Developers, please take note of the authors statement below....

"Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “The cloud” is the last place they want their data to go."

There are so many great note taking and productivity application that I just can't use because the majority of my notes are of a confidential nature. If my company provided macbook where to be compromised I would not be held liable, however if my personal dropbox or evernote account where compromised I would be held accountable.

No, thank you. I know abused kids are a serious issue, but the vast majority of kids aren't abused, and this is a disturbing ad to show specifically to a kid, especially when the grown-up with them doesn't see it.

I'm picturing walking past this billboard with my kid and having him ask "Daddy, why does that kid look all beat up" and answering "no, that kid looks perfectly normal, you're making it up". Nice.

There are far better ways to have a very high-quality 2-way covert channel to any kid old enough to read an ad and act on the information here, namely: school. Many teachers are extremely pro-active about figuring out signs of abuse. My mother was a teacher and intervened decisively and successfully in a serious ongoing physical abuse situation once.

Plus, the idea that you might care about kids at school and find out what's up with them is a good precedent that can lead to a lot of other nice related things even when there isn't abuse. On the other hand, lenticular ads that show different things to adults and kids is not a good precedent, whether it's used to show grosser ads to grownups than we currently have to see already ("hey, the kids can't see this") or to covertly market to kids.

This is a sadly shallow article; where I think it fails is in recognising (and responding to) the core of the criticism levelled at Arc. Instead there is some pithy comparison to 70s cars.

The 911 is timeless for a number of reasons: Porsche have spent years keeping the brand and style consistent. It was expensive and exclusive, which made it desirable.

But that care was very hard to drive. If you don't know what you're doing then you will not get anything like the true performance it can give.

It was also very expensive, so only those with the adequate resources could afford one. These were not always people who could get the true performance out of the car.

The Cad, on the other hand, is a fantastic car in its own right. Widely available, easy to get its maximum performance, perfect for almost any job. OK, so it doesn't look as sexy, and for seriously hardcore tasks it doesn't perform as well as the Porsche. But if I had to pick a car that was most likely to be reliable today then the Cad is an obvious choice.

Even more damning; Caddillac, like Porsche and the 911, were still making that brand of car up till ~2006. You wouldn't recognise it though because the shape and performance has evolved to meet modern needs.

It's sad to see his list of languages; whilst I would agree C is a ridiculously good language, smalltalk and lisp? They've always struck me as pretty specialist. Conversely a lot of production code still uses Cobol and Pascal. And what about Fortran? Or Delphi (wasn't Skype written in Delphi originally?).

I know we're hackers, and so it's hip to drive Prosche's. But it is sometimes sad to see how we forget about a massive section of our industry who also do cool things, but tend not to have blogs...