metageek

You're conflating two issues. Conspiracy to fix prices is generally illegal; robbing users of the right to use their own hardware is not.

And Amazon isn't dictating terms on ebooks. You can install .mobi books you didn't get from them. You can even sideload apps onto the Kindle Fire.

It's a tradeoff. Some of my worst managers were former programmers; some of my best came in through some side door. Management ability--real management, as in getting people to get along and get the job done, not as in making Gantt charts and chanting buzzwords--is essential, and it's really rare to find it combined with technical skills.

>HTTPS = more overhead than HTTP

Is that true? Most encryption schemes include compression (since compression removes redundancy, and redundancy is where cryptanalysts attack).

>Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'm pretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess a really truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that.

Maybe this explains why I've been contacted by Amazon recruiters three times over the past three years...

"Sure, we'll give you a new razor," said the bladesmith...

And the autocomplete relies on the Places system, which is what is hanging (or was, until a few weeks ago).

I thought I hadn't seen Firefox hang in a while.

>the argument could be made that Palm invented the smartphone

Didn't Qualcomm beat them to it? I remember reading about a Qualcomm phone which was a PalmOS device, around 2000 or 2001. At that time, I don't think Palm had any smartphones of their own; the closest they had was the Palm V, which had wireless data, but was not a phone.

The front page says "Earnings are transferred to your bank account on a 7 day rolling basis.".

$100, actually--BestBuy is now selling the 16GB Playbook for $299.

What happens if you use a nonstandard Unicode character, something from the one of the private use areas? Will screen readers ignore it?

Providing a localized title and description, without localizing the app, strikes me as misleading--unless the localized description explicitly says the app itself hasn't been translated.

I think you mean "going for broke".

> I almost never use my queue for streaming.

On my Blu-Ray player, the queue is the only way to play anything.

Prime is $79/year.

> Why do you think this is a terrible move?

Because the two services work well together. There are lots of movies and shows that you can't stream, but you can get on disc. Your data about what discs I rent improves your recommendations on the streaming side; and having one UI for both services makes me more likely to get them both from you. If Qwikster fully splits from Netflix, it'll have to compete on its own with other disc-only solutions.

Maybe you're going to radically improve your streaming library Real Soon Now; but, if so, the time to split is after that improvement, when streaming can better stand on its own.

So maybe the overall answer is that whether a school has people checking IDs depends less on rational decisions and more on their history—have they had trouble, have they had paranoid management, that sort of thing.

I don't know about that. Thinking about the four universities I've got experience with, the only one that didn't have someone checking IDs at the door of the library was the small one that probably couldn't afford it.

Same in the US.

Yeah, but it wasn't as obviously electronic; until I read that Ars article last fall, I always thought it was just a pad of paper.

True. Upvoted.

Two points. First, when you're requesting a patent be reexamined, you're talking to a patent examiner. To a patent examiner, patents are the most convincing form of prior art--if only because she's used to reading them.

Second, it's widely thought to be risky to have your engineers read other people's patents, because then, if they later infringe those patents, the court is more likely to hold that it was willful infringement, and triple the damages. So, if you've got to have your engineers spend time reading patents, looking for prior art on your competitor's patent, you generally want them to be reading your own patents.

Bundle them with PCs, most likely. Landfill space is expensive.

>The thing is, the Touchpad already had a dual core cpu built in.

Except it's an A8 instead of an A9.

>He used to work at SaS

SAP.

No. Spammers include unsubscribe links, too; they just don't obey them.

If there were 6 people, he wouldn't be saying 82%. 83%, maybe.

Right. "Through" is better than "until" because "until" leaves the reader unsure whether it includes August 19th. And 2011 is unnecessary; if someone does find an old message, they can look at the Date: header.

Personally, I would say "August 19th", not "19".

>I don't see how having WinCE as the OS hurt Kin's chances in the market after it shipped?

Well, it meant the Danger team had to start from scratch, and the delay meant they were going up against tougher competition.

Chromebooks start at $350.