A nice tale but for every anecdote of this kind there is another that shows the opposite. Its partly this that has led to the outsourcing of support to experts with SLAs that include fix times. Here's one such tale:
Around 10 years ago I had a short, back fill, contract at a place close to home leading up to Xmas. They were running a pair of Sun E10000 servers and a whole stack of A5200 JBOD fibre disk arrays. I was the expensive contractor so, as well as being on hand to deal with emergencies, they asked me to look at a performance issue they had. Once a month they ran a job that slowed everything down to the point where the system was unresponsive. Their in-house techs had looked at it and were stumped.
I took a look at the system, the disk layout, the processes being run and prepared a report. The issue was a race condition that happened when they exceeded physical memory. The Oracle database was striped across every spindle in the disk arrays. Common, and good, practice to get the best performance. Sadly some of those spindles also housed the swap space for the systems. When this particular job ran these disks became 'hot'. The demands for them to process Oracle requests and swap pages conflicted. As more queries, running across the whole database, were queued the situation became worse. My recommendation was to move the database off these disks.
The in-house DBA came back from his course, took one look at my report, and said that 'Oracle had to be on all the spindles'. I shrugged and my contract finished. A few years later working somewhere else I mentioned this place and one of my colleages said that he'd worked for a external support company that had been hired to manage their systems a year or two after I'd left. The first thing they had done was solve the disk layout issues.
The arrogance of the internal staff here had eventually caused the management to fire the whole team and get in an external company that immediately improved the performance of their systems extending the life of the hardware investment. The problem is that not all IT staff are equal and companies don't usually find out which type they have until they leave.
Why not just have a 1TB HDD? Or a swanky SSD? That's the inevitability anyway. Store games in the cloud a la Steam and download them at your convenience. Don't fear the cloud. These days, such a move isn't bound to exclude many as it would have in the past.
This would be a disaster as the XBox experience would be out of control of Microsoft. Instead they would be at the mercy of ISPs. This cannot be overstated. Regardless of the availability of fast Internet connectivity there is a lot to be said for the immediacy of plugging in the XBox, slapping in a disc, and just playing.
Steam is an interesting experiment, and does work, but if you have issues with access to your account you can easily lose an hour or two sorting it out by which time you've lost your time to play.
I'll probably get modded down for saying this - but over the years, I've worked as a developer/tech arch in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Milwaukee and Portsmouth, and my experience is that the vast majority of US programmers also suck.
The main problem I've had with Indian programmers is that a lot of them don't really understand english (even though it is the official language of India) - which makes explaining requirements more difficult, but at least they can do math properly.
Not all overseas developers suck, and not all US developers are awesome. I can see why management would be willing to take the lower cost option, when they aren't guaranteed (or qualified) to identify and hire good talent locally.
My experience is that most people in IT suck. They have gone into IT as a career decision rather than having any real aptitude for what they are doing. They are able to follow instruction though and when tightly managed are able to just about justify their position. Though I still reckon you could get 90% of the work done better with 10% of the work force. This has always been the way though and always will be so you've just got to get used to it.
The language issue with overseas outsourcing is more to do with idioms and cultural references than with English comprehension. I suffer the same issues communicating with people with better English than me, I'm from the UK, from other English speaking nations such as the US. The issue isn't necessarily the words that are written/spoken but the ambiguous meaning that they hold.
As an example I worked for an organisation that brought in a bunch of people from their India office to act as testing resource on a project. They were intelligent, spoke good English, and an asset to the project. My first dealings with them were problematic though. Its a habit over here that after explaining something I'd say "do you understand?". The answer was always in the affirmative. I later found out that they wouldn't say otherwise as to do so would be to insult me. Once I was aware of this I changed the way that I explained things and we made faster progress.
Getting back to the original topic outsourcing can work but only if the specification is nailed down in absolute terms using clear and unambiguous language. This latter part is so difficult that it is often missed and other things are blamed for the problems.
As with all of these 'sky is falling' predictions of doom this piece is looking at the wrong problem. Rather than lamenting the fact that so many people are choosing to use the latest smart device with walled-garden application stores they should look at why?
The problem is that the general purpose PC doesn't protect the users from themselves. Its too easy for them to install a peice of malware, I including IE search bars in this category, and too difficult for them to get rid of them. The easy solution to this is to restrict what people can install, the walled garden approach, the harder solution is to make it easier for users to help themselves. Rather than shout at the moon over the injustice of it people should instead work on a way of solving the harder problem.
It creeps me how young geeks hand out all their personal data to the first free provider they happen to come across.
Yeah, it's a bit of a pain sometimes, but the benefit of having the data where I want it, dealt with how I want it, outweighs the cost IMO. It also makes for good system administration practice if you have an interest in that kind of thing.
I never cease to be amazed by this. If you read this site at first you would suspect that everyone is concerned about privacy and organisational access to their data. Then you come across questions like this were the solution is generally 'leave it to Google' or 'load it onto XYZ storage service'. To me the two things seem diametrically opposed. The uneducated viewer would be spinning trying to work out what people really think.
I don't understand the trust in Google that people have, especially with personal email. I keep my email on my server. It took very little time to setup and pretty much runs itself. I just need to apply security updates from time to time.
Its personal email. I've reasonably often searched back over a number of years for something I vaguely remembered, finding the associated emails gave me the information I was looking for. I have personal email going back to 1996 all sitting behind an IMAP server. I did look at clearing it down at one time but, in the end, that was more effort than simply leaving it there.
I guess I'm not part of the disposal culture that we have these days. I place value on history, even my own.
My own companies consumer website, I work for a financial institution, shows figures of 11% Firefox, 11% Chrome, 11% Safari (including mobile Safari), with IE having all but 1% of the rest.
I'm always skeptical of browser stats because they very much depend on the audience you are monitoring and don't take account of changing usage. As an example Firefox and IE are likely to have dropped percentages on google.com as Bing has been an alternative/default search engine. This could be interpreted as a decrease in the use of these browsers when in fact its just that the traffic is going elsewhere.
How are the publishers losing out here? If anything Amazon is helping them out. Regardless of the popularity of ebooks there is always the need for physical copies. This means that the authors are going to go to the publishing companies. They then allow Amazon to sell their ebook for the Kindle and what is the cost to them of doing this? They don't care about the delivery mechanism as long as they get their profit from each sale. The chances are that they make more from the ebook sales than the equivalent physical copy.
OK, consciousness, free choice, reason, logic, information. We'll start there. You just have to spend a bit of actual time looking.
Been there, seen it, bought the t-shirt. I spent sometime doing bible studies*, interpretation of passages of scripture etc. In the end it brought me to the position that there was nothing really on offer except a code to live by. No magical revelation, no light on the way to Damascus, just a collection of stories who's meaning had to be interpreted to fit into the what we know of the world today.
I talked to people that believed about their beliefs. More importantly about why they believe. The main reason is to give meaning to their lives. To give them an emotional crutch that there is more to their life than their time on planet Earth. This gave me the insight I was looking for.
If you take the starting point that religion is about giving meaning to people to keep them happy in their lot it fits pretty well. Once someone believes in a religion it provides the answers to those awkward questions about life. It provides certainty in an uncertain world.
I'm happy not to believe. I don't need the support of a mystical being to give purpose to my life. I'm happy not having an underlying truth. The humanist approach of treating others how I expect them to treat me is fine. I don't need an immortal soul, I have one in my children, and their offspring. To my mind not having this belief in a God makes me more grounded in this world. It behooves me to try to make the best of it because there's no God to come along and tidy it up afterwards.
I understand that other people don't have that confidence and need to believe in something. I don't judge them for that, and won't try to convert them to my world view. I just wish that they wouldn't try and foist their's on me claiming that its the only way to find truth.
* I admit it initially this was all because of a girl but don't let that give a false impression on how serious I took it.
>p>Then there's that the bible references plenty events that clearly didn't happen, such as a global flood or the plagues of Egypt, which definitely is fiction.
If you look at the plagues of Egypt they are all possible. Even down to children being struck down dead. Literal interpretation is always a stretch but there have been a number of programmes looking at the facts behind various Old Testament stories and a lot of it can be explained without having to make a leap of faith.
To be honest if the US want to put up a firewall that stops me being able to view content in the US or people in the US from viewing content from without I don't care. If the US choose to manipulate DNS registries to stop me in Europe being able to view content housed in Europe then I have serious issues with that. That people either can't, or won't, see a difference between the two doesn't surprise me it does sadden me though. It shows that reason has been lost to the world.
Having gone through CoD 4:MW, CoD:WaW, CoD:MW2, and CoD:BO I'm not going to buy MW3. They are all essentially the same game with different guns. There may be one or two wrinkles that change with each version but that's about it. I don't buy for the single player game as again they are all pretty much the same so its only the multi-player. Unless there are massive changes I'm guessing that MW3 will have the same Halo physics of the previous incarnations with people sprinting and bouncing to dodge bullets. Don't get me wrong, in its place its fun, but its not worth an CoD Tax. Activision have got themselves a franchise in the mold of Madden and are going to milk it all they can whilst doing as little actual development as possible.
I bought BF3 because I'd not played Battlefield before. After playing the multi-player I won't be going back to CoD. The experience just seems that bit more.
Why wouldn't you want your Grandma to be able to access the internet? If she's still got it mentally then easy access to the internet might be good. My mother, in her 70's uses her iPad to access the Internet everyday.
The third article has an update stating that Apple didn't litigate this case, but MAY have been behind the original complaint. Surely we need something a bit more substantial than this before we break out the standard pro/anti-Apple rhetoric?
Of course, Apple was not behind this. It was my dog.
Because he's known to sue everyone (using retarded design patent claims), and he is gaining a lot from this.
Bad dog.
If you needed reason as to why Geeks aren't consulted about important decisions just read the above. The facts of the case are not important, what is important is prejudice and personal opinion. Seriously, all you have to do is mention Apple, or Microsoft, or Google and you don't need to read the comments. In the first two the majority of people will be against and will pour vitriol and insults at anyone that disagrees with the hive mind. In the latter there will be overwhelming support regardless of what is actually being done. Google lays claim to every 2nd child as payment for their services, "seems fair" says Slashdot.
They also have this odd Command key (flower power) which seems to have taken over a lot of the functions of the Control key (but not all... I'm still figuring this out).
The command key has been there since 1984. It provides a consistent way of managing keyboard shortcuts.
Until the range and recharge issues of electric cars are addressed they are quite right to review them in this manner. The manufacturer blurb around the Leaf suggests that you can use it to replace a normal family runabout. That charging it is as simple as finding a suitable outlet.
I took a drive yesterday in a car that I think the Leaf would be targetted to replace. A Suzuki Swift. I drove my wife, daughter, and grandchild off to visit family 140 miles away. A 280 mile round trip in 9 hours. I filled up with unleaded before I set off and made it back on a single tank of fuel. I couldn't have made the journey in the Leaf. I know that the journey I made was above the range of the Leaf, but that was the point of the Top Gear test. Its not a journey we make that often, but when we do we use the same car we use to drive around the rest of the time. In effect they are saying that a Leaf is only any use for short distance driving, don't even think about an occasional long journey, so you'd need a second car for longer distance.
p>They faked the catastrophic shutdowns, range estimate, and staged having to push it back into the hangar, which I think can be shown on the face of it to deal damage to the Tesla brand.
Really? It would damage teh Tesla brand? Did people who were looking to buy a Tesla Roadster suddenly decide that because of what was said on Top Gear that they'd not buy one?
Electric cars do have the issues they pointed out when compared with a car powered by a internal combustion engine. What does it matter that they showed it in a humourous way. Its an entertainment show, give them artistic licence.
Regardless of whether this is just normal corporate practice how does this sit with the 'Do No Evil' motto?
Personally I'd avoid paying any tax I could, but then I've not portrayed myself as anything other than a normal individual. Google, through their motto, have set themselves a higher bar. To me this shows that the pressures of being a public company have made the halo slip a little,
No. This is more like the Noble Exchange. Its a vanity item that can be traded for in game currency. PLEX are not a vanity item as they have a use that consumes them.
I was expecting some nonsense in the comments for this story but the parent getting modded Insightful takes the biscuit. Given that the iPhone was released before Android how has it had pretty much every technical feature before the iPhone?
Ah, I get it. Google have used their massive computing power on the faster than c neutrino problem and gone back in time to change history.
Im glad that a company like B & N has balls where as HTC and samsung c not.
Yeah, Samsung or HTC clearly have no balls for patent fights. That's why they also just let Apple steamroll them too. Oh wait, they didn't. The fact that they aren't fighting these patents from Microsoft (along with the others licensing them) is a good indication that they are viewed as valid patents despite the wet dreams of Slashtards to the contrary.
If you came to slashdot looking for reasoned debate where MS or Apple are concerned you are 10 years too late.
IIRC Apple explicitly didn't want native apps when it released the iPhone. Their original idea was to have everything web based and accessed through Safari. A lot of time and effort was put into making this work. Native apps, and the app store, only surfaced with the 2nd revision of iOS and after people had been jail-breaking their phones to be able to install native apps. Android had to allow native apps because iOS did. This drive to native apps was from the users not from the manufacturers. The whole summary is a massive rewrite of history to fit the author's viewpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Its actually a bit worse than this. It gives a bonafide target for a trojan.
A nice tale but for every anecdote of this kind there is another that shows the opposite. Its partly this that has led to the outsourcing of support to experts with SLAs that include fix times. Here's one such tale:
Around 10 years ago I had a short, back fill, contract at a place close to home leading up to Xmas. They were running a pair of Sun E10000 servers and a whole stack of A5200 JBOD fibre disk arrays. I was the expensive contractor so, as well as being on hand to deal with emergencies, they asked me to look at a performance issue they had. Once a month they ran a job that slowed everything down to the point where the system was unresponsive. Their in-house techs had looked at it and were stumped.
I took a look at the system, the disk layout, the processes being run and prepared a report. The issue was a race condition that happened when they exceeded physical memory. The Oracle database was striped across every spindle in the disk arrays. Common, and good, practice to get the best performance. Sadly some of those spindles also housed the swap space for the systems. When this particular job ran these disks became 'hot'. The demands for them to process Oracle requests and swap pages conflicted. As more queries, running across the whole database, were queued the situation became worse. My recommendation was to move the database off these disks.
The in-house DBA came back from his course, took one look at my report, and said that 'Oracle had to be on all the spindles'. I shrugged and my contract finished. A few years later working somewhere else I mentioned this place and one of my colleages said that he'd worked for a external support company that had been hired to manage their systems a year or two after I'd left. The first thing they had done was solve the disk layout issues.
The arrogance of the internal staff here had eventually caused the management to fire the whole team and get in an external company that immediately improved the performance of their systems extending the life of the hardware investment. The problem is that not all IT staff are equal and companies don't usually find out which type they have until they leave.
Why not just have a 1TB HDD? Or a swanky SSD? That's the inevitability anyway. Store games in the cloud a la Steam and download them at your convenience. Don't fear the cloud. These days, such a move isn't bound to exclude many as it would have in the past.
This would be a disaster as the XBox experience would be out of control of Microsoft. Instead they would be at the mercy of ISPs. This cannot be overstated. Regardless of the availability of fast Internet connectivity there is a lot to be said for the immediacy of plugging in the XBox, slapping in a disc, and just playing.
Steam is an interesting experiment, and does work, but if you have issues with access to your account you can easily lose an hour or two sorting it out by which time you've lost your time to play.
I'll probably get modded down for saying this - but over the years, I've worked as a developer/tech arch in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Milwaukee and Portsmouth, and my experience is that the vast majority of US programmers also suck.
The main problem I've had with Indian programmers is that a lot of them don't really understand english (even though it is the official language of India) - which makes explaining requirements more difficult, but at least they can do math properly.
Not all overseas developers suck, and not all US developers are awesome. I can see why management would be willing to take the lower cost option, when they aren't guaranteed (or qualified) to identify and hire good talent locally.
My experience is that most people in IT suck. They have gone into IT as a career decision rather than having any real aptitude for what they are doing. They are able to follow instruction though and when tightly managed are able to just about justify their position. Though I still reckon you could get 90% of the work done better with 10% of the work force. This has always been the way though and always will be so you've just got to get used to it.
The language issue with overseas outsourcing is more to do with idioms and cultural references than with English comprehension. I suffer the same issues communicating with people with better English than me, I'm from the UK, from other English speaking nations such as the US. The issue isn't necessarily the words that are written/spoken but the ambiguous meaning that they hold.
As an example I worked for an organisation that brought in a bunch of people from their India office to act as testing resource on a project. They were intelligent, spoke good English, and an asset to the project. My first dealings with them were problematic though. Its a habit over here that after explaining something I'd say "do you understand?". The answer was always in the affirmative. I later found out that they wouldn't say otherwise as to do so would be to insult me. Once I was aware of this I changed the way that I explained things and we made faster progress.
Getting back to the original topic outsourcing can work but only if the specification is nailed down in absolute terms using clear and unambiguous language. This latter part is so difficult that it is often missed and other things are blamed for the problems.
As with all of these 'sky is falling' predictions of doom this piece is looking at the wrong problem. Rather than lamenting the fact that so many people are choosing to use the latest smart device with walled-garden application stores they should look at why?
The problem is that the general purpose PC doesn't protect the users from themselves. Its too easy for them to install a peice of malware, I including IE search bars in this category, and too difficult for them to get rid of them. The easy solution to this is to restrict what people can install, the walled garden approach, the harder solution is to make it easier for users to help themselves. Rather than shout at the moon over the injustice of it people should instead work on a way of solving the harder problem.
It creeps me how young geeks hand out all their personal data to the first free provider they happen to come across.
Yeah, it's a bit of a pain sometimes, but the benefit of having the data where I want it, dealt with how I want it, outweighs the cost IMO. It also makes for good system administration practice if you have an interest in that kind of thing.
I never cease to be amazed by this. If you read this site at first you would suspect that everyone is concerned about privacy and organisational access to their data. Then you come across questions like this were the solution is generally 'leave it to Google' or 'load it onto XYZ storage service'. To me the two things seem diametrically opposed. The uneducated viewer would be spinning trying to work out what people really think.
I don't understand the trust in Google that people have, especially with personal email. I keep my email on my server. It took very little time to setup and pretty much runs itself. I just need to apply security updates from time to time.
Its personal email. I've reasonably often searched back over a number of years for something I vaguely remembered, finding the associated emails gave me the information I was looking for. I have personal email going back to 1996 all sitting behind an IMAP server. I did look at clearing it down at one time but, in the end, that was more effort than simply leaving it there.
I guess I'm not part of the disposal culture that we have these days. I place value on history, even my own.
My own companies consumer website, I work for a financial institution, shows figures of 11% Firefox, 11% Chrome, 11% Safari (including mobile Safari), with IE having all but 1% of the rest.
I'm always skeptical of browser stats because they very much depend on the audience you are monitoring and don't take account of changing usage. As an example Firefox and IE are likely to have dropped percentages on google.com as Bing has been an alternative/default search engine. This could be interpreted as a decrease in the use of these browsers when in fact its just that the traffic is going elsewhere.
How are the publishers losing out here? If anything Amazon is helping them out. Regardless of the popularity of ebooks there is always the need for physical copies. This means that the authors are going to go to the publishing companies. They then allow Amazon to sell their ebook for the Kindle and what is the cost to them of doing this? They don't care about the delivery mechanism as long as they get their profit from each sale. The chances are that they make more from the ebook sales than the equivalent physical copy.
OK, consciousness, free choice, reason, logic, information. We'll start there.
You just have to spend a bit of actual time looking.
Been there, seen it, bought the t-shirt. I spent sometime doing bible studies*, interpretation of passages of scripture etc. In the end it brought me to the position that there was nothing really on offer except a code to live by. No magical revelation, no light on the way to Damascus, just a collection of stories who's meaning had to be interpreted to fit into the what we know of the world today.
I talked to people that believed about their beliefs. More importantly about why they believe. The main reason is to give meaning to their lives. To give them an emotional crutch that there is more to their life than their time on planet Earth. This gave me the insight I was looking for.
If you take the starting point that religion is about giving meaning to people to keep them happy in their lot it fits pretty well. Once someone believes in a religion it provides the answers to those awkward questions about life. It provides certainty in an uncertain world.
I'm happy not to believe. I don't need the support of a mystical being to give purpose to my life. I'm happy not having an underlying truth. The humanist approach of treating others how I expect them to treat me is fine. I don't need an immortal soul, I have one in my children, and their offspring. To my mind not having this belief in a God makes me more grounded in this world. It behooves me to try to make the best of it because there's no God to come along and tidy it up afterwards.
I understand that other people don't have that confidence and need to believe in something. I don't judge them for that, and won't try to convert them to my world view. I just wish that they wouldn't try and foist their's on me claiming that its the only way to find truth.
* I admit it initially this was all because of a girl but don't let that give a false impression on how serious I took it.
>p>Then there's that the bible references plenty events that clearly didn't happen, such as a global flood or the plagues of Egypt, which definitely is fiction.
If you look at the plagues of Egypt they are all possible. Even down to children being struck down dead. Literal interpretation is always a stretch but there have been a number of programmes looking at the facts behind various Old Testament stories and a lot of it can be explained without having to make a leap of faith.
To be honest if the US want to put up a firewall that stops me being able to view content in the US or people in the US from viewing content from without I don't care. If the US choose to manipulate DNS registries to stop me in Europe being able to view content housed in Europe then I have serious issues with that. That people either can't, or won't, see a difference between the two doesn't surprise me it does sadden me though. It shows that reason has been lost to the world.
Having gone through CoD 4:MW, CoD:WaW, CoD:MW2, and CoD:BO I'm not going to buy MW3. They are all essentially the same game with different guns. There may be one or two wrinkles that change with each version but that's about it. I don't buy for the single player game as again they are all pretty much the same so its only the multi-player. Unless there are massive changes I'm guessing that MW3 will have the same Halo physics of the previous incarnations with people sprinting and bouncing to dodge bullets. Don't get me wrong, in its place its fun, but its not worth an CoD Tax. Activision have got themselves a franchise in the mold of Madden and are going to milk it all they can whilst doing as little actual development as possible.
I bought BF3 because I'd not played Battlefield before. After playing the multi-player I won't be going back to CoD. The experience just seems that bit more.
Why wouldn't you want your Grandma to be able to access the internet? If she's still got it mentally then easy access to the internet might be good. My mother, in her 70's uses her iPad to access the Internet everyday.
The third article has an update stating that Apple didn't litigate this case, but MAY have been behind the original complaint. Surely we need something a bit more substantial than this before we break out the standard pro/anti-Apple rhetoric?
Of course, Apple was not behind this. It was my dog.
Because he's known to sue everyone (using retarded design patent claims), and he is gaining a lot from this.
Bad dog.
If you needed reason as to why Geeks aren't consulted about important decisions just read the above. The facts of the case are not important, what is important is prejudice and personal opinion. Seriously, all you have to do is mention Apple, or Microsoft, or Google and you don't need to read the comments. In the first two the majority of people will be against and will pour vitriol and insults at anyone that disagrees with the hive mind. In the latter there will be overwhelming support regardless of what is actually being done. Google lays claim to every 2nd child as payment for their services, "seems fair" says Slashdot.
They also have this odd Command key (flower power) which seems to have taken over a lot of the functions of the Control key (but not all... I'm still figuring this out).
The command key has been there since 1984. It provides a consistent way of managing keyboard shortcuts.
Until the range and recharge issues of electric cars are addressed they are quite right to review them in this manner. The manufacturer blurb around the Leaf suggests that you can use it to replace a normal family runabout. That charging it is as simple as finding a suitable outlet.
I took a drive yesterday in a car that I think the Leaf would be targetted to replace. A Suzuki Swift. I drove my wife, daughter, and grandchild off to visit family 140 miles away. A 280 mile round trip in 9 hours. I filled up with unleaded before I set off and made it back on a single tank of fuel. I couldn't have made the journey in the Leaf. I know that the journey I made was above the range of the Leaf, but that was the point of the Top Gear test. Its not a journey we make that often, but when we do we use the same car we use to drive around the rest of the time. In effect they are saying that a Leaf is only any use for short distance driving, don't even think about an occasional long journey, so you'd need a second car for longer distance.
p>They faked the catastrophic shutdowns, range estimate, and staged having to push it back into the hangar, which I think can be shown on the face of it to deal damage to the Tesla brand.
Really? It would damage teh Tesla brand? Did people who were looking to buy a Tesla Roadster suddenly decide that because of what was said on Top Gear that they'd not buy one?
Electric cars do have the issues they pointed out when compared with a car powered by a internal combustion engine. What does it matter that they showed it in a humourous way. Its an entertainment show, give them artistic licence.
Nah. The porn industry will be the first to buy cameras. They will be ready from day one.
Regardless of whether this is just normal corporate practice how does this sit with the 'Do No Evil' motto?
Personally I'd avoid paying any tax I could, but then I've not portrayed myself as anything other than a normal individual. Google, through their motto, have set themselves a higher bar. To me this shows that the pressures of being a public company have made the halo slip a little,
No. This is more like the Noble Exchange. Its a vanity item that can be traded for in game currency. PLEX are not a vanity item as they have a use that consumes them.
misplaced? Android has had pretty much every technical feature before the iPhone.
so, no not misplaced.
http://techthirst.com/?p=414
I was expecting some nonsense in the comments for this story but the parent getting modded Insightful takes the biscuit. Given that the iPhone was released before Android how has it had pretty much every technical feature before the iPhone?
Ah, I get it. Google have used their massive computing power on the faster than c neutrino problem and gone back in time to change history.
Im glad that a company like B & N has balls where as HTC and samsung c not.
Yeah, Samsung or HTC clearly have no balls for patent fights. That's why they also just let Apple steamroll them too. Oh wait, they didn't. The fact that they aren't fighting these patents from Microsoft (along with the others licensing them) is a good indication that they are viewed as valid patents despite the wet dreams of Slashtards to the contrary.
If you came to slashdot looking for reasoned debate where MS or Apple are concerned you are 10 years too late.
When you can point to an area where Samsung or Google have innovated in the mobile phone space I'll pay attention. Until then this is just noise.
IIRC Apple explicitly didn't want native apps when it released the iPhone. Their original idea was to have everything web based and accessed through Safari. A lot of time and effort was put into making this work. Native apps, and the app store, only surfaced with the 2nd revision of iOS and after people had been jail-breaking their phones to be able to install native apps. Android had to allow native apps because iOS did. This drive to native apps was from the users not from the manufacturers. The whole summary is a massive rewrite of history to fit the author's viewpoint.