somebear

Believing in the death of Symbian is very premature. It has been years where the series 30 platform has been on its deathbed, but it is still being developed actively, and there are still products being produced on it.

Now that Symbian is being pushed down in segmentation by Meego, it is getting closer to oblivion, but I'll have to see it before I believe it.

Researchers from the Bartholin Institute at the Danish national hospital have found a correlation between intake of refined sugar and type-1 diabetes. There is still quite a bit of controversy over whether an increased intake of refined sugar does lead to type-1 diabetes, with researchers from the Danish Diabetes association dissenting.

Unfortunately, the only information I could find about this research was in Danish, but feel free to read the (translated) newspaper article here: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...

I have also experienced several times that developers have been quite hostile towards bug reports. Even bug reports that I, as a developer, would be quite happy to receive myself. That kind of attitude means you are less inclined to try and help out again, and will most likely dump the product first chance you get.

The US vs. Microsoft case started in 1998 [1], but the investigation started all the way back in 1991. Given that the DOJ has just initiated an investigation into Apple over possible antitrust violations in online music sales [2], we can expect to maybe see a case in 2017 or so...

That said, there are many difference between the Windows platform and the iPhone. When the DOJ started investigating Microsoft in 1991 they did have a monopoly on PC operating systems, and (as the DOJ investigation found) was using this power to unfairly give Internet Explorer an edge.

The iPhone platform may command the lion's share of the attention in the smartphone market, it is nowhere near a monopoly [3, 4]. The same cannot be said about the iTunes Music Store [5]. It seems, however, that the investigation into Apple's practices are moving beyond music [6], so we'll see in 7 years time about "does nothing".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft [2] http://topnews.us/content/221070-apple-under-doj-investigati... [3] http://mashable.com/2010/02/09/android-iphone-market-share/ [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone [5] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/04/03itunes.html [6] http://newsblog.thecmuwebsite.com/post/DOJs-Apple-investigat...

[Hope this wasn't too citation heavy, I tend to get a bit verbose when I am tired.]

I think my colleagues would start to look even more funnily at me than the already do if I started doing this. Especially since we work in an open office environment. If I had an office I would definitely consider.

For now I think I will try and heed troutwine's advice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1379082

The preferred development avenues for Nokia smartphones (Symbian & Maemo/Meego) is either the Qt SDK [http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Docs_and_Code/Tools/IDEs/No...] or WRT (Web RunTime) [http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Web_Technologie...].

I agree that Qt is "surprisingly nice". Personally, I enjoy the iPhone UIKit framework, but the Qt SDK is almost as good (and in some areas better). I don't have much experience with the WRT, but in the N8 the demos I have seen are quite impressive performance-wise.

[disclaimer: I work for Nokia, take all I say (on this matter) with a grain of salt.]

Edit: Minor spelling.

My biggest issue with Facebook is that it is so incredibly buggy. It seems like they don't run any testing before doing changes to the UI or releasing new features. Basic functionality seems to only be working off-and-on, and sometimes you just get periods where Facebook becomes totally unusable, for instance when your news feed (or "News Ahoy!" as it says on mine) is sorted completely randomly and only shows old updates (and no, I'm not talking about the "Shiniest booty" here, but the "Fresh booty").

Yes, I use Pirate as the language on Facebook, can you tell?

This is one of my biggest problems. When compilation, image creation, or device flashing takes longer than ~1 minute, then I will switch to the browser and get lost. 15-30 minutes later I will discover that my build, flash file, whatever was done, and will resume work (and feel really bad about it).

Do you know if that is specific to the iPhone HW? My 1st-gen iPod touch performs very well with iPhone OS 3, only stutters a bit when changing tracks while playing games.

All of those problems require one very important thing: an assessment of the prospective employee, car, or woman. I'm sure Dr. Norvig has plenty to say about evaluating prospective employees, but it is still the hardest part about hiring better employees (my opinion, but with no actual hiring experience).

Odd, the jobs page [http://banksimple.net/jobs/] works, and from there you can get to the rest of the website...

You could start with the simple question "who will be hurt if I do not publish this information?" I have a hard time finding anyone who would be hurt if the finder of iphone had handed it over to the bartender, apart from Apple's competitors.

Like it or not, real journalists make these distinctions all the time.

It means that the DA thought Gizmodo, and the editors in particular, had broken the law in paying for the iphone prototype. Simple as that.

You can also consider for a moment that Engadget posted pictures of the same device [http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/17/iphone-4g-is-this-it/], but did not pay any money for it, nor mocked Apple or the engineer in question. I have yet to see the police breaking down the doors at Engadget.

Deep honesty from Jason there, acknowledging that Mahalo is a dying company. Didn't know they had burned through 4,367 employees already though.

I totally agree with your criticism. His designs look nice, but it seems like that has been the focus rather than conveying the important information. Something like the missing terminal is an excellent example of this.

Also, why have a map of the US? Would he have a map of the world for international flights? There would be an awful lot of white space where the font wouldn't show up.

On all the trips I've taken the past few years I have checked in at home, and printed the boarding pass. The next time I will definitely use the 2D bar code on my cellphone. It's nice to have the information available, but I have that in the confirmation email, the boarding pass is (to me) just to prove that I'm allowed to get on the flight.

Except I have Click to Flash installed in Safari, and it still insists on that full screen flash monstrosity.

I gave up TV because it just became too tiresome. Haven't missed it at all. I just noticed the other day, when I turned on the TV to play some Wii, that the cable company still hasn't turned off the signal, I don't know if they are hoping to sucker me in?

I was just going to say that. I had similar performance problems with Safari, especially when opening the Top Sites view. After the latest Safari update, however, I see none of those problems.

I have read neither K&R nor the C++ book cover-to-cover, but the C++ book is standing practically unused on my bookshelf, while my K&R is noticeably worn.

I don't know, but Symbian does have the largest value share of the platforms at Nokia (S30/S40, Symbian, Maemo).

The thing that has always struck me about K&R is that it contains no fluff. You get so much information for each paragraph, that you often have to re-read them to get all the information contained therein. Probably the programming book I've used the most.

In contrast, the C++ programming language is a mouthful, and ended up being just another pretty book on my bookshelf.

I'm not sure you've heard about Symbian, it's only 47% of the smartphone market [1]. You can develop apps for Symbian and install them on your device very easily. Unless you are doing anything hardcore they can even be self-signed (since Symbian OS 9.1 released in 2005 apps have to be signed to be installed) as long as they don't need any hardcore capabilities.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone

A bit more, but not much [1].

[1]: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/joojoo-preorders/

Must have been before they were bought by Lenovo. Seems like the T61's we have at work are nothing but trouble.

Regarding the new Macbooks, the casing machined from a solid block of aluminum is very robust. Quite a bit more robust than any Thinkpad I've ever had by hands on.

I like the updated version, after all, the "Sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma", rather than "a mass of incandescent gas": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA

I must admit, I like this version of Code Monkey better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYodWEKCuGg

Except you could build pre-loading of map data into the app. On Symbian phones with Ovi Maps the app will download map data on-the-fly, or you can choose to pre-load it (for example the full maps for Europe or whatnot). I see no reason Google couldn't do something similar.

There are porn sites that have started supporting H.264, possibly in order to cater to the iPhone users, although I have no data to back up that assumption.

I don't understand it either. If I were an investor I would rather the startup found out after 3 months and 50,000 that the idea didn't work, than after 3 years and 500,000 (or more).