Once you go silverback, there's no going back.

The big marketing hurdle of Nokia isn't going to be in pushing Windows Phone - once Windows 8 launches and the Metro UI becomes ubiquitous then more people will be comfortable with it on their phones as well.

The big marketing problem for Nokia will be in convincing people to shell extra for a Nokia branded Windows Phone - I've been satisfied with my (cheaper) HTC Windows Phone with largely the same functionality and apps for the past 11 months.

This is coincidentally the same problem they'd face in the Android handset market as well.

Actually, what I think the parent is worried about is how Android navigation might provide information to Google, and from a programming point of view it seems entirely possible (and even sensible) to correlate map tile request frequency with traffic flow (I assume Android navigation fetches new map tiles as needed). So, conceivably Google could collect and archive information like 'john.doe@gmail.com's mobile phone is travelling at 90 mph along the Interstate' if you use Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation.

On the other hand, it's my understanding that traffic data is purchased from companies like transport companies who fit their trucks with GPS for realtime logistics purposes (I've sometimes seen alerts for traffic queues on empty roads where there are transport lorries parked by the roadside). These days traffic data is also reported by modern Sat Nav units (e.g. http://consumerist.com/2011/04/tomtom-sold-speeding-data-to-police-cops-used-it-to-bust-drivers.html ) and as said maybe Google can harvest a bit of traffic data from their Android sets as well.

Whether we like it or not, companies like Google buy and harvest traffic data from misc existing sources, and use this data to propagate their results. Those drivers who knowingly or unknowingly share their traffic data will help those of us who just want to avoid being stuck in traffic.

FTFA:

You might have seen early Go talks in which Rob Pike jokes that the idea for Go arose while waiting for a large Google server to compile. That really was the motivation for Go: to build a language that worked well for building the large software that Google writes and runs.

I looked at the Go pages for 15 minutes to try to figure out why this was commissioned as a project to begin with. Ultimately I ran into the above paragraph. Projects like this make me think that Google no longer has a clear idea of how they could improve their existing business, so they're spending an increasing amount of time rearranging deck chairs to keep their programmers busy on the off chance that they'll need them for something useful.

The expected market demand for Jedi Knights is probably marginally less than the expected market demand for philosophers in general - yet this doesn't stop people from studying philosophy for misc reasons.

However, in this case it seems like the primary goal is simply to provide exercise/dance classes with a bit of a Sci-Fi/philo twist (Sci-Phi?), and there's definitively a market demand for fitness courses/instructors. If this niche inspires a few couch potatoes to exercise more than they otherwise would, why not?

I can only imagine the time and effort spent on tracking down this problem - a rare CPU condition is exponentially more difficult to narrow down than most programming mistakes. A lot of progress in IT depends on engineers like this, who obsessively solve problems even when it's much easier to just ignore them, try to hack around them or pass the buck around. Kudos.

For me it's partly about saving space (yes, 50K documents take a fair bit of it), partly about 'fireproofing' them, partly about portability (I travel) and partly about searchability (OCR + indexing) - the ability to find most documents which mention a particular topic over the past few decades in a matter of seconds is exceptionally valuable for me personally.

Outsourcing is definitively the way to go if your archive is big. I am facing the same problem - basically looking to digitize an old archive of miscellaneous "important" documents - and a local business offered to scan my estimated 50,000 pieces of paper for GBP 1350 (approx USD 2150). That's 4 cents per document - a no brainer in labour-saving and time-saving terms.

Most people probably wouldn't deny that the climate keeps changing (e.g. Ice Age) but so far I've personally not seen credible evidence for the idea that mankind has much if anything to do with it - temperatures appear to have changed substantially even long before the industrial revolution. On balance it's probably natural for geeks (many of whom are naturally inquisitive) to question ideas which insist on substantial changes to our lifestyles with tenuous evidence behind them.

Obviously 100K is much better than nothing, but it's difficult to see the odd 100K donation making much difference to a software project of the scale of perl. At the same time it's easy to demonstrate how much OS projects like perl are contributing to the economy. Perhaps after a few more SOPA-like victories the IT industry will feel empowered enough to lobby the government for some taxpayer money to support critical web infrastructure maintenance/development.

If we had this technology in the shape of a buttocks then it would bring telecommuting to a whole new level.

Agreed. On certain business-oriented Finnish web sites I've noticed an odd pattern of posters who claim the Lumia phones are 'the best phone ever' and who attack any negative commenters on WP7 as "liars" etc. The pattern reeks very much of a deliberate marketing campaign either by Nokia's marketing department or desperate stock holders trying to cash out before the wheels come off. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was happening on English language web sites as well.

I've had an HTC WP7 from the company for almost 6 months now and esp after the 7.5 Mango update the phone has felt reliable (reliable enough where this is now the phone I trust to wake me up in the mornings) and the device feels quite responsive. The things which I don't like about the phone is a) the demented interface design which expects you to reorient the phone between landscape and portrait when navigating from one menu to another and b) the phone is lacking in apps which I'd personally find useful/interesting. The free apps tend to be ad-filled garbage and the paid apps are overpriced IMO - but I appreciate that my Nokia N900-based expectation of getting useful/interesting apps for cheap/free is part of any problem Nokia may face in trying to convince iPhone/Android devs to target the WP7 platform.

As a taxpayer I'd prefer my tax money to go towards supporting lean security-hardened Linux distros (with some genuine potential for overall cost savings) rather than licenses for the latest Microsoft desktop OS, Exchange servers etc. This ought to be good news for taxpayers long-term regardless of how the economy is doing now.

Here's a prediction.. 20 years from now Apple won't be remembered for the iMacs or iPods, but for successfully revolutionising education as we know it. If $60-$100 textbooks can be acquired for $15 per book for a digital iPad version, it'll be a no-brainer (for whomever is currently paying for the textbooks) to buy an iPad for any education requiring more than 6-12 textbooks.

Debris in close orbit around Earth? Trailer parks in year 2200?