In a statement, Risto Siilasmaa, chairman of Nokia’s board and Nokia’s interim chief executive, said that “the deal offers future opportunities for many Nokia employees as part of a company with the strategy, financial resources and determination to succeed in the mobile space.”
In case you missed it in all that PR-talk, the Nokia board believes that Microsoft has the strategy to succeed in the mobile space, despite the fact that Microsoft's failed strategy and partnership with Nokia is what caused Nokia's failure. In other words, he's been asleep for the last three years.
A better question is "what was Microsoft thinking?" Nokia makes good hardware, but so does Microsoft. What Microsoft needs in the mobile space is a good operating system, which Nokia had until Microsoft convinced it to supplant it with Windows. Nokia's not failing because it didn't make a good phone, it's failing because it filled good hardware with Microsoft's software. Now Microsoft is buying a company allegedly for its expertise in cramming poor MS software into good hardware? It doesn't make any sense. If your head doesn't hurt yet, wait for the claims that Microsoft only bought Nokia to get Elop back to take a leaf out of Apple's playbook, buying next to get Jobs back.
A brief history of Stephen Elop:
-CIO of Boston Chicken (Boston Market) when it filed for bankruptcy protection and left that year. The company was bought by McDonald's for its real estate holdings two years later.
-CEO of Macromedia, acquired by Adobe three months after he took the job.
-Worked at Adobe for a year, resigned.
-Worked at Juniper for a year, resigned.
-Worked at Microsoft for two years
-Named CEO of Nokia three years ago this month, big contribution was throwing out in-house work and betting the company on Windows mobile, and ultimately oversees the sale of the company to Microsoft.
-Next up: Back at Microsoft, poised as the only act who could possibly top Ballmer as worst CEO ever. For the record, he doesn't throw chairs... he throws phones. "I can take care of that for you right here. It's gone!" Remember those words when Windows is the next "burning platform." The problem is... Elop doesn't have anyone to sell Microsoft to...
Great. Now I've got this mental image of Bashar al-Assad with a bunch of kids with late 70s haircuts in a Damascus bunker rocking out to Don't Bring Me Down while they take down U.S. media sites.
My site is running, serving The New York Times...
You've got me thinking SEA's a waste of my time...
Don't bring me down... no no no no no
I'll tell you once more before I email Melbourne
Don't bring me down...
Since the domain registrar is what was attacked, the site is still "up," just not reachable at the name nytimes.com. You can still access the site from its IP address: 170.149.168.130
Note that many links on the site will not work because they point to the nytimes.com domain. To read articles you'll have to copy the link, paste it into the location field and change "www.nytimes.com" to "170.149.168.130"... for example:
We're talking about the person who popularized the term "debugging." She was accustomed to making systems do what others said couldn't be done and getting people to fix the flaws in their broken systems. She would probably write a paper on the bugs in the company's hiring system (does not hire programmer if gender is F), hang out at the Starbucks across the street and use social engineering to get someone to deliver the paper to a decision maker who would invite her in for an interview and hire her.
...since when did the Slashdot edittors ever RTFA?
Not since they upgraded to the new JohnnyDot editorless publishing system. If you turn the sound up on your computer while submitting a story, you'll hear Robert Picardo's voice asking, "Please state the nature of the stuff that matters emergency."
(Picardo's voiced the JohnnyCab robot in Total Recall, and his face was used as the model for the robot. He also played the holographic doctor on Voyager and the robotic bureaucrat who thought he could run Stargate Atlantis.)
Martin Bishop: Sorry to waste your time, gentlemen. I don't work for the government. Agent Wallace: We know. (flashes a badge) National Security Agency. Martin Bishop: Oh. You're the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone. Agent Wallace: No, that's the FBI. We're not chartered for domestic surveillance. Martin Bishop: Oh I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators. Agent Wallace: No, that's the CIA. We protect our government's communications. We try to break the other fella's codes. We're the good guys, Marty. Martin Bishop: Gee, I can't tell you what a relief that is, Dick.
Courtesy of Sneakers (1992) (video clip of the above here)
No, we would say it wasn't done right because because the check would be drawn on the Windows Xbox Developers Kinect Connection Development Bank and made out for $10.00 in Windows 8 Xbox Windows Gamerscore points, which would only be redeemable through the "Windows RT Xbox Games Bing Banking -- Live app" that is easy to to use once you find it on your Windows RT Pro Home Edition that no one bought even at below-cost prices. Because that's what Microsoft does. It has some serious fragmentation and naming convention issues... which is what happens when people have to stand in meetings because the CEO broke all the chairs.
Seriously... "Xbox.com PC Marketplace?" Does that sell PCs or Xboxes? Is that on the Xbox or a Web site?
Every time someone says "mouthfeel" I have an inexplicable desire to punch something.
Might I suggest a bottle of Fiji water? You may find that the soft mouthfeel of the artesian water translates into a soft fistfeel and spares your knuckles from the consequences of your aggression.
"Producing beef without cows" is old news. I'm unimpressed. Show me evidence that you can produce slashdot without slashvertisements and you've got my money.
The submitter, Velcroman1, has submitted hundreds of stories since October 2009, all of which link to Foxnews.com, but only five comments in the last two years... just one this year so far.
Even more interesting is that stories submitted by MarkWhittington come up on Velcroman1's slashdot page as if they were Velcroman1's submissions... If you look at MarkWhittington's slashdot page, all of his submissions link to his own articles or opinion pieces on voices.yahoo.com or examiner.com. ALL of them. And also no comments. MarkWhittington apparently contributes his own content to these sites as a freelancer and submits them to slashdot to drive traffic.
On page 2 of Velcroman1's slashdot profile Nerval's Lobster (nkolakowski@slashdotmedia.com, nkolakowski@geek.net) submissions start to show up. We'vealreadyestablished that Nerval's Lobster is Nick Kolakowski, a slashdot employee submitting paid content as user-submitted stories...
It would be interesting to see what percentage of published slashdot stories are genuinely submitted by people who have no financial interest in the submission.
The summary is incorrect. The story is about retailers tracking customers who are running the retailer's app while shopping in the store so they can suggest related items. The article even leads off with a ridiculous photo of someone holding an iPad mini and looking at a listing for the item on the shelf. When was the last time you saw someone walking around a store with an iPad in their hand?
In theory, if you're downloading the retailer's app and using it in their store on your phone, you are looking for "something extra" from the retailer. What they're talking about here is the app acting as a salesperson, noting where you are in the store and possibly what you might be looking at to suggest items you might want. It's a gimmick, though. The app may know where you are within a few feet, but it doesn't know what item you have in your hand, so it can't properly suggest products based on what you're about to buy while you're still in the store. All it can do is say "I see you're by the polo shirt table... want two of these? We'll give you a coupon for two for $20." This is no more effective than putting a dead tree sign on the table that says "polo shirts: 2 for $20." Dead trees are cheaper, and everyone can see them, resulting in more sales than limiting your promotion to the <1% of customers who are walking through your store running your app and paying attention to it.
The way to make it somewhat more effective would be to tie it into what safeway is doing, where they keep track of everything you buy with your Safeway card and the highest prices you've historically been willing to pay for those items. Then they offer you a discount based on what they know your threshold is... and they offer the person 10 feet away from you a deeper discount on the same item because they see that she only buys the item when it's below a certain price. That systematic price discrimination is the greater concern, but the article doesn't mention that because the author doesn't get it.
Was just thinking the same thing and looking up the quotes:
BERNSTEIN
At USC, you had a word the this--
screwing up the opposition you all
did it at college and called it
ratfucking.
(SEGRETTI half-smiles, nods)
Ever wonder if Nixon might turn out
to be the biggest ratfucker of them
all?
...
DEEP THROAT
My turn to keep you waiting.
(approaches)
What's the topic for tonight?
WOODWARD
Ratfucking.
DEEP THROAT
In my day, it was simply called the
double cross. I believe the CIA refers
to it as Mindfuck. In our context,
it simply means infiltration of the
Democrats.
WOODWARD
I know what it means--Segretti
wouldn't go on the record, but if he
would, we know he'd implicate Chapin.
And that would put us inside the
White House.
DEEP THROAT
(nods)
Yes, the little ratfuckers are now
running our government.
I own the movie on DVD, but ironically, I had to go to a Russian site for the transcript.
Mr. Pegoraro barely gets a word in here and there.
Agreed. Let's have a do-over.
How about an "Ask Rob Pegoraro About Traditional News Decline" story where people submit questions, moderators bring the cream to the top and Rob selects the ones he feels he can best answer? He'd be totally in his element because he did almost exactly that in The Post's Live Online discussions (where readers would submit tech questions and he would select the ones he wanted to answer). He wasn't at DigitalInk/WPNI when they started the transition to digital (for that you'd want to talk to Don Brazeal), but he was there in The Post newsroom when they brought it back in-house and got to see the effects of staffing cuts as the newspaper responded to declining circulation and ad revenue.
Rob was basically the technology editor at the post for over a decade. I occasionally worked with him via phone calls and emails, but he and Mike Musgrove took me to lunch one day at The Madison across the street to talk about how they wanted their ISP database set up. Walking into The Madison for lunch is kind of like walking into The White House, decor-wise, so it was kind of overkill for what we were looking to accomplish, but I was a kid at the time and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
My first thought when I learned Rob had left The Post was, "he just lost one of the shortest, coolest email addresses in the world." Back in the late 90s, I was proud of my @washingtonpost.com email address, but envious of Rob's @twp.com address.
I remember talking to Rob on the phone one day as he was writing his first article about Google. It must have been '98 or '99. We were talking about something else, but he was so excited about Google he kept getting sidetracked and telling me I had to check these guys out. I specifically remember him saying: "These guys are going to rule the world."
It seems a new hope was duned from the beginning. I thought everything looked a little grainier from Episode IV onward. Hope they can clear things up in the future.
For $24.95 a month extra, the new Privacy+ Tier offers consumers the ability to feed all data to the NSA at the slowest speeds available. However, for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, the NSA can override the Privacy+ Tier and spy on Americans at Speeds of up to 6.0 Megabits per Second
You can't stop them from giving the NSA your data, but for an extra $29.99 a month you can have AT&T re-class your data as Privacy+ tier which costs the NSA an extra $599.99 in monthly surcharges to obtain. For the extra-privacy-conscious, you can name your price ($50 or greater) for PrivacyUnlimited and whatever you spend per month will cost the NSA 30 times as much to obtain.
Imagine a nuclear submarine. You have a power plant with a seemingly limitless supply of fuel compared to conventional designs, which grants you the ability to operate at high speed underwater for long periods of time with only occasional needs to surface for air. However, it only works because you have a thick layer of shielding that protects the crew from direct exposure to the power source. Now consider the kind of energy Ballmer radiates. Technically, he is in slow decline, but he has a half life of about 20 years. A division president would have acted the shielding between Ballmerizing radiation and the crew. Without that shield, how long will the crew survive?
Because hardly anyone buys phones with their phone OS. True story... not a troll:
I have a friend who has been anti-smartphone for years. She absolutely refused to buy a smartphone because she knew she'd end up playing with it all the time. Every time her cheap "dumb" phone died, she'd go get another cheap dumb phone. A couple months ago she told me she got a Lumia. I was shocked. She said she only got it because the salesperson was offering it for free because they weren't selling. That and he said it was so bad she figured she wouldn't get sucked into playing with it. Her review after a few weeks: "It's pretty, but I hate using it. Which is exactly what I wanted." Reminds me of Domino in Thunderball (the novel), telling the tobacconist she wants a carton of cigarettes that is so terrible it will make her stop smoking.
I'm not saying no one uses Windows phones. There are people who have them specifically because they hate them and they were free.
And all this time I thought Californians who leave 0.1 seconds of following distance beween their car and the one in front were just stupid. Turns out they were trying to avoid having their plates scanned.
In journalism school I had a professor who had personally interviewed the Dalai Lama and as a result he often had a very practical outlook on things. When he gave us our first writing assignment (an obituary for a famous person of our choice who was still alive... I decided William Safire had died of a heart attack upon learning that genetic testing proved Hillary Clinton was not, in fact, a congenital liar), someone immediately asked how many column inches he wanted. He replied with a question: "How long is a man's arm?" People started trying to measure their arms against things or guesstimate the average length of a man's arm, asking if that meant he wanted 30 column inches. Finally he quieted everyone and said, "A man's arm is long enough to get the job done. No more. No less." Likewise, the articles we were to write were to be long enough to get the job done. No important things left out, no filler added in. It was an important lesson in judgment.
I think the same applies to code. It should be just complex enough to get the job done. No more, no less. Sometimes that means you're going to have complex code, but it shouldn't be any more complex than it needs to be.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell was the Nokia board thinking?
The New York Times has that quote:
In a statement, Risto Siilasmaa, chairman of Nokia’s board and Nokia’s interim chief executive, said that “the deal offers future opportunities for many Nokia employees as part of a company with the strategy, financial resources and determination to succeed in the mobile space.”
In case you missed it in all that PR-talk, the Nokia board believes that Microsoft has the strategy to succeed in the mobile space, despite the fact that Microsoft's failed strategy and partnership with Nokia is what caused Nokia's failure. In other words, he's been asleep for the last three years.
A better question is "what was Microsoft thinking?" Nokia makes good hardware, but so does Microsoft. What Microsoft needs in the mobile space is a good operating system, which Nokia had until Microsoft convinced it to supplant it with Windows. Nokia's not failing because it didn't make a good phone, it's failing because it filled good hardware with Microsoft's software. Now Microsoft is buying a company allegedly for its expertise in cramming poor MS software into good hardware? It doesn't make any sense. If your head doesn't hurt yet, wait for the claims that Microsoft only bought Nokia to get Elop back to take a leaf out of Apple's playbook, buying next to get Jobs back.
A brief history of Stephen Elop:
-CIO of Boston Chicken (Boston Market) when it filed for bankruptcy protection and left that year. The company was bought by McDonald's for its real estate holdings two years later.
-CEO of Macromedia, acquired by Adobe three months after he took the job.
-Worked at Adobe for a year, resigned.
-Worked at Juniper for a year, resigned.
-Worked at Microsoft for two years
-Named CEO of Nokia three years ago this month, big contribution was throwing out in-house work and betting the company on Windows mobile, and ultimately oversees the sale of the company to Microsoft.
-Next up: Back at Microsoft, poised as the only act who could possibly top Ballmer as worst CEO ever. For the record, he doesn't throw chairs... he throws phones. "I can take care of that for you right here. It's gone!" Remember those words when Windows is the next "burning platform." The problem is... Elop doesn't have anyone to sell Microsoft to...
My site is running, serving The New York Times...
You've got me thinking SEA's a waste of my time...
Don't bring me down... no no no no no
I'll tell you once more before I email Melbourne
Don't bring me down...
Note that many links on the site will not work because they point to the nytimes.com domain. To read articles you'll have to copy the link, paste it into the location field and change "www.nytimes.com" to "170.149.168.130"... for example:
Clicking a link on their home page attempts to take you here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/business/media/hacking-attack-is-suspected-on-times-web-site.html
But that won't work, so you want to change it to:
http://170.149.168.130/2013/08/28/business/media/hacking-attack-is-suspected-on-times-web-site.html
The CSS is still pointing to nytimes.com, so the page will look funny, but at least you can read it.
We're talking about the person who popularized the term "debugging." She was accustomed to making systems do what others said couldn't be done and getting people to fix the flaws in their broken systems. She would probably write a paper on the bugs in the company's hiring system (does not hire programmer if gender is F), hang out at the Starbucks across the street and use social engineering to get someone to deliver the paper to a decision maker who would invite her in for an interview and hire her.
...since when did the Slashdot edittors ever RTFA?
Not since they upgraded to the new JohnnyDot editorless publishing system. If you turn the sound up on your computer while submitting a story, you'll hear Robert Picardo's voice asking, "Please state the nature of the stuff that matters emergency."
(Picardo's voiced the JohnnyCab robot in Total Recall, and his face was used as the model for the robot. He also played the holographic doctor on Voyager and the robotic bureaucrat who thought he could run Stargate Atlantis.)
Martin Bishop: Sorry to waste your time, gentlemen. I don't work for the government.
Agent Wallace: We know. (flashes a badge) National Security Agency.
Martin Bishop: Oh. You're the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
Agent Wallace: No, that's the FBI. We're not chartered for domestic surveillance.
Martin Bishop: Oh I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators.
Agent Wallace: No, that's the CIA. We protect our government's communications. We try to break the other fella's codes. We're the good guys, Marty.
Martin Bishop: Gee, I can't tell you what a relief that is, Dick.
Courtesy of Sneakers (1992) (video clip of the above here)
It happens when they change something. I was wondering why my cat walked past me twice last night. Have you checked your exits for brick?
No, we would say it wasn't done right because because the check would be drawn on the Windows Xbox Developers Kinect Connection Development Bank and made out for $10.00 in Windows 8 Xbox Windows Gamerscore points, which would only be redeemable through the "Windows RT Xbox Games Bing Banking -- Live app" that is easy to to use once you find it on your Windows RT Pro Home Edition that no one bought even at below-cost prices. Because that's what Microsoft does. It has some serious fragmentation and naming convention issues... which is what happens when people have to stand in meetings because the CEO broke all the chairs.
Seriously... "Xbox.com PC Marketplace?" Does that sell PCs or Xboxes? Is that on the Xbox or a Web site?
Every time someone says "mouthfeel" I have an inexplicable desire to punch something.
Might I suggest a bottle of Fiji water? You may find that the soft mouthfeel of the artesian water translates into a soft fistfeel and spares your knuckles from the consequences of your aggression.
"Producing beef without cows" is old news. I'm unimpressed. Show me evidence that you can produce slashdot without slashvertisements and you've got my money.
The submitter, Velcroman1, has submitted hundreds of stories since October 2009, all of which link to Foxnews.com, but only five comments in the last two years... just one this year so far.
Even more interesting is that stories submitted by MarkWhittington come up on Velcroman1's slashdot page as if they were Velcroman1's submissions... If you look at MarkWhittington's slashdot page, all of his submissions link to his own articles or opinion pieces on voices.yahoo.com or examiner.com. ALL of them. And also no comments. MarkWhittington apparently contributes his own content to these sites as a freelancer and submits them to slashdot to drive traffic.
On page 2 of Velcroman1's slashdot profile Nerval's Lobster (nkolakowski@slashdotmedia.com, nkolakowski@geek.net) submissions start to show up. We've already established that Nerval's Lobster is Nick Kolakowski, a slashdot employee submitting paid content as user-submitted stories...
It would be interesting to see what percentage of published slashdot stories are genuinely submitted by people who have no financial interest in the submission.
The summary is incorrect. The story is about retailers tracking customers who are running the retailer's app while shopping in the store so they can suggest related items. The article even leads off with a ridiculous photo of someone holding an iPad mini and looking at a listing for the item on the shelf. When was the last time you saw someone walking around a store with an iPad in their hand?
In theory, if you're downloading the retailer's app and using it in their store on your phone, you are looking for "something extra" from the retailer. What they're talking about here is the app acting as a salesperson, noting where you are in the store and possibly what you might be looking at to suggest items you might want. It's a gimmick, though. The app may know where you are within a few feet, but it doesn't know what item you have in your hand, so it can't properly suggest products based on what you're about to buy while you're still in the store. All it can do is say "I see you're by the polo shirt table... want two of these? We'll give you a coupon for two for $20." This is no more effective than putting a dead tree sign on the table that says "polo shirts: 2 for $20." Dead trees are cheaper, and everyone can see them, resulting in more sales than limiting your promotion to the <1% of customers who are walking through your store running your app and paying attention to it.
The way to make it somewhat more effective would be to tie it into what safeway is doing, where they keep track of everything you buy with your Safeway card and the highest prices you've historically been willing to pay for those items. Then they offer you a discount based on what they know your threshold is... and they offer the person 10 feet away from you a deeper discount on the same item because they see that she only buys the item when it's below a certain price. That systematic price discrimination is the greater concern, but the article doesn't mention that because the author doesn't get it.
BERNSTEIN
...
At USC, you had a word the this--
screwing up the opposition you all
did it at college and called it
ratfucking.
(SEGRETTI half-smiles, nods)
Ever wonder if Nixon might turn out
to be the biggest ratfucker of them
all?
DEEP THROAT
My turn to keep you waiting.
(approaches)
What's the topic for tonight?
WOODWARD
Ratfucking.
DEEP THROAT
In my day, it was simply called the
double cross. I believe the CIA refers
to it as Mindfuck. In our context,
it simply means infiltration of the
Democrats.
WOODWARD
I know what it means--Segretti
wouldn't go on the record, but if he
would, we know he'd implicate Chapin.
And that would put us inside the
White House.
DEEP THROAT
(nods)
Yes, the little ratfuckers are now
running our government.
I own the movie on DVD, but ironically, I had to go to a Russian site for the transcript.
I think you mean, "Robo-Dr. Acula!" (Video)
Mr. Pegoraro barely gets a word in here and there.
Agreed. Let's have a do-over.
How about an "Ask Rob Pegoraro About Traditional News Decline" story where people submit questions, moderators bring the cream to the top and Rob selects the ones he feels he can best answer? He'd be totally in his element because he did almost exactly that in The Post's Live Online discussions (where readers would submit tech questions and he would select the ones he wanted to answer). He wasn't at DigitalInk/WPNI when they started the transition to digital (for that you'd want to talk to Don Brazeal), but he was there in The Post newsroom when they brought it back in-house and got to see the effects of staffing cuts as the newspaper responded to declining circulation and ad revenue.
Rob was basically the technology editor at the post for over a decade. I occasionally worked with him via phone calls and emails, but he and Mike Musgrove took me to lunch one day at The Madison across the street to talk about how they wanted their ISP database set up. Walking into The Madison for lunch is kind of like walking into The White House, decor-wise, so it was kind of overkill for what we were looking to accomplish, but I was a kid at the time and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
My first thought when I learned Rob had left The Post was, "he just lost one of the shortest, coolest email addresses in the world." Back in the late 90s, I was proud of my @washingtonpost.com email address, but envious of Rob's @twp.com address.
I remember talking to Rob on the phone one day as he was writing his first article about Google. It must have been '98 or '99. We were talking about something else, but he was so excited about Google he kept getting sidetracked and telling me I had to check these guys out. I specifically remember him saying: "These guys are going to rule the world."
Glad he's doing all right in his post-Post life.
Dunes don't move that quickly. It took a few years.
It seems a new hope was duned from the beginning. I thought everything looked a little grainier from Episode IV onward. Hope they can clear things up in the future.
For $24.95 a month extra, the new Privacy+ Tier offers consumers the ability to feed all data to the NSA at the slowest speeds available. However, for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, the NSA can override the Privacy+ Tier and spy on Americans at Speeds of up to 6.0 Megabits per Second
You can't stop them from giving the NSA your data, but for an extra $29.99 a month you can have AT&T re-class your data as Privacy+ tier which costs the NSA an extra $599.99 in monthly surcharges to obtain. For the extra-privacy-conscious, you can name your price ($50 or greater) for PrivacyUnlimited and whatever you spend per month will cost the NSA 30 times as much to obtain.
AT&T: We're Listening
three words should put an end to this chicanery: Immortal Dick Cheney.
Wouldn't that be "Dickchenery?"
What could possibly go wrong?
Why didn't somebody tell me my ass was so big?
I think you're overreacting. If it was really that big you never would have gotten your head stuck in it.
Imagine a nuclear submarine. You have a power plant with a seemingly limitless supply of fuel compared to conventional designs, which grants you the ability to operate at high speed underwater for long periods of time with only occasional needs to surface for air. However, it only works because you have a thick layer of shielding that protects the crew from direct exposure to the power source. Now consider the kind of energy Ballmer radiates. Technically, he is in slow decline, but he has a half life of about 20 years. A division president would have acted the shielding between Ballmerizing radiation and the crew. Without that shield, how long will the crew survive?
They don't make a version for their own phone OS?
Because hardly anyone buys phones with their phone OS. True story... not a troll:
I have a friend who has been anti-smartphone for years. She absolutely refused to buy a smartphone because she knew she'd end up playing with it all the time. Every time her cheap "dumb" phone died, she'd go get another cheap dumb phone. A couple months ago she told me she got a Lumia. I was shocked. She said she only got it because the salesperson was offering it for free because they weren't selling. That and he said it was so bad she figured she wouldn't get sucked into playing with it. Her review after a few weeks: "It's pretty, but I hate using it. Which is exactly what I wanted." Reminds me of Domino in Thunderball (the novel), telling the tobacconist she wants a carton of cigarettes that is so terrible it will make her stop smoking.
I'm not saying no one uses Windows phones. There are people who have them specifically because they hate them and they were free.
And all this time I thought Californians who leave 0.1 seconds of following distance beween their car and the one in front were just stupid. Turns out they were trying to avoid having their plates scanned.
In journalism school I had a professor who had personally interviewed the Dalai Lama and as a result he often had a very practical outlook on things. When he gave us our first writing assignment (an obituary for a famous person of our choice who was still alive... I decided William Safire had died of a heart attack upon learning that genetic testing proved Hillary Clinton was not, in fact, a congenital liar), someone immediately asked how many column inches he wanted. He replied with a question: "How long is a man's arm?" People started trying to measure their arms against things or guesstimate the average length of a man's arm, asking if that meant he wanted 30 column inches. Finally he quieted everyone and said, "A man's arm is long enough to get the job done. No more. No less." Likewise, the articles we were to write were to be long enough to get the job done. No important things left out, no filler added in. It was an important lesson in judgment.
I think the same applies to code. It should be just complex enough to get the job done. No more, no less. Sometimes that means you're going to have complex code, but it shouldn't be any more complex than it needs to be.