151–160 of 178 posts
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Even if the reviews are positive, I've spoken to many people about the Surface (techies and not) and very few spoke well of Windows 8/Surface.
How many had a Surface? I know lots of people who pan the Surface, but don't actually own one.
I think this is a sign of Microsoft's desperation to stay relevant. Most of the Surface reviews have spoken poorly about the device. Windows RT hasn't been well received. They've tried to revamp their entire image -- with new hardware, software, and extensive marketing -- with limited success. "Look at how cool our product is" hasn't worked for them, so they're resorting to "look at how terrible their product is." Yo…
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Text mining has come a long way since 1985, so I don't think that's how it's done (in fact I know it's not done that way), but I guess what you mean is that no human ever looks at the data. That's possible, but not reassuring. Many of the shady purposes this data could be misused for don't require a human to ever read it. Say, one day, that C++ binary computes a score that indicates how reliable, credit worthy, dange…
No, but that's a separate problem from algorithmic ads. When Google shares personal data and not merely statistics about personal data I'll being doing the call-to-arms along side you. What Microsoft wants you to think, however, is that there is an office full of people some where reading your emails and picking ads that they think you might respond to.
What I'm concerned about is that data that allows such a score to be computed is out there and I have no way to control it or take it back. Google could change and start to interpret their privacy policy slightly differently. The data could be stolen or accessed by governments. Many things could happen that are outside of my control.
But I agree that Microsoft may try to insinuate something different from what I'm concerend about.
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I hope that Microsoft does succeed in making privacy a competitive differentiator, but I feel they lack tact and common sense in many cases.. There is no love lost between them, and IMO Microsoft will get some traction because Google is desperate to increase revenue and keep their PE at over 20. Their shopping is 100% ads and probably 90% of most transactional query pages are ads. Search for a commercial item and you…
A sincere curiosity: why do you think it would be in google's interest to bias search result ? What kind of bias you expect exactly ? Showing paying customers first in search results? Or not showing results if there are similar ads to be displayed?
Ask a Googler or Larry Page, why did they do that?
Showing paying customers first in search results? Or not showing results if there are similar ads to be displayed?
It's a lot more than showing a few ads next to search, it's almost all ads. Frankly even the "unbiased results" are mostly from advertisers. I do not trust them at all, their revenue keeps increasing with each change
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Text mining has come a long way since 1985, so I don't think that's how it's done (in fact I know it's not done that way), but I guess what you mean is that no human ever looks at the data. That's possible, but not reassuring. Many of the shady purposes this data could be misused for don't require a human to ever read it. Say, one day, that C++ binary computes a score that indicates how reliable, credit worthy, dange…
But what business sense does it make for Google to sell the data directly? You can only sell data once; targeted advertising can be sold over and over again.
Granted it would not make business sense for Google to do that right now. But the future might look very differently. What about a desperate future Google that has been deprived of ad income by regulation happy governments or threatened by anti-trust legislation? What about a Google disrupted and superseded by some other new and cool company, lead by someone put in place by activist investors to monetize its assets?
Things change, but our ability to react to such changes is very limited when it comes to taking back information that has been put out there.
I think this is a sign of Microsoft's desperation to stay relevant. Most of the Surface reviews have spoken poorly about the device. Windows RT hasn't been well received. They've tried to revamp their entire image -- with new hardware, software, and extensive marketing -- with limited success. "Look at how cool our product is" hasn't worked for them, so they're resorting to "look at how terrible their product is." Yo…
Ohh so this is what happens when all the pro Microsoft news gets flagged off from the frontpage. That aside, the Surface reviews have been fairly mixed, from biased journalist on both sides to Jeff Atwood seems to either hate it or love it. I like to think of it as a niche product (that is still in beta) than a competition to Ipad or the Ultrabooks.
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"All of the original Surface reviews were negative" No they're not? Then you haven't read ALL of them, mine weren't negative and most of the ones I read weren't negative either. I don't think you want to remember the positive ones, but there are a lot of them.
I'm referring to the ones I saw on the HN front page, not some kind of logical for-all statement. And it's true, I didn't go digging around for other points of view, but I read three or four and they all seemed to say the same thing: an interesting idea with inadequate execution. They were negative in the "promising idea but don't buy this until they get these issues worked out" sense, not in the "what a stupid idea,…
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>so they're resorting to "look at how terrible their product is." I'll presume you must have felt the same way about Apple's I'm a Mac/I'm a PC series of ads? Since all they really did was try to paint a picture of how terrible PCs were, and since Windows is the dominant PC OS, how terrible Windows was.
I felt that way about the ads. The idea that Macs were immune to virus infection was laughable.
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I'm referring to the ones I saw on the HN front page, not some kind of logical for-all statement. And it's true, I didn't go digging around for other points of view, but I read three or four and they all seemed to say the same thing: an interesting idea with inadequate execution. They were negative in the "promising idea but don't buy this until they get these issues worked out" sense, not in the "what a stupid idea,…
Well the good ones that made it to the front page were down voted off with in hours so maybe you should use other sources. I don't have any idea how the surface is but unfortunately hacker news might not be the best place for balanced information.