I own and like Scrabble. Online, I tend to play Yahoo's "Literati" game. I've got my iphone dev kit, and this made me wonder - what sort of IP would it infringe?
You can certainly copyright rules and such for a board game, but if they're rewritten, that's taken care of. I figure you can probably copyright a board design, but the look and feel can be reworked without changing gameplay.
You can trademark the name - and maybe they think "Scrabulous" is infringing.
Lastly, there's gameplay patents. Scrabble apparently had no patents aside from a patent on an indicator in the corners of tiles so you could tell how they had been played after the fact without lifting the tile. And it was 1956 and expired in the 70s.
So, I guess what I want to know is: what are they infringing? My guess is the name (trademark) or the board design (copyright), but who knows?
TFA has no mention of battery backup, which is insane, since not only can it improve reliability, it can allow the drive to return write success before the data actually makes it to disk, leading to significant write performance gains in many circumstances.
If IBM had retained a lock on the PC, something else would be the dominant computing platform. The main reason Apple is gaining traction with their own platform is because they can build on free software, and because Microsoft has an OS monopoly on PCs and has poisoned the market with their lousy OS.
The enforcement of the GPL is not predicated on the idea that executing a program is the defacto creation of a copy.
This ruling is stupid, because it could lead to all sorts of infringements based on technicalities - and "technical" belongs in that word.
We now have an entire can of worms open - for example, when the program is executing and makes a copy of the stack, I now have 2 copies of certain parts, both in RAM. I quite possibly have one copy in main memory, and another copy in a disk buffer RAM cache. I may have those two copies, and a third copy of part loaded into the processor's cache. The code from RAM is being copied into the cpu for execution. When I run low on RAM, part of the program is moved back onto ANOTHER copy on the disk in the form of virtual memory. How many copies are we up to now?
This "convict you of copyright infringement using some nuance about how computers work" is insane.
Anything your computer does in the process of executing anything you get as a program should be considered fair use, as it is clearly for your personal enjoyment.
I completely sympathize with Blizzard's motives; the desire to keep WoW "clean" is a great one, and I think virtual/mmo gaming has a huge future, and some day, we'll all be joking about how ridiculously small WoW was as a game. That having been said, these things seem to have a way of snowballing. First it was shrink wrap licenses, and before long, there were shrink-wrapped textbooks showing up. First, Blizzard sues over this... the next thing you know, the RIAA is successfully proving in court that ripping a CD is copyright infringement, because format-shifting is legal, sure, but a computer putting the bits into RAM in order to format-shift them is illegal.
No, Vista isn't going to grow to 80%. It's become the next "must skip" version of Windows. No one ever desperately stocked up on XP like this before.
Apple is already capturing 66% of all PC sales over $1000, so Microsoft isn't "losing" the high end market, they lost.
If you're a developer, who do you want to sell software to? Cheapasses on $300 Dell systems, or people who just dropped $2k on a new Mac Book? I'll give you a while to think about this, and while you ponder it, I'll just be flipping through my "Cocoa Development with Objective C" book. Take your time.
Microsoft is going to be squeezed out of business by their own ineptitude, stuck between low-price Linux offerings, handhelds obsoleting PCs, and superior high-end products from Apple. Their apparent inability to use their ubiquitous market share to get good features into Windows for media enthusiasts will clip that market and people use airtunes+mac mini+apple tv to outfit their house for easy media distribution.
Business users, meanwhile, pretty much go Mac and don't go back. You either have some application that is PC only, or you have a Mac. Because who the hell wants clippy and a bunch of viruses? For basic users, the Mac just works. For advanced users, it gives you way more ability to dig in and do stuff.
Microsoft knows about these risks. Microsoft didn't develop Windows CE, Windows Media Center, and Internet Explorer for profits. They built them to block potential sluice gates where their monopoly could be flushed away. The only problem is, everything they have produced for half a decade has peen a pile of crap. They keep moving from market to market, but what do they have that's a winner? XBox? Can't make money. Mobile? Failure. Silverlight? Good luck. MSN/Search/Ads? Epic fail.
There is a time, not far distant, when the phrase "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" simply won't be true. There is a point at which Microsoft, the way it currently works, makes software, and survives, simply will not make sense, and it will be rejected whole.
It will probably happen at the tail end of an economic downturn, after a lot of IT purchasing has been deferred, and a larger percentage of things are waiting for replacement. If you replace 25% of equipment per year, but defer 18 months, suddenly you're looking at needing to replace 2/3rds. What better time to switch? And all the outsourced email/apps/etc are only making that easier.
Vista is spectacularly worse than 98/ME ever were. The problem is that Windows is becoming a cesspool piece of garbage that serves no market. If you're a business user, the web and your cell phone are very close to becoming more important to you than your OS. If you're a casual user, especially a young one, the web and your cell phone are already more important to you than your OS. If you're a power user or enthusiast, Linux is becoming more and more accessible, and it's free. If you're a gamer, you have consoles and plenty (including Blizzard games) coming out for the Mac. If you're any kind of professional/semi-professional user, you probably bought a Mac already instead of Vista, because you're frankly tired of wasting your time dealing with viruses, blue screens, and a paperclip that has to tell you how to do things because the Windows UI blows. If you're a gamer, HTPC user, or whatever, you're going to beg, borrow, or pirate XP because you don't want to deal with Vista automatically downgrading your HDMI output or your games crashing.
And that's not even going into consumers wondering what the hell is up with the 28 different versions of Vista, or why it is that the cheapest one (at retail) costs about 50% of the cost of their new computer.
People *hate* Vista. They don't want it. It's been out retail 18 months now. I'm looking at webstats now for one site, 1M visitors/month, and WINDOWS visitors are 76% XP, 20% Vista. (Windows as a whole is 88%, 10% or so mac, then linux, then iphone/psp/ps3/etc)
Now, Windows is certainly entrenched, so this is not the complete failure for the company it might be for less entrenched companies. But what happens when Microsoft releases two Vistas in a row?
Answer: it's a good time to own stock in Apple, Red Hat, and Novell.
I'd really like a smarmy paperclip that will pipe up all the time and suggest things. Say, it pops up while posting on the Intarwebs and says, "It looks like you're trying to spell the word 'ridiculous'. Can I help with that?"
It makes sense to me, and they're probably right. You can't claim safe harbor for your OWN postings. Just showing a Google employee uploaded a copyrighted video from Google HQ won't automatically make Google liable, any more than someone making a death threat from Google's phone system would make Google liable for that - but it's a very smart first step. This might be one of the smartest strategies I actually recall hearing idiotic content old-guard lawyers pulling.
It doesn't make it the smartest strategy - licensing might be better. But of course, this could all be a prelude to a "better" licensing deal.
It seems like you just argued having ads online wouldn't work because people would turn to somewhere that had no ads, and then you suggested Viacom wants people on ordinary TV... which has ads.
The fact is, people are used to some amount of advertising. You can get away with having some amount of advertising, if it's reasonably hard to skip but reasonably easy - or, God forbid, actually entertaining - to sit through.
In other words, restrict yourself to a few minutes per hour - perhaps 3 minutes - of advertising. And MAKE IT RELEVANT. If you have a bunch of content I can get easily - and it's stuff I want - I'll happily watch a few ads. I'll even tell you what I think of them, and I'll give you feedback saying, "Not remotely interested, don't even think about displaying it again" to "intriguing, send me more info (later, I'm watching this show)".
In other words, if you're Coca Cola and you want to brandstorm my attention with garbage: Your time is up, go away and die. If you're someone who has a cool product that I'm likely to want and you just need me to know about it: your time has come.
Imagine a world where I can get any new show(s) I want automatically put on my iPhone, with modest amounts of embedded advertising, and the ability to click a "go away" or "interesting" button as I watch. Powerful, powerful transformation.
Even for traditional programming, one-way advertising is a stupid waste of time and effort for all involved.
The lack of an SSH app is currently screwing me. I unjailbroke my phone like 6 weeks ago and started to miss it pretty quickly. That said, I wasn't real impressed with terminals last time I installed one (which was way back in 1.02; I went a long with without updating)
That said, 2.0 is already jailbroken and has legit apps running side by side with Installer.app apps.
Wait, we're on slashdot, and someone just modded some asp.net smackdown on php as insightful?
Hey, next, let's find a thread where someone rips into MySQL as being hopeless, and talks about how they're happy to stick with Access, and mod THAT insightful too.
When in doubt, pick the mindshare leader. Right now, if you were going into LAMP-style web programming, Ruby, Python, and PHP are all decent choices. PHP is the clear mindshare leader in terms of number of sites/devs/etc. On the other hand, PHP also skews lowest in terms of developer skill (and I say that as someone who develops primarily in PHP), but that's an average - just because the language is accessible doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.
So find itches to scratch. I've been building something on the Google App Engine platform lately, filling a small need people may find they have, learning Python and Django as I go (and GAE, of course), and have found it quite fun.
I'm also simultaneously working on an iPhone app, learning XCode, obj C, and so on. Trying different things keeps all tech fresh.
This just in: people who can constantly master and excel at new technologies with minimal lead time, constantly changing specs, expectations, tools, and standards, and put them in front of end users in rapid, frequent development bursts are hard to come by.
Wow, who'dathunkit?
I think there's a trifecta of issues that plague the hiring of web developers:
(1) Rapid Technological Change means no OJT via college. Unless you're doing your web tech in Java, there's a decent chance you're not getting college grads trained in your language and tools. The good ones will have adaptable skills of course. You do know how to distinguish between the good just-graduated devs and the bad, right? No? Oh...
(2) Crowd of Pretenders lowers expectations of skill/quality, and salary. Shockingly, unqualified idiots are willing to work for less. Some places hear about these mythical highly skilled web devs willing to work full time (+?) for $32k a year, and generously offer $40k. They get no response, or they get morons. This reflects poorly back on web developers in general, especially those who are skilled programmers.
(3) An incredibly low barrier to entry for many models means talented people start their own companies. If I'm one of the most skilled, and can handle (or partner) to provide design, programming, and business aspects of a web page, there's a decent chance I can find a niche where I can make a run at a real business. Which is why there are a thousand Bantrs and Flickrs and Cheezbrgrs and Meebo Zeebo Zimbra Flumbrs all spun up. The expected value for a buyout by Google or being the next SmugMug is so high, even a small chance makes it worth it, especially if you can get enough funding to put food on the table.
And #3 has an inverse: the low barrier to entry also means that a lot of people get their godaddy hosting, start tossing together web pages with their pirated photoshop, and think they're ready to make 80k a year.
It's so horrifically bad, I've considered going into business as an interviewer. I've had remarkable success getting good devs on my team. I think a major problem with companies hiring web developers is: they don't know how. They don't know which skills out there are transitive to skills they need. They don't know which related skills (security, networking, system administration and integration, database architecture) might be critical for their project.
As a lot of cogent programmer/bloggers have pointed out, you can only really hire someone better than you are by luck. I keep coming across companies who could really, really use some programming/IT experience - in fact, it's so bad, they don't even know WHY they need it. Their knowledge isn't sufficient to even inform them to what good staff could do for them. You start a little project for them and ask, "Well, why not do this?" "Oh, you can do that?" "Sure, and we could also..." "Really? Can you...?"
Ultimately, you also get what you pay for. If people expect "good" web developers to work for way less than skilled programmers in other languages, they're nuts.
OTOH, I think the specialization argument is bunk. How many specialties are there in application programming? Everything from databases to development tools to reporting, 3d software, operating systems, embedded, RTOS, a/v en/decoding - we could go on all day. But web is fragmented? Heck, web isn't *that* fragmented. It's one of the things that makes development so fun, fast, and effective using it as a platform.
One reason the lines are long in the first place is the sync issues. The activation server is timing out (probably from load). If it was being prompt, people would be out the door in a fraction of the time.
I'm on a 3-person 3-iphone family plan, and we already had unlimited family text added. So We're going to drop from 3k minutes to 2100, leaving our monthly cost the same (we have 20k rollover minutes, so we sort of overestimated:D).
But I would say - if I had a choice between 2.5g 1st-gen iphone with the apps, vs 3g without, it would be EDGE all the way. Apps ftw. I spent months without upgrading because I had jailbroken, and only fairly recently restored back with the app store coming.
Your friend is wrong. Even people not eligible for ugprade can get the iphone at the middle price ($400/500).
The subsidized price is available when you are eligible for an upgrade; just like any subsidized phone - if you lose it, you pay an unsubsidized price. AT&T has a freaky offer of a non-contract iphone at $600/700, but it makes no sense to buy it, since the ETF is the same or less than the cost differential.
Offer a spamfree block of IPs using their persistent IP offering, and let people put in a large deposit when getting an IP there. If they spam, confiscate the deposit. Use the interest on the deposit to offset the cost of triaging abuse complaints.
Although if mail is incidental to your business you can probably just host a relay offsite.
The blogs Carnage cites immediately read to me like whining from people who found they couldn't hack it at Google. "There's not enough process!". Translation: "I can't do this unless I can spec it out in massive detail, get feedback from people with a clue, and then have a project manager follow my progress all the way through while 'balancing' other resources into my project when I'm slow!"
"The interviews are all focused on algorithms and not software engineering skills!"
Translation: "My Java vocational training degree didn't prepare me to actually think, and Google doesn't care how into scrums I am! Waah!"
And this is why people love and continue to use Google, especially the clued-in crowd, and why people desperately buy up copies of Microsoft's OLD product because it sucks less than their new product.
Slashdot Mirror
I own and like Scrabble. Online, I tend to play Yahoo's "Literati" game. I've got my iphone dev kit, and this made me wonder - what sort of IP would it infringe?
You can certainly copyright rules and such for a board game, but if they're rewritten, that's taken care of. I figure you can probably copyright a board design, but the look and feel can be reworked without changing gameplay.
You can trademark the name - and maybe they think "Scrabulous" is infringing.
Lastly, there's gameplay patents. Scrabble apparently had no patents aside from a patent on an indicator in the corners of tiles so you could tell how they had been played after the fact without lifting the tile. And it was 1956 and expired in the 70s.
So, I guess what I want to know is: what are they infringing? My guess is the name (trademark) or the board design (copyright), but who knows?
TFA has no mention of battery backup, which is insane, since not only can it improve reliability, it can allow the drive to return write success before the data actually makes it to disk, leading to significant write performance gains in many circumstances.
If IBM had retained a lock on the PC, something else would be the dominant computing platform. The main reason Apple is gaining traction with their own platform is because they can build on free software, and because Microsoft has an OS monopoly on PCs and has poisoned the market with their lousy OS.
The enforcement of the GPL is not predicated on the idea that executing a program is the defacto creation of a copy.
This ruling is stupid, because it could lead to all sorts of infringements based on technicalities - and "technical" belongs in that word.
We now have an entire can of worms open - for example, when the program is executing and makes a copy of the stack, I now have 2 copies of certain parts, both in RAM. I quite possibly have one copy in main memory, and another copy in a disk buffer RAM cache. I may have those two copies, and a third copy of part loaded into the processor's cache. The code from RAM is being copied into the cpu for execution. When I run low on RAM, part of the program is moved back onto ANOTHER copy on the disk in the form of virtual memory. How many copies are we up to now?
This "convict you of copyright infringement using some nuance about how computers work" is insane.
Anything your computer does in the process of executing anything you get as a program should be considered fair use, as it is clearly for your personal enjoyment.
I completely sympathize with Blizzard's motives; the desire to keep WoW "clean" is a great one, and I think virtual/mmo gaming has a huge future, and some day, we'll all be joking about how ridiculously small WoW was as a game. That having been said, these things seem to have a way of snowballing. First it was shrink wrap licenses, and before long, there were shrink-wrapped textbooks showing up. First, Blizzard sues over this... the next thing you know, the RIAA is successfully proving in court that ripping a CD is copyright infringement, because format-shifting is legal, sure, but a computer putting the bits into RAM in order to format-shift them is illegal.
A year and a half is not that long?
No, Vista isn't going to grow to 80%. It's become the next "must skip" version of Windows. No one ever desperately stocked up on XP like this before.
Apple is already capturing 66% of all PC sales over $1000, so Microsoft isn't "losing" the high end market, they lost.
If you're a developer, who do you want to sell software to? Cheapasses on $300 Dell systems, or people who just dropped $2k on a new Mac Book? I'll give you a while to think about this, and while you ponder it, I'll just be flipping through my "Cocoa Development with Objective C" book. Take your time.
Microsoft is going to be squeezed out of business by their own ineptitude, stuck between low-price Linux offerings, handhelds obsoleting PCs, and superior high-end products from Apple. Their apparent inability to use their ubiquitous market share to get good features into Windows for media enthusiasts will clip that market and people use airtunes+mac mini+apple tv to outfit their house for easy media distribution.
Business users, meanwhile, pretty much go Mac and don't go back. You either have some application that is PC only, or you have a Mac. Because who the hell wants clippy and a bunch of viruses? For basic users, the Mac just works. For advanced users, it gives you way more ability to dig in and do stuff.
Microsoft knows about these risks. Microsoft didn't develop Windows CE, Windows Media Center, and Internet Explorer for profits. They built them to block potential sluice gates where their monopoly could be flushed away. The only problem is, everything they have produced for half a decade has peen a pile of crap. They keep moving from market to market, but what do they have that's a winner? XBox? Can't make money. Mobile? Failure. Silverlight? Good luck. MSN/Search/Ads? Epic fail.
There is a time, not far distant, when the phrase "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" simply won't be true. There is a point at which Microsoft, the way it currently works, makes software, and survives, simply will not make sense, and it will be rejected whole.
It will probably happen at the tail end of an economic downturn, after a lot of IT purchasing has been deferred, and a larger percentage of things are waiting for replacement. If you replace 25% of equipment per year, but defer 18 months, suddenly you're looking at needing to replace 2/3rds. What better time to switch? And all the outsourced email/apps/etc are only making that easier.
Vista is spectacularly worse than 98/ME ever were. The problem is that Windows is becoming a cesspool piece of garbage that serves no market. If you're a business user, the web and your cell phone are very close to becoming more important to you than your OS. If you're a casual user, especially a young one, the web and your cell phone are already more important to you than your OS. If you're a power user or enthusiast, Linux is becoming more and more accessible, and it's free. If you're a gamer, you have consoles and plenty (including Blizzard games) coming out for the Mac. If you're any kind of professional/semi-professional user, you probably bought a Mac already instead of Vista, because you're frankly tired of wasting your time dealing with viruses, blue screens, and a paperclip that has to tell you how to do things because the Windows UI blows. If you're a gamer, HTPC user, or whatever, you're going to beg, borrow, or pirate XP because you don't want to deal with Vista automatically downgrading your HDMI output or your games crashing.
And that's not even going into consumers wondering what the hell is up with the 28 different versions of Vista, or why it is that the cheapest one (at retail) costs about 50% of the cost of their new computer.
People *hate* Vista. They don't want it. It's been out retail 18 months now. I'm looking at webstats now for one site, 1M visitors/month, and WINDOWS visitors are 76% XP, 20% Vista. (Windows as a whole is 88%, 10% or so mac, then linux, then iphone/psp/ps3/etc)
Now, Windows is certainly entrenched, so this is not the complete failure for the company it might be for less entrenched companies. But what happens when Microsoft releases two Vistas in a row?
Answer: it's a good time to own stock in Apple, Red Hat, and Novell.
I'd really like a smarmy paperclip that will pipe up all the time and suggest things. Say, it pops up while posting on the Intarwebs and says, "It looks like you're trying to spell the word 'ridiculous'. Can I help with that?"
It makes sense to me, and they're probably right. You can't claim safe harbor for your OWN postings. Just showing a Google employee uploaded a copyrighted video from Google HQ won't automatically make Google liable, any more than someone making a death threat from Google's phone system would make Google liable for that - but it's a very smart first step. This might be one of the smartest strategies I actually recall hearing idiotic content old-guard lawyers pulling.
It doesn't make it the smartest strategy - licensing might be better. But of course, this could all be a prelude to a "better" licensing deal.
It seems like you just argued having ads online wouldn't work because people would turn to somewhere that had no ads, and then you suggested Viacom wants people on ordinary TV... which has ads.
The fact is, people are used to some amount of advertising. You can get away with having some amount of advertising, if it's reasonably hard to skip but reasonably easy - or, God forbid, actually entertaining - to sit through.
In other words, restrict yourself to a few minutes per hour - perhaps 3 minutes - of advertising. And MAKE IT RELEVANT. If you have a bunch of content I can get easily - and it's stuff I want - I'll happily watch a few ads. I'll even tell you what I think of them, and I'll give you feedback saying, "Not remotely interested, don't even think about displaying it again" to "intriguing, send me more info (later, I'm watching this show)".
In other words, if you're Coca Cola and you want to brandstorm my attention with garbage: Your time is up, go away and die. If you're someone who has a cool product that I'm likely to want and you just need me to know about it: your time has come.
Imagine a world where I can get any new show(s) I want automatically put on my iPhone, with modest amounts of embedded advertising, and the ability to click a "go away" or "interesting" button as I watch. Powerful, powerful transformation.
Even for traditional programming, one-way advertising is a stupid waste of time and effort for all involved.
The lack of an SSH app is currently screwing me. I unjailbroke my phone like 6 weeks ago and started to miss it pretty quickly. That said, I wasn't real impressed with terminals last time I installed one (which was way back in 1.02; I went a long with without updating)
That said, 2.0 is already jailbroken and has legit apps running side by side with Installer.app apps.
Wait, we're on slashdot, and someone just modded some asp.net smackdown on php as insightful?
Hey, next, let's find a thread where someone rips into MySQL as being hopeless, and talks about how they're happy to stick with Access, and mod THAT insightful too.
When in doubt, pick the mindshare leader. Right now, if you were going into LAMP-style web programming, Ruby, Python, and PHP are all decent choices. PHP is the clear mindshare leader in terms of number of sites/devs/etc. On the other hand, PHP also skews lowest in terms of developer skill (and I say that as someone who develops primarily in PHP), but that's an average - just because the language is accessible doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.
So find itches to scratch. I've been building something on the Google App Engine platform lately, filling a small need people may find they have, learning Python and Django as I go (and GAE, of course), and have found it quite fun.
I'm also simultaneously working on an iPhone app, learning XCode, obj C, and so on. Trying different things keeps all tech fresh.
This just in: people who can constantly master and excel at new technologies with minimal lead time, constantly changing specs, expectations, tools, and standards, and put them in front of end users in rapid, frequent development bursts are hard to come by.
Wow, who'dathunkit?
I think there's a trifecta of issues that plague the hiring of web developers:
(1) Rapid Technological Change means no OJT via college. Unless you're doing your web tech in Java, there's a decent chance you're not getting college grads trained in your language and tools. The good ones will have adaptable skills of course. You do know how to distinguish between the good just-graduated devs and the bad, right? No? Oh...
(2) Crowd of Pretenders lowers expectations of skill/quality, and salary. Shockingly, unqualified idiots are willing to work for less. Some places hear about these mythical highly skilled web devs willing to work full time (+?) for $32k a year, and generously offer $40k. They get no response, or they get morons. This reflects poorly back on web developers in general, especially those who are skilled programmers.
(3) An incredibly low barrier to entry for many models means talented people start their own companies. If I'm one of the most skilled, and can handle (or partner) to provide design, programming, and business aspects of a web page, there's a decent chance I can find a niche where I can make a run at a real business. Which is why there are a thousand Bantrs and Flickrs and Cheezbrgrs and Meebo Zeebo Zimbra Flumbrs all spun up. The expected value for a buyout by Google or being the next SmugMug is so high, even a small chance makes it worth it, especially if you can get enough funding to put food on the table.
And #3 has an inverse: the low barrier to entry also means that a lot of people get their godaddy hosting, start tossing together web pages with their pirated photoshop, and think they're ready to make 80k a year.
It's so horrifically bad, I've considered going into business as an interviewer. I've had remarkable success getting good devs on my team. I think a major problem with companies hiring web developers is: they don't know how. They don't know which skills out there are transitive to skills they need. They don't know which related skills (security, networking, system administration and integration, database architecture) might be critical for their project.
As a lot of cogent programmer/bloggers have pointed out, you can only really hire someone better than you are by luck. I keep coming across companies who could really, really use some programming/IT experience - in fact, it's so bad, they don't even know WHY they need it. Their knowledge isn't sufficient to even inform them to what good staff could do for them. You start a little project for them and ask, "Well, why not do this?" "Oh, you can do that?" "Sure, and we could also..." "Really? Can you...?"
Ultimately, you also get what you pay for. If people expect "good" web developers to work for way less than skilled programmers in other languages, they're nuts.
OTOH, I think the specialization argument is bunk. How many specialties are there in application programming? Everything from databases to development tools to reporting, 3d software, operating systems, embedded, RTOS, a/v en/decoding - we could go on all day. But web is fragmented? Heck, web isn't *that* fragmented. It's one of the things that makes development so fun, fast, and effective using it as a platform.
Anyone can claim to be a plumber, too.* That doesn't mean you should let them fix your sink.
* = in some jurisdictions
What site do you think you're on? I think you mean Bruce Schneier.
One reason the lines are long in the first place is the sync issues. The activation server is timing out (probably from load). If it was being prompt, people would be out the door in a fraction of the time.
I'm on a 3-person 3-iphone family plan, and we already had unlimited family text added. So We're going to drop from 3k minutes to 2100, leaving our monthly cost the same (we have 20k rollover minutes, so we sort of overestimated :D).
But I would say - if I had a choice between 2.5g 1st-gen iphone with the apps, vs 3g without, it would be EDGE all the way. Apps ftw. I spent months without upgrading because I had jailbroken, and only fairly recently restored back with the app store coming.
Catching, or caught? And it was already ahead in many areas.
Your friend is wrong. Even people not eligible for ugprade can get the iphone at the middle price ($400/500).
The subsidized price is available when you are eligible for an upgrade; just like any subsidized phone - if you lose it, you pay an unsubsidized price. AT&T has a freaky offer of a non-contract iphone at $600/700, but it makes no sense to buy it, since the ETF is the same or less than the cost differential.
Ender's Game, of course.
Offer a spamfree block of IPs using their persistent IP offering, and let people put in a large deposit when getting an IP there. If they spam, confiscate the deposit. Use the interest on the deposit to offset the cost of triaging abuse complaints.
Although if mail is incidental to your business you can probably just host a relay offsite.
The blogs Carnage cites immediately read to me like whining from people who found they couldn't hack it at Google. "There's not enough process!". Translation: "I can't do this unless I can spec it out in massive detail, get feedback from people with a clue, and then have a project manager follow my progress all the way through while 'balancing' other resources into my project when I'm slow!"
"The interviews are all focused on algorithms and not software engineering skills!"
Translation: "My Java vocational training degree didn't prepare me to actually think, and Google doesn't care how into scrums I am! Waah!"
And this is why people love and continue to use Google, especially the clued-in crowd, and why people desperately buy up copies of Microsoft's OLD product because it sucks less than their new product.
And the Microsoft employee claims that Google can't build enterprise-class reliability because of their happy-hacker environment. Oooookay.
"How do you write Microsoft employees so well?"
"I picture a Google employee, and I take away reason and accountability."
It's time for some sanctions against the RIAA.
GTA is not popular because of technology or the performances. It's popular because it's a well-designed game. Do the designers get royalties?