Ask HN: Please review our site: www.tempimages.com - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, we are long time readers and past YComb applicants and now first time posters.
tempimages.com is somewhat like drop.io for photos.
-no registration and no signup -upload photos and get a slideshow -share w/ friends & download the originals
Please let us know what you think. We are just releasing this now so you are amongst the first to see it. We'd like to get the feedback from you guys first because we appreciate the genuine feedback from the community.
Thanks,
Nik & Rob <comment><USER2> We all may know what a slideshow is and looks like, but how about a demo of what YOUR slideshow looks like? Does it make sense to describe your product using your product (have a slideshow that guides me to how to use it)?

Also, for a site that deals with slideshows and images, I would expect more care to be put into the design. Your logo is very pixelated, you have a square color behind your buttons, etc.

These may seem like minor things, but I think you'd be amazed at what some care in design can do in attracting users.

You don't have to go out and get a designer and spend lots of money, but maybe get a theme from themeforest (under $20) or try to find something free.

<comment><USER3> Good points here.

Programmers and Designers should be one in the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Programmers and Designers should be one in the same." - nope...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the graphic that suggests using it for kijiji/craigslist. Obvious idea that most people miss.

A couple of things:

1) Step 1 is cumbersome. Perhaps start with an autogenerated name or make this optional?

2) UI made me expect the image to start uploading as soon as I selected it. Whether it should or not is another question, but the "Current Progress" bar is confusing in this context.

3) Once they've uploaded the image, perhaps you should indicate the step 3 button visually (perhaps going from partial opacity to full opacity). I expected to be taken to the gallery when my upload finished, and had to think. Don't make me think.

4) Offer embed codes

<comment><AUTHOR> All very good points...and we're going to implement each one asap. Thanks, much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Couldn't you use an HTML file upload thinggie or at least one augmented with JavaScript? I just don't understand why flash is necessary in here.

<comment><USER6> The flash uploader provides a much better user experience: better designed controls (usually), multiple-file upload, upload progress.

But graceful degredation is always appreciated.

<comment><AUTHOR> good points... as we go on we'll add different uploaders

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Put the www.tempimages.com/ outside the red box.

Make it so when I select images it says something so I know it is responsive. I kept on selecting the same image, then thinking... well it still says 0/50 maybe it didn't work. So now there are 3 of the same image.

Otherwise, I like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks...we'll change that second step...seems to be an issue with a lot of users

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1) Where is the legal stuff that says what happens to embarrassing photos of grandma?

2) Asking users to select their own url may have some issues. What happens if two people go on a vacation to Hawaii? :-)

3) I would really like to password-protect my slideshow.

<comment><AUTHOR> No legal stuff yet...actually we're not sure how/what the legal stuff entails. If anyone can lend us a helping hand or just point us in the right direction we'd really appreciate it.

Privacy is another feature we'll be implementing soon...good point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry I wasn't able to complete an upload to the site. I was uploading two images (2mb) and the progress bar failed at 24%.

I use Safari 4.1 on OSX.6.5 with a slow internet connection (768kbps) currently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know...haven't tested it on every system yet but at least now we know

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You need some disclaimers on there, and at least some sort of privacy policy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.tempimages.com>

</comment><comment><USER10> kijiji? Really?

<comment><USER11> I wonder if people in regions where craigslist is unsuccessful have the inverse reaction...

The line between awkward promotion and acknowledging reality when mentioning orthogonal services is a tough one, and there are few universalities.

<comment><USER10> I had no idea. Where is kijiji big?

<comment><USER12> Canada for one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How 3D printing threatens our patent system - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/how-3d-printing-threatens-our-patent-system-52665 <comment><USER3> That is the idea of a patent.

A patent is a document that makes it possible for someone else to replicate your idea. You exchange this knowledge for a monopoly as the only seller of this product in a given country.

But if other sources can't replicate your idea, your patent should be invalid.

Everybody can manufacture their own products, even if they are patented. What they can't do is sell them on the market.

What lawyers want is to receive a monopoly while giving nothing in return. They try to obfuscate the patent using strange verbs so examiners could not find prior art, try to extend the patent as generic as they can and even introduce invalid information so competitors could not replicate the thing, even after the patent expire.

Valid 3D computer files should be a requirement for a patent. The only reason they are not is because the patent office is obsolete.

<comment><USER4> _Everybody can manufacture their own products, even if they are patented. What they can 't do is sell them on the market._

Actually, I believe this is false. It is my understanding that it is illegal to copy a patented invention even for your own non-commercial use.

<comment><USER5> If I'm reading it correctly, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) disagrees [1]

> Most of the Member States provide the private and/or non-commercial use > exception under their statutes. Only the response from Australia informed > that the exception was not included in its statutes, but provided by common > law as a "non-commercial use defense"

...

> Most of the Member States, however, provide a broad definition of the scope > of the patent rights which encompasses all kinds of activities, and > explicitly stipulate that private use for non-commercial purposes or private > and non-commercial use is an exception to the exclusive patent rights. In > formulating the exception, provisions of many national laws stipulate that > the it applies to acts carried out in the private sphere and for non- > commercial purposes or to use of a patented invention for personal needs > with no purpose to make profits. The response from the United Kingdom stated > that the exclusion is provided for acts done "privately and for the purposes > which are not commercial".

[1] [http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/patent_policy/en/scp_20/scp_...](http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/patent_policy/en/scp_20/scp_20_3.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Admittedly my answer was U.S.-centric, but to be clear: The United States provides no such exception, while about 60 countries do seem to.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it would hold up in court.

<comment><USER8> It has been held up in court, repeatedly, even against Duke University who argued in favor of an academic research exemption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author is ignorant of both 3D printing and traditional manufacturing methods, and as far as I can tell, how intellectual property works. Nothing he describes couldn't be done by someone with $20 and a 40% off coupon at Michaels. Patents don't work because of difficulty of manufacture.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the authors of this piece are ignorant. I suspect they have a motivation. This is the beginning of a lobby similar to the existing copyright maximalist one.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think it's someone looking at the digital media endgame and deciding that it's not long before even complex physical objects can be "digitized" and replicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apart from the obvious clickbaity fearmongering, I'm doubtful this will ever be a huge problem. If you've ever played with 3D printing, you come away with a profound respect for the quality of finished manufactured goods these days. A McDonald's toy is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars in injection mold costs, 3D designers, 2D designers, and a nontrivial logistics chain.

Sure, you can 3D print rocket parts--with a printer that costs millions and takes several people just to maintain, let alone things like the cost of consumables.

<comment><USER13> Yeah but what if the technology improves?

<comment><USER14> It inevitability will. Not so much as if, but when.

<comment><USER12> Manufacturing real goods involves a shitload of toxic substances, compliance to arcane local, state, and federal guidelines, a ton of tools, and a vast set of roles we don't normally think about. Painting details by hand, trimming off the flash and so on just isn't going to happen within the next few decades. (Definitely later, when robots are a few orders of magnitude smarter.) Sure, I can 3D print a toy flute or a napkin holder, but real flute mechanisms are a bitch. Any serious flute player will happily pay for it to work right every time.

<comment><USER15> Real mechanisms you say? How about a 3D printed remote control car that snaps together, uses no screws, and costs $10 in plastic?

[http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race- car/](http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race-car/) [https://github.com/tlalexander/Flutter- Scout](https://github.com/tlalexander/Flutter-Scout)

Note: I am the designer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shouldn't the title rather be "How the patent system threatens 3D printing" ?

</comment><comment><USER17> The author may be biased as a _law professor_ from Emory.

It is clear to me, just from the history of the volume printing industry itself, that patents are now hindering progress rather than promoting it.

Stratasys, the patent-holder for the fused deposition modeling (FDM) method of volume printing, failed to produce a printer widely accessible to the hobbyist market. As soon as the patent expired, we got an explosion of open, affordable devices for that market, with varying levels of required customer expertise and professional hand-holding services.

I think a similar explosion will occur again when robocasting and laser sintering are fully liberated.

I think the major damage to patents will not occur because people will ignore them, but because people will be producing and sharing prior art before the patents can even be filed. So far, the open source community has been rather more scrupulous than I would have expected regarding avoidance of patented technologies.

It's almost as if they see patents as damage, and simply route around them.

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant > _One of the greatest innovations of our time may ultimately undermine a key_ > engine _of innovation, the patent system_.

Now, now, didn't the author mean _hindrance_?

In any case, I would _love_ to see patents undermined. Let's just hope we don't fall into a police state just to enforce corporate monopoly. The world is close enough to cyberpunk as it is.

<comment><USER18> > _One of the greatest innovations of our time may ultimately undermine a key > engine of innovation, the patent system._

If the author had led with that sentence instead of closing with it, we could have immediately identified the article as quackery and moved on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's odd that a CAD file is made to seem equivalent to the actual physical object.

A CAD file should, under the current system, be copyrightable, which it is. However, it is nothing more than a description of an object. A patent is also a description of an object, with the only difference that the former is interpreted by computers (or humans with the aid of computers) and the latter is interpreted by lawyers.

As mentioned in another comment, patents should contain relevant CAD files to better describe the invention, instead of obfuscated legalese prose that nobody understands. Patents are supposed to create a legal monopoly for the price of disclosing the invention. If the inventor does not wish to disclose details, the invention can remain a trade secret instead, but granting both secrecy and a monopoly does nothing for innovation.

Clearly, 3D printing makes it easier to replicate physical objects, but as the patent system's stated objective is to further innovation, maybe it's time to relax patent licensing instead, as 3D printing giving the ability to tinker and create to "the masses", and will undoubtedly produce a lot more innovation than locking down patent law.

<comment><USER10> > patents should contain relevant CAD files to better describe the invention

Interestingly this could actually provide stronger legal protection for the patenting person. Under existing copyright law people are unwilling to work on open source projects that interact with closed source products for which there has been a source code leak because it is harder to prove that you've never seen the closed source code.

Currently one can make new CAD file without infringing copyright (patent law I'm not sure of) but if people published the CAD files with the patent the patent owner could claim that any files that floated around on the internet are copyright infringements (and hence crimes an an of themselves).

\--- I am not a lawyer. I'm definitely not your lawyer. If you need legal advice pay someone that knows what they're talking about.

<comment><USER19> Interesting twist, as data itself is not under copyright, but a compilation may be. Is a CAD file such a compilation, or just data formatting? I'm not sure.

(However, I do blame The System for this uncertainty. I wish it'd err more often favouring the copier, instead of the rights holder, if that would make everything simpler.)

<comment><USER10> Surely a CAD file is the intellectual property of the person that made it (or the company that hired them to do so)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If someone invents a drill, then you shouldn't be able to get a patent on a hole of a certain depth. An invention can sometimes make what used to be invention just a set of arbitrary parameters. Then it isn't an invention anymore. At that point you shouldn't expect to get a patent. Instead you have a creative work. We have something for that called copyright.

</comment><comment><USER21> "They're awarded for inventions that are nontrivial advances in the state of the art."

I stopped reading right there.

<comment><USER22> Why? That's the actual intention of patents. You make it sound like the author has a fundamental misunderstanding.

While I agree that our current patent office is doing a lousy job protecting us from the trivial, that is actually the intention.

<comment><USER23> Since the reality does not reflect the intention we cannot defend the reality on the basis of the intention.

<comment><USER22> We can debate the intention as one topic, and we can debate improving the reality to make it closer to the intention as another topic.

An article which discusses the intention - and the implications of that - <USER2> perfectly valid.

<comment><USER21> Except that with the current reality people are commiting patent infringement for replicating objects based on obvious and trivial patents. And unlike large corporations with their war arsenals of patents, the little guy has little hope of overturning these patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _Copyright provides a helpful contrast. Digital files themselves infringe. They are copies of the work._

Is this true? I'm skeptical. I own hundreds of MP3s legitimately bought from amazon.com without any DRM on them. The existence of these files on my computer are in no way evidence of any infringement. Only if I were to share these files online without first securing the right to do so do I infringe. It is the act, not the file that is illegal.

Luckily, they seem to get this distinction in the following statements:

 _We argue that if someone sells a CAD file that prints a patented item, that should be considered infringing... But what if someone is not selling the CAD file? Instead, they just possess it. Should that be infringement, too? We think not. The patent system encourages others to design around existing patents, which is often done in a virtual space. If the CAD file itself would be viewed as infringement, then the system could lose such beneficial improvement efforts._

First a quibble: very few 3D-printing enthusiasts use CAD, they use STL files or GCode (the actual code instructions for the printer). The fact that the author makes no mention of this tells me they haven't really taken the time to understand the technology they are critiquing.

Secondly, they are painting an incomplete picture here. You are either selling patented 3D files, which should be illegal, or you are working with them personally, which should remain legal in the spirit of promoting innovation. But what about collaboration, which requires sharing these files? 3D Printing Designers often share their designs in order to solicit feedback. What happens if I send my design to a someone on 3DHubs to have them print it for me?

Thirdly, how the heck are designers supposed to know what is patented and what isn't? Have you ever tried to find prior-work on the US Patent Office web site? Good luck getting the keywords right or sifting through the PDF drawings to see if someone else had your idea. This isn't at all like copyright infringement, where you are copying something someone else created. In a world of obvious ideas, inventing the same thing as someone else is very easy.

I agree with the other comments that predict this is the beginning of a very ugly lobbying effort, and the only ones who are going to get rich off it are the lawyers.

<comment><USER25> >Is this true? I'm skeptical. I own hundreds of MP3s legitimately bought from amazon.com without any DRM on them. The existence of these files on my computer are in no way evidence of any infringement. Only if I were to share these files online without first securing the right to do so do I infringe. It is the act, not the file that is illegal.

What they mean is that digital files __can __be infringing under the right circumstance (it 's an unlicensed copy). In contrast to patents, where the actual product has to exist or the method has to be practiced. A blueprint for product is not itself infringing. I wouldn't say that a digital file can never be infringing (because I think it could under limited circumstances when the claims are claiming a digital file), but if you have a patent on a widget, the CAD file for that widget isn't infringing.

>Secondly, they are painting an incomplete picture here. You are either selling patented 3D files, which should be illegal, or you are working with them personally, which should remain legal in the spirit of promoting innovation. But what about collaboration, which requires sharing these files? 3D Printing Designers often share their designs in order to solicit feedback. What happens if I send my design to a someone on 3DHubs to have them print it for me?

I'm pretty pro-IP, but I think there are good reasons not to call patented 3D infringing articles. The big reason is reverse engineering.

I think we can handle this issue with the induced and indirect infringement law already on the books. The article points out that the alleged inducer has to know about the patent to be found liable. But that is a good thing. The last thing we need is for patent trolls to go around extorting people. It would protect people from say, molding specific products (that are marketed with a valid patent number) because that puts you on notice that there is a patent covering the product. And if someone is innocently distributing a file that infringes, then you can send them a letter informing them of the patent and they'll be forced to stop or risk damages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Surprised that no one has pointed out that this is nothing new. Software patents have had exactly this problem from the beginning. All that's changing is that 3D printing is making physical objects almost as easy to reproduce as source code.

</comment><comment><USER27> A dramatic example of this concern is (albeit not in the patent space) as 3D printing et al regards gun control: where guns of certain kinds may be prohibited, possession of files & equipment which turn raw materials into copies of such guns are being legally targeted for prohibition. Even now, the US government aggressively shuts down any website providing such files on grounds of arms export controls.

Of note: the Solid Concepts M1911 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Concepts_1911_DMLS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Concepts_1911_DMLS) project produced a completely 3D printed metal handgun (barrel included!), which has of last report held up to firing 5000 rounds. The printer is at this time hideously expensive, but obviously it's just a matter of time before it reaches "affordable" to the point that the combination of printer & CAD files becomes considered a threat in jurisdictions criminalizing manufacture/sale/possession of such items.

Ergo, the issue extends well beyond just patent infringements.

</comment><comment><USER28> "3D printing threatens our patent system"

Good.

</comment><comment><USER29> That dental braces example is bad. If two people came up with the same invention independent of each other, there shouldn't be any problem with one sharing it with the rest of the world for free. It's an indication that it's not unique enough.

The whole article sounds like the usual FUD of IP maximalists who freak out with every new technology emerging.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't understand how people can view such a profound advancement of the human species as a 'threat'

<comment><USER31> I don't think anyone's arguing that they're a threat to humans, or humanity, or our health, or anything like that, but here's a good case to be made for 3d printing having complicated and likely negative effects on the patent system. Whether you think that's a bad thing is a separate discussion.

<comment><USER32> IMO: It's not a threat to humanity, but it _is_ scary. It's scary because our entire economic model is based on supply and demand (I'm simplifying, I know that's not completely true). With things like 3d printers, that model no longer makes sense because the supply = infinity.

We're entering a post-scarcity society, and I'm super-excited. I hope it comes sooner rather than later, but there are going to be some significant growing pains as we re-adjust.

<comment><USER33> I'd call it the Star Trek society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've seen a very similar article before, and it's utter bullshit. Few mechanical parts are covered by patents. You can't copyright a working part; the auto industry tried to get that enacted into law and failed. You can make all the clone auto parts you want, and you'll find many of them for sale at your local auto parts store.

There's one area in which this is a problem, for small values of "problem" \- people turning out movie fan merchandise on 3D printers.[1] 3D printers are good enough to make that stuff, although at a far higher price point than injection molding.

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/hollywoods-other-piracy- problem-...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/hollywoods-other-piracy- problem-3-d-printers-1437420799)

</comment><comment><USER35> [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/01/13/copyright...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/01/13/copyright_law_shouldn_t_keep_me_from_fixing_a_tractor.html)

"I'm a repairman. I recognize broken things when I see them. I got into this fight because I wanted to help people repair their broken stuff. Turns out, copyright law is the thing that was broken all along."

The problem is, as perceived by me and some others, that the patent system isn't functioning as intended.

It needs to get fixed. Part of that could probably be reducing the restrictions on individual manufacturing, even though, taken as a mass event, that defeats the forbidding power of patents. Other parts could be decreasing the time period for patent enforcement, adding requirements for patent holders - to, e.g., diminish problems with "patent trolls". Yet another could be admitting that patents in different areas work differently - a software patent (which today doesn't really justify its existence) is a very different thing than a pharmaceutical patent.

</comment><comment><USER36> omg ... I thought for sure I was reading a piece of parody that applies the tragedy of the copyright wars/file sharing to patents/3d printing.

</comment><comment> gene-h Of course, the author seems to be ignoring the fact that 3d printers can't make everything and will not for the foreseeable future. Not to mention, the issue with some of the 3d printing processes themselves being patented.

</comment><comment><USER37> Their description of how people could use 3d printers talks a lot about "sharing" of CAD files but their enforcement conclusion talks about "selling" of CAD files. Sharing and selling are very different, selling is very easy to track while sharing (as shown by things like enforcement of bittorrent copyright infringement enforcement) is a bit harder.

I could easily see that selling a CAD file which infringes on a patent could be enforceable. In theory, also sharing of a CAD file which infringes could be enforceable but it would be much harder to do so as there's much less of a paper trail.

</comment><comment><USER38> Having tried a few 3D scanners, they typically give very noisy digital reproductions of a particular object, usually one side is missing. Moreover, 3D printers are very limited in terms of the strength and material of objects.

Given that most objects of interest to duplication aren't just one solid chunk of a weak material, but usually consist of many parts created during the manufacturing process, this seems like a pretty trivial risk at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER39> If the question is: How can patents protect things when things are now digital files, wouldn't the answer be that things would then fall under the laws governing intellectual property? Instead of patenting your invention you'd register the CAD files or whatever the same as musicians do when they create music.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is this what was said about the tools we use now to machine metal for use in thousands of products?

<comment><USER10> It was certainly said about the printing press.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > We argue that if someone sells a CAD file that prints a patented item, that > should be considered infringing.

Wait, what? Are patents copyrighted too?

<comment><USER30> That's an interesting point. If you think about it, the CAD file in question would really just be the patent itself translated to a standardized form, since all patents are supposed to contain _cough_ clear steps to reproduce the invention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> When are mass market 3D printers coming anyway? I feel like we've been promised them for the years now.

<comment><USER43> Check out the MOD-t from New Matter. $399 US. Prints PLA at good resolution, web-based UI, online object store.

[https://www.newmatter.com/#!/our-product](https://www.newmatter.com/#!/our- product)

<comment><USER42> That's pretty cool. What's the cost of operation? Are there any good reviews?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> tldr; Good.

</comment><comment><USER45> Good.</comment>


My weekend project: All 1e280 possible tweets on one page - <AUTHOR> http://qwerjk.com/tweet-directory/

<comment><USER2> You're not including spaces (0x32). Even then, this won't create all possible tweets since it is limited to a little tiny bit of the whole unicode space. Please don't think that I don't like your idea, but it might benefit from some improvments :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've added a unicode charset, but it's pretty sparse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting experiment. Reminds me of Borges's "The Library of Babel".

Would be interesting to see all tweets using only lower-case alphabet plus spaces. (~ 2.5e200)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is impressive from the simple fact I can type any tweet-able sentence and it is there. Now, this is kinda obvious because it is what the post is about.

But, doing it. Actually typing in a sentence. Every sentence. Even what I am writing now is there. Really, take one, copy and paste, like this one, and it is there.

</comment><comment><USER5> This could actually be useful if the tweets were assigned indexes. You could create a tidy little cipher.

</comment><comment><USER6> The first thing I thought of when seeing this was the short story "the nine billion names of God." Except that this is a hair more than nine billion... Seriously though, this is impressive; it's so quick!

</comment><comment><USER7> It's really, really fast. Congrats ! No accents though: try searching for `é` for example.</comment>


Show HN: Hackathon project to browse live broadcasted videos around a country - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Zarlex/live-cloud-player <comment><USER2> I just spend 10 minutes on it without realizing, its entertaining</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage your passwords? - <AUTHOR>

Perhaps I'm just more aware of it, or perhaps it's happening more frequently, but it seems like every couple of weeks a major service demonstrates that they have exposed some user data or passwords.
Intellectually, I know I should be using a different password for every service, game, and application I use. Practically, I reuse a handful of long, strong passwords.
I'd like to change that practice. I'd like to use a different password on every service, but that's probably a few dozen passwords. Too many to remember practically, in any case. There's a lot of misinformation out there about how to do this correctly, and I'm looking for examples on how to do it right. <comment><USER2> After shitting the proverbial brick last week re the Apple ID/iCloud debacle, I downloaded 1Password and methodically changed the password to everything I cared about with a randomly generated string that included non-alphanumeric chars. Sometimes I find this inconvenient as the integration on the iOS app is not great (unless I'm missing something), and will never improve unless Apple exposes APIs allowing deeper integration; but my current thinking is the extra security is worth it. Previously all my passwords were the same thing modulo a changing non-alphanumeric char, which I understand is dumb, but I was too lazy to change them. The aforementioned Apple incident provided the final impetus for change. Obviously, it later transpired that the breach was down to social engineering and weaknesses in human security rather than compromised passwords, so all this is moot as the best security precautions are only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

Something else I found interesting is Apple allows a max of 32 chars in their passwords. I discovered this as the password I was trying to set was significantly longer than this. Does this not suggest that the passwords are not hashed? If they were the length of password would not matter as the hash outputs are identical lengths and Apple could set the db column size accordingly.

<comment><USER3> I also switched to 1password after that debacle (though I should have done it before). 1password is great on a mac, but accessing passwords (via dropbox) from a linux machine is a pain in the ass.

Password management still seems like an unsolved problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All of my passwords are randomly generated and kept in a password database. The database is then auto-sync'd to a cloud storage service. This keeps my passwords secure, but easily accessible.

Specifically, I use Password Gorilla (since it's psafe compatible and cross- platform) and SpiderOak (since it's encrypted and cross-platform).

</comment><comment><USER5> I wrote a bit about this awhile back here ([http://software-and- algorithms.blogspot.com/2012/06/password...](http://software-and- algorithms.blogspot.com/2012/06/password-management.html)). Basically, I use HMAC to generate passwords based upon a single strong password and an account- specific phrase.

</comment><comment><USER6> PasswordSafe is good <http://pwsafe.org/> and helps me keep a different password for every site. You can also save some ancillary information as well - useful for developers with data keys for api access.

Simple and quick to use which helps maintain the discipline.

</comment><comment><USER7> LastPass Premium -- it runs on everything. I am happy with it, but I'll probably take a look at 1Password soonish.

<comment><USER8> The price of 1Password turned me off. (There was also some UI glitch I didn't like, but I don't remember what it was, and Lastpass is no beauty itself.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the ways I manage my passwords is by not sharing meaningful information about how I manage them in public.

</comment><comment><USER10> There was a discussion right about this 4 days ago : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4343097>

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been using RoboForm, not well designed (it seems like they are improving though) but works great on both Mac and PC (sucks on iOS).

</comment><comment><USER12> We are using LastPass. There are risk still though.

</comment><comment><USER13> keepasx

</comment><comment><USER14> 1password.

</comment><comment><USER15> KeyPass has always treated me well, is free, and runs on multiple platforms.</comment>


AWS and Ionic team up to build the ultimate full-stack starter - happy-go-lucky https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/05/mobile-web-and-hybrid-application-with-exported-mobile-hub-project-for-deploying-apps-and-mobile-backend/ <comment><AUTHOR> GitHub repo: [https://github.com/driftyco/ionic2-starter- aws](https://github.com/driftyco/ionic2-starter-aws)

Ionic's writeup: [http://blog.ionic.io/aws-and-ionic-team-up-to-build-the- ulti...](http://blog.ionic.io/aws-and-ionic-team-up-to-build-the-ultimate- full-stack-starter/)</comment>


Sinclair Zx Spectrum: absolutely better than Commodore 64 (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.alfonsomartone.itb.it/fztsmo.html <comment><USER2> Watch it. Wars were started for less.

The Spectrum was my first ever computer, and the Commodore 64 my second.. Or rather, _our_ computer, as it was shared by the adults in our family and their adult friends, who only let me use it with supervision so I wouldn't break anything. :)

My best memories from that era are the MAGAZINES.

The art, the wacky reviewers (some of them fictional characters), the slang, the in-jokes, the readers' letters, the tips, the maps, the type-in programs, the pull-out posters, previews, developer diaries..

It really was a great time to be growing up, and computers and video games were the best hobby, because there was never a period when there wasn't something NEW.

There was always something to be amazed at. Always something to look forward to. New software and new hardware were constantly coming out. All other interests seemed so _dull_ and uneventful. Ooh, 16 colors! then ooh, 32! then omg, you won't believe this, 256!!

Entire genres being born right before your eyes. Sound channels were also increasing, music the kind you didn't hear anywhere else, speech synthesis to call your friends naughty words with, mice like they used in posh offices, game controllers like in that arcade your parents never let you stay long enough in, new operating systems... what's an operating system? Why do we need one? Computers run just fine without it..

I wouldn't pick any other childhood.

I fantasized about owning an Amiga but the C64 was good enough too. I still remember the very first game I played on it and its music:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slBHx5_8fms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slBHx5_8fms)

<comment><USER3> I had the exact same childhood. Somehow I feel that the limited resources of the computers back then made the games more fun and original. There was a lot of creativity. People would come up with new concepts all the time, you never knew what the next cool games would be like.

Another notable point is that not everybody had a computer (at least where I lived). Something like 10-20% of the kids were actively using their computer, so you could be part of a tribe.

It was also easy to get into programming. The OS presented itself as a basic interpreter, and any manual that you would buy with your computer would explain how to write simple programs.

It was definitely a particular era. I wonder if there is something equivalent today. What do 8-years old kids do nowadays? besides watching youtube videos.

<comment><USER4> There's quite a big community around Scratch, also with Python on Raspberry Pi (at least in the UK), but nothing on the scale of the 80s.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but it's hard to compare that to the home computer era, we were the first generation with a computer of our own, and grown-ups had literally no clue. The systems where very limited and the gaps had to be filled by the imagination. It was a magic time in history that won't return.

<comment><USER2> > _It was a magic time in history that won 't return._

That is such a true and sad realization..

I guess it applies to other fields of technology which have rapid progress at the start and there's a lot of room to explore and few visible boundaries.

Like seafaring. When people first invented boats they had literally the entire world made open to them, that they could previously only imagine.

Personal computers were like the invention of seafaring for the mind.

I guess the next frontier like that is space, where literally the entire universe is waiting to be discovered. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hilarious story. I repaired both for a living at the time for Cafka (when they were still small), an Amsterdam computer store that did great business until one day the owner went to his accountant and upon returning shot himself. He never factored in paying taxes.

The C64 had pretty good hardware, but absolutely terrible software. The BASIC it shipped with was just good enough to load machine language from disk to run it, compared to let's say BBC Micro basic it didn't stand a chance, so it isn't all that surprising that the Spectrum ran rings around it when it came to basic (pun intended) functionality.

Both the Spectrum _and_ the C64 were left in the dust by the BBC by the way, but it cost a large amount of money so that shouldn't be a surprise. It was also built like a tank and came with a ton of expansion options. Pity it wasn't a three way match :)

<comment><USER7> And yet the C64 (and VIC) far outsold the BBC Micro and the Spectrum.

And yes, BBC Basic was a very nice language, but it wasn't very fast for real- world tasks. Way back then I implemented the KERMIT file transfer protocol (and a VT100 terminal emulator) in BBC Basic and it was very slow. I re-wrote it in 6502 assembler to make it really usable. So for anything serious you needed to do on the BBC Micro, you needed to write it in assembler.

And don't get me started on that "reset" key that could be hit by accident at any time. Or the crap DFS disk file system.

<comment><USER6> Ah, but the assembler was built in, for other computers that was extra, and the 'reset' key (aka the 'break' key) was annoying _but_ the BASIC interpreter had the 'old' command which would usually - but not always... - restore your code.

Still, to make that key a keyboard key right next to a function key wasn't the best UI decision, to put it mildly.

As for speed, it wasn't very fast in absolute terms, but it was very fast compared to other BASIC implementations, and pretty much bug free (only one bug was ever found in the code, which I think is absolutely amazing for a ROM that size).

<comment><USER7> The built-in assembler was really not suitable for anything other than writing some small snippets to be called from Basic - the KERMIT/VT100 implementation I wrote, which was quite full-feature, was written using a 3rd party disk- based assembler, which was much easier to work with.

<comment><USER6> I wrote my own, didn't have money for 3rd party stuff, already did a 6809 version together with a friend so it was relatively easy. Even so, the built in assembler was a bonus item and it worked pretty good to bootstrap new stuff including ROM images and proper assemblers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Side note: ZX Spectrum was my first computer, and since then I have never ever experienced such a joy about working with new gadget.. I even thought it was some childhood effect, never to be repeated again. Can't describe in words, I think everyone here know what I mean.

Until I have made a Tesla test drive..

<comment><USER9> I grew up in the UK, and my first computer (shared with the family) was a ZX Spectrum.

The fact that we couldn't load games over hte christmas period, because the cassette player was broken, was the reason I started programming:

[https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html](https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html)

<comment><USER10> The jack socket on my 48k+ had a fault where you needed to hold the plug at a specific angle or it wouldn't make contact. You had to do that and remain motionless for the entire loading cycle. Something like 40% of the tapes I bought never actually loaded, and I was never sure if it was because I wasn't holding it right, or they were faulty out of the box.

And no, I never had the confidence at the time to take the lid off and see if I could fix it. It was just too precious to take the risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> First program I ever wrote on a Sinclair Spectrum was to spin a disk on the screen.

I was disappointed with the performance, so for the second program I precalculated the sin/cos values and stored them in an array (and learnt that all programming is an exercise in caching).

I was still disappointed with the performance, so the third program I wrote was a hex loader so I could poke machine code straight into it (had to run down to the local electronics store to pick up copy of the Z80 assembler manual). I then was happy with the speed.

That kickstarted a career in software development which I still derive immense enjoyment from.

<comment> alok-g Oh my! Your story is a very significant overlap with mine!

I started programming at an age of 11 years, when I did not even know the meaning of sin and cos.

The spinning 3D ring I had created was slow like yours, speeded up by caching sin and cos values like yours. The final one had entire frames precomputed in memory and cycled by hand-written machine code into the video memory space. That last one was when I was when 14 years of age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Zx has a Z80 3.5 MHz where the C64 has a 6510 1.0 MHz. With this difference it would take major limitations in the graphics/sound hw of the Zx to come off worse.

Edit: I had an Atari 6502 1.79 MHz and I wouldn't say it was clearly superior to the C64 because the C64 had more flexible sprites and sound. What I would say is that the Atari peeps I met were more hacker-like than the C64 folks who were more like users/gamers.

<comment><USER13> > major limitations in the graphics/sound hw of the Zx

That's exactly the case. The C64 had hardware sprites and scrolling, and one of the best sound chips of all time with the SID. The Spectrum had a memory- mapped bitmap display with low resolution color, and a CPU-controlled beeper. And the Spectrum's CPU advantage wasn't as much as the clock speeds suggest, because the 6502 could get more done per cycle, and the Spectrum's CPU had wait states when accessing the 16K block of RAM containing the graphics RAM.

I played a lot of Spectrum games as a child, but looking at it objectively, the C64 is a far superior machine. However, both systems were crippled by the single-button joystick standard of the time. The greatest feature of the NES was the B button.

<comment><USER12> I never really thought about the joystick button limitation at the time. The original Atari 800/400 had 4 joystick ports so someone could have used two ports 10-bits of input per player for a 2-player game. Each cardinal direction (NSWE was 1-bit with pairs being closed for diagonals).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Everyone knows MSX were the truly superior computers at the time

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX)

<comment><USER15> Nah, I had a C64c and access to YIS503II MSX.

MSX is nowhere near a C64. It's just.. bland. Also ugly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Title is factually correct. Article is superfluous.

</comment><comment><USER17> The craziest c64 thing I've seen recently is this 48Khz audio player [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYAf_awh5XA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYAf_awh5XA), blog post here [http://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital- musi...](http://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player- for.html).

Its quite outstanding what you can do with the SID chip.

</comment><comment><USER18> Except that pesky -used chewinggum- keyboard..

<comment><USER19> Just get a Spectrum+, a better keyboard than some modern laptops... :)

<comment> amiga-workbench Apart from when you hit a key at just the wrong angle and it sticks.

<comment><USER19> Ha, didn't have that problem with my A4000 keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love the Z80; it was my second (the first was a luggable IBM XT clone; it truly sucked compared to the home computers of that time) CPU experience beginning of the 80s and it was great. I couldn't imagine anything better and I have not found anything better. I do a lot of embedded asm coding now with modern CPUs and it is just not as nice to me as writing asm on a Z80 system is. Probably because I did so much of it at a young age; it is still fun and fluent. No manuals/internet needed on msx or spectrum, which is also fun; if anything tells me it is not only nostalgia, it is that; being able to write programs without needing to look everything up or download libraries. Not practical these days (mostly because everything has to be modular, so almost nothing ships with batteries included anymore), but still preferable in my opinion.

<comment><USER9> I'm reliving my youth by programming assembly which is running on a real Z80 processor, driven by an arduino mega.

<comment><USER20> I collected old (60s-80s) machines for many years when they were still free or very cheap. So I have all kinds of ZX spectrums and MSXs and others (very rare dual cpu Z80) to play around on reliving my youth. With Symbos [0] it is a lot of fun.

[0] [http://www.symbos.de/](http://www.symbos.de/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you can find it, MicroMen is a really good watch you'll all enjoy (this is just a link to the trailer) [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fGiGrf2YyZE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fGiGrf2YyZE)

</comment><comment><USER22> We can see then, there are some advantages and disadvantages each one. Clearly, ZX Spectrum has a better included BASIC software; will allow you to make large strings, screen pausing automatically, and the Commodore 64 system software must take up too much RAM that only 38911 out of 64K is available for BASIC (or maybe it is due to bank switching; I don't know). But because they compare disks with tapes we cannot compare the loading speed properly, and do not know which is better.

</comment><comment><USER2> For those who're interested in the 1980s "micro wars", BBC's Micro Men TV movie (2009) is a nice dramatized glimpse of it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM)

Though it does paint Clive Sinclair (the Steve Jobs of the UK) in a somewhat unflattering light.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just from a usability standpoint, what is it about the ZX Spectrum that could possibly make up for the horrific rubber keyboard?

<comment><USER24> They released a Spectrum+ that has a much better keyboard.

<comment><USER23> It went from horrific to merely bad. That model also had a 30% unit failure rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish I knew back then all the technic knowledge I have now.

I really had zero idea what was going on inside the machine and no-one to teach me.

<comment><USER9> I was lucky enough to be able to get a couple of books from the local library with coding examples. Usually these would be the usbourne books - which had BASIC listings for multiple home-computers at the time.

I did come across a couple of books that briefly documented assembly language stuff, and of course the (orange) manuals included with the computer contained a lot of good information.

Even now I have my Z80 books, they've moved house with me and even emigrated to a whole new country.

<comment><USER26> Do you mean the Usborne books? For some serious nostalgia, you can read them for free at [https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and- codin...](https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-coding- books/).

<comment><USER9> Yup, thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can the Sinclair do nearly full-screen 16fps video and 8khz digital audio streamed and real time decompressed from a floppy? Demoscene shows how vastly more capable the C64 was. Look at the hi-res ultra-color art in this demo. (watch from beginning to see some of the art)

[https://youtu.be/FTtKHLZTbtA?t=653](https://youtu.be/FTtKHLZTbtA?t=653)

</comment><comment><USER28> "..for BASIC"

and as everyone should know "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

</comment><comment><USER29> ZX Spectrum of my childhood. Some of greatest moments spent thanks to it. Determined my career.

And superior to C64 :), except turbo loader was just a thing we couldn't have properly.

Raspberry Pi could become something similar with a little love and support.

</comment><comment><USER30> Silly ZX Spectrum people.

Of course breadbin is better! ;-)

</comment><comment><USER31> The Commodore 64 is the best selling 8-bit computer in the world. Nobody really used the Spectrum outside the UK and eastern Europe.

<comment><USER32> It was sold as the Timex Sinclair in the USA.

I was planning on buying one, but ended up with a used VIC-20 instead.

<comment><USER33> The Timex Sinclair was a variation on the ZX81, not a Spectrum.

<comment><USER4> The Timex Sinclair 2068 was the US Spectrum variant:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Middle Age - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2018/apples-middle-age/ <comment><USER3> Any article that speculates on Apple's future viability in the market would be remiss not to mention Apple's unprecedented cash hoard. Currently, Apple is sitting on $126B in net tangible assets.

With 100,000 full-time equivalent employees, that means that Apple could pay every one of their full-time equivalent employees (which, as a reminder, includes a large number of retail employees) an average yearly salary of $100K for 12 years while making $0 in revenue and still not deplete their cash reserves!

Or, to put it all in perspective, based on Wikipedia's cited estimate ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Cost)) the International Space Station cost $150B to construct. Personally, I'm looking forward to visiting the iSS at some point in the future.

<comment><USER4> That's not actually how things unfold when a company gets into trouble. Your scenario is the perfect, idealized, never-happens outcome. We have dozens of historical examples at this point, from elite, massive corporations unraveling: what they basically never do, is the strictly rational idealized scenario.

What actually happens is closer to chaos loaded with self-interest and stupidity by management and the board.

The board gets attacked aggressively by large investors. Existing management and the board goes into bunker war bribery mode.

The board bribes shareholders, further depleting its cash position. See: IBM's most recent idiocy as their revenue melted for 23 straight quarters, while they continued to buy back stock aggressively.

The cost of their staggering $100+ billion in debt climbs over time as their financial and earnings situation erodes. By the time a serious problem erupts, they'll probably have $200+ billion in debt (they'll have that in just four or five years now), continuing their existing mistake.

They intentionally avoid paying off all of their debt while they can, to hold onto the cash (because hey, debt is cheap today, forget about tomorrow, tomorrow is valhalla and rainbows), which they then make the mistake of expending to bribe shareholders as the stock plunges. Because, you know, things are going to turn around any day now.

Then they end up with less cash than they have debt, and down it all goes from there, in a spiral they can't pull out of.

If we're talking about what happens in a bad scenario, that's more like what commonly happens in reality. That net cash position will not be preciously saved to protect employees, the employees are the first ones to go. That net cash will be used as a bribery slush fund.

Their earnings haven't increased in years. They're facing a zero growth future, if only because of their immense size. The smartphone market contracted by ~9% in 2017 (-16% in China). They're facing a PC market scenario, where consumers start replacing devices a lot less often (while simultaneously smartphones face increased competition from all sorts of cheaper AI-focused devices). Their cash accumulation is far slower now than it was in the past, because it's all going to shareholder bribery. Meanwhile, they've added $50 billion in debt in about two years, with that pace continuing in the latest quarter. Their income to debt ratio has been eroding for five straight years.

Consider: right now Apple is making the incredibly foolish mistake of aggressively buying back stock with their capital, while its AI efforts are an embarrasment and they get their ass kicked by Amazon. Spend $50 billion catching up in AI etc? Or buy back stock? Apple has made its choice, and it shows.

<comment><USER5> If you look back just a few years, Apple has responded multiple times to saturated markets by introducing new product classes. We don't have iPods anymore for instance, now we have watches (even though at one point you could have argued that the music player market was full too). If phones really do start to lose steam, Apple should have plenty of opportunity to create a new interesting product.

<comment><USER6> And yet Amazon introduced Alexa before Apple did.

Alexa (Applexa?) could have been a natural Apple product. HomePod is clearly a catch-up, and not a particularly interesting one given that Alexa has already moved to built-in screens, and creating an AI home-hub in a variety of form factors, both big and small, is a trivial update now.

Alexa gives consumers utility/service computing without all the tragic time- wasting updater/installer/management nonsense forced on them by desktops, laptops, and (to a smaller extent) tablets and apps.

Cook's Apple has missed the point of this, which is the subtle but huge difference between consumer utility computing and content and hardware consumption computing.

Jobs was a genius at making everything fit together, and I suspect he was reaching for a utility strategy. The iPhone and iPad were the first generation of utility devices, while Siri was a first gen utility service. They were wildly impressive for their time, but still limited by elements of desktop legacy thinking - which is why we have to wait while apps launch and close, instead of just being able to do whatever we want to do.

Cook sells SKUs, not synergies or utility. I see no evidence that Apple is able to think of the future with a unified vision that doesn't involve selling _things_ \- even if those things are music and video content units - <USER2> by some very constrained AI.

Right now Amazon is more of a synergy company than Apple. The aim seems to be total domination of retail, but there's going to be some overlap in services and in hardware too, and Amazon seem better placed culturally to innovate in ways that win that race.

<comment><USER5> The iPod was a catch-up product in a crowded music player market. The iPhone was a phone in a world of massive, dominating phone makers. Heck, the Apple II was a computer in an IBM-dominated world.

Apple is not "first" that often so who cares if they didn't make an Alexa before anyone else?

Instead, Apple tries to get it "right" (and sometimes they still don't but that is their strategy nonetheless).

Alexa has plenty of flaws. It is functional but not intelligent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My Windows devices since 97 were consistent top of the line and rarely lasted more than 2 years before they slowed to an unbearable speed.

In 2012 I switched to Mac and still use the same MacBook Pro which still runs as quick as it did 6 years ago. It was a huge investment at the time but turned out to be cheaper than the 4+ Windows machine I likely would have cycled through not to mention the boot time and performance gains.

<comment><USER8> That was true in the late 90s. It's not really true anymore.

I built a Windows PC using parts from MicroCenter back in 2014. Core i5-4690K, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GTX 970 running Windows 8. It was around $1400 USD at that time, if I remember correctly.

It's now 2018. That same PC with all it's original hardware, is now running Windows 10 just as quickly as always. Not only is the performance still great, but my 4-year-old mid-range PC still _outperforms_ many brand new PCs today. (It's still slightly faster than the current 21in 4K i5 iMac, for example).

If you had bought a Windows machine in 2012, it would not have "slowed down" the way your 90's computers did, and could still use it at it's full original performance today (just like your Mac).

<comment><USER9> I don't know if I can agree with you on this. In ~2016 I built a PC (i7, 24GB RAM, 1.5TB ssd, gtx 1080) and my 2014 17 inch mbp has slowly been closing the gap. This is probably more due to software optimizations than hardware, but things just open and close more smoothly and quickly these days on the laptop.

I think the real issue is that Windows hasn't been effectively utilizing the RAM I've given it.

<comment><USER10> I've found that windows benefits from being reinstalled every once in a while. Try a fresh install of Windows 10, and see where that gets you?

<comment><USER9> I suspect you are right, but I really, really, don't want to take the time to do that.

<comment><USER11> Windows 10 has a nice feature to "refresh" which supposedly re-installs Windows while keeping programs and settings. I haven't tried it, so no idea how well it works, but it might be worth your time

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Apple's growth is almost entirely inwardly-focused when it comes to its user- base: higher prices, more services, and more devices_

I find myself increasingly stuck in an Apple 2011 - 2013 universe.

For starters Apple has not yet provided a viable upgrade for my primary desktop machine: a 2011 Mac Mini (2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 with 8 GB ram and SSD). The specs on the current 2018 Mac Mini lineup are considerable lower than yesteryears Mac Mini. No idea why? I'd love to upgrade to a faster Mac Mini, but there's really no options, even 6 years later. So nope.

Then there's my 2013 MacBook Air (1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 with 8 GB ram and SSD). This thing has been a workhorse. That said I'd love to get a similar form factor with Retina, however, the only somewhat viable upgrade option seems to be the 12" MacBook. Too small, so nope.

Finally, there's my iPhone 5S (2013 as well). It's showing it's age (sluggish at times), however, I've replaced the battery and to be honest, it's still got some life left in it. Admittedly, the iPhone is the only Apple product I own that actually does have a viable upgrade path.

Unfortunately, with the lack of upgrade options for my primary Apple devices, and issues I've had with iTunes and Apple TV, I'm hesitant to buy in again ...

Most other Apple devices and products I own simply collect dust:

Various iPods and thousands of purchased iTunes songs collecting dust - as I switched to Spotify. I switched to Spotify when iTunes + iCloud (perhaps user error, not sure) somehow deleted all of my ripped MP3s from along time ago. Generally speaking the iTunes app itself got to the point where it was unusably bloated and convoluted. Not sure why.

Apple TV collecting dust. Replaced by an Android TV due to not making it easy to play all file formats.

AirPort Extreme collecting dust - had multiple issues and it eventually stopped working (bricked).

Finally, MacOS itself has been lacklustre the past couple of releases. I hesitate to upgrade now, due to various bugs and lack of quality control. Apps I previously purchased on the Mac App store have stopped working as well.

So while Apple embarks on a new chapter in it's "middle age", it seems like the previous generation has been left to rot ... with not much in the way of upgrade options. How is this an inwardly-focused strategy?

<comment><USER13> I just looked on the Apple store app and you can get a Mac mini with a 3.0ghz dual core i7 and 16 gb of ram.

<comment><USER14> The Mac mini at one point had a quad core option. It actually had the maximum spec option reduced some time ago. The current Mac mini is less powerful than one you could buy several years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As Apple moves into its middle age, the rational move is to become more like the established vertically-integrated companies.

* Intel

* Samsung

* The British East India Company

If Apple leadership decides to accept this, they will begin to act like their peers:

* Recognize that the smartphone market will not grow like it has in the past. Create and then dominate standards using IP - barrier to competitors that simultaneously blocks a lot of regulatory burden.

* Recognize that Apple will not be the "innovator" that it was in the past. (Apple will still innovate, but not home runs every time.) Nurture the ecosystem around their product - allow small companies to find exciting new products, then acquire them.

* Recognize that their financials will need to adapt. Diversify their revenue stream beyond just one or two plays.

Apple still has the baggage of its own proprietary reinventions that they try to tightly control. iCloud. Lightning port. AirPlay. MacOS. The net negative impact comes as they gradually end up falling behind nimbler companies, like Amazon.

And yes, this will lead to the ultimate death of Apple as all behemoth conglomerates eventually choke on their own red tape and drown in their own largess. But Apple's days of youth are gone; no amount of dieting or exercise will bring them back.

I don't actually think Apple for the next 5 years will make the dramatic changes needed to realize these ideas. But perhaps a more interesting question is:

Is there any other avenue for a company who has reached middle age?

<comment><USER16> > Recognize that Apple will not be the "innovator" that it was in the past. > (Apple will still innovate, but not home runs every time.)

I don't know where Apple gets this reputation, but they have hardly hit home runs every time. I mean, does no one remember the Newton? Final Cut X? The original Apple TV? The trash can PowerMac? Does anyone think the Touch Bar is a home run?

Which is good, because innovation necessarily means _not_ hitting home runs every time, and Apple knows that. That's why they hoard so much cash, so they can afford to miss sometimes.

I question whether you understand Apple's core business. They can't vertically integrate like old school conglomerates because they don't have anything to integrate. They own very few assets apart from their IP. Intel and Samsung own factories; Apple does not. The East India Company owned land and ships; Apple does not. Amazon owns warehouses and many $billions of inventory... Apple does not.

From an IP perspective they are already vertically integrated, from chip design to UI to services to retail. But then you ding them for that...

<comment><USER17> Apple Watch Series 3 is roughly equivalent to the original iPhone. It's a weird blindspot for all the Apple critics.

Best as I can tell, Apple is 2 - 3 years ahead of everyone else.

\--

My singular and persistent disappointment remains iCloud. I still want seamless sync and handoff and backup and unlimited storage... That _just works_. That doesn't require me to do tech supp for my family members.

It's getting incrementally better, but isn't quite the whole enchilada yet.

No one has cracked the ubiquitous computing nut, so maybe it's just a hard problem.

<comment><USER18> I am on the same page as you...I think the Apple Watch is going to be the replacement for the iPhone. In fact this will be the largest segment as we slowly see most functions move from the phone to the Watch (yes I realize that there are some limitations due to screen size) but in general you will see much move over while the Apple Glass will take over the other function that you need a image of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-err Tl,dr: "it makes sense to settle down". Tells how much this is pure projection from the author (he's open about it).

Apple has amazing bricks to build on (Watch especially) so to not settle down. Even iPhone X shows they can still bet big with their flagship.

<comment><USER19> > Even iPhone X shows they can still bet big with their flagship.

Does it? The iPhone X (which is a great phone and one that I own) is a Galaxy S8 with a Face ID scanner. They didn't "bet big" on it, it was the only logical place to take their market.

<comment><USER20> Also doesn't have that Bixby shovelware or exploding battery feature. I get that a lot of Samsung phones are shipped and sold, but there's a difference in shipping shit at scale and shipping quality engineering at scale, and it's a tale told in decades, not single years.

<comment><USER21> > exploding battery feature

Stop spreading misinformation. That did not occur with the S8 at all since its release. [http://bgr.com/2017/06/12/galaxy-s8-battery- explosions/](http://bgr.com/2017/06/12/galaxy-s8-battery-explosions/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The most interesting points of the article were this:

1) iPhone unit sales growth has essentially stagnated, because the overall market has reached saturation. 2) Apple has successfully managed to maintain growth in the face of 1) by increasing revenue per device (ASP).

I think the question of "What does Apple do, now?" is a hugely important one. However, I disagree with the author that the only reasonable approach Apple has is to "settle down" in its middle age position.

That question is important, because it implicitly asks, "What is next?" I don't see Apple deciding to not create a product that attempts to answer that question. We will have to wait and see what that product looks like (AR?), whether it is successful, and when it will come. Apple is definitely not going to rest on the iPhones success forever, though.

<comment><USER22> I'd add to this that Apple's current approach to AR and wearables is not one that necessitates the cannibalization of the iPhone. They are taking a constellation approach (as noted in the article), with the iPhone in the center.

I think that approach is not one based in defense, but one that actually plays to their strengths: personal products with an excellent experience, vertically integrated. Because of AR's computational requirements, it will be a long time until we have an AR experience that is untethered to a mobile computing device. A vertically integrated, constellation-based system will offer a better user experience, at least initially. Intel's recent Vaunt glasses [1] could be much more powerful if Intel also controlled the entire device the glasses co-ordinated with.

[1] - [https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt- smart...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt-smart- glasses-announced-ar-video)

<comment><USER18> I actually think it is a deliberate cannibalization being done with here. But they are doing it slowly as not to be a shock to the system. Look at the Apple Watch...my gut you will start to see every year more and more of the functions on the iPhone move over. The beauty of this is ppl will not bark at this as the Watch becomes the yearly replacement cycle vs. the phone which will be every 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I really like stratechery, but I don't get this post. Example

 _Instead, I think the order goes like this:

Customer owns an iPhone Customer subscribes to Apple Music because it is installed by default on their iPhone As an Apple Music subscriber, customer only has one choice in smart speakers: HomePod (and to make the decision to spend more money palatable, Apple pushes sound quality), from which Apple makes a profit_

Well, I don't know. Maybe it's just:

 _Let's make exceptionally good products that people love_

<comment><USER24> How do you decide which product to make?

<comment><USER23> I have read somewhere, that Apple has a prioritized list of products to build, which they update yearly at their top 100 (?) leaders' workshop. Maybe someone from Apple reading this could comment :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR>
      [A]s a general rule, challengers pursue interoperability while incumbents strive for incompatibility.
      This is Strategy 101: seek to fight battles where you have the greatest advantage.

Should Apple buy a wireless carrier?

<comment><USER25> No.

If Apple bought a mobile carrier it would be competing with its customers. Most phones are sold through carriers - meaning the carriers are buying iPhones not the end user.

Besides, Apple sells phones worldwide. What would be the benefit of just buying a carrier in the US?

Netflix made a similar calculation years ago. Netflix actually created what is now the Roku, but decided to spin it off to a separate company so it could more easily make deals to have Netflix installed everywhere without being seen as a competitor.

In a completely separate market, another example is that PepsiCo use to own KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. But that made it harder for them to do deals with other fast food companies because they didn't want to make deals with a competitor.

<comment><USER26> > What would be the benefit of just buying a carrier in the US?

Buying a carrier would indeed be a bad move, both for competing with customers and maintaining a lot of infrastructure, but I could see Apple becoming an MVNO. Wireless companies are right down there with Comcast and the airlines in terms of customer satisfaction, so I would guess there are plenty of people willing to pay a bit more for a less hostile carrier.

<comment><USER27> Isn't that what Apple kind of did with its Virgin Mobile deal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> With the "features" of new macbooks, it doesn't really seem like they would like to settle down, even though it would probably make sense there...

</comment><comment><USER29> Seems to me that when you boil it down Apple's primary strategy now is to focus on convenience and simplicity in a purposely anti competitive way. What advantage does Apple music have over a service like Spotify besides being pre- installed? What about iMessage? What about Facetime? What about the MacBook with a single port?

Apple is not worried about competition or more importantly innovation, it instead focuses on creating a walled garden that can keep its users happy. The HomePod is not trying to be innovative it is trying to keep Apple users in their ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER30> The author seems to praise the vendor lock-in that Apple imposes upon its customers as being a good business move and a sign that Apple has "matured", without really offering any hard facts to back it up.

I'm going to offer an opinion of my own without any facts to back it up. Vendor lock-in may be successful in the short term, but interoperability is successful in the long-term. The internet would have never took off if it wasn't for the fact that every website author had access to the same APIs as every other one.

It's bullshit that I can't tell Siri to play music with Spotify instead of Apple Music. It's bullshit that I can't change my browser from Safari, and therefore can't use any Progressive Web App features like push notifications because Apple is afraid of web apps cannibalizing App Store sales. It's anti- competitive and a scummy business move. Android is weak in a lot of areas but at least they got this part right.

<comment><USER25> How much of a "longer term" view is needed than 40+ years? Apple has used this strategy since day one.

<comment><USER31> That is not at all true. That was certainly not the philosophy on the very successful Apple II series. And it was not how Apple operated in the non-Jobs Mac years in the late 80s and early 90s.

And it's not how they operated for the early part of the 2000s when Apple went on a major open source / standards binge: adopting the standard Intel/PCI architecture, using Unix as the foundation of their OS, open sourcing their kernel, using open source WebKit, etc. etc. Hell, the first version of the iPod even did it right and was basically an external USB hard drive.

But there's been a major turn to the proprietary as the iPhone business has eaten Apple. They've locked that platform down in a big way, and they've failed to embrace the web and cloud in a functional way. There's less and less open standards embrace there, and more lock-in style in both hardware and software.

In a way Apple has always had two hearts -- a Wozniak (the open Apple II) vs Jobs (the closed Mac), long after those two have left the company.

<comment><USER25> Apple announced support for PCI in 1993 with their original PPC road map. The first gen of PPC Macs were Nubus for backwards compatibility but the second gen in 1995 were PCI. Apple allowed third party Mac clone makers to make hybrid Nubus/PPC Macs.

The first generation iPod was FireWire not USB and always had a proprietary file system for actually adding music and forced you to use either iTunes or MusicMatch (Windows) to add music.

Apple is no different than Googke or Microsoft. They use open source when it suits them but none of the major companies outsource their Crown Jewels.

But even if you go back to 1984, all of the other computer makers that made non generic clones are out of business except for Apple. So that's still 35+ years of Apple going thier own way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> People have a soft touch for companies that are on death's door, proof in point is when a startup is closing door. it's their biggest boost in marketing they ever had. and people complain they didn't already know about it.

<comment><USER33> s/touch/spot/</comment></comment>


Learn to think big - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2013/12/learn-to-think-big.html <comment><USER2> For the first time throughout his series of blog posts, I respectfully disagree.

Thinking big seems to be the favourite pastime and recommendation based on hindsight bias of people who have already made it. It's not the reason why projects are successful and it's very likely not something that will get you taken seriously by a VC investor or startup angel (too much delusion of grandeur does not befit people who don't even have a working prototype).

It's much more important to _try to solve real problems_ (that hopefully affect many people). If your solution a) works and b) turns out to scale to something huge, then you've made it. If it doesn't scale, you might still end up with a successful und useful, albeit smaller company. Would that be such a bad outcome?

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Take Facebook, Zuckerberg wasn't trying to be the next Zuckerberg at the beginning.

Take a look at this very early interview with him: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ5otpv6kTw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ5otpv6kTw)

Skip to 3:57, he is saying "doesn't have to be more" after being at 29 schools. He is worried about quality over quantity. If Facebook started with this mentality and landed a billion users, why anyone would think that think big has any relation with becoming big?

<comment><USER4> "I'm pretty sure that, given those instructions, young Boz would build a social network and make it immediately available to everyone. It would obviously seem like a mistake to him to limit membership to a small subset of the population. Some other social network might come along and just open its doors to everyone and he would never overtake them!

As you probably already know, the situation I describe actually happened; there was one social network that grew incrementally while another opened its doors to the world. Fast forward five years and things haven't turned out the way young Boz might have expected. As it turns out, the path Facebook took to connecting everyone in the world was not the shortest and that has made all the difference. By starting small and expanding outward we built a community. By integrating networks that had originally been separate we had to focus on privacy. By throwing open the floodgates of growth in increments rather than all at once we were able to focus on keeping a consistent design and building scalable infrastructure. These things are now part of the DNA of our company and they affect everything we build." \- Boz

[https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=82081294140](https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=82081294140)

<comment><USER5> IMO, Facebook won because it uses real names. It's a lot faster to find people (especially people you've lost touch with) when you can see their names.

<comment><USER6> I have lots of facebook friends without real names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At least Gabriel is upfront about it: investing contributed a big part to the changing of his world view. Here is how a cynic may see it:

(1) Risk of time (and other things, including money) => go safe.

(2) Risk of money (only) => go big.

I am genuinely not sure[1], but it does occur to me that this could be the underlying difference in approach between an investor and a founder (more specifically: a founder still looking for his safety net.)

\---

[1] To tell you the truth, I find myself leaning towards "going big" of late. But until I found something tangible, it's just an exercise in vanity.

</comment><comment><USER8> It would help to define what "changing the world" means to the author (and whether it's a good thing; not every change is desirable; 9/11 changed the world for the worse).

It could be argued that only two tech companies actually changed the world since 1980: Microsoft and Google. Amazon, maybe.

But for example, I don't think Apple, Sun, Oracle, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter... "changed the world". They are very big, wildly successful companies, they make products and software that people enjoy (me included), but they didn't turn the world into a different place than it was before.

<comment><USER9> Hmm... Not a FB fan at all, but when a billion people in the world open FB for at least a few minutes every single day.. that's gotta count for something right?

Likewise, when a billion people are using the iPhone to call their loved ones, that's changing the world. I mean, that's as good as it's gonna get, short of inventing the cure to cancer, or blowing the Earth up.

<comment><USER10> Interesting that you suggest the iPhone changed the world because 'a billion people are using the iPhone to all their loved ones'. You realize they would have just used a phone before the iPhone, and therefore, the iPhone hasn't changed that process.

This is the point where I suggest the iPhone didn't REALLY change that much for most of us. Sure, it's easier to get maps and directions now (though old Blackberrys had that too). But the massively world changing innovations of smartphones are really minor conveniences wrapped in nice packaging.

Unless, of course, you live in less-developed countries, where a smart-phone may be your first computer, or even your first phone, and offers a connection to information and the rest of the world that you didn't have before.

<comment><USER11> > This is the point where I suggest the iPhone didn't REALLY change that much > for most of us. Sure, it's easier to get maps and directions now (though old > Blackberrys had that too)

For me it was when my parents (without any prompts from myself) got an iPhone and started emailing / Facetiming me from it.

If you had told me 6 years ago that my parents would be able to send me email from their phone, or be sophisticated enough to look up movie times while I'm out having dinner with them I would have laughed.

I think what the iPhone did was make it easy for everyday people to use technology that was only available to a select few. Not just with their technology (which made it easy to use) but also their advertising / marketing which made everyone aware of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Investors want the big ideas, though they don't want to pay for them. Tesla Motors and SpaceX would have never of started if Elon Musk didn't have money from PayPal being sold. This is why unless you know you'll have the funds to work on the big ideas yourself, it could be time and energy invested that will leave you not benefitting from it. Really it comes down to learning to enjoy what you're doing in the moment, and be working towards something bigger. It helps knowing what that bigger thing is, though I imagine not always necessary.

<comment><USER4> And consider how even Tesla started with the Roadster, and then the Model S- targeted at small demographics. Consider how SpaceX is working on reusability of rockets.

They might be "thinking big", but they're also "working small". They have to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good stuff. The one validator of thinking big is when people constantly detract your ideas - OR - equally detract you from your pursuit to tackle those ideas.

Can you imagine someone coming up to you in a Twitterless world and saying "Hey, do you want to invest $10k into my startup that allows people to communicate with each other in 140 characters or less, in an online open forum?"

</comment><comment><USER14> He had some small successes and decided to swing for the fences. That's not the right strategy for everyone.

Startups are a high risk endeavour. There are much better odds in having a small success than a large one.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes how you decide to tackle the problem matters more than the size of the idea.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well if you have talent, experience, connections, and a proven and/or good team, then yes you should consider thinking big.</comment>


How do you guys detect people hitting your site too often/scraping content? - <AUTHOR>

I was wonder if you guys manually analyze log files or use a service like Splunk/Loggy/etc to help with detecting abuse? What is your first step in blocking this behavior? <comment><USER2> Detect:

Look for high frequency access with low variability in the delay between same- type resource requests. It's a relatively simple heuristic, but great precision & recall for classifying scrapers vs. manual access.

Block:

You can't block a sufficiently determined expert scraper.

You can filter out a lot of scraping if that's a meaningful goal, but it's often not. A good strategy here is rate limiting + header inspection + CAPTCHA on high activity. Possibly add transfer quotas if you have a lot of large assets which might cause problems at low request rates.

This will deal with "script kiddies" and automated tools which account for the majority of cases where scraping could potentially impact the server's ability to respond to other users. It won't block researchers or other scrapers with more sophisticated skills.

I've seen people go wild here, to the point of silly things like displaying database record text as images. Complicated schemes generally impact UX for your routine users, while making it take slightly more time to write a scraper that's already "build once, use until the site is redesigned."

</comment><comment><USER3> \- I haven't used any existing tools, but built some easy blockers myself

\- Adding hidden-with-css honeypot links with URLs formatted with the same pattern as good links

\- Check user agents - many scrapers forget to change "phantomjs" to something else

\- Maybe block ip ranges of known vps providers

\- make an access_log DB, define some patterns (e.g. regularness / number of visits, skewed distribution of pages viewed, etc.) and look up offending IPs

\- decide what to do with offenders - block outright, mangle content (e.g. Obnoxiously watermark images, hide prices, provide less detailed product descriptions, add your brand to titles/descriptions if these are probably your competitors scraping your catalog).

</comment><comment><USER4> You could use [http://www.sumologic.com/](http://www.sumologic.com/)

Have it send a report when an IP is seen > x times in your logs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can set up a honeypot. Include links that only a robot can see, and then whenever someone clicks on that link block the ip address.</comment>


Design, Basecamp for iPhone, and Going Mobile at 37Signals - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hipmob.com/post/58243729559/an-interview-with-ryan-singer-design-basecamp-for

<comment><USER2> Love reading the last few paragraphs about immersion in a non-desktop/laptop world, and how he's dealt with data that signals a need for an Android App. Great interview.</comment>