nirvana

Those aren't made up numbers. I actually did the math based on my income. How about you stop being a dishonest coward who characterizes your opponent, rather than making an argument, hmm?

You don't get what you pay for, of course, if you bothered to actually add up what you really do pay, and what you really do get, but then that is the essential swindle isn't it? You and all the rest of the thieves like to pretend like it's better to pay government $20,000 a year for services the free market would happily deliver for $20. And then you act as if those of us who point out we're getting ripped off are "greedy", or in your case-- dishonest.

Well, if you have to lie to make an argument, that tells me even you know your argument is the suck.

Ok, so you don't pay %50 on 1/3rd of your salary for 10 years. I wouldn't exactly call that "an amazing tax break". You're still paying way too much in taxes.

No. And contrary to what others have said, more Germans know english than Dutch know english, on a day to day basis. Though you can get by without knowing dutch in amsterdam with a little creativity.

Milton Friedman did a study of healthcare in the USA, and found that the government "help" had driven up the cost 26fold and driven down availability. Or put another way, the reason people could get bankrupted by an illness is socialized medicine, and it's also the reason they might not be able to find care when they need it. Contrary to what Obama says, socialism doesn't work, and if you think you'll get better healthcare in the NL than in the USA, you'll have a very rude awakening... but of course you won't be alive to post your mea culpas here on HN. Frankly, even assuming this shows a profound ignorance of both history and economics.

You should learn to think.

If you run a successful business in holland, and pay yourself a salary out of it, your tax rate is over %70! And on top of that, you have %20 VAT. And this isn't even going into the manifold fees and other types of taxes you are subjected to.

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This comment is not spam. It had a nice positive score until the socialists arrived. Of course, socialists being unable to deal with reality (or history!) must censor those who point out simple facts that undermine their ideology. And so this comment has been downvoted to obscurity (-15 at this moment) to make it less likely others would be made aware of the high tax rates in holland.

This kind of dishonesty and censorship is why you can't have fruitful discussion on hacker news. The site is overrun by ideologues and moderated by ideologues and anything that doesn't strictly toe to the fascist modern ideology gets the boot.

Ok, just accept, though, that you're anti-intellectual in a very profound way.

When you can't tolerate people stating inconvenient facts, it's time to admit you're an intellectual coward.

Frankly, I think you're all shit. You've elected a guy who claims he has the right to kill any american with a drone strike, in america, without any due process.

And you're so proud of it! It's astounding. You should be ashamed. Profoundly ashamed.

But know this, it is your cowardice and intellectual dishonesty that caused the state of affairs we find ourselves in. Run away to amsterdam if you like, see how long it remains nice.

also android fanboys who are instead falling all over themselves to claim that later and worse but open somehow beats better and earlier.

It's an ideology, mindless anti-progress, anti-innovation ideology.

A little thought experiment... some clever dudes manage to reverse engineer enough to "jailbreak" this, and then they put a little OS image on it and start hacking away... then a bunch of people say "hey, this is really cool! It's like Apple made a little raspberry pi for us!" but then even more say "but it's so limited, it doesn't have USB out, etc, etc."

And then dozens more just go on and on about how Apple "crippled" the device by not giving it USB and how this "proves" Apple just wants "control" and why did they have to jailbreak it anyway?

In the process of getting their panties all bundled up they never realize they're bitching about an adapter not being a general computing platform.

They're also proving Apple right-- it's engineered to solve a specific problem and provide specific functionality. Even if it were jailbroken from the factory, people would be complaining and demanding that it does other things... than what it was designed to do.

Ideology has trumped engineering, and as hackers, you shouldn't tolerate it.

Frankly, all of this has been obvious all along to any competent engineer, since the moment Apple introduced lightening. They described it as a serial bus and talked about how it gave more flexibility. If you think about it for 2 seconds its obviously better to run protocols over a serial bus than to run 30 lines of individual signals, with dedicated lines for analog and dedicated lines for digital in a world where people want HDMI adapters for a connector that originally had firewire signals on it, from a time before HDMI was even common.

But this is Apple, so the REAL reality distortion field kicked in-- a tsunami of press acting as if Apple was ripping people off with a $30 adapter, hundreds of mindless conspiracy theories from Apple bashers on Hacker News about how this is to have more control over people and how this once again proves that "open" (defined as google, not actually anything to do with openness) is better than "closed" (defined as Apple, you know the company with the most popular open source operating system in the world?).

It's one thing to not know enough engineering for this to have been obvious to you, it's quite another to spread lies and engineering ignorance as a result of your ideological hatred of Apple. And the latter is basically all I saw on HN about this format. (Which is one of the reasons I write HN off as worthless for months at a time.)

Because Steve Mann is into wearable computers and google glass is not a wearable computer project. Your wondering this is understandable because google has mislead you. But glass has no CPU, there's not enough power or space for one. The intelligence lives on google servers where the speach recognition is done, and everything else, and glass is useless without a net connection (So you have to be in an area with wifi or have a smartphone handy to tether to.)

Steve Mann has been working on head mounted displays, true, but he's been focusing on local horsepower wearable computers.

Ultimately, I don't think google glass is anything more than a PR project to remove the stigma of google as ripoff artists and to make it look like they're innovative.

Given current technology, glass on wifi should have about 20 minutes of battery life, maybe an hour. Which makes them pretty useless.

There's really quite a difference between a wearable computer (what Mann works on) and a bluetooth headset with integrated display (what glass is.)

For the record, this guy has been wearing actual computers.

Google glass is an accessory- essentially a bluetooth headset, display and camera built into glasses. The intelligence lives on the servers, and glass needs a bluetooth or wifi connection to talk to the net.

I think google's engaging in a bit of a PR swindle by making people think google glass is like an iPhone. It isn't, it needs and iPhone or android phone to connect to the net.

Consequently it can't replace a smartphone.

I'm also pretty dubious about the battery time it will get, even without having to run a local CPU.

The answer is that lightening is a general purpose next generation serial format.

This allows them to support different formats in the future, for instance, say when HDMI isn't popular.

The 30 pin connector didn't have HDMI on it at the time it was created and they have repurposed pins over the years regularly.

Here they can have a much less complicated solution-- a standardised serial bus over which they can stream any future protocol they want to support.

It's a lot more future proof.

The 30 pin dock had 30 pins so it could put video out directly and things like that.

Lightening is a SERIAL FORMAT with 9pins. So it streams audio and video out in an encoded form.

The AV adapter, need to take that audio and video and turn it into a standardized AV format for the AV plugs.

Now, rather than a lot of odd incompatibilities because Apple added new features to new devices that older docks don't support, we have a common communication format in lightening that should be much more robust going forward.

Apple can add whatever protocols it needs over the serial connection to support future tech, rather than the old way of redefining what some of those 30 pins meant from period to period-- remember the 30 pin connecter started out in a time when there was firewire taking up some of those pins!

People like to ascribe nefarious purposes to Apple or claim apple is "rippng them off" because a small computer that does digital AV conversion costs $30... and they dont' realize that the 30 pin connector didnt' do any conversion of formats was just bringing the signals out to a standard connector. This one actually has to do work, which is why it has a SoC on it.

Steam's support on OS X is the suck. I don't know what the experience is like on Linux, but given there is less competition from better stores on Linux I wouldn't be surprised to see Steam be a big hit on Linux.

As for me, after being a steam user for years, but given the fact that I haven't been able to play team fortress for 5 months now despite playing it for years, in the future, I'll use the Mac App Store.

Google glass is just a bluetooth headset with a display and camera, combined with a SIRI like service.

People seem to think it's a competitor to the iPhone, but it's an ACCESSORY that needs and iPhone to connect to the network.

Worse, it has no technology (other than miniturization) that hasn't been done many times before-- I first saw a "glass" type system in the 1980s.... and that one actually had a computer on board!

Innovation is not just about being different, its about being different successfully.

I give credit to MSFT for ... finally, after 2 decades... trying to innovate. I don't think they will be successful with these products, but possibly they can iterate on them until they are successful.

This is a lot more than google has done, and you're right, people should make the comparison to 1990s Microsoft which used FUD to kill innovation in the industry.

Fortunately, Balmer seems to have killed that ability in 2007 when he said there was no chance the iPhone would be successful.

Maybe MSFT has turned a corner. And unlike google and everyone else, they actually have a license from Apple to use multi-touch, etc, so they're actually legitimate competitors.

I'm sure there's a couple hundred thousand other people like you.

That's not what taligent is talking about.

Apple ships tens of millions of devices in a quarter.

Google's never had a hardware hit, not even close.

IT's not even as good as the iPad, which unlike the pixel, can run more than just a web browser.

The iPad costs about 1/3 the price, and it does more and is better made.

Comparing this to the MBA is like comparing a feature phone to a netbook.

Forget specs, lets talk about software: The MacBook air is a real computer. You can compile your code on it. IT has an operating system. You can play games.

The pixel is just a web browser.

The correct thing to make the comparison to is the iPad, but even the iPad is more functional, since it can run apps that aren't browsers.

From a usability viewpoint, the pixel is kinda laughable... it's so arbitrarily limited, it isn't even really usable unless you're on a network.

Apple is vastly more efficient at R&D than google is, in part because Apple's products are so profitable, that it's R&D as a proportion of sales is "small".

Meanwhile, Apple is investing $10B this year in CapEx, and while a couple billion of that are for server farms, the new HQ and store upgrades, many billions are going into the equipment and tooling necessary to make Apple products.

People seem to think you just call fox con and say "I want 100 million mobile phones by monday!"

Apple's "R&D" includes the investment in being able to scale a manufacturing business to the point where it can sell twice as many devices as the previous year, for several years running.

This is under appreciated by people who look at no-sales devices like the google Nexus and claim that google is in the lead by some arbitrary criteria.

It's also a pretty blatant copy of the Macbook. Given the history you outline (which I agree with) I think the huge leap for the pixel came from Apple. Just like the huge leap from a blackberry clone to an iPhone clone that android took over the course of 2007-2008.

Interesting. I'm using ~24,800 of my 25,000 available tracks. About %90 of that is actually CDs that I ripped (I'm not really much of a pirate). I had a problem where it wouldn't accept one of them at all, and I ended up pirating that one to get it to work. The rest I was able to import ok, so my CD collection going back to the 1980s when I first started buying them I was able to import.

I have no trouble with playback on iOS. But I don't tend to stream, I tend to sync the songs I want to the device and then play them.

The one time I did have problems with iTunes match was a period where we rented a house in rural mexico. We were using some sort of fly-by-nite mexican ISP, and iTunes match had a lot of difficulty. It was really inconsistent and it sounds like this is what you experienced.

I suspect the issue there is that certain ports were being blocked, or that the ISP couldn't keep a consistent connection (Though loading web pages was fine, longer streaming connections like watching video were not.) I think iTunes match is probably sensitive to needing specific ports open and isn't great at falling back when they are blocked, or isn't great at handling frequent interruptions in the net connection (even if they are short.)

Your link to patrik gibson's twitter shows how silly the original hypothesis is.

For instance, Apple's stores are still powered by WebObjects because WebObject is still one of the best web frameworks in the world.

Do people say that Amazon is "bad at the web" because obidos and gurupa were designed in the 1990s? They're worse than WebObjects by a wide margin. How about all the companies whose web services are from the 1990s?

Including google!

The rest of his examples are cheap shots or simply based on ignorance.

For instance, Game Center having trouble under heavy load is an exceptional event not a daily occurence, and lets not forget the weeks of cummulative time that google has had gmail down because of issues over the years, and all the mail people have lost and the fact that google will just blackhole people's accounts for no reasons and then when it happens you have no way to get your data back.

The rest of it is misunderstanding or misrepresentation.

In other words, this is just more propaganda in the endless google good, apple bad, ideological war that was started to try and cover the fact that android is a blatant ripoff of iOS.

How is iTunes match a "scam"? It accepts my music downloaded from the pirate bay as proof of purchase then gives me access to it on all my devices.

The hugest advantage is not having to manage all of that music on all the machines in our house. We just have one backup somewhere in case we need it, and then everyone syncs with iTunes Match just the music they want on their personal device.

This is an area where we can do direct comparison.

Mail- Google has gmail, Apple has iCloud mail. Both have "web 2.0" UI's. I think here Apple wins hands down. Apple's support of sproutcore (what became ember.js) has given it a great lead in the ability to do great web apps. And apple's iCloud.com mail app is a good example of this.

Google "Office" vs. Apple Works - Apple wins again here in my opinion. Numbers, Pages and Keynote are much better experiences than using google's products thru the web, simply because they are native and can take advantage of better APIs. Both products provide ubiquitous storage of your data, so you can access your documents from your iPhone or your laptop. I wouldn't say Google is ahead on services there, but before Apple released iCloud they were.

I really don't think Apple has done a bad job with online services. Certainly not when compared to google. IF you look at iTunes Store-- which is actually an web service-- it is larger than anything google has, except maybe google search, depending on what metrics you use.

It's been stable and robust and usable with great UI since the store was first launched. It's certainly sold more goods than google and made more profit than amazon, I bet.

Apple took the lead with web development way back when it was NeXT with webobjects which was the first modern web development framework. They again have had the best product with sproutcore, dashcode, etc, though they've been a bit inconsistent. Its only recently that google's really tried to produce web development tech, and while go is a good attempt at a language it is written by people who felt comfortable enforcing a religious design choice on every programmer! (namely where the brackets go. I'm fine with people putting them in the "wrong place", I can still read their code. Let them do as they like, but forcing me, at the language level, to do as the language designers like? Well, that's just being assholes, and I won't use the language because of that (not to mention its crap design in some key areas.)

Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers.

What you say is correct, but what I was trying to say (you may disagree) is that SIRI was a big jump into mobile search, and that it is a bigger move into mobile search than google's hardware projects have been in competing with Apple.

SIRI is still in the early stages and would benefit a great deal from becoming more of an App platform, but I think that is going to take some time due to the nature of how SIRI works.

I think people musnderstand what it is that Apple does best. And what it is is deliver great products that focus on what the consumer needs.

Google has yet to deliver a compelling or wildly popular hardware product to the market. Google is getting really great at propaganda and hype though-- like that carefully set up PR event of brin on the subway with glass.

Glass and this computer are both misfires because glass is just a bluetooth headset with a camera-- it needs a network to work. It needs an iPhone or android device to teather too (and I still think its really going to have bad battery life.)

Same with this netbook-- it doesnt' have a real operating system, and it relies on being connected to the cloud all the time... which is impractical in a lot of ways.

The iPad is the competitor to this device, not the macbook. The macbook is a real computer you can use for development, the iPad you can use for content creation but not really hardcore software development.

The iPad is much cheaper, higher build quality, and doesn't need a network connection to really work.

Google's delivered a lot of products like the nexus, the nexus q that have had a lot of hype but haven't really been big successes.

Until they do make a big hardware success you can't really say they're learning to do what Apple does.

It's not like you just call up foxxconn and say "I want 100 million phones made."

Meanwhile, what google does best is selling customers to advertisers and search.

I'd say Apple getting good at that reasonably fast. Apple's SIRI upended search and was a big jump forward. Apple's iAds has not been as successful, but this is probably due to mobile being a hostile environment for ads (google and facebook aren't having great success yet either.)

Good managers will not have a fetish for making decisions, but will, instead, ask you questions that reveal the motivation for their concern about a given technical solution, such as, "I've been told that we need to do X, and that Y solution does X, how does your solution handle the X requirement?" Where X could be a business requirement or a need that some other team in the company has.

A good boss will bring his concerns forward and give you the opportunity to address them, and if you tell him this is a better solution for the X issue, then he'll trust you to do it and give you approval.

If it turns out that your solution was worse for X, then when he has to be more careful in the future, he can remind you that X didn't get met last time and that is why he's not sure about this time. You then have to prove it or shape up.

It's all about building trust-- with GOOD bosses.

The problem is, good bosses are maybe %30. To many of them are simply people who were promoted to management because they are ambitious and good at playing politics and in a lot of companies their incompetence (eg: knowing nothing about software despite managing programmers) is seen as an advantage (that was the case at Amazon where my boss had trouble operating excel and his background was in criminal justice.)

Hell, I once worked for an educational software company that higher ex-kindergarten teachers to manage programmers. They knew nothing, but they had been trained that "young ones" (eg us 20-30 year old artists and programmers) were not to be trusted.... we even got scolded once for stepping out of the office to have a conversation! It was a company run like a kindergarten class!

Trying to explain technology in both of these examples to profoundly technology illiterate people was taken as "back talking". What they heard from some cousin (or once, I kid you not "bill gate's investment group might make an investment, so we need to get rid of our linux mail and file server and replace it with windows") .... was always more compelling than what their employees, who actually knew the situation, would tell them.

I think their incompetence fed a need to put their foot down.

In both cases the team collapsed as all the talent walked out the door.

This works with good bosses and after awhile you become the technical person that they trust.

Unfortunately, a lot of bosses are mediocre and no amount of explaining, even if you're really good at it, will reach them because it's all about ego for them.

Or they believe some nonsense falsehood they heard on the internet. And the internet is always right.

I think the fundamental problem is that non-technical people end up in positions of power and then feel they need to assert their decision making power or they will lose it. In fact, in my experience, it becomes an article of faith with some of them that the technical people are being short sighted in some way, and thus going with "industry standard practices" (eg: currently popular buzzwords) is superior to the "indulgent" suggestions of the technical person.

I worry that today's generation of hackers have cottoned to the need to start companies so that they can do great work, rather than being forced into mediocrity by non-technical middle "managers"... only to turn around and be hampered by non-technical investors making absurd demands. (Maybe VC meddling has declined precipitously in the last 5 years or so, I hope so.)

In my experience at many startups a few VCs mostly left us alone, but most VCs forced decisions on us that were bad decisions, often bad market decisions, but many of them bad technology decisions Just one example: "You're getting $4M in funding but you have to spend $2M of it on this other portfolio companies product that claims to do what you need." Even though that other product didn't actually do what we needed, targeted something else entirely, but the VC was not technical so he didn't understand this. It was akin to "javascript, java, whatever". This decision set us back 2 years and ultimately cut the exit return by about %90 of what it would have been (given the value of similar companies at the stage we were when we sold, even one year earlier.) Did the VC learn his lesson? Of course not, he never heard (or was willing to hear) that it was a mistake and due to liquidation preferences and other double dipping, they made out great. The employees, however, lost out.