mm.. http://www.westhost.com/ - been using them for 10+ years, i have a dedicated server.. but, their VPS solution gives you email, ftp, http for a modest price.. no reason not to use a service like this. $50 / year, cloud hosting (full VPS).. would be more than enough. quit whining about the loss of free pirate servers.

want to share files? host your own server - thats how we used to do it back in the day.

i also have projects i work on where i need to share "legal" files (artwork, music et al) for various things - why would i want to upload it to a public service where anyone can access this stuff? with my own ftp server, heck, can even expose it via http with htaccess - my clients can upload/download files as they need.

it is the pirates (stealing music, videos) who use these public services.. maybe we will see a few more of these sites drop, it is where all of our software that we have written ends up for kiddies to pirate. i say this is a step in the right direction. for p2p file sharing, bittorrent is always the way to go.. but, depends on the community as another poster has said.

cross-platform development is not hard.

the issue is when a developer focuses on one platform; utilizes special functionality and then says "oh.. i need to support that platform to". this is purely a design problem; not an industry problem. if you know, you need to support multiple platforms - one key word.. ABSTRACTION. separate platform code from business logic. that way; when you need to add a new platform, you have a small layer of abstraction to implement appropriately.. games are easier, as UI isn't an issue - but you can do the same with business applications (hint: standards, HTML5 et al).

i've been doing cross platform development for years, always laugh at comments on how difficult it is. if developers were not so trigger happy to get coding; they could simply design/architect their solutions better and there wouldn't be a problem at all. the great thing about my games/apps - i can add a new platform without modifying a single line of the application code itself. implement abstraction layer - select target.. compile.

dealing with complexities of distribution models on different platforms (ios, mac, windows, linux, webos, playbook, windows phone 7).. thats a PITA.

when you download the SDK, you get the PDK included. this was only recently the way however - with 3.0 SDK.

um.. PDK (plugin "native" development kit)?

https://developer.palm.com/content/resources/develop/sdk_pdk_download.html

it was only the "enyo" and "web friendly" development environments that used webkit. you can write very powerful applications using native code (SDL, open GL) - which under the hood utilized CodeSourcery Toolchain—Sourcery G++ Lite for ARM. in fact, a lot of our games ran better on webos than on ios due to apple's insane requirement that there was no framebuffer available for graphics and you have to do everything via open GL.

i think these "insiders" do not know what they are talking about. but the fact that there are no more devices being made - i guess the whole discussion becomes mute.. relying on $99 fire-sales to get users to develop against does not work in my books.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/06/28/0253226/Porting-Lemmings-In-36-Hours

but seriously; these code-jamming sessions are cool and all but doing so typically means cutting corners and not really having enough time to do all the appropriate testing and validation.. i mean these are great for prototyping. it is like having 10 minute abs and then someone releases a new method for 9 minutes. w00t.

i am the type that leaves everything in the Inbox and search for what i need - but when i was issued a company laptop with Office 2007 installed; Outlook just sucked at searching the Inbox. upgrading to a Mac OSX laptop with Office 2011, everything just got a lot better - meaning searching the "Inbox" is now feasible again :) i think it really depends on the mail client that is used (or, forced onto you - in a corporate environment).. i've always found searching the Inbox in gmail to be very efficient. in some cases tho; breaking your "massive" inbox into smaller project inboxes, categorizing them at least one level makes sense - you just need to remember your logical separation before diving into a search; worst case, you can search recursively as well.

any plans to ban it germany, file a motion in berlin? these patent wars are getting stupid - why not just share the knowledge and build an awesome product instead of all this crazy fighting over who has the biggest penis.

guru "unix" command line users know pretty much exactly what they are doing and mostly escape extend their commands and type like there is no tomorrow - you would have to play back these videos in slow motion to really learn from them, command typed, enter pressed, pages of stdout scroll by. nice reference point for learners. the only way to truly learn unix commands and get comfortable with command line tools is to avoid the UI completely. try doing stuff from your tty terminals and disable x11 :) learn to do word processing with latex, telnet into your routers to configure them. if your not up for doing that, forget about using the command line tools. back in the early 90's, we couldn't afford RAM to even start x11 :) i personally use cygwin on windows and terminal on macosx for as much as i can.. never know when you need those command line skills again

CEO? where was that justification taken from?
the article specifically talks about 525 people - which are within the hardware area of the company (logical), when i see some developer relations guys and the OS developers get fired; then i'll believe where things are going. since they do not make hardware anymore; it is only natural these are the hardware guys being flushed out.

as a developer; it is going to be a royal pain in the rear to recompile our apps to support another processor architecture; unless of course they go down the emulation route; but using x86 and emulating ARM is going to require a lot of processing power. if intel was to build ARM chips; sure - but typically we associated x86 with intel. apple has experience with this with the transition from PPC to x86 for the mac osx environment; i am sure they'll keep that in mind for iOS developers as well. i would only see recompilation as feasible - emulating ARM wouldn't make sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

russia and china make up 21.5% of the worlds population - i am sure the 90% result will skew a lot more with these included.

yes - the issue with video tools is more the optimization and performance of the codecs, they are typically built for desktop environments and do not compile well for mobile platforms. just search slashdot for my 36 hour porting effort of lemmings to many platforms.. that was a complete game, not a mere codec.. the codec job is much easier. it is very trivial if you know what you are doing. google even made it easier recently:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html

>> Android NDK, Revision 4b (June 2010)
Adds support for Android 2.2, including a new stable API for accessing the pixel buffers of Bitmap objects from native code.

how about doing some RTFM and then bitching about how difficult things are.. it is typical people comment before doing any form of research - this stuff is really simple. it didn't even deserve a slashdot mention in the first place.

the NDK has been available for years - what has taken them so long to find this out? create a texture, pass a pointer to it and compile the codec natively. nit more than a one-day job if you know what you are doing. the issue is more about the optimizations of the codecs, not the language barrier.

they got 20 seats
http://www.val.se/val/val2010/valnatt/R/rike/index.html