Excused. I'm going to go do my dailies.

+1, Horrifying

They moved their first call center out of Austin not because their employees were demanding high wages, but because they'd so pissed off everyone even remotely technical in town that they couldn't hire anyone in the first place.
The great thing about following Dell is at least you know you're going to go into bankruptcy really, really slowly. I guess that's a business plan.

On the other hand, it is over nine thousand. ...Eight thousand in the original Japanese.

Then maybe the global warmers should stop acting like they're religious types, and making accusations like "you don't read" to people like myself who question if the problem is manmade or natural. If you're going to act like a zealot, then I'm going to call you one.

Yes, me too! Only a matter of time until someone is ticketed while on their way to purchase a parking permit.

Nope. He probably doesn't think that patents on "ideas" should exist.

A lot of the more bogus recent patents are effectively that.

The rather difficult task of building the mousetrap isn't the
thing subject to a government enforced monopoly, the IDEA of
a mousetrap is.

The whole "bundleware" thing is a tragedy but allowing bogus patents isn't the answer.

With TV so fragmented and diverse now it's very hard for all but few shows to break out of the scrum and gain an audience. Just as with film studios the networks don't want niche viewers for quality programs (well maybe PBS does) they want blockbusters with high viewer ratings and long term rebroadcast royalties and DVD sales. Nobody wants a good but low rated Firefly; they all want a mega-hits like Seinfeld. As for reality shows they're cheap to produce.

While this is true and all, they really need to pick a better way of going about this sort of thing instead of slinging hyperbole around. As it stands the "FSF" campaigns are hard to take seriously, I mean they really come off sounding like crackpots. I guess maybe they are. When you've the FSF essentially sling FUD (mostly fact-based but presented w/ an exagerated and alarmist style) by association all Free and to the extent that it is confused Open software developers, distributors, and users become crackpots by association in the public eye.

Because doing things "the company way" (read: The BOFH IT administrator way) is not always the fastest or most efficient way to do things - if the company want value for money/paycheck, they won't lock my software down so hard I can barely breathe.

Can you tell I've just been hit with the totally locked down Exchange-server virus at my workplace? ;-)

Well hell, why stop there? You can learn all about how to handle medical emergencies from WMD. If you're really nice, I'll even tell you how to open the debug console and set your score to 100.

The FSF doesn't need to change their message to "using Free Software is better for you than using proprietary" because that's been taken over by the OSI. I think the most admirable thing about the FSF is that they haven't changed their message at all despite many naysayers and have had great positive impact. They will probably always be a fringe group in some ways, but we need people willing to buck the system and challenge groupthink.

Although I don't agree with the FSF's most extreme views such as that developing proprietary software is inherently immoral, I do agree that society at large is better served by Free Software than proprietary. I think that's an inherently more durable position than the OSI's position that using Open Source is a business advantage, though I think the latter is also usually true.

How can you list nothing but Android-related points and then conclude that it's far friendlier? Just a wee bit biased, are we?

For the iPhone, you can develop in assembly if you want to. You can certainly use C or C++. You aren't tied to the horrible monstrosity that is Java.

There are only two downsides I know of to iPhone developement, in comparison to Android. One, it costs more money to get software onto a physical device, and two, you have a small chance of having your app rejected for sale on the App Store.

Then again, I have exactly one app for sale, with a niche target audience, and I still have managed to make more money than I've spent. I do have to admit that I already owned the Macbook I do development on, as well as the iPod Touch I wrote it for.

But in terms of friendliness, I don't see how Apple could be better. You get a free IDE, awesome documentation, an incredible set of frameworks (APIs) and a really great language. There is sample code for just about every topic and each revision of the OS adds more toys and more access to the physical device.

I know quite a few people who were 6 feet tall and pretty much done growing when they turned 14 or 15.

I guess it would also make some people cry, as they watched themselves balloon up to fatness.

ugh !!

i won't blame novell, i won't blame sco, i blame bell labs !

why don't they just open-source that thing in the beginning???