I came to that conclusion about Google several years ago. There's a reason that I never bother to look at my Google+ account even though I created one. I didn't trust it to not go away, so why bother. And that was almost four years ago.

We're well past the point where new Google services should be presumed DOA. My general assumption at this point is that unless it is a major source of ad revenue or they spent at least triple-digit millions to acquire it, they don't care about it.

So what you're saying is that the GGP should himself or herself a letter about it. Sounds like a solid plan to me.

You're assuming that fix-ups involve the same characters. That need not be the case. For example, most people would probably categorize my first novel as a fix-up, because a chunk of it started as an unrelated short story that I adapted into the universe. It uses different characters, and is expressed as a flashback to the main character as a child, being told the secondary story by his grandfather (who otherwise plays a very insignificant role in the book).

Other fix-ups interleave stories about different groups of characters that are happening at the same time. If done well, the result is indistinguishable from any other well-written third-person novel unless you've read one or more of the original stories.

Actually, it does make them incompetent. A competent leader would look at your point of view, recognize that your points have merit (assuming they do), and try to find a compromise design that meets your needs without compromising too much on their goals. Only an incompetent leader is intransigent and is unwilling to adapt his or her views when presented with new information that contradicts them.

You have to come up with a better reason than "that's the way it has been done in the past". Sometimes decisions need to be made to undo past fails. So make an argument about the merits of the current design please.

Making changes to a design may be justified, but it is the responsibility of those who want to change the design to justify those changes by showing how it makes things easier for the common use case without making the uncommon use cases impossible. If the designer can't do that, then either the design change needs to be rethought or it needs to be a user preference.

Either way, if you're going against established norms, and if there were good, solid reasons for those norms, you'd better have a darn good justification for going against convention, because probably 99.9% of the time, when UI designers do so, they're making a serious mistake. To use an architecture example, the Centre Pompidou is quite possibly the ugliest building in existence. They went against the established norms, and they got away with it because it's an art gallery, and a part of what art galleries do is to challenge those norms. But try to design a law firm's headquarters that way, and you'll be asked to take a long walk off a short pier.

This MacBook (not a MacBook Air, nor a MacBook Pro) is aimed at a definite market segment, arguably the biggest buyer of Apple's computers... college students.

Go poll real college students and see how many of them use their laptop to charge their cell phones at night to save space in their tiny dorm room. See how many of them sync their phones to their laptops using a cable. Go ahead. I'll wait.

A cell phone manufacturer building a laptop that can't even be connected to their own cell phone without unplugging the laptop from the wall falls solidly on the "There's not enough crack in the world for this design to make sense" end of the scale. I truly can't imagine what they could possibly have been thinking, and I'm even more baffled that nobody along the way spoke up and said, "What in h*** are you thinking?" loudly enough to get this design rethought before it made it all the way to the general public.

The key words in your post are "for work". Apple has not historically built products that are designed primarily for corporate users. It builds stuff for consumers. And a sizable percentage of consumer laptop users regularly use HDMI. A sizable percentage regularly use SD cards. A sizable percentage regularly use their laptop to charge their cell phone while traveling. As you start to chip away at the highly common tasks that this laptop fails miserably at doing, you're quickly left wondering who will actually buy this, or at least I am. I'd imagine it will be very popular among Apple managers, and maybe in some other corporate environments, but beyond that....

Okay, maybe K-12, but only by cannibalizing the K-12 iPad market.

Which is pretty much everybody who uses HDMI. Have you seen how quickly Netflix burns your battery life? And on an ultrathin laptop that tries to squeeze every bit of battery power that it can out of an undersized battery, I'd expect it to be even worse.

Try an $80 adapter... just to get HDMI. This new laptop makes no sense. I can't think of anybody I know who doesn't use HDMI with their laptops, even if it is just as a way of piping Netflix to a hotel TV while traveling. And I can't think of anybody who doesn't use a USB port, even if it is just for charging an iPhone. So pretty much 100% of laptop users will have to own this enormously overpriced, clumsy adapter and carry it around with them at all times, just so they could make that computer slightly thinner.

Worse, most users polled would rather Apple make laptops thicker to give us better battery life, because the real-world battery life is a third what Apple claims unless you do nothing more complex than running Word and a web browser. A whole day running Xcode or Photoshop? Yeah, right. Making them even thinner and taking away ports that nearly everybody uses is exactly the opposite of what users are asking for.

Who did they design this for again? Apple managers?

My position is that businesses make money using the property, and their location is a significant contributing factor to their financial success, so because they gain the most from owning a particular piece of property, they should also have the highest property tax burden. Residents receive less benefit from owning property, so they should pay less.

On the flip side of that, business property should be taxed on property's actual value, because it is actively making money using that property, so the business should be able to recover the difference in value through the use of the property. If it can't, then that business isn't making effective use of a scarce resource (commercially zoned real estate) and should make way for a business that will.

That's what bugs me about California's Prop 13. People get stuck in their homes and can't afford to move closer to their jobs because they'd take a huge property tax hit, but businesses just lease from land management companies that own properties forever (literally, because businesses don't ever really die), thus artificially deflating their costs and encouraging businesses to locate themselves in places where housing is most expensive rather than in the suburbs where most of their employees live. All of these factors put serious strain on the highway system, on workers, etc.

And rental housing units have artificially deflated rent because they aren't subject to property tax increases based on the value of the property, thus making it harder and harder for people to justify buying homes. As a result, whenever there's a recession, the housing market falls significantly faster in California than the national average.

If you ask me, property tax should be limited to property that is used commercially, either for a business (not including small businesses run by an individual within his or her home) or for rental purposes, and should be eliminated entirely for personal residences (or at least for your primary residence). This would go a long way towards fixing a lot of problems with one simple law change.

That's certainly true in many states. We used to take advantage of that law by buying expensive things at a discount from stores in Kentucky right before the end of the year; if they had those products on their books on January 1, they had to pay tax on them, so they had an added incentive to sell them. Thus, they were willing to take a little bit less money for them, because they knew they'd get that much less if they sold them a week later anyway.

What horrible department were you in? That doesn't sound like any department I encountered. Well, I'm not sure about the IT folks.

I thought Apple had already done this. Their cafeteria workers have been employees since the late 90s, give or take, and the folks who sit at the front desk are also employees. I had always assumed the security guards were as well, but apparently not.

About 5600 lines. However, because it was a glorified case statement, you were really only debugging a single case at a time, each of which was about the length of a sane function, so splitting it into functions would do little to improve readability. I like to trot out that example to terrify people, but the function itself was really quite sane and easy to maintain.

You did, however, have to fully understand the state machine as a whole, which in total was almost twenty kloc, had almost 200 instance variables in the state object, and leaned heavily on a tree object with about 30 instance variables. That's the point at which most people's heads exploded.

Either way, 4,500 lines is the size of a fairly straightforward iOS app. Most folks can dig into that and figure out enough to maintain it without spending a huge amount of time, even if the organization isn't ideal. When you hit tens of thousands of lines, that's where you have to start thinking about how you organize it and document it, because with such large projects, if you jump into the middle without a complete picture, you're likely to be hopelessly lost.