We've seen what happens with democratic decision making, as the population grows so does the splintering and each side grows further apart. Unless human nature can progress like the "25 years of" technology I dont see large hiveminds getting too far past their internal "debates".

An issue recently came up on my Engineering team where a pig mapreduce job that stores in hbase slowed over the course of completing tasks until all the tasks failed due to timeouts. What appeared to be happening was a gc failure and pause due to tenure region exaustion and the built in cluster function to kill off the garbage collecting regionserver. The link below describes the issue and possible workarounds by implementing a custom memory allocation strategy. It's also a must read for anyone who isn't a java garbage collection expert. http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2011/02/avoiding-full-gcs-in-hbase-with-memstore-local-allocation-buffers-part-1/

FTFA: "But I think Microsoft should understand that it doesn’t have an engineering or a product problem, it has a marketing problem and that it needs to address it" I tend to ignore anyone who tries to explain a trend (or lack there of) in the mobile space but I agree with this point. As a mobile developer I was pleasantly surprised by how easy and "fun" it could be to build a WP7 app. The development tools arent too bad and seem pretty mature. Also, aside from the Windows-Live nagging I have found the OS to be fairly well engineered, which is saying a lot in the current Mobile OS landscape. All that said I dont know what else could be attributed to how ZTE, LG, and the market in general have responded to WP7 other than the poor marketing.

Developers do not have access to your visa, regardless of how you pay for content in iOS. All iOS purchases, whether they be appstore or in-app, are payed to Apple, period, end of story. Apple, then, takes care of distributing the payment. Apple mediates everything. The developer is cut a check from Apple after they take a cut, even for in-app purchases.

Its not good enough for developers though. The app market has done quite a bit to boost iphone and android usage. I, as a mobile developer, hate building symbian apps and dont know of many people who do, and that seems to matter these days

Microsoft sells an ad server called 'Atlas' and a company that I once worked for that depends heavily on online advertising paired that server with a behavioral targetting (Read: tracking) system in order to "better" target advertisements to our users. Now there is no direct connection between Atlas and tracking usage/behavior but I know for a fact that online ads, and thus an ad server, become MUCH less useful if there is no usage/behavioral data on the users... so I am not entirely buying a full blown usage blocker. Although I suppose that the hit that a competitor such as Google would take from that kind of feature would exponentially outweigh the impact against Microsoft

Not entirely related to this posting but I would like to know why you have made this conclusion? I have ported an iOS application to Android and found it to be easier. In a way, it almost makes perfect sense that if you build an app on a locked down platform (foo) it should be much easier to port to a more open platform (bar) since you are "practically" guaranteed that bar will have all of the functionality of foo and then some....no?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moX3z2RJAV8

Can Mark Cutkosky's little robot bring about a whole new area of voyeurism?

My wallpaper of David Hasselhoff. Thats the only icon I need

By the way, you have now upset my two kitties, Jobz and Woz, so I have no choice but to move my \. bookmark down a couple of spots, probably below BBC, in my Safari NEWS folder... hope you're happy.

My old phones are not "hanging around" you insensitive clods! My precious iphone 2, 3, and 3G iphones are all on display in my living room, lying.... nay resting, gently within the confines of their individually hand built glass cases.

Do I really need to say anything else?