Hehe, with so many people on here, it's bound to happen someday! ;)

That support engineer deserves to be the annoying character of a Valley made-for-tv drama or something. That's amazingly delusional for him to expect a free lunch everywhere he goes. I mean, sure, there's a number of startups who do the free lunch thing. But really?

Perhaps it's simply anecdotal, but the other company making a run for "world's biggest startup" (Facebook) doesn't seem to be arrogant. Naive, perhaps, but that's a whole nother can of worms. Most employees I've met from there also mention free food and doing fun random stuff at work, but I haven't had one rub it in my face before.

I think the problem with Google is that while they're driven to be innovative, they're only driven to be innovative around the field of data collection. They care little about experience (have they finally given people a way to contact them for customer service?). I'm not even certain they care about money. They most definitely care about data.

I mean, they're the company who singlehandedly fucked up the meaning of "beta software" by deploying Gmail "beta" live to the world in order to refuse to provide technical support. Now that the general public thinks "beta" means "works for most people but no support", all us other devs are fucked every time we want to do a real public beta.

Perhaps I'm jaded from watching them screw it all up, but it boils down to trying to run themselves like a well-funded startup who continues to push out their minimum viable product as long as it meets their goal: getting more data.

Chromecast: Doesn't care about experience. Just cares about encouraging people to use Google Play Movies so they can find out more about what you like, as well as seeing what people actually want to do with streaming devices.
Google Wallet: We want to see where people spend.
Android: We need an mobile platform where we can still deploy ads with tracking tags.
Self-Driving Car: We can't map the world fast enough with human drivers.
Google Glass: We think it's cool. But we don't have a clue what to do with it, so we'll put out a developer launch in order to gather ideas from other developers.

I also agree they're arrogant (in a different way from how Apple is also arrogant). Not sure why. I'd guess they're used to being the darling of the tech industry when they still believed in "don't be evil."

I have a hunch that NFC is locked down because of the secure element. Not that it's not secure. But rather that there's probably some detail about NFC chipsets where once you have it some mode, it's hard to switch in and out of it.

So say ApplePay is active, then in order to do stuff with the NFC reader for CustomApp1, you need to turn off ApplePay and then reload all the state data for CustomApp1. Then If you decide to switch to CustomApp2, then it has to unload all the state data for CustomApp2. Meanwhile, the user flips out because they can't pay for their soda using ApplePay while CustomApp2 is launched. That'd be shitty.

(I don't know if that's actually the problem. But while playing with NFC on Android, there's a lot of fucked up situations I've seen/heard of including Samsung Galaxy S2s bricking their own NFC reader permanently. So I wouldn't be surprised.)

Not quite.

Google's implementation is irrelevant because Google funneled all your transactions through Google because they're not big on privacy. Apple doesn't.

Oh, and they failed to support all the Nexus phones with NFC readers.

The UI, the launch, and the marketing fuck up are significant, but not as much as the above two.

The original Apple Airport base station had a built in modem which would dial on demand, NAT the dialup connection, and share it with both wifi and ethernet.

Pairing that with an iPad means that all the effort Apple put into banishing jailbreakers from the platform would do wonders for the trojan problem.

An engineer for Intel mentioned once that the CPU power regulators now, although low voltage, pass enough amps to do arc welding. Just think about that for a second.

An object? It's a struct with a pointer to a struct with function pointers. And some fancy compiler macros that makes the syntax shorter. ;)

Best tech book ever! (Well, I have the 3rd edition or something older.)
For anybody who really wants to understand the stuff, go look up all the classwork for CS61c at UC Berkeley.
It's the undergrad course that uses this book. Heck, Patterson even taught it from time to time.

If your only suggestion is randomly calling System.gc() or randomly assigning null to variables, I'd drop everything right now and revoke your commit privileges.

Matheus is pretty much right. Another way to describe it is that GC doesn't absolve you of needing to know and codify your object lifecycles.

When you create an object or assign it to an instance variable, you have taken partial ownership of it.
Therefore, every time you do this, you must figure out where in your object lifecycle you give up (assign null) your partial ownership of that object.
Easiest way to do encourage this is for all classes which hold onto objects, you create your constructor and you create an invalidate() function where you let go of all these objects (usually by calling invalidate() against objects, and assigning null or clear() on containers/collections).
Finally, you need to be able to document when exactly this object is intended to be instantiated and when it is expected to be freed.

If you can't figure out when you should own or disown other objects, either:
* you should be reading through the class to figure it out
* you should redesign the object because it's poorly written
* you should redesign the architecture because it's poorly written
* you should write down a ton of comments and suspicions
* you should ask for help
* or you should do more than one of these options.

Maybe I'll get flamed by somebody for thinking this, but the idea of rotating the top 10's by average session length, un-install rate, and other similar metrics would at the same time be literally asking for Apple to gather usage data about individual users.

Personally, I don't see that happening. I can't say I'm fond of the idea of invading my privacy by monitoring what I do remotely and spending my battery life simply to augment a store. I'm not even sure which one I find harder to give up: battery life or privacy.
Given Apple's stance on privacy, I can't see them taking the time to implement such a monitoring system, even if it's reasonably anonymous.

For Google, on the other hand, this is right up their alley. Power management sucks as it is on Android, so it wouldn't be hard to sneak that by anyways.

The Fascinate you picked is a special case since it's basically the same thing as a Nexus S, which has a whole 'nother community behind it simply because it was a Nexus device. And it's got bog-standard ARM hardware, which is the reason it's just slow as all hell. You can't expect this kind of support for most device ever.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2...

I don't know why your vivow isn't supported anymore, but I'd have to guess it has to do with one of the selling points: Qualcomm's ARM CPUs are custom. That Snapdragon S2 was pretty awesome, yeah? Makes them faster but harder to support as they get older.
You knew this going in. And you know it'll bite you again eventually if you buy a Samsung with a Qualcomm CPU. In the meantime, hey, Snapdragon S4s are supported for now.

Come to think of it, the link I posted above mentions that even Samsung fucks up support for their Exynos SoCs without building their own CPU cores.

If I recall, I think the Cypress FX2LP that was mentioned (or something similar) was designed in such a way that firmware upload over USB wasn't something easily disabled.

So, perhaps a bad choice of MCU.

Holy shit.

8 amps through the microUSB port is just stupid. I'm guessing the power supply circuit isn't overheating, it's the microUSB connectors that are overheating.

Telling people it's okay to use any charger but the one it comes with only works because the Chromebook won't try to suck 8 amps over a connector typically rated for 1.8 amps.

No fucking wonder why Apple launched Lightning instead.

http://www.molex.com/webdocs/datasheets/pdf/en-us/0475901001_IO_CONNECTORS.pdf

The original iPhone and iPhone 3G can run both iOS 3 and Android 2....

Of course, this doesn't help much given that there's been a lot of changes for power management since then. At least on the iOS side.

Phht, it obvious you've never experienced the sadness that is the Nexus 4 in Northern California.

1) When my apps fail to connect to the internet, I can't tell if it's the latest OS is bad, or it's the hardware, or if it's T-mobile. Or if it's all of them.
2) Charging via microUSB and inductive will fail from time to time. There appears to be multiple problems. One of which is the phone draining more power than some 3rd party inductive chargers can provide, causing the battery icon and charging dialog to flash on and off rapidly (and not charge). Another friend who uses the official Nexus 4 inductive charger found and filed a bug where after you use it, power management breaks itself and the OS refuses to return to low power states until you reboot.
3) Other mystery bugs in Android: notifications for some apps never show up in the drop down. Stock messaging app sometimes never notifies you of new SMS messages. MMS sometimes refuse to download. This sort of outage continues for days, and all of a sudden fixes itself only to rebreak later. (it's not T-mobile's fault as opening the app will reveal the un-notified message)

Given my experiences, a Nexus 4 is most definitely a crappier phone than an iPhone 4.