ergo98

What's untrue about it? While SO had a CC policy since the early days, the actual CC database, which was the subject of my post, was made available well over a year later, coinciding with a outpouring of foolish developers claiming that they could recreate the site on the weekend. I recall the timing simply because it was interesting seeing how that momentum disappeared.

That movement disappeared once SO started making the DB available for download.

It's entirely unsustainable though. It is a community destined to fail, as cool as it is right now.

Remarkably little spam gets through to me. I actually see more spam in my non-public gmail account where, I suspect, the spammers are simply name guessing.

Long story made not much shorter -- I would guess that scraping isn't that big of a strategy any more.

I would think RAM preservation would be a much greater concern in the VPS world as the hard limits are ever present, and quickly become enormously expensive.

In the dedicated server world it isn't quite as prohibitive. An R810 can be had with 512GB. Just got several new servers to add to the mix, each with 144GB of memory.

Though of course I eminently disagree with Atwood's statement about algorithms. In fact I think he doesn't believe that either, but it was just a bit of color on the entry.

There's no hate for Apple. There is, however, perspective on human behavior, one of which is a "with us or against us" mentality.

Searching for programming questions always sucked on Google proper. The only redeeming target was the Deja News corpus Google acquired. I doubt I'm along in my sadness at seeing the beautifully categorized and well discussed Usenet groups descend to uselessness, replaced by a disparate collection of poorly organized, polluted Q&A sites.

Commerce -- like finding a review. When do people ever think that was good on Google? Seriously I'm seeing people talking about trying to buy iPhone cases -- come on. Again, it always sucked on Google. Always. It's worse now simply because there is remarkably little real content (the professional review industry has almost disappeared, as it was supported by magazines, and the consumer review space disappeared because people stopped hosting their own Geocities sites and the like).

Specialized sites were always a world above any search engine. For game reviews I go to Metacritic. For movie information I go to imdb. For restaurant reviews I go to yelp. And so on.

So no, I don't resent Google for those things, because it was never good at them.

I suspect this shift in sentiment has more to do with Google evolving from being Microsoft's competitor (back when Microsoft was the boogeyman to Apple), to Google being Apple's competitor.

To many who hold Apple so dearly to their heart, this causes a serious conundrum. Suddenly every move by Google can only be seen with incredible suspicion and assumptions of worst intentions. See the recent raging about WebM as a perfect example.

The Android operating system it makes for mobile phones has become a viable challenger for Apple’s iOS. But for all the talk about it being open, they’re not giving it away out of the goodness of their hearts

The link provided to purportedly demonstrate this undermines the point, because it is, demonstrating the point above, nothing but the raging conspiracy by an Apple fanatic who abhors any perceived threat to his love Apple.

Nonetheless, as a consumer I am fully aware of Google's ambitions with Android, which is the same reason why I don't use Chrome. However Android is the best available option in the space for my rights, and the best opportunity to stop those rights from being trampled, however many ridiculous scarequotes are used to express the author's total misunderstanding of open.

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Sure, but in this case the input in question is the renewed competition courtesy of Android. The natural question everyone will have is how that impacts the iPhone.

For reference, for the same quarter over quarter of 2009, iPhone sales increased 68%.

Iphones are nearing the mid point of the yearly cycle, and I'd expect them to be relatively flatish until summertime

I wouldn't expect this at all. While we might get a sense that everyone is like us, most consumers aren't planning their purchase around Apple's update cycle. They decide they want a smartphone so they go and buy one. We all know that the smartphone market is exploding, and there is a huge untapped reserve of potential customers, so the numbers now are generally big.

Regardless, the iPad and iPod more than make it up. While everone was talking about the 300,000 Android devices activated per day, over this quarter the combined iOS devices hit a simple division rate of almost 360,000 per day. That is amazing.

It is notable that between Q4 2010 and Q1 2011 (the latter includes the holiday season), the growth areas were the iPod [115%] and the iPad [75%]. Macs increased 6%, but actually decreased by 7% in the Americas.

It's hard to hold it as a "bad" result, but among such stellar results the relatively small 15% growth of the iPhone does stand out. Tomorrow the talking heads will probably play that up despite the incredible scale of these results.

And of course there's the march of progress, and the nexus one of one year ago is now outmatched by almost all devices with better screens, dual cameras, coming dual core processors and much better GPUs, etc.

Microsoft did a tonne of heavy lifting to make it so. There were boxed in drivers for virtually everything, and customization was absolutely minimal.

And when you bought a MotoQ, it was stock CE.

Dell has suffered the same outcome for its entrants into the Android field. Clearly they were trying to enter the market on the cheap and it hurt them.

I quit and deleted the account, however, when the demands of reciprocity got not only too time consuming, but too transparent and formulaic to participate in without feeling almost ridiculous.

It is tangentially related to a scene from Fight Club-

Narrator: When people think you're dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just...

Marla Singer: - instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.

On Facebook, as with many social media sites (including Flickr), people "listen to you" to remind you that you should listen to them. They like your posts and comment on your pictures and send you happy birthdays all to ensure that you feel the obligation to do the same to them.

Life is full of that sort of reciprocity, but never could it be piled onto people with the easy lack of friction that Facebook affords.

How so? It aligns interests in virtually every way.

Aside from simply having technical insight into the individual ROMs, you needn't look further than the disaster that has been Sony Erricson and Dell's Android entrants to see the truth in this -- those vendors came out with devices running dated Android versions, turning possible winners into catastrophic losers, eviscerating sales of the Streak and X10.

If they could have just done a merge and they were done, obviously they would have.

So now we're getting to the point where it seems that makers like Motorola and HTC have started to build up a significant Android talent pool, and that bodes well. Despite the constant incantations that Android is free, I wouldn't be surprised if the in-house development costs rivaled or exceeded what something like Windows Mobile cost to license.

Naturally people are going to compare it to iOS, where updates are free and rapidly disseminated. The difference there is that there definitely is something in it for Apple -- they're getting a cut of every app you buy, every song you download, etc. They're a middleman, so it's just a cost of doing business.

I wish we could get to a point where Android updates cost money. I would happily pay $30 or whatever for each major update if it motivated the vendor to have an interest in keeping it up to date.

That perception can't just suddenly change overnight when its no longer convenient.

Android didn't prevent anyone else from entering the space. Yet where are they? If Android didn't appear and get a lot of often undeserved goodwill on Google's back (through much of its life it has been a seriously shitty platform. I've been using it since it was released but would not wish it upon even an enemy until recently), the iPhone would have conquered the whole smartphone market with ease.

Windows Phone 7 already appears too far behind, yet in an alternate scenario where Android didn't "fragment" the market it would have been impossible behind the times.

The iPhone had overwhelming dominance in the consumer smartphone space. That is absolutely without question. That dominance is how it moved into the enterprise market, the gaming market, and so on. Exactly how Windows invaded the server room based upon the massive dominance it had outside of the server room.

If Google didn't have their huge amounts of cash, we'd still have the Blackberry OS, which is still enormously successful (though it's taken a hit recently), and we'd have Windows Phone 7, which is actually a really damn decent operating system.

If Android didn't prevent absolute iPhone dominance, RIM would be dead in the consumer space (and dying in the enterprise space), and Windows Phone 7 would have been DoA. Every single review would say "it's cute and all, but without the apps its a nonstarter".

The Windows monopoly was entrenched when the market was a fraction of a fraction what it was today: That's the whole essence of a monopoly -- it is self-sustaining.

While Android has made a lot of gains, there are still a lot of networked usages where you are left out if you don't get on the iOS train, whether it's a compelling platform itself or not. I'm going to grab my wife an iPod Touch purely so she can play a WeDoodle game, because that's what every other person on a mommy group plays. My bank released an iPhone application -- promoting it heavily -- after having never released a rich-client application for any platform ever, including when Windows had some 99% of the market.

That's the essence of a monopoly. When your choice is very heavily driven by the network effect of the product. Today it is much, much weaker than it was a year or two ago, but it is still in effect.

While the iPhone's very competitive, and while it has a near monopoly in terms of media popularity - I've seen many iPhones in movies, and no Droid - it by no means came remotely close to a monopoly

Well clearly it isn't now. Android has fractured that nascent monopoly (though many in the Apple cheerleading camp are now proclaiming that with the Verizon phone you no longer need to worry about developing for other platforms -- those suckers have an option of iOS devices on two carriers now. Problem?). Which is why I said that it was close. Two years ago the iPhone was the only smartphone that mattered. Even one year ago there was a strong argument made on places like here that the iPhone was all that really mattered.

And the reality is that if Google didn't have an enormous pile of cash to burn on this project, and they didn't have the "enemy of few" status to actually get the partnerships that mattered, today the iPhone would be the only valid smartphone choice.

Many fail to see how perilously close we actually came to an iPhone monopoly. While work-issued Blackberries and not-really-smartphone Nokias made the chart look less intimidating, from a real consumer perspective the iPhone owned the game completely.

And of course that matters to all of us because mobile devices are the future, and the choices today -- like the choice of DOS in the 80s -- will impact us well into the future. I don't want to live in a world where the freedoms we enjoy is granted by the department of justice.

But yes, just a phone and all that.