kungfooey

Yes, the phone hardware looks pretty nice. However, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant) and was subsequently underwhelmed with their lack of ongoing support for the phone itself. I will not be purchasing another phone from Samsung unless it is a Google-branded phone (e.g., Nexus S).

Fool me once and all that.

Thanks for the link. I just emailed my representative on the committee.

Stratasan (stratasan.com) - Nashville, Tennessee

Python Developer

Prior experience with other web-stack languages is fine (Ruby/Rails, PHP, Perl, etc), as long as you're willing to learn Python. Remote is an option for the right candidates, but we have a strong preference for someone local or willing to relocate.

We're a small startup in the healthcare sector. We take data from public and private sources and allow healthcare companies (hospital systems, non-profits, etc) to look at markets from multiple angles. Our biggest competitor is Thomson Rueters. More information on our full job post on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/1827430

Currently our team consists of two developers (and an intern), with 20+ years of programming experience between us. We are lazy developers, so we like to do things correctly the first time around (this means unit tests, readable code, etc.) so we can go home and be with our families. Rockstars, ninjas, and studs need not apply. If this sounds like a good fit for you, email us. We would prefer a mid- to senior-level developer, but if you're a junior and looking for mentorship in the trade, we still want to talk to you.

You can email jobs@stratasan.com, or email me directly at brian@ (same domain).

I agree with you. I have been an Ubuntu user since 6.06, and 11.10 was the buggiest release yet, by far.

I actually bought a Mac on Friday. I need a development environment that works. I don't like spending time yak-shaving when I could be solving real problems.

I'm glad to hear it's better than the SGS1 model (especially GPS). However, having been burnt once (I own the SGS1), I'm certainly not going to let it happen again. My next phone will not be a Samsung handset.

Nashville, TN

BorderJump

Need a Senior Python developer to both maintain the existing project and help guide the company from the tech side. Experience with Ruby or PHP would be great! More job description here: http://bit.ly/qxcZCU

Email Chuck Bryant, chuck dot bryant at borderjump.com

It's a short-term gain. As a Galaxy S1 owner, I've been burnt by the "nice hardware, no ongoing software support" issue and I probably will not invest any of my hard-earned money in Samsung products in the future. As a tech-influencer of friends and family, when asked for advice about the Samsung phones, I always recommend against them.

I've noted other users express similar concerns, which leads me to believe they've sacrificed long-term consumer loyalty to short-term growth.

Wow. This is fantastic. Clever story, clever execution, clever little surprises in the illustrations. Can't wait to see what else this guy comes up with.

As a Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant) buyer there I no way I would touch this phone. Samsung took nearly a year to go from 2.1 to 2.2, and seeing 2.3.4 on the original S line is highly unlikely.

I think Samsung makes some great hardware (I'm typing this on a Galaxy Tab 10.1), but until they start showing more support for existing hardware, I do not plan to purchase anything else from them.

That's balderdash. These kinds of tools raise awareness of the issue, hopefully making more people think twice about posting private data to a public place. If they continue to be unaware of the danger of doing so, then it is simply exploited silently and everyone wonders how it happened.

Your statement assumes that security through obscurity is a good thing.

Well, I made a typo in my job post, and I can't edit it. Now I must shame myself in front of the community. Woe is me.

Any chance we can edit the title later?

Maybe I missed it, but why exactly would you use this over the Dropbox .deb available directly from dropbox.com?

Seems like the "official" one would have longer term support.

It is much more straightforward to take on a little side work. Set your rate to $100/hr and work an extra 20 hours a month. In today's market this isn't terribly difficult to do.

The author only addresses one side of the equation. The other side is the person who makes the loan. This bubble has a lot to do with the ease of which a loan can be obtained - thereby driving up the price (see: Housing Bubble).

The bubble will begin to pop when enough students start defaulting on the loan (by not working or getting paid under the table), not when potential students come to the realization that it is overpriced.

That's a good question. That seems like important context. What does the "official system" consist of, exactly, and why do so many entrepreneurs apparently raise funds outside of it?

I've been following the author's blog at http://www.spousonomics.com/ - some fluff, but in general it's pretty good.

In NY, health insurance coverage cannot decline anyone based on pre-existing conditions. So younger, healthy applicants have to pay more since there are a lot of people in the system who are a net loss. Thus, less healthy people are covered, and the system continues become worse... it's a very bad feedback loop.

I moved out of NYC to a more affordable state for this very reason. In 2009 my health care costs and rent were nearly all of my take-home pay. I had a kid on the way and it was going to be even worse, so I moved. Now my healthcare costs, while still significant, fell by 50%. I also rent a 3-bedroom house for about half as much as I paid for rent on a 1-room apartment. With those savings, I can afford to fly back to NYC when I need to as often as I like. (FWIW, I now live in Nashville. I also don't have to fool around with NY+NYC income taxes, which are also significant - plus their nice little 'unincorporated business tax' just for freelancers like myself.)

I never could get the "restricted driver" to work for me (I have on past laptops, but not this one). It's possible that this has changed with more recent restricted driver releases.

I am a web dev that has been using Ubuntu as my desktop host OS since version 6.06, and I'll be the first to admit that, while 10.10 is a significant improvement, there are still some problems that probably keep it from being mainstream.

One example: I currently use an ASUS laptop. Every time I get a kernel upgrade from Ubuntu, it breaks my Nvidia driver so X server will no longer start up properly. So I have to go into the shell, stop GDM, start the Nvidia driver install (I keep a local copy just for this), and then restart GDM.

It's just a minor inconvenience for me, but the average user is going to lose his mind when the computer appears to fail at bootup.

I still use it because I find it to be the most productive environment for my work - it gets in my way far less than any other OS I've tried. But, yes, there are a lot of hardware-related problems that still haven't been dealt with. I suspect there will always be.

I'm on T-mobile. It's quite stable. It's crashed about as much as the Samsung stock ROM. You can back up your data (most of it, anyway) with Titanium Backup (available in the app store, both free and pro). If your contacts are tied to your Google account, then they're automatically backed up anyway.

It took me a while to suck it up and flash a ROM on my Vibrant, but I'm happily running Nero v3 (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=883379) now and I keep kicking myself for not doing it sooner. The difference in 2.1 to 2.2 is incredible. It's really not that difficult to install it, either.

Is this for real? Is there any science to support the anecdotal experience of "the hot girl effect"?

Like a few other posters here, I got my start in QBASIC (kids want instant visual feedback, and QBASIC certainly did that). Parents bought a computer, then forbid us to play anything resembling a game. So I wrote my own (and also discovered Gorillas). I think the first thing I built was a slot machine making use of random numbers.

I don't own a MBA, but I have owned a lot of Dell laptop's over the past decade (including some of their higher-end XPS laptops). I don't know how good the MBA build-quality is, but if it's even slightly better-than-average, then this Dell is in no way a "competitor."

I swore off buying Dell laptops after the last XPS I bought burnt through two separate motherboards (it's still warm to the touch when idling). Previous Dell laptops had an array of different issues: hinges that became brittle and broke, fans that stopped working, etc. Their hardware just seems ridiculously error prone, which explains why they're able to price themselves so competitively.

This would be interesting/useful for smoothing geospatial polygons (eg, KML).

I think it's appropriate to mention that the New York Times just ran an article covering some lawsuits related to tracking users:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/technology/21cookie.html?p...

I think the take-away here is that if you're going to use a trick like this, it might be in your best interest to be transparent with your users and offer a way for them to remove all of this information. Of course, if you're using this particular hack then you probably don't want your users to remove the cookie to begin with.

One could argue that this has already happened to some extent (where the domain model is commonly known and well explored: blogs, ecommerce) via packaged solutions and web frameworks.

There is no "unbiased news." Period.

If what you want to do is get information without an overt bias, then yes, NPR is fairly good. Others have recommended The Economist, I second that. I would recommend getting your news from a variety of sources (preferably not American-centric, if you wish to hear international news).

I tend to lean heavily on NPR, The Economist, and the NY Times (the last two are seriously contradictory, but I find that to be useful). I have heard good things about The Atlantic, although I cannot vouch for it myself.

Geeze, your setup looks unusually similar to mine (that looks like an ASUS).

(I have an ASUS laptop w/ a 21" monitor and an old Macbook for iPhone dev.)