I have Windows 10 installed on my Laptop (everything but gaming) and my wife's ageing ThinkPad.

I find it noticeably faster esp. on low end Graphics. You mileage may vary.

In comparison to Win 8 (which I had installed, too and which was horrible) it's fairly consistently done and an easy transition for nontechnical users coming from Win 8.

Yes, you do have to opt out of a bunch of stuff that should be opt in. Sadly, the OS is not the only Software you're using that does it this ways. In Chrome you need to opt out of telemetry, too ( https://www.google.com/intl/en... ), Firefox does it right and lets you opt in ( https://support.mozilla.org/en... ). A lot of iOS and Android apps you probably use are "calling home" a lot without even asking you or giving you the chance to opt out (which is bad manners) etc. pp. Apple OSes are a notable exection.

I think as an educated software users we have to adapt by regularly checking the telemetry settings of the software we use like we did adapt habits like manually looking for software updates with security fixes in past times (or defragmenting the harddrive etc. pp.). Computers were never maintenance-free and will remain so.

my god, let's get back to what the _software_ aspect of the essay is.
Google relaunched maps in 2013 with two massive changes:
1. switch from pre-renderd tiles to vector-based client-side rendering (good for native maps app and network traffic)
2. heavy personalization ( watch this intro video from Google in 2013 to see the idea in extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )

So what did O'Beirne see and post? No, he did not see the place names and point of interest marks you will probably see at the same zoom level (esp. in your local area) - he posted a screenshot with the city names the big google correlation machine thinks is relevant to him. This is both good and bad imho. We're even deeper in our bubble and don't even see unwanted city areas on the maps (bad). But when we quickly want to find something relevant, it's great (assuming the relevance works).
Concerning the map design: I agree, the manually / traditionally done tiles had more semantic and cultural context and did in fact look more balanced and structured.
But they did not have any notion of intermediate Zoom levels, which is crucial on smaller screens. And they had a very ugly way to incrementally render on slow connections. If O'Beirne posted Videos instead of images the impression would have been different.

Overall I agree with his findings as long as you see Google Maps as a static map image (to print out). Which it isn't. Even if you see it, I do not agree with one of his findings: Streets that do not connect named places. The actual structure of cities and their wider surroundings did in fact change towards being form- and shapeless continuums of houses and streets. Many areas simply do not have structural centers any more that could be named, but are very relevant to the people living or working there. In addition, new streets are built to _not_ touch city centers but to avoid traffic there. The traditional map layout pattern of lines connecting dots (cities) does not represent the current metropolitan structures any more (and his screenshots were all metropolitan). Does anybody know good resources on the topic?

Totally Agree. The primary issue of a company (Tesla) in an early phase of the market (fully electric vehicles for private use) is to make the market and general consumer acceptance. If you're early you have the know-how advantage anyways, but to get beyond early adopter buyers you need the proof that this thing is not just some rich techie's pipe dream but "normal" and good.

So IMHO the previous responses to this comment (charger grid, battery supply, parts, etc pp.) and also the are probably technically correct and your hint to the "good guy" image is probably, too. But I think the fundamental logic is just that big players entering a market makes this market - which is still extremely far from saturation - more attractive and growing faster than if there were no big players (no, Tesla is not a big player yet in automotive scale).

I think this applies to any market that have no tendency to natural monopolies (e.g. like telecommunications and social networks).

Absolutely true- We've had a few SSDs fail in my company (much higher rate than HDDs, but that's a different issue) and not a single of them failed gracefully. Due to internal reorganization algorithms of the SSD the filesystem's behavior to "mark bad blocks" ran into nonsense. Effect: not even a bit recoverable. New policy for every machine that has the space for an additional HDD ist to either use the SSD as a Caching layer only or to do a full image backup of the SSD every night (SSD->HDD local on the machine, ideal for laptops etc).