Hi, I'm Weiran Zhang. I'm passionate about technology and building thriving software teams. This blog is where I write about things I find interesting. You can follow me on Mastodon.
My local (Northern Virginia) Microsoft store sold out in 15 minutes, which means there wasn’t much to sell. The local Best Buy sold out too, but only received one unit. The local Staples received and sold a whopping two units. Selling out on launch day doesn’t mean very much when there isn’t anything to sell in the first place.
Design is now so ingrained with taste that it's quite hard to form partisan arguments, but Rian van der Merwe manages it:
In an interview this week, Mr Heins hailed the success of his company’s new phones, saying that sales in the UK were “beyond expectations”. Talking about the Z10 - one of two new BlackBerry handsets unveiled last week - he added: “White is sold out already. The black is hard to stock up again. It’s very encouraging.” \[…\] Staff at Phones 4U, the exclusive UK supplier of the white Z10, said that they have not sold out of the handsets. When the website Mobile News contacted the retailer’s customer services and two of its retail stores, all of them said the white handset was still in stock.
In late October, researchers at North Carolina State University alerted Google to a security flaw that could let scam artists send phony text messages to Android phones — a practice called “smishing” that can ensnare consumers in fraud. Google’s security officials replied in minutes, confirming the flaw and promising to correct it. Within days they had incorporated a fix into the latest version of the Android operating system, Jelly Bean 4.2, and made available a security update for earlier versions. But for most Android phones, the fix never arrived. For many, it never will.
Good reporting from Ed Bott, when comparing the Surface Pro to a MacBook Air the amount of free space is about the same. The problem is that people will naturally compare the Surface Pro with an iPad.
This is Dell’s Battle of Britain. This could be his finest hour or it could be him and his ego, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s last stand against the Bolivian army. Who knows. So why do it? My explanation — you don’t really have a rational choice, so you make an emotional choice. As a founder whose name adorns the shingle outside the door, Dell is playing a high stakes poker to literally save his good name. Just the idea that some faceless Asian company would own “Dell” the brand and his name is anathema.
Discourse is a new 'discussion platform' to replace the old, slow, and over-complicated forum software like phpBB.
The Galaxy brand is fast becoming more popular than Android, I wonder if Google feel threatened by this or if it's part of their master plan.
Tim Berners-Lee spoke at a Linux conference today about mobile platforms and native apps vs. HTML: