Google isn't above doing things that harm people to make them more money. Like the steadily decreasing background contrast and lack of borders separating ads from search results. Older people are far less cognizant of borders and thus would click on ads thinking they're search results.
The difference is that the negative Microsoft news tends to float on top of sites like HN more than positive news, and the reverse is true for Google so this alters perceptions of people.
Actually, the "they" that got "rapped" by the FTC were "AOL, Ask, Bing, Blekko, Duck Duck Go, Google and Yahoo as general purpose search engines and 17 'of the most heavily trafficked' shopping, travel and local search engines"[1].
These were reissued rules that clarified and enhanced the rules issued by the FTC in 2002 to make advertising clear. It likely came out of Danny Sullivan's letter to the FTC[2] showing how the competitors accusing Google Shopping of not disclosing paid inclusion well enough had no intention of themselves following the FTC's rules.
> The difference is that the negative Microsoft news tends to float on top of sites like HN more than positive news, and the reverse is true for Google so this alters perceptions of people.
You clearly visit a different HN than I do. While there is plenty of positive Google news here, the negative news in the top 10 is almost daily (Reader, account closing, PRISM, etc). Considering your account is 6 hours old (with 196 karma!), maybe stick around for a while before making pseudo-hypotheses about story dynamics?
"maybe stick around for a while before making pseudo-hypotheses about story dynamics?"
Ok I've been around for awhile and can vouch that what he's claiming happens regularly. Some links from the last time I bothered to comment on it can be found in the following:
And, as last time this topic was brought up, I feel obliged to point out that HN rank is more than a function of votes, flags, comment total, and time. The quality of the comments, likely determined by the speed and voting patterns, is also used. This, or a similar system, is also reputed to be used to hide the "reply" link during suspected flamewars.
So sure, you could blame some perceived Google bias on Google shills flagging Microsoft articles. You could also blame some perceived Anti-Microsoft bias on Microsoft shills being abrasive and causing comment sections to become toxic (for example, by filling the comment sections with comments complaining about HN rank compared to Google articles).
I see little to no evidence for either, I am not in a position to inspect the complete data to determine what is causing any perceived phenomenon (nor are you, I suspect).
It's pretty clear when an article has been flagged off the frontpage intentionally on hnrankings.info and in my experience every link of the type also "just happened" to be anti-google, pro-ms or pro-apple.
I have seen your links to hnrankings.info and cannot say that they make it clear flagging is the cause (much less organized flagging). Your (and others) assertions are too strong for the data that you have.
With hnrankings.info I believe you could establish a trend (so far I have only seen specific handpicked examples, not a trend. A trend is probably there, but nobody that I have seen has bothered to do the legwork to uncover it.), but there is not enough there to say that (as many have claimed) there are non-organic rings of flaggers targetting pro-Microsoft articles.
I haven't bothered to link many hnrankings I've done personally because (tangent) both HN search & hnrankings.info are blocked by the handsome and intelligent admins at my office (/tangent).
But here's a simple experiment that can be done in a few minutes: search for daringfireball.net links on HN, click on the ones with a decent number of points, put those into hnrankings.info and you'll see a clear pattern of flagging for pretty much every single one.
Now maybe Gruber articles are just terrible (ymmv) but I can say that every other article I've seen flagged down (fairly easy to tell from rank/points/time) falls into the same categories. And I don't see how it's a big conspiracy theory to apply occam's razor to the observation that "hey all these anti-google or pro-apple or pro-ms links have a graph that makes it look like they were flagged off the first page". The same mentality that would abuse this is not hard to find in the comment sections of many tech sites so I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised or think HN is immune.
And again if HN mods want to produce a list of flagged articles I'm confident it would back the assertions that I and others have made.
Windows Phone is more open than iOS in the sense that you have multiple OEMs making multiple types of phones targeting different markets unlike the iPhone. For example, the Lumia 521 is just $130 off contract in the US. Also the walled garden prevents the malware problem that Android has. So it can be considered as a happy medium between iOS and Android.
Yup, I managed to grab a new one at a Microsoft store for $86 (had a gift card and they had in store promos I abused). Most bang for the buck consumer product I have ever purchased.
I am glad that there's more competition in the marketplace rather than just Apple and Android and that there are companies looking beyond earnings in their next quarter.
Apple could have probably made more money over the years by selling Macs with Windows and retiring their own OS.
Competition is good, for example see the flat look and concentration on typography that both Android and iOS borrowed from Windows Phone.
That's why I don't get all the deriding of Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone. Android has plenty hardware OEMs behind it.
>99.9% of people who will buy this phone will never have a need for 41 megapixels. But they'll buy it just the same.
The tech does make normal pictures look better because of the oversampling. Not to mention optical image stabilization for reducing blur and shake in both image and video.
I know the details and understand pixel oversampling etc. In the real world they produce acceptable photos for the type of device but it is nothing special and definitely over-marketed.
I used an 808 for a week when they came out. Wishy washy colours, constant over exposure and distortion due to the pissy little lens. Not what they were promoting.
Whilst I compare this to a DSLR, a cheaper compact can do a better job of being a camera.
Personally I drag a DSLR around everywhere with me but that's because I started doing that sort of stuff before we had mobile phones and have developed an appreciation of quality prints.
> Wishy washy colours, constant over exposure and distortion due to the pissy little lens.
With the exception of maybe the distortion I'd chalk that up to crappy dynamic nonlinear exposure heuristics trying to boost dynamic range. For an example, take a look at the "HDR mode" in this guy's datasheet: http://www.aptina.com/products/image_sensors/mt9v034c12stc/
To be honest I think exposure was the software as you could reliably underexpose it and get the result you wanted.
Colours, probably dynamic range as you state. Looking at the curves for a pure white photo suggests range of blue was a little tight which is what made it look like out of date Kodak ektachrome on a good day. That may be software again bit I'm suspicious as the sensor on my D3100 doesn't exhibit that problem. Perhaps its better quality control.
Blue curves being off says they probably did a poor job on the transmittance of their blue filter material. There is also a trend toward oversaturation in cheap consumer cameras. Makes the consumer say "oh, it's so colorful!"
With cheap sensors the name of the game is always "get it close, and find a way to hack it so most people won't know."
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...
They recently got rapped by the FTC for it.
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-i...
The difference is that the negative Microsoft news tends to float on top of sites like HN more than positive news, and the reverse is true for Google so this alters perceptions of people.