loewenskind

>But having a monopoly in the mobile app market does give Apple a monopoly.

They don't. Doesn't Android actually have more apps in their app store? It really is what the parent said: the Apple market place is just better, it's not any kind of monopoly.

I can't believe history can be completely forgotten in less than 20 years.

Here are a couple of links I found with a quick googling:

http://www.kmfms.com/whatsbad.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20071215231524/http://www.vcnet.c...

The second tries to document every company destroyed by MS and how.

If we ever get to the point that jobs aren't replaced that would mean that all work isn't needed so the typical rules of capitalism no longer apply.

Capitalism is just a mechanism for allocating resources, it's not any kind of moral judgment on anything.

If last.fm, etc. are providing so much value why are their margins so thin? Are they providing value less than 30% of the cost of the base product?

You can't possibly be serious. You don't know of Microsoft's long history of copying software that other companies had made, putting them out of business? And three other people as well apparently.

This sounds a bit hyperbolic. The company that is notorious for doing this is Microsoft.

Personally I would prefer Racket over Guile, but if it starts to keep its promise about becoming the scripting language for linux then I would get more interested.

Any link for all the things that have started to happen with it lately for those of us who are out of the loop?

I can understand Apple wanting to cut out middle men. I've never been a big fan of middle men myself, for the most part. But the biggest thing that bugs me about this is: iBooks doesn't have any books where I am! I buy all my stuff on Kindle because it's the only place I can legally buy a book at all. They can't try to shove everyone off the platform when they don't have any viable alternative themselves.

Simple solution: sell your crops where it is most profitable. Maybe with 11x normal it's still worth it. As soon as it's not, you switch.

>It's deeply disturbing that the people at Apple feel entitled to radically change the rules of the game whenever it suits them.

What makes you think that's what they're doing? It could also be that they never intended for their platform to be used this way but didn't explicitly deny it because they didn't see this coming. I don't have any way of knowing that is the case, but I don't think you have anyway of knowing your opinion is right either.

Couldn't disagree more. The "all apps should be web apps" movement is just an attempt to return to dumb terminals. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way again, but this time "fat client" apps can just be nicer front ends to web services.

Personally, my strategy is to create my product as a REST web service and provide some kind of default web interface, but let native clients use the REST interface to provide a nicer experience where applicable. I.e. the HTML interface is just one possible "view" to the service.

Why does my native app have to be the completely generic web browser native app when it could be a specific "web browser" custom tailored for my specific service?

If people are using apps because they make more money with them, then what is your basis for claiming web apps are superior?

If you don't have speech without consequences then there will always be things that need to be said that can't be.

Looks like you're getting a bit defensive for some reason. I was using "you" as a generic pronoun (I could have said "one would be" instead but that's more wordy and is IMO less clear).

You make some good points but I think you're underestimating the power a monopoly can have. It's true that IBM wasn't able to keep their strangle hold on technology, but Microsoft did for a long time. Walmart still stands largely unopposed.

>Happy wife = happy life

I hate this phrase, it's the battle cry of those who do whatever their wife says and laugh with their buddies about how whipped they are. Marriage is a balancing act. Of course you have to change and give in where appropriate but if you do everything she says she wants you will lower her opinion of you (as it should, since you're a coward).

I agree with PG: just ignore patents when you're small. If you ever get big enough for it to matter than things are looking really good and you'll have more bargaining options.

>You come across patterns like that by doing the tedious work the hard way and looking for short-cuts.

This doesn't work for me. After a little bit of tedium my mind quickly switches through "just fight your way through this" and no more insight will be gained. All the math shortcuts I know I either read about or discovered while playing with numbers on my own time without any homework deadlines.

>He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules then.

Everyone is responsible for their own action. You should not follow rules that are bad, you should ignore them or try to change them yourself. "Just doing my job" is not a legitimate excuse and if I had the power I would punish that defense more severely than any other because it's the most dangerous.

Nothing lets the terrorists win more than spending ourselves into a stupor chasing non-existent boogy men.

What is the point of posting a 10+ year old toy? You could do this same thing in a very wide variety of languages, but since it's useless most people usually don't bother.

Good catch. Windows has never been the king of OS's ever. They've been spectacular at marketing to Corporations, etc., but their OS's have always been "within range" or worse than the alternatives.

From your moral high horse can you see what the correct action to take is? More useless voting between two parties who take near identical actions?

Anonymous did what their target did. It was no more legal or illegal. If you want to punish them fine, but make sure you punish both criminals equally.

As we see in Egypt, fighting within the laws (which are just a list of rules made up by people in control) doesn't always give you the option to win.

The entire point of a civilized society is to overcome evolution. For consistency, do you at least hate all our technology that lets e.g. babies that would have died 50 years ago lead long productive lives? They obviously had bad genes, right?

That's actually a very cute story. It would make a nice blog post, or Calvin & Hobbes type comic strip or something.

Agreed, both are trade offs. One is not "clearly a winner", it depends on your goals.

It's not as straight forward as you describe. The "instantly and globally released" nature of web apps is both an advantage and a disadvantage. What if I have a client that needs to keep the only interface for some reason? It's easy to just not upgrade, provided you have that option...

> Ideally, data synced on the web, with clients on the desktop seems like an ideal possibility to me. Or maybe its just me who thinks this way.

You're not the only one.

Which further illustrates my point. What is the point of posting 4 or 5 paragraphs from someone clueless about the subject they're talking about?

>it seems to me it is the naysayers who are doing that.

At most, the "naysayers" can't be any more than the perl advocates. No one is going out of their way to post articles against perl. We just come out when someone posts yet another perl advocation piece.

>Disliking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive.

Liking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive.

>And then the original commenter is talking about "back in the day,"

For all intents and purposes, perl's time has come and gone. Right or wrong, just or unjust. That's just how it is. No amount of wishing or screaming "look at this, we can also do Rails-type stuff!" will change that. Of course when someone posts yet another perl plea for relevancy, people who used it back when it was the language wax sentimental. You'd get something similar if you posted about some new project with OS2 or BEOS or something (arguably better technologies in their day then the one that ended up winning).