iOS might not, but good chance the management tool that will be baked into their phones is. I'm also confident that Apple's staunch refusal to accommodate corporate customers got pushed to the side here.

Now we know that RIM is dead. You heard it here first.

A few days ago, I was in Best Buy looking for a new external hard drive. While I was trying to get over the insane price markups, a very svelte-looking laptop caught the corner of my eye. It was one of Samsung's newest models, and it was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful, as it reminded me up, down and center of the MacBook Pro it was obviously trying to compete with.

Anyone that has good working vision can see that Samsung, more or less, copies Apple's designs wholesale. They might not be complete replicas of their products, but the "nods" they include in their designs are pretty obvious. Not a bad thing when you consider the technological advancements they provide with their clone-killers, but not surprising when Apple throws down the legal gauntlet as a response.

Its been well known that RFID cards are suspectible to this kind of threat. The only reason why jammers and blocks havent been enforced as much is because there haven't been enough cases of this happening to justify wide-scale enforcement. I really like the convenience of contactless payment systems and hope jammers and guards become ubitquitous enough for banks to provide them along with these cards.

You can still downgrade to pre-iOS 5 releases if you have SHSH blobs saved for those revisions. Downgrading has been rendered "impossible" because the APticket used to verify ipsw's is now generated randomly instead of being solely comprised of data from the phone's ECID and firmware version.

More info here.

Sent from my easily jailbroken Android tablet.

On one hand, these kinds of sites have made it stupidly easy to host and download all sorts of different data, legal and illegal. It's funny how the powers that be think that shutting these guys down will curb piracy when (a) there are so many ways people can get illegal data and (b) new and more anonymous ones will pop up as the older ones fall.

On the other hand, it's not a terribly huge loss on the material scheme of things. There are still plenty of other sites that people can use to host data, including wider-range services like Dropbox and Sugarsync. The other funny thing is that Megaupload et. al. did shut down links to any media that infringed on copyright policies, so it's scary to see how far these laws will go. I'm hoping that Dropbox and partners will not start telling people what can/can't be backed up.

Yeah...a lot of really good stuff is written by people just like the OP that are just learning. The other good thing about software is that it's an evolving work. Nobody cares if it's bloated or whatever; if it's a cool idea, helps in some way and is acceptable enough to use, people will like it. The other awesome thing is that if you do reach that point, you learn as you improve and everyone benefits!

It's not like being a doctor where you have to be GOOD right out the gate since people's lives are at stake. Unless, of course, you want to code medical instruments or things for planes...

But most people hate hate hate everything that makes good programmers good programmers. They hate the tediousness, the methodicalness, the breaking-things-down-into-tiny-steps, the 8+ hours of keeping your brain in an alpha state. What "real" programmers view as fun and almost a form of meditation, the average Joe views as nothing short of self-imposed torture. Everyone loves and wishes they could sing, dance or draw. But will everyone love the hours and hours and hours and HOURS of training that goes into becoming a singer, dancer or "professional artist," only to find out that you have to work really, really, REALLY hard to get noticed because a lot of people can sing, dance AND draw? If you're a singer, you get paid like shit and will probably have to work two or three jobs to make rent and side money in hopes that an A&R guy discovers your talent, submits your demo, really pushes for the exec to drop an advance for you, all of which will probably be eaten up by "overhead" and will leave you broke anyway. If you're a dancer, you'll probably mess up your feet and be practicing just about ALL the time. If you're an artist, you're struggling almost everyday...even if your stuff makes gallery.

Nobody loves real work except those that love the work.

Most people grow to hate programming because most teachers teach it badly. Perfect example: all engineers at my alma mater (Stevens) needed to go through a programming course with the idea that everyone would become a better engineer with a little bit of programmer in their system. That probably would be the case IF they didn't C++, arguably the most unfriendly language for beginners to learn. It's fine for Computer Engineering students like myself to take that because we will actually need those concepts later on. Does a Chemical Engineer who's bound for doing pure chemistry research really need to know what pointers are and how to use them? (This alone confused most of the people in the class.) Does anyone that isn't doing this for a living need to do this if they just want to write an Android app?

If CodeAcademy can teach people the basics in ways that are actually interesting and worthwhile (Project Euler doesn't count...a lot of people hate math too), more people *will* learn how to code. Tons and tons of people of varying intelligence come up with great ideas every minute of the day but fail to execute because they not only don't know how to code, but are afraid of learning because "it looks hard." Google tried working around this with App Inventor, but that never really took off. This initiative probably won't make people Google-quality coders in a year, but it will spark the innovative light our country has been direly looking for lately.

(You can definitely start making serious money as a programmer or IT guy with a year or two of education and a good connection. People admire doctors and lawyers for what they make, but I know guys who make just as much as they do or more with no degrees and WAY less stress...as contractors anyway. IT in general still pays really nice money, especially if you know where to look.)

If anything, I'm hoping this will make those with the IT pursestrings up those budgets a little easier...

There are a couple of problems I've noticed from this statement that tells me they'll need to do a LOT of maturing here.

There is? Last time I checked, the things people care about most are getting nice phones at a good price that they can play Angry Birds on and snap pictures with to upload to their Facebook/Twitter accounts.

This is the first quote that frustrates me from this snippet: I mean the governance structure, the ability to collaborate, the ability for there to be multiple devices from multiple vendors.. Do they not realise that this is exactly the status quo? Collaboration and governance are HUGE objectives for all of the major players in this game. Apple has iCloud, Microsoft has Windows Live and Office 365. Android has Google account synchronisation, control and access deeply ingrained into its fundamentals. All of these are free. Ubuntu's offering costs money. Umm...

This is the second most frustrating quote: we think we can do that effectively because of characteristics of Ubuntu as a platform. Let's not forget that this is the platform that's changed their stance on the minimise/close button three times in between, what, the last three releases?

Like Android's NDK with Eclipse integration or Apple's iPhone/iOS SDK with XCode or Windows Phone's leveraging of .NET with Visual Studio? Still wondering what they're bringing to the table at this point.

No, those projects never cracked the marketing required to reach the big time. Nokia could have really flaunted Maemo/MeeGo but chose to ride the sidelines while Apple and Android made themselves known everywhere. MeeGo, as far as I undersatand it, was actually a pretty reliable mobile OS and had a lot of potential.

This "advantage" is weak at best. In fact, I'm hard pressed to rely on this since I can't trust Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution) enough to install it for my non-technical peers and clients. While it certainly offers the nicest GNU/Linux UX experience available, there are some things still left to be desired on the hardware side.

The other problem I have with this is that Unity, compared to Android or iOS, does not really offer any real usability advantages over those other platforms. As far as I see it, it offers an OS-X like icon dock (that doesn't work nearly as nicely) and a focus on searching for things. It's a good starting point, but it's hard to see where they are going with it and how it will provide something competitive enough to give Android, Apple and Microsoft (whose offering is not only really nice, but will have tie-in's to Windows itself) runs for their money (or market share).

Hopefully they have a better strategy than the one they used for trying to get in cahoots with Dell. Then again, Dell was in a poor position where they couldn't really promote Ubuntu since Microsoft completely owns them.

I think Canonical made the right decision in focusing on the tablet game, as that is where a lot of people will start moving to in the coming months. If they play their cards right, they can probably get a nice portion of the low-end tablet market since Android or Apple hasn't really paid any attention there yet. However, I don't see anything from this that convinces me of them having a plan to make themselves really stand out from the status quo. I also think it's great they want to cater to the developer, but if the developers themselves can't really find a reason to develop for them (Windows Phone's biggest problem that they are battling hard with), why bother?

Nokia's strong point (or given their performance lately, least weak point) is very much in their mobile phone business. If you look at their latest quarterly earnings, the net sale of mobile phones decreased (-14% from last) significantly less than their smart phones (-39% from last). On top of that, their smartphone sales dropped significantly in NA since last year, presumably because of the competition in the market and their lack of a real offering lately.

Furthermore, it's pretty clear (as in their only choice at the moment) that they will use Windows Phone as their only smartphone platform and are dropping any commitments to any alternatives they had on the shelf. There is a good chance they will make deep system changes in their ROMs to enhance the experience as well, further enveloping their relationship with them. I doubt they will commit to Android sometime down the line, since (a) Elop has obvious ties with MS and (b) it will be way more work for them to "Nokia"-ize the UI to make it appealing to people like every other manufacturer did.

So what if they sold that division to Microsoft? Their bread-and-butter won't change and won't be influenced by the move. Microsoft won't build any devices; if anything, they will have an easier hand in making sure the hardware gels perfectly with Windows Phone to make the experience as awesome as possible. Both companies would be better positioned to compete with Apple and Android since they will be able to use them as the "Nexus" of Windows Phone and, if they don't step on Nokia's toes, provide an awesome experience that neither company can match AND have manufacturer variety that gives people just enough choice to be appealing without being overwhelming. It's a win-win, though I'm probably being naive and overly simplistic.

I know the news is fake, but I'm really excited about this collaboration. I love Nokia and I think this will finally make them relevant again if they don't let Microsoft run the hardware design show too much. They already did the right thing by setting a tight hardware baseline; Nokia can handle the rest.

As it reads right now, this sounds like a huge game-change for the worse. Here are my questions:

• Third-tier newspapers. How will this impact third-tier (neighborhood, college, special interest group) newspapers that relay their original content? Will they have to pay for partnerships to simply get their news? What if they "steal" it from a news aggregator like Yahoo! News or Google? Do they get penalised?
• Paraphrasing. Let's say I'm a blogger and want to avoid getting fined by the news media cartel, so I buy a newspaper (or, again, take it from Google et. al) and paraphrase it. Or deep-link it so that's it far away from the original source. What happens then?

• It sounds like this is an attempt to create the MPAA of news. On one hand, I feel like this won't really affect the casual reader since most folks get their news through a source that would not have problems with this (e.g. local channels, newspapers, Google News,e tc.) On the other hand, I feel like it's an immoral attempt to control the flow of information.

Here in NYC, TaskRabbit is doing, more or less, the same thing. If you have free time and want to make a few bucks, you go to their website and sign up for something to do. Works great for college students and people who really need the money. I know I've seen ads for other services that do the same thing. The big difference is that these sites take real money. Apart from Bitcoin, I don't understand the lure of using virtual currency that requires real currency to obtain. What does this accomplish?

There are two caveats to this:

• Only applies to low-end devices. Historically, flagship devices have always had a clear-cut and well-supported upgrade path for at least one or two iterations.
  
  For example, this chart highlights the upgrades available for Motorola devices. All of the flagship devices they've sold, such as the Droid, Droid X and Xoom, have gotten carrier-supported upgrades to Gingerbread. I know that flagship HTC and Samsung devices, like the Droid Incredible, Desire HD/Inspire and Galaxy S (Vibrant, Epic, Captivate, Fascinate and International i9000), have all gotten similar treatments as well. This is, in part, because of:
• Lack of customer demand. People that purchase lower-end devices usually get them to have a phone more capable than a regular phone for a decent price. Many of these folks don't know what upgrades are. Additionally, it takes real effort for these carriers to update and test every single CPU and/or GPU, sound DAC and USB controller (some of which run on hacks, as some ports to Cyanogenmod et. al. demonstrate) on top of updates to the UI (which some of these devices can barely run). Consequently, they focus those efforts on the higher-end devices and let the others have cake.
  
  It's sort of messed up, but when you consider that the point of Android was to give "the masses" a better alternative to smartphone computing, it's a lot better than shelling a few hundred bucks for a shiny iPhone or waiting a few years for the hand-me-downs to drop price.

Fortunately, and unlike iPhone, because of Android's strong community support model and its openness, lower-end devices usually get upgrade options anyway.

Two months ago, I traded my wonderful G2 for a HD7 to get a taste of the Windows Phone experience. I've used Windows Mobile since the 2003 version on the MPx200 (solid flip-phone; absolutely loved it) and wanted to see how far Microsoft has matured in the mobile arena.

Windows Phone 7 has, hands down, the best mobile UI experience you can get right now. Everything is fluid, fast and easy. The stock applications and voice controls gel perfectly and make Android look like a total mess, though it's cleaned up its act with Ice Cream Sandwich. App switching is WebOS-like and will make multi-tasking awesome when it comes to life in the next version. It's integration with Windows Live and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is the best I have ever seen and used and totally antiquates the need for their dedicated apps. (This might not matter for many Slashdot folks, but it matters for most people.) Forget iPod and iTunes; the Zune is just as easy to use and is much prettier to use. (It helps that the Zune software runs great on Windows, unlike iTunes.) The camera has ZERO lag, though the lens on the HD7 absolutely sucked. It's experience is absolutely beautiful and I can totally see iPhone users defecting to this once the app ecosystem.

Microsoft's strategy to use Nokia as their flagship supplier makes much more sense after you use it for a while; Nokia still has huge brand recognition and will shake up the market really nicely when they release (and market) their ace device.

The biggest obvious problem is that Apple and Android both had first-mover's advantage and, thus, own the space at the moment. However, this is not as problematic as it seems. People are getting tired of iOS (it hasn't changed very much since 1.0, despite great hardware advances) and Windows Phone offers a very cool and equally smooth alternative that a lot of people will feel comfortable moving to, especially with its strong Facebook integration. It's going to be very difficult for Apple to match this and Android's UI improvements and they can't depend on making killer hardware leaps anymore since both fronts have caught up there. (Kind of like how Intel can't really market GHz anymore since every processor is "fast enough.")

Apple is, finally, in trouble, but that's what happens when you're on top for so long. :)