So you're loyal to your company. Great. How loyal are they to you?

Do they pay you at or above what you could make elsewhere?

Do they do their best to schedule things so that you're not constantly working death-march overtime?

Do they respect you and your contributions?

Do they lay people off only when they absolutely have to, or whenever doing so could goose their quarterly numbers?

Loyalty is great. Loyalty is undervalued. But loyalty has to be earned, and while you've told us you're loyal to your company you haven't given us any reasons why, so we can't judge whether your loyalty is misplaced or not. The one reason you gave is that you consider some of your current managers to be friends, and that's great, but I can tell you from experience that just because a manager is your friend doesn't necessarily mean that he won't lay your ass off in a hot minute if he thinks he can benefit by doing so. There are lots of people who put the "business" part of "business friendships" first and foremost.

If this company has earned your loyalty -- if they've gone above and beyond to treat you with the respect you deserve -- then by all means return that loyalty. If it's just a place you've worked for a few years, though, then in the long run you'll do better to look out for number one and save your loyalty for people who deserve it.

Don't bother, before you're done rebuilding a new version of Firefox will be out anyway.

The market is fragmenting so fast its with all these "App" platforms, that there will be a great incentive for the first to create the "write once" , "run everywhere" tool chain.

Yes! If only we had some kind of "world wide web" that you could deploy your application on, and then have it just work on any platform...

(I know, crazy talk)

Indeed. If Facebook wanted Spotify to become Facebook Music, you would have thought that they could have at least had the class to buy Spotify and give the owners a payout. I suppose there's a reason why "Facebook" and "class" aren't words you think of together too often, though.

Part of me wonders if Facebook didn't give them the old Offer You Can't Refuse, the way Microsoft used to do in the old days. Back when Windows was the monoculture, Microsoft could extract enormous concessions from potential partners simply by threatening to dump a competing product into Windows and give it away for free if they didn't play ball. One could certainly see Facebook having similar leverage over any social service; so many people are on Facebook now that if FB picked up a Spotify competitor (say, rdio), rebranded it as Facebook Music, and gave it away 100% free, Spotify's business model would be in serious jeopardy. That gives Facebook a pretty big hammer to wield over Spotify at the negotiating table.

Yeah, because asking people to choose from six options (of which at least two or three probably apply to them -- most people who have a Facebook account probably also have a Google account, a Yahoo account, etc.) is super seamless. Like the man said, the key to usability is "don't make me think."

Not that I'm a fan of Spotify going Facebook-only -- I think it's a terrible move from a business perspective, because it means they now have a middleman standing between them and their customers, which means they live or die at the middleman's pleasure -- but from a usability perspective it's hard to argue that one button is less usable than six. And if you had to pick one of those six buttons to be the only way to log in, Facebook's massive user base probably makes it the choice least likely to result in potential users not being able to get in.

Except that HP doesn't want to be a hardware company anymore.

Native HTML5. Funky, dirty, native HTML5.

It's neither. The reason is because the environments we live in have become less dangerous. There's only so many hours in the day to worry about things, so the more dangerous things take priority. As we've removed more and more dangers through scientific and social progress, it has freed up room in our busy schedules to worry about less significant things.

Think of it as a Maslow-style hierarchy of risks. You only start worrying about things higher on the hierarchy when you no longer have to worry about the things beneath it. At the bottom are things like "being eaten by bears." Then above that is "plague." Then above that is "being crushed by industrial machinery." And then above that is "peanut allergy."

1) WTF does atheism have to do with cracking down on knockoff handbags?

2) The problem with China's governing "no-bullshit-style atheists" is that if you disagree with them, you disappear off the face of the earth. You may not have a problem with that, since you agree with what they're doing today. But it'll probably seem a lot less appealing if you find yourself disagreeing with them tomorrow.

No, it was because of the crappy hardware. The first generation of WebOS phones (which Palm desperately needed to be a hit, to bring in enough cash to keep them viable) were amazingly shoddy hardware-wise. I bought a Pre on launch week and ended up having it replaced TWICE by Sprint within a month of purchase because of hardware failures. And these weren't weird esoteric issues either, but basic stuff that any QA department worth the name should have caught; one of the Pres I got, for instance, simply couldn't secure its battery in place properly -- the battery compartment was a hair larger than the battery itself -- leading to the phone just shutting down in the middle of a call when the battery slid out of position. Lots of others had the same experience, which killed any chance of early-adopter word-of-mouth generating more sales. Palm eventually got the hardware problems (mostly) sorted, but by that point it was too late; the high defect rates had burned their rep both with customers, who didn't want to buy a phone that was likely to be a brick, and with carriers, who didn't want to be stuck having to service all those returns.

Finally, the NSA's secret plan to eliminate Julian Assange is revealed!

Google opened the source of their Windows package manager (under the Apache license) a while back, so presumably you could use it to roll your own Google Pack if you wanted to. No idea how much work that would require, though.

You're using the term "third-party software" in a difference sense than bigstrat2003 was. You mean it in the sense of "anything other than the kernel". He/she meant it in the sense of "anything that didn't come with your distro". Big difference. And in this case your definition isn't as accurate, since from the user's perspective the question is "can I mount ISOs after installing the operating system without having to acquire any other tools?" And until this announcement the answer for Linux was yes, while for Windows it was no.

I am fond of webOS(application base is tiny; but the interface is actually quite well thought out. The "cards" work quite well. Hell, maybe team Google will pick up their smoldering remains at the firesale and polish up the 'chromebooks' with some of the UI touches...)

Google's one step ahead of you :-D When Palm sold to HP, Google moved in and lured away the guy who designed the webOS user interface, Mathias Duarte. His current job title there is "Director, Android User Experience", so it's safe to assume that we'll see some of the same ideas that animated webOS making their way into the Android UI, if not their specific implementations.

Yup, SuperPoke is on its way out. And the Pokers are piiiiiiiiiiissed.