Give it a try. It's got version history built in. It's a collaborative text editor, doubt you need that ability, but it does the version history stuff as far as I recall.
Or, you could do what everyone else is saying and cobble together a SVN/CVS/whatever system and use that, but that decision is up to you.
I mean, maybe there was a gap if you took the average of a bunch of kids from either gender and compared them...but when I was in 5th grade, the two kids with the best math scores were a boy and a girl. And I had to work really hard to keep up with her...
Because it's either this, or more unimaginative drivel during a time when getting people to spend money on movies is much harder than usual. They're basically pulling all the wild cards out of their pockets they can find and throwing them all down on the table this year. This is a blatant attempt at trying to get a particular demographic that makes the most disposable income on the average to come out to the movies.
I remember hearing a radio interview with him back in 1995 where he said pretty much the same thing. He's been saying it a lot longer than that, too.
And now finally, after all these years, he makes/. The culmination of years of crackpot radio shows like Art Bell leads to this.
When I first got into Palm development 10 years ago, there was a vibrant and amazing community...I used to participate heavily in the mailing list and forums back then. If you wanted to do something that wasn't explained in the manual, you could post a question...and there was a good chance the person giving you a reply was one of their top OS design engineers. Microsoft started doing some of that later on when they had so many employees with free time on their hands...but you couldn't put a price on that kind of interaction. It seriously helped me pick up the platform so quickly, and that helped me build a pretty good career for myself. Even now I'm still a Palm OS hobbyist for mainly that reason.
I can't see that happening with iPhone. What a stupid, stupid way to go about things. Palm didn't even have a robust platform, and they kept a huge market dominance way longer than they should have by making it easy to develop for their platform by keeping things out in the open. You had to sign agreements, but it wasn't this fascist Apple crap for sure. I'll take on any Apple fanboy on that point.
It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.
Wikipedia with optional ads, too. Whatever is in Knol, will most likely already be in Wikipedia without intrusive ads. I, as the regular user, will stick with Wikipedia, thank you. It's the same reason why I'll use craigslist instead of my newspaper's online classifieds, too.
Harvest the stuff. Make fuel out of it. It's way better than using corn. You're throwing away free gas...ok diesel.
What everyone else is saying is that this statement doesn't seem to take into count that the algae is TOXIC. You're talking about harvesting and therefore growing TOXIC algae. Do you want to run your car on TOXIC algae, when there is tons of wastewater algae freely available? You can't take two steps in Minnesota in the late spring without stepping in some. It grows in mud puddles in less than a week.
Firefox 3 is basically a whole lot of bug fixes with a few behind the scenes additions. I never had nearly as many problems with FF2 as I have had with any of the IE browsers, but even then, FF3 contains a lot of fixes for bugs that seemingly bothered a lot of other people (like the memory leaks that I never seemed to have for some reason, even though I do pretty much the same stuff that a lot of/.ers do).
The first is that FISA, in its current state, will continue merrily along, or even be loosened up more to allow Homeland Security easier access to your personal data. Your info will continue to be stored in an illegal database if you so dare as to call someone outside of the states, surf a website hosted overseas, etc.
Or, you could have a President who would come back to the issue as he's already stated he would and revise the bill, remove the parts that he already has stated were unconstitutional, and make it reasonable again.
The former is obviously John McCain, a guy who cares so little about this bill that he couldn't even be bothered to vote on it. FISA means nothing to him...just like it was with Bush when he made his first big stink about it because it could have been used to show how he broke the law.
The latter is obviously Obama, if you actually took the time to read his statement as to WHY he voted the way he did.
So, we got 7 months to decide if we like this, or we want something better. This president is following the party line, and that line is to not allow anything, no matter how reasonable it is, that could be counted as a success to the Democrats, to pass. The guy only passed the Veterans bill because there was no way that his veto could hold up on something like that in an election year. Bush doesn't do things because they're right or wrong, he's doing this because the Republican party "big picture" plan is to sandbag until enough Democrats cross their arms and pout and stay home on election night to make things easy. Notice how many Republicans voted against the FISA compromise? Not too many there. Notice how many Democrats voted against the FISA compromise? A whole lot more.
The writer obviously has a very serious political bias in writing his summary, and I'm calling bullshit on it in a big way.
The fairness doctrine simply required equal time for both liberal and conservative views. It didn't censor conservative viewpoints in the slightest, it just meant that stations needed to provide both sides of an argument. The reason it was created was to prevent what ended up happening when it was removed by conservatives in the first place, which was a virtual monopoly over radio stations by a particular group focused on controlling the conversation.
The education system in the US can produce as much good talent as anywhere else in the world, but the cash flow in this particular society trumps all other things. Why make a relatively paltry living as a scientist when you can make oodles of cash as a lawyer, running a business, or even to a lesser degree, writing software?
There's no prestige in this country in being a geek in a lab coat. The prestige is all in being the guy in the suit making the deals and living large. 18 year old kids don't even bother thinking about being that geek in the lab coat with his middle class income.
...like they're really in control of things, right?
Every company I've worked for thought of that one. They enforced it in the coding standard. Same reasons you cite...always. And always, they build a team of generic code monkeys that only know and work with one language, and by extension, they get too specialized.
Then, one day, a salesman gets a customer that really needs a piece of software written that integrates with some device...and the company can't turn it down because they need the business. Then, generic (company standard) language programmer Jim finds out that the device doesn't have a compiler written that compiles to its platform, so the company ends up hiring a guy who specializes on that device and its platform.
Whoops. Just broke the standard. No biggie, it's just a short term deal, right? Well, not always. They might get more work on that platform. That platform may open doors to work on other platforms...at a catch. Their "corporate standard" language suddenly can't be enforceable or it would directly cost business.
I think the last 5 contracts I've worked have all been like that. And I'm EXPENSIVE for short terms. It would be cheaper if they had salaried people on hand that were more experienced with multiple platforms and languages (like me!). I always was brought in to work with a language that wasn't the corporate standard...and the corporation looked the other way. Which makes that standard silly because the code I wrote would have had to be maintained by me or by one of the code monkeys who only worked with the standard language. It's better to set a priority for languages, if platforms can't do the top choice, try the second, third, etc. rather than force down a single language.
First of all, dialup is an unnecessary expense for ISPs. No one wants to maintain modem pools in every area code and have to charge far less than the cheapest broadband connection they offer. So, the extra costs of maintaining modems get leveraged onto all the broadband users.
Second of all, these are the people that have to learn, and it's going to hurt everyone for a little bit while they learn to lock their doors, so to speak. Patching OSs is going to require more and more bandwidth to accomplish, and they're just not going to patch their stuff before they disconnect their modem to call someone.
Third, it's economically inefficient. People who have to wait 15 minutes to work their way through some flash to buy something aren't going to do that, they're just going to hop in their car, burn some gas, pollute the air, and buy it elsewhere. At least when you have something shipped, you have someone driving one vehicle instead of 8 people driving 8 personal vehicles.
These people just need to learn to use the web correctly. That's really all it is. If someone can learn to drive a car without killing pedestrians, they can learn to do basic maintenance in order to keep their computer running and not being infected by botnets. Maybe a required class should be given by stores that sell computers to first time buyers, I don't know. Maybe a license or certificate for passing basic computer security and maintenance, like with firearms. Computers can be used to do some pretty bad things that can hurt the owner or someone else by accidental disclosure of personal info, phishing, whatever. But that's not my call.
I know about the silly lawsuit over the old Hero's Quest...but how can you leave that out in favor of the later, far crappier, Quest for Glory series? In my humble opinion, Sierra has sucked ever since discarding the command interpreter. Hero's Quest 1 and 2 raised my typing speed by 20 wpm. That might have been the most professionally beneficial thing an RPG has ever done for me.
It's generally not hard to work around this sort of stuff, and has been done many times in the past with yahoo messenger, MSN, and ICQ as well. Even if they start doing some sort of signature based stuff, it just means one more step. Sniff the line, figure out the packet data, fake it out.
The only thing that constantly dinking with your client accomplishes is to wear out folks using alternative clients and force them to just stop using your servers altogether.
They're working on a new OS...Just like Google...
on
What Happened To Palm?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem with Palm was simple. They were a hardware company with a software arm. They spun off the software side so they could offer devices with different OSs, mainly so they no longer had to compete with Microsoft. The software side created a mobile OS that was technically superior to most out there, but cheap hardware couldn't run the microthreaded OS real effectively.
Enter Linux. Palm has been working on a Linux kernel based OS for the past couple years now. When I was down there awhile back, they were hiring Linux guys in a major way. They're at least as far along as Android, and maybe further. The main reason you don't hear about Palm's Linux distro is because they keep tight lipped about things, unlike Android, which has been more about marketing than about actual development now for a long, long time. The thing is, Palm takes longer because they tend to do wild things like...make developer tools available before the thing is released...stuff that Apple could never be bothered with doing properly.
Hilarious! Nice try. No, their WinMob Treos sucked. They got picked up by cell carriers, and that's why they did okay. But they were BUGGY! I personally know some of the people who worked on them, and I had to validate and get software to work on them. They're good for development work, but in practice, the WinMob Treos suck. So much so that I was reminded why I don't carry a WinMob device nor use one as my personal and work phone.
Palm is a hardware company, first and foremost. Their deal is to support as many OSs as needed, like PC companies SHOULD. They're not a software company. That's why they supported WinMob. They have silently rebuilt their software division since the Access acquisition of Palmsource, and are pretty close to finishing off their Linux based OS, though, from the people I've talked to down in Sunnyvale.
That's odd. I've had the same treo 700p since it was released. I haven't had any problems with it, even when everyone in the world complained about "how slow it was". I've dropped it 6 feet onto cement about 5 times, and the only damage I've done to it was that I rubbed off some of the shiny silvery paint on the front (I just had to have a leather flip case). Then again, I've used iPhones and WinMob devices. Now THOSE are freaking slow.
I sometimes question the veracity of all the Treo haters out there. I've never met a single one, in person, that ever had a problem with theirs. And I've met a heck of a lot. I've been writing code for mobile devices since the late 90's, for every mobile OS that's come along, and the device I use for my day to day work is always a PalmOS device.
Just because they don't keep tweaking the OS doesn't mean that it sucks. It just means that it does what it's supposed to do.
presented with a wig comprised of all of Ballmer's remaining hair, a bottle of Christian Brothers brandy, and a shotgun that jams frequently. They could call it the "Windows ME Treatment"
There are definitely corners of the IT Profession that are ridiculously dull. If you want to know if what you do for a living is boring, try saying what you do while looking at yourself in a mirror. That right there is what you are.
"I change tapes in the backup machine and start the automated build process for a living". Everything you do can and should be done by robots already.
What is sad, though, is that when a field becomes so mindlessly dull, that's exactly the sort of person that works within it. The kind of person that works there for a paycheck and nothing else. And there's really no good reason for it either, considering what tools we have at our disposal. Teleconferencing, remote management...there's no good reason besides stodgy old farts that don't want to learn how to do something braindead simple as to learn how to use the conferencing or chat feature in their IM and insist on having you in your cube to assuage their fear of you goofing off at work. If you get your job done in IT, it should be fairly obvious as networks and databases wouldn't be broken all the freaking time. And that doesn't even cover what managers can do in regards to cross-training and research projects to keep people interested.
Kids come out thinking it's all Dilbert and Office Space. The key to Dilbert and Office Space is that those are two fine examples of what you shouldn't ever allow yourself to become. That's the whole point of both.
For me, it's 100% self-serving. I used no license whatsoever, so that's the best I can expect.
Whenever I try out an app on a handheld that has some features that look suspiciously similar to my work, it makes me well up with self-delusional pride that, just maybe, that's my 45 minutes of actual work in there somewhere.
The first thing you should be prepared for in the world of mobile phone development is that, half way through any product development (or especially right when you think you have a finished product), you must be ready for salespeople to burst in at any moment and demand that you "make it faster" or "prettier" or shoehorn in some proprietary technology because mobile phone X just was released and people were lining up to buy it.
This is what sent Palm into limbo, made people forget about HTC and the WinMob phones, the Motorola Q and Razr...it just keeps going. I'm someone whose spent his entire career in the mobile arena, and I can say that this is one competitive business considering how much of a pain it is to reengineer a smartphone every year just to keep your head above water. Because if you don't keep improving and releasing, the industry writes you off. Companies as big as Google have been stymied and left behind as roadkill before and it'll happen again for sure.
The word is that the Senate is going to try and remove the provision that grants retroactive immunity to the telcos. Mainly, the most attractive part of the new bill is that it restores the original FISA law and prevents the current President from continuing to warrantlessly wiretap people for the next, oh, several months.
I don't think the Senate will be able to strip that provision, we can only hope that the next administration will find the provision Unconstitutional (which it IS), knock it out, and frogmarch the scumbag CEOs responsible for illegally violating their customers' privacy without legally informing them and getting their consent.
I'd think that if you were a technolibertarian, the first thing you'd do is create a website of competitor companies that DIDN'T sell out their customers' information to the Government, along with a list of companies that did, in order to inform people as to which company they should do business with. That requires no government regulation at all, as well as technology.
Yep, what it only does is to create an interesting situation where the President, whom is presumably a representative of the people, is held above the laws that the people he represents has to follow. So...which goes first, the notion of being a Republic and not just a dictatorship, or the laws we all have to follow?
Slashdot Mirror
Give it a try. It's got version history built in. It's a collaborative text editor, doubt you need that ability, but it does the version history stuff as far as I recall. Or, you could do what everyone else is saying and cobble together a SVN/CVS/whatever system and use that, but that decision is up to you.
I mean, maybe there was a gap if you took the average of a bunch of kids from either gender and compared them...but when I was in 5th grade, the two kids with the best math scores were a boy and a girl. And I had to work really hard to keep up with her...
Because it's either this, or more unimaginative drivel during a time when getting people to spend money on movies is much harder than usual. They're basically pulling all the wild cards out of their pockets they can find and throwing them all down on the table this year. This is a blatant attempt at trying to get a particular demographic that makes the most disposable income on the average to come out to the movies.
I remember hearing a radio interview with him back in 1995 where he said pretty much the same thing. He's been saying it a lot longer than that, too. And now finally, after all these years, he makes /. The culmination of years of crackpot radio shows like Art Bell leads to this.
When I first got into Palm development 10 years ago, there was a vibrant and amazing community...I used to participate heavily in the mailing list and forums back then. If you wanted to do something that wasn't explained in the manual, you could post a question...and there was a good chance the person giving you a reply was one of their top OS design engineers. Microsoft started doing some of that later on when they had so many employees with free time on their hands...but you couldn't put a price on that kind of interaction. It seriously helped me pick up the platform so quickly, and that helped me build a pretty good career for myself. Even now I'm still a Palm OS hobbyist for mainly that reason.
I can't see that happening with iPhone. What a stupid, stupid way to go about things. Palm didn't even have a robust platform, and they kept a huge market dominance way longer than they should have by making it easy to develop for their platform by keeping things out in the open. You had to sign agreements, but it wasn't this fascist Apple crap for sure. I'll take on any Apple fanboy on that point.
It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.
Wikipedia with optional ads, too. Whatever is in Knol, will most likely already be in Wikipedia without intrusive ads. I, as the regular user, will stick with Wikipedia, thank you. It's the same reason why I'll use craigslist instead of my newspaper's online classifieds, too.
Harvest the stuff. Make fuel out of it. It's way better than using corn. You're throwing away free gas...ok diesel.
What everyone else is saying is that this statement doesn't seem to take into count that the algae is TOXIC. You're talking about harvesting and therefore growing TOXIC algae. Do you want to run your car on TOXIC algae, when there is tons of wastewater algae freely available? You can't take two steps in Minnesota in the late spring without stepping in some. It grows in mud puddles in less than a week.
Firefox 3 is basically a whole lot of bug fixes with a few behind the scenes additions. I never had nearly as many problems with FF2 as I have had with any of the IE browsers, but even then, FF3 contains a lot of fixes for bugs that seemingly bothered a lot of other people (like the memory leaks that I never seemed to have for some reason, even though I do pretty much the same stuff that a lot of /.ers do).
You will be subjected to 2 possible outcomes.
The first is that FISA, in its current state, will continue merrily along, or even be loosened up more to allow Homeland Security easier access to your personal data. Your info will continue to be stored in an illegal database if you so dare as to call someone outside of the states, surf a website hosted overseas, etc.
Or, you could have a President who would come back to the issue as he's already stated he would and revise the bill, remove the parts that he already has stated were unconstitutional, and make it reasonable again.
The former is obviously John McCain, a guy who cares so little about this bill that he couldn't even be bothered to vote on it. FISA means nothing to him...just like it was with Bush when he made his first big stink about it because it could have been used to show how he broke the law.
The latter is obviously Obama, if you actually took the time to read his statement as to WHY he voted the way he did.
So, we got 7 months to decide if we like this, or we want something better. This president is following the party line, and that line is to not allow anything, no matter how reasonable it is, that could be counted as a success to the Democrats, to pass. The guy only passed the Veterans bill because there was no way that his veto could hold up on something like that in an election year. Bush doesn't do things because they're right or wrong, he's doing this because the Republican party "big picture" plan is to sandbag until enough Democrats cross their arms and pout and stay home on election night to make things easy. Notice how many Republicans voted against the FISA compromise? Not too many there. Notice how many Democrats voted against the FISA compromise? A whole lot more.
The writer obviously has a very serious political bias in writing his summary, and I'm calling bullshit on it in a big way. The fairness doctrine simply required equal time for both liberal and conservative views. It didn't censor conservative viewpoints in the slightest, it just meant that stations needed to provide both sides of an argument. The reason it was created was to prevent what ended up happening when it was removed by conservatives in the first place, which was a virtual monopoly over radio stations by a particular group focused on controlling the conversation.
The education system in the US can produce as much good talent as anywhere else in the world, but the cash flow in this particular society trumps all other things. Why make a relatively paltry living as a scientist when you can make oodles of cash as a lawyer, running a business, or even to a lesser degree, writing software?
There's no prestige in this country in being a geek in a lab coat. The prestige is all in being the guy in the suit making the deals and living large. 18 year old kids don't even bother thinking about being that geek in the lab coat with his middle class income.
...like they're really in control of things, right?
Every company I've worked for thought of that one. They enforced it in the coding standard. Same reasons you cite...always. And always, they build a team of generic code monkeys that only know and work with one language, and by extension, they get too specialized.
Then, one day, a salesman gets a customer that really needs a piece of software written that integrates with some device...and the company can't turn it down because they need the business. Then, generic (company standard) language programmer Jim finds out that the device doesn't have a compiler written that compiles to its platform, so the company ends up hiring a guy who specializes on that device and its platform.
Whoops. Just broke the standard. No biggie, it's just a short term deal, right? Well, not always. They might get more work on that platform. That platform may open doors to work on other platforms...at a catch. Their "corporate standard" language suddenly can't be enforceable or it would directly cost business.
I think the last 5 contracts I've worked have all been like that. And I'm EXPENSIVE for short terms. It would be cheaper if they had salaried people on hand that were more experienced with multiple platforms and languages (like me!). I always was brought in to work with a language that wasn't the corporate standard...and the corporation looked the other way. Which makes that standard silly because the code I wrote would have had to be maintained by me or by one of the code monkeys who only worked with the standard language. It's better to set a priority for languages, if platforms can't do the top choice, try the second, third, etc. rather than force down a single language.
First of all, dialup is an unnecessary expense for ISPs. No one wants to maintain modem pools in every area code and have to charge far less than the cheapest broadband connection they offer. So, the extra costs of maintaining modems get leveraged onto all the broadband users.
Second of all, these are the people that have to learn, and it's going to hurt everyone for a little bit while they learn to lock their doors, so to speak. Patching OSs is going to require more and more bandwidth to accomplish, and they're just not going to patch their stuff before they disconnect their modem to call someone.
Third, it's economically inefficient. People who have to wait 15 minutes to work their way through some flash to buy something aren't going to do that, they're just going to hop in their car, burn some gas, pollute the air, and buy it elsewhere. At least when you have something shipped, you have someone driving one vehicle instead of 8 people driving 8 personal vehicles.
These people just need to learn to use the web correctly. That's really all it is. If someone can learn to drive a car without killing pedestrians, they can learn to do basic maintenance in order to keep their computer running and not being infected by botnets. Maybe a required class should be given by stores that sell computers to first time buyers, I don't know. Maybe a license or certificate for passing basic computer security and maintenance, like with firearms. Computers can be used to do some pretty bad things that can hurt the owner or someone else by accidental disclosure of personal info, phishing, whatever. But that's not my call.
I know about the silly lawsuit over the old Hero's Quest...but how can you leave that out in favor of the later, far crappier, Quest for Glory series? In my humble opinion, Sierra has sucked ever since discarding the command interpreter. Hero's Quest 1 and 2 raised my typing speed by 20 wpm. That might have been the most professionally beneficial thing an RPG has ever done for me.
It's generally not hard to work around this sort of stuff, and has been done many times in the past with yahoo messenger, MSN, and ICQ as well. Even if they start doing some sort of signature based stuff, it just means one more step. Sniff the line, figure out the packet data, fake it out.
The only thing that constantly dinking with your client accomplishes is to wear out folks using alternative clients and force them to just stop using your servers altogether.
The problem with Palm was simple. They were a hardware company with a software arm. They spun off the software side so they could offer devices with different OSs, mainly so they no longer had to compete with Microsoft. The software side created a mobile OS that was technically superior to most out there, but cheap hardware couldn't run the microthreaded OS real effectively.
Enter Linux. Palm has been working on a Linux kernel based OS for the past couple years now. When I was down there awhile back, they were hiring Linux guys in a major way. They're at least as far along as Android, and maybe further. The main reason you don't hear about Palm's Linux distro is because they keep tight lipped about things, unlike Android, which has been more about marketing than about actual development now for a long, long time. The thing is, Palm takes longer because they tend to do wild things like...make developer tools available before the thing is released...stuff that Apple could never be bothered with doing properly.
Hilarious! Nice try. No, their WinMob Treos sucked. They got picked up by cell carriers, and that's why they did okay. But they were BUGGY! I personally know some of the people who worked on them, and I had to validate and get software to work on them. They're good for development work, but in practice, the WinMob Treos suck. So much so that I was reminded why I don't carry a WinMob device nor use one as my personal and work phone.
Palm is a hardware company, first and foremost. Their deal is to support as many OSs as needed, like PC companies SHOULD. They're not a software company. That's why they supported WinMob. They have silently rebuilt their software division since the Access acquisition of Palmsource, and are pretty close to finishing off their Linux based OS, though, from the people I've talked to down in Sunnyvale.
That's odd. I've had the same treo 700p since it was released. I haven't had any problems with it, even when everyone in the world complained about "how slow it was". I've dropped it 6 feet onto cement about 5 times, and the only damage I've done to it was that I rubbed off some of the shiny silvery paint on the front (I just had to have a leather flip case). Then again, I've used iPhones and WinMob devices. Now THOSE are freaking slow.
I sometimes question the veracity of all the Treo haters out there. I've never met a single one, in person, that ever had a problem with theirs. And I've met a heck of a lot. I've been writing code for mobile devices since the late 90's, for every mobile OS that's come along, and the device I use for my day to day work is always a PalmOS device.
Just because they don't keep tweaking the OS doesn't mean that it sucks. It just means that it does what it's supposed to do.
presented with a wig comprised of all of Ballmer's remaining hair, a bottle of Christian Brothers brandy, and a shotgun that jams frequently. They could call it the "Windows ME Treatment"
There are definitely corners of the IT Profession that are ridiculously dull. If you want to know if what you do for a living is boring, try saying what you do while looking at yourself in a mirror. That right there is what you are.
"I change tapes in the backup machine and start the automated build process for a living". Everything you do can and should be done by robots already.
What is sad, though, is that when a field becomes so mindlessly dull, that's exactly the sort of person that works within it. The kind of person that works there for a paycheck and nothing else. And there's really no good reason for it either, considering what tools we have at our disposal. Teleconferencing, remote management...there's no good reason besides stodgy old farts that don't want to learn how to do something braindead simple as to learn how to use the conferencing or chat feature in their IM and insist on having you in your cube to assuage their fear of you goofing off at work. If you get your job done in IT, it should be fairly obvious as networks and databases wouldn't be broken all the freaking time. And that doesn't even cover what managers can do in regards to cross-training and research projects to keep people interested.
Kids come out thinking it's all Dilbert and Office Space. The key to Dilbert and Office Space is that those are two fine examples of what you shouldn't ever allow yourself to become. That's the whole point of both.
For me, it's 100% self-serving. I used no license whatsoever, so that's the best I can expect.
Whenever I try out an app on a handheld that has some features that look suspiciously similar to my work, it makes me well up with self-delusional pride that, just maybe, that's my 45 minutes of actual work in there somewhere.
The first thing you should be prepared for in the world of mobile phone development is that, half way through any product development (or especially right when you think you have a finished product), you must be ready for salespeople to burst in at any moment and demand that you "make it faster" or "prettier" or shoehorn in some proprietary technology because mobile phone X just was released and people were lining up to buy it.
This is what sent Palm into limbo, made people forget about HTC and the WinMob phones, the Motorola Q and Razr...it just keeps going. I'm someone whose spent his entire career in the mobile arena, and I can say that this is one competitive business considering how much of a pain it is to reengineer a smartphone every year just to keep your head above water. Because if you don't keep improving and releasing, the industry writes you off. Companies as big as Google have been stymied and left behind as roadkill before and it'll happen again for sure.
The word is that the Senate is going to try and remove the provision that grants retroactive immunity to the telcos. Mainly, the most attractive part of the new bill is that it restores the original FISA law and prevents the current President from continuing to warrantlessly wiretap people for the next, oh, several months.
I don't think the Senate will be able to strip that provision, we can only hope that the next administration will find the provision Unconstitutional (which it IS), knock it out, and frogmarch the scumbag CEOs responsible for illegally violating their customers' privacy without legally informing them and getting their consent.
I'd think that if you were a technolibertarian, the first thing you'd do is create a website of competitor companies that DIDN'T sell out their customers' information to the Government, along with a list of companies that did, in order to inform people as to which company they should do business with. That requires no government regulation at all, as well as technology.
Yep, what it only does is to create an interesting situation where the President, whom is presumably a representative of the people, is held above the laws that the people he represents has to follow. So...which goes first, the notion of being a Republic and not just a dictatorship, or the laws we all have to follow?