Professionals working for bigger companies who build apps for millions of users or on commission for businesses get paid pretty well. But for people working alone on in small groups, developing apps for smaller crowds, the income isn't all that good, because they are competing with hobbyists. Another factor is the size of the market: in principle it is nice for any developer to have a market of 10s of millions of potential customers, but in practice it alters the economics and customer expectations to their disadvantage.

There are really two kinds of apps. You have the ones by companies who are selling products incidental to the app - e.g., banking, shopping, social media, streaming media and other apps. The app makes life convenient and increases sales of the core service,.

Then there are apps that are designed for the device itself - which can be subdivided into two more categories - indies and non-indies. Non indies would be the big publishers in your platform - the EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Google and others, while the indies are everyone else.

And just like on the PC, indies have practically never made money - sure you get maybe the 0.01% that rise up and become mainstream and make tons of money, but the rest of the crap gets released, forgotten, and doesn't make money. Doesn't matter if it's Apple's App Store, Google Play, Steam (though its curation is even more stringent than Apple, so a lot of the crap is filtered out, but there's still a large chunk), Xbox Live Indie Arcade, or the general entire PC ecosystem.

As for the 30% cut, running your own ecommerce platform isn't easy - if you want to deal with re-downloads/updates, accounts (and security!), merchanting (Paypal or direct credit cards and PCI-DSS) and other things. It's why sites like Shopify and Amazon exist, but surprise surprise, they also have their cut (typically 10% if not more) and you still have to do a lot of work on your end.

You can try to do it yourself, but then you have security issues - ongoing maintenance is expensive and even today there's still a bunch of sites vulnerable to Heartbleed (!). Or SQL injections making them one step away from having your personal information compromised.

Sure 30% seems expensive, but in the end, having a lot of that stuff taken care of for you makes it more worthwhile for a bunch of developers who would rather work on their app, not figuring out why updating the SSL library to fix Heartbleed broke their ecommerce system.

PV cells apparently require a lot of material compared to a lot of other potential applications of GaAs (RF? Optoelectronics?).

Well, one look at a silicon PV cell should tell you how much material is used - practically the entire wafer. I mean, the big panels with the blue squares are basically single wafers of silicon. The cheaper ones use cut up wafers which is why they're a lot more irregularly shaped (the wafers are circular for processing, and then sides are lopped off to square them up. Those sides are then used in much cheaper PV arrays which is why they're practically always curved on one edge and straight on the other.

And remember for semiconductor manufacturing, area is everything - the smaller your IC, the more you can stick on a wafer (per IC cost is lower), the chance of a chip being patterned on a bulk defect is a lot lower (bulk defects are small, so they generally only affect one die. The larger the die, the larger amount of the wafer is now useless as the defect scraps that die) so yields are higher, meaning even more good dies, lowering per-die cost.

Modern digital ICs using CMOS technology use big 12" (30cm) wafers since the mid 90s, because bigger wafers mean more dies and lower per-die costs since you can produce a lot more per processing step. It's why CMOS camera sensors are stupidly cheap, and why full frame sensors are practically all CMOS. Non-CMOS technologies still use smaller wafers

MuseScore is also one of the few FOSS projects for music that actually start to rival its commercial counterparts.

Far too often we hear the question "I'm a musician and want to use Linux. What software can I use" only to really hear that the reality is the FOSS alternatives generally suck compared to the more polished commercial versions (even the ones that run on Linux).

So MuseScore is extremely important in that aspect. The rest of the programs for music that are FOSS still suck but at least there's one that rivals commercial offerings in quality.

preventing accidental speeding, just as long as it leaves me alone when I'm speeding deliberately.

Well, it does just that since you can override it in the most obvious way possible - give it more gas. So if you need to overtake and speed to do it, you'd probably floor the accelerator which disables the system to quickly pass.

Speed traps are always interesting - I've seen a case where we spotted a speed trap, slowed down, and the guy behind us got annoyed, changed lanes and floored it right in front of the cops. Who proceeded to pull him over.

I am pretty miffed to read this. Nothing like paying a load of cash for a shiny new laptop only to find out a couple months later that you'd have been way better off waiting.

Apple stuff is fairly predictable. Unlike everyone else, Apple generally releases on a set schedule the same time every year. Enough so that there are many "buyers guide" for Apple products.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.c...

If you're ever contemplating an Apple purchase, check that out first. Anything beyond midlife is a caution - if you can wait, then wait. Anything marked as "Don't Buy" is basically meaning it's going to come out in the next 3 months.

I'm still waiting for the next laptop to even meet 2 years ago Apple's model. Hint: 750Mbs continuous speed is the limit of SATA-III. Show me a standard SSD that hits that. Hint, the brand new relatively well thought of top brand I just bought only comes near that number, and not on continuous mixed R/W operation, even in a 2 drive RAID0. Last year's MBP handily beats it in disk I/O performance. Maybe if I get 4 in RAID0 I'll be equal. Unless, of course, you're talking about those PCIe drives (they're a whole different class of SSD, and priced appropriately.)

Actually, SATA3 is 6Gbps, which could be 750MB/sec full tilt, but after protocol and PHY stuff, 540MB/sec is the practical limit. Which all SSDs pretty much hit these days - both reading and writing. It's not that it's a magic limit, it's what the practical limit is for SATA3.

It's why Apple went PCIe for their SSDs because SATA is a bottleneck, and SATA3 only came out a couple of years BEFORE we maxed it out.

I think you are wrong, and I think you are not going to get a proprietary alternative that's as fast as it could be. The interfaces needed to make graphics faster on Linux are all EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL, meaning that they can't legally be used by proprietary (read: faster) kernel modules. So basically, the interfaces that are needed are, in fact, politicized.

I thought APIs couldn't be copyrighted? You know, like what the Oracle v. Google Android-Java lawsuit was all about?

If so, then without copyright protection GPL is worthless - GPL requires copyright in order to work (because copyright gives you certain rights - GPL gives you MORE rights in exchange for agreeing to certain conditions - if you don't agree, your basic rights under copyright law apply). In that case the APIs are unprotected.

But if you want to claim GPL protects those APIs, then it also means Oracle has a point w.r.t. Android's implementation of Java.

Did Dice ditch unicode support? I thought the slash code always had issues/didn't support it, long before Dice acquired them.

Slashcode always supported Unicode.

The reason it appears it doesn't is that thanks to a bunch of wankers who decided to abuse Unicode to no end, it ended up screwing the site layout up thanks to abuse of control codes.

So what was added was an input filter that limited what Unicode could come in - pretty much just ASCII at this point.

Unicode IS complex, and you really cannot blindly handle "all of it" because there will be odd edge cases you will NOT have thought of. And even more so as it's not a static character set - today you might think you handled all the edge cases, but tomorrow the new Unicode spec may introduce more and now you have more edge cases and combinations to test.

A couple of years ago it seems Slashcode implemented an output Unicode filter as well - because the old pages that were screwed up by the Unicode abuse no longer are screwed up. But their legacy lives on - Google for ":erocS" on /.

(Yes, abuse of the right-to-left override meant you could "fakemod" yourself by pretending you had a +5 mod)

And ActiveX got a severe makeover in IE7. So much so that practically everything broke. Which is why IE6 hung around so long.

Of course, you have admit that South Korea is FINALLY getting around to fixing it given IE7+ has been around for years now. I'm guessing Windows 7 and XP Mode support is getting harder to come by?

I tried for a day to get Linux installed on my Mac. I thought Boot Camp would be perfect; it repartitioned the drive nicely, but I couldn't get Linux to load. I couldn't delete the Windows partition, couldn't remake it as a Linux partition. Eventually gave up. Is there a way to do this?

It's a lot easier now than it was in the past, but all you need to do avoid legacy boot.

And that's what happened here - Apple stopped supporting legacy boot.

Instead, it's UEFI firmware does a UEFI boot, which has been supported in Linux for ages (at least to Ubuntu 8.04 or earlier).

And you need to think EFI boot.

Once you do that, it's easy. In fact, there are so many tutorials on installing Linux on Macs that I think you didn't google at all.

Anyhow, first thing first, you need to overwrite the Mac EFI boot manager - the one that gives you that nice startup disc selection. It's just an EFI application. Use something like rEFIt and you're done. It's just a more sophisticated boot manager.

From there, use rEFIt to boot your EFI-based OS. Like Linux (you know how on the CD it has that "BOOT/EFI" directory? Bingo).

In fact, Windows 7 can EFI boot - it has EFI support right there. Many laptops that come with Windows 7 use EFI mode rather than legacy boot, which is a huge PITA if you try to reinstall.

Of course, it's only a matter of time before someone re-writes the compatibility module so you can boot the EFI application to do a legacy boot.

What is the purpose of security alerts if not to warn people who don't know any better? For the crowd that gets it, you could flash a brief icon featuring a guy fawkes mask and that'd be sufficient. I also wonder how many of them would click "proceed anyway" if the pr0ns were there...

The purpose is because the developer doesn't know how to do it properly.

The problem is developers don't want to acknowledge the security problem and are just passing it off - it's called Dancing Pigs (or rabbits, whatever) and the basic concept is given a choice, a user will choose one that compromises security every time. If you ask them to click through a warning dialog to get to the pr0n, guess what? They will!

Plus, there's also an over saturation of warnings. They're like EULAs - the vast majority of people just do not read them.They become just another obstacle in the way to accomplishing what they want.

The reality is, Dancing Pigs is real, and it's really a tough choice in handling it. Walled gardens is one way, and it can be quite successful, but there's always the edge cases and the "but I wanna do this!" crowd - you can choose to ignore them, or handle them. But even handling them may not be a good choice - see Android's "Allow Non-Play Store Apps" checkbox that's all or nothing. With it checked, you can sideload, but what if you just want to use apps from another store, like say, Amazon? You can't just allow Amazon and block everyone else.

It's even harder if you want to cater to the average user (who really wants to just get their work done) and those of developers (who want to play with the computer) - you can lock it down, let users get their work done, but the developers will complain of inflexibility. Or you can make it cater to developers, but then users will complain of complexity and "why do I have to learn all this just to do X? Why are you wasting my time making me learn all this extra crap just so I can produce this one report?"

(Or, for a more cynical take - thank you Mr. Developer, because making me take an extra hour to learn it means I can bill you an extra hour! Yeah, not what you want to see from your lawyer, accountant, mechanic or other person - having that hour billed to YOU...)

Think of the "decency" statues for broadcast TV. Sometimes you can swear (playing Saving Private Ryan) sometimes you can't (some random award show) Sometimes you can show nudity (NYPD Blue) sometimes you can't (Superbowl?) The FCC will let you know you violated the unspecified rules via a fine
well after the fact.

The reason for this is simple - the FCC for this operates on a complaint basis. Now some rather conservative parents got their panties in a knot over "wardrobe malfunction" (no doubt helped by massive publicity about it) who see a boob and panic that their children will now turn into masturbating sex-crazed addicts from that brief exposure to nudity.

These days though, those groups are now concentrating on apps - it's why forced Apple to clear the App Store of porn apps (because the same group decided to methodically go and complain about each and every porn app).

Nonsense, I totally think kids should be in new cars...

New cars tend to have the best safety equipment, or at least better than what was standard 5-10 years ago.

I think so too. However, I think the parents should pick the car - pick a boring car that's known for extreme reliability, and low cost.

Something like the utterly dull Toyota Corolla - just a boring vehicle but with good reliability.

A new car gives them the newest safety equipment, but also is generally more reliable. Last thing a parent wants is to worry about their kid stuck in a broken down vehicle. Just something that will reliably get them from point A to point B for a few years then they can upgrade to another car.

TL/DR: Javascript+HTML5 is the new Java applet + Flash Player + ActiveX control.

But it's far better than before. Because Flash Player and ActiveX you were limited to waiting for a third party to fix the flaw. There's nothing the browser vendor or the user could do. JavaScript/HTML5? The browser vendor's at fault and hell, it may even be possible to fix it yourself.

JavaScript/HTML5 may be the new vulnerability, but it's a lot easier to fix the issue. If the vulnerability was in Flash Player or some random ActiveX object, you're stuck waiting for Adobe or other third party to make the fix. With JavaScript/HTML5, the browser vendor can fix it, if it's open source, you or the community can fix it.

So yeah, there's vulnerabilities, but the resolution of which is far easier. It may even be simply switching browsers!

Especially if the any of this ill gotten intelligence serves to save you or your loved ones from dying horribly right?

Get impaired off the road first and maybe you'll have a point. And by impaired, I mean by distraction (e.g., phones), drugs, or alcohol.

It's sort of funny how "terrorism" doesn't actually kill a lot of people - overall, traffic accidents cause far more fatalities and the ones dying are rarely the ones who made the poor decision.

So yes, getting hit by an impaired driver is often a terrible way to go because there's little you could've done to prevent it.