A few years ago, this would have been a story about how geeks prefer DVDs because they don't want proprietary DRM-encumbered formats that only work in Windows and require installing Silverlight. Now, it is about how studios are behind because they only allow DVDs. It is amazing how quickly convenience trumps freedom.

Blame marketing, not UX designers. Some companies have UI design done by marketing, and others have it done by technical staff. Both are wrong.

A UX designer would not favor form over function. A UX designer is responsible for implementing best practices, assigning a consistent look-and-feel, and gathering data to ensure that the "user experience" is a good one. That means measuring productivity. They should be drawing from knowledge in graphic design, psychology, statistics, and engineering. Contrast that with Marketing people who want it to look cool for their brochures. They are the form-over-function people, not the designers.

My employer hired a user experience expert and it is great. Our new products have the same look-and-feel. The icons are no longer coder art. They are applying best practices like moving tabs to the bottom on touch screens so your arm isn't in the way of the screen and you don't get monkey arm. Stuff like that. Having a real UX expert is a good thing.

Don't blame the profession or the terminology for fools masquerading as experts.

Thank you for saying this!! I just posted this in the OneNote discussion and nobody seemed to get it.

If you want to synch data, use an existing protocol like FTP, SFTP, SCP, rsynch, etc. The application should prompt the user for URL + user name + password. Then it can synch to anything. One should not have to run special host software like a Firefox Sync server or Sharepoint in order to synch files.

I remember this from a Slashdot article back in 2009.
New laser system targets mosquitos

1) I suppose it depends on what the requirements are. For 90% of users, just synching the file would probably be enough, with minimal conflict resolution across users/devices.
2) Shouldn't the customer needs be more important?

This is one of the reasons I'm excited about Owncloud. Finally, a way to synch files and share stuff without having to rely on someone else's servers. I'd love to be able to sync files amongst my family. But good luck finding an app that works on Windows, Mac, Android, and IOS that doesn't require a monthly fee to use someone else's server when I already have my own.

If I had time I'd find some open-source Android text editor and modify it to automatically rsych the files when you open the app.

Thank you, I was looking for that term.

Yes, you could do that. But that isn't how OneNote is intended to work. You could manually setup a synchronization option for any application. You could do it for Notepad, or Microsoft Word, or Pages, or even iPhoto. But it defeats the purpose of something like OneNote or EverNote.

OneNote and EverNote have *built-in* synchronization. It is easier to setup than creating a scheduled task on every machine. It is convenient, and cross-platform. Ex: Setting up my phone, my wife's mac, and my home PC to synch those files is a pain. OneNote also provides version control and history tracking capabilities. This is really nice. But what would be great is if OneNote or EverNote or Google Docs, could synch to any file server. EverNote and Google Docs synch to their own servers. OneNote can synch to any Sharepoint server or Microsoft's Cloud. They all use their own protocols. That's limiting.

Fair enough.

Here's a few hits from Google. This is interesting because they both agree on the data, but draw different conclusions. The first one says eliminating immigrant workers would result in a 5% cost increase in the stores, which is devastating.
http://www.fb.org/index.php?ac...

The other says the same thing, around 3.6%, but thinks it is a good idea anyway:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...

I find lots of articles claiming that organic is more expensive because it is more labor intensive, but few numbers to say how much. So the impact may be much greater there.

Overall, I've never met a rich farmer before. That's not to say there aren't large multinational corporations who buy and sell food profitably. But that is a long way from farmers. Farmers often only survive because of government subsidies. Today, family farms are vanishing because a strip mall is more profitable per acre. Some family farms vanish because the estate can't pay the inheritance taxes. It's a tough industry.

Ahh, that makes more sense.

You showed a stock chart. It did not show any people, and it did not show how much money they had. Now you are just trolling, so I am done.

Why are VR headsets 90 degrees horizontal? humans can see close to 180 degrees horizontal. I thought FOV was one of the big benefits of VR headsets.

I logged into Facebook for the first time in about 6 months, and it required me to authenticate myself by answering a series of questions about who was in each picture. It would display 3 pictures, each showing a square around a particular person, and it would ask who the person is. It was multiple choice.

I wonder if this is how they confirm that the data is correct, to eliminate intentional errors. You can ask a person who doesn't own the picture and didn't tag it to confirm the person in there. By masking it as an authorization request you convince people who otherwise would not be involved in tagging to participate.

That still doesn't address the issue I am bringing up. Suppose you have a web site: www.mycompany.com, which supports various standard internet protocols for storing files: FTP, SFTP, SCP, HTTP, rsync, ... Yet OneNote can't sync its files onto there. IMHO, that's dumb. The same goes for many many competing products.

That's my point. Why can't they just sync files using existing standard protocols? I'm tired of buying XYZNote and it only syncs with XYZNote's servers. Businesses want to be able to use their servers. And people are more and more paranoid of government spying. They should offer to sync with anything that lets them upload/download.

This same problem happens with image sharing tools. You import your picture to iPhoto: Great! It syncs with Facebook, Flickr, and some others. But maybe not your favorite service. Instead, they should offer a sync over FTP/SFTP/whatever. Then it can work with anything. It's silly that application developers have to tune their app to every flavor-of-the-month service.

Apparently not:

A quick web search claims that Bangladesh has "one of the highest undernutrition rates in the world." Wikipedia agrees with "Though they may own a small plot of land and some livestock and generally have enough to eat, their diets lack nutritional value", and also claims that "Foreign assistance and commercial imports fill the gap".

The one acre-per-person figures I saw were specifically excluding meat.

Show me the portion of that chart that backs-up your claim that doubling the wages of food workers would not impact food prices, and that they could absorb the cost. Or were you merely going "Look! There's rich people over there!"