Pooter

I think his reasoning is more like "I see a fundamental design flaw in all other cars which Toyota has recognized and addressed in a way that I like, and wish other manufacturers would adopt that solution or one similar to it."

You don't have to agree, but don't poo-poo his desire for a unified, simple application purchasing experience in his OS of choice. That's a customer talking about what they want out of a product.

> It's a test update, one whose sole purpose is to help Microsoft work with the carriers to figure out how to roll out updates.

If it's a test update, why is anyone who doesn't work for a carrier and/or Microsoft aware of the problem? If real live customers are having issues, that's not testing, that's screwed up deployment. It doesn't matter how minor the update is.

Looks like a really cool framework; the demos are pretty spiffy, too, particularly the realtime video frame analysis of the Shreck trailer.

Actually, my solution was to fire the whole division AND get out of the market.

And this isn't a technical problem; it's a process and culture problem. MS almost certainly has the technical and financial resources to have prevented this. The fact that they didn't points to an utterly dysfunctional company. Getting out of a market that they're rather obviously too hidebound or screwed up to compete in, is definitely a solution.

Thanks for having the courage to disagree through mods rather than comments.

And thanks again for the continued cowardice.

I had roughly this same experience with buying VMWare Fusion two years ago. Nice to see they're paying attention to customers.

Just wow. Fire the entire mobile division and get out of the market; you're cursed and/or hopelessly incapable of executing properly on anything in the space.

If you're gonna disagree, have the courage to do so in writing.

Why can't you explain it?

Is it because your post is a bunch of poorly conceived bullshit? Is it because you don't really give any time to consider the intent of what's being said and the social context of the terms employed? Is it cause you're looking to be offended?

If you can't provide some analysis of the origins of thoughts and feelings which are presumably your own, maybe you should keep them to yourself till you can.

The solution, ultimately, is for the site to wither and die, and be replaced by something else that will have the same fate. This is what happens to all things, and to all human social groupings in particular, from ancient Rome on down to your nuclear family.

If you're tired of it, start something else. Or hang out and jump ship when the next great thing comes along. Trying to preserve the golden age is rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.

No, shut up. Python isn't a statistical programming language.

I think I get an email once a week or so that tells me what people I'm connected to have changed. That's basically the only time I ever even consider checking out LinkedIn's site.

Part of the selling point of iOS is that it works well.

And it does. And 3rd party plugins that Apple has no control over reduce the quality of that experience, increase support costs, and generally add instability.

I believe Jobs actually made this point fairly directly, though couched it in terms like "if people start using 3rd party tools to generate cross platform apps, you wind up with crappy apps that don't suit the platform, have undesirable performance characteristics, and fail to take advantage of platform specific features that get added."

Don't kid yourself. In Philly, it owes more to the apathy of the courts than any egalitarian motivations.

> People don't seem to really have a clue as to what is actually difficult or interesting from a CS perspective.

Pardon me, but I do have a clue as to what's actually interesting and/or difficult from a CS perspective. I work in NLP research, and I'm actually familiar with other research systems being developed IBM, as well as other organizations.

I wasn't particularly impressed or surprised.

1) Find person nearby with a drink that has ice in it

2) Use spoon to extract the ice from their glass

3) Put ice in coffee

Also, you may need to threaten the person with the spoon to get the ice.

No, I'm not sure what everyone's so excited about. Basically, they did a televised demo of a natural language search interface.

I'd be curious to know more about how the system works, and how they trained it and/or curated the knowledge base it worked from. Maybe they'll write a more informative paper or something. But as it is, this wasn't a particularly surprising or impressive technology demo.

Just do it. Keeping someone around who doesn't pull his weight AND has a bad attitude is poison. Cut the losses (yours and his) and get it over with.

Also, don't give advance warning and don't give reasons. Warning just creates risk for you and stress for him. Giving reasons is legally problematic, and he's not going to believe what you tell him anyway.

Just tell him that it's not working out, that you wish him the best, and hand him a final paycheck. Severance might be nice, if you can afford it.

I had a Russian professor (teaching the language, and from the country) in college who mentioned one day in class (I forget how we got onto the subject) that Americans smile a lot more than Russian people, and that it generally seemed false and insincere to her. I've had other Russians confirm this, though they generally tend to be older.

When Watson's language processing abilities are sophisticated enough to understand contextually sensitive ambiguities that humans have no problem with, I'm more inclined to entertain the notion.

As someone that works in NLP and information extraction research, I've gotta say that unless there's some massive technological upheavals, we're not getting to thinking machines for a good long time.

Cause they're able to get laws written to suit them, cause they're richer and more motivated than you are.

Or RealPlayer, MediaCenter, or Songbird.

Enough to be dangerous. How much more to they have to demonstrate?

And because they realized that it ruled out large swaths of application classes that they don't have an issue with (games, for example).

Mostly, it was about keeping crappy flash apps of iOS. And from a platform perspective, that did actually make a lot of sense.

1) You're not locked into Apple's devices. ITunes is standard mp4 audio and plays on a variety of platforms; the DRMed video plays through itunes on windows too.

2) Amazon's VOD service provides DRMed video, too.

Then what's the issue?

Or, you know, it's a way to get content providers to sell through Apple. If there's a 30% premium to get on iOS through Amazon, a way around that is to just sell through iBooks.

We'll see how it shakes out. Maybe it'll be like the "nothing but objective-c" thing. People freak out too much about this kind of stuff.

> While not the most honest move, it is a brilliant PR coup.

You misspelled vaporware.

Apple announced something they're gonna roll out in the next rev. of iOS. Google put out a press release.

Apple doesn't even come close to having a monopoly.

Microsoft most certainly did have one during the browser wars, and were leveraging it to get people to increase IE marketshare.

With Windows on the desktop, you didn't really have much of a choice but Windows if you were going to use pre-package software, play games, or do business. With the iPhone, you've got tons of competition - Android, RIM, and WP7. If you don't want to work in that model, nothing forces you to, either as end user or VAR.

None of these are Rails specific. Don't stick session data in a relational db if you can put it in memcache or someplace similar. Also, MySQL's query optimizer and execution engine suck (SQL server, DB2, Oracle, and PostgreSQL all handle in() queries with select statements just fine).

The select for update thing, though, sounds like a table type selection issue. Doesn't innodb handle locking at roughly row level (maybe db page)? Seems like that one is for people who stick with MyISAM. If you're doing concurrency sensitive stuff, pick a better storage engine (or more robust db).