I'm going to be a dick, as usual, and ask why people still bother with RIM in 2011.
I'm in the frustrating position of having to develop (admittedly simple) apps for iOS, Android, BB and WinPhone7. After experimenting with all four platforms, I found iOS by far the most "pleasant" to work with, as both user and developer. Now this was the first time I ever worked with a Mac, and I was pleasantly surprised by XCode and its tight integration with the SDK. The whole drag&drop thing between interfaces and code was a bit of a mindfuck, but it does make sense once you learn it. More importantly, almost everything you learn for the iPhone carries over to the iPad, and the workflow is identical.
Android was a not-too-distant second, their Eclipse toolkit is decent, if slightly disjointed, but app performance and usability is greatly dependent on the actual phone hardware, and it seems 99% of them are utter garbage except for that coveted Samsung Galaxy.
BB's interface makes me want to throw puppies in a wood chipper, and the JDE is a throwback to the 90's, lacking many creature comforts found in modern IDEs. Code signing is a pain in the ass, and even though the JDE said I had no "restricted items" in my code, it still refused to run on a real phone. And that emulator ? Fuck sake, do I really need to "boot" the emulator every single time ? Slowest dev cycle ever! I'm just grateful they used the WebKit browser like the other two, so once I got my hybrid app to compile and run, I was pretty much done, though I dread the day the client hires me to build the 2.0 version. The actual phones seem to be plagued with stability issues, freezing or losing network connectivity for no apparent reason, and I regularly encountered an issue where it simply refused to sync, requiring a reboot of the phone, and killing of the host-side tasks that were stuck in limbo. Just messy all around.
And finally we have Windows Phone 7. Development was actually decent, maybe because I was already familiar with Visual Studio, maybe because they significantly improved things since WinMobile 6. Now the browser, on the other hand, is a steamer. Apparently it's "based on" IE7, well to my untrained eye it's based on Netscape 3.0, because the damn thing can't compute HTML5, nor CSS, nor half of jQuery. It's ass. I don't care for the phone's UI, though it seems sleek and more streamlined than all the others.
So to me, it seems the Blackberry is sorely outclassed. They were early to the game, but failed to keep up with the times. So I reiterate my question: why in hell are people still buying and supporting this dinosaur of a platform, and the near-sighted company behind it ?
I'll be "at last!"-ing when they hit 4.5. If there's one thing the Mozilla org sucks at, it's.0 releases. Thunderbird is still a clusterfuck. Mozilla 3.6 actually isn't too terrible, but everything up to it was pokey.
I frankly still don't understand what's so damned hard about building a browser, but I haven't tried to do that since HTML 3 was all the rage, so I'm not exactly in a position to point fingers.
Replace "thumb their noses" with "execute every last IP and copyright troll", and you might be on to something.
The big problem with things like the DMCA and egregious copyright abuse, is we (consumers) let it happen. We all recognize that good work should be rewarded, but the rules are set up in a way that gives way too much power to the publishers and distributors... often not even the content creators themselves, who sign away their rights. This abusive practice needs to be stopped. In the age of the internet, many of these old-world distribution powerhouses have become obsolete, and they know it, but they're doing everything they can do stretch out just a few more years of profits. HarperCollins "licensing" e-books to libraries is such an example. In reality, the author should be licensing the book directly, since HarperCollins' involvement is merely as a middleman, a useless, contract-abusing profit-hoarding freedom-stifling parasitic middleman.
Who typically buys support contracts ? Small to medium businesses.
Who typically installs Ubuntu ? Linux weenies who want a user-friendly, free OS for personal use.
How do the two segments cross over ? Not at all.
Ubuntu has a reputation for being easy to use. It is NOT reputed to be: secure, high-performance, admin friendly. Typically someone installing Ubuntu on a server, is someone who also runs it on their desktop, aka not your typical sysadmin, and not someone with any influence over significant I.T. budgets. This is just Marketing 101.
RedHat did it right. They marketed RHEL as an enterprise-class platform, says so in the name, and they devoted significant resources to cultivate that image.
What I took away from the article, is that the CPU & GPU performance is slightly too low for most uses. For a netbook, OK, but for a compact and low-power desktop or HTPC, it falls short. More importantly, if it took this long for AMD to barely eke out the Atom, there's a good chance Intel's Cedar View will blow it away when it is released later this year.
The one place where Fusion wins is power consumption, as their chipset is far more efficient than Intel's half-assed PCH. This means that even though performance is blah, for netbooks the Fusion will gain a fair bit of traction. Nettops will probably skip it and wait for Cedar View.
Before such tainted cash even hits the streets, you will be able to buy a shielded billfold, or an inexpensive device that fries the tracking chip.
That, or the smart ones among us will make a concerted effort to displace tainted cash with a new money system. Maybe something like the funny money some communities have started using for local businesses.
SyFy... blarg. The only decent show on nowadays is Sanctuary, and note I said "decent". Everything has gotten so politically correct that they simply won't air anything that pushes the envelope anymore. This SF starvation has pushed me to seek out dystopian B-movies from the 70's and 80's, most with really awful acting, but at least it wasn't about a sparkly vampire or an effeminate teenage wizard.
Maybe (*snicker*) people have gotten so terminally stupid from watching MTV and Michael Bay films, that they can no longer appreciate the poignant social commentary expressed within fiction. And then we wind up with messes like Doomsday and Resident Evil, which completely miss the point, focusing on the images of chicks with guns, rather than the IDEA of a fucked up future that shares enough with reality to get your own speculative mind revved up. I mean really, why bother understanding the many allusions and projections of a plot, when you can glaze over and indulge in random sexualized violence... this is what the average TV/movie watcher has become.
You know, if a terrorist wanted to do damage, instead of getting on a plane, they could blow shit up ON THE GROUND! Like, say, in an airport full of people stuck waiting 5 hours to get on a fucking plane. There are more people in a public airport than in any single plane. Malls are even worse. Frankly, if someone wanted to "send a message" to the U.S., just do it on Black Friday amid the roving flash mobs of consumer whores.
The world saw more plane hijackings in the 80's than in the 2000's. I'm way more worried about getting robbed and stabbed by some random meth-head in my apartment building, than getting blown up on a plane. At least meth heads can't afford airfare.
The iPhone has all that much I/O capacity to spare, because the bottleneck isn't the port, it's the flash storage. Much like everyday USB flash drives, the iDevices seem to hover around 10mb/sec on writes. It wouldn't matter if you slapped a SAS 6G port on that thing, it won't make the flash cells go any faster.
If you are too small to afford a VPS or dedicated box in a datacenter, you are effectively too small to be trusted with a mail server. It sucks, but frankly, for the sake of a $30 VPS, I have absolutely no pity for people trying to push mail off even a "business" cable/DSL line. Alternately, use the SMTP relay provided by your ISP, that's what it's for!
Spam is a very complicated affair, and every decent filter checks the sender's route against various lists. Simply being on a known cable/DSL address pool is enough to knock your score up a point, and if your forward and reverse DNS don't match well enough, that's another point. On my networks, that's only another 2 points away from the Junk folder, so I hope you don't have any malformed HTML or shortened URLs in the body. If you are sending important mail, that should be reason alone to pay for a properly homed mail server.
How much business are you losing, and how much time have you wasted, fussing with mail issues ? A mail box behind a SOHO connection is a hack at best.
Amen! Security is a juggle between risk, convenience, and accountability. There are those who always favor the path of least risk (and greatest inconvenience), and there are others who take a more progressive approach.
I'm the kind of guy who logs in as root, usually with a private key. Anything less will limit my ability to fondle the boxes remotely via ssh/scp/rsync. On top of that, I often whitelist a handful of IPs for SSH, maybe with port knocking as a fallback if I'm traveling. If anyone modifies that whitelist, I get an alert on my phone. This, to me, is good enough. If a trusted user does something stupid that brings the box down, they get a roundhouse to the ear, and a bill at the emergency rate for my time to repair it. If a malicious user somehow gets through all the defenses, well in the worst case I can take down the interface and repair the damage via an OOB KVM.
The way I see it, if that's not "good enough", the client is more than welcome to pay more for the extra time it takes me to perform common maintenance tasks, or pay more for redundant hardware and a multi-stage deployment/backup scheme. Call me crazy, but I favor the hardware route. Hardware is cheap, my time is not. I'd much rather spend 15 minutes reloading a known-good backup image from the day before, than 4 hours reinstalling an OS and scouring all the client files for trojans.
I'm pretty sure you surrender all rights to your video the moment you upload it to one of these services. But who reads all that legalese, right ? They just click "Accept" and upload to their heart's content. Let's not let facts, established laws and (gasp) 9th grade english language get in the way of a good old-fashioned catholic guilt trip.
Nah... DHS just ran out of people to falsely accuse of terrorism, so they've now set their sights on far more easily prosecuted targets. Just calling someone a pedophile, without evidence, is enough to ruin someone's reputation forever, if not get them killed outright from vigilante mobs.
PROTIP: If you want to be safe from terrorists, the DHS can't help you. Not unless its mandate is immediately changed to "removing troops from hostile soil and ending all military and trade-based international extortion schemes".
But that would be unamerican, right ? God forbid your government would let people be.
Difference being that back then, people gave a damn.
I'm not that old, and yet I've already lost that "spark" that made hacking fun. The need to pay bills by entertaining increasingly dumber clients has taken all the joy out of computing. 15 years ago I would have pooped out these self-assembling network plugs over a few sleepless nights of furious coding and soldering. Today,
consumes all the neural budget I'm willing to commit.
Between that and the endless stream of idiots with "the next billion-dollar idea", I can't help but show indifference at the idea of yet another network filled with the same people. It has gotten so ridiculous that the idea of a moneyless society seems more realistic than a decent internet.
That simply means you need a "trusted" box to reply to the challenge. It doesn't have to be THE box. This sounds like something a Windows VM and some packet sniffing/injection could very easily defeat, while we run our unapproved OS of choice.
Hell, if the technique works against game DRM, why wouldn't it work against some moronic Microsoft ploy ?
Only in the U.S. can you sell 2 million units of something and still be considered a failure. EA and Activision need to stop thinking like Hollywood if they are to survive another decade of this nihilistic dumbening of the industry. We (game developers) used to produce a much wider variety of games on comparatively microscopic budgets, and there was something for everyone. This is going way back, but I'm reminded of a few indie titles on the PS1 that I still replay from time to time, like Intelligent Qube and Devil Dice. They sold maybe a million each, but cost much less than $100k to produce.
Not every title needs to be a cinematic masterpiece, that is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy that is rotting the industry inside-out.
I had that feeling of disorientation in the beginning, where the sequence of events seemed totally random and idiotic. Then it clicked in my head, as if I suddenly gained the ability to instantly scan an area and piece together an escape route. The game is designed for you to race through, so by necessity there is a certain flow that must be maintained.
The problem is at first, I had also just finished playing the ludicriously violent Stranglehold. I thought Mirror's Edge was an art-house FPS, so I was thinking in FPS mode. I'd automatically look for cover, try to anticipate where dozens of bad guys might storm out, and they never came. Once I got out of that rut, and accepted the fact that, most of the time, I'd be free to roam the rooftops like a suicidal gazelle, I started thinking in terms of "can I make that jump" and "where does that zip line go". When a baddie showed up, rather than whip out the gun and go for the headshot, my thought was "hey fuck off you're blocking my ladder".
A sequel would have allowed DICE to expand on this concept, address some of the flaws (game length), add some ground-level urban maps to "bring it home" so to speak, maybe an option to remove all the shooters making it more of a zen experience. That said, it is clearly not in line with EA's nihilistic capitalism. If it can't sell 10 million copies and three expansions, it ain't worth EA's time.
And since when does the GDP mean anything ? Debt actually increases the GDP, because you're counting the same amount twice: once for the debtor, and once for the creditor - unless the creditor is out-of-country.
A more meaningful metric would be to look at what that debt buys you. If the other G8 nations are more indebted due to things like national healthcare and public services, then you either have to put on your "socialism is bad" hat or STFU.
The blame lies not on Amazon, but on the State of Texas for extending certain tax incentives to attract large businesses. Particularly in this case, only businesses with an actual in-state retail store, accessible to the public, were required to collect sales tax. Amazon obviously does not have retail stores, so they were exempt. And then the law was changed, and Texas is trying to screw Amazon out of back taxes.
What Texas is doing is of questionable legality, as they are demanding tax money that they explicitly told Amazon not to collect.
The crux of this argument is that Texas is demanding taxes which were never collected. Amazon cannot go back in time and collect 6.5% from every item shipped to a Texan over the years, so the state is effectively asking for a handout.
Ultimately this plays into the greater debate about sales tax being a regressive tax, which then plays into an even greater debate over the fact that government is just a collection agency for the obscenely wealthy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to be a dick, as usual, and ask why people still bother with RIM in 2011.
I'm in the frustrating position of having to develop (admittedly simple) apps for iOS, Android, BB and WinPhone7. After experimenting with all four platforms, I found iOS by far the most "pleasant" to work with, as both user and developer. Now this was the first time I ever worked with a Mac, and I was pleasantly surprised by XCode and its tight integration with the SDK. The whole drag&drop thing between interfaces and code was a bit of a mindfuck, but it does make sense once you learn it. More importantly, almost everything you learn for the iPhone carries over to the iPad, and the workflow is identical.
Android was a not-too-distant second, their Eclipse toolkit is decent, if slightly disjointed, but app performance and usability is greatly dependent on the actual phone hardware, and it seems 99% of them are utter garbage except for that coveted Samsung Galaxy.
BB's interface makes me want to throw puppies in a wood chipper, and the JDE is a throwback to the 90's, lacking many creature comforts found in modern IDEs. Code signing is a pain in the ass, and even though the JDE said I had no "restricted items" in my code, it still refused to run on a real phone. And that emulator ? Fuck sake, do I really need to "boot" the emulator every single time ? Slowest dev cycle ever! I'm just grateful they used the WebKit browser like the other two, so once I got my hybrid app to compile and run, I was pretty much done, though I dread the day the client hires me to build the 2.0 version. The actual phones seem to be plagued with stability issues, freezing or losing network connectivity for no apparent reason, and I regularly encountered an issue where it simply refused to sync, requiring a reboot of the phone, and killing of the host-side tasks that were stuck in limbo. Just messy all around.
And finally we have Windows Phone 7. Development was actually decent, maybe because I was already familiar with Visual Studio, maybe because they significantly improved things since WinMobile 6. Now the browser, on the other hand, is a steamer. Apparently it's "based on" IE7, well to my untrained eye it's based on Netscape 3.0, because the damn thing can't compute HTML5, nor CSS, nor half of jQuery. It's ass. I don't care for the phone's UI, though it seems sleek and more streamlined than all the others.
So to me, it seems the Blackberry is sorely outclassed. They were early to the game, but failed to keep up with the times. So I reiterate my question: why in hell are people still buying and supporting this dinosaur of a platform, and the near-sighted company behind it ?
I'll be "at last!"-ing when they hit 4.5. If there's one thing the Mozilla org sucks at, it's .0 releases. Thunderbird is still a clusterfuck. Mozilla 3.6 actually isn't too terrible, but everything up to it was pokey.
I frankly still don't understand what's so damned hard about building a browser, but I haven't tried to do that since HTML 3 was all the rage, so I'm not exactly in a position to point fingers.
Replace "thumb their noses" with "execute every last IP and copyright troll", and you might be on to something.
The big problem with things like the DMCA and egregious copyright abuse, is we (consumers) let it happen. We all recognize that good work should be rewarded, but the rules are set up in a way that gives way too much power to the publishers and distributors... often not even the content creators themselves, who sign away their rights. This abusive practice needs to be stopped. In the age of the internet, many of these old-world distribution powerhouses have become obsolete, and they know it, but they're doing everything they can do stretch out just a few more years of profits. HarperCollins "licensing" e-books to libraries is such an example. In reality, the author should be licensing the book directly, since HarperCollins' involvement is merely as a middleman, a useless, contract-abusing profit-hoarding freedom-stifling parasitic middleman.
Who typically buys support contracts ? Small to medium businesses.
Who typically installs Ubuntu ? Linux weenies who want a user-friendly, free OS for personal use.
How do the two segments cross over ? Not at all.
Ubuntu has a reputation for being easy to use. It is NOT reputed to be: secure, high-performance, admin friendly. Typically someone installing Ubuntu on a server, is someone who also runs it on their desktop, aka not your typical sysadmin, and not someone with any influence over significant I.T. budgets. This is just Marketing 101.
RedHat did it right. They marketed RHEL as an enterprise-class platform, says so in the name, and they devoted significant resources to cultivate that image.
What I took away from the article, is that the CPU & GPU performance is slightly too low for most uses. For a netbook, OK, but for a compact and low-power desktop or HTPC, it falls short. More importantly, if it took this long for AMD to barely eke out the Atom, there's a good chance Intel's Cedar View will blow it away when it is released later this year.
The one place where Fusion wins is power consumption, as their chipset is far more efficient than Intel's half-assed PCH. This means that even though performance is blah, for netbooks the Fusion will gain a fair bit of traction. Nettops will probably skip it and wait for Cedar View.
Before such tainted cash even hits the streets, you will be able to buy a shielded billfold, or an inexpensive device that fries the tracking chip.
That, or the smart ones among us will make a concerted effort to displace tainted cash with a new money system. Maybe something like the funny money some communities have started using for local businesses.
SyFy... blarg. The only decent show on nowadays is Sanctuary, and note I said "decent". Everything has gotten so politically correct that they simply won't air anything that pushes the envelope anymore. This SF starvation has pushed me to seek out dystopian B-movies from the 70's and 80's, most with really awful acting, but at least it wasn't about a sparkly vampire or an effeminate teenage wizard.
Maybe (*snicker*) people have gotten so terminally stupid from watching MTV and Michael Bay films, that they can no longer appreciate the poignant social commentary expressed within fiction. And then we wind up with messes like Doomsday and Resident Evil, which completely miss the point, focusing on the images of chicks with guns, rather than the IDEA of a fucked up future that shares enough with reality to get your own speculative mind revved up. I mean really, why bother understanding the many allusions and projections of a plot, when you can glaze over and indulge in random sexualized violence... this is what the average TV/movie watcher has become.
Great, now I don't feel so bad for sucking at Symfony.
Frameworks seem to embody everything I hate about modern programmers. Sadly, I gotta eat, so I have to play ball.
You know, if a terrorist wanted to do damage, instead of getting on a plane, they could blow shit up ON THE GROUND! Like, say, in an airport full of people stuck waiting 5 hours to get on a fucking plane. There are more people in a public airport than in any single plane. Malls are even worse. Frankly, if someone wanted to "send a message" to the U.S., just do it on Black Friday amid the roving flash mobs of consumer whores.
The world saw more plane hijackings in the 80's than in the 2000's. I'm way more worried about getting robbed and stabbed by some random meth-head in my apartment building, than getting blown up on a plane. At least meth heads can't afford airfare.
The iPhone has all that much I/O capacity to spare, because the bottleneck isn't the port, it's the flash storage. Much like everyday USB flash drives, the iDevices seem to hover around 10mb/sec on writes. It wouldn't matter if you slapped a SAS 6G port on that thing, it won't make the flash cells go any faster.
If you are too small to afford a VPS or dedicated box in a datacenter, you are effectively too small to be trusted with a mail server. It sucks, but frankly, for the sake of a $30 VPS, I have absolutely no pity for people trying to push mail off even a "business" cable/DSL line. Alternately, use the SMTP relay provided by your ISP, that's what it's for!
Spam is a very complicated affair, and every decent filter checks the sender's route against various lists. Simply being on a known cable/DSL address pool is enough to knock your score up a point, and if your forward and reverse DNS don't match well enough, that's another point. On my networks, that's only another 2 points away from the Junk folder, so I hope you don't have any malformed HTML or shortened URLs in the body. If you are sending important mail, that should be reason alone to pay for a properly homed mail server.
How much business are you losing, and how much time have you wasted, fussing with mail issues ? A mail box behind a SOHO connection is a hack at best.
Amen! Security is a juggle between risk, convenience, and accountability. There are those who always favor the path of least risk (and greatest inconvenience), and there are others who take a more progressive approach.
I'm the kind of guy who logs in as root, usually with a private key. Anything less will limit my ability to fondle the boxes remotely via ssh/scp/rsync. On top of that, I often whitelist a handful of IPs for SSH, maybe with port knocking as a fallback if I'm traveling. If anyone modifies that whitelist, I get an alert on my phone. This, to me, is good enough. If a trusted user does something stupid that brings the box down, they get a roundhouse to the ear, and a bill at the emergency rate for my time to repair it. If a malicious user somehow gets through all the defenses, well in the worst case I can take down the interface and repair the damage via an OOB KVM.
The way I see it, if that's not "good enough", the client is more than welcome to pay more for the extra time it takes me to perform common maintenance tasks, or pay more for redundant hardware and a multi-stage deployment/backup scheme. Call me crazy, but I favor the hardware route. Hardware is cheap, my time is not. I'd much rather spend 15 minutes reloading a known-good backup image from the day before, than 4 hours reinstalling an OS and scouring all the client files for trojans.
I'm pretty sure you surrender all rights to your video the moment you upload it to one of these services. But who reads all that legalese, right ? They just click "Accept" and upload to their heart's content. Let's not let facts, established laws and (gasp) 9th grade english language get in the way of a good old-fashioned catholic guilt trip.
The offending code was traced back to :
$stockprice = power( 2, rand()*10 + 0.0001 );
Data vendors quickly addressed the issue by cutting the LSE out entirely, and rolling their own rand() function.
Fucking stock markets... .what a joke!
Nah... DHS just ran out of people to falsely accuse of terrorism, so they've now set their sights on far more easily prosecuted targets. Just calling someone a pedophile, without evidence, is enough to ruin someone's reputation forever, if not get them killed outright from vigilante mobs.
PROTIP: If you want to be safe from terrorists, the DHS can't help you. Not unless its mandate is immediately changed to "removing troops from hostile soil and ending all military and trade-based international extortion schemes".
But that would be unamerican, right ? God forbid your government would let people be.
Difference being that back then, people gave a damn.
I'm not that old, and yet I've already lost that "spark" that made hacking fun. The need to pay bills by entertaining increasingly dumber clients has taken all the joy out of computing. 15 years ago I would have pooped out these self-assembling network plugs over a few sleepless nights of furious coding and soldering. Today,
consumes all the neural budget I'm willing to commit.
Between that and the endless stream of idiots with "the next billion-dollar idea", I can't help but show indifference at the idea of yet another network filled with the same people. It has gotten so ridiculous that the idea of a moneyless society seems more realistic than a decent internet.
That simply means you need a "trusted" box to reply to the challenge. It doesn't have to be THE box. This sounds like something a Windows VM and some packet sniffing/injection could very easily defeat, while we run our unapproved OS of choice.
Hell, if the technique works against game DRM, why wouldn't it work against some moronic Microsoft ploy ?
Microsoft's security problems reside between the keyboard and the chair...
Only in the U.S. can you sell 2 million units of something and still be considered a failure. EA and Activision need to stop thinking like Hollywood if they are to survive another decade of this nihilistic dumbening of the industry. We (game developers) used to produce a much wider variety of games on comparatively microscopic budgets, and there was something for everyone. This is going way back, but I'm reminded of a few indie titles on the PS1 that I still replay from time to time, like Intelligent Qube and Devil Dice. They sold maybe a million each, but cost much less than $100k to produce.
Not every title needs to be a cinematic masterpiece, that is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy that is rotting the industry inside-out.
Not quite. They're in the business of selling multiplayer frameworks labeled "expansion pack fodder".
I had that feeling of disorientation in the beginning, where the sequence of events seemed totally random and idiotic. Then it clicked in my head, as if I suddenly gained the ability to instantly scan an area and piece together an escape route. The game is designed for you to race through, so by necessity there is a certain flow that must be maintained.
The problem is at first, I had also just finished playing the ludicriously violent Stranglehold. I thought Mirror's Edge was an art-house FPS, so I was thinking in FPS mode. I'd automatically look for cover, try to anticipate where dozens of bad guys might storm out, and they never came. Once I got out of that rut, and accepted the fact that, most of the time, I'd be free to roam the rooftops like a suicidal gazelle, I started thinking in terms of "can I make that jump" and "where does that zip line go". When a baddie showed up, rather than whip out the gun and go for the headshot, my thought was "hey fuck off you're blocking my ladder".
A sequel would have allowed DICE to expand on this concept, address some of the flaws (game length), add some ground-level urban maps to "bring it home" so to speak, maybe an option to remove all the shooters making it more of a zen experience. That said, it is clearly not in line with EA's nihilistic capitalism. If it can't sell 10 million copies and three expansions, it ain't worth EA's time.
And since when does the GDP mean anything ? Debt actually increases the GDP, because you're counting the same amount twice: once for the debtor, and once for the creditor - unless the creditor is out-of-country.
A more meaningful metric would be to look at what that debt buys you. If the other G8 nations are more indebted due to things like national healthcare and public services, then you either have to put on your "socialism is bad" hat or STFU.
The blame lies not on Amazon, but on the State of Texas for extending certain tax incentives to attract large businesses. Particularly in this case, only businesses with an actual in-state retail store, accessible to the public, were required to collect sales tax. Amazon obviously does not have retail stores, so they were exempt. And then the law was changed, and Texas is trying to screw Amazon out of back taxes.
What Texas is doing is of questionable legality, as they are demanding tax money that they explicitly told Amazon not to collect.
The crux of this argument is that Texas is demanding taxes which were never collected. Amazon cannot go back in time and collect 6.5% from every item shipped to a Texan over the years, so the state is effectively asking for a handout.
Ultimately this plays into the greater debate about sales tax being a regressive tax, which then plays into an even greater debate over the fact that government is just a collection agency for the obscenely wealthy.