I haven't actually written any Android software (although I have a myTouch now, so I might give it a try one of these days), so I'm not speaking from experience here. One advantage Android has over the iPhone as far as development goes is that it's Java-based. Pretty much every practicing software developer now learned Java at some point in their life, so chances are they could pick up the Android API pretty quickly. Android also has an Eclipse plugin, letting developers use familiar tools that work on Mac, Windows and Linux. It looks like there's also a C-based API for writing native code.

For the iPhone, on the other hand, you have to use Objective-C. While Objective-C seems like a nice language in a lot of ways, pretty much the only people who know it are Mac developers. You've also got to use XCode, which is Mac-only. Clearly this isn't preventing a huge number of apps from being written anyway (probably even more than are written for Mac OS X), but it does seem to me like it's at least somewhat of a disadvantage for the ease of developing apps.

Microsoft actually does have some experience with this. The XBox 360 is PowerPC-based, but it's able to run games from the original XBox, which was x64-based. I'm not sure, but this is quite possibly done using the very software you mentioned from Connectix.

At any rate, if Microsoft were to release an ARM port of Windows, it'd very likely be some kind of Windows Netbook Edition, and application providers would release versions of their apps for the netbook edition. It seems like the trend is largely towards smaller computers, and software companies would be stupid not to make sure they support this space too.

It's probably a lot easier to convince application makers to port their application from Windows (x86) to Windows (ARM) than from Windows (x86) to Linux (x86). There's a pretty good chance that switching architectures for most applications just requires a recompile, like porting from x86 to amd64. It's not always that simple, but in this case you'll still have all your Win32 APIs available, whereas porting to Linux will often times mean rewriting the whole thing in GTK or QT.

ARM processors still aren't being targeted at desktop machines either, but mostly Netbooks. I could see application makers being convinced that writing a netbook edition would be worth porting architectures, but maybe not being worth the full cost of porting to Linux.

It's not really that absurd. It sounds a lot like how the world was around the time I first got online. Back then, everyone had Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, or any other online services that were around. I don't remember there being any interoperability at the time, so in effect they said "Let them build their own free internet if they want to complete." That's exactly what they did, and now these companies are all either out of business or they have morphed into just another ISP.

True, the Internet was developed long before I got online through these non-Internet services, but in the early 90s, I recall a world where the Internet was not something targeted at normal people. Researchers, businesses, the military, etc., all used the Internet. Regular people used closed services. Ultimately, openness won.

You were modded funny, and I'm not sure if you meant it as such, but this is really a pretty good point. People encourage you to come up with a password that's easy to remember. The problem is, these usually make passwords a lot easier to guess. Instead, you should just use a randomly generated string of 8 characters. If you type the password often enough, it'll be stored in muscle memory with about as much effort in my experience as trying to remember an easy to remember password.

One benefit I can see is that it gives you a single place to go get books from. I don't have to remember the web sites for 100 authors, or 50 publishers. Instead, I can just remember a single site which aggregates all the books together. Sure, I'll end up paying a higher monetary cost due to the middleman, but presumably the time cost savings is enough to me that it is worthwhile.

It's sort like having an iPhone App Store instead of hundreds of independent software publishers to download from. Another benefit is that the App Store provides common payment processing infrastructure, which keeps the cost of implementing this from being duplicated for every software publisher.

If the problem is the oxygen, clearly we need to produce a vacuum between the transmitter and the receiver. I propose a long cylinder of some rigid material, with a smaller cylinder bored out through the middle. Once this long pipe, or "tube," if you will, is connected to the transmitter and receiver, you could suck the air out of the inside of the tube and extend the wireless range. Several such transmitting and listening stations could be combined to form a series of tubes.

Maybe my sarcasm detector failed miserably, but isn't the point of a multiprocess Firefox so that you can encapsulate Flash in its own process?

I'm pretty sure kittens would be extinct within a matter of seconds if that happened.

Keep in mind that RTM means "Released To Manufacturing." In other words, it's the date the developers stop working on it and they hand the final product off to the people that stamp millions of pretty CDs, put them in boxes and ship them out to all the distribution channels. It takes a little while after RTM before you can actually buy a product in stores.

From what I've read the fears over this one are that so far it is killing a lot higher percentage than the flu normally kills. This flu also seems to kill a disproportionate number of people in the 20-50 age rage. Normally flu deaths are mostly confined to infants and the elderly.

From a pure numbers standpoint it's not so bad. What's scary is the similarity to earlier flu pandemics. No one's really sure how bad this may get, so people are taking extra precautions.

I don't think it's altruism if I can be thrown in jail if I decide not to pay my taxes.

Well, most of the problems affecting Windows machines are the result of people installing "Shiny dolphinz Screen Saverz!" or "Save $100s with secret deal-finder software," or "Your computer is infected! Download our super-safe security software that protects you from the NSA spies!" It's technically the fault of the user, but that doesn't seem to stop people from blaming Microsoft for it.

I think OWA (or whatever it was called at the time) was actually the first AJAX application. A while back, I was talking with someone from the Exchange team, and he said the team developed the XmlHttpRequest object that makes AJAX possible for the purposes of making OWA.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, no one really noticed until Google made GMail.

By "majority" in that last sense, you mean plurality. Either way, though, I'm much more a fan of that system.