There were some problems with the authorization process with twitter and I had to refresh the page several times before it took me back to the application's main page. Also, it's a little confusing when you ask for email and password before sending the user to twitter to be authenticated. Usually people do it the other way around by authenticating the user first and then asking for other credentials once the user is already on the application's main page.
Did you miss the part about the revolving door? There are no legal issues because the ones that need to make sure everything is happening legally are bankers themselves or close friends of ones. So you standing there and saying "I see nothing legally wrong with this so therefore it's not criminal?" is one of the many reasons bankers continue to defraud common main street investors.
What exactly are they trying to accomplish with this policy? The stackexchange network of sites has "fake" names all over and yet they do business just fine.
This was really cool. It just goes to show you what an experienced programmer with the proper understanding of the tools can accomplish. He right away zeroed in on the blocking nature of certain operations and "erlangized" it, making the entire thing almost as fast as git-daemon.
The interesting bit is that these "security" companies actually work with various government agencies and get tons of taxpayer money. Most politicians are clueless about what computer security means and have even less of a clue about cyber terrorism so companies like HBGary continue to proliferate even though they offer absolutely nothing for public well being.
People had been doing some pretty nifty stuff even before the native SDK for webOS came out so I'm not sure what you mean by open sourcing it. Among the various platforms they are probably the most open and their developer tools are light years ahead of anything the competition has to offer.
Why does Siegler comment on technology he doesn't understand? The holy grail of mobile development would be a minimal runtime that would work on all the mobile platforms which developers could use to factor out the common base of their applications. Something like a native webkit with some kind of sandboxed privileges giving the illusion of a native OS. Currently the only thing that comes close is html/javascript and I know android has a way of bridging Java and Javascript code and wp7 also has the same capability except with C# and Javascript. WebOS is all basically javascript so there is nothing to worry about there and I can't comment on iOS but I'd be surprised if they didn't offer similar capabilities.
I think at this point it's a little too soon to make comments like Siegler. The space is still young and developers are still figuring out the proper way to do cross-platform mobile development.
I really hope they do come out with something nice. I wrote applications for the palm pre with their ares IDE and it was a blast. They just don't have the user base to make it worthwhile for developers and it sucks because I don't think anything beats HTML/Javascript when it comes to writing mobile apps.
I like your idea but what are you going to do when a lot of people start visiting on the least busy days turning them into busy days? I know from personal experience that Wednesday afternoons between 1-4pm are usually the quietest times in movie theatres and other venues that tend to be packed on weekends so by putting this information in people's hands you're messing with my zen dude.
Ya, and? They are also taking information from a whole bunch of other sites collected by their users and incorporating that information into ranking search results. I don't really see how this is inherently wrong.
You just said you can give away your photos by agreeing to not have any access rights to it and still own those same photos. It seems like you are using a different definition of "ownership" or maybe "click stream" than I am so this argument is pointless unless you define exactly what you mean by those words. By "click stream" I mean the aggregate history of clicks along with contextual information related to those clicks as one coherent, single entity and not individual clicks looked at one by one each of which was owned by the person that generated the click and who transfered ownership of that single click to somebody else. If you meant giving away a copy of your collection then that's a little different but that's not what's happening with user generated click streams. The only click stream copy is the one at google, microsoft headquarters and you have no access to it so you don't technically own it.
Of course not. Try inquiring google or bing about obtaining all the information they have gathered from your toolbar and see what response you get. Actually I'll tell you: "The gathered data is anonymous and we have no way of verifying who sent it to us". So how exactly do you own information that you have absolutely no access to and with no way to transfer to competing search companies?
What do you suppose google does when they are faced with a novel query and their algorithm returns 10 equally good results as matches? At that point you might as well provide a whole bunch of users some permutation of the matches and take into account which links are clicked on the most. This is exactly what bing is doing and if you crawl the web then you will indeed end up with google's database, the only difference will be how you rank results.
You should be able to share your results with whoever you want but that's not what happens. You share your data with just bing and google. You don't really own any of the data you are generating so saying you should be able to share it with whoever you want is saying hop before you've jumped.
I didn't suggest it should be our job to make it easy for them. I want great results too and I want it without ads and spam getting in the way as well. In fact there should be more tools integrated into browsers to allow the user to own their own click stream and browsing pattern data and "sell" it to the highest bidder. Do you know of such tools? I don't. We are even at the point both in terms of computational power and data storage costs that each user could potentially have their own web crawler/search engine. The bing and google bars basically steal this information from users and in return provide little to no improvement on search results. The point I was making was that there is absolutely no incentive on either side to share knowledge and converge onto a high quality, common query result set because both companies try really really hard to not appear like the other guy and the result set is part of this.
If this joint toolbar comes to fruition, which it never will, the crowd will decide the obvious winner for practically all queries. At that point what will be the difference between Bing and Google?
He's a smart guy so when he does tackle something he is very efficient. The stuff about being lazy is just his way of saying his intelligence was very poorly measured by usual metrics like academic success.
Many activities become enjoyable after a certain amount of mastery. Overcoming the initial hurdles is not fun and it's important to stick with it but it seems like some Chinese parents overdo it. If you just give up because you can not overcome certain initial hurdles then you might miss out on something worthwhile but if after the initial hurdles you're still not liking it then it might be a good idea to pick up something else.
It's not like being the players and participating in tournaments is such a hard gig. They are often sponsored by various technology or clothing companies and get to do what they really enjoy. The casters also get to do what they enjoy but they serve a much larger audience of people that fall between casual and professional player so that's one of the reasons they make more money.
All the things you mentioned requires a lot of effort. In fact it's more effort than just actually providing one or two good answers and questions a day. Also, I have never seen any of the popular answers get answers that are not really close to the mark. Even the unpopular ones always get good answers that float to the top. Organizing a cabal of voters and then monitoring new questions within your area of expertise just so you can post semi-plausible answers to move up the ranks is borderline psychotic and I have yet to encounter these people on SO.
The old forums had the same system so there is nothing new or brilliant going on here, the stackexchange sites just measure things in terms of reputation/votes and the old forums did something similar with posts/replies. The only innovation I see is the automation of how promotion happens in terms of votes/rep.
The voting is a crude proxy for correctness. I say crude because sometimes the first few answers get way too many votes for simply being the first but over time the correct answers float to the top.
What game and what advantage? It's a Q/A site. The only way you are going to game the system is if you ask clearly delineated questions and provide thoughtful and clear answers.
There is nothing sucky about the stackexchange sites. They are designed to be useful and growing repositories of frequent question and answers. The whole rep/voting thing is just a gaming layer on top to make the process of participation a little more fun but if you just focus on the gaming aspect and take it way too seriously like this guy then you miss out completely.
The dude just doesn't stop. Not only does he create top notch software but he's got the excellent documentation to go along with it as well so pretty much anyone can pick up the stuff and use it.
I have just started getting into perl and its terse procedural goodness is a breath of fresh air. Sometimes static types, classes and objects get really old.