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A few individual companies suing each other over patent disputes is one thing. When Apple is going out and suing ANYONE who has anything to do with an Android phone (which is raping the iPhone in sales and market share), that's using litigation over innovation.

An oldie but a goodie, this graphic should be updated but it shows the problem doesn't lie with Apple but with the general state of mobile computing at the moment. Everyone is suing everyone else, a side effect of mobile being the most competitive business out there at the moment (a good thing.) Apple is just more visible because everything they do is news, apparently.

As to Android "raping" Apple in marketshare, all Android manufacturers combined have 38% of the market while Apple by itself owns 27% of the market and a whopping 50% of the profits. That's a pretty comfortable position. Worst comes to worst, long term they end up with something resembling their mac marketshare now, another profitable business if not a cash-cow.

As for innovative products? I'm not sure what you're talking about when they make minor improvements to hardware without adding new features (usually - they did finally put a front facing camera on) and copying OS features from other mobile OS's..... I had an iPhone a couple years ago when it was the best and most innovative thing out there - now it's not, so I moved on.

That's the Apple Way(tm), great leap forward followed by incremental improvement. That's why they spent a decade tweaking the iPod and why you find people who don't get it bitching about the (perceived) lack of new features in OSX releases. What Apple don't do is feature bloat, in many cases they even prefer to cut rather than to add. Personally I like it but many don't, especially the more hardcore spec-obsessed geeks. Thing is, taking away things and improving the UI and user experience is also innovation. For an example look no further than Google Search's famously uncluttered interface which was innovative in its portal-riddled day (though possibly accidentally so.)

If Windows Phone 7 turns into the best mobile OS with the best hardware next year, I'll ditch Android for WP7. I'm not a fanboy - I go with who's producing the best product for the best price. Sadly, Apple fails on both counts - but I blame that on Lord Jobs arrogance in knowing that he can literally sell dog shit with an Apple sticker on it (iShit) and fanboys will pay hundreds of dollars for this (literally) useless piece of shit. Why innovate when your core customer base is so religiously devoted to you that they will always unquestionably buy anything you tell them to?

Saying you're not a fanboy (I really hate that word, it's the "nigger" of the geek world), and then spouting off nonsense like "Lord Jobs", "iShit", "religiously devoted", etc doesn't jive. Keep it rational and factual. You and I have a different idea of what makes up the ideal smartphone that's all. All these insults just confuse and inflame.

China did block Wikipedia before. I can see them doing it again, and maybe this time permanently. Unless Wikipedia makes a China-friendly version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Wikipedia_by_the_People's_Republic_of_China
http://shanghaiist.com/archives/2005/10/20/you_bastards_wi.php
http://www.itworld.com/040614wikipedia
http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com/china_blocks_wikipedia_again.htm

I didn't know that [...] only Indians can be named Haji. Aren't you being racist by assuming that names are tied to race?

A) Because of the outsourcing of tech jobs to India, the "cheaper Indian tech worker" is a stereotype - especially in tech circles.

B) Haji is a racial epithet for all people with brown skin or of non-Christian belief. It is a blanket term for "the other" or "them", and is used by US military personnel in Iraq like "gook" was used in Vietnam, "Kraut" in Germany, and the way the "N word" is used in the United States by rednecks: As a way to dehumanize and demoralize.

I will assume you were ignorant of this second fact, but have a hard time believing you didn't know the first.

Manufacturing a fictional cheaper coder named Haji for the sake of discussion may not have been willfully bigoted, but to claim that your fictional Haji was anything other than a person with brown skin insults the intelligence of everyone reading this thread.

Of one thing you are correct: Nationalism and Racism are not (strictly speaking) the same thing. Xenophobia has many shades, but they all divide the world into "us" and "them".

I don't believe there was any malice in your choice of names. If only you said "If Bob next door can write a app and sell it for $1.99 that you want to write and sell for $29.99...", but you didn't. You used a stereotype and an epithet to create a "them" to compare someone to and got called out on it.

Man up and move on. Don't dig any deeper.

I didn't say that, I said a lot of their sites uses python and get a lot of traffic, one example is code.google.com.

You can read some of it here if you like:
http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm

What the hell do you think HTML, XML, news stories, book descriptions, and reviews are? Are they not text?

Yahoo Shopping was written in Lisp. It was later rewritten, in sections at least, by a mixture of C++ and Perl. They wrote a Lisp interpreter in C++ to facilitate this.

Yahoo would have never happened without Perl.

Slashdot already ran a story about the BBC making a Rails-like framework for Perl because they liked Rails but prefer Perl as a language. The article at that second link says they're pretty dedicated to Perl for their whole Web infrastructure.

Amazon use Perl as a major component gluing the front end order-entry system to a back-end database, and also for part of their document authoring chain.

Amazon (for Amazon.com's own site) uses Mason (a Perl website templating system) as their official web development template system, and they're hiring for people with that skill set. They do use a lot of Java, too, apparently, but Perl is an important part of the site.

IMDb uses Linux, Apache, Perl and mod_perl to run pretty much the whole site, and is part of Amazon.

Google is using quite a bit of server-side JavaScript -- on the JVM as a replacement for Java in many cases.

Google uses C++, Python, and Java for most public-facing sites, and much of the management of the systems is done with Python.

This Google job (for a software engineer) lists C++ as a must and Python as a plus. This other job (for a software engineer) requires both one or more of C, C+, or Java and one or more of shell, Perl, PHP, or Python.

The nation of Scotland used Perl to migrate millions of land records between systems, which certainly is data munging, but a pretty important bit of it.

It was way back in 1999, but Agilent used Perl to build their big customer-facing e-commerce site.

Booking.com (part of Priceline) uses primarily Perl to run their site.

This PowerPoint presentation says Morgan Stanley in 2004 was using Perl written by over 500 developers on over 9000 (no, that's not a /b/ ism) systems to keep their network running smoothly, for a web front end development language, to develop middleware, and to develop backend applications.

ValueClick and TicketMaster make much use of Perl, too. That's along with the content management system -- Bricolage -- used by the Dean for President campaign, ETOnline, and the World Health Organization being written in Perl. You may have also heard of MovableType, which is a serious CMS from Six Apart. Or maybe you've heard of a site that runs it, called The Huffington Post, who right now is looking for someone to work on it?

Uhh.. You realize that Google uses Python right? http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm

Custom protocols and standards wreck the web, which originally got large in part because of its inherent interoperability.

It's why we bothered to put things in HTML in the first place, instead of linking Gopher trees to LaTex and .doc files.

I have never liked Flash for this reason. It's a hog on Opera, and unstable as well on Firefox. It encourages the worst kind of contentless web site creation. Finally, it's a giant sieve of security holes and vulnerabilities.

I understand the retarded, half-coherent post about Microsoft supposedly Google-bombing the open source EMR system. They have no motive though, because, like I said, everyone with MONEY buys into the big integrated systems like Cerner and Epic. There's no money in going after VistA, so there's no reason for them to do it. It just so happens to be a good name, so take off your tin foil hat.

Maybe you should learn about the healthcare IT industry before blathering about "Google bombing".

Here
http://histalk.blog-city.com/
are
http://www.healthcomputing.com/
some links
http://www.himss.org/
n00b

You underestimate children.

? Perhaps I was unclear. I don't mean that OLPC is "dumbed down" (it's not). I mean that the custom UI is designed for self-directed exploration of both the computer and the world accessible to the computer, with minimal IT infrastructure. This is simply not true of off-the-shelf laptops, as anyone who gets to help maintain them will testify. (And I trust you're aware that the child can easily switch from the custom UI to Gnome, right? At least, the one I played with at PyCon did, and the speaker indicated that was the plan for production.)

Thus, a child in Nigeria, let's call her Fa'izah, handed a stock Windows computer (your words), would have [a] no problem or [b] much problem with the following?

1. Connecting wirelessly to another stock Windows laptop in the next village, 1 km away, which is not connected to the Internet, and is owned by (let's say) Maimunaand, and collaboratively working with her on an art project;
2. Figure out how to connect her new friend Maimuna to the Internet, using a peer-to-peer multi-hop mesh network from Maimuna's laptop to Fa'izah's laptop to the satellite dish at the school, 2 km in the opposite direction from Maimuna, so Maimuna can browse Wikipedia for ideas on the art project;
3. After taking a wrong turn in the project, "rolling back" several saves to the version that looked best, and restarting from there; and
4. Having finished the project, and become interested in how Microsoft Paint draws patterns, look at the source code to figure it out for herself.

That is the type of collaborative, self-directed educational experience that OLPC is intending to foster. Sorry to sound like an evangelist - I'm not even affiliated with OLPC in any way. But as a teacher, I get pretty jazzed at the possibilities of some of their innovations, and hope to see them in the mainstream soon.

And the OS UI is written in Python, not compatible with anything out there.

Uh, Microsoft? http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython/ (Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "not compatible with anything"?)

The point of providing a UI in a dynamic language is to make it easily modified by the children (which is not under-estimating them, IMHO). Python is a good choice because (1) it runs on pretty much every other computer and virtual platform in the world, so the knowledge gained will transfer wherever the child goes, (2) it's easier to learn than most languages (*far* easier than C++!), and (3) it's a full strength language promoted and used heavily by some of the largest corporations in the world - at Google, for instance, 'python is one of the 3 "official languages" alongside with C++ and Java' http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm, not to mention NASA, Lockheed Martin, Industrial Light and Magic... well, you can google if you like.

The XO isn't perfect, but I obviously think rather highly of it, and believe it is unorthodox in all the right places. If you still don't see why, we are probably just looking for very different things in an educational laptop. Time will tell which approach prevails, I suppose.

Yep - Seanbaby.

For instance when I took the SAT the only reason that I scored in the 90th percentile and not the the 98th percentile was because I was stoned out of my mind on Vicatin from damn near cutting my thumb off in a tablesaw two days before I took it. I did visit one of my teachers from back then (chemistry) and she told me that she has yet to have a class that was as fun as the one my friend and I were in.

Dude, its spelled Vicodin , if you're going to proclaim yourself a "genius", you should at least attempt to spell your words right. Reminds me of that school for the gifted far side comic.

Here's the first e-mail. Their CEO sent out an e-mail response to all their employees the next day (the same day it looks like the CIO suddenly resigned effective immediately).

I don't know what to say about the first e-mail until I see more but the CEO sounds like a real jack ass in the second one. And if that 99.2% number is right then they got bigger problems than some email - that's all I can say!

ac

I think he was perceived as a jerk because of the big fat hound he chose to sleep around with. I may be wrong.

Even if m4p's were sold without DRM from itms (read aac), you'd still need apple hardware to listen to them. So in effect, you are locked into apple with or without DRM. My blog has more details.

Some general GUIDELINES for tagging could be helpful for cross-user findability. I don't see a need for a standard at this point but clever search tools for the tag space are definitely missing. For example, to search for items with two words in a defined order users have to guess the tags of other users, e.g. hard drive: hard::drive, hard_drive, hard-drive). Using a small set of main tags and the concept of ordered tags has some advantages (more details: http://tdot.blog-city.com/advanced_tagging_with_or dered_tags.htm).

The sad thing is, JDJ used to be it for Java/J2EE news. Granted, sys-con has always been a whore of a publisher (ColdFusion Developers' Journal, anyone?), but JDJ once had insightful news and information that an actual factual professional Java developer could use to better perform his/her job. Nowadays, it's just thinly-veiled pimping for frameworks that no one will ever use, often written in bad Engrish. I think they jumped the shark when Alan Williamson took over as chief editor back in '02. I always loved the guy's columns, but he had a hard time saying "no" to bad articles. When they guessed wrong and started pushing EJB real hard (despite the industry's complete lack of enthusiasm), that was the last straw. Hell, even Williamson himself acknowledged as much in his blog.

I started getting it for free in the late nineties, and was grandfathered in even when they started charging for it. I let my free subscription lapse long ago.

Look at the comments here for more information about the 25 year old Publication Project Supervisor in the Health Education and Training Department, and some of the nonsense he is spouting as facts.

See also here (the Kaiser summary) for a more balanced view of the issue.

Look at the comments here for more information about the 25 year old Publication Project Supervisor in the Health Education and Training Department, and some of the nonsense he is spouting as facts.

See also here (the Kaiser summary) for a more balanced view of the issue.

Couple of things to clarify here. First off, I'm admin at Chinese-forums.com and I added the note to the wikipedia page which is quoted in the article. Editor and Publisher doesn't seem to understand how Wikipedia works, as Wikipedia didn't 'receive word' - I didn't contact them at all, I just edited their page, and the company did not say 'We'll see how long this lasts', I did, although that has now been edited out. Secondly, the (un)blocking. Wikipedia is now accessible in English. The Chinese version remains blocked. The unblocking was reported first about 6pm Tuesday Beijing time by a blogger in the south of China, http://liuzhou.blog-city.com/ here http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=132 93

This article is informative and all, but it doesn't give us techies much insight on the companies that are providing the IT behind these major healthcare organizations. There are a handful of major vendors out there, and a lot of smaller ones. These vendors not only create jobs in their cities, but require the facilities that use the software to hire teams of tech savvy individuals. Only a small percentage of hospitals are using Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and the process for health care organizations to convert from paper charts can sometimes take years. These roll outs give a lot of jobs to consultants too. I'm really surprised the article didn't mention that. I was trying to think of some good links I could give you all that would list some major vendors, but I can't think of what would be fair since I work for a vendor that supplied a software to a number of the healthcare organizations mentioned in the article.

Here's a link to HIS talk though, it's a forum for those of us in the healthcare IT industry.

http://histalk.blog-city.com/

If you read it you'll see a lot of company names repeated, in alphabetical order here are a few of the big ones that come to mind (difinitely not a comprehensive list): Cerner, Epic Systems Corp., GE Healthcare, McKesson,

Actually, that's wrong.

Page and Brin were going to name their company Googol, after the number. However, their first investor handed them a $10,000 cheque made out to "Google Inc", so they went with that spelling instead.

The Monty Python connection is a coincidence. Were you ever actually told differently by anyone, or did you just see it, assume and then start presenting said assumption as fact?

http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_ stein__sdforum.htm discusses the fact that Google has three official languages: c++, Java, and Python. It then goes into some detail about the use of Python at Google. It is a worthwhile read.

I recently blogged about a talk given by Greg Stein (a googler) where he briefly discussed why they use mysql

Good question. Why don't more people look at python? I just recently attended a forum where Greg Stein of Google addressed this issue.
He obviously thinks python is the "secret sauce"...

He wants his opinion openly known to the CHINESE public. It is not as if he's been banned from posting, d'uh. If he has been banned from posting he'd be in jail now. He's back online now, but regrettably gone back where he originally started in Blog City.

Do you think it is feasible for him to ask every reader to install freenet in order to read his posts? Blog City is blocked by the GFW because of him, and people are still fuming about such consequences.

He has to resort to ask his beloved readers to use proxies, feedburner or even email subscription in order to read his post!

(N.B. Blogger is also TOTALLY BLOCKED by the GFW, think about the far-reaching consequences... MSN is one of the few sites which is OPEN at the moment and enjoys wide readership. In fact, the top ten blogs in China (in terms of traffic) are all hosted in MSN, go figure...)

It seems people start to realize the hidden price tags of monopolies like Walmart and Microsoft. Why not for Google? Is it really to early to realize the risks of Google's market dominance? Is Google's PR motto "do no evil" still unquestioned? I think it is time to look for alternatives beyond Google that can generate a sustainable development and without the threads of monopolies. ... Google Print and the Society

Interestingly, they allegedly misspelled googol on accident. It also seems that the founders didn't know much HTML.

http://panela.blog-city.com/cinelerra_forking_and_ competition_redux.htm

His blog is at http://panela.blog-city.com/. He thought it was a great conference.

If you're a fan of good game music, pick up Phantom Crash for the Xbox. The gameplay is repetitive, the bot construction is opaque with a steep learning curve, and the RPG elements are cliched, but the soundtrack is easily the best and most eclectic that I've ever heard on a game.

I'll be buying the upcoming PS2 version just on the hopes that the music will be half as good.

http://pdb.blog-city.com/

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/04/22 12228&tid=108

And yhea its the Inquirer but still worth a read:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9504

JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL Editor-in-chief Alan Williamson has recently awarded Marc Fleury with the title "JBoss's own worst enemy" in his blog (http://alan.blog-city.com/readblog.cfm?BID=77874) . It appears that there were some polling inconsistencies with the JDJ awards and that the JBoss Group's CEO gave Williamson quite the verbal lashing in a letter earlier this week. Williamson reacted by publishing Fleury's email in his blog.

I agree. Check out my post here, where I basically say the same thing, just a bit earlier:
http://panela.blog-city.com/apples_latest_announce ment.htm

Why do so many people sell their games to game stores? Wouldn't they make more money on eBay and the buyer would pay less, win-win?

Convenience and selection. Selling stuff on eBay (shipping, registration, getting payment, deadbeats, etc) is a rip-snortin' PITA that most casual gamers don't want to put up with.

The hypothetical game that would warrant $8 in store credit would probably fetch around the same in a straight up eBay auction, give or take. Then, subtract eBay fees, paypal fees, time and money to ship, and it's suddenly less competitive.

fwiw,
http://pdb.blog-city.com/

Just a couple of nits. I don't mean to beat on the guy since I'm in the same boat. I've managed independent stores for about 5 years now, and 6 months ago bought my own.

The key is that if you love games more than you love money, you should NOT be in this business. If your focus is on renting a 1400sqft strip mall gamer room where you can hold court and gab about games and do special orders, you have doomed yourself to failure. If you find your store slouching toward that ideal, turn that sucker around NOW.

If you're an independent and don't rent out games, you're committing slow suicide. Not only is it a nice side income that you can count on every week, but it also means that you DON'T have to stock every single $50 game that comes out.

"Hey, do you have that new Fleshreaper game?"

"Sure. But have you played it yet? I've heard mixed reviews on it. It's just $7 for a week, and wouldn't you hate to blow $50 on a game you'll hate? Lemme sign you up."

Bingo. Instead of having to spend $160 to get 4 copies to sit on your shelf and silently stare at you, while you pray for them to sell, you can spend $80 for two rental copies, maintain the appearance of a well stocked store and give the customer the impression that you care more about making him happy than making $50. If it's not Christmas, I only order new releases to get rentals and preorders. I do stock surefire stuff (GTA, Madden and other AAA titles), but everything else I do NOT stock deep.

Systems: Why should I bother losing money on these when I can send people to the Walmart across the street? "And please check out the fine selection of used PS2 titles before you go!"

Giving store credit for used stuff: This is where we see, again, that gamers shouldn't own game stores. If you don't have your banter down, you're in the wrong line of work. "Sure you paid $50 for that when it came out. But it sells new for $20 now. I can give you $8 for it, and that's about $5 more than what EB will give you for it!"

Anyway, while I don't think my business model will last forever, I also don't think properly run independent stores are going to burst into flames. I will continue to exploit the holes that EB, Best Buy and Blockbuster leave gaping open.

I bought my store 6 months ago from a guy who was augering it in because he wasn't willing to spend the time and money to turn it around. Income is up 20% this month from this time last year. So far, so good.

http://pdb.blog-city.com/

The documentation for developing on the netbeans platform wasn't great but it's gotten a lot better. This blog entry is a good starting point to see what people are saying about the netbeans platform. It has a lot of links.

I've played around with the netbeans platform. All the IDE stuff are modules and easy to remove from the platform. The auto update is part of the platform as well. You can see who's built stuff on netbeans on their website. There's a long list.

you might want to read this :)

I think James Turner says it best, nice turn of phrase :)

At the request of Apple the license was changed to allow them to integrate it into their proprietory software. See this discussion. Unfortunately they didn't forsee that Apple would obfuscate their patches by merging them into mega-patches.

The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface.

Here is the /. article that links to that blog.

I think you were thinking of this Google Tidbits article (source) from a little while ago.

Here's library director Francis DiMenno's blog
http://www.dimenno.blog-city.com

This is probably due to the fact that they do not know html. ;)

_____________________________

My Blog Get a free ipod!

As mentioned in a previous slashdot story, Google often tries new features on a subset of users. Depending on how they work and feedback from users, they may or may not include them in the standard interface.

For those too lazy to click through to the original article referenced by the above story, the relevant line is:

Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren't told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.

Yep. The Google article on here a couple days ago pointed out how Google specifically does testing on subnets before going wide with a new feature.

From the earlier /. story titled "Google Tidbits" which mentioned this blog entry about "an evening with Google's Marissa Mayer", we find that:
Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example.

So, it is possible that only people in this guy's subnet are seeing these pictures of "Traktor"...

"Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren't told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it."

...from this page , which was posted on /. earlier this week.

Elections here use big mark-sense ballots, which are scanned when they go into the locked ballot box. You mark them with a felt-tip marker, using big marks that are unambiguous. They're counted automatically, but can easily be recounted manually if necessary. Any single ballot box can be recounted and verified against the scanner results for that box, so it's easy to check the accuracy of the system.

Here's his take on Diebold:

• It's about time that Diebold got punished for its lying ways. The company this week was fined by California's Attorney General ...

No ambiguity there.

Slocum has an RSS feed for election issues.

Elections here use big mark-sense ballots, which are scanned when they go into the locked ballot box. You mark them with a felt-tip marker, using big marks that are unambiguous. They're counted automatically, but can easily be recounted manually if necessary. Any single ballot box can be recounted and verified against the scanner results for that box, so it's easy to check the accuracy of the system.

Here's his take on Diebold:

• It's about time that Diebold got punished for its lying ways. The company this week was fined by California's Attorney General ...

No ambiguity there.

Slocum has an RSS feed for election issues.

this guy has a pretty good side by side comparison of a Treo 600 and 1st gen side kick.