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Everything about the story reads like it was fabricated.

jdqon Oracle v. Google judge to decide whether APIs are Copyrightable, not the jury

The code in question is most certainly not TimSort, but the rangecheck() method within it, which is copied verbatim from arrays.java, which Bloch wrote while at Sun. It's what Oracle is using to show that Bloch did reference Sun code and Android is not a clean-room implementation. It's there in the Groklaw piece, but glanced over very quickly because, well it's groklaw.

"Q. Why did you use the same rangecheck() function in Timsort as was in arrays.java?

A. It's good software engineering to reuse an existing function.

Q. But why use the exact same code?

A. I copied rangecheck() as a temporary measure, assuming this would be merged into arrays.java and my version of rangecheck() would go away.

[Discussion of Timsort dates and Android work dates.]"

jdqon Oracle v. Google judge to decide whether APIs are Copyrightable, not the jury

"...Josh Bloch (the Google employee who checked it into Android) wrote it in the first place and gave it to Sun."

What does that mean exactly--'gave it to Sun'? He was a Sun employee at the time. It's silly to say the Java code he wrote while working at Sun was given to Sun by him. Likewise, it's silly to say that then by extension when he went to work for Google he just took his code with him and gave it to Android.

jdqon The One Product That Makes Apple a Trillion-Dollar Company Overnight

Tiny correction: As of March 2011, iTunes has 200 million credit cards.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/02/apple-200-million-itunes-ac...

jdqon I got my AdWords account unsuspended by not giving up

"It took contacting them again, insisting on a response, to get an explanation."

Which was...?

jdqon While Apple Is Criticized for Foxconn, Other Companies Are Silent

"As we are constantly reminded here, Apple takes 80% of the phone industry profits and thus deserve proportionate blame for working conditions."

Blame needs to be proportional to amount produced, not amount profited. If I have one phone manufactured and I charge $11 million for it (and actually find a buyer), but you produce a million $10 phones, your impact on the workers is far greater.

"On the other hand, many other companies like Amazon and Microsoft sell the hardware for a loss, hoping to make it up on software and media purchases."

So if tomorrow Apple decided to sell their phones at half price, thereby eliminating all profits, then suddenly no one will be able to say anything to Apple about their manufacturing and worker treatment?

"Meanwhile, the other companies are not doing very well, and labor cost increases for them might put them out of business entirely and then the workers won't even have a job. ... This is why Apple is criticized more since it has most leeway of all the companies mentioned in the article to increase wages."

So it all amounts to how much you charge the end user. If a company charges more for their product they must ensure the workers of the companies they contract with are paid/treated fairly, but if a company chooses to sell devices at little to not profit, they can treat the workers however they want.

It sounds to me more like if a company makes a device and provides it to you cheaply, you'll look the other way on how they handle manufacturing.

jdqon Don’t Be Evil: How Google Screwed a Startup

Not trying to refute you, but how can that be the problem? From the email you cite,

"Please be assured that your Adsense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other Adsense ads."

The author of the blog post states after receiving that email he took the Adsense ads off. This was also in Feb. 2009 and the account was closed in April 2011.

Does the Adsense team (or whoever) go back and look at incidences from 2+ years in the past when looking for people to ban?

jdqon If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone

You mean the non-smartphone that was announced a couple weeks before the iPhone? I forget, how was multitouch on it? And the web browser, was it any good?

jdqon Between a rock and a hard place – our decision to abandon the Mac App Store

Except that you just made this up. Do you really think Apple doesn't know people are on the lookout for just such behavior?

jdqon Google Tracked iPhones, Bypassing Apple Browser Privacy Settings

So "a consistent experience that users expect" == user tracking for ads?? I don't think so. That's quite some spin on Google exploiting a bug to track me.

jdqon Google Tracked iPhones, Bypassing Apple Browser Privacy Settings

The Battelle link is a horrible explanation. His position is that user tracking for ads is a normal function of the web people want and therefore it is Apple's fault for blocking it by default. Unreal.

jdqon Oracle removes former Sun CEO's blog

The post in question by itself means nothing. There is no context.

We know Google and Sun were in talks about Java. This post could have very well been posted when Google made it clear they were going to use the Java language, but before making it clear to Sun they weren't going to license anything. Without a timeline or any other details this proves nothing.

jdqon Our security auditor is an idiot. How do I give him the information he wants?

Agreed. I wouldn't want to do business with this company.

jdqon Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary

Windows Phone 7 is 'stealing' the idea [of a touch-screen smart phone]. That is very different than just copying. Ex:

http://www.cultofmac.com/side-by-side-comparison-samsung-vs-...

jdqon Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary

There is a difference between stealing an idea and blatant copying.

jdqon Brubeck: A new Python web framework running on mongrel2

"...Tornado because it offers little support for the plethora of Python drivers that are blocking only."

Could you list an example of what you mean by support for blocking drivers? Thanks.

jdqon To defend Android, Google must attack software patents

"To defend Android, Google must attack software patents"

But then Google jeopardizes its own search patents.

jdqon iOS users buy more apps and pay more for them

" A common algorithm for succeeding in the App Store is take Popular App A from 2009 and re-implement it with new graphics and perhaps an additional gameplay mechanic and release it as Hopeful Popular App B in 2011."

Not disagreeing with you, but isn't this the common algorithm for most things? I can think of TV Shows, movies, books, websites etc. that use the same algorithm.

jdqon Ask HN: Best Python Framework for Google App Engine?

It's going to be hard to get the 'best' framework, but you'll certainly get a lot of responses of frameworks that definitely work for people. I'll add:

Tornado

http://www.tornadoweb.org

jdqon How to create HTML5 web apps with Xcode4

Better title:

How to create Cappuccino interfaces using XCode4

jdqon AWS drops bandwidth pricing

The io is burstable. Try doing a sustained large download and you will see the speed throttle down

jdqon Better Python Scraping - Installing lxml and Beautiful Soup

I concur, but technically Scrapy is an entire web scraping/crawling framework for writing crawlers, not just XML/HTML parsing like BeautifulSoup or lxml. You don't even have to use Scrapy's built in processor, you can use BeautifulSoup (or whatever else) if you want. What Scrapy gets you is all the logic for crawling of the web pages (requesting pages, reacting to html errors, etc.). You basically just tell it what urls to parse, what to parse from the pages, and what to do with the parsed data. It handles all the rest. I used it Scrapy just recently on an online movie site (shameless plug: www.qwink.com).

jdqon Show HN: Qwink.com - Search engine for online movies

Good advice, thanks.

jdqon Show HN: Qwink.com - Search engine for online movies

Prices are listed as well. How would one describe a price comparator/search engine for something like a tag line?

jdqon Apple is professional, the web is amateur

It's this part that's going to get people disagreeing with you:

"No more pixel perfect web apps that feel like desktop apps, no more sites that look like glossy brochures, and embracing chaos and amateurism over order and professionalism. It is going to be very hard."

jdqon Nearly three dozen Android apps infected with malware

Now updated to increase the total number of apps with malware to 34.

jdqon IPad Dwarfs Rivals On The Web, Surpasses Linux

Perhaps, but this is with the assumption that the $499 inexpensive model is the most popular. A research report from Context showed that the best selling iPad 2 model is the 64GB 3G model, i.e. the most expensive one.

http://gigaom.com/apple/most-popular-ipad-2-model-is-also-th...

jdqon Lodsys Responds to Apple, Files Lawsuits Against App Developers

I'm not sure exactly what you are implying about feeling since Apple is very polarizing (happy iOS devs are getting sued?), but if you take a step back you'll see that this isn't just an Apple problem. The lawsuits will come to Android app devs next, and probably most other mobile platforms with in-app purchases.

jdqon Why the surprise over Android data usage?

90 MB per month, according to:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/30/nielsen-androids-lead...

jdqon Linux 3.0 Kernel to have new Microsoft Kinect driver

"The Kinect gspca subdriver just supports the video stream for now..."

Works as only a webcam; no depth data.