scottmp10

If someone shares a link to a public Facebook post, do you consider it an attempt to get you to share stuff on Facebook? I find it odd that you assume someone sharing something on Google+ is an attempt to get you to use Google+ rather than an attempt to share the content with you.

First, I am a little surprised at the number of people that laud this UX. The only time I have encountered it was in the Facebook for Android app and I found it not to be intuitive. Even once I understood the behavior, it is not always obvious what will happen when you drag down since there is no indication that you are at the top of the stream. You essentially have overloaded the pull-down action.

As to when this is patent worthy, I would argue no. Pull-down is as basic an action as you can do. The patent is equivalent to patenting the concept (as opposed to the engineering implementation) of selecting an item on a screen that a user points to with their hand. Or the concept of performing an action when you click on an item on your desktop (since clicking is as basic on a mouse as swiping is on a touch screen).

To be fair, it is difficult to argue where to draw the line for patents and some people would probably argue that my examples should be patentable (regardless of whether they are - I don't actually know). It just strikes me that rewarding people for these "innovations" does exactly nothing to increase people's effort to figure out a good UX for their product.

It doesn't look like it would include government communications hardware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Solutions

There is a link in the "About" section to the developer page: https://developers.google.com/+/

I personally prefer them having the opportunity to think before answering and making sure they don't accidentally offend someone.

I do agree that it would be nice to see how they handle questions on their feet but too often a slip of words or someone too willing to read into things result in scandals out of nothing.

I see what you are saying and I think there are short-term and long-term consequences. Certainly an injunction hurts consumers in the short-term since they have less choice. The patent-advocate would argue that in the long-term this model rewards innovators more and thus more people invest in innovation, helping consumers over the long term.

You are correct that my personal opinion is in favor of no patent protection. However my original point was that Apple's patent actions have had significant short-term impact that hurts consumers. You can certainly make an argument that there is a long-term positive impact, but I do not believe that Apple is in any way harming the patent system itself.

Unfortunately this is clearly not the case. There actions are clearly harming both competitors (Samsung, etc) and consumers (through less consumer choice in the tablet market).

The Motorola acquisition has not been approved yet. And I believe they are actually prohibited from coordinating efforts until that happens.

Yes, I really liked that project and I think the design is fantastic (it leverages WebKit for rendering).

Both TermKit and this project will have an interesting dilemma with editing remote files though. The advantage of SSH is that you really aren't storing any remote files locally (only the currently visible characters are stored in memory). An editor that uses this new model and eliminates lag requires transfer of remote files to the local computer. There are a lot of situations where this is not a viable option.

GoogleTV blog post:

http://googletv.blogspot.com/2011/10/update-on-google-tv.htm...

You can double click on the ground to move to that spot, or on the side of a building to move there and look at that spot. I see that indoors you cannot do this, but hopefully they will add it.

Google already provides remote wipe and other domain management with the Google Apps Device Policy app. Domain owners can require users that want to link an account to their phone to accept the device policy, which can include remote wipe permission, remote lock, etc.

Source: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.app...

Created in partnership with Google:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/from-desert-to-web-br...

I believe it says that it is public-only data for now.

This, and previous FB APIs, seem to really be lacking. For a Python API, for instance, you shouldn't be calling generic 'graph' functions and then passing strings to tell it what to do. If you want to do that, you might as well just construct the URL yourself.

Python is powerful for hackers because of introspection. You can pull up a shell and all of the documentation is available with type() and dir() and iPython's tricks. An API that takes actions as strings fails for Python.

There is a difference between leveraging a monopoly to create a new offering in a different product area (increasing competition) and leveraging it to lock users into another of your products (decreasing competition).

By locking users into IE, Microsoft was decreasing competition. Google, by pumping resources into Android and Chrome, is increasing competition.

Yes so there are likely some software companies that might have issues (depending on what the changes looked like) such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM (not sure if these companies would object or not, just citing companies with large portfolios). Some non-software companies like pharmaceuticals almost certainly would oppose changes that would affect their ability to exercise their patents.

Edit: A better example might be a company like Intel that has a lot of hardware patents. It is potentially difficult to change the patent laws to prohibit software patents without affecting hardware patents.

I think that it will be very difficult to have serious patent reform for the software industry without having significant effects on other industries. So while it seems like the software industry is generally behind getting rid of patents, the changes will be very difficult to isolate to software and companies outside the field will likely oppose any significant changes. FWIW, I hope they make significant changes for software patents soon.

This seems like a really ingenious way to simplify programming for both programmers and non-programmer-but-still-technically-savvy-people. For instance, this service provides a dead simple way to get an email or text alert for anything you can "trigger" on the available web services.

For programmers, this is also a simple way to hook into external services without having to download/learn their API.

I have been thinking about how to make web services more easily connectable for a while but all of my ideas required some participation from each service. Ifttt still requires a thin wrapper to expose a web service as a channel but after that everything has the same interface.

The problem is exclusive containment. Folders/directories are an example of hierarchical exclusive containment. The author suggests avoiding the problems associated with this by getting rid of the hierarchy.

However, the author is onto something: storing functions in a database. Using the file system results in exclusive containment (file can't be in two different directories - link don't count) that a database can avoid.

If you are lost, think of Gmail's tags with nesting. You can still have the hierarchy but data can be "located" under different tags. A lot of times the problem is using the file system as the back end. Python's modules, for instance, do not inherently enforce exclusive containment; the file system imposes this constraint.

I had a chat with Jeff Bone a year ago after I read his partially-related rant here: http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20091109/0545...

I wish I could paste everything he said to me in here; he pointed me to a lot of examples of good file system / graph database examples that get a lot of these things right. Quick further reading list: Original ReiserFS design, BeFS design, FluidDB, LUFS, and Tannenbaum's design for the directory services and file system of Ameoba.

Modern unions seem to be worried more about "fair wages" (where fair is determined by the union) than preventing employee abuse. The fact of the matter is that there is choice in employment, especially if you are employable enough to be hired by Apple Retail. What is happening here is effectively the same as if Apple Retail, Best Buy, etc banded together to demand "fair wages" (as determined by them). In free markets (i.e. not what unions were initially designed for), unions provide excess leverage to employees that force companies into unfairly paying employees more than they are worth (and I feel this is a large cause of the U.S. auto market crash).

I agree here. I understand the trade offs being made but I just don't see this being useful for too many people with zero fault tolerance and the single point of failure meta data master. It probably gets some pretty good performance improvements from not worrying about that though.

There is an advanced search link next to the Google search bar that provides the functionality you described for non-power users.

The fact that Microsoft is able to take only the relevant results from Google doesn't change the fact that the results are coming from Google. The problem is that if search engines start using the technique that Microsoft is using then there is substantially less value to Google, Microsoft and other search engines for innovating on rare search term relevancy since the other search engines get the benefits for free.

My understanding is that running the experiment on some random other sites would work as well as long as Bing user's were actually clicking the honeypot links. This is probably the intended functionality of the click stream data. That doesn't change the fact that using this type of data from competitor search engines results in "stealing" (for lack of a better word) search results, particularly for rare terms such as "tarsorrhaphy".

I think Facebook will issue new shares to the new investors so who owns the existing shares doesn't matter. The new valuation is determined only by the total number of shares before the deal, the number of shares being issued, and the size of the investment.

Valuation = new value per share * total shares = (amount invested / # new shares issued) * (# existing shares + # new shares issued)

Although they probably agree on the valuation and the amount of capital to be invested first. Then the number of shares to be issued is set so those numbers to match.

I tried upgrading to the Chrome beta (which I have been meaning to do anyway) but there was no new tab to sign up for a notebook.

And I doubt the QR code page still works but might be worth the try.

It's turtles all the way down...

While I agree with the current comments for the most part, I have found communication to be a really significant part of team relations. Often, this type of problem compounds and I have seen similar situations end with a member leaving the team.

That being said, I have found that this type of issue can usually be solved by talking about what your expectations are and being clear when they are not met. Just make sure that your expectations are reasonable and leave room for error here and there.

Finally, you need to decide if you are ok with having your teammate working part time. Someone splitting their time between two projects usually contributes less than half of their potential to each team.

As others have mentioned, the fact that he has been meeting his deliverables probably means that the issue is less about contribution and more about communication. If you cannot solve the communication issues then you may want to look at alternatives without this partner.

The largest problem with Google Health for many people is that their medical provider does not share data with Google so it is very difficult to get your data in. I think this would be difficult for a solo start up so you might look into providing easy ways for the user to create data, such as a mobile app like Instant Heart Rate.