It's not that difficult. I'd rather have more updates...including security updates...than fewer and far between. People who complain about updates are like people who complain about having to have bumpers on their car or safety belts on a plane. Besides, the updates install themselves now automatically. Good for you, switching to Chrome for that reason...it only does the exact same thing Firefox does now.

That's because you don't have the latest updater.

Once you get it, Firefox will update itself with each rev automatically, just like it does on my machine.

It's not Mozilla's fault that they've been around longer, and that their browser hasn't always updated itself automatically. Once upon a time, that wasn't exactly something people cared about. They were fine just downloading and installing the new version. But when people began to care about it and began to whine about the hassle, they responded by adding that in. Unfortunately, people whined that they couldn't update because they refused to download the version that could automatically update.

That's funny, Firefox works just about the same way for me. Maybe not as silent, but as a web dev, I kind of like it when my browser gives me an idea that it's going and updating on me.

I bet it really helps Chrome out though that it is packaged as a third party optional add-on that is usually checked (and will just install itself if you click through certain installers) when you go to install various popular applications. And that it pimps itself out on its search engine all the time over any other browser.

But Microsoft gets sued for using its monopolistic OS market to leverage its browser. Apparently Google gets to play by a different set of rules.

You should check out Diaspora*, just saying. If you are concerned about having to choose between the lesser of two evils and all. They're currently rolling out invites for the beta, so be patient.

I'm fine with using Chrome without the Google. Completely and totally fine with that.

...there's going to be some seriously ego-bloated Opera users who still love their one time ad-bloated fad from the 90's that couldn't properly spoof itself as IE or Netscape no matter how much they said it could. But I'm sure it's "Much better now!".

Oh, yeah, and the trick about IE being the browser used by dumb people...well, duh. It comes preloaded with the operating system sold on the cheapest mass marketed PCs that don't give dumb people aneurysms looking at the boot screen.

A step above that is Chrome, a browser that is often distributed along with various other software products in a manner not unlike spyware. And Firefox, which the media publications told Windows users to use because it was safer (which means slightly more intelligent people were paying attention and downloaded it instead of being absolutely ignorant). And Safari, which comes along with PCs that are fairly more expensive, mainly status symbols, and owned by people who generally are of a higher pay grade.

As for Camino and Chrome Frame, those are probably being used by nerds because 98% of the population haven't even heard of those options. I have, but I just don't care about them all that much. And of course, Opera, which is only being used by people who are stubbornly holding onto a notion of technical superiority and heightened security that Opera hasn't had in several years. And they're probably using it on Linux to boot.

So yeah, I can see how that survey kind of sets itself up nicely. You probably don't have to even survey people, it kind of all falls into place quite well if you've paid attention to anything browser related over the past 15 years.

Out of the gate, they're already behind. That is, if this isn't just some pathetic attempt by Microsoft to drum up some stock interest with a paid blogger doing a PR puff piece.

Both iOS and webOS have made a lot of strides over the past few years. A big part of how they do things is user experience...Microsoft gets too geekily technical about some details, and the fact is, those details aren't as popular with the wider population than they'd like to admit. It's been the same story since Microsoft first ventured into the mobile space years ago.

Personally, I really, really like how fast and accurate the built in search is on webOS. I know a lot of other guys who left the platform and came back because once you get the bug, it's hard to give up. Especially if you figure out how to really use the platform well. Instead of swiping and scrolling through silly little screenspace consuming icons, you pull out the keyboard, type a couple letters, and it'll give you contacts, apps, you can mod it to do a wikipedia lookup, imdb, whatever. It's pretty sweet. It's like taking all the best things about a CLI and all the best things of the standard GUI and putting them all together. That's something, to me, I can deal with using 2 year old hardware on a day to day basis when I know there's better hardware out there...and I could even get it for free. And unless my provider would let me install webOS on that other phone and all my apps work, I'm not going to switch hardware. I'll duct tape my first gen Pre together if it comes down to it, and if that doesn't work, I'd be spending plenty of time trying to make it work on other hardware.

The reason I say all that is that if you're releasing a new mobile OS, you aren't going to "get me" to give up my apps, my preferred workflow, my cash, just to switch if you're playing catch-up. Just because you're Microsoft or Apple or Google doesn't impress me. Its whether or not your stuff does what I want, and if your software can't do it like I want, then either you pay me to use your stuff, or give me some features I can't live without. And no, I'm not going to switch just to "get" with a paid third party app something I already have well-integrated and free on my current platform of choice. Plus, it's all got to work well with what I currently have, or it's not happening. Not only that, but I stopped writing software for Windows Mobile about 3 years ago. You know what I really liked about it? It was a fairly powerful (if not a little quirky) platform to code for. I like .NET. It's something that Microsoft did very well. Unfortunately, in their effort to "be more like the other guys", I feel like they're abandoning a lot of the consistency of development between Windows apps, Windows web applications, and Windows mobile applications. They're still using ".NET technologies" to do things, but the basic design philosophies and approaches are getting really scattered and confusing, while .NET itself keeps jumping all over the place in basic application design philosophy with each new incarnation. They really need to find a few basic approaches to developing applications for their platforms and stick with them. Unless I'm using Silverlight as my standard, out of the box presentation layer for desktop applications as well as web applications...and that's all I'm doing from now on, then fine. But pick one approach and stick with it, you know?

It's just a toolset. If you're smart, you can fit more than one language or platform up in your noggin and be able to move back and forth. That said, it's a tremendously powerful framework. If I may say so, as someone who goes back and forth between C++ and .NET, I find C++ to be akin to a wrench, hammer, and screwdriver. .NET feels like a compression wrench, a jackhammer, and a power screwdriver. Sometimes, it's a little too much, but generally for most things, I get more done quicker with fewer lines of code, enabling me to spend a lot more time polishing the edges and handing off a more polished product to my customers than I can with C++ or even Java (in some circumstances).

The reason I do it, though, is because far more CEOs than some random, obviously big-headed CEO of some startup pay me to write code in that language. And I don't just do "Windows Mobile" for god's sake. I write a lot of web services, and the majority of customers don't care what's running on the server...they couldn't care if you wrote that service in C#, C++, Java...using SOAP, REST, whatever. They just want data when they click a button, and they want it to be up to date. There might be a few nerds who have the opinion that they might get their data a tad faster if they used one or the other, but frankly, over time the more maintainable project will always be the one that works the best...because developers will want to work on it, refactor it, keep it up to date. If you write it in some obscure fad language that has shaky support, guess what developers will do to it once you get another job? They will throw your work away and rewrite it from scratch. And I guarantee that, with the abundance of .NET developers out there, they're going to rewrite it for .NET anyway. And they're going to curse your existence the whole time. How does one such as I know? Because I've been on both sides of that mess. I've written code in goofball languages when I was younger, and I've been tasked to replace projects written in goofball, non-widely supported languages plenty of times over the past several years.

And then there's the last thing. I put my support behind a framework or company that provides powerful tools to developers. It's sort of my activist side coming through. If a company could care less about providing powerful, open, extensible tools and frameworks for developers, that's a sign that a company simply doesn't care about the quality of third party products for their platform...and a company that most likely would use their internal tools to trump any project that I'd put substantial effort into that managed to become popular with users. For example, if I were to make a killer cloud service app for iPhone, and Apple saw a substantial potential revenue stream in it, they could easily use their own internal use tools and APIs and put me totally out of business...which is a big reason I don't do iPhone development anymore. And it's also a reason I am highly tentative about doing Android development either, because for all the tools Google puts out, I know they've got better ones behind the scenes and I've seen them kill startups plenty of times by releasing slightly better (or even inferior) services for "free". And when I say all that, I'm also saying that I want platforms that aren't just open and follow standards well, but I want a platform and toolset that is well integrated. I want to drop a breakpoint in my presentation layer code, drop one in my service code, and drop one in my business logic layer code, and I want to debug through each layer to find a problem. I can do that with .NET because frankly, Microsoft put forth the effort to make that really quite simple to do. I don't like wasting time unhooking my business logic from my web service and hooking it up to my presentation layer just to run a debug, and if I'm not getting a good stack trace, then the toolset I've been given is crap.

While I'm certainly no Microsoft fan, I certainly want to support their developer tools as a way of saying to all those other evil overlord software corporations out there "Hey! They're doing this right...why not follow that example! You don't have to be just like them about everything, but on this thing, they've got it right and they understand us!".

You can't outsource a lot of those jobs brushing up sites to support the disabled. However, you could license third party controls that are developed overseas (but you still have to hire people to drop those controls in, and that's often plenty of work in and of itself). Anyway, if you have to update websites to support disabled users, that's a whole lot of work for a whole lot of people. Heck, even if you don't develop websites, there will be work supporting the new hardware needed to support voice and sensory feedback-based content.

If you're a geek, look at it this way...it's like the y2k boom all over again, though it will actually help people long term and bring more people onto the web instead of serve virtually no purpose. And if you're not a geek, and you run some business and you're panicking about making your website accessible for the disabled, then screw you for dumping on disabled people.

Besides. What would they have found along the freaking border? The alkalinity of Iranian soil? Maybe some killer samples of Iranian bark dust? Oh, I know. They could find "crucial information" that the Iranian government is poisoning waterways along the border to control the water supply. I see where that's going.

The US military or intelligence agencies have no need to send kids on suicide missions to gather "information" along the border. None. That's just stupid. They've got that border under satellite surveillance along with intel they gather from the Kurdish security forces that probably monitor the border as well. There's just no need to send kids to their probable deaths just to see if they can catch a glimpse of a military movement along the border or lack thereof. And there certainly isn't any reason to send them just to be arrested, because they aren't going to gather a whole lot of intel in an Iranian prison. They were probably drugged and blindfolded on the way there.

Do you have any proof they were, besides your own paranoia?

See, there's this thing called the law. Innocent until PROVEN guilty. That whole deal. "CIA written all over her" because she didn't act the way you expected her to act? What, you know that woman personally?

I've met government agents. They don't typically look like young, recent college grads. Most of them are in their thirties to forties, and the ones that hike along foreign borders typically look strikingly similar to the people who live within those borders. They typically don't wear t-shirts and jeans and scream at people in English. They grow beards. They get tans. They wear appropriate clothing to the situation. If they're hiring dumb kids to get caught by terrorists by painting Old Glory across their foreheads and wearing Birkenstocks, don't you think those kids would be just a little pissed off at the CIA when/if they're released? After all, that's a literal suicide mission, and I doubt those kids would have signed up for a suicide mission, getting engaged and all.

Then again, as with you, I have no proof of that, nor do I know those kids. So maybe we're both wrong. Or maybe one of us is right. But there's no way to know if you don't have proof, and you won't ever have proof either way. It's the CIA, idiot. What do you think?

It's tongue in cheek, but you guys didn't get it. If you're not out and about, it is implied that you must use a stationary desktop around the home.

There's nothing I love more than spelling a joke out to geeks who should understand a very venerable geek joke, I tell ya.

You know why you get marked a troll? It's sad because you probably don't even intend it or know why you're being called a troll.

Did you read some of those posts above? Get your information from multiple sources. Not just ones that are spreading the same story around. See, when the economy is bad and pointing fingers won't get you anything anymore, politicians take a lovely wedge issue and run their assistants and cronies out to the talking head media shows to "put things out there". Those things get picked up, regurgitated, and passed around until everyone swears they're facts. You're part of that machine. None of this is really about racism, it's just a convenient wedge issue that happens to involve another nationality. It's about politics and winning in an election year. You didn't hear about this stuff so much last year...isn't that a little surprising? Nor did you hear about it the year before...and yet, that war has been going on for more than just this year.

Like how they use migrant workers to scare people who are scared for their jobs in a down economy, they picked a wedge issue that drives fear in the hearts of people like you and took a few minor incidents and transformed them through the media grapevine into an all out assault on your fellow US citizens. However, the numbers fly right in the face of that. There is more border security than EVER, right now, at the US/Mexican border. That's a fact that your tax dollars are paying for. There are several times more people getting deported the past 2 years...again, using your tax dollars...than there were the previous several years. That is also a fact. If you people were whining and shivering and scared about this stuff 6 years ago, you'd have credibility. But right now, you're just an unwitting tool of a political machine trying to get its people in positions of power so it can rip you off and give that money to their buddies in the industries that pay their bills, just like they did when they were in power. It's their job, and using you is a great way of saving themselves money they'd have to pay a staffer.

Oh, come on. You completely missed the fact that most of the tech news was probably posted at Engadget a day or two before.

Without a proper understanding of how the concepts have changed, you cannot understand these languages and you'd never know where to begin.

First and foremost, pick up a book on object oriented development. Read it, draw diagrams, do some of the examples. Start with C++ and get the basics.

Second: Don't be afraid to write inefficient code (by your standards). Kids these days don't understand how things were in the 80's when 512 bytes of binary size could demand a near rewrite and massive refactoring. A lot of this stuff is virtualized, like .NET, Python, you name it. It's being run through an interpreter. It's the stuff we all turned our noses up at 30 years ago (around the time I first started getting into programming, anyway, in the very early 90's). These new languages almost force you to write inefficiently (by your standards). They take away the efficiency of pointer arithmetic, bcd, segmentation, and other tricks you could do to shrink your code down. Efficiency, these days, is how fast it runs, not how much memory it requires. Wrap your head around that concept because it's the most fun thing about modern development (unless you're really OCD about memory management, of course).

Now, jump into a language. I'd take C++. Most languages derive a lot of their concepts from it, and if you get solid with it, you can pick up most other languages fairly easily. Get a book on design patterns...it'll help prevent you from knotting your code up too badly when you jump into your first project if you can pick a pattern or two that fits what you want to do and implement them.

Last, mobile coding isn't what you'd think it would be. It's closer to web development these days than it is to desktop development. Maybe 10 years ago with Palm OS you would have been able to dive right in, as it was single tasking, segmented 64k memory model, and you could write everything in good ol' C. But since then, mobile platforms have gone all over the map with various ideas. Where you have basically Appleified C++ on iOS, you have non-standard java on Android, .NET C# or VB on WinMob, and either C++ or literally HTML+Javascript on webOS. Heck, even Blackberry OS is basically Java-oriented. My advice is to code out a hello world for whatever platform that strikes your fancy, and see which one is easiest for you to "get". Just because a platform is "hot" in the mobile space doesn't mean it'll stay around...I've been doing this stuff for over 10 years, and the only thing you can rely on in mobile is that whatever's big now will be on the downside soon enough. It's always been a big pitfight in mobile. Just pick the platform you like developing for the most and stick with it, maybe branch out if it's lucrative enough, but don't count on anything sticking around.