archangel_one

Yes, but you'd have to install Windows onto that, and it's not.

Also a -w parameter, to match whole words only, which is generally better than adding spaces :)

No. It allows you to run Windows-in-Linux, but you're still relying on non-Free software.

I always assumed that was to placate business customers who might have (justifiably) worried that Windows 2000 was related to Windows 98, rather than descending from NT 4.

But the problem is that if it reached the goal of $1M but didn't get far past it, they'd be expected to then supply the phones those people had pledged for without actually having enough money to produce them.

There are significant fixed costs, you can't just divide the required goal by 32 to produce 1/32 of the number of phones. I'd guess that $1M wouldn't be enough to even produce one of those phones.

No, I'm replying to someone who simultaneously called Google a one-trick pony and suggested that they're attacking Microsoft on many fronts, which seemed like an odd kind of thing for a one-trick pony to be able to do.

Don't know why you got the idea I was referring to Microsoft at all.

Edit: To clarify, and before I get another laundry list of achievements, I clearly don't think Google is one either.

Attacking someone in many areas is a pretty neat trick for a one-trick pony to learn.

> Google's brainteasers did not lead to quality candidates

This is why we at Google don't (or shouldn't, at least - it's widely discouraged) ask brainteaser questions in interviews.

I disagree on whiteboard coding though. I don't find it that easy, but I think it's reasonable to expect a demonstration of relevant skills before you hire a candidate. Any sensible interviewer won't expect syntax-perfect code on a whiteboard, but it's at least a way of seeing if the candidate can walk the walk rather than just talking for an hour.

> I guess I do not see how you can lose if you take the contract-to-hire approach ..

For the first month, the vast majority of people are relatively unproductive. After the next month, good candidates are generally still going through a significant learning curve. Contracting several candidates for a few months to pick one who seems good enough is expensive for relatively little output - apart from salaries, they need desks and computers etc, and you have to do some interviewing to pick them in the first place. It's not a worthless approach, but I don't see it as a panacea.

IMO finance is not a good idea for this sort of thing - it would only encourage people to buy something they can't really afford. This is a luxury even in the modern era of smartphones being commonplace, nobody needs to have it.

Legally speaking, I believe it is not cloudy; it is still illegal because you have bought a copy of the movie, but you do not have the copyright of it so don't have the right to copy it (as the name suggests!).

Morally, I think most people probably feel that it is cloudy and in such a case often justifiable, but that has little bearing on the legal situation.

> the tedious manual memory management in C/C++.

The two aren't remotely the same - I find it fairly tedious (but explicit, which is sometimes nice) in C, but reasonably painless in C++ with unique_ptr and similar things.

As has been mentioned in other comments on this article, treating the two as the same language, or versions of it, is a mistake.

Ridiculous. Of course it's not holding the two companies together - they both use it, but it doesn't determine any kind of strategic direction common to the two.

A lot of code doesn't have exceptions; it might, for example, be written in C, or C++ in a place where exceptions aren't used. fprintf() and friends don't raise exceptions on failure.

But wouldn't you expect these particles that we're moving through to be being spun by that black hole as well?

I don't think they care about that. The reason they're shifting is that they don't want to sell you Word once, then fail to persuade you to upgrade to the next version; they want to sell it over and over which brings a more stable and guaranteed revenue stream.

No, they don't save the non-tech savvy users. They click "yes, I want to see the dancing bunnies" every time they see a UAC popup.

They do make it reasonably pleasant to run Windows as a non-admin user though, and not the impossibility that was in XP.

collections isn't an external library. It's part of the Python standard library.

Collision detection is a bit ropey, I guess. Some of them don't escape but start bouncing back and forth. Also, the whole lot should reach equilibrium before long, but it doesn't seem to. It all seems a bit overly bouncy - kind of like Angry Birds physics, but turned up to 11.

Quite hard, because all the backgrounds are bitmaps. It's an unfortunate era for that - Final Fantasy X looks fantastic on a modern system, because it can be rerendered at higher resolution.

It certainly was one of them on some phones. I have had a "Facebook for LG" in the past that wasn't removable via the factory phone image.

There are things in economics called Veblen goods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) which become more desirable as they become more expensive. They seem related, but not exactly the same phenomenon you describe.

Not hard. But how hard would it be to make large existing codebases which have always been built by VC++ compile against them? Very. Let alone the institutional aversion to admitting their competitors have done something better than them...

No, but libel and slander laws do exist to keep people from saying untrue negative things about you, so it still pays to be careful if that's what you intend to do.

This is true of Germanic languages more generally, where they have special cases for teens too but also read higher numbers as "five-and-twenty" etc. And then French has their vigesimal thing - 92 is quatre-vingt-douze, ie. "four twentys and twelve". English gets off relatively lightly with teens only...

Yep, I understand that those clauses are common in many agreements. Doesn't change that I just don't care for any of them, though :)

I think having them laid out that might make me more likely to react to them than if they were buried in a whole lot of jargon, which makes a slightly unpleasant case for longer agreements :(

I don't especially care for license agreements, but it does seem better that they be simple like this than fifty pages of legalese. On the other hand, I don't especially like that this keeps some of the most typical objectionable clauses of such agreements:

Clause 1: you disclaim any fitness for purpose? Not only is this likely unenforceable in many jurisdictions, it seems distinctly weaselly to sell a product and attempt to claim that in the fine print.

Clause 2: does that mean if it erases my entire hard drive, you're not responsible? Seems a bit not cool; though I can understand wanting to avoid claims if it crashes and data is lost, it seems overly wide-ranging.

Clause 4: I have a perpetual license, until you decide it's over for no reason at all and that's that - in which case I get no consideration or refund?

Clause 5: as csense mentioned, at least parts of this would seem unenforceable too.

I guess maybe it makes it seem worse that it's all laid out starkly without all the jargon to mask them; they're not uncommon clauses to include in such agreements, of course.

They can say whatever they want, but it's still not necessarily true or enforceable. The Wikipedia page linked above describes rulings by the European court which suggest that they consider that software is sold rather than licensed, in which case it can't be contracted out of as this tries to do.

Mass storage doesn't work on a device like the Galaxy Nexus that emulates the "SD card" on its internal storage, because it requires making the blocks of the underlying device available to the host OS.

IMO it's worth it to avoid that awful old chestnut where you'd run out of internal space with heaps left on the card, but unfortunately MTP isn't quite as convenient :(

Strictly, I don't think he did; Dropbox is a big thing but it is not a "killer application" as I'd define it, ie. an application that people would buy a particular platform just to get. In the way that, say, Office is for Windows, or Halo might be for Xbox (or so I hear).

Of course, it's kind of irrelevant to Dropbox; they don't have a horse in the platform race, so they're supporting all the major ones and doing very well, but they're not a killer app for any one of them. I don't think that proves that it couldn't ever have been a killer app, but it looks unlikely now that it'll be the case.