Bad design can creep into any process, whether small or the much larger Twitter. I was thrust upon this when I (rather innocently) changed my phone number – but forgot to turn off Twitter’s “login verification” process first. There is no way I could have known, but my specific use case of Twitter, coupled with a phone number change, locked me out. After much consternation, I understood Twitter’s two-step process is broken.
Microsoft has had an interesting history with creating versions of Windows Server that might fit into different verticals. You might recall the horrible Windows Small Business Server version for an example of how you can’t just slap a bunch of products together and make a good product. What Microsoft tends to do is create limits on products that can do more, instead of taking limited products and giving them more options. Nowhere is this more evident than Windows Server 2012 Foundation edition. Read on to see why you might not want to implement this version.
In a very unexpected move, Google has announced the purchase of streaming service Songza. For the time being, they appear to plan on keeping the service intact, though that will likely change in the future. They’ve even made an interesting Google version of the Songza logo.
Last week Amazon announced a new Android-based phone named “Fire Phone”. This ultra-super-secret phone was probably an inevitability, but until it was announced, nobody really knew for sure. If you thought this was shades of Facebook Home, you would be right. I thought I’d take a look at what’s good, and what’s bad about Amazon’s announcement.
I was interested in this time-tested idea of how “broken” commenting systems are. Dave Winer is also talking about this, and as you might expect, I mostly disagree with him. The thing is, commenting systems are not broken, they just suck. We may currently have the best we can get from the text-based system, but the work should be spent on making them suck less.
If you do intend on looking for a reasonable alternative to TrueCrypt’s features, finding the right tool may be a challenge. I’ve decided to install and quickly test a few of the freely available encryption tools to see if they’re worth looking into as a replacement.
If you’ve been following news about security and encryption tools, no doubt you’ve heard of the shutdown of popular open source encryption tool TrueCrypt. Given that using TrueCrypt was considered one of a handful of ways for individuals to protect data in the wake of recent NSA spying revelations, this unexpected news has rocked the Internet.
Big Apple announcements are always greeted with interest. This time around you’ll probably have come across slew of blogs that talk about what Apple decided to release. In that vain, I guess I’m no different; but, as a user and supporter of most of Apple’s technologies, I’m usually in a position to offer some insight into how the uptake might be on this stuff. Without further adieu, let me get into what seems like a mostly software edition of WWDC.
New business owners want to work at something in a moral way, be empowered to make their own choices, and create a company (or more) that might actually be bigger than them. That doesn’t come easy when many of the ideas you have are wrong. I recently came across a great list of misconceptions and added a number of my own items to it.
Starting yesterday, I have embarked on a process of cleaning up most of the 540 posts I’ve done here on the blog. This process aims to fix a number of messy things left after a large migration from Google’s Blogger. I ask for your patience in this painful and manual process.