codingthewheel

The FCC challenges...to create apps that empower consumers to monitor and protect Internet Openess

...I'd suggest a challenge to create apps that empower consumers to monitor and protect...spell check.

But hey, good to hear the FCC, that champion of digital liberty, juggernauting down the bastions of tyranny with a whopping $500 all-expenses-paid trip to DC to meet some midlevel FCC bureaucrat. The Interwebs are saved.

Cameras that require you to download, install, update, and maintain iTunes before they'll give up their precious cargo of pictures of you doing tequila shots off your girlfriend's...oh wait, you're an Apple geek, nevermind.

Slate-gray $4 Apple trashbags that don't resize except when you grab them in the bottom right corner and pull diagonally, and which are equipped with random LEDs to let you know the bag's status. Yay.

Gorgeously designed hybrid induction stoves that can cook anything -- but only if you get your power through Acme Power co, or root the damn thing, voiding your warranty.

And the list goes on.

Add to that the fact that you can get an app written and deployed for Android in a fraction of the time it would take you on the iPhone...

- Because you're not required to use horrid tools like Objective C

- Because there are no imperious App Store overlords deciding the fate of your app's life or approval

- Because you don't need to make a several-thousands-of-dollars investment in Apple hardware and software

...and I think it's likely that Android will eclipse iPhone, not just in numbers of handsets (many orders of magnitude more coming for Android), but in mindshare, pop culture relevance, developer sentiment, and every other thing.

The iPhone will always be the phone that launched the smartphone revolution, and Apple and Steve Jobs have been well rewarded for it. Android to me represents the democritization of the iPhone, and the democritization of designer tech has always been the bane of Steve Jobs. Put another way: iOS devices are going to seem much less compelling when they've been copied, perfected, rebranded, and sold for half the price. It's Mac vs. PC all over again.

The larger point here, and your correct response, was simply "who cares?" If you're going to take the time to write a 12-paragraph explanation of every article you write, to every reader, troll, and conspicuous other who has a bone to pick with you, then I don't know how you manage to get any writing done at all.

And lastly, this little bit of ad hominem...

but that's another consideration that I had in mind that was probably lost on you.

...is just in poor taste. Never in a million years would I say this to a reader.

What?

Here's a piece of good advice. When you post in response to someone else's posting, have the courtesy to link to them, rather than simply calling them out.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/title_junk

FTFY

  compile Android on a home Linux machin--a way

Spolsky and Atwood argued this out in Stackoverflow Podcast #2. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/04/podcast-2/

Just get a comfort level with it (C), and move on. It will pay dividends.

Also re: maintainability. C++ is completely maintainable, and built from the ground up for maintainability specifically in large projects.

Don't blame C++ for the sins of Microsoft (managed C++ extensions, DLL HEll, C++ COM interfaces, compiler support classes, 9 different string types). Don't blame C++ for the sins of gcc. At some point we need to distinguish between the (pure) LANGUAGE and the (often politically motivated) TOOLSET.

Where this style of UI really shines is for the iPhone. I don't think anybody still seriously thinks that Mac is preeminent on the desktop. That hasn't been true since .NET, let alone WPF. But on the iOS...Apple's dominance is clear.

I agree going to a trusted professional is always a good idea, budget allowing. The value of 99designs at that level isn't so much to crowdsource your fundamental design as it is to quickly generate multiple views/impressions/takes on a particular theme, either for the benefit of your chosen designer, or to present a list of basic designs to the stakeholders. 99designs becomes a way to get a bunch of cheap "looks" at different designs, that your GA and stakeholders can use to help define what it is they're actually looking for.

Harvesting user's emails from a 3rd-party site that you plan to compete against is unequivocally and unambiguously a shitty, low, underhanded practice. Not to put too fine a point on it.

You didn't put in the footwork or the dollars necessary to get those customers yourself.

You didn't get the customer's permission to contact them (and NO, just because a customer posts his email address in plainview does NOT mean he's implicitly given you his permission.)

You didn't achieve a real and meaningful relationship with your customers or your competitors.

You just harvested some emails that were left in plainview, no different than any other 2nd-rate spammer on the net.

Ethics aside, any business that depends on the glomming of email addresses/discussions from 3rd-party competitors is...the best word I can find is "uninspired". If you don't have a problem with this business model, you don't have a problem with targeted spam.

Another article from the same original source re: the alien starchild:

http://m.www.helium.com/items/1618071-mystery-of-the-alien-s...

Have fun.

But sit down and play 5 or 10 million hands online (that's under a decade of regular play, well within a human lifespan), or even considerably less than that, and luck becomes a rounding error. Mathematically. Incontrovertibly. Your long-term results in poker will reflect your skill level closely. And of course the rake plays a part as well, by turning poker into a negative-sum game instead of a zero-sum game, and dragging everybody's results slightly south of where they would have been otherwise.

But rake or no rake, there's very little "luck" in poker at depths of millions of hands, as you get in today's online games.

And even in the live game, where hand throughput is lower, luck is a small enough factor over the years that the same skilled players win consistently, and you can only win consistently by learning those skills.

I just don't think you can flip the switch without also doing due diligence so far as re-testing goes. I wouldn't feel comfortable making that sort of change and just blindly shoving it into production. So it's really not "flip a switch" it's "flip a switch and re-test the entire codebase" IMO. It requires dev resources.

Could infection of the 5 largest wheat-producing countries be done maliciously? If the disease is fungal in nature, what's to stop Joe Terrorist from hopping over to mainland USA or AUS and injecting a few dozen crops, and letting it spread from there over the next 5 years? Can anybody speak to this?

    "Even after they made their case, we were fairly 
     direct in asking them why they couldn't do a 
     simple recompile and use SSE instead of x87.."

Online gaming/gambling right now exists in an almost-perfect state of deregulation. This deregulation allows low-rake, low-vig games to flourish, and is IMO only reason why it's possible for consenting adults to play these games (online poker being the classic example) with positive expectation.

Regulation of online gambling will likely create games with 20%, 30%, and 40% vigs, as this is what a politician means when he says "regulate and tax". Most state lotteries currently extract around a 30-40% vig, meaning only 60-70% of the money going into the system is paid out as winnings. Other state-mandated games extract similarly huge percentages. Nobody complains because the money gets funneled into "education" or "public works", but state-mandated forms of gambling are far and away some of the most pernicious gambling instruments ever foisted on the public.

The endgame: if online gambling is ever widely regulated, the tax burdens and regulatory requirements imposed will be passed along to customers (who are mostly clueless about things like "rake" and "vig" anyway) and this will create a world in which the only available forms of real-money gaming on the net will be ones in which adults stare drooling at the screen, pressing pretty colored buttons in the futile hope that they can somehow "beat" a game which is now mathematically unbeatable.

I support the call for regulation. But anybody who thinks politicians like Barney Frank are going to protect low-rake, low-vig online gambling of any sort are likely going to be disappointed. Preserving a low rake isn't even on the menu.