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Yes, I agree the patents are the main driver.

But I hope they use the opportunity to make great Android handsets. (a role HTC seemed to take on and then drift away from).

They don't have to worry about their partners. It's not like any of them have much choice - only Android & WP7.

divtxton Balls

Sour grapes would be if Google had said "the Nortel patents suck" after they lost.

What you're describing is closer to "they ganged up against us".

divtxton Balls

To clarify: a biased Gruber article may actually have valid points. The problem is that Gruber will only include pro-Apple points.

For example, note that Gruber does NOT point out how the acquisition will allow Google to do Apple-style seamless hardware/software design.

edit: Android -> Google as pointed out by m_eiman below

divtxton Balls

The problem with Gruber is that he'll write a fair analysis only as long as the fair analysis favors Apple. This means we won't get a fair analysis from him on things like the patent war and app store high-handedness. Sometimes he'll do a great piece. Sometimes you have to sift carefully for the bias. Then there are articles like this - insults, lies and condescension:

- Lyons has always been an ass, but when did he get so bitter?

- you just look childish when, only after losing the auction, you then claim you didn’t really want the thing anyway (google never cried sour grapes on nortel)

- Motorola knew they had Google by the balls. ... and they made Google pay and pay handsomely

The trick is not to get fooled by the reasonable-sounding phrases like: Another way to look at this story... and That’s not to say it wasn’t a bold, brash move, or even... the right move.

To those of you discussing Gruber's position on patents: it is the patents that change position relative to Gruber. :)

edit: typos, formatting

divtxton Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it

Registered! Not sure if it's what I was looking for, but it looks interesting for many things!

divtxton Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it

This is great for motivation during a heads-down sprint.

What I'm looking for is slightly different: a place to show off when done and get/give feedback.

divtxton Command line tools for web developers

Wow! Just wow! Bookmarked! A mere upvote is not enough for this! Thank you!!!

Questions:

- Is there a site pointing out amazing command line tools like this? (their existence as opposed to usage examples like at http://www.commandlinefu.com/)

- Is there a site listing the OS X equivalents for Linux command line tools? (e.g. what's the OS X equivalent for dos2unix / flip?)

(edit: merge 2 comments into 1)

divtxton Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it

He refers to "November Startup Sprint" here on HN. I would love to see regular posts like that for launch & feedback.

The current convention seems to be "Show HN: my app" posts, but I'm worried about missing interesting posts and/or repetitive posts when an app is updated.

How about a monthly/weekly post for apps - similar to "Who's hiring..." - to show off apps/updates & get feedback?

(Also, the november discussions have a http://startupmonth.org/ site which seems to be down. Was there not enough traffic?)

divtxton See what Google knows about you

Me: Male, 65+

I'm in my late 30s.

They have my interests as Business News & Finance (correct), but no Tech (incorrect), so perhaps the ad system is guessing age & gender from interests?

divtxton The real story behind the Java 7 GA bugs affecting Apache Lucene / Solr

Sorry for the late reply. Not sure which you wanted details on:

- java issues / sun not caring - there are examples above by SeanLuke, gojomo and myself

- java.lang.Object depends on hundreds of classes - violates basic design principles of modularity and avoiding cyclic dependencies

- "Sun sat on it's laurels..." - apart from ignoring existing issues, they also ignored requests for language enhancements (e.g. dynamic language support, covariance, etc) for a long time causing many developers to give up on java for web development and move to python & ruby

divtxton The real story behind the Java 7 GA bugs affecting Apache Lucene / Solr

Another 10-year old issue which has probably cost thousands of developer hours:

String.substring() leaks memory

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4513622

divtxton The real story behind the Java 7 GA bugs affecting Apache Lucene / Solr

The java classes have always had major warts and no one in charge has ever seemed to care.

My personal bugbear: java.lang.Object depends on hundreds of classes including, among other absurdities, the Turkish locale (IIRC). This was about 13 years ago. Of course, the bug was eventually marked WONTFIX.

14 years ago, I adopted Java because it was a beautiful escape from the warty giant that C++ was becoming. Sun sat on it's laurels and, like many others, I moved on to Python.

Now Java is the new C++: unpleasant and to be avoided when possible.

divtxton Why you can't search for phpBB on Bing

For me just now:

Ref A: 1868CAC6D8EA4D63B186C4E1C09E8822 Ref B: 22A00154B361421B403038C5A5D4A80F Ref C: Mon Aug 01 17:20:45 2011 PST

Edit: this is under Chrome incognito mode as others have mentioned

divtxton How Scientists and Engineers Got It Right, and VCs Got It Wrong

Necessary and meaningful, and wrong in this case.

- "VCs Got It Wrong" means: many (plural) VCs got something wrong

- "VC's Got It Wrong" means: a "Got It Wrong" that belongs to a VC

divtxton Why Google cares if you use your real name

Re can anyone can read the posts - Yes!

Your g+ public profile page doubles as your blog of 'Public' posts.

divtxton Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

Can someone suggest why my above comment was downvoted?

I gave an actual occurrence for a hypothetical. The only offense I can see is that it was anecdotal evidence.

edit: thanks to those who upvoted me back to 1 :)

divtxton Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

I saw the untag feature, but it shouldn't be my job to monitor facebook 24x7 to untag embarrassing photos.

divtxton Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

What if you tagged an embarrassing photo of me...

This happened to me 3 HOURS after joining facebook, and was not even ill-intentioned. (ah, young people!)

edit: I marked tagged photos as private for a year till that photo was untagged. The photo is still there. :(

divtxton When operating "at web scale", users often simply don't have "real names"

If that was the reason, they could just have asked for your real name without requiring that it be your public name.

divtxton Ask HN: Would you pay for an online, restore-only Gmail backup?

Yes - it's not simple to make sure you've done the right thing to make email clients backup correctly.

I used to be a regular Thunderbird user on Windows because the mail file format would be open, but haven't touched desktop email since GMail.

If I were to make a choice now, I'd look at those with conversation support i.e. Postbox or Thunderbird for Windows, Sparrow or Lion's Mail.app for Mac.

divtxton Ask HN: Would you pay for an online, restore-only Gmail backup?

Would anyone buy a simple desktop app to backup gmail to the desktop?

I thought of adding features like search and mail viewer. Then I realized I could just use a full email client. :P

divtxton Ask HN: Would you pay for an online, restore-only Gmail backup?

There are two issues with that logic:

1. Yes, probability of gmail data loss is less than probability of desktop mail data loss.

But that's for the average user. An individual desktop mail user can improve his probability to a higher level than gmail if he chooses.

2. Google may lose your data due to unexpected account termination as mentioned in the story above.

divtxton Ask HN: Would you pay for an online, restore-only Gmail backup?

For a cloud-to-cloud backup service like this, my biggest worry would be about finding out the hard way that the backup provider has bugs.

How do I solve this as a user? Look for reviews and stories of successful/failed user restores?

divtxton Apple’s Cash Hoard Exceeds GDP of 126 Countries

There is competition - they're competing with other charities for funds.

divtxton Apple’s Cash Hoard Exceeds GDP of 126 Countries

The problem is that the evolutionary forces for fundraising non-profits can only result in ineffectiveness.

For senior management, success at fundraising and is income security and growth. Actual charity work is a cost center with no ROI, so you cut costs by having less and worse services.

related: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bur...

divtxton Ask HN: Modern Resume Style/Formatting

+1 for single HTML file (embedded CSS) and Safari print to PDF.

divtxton Xcode 4.1 now available free from the Mac App Store

Is that one mac mini per version or is there an easy way to set up multiple installs?

divtxton Nginx established as a company

I second this based on hard personal experience.

You end up with platform-specific features, behavior and bugs, compounded across multiple pieces in the stack. You also end up with conflicting design decisions.

In my case, I wanted to use Apache & Python, but the recommendation is for a threading Apache on Windows, but forking on Linux (allowing e.g. mod_python).

To be cross-platform, I ended up going pure python webserver at the cost of performance and then had to deal with divergent cpython threading behavior, as well as postgres win32-specific issues.

divtxton How RIM BlackBerry works with loyal app developers

I'd love to hear your history, reasons and current attitude to developing BB apps.

The stories* tell me that the RIM/BB developer experience is so much worse than iOS and Android that it's not worth bothering with (as developers and hence as a viable platform).

* the big ones: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2263882 ("You Win, RIM!") and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714270 ("Open letter to BlackBerry bosses")

divtxton How RIM BlackBerry works with loyal app developers

I'd say it's intentional due to Hanlon's razor in upper management.

Perhaps some logic like this: we can't lose "our" BBM users but blocking IM apps would drive users and developers away. Let's quietly block IM apps at the approval stage!

Also, "anti-competitive" is the wrong description - unless you count killing your own company. :D