MetaMan

Effectively there is an invisible google circle and everyone is in it!

For me this contradicts my understanding of the basic principle of G+ cirlces. I.e that I can post stuff to a few individuals knowing that only they will see it. If Google can, say, use my photos or posts for their purposes without my permissions then its really not that much better than Facebook.

Shame. I've been using G+ over the last couple of days and I like it.

I spotted this clause as well

“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

Legally then google can do anything they like with your content, whether you made it private to a few friends only or completely public. You just have to trust them. Scary!

I think the real issue is that there is a misalignment of "business models".

On the one hand you have an open Source project with little funding relying on a small group of volunteers acting mostly out of a sense of social responsibility and on the other hand you have dishonest rip-off artists able to make money for free with little or no practical sanction applied.

Its not really google's job to police the web (Note I'm not condoning Google's behaviour). The extent to which they do this depends on how well that policing activity aligns with their business interests.

The root problem is profit Vs non-profit in an environment with dis-interested / conflicted and or toothless regulatory bodies.

IMHO Money is metaphor for power and as long as VLC/VideoLAN is a 'not-for-profit' organisation they will have problems.

Wow. Thanks. I've certainly learn a lot from the linked presentation. For me It really illustrated the fundamental flaws with Facebook.

Thanks for the link. Yes is it sad that many (most?) developers are only paying attention to the headline CPU benchmarks rather than the GUImark 3 benchmark which for me is much closer to real world apps.

The GUImark benchmark tests clearly show that while Flash video on current mobile devices is not quite as good as HTML5 (because of Flash's lack of support for Video Hardware acceleration - which apparently is fixed with Flash 10.3?), for Bitmap and vector rendering Flash still has a X2 performance advantage.

Thank you. I understand things a bit better now.

Thanks for the links but I remain unconvinced that Extraversion (describing people as either extrovert or introvert) is accurate or ultimately useful. From the 1st Wiki link I note that:

1. "Many studies have confirmed that in predicting actual behavior the more numerous facet or primary level traits are far more effective (e.g. Mershon & Gorsuch, 1988;[25] Paunonon & Ashton, 2001[26])"

2. Most measures are based on self-description.

So we have a personality description which is not very accurate in terms of predicting behaviour and which also leads to a lot of disagreement (as witnessed by the comments here) about what it actually means in terms of behaviour and human interaction!

If a "measure" is (a) not very accurate and (b) confuses rather than clarifies behaviour / human interaction then for me its not very useful no matter how seductive it is.

Sorry but I can't take the article seriously. The notion that everybody can simply be divided into either being an "Extrovert" or "Introvert" is very doubtful for me.

Even if you accept this one dimensional personality description as being useful by itself;

- is it constant (the same in all circumstances),

- does it vary over time?

- Is everyone either an "introvert" or an "extrovert" OR do people fit on a sliding scale between the two extremes?

I'm guessing that the author feels he is an introvert. IMO, rather than trying to redefine or clarify what it means to be an "introvert" just don't accept the "introvert/Extrovert" labels. Its a pseudo-scientific term which is used in a lazy way to put people into neat boxes.

I'll bet most people can think of situations where they will act "extroverted" and others where they'll be "introverted".

We are neither a number or a label!

Wow! So if you can't prove they are explicitly colluding then its OK? Doesn't this mean they can get away with it by, for example, not having anything written down or recorded? I assume this applies to all industries E.g. the health Industry?

I'm getting more and more worried about the US.

So you have extremely strong evidence of legal and anti-competitive practices and nothing can probably be done ?? Is the US financial industry now untouchable? Sounds like some south american banana republic from the 70's to me.

The scary thing is this probably speaks volumes about the insidious effect of the banking industry on the US economy. (BTW - I am a brit and living on the UK but I care because if the US economy goes I'm pretty sure it'll drag the UK and most of western europe down with it.

3 points

1. Most existing Flash content is designed for the keyboard and mouse. Even if they were written using JS/CSS etc the same user interface issues would exist. In other words the problems are with the initial UI design. Flash really should not be blamed here! The current versions of the Flash developer tools support multi-touch.

2. I disagree about the deal. Flash offers the ability to have content appear the same across different platforms with the same form factor. E.g. the same on a 10" android tablet or a 10" windows tablet. Given the platform battle currently taking place spreading your risk by not developing purely for one platform (E.g. webOS) makes a lot of sense.

3. Unless developers have really deep pockets, the choice often boils down to - select a multi-platform development environment and accept some technical compromises but spread your financial risk OR make a calculated gamble and develop purely for one platform and hopefully get an optimised user experience.

Do you really think the various browser vendors are going to implement the new HTML5 features identically? Its already a mess. The real advantage of HTML5 is that it will allow vendor lock-in to take place.

My understanding is that, at least in the UK, patents are a contract between the inventor and the state. The state grants you a monopoly and in exchange you tell the state how it works. The state has the right to seize your invention (after offering you some compensation). My first patent was held up by the UK government for nearly 2 years whilst they worked out if they wanted it !

IMO the fundamental problem with software patents is that the bar for a "patentable invention" is far too low.

Abolishing software patents isn't feasible for me. What about the firmware embedded in many current hardware devices. Where would you draw the line ?

If you abolish patents this really would disadvantage start-ups as large corporations could easily copy any good invention before the start-up has reached critical mass.