I live in Seattle where we get access to Amazon Fresh, the Amazon grocery delivery service and would it would be my guess they will be testing our their own product lines out here first. And I will be surprised if Amazon food products will sell at all. I've lived with maybe a dozen people and known a bunch of other people who have used this service. And the bulk of the stuff people buy are stuff they know, namely products by their brand names, because that's what they know they like, and what to search for. People who are not worried about price (Amazon Fresh rarely has stuff on sale, doesn't have coupons, and no card/point system) are not going to buy low quality products that will not be much cheaper then brand name items. Amazon Fresh is always much more expensive then local chains in general, so if you're buying from Fresh, you're not going to buy off brand chicken (oh it's $.50 cheaper then brand name, but $1.50 more in your local chain).
I'm not going to bother touching on the ongoing debate of which sounds better or which format is generally better. I personally believe the difference of vinyl and other audio formats is the process involved with vinyl and the a lack of a better word the intimacy people have with it.
I always tell friends who ask about my collection that vinyl is to digital media what home cooked meals are to microwave dinners. Some people don't like cooking and choose easy and fact meals they can just eat so they are no longer hungry. While other people enjoy the process of cooking for hours to make a meal they are proud of and enjoy. Is the home cooked meal better? To the person who cooked it yes it most likely is because of their involvement.
These days with digital media you simply browse a site/app click a few buttons and the song or album is lost into your collection. It becomes background noise after listing to it a few times and has no real relevance to the person. With vinyl (specifically hard to find albums) a person can spend years searching for the album. They might go to stores weekly talking with employees and building friendships so they can get items held for them or called when a big collection just comes in, or spend hours walking around the city searching all the stores. Nearly all my records have stories like this.
There is also the process of playing the albums vs simply hitting shuffle on your computer. You have to search your collection deciding what you want to listen to, start up your equipment, maybe you have to clean the record before hand. You also have a tangible object you need to interact with. There is involvement.
So like I said; some people want quick and easy music that requires no involvement. Some of us do. I love the process and thinking about what I went though to get an album I'm listening to, or who I talked to when they suggested something or the show I picked the album up at. Personally I could care less if one or the other sounds better and I still personally listen to streaming music/mp3's when I simply want background noise, but when I want to listen to music I turn to my vinyl.
If ubisoft and EA have shown us anything over the last few years its that always on never works. Interruption at home? Yep you lose all your unsaved game. Interruption with your ISP, major node some where, at the data center, or maybe a server failure, slight down time (anywhere) and you get to replay everything again.
I'm also going to assume that this activation code that will be required to be used will not give me the ability to download the game if the disk is lost or destroyed, or if I lose my game I will not be able to get a discounted price for the physical disk? Oh and I'm just guessing here but if I did buy a new copy my old save games wouldn't work with the different "game" will they?
Its like they WANT people to pirate games and software. Why go though all this when I can simply download/burn the game and play it for free? Sounds much easier.
Am I the only person who generates easy to remember yet difficult to read / crack passwords based on things like movie / cartoon / book quotes or music lyrics? I don't think I have ever make a totally random password for myself and instead create easy to remember passwords from all sorts of phrases. The only problem with this is when sites disallow long passwords (so many limit passwords under 10,12,20 characters).
Take for example (random things off the top of my head) the sun will come up to morrow, to morrow. Tswcu2m2m. Or Dance your cares away Worrys for another day DycaWfad. Throw in a few !! or $$ at the beginning or ending and you're set.
Or music videos. Or playlists not following album releases.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge vinyl collector and would never pay for a digital download (as I enjoy the entire album experience) but once you give in you basically throw out your entire excuse and invalidate everything you have previously said.
Ubisoft has been trying to use DRM in their games for years and has failed at every attempt at a functional DRM that dosen't limit the person who "purchased" the game.
I recently bought Heroes of Might and Magic VI not realizing it was owned by Ubisoft. I was unable to play the game right after I downloaded it (their Authentication system was down to login to). After waiting several hours I was finally able to login and play. After about 2 hours of play I was disconnected again because the connection to their DRM server was lost. This meant I couldn't continue my game (and all saved data was lost too). After waiting a day it was finally back up. And on weekends you deal with the same problem.
Plenty of other games, systems, etc have been able to do very simple and very easy DRM on games. Look at battle.net and all of blizzards games. Their DRM management is so effective you don't even realize your dealing with any type of DRM or license authentication.
Gamers are willing to deal with DRM if it allows them to play their damn games they bought (forever) and have to deal with very little when dealing with the DRM. Ubisoft hasn't realize this and it will (and should be) the death of the company.
The problem is that no one wants to spend an extra $500 - $1000 for a 3D tv while most tv manufactures are trying to cover all their losses over the last 4 years from the mistake of trying to push this silly technology.
Once the focus is back to standard TV's with increasingly better displays at a reasonable price then people will start buying again instead off holding onto their all ready "good enough" LED / LCD tv's.
I take it you have never had to deal with identity theft before?
If your credit card / account was used in a different country or obviously not possible to be you making the transactions then you are damn lucky. In most cases though you are dealing with identify theft in your general area like a city or state. In these situations you have to prove that you are Innocent which is damn near impossible. In fact the credit card companies try to make it as difficult as possible for you to prove your Innocent.
So during Christmas time and banks dealing with thousands (tens of thousands?) of extra malice credit card transactions on top of what they normally would at this time of year I can't imagine the banks trying to make it easier for their customers. It will be in fact the most difficult time of the year for the customers to deal with this.
I've stood behind many of the things Anonymous has done in the past but this just seems stupid.
The only thing this will do is cost charities millions in audits, time, etc and make many lose services they use to collect donations. You know what will happen if a charity receives illicit funds through paypal? Their bank account gets frozen and paypal will in most cases never allow them to use their service again.
If they want to be dicks they should use these attacks through online services that the music/movie industries run / make money from, or big evil online retails like walmart and bestbuy or make payments to other banks customers mortgages / dept.
Did a quick re-read and it turns out they are going to offer it for free to developers in hopes of forcing customers to click on a button to get charged for better network speeds.
Somehow if their network is too saturated this client api will speed up their network they are saying. Oh, no it wont, they will simply throttle other paying customers while charging you an additional fee for a service you are all ready paying for.
Oh and a great quote from the article :
"And just because you request a high quality of service doesn't mean you're gonna get it."
So now software developers will have to pay a fee to get "good" data speeds?
And to top that off now developers will need to design 2 versions of their application for every type of version phone / OS and everyone else. Way to go guys.
It could be that the hardware isn't worse for androids, its that it is more difficult to replace or file a claim with Apple then it is with android phones.
I had a blackberry for several years and have had an android phone for 2 and have never had any problem.
I do on the other hand know several people who have had several iphones die and were un-replaceable because of whatever excuse Apple could come up with.
That and people are far more likely to "upgrade" their iphones the moment a new version comes out instead of using their existing phone until it stops functioning.
"Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things"
Am I the only person who sees this as one of the biggest problems with PERL? Don't get me wrong, I love choice and having options. But when you're learning a language you do not want 10 different styles of writing a function, statement, loop, whatever. Because when you are working with 10+ people you now have 1 language, 10 different ways to write in (and now 10 different ways you need to read).
When I first started learning PERL and reading books, websites and downloading examples all the different styles of writing in PERL was the biggest problem. You can't just simply learn how to do an IF statement, you have to learn the 20+ different ways you COULD write an IF statement, since every example you will find online will be totally different.
This guy is spot on with pretty much everything he discussed. I have never understood why Google does the things it does. They create some fantastic products, but they their products never overlap; meaning you do not get access to many other applications within other applications.
Look at reCaptcha. Quite easily one of the best, if not the best captcha system around. Google bought it like 2 years ago; and yet they do not use it within any of their sites. They use their horrible, out-dated and unreadable captcha system.
Also look at dodgeball. It was a fantastic service that google killed off like 3 years ago. And now facebook has this exact feature that is insanely popular.
Their user account system is just awful too. Yes at least you can link your webmaster, analyst, gmail, home page, etc together, but its just done so poorly that this is very little reason to have 1 single account. Its about as continent as having several accounts.
Google was onto something with gears and with gadgets but with gears gone and gadgets basically having zero development done in 5+ years they have pretty much killed off any really cool way to share, use or access cool or useful tools.
Hopefully this changes because I would hate to see facebook continue to get bigger.
The concept of banning "hacking tools" is just silly. What would these people consider a hacking tool? SSH terminals since they allow people to connect to compromised systems or to connect to machines with "hacker tools"? Or what about IRC servers since many bot networks have used them or offer the ability to let people talk about hacking?
Even some of the biggest "hacker tools" are used for real network and server analysis like winshark and the like.
This is simply the wrong approach to fix a problem. This is in fact the worst way to approach the problem. The real solution is to charge software companies for making insecure software. Don't fine the hackers for finding the exploits, fine the developers for not finding them. The software developers are the ones making money off the software, if they cause people to lose data or have their systems compromised they should be the ones that should be held responsible, not the person who found it.
Instead of trying to remove the ability to make "hacker tools" why not remove the ability or need of these tools by making more secure software. I guess that would be too easy though.
I'm sorry, but are we supposed to be impressed by the 130 million on ENERGY? This is almost 1/10th the cost of a stealth bomber.
Energy is one of our biggest problems in this country and is one of the scariest things we have to look forward to in the future. 130 million will not solve any problems or come up with any new solutions and will barely line the pockets of which ever friends of friends were given government contacts that will receive this money. We need to start coming up with massive amounts of money to not only put into R & D but as basically bribery to the current oil industries (cars/aircrafts) to really pull out heads our of our asses and move on from our current primitive situation.
If our country really wanted to try solving the worlds energy problem we would be spending 130 BILLION. That is a number that will solve problems.
Why are people saying this is a privacy issue? It's not. It uses publicly available information that the person freely posts online for the general public to read. Its like saying articles posted in the New York Times is private information of the authors who write for it. This program dosen't even do anything cool like make HTTP requests from state / city govermently run publicly available data.
There are all ready existing applications out there that have all the features this software has and much much more.
Really have people in the open source community not realized this yet? App stores like Apple are not setup to distribute software or sharing code or ideas. it's about making money. Period! If apple has to choose between a sub par app that will sell for $5.00 over a similar app that is open source and free they will accept the lesser product because they can make money. It has happened in the past so don't expect it to change.
Besides with these apps stores are a dead end for open source products. People can download and use the product and it ends there. They can't download the source, make changes, distribute, etc. So these stores really limit open source software since the changes of people getting involved with them is almost non existent.
Everything about this phone was great, and it shouldn't have died in the tree like it did. I was really excited to get one and even had a "free upgrade" through tmobile.
The reason it died is not because people didn't want to buy it online. Did you see how they were selling it online? It was just too damn confusing and this is coming from someone who has been developing confusing sites for 13 years. I couldn't understand if I was going to be buying the phone or signing up for new service. I couldn't tell exactly how much I was going to spend. I also couldn't tell if I would keep my old service. Finally after a few days I spoke with Tmobile, and it was going to cost me roughly $400 with my "free upgrade" plus my monthly bill would increase over $40.00 a month because of th service you had to get.
So no it wasn't any of their silly excuees as to why it didn't sell. Bad and confusing site design, price and forced "upgrades" were the reason. This and the fact that there were several other phones almost as good that were free (no upgrade, no out of pocket) compared to spending over 1200 freaking dollars over a 2 year period extra just to have a new fancy phone.
From what I know from firends who have worked with state/federal agencies most work done out of the agency requires them to accept bids for work. Meaning a number of companies or people bid on the projects to get this work. Its done this way so there can (nor should there be) any endorcement.
When projects come up conact known open source groups, companies etc that there are bids for the available work. Yes you wont be contributing directly to the projects, but you could get the developers making cash with allows them to offer more to the projects they are working on.
"Apple keeps those measures of control because they help to protect their platform's image from incompetent or unscrupulous coders, and their negative impact on most users is relatively minor. If that balance ever shifts, either due to more competent coders (supposedly Flash 10.1 is heavily optimized) or more demanding users (with friends whose phones do some or all of the above), the rules can change in an instant"
Ok thats a downirght B.S. excuese right there. The majority of the flash files people would be going after/ watching/using would be from youtube.com or google.com or myspace.com for video which last time I checked had some of the top people in the world dealing with compression, codexes and flash players in the world. Saying Apple is trying to keep bad ugly un-useful flash apps from their users is like saying Apple isn't trying to not lose money from forcing people to only buy videos from their itunes store.
It has nothing to do with scary bad coders, it has everything to do with them keeping people from getting videos outside of what they control (itunes).
Or offer your software to every other company that makes phones on every carrier other then and including AT&T.
Offer an open platform for development (free open source development that is not restricted to a MAC, pripriority lagnuage that costs money to develop in, and THEN have apple say its ok to sell your software if they WANT you to be able to).
Create software that dosen't limit you and force you to upgrade to a new phone
Buy a phone that lets you buy and replace your battery (Really? You can't replace the battery in your PHONE?)
And much much more. From what I have seen from Android alone I see promise. Iphone killer? No not at all. Does this phone have the ability to take away interest from the Iphone from the general non fanboy public? Yes very much so. Better phones, more phone features, faster hardware, better software thats more open and free which means more software available. Yeah I can see public interst shifting.
Iphone killer? No not at all. Why kill something when it will die off on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Seattle where we get access to Amazon Fresh, the Amazon grocery delivery service and would it would be my guess they will be testing our their own product lines out here first. And I will be surprised if Amazon food products will sell at all. I've lived with maybe a dozen people and known a bunch of other people who have used this service. And the bulk of the stuff people buy are stuff they know, namely products by their brand names, because that's what they know they like, and what to search for. People who are not worried about price (Amazon Fresh rarely has stuff on sale, doesn't have coupons, and no card/point system) are not going to buy low quality products that will not be much cheaper then brand name items. Amazon Fresh is always much more expensive then local chains in general, so if you're buying from Fresh, you're not going to buy off brand chicken (oh it's $.50 cheaper then brand name, but $1.50 more in your local chain).
I'm not going to bother touching on the ongoing debate of which sounds better or which format is generally better. I personally believe the difference of vinyl and other audio formats is the process involved with vinyl and the a lack of a better word the intimacy people have with it.
I always tell friends who ask about my collection that vinyl is to digital media what home cooked meals are to microwave dinners. Some people don't like cooking and choose easy and fact meals they can just eat so they are no longer hungry. While other people enjoy the process of cooking for hours to make a meal they are proud of and enjoy. Is the home cooked meal better? To the person who cooked it yes it most likely is because of their involvement.
These days with digital media you simply browse a site/app click a few buttons and the song or album is lost into your collection. It becomes background noise after listing to it a few times and has no real relevance to the person. With vinyl (specifically hard to find albums) a person can spend years searching for the album. They might go to stores weekly talking with employees and building friendships so they can get items held for them or called when a big collection just comes in, or spend hours walking around the city searching all the stores. Nearly all my records have stories like this.
There is also the process of playing the albums vs simply hitting shuffle on your computer. You have to search your collection deciding what you want to listen to, start up your equipment, maybe you have to clean the record before hand. You also have a tangible object you need to interact with. There is involvement.
So like I said; some people want quick and easy music that requires no involvement. Some of us do. I love the process and thinking about what I went though to get an album I'm listening to, or who I talked to when they suggested something or the show I picked the album up at. Personally I could care less if one or the other sounds better and I still personally listen to streaming music/mp3's when I simply want background noise, but when I want to listen to music I turn to my vinyl.
If ubisoft and EA have shown us anything over the last few years its that always on never works. Interruption at home? Yep you lose all your unsaved game. Interruption with your ISP, major node some where, at the data center, or maybe a server failure, slight down time (anywhere) and you get to replay everything again.
I'm also going to assume that this activation code that will be required to be used will not give me the ability to download the game if the disk is lost or destroyed, or if I lose my game I will not be able to get a discounted price for the physical disk? Oh and I'm just guessing here but if I did buy a new copy my old save games wouldn't work with the different "game" will they?
Its like they WANT people to pirate games and software. Why go though all this when I can simply download/burn the game and play it for free? Sounds much easier.
Am I the only person who generates easy to remember yet difficult to read / crack passwords based on things like movie / cartoon / book quotes or music lyrics? I don't think I have ever make a totally random password for myself and instead create easy to remember passwords from all sorts of phrases. The only problem with this is when sites disallow long passwords (so many limit passwords under 10,12,20 characters).
Take for example (random things off the top of my head) the sun will come up to morrow, to morrow. Tswcu2m2m. Or Dance your cares away Worrys for another day DycaWfad. Throw in a few !! or $$ at the beginning or ending and you're set.
I'd say I hate HP more because I have at some point in the past used a Ebay/Paypal service.
Or music videos. Or playlists not following album releases.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge vinyl collector and would never pay for a digital download (as I enjoy the entire album experience) but once you give in you basically throw out your entire excuse and invalidate everything you have previously said.
" How far do we have to go to ensure we are diverse?""
By not ensuring it and let it happen organically? Doing it any other way defeats the purpose of trying to be diverse.
Ubisoft has been trying to use DRM in their games for years and has failed at every attempt at a functional DRM that dosen't limit the person who "purchased" the game.
I recently bought Heroes of Might and Magic VI not realizing it was owned by Ubisoft. I was unable to play the game right after I downloaded it (their Authentication system was down to login to). After waiting several hours I was finally able to login and play. After about 2 hours of play I was disconnected again because the connection to their DRM server was lost. This meant I couldn't continue my game (and all saved data was lost too). After waiting a day it was finally back up. And on weekends you deal with the same problem.
Plenty of other games, systems, etc have been able to do very simple and very easy DRM on games. Look at battle.net and all of blizzards games. Their DRM management is so effective you don't even realize your dealing with any type of DRM or license authentication.
Gamers are willing to deal with DRM if it allows them to play their damn games they bought (forever) and have to deal with very little when dealing with the DRM. Ubisoft hasn't realize this and it will (and should be) the death of the company.
The problem is that no one wants to spend an extra $500 - $1000 for a 3D tv while most tv manufactures are trying to cover all their losses over the last 4 years from the mistake of trying to push this silly technology.
Once the focus is back to standard TV's with increasingly better displays at a reasonable price then people will start buying again instead off holding onto their all ready "good enough" LED / LCD tv's.
I take it you have never had to deal with identity theft before?
If your credit card / account was used in a different country or obviously not possible to be you making the transactions then you are damn lucky. In most cases though you are dealing with identify theft in your general area like a city or state. In these situations you have to prove that you are Innocent which is damn near impossible. In fact the credit card companies try to make it as difficult as possible for you to prove your Innocent.
So during Christmas time and banks dealing with thousands (tens of thousands?) of extra malice credit card transactions on top of what they normally would at this time of year I can't imagine the banks trying to make it easier for their customers. It will be in fact the most difficult time of the year for the customers to deal with this.
I've stood behind many of the things Anonymous has done in the past but this just seems stupid.
The only thing this will do is cost charities millions in audits, time, etc and make many lose services they use to collect donations. You know what will happen if a charity receives illicit funds through paypal? Their bank account gets frozen and paypal will in most cases never allow them to use their service again.
If they want to be dicks they should use these attacks through online services that the music/movie industries run / make money from, or big evil online retails like walmart and bestbuy or make payments to other banks customers mortgages / dept.
Did a quick re-read and it turns out they are going to offer it for free to developers in hopes of forcing customers to click on a button to get charged for better network speeds.
Somehow if their network is too saturated this client api will speed up their network they are saying. Oh, no it wont, they will simply throttle other paying customers while charging you an additional fee for a service you are all ready paying for.
Oh and a great quote from the article :
"And just because you request a high quality of service doesn't mean you're gonna get it."
So now software developers will have to pay a fee to get "good" data speeds?
And to top that off now developers will need to design 2 versions of their application for every type of version phone / OS and everyone else. Way to go guys.
It could be that the hardware isn't worse for androids, its that it is more difficult to replace or file a claim with Apple then it is with android phones.
I had a blackberry for several years and have had an android phone for 2 and have never had any problem.
I do on the other hand know several people who have had several iphones die and were un-replaceable because of whatever excuse Apple could come up with.
That and people are far more likely to "upgrade" their iphones the moment a new version comes out instead of using their existing phone until it stops functioning.
"Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things"
Am I the only person who sees this as one of the biggest problems with PERL? Don't get me wrong, I love choice and having options. But when you're learning a language you do not want 10 different styles of writing a function, statement, loop, whatever. Because when you are working with 10+ people you now have 1 language, 10 different ways to write in (and now 10 different ways you need to read).
When I first started learning PERL and reading books, websites and downloading examples all the different styles of writing in PERL was the biggest problem. You can't just simply learn how to do an IF statement, you have to learn the 20+ different ways you COULD write an IF statement, since every example you will find online will be totally different.
This guy is spot on with pretty much everything he discussed. I have never understood why Google does the things it does. They create some fantastic products, but they their products never overlap; meaning you do not get access to many other applications within other applications.
Look at reCaptcha. Quite easily one of the best, if not the best captcha system around. Google bought it like 2 years ago; and yet they do not use it within any of their sites. They use their horrible, out-dated and unreadable captcha system.
Also look at dodgeball. It was a fantastic service that google killed off like 3 years ago. And now facebook has this exact feature that is insanely popular.
Their user account system is just awful too. Yes at least you can link your webmaster, analyst, gmail, home page, etc together, but its just done so poorly that this is very little reason to have 1 single account. Its about as continent as having several accounts.
Google was onto something with gears and with gadgets but with gears gone and gadgets basically having zero development done in 5+ years they have pretty much killed off any really cool way to share, use or access cool or useful tools.
Hopefully this changes because I would hate to see facebook continue to get bigger.
The concept of banning "hacking tools" is just silly. What would these people consider a hacking tool? SSH terminals since they allow people to connect to compromised systems or to connect to machines with "hacker tools"? Or what about IRC servers since many bot networks have used them or offer the ability to let people talk about hacking?
Even some of the biggest "hacker tools" are used for real network and server analysis like winshark and the like.
This is simply the wrong approach to fix a problem. This is in fact the worst way to approach the problem. The real solution is to charge software companies for making insecure software. Don't fine the hackers for finding the exploits, fine the developers for not finding them. The software developers are the ones making money off the software, if they cause people to lose data or have their systems compromised they should be the ones that should be held responsible, not the person who found it.
Instead of trying to remove the ability to make "hacker tools" why not remove the ability or need of these tools by making more secure software. I guess that would be too easy though.
I'm sorry, but are we supposed to be impressed by the 130 million on ENERGY? This is almost 1/10th the cost of a stealth bomber.
Energy is one of our biggest problems in this country and is one of the scariest things we have to look forward to in the future. 130 million will not solve any problems or come up with any new solutions and will barely line the pockets of which ever friends of friends were given government contacts that will receive this money. We need to start coming up with massive amounts of money to not only put into R & D but as basically bribery to the current oil industries (cars/aircrafts) to really pull out heads our of our asses and move on from our current primitive situation.
If our country really wanted to try solving the worlds energy problem we would be spending 130 BILLION. That is a number that will solve problems.
Why are people saying this is a privacy issue? It's not. It uses publicly available information that the person freely posts online for the general public to read. Its like saying articles posted in the New York Times is private information of the authors who write for it. This program dosen't even do anything cool like make HTTP requests from state / city govermently run publicly available data.
There are all ready existing applications out there that have all the features this software has and much much more.
Really have people in the open source community not realized this yet? App stores like Apple are not setup to distribute software or sharing code or ideas. it's about making money. Period! If apple has to choose between a sub par app that will sell for $5.00 over a similar app that is open source and free they will accept the lesser product because they can make money. It has happened in the past so don't expect it to change.
Besides with these apps stores are a dead end for open source products. People can download and use the product and it ends there. They can't download the source, make changes, distribute, etc. So these stores really limit open source software since the changes of people getting involved with them is almost non existent.
Everything about this phone was great, and it shouldn't have died in the tree like it did. I was really excited to get one and even had a "free upgrade" through tmobile.
The reason it died is not because people didn't want to buy it online. Did you see how they were selling it online? It was just too damn confusing and this is coming from someone who has been developing confusing sites for 13 years. I couldn't understand if I was going to be buying the phone or signing up for new service. I couldn't tell exactly how much I was going to spend. I also couldn't tell if I would keep my old service. Finally after a few days I spoke with Tmobile, and it was going to cost me roughly $400 with my "free upgrade" plus my monthly bill would increase over $40.00 a month because of th service you had to get.
So no it wasn't any of their silly excuees as to why it didn't sell. Bad and confusing site design, price and forced "upgrades" were the reason. This and the fact that there were several other phones almost as good that were free (no upgrade, no out of pocket) compared to spending over 1200 freaking dollars over a 2 year period extra just to have a new fancy phone.
So cops don't have to follow the laws or enforce laws on other cops because other cops might get mad at you and not do their jobs?
Ok, I see your point. Cops should be allowed to break any law they want (or their family members, hell their friends too).
From what I know from firends who have worked with state/federal agencies most work done out of the agency requires them to accept bids for work. Meaning a number of companies or people bid on the projects to get this work. Its done this way so there can (nor should there be) any endorcement.
When projects come up conact known open source groups, companies etc that there are bids for the available work. Yes you wont be contributing directly to the projects, but you could get the developers making cash with allows them to offer more to the projects they are working on.
"Apple keeps those measures of control because they help to protect their platform's image from incompetent or unscrupulous coders, and their negative impact on most users is relatively minor. If that balance ever shifts, either due to more competent coders (supposedly Flash 10.1 is heavily optimized) or more demanding users (with friends whose phones do some or all of the above), the rules can change in an instant"
Ok thats a downirght B.S. excuese right there. The majority of the flash files people would be going after/ watching/using would be from youtube.com or google.com or myspace.com for video which last time I checked had some of the top people in the world dealing with compression, codexes and flash players in the world. Saying Apple is trying to keep bad ugly un-useful flash apps from their users is like saying Apple isn't trying to not lose money from forcing people to only buy videos from their itunes store.
It has nothing to do with scary bad coders, it has everything to do with them keeping people from getting videos outside of what they control (itunes).
Or offer your software to every other company that makes phones on every carrier other then and including AT&T.
Offer an open platform for development (free open source development that is not restricted to a MAC, pripriority lagnuage that costs money to develop in, and THEN have apple say its ok to sell your software if they WANT you to be able to).
Create software that dosen't limit you and force you to upgrade to a new phone
Buy a phone that lets you buy and replace your battery (Really? You can't replace the battery in your PHONE?)
And much much more. From what I have seen from Android alone I see promise. Iphone killer? No not at all. Does this phone have the ability to take away interest from the Iphone from the general non fanboy public? Yes very much so. Better phones, more phone features, faster hardware, better software thats more open and free which means more software available. Yeah I can see public interst shifting.
Iphone killer? No not at all. Why kill something when it will die off on its own.