It will have gone full circle when Facebook, Groupon and Twitter will have an IPO. VCs and other investors will get their money back and individual investors will absorb the losses of the collapsing pyramid.
I agree. In the 90's bubble the public got let in earlier. Now VCs and investment banks squeeze all the value out before the public finally can invest.
They could do something that my Windows folder doesn't eat up 30GB of my SSD disk. Or do something like an app store where all applications get updated in a uniform manner. They could make the backup program usable.
There is so much that could be done.
Sometimes I wonder what the 50000 (just a guess) or so people in Redmond do.
It works pretty well though. Every issue is framed as a decision whether the country as we know it will be destroyed.
Seems a lot of voters like this style.
That would be OK if there was a functioning market for ISPs. But there clearly isn't. Most people don't have a choice of service provider and the cost of entry is too high for new competitors to come in.
This is just basic human decency and I am sure Apple is not the only company doing this. I don't think it's a good time for some guy from Silicon Valley to praise some entity from Silicon Valley for doing great things. Reminds me of Twitter getting all the praise for revolutions while people were dying. Let's praise them when they spend some of their billions on earthquake relief.
I always think the same thing about lobbying. The contributions to politicians are really small in comparison to the benefits received. Maybe we should make bribing more competitive to raise the price in order to make it less profitable?
I don't think regulation will help (maybe a little). They will find other ways.
The whole culture needs to change. As long as they can get away with blatantly unethical behavior nothing will change. Not sure how to achieve a cultural change though. The current system is very profitable for both parties.
I think a third party or a press that reports facts and calls out blatant untruths may help.
That's what worries me about nuclear power. A well maintained plant is probably very safe but there is an incentive for operators to cover up flaws in order to save money.
Let's wait until more power plants get old. They probably should be shut down but that's the time when they are the most profitable and fixing problems is the most expensive.
I don't understand why they can't give us a profiler that shows memory consumed by add-on and start up time by add-on . This shouldn't be difficult. Then everybody can see where the problems are.
If I leave Firefox open during the day the memory goes up to 1.2 GB. The performance slows down at about 800BM memory. I have 8 GB so it's not a big deal but it still seems an awful lot of memory.
While VS is good I think they made a huge mistake pricing Team System to up to $10000 per developer. The Express versions are nice but they don't contain a profiler for example.
I don't think it's smart trying to make money from developers. Apple made the same mistake with the Newton when they priced the dev kit at $800 (not sure if that's accurate but it was expensive) while the Palm dev tools were free.
I think the idea is good but such a system could probably be gamed easily. I am sure students would start to pad their resumes with great sounding projects without any substance.
I think the compatibility with older browsers has always been a cheap excuse. It shouldn't be too difficult to have a setting that forces certain URLs to run as a specific browser version as you mentioned.
Sometimes you can use this for trade ins to Amazon directly. Last week I traded in a book that had several prices for $100.
Amazon took it for $27. On other sites you can get it for $24.
It's definitely a real issue. I have been working at a desk since my 20s. Now in my 40s my legs go numb after sitting for a half an hour. The problem goes away when I am on vacation for a few weeks. I bet a lot of health issues would go away if people could spend less time sitting.
I have tried different chairs and postures without success. I teach yoga classes a few times a week and I see a lot of people (age 40+) showing similar symptoms: numb legs and arms, lower back pain.
I believe an additional problem is that if you sit the whole day the muscles at the front side of your body get too short and the back side too long. So when you finally exercise this imbalance may cause even more problems.
I have read somewhere that the ratio of administrators to teachers goes up constantly. That would also explain the rise in college tuition. More and more administrators and consultants to pay. Wish I could find hard numbers somewhere. But as with all political discussions real data is hard to find..,
After reading the article maybe it should be titled "Open source developers are like local musicians but maybe can make a bit more money".
In general I don't believe that open source developers are rocks stars but the people who use open source. Pretty much all well known web companies use open source but don't open source their flagship products. E.g. Google. Facebook, 37 Signals
I think there is a noticeable slowdown when the wing goes back into normal position so the driver will know if something doesn't work. It may still be a problem.
"Germany’s approach, which Mr. Davidson said typically starts with acquiring a deep understanding of the problem before making the decision to act was exactly the opposite of the culture he saw both in his home country of Israel and in America."
They should appreciate different approaches instead of calling them a "problem". It's ridiculous to tell the Germans to become more like America or Israel. The German strategy has its problems and so does America's.
I think a lot of developers are simply getting tired of MS cranking out half baked technologies and abandoning them after a while. If you want to write a desktop app there simply is no obvious platform of choice. You have Winforms (abandoned), WPF (slow, future unclear, do fonts render OK now?), MFC (has been out of date for 10 years), Win32 (hard to use), Silverlight (direction changes every 3 months). They all have different problems MS doesn't seem to interested addressing.
I wish MS would make a decision to bet everything on one platform (I don't care which), stick to it and make it really good.
A simple to medium complexity WPF app will be slower than its Winforms or Win32 counter part. It will use a lot more memory too. There may be ways around this but why can't MS optimize it instead of forcing every developer to jump through the same hoops?
I wish there had been a careful reexamination of standards based on new knowledge.
More likely is that bringing old plants up to standard was too expensive. Or even worse, taking them off the grid.
In my view this is the real danger of nuclear power: New plants are probably quite safe but they are very expensive to maintain when they get old. On the other hand, if you relax the standard they are more profitable the older they get. So at some point you end up with a lot of old plants that are extremely expensive to maintain or shut down.
