When I purchase from Amazon I am engaging in a private transaction with an out of state vendor. What exactly is my state contributing to that transaction that it deserves a cut? Sure, the state can take a cut, because it can cause injury to my property or to my person if I refuse, but so can the mafia. In a modern, democratic republic shouldn't we require a higher standard of our government? Let's give the state some credit here. Surely this isn't outright extortion. What is it that my state is doing to deserve this additional cut?
Let's see. My state already collected taxes on the income I'll use to make the purchase, already collected taxes from the shipping company that will deliver my purchase, already collected taxes for the roads on which the purchase will be delivered, already collected taxes from me for the home in which I'll use my purchase, already collected taxes to pay for the police and fire that will aid me in protecting my purchase, and my state will be right there to collect taxes on the disposal of my purchase when I one day discard it.
Now, what exactly is my state, or your state, doing to deserve an additional, direct cut of this private transaction?
Other than the threat of force? Nothing. I have it, and it wants it. Nothing. The same thing it's doing when it tells me to buy health insurance for simply existing, for simply having been born into this world and having the audacity to be alive. This, my friends, is the audacity of hope.
Most of those suggestions are perfectly reasonable if you want an optimal online experience. If you can't tolerate hiccups when streaming HD video, something that many consumers would call their ISPs to complain about, then yes, you are going to pay an arm and a leg for that convenience. The same goes for uploading albums of high megapixel images from your cameras - sharing pictures. You are going to pay an arm and a leg for that upload bandwidth.
It's not as though we're talking about medications here. It's not as though this is predatory. Anyone with this kind of money to dump just to avoid hiccups when streaming HD video of Dances with Douches from Hulu.com, but can't be bothered to do even minimal consumer research, is going to get exactly what they deserve. Consider it a tax on ignorance. It's a public good.
Correction. Both parties focus resources on entitlements and war.
This is shameful. Better to be a beggar in a world colonizing the Moon, Mars, and mining asteroids, than to be a CEO in a world in which the human spirit is dead.
According to the study, most males and females were employed (66.29% of females, 79.84% of males).
However, that is a 13% gap. Also, there was a large gap between the incomes of males and females who were employed, perhaps in part because they tended to be a secondary income.
Both of these factors probably account for some of the observed effect of women being disproportionately "hardcore", but not all of it.
I think the take away is that social gaming can be powerfully addicting to females as well. There probably also something going on with the fact that as many as 20% of females in the sample were LGBT. What that is would require another study to determine.
I see Scientific American has about as much to do with science as the History Channel does with History. "60 second news?" I see the author didn't spend more than 60 seconds reading the report.
Contrary to the article's implication, players in the sample were still overwhelmingly male, and while female players were more likely than male players to be "hardcore", numerically there were still more hardcore male players than hardcore female players.
- The sample was self-selecting. The survey was offered to all players logged in during the sampling window. - Self-reported gender: 80.22% male, 19.72% female,.06% declined - Self-reported as being employed: 66.29% of females, 79.84% of males - Self-reported sexual orientation: Female: 14.15% Bisexual, 2.28% Homosexual, 6.4% Declined; Male: 3.64% Bisexual, 3.37% Homosexual, 3.6% Declined. - Self-reported played with a romantic partner: 61.52% of females, but only 24.77% of males
What I found more interesting was that as many as 22% of female players were lesbian or bi-sexual, far more than in the general population. This was not mirrored in male players.
I'll speculate that females playing more hours than males is in some part accounted for by the 13% employment gap reported between males and females in the sample.
As to whether to believe the better than average self-reported BMI and exercise numbers from the women in the survey? What, women misrepresent their weight online? Unheard of!
Most FOSS a user runs is a FOSS derivative of an already existing proprietary product. Linux was only written years after it was well understood how to develop a modern OS. It was well understood how to develop a desktop environment when Gnome and KDE came along. This is the pattern followed by most end-user FOSS software.
And why shouldn't it be that way on new mobile platforms? How else do you propose to reward the innovation and labor of those developing software for these platforms? That's not a rhetorical question. If you have a viable alternative, I'd like to hear it. The people who develop these mass market applications need to eat and pay their bills. All the more so the case in the present economic climate. Time is money, and skilled professionals are much less willing to give their time away for free.
Once the economy recovers, and once the best apps and the best ways of doing things on these new platforms begins to solidify, then we will see FOSS replacements come along for them.
Would the author rather that device vendors increase the cost of their devices by 1000% in order to subsidize app developers? Would the author rather that the government tax him in order to subsidize app developers? No? Well in that case he gets to wait until the apps become commoditized and have FOSS replacements.
Didn't your mother ever tell you that beggars can't be choosers?
What I've seen saying for years we need in order for that to happen is either for Javascript to become a first class platform outside the browser, or for a current generation language to become a first class browser citizen that Java applets never were.
I think the former, Javascript, is a dead end. In my opinion as an observer, it's primarily Microsoft through IE and their feet-dragging in the standards process that is hampering the evolution of Javascript into a proper platform. Microsoft has their own proprietary vision for a platform for rich, web-based applications, and industry standards like ECMAScript and Java don't factor into it other than as potential spoilers.
In my opinion the way forward is for Java or Python to become first-class citizens in Mozilla Foundation products. My preference would be Java due to the richness of its standard and community libraries, its mindshare among professional engineers, and its acceptance by industry.
No kidding. I don't understand what Palm is doing here. If Palm were to offer a standard Java or.Net environment, I would start targeting their devices again. They could differentiate themselves from Android by offering a standard Java environment with value-added extensions, rather than delivering a kick to the community's groin just because they could.
I have so far refused to target the iPhone for just this reason: the platform is proprietary, and unnecessarily so. I'm betting on Android to be the next Symbian, and while Google has open sourced their non-standard parts, and so far I'm living with that, it is a let down. Java and its rich standard library is free, is open source, and is a community and industry standard with multiple compliant implementations.
Sure, Javascript is an industry standard, ECMAScript, but its standard library is downright anemic, it does not have the kind of tool support professional engineers expect, and the fact that it's tied so closely to the web browser is its greatest weakness, not strength.
I hope they don't think they're going to pick up serious developers just for making their tools web-based, as if that was an end in itself, so I hope that they believe there is some benefit to making their tools all web based.
Reading the articles, I'm no so sure that isn't what they're doing here. According to them this is about enabling a next-generation web-based development workflow. It's different because... the IDE runs in your web browser.
The kind of developers you want to attract to your platform, who are going to build the quality apps that you want to be a reflection of the quality of your platform your platform, aren't held up on account of the "barrier to entry" of such ponderous requirements as having to install a J2ME development environment or have local storage space available.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a longtime fan of Palm and want to see them succeed. I owned many of their PDAs over the years. But this isn't the way to go about it. This sounds like marketing running their engineering organization. A next generation mobile development workflow isn't one that lets met develop in a web browser. It's one that gives me powerful APIs at multiple levels so that I have an API of appropriate richness and complexity whether I want to develop a calendaring extension, whether I want to develop a social media client, or whether I want to develop a game. This does none of those things, and it should go with out saying that my products won't be targeting any of the current webOS devices.
This is brilliant! I think it's clear now the direction we must go. Overuse of energy-guzzling languages like PHP have put us on an unsustainable trajectory fueling out of control global warming.
Congress must act to regulate the use of these energy-guzzling languages. No longer will programmers and corporations be permitted to turn out inefficient code with impunity.
PHP, Perl, Ruby, Bash, your days are numbered!
Just wait until we can get UN involved. Python, you and your CO2 spewing simplicity are next!
I agree. I wish our leaders would go back to publicly embracing what space exploration is about. It's about imagination, about hope and inspiration, about the ennoblement of the human spirit, and yes, also about some really cool science. My hope was that Obama would recognize this, but so far he doesn't seem to be able to see much beyond science as some kind of economic stimulus.
What greater question is there for every human being, regardless of how rich or poor they may be, than whether we are alone in the universe?
To die having not done everything we could to look right under our noses would be agony.
Human exploration is what capture's the public's imagination.
We are driving robots around on the surface of Mars. That is really cool. As a kid I never thought this is how it would happen.
We have now sent probes outside our own solar system. That is a humbling experience, to be be alive in the generation in which mankind first extends its reach beyond its home solar system.
But apart from a few news broadcasts and scoping out some pictures on the internet, the public has hardly batted an eye. We need to get back to pushing the boundaries of human space exploration. Yes there are more practical matters to apply resources to, yes it violates a minority's view of the philosophy of government, but I am hard pressed to care.
We have one life to live. Let's push as hard as we can, as far as we can. Let's put a permanent base on the Moon in 10 years. Let's put a permanent base on Mars in 15 years. Let's mine asteroids for resources. Let's turn those bases into colonies.
Where's our perspective? Where's our human spirit? The problems we face on this pale blue dot are utterly insignificant in scheme of the cosmos.
Let's go see what's out there, or fail spectacularly trying, but at least having tried.
Granted, those used to be more expensive than a regular laptop, not less, and be targeted (at least in the US) at business travelers, but apart from the fact that technological advancement and commoditization has driven down prices, and all of a sudden average people are interested in small laptops, I really don't understand what the difference is from a netbook.
There's at least 10 years of precedent for this terminology to describe what is now being called a netbook.
But heck, now netbooks can have 12" and 14" in screens. 12 was absolutely the cutoff for an ultraportable or subnotebook.
I'm starting to think that netbook just means, "mass market laptop with shitty component quality". Compare this POS to even a Macbook Air, or any of the ultraportables from 5 and 10 years ago.
Yay consumerism. The triumph of mass market shit. Don't get me wrong, I like prices coming down and democratization of technology, but this low quality netbook fad has become way too damn manipulative. Technology journalists need to get off the corporate teet and inform today's consumers just what is happening here.
I don't think the article appreciates where most consumers are at. Most consumers have simply cell phones and will continue to have simply cell phones. Most cell phones today are for all practical purposes, smart phones. What most consumers do not have, have rejected for the past 15 years, and will continue to reject, is a device that is a big rectangular brick that happens to also let you make calls, what used to be a PDA, and is now a mobile internet device (MID).
Android is an OS that is first and foremost is for smart phones. The iPhone is not a smart phone at all. The iPhone is a MID that happens to have phone functions. See: iPod Touch.
With Android, Google isn't focusing on the iPhone market. Google is focused on the Symbian market where Apple does not even compete today.
Apple is going to need to decide very quickly whether they want to remain only a player in the niche mobile internet device market, or whether they want to enter the smart phone market proper, where most consumers are and will continue to be.
With any luck, Apple will enter this market with something like an iPhone nano. I really like their interface, but like most consumers I don't want a mobile computer, I want a phone, one that flips open and follows the contours of my head, and in this day and age gives me email, gps, search, and music in a phone, not in a pocket computer.
Microsoft has a monopoly in the operating system market. Different rules therefore apply to Microsoft when they attempt to use their monopoly in that market to stomp out competition in that market or another market.
Apple is not and does not have a monopoly. No, as much as you might like it to be, the "OS X market" is not a market for the purposes of anti-trust law.
Now, most likely Apple trying to prevent you from purchasing and installing OS X on intel hardware for your personal use would not stand up in court, even though it is copyright infringement, but that's not what Psystar was doing here. Psystar was infringing Apple's copyright for commercial gain. If you don't understand what that's copyright infringement, please educate yourself. Copyright infringement encompasses much more than simply making an unauthorized copy of an MP3 or DIVX.
Hear my plea, oh Mozilla developers. What must I do to appease your wrath?
Please don't build another application platform on Javascript. Just make Java a first class citizen in the damn browser and be done with it.
Heck, any proper language with a proper standard library will do. I'm not partial to Java. All I care is that it isn't Javascript. Javascript should have died in 1996.
Javascript helps no one. It is a shitty language with shitty tools that has spawned so much shitty code that it threatens to fold the universe in on itself.
In my experience women in IT are less willing to go to the mat for the team. I've never met a woman in IT willing to regularly work 16 hour days, willing to sleep in the office, or willing to pull all-nighters to meet a deadline.
But I don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. I think it has to do with genetic and culturally imposed priorities. It's still overwhelmingly the case that when the shit hits the fan for the team that counts, the kids, the family, that it's the woman who stays up all night, doesn't get to sleep more than 2 hours at a time, takes them to the doctor, picks them up at school, or drives them to practice.
I don't see why this is considered a problem. It was good enough to get us out of the trees, to the top of the food pyramid, and even to travel beyond our home planet. Obviously it works. And it's not as though the option isn't out there. Women certainly can choose not to have children, or certainly can hold out for a man who is willing to take on the majority of the burden of raising them.
Anyone? Same scene done better in a novel story that was a huge risk in Hollywood.
Yes, it's impressive that the linked video was done on an amateur budget, and congratulations to this guy; I hope he makes millions, but let's not pretend this is original stuff.
And how will AGW proponents respond to this in the media? With appeals to authority, ad hominem attacks, and bluster.
The media and the scientists who have become the public faces of AGW in the media have taken the position that the public is too stupid to understand AGW, and must be convinced by multimedia slideshows, appeals to authority, and bluster. They do not seek to convey an understanding of the data, methods, and conclusions. Instead, they seek to replace one belief with another. When this is how you approach your audience, it doesn't matter whether what you teach is true or false, it is indoctrination, not education.
How should they handle it in the media? They should spend 4 hours in primetime, instead of Dances with Fucktards, walk the public through the data, walk the public through the methods, examine the claim being made here, and explain its impact or irrelevance to the conclusions. You know. EDUCATE. Not pontificate. Not intimidate.
You and your customers create issues describing what they want done. You estimate them. They prioritize them in the order they want them done. You track your time and status on each issue. You can add notes and artifacts to each issue so that you can pickup where you left off if priorities change.
This might sound like a lot of extra work. Not only is it not a lot of work, it is hugely to your advantage in two ways: 1. When the time comes, and it will, that whoever pays your bills wants you to justify your existence or justify why tasks are taking longer than they want, you can point them to this system and show exactly what you've done, where your time has went, and when priorities and requirements have changed.
2. When you're ready to move onto a larger company, having personally been responsible for rolling out and implementing an issue tracking system is a nice accomplishment to put on your resume.
Which means that if they aren't delivering ads directly on the device, they are almost certainly using it to collect data about everything you do and everywhere you go in order to increase your value to advertisers through search and mail.
It won't be a separate model. It will be the standard model, just like Google and Gmail. The ads will be unobtrusive to the majority of consumers, but still valuable to advertisers. Google will no more offer this without personal data collection and advertising than they do Google and Gmail. Sure, they'll give you some privacy options, but they won't give you options that have a meaningful negative impact on the value of their services to advertisers.
If you run AdBlock, you are a minority. This isn't the phone for you. Since Google will control the hardware and the software, you'd have a heck of a time running AdBlock even if you wanted to. That's the point.
Slashdot Mirror
When I purchase from Amazon I am engaging in a private transaction with an out of state vendor. What exactly is my state contributing to that transaction that it deserves a cut? Sure, the state can take a cut, because it can cause injury to my property or to my person if I refuse, but so can the mafia. In a modern, democratic republic shouldn't we require a higher standard of our government? Let's give the state some credit here. Surely this isn't outright extortion. What is it that my state is doing to deserve this additional cut?
Let's see. My state already collected taxes on the income I'll use to make the purchase, already collected taxes from the shipping company that will deliver my purchase, already collected taxes for the roads on which the purchase will be delivered, already collected taxes from me for the home in which I'll use my purchase, already collected taxes to pay for the police and fire that will aid me in protecting my purchase, and my state will be right there to collect taxes on the disposal of my purchase when I one day discard it.
Now, what exactly is my state, or your state, doing to deserve an additional, direct cut of this private transaction?
Other than the threat of force? Nothing. I have it, and it wants it. Nothing. The same thing it's doing when it tells me to buy health insurance for simply existing, for simply having been born into this world and having the audacity to be alive. This, my friends, is the audacity of hope.
Most of those suggestions are perfectly reasonable if you want an optimal online experience. If you can't tolerate hiccups when streaming HD video, something that many consumers would call their ISPs to complain about, then yes, you are going to pay an arm and a leg for that convenience. The same goes for uploading albums of high megapixel images from your cameras - sharing pictures. You are going to pay an arm and a leg for that upload bandwidth.
It's not as though we're talking about medications here. It's not as though this is predatory. Anyone with this kind of money to dump just to avoid hiccups when streaming HD video of Dances with Douches from Hulu.com, but can't be bothered to do even minimal consumer research, is going to get exactly what they deserve. Consider it a tax on ignorance. It's a public good.
Correction. Both parties focus resources on entitlements and war.
This is shameful. Better to be a beggar in a world colonizing the Moon, Mars, and mining asteroids, than to be a CEO in a world in which the human spirit is dead.
According to the study, most males and females were employed (66.29% of females, 79.84% of males).
However, that is a 13% gap. Also, there was a large gap between the incomes of males and females who were employed, perhaps in part because they tended to be a secondary income.
Both of these factors probably account for some of the observed effect of women being disproportionately "hardcore", but not all of it.
I think the take away is that social gaming can be powerfully addicting to females as well. There probably also something going on with the fact that as many as 20% of females in the sample were LGBT. What that is would require another study to determine.
The report showed that in the sample males were 13% more likely to be considering quitting than females.
This is true. The average player in this sample played 27 hours a week.
That's 3-4 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I see Scientific American has about as much to do with science as the History Channel does with History. "60 second news?" I see the author didn't spend more than 60 seconds reading the report.
Contrary to the article's implication, players in the sample were still overwhelmingly male, and while female players were more likely than male players to be "hardcore", numerically there were still more hardcore male players than hardcore female players.
There are a number of datapoints in the study that are interesting:
http://dmitriwilliams.com/LFGpaperfinal.pdf
- The sample was self-selecting. The survey was offered to all players logged in during the sampling window. .06% declined
- Self-reported gender: 80.22% male, 19.72% female,
- Self-reported as being employed: 66.29% of females, 79.84% of males
- Self-reported sexual orientation: Female: 14.15% Bisexual, 2.28% Homosexual, 6.4% Declined; Male: 3.64% Bisexual, 3.37% Homosexual, 3.6% Declined.
- Self-reported played with a romantic partner: 61.52% of females, but only 24.77% of males
What I found more interesting was that as many as 22% of female players were lesbian or bi-sexual, far more than in the general population. This was not mirrored in male players.
I'll speculate that females playing more hours than males is in some part accounted for by the 13% employment gap reported between males and females in the sample.
As to whether to believe the better than average self-reported BMI and exercise numbers from the women in the survey? What, women misrepresent their weight online? Unheard of!
Most FOSS a user runs is a FOSS derivative of an already existing proprietary product. Linux was only written years after it was well understood how to develop a modern OS. It was well understood how to develop a desktop environment when Gnome and KDE came along. This is the pattern followed by most end-user FOSS software.
And why shouldn't it be that way on new mobile platforms? How else do you propose to reward the innovation and labor of those developing software for these platforms? That's not a rhetorical question. If you have a viable alternative, I'd like to hear it. The people who develop these mass market applications need to eat and pay their bills. All the more so the case in the present economic climate. Time is money, and skilled professionals are much less willing to give their time away for free.
Once the economy recovers, and once the best apps and the best ways of doing things on these new platforms begins to solidify, then we will see FOSS replacements come along for them.
Would the author rather that device vendors increase the cost of their devices by 1000% in order to subsidize app developers? Would the author rather that the government tax him in order to subsidize app developers? No? Well in that case he gets to wait until the apps become commoditized and have FOSS replacements.
Didn't your mother ever tell you that beggars can't be choosers?
What I've seen saying for years we need in order for that to happen is either for Javascript to become a first class platform outside the browser, or for a current generation language to become a first class browser citizen that Java applets never were.
I think the former, Javascript, is a dead end. In my opinion as an observer, it's primarily Microsoft through IE and their feet-dragging in the standards process that is hampering the evolution of Javascript into a proper platform. Microsoft has their own proprietary vision for a platform for rich, web-based applications, and industry standards like ECMAScript and Java don't factor into it other than as potential spoilers.
In my opinion the way forward is for Java or Python to become first-class citizens in Mozilla Foundation products. My preference would be Java due to the richness of its standard and community libraries, its mindshare among professional engineers, and its acceptance by industry.
No kidding. I don't understand what Palm is doing here. If Palm were to offer a standard Java or .Net environment, I would start targeting their devices again. They could differentiate themselves from Android by offering a standard Java environment with value-added extensions, rather than delivering a kick to the community's groin just because they could.
I have so far refused to target the iPhone for just this reason: the platform is proprietary, and unnecessarily so. I'm betting on Android to be the next Symbian, and while Google has open sourced their non-standard parts, and so far I'm living with that, it is a let down. Java and its rich standard library is free, is open source, and is a community and industry standard with multiple compliant implementations.
Sure, Javascript is an industry standard, ECMAScript, but its standard library is downright anemic, it does not have the kind of tool support professional engineers expect, and the fact that it's tied so closely to the web browser is its greatest weakness, not strength.
I hope they don't think they're going to pick up serious developers just for making their tools web-based, as if that was an end in itself, so I hope that they believe there is some benefit to making their tools all web based.
Reading the articles, I'm no so sure that isn't what they're doing here. According to them this is about enabling a next-generation web-based development workflow. It's different because... the IDE runs in your web browser.
The kind of developers you want to attract to your platform, who are going to build the quality apps that you want to be a reflection of the quality of your platform your platform, aren't held up on account of the "barrier to entry" of such ponderous requirements as having to install a J2ME development environment or have local storage space available.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a longtime fan of Palm and want to see them succeed. I owned many of their PDAs over the years. But this isn't the way to go about it. This sounds like marketing running their engineering organization. A next generation mobile development workflow isn't one that lets met develop in a web browser. It's one that gives me powerful APIs at multiple levels so that I have an API of appropriate richness and complexity whether I want to develop a calendaring extension, whether I want to develop a social media client, or whether I want to develop a game. This does none of those things, and it should go with out saying that my products won't be targeting any of the current webOS devices.
This is brilliant! I think it's clear now the direction we must go. Overuse of energy-guzzling languages like PHP have put us on an unsustainable trajectory fueling out of control global warming.
Congress must act to regulate the use of these energy-guzzling languages. No longer will programmers and corporations be permitted to turn out inefficient code with impunity.
PHP, Perl, Ruby, Bash, your days are numbered!
Just wait until we can get UN involved. Python, you and your CO2 spewing simplicity are next!
I agree. I wish our leaders would go back to publicly embracing what space exploration is about. It's about imagination, about hope and inspiration, about the ennoblement of the human spirit, and yes, also about some really cool science. My hope was that Obama would recognize this, but so far he doesn't seem to be able to see much beyond science as some kind of economic stimulus.
What greater question is there for every human being, regardless of how rich or poor they may be, than whether we are alone in the universe?
To die having not done everything we could to look right under our noses would be agony.
Human exploration is what capture's the public's imagination.
We are driving robots around on the surface of Mars. That is really cool. As a kid I never thought this is how it would happen.
We have now sent probes outside our own solar system. That is a humbling experience, to be be alive in the generation in which mankind first extends its reach beyond its home solar system.
But apart from a few news broadcasts and scoping out some pictures on the internet, the public has hardly batted an eye. We need to get back to pushing the boundaries of human space exploration. Yes there are more practical matters to apply resources to, yes it violates a minority's view of the philosophy of government, but I am hard pressed to care.
We have one life to live. Let's push as hard as we can, as far as we can. Let's put a permanent base on the Moon in 10 years. Let's put a permanent base on Mars in 15 years. Let's mine asteroids for resources. Let's turn those bases into colonies.
Where's our perspective? Where's our human spirit? The problems we face on this pale blue dot are utterly insignificant in scheme of the cosmos.
Let's go see what's out there, or fail spectacularly trying, but at least having tried.
Granted, those used to be more expensive than a regular laptop, not less, and be targeted (at least in the US) at business travelers, but apart from the fact that technological advancement and commoditization has driven down prices, and all of a sudden average people are interested in small laptops, I really don't understand what the difference is from a netbook.
There's at least 10 years of precedent for this terminology to describe what is now being called a netbook.
But heck, now netbooks can have 12" and 14" in screens. 12 was absolutely the cutoff for an ultraportable or subnotebook.
I'm starting to think that netbook just means, "mass market laptop with shitty component quality". Compare this POS to even a Macbook Air, or any of the ultraportables from 5 and 10 years ago.
Yay consumerism. The triumph of mass market shit. Don't get me wrong, I like prices coming down and democratization of technology, but this low quality netbook fad has become way too damn manipulative. Technology journalists need to get off the corporate teet and inform today's consumers just what is happening here.
I don't think the article appreciates where most consumers are at. Most consumers have simply cell phones and will continue to have simply cell phones. Most cell phones today are for all practical purposes, smart phones. What most consumers do not have, have rejected for the past 15 years, and will continue to reject, is a device that is a big rectangular brick that happens to also let you make calls, what used to be a PDA, and is now a mobile internet device (MID).
Android is an OS that is first and foremost is for smart phones. The iPhone is not a smart phone at all. The iPhone is a MID that happens to have phone functions. See: iPod Touch.
With Android, Google isn't focusing on the iPhone market. Google is focused on the Symbian market where Apple does not even compete today.
Apple is going to need to decide very quickly whether they want to remain only a player in the niche mobile internet device market, or whether they want to enter the smart phone market proper, where most consumers are and will continue to be.
With any luck, Apple will enter this market with something like an iPhone nano. I really like their interface, but like most consumers I don't want a mobile computer, I want a phone, one that flips open and follows the contours of my head, and in this day and age gives me email, gps, search, and music in a phone, not in a pocket computer.
This is the US, not the EU.
Microsoft has a monopoly in the operating system market. Different rules therefore apply to Microsoft when they attempt to use their monopoly in that market to stomp out competition in that market or another market.
Apple is not and does not have a monopoly. No, as much as you might like it to be, the "OS X market" is not a market for the purposes of anti-trust law.
Now, most likely Apple trying to prevent you from purchasing and installing OS X on intel hardware for your personal use would not stand up in court, even though it is copyright infringement, but that's not what Psystar was doing here. Psystar was infringing Apple's copyright for commercial gain. If you don't understand what that's copyright infringement, please educate yourself. Copyright infringement encompasses much more than simply making an unauthorized copy of an MP3 or DIVX.
Hear my plea, oh Mozilla developers. What must I do to appease your wrath?
Please don't build another application platform on Javascript. Just make Java a first class citizen in the damn browser and be done with it.
Heck, any proper language with a proper standard library will do. I'm not partial to Java. All I care is that it isn't Javascript. Javascript should have died in 1996.
Javascript helps no one. It is a shitty language with shitty tools that has spawned so much shitty code that it threatens to fold the universe in on itself.
In other words, the best advice for your first day in an IT job is the same advice as for your first day in prison.
How does that go over with women at job fairs?
In my experience women in IT are less willing to go to the mat for the team. I've never met a woman in IT willing to regularly work 16 hour days, willing to sleep in the office, or willing to pull all-nighters to meet a deadline.
But I don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. I think it has to do with genetic and culturally imposed priorities. It's still overwhelmingly the case that when the shit hits the fan for the team that counts, the kids, the family, that it's the woman who stays up all night, doesn't get to sleep more than 2 hours at a time, takes them to the doctor, picks them up at school, or drives them to practice.
I don't see why this is considered a problem. It was good enough to get us out of the trees, to the top of the food pyramid, and even to travel beyond our home planet. Obviously it works. And it's not as though the option isn't out there. Women certainly can choose not to have children, or certainly can hold out for a man who is willing to take on the majority of the burden of raising them.
Anyone? Same scene done better in a novel story that was a huge risk in Hollywood.
Yes, it's impressive that the linked video was done on an amateur budget, and congratulations to this guy; I hope he makes millions, but let's not pretend this is original stuff.
And how will AGW proponents respond to this in the media? With appeals to authority, ad hominem attacks, and bluster.
The media and the scientists who have become the public faces of AGW in the media have taken the position that the public is too stupid to understand AGW, and must be convinced by multimedia slideshows, appeals to authority, and bluster. They do not seek to convey an understanding of the data, methods, and conclusions. Instead, they seek to replace one belief with another. When this is how you approach your audience, it doesn't matter whether what you teach is true or false, it is indoctrination, not education.
How should they handle it in the media? They should spend 4 hours in primetime, instead of Dances with Fucktards, walk the public through the data, walk the public through the methods, examine the claim being made here, and explain its impact or irrelevance to the conclusions. You know. EDUCATE. Not pontificate. Not intimidate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems
You and your customers create issues describing what they want done. You estimate them. They prioritize them in the order they want them done. You track your time and status on each issue. You can add notes and artifacts to each issue so that you can pickup where you left off if priorities change.
This might sound like a lot of extra work. Not only is it not a lot of work, it is hugely to your advantage in two ways:
1. When the time comes, and it will, that whoever pays your bills wants you to justify your existence or justify why tasks are taking longer than they want, you can point them to this system and show exactly what you've done, where your time has went, and when priorities and requirements have changed.
2. When you're ready to move onto a larger company, having personally been responsible for rolling out and implementing an issue tracking system is a nice accomplishment to put on your resume.
Which means that if they aren't delivering ads directly on the device, they are almost certainly using it to collect data about everything you do and everywhere you go in order to increase your value to advertisers through search and mail.
It won't be a separate model. It will be the standard model, just like Google and Gmail. The ads will be unobtrusive to the majority of consumers, but still valuable to advertisers. Google will no more offer this without personal data collection and advertising than they do Google and Gmail. Sure, they'll give you some privacy options, but they won't give you options that have a meaningful negative impact on the value of their services to advertisers.
If you run AdBlock, you are a minority. This isn't the phone for you. Since Google will control the hardware and the software, you'd have a heck of a time running AdBlock even if you wanted to. That's the point.