Facebook has had a lot of flack recently surrounding its policy on privacy. Since December, when Facebook decided to controversially change the privacy settings of its 350 million users, the complaints have kept rolling in.
Well Facebook founder, 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg has hit back. Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco, he said that people no longer expect total privacy online.
“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people” said Zuckerberg.
“That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
In a way I have to agree with him, I mean people are free to use Facebook, or not, and to change their privacy settings, or not. No one is forcing anyone to reveal information. Surely if people were that unhappy they would just stop using the site but they don’t.
Now we all know that revealing personal information on the Internet, whether that is on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site or blog or website, can carry risks, we only need to check out the news headlines to see that so the responsibility lies with us as users.
Zuckerberg maintains that the rise in the popularity of sites like Facebook is a reflection of how our attitudes towards communicating online have changed in the last few years.
“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?”
“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information,” he said.
Zuckerberg also reckons that companies need to keep up with the times too, and to do so they have to reflect the ‘social norms’.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built” he said.
“Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.
“But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”
They sure did!
For starters, a fair share of the new MacBook’s circuitry comes from Nvidia instead of Intel. Most notably the 9400M integrated graphics, which is a big step up from the Intel X3100 found in the white MacBook. Apple claims it has five times the performance over the Intel IGP, but in the real world the difference is actually even more significant – the 9400M lets you to play some recent games whereas the old and tired Intel X3100 certainly does not.
As far as the new design goes, this is arguably the best looking laptop since the Osborne 1. The no-doubt well paid broilers at Apple’s design department have done an awesome job with the new "unibody" construction, allegedly made from a single piece of aluminum.
To get completely in line with an otherwise minimalistic design, they also decided to let go of the trackpad button altogether, opting for one built into the glass trackpad itself. Thanks to the multi-touch functionality, this works very well – actually there’s no need to use the built-in button at all. The new four-finger gestures to bring down Expose and Spaces are also well implemented.
Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to drill a lot of holes in that single piece of aluminum. There’s not a single FireWire port to be found, which is bound to feel like a betrayal to many diehard Mac users with a room full of FireWire accessories. On top of that it only has a measly two USB ports and Apple’s proprietary Mini DisplayPort, so forget about using your external monitor unless you fork over an additional $29 for a standard VGA or DVI adapter, or $99 (!) for the dual-link DVI adapter.
The new MacBook is available in two varieties (so far): one 2.0GHz version (our review sample) and a more expensive 2.4GHz model with a larger hard drive and backlit keyboard. Both models come with the same Nvidia chipset, a LED-backlit screen, and 2 gigs of top-of-the-line 1066MHz DDR3 RAM. It’s worth mentioning that the hard drives that ship with the new MacBooks are very well isolated and silent. When the laptop is idle or doing light tasks like web browsing, it’s almost inaudible.
Thanks to the DDR3 memory, a 1066MHz front side bus, and the Nvidia chipset, the new MacBooks are faster than older models at the same CPU clock speed. Our 2.0GHz MacBook generated an Xbench score of 166.40. It is also perfectly capable of playing some games – WoW delivered fully playable framerates (50-60 fps) at high settings, which is to be expected from an aging game, but even Call of Duty 4 was playable with the settings tuned down a little. Apple promised five hours of battery life, which we found to be a little too optimistic, but the 4.5 hours we managed to squeeze out of it is still very good.
Overall, the aluminum MacBook is an excellent laptop. Although it’s somewhat more expensive than we had hoped, you get a solid and great-looking laptop, and some features that you’ll never find in a similar PC.
HP released a whole number of new laptops last week, updating virtually their entire line with better hardware and more attractive looks.
HP has recently done a lot of work in updating their consumer products, including Pavilion notebooks, G-Series notebooks and Envy notebooks. Many of them have a redesigned brushed metal chassis as well as updated internals. As part of what might become a weekly ritual here at Laptopical.com, I'll walk you through some of the best new releases of this week.