alexandros

Hi, I am the author of that. Would you say the depiction in the article is more-or-less accurate? I am asking as I wrote this purely from an outside/theoretical perspective.

Pretty amazing idea. Now if they could fix the "Cannot allocate memory - fork(2)" error...

This is a very insightful post. At the end of the day, having some company (especially one run by a volatile 25-year old) be the intermediary between me and my online identity just doesn't work. My identity should play by my rules, not theirs.

You are aware that this is somebody's personal blog, yeah? And that it's only here because people other than the author submitted and voted it up, right?

In other words, you're not the intended audience. If you can find value, so be it. If not, it's not the author's fault or problem.

By the way, I think you missed a healthy dose of sarcasm in the post, but nevermind.

Summary: "Other distributions have problematic releases but other major distributions do not have significant problems in nearly every release. Ubuntu does."

To what extent this is true is unknown as the author only gives anecdotes.

I was always critical of Apple's closed ecosystem but nobody saw this coming. In a sense, they're not even leaving room for doubt that they are not to be trusted.

What's worse, essentially developers are now told that they have to put up or shut up, since Apple has the apps market cornered, and their app store full of apps.

Developers take heed. Every time you write an application for Steve's app store, it's just one more weapon that steve can and will use against you and every other developer when he decides he has a reason.

Nobody saw this one coming, and I shudder to think what's next.

One more thing: what about apps that have been already written with some translation tool? Do the developers have to rewrite in Obj-C or abandon altogether? How is this in the interest of the users exactly?

That was my initial understanding too, but I am not sure if TurboHercules, the for-profit company, is shielded as is openHercules, the open-source project. This loophole may allow them to sue and keep their promise at the same time. Again, I am not quite clear if this is the case.

This is very interesting. Has anyone seen any models of HTTP in pi-calculus? A quick search didn't turn anything up, but then http is a tainted keyword.

When we think back on Newton or Einstein, we don't say 'he won an Nobel and pocketed a cool million'. We remember them for their results, which changed the way humanity sees the world. Granted, if it was me I probably wouldn't have declined, but then, I wouldn't have found the proof either. In 40 years nobody will remember all this circus around medals, awards, and money, just his result, which is the way he wants it. Feynman also cursed the day he received the Nobel and wished these awards bodies were more discrete and privately gave an opportunity to decline without all the publicity circus.

I hope he is secretly at work doing what he does best, away from all these distractions.

POST is the wildcard verb when you can't use anything else. PATCHing seemed to be a common enough use case to warrant standardising. PATCH, combined with ETags, offers idempotentcy meaning that if you are unsure of success you can simply repeat the operation. This can really come in handy in a distributed system working over a network. (PUT and DELETE have this property, POST does not) Also, when intermediaries can understand what you're doing, they can handle caching much better, invalidating what they must, etc. Again, POST does not give you that luxury.

I believe the original Apple vs. Microsoft patent spat was for 'Look & Feel' as is part of the current 'Apple vs. Nokia' and 'Apple vs. HTC' patent duels. However my point was that Apple definitely builds on the ideas of others, oftentimes pretty blatantly. So no moral high ground there. What the legal system enables and what is 'right' are two different things.

Tell that to Wil Shipley. Oh I forgot, he can't afford to patent and have lawyers to protect the patent, so it's all right. http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...

I am sure the android devs would love to implement that, but there were a few patents in the way...

That's interesting. I always interpret it to be 99.9% of the population on a given surface. It could be read as types also I guess.

EDIT: the article posted here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1031922 seems to support the 'types' theory, although it also casts significant doubt on the validity of the claims.

What I'm more worried about is the claim that they kill 99.9% of germs. This would mean that the most resistant 0.1% get all the free space to grow. We're not disinfecting our world, we're creating evolutionary pressure on the germs to become resistant to our countermeasures.

What google leaves on the table due to principles, a marketshare-only oriented competitor will definitely jump at. What's best in the long term remains to be seen. While I personally prefer companies with a personality because it gives me a feeling of a longer term vision, it could be considered condescending to enforce your morals on a market that in majority is averse to specific content.

The data (and metadata) is definitely important. And yes the Sun is a singleton in our solar system. Closer to home, if anything goes wrong with the earth, (asteroid, LHC, some unknown weapons programme) we're all doomed, including all ecosystems on the planet (depending of course on the magnitude of the disaster). The field of global existential risks is devoted to asking such questions.

That being said, I would rather my work depends on the sun's or earth's continued existence, rather than on twitter's or facebook's or amazon's uptime/finances/goodwill. We should aim to remove SPOFs/SPOCs to the extent possible.

Being in Digital Ecosystems research myself, I would say the author is missing one important point: Absence of single points of control and failure. Natural ecosystems are rarely if ever dependent on singletons (single species or single organism) to be sustained. Their adaptivity and resilience comes from that one fact. All the examples the author states are tied to a single corporate entity, often designed so, and therefore cannot exceed the lifespan of the entity that created them. A great example of that is napster. Once the central entity was shut down by way of courts, the ecosystem evaporated.

In a sense the Internet and the Web are much closer to the true Digital Ecosystem, even though purists such as myself can still find things that can be improved, single points of control/failure etc. but at least they are not as pronounced as the ones present in the star-topology twiter/amazon/apple ecosystems.

A small victory for Flex, a bigger problem for Photoshop.

...and so Google entered Adobe's turf.

perhaps this: http://www.google.com/relief/chileearthquake/ and this: http://mashable.com/2010/02/27/chile-earthquake-person-finde... will change your mind?

Which is why I've subtly modified the title here.

I understand the general sentiment against child labour, but somehow a 15-year old doesn't seem incapable of working at a factory. Child and teenager are diferent words, except when they're not. People have been working the fields from small ages throughout history. As long as the child didn't drop school or something else to go there, maybe getting a job was the best idea. Having a hard age limit just seems arbitrary, outsourcing the worries about worker mistreatment (a real problem) to a magical number. Perhaps, counterintuitively, not being able to get the amount of workers necessary for the cost allowed by apple's contract, leads manufacturers to press workers to work longer.

What is interesting is that large corporations like google are taking on national governments more and more like equals. First it was Google v. China, now Google v. Italy. These are interesting times we live in...

Not everything is necessarily centrally planed. Perhaps a naive prosecutor mistakenly pursuing something and trying to save face, perhaps some 'think of the children' indignation, etc. The result however, is to demonstrate how out of touch Italian law is with the Web.

I'm not grandstanding here, Greek law is also flawed, as is US law (e.g. DMCA). It just never ceases to amaze me in how many ways national laws are out of sync with the Web.

Perhaps it's a good thing in the long term though. By these blatantly idiotic conclusions, it is plain for everyone to see that something in the reasoning process is broken.

I posted this about 2 hours ago but it seemingly fell through: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142971

he may have subscribed using google reader, which has an independent cache of the items in a feed.

It seems another website is now the top result for facebook login, with equally uhm.. odd comments: http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&news_id=c5...

Must be hard to be Adobe these days. These guys just cannot get a break.

I guess that's a novel open source monetisation model. Make it open source, but dependent on boatloads of proprietary products.