. We're terrible at digital security. Pretend everything you type into a computer is on the front page of the New York Times.

<comment><USER4> Better not be openly gay in Russia! Or openly gay 15 years ago and have them scrape old data and find out.

<comment><USER5> Or openly conservative in the USA

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry, but what? Are you suggesting that being conservative in the United States is somehow equivalent to being gay in Russia?

<comment><USER5> Yep. Assuming you live in SV, would you like to disprove me by putting a TRUMP 2020 sign on your lawn?

<comment><USER6> Sure, because that won't have me thrown in jail or possibly even killed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This headline/article are pretty misleading. It makes the issue sound like if you had "Protect My Tweets" enabled, your tweets were still public.

From reading the original notice [[https://help.twitter.com/en/protected- tweets-android](https://help.twitter.com/en/protected-tweets-android)] it sounds like the setting would just be disabled, which then made your tweets public. But not that Twitter's app would continue to say they were protected. That's a pretty significant difference (also by the fact that such a huge thing was not noticed for 6 years I'm guessing not many people were actually impacted)

Also just for fun, I'd wager how it happened is that the developer had some "default request object" that had "true" as the default setting for this and merged it with the updated property values ;) a classic

<comment><USER8> If you don't check your settings before each tweet, there's not much difference for between your settings being changed and your settings not working correctly.

<comment><USER9> Private tweets and profiles show a padlock next to the user's name... You don't have to go to any obscure menu to find out whether your tweets are public or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shouldn't this involve lots of penalties? This has the potential to change/ruin lives drastically. A prudent consumer never trusts what the companies say nowadays. However, that shouldn't absolve the company of falsely claiming private product when it isn't so.

<comment><USER11> A prudent consumer also doesn't send 'live-destroying' messages on a public, hosted messaging platform, regardless of a private setting...

Note that this isn't even about DMs.

<comment><USER12> If companies can't be trusted to act carefully and responsibly with users' data, then I think that's a problem with the companies.

<comment><USER13> It's not 'users' data anymore once its on their servers.

<comment><USER14> Of course it is. This is the essence of the GDPR.

<comment><USER13> GDPR is nice on paper, I'd like to see it actually enforced as its been written. Seems like strong words and weak teeth so far. However, most companies are more concerned with hockey stick charts and are willing to ask for forgiveness later in terms of all things privacy related. I wish it weren't that way, but Ive yet to see that happen successfully.

<comment><USER15> Did you not see millions of emails sent out by companies about their new data policy? How then is GDPR not being enforced?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the actual source: [https://help.twitter.com/en/protected-tweets- android](https://help.twitter.com/en/protected-tweets-android).

<comment><USER16> So basically, the issue was that the settings screen in the Android app would toggle the "account is private" setting off when updating unrelated settings; however, the setting itself, if turned on, worked fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've noticed a hole in a lot of people's thinking where even if they thing to write automated testing or QA testing to ensure that a given thing is available to a certain user or role, there is often not a lot of thought given to writing tests to enure that users or roles that should _not_ have access to the data can't get it.

I'm not sure I've ever found a permission system without explicit testing that the denials work that didn't turn out to have _gaping_ holes in what could actually be done. Generally, the code that hides the UI for what you're not supposed to be able to do works, since that's visible, but on something like the Web where the user also has fairly direct access to the message bus the application is using to communicate to the web server, that's not enough.

<comment><USER18> Testing a negative is much more difficult. Testing the positive is "can this user access this private data using this procedure". Testing the negative is "can any use access any private data using any procedure". That's almost impossible to verify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> At this point it should probably be illegal to call something "private" when there is no guarantee of protections.

<comment><USER20> twitter uses the word "protected", only the article's author ever used the word "private".

<comment><USER19> Was it really a good faith effort to make them protected?

<comment><USER21> Yes, it was a bug that revealed them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great site and a great thort as well I really get amazed to read this. It's really fine.For USA Assignment Help visit our site Casestudyhelp.com. [https://casestudyhelp.com/usa/](https://casestudyhelp.com/usa/)

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</comment><comment><USER24> Sometimes, I'm sad I quit using Twitter. There are some neat people sharing content there.

But the more time goes by, the less sad I get. Their tech stack is and always has been a bit of a garbage fire.

<comment><USER25> Name one startup that grew quickly and organically into a massive company which doesn't have a "garbage fire" tech stack.

<comment><USER26> WhatsApp.

<comment><USER27> erlang is amazing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Specific to Twitter for Android (not web or iOS device clients)

</comment><comment><USER29> Too much to ask for the headline to include the word "Android", since it was _only Android tweets_ that were affected?

</comment><comment><USER30> The very first words I wrote online sometime around 91 were visible for over 15 years.

I pretty much don't put anything online I cannot live with.

<comment><USER15> This is a good principle in general but you didn't exactly put those words up on a site that promised "privacy/protection" did you? That's the difference here.

<comment><USER30> Spot on. Let's just say I knew better. Seriously.

There was absolutely no way these companies were not going to exploit the crap out of both their position and data.

None.

How were they all built? As fast as possible, growth first, etc... I expect these kinds of things to boil down to risks and costs, ideally paid after the enterprise is big enough to deal.

And a whole lot of us know it too. How else was it all going to go?

I am a realist. There is no real privacy online. One can get close, but doing that is a lot of work, takes understanding, and is still a bit of a risk.

Long ago I realized it is better to just not put things I can't live with online.

Frankly, I won't do that electronically, unless it is very worth it.

Edit: It is all still pretty new. We are leaving the honeymoon time. Bad things will happen, so will more regulation, and that crank will get turned a few times.

My expectations are super low right now. That could change, but not yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It most likely only take a bool in a DB to make something public.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is why whenever you build software, you basically should encrypt any and all data and you should be extremely careful when it comes to permission checks. Especially if you are a company or startup, there's no excuse for not burning through a few thousand dollars more here and there to build more secure software that doesn't result in privacy blow-ups like this.

I wonder if GDPR affects Twitter in this case and what % of their revenue can be taken as a penalty for treating users like shit.

</comment><comment><USER33> We really need regulation here.

<comment><USER34> Which government regulation would have prevented this, exactly?

<comment><USER35> Perhaps a regulation that fined previous companies where this had happened $1000 per affected user

<comment><USER36> 10 000 USD seems better IMHO

<comment><USER34> Why stop there. Why not $1,000,000,000 per user? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I had the pleasure of interviewing the anonymous developer of the fastest organically growing decentralized p2p app notabug.io I feel its relevant to this conversation. Why are we not switching to decentralized content sharing platforms? :S

[https://electronicsforu.com/resources/cool-stuff- misc/future...](https://electronicsforu.com/resources/cool-stuff-misc/future- decentralised-web-part-1) [https://electronicsforu.com/resources/cool-stuff- misc/future...](https://electronicsforu.com/resources/cool-stuff-misc/future- decentralised-web-part-2)

<comment><USER38> > Why are we not switching to decentralized content sharing platforms?

Because that site looks like a phishing site for reddit accounts. How is 100% cloning another site's design acceptable at all?

<comment><USER37> Geez! It's a design that all are familiar with, UX 101 and facebook does it all the time! No one 'cloned a site' the whole backend infrastructure is different. Did you read it at all?

<comment><USER38> Facebook doesn't copy and paste the css of competitors. That site did. I didn't read any of the interview, I just went to the site like most users would.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google to Retire Blogger & Picasa Brands in Google+ Push - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/07/05/google-blogger-picasa-rebranding/ <comment><USER3> These are moves in the wrong direction: Google needs more distinctive brands, not fewer.

While the multi-brand strategy didn't work for Yahoo, Yahoo had many other integration/prioritization problems.

The fact that YouTube had a different, more-market-appropriate name than 'Google Video' was important for its identity and success. (Or is Google going to rename YouTube to "Google+ Video", now?)

'Blogger' is a uniquely-interesting brand for them to throw away. If launched today, the word would almost be too generic for trademark protection. But its history practically grandfathers it in: its popularity was part of the mechanism by which 'blog' became a generic term.

'Google Blogs'? Blah.

<comment><USER4> It's a bit older, but the book "Positioning" takes a pretty hard line against "line extension":

> From the prospect's point of view, line extension works against the generic > brand position. It blurs the sharp focus of the brand in the mind. No longer > can the prospect say "Bayer" if he or she wants aspirin. Or "Dial" for soap. > In a sense, line extension educates the prospect to the fact that Bayer is > nothing but a brand name. It destroys the illusion that Bayer is a superior > form of aspirin. Or that Dial is deodorant soap rather than just a brand > name for a deodorant soap

<http://t.co/0mPeBsf>

Is this still relevant these days? I think their argument has some merit.

<comment><USER5> So does the book "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" ( [http://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing- Violate/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing- Violate/dp/0887306667) ).

It essentially claims that a brand should not try to be all things to all people. Different brands, however, can. For a good discussion, see: [http://www.codemyownroad.com/circumventing-the-law-of- line-e...](http://www.codemyownroad.com/circumventing-the-law-of-line- extension/)

Edit: I see the book is written by the same author. Probably no coincidence.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I think I've read about a dozen of his books. But there's also such thing as "halo effect" (I think there's a book on this, too). Take the "i" letter for all Apple products now. It works the same way.

The halo effect makes it so all the children products benefit from the main product's influence, but it can also work the other way around, so they have to be very careful not to brand a crappy product like that, because then it will end up affecting all the others in a negative way.

It's also very important that they keep re-inventing themselves at least every 10 years (like Google is doing now). Because otherwise they risk becoming "the product my dad used", or uncool like that. Who thinks Yahoo is still cool now? 13-14 years ago they were "the Internet".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm really impressed with the speed and scope of these recent changes Google has made. Most giant tech companies wouldn't be able to pull this off. Could anyone imagine Microsoft doing anything this big and fast? I can't.

<comment><USER8> Internet Explorer.

You could argue that this is Google's Internet Explorer moment. Disruptive technology comes along that threatens entrenched tech giant's core business. Tech giant is still lead by its brilliant, passionate founder, and still filled with many smart people. Big long memo is sent out by one of the company's VPs. Senior engineers are pulled off other projects and brought together on one team, first to catch-up to the new challenger and then to surpass it. The rest of the company is realigned to support their efforts.

Remember that Microsoft _did_ do something this big and fast once - they won the browser wars. They probably couldn't do it now that Ballmer's in charge. But in Microsoft's heyday...yes, they could.

<comment><USER9> It's important to note though, that Microsoft only accomplished that by bundling it with their OS (which they'd gotten to near monopoly status through a long series of dirty tricks). Then they tightly integrated its code to prevent removal. They attacked alternative projects at every level from PR/FUD to lawsuits. They used things like Active-X to create technology traps which they wantonly inflicted on naive customer, totally against the customer's interests. They increased lock-in at every step, making it easy to use other program's settings but hard to migrate away. Just as we hear Facebook is doing, blocking tools for reading your own data.

Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling. You can export your setting easily.

They're doing something much harder, and that we rarely see. They're competing on value. If they want users to stick around they'll have to treat them as the customers.

It could, eventually, usher in a new age in software - one where you didn't just tolerate failure because it came bundled with your hardware.

<comment><USER8> I'm not entirely sure that IE only became successful because it was bundled with the OS. In many ways, it really was the better browser. It rendered faster than Netscape, its UI was for the most part cleaner, it introduced innovations like the XHR, and it was even more standards-compliant. (Shocker I know, but does anyone remember trying to do DHTML with Layers in Netscape 4?) The reason I switched from Netscape 4 to IE5 wasn't that IE5 came with my computer (the first thing I did with a new computer was to download Netscape anyway), it was that Netscape 4 flat out hung when I tried to visit many websites.

Microsoft _also_ did all this shady stuff with bundling it into the OS because that's apparently how they operate, but I'm not actually sure this made all that much difference in winning. It certainly wasn't what won _me_ over.

<comment><USER10> I hate Microsoft, but there is a lot of truth to what you say. IE 4 was clearly better than Netscape 4. And IE 5 better still. Then they rested on their laurels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great news, I hope the Picasa re-branding comes with a much-needed visual overhaul (similar to the redesigns that came to Gmail, Calendar, etc). Picasa and Google Reader are the last two remaining products in my daily use that desperately need a visual refresh.

<comment><USER12> If Reader were integrated heavily into G+, I would not complain one bit (more likely, I would push more and more of my tweeting into G+ shares).

<comment><USER13> Definitely. I would love it if my Reader shared items made their way into G+ as shares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It makes sense, but they should be careful with the blogger rebranding - <USER2> _should_ be integrated into G+, but people need to be able to keep all their templates and customizations.

Something like replacing the blogger toolbar with a g+ toolbar and adding G+ widgets (or gadgets or whatever they call them) would work pretty well.

<comment><USER15> From reading the article, it doesn't sound like Google is going to make major functional changes to the products. Rather, the article suggests that Google is going to rename and rebrand the products to be more consistent with their other product names.

<comment><USER16> Yes, the individualized product names don't really fit with the sandbar. Blogger was probably OK (it's clear what it does), but Picasa doesn't communicate what it does well, and worse, the Sandbar calls it "photos" but then you land at the Picasa page, and you're not sure whether it's correct or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have blogger configured to use my domain (blog.markwatson.com) and I certainly hope that Google does not take away this flexibility.

</comment><comment><USER18> Referenced from the article, I found this ([http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...](http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1192471&p=public_profile)):

> We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with > you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don't allow > this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.

I couldn't find any such info (forcing user profiles to be made public) about Google+, but anyway I find it a little bit strange coming from Google, or any other company for that matter.

For crying out loud, at least FB gave me the option of my name not showing up in any of their searches. That's why when I google my FB profile name it's nowhere to be found in the first 10 pages, because I don't want the whole world to know what friends do I have or which photo did I choose to represent me. It's like giving the option of everyone who has access to the Internet of entering my living room while I'm having a beer with my friends, at least this is how I perceive it.

Or maybe Google+ just wants to be more like Twitter and less like FB, I cannot really tell, either way, I won't ever use it because of this.

<comment><USER19> Google+/Profiles also has an option to not be indexed by search engines and I believe the only info required for a Google Profile is name, gender, and maybe age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Am I the only one who doesnt see the direct connection between rebranding Blogger & Picasa & G+ push? I think its more of a good timing for it because everybody focuses towards G+ now. If the growth of the two services were satisfying there wouldnt be need to change anything.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice, but please god let them fully integrate gmail and gapps accounts before they do this. gapps accounts can't create profiles which means they can't join google+...

</comment><comment><USER22> Sad to see the name Blogger go, it's just so much more unique than Google Blogs. They're both pretty generic sounding names, but Blogger has a history behind the name. Google Blogs is like...Facebook Blogs, Yahoo Blogs and (Insert Generic Blog or Blog Host Name Here).

I've noticed Google+ imported my Blogger images though, it'll be interesting to see how they incorporate Google Blogs from Blogger into Plus. I'll still be sad to see Blogger go though.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what becomes of the 'Blogger' name/domain etc. I'd say it's a pretty valuable 'word' -- an iconic brand somewhat.

<comment><USER24> (DISCLAIMER: not terribly relevant, may contain nostalgia.)

It's not that big a deal that a big company is rebranding its products. I certainly won't rant or protest that. But since I no longer have a blog, I thought I should leave an _in memoriam_ here.

Their retiring the "Blogger" brand makes me a little sad. I made my first blog there at age 13, and I learnt a lot about HTML and CSS over the following years thanks to Blogger. In a way, Blogger was my BASIC. I eventually outgrew its simplicity and scope, got a domain and some space (at a friend's mom's server) and started mixing Blogger's templating code with PHP and Perl. That site was my platform to learn code and its political implications.

Forward to high school, a few friends and I had a group blog which got sort of popular among the student body. We had buttons pressed with the Blogger logo. We wore it with pride. The implications of the web were gaining momentum among our generation right about then.

I will miss seeing that big orange B around.

<comment><USER25> Meh, I had a similar experience with geocities back in the day but it was pretty much already dead to me.

With regards to the big orange B, why do you think they aren't going to keep that around?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> not being able to extend this logic to also renaming youtube should be a hint that what they are doing is a mistake

</comment><comment><USER27> It's really nice to see Google with a clear direction, operate with determination, going "all in", consolidate it's different offerings into something that will, I'm guessing, be greater than the sum of the parts.

</comment><comment><USER28> Would rebranding YouTube in the near-future make sense as well?

<comment><USER29> No, because YouTube is a brand name that competes successfully on its own. There's nothing they could name it that would have better name recognition than YouTube already does.

<comment><USER19> Wouldn't the same hold true for Blogger then? "one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world"

<comment><USER29> No. Blogger has a generic stigma. You say the word blogger all the time, but rarely do you actually think of blogger.com. Actually, I never think of blogger.com. And we're talking about brand power/brand recognition, not how popular the sites are.

<comment><USER19> YouTube certainly has a stronger brand but when blogger is referenced I only see it either referring to a person who blogs or Blogger and the two are pretty easy to differentiate. E.g. "a blogger", "the blogger" refer to a person blogging vs "on blogger", "with blogger" that refer to blogger.com.

<comment><USER29> Considering that your comment lacks comprehension, I think my point towards 'Blogger' being too generic a term is even more valid.

"Bob is a blogger on 'blogger' who blogs about blogging."

"Bob is a blogger on 'Google Blogs' who blogs about blogging."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Okay, time for renaming fun: Picasa will now be known as Google+Photos and Blooger will become.. Google+Globber! :D

</comment><comment><USER31> What happens to the name of the desktop version of Picasa?

<comment><USER32> My guess is they'll make that a webapp instead.

<comment><USER33> Webapp? They acquired Picnik and is in Flash. So IMO, they might shutdown Picnik and do something in HTML5 and javascript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Next up Google Windows followed by Google Anti-Virus, who knows one day we might have a Google president.

</comment><comment><USER35> And remember kids: making these kinds of brand/logo changes are what earns folks the Big Bucks. solving hairy concurrency bugs at 2am, dealing with a site outage? $100k/yr. "managing brands", consolidating them, moving the deck chairs around: many hundreds of thousands per year, sometimes millions. it's not about how hard what you do is, it's about "impact" and/or how close you are to the top of the org tree. :)

<comment><USER36> To be fair 100k/yr is still a shitload of money to most people.

<comment><USER35> good point. and totally agreed. however between a choice of making 1 shitload per year, and making 10 shitloads a year, or 100 shitloads, I'll go with what's behind door number 3! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does this means if I own a blogspot blog, the URL will change to a google plus domain? I truly hope that ain't the case...</comment>


ATSC 3.0: The future of free antenna TV is coming, eventually - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/atsc-3-0-the-future-of-free-antenna-tv-is-coming-eventually/ <comment><USER2>
      Ever wonder why your phone doesn't have an FM radio tuner?

Mine does. Many do:

[http://nextradioapp.com/supporteddevices/](http://nextradioapp.com/supporteddevices/)</comment>


Show HN: Review Our Startup: Jobiki – Find Jobs with the Best Culture - <AUTHOR> Link: https://www.jobiki.com
Jobiki is a platform where the job seeker can look for the best place to work for them. We use photos, benefits, amenities, location data, and other unique company information to give you a picture of what the company culture is like.
The big idea is to allow the job seekers to find companies that align with their personal brand and lifestyle. This, in turn, allows companies to get candidates who believe in the company first. Then, place them in the open positions at the company that they fit with.
Our ideal users are people who care about culture/company fit more than just job fit. The ideal company for Jobiki is those who prove the value of their employee as much as their bottom line.
We mainly have companies in Minneapolis and Sioux Falls, so we may not be in your area yet. But, what we would love is, if you could take a look and try it out. Tells us what you'd like to see, what we could improve on, and any concerns or other comments you have.
We are still in beta and building out the platform. We have a lot of work to do, and some cool new features soon, but would love your feedback.
Alex @aguggs Nathan @nguggs <comment><USER2> The recruiting/placement industry is in need of innovative ideas like this. Too often people get hired by companies they don't even like, only to end up leaving soon after.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, retention is a hot topic these days. Jobiki is set out to solve that by creating a longer lasting relationship from the start. Thank you for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you post this as 'Show HN'? [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show)

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to have a career with purpose and passion, not just hourly or salary pay. Sounds like a solid Platform!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable Link: [https://www.jobiki.com](https://www.jobiki.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> I LOVE this idea! What do you think will be the most effective way to market jobiki.com?

<comment><USER3> We are targeting career rookies ages 21-35. With that, social media media will be a big part of our marketing strategy. Another aspect is gorilla marketing on college campuses. Really, it is all about getting people to realize that applying for jobs on job boards is really not helping anyone. Once that happens, then we can propose Jobiki as the solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This should help with the job search.

<comment><USER3> We sure hope so!</comment></comment>