Unless coding applications are much much improved from general text input applications, not likely is my answer.

I can barely be hassled "typing" any more than 3-4 sentence email on an ipad before I get annoyed. In addition to the difficulty of typing, the lack of cursor control (touching to move the cursor is just down to luck as to where exactly it goes) means the entire experience is a retrograde step. Fine for 140 character input, useless if you want to type any lengthy piece of text.

Tablets are great for some things (content consumption primary amongst them). But honestly, any time I am told that tablets represent a "post-pc" world for content creation (whether professional coding, or simple word processing), I just laugh.

They are coding an HTML5 version for android, but that takes time, and QA for an application that millions will download and use really matters. It would be a very bad idea to release a buggy HTML5 application.

Since Adobe have behaved like a bunch of amateurs on flash for android (bin a framework on a whim without any sort of reasonable migration framework over a sensible amount of time), everyone else is playing catchup.

The BBC are coding a new android application, but they don't have 10's of developers that they can just deploy to recode something in a week or two. This extension will be just for a month or so until they can transition with a stable player. The situation reflects badly on Adobe for dropping support in such a shoddy manner.

Can you copy the file to a usb stick? Could that file then be played without requiring an apple product? If you can't (by design) then that is digital rights management. Simple. DRM isn't copyright protection, it is any number of enforced restrictions on what you can do with something you have paid for - not enforced retrospectively by law (e.g. If you chose to illegally redistribute the song), but enforced pro-actively by software/hardware restrictions.

Burning to a cd as an audio cd is a workaround - and it is a workaround because there are far far simpler solutions (copying the file, or exporting to mp3 or exporting to wav) that are AFAIK, disallowed for itunes purchased material.

But the whole story that seems to be missing from the comments here on /. is that the real reason that the company left is that fb refused to do anything about it.

I read this story on cnet yesterday, and the crux of it was that the company complained to facebook a lot - and fb just ignored them. The went to analytics, then wrote their own analytics, and finally uncovered the 80% bots conclusion. At every stage fb just ignored them. Click fraud is neither new nor interesting - it goes on - the issue is how it is dealt with. Compare fb's response (or lack of it) with some accounts in comments above about how google deal with click fraud. They investigate, lower rates and set alert limits if there are revenue spikes in the future.

The last straw for this company was that fb were trying to charge thousands of dollars for them to change their company name - so at that point and with the click fraud problems they just said "f that - we are off to twitter".

So in conclusion I don't think the company are saying that there is some mass conspiracy, or that fb are committing fraud (by running the bots), but rather they are just not interested in acknowledging that click fraud occurs, and are mildly trying to extort money out of companies if they want to change names etc. I think with each piece of evidence that adds it suggests that fb is desperate for money, and desperate for short term cash at the expense of long term reputation - there is no other explanation for their actions.

I mean not only is the total horse shit - it isn't even true (as it were), in the sense that such a proposition has to be predicated on "almost everyone" having an account - something that is BS.

It just shows how the echo chamber of online ideas leads to situations like this, where people end up believing that "almost everyone" would have an account simply because their world is centrered around the ecosystem.

I had a group convo a while ago on fb that was interesting for two reasons. 1. The very fact that the convo happened, as fb very rarely comes up in discussions - people just don't care much about it, and are more likely to email or text than center their lives around it. And 2, the fact that as the convo proceeded it was surprising how many people didn't have or rarely used it.

Honestly, move outside the 18-25 bracket and usage just dives - even if they have accounts, they don't use them. Facebook isn't a new google - the markets are starting to realise that - "tagesspiegel.de" should probably realise it as well

It would be interesting to recast the entire "space tourism" options in terms of energy costs.

I wonder just how much of the "costs" are associated with each element of a trip (not specifically the trip in TFA, which I haven't read). I would guess that energetically, getting out of the earth's gravity well is going to cost by far the most - beyond that (and presuming infrastructure is in place - a big presumption I know), energetically things become easier. I guess what I am musing on is whether space tourism might become something slightly feasible if there is a destination.

Beyond weightlessness and seeing the earth's curvature, super rich paying to go to the ISS has always seemed like a bit of a dead-end. The ISS isn't for tourists, and so you are left with a mental image of them floating about on a science base just throwing money about the place and everyone else going "who is the dick with the cash on-board?". Now if the destination was specifically a tourist moon base and you went there for a month then it might seem like it had some sort of point. Fixed costs to get that running would be crazy - but ongoing costs might be affordable (energy from PV, moon H2O providing water & oxygen - with full reclamation).

Wishful thinking that it would ever happen or that I would have enough money to do it if it did exist! But better to do that than what has been allowed to happen in society over the last 30 years of sitting about becoming a reductive species, more interested in silly gewgaws than true hope and progress.

You are correct that as a public company with shareholders they are required by law to "derive value" for those shareholders, however on the email front tarring google with the same brush is a little unfair.

This move by facebook, as almost everyone concedes, is about trying to force people to remain their site, creating a very morally questionable form of lock-in, and corrupting the word "email" as their service has almost nothing to do with the word as we have come to accept over the last 30+ years. Google, when they released gmail, while going for ads to display on the webmail, were pretty honest in following the standards of email. I mean it was a "what? really?" moment when they happily provided full free imap capabilities, something that at the time was a service that attracted a hefty premium. To take it to its limits I can set up a gmail account, have it forwarding to a non google email addy, and never look back. Yes the emails pass through google's servers, but if I never log in what use it that to them in either displaying ads for me or for better targeting me through doubleclick etc. as I browse the web.

So while google are far from saints with some of what they do these days, on things like email they follow conventions/standards very well and deserve praise - facebook are not interested in anything but ensuring that you spend as little time on the internet as possible outside their domain (literal and figurative).

With rotational manufactures proving technology up to 60 TB on a disk (seagate I think), I don't see SSDs touching them for a long time.

We wan't more storage - and the more storage we get the more we want. SSDs just can't get on the right growth curve - the price/size ratio for SSDs just doesn't scale. Look at the class of "mobile" devices (phones, tablets etc.) - they are topping out for onboard starage at numbers that are pretty poor in a modern context - and the sizes aren't growing. You don't see apple saying with the release of a new ipad, "we are doubling everything: to 32, 64, 128 GB - for no extra cost" - because they can't, the prices haven't come down very much for those sort of sizes over the timespan of a number of years.

New technology may change things, but I can't see it happening any time soon - new tech introduced takes quite a while to get the economies of scale it needs to beat the incumbent technology.

There are so many variables here that it isn't funny. I frequently cringe when I see social science "foo linked to bar says study" headlines. There are so many ways to cut the data, so many internal biases that influence what is published, and almost always not enough evidence to definitively prove a correlation-causation linkage (small samples sizes, poorly defined data, poorly handled statistics etc.).

Gary Gutting (Philosopher, Notre Dame) had a blog piece in the NYT last week that tackles this head on:

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences?

Actually not quite true, in the year+ before Google's IPO they were making money hand over fist, far more than they had thought they would be, and so they were hiding it:

source

The surest sign that a bubble is occurring is that if those inside the bubble are asked if it is a bubble, they respond "no, this time it's different".

Honesty, look down through history, from the gold-rushes, through the 1920's, 1980's, dotcom, sub-prime, and you will see that same phrase come up again and again. Bubbles only pay off for those who know it is a bubble and who hype it - they are a long form legalised ponzi-scheme - and they only make money if the majority of people believe it isn't a bubble - hence this time, clearly, it is different - yeah right.

With the floppy drive they may just have been doing it to save space/appear to be cool, forward looking/grab some press headlines etc. They did lots of random "out of the box" stuff back in the mid to late nineties as a way of trying to get the company some "cool" profile.

I think now though there could be a good case to make that they want to remove (no pun intended) removable media as part of a general push. They are interested in the 30% or whatever it is cut of consumable revenue that they take. It is not in their interests for us to be buying a dvd and putting it in our laptop, they don't get a penny from that - they do get many pennies when we are forced to rent (and the word rent can be underlined) it from itunes - as it is never truly ours, it is always under their control.

Tech savy people will always get around their restrictions, but the great masses can be more easily subjugated.

Granted firefox can offer something close, but not quite. Cookieculler offers finer control, because you can whitelist the *cookies* rather than the domain. So I can (and do) choose to protect my /. cookie, but not anything else that /. place in my browser (hypothetical example, as /. don't place any other cookies).

Bit of a shoutout for the firefox extension cookieculler.

I have never found anything that matches cookieculler for features: it doesn't just purely delete cookies, it operates with a white-list based system (the way everything on the web should work). Cookieculler deletes all cookies each time you close the browser, except the ones you have whitelist "protected", that keep login information etc. as you choose.

Along with noscript, cookieculler is the main reason I stay on firefox.

This might be a little "tinfoil hat", and I doubt very much if it is the main reason why google started charging - but I just wonder if longer term thoughts like project glass might factor into their decision.

Products like Glass are basically just one big world of maps - mapping, satellite, traffic, public transport. Giving that away completely free no-strings-attached forever would just allow others to make products without the overhead that google have to shoulder alone. Something like glass is a long way off, but perhaps there may be a small degree of laying down the norms early on.

For basic mapping openstreetmap is completely fine, but if all of the finer granularity (streetview, satellite, traffic data) is required then that costs a lot of money to acquire/maintain - and fair enough if google want to start asking those that use it to contribute.