You make a good argument there, shitty programmers may have been a little overboard. To tell you the truth, based on the title of the summary I expected another bogeyman fragmentation article. Actually, the blog post is quite cool, some interesting statistics there, and no whining! Still, I strongly disagree with the general point that fragmentation is a big problem in the grand scheme of things. Even if developers leave the platform in droves (the opposite seems to be happening actually) - there will still be enough talent left to develop for Android and the vast majority of its users.

You're right about Google Goggles of course, but I have to question the quality of the phones you mentioned. Sanyo is a good name (they make excellent refrigerators, I own one) - though not sure about the quality of their phones. Don't know much about Kyocera. However, incompatibilities are to be expected with a completely open system like Android. Basically, any Chinese mom & pop shop can assemble hardware capable of running Android for 30$ - will those handle an app like Google Goggles? Probably not. But this is unavoidable.

Now I don't mean to take a jibe at your choice of phones, please don't misunderstand me. A lots of cool apps depend on numbers. Others are useful if your whole family runs Android (latitude for example can be extremely useful in situation where you are likely to get lost, separated, etc). The same functionality exists on iOS of course, but than you need to shell out $$$ for each member of your family. That is the beauty of Android, you can get high-end phones like the Nexus or the Desire (still considerable cheaper than the iPhone4 - unlocked, unsubsidized price of course), and you can get a handset for $200. Probably less. But between the absolute low end and the high-end phones, you have a choice, and if you research your options carefully, you may be able to find a fully capable phone that runs Android very well. The market right now is pretty much chaotic, hard to choose. But sooner or later a small manufacturer, or perhaps one of the big ones (I think LG is working on a sub $200 Android phone) will come up with a series of cheap phones that work very well with Android, supporting all the features that make it a good mobile OS, including the application stack.

Actually they can handle it. The slashdot summary title is misleading. The blog itself is kinda fun to read. When I read the title, I thought that here we go, another whining developer who cannot handle targeting multiple builds/architecture. Note that I had a WinMo phone before, a HTC Touch HD, and windows phones came on a variety of hardware from different vendors, and in different versions too - yet there was no fragmentation hysteria. Linux works in a similar way, a developer whose app would only work on a given version of a single distribution would be derided by the community if he whined about fragmentation. That said, TweetDeck devs don't whine at all. Read the TFA - they have some really interesting graphs and statistics, while they seem to be kinda proud that their app runs on 244 different handsets and a variety of ROMs, some crazier than others.

Correction - I actually clicked on the link, and TweetDeck is not a random whining programmer. The summary is bad as usual, but for those who didn't read the TFA (just like me at first) - they think it's pretty cool their app runs on 244 different handsets and dozens of different modified/hacked/cooked ROMs of Android. What I said still stands, but TweetDeck is the wrong target, sorry :)

Eventually I just RTFA, yeah yeah I know - and what I said above is not targeted at this particular developer. For those who didn't RTFA, TweetDeck's blogpost only mentions how proud they are that their app runs on over a hundred combinations of hardware and ROM versions. Their app is exactly the kind of example I had in mind for the developers who can do (vs. the devs who just whine).

To be successful on the Market, you need a) good ideas b) programming skills to implement them. There are lots of hugely popular applications on the Android Market that I haven't seen problems reported by users on any handset. Basically, this is the same as with other platforms - Windows, Linux, etc. Linux is a good example.

We have thousands of applications and libraries on Linux. They not only work across different versions of the OS, most of them work across different versions AND different architectures. Now if a programmer releases an app that works only on Ubuntu 9.04 and breaks on every other platform - that's shitty programming, plain and simple. At that point, the programmer can either improve his/her skills, give up on the Linux platform in general, or whine on a blog and get linked on Slashdot (seriously, WTF were the editors thinking?). Android is exactly the same. Except that if the programmer with the broken linux app would whine about fragmentation on his blog, most would ignore him, others would probably flame him to death.

Of course, now we have lots of developers coming from the closed iOS ecosystem, because Android is hot. They were used to developing for a single hardware + OS spec. Most of them get the job done. Some give up. Some throw a tantrum over fragmentation. I have obviously no problem with the first group. I don't have a problem with the second group either. The whiners piss me off, however. It's completely, utterly useless and stupid. Android won't change, and other developers already proved that programming for the platform should not be a problem - provided you have the necessary skills. So shut up and improve your skills or go away, just please don't whine. The Market is booming, if a few dozen programmers leave, that won't affect Android much. There are thousands of developers with the will and the talent to target Android.

As you probably suspect... nothing. There are thousands of useful apps working on all handsets without problems. I have about 30 installed on my Nexus One, carefully read the user reviews for each on AppBrain, and there is a reason most of these have 4.5+ stars... In other words, there are programmers who can do, and programmers who can whine on their blog. What I don't understand is why Slashdot links to random whining programmer to inflate the issue of fragmentation. Actually, you're right on target with the windows analogy. There are shitty programmers whose apps suffer due to hardware/platform (win7/vista/xp) differences, and then there are apps that work fine across all versions of the OS/hw.

For me, this study confirmed what I came to believe instinctively, since I moved to live in Vietnam. In Vietnam, social relations are far more important than anything else when doing business, including simple things as buying grocery.

I often encounter other foreigners who complain about how Vietnamese try to cheat them, tell them ridiculous prices, etc. Me, I had exactly the opposite experience. One of the reasons was that I took the time to read about their culture before I came here. And one aspect of their culture is that social relations are far more important than anything else. It doesn't matter who you are, how much you are willing to spend, etc. Once I was buying a pack of cigarettes from a street vendor, when I noticed a coin just under my motorbike. It may have fallen out of my pocket, or not... I didn't care, I gave it to the vendor. She was protesting, but I smiled, patted her on the shoulder, and drove away. Two weeks later, I bought another pack from the same vendor. She kept the coin and gave it to me, trying to explain something enthusiastically. I speak a little Vietnamese, but couldn't understand her.

I know this is common sense, and we all know that if we befriend a shopkeeper or an official, he or she will treat us better - but it is far more prevalent in Vietnam than in our cultures. So I usually start any interaction by talking, telling them my name, age, marital status (those will be the first question you encounter) and making them laugh. They are a fun loving people, make them laugh, and you won't have to pay more than the locals.

Expacts complaining about them usually approach vendors expecting to be cheated. Vietnamese have a very keen sense of your attitude, enhanced by the language barrier (they have to rely more on their instinct when you don't speak their language). They are very good at reading people. Approach them with an open heart, and they will like you. If they like you, you pay local prices. Simple as that. Pretending to like them, fake smiles don't really work. When I share my views with these complaining expacts, they usually say I'm just naive, and I'm being cheated without even knowing it. Funny, considering I've been here for over two years, have lots of Vietnamese friends, and know the local prices of almost everything. Plus I understand enough Vietnamese to know how much they asked their countrymen to pay for a given item.

Point is that here, it is far more important to establish some sort of relationship before conducting any business. That includes very personal questions, like your age, marital status, etc. Of course, age is also important because they don't have a generic "you" in their language. You can't say "you" in Vietnamese. If someone's younger than you, you is "em", same age will be "anh" for men and "chi" for women, "ong" and "co" respectively for men and women who could be your mother. There are a dozen more commonly used personal pronouns for you, depending on position in the family, your age, your gender, and your social status. So I'd say that the findings in this study can be important to understand not only our own cultures, but other cultures too. It also shows an aspect of general human nature that in many western cultures became more buried under formalities.

How? It's a serious question. I had my phone number listed already, never saw any drawbacks. Of course, it can be abused, mostly by users, but that's when "don't be stupid" kicks in - don't befriend random people you know nothing about, adjust your privacy settings, etc. So how is Facebook going to abuse this information?

Most of what you say is correct, especially when it comes to desktop offering. That last bit, however, is nonsense or just fanboyism. See this for example.

China is in territorial dispute with every SE-Asian country that has a shoreline. They claim sovereignty over every island down to the Philippines. For example, they have claims over Paracel islands which in theory, belong to Vietnam. Recently they started to harass fishing boats, hold them at ransom, very similar to what Somalian pirates do. Vietnam has historical documents to prove their claim - irony is, that actually some of the documents the Chinese produced to prove their point turned out to be validate the Vietnamese claims (they mention these islands as "foreign lands" in their records). Also, they threatened foreign companies (oil exploration) that had contracts with Vietnamese oil companies to back out. Finally - this started this year - they began to organize "tours" to these islands, showing the beauty of these "most remote Chinese lands." In reality, there's nothing to see there actually. Except Vietnamese fishermen who lived there for generations. Well, not anymore, actually, but you get the point ... just trying to illustrate how territorial the Chinese are... and how arrogant.

That's very interesting - it seems to me that Assange is the right person for the kind of job he does. He's like a vulcan in that chatlog, refuses to get into any emotional exchange. In fact that's not really a flamewar, because Assange avoids completely a who said what/did what kind of back and forth bickering. Instead, his only concern is the leak itself: how many people and who exactly heard the information. Domscheit-Berg comes off as a typical forum prick, likening Assange to a slave trader, king, emperor...

I don't think you have tried flash on Froyo - I don't care what random author says on the internet, most sites I have ran into work well with flash enabled on my Nexus One. That includes flashgames247, a site I just visited to try out how flash works. Played a game where you had to shoot arrows by dragging backwards and clicking with the mouse. Worked flawlessly with fingers. Then before I bought this phone, I was looking at reviews on youtube. Found a video comparing the Iphone 4 with the Nexus One. By the time the Iphone finished loading the page of one specific site*, the Nexus one has already finished and the flash video was already playing! The slowest site I managed to find was sonystyle, animation is as slow as a slideshow, but so far, the majority of flash heavy sites I visited work very well.

*www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjhF1xZQRQk - browser test is between the 6th and 7th minute

A lot of people post stuff far more farcical than yours, and they are being dead serious about their crap. Especially when it comes to politics. I read your post and was asking myself the same question - is he serious? Without visual cues or hearing your tone, there was a good chance you were, even if you thought that this is glaringly obvious. Happened to me a number of times, I thought no one would miss that for a joke, then most people did. Actually, it happens to me all the time in face to face conversations.