flatulent1

>If there's a demand for something, someone, somewhere will figure out a way to monetize it.

That certainly seems to be true. What puzzles me is if it's the startup potential of such a business or perhaps one that develops web services to support it that makes this a relevant story here?

</halo off>

Sometimes being less rugged is a feature. Modern cars are designed to have the front crumple to absorb energy in a collision, reducing the impact on the passenger area.

A dashboard that's soft and light may be easier on the head and save gas, but it sure is annoying the way they dry out and crack from mere heat and sunshine.

Modern engines last longer, but I think that's mainly due to the process the Japanese developed for easily producing hard steel (amounted to a simple additive). Engines aren't worn out at 100,000 miles any more.

>PayPal is in the business of efficiently detecting and not paying for fraud.

I think it is likely that since PayPal has become an Ebay property, they are tighter with releasing funds to reduce their losses related to "Ebay Buyer Protection" on Ebay sales. On a sale where that protection is provided, a purchaser gets his money back from Ebay (which generally means paypal) when buyers have failed to deliver what was promised and failed to work out the problem directly.

So Ebay/PayPal needs/wants to be able to snatch the cash back. If the funds are held long enough, they're covered. I seem to recall Ebay recently updating their user agreement terms related to PayPal funds.

I doubt that PayPal is trying to rip off or upset customers. They're trying to combat various types of theft/fraud and do so without using much in the way of resources. They should be more transparent with whatever is going on though.

Altering desktop apps seems like it wouldn't have as much impact since those aren't being marketed through integrated app stores. It seems attempts at selling counterfeit copies online is the biggest problem for those. They get removed from Ebay generally, but have turned up on Craigslist occasionally.

Still, there are quite a few programs out there that use open-source in violation of the GPL. In particular, there are quite a few video-conversion or DVD apps using ffmpeg improperly on both Windows and OS X. (Use on Linux is proper, and users get needed patches) Aside from denying users the ability to make more changes with the relevant source, the apps are also generally poorly maintained. Even some with frequent GUI updates have failed to stay current with the core code. There have been several ffmpeg updates to address exploits using malformed videos, but users of many of the utilities are still vulnerable. The true open source projects are maintained very well, it's the apps where people are out to make a quick buck with a GUI on some free code and ignore the license that are the offenders. Projects such as VLC saw immediate updates.

The many utilities that hide their use of ffmpeg and related open-source generally don't get listed in the security alerts such as this. http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/15743

Even Pre OS X Mac applications had many resources that were easily modified With ResEdit and other tools. It would have been more work to alter code with security features, but changing the about box, splash screens, icons, and menu/dialog text was trivial and didn't require programming skills. Of course the sort of resources modularity used it was made international localization so easy.

I never did hear of any apps being hijacked, but those were comparatively innocent times.

>Can you imagine a 17 y/o trying to make a dynamic haptic UI? (what the hell was I thinking?)

That might depend on whether you live in a region stifled by software patents, or need another market that is. It's sad that many may not even attempt projects because it can be a minefield out there. Even when it turns out you're first, you can still burn through your capital defending it. Copyright should be enough.

I wonder what level of humidity that 2 dB per kilometer figure is for? Is that typical or worst case?

At 20 kilometers (about 12.4 miles), a distance this ISP is trying to serve some customers at, that 2 db becomes 40db. Overcoming an additional 40 db loss would require increasing the power by a factor of 10,000 times. They're using amplifiers and directional antennas but the fade margin is nowhere near 40 db. And they do have fading problems. Of course refraction/reflection from temperature/humidity inversion gradients and other propagation effects come into play too. It isn't just simple absorption.

Even some well known companies occasionally try to walk all over the GPL.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20014828-260.html

Prior to that, there was equipment using channels that were between some of the channels on the old 23 channel Citizens' Band. That was far worse. C.B. operators running splatter-prone illegal amplifiers were bad enough, but people discovered these apparently "empty" channels (sometimes called 3A 7A 11A 15A 19A 22A and 22B) and modified their radios to use them. Eventually the F.C.C. gave up on those channels being viable for things like garage doors and R.C. model airplanes, and they became part of 40 channel C.B.

I think some of that remote control equipment shared 72 to 76 Mhz for a while. That's a gap, 2/3 the size of a t.v. channel between channels 4 and 5.

I'm wondering if the F.C.C. will take away t.v. channels 2 through 6. Almost everywhere, the stations formerly on those went to U.H.F. with the digital transition. I guess they figure that few people want to buy really big antennas for the lowest frequencies. (UHF and 7-13 use much shorter antenna elements). Anyway, those channels have the best coverage potential of all of them, but they're hardly used now. (see tvfool.com or the FCC database)

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/video/tvq.html

I'm surprised the article didn't mention that a ham band partly overlaps the 2.4 GHz WiFi frequencies. In theory at least, anyone operating WiFi gear isn't allowed to interfere with licensed services, including hams. Also, our unlicensed WiFi gear must accept any interference including that which "may cause undesired operation"... from anything, including the neighbors WiFi. (see FCC notice in U.S. WiFi product manuals)

Another related tidbit: Microwave ovens getting water molecules so excited at 2.4 GHz ties in with WiFi performance. It's a tidbit the head tech at a local wireless ISP didn't even know... 2.4 GHz WiFi is particularly prone to fading in fog/rain because water absorbs energy so efficiently at that frequency.

If they really want to get into strange frequency trivia, they should explain why Channel 37 has never been used by any over-the-air television station in Canada or the United States. Hint: little green men

"the company's investigation of the claim also revealed Hurd's attempts to conceal payments he made to her" (quote from another article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/07/... )

Beyond things that a company would approve of, just what were these payments for? (...something beyond payments for sex, or payments not to talk about having had sex?)

Note that payments "to her" is different than saying payments "for meals" mentioned elsewhere. (obviously those would go to the restaurant, not her)

If it would make anyone feel better, there are affairs that are non sexual.

The WSJ had this on the amount: "One person familiar with the matter said the questionable expense reports totaled no more than around $20,000."

A bit much for dinner? Do HP stockholders have a right to know what that was spent on?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870330970457541...

My own custom build? That sounds wonderful. What phones/carriers allow this without jailbreaking? What stores/carriers sell those phones to consumers?

Before I customize it, how do I get/build a fully functional current vanilla version? By fully functional I mean all of the things normally needed/expected by default (like the app store for instance).

Does each carrier post source to their builds so I can modify what the phone came with?

There are many developers on this site. Have ANY of you built Android from source and used that on your phone? How did it work out?

It is a bit funny seeing one Oracle exec who had an affair (Charles E. Phillips Jr) getting replaced by another. Someone could base a movie on them.

It's good to see Mr Hurd back at work so soon. He seems a good match and well qualified. Besides seeing how Oracle does under him, it'll be interesting to see what influence he has on decisions affecting the industry in general.

In particular, some wonder how much Android will be affected by the JAVA case against Google. Others wonder about the future of other open-source projects such as VirtualBox (development appears to be continuing)

If they need another exec with a colorful past, there's always former Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas. He was accused of putting drugs in others' drinks; an airline pilot complained of pot smoke so thick that a gas mask was needed.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/06/06/he...

Steve Jobs used LSD when he was younger and turned out pretty well. Sun had other that did the same. I heard one former Sun exec in a PBS interview talking about that experimental period, trying to expand the mind. Basically he said drugs failed at that, and the expanding experience came later... the internet

There's a little bit of related history at this link that mentions Suns' fifth employee:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-grim/read-the-never-befor...

How do any differences in the business model cause or justify bad design/integration in either their web experience or software products? Duplicating popular software in higher volume isn't a burden on design, is it? I fail to see why popularity should be an excuse for mediocrity.

The distribution methods and relationships with customers differ a great deal, but both companies develop software, some of it very similar in purpose, and both also sell hardware. The problems outlined in the email were not related to problems integrating with others' hardware, so lack of ability to integrate with that isn't an excuse (this time).

I think it is the ice cream comparison that's the unfair one. Software sold in volume is a high margin business. With 80% market share there is neither the justification nor the excuse for the sort of blunders outlined in the email. Unlike ice cream, there are no physical ingredients to cut corners with. It's doubtful that things that compromised quality saved them any money at all. What resource did they lack?

It's not as if they were a hardware business operating on razor-thin margins to get market share and cutting corners to break even. They've got revenue, they've got cash, they've got many talented engineers. They spent about 9 times as much as Apple on R&D in 2007, about 7 times as much in 2009. Considering how often Apple has major OS updates, and introducing new/updated hardware designs, it seems like MS isn't producing as much fruit for the R&D money. Did I miss something?

R&D From the 10K filings with SEC

Microsoft USD 9 billion in 2009 https://investor.shareholder.com/msft/EdgarDetail.asp? CIK=789019&FID=1193125-09-158735&SID=09-00

Apple USD 1.3 billion in 2009 http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File? item=UGFyZW50SUQ9MTg1OTB8Q2hpbGRJRD0tMXxUeXBlPTM=&t=1

The Onion just did a piece that fits in really well with all this... Even though it is written in jest, it somehow fits reality much better than we might like to admit when it comes to social motivation... Brutal honesty? You decide...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/sorry-im-just-really-bad-wi...

Most of the print activities that share corporate ownership with CNN are probably under Time. Here's a link to the Time-Warner businesses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Time_Wa...

As far as hurting newspapers goes, don't measure it by what Craigslist takes in. Some of the would-be paying newsprint advertisers are getting exposure on Craigslist for free, and of course papers still see that as damaging.

The media is not very friendly towards entities that don't buy advertising and take away ad dollars of or compete with operations that do. Note how little mention Ubuntu gets at release time, or when Windows malware hits, even though it would help many readers/viewers.

Not only is Craigslist affecting ad revenue, it a safe target since it is not a business likely to buy ads. Some news departments get a bit sheepish when it comes to attacking companies that buy advertising. They're more apt to run stories that amount to press releases.

News outlets seem to like stories like sex scandals in general... remember how much attention they gave Michael Jackson. Even jury selection swamped out some other stories that actually mattered. Here's one of the stories I saw no mention of locally during jury selection:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3206841.stm

What are good debugging and development tools for a novice to use to get experience with Linux on a device with JTAG, such as one of those popular old Linksys routers? (perhaps using openwrt source as a starting point)

I'd like to use one that has hidden USB ports (like the T-mobile version of the wrt-54g) to make the printer logging output of another device accessible through the router web server cheaply and with minimal space/power requirements. The printer is fed serial data, as found with gas pump printers.

>In case anyone is wondering what happened to this guy, he's writing for Microsoft now.

Perhaps he was writing for Microsoft then too??

Between the shills and those just after page hits, there sure are a lot of articles not worth the paper they could have been written on. It's funny seeing the guy cite himself though.

Pity the iPhone is so hard to use and lacking that keyboard. People with the urge to hit control-alt-F7 obviously weren't consulted. And his point about multiple functions... Perhaps he figures there's still a market for dedicated word processors or something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories#WP_Market_Col...

Besides supplemental uses on the current iOS devices, if there were to be an iMac with touch down the road, this would be a good first step getting ready for it.

We're so dependent on things that use the net. Are we prepared to cripple commerce and unplug everyone's IP based phone? Maybe we should be focusing more on making mission critical services invulnerable to compromise through the net.

>This comes with the territory of having an open-source OS.

Huh? If Dell shipped a PC with an old version of Ubuntu, would anyone really have a problem getting up to date? If Dell hasn't added anything compelling to Android, what is stopping people from getting the latest vanilla version from someplace besides Dell?

I thought the openness and freedom from restrictions were supposed to be the strong points of Android. If you don't like one fork, can't you just load another?

Maybe I've missed something big. (I'm not an Android user and don't claim to be an expert) I am puzzled that a forum with so many developers has most acting like users are helpless in this matter. What's the dang deal??

Hopefully most phones aren't stale out of the box, but without updates all would become that way. Other than seeming old already, isn't the Dell really like the rest?

Some of the more creative people I've known seem to be the same ones that blur the lines between work and play. They'll have an interest in something and dive into it having a great time. They're constantly thinking, analyzing, enjoying what they're doing, looking at every angle of doing something. (sounds like Apple?) They're not afraid of much of anything either, including some failures (which they also learn from). They're not going through some memorized motions, they're heavily involved.

I guess that's where they play side of it ties in... heavy involvement, and the happy-chemicals that go with fun/play help to more easily form mental pathways. Disliking what you're doing, being completely bored/mechanical or having excessive levels of anxiety tends to shut one down mentally.

Work hard and play hard

"What you're not going to be able to demonstrate is that, in laboratory controlled conditions where literally every calorie is counted by a scientist, and all variables are taken into account (e.g. hyrdation levels) that one kind of calorie leads to a "metabolic advantage" over another..."

There doesn't have to be a metabolic advantage for there to be a difference between calorie sources.

The number of calories eaten does not equal the number absorbed. Some things will be absorbed more readily than others. Foods are not all equal. People differ in significant ways both longer and short term. We don't all have the same mix of intestinal floura to help with digestion. Some foods may help/hinder getting calories/nutrients from others. Efficiency no doubt is higher when the food is taken in throughout the day instead of mostly at once. Even chewing better makes some difference. And other aspects of body chemistry, such as stomach acidity level no doubt have an influence.

I read of a U.N. worker working to help people with serious health problems in very poor nations. To get a fast inexpensive benefit a comparison was made of healthy/unhealthy people with similar (limited) food access and exposure to environmental hazards. The conclusion was that those who spread a given amount of food out through the day got more nutrition that those who ate it all at once. Of course some things are absorbed very easily (like our corn syrup), but it's easier to disrupt absorption of fats and heavier things.

I'd been taught that it was better to delay most liquids to the end of a meal, so that stomach acids would be more effective for breaking things down. Eat most of the heavier items first, shifting towards veggies and fruit then liquids.

Doing the opposite may cause weight loss (seems better to say less gain), but I think most consuming a significant amount of liquid first are apt to feel uncomfortable, especially with higher fat meals, as they're not handled as well. Eating a patty melt or other greasy food after a lot of water or coffee always had me feeling much worse on the road afterward than the same amount of everything in the reverse order. It's better to eat less than to make digestion less efficient.

My summary: It's the water reducing the acidity that made the difference with constant calorie input, but it's better to eat less than to make digestion less efficient like that.

I ran across an interesting piece which looks at history and the impact of copyright law. It contrasts England and Germany and looks at growth and publishing during the industrial revolution.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,...

There are many issues that complicate recycling. There are many different types of plastics. The possible uses and available processing methods differ. There's the matter of sorting them, minimizing impurities, transport costs, energy of processing, issues with various toxic materials.

At least five years ago an electronics/metals/scrap/recycling dealer I spoke with told me he was shipping his monitor scraps to the central valley (California), near Kettleman City I believe. He'd mentioned that there was a plant able to process the plastic from computer monitor cases into oil. I doubt that it is a cheap way to get oil, and it probably can't produce huge amounts of it, but it is a good alternative to putting scrap in a landfill. California collects a recycling fee with the purchase of monitors/TVs which goes to subsidize processing later. I'm not sure if the conversion is cost effective without the subsidy, but it seems the right thing to do regardless. I believe there's another processor near Victorville California. I heard they actually get quite a bit (over fifty cents a pound) for c.r.t. glass. It contains a large amount of lead.

Dealing with our wastes can be dangerous business.

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/california-cluster-birth-defect...

Huell Howser on PBS has had a number of shows relating to different kinds of recycling

http://www.calgold.com/green/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo2Pl7UxbNo

I have to laugh and cringe when Huell keeps scooping up and pouring c.r.t. glass sand with his hand... no doubt throwing a bunch of lead dust in the air. Opps!!

Perhaps this relates to the experience I've heard some relate, finding that food tastes better when camping. There's more fresh air, more air movement, and perhaps deeper breathing from moving around more.

Here's a link to the BBC coverage of this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316

Okay, let's try going wayyyy beyond that... think what you could do if you actually designed the game for the purpose of testing the user in ways that didn't affect the score.

He seems honest, just not as comforting as some would like. The problem is reality has become kinda creepy.

Google certainly swallowed a lump of creepiness when they bought doubleclick, that company the state of Texas had sued for stalking. One of the former upper figures there was hired by homeland security. Wonder what skill that was for?

It seems we must ask if Google is far less evil than others would be in the same position.

I'm kind of liking the Apple iAds thing. If done right, it could basically do away with accessing third-party sites when displaying third-party content. The user demographic could be typed simply by the kind of app the ad is in, and just being an Apple customer probably puts him in a more sought-after group of spenders.

Hmmm. I just had an odd thought. For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment...

An old story but still shocking.

One should be careful making such damage threats though, may end up with male appendage replacing rabbit foot on someones' keychain