Thanks, I just may. I wonder who the other person was?

B&N has one too, I may just go for both and look for more.

Amazon was an experiment. I read the library's copy of Andy Wier's The Martian, really liked it, and googled to see if he had any more titles. Wikipedia said that he couldn't get a publisher so he introduced it as an Amazon ebook, it went to their best seller list, and a publisher bought the hardcover rights for a six figure sum.

So I thought, what the hell, why not give it a try? I thought it might give me extra exposure, but I was wrong.

It doesn't help that most VPNs are so easy to detect and block at the IP header level. PPTP depends on the GRE IP protocol (47), and L2TP is usually tunneled over IPSec, which depends on the ESP IP protocol (50). By using different protocol numbers in the IP headers, the designers of these protocols made it mindlessly easy to block them, and made them harder to support, because routers have to explicitly know how to handle those nonstandard protocol numbers.

You can build a full VW Beetle from 3rd party parts. Quite literally, you could have absolutely no parts sourced from Volkswagen or their OEM manufacturers at all. It's an expensive hobby, but people do it.

Try this: Crash safety testing.

Well, assuming the article saying that the consumer can "design" it really means design, and not just select from a few options to make it custom.

Nah, it's more like whining that Chryslers should be able to burn the same 87 octane gas as Fords without having to buy overpriced filler necks on license from GM. Or that GE lightbulbs should be allowed to work on ConEd electricity. Standards exist for a reason. Letting monopolists enforce their own whims without accomodating the competition is bad for everyone in the long run. Ask JP Morgan what happened to Standard Oil in the courts.

On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, no. Standards can only go so far. Suppose you design a laptop that has an innovative power storage system that can power it for a week, but in order to get the energy density high enough, you had to run the battery packs at 48VDC. Could you design it to be compatible with an existing 12–18V power supply? Sure. Would it be energy efficient? No.

The same goes for software. If you're designing a new OS, you could ostentibly add the necessary hooks to let it run Android apps, but your OS probably won't run them as efficiently, and you'd prefer folks to develop apps for your own native APIs anyway, because that results in a better, more consistent user experience.

There is no fundamental difference other than the webpages are standardized and the interface between apps and the OS is not standardized. They are fundamentally the same -- apps can be converted to websites and vice versa.

There is no fundamental difference between ice and steam other than the temperature. I don't recommend trying to walk on steam or clean your carpets with ice.

The reality is that the layout system and DOM programming interfaces available for web programming are positively primitive compared with app programming. (I'm deliberately ignoring WebGL for the moment, which though powerful, is low-level enough that it isn't practical except for games, and still isn't broadly available.) And networking is even more limited (same-origin restrictions) without cooperation from every destination site.

So in theory, yes, but in practice, not even close. And the fact that even relatively straightforward stuff like HTML editing isn't fully standardized (or, frankly, fully working) across major browsers should give you serious pause when considering standardizing anything as complex as a full-blown collection of application APIs across multiple platforms.

OS companies go to great lengths to create system APIs that are incompatible with other OSes to prevent developers from developing platform-independent apps.

Uh... no. OS companies build their systems using entirely different programming languages, for philosophical reasons that diverged decades back. Because of that difference, they create system APIs that are incompatible with other OSes because it would not be feasible to create APIs that aren't. Additionally, there are a number of fundamental differences between the two platforms (including their security model) that require platform-specific handling. Those differences have nothing to do with wanting to be incompatible, and everything to do with designing APIs to meet their specific goals and ideals.

In fact, platform vendors have gone to a great deal of effort to reduce portability problems. That's why both Android and iOS support cross-platform APIs such as POSIX and OpenGL ES. By taking advantage of those technologies, developers can write much of their code in a platform-independent way (with lots of caveats, of course).

Sounds like a buying opportunity... for put options....

But where he is being completely batshit illogical is where he argues that once app platforms are common carriers, the users must give equal treatment to the platforms rather than the other way around. To use the previous example, it would be as if the government mandated that if you offered to ship something via UPS, you must also offer to ship it via FedEx. Such a mandate has never happened, and probably never will.

Not offer to ship it. Ship it. With physical products, the analogy can't really work, but the closest equivalent would be mandating that companies take bids when working government contracts....

Either way, though, the idea is absurd for several reasons: platforms can't easily be compatible with one another, you can't realistically expect companies to design software for platforms that they're unfamiliar with, and there's not even a guarantee that it would be possible for a company like Apple to port their software to Blackberry, because the OS may lack required functionality under the hood. Add to that the risk of giving anyone who creates a platform with ten users the right to demand that Apple port iMessage to their token platform, and you can see how such a law would quickly spiral out of control.

What the Blackberry CEO should really be asking for is a law mandating that all protocols and exchange formats be open (with reasonable documentation) and free of any patent encumbrances that are fundamental to any implementation of the protocol. Such a law would ensure that Blackberry could freely implement iMessage compatibility themselves. And the right way to argue for such a law is twofold:

• Communications technologies must be standard if you want people to communicate with one another. It's harmful to the consumer when a text message either costs money or doesn't, depending on what phone the other person happens to use. After all, the recipient's hardware platform could change at any time. And it is doubly problematic when you factor in protocols like FaceTime, where you have to run entirely different apps and contact the other user in entirely different ways depending on what kind of phone the other person is using (e.g. Skype if the other person is running Android).
• Protocols and file formats contain copyrighted material created by users. To the extent that those protocols and file formats are controlled solely by a single company, they have the effect of taking the users' creations and locking them up. If that company goes out of business, the users' creative works could be permanently lost.

The extent to which the second argument applies depends to some degree on the ephemerality of the communication, of course.

As a happy side effect, such a law would have the benefit of putting an end to patents on technologies like GSM, CDMA, LTE, etc. for the same reasons.

That's farther down the list. "Don't implicate yourself, even to your friends" :)

I'm the wrong one to implicate. Your diversion will be a bit too transparent. You may as well hang a neon sign in your front window saying "IT'S ME!"

At best, someone will show up to my door with doughnuts, and we'll have a good laugh over it.

A lot of these guys get caught because they open their yaps. A lot of us old timers from the early days never got caught. When the 414's were taken down I know several people that avoided it simply because they actually listened to the "trust no one" mantra. Just like how the guys that took over WTTW never got caught because they did NOT open their big fat mouths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

So a tip from someone old..... earning "cred" is for noobs. Keep your mouth shut and you really reduce the risk of getting caught.