protolif

I'm strangely reminded of when people said that Android support would kill Instagram, because of their inferior cameras. (Don't shoot me. I'm an Android user of Instagram.)

This must be what they use on TV when they're pretending to know about computers.

Thomas Jefferson was strongly against the idea of intellectual property. http://bit.ly/JJa8Va

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Is Pixelmator not a decent alternative to Photoshop? What about the GIMP? I haven't installed Photoshop in years, but then again, I'm a developer, not a designer.

They're not exactly trying to get it taken down either. I'm sure that their legal team could make that happen, if it was in the company's best interest.

Sluggishness is not evidence of good or even hard work.

The time should be proportionate to the cost of the software.

You're right. They were bound to use that data. I just assumed that it was for serving up more targeted averts. I'm not against making money. I just don't want to see what happened with newspaper and TV happen to the internet.

I think the bubble trend is dangerous. For a while, I was comfortable with Google knowing so much about me. But since they're using that data to decide what I need to know, I decided that it was time to ween myself off their services, including Business Gmail.

For a while I hated my Motorola Defy. T-Mobile was really behind on releasing Android updates, and all the bloatware really slowed it down. Finally, CyanogenMod 7 came out with Defy support, and I was amazed by how snappy it was, and how much longer my battery lasted. My girlfriend's jealous of how awesome my phone is compared to hers, even though the hardware is identical and we're on the same plan.

This is slightly off-topic, but I remember reading about a European initiative for a standard mobile charger a while back. Did that actually happen?

People are still using Facebook?

AT&T seems to have forgotten how many customers they gained by being the only network to offer iPhone for a long time. Now that they've got those users, it's easy to take them for granted, and wish they'd done things differently. Had they not offered an unlimited data plan in the beginning, Apple may have went with another provider. Apple benefits from commoditizing industries adjacent to their main: hardware.

Mobile internet access is a commodity, just as wired internet access is a commodity. Most ISPs today advertise UNLIMITED LIGHTNING FAST DOWNLOAD SPEEDS, knowing that their network can't support everyone downloading at that speed at once.

It's like gym memberships. Gyms can't support all of their members showing up at the same time. In fact, they profit on the fact that most people underutilize their membership. What gyms don't do, is harass, limit, and double charge members who show up every day, to work out and get their money's worth.

Java 6... from 2006? I'm sorry, but innovation and Java do not belong in the same sentence. All of the innovation has moved on to dynamically typed languages, because it grew tired of having its balls fondled by JVM/TSA. Public Static Void Main? No thanks.

Programmers have been tossing the word Enterprise around for decades, like it means something. Quit it already. You're embarrassing yourself.

Many so-called Enterprise Java apps often don't work at all unless you've installed the /exact/ JRE version that the particular app supports (Looking at you, Citrix). The fact is, that it was a dying language before Android. Hopefully it will resume dying, and Google will either release something better, or embrace an existing Open Source community like JavaScript, Ruby, or Python. (Edit: Now that I think about it, Google's own V8 JavaScript engine would be well suited for this. It already supports ARM Linux.)

Personally, I was forced to take 2 Java classes in college. The examples in our labs never worked. I had to Google everything in the book to make Java code that actually ran. Swing looks the same as it did in 1996. Everyone at the local JUG was considerably older, and spent most of the time complaining about what a pain SVN was. (A clue: You're doing it wrong.)

Despite all of this, I was still learning to program, and actually sortof enjoyed it. But then Sun got acquired by Oracle, inventors of the only database system that makes me want to kill myself. After that, I started seriously considering other languages. But the real nail in the coffin was when Oracle decided to cockblock Apache Harmony, and Apache stepped down from the Java Committee. For shame, Oracle. After all nice things Apache made for the Java Community. How fitting, that Google used Harmony code to create Dalvik, the Android VM.

Show me a judge that can write Hello World in Java without Googling it.

Is this rangecheck() function that we're debating critical to the Android platform? Is that the feature that made it so popular? Clearly not, or Oracle would have made smartphones already. I'm curious as to how many different ways a range check function can be written in Java. Can we reasonably expect Bloch to re-implement his own code in a slightly different way? Should Google have diff'd Android source against Java source? What does Open Source mean to you?