I have one issue with this argument. Replication - a mechanic or a doctor can keep repeating their act all their lives (on different people/machines) and get paid every time. And each act of theirs takes a few hours, or a few days at most. A programmer, an author, a research scientist have to do something new every time to get paid and each act of theirs takes weeks, months or in some cases years, to complete. And paying once irrespective how useful it is and how many people use it seems illogical.

you need to get your sarcasm detector checked.

This improves the standby and talk time, and may be network power consumption. Most of the other stuff the apps use - like CPU, GPU, sensors will not be any different because of this. So to claim double of battery life is exaggeration. It may double the standby time and probably improve the talk time by a considerable percentage.

Seriously, we need +1 Sarcastic! Otherwise, some moron mods may downmod some very insightful comments because they don't get the sarcasm.

Whoosh!

Prakash is a name. It should not be preceded with "the". That (I guess) is the point the GP is trying to make.

A sling, rock or a pocket knife are very dissimilar from what feels like a toy. Say what you will to the kid, but it still feels like a toy and the harm it causes it not "obvious".

Thanks for the insight. I have been living for 38 years, and never had the use for my life insurance so far. I think I will stop wasting money on that ;-)

I am almost forty years old. What does it get me?

Awesome retort, bro! I bet you posted it from your iPad, too.

are you being sarcastic? How the hell does Bush's Iraq war compare with WWII? Forget relative to WWII, how on earth can you justify Bush's war?

Wrt search, Google is getting handsomely compensated for it by their search ads. So, we don't have to pay for it through our information. Our intent (which we disclose through the search term) is enough.

I am in a similar situation - I am planning to start something with a few of my friends. And this is something we are trying to solve too. The biggest issue with your proposed solution of using Linux and in-house servers is maintenance. Remember we don't have a dedicated IT person, one of us will be handling that as additional (hopefully minor) responsibility with the major responsibility being software development. So, having a server, keeping it up, maintaining it with updates etc seems like a lot of work, especially when we're just 5 people and are working without any salaries (so may be using a very small office and we may not even have an A/C). We are inclining towards hosted solutions and are close to signing up with Google Apps. The only other option I found is Zoho, but given our size (4 or 5 people), Google Apps is free and we're thinking of taking it, at least initially.

My only concern is when we grow, and want to migrate out of Google Apps, how hard is it going to be? We are assuming it should be possible since gmail supports IMAP and all of docs can be taken offline. If I want to migrate it to say Exchange or Thunderbird for mail and Libre Office or MS Office for other apps later, I'm hoping I should be able to do it.

I keep hearing this comparison of Facebook and Myspace and a prediction that Facebook will suffer the same fate as some other cooler social network catches the fancy of people. I don't believe that. I think Facebook has won the social networking war. I think social networking went through its "evolution" phase and Facebook is the winner. While it is possible that some other social network ousts Facebook, I think it is not very likely. Now, I don't mean Facebook will be the king forever, it will be killed, but by something else, not another social network. The industry goes through these cycles and the prize keeps changing. Microsoft wasn't unseated by another OS or office software company. It was unseated by Google. Microsoft (or Yahoo! which was a predominant web property then) didn't consider search to be important at the initial stages. Similarly Google was unseated by something it didn't consider significant until Facebook became huge. And now it is playing catchup, just like how MS is trying with Google. Same way, some other activity which is non-existent or insignificant now will become a predominant use of the web/net/technology and THAT will oust Facebook. That is what Mark Z feared Instagram could become and he paid such a huge premium to acquire it.

PS: You may dispute that MS is unseated by G or G is unseated by FB by citing revenues, market cap or something else. But I'm talking about popular imagination. G is very afraid of FB now (if nothing else, in terms of employee drain), just as MS was of G.