Disqus - Latest Comments for logicalextremes

Re: Utilities vs Networks

logicalextremes — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:48:21 -0000

Some users aren't doing much with apps at all. Some users aren't doing much on the sharing side. There will always be a segment who will use the provided utilities. I really can't see the mobile OS makers, especially Apple, *not* providing software functionality for all of the hardware and for all of the basic functions that almost everyone uses on a smartphone. But in a sense it's not as important to Apple to 'win' on the app side since their profits are concentrated in the hardware.

Re: Utilities vs Networks

logicalextremes — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:40:53 -0000

An interesting observation about sharing vs. consuming. I hope that comes to pass, it would be great for consumers, but you know the incumbents will try to keep that from happening. It's so much better for monetization when no one ever has to leave your garden.

Re: 10 Ways To Use Facebook Without Going To Facebook

logicalextremes — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:54:59 -0000

Thanks, yes I was being dense, it was a browser issue. The second link I found from the first, but seems more tailored to starting up a new Yahoo account (still no Facebook link there though, and it works through giving credentials to a 3rd-party service rather than OAuth :( ).

Re: 10 Ways To Use Facebook Without Going To Facebook

logicalextremes — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 01:34:42 -0000

Some great tips here!

The Yahoo address book import doesn't work for me though. There's no live link for Facebook among the others, either at:
http://address.yahoo.com/?_...
(Facebook word is there, but no image or link)
or:
http://overview.mail.yahoo....
(FB not in the lists)
Can anyone else confirm, or is something unique at my end?

Re: Privacy and the Treacherous Middle Ground

logicalextremes — Sun, 16 May 2010 20:09:32 -0000

You may well be right for services with limited scope, like a tweet or a checkin. But for aggregation or broader lifestreaming it's not enough. Facebook's current privacy difficulties arise from the clash of historical expectations with new strategic directions (including turning formerly private data into public data) with convoluted UI added to the mix, rather than from simply providing more than two choices.

To fully address the needs of the mass market though, services with broader functions need additional privacy choices like friend lists, allowing pseudonyms and multiple accounts, and the ability to show or hide profile data (including social graph).

I agree with your assessment of the difficulty of modeling real world complexities. We do have to rely on people to handle much of that (setting expectations and honoring expectations), but we absolutely don't want the tools to be working against us like the current Facebook.

Re: Privacy and the Treacherous Middle Ground

logicalextremes — Sat, 15 May 2010 13:29:20 -0000

While the middle may be difficult, we shouldn't require people to change to suit limited tools (or limited imagination of the tool makers). Privacy is absolutely not binary in the real world and until the tools properly support real people's real needs and wants, there will be privacy and publicity failures. Facebook intentionally makes the middle more difficult than it needs to be, and the recent rapid changes that have removed choices have only exacerbated that difficulty.

Re: Senator Doesn’t “Like” Facebook’s Instant Personalization Features

logicalextremes — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:30:36 -0000

he Facebook response is BS. In it, Andrew Noyes says, “None of these changes removed or reduced people’s control over their information and several offered even greater controls.”

First, the December changes took care of that, so this is misdirection at best. Second, the changes last week most definitely did remove choices: http://www.eff.org/deeplink... Third, carefully-chosen words don’t negate the fact that defaults matter and Facebook has made it very difficult to understand and scale back the new sharing: http://w2.eff.org/deeplinks... (not to mention prior unsolicited expansions of publicity).

Facebook has a clear history of using its monopoly over the social graph to abuse the trust of its users by forcing ever-more-public defaults, making controls hard to find and complex, and by removing choice by forcing more personal information fields to be always public.

Re: Senator Doesn’t “Like” Facebook’s Instant Personalization Features

logicalextremes — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:27:32 -0000

The Facebook response is BS. In it, Andrew Noyes says, “None of these changes removed or reduced people’s control over their information and several offered even greater controls.”

Re: “Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You”

logicalextremes — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:12:53 -0000

The world is much bigger than Facebook (if it ever ceases to be, it will truly be a scary place to live). It's not my intention to use anyone's personal information. What I do want is for people to have choices about where they want to live on the very broad and deep spectrum of publicity-to-privacy. Facebook continually removes choices, which will make it increasingly unattractive to more people.

BTW, I'm not anonymous, I'm pseudonymous and have had this identity for years now since I started being active on the public social web. Google any form of my nom de plume and you'll see. I (as many others do) just see no reason to link my real world personal facts with my fully public online presence. All people have an internationally-recognized human right to privacy.

Re: “Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You”

logicalextremes — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:05:15 -0000

Not ironic at all. Sure, you can unfriend on Facebook, but you can't kick the bad actors off the web, and they still have access to anything fully public about you. It should be apparent from my concerns that I'm not willing to publicly share everything about myself on the fully open part of the web. I'm not alone in that by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: “Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You”

logicalextremes — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 21:09:22 -0000

Not correct. Unless you specifically waded through the murky controls and locked down other aspects of your Facebook experience, you may well have other data set to share with everyone, thanks to the December changes. BTW, the December changes also removed user choice in that before December all that was forced to be public was Name and Networks. Now it is Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages - there is no way any more to maintain the old level of privacy on Facebook - not because people were clamoring for less choice, but because Facebook decided its business model was more important than its users.

Re: “Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You”

logicalextremes — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 21:04:09 -0000

It is scary. The "small community" effect doesn't apply to the web because there is nowhere else to go and there will always be bad actors out there who don't deserve your trust. I, and many others, want a system where we own and control our own identities, our own interactions, and our own content sharing, within our trusted circles. Facebook used to be one of the places where that could happen, but now that hundreds of millions of users are largely locked in, Facebook feels free to repeatedly abuse the trust of its users.

Re: Facebook Founder on Privacy: Public Is the New “Social Norm”

logicalextremes — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:35:38 -0000

Marshall is very right about Facebook. Facebook built itself up on the notion of privacy, amassing tons of personal data, then pulled a bait and switch by forcing to public many types of information that could be controlled previously, by very strongly guiding people into new defaults that are more public, and by continually making it difficult to understand the privacy controls and how they affect visibility. The network effects (near-monopoly among mainstream users), the proliferation of single sign-on with Facebook Connect, and the ongoing non-portability of contributed data skew people’s incentives. Surely there’s a happy medium where people can have the kind of online relationships they desire, without being undermined by the very services that rely on their accounts to stay in business.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

logicalextremes — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:50:21 -0000

One more item for #6... + Facebook does not allow pseudonymous accounts, FriendFeed does. Google does. Twitter does.

Re: ZumoDrive is going to change EVERYTHING

logicalextremes — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:19:01 -0000

"The FUNDAMENTAL problem is that I want everything in The Cloud. Everything." - Wow, that's pretty scary. Hard drive space gets cheaper and more reliable by the week. Services like this strike me as Thin Clients 3.0, solving a problem that doesn't really exist on a mass scale (though certainly there are niches of users that it works for). It's one thing to want to back up in the cloud, but I would never want to accumulate more data than I could store (and reliably back up) on local physical media.

Re: How To Type ♺ On Mac, And The Reasons Why Not

logicalextremes — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:46:44 -0000

I think it encodes as one byte, I managed to get 140 of them into Twitter and through to FriendFeed... http://friendfeed.com/e/fd2... But I agree it's not universally compatible, so should be used with caution.

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

logicalextremes — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:51:37 -0000

I don't disagree with the anti-consumer aspect of exclusivity (all carriers are guilty of this), but... Warranty and insurance don't cover negligence, only defects. But the Apple Store may be lenient, it's worth a try. But if not, ATT is telling you wrong. Even if you are within your current contract, it should definitely be at the subsidized price if the contract is getting extended. I've done this, push back.

Re: Dominiek - web, technology and startups

logicalextremes — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:56:22 -0000

Privacy is only dead for those to choose to have none...
http://logicalextremes.blog...

Re: No More Laptops or Work in My Bedroom

logicalextremes — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:31:54 -0000

That's a good idea. I usually fall alseep within a couple of minutes, but I've read a lot of articles that suggest a pre-sleep ritual, including distraction-free relaxation. Came across this also... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/... ...I always thought music would be a distraction to sleep, but maybe I never tried the right kind.

Re: The question is wrong

logicalextremes — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:31:59 -0000

But in your new 3-child problem, the game has ended once you give that information. There are no more unknowns. It's a different class of problem.

In the original problem, we are told only that of two children, one is a girl. The other is still a mystery, and has a 50% chance of being a boy and a 50% chance of being a girl.

Re: The question is wrong

logicalextremes — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:01:51 -0000

The simpler, intuitive to some, way to think about the problem is that children ARE like coins... successive children are independent events. It's irrelevant whether one is a girl or not. The odds of any given child being a boy or girl is 50%.

Re: The question is wrong

logicalextremes — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:19:17 -0000

Paul, you are absolutely right of course. 50% is probably the most acceptable answer because people should be able to assume that all known information has been presented in the problem, and it has not been rigged in some arbitrary way. The rigged problem is essentially similar to the Monty Hall problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... where motivations and asymmetric information come into play.

Re: louisgray.com: 5 Questions and Answers to Better Understand Blu-ray

logicalextremes — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:36:55 -0000

Good additional detail, Phil. I think the takeaway for most consumers is that it's not a simple yes-no answer. The last couple percent of video quality improvement to be extracted from a standard DVD depends on the specific TV, DVD player, and Blu-ray player combinations being considered. But in practice, they will all look about equally great to 90% of the population.

Re: louisgray.com: 5 Questions and Answers to Better Understand Blu-ray

logicalextremes — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:30:43 -0000

480p (progressive) is the best a conventional DVD will do, but older players without a digital output will be sending this to the TV on an analog component (or, worse, composite) connection. This analog connection is generally inferior to an HDMI connection (one factor is that it goes from digital data to analog signal, then gets converted to digital again in the TV). But newer DVD players with an HDMI connection should give comparable performance to a Blu-ray player (with an HDMI connection), with regular DVDs. The settings on the player and the TV can be optimized to take advantage of whichever has better scaling hardware.

Re: louisgray.com: 5 Questions and Answers to Better Understand Blu-ray

logicalextremes — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:45:45 -0000

I question the "boost" in resolution that a Blu-ray player can give to a traditional DVD. There are only so many bits there (480p) and a player can't create data from nothing. DVDs really do look pretty darn good on a large HDTV, particularly via a digital (HDMI) connection. I'm not aware of anything a Blu-ray player can do to improve traditional DVD output quality that a good modern DVD player can't do. It comes down to which chunk of hardware has the best algorithms, and most consumers have little desire or knowledge to get to that level.