tophat02

I won't speak to Jobs' health issues, but with respect to the insane amount of secrecy involving product launches, I really hope Apple keeps it this way...

...just makes it a whole lot more fun. We all need some intrigue in our lives, even if it's just from a company that sells plastic gizmos.

This is a non-story. How could this developer have not known that Apple's app store agreement forbids emulators, interpreters, and so forth?

I mean, not only is it there in plain letters, but that particular clause was all over the interwebz! The fault here lies solely on the developer for spending all that time and money on development without reading the contract.

Or maybe I should say "praise". This is most likely a PR stunt to increase awareness of his product so he can then go sell it to jailbreakers (who are probably more likely to use, enjoy, and be able to understand it anyway).

Two thoughts immediately rushed through my head:

1) Netscape Navigator did this 15 years ago, although not nearly as cool

2) Why did he just show a screenshot? Couldn't he have given, you know, a link?

Maybe because they're so excited that they might make birdie on the hole that they lose their concentration?

>The rest of the information (on how to interpret the data) can then be stored in the first mega/gigabytes of the binary data. Plain text ASCII only, ofcourse. No pictures, audio, or video. You could only include such data once you've told them how to build a computer and all necessary software.

That's OK. At these data density scales, a small room full of 10"x10" tablets would provide space for a LOT.

I'd imagine you'd encode media in some simple lossless RLE format which you would then describe.

Imagine being an architect in the year 27,000 coming across this stuff. I'm sure the value would be immeasurable, especially the video and audio! Can you imagine having HD "documentaries" from Ancient Egypt or Greece? How cool would that be!

As you can see, this stuff fascinates me.

I added up every material possession I always dream about: two really nice houses, a speed boat and a yacht, tons of furniture for the houses, about 6 cars and trucks that I love, etc.

It came out to "only" $4.4 million. That exercise actually really helped me. $4.4 million actually sounds "doable" in some abstract way, where as $440 million doesn't.

I love this kind of thing. It's effectively a "perpetual motion" machine, but because it uses waste energy generated from somewhere else, it avoids that pesky "laws of physics" thing.

I really think we'll see more of this in the future, perhaps even on much bigger scales.

Was his name David?

I don't agree with the author, but games DID get a little less interesting around that time, but the reason was actually 3dfx.

In my opinion, fixed function triangle rasterizers killed a lot of the wonder and excitement that used to come with each game release. Before that, it was thrilling to see what people like Carmack were going to come up with next.

Hope is not lost, though. One word: Larrabee

To be fair: it wasn't as easy, quick, or high fidelity to tape music as it currently is with ripping or pirating.

Not that I think either of those will "kill music"... it just kind of bothers me when people make the comparison as if it's an exact analog (ha!).

I feel this way about Mint.com. They're a great site, but I would gladly pay a premium to not be offered "deals" and to be given features (like advanced envelope budgeting and the like) that may be at odds with their advertising interests.

The only problem is that there's no place for me to put my credit card. Why not, Mint?

I think a better title for this article would be "Why the Palm Pre Will Fail to be an Immediate Smash Hit Like the iPhone". (Maybe there wasn't enough space)

Here's hoping that Palm has the financial resources to withstand a slow uptake. I love my iPhone, but I hope Palm succeeds here. Competition == good

At least 1/3 of the time. Often, I'll start to write an argument or an opinion, and then realize halfway through that the argument is wrong or the opinion is actually crap now that I'm looking at it in words.

Also, being from a conservative Texas town, I tend to have knee jerk reactions to more "liberal" stories and tend to want to blurt things out like "screw the poor people, it's all their fault". I don't really mean this, it just comes out from my upbringing. I usually delete those, unless I'm just really angry or have an insight as to why people feel that way in such-and-such a circumstance.

But we can hope that it happens the other way around: what we need is a definitive "killer app" that can only be done given near native speed JS + HTML 5 capabilities.

If it truly IS a killer app, it will kill IE in short order.

We can dream, anyway.

Posterous is what a startup should be: simple enough that it really needs no hype to promote it. To wit: it's not even the new "currency" of anything! :)

Happiness is not worrying about being happy. To quote a the Baz: "If you succeed in doing this, tell me how."

I love the smell of hype in the morning.

I'm afraid I don't get your point (or your prickish tone, for that matter). Do you disagree that a course or section of a course teaching students about release management, merging, and reproducible builds from source artifacts is a useful thing?

Examples of classes I should not have had to take:

- Kinesiology (fancy term for "PE" and/or "Health"): they had their chance in high school. By college, most people know whether they're going to be "physical" or not. I had to take FOUR of these, each for only 1 hour of credit

- "Multi cultural studies": politically correct indoctrination course. By my observation, usually had the reverse effect of what was intended

- Political Science I & II: Just replace with a poli sci survey course. Interested students could take more as elective or major in it

- Economics and Accounting: Both of these classes are incredibly theoretical, dry, and boring - unless you happen to like the subjects, in which case you're probably majoring or minoring in them. Replace with ONE course about how not to screw up your personal financial life, since they can't be bothered to teach that in high school

- Physics I & II: I don't need two full semesters of physics. Again, just give me a survey course (that's all I'll remember anyway). The interested students can go on to learn more

- History I & II: We know, there's a lot of history to cover, but a whirlwind course would probably hold students' attentions more than two whole semesters

Oh, and, for Computer Scientists:

- The vast majority of people in computer science departments want to be programmers, NOT computer scientists. I recommend splitting this major into computer science and software engineering. Computer Science would be in the department of science and software engineering would be in the department of engineering. For software engineering students, I would collapse most of the computer science curriculum into one or two survey courses and use the rest of the time to teach solid, modern, software engineering concepts (configuration management, working in a team, requirements gathering, design patterns, methodologies, real-world programming, etc...)

Terrible latency, though.

As terrible as the App Store situation is today, it will get better starting in June/July. I have a hunch that Apple is going to solve this problem with parental controls.

The NEXT next iPhone needs to really be your "personal computer". I imagine a time when the only computer you have will be your mobile device. How this device acts will depend on what you dock it with. Maybe when you're on the couch you'll slide it into a tablet-like device and you instantly run in tablet mode, with more apps and functionality becoming available to you in that mode.

Maybe when you're in your home office you'll dock it with a keyboard, mouse, and two monitors, and use it as your workstation.

The point is, I look forward to the day when physical device size no longer really correlates to usable power or storage space, and THAT means that, barring supercomputers and servers, most people will have just their "phone". What that device acts like will be based on which I/O peripherals you plug it in to.

A guy can dream...

Because after today, any bugs you find in the Arc language are staying in there!

"Actionable Metrics" is quite possibly the worst business buzzword combination I've ever heard.

Hey Lawrence, when you're at work does anyone ever talk to you about "Actionable Metrics?"

No. NO. Shit, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked for saying something like'gat man.

Great, now give me a tasks.app on my iPhone and let it sync with Google, Outlook, and Apple tasks through mail.app.

Please??

Luckily, Wolfram Alpha has enough funding (and ego) behind it to survive for at least five years. If they throw serious effort into it during all that time, I'll bet we'll end up with something truly impressive (if perhaps not life-changing).

The core flaw with Wolfram Alpha in my opinion is that it relies on curated data. Such data takes time to source, verify, and translate into the necessary target format.

I sincerely hope the same thing for Wolfram Alpha that I do with the Palm Pre: that it'll get the market leader off its ass and spur true competition.

Apparently, when you have money all the sudden lots of people want to meet with you.

No one wants to meet with me, no one. But I'm sure if I scrounged up a couple hundred million bucks I'd have to write an article like this.

The biggest problem preventing more widespread adoption of .NET on the web is hosting. Compared to Linux-based hosts, the market for Windows/IIS hosting is not quite as large, and also not quite as trusted.

.NET really is a great platform, it's just a bit hampered by the baggage (imagined or otherwise) that is the Microsoft juggernaut.

Wolfram is remarkably short-sighted. You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized that spending 1100+ pages blowing is own horn would tend to turn off the very people he hoped to convince.

They say that love is blind, ego must just be plain blinding.

Apple will do the same thing it always does with stuff like this: introduce a system that accomplishes 50% - 80% of what people need and then listen to what people scream the loudest about for where to go next.

First round: Push notifications. This (mostly) satisfies the loudest screamers... "I HAVE TO RUN MY IM CLIENT TO GET IMs!!!"

It's all speculation from here on out, but...

Second round: Background Music. Apple will provide some API so applications like Pandora can play their music in the background. This will necessarily entail some amount of background processing to be allowed, but I'm sure it will be heavily curtailed.

Third Round: Limited "full" backround support. Who know what this will look like, but it will probably be something like the user can select N apps to run in the background

By the end of the third round, hopefully the hardware and battery technology will have advanced enough that Apple will allow any app to run in the background