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I'm not sure youth is solely responsible for that. Instead, when you hire a bunch of folks through a super-competitive hiring process, everyone thinks it's beneath them to do the boring work that comprises the bulk of most software. This Quora lends a little insight: http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-part-about-working-at-Google

You are aware that homeopathy is nothing but a hoax (source), and try to enforce the neutral point of view of Wikipedia. However, in some of the editions of wikipedia, such as the spanish one, it's quite common to find entries that give a positive spin to hoaxes such as homeopathy or acupuncture; even the spanish entry on the neutral point of view is constantly edited and "interpreted" to make room to "all opinions" no matter their reliability. How feasibile is to truly enforce the NPOV in all the editions of Wikipedia?

You should read the original http://deedy.quora.com/Hacking-into-the-Indian-Education-System. The missing scores are in extremely suspicious positions. For example, there are no scores of 32,33 and 34, and the minimum pass grade if 35. That looks pretty close to a bump to get people to pass. This doesn't look like someone not understanding the grading system. It looks like manipulation. Frankly, speaking as someone who does a fair bit of grading, yes one can get weird distributions from legitimate adjustments, but they don't look like this.

You need to read TFA http://deedy.quora.com/Hacking-into-the-Indian-Education-System that should give you an idea of what the person in the article talks about with tampering data. Even with 1 question asked in the test, the score range should not be this ugly or the evaluation/grading method is not up to par. TLDR summary, it is statistically impossible to miss that "many" score points between 1~100 from this size of data.

On a side note, I am not sure whether the person is going to jail... I hope there won't be "mysteriously missing or injured" person because India culture is not a western culture...

I doubt they have the storage capacity.

ha ha, no. They totally do. Did you know that in 2011, 680 million drives were shipped? Do you really think a couple exobytes of data would even be a blip on the radar? That's only a few thousand drives.

You can't buy that much storage and not affect the market.

1 petabyte = 293 x 3.5 terabyte drives.
1 exobyte = 1024 petabytes.
2 exobytes = 600,064 drives.

Number of drives produced each year: 680 million in 2011.

So, umm.. 0.0006% increase in volume to satisfy that order. Yeah. I'm sure the market just buckled under that enormous demand.

Which is kind of ironic considering their cloud vending came from their retail business. Amazon used to have tons of extra server power set aside which was just used keep the site running smoothly during the insane blitz of online shoppers during the holiday season. Of course that only lasted for a month or so out of the year so they began to lease out that extra server power during all the months it wasn't in use.

This is a myth. AWS founder addressed in in a Quora answer: http://www.quora.com/Amazon/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud-computing-business

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://tnx.nl/php.jpg http://www.quora.com/PHP/Why-is-PHP-hated-by-so-many-developers It's a bad horrible language, and why should I or anyone else be forced to use it.

There's more to it than that:
http://www.quora.com/Canadian-Armed-Forces/What-is-the-rationale-for-Canadas-purchase-of-65-Lockheed-Martin-F-35-planes

the more people that join the pyramid the more the "bitcoins" held by people like the above poster are worth

No. During the last year and a half, when the value of a bitcoin went from $32 (at which price point I bought a few) down to just above $2 (at which price point I didn't manage to buy a few) and then back up to $30 again the number of bitcoin users has increased exponentially.

There's actually no correlation whatsoever between the number of bitcoin users and the price of a bitcoin, which could be seen as falsifying your statement.

On the other hand, it's well known that the bitcoin economy in no way functions as a pyramid or ponzi scheme: http://www.quora.com/Is-Bitcoin-a-ponzi-scheme

Multitouch? They had that in the original surface, the table not that tablet, before the iPhone existed. Died.

The rest of your points are valid, but your history here is wrong. The iPhone "existed" to the public before the Surface table, not the other way around.

Per wikipedia, Surface (PixelSense) 1.0 was announced to the public May 29, 2007, and shipped April 17, 2008.

First iPhone was announced to the public January 9, 2007, and shipped June 29 the same year--ten months before the Surface Table did.

There's vague mention of it being demoed in 2006 at a Microsoft company meeting in Quest Stadium, but that means nothing because it wasn't public knowledge at the time. The iPhone was most definitely being tested and demoed internally in 2006, too, just to a much smaller audience.

There's also absolutely no mention of it in another employee's post-meeting blog post, so either this reinforces the strictly internal-only nature of the unveiling... or suggests that the first story's account of the 2006 unveiling is false.

It probably depends on the project, it appears that Perforce is mainly used, but git is also used. For example, the Android project uses git.

http://www.quora.com/What-version-control-system-does-Google-use-and-why

"The N900 might have been this neat little device but clearly it sold poorly or Nokia wouldn't have ditched it."

Your entire post starts from a false assumption. Actually, it sold really well considering. Some estimates are over 1mm. Here's some substantiation:

http://www.intomobile.com/2010/06/01/how-many-n900-units-has-nokia-sold/

This was a phone with no subsidies, no marketing or advertising, not compatible with anything else...

OK, then of course, the N9 must have been a sales failure, right? Nope.

http://www.quora.com/Is-the-Nokia-N9-MeeGo-handset-still-outselling-Nokias-Windows-Phone-7-handsets-February-2012

Again, no subsidies, no advertising - and Elop shitting all over it, disowning it, etc.

If anything, it looks like Nokia made the absolutely wrong decision. It's almost as if there was an agenda that wasn't primarily motivated by profit or unit sales. Hmmm.

Half joking aside, would you agree that the only atheist sub-group(s) that come close to understanding this would be the Buddhists because it frees a person of all the dogma & symbology?

It depends on the Buddhist branch. Buddhism, being faithful to the middle path, isn't actually atheist, but indifferent to the debate. Certain schools go about not talking about gods at all, such as Zen or Jodo Shinshu; others acknowledge gods but don't care about them, such as Theravada; and others still fully embrace them, such as the Vajrayana schools. Also, all of them have dogmas and tons of symbolism, the freeing of which comes at the end of the process, not its middle. So, not quite.

But there are self-professed Atheist schools that almost get there. The Bayesian one is the most advanced in that regards, at least as far as I can judge these things. See for instance this essay of theirs for an example: Timeless Physics. It's the closest I've ever seen a non-mystic getting to grasp the notion of the Absolute. IMHO, if there's actual potential in Atheism, it's going to be developed by them, just give it a few centuries or, best case scenario, decades.

I'm very curious how you were able to come to see/be the full potential of Atheism -- knowing both its strengths and weaknesses? It is very rare to find a person who has that deep grasp of the fundamentals.

Well, I've had this habit of going after both sides on any argument then attempting to identify the common ground upon which they're battling and build from there for as long as I remember myself studying anything. and as such my intellectual references ended up spread all over the board. Over time it adds up. :-)

By the way: Currently I'm a polytheist, following both Shinto and the Shingon Buddhist school (esoteric Vajrayana), with a background in Continental Philosophy and the Traditionalist School of Rene Guenon. I've also written more on the theism vs. atheism debate replying to questions on Quora, so maybe you're interested. Too bad I still haven't had time to collect these bits and pieces into more permanent texts. Anyway, let's keep in touch!

I think that if a language is being used to power sites like Reddit, Quora, Pintrest, Instagram, Disqus, Mozilla, and various bits of Google, it's disingenuous to call it "niche" and suggest learning C.

http://www.quora.com/Django/What-is-the-highest-traffic-website-built-on-top-of-Django

Without picking on any network in particular, according to Nielson one network has an average viewer age over 65. Surprisingly, the competing networks are not wildly younger wrt age demos.

Not the source but a nice overview of the demographics:
http://www.quora.com/Fox-News-cable-news-network/What-are-the-demographics-of-Fox-News-viewers

Could certainly be considered trollish, I know. But it's an interesting hypothesis nonetheless.

All devices that use the 30 pin dock connector pay a licensing fee to Apple for the privilege. They also get to put a "Made for iPhone" (or whatever) sticker on the box.

The cost is rumored to be the greater of 10% or $10. (These prices are subject to NDA and probably change depending on deals made with the accessory manufacturer, so I wouldn't necessarily take the exact number as factual). I believe the cost of the connector component itself is extra.

So, a simple $80 iHome stereo system has $10 going to Apple. A $400 Bose system would be closer to $40. I can only hope that BMW made some sort of arrangement so that it's not 10% of the cost of a new car.

And Apple wants to pay $1 per phone for some very significant patent licenses. What hypocrites!

I know this was in jest, but in this case, unlike so many other times this joke is made, it's slightly relevant. A quick Google turned up the following incomplete info http://www.quora.com/Library-of-Congress/How-much-data-does-the-library-of-congress-actually-represent which states tape storage capacity of the Library of Congress circa 2011 at 4.5 petabytes. The answer, then, is the this is approximately ~2 Library of Congresses of data, which is just a tad bit much to fit in the trunk of your car. It's going to take a few trips to the Library and back to move that data around.

Did you miss that Google has already moved into the hardware with their purchase of Motorola Mobility?

Apparently you missed that Android is open sourced. That means that there are at least three major competitive ecosystems (Amazon ; Barnes and Nobel and the major Chinese app market places) as well as innumerable minor ones (e.g. CyanogenMod and all the small independent market places). Any or all of those would welcome a major manufacturer as a partner.

Google has to compete for favour from Mobile manufacturers. Microsoft is setting its self up to completely mess them over. Probably, it will buy one of the more successful ones with a Windows phone (HTC? LG?) once it has driven Nokia and co bankrupt whilst stealing their ideas.

Remember the strategy; Embrace and cooperate (Burn the platforms memo) Extend (provide Windows 8 with Nokia and other people's functions and ideas) Exterminate (Windows 9 / 10 has special "Microsoft only" features; Windows 11 barely works on partners phones).

Even if Android from Google went closed source tomorrow, there is enough weight of developers outside Google to overtake it within two releases.

I don't see where the growth is coming from there.

The following two articles seem to capture the general analyst and investor opinions on the matter:

Skeptical Of Amazon At These Levels

Why is Amazon's price-to-earnings ratio so high?

Basically Amazon has a lot of long speculative interest based upon the possible future value of their EC2 compute cloud, tablet business and other SAAS offerings which remain largely unrealized as of today. Essentially, there's a lot of betting on high future revenue growth in those areas of Amazon's business while the current earnings, which come mostly from retail operations, are still relatively modest by way of comparison. They're good, but not enough by themselves to justify the high price; hence the high P/E ratio. All of the current and likely future revenue, at least for the near term, seems to be priced in right now PLUS a hefty premium. In a word, owning Amazon stock is relatively expensive ; especially if their tech investments don't pay out big time in the medium to longer term. Incidentally, I don't own Apple for many of the same reasons; very high future growth projections and betting on future prospects with little or no compensation for downside risk. When everyone "has to own" a particular stock, like Apple or Amazon or Google, that's often a fairly reliable signal that the stock is over-hyped and overbought. Even if the underlying business is good, it's still very easy to pay too much for a share.

If you're a small investor reading this and you still want to trade expensive and risky stocks like Amazon or Apple, it would be best to do it using a collar with options. Your upside may be limited, but so is your downside and with a share price that high even a few percentage points move in the wrong direction can mean a big loss for the small investor; you can get squashed. Even with protection, it's still risky to trade these stocks because the likelihood that an individual knows something that the analysts and insiders don't or haven't already traded on is miniscule. You'd have to take larger risks on upside or downside surprises to make any money and IMHO, and that's just not worth it. The same limited profit can be had more easily and for less risk in other investments.

That would be very...un-Apple-like. They currently make money on every device legitimately sold by 3rd party OEMs (iHome, JBL) by requiring an NDA and licensing agreement through their MFi program. I found and interesting read here about the reasoning behind the Square CC reader using the audio port. They cite several valid reasons but one that sticks out in a big way is basically it costs Square US $1 to manufacture the device but it would have cost them $4-$8 per device in licensing if they had gone with the 30 pin dock connector.

Google Borg is something else: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Borg-at-Google

Here is a link to a quora post explaining how it works. It's delivered over a QAM channel, not IP, for the last mile in most cable systems. So, as I was saying, not actually an issue under net neutrality.

Dropbox owns this space because it's a folder. It's not a filesystem or a server or an application. It's a folder, you put stuff in it, it syncs.

See Michael Wolfe's excellent answer to this question about Dropbox at Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality

No, we didn't know that and the reason because it's BULLSHIT.
When will you RightWingNutBars stop FUCKING LYING??

http://www.quora.com/How-close-was-the-vote-to-cancel-the-Superconducting-Super-Collider

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PPP-1993-book1/pdf/PPP-1993-book1-doc-pg864.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/31/us/stating-regret-clinton-signs-bill-that-kills-supercollider.html?src=pm

I guess the answer is never because if you weren't telling lies, you'd have nothing to say.

What the fuck do you all have against Clinton? So he got his cock sucked while in office; it happens.
Hilary got over it and so should you.

http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/How-big-are-the-Bitcoin-ad-networks

Not surprising considering their lack of a software QA team.

When it comes to industry questions, I find myself going to Quora first.
http://www.quora.com/Hearing-Aids/Are-hearing-aid-manufacturers-price-gouging

"Tushar Katira, Industry Pro" knocking one /. talking point:

There is neither an expensive FDA approval process (except for hearing implants) nor are there IP related obstacles.

Affirming another:

As long as governments and insurance companies continue to cover the (high) costs, there is no incentive or reason for hearing aid companies to reduce prices and margins (as Andrew pointed out).

And a silver lining:

The iPhone does have all the components of a high quality hearing aid: A good mic, DSP amplifier, programmability. There are good output transducers available. There are some good apps for amplification and better ones are on the way.

One problem with using your iPhone as a hearing aid is the necessity of "cords / wires / cables". The current bluetooth headsets have a lot of latency delay resulting in the the sound and the movement of lips being out of sync. The new Bluetooth standard and other wireless devices will solve this very soon.

Neutrality means reflecting real-world views in accurate proportions, rather than adopting a fringe position. Wikipedia is the only mainstream site that does not have an adult filter. It pinches thousands of private sexual images from Flickr, where they are behind an age-18 wall, and puts them in public view on Wikimedia sites, without even asking Flickr account holders for their consent: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3ADeletion_requests%2FFile%3ATasting_a_condom.jpg&diff=67108318&oldid=66957446

Wikimedia provides unfiltered access to a bestiality video in response to a harmless search term like "devoirs" (homework) or "vacances" (holidays).

The first search result when entering toothbrush as a search term shows a woman masturbating with one: http://tch995319.tch.www.quora.com/Why-is-the-second-image-returned-on-Wikimedia-Commons-when-one-searches-for-electric-toothbrush-an-image-of-a-female-masturbating

Wikimedia hosts sexually explicit material without any of the contributors adding and managing this material on Wikimedia sites having the legally required records for 18 USC 2257 compliance. Hundreds of uploads are just pure exhibitionism of Wikimedia contributors taking videos and photos of their dicks, or of themselves masturbating in their bathrooms.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Masturbation.gif

How is that jerky (pun intended) video realistically useful for an educational purpose?

See the images listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BADIMAGES

See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Problems for random image searches on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons bringing up adult material

See http://wikipediocracy.com/2012/04/11/wikimedia-commons-pornography-concerns-just-right-wing-prudery/

Quora also has a discussion about some of these -> http://www.quora.com/Microsoft-Research/What-products-have-come-out-of-Microsoft-Research

And these are exact, high-profile products that have come out of Microsoft Research. You have to remember that they work on many smaller things that will be then integrated into other Microsoft products, or do work 'just for science' (which is pretty amazing from Microsoft).

> But did Google *pay* for Angry Birds to do that?

I have no idea what their contract, if any, with Angry Birds looked like.

But they have certainly been encouraging web developers to do just that, yes.

> And what is your source for that Skype behaviour?

Personal experience, for one thing. You can see a screenshot from the advanced install at http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png if you want.

As far as a Google search not finding anything.... https://www.google.com/search?q=skype+chrome+bundling shows http://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/4135280.htm and http://www.winrumors.com/skype-for-windows-updated-to-remove-google-product-bundling/ and http://mynetx.net/6494/skype-removes-google-integration

It also finds, not coincidentally, http://www.osnews.com/comments/25184 (do read the first response too!) and http://www.salsitasoft.com/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome-is-growing-market-share-ask-adobe/

A similar search on Bing also finds http://www.quora.com/Just-got-a-Skype-update-and-they-wanted-me-to-install-Chrome-Why

have you even heard of Microsoft Research?

Yes.

Here's a list of their output. http://www.quora.com/Microsoft-Research/What-products-have-come-out-of-Microsoft-Research

Perhaps you'd like to select a few highlights of genuine innovation for us to discuss here?

I call B.S. on that logic. If we assume that all 631,939,829 passengers who flew in 2010 is a fair average for how many people fly per year (and according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics it seems to be accurate for 2011 and the projected 2012 stats), then that's over 7,000,000,000 passengers since 9/11. On 9/11, there were what, fifteen hijackers? We've seen two underwear bombers and one shoe bomber since then. Am I missing any other would-be terrorists? If not, that makes a grand total of...


Wait for it...


18 out of over seven billion passengers who are (were) terrorists. In other words, stopping and searching every airline passenger gives you a one in 388 million chance of actually catching a terrorist. Pick any other crime and tell the public that you'll have a one in 388 million chance of catching a bad guy if they would just allow the cops to stop and search people at random, and there would be torches and pitchforks marching towards D.C. Yet we think that's "reasonable" when we want to get on an airplane?!?!

http://www.quora.com/Do-most-Farmville-users-have-multiple-accounts-to-be-able-to-be-able-to-do-tasks-you-need-to-do-with-a-friend

The first is to create fake accounts. It's trivially easy since all you need is an email address. However, these are very easily spotted by Facebook since they generally all only have one or two friends. If Facebook thinks these accounts are fraudulent, you'll often need to provide a unique phone number to verify that it is real.

[user comment] yes, it's too easy to create multiple facebook accounts. my sis made like 10 of them.

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facebook-statistics-stats-facts-2011/

Anthony Permal Says:
January 27th, 2011 at 2:42 pm

Nice stats, however I wonder alot about that figure claim of 500 million âactiveâ(TM) users. I know at least 5 or 6 people who have multiple facebook accounts for various purposes including personal accounts, professional accounts and the like. I feel the stat should be changed to say 500 million active âprofilesâ(TM) instead. Its very misleading.

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57399449-285/manage-multiple-facebook-and-twitter-accounts-in-one-place/

Manage multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts in one place

Whether you're a freelance social media manager or just someone with lots of online IDs, it can be a struggle to keep up with multiple Facebook and Twitter streams. Conversocial makes it much simpler.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-not-20-times-the-size-of-google-its-even-bigger/4654

kus2728 14th Oct

@aep528 the other thing to consider in all of this is are they both reporting actual users or just active accounts. I know multiple people that have multiple FB accounts that they log in to regularly. 1 person with 4 accounts does not equal 4 users in my opinion but I don't know if either network acknowledges the difference in their reporting.

and

Michael Alan Goff 14th Oct

I was wondering how it might have been me. XD

He is counting signups vs usage, but even signups vs signups doesn't tell the whole picture. There are people, and I this to be a fact, that make multiple Facebook accounts.

Some of them are for fictional characters they write.

and

inux for me 14th Oct

Everyone I know that is on Facebook and play the games on it, have 2 or more accounts. Many of these games allow player to transfer resources to other players, so they use multiple accounts to accumulate resources to transfer them to their main account. This makes the Facebook numbers extremely inflated compared to actual users.

If Google+ adds games, then the same thing will happen there too.

http://www.facedekk.com/

Facedekk

Manage Multiple Facebook Accounts

With Facedekkyou have all the following features available at your fingertips

Simultaneously update statuses for multiple Facebook accounts

There's plenty more like that. I know people who manage multiple fake accounts just so that they can either spam, or to make it look like their SEO activities are working "look you have these many new friends" - it's the same as buying facebook fans in bulk - they're mostly fake accounts.

Belgium...

And everyone was so offended that they forgot about the lawsuit entirely.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but unfortunately there is no guarantee that those words are truthful.

Motorola had a very iPhone-like device (even with an app store) in 2006 before the iPhone was released...
http://www.quora.com/Why-was-Motorola-unable-to-capitalize-on-their-EZX-MotoMAGX-smartphone-platform-outside-of-China

Motorola hurt themselves with some bad decisions, but Apple did not single-handedly invent the modern smartphone. And I'm sure there are similar examples from other companies at the time. The fact that Apple executed better than their competitors has given them plenty of deserved success. It does not give them the right to hold a monopoly over the industry.

So maybe its users *do* use it for fewer minutes a month -- but isn't that okay? Is there not a market for that?

Not really. Social networks are not cheap to run, and they barely can gain any ad revenue if all you do is go in and out once a day.

I know Qudora is not the best source of info but this Q&A seems to have some logic behind it (and the numbers match):

http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Facebook-make-from-a-single-user-using-the-site-for-1-hour
How much money does Facebook make from a single user using the site for 1 hour?
4 cents/user per hour of usage, with the following assumptions:
$2b in revenue in 2010, 540m unique monthly users, average usage of 7 hours per month per user.

IF we are talking the same profit ratios, this means 90 million users * (3/60) * 4c = 180,000 a month.

Thats absolutely nothing for a company like Google.

Also keep in mind Facebook is capitalizing heavily on in-game currency for games like FarmVille, something I dont think Google is doing, so the average may be even lower than 4 cents for Google.
This means that G+ is running at..

we send it all to the 1%

Yea, people like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi, who both own millions in Apple stock (Gore is # 5 on the list of individual stockholders), Pelosi cashed out a lot of her shares a couple of years ago.

For one thing, might that be part of why among freeware Tetris clones, clones released as free software (such as M-x tetris) have historically been least likely to draw nastygrams from The Tetris Company? For another, iOS itself has the same ethical problem as any other platform without the ability to install self-signed software, and cloning an iOS-exclusive game frees its mechanics from being tied to that platform.

A valid point, but you contradict yourself. If there already exist two implementations of (roughly) the same game which both run on different platforms (presumably one of which is a Zynga target platform), Zynga aren't "freeing" anything.

As an aside, I was interested in the Tetris IP arrangements so I searched around and found this Quora question. Can you guess who wrote the first (and current top rated) answer?

Seth Sivak, PM / Designer @ Zynga Boston

Oh the irony. But I digress.

But how is that practical? After some point, all the possible mechanics within a genre have been tried. Everything is just a different combination of the same elements, and one might end up combining them the same way someone else did. The last genre launch I know of was a decade and a half ago with Parappa the Rapper.

To claim that Zynga were just "throwing shit at the wall" and managed to create a 1:1 copy of Tiny Tower strains credulity. I know getting past the "threshold of originality" is practical because so many game developers manage to do it year after year. As hardware and user interfaces evolve (think touchscreens and accelerometers), there are more and more opportunities for companies to put forward unique and original experiences tailored for new devices. I highly doubt that the pool of available original game ideas is even finite, let alone close to exhausted.

To compare operating systems with games based on the criteria of originality completely misses a key difference between games and operating systems. When it comes to OSes, most users absolutely *detest* change. They can, and *will* simply ignore your product in order to stick with what they feel comfortable with. Take a couple of Microsoft examples: Vista and the ribbon UI. Both of these were widely panned by users, to the point that many people threatened to do away with using Windows altogether. But they stuck with it. Why? Microsoft certainly didn't keep their customers because of a lack of worthy commercial and non-commercial competitors, and they didn't keep their customers by immediately caving in to user demands (even if they wanted to do so, their distribution mechanisms and release cycles were far too rigid to undo their UI changes at the click of a button). Microsoft kept their customers because they had a platform, and on that platform they and others had built applications which Windows users had become attached to. Sure, everyone could have switched to something other than Windows, but that would have taken time and had a steep learning curve. The real winner there was Windows 7, because it had the shallowest learning curve available and virtually zero cost of migration for most business-critical Windows apps (which are usually more expensive than the OS itself). The lesson is that if you want people to jump ship to your OS, you need to make it as easy as possible for them. This is why (IMO) GNU would have failed if it modelled itself on anything other than the dominant (or near-dominant) OS at the time.

Games are different; your average gamer doesn't care whether or not they'll have to upgrade to QuickBooks 2012 if they buy a copy of your new game. They just want something interesting that they haven't played to death yet. In addition, moderately steep learning curves for games are often valued (think StarCraft 2) as they reward players who put effort into learning the ropes. Zynga aren't going to sell their new game to any of tho

FWIW, I found this post useful as a layman's summary of the differences between PIPA and SOPA.

Of course, now that they're 'massaging' both of them to make them more digestible, this may no longer apply...

Obviously, you were not doing web development in 2001.

http://www.quora.com/Why-has-Microsoft-failed-to-make-Internet-Explorer-web-standards-compliant-in-spite-of-years-of-browser-market-share-loss

Actually, yes. IE6, at the time of its release was the most standards compliant browser on the market. Seriously.

There were many articles at the time discussing this. Don't believe me? There's still articles around that discuss this. For instance:

http://www.quora.com/Why-has-Microsoft-failed-to-make-Internet-Explorer-web-standards-compliant-in-spite-of-years-of-browser-market-share-loss

It's just plain revisionist history to suggest otherwise. IE's problem was that it was not updated as the standards evolved and were clarified, not that it was originally so vastly uncompliant.

Or, here are some interesting alternatives.

If your connection can't do 600K a second or better, I wouldn't worry too much about streaming anything HD, SD runs around 150K a second, 1080P runs like 1200K a second, All these numbers are pulled from my home network and depending on the codec and material can change A LOT (Animated movies seem to eat up a lot less bandwidth.) The 600K a second is for 720P, but these are all rough estimates. My connection is on the cheaper end in my area, I can pull down about 2500K a second on a connection thats supposedly 20Mbps (I actually get more then what I pay for... odd in this day and age lol)

This web page has a bit more information on it then I truly understand....

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-bandwidth-requirement-to-stream-a-1080p-HD-movie-off-a-remote-server

Yup, that is the delusion du jour. However, I have found Android to be unusable without setting up a Google account. The problem is that even without using Google, you're still spying for Google - on others. Google admitted as much, also in Canada, right after the Streetview scanning scandal (read point 47, it's nicely tucked away).

I had to choose between Android and Apple, and I picked the latter exactly because they are so "rear end retentive" with their app admission policy. They will not catch everything that way, but it needs less checking than the Wild West of the Android market. However, I respect that others *want* that complete freedom, which is probably why *both* markets do well.

Oh, I almost forgot. I also make calls with that phone. I know, I'm old fashioned :)

Shrink wrap legal agreements aren't enforceable and it's a shocker that the judge didn't know that.

I'm pretty sure that case precedent actually suggests they may be enforceable.

They can't make up crazy things that you can't legally sign away via contract (ie slavery or your first born), but they are widely deemed to be a valid contract.

I'm not sure there's been any ruling which categorically says they aren't enforceable ... possibly in some countries, but generally I think they're more valid than you think.

http://www.quora.com/Brian-Dodson-1/Electronics/answers

Well, I think it happened after Larry Page became CEO. And on AOL:
http://www.quora.com/Did-AOL-make-it-hard-to-cancel-in-order-to-keep-customers

I haven't upgraded to Xcode 4.2 yet, but I fully expect to be running it on my 6 year old Macbook.

6 years old... October 18, 2005... first Intel MacBook in April 2006...
I was under the impression that Xcode 4.2 required Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard required an Intel CPU.

Oh well, maybe when China owns us, everything will be on the right track ;-D

http://www.quora.com/Why-do-Chinese-political-leaders-have-engineering-degrees-whereas-their-American-counterparts-have-law-degrees