semipermeable

You discuss how WoW either hold back life progress or doesn't. Have you (or anyone you know) encountered a case where WoW has helped someone?

I get the same sinking feeling every time I check for an OS update on my Samsung Fascinate and it's not there.

No update means:

- ZERO GPS functionality (Verizon reps acknowledge this) - crippled performance on what's supposed to be top-of-the-line hardware (because the Samsung version of Android 2.1 uses a badly written swap filesystem)

My iPhone 3G has a better UI, multitouch, and even now feels like a more solidly built device. On the other hand, I've never had a dropped call on Verizon in San Francisco. I'd rather have a mostly-functioning, always-connected device than a beautiful idiot that connects to a network incapable of delivering even SMS.

The author needs to get past the fantasy that the US government is the big bad guy in a room full of innocent school children. Russia, while weakened over the past few years, is a global military power. China (and India) are starting to flex their muscles. North Korea is still ruled by a cantankerous despot. The technology advantage the US has held since WWII is waning, and with it goes the luxury of military complacency. I'd rather the skirmishes happen behind the scenes than with more large-scale conventional warfare.

People who appear to be coddled through their education may just have taken the easy way out and cheated:

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

Another Heinlein quote (from Starship Troopers): "Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that. Nothing More."

Who says its source code that was stolen? "Intellectual Property" covers a very wide range.

It's easy for Oracle to stand up, roll out the long list of their patents, call "They're infringing!", and then the burden is on SAP to show they were not.

I'm sure that some of SAP's products have similar (or near identical) UIs and APIs to Oracle's copyrighted works. Whether the similarity is intended, who knows...

I agree fully that everyone knows how email works, and I'm not debating the point that email-capable devices outnumber javascript-web-capable devices. I'm questioning the point that because there are more email-capable devices, email is a superior medium for project communications -- because there are enough devices with modern web browsers to let people use more advanced tools.

Considering that 37signals products are web-based, they also work natively on a pretty large percentage of available hardware and software platforms (at least the ones you're likely to be using).

Reminds me of adhoc wifi gaming with Nintendo DS Lites in 2005.

There's an interesting TED Talk about sleep cycles, and the impact of sleep on waking alertness.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jessa_gamble_how_to_sleep.html

I hardly think it's worse than antennagate. The iPhone's antenna issues caused so much of a stir because they impact the basic usage of the device. Is iPhoto such a core piece of MacOS functionality that this bug will make people stop buying Macs?

Then again, the timing along with the iPhone screen lock bug could have been better...

Has anyone had experience comparing MongoDB and HiveDB from apache? I briefly considered both of them over a year ago before realizing that they weren't quite yet prime time for my application, and I've not had time to look at them since. I'm curious to see how they've evolved in practice.

Maybe the SEC should counter by saying that they will take his money to make their entire operation faster -- his case will be processed faster, along with everyone elses!

If you're forced to use a platform that requires manual memory management, I'm all for this approach -- either explicitly, or implicitly on a fixed-size stack.

Or, use a platform that handles dynamic allocation for you, or that lets you perform "object" based memory management instead of size-based memory management.

A similar principle applies to locking: do as little as possible. If you can use a development platform that lets you solve your parallel/concurrent problem naturally without locking (like folks have applied functional programming to do so successfully), do it!

History has shown that intel is very good at getting out of potential death spirals...

A good approach I've used before is:

- no Friday deployments - deployments run primarily by a single person should be done early in their work day - avoid Monday deployments ... people are usually fuzzier on Monday than they are on Tuesday, after having had a day to go through the weekend's email and get their heads back into work.

Note the coincident announcement about the Mac App Store... I bet the software you can get there will run snappily enough.

I don't think the credit card is meant to reduce spam. It's meant to let them seamlessly charge you for overage.