The high price tag is probably the primary reason that he's not selling many of these things; I know plenty of devs that successfully sell simple games at the $1 level, and they are able to sell tons of them as long as the product is good (20 or 30 thousand is not unheard of, even if you're not a huge success). A couple hundred purchases means that you made some serious mistakes either in pricing or promotion.

I disagree. Now, I haven't released any games on the store, but I've released three different applications. On one of our apps, we raised the price to $6.99 from $0.99 since it was a niche product. We now are selling 1/2 as many as we were before, but the 7x increase in price more than makes up for the difference.

The key phrase you have is "as long as the product is good." The problem is that the App Store itself is no longer a viable marketing channel, since there is so much competition. You have to be in the top 50 of a category to get any traction. The indie devs are having difficulty getting noticed in all the clutter, and a "few hundred downloads" is about on par with what I am expecting for each app we release.

Maybe eventually we will release an app that catches fire, but I'm holding expectations at the few hundred mark for now.

Technical debt builds up, and having a bunch of ActiveX apps around means you are accruing a shitload of that debt each day. 5 years ago, when 95% of the world used Windows and IE, it was still a dumb idea to build an app that used ActiveX.

Kill it, MS. Please!

You actually want Best Buy to go out of business? You want thousands of teenagers, not to mention thousands of really smart people that work at HQ, out of work? Wow. It's not like they are forcing you to shop there or somehow lowering your quality of life. Some people actually enjoy shopping there. (I'm not a huge fan, personally, but I really don't enjoy watching American businesses crumble and thousands of normal people losing their jobs.)

4 gig cards are not that expensive and they hold an amazing amount of stuff. Probably 8 gig cards will be pretty standard in a year or two. So just get the largest cards you can afford and you won't need to have lots of extra ones lying around.

The downside to doing this is that you put all of your eggs in one basket. If that card is lost or fails before you back up the images, you will lose way too many photos. For a pro photographer, that is probably unacceptable risk.

For casual photographers, though, buying the biggest card you can does make sense.

Noone demanded something like the iPhone.

That's not entirely true. I recall many blogs and other places asking for iPod functionality in a cellular phone, so they only needed one device.

The problem is, Motorola listened, and we ended up with the P.O.S. that was called 'ROKR'.

Apple knew the right way to execute on that promise, and delivered the iPhone.

Freedom isn't free.

Yes, you're absolutely right. Freedom costs $1.05.

Yeah, but that's the gift that keeps on giving all year!

You think that's cool? I think it's frightening and would be a ridiculous invasion of privacy.

Do you really want George W. Bush having access to your thoughts, even if it was just visual data? I can personally think of few worse things than that.

In fact, this paper is just corroborating what other people have already proven in this Astrophysical Journal paper from 2005.

So yes, this is an interesting topic, but really the only plus on this paper was that they further refined the size of the black hole at the center of our galaxy (and of course they are assuming black holes exist).

Where is the revolutionary part of this paper? Anyone?

Safari: I dont own a mac. I dont care to own a mac. And I dont even want to pirate OSX for my very compatible Thinkpad-T61 to run it. And pretty much every software ported from OSX to Windows is bad, and I mean BAD.

iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari are all capable and useful software products for Windows. You may not like them, and they are not perfect, but calling them "BAD" is a bit ridiculous.

Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Konqueror) seem to me to be noticeably faster than FireFox and IE in rendering pages that I frequent. To me, render time and memory footprint are a very important criteria when choosing a browser. Safari and Chrome are great options for most Windows users.

Do yourself a favor and download Safari or Chrome and give them a try, especially since you used to use Konqueror. I think you might be surprised, even if you have to give up Greasemonkey and AdBlock.

Don't look now, but you are officially an author of the most concise and rational explanation of why the Republican party is in shambles.

The crazy thing is that McCain and Palin's "maverick" reputations still weren't enough to quell the insanity of the clowns that are in charge of that party. McCain's concession speech was indeed a beautiful thing, and you could see the "real" John McCain, freed from the irrational fear-mongering that the Republican party has been flinging at us for the past eight years.

Out of curiosity, what exactly are you trying to do that Hibernate isn't solving? Is it some database-level craziness with stored procedures or something?

Hibernate, while not perfect, meets the vast majority of my needs... and for the 0.1% of the time it doesn't, I can always write my own persistence layer.

Code re-use will make you look good when future requirements come up. For example, what happens when you decide to move to MySQL to get away from Oracle, and all of your code is using JDBC with hand-coded SQL? You'll be spending weeks changing that stuff when Hibernate would have abstracted away the vast majority of issues.

Ideally, the best way to avoid bugs is to code smartly and minimize lines of code. Re-using industry standard libraries and frameworks like Hibernate and Spring lets you do that.

Even though I voted Obama and am VERY glad he won, I think that's overly harsh on McCain. Every impression I got was that he was more intelligent and sane than the Texas Village Idiot.

Nice backhanded compliment!

The problem is that McCain and Palin ran on a platform that catered to the same uneducated religious nutjobs that Bush appealed to.

They were trying to get elected, and since it worked for Bush, they figured it was their best shot. Unfortunately, it seems that McCain sold out everything that he did over the past thirty years and listened to his Karl Rove-esque advisers too much. Every time I saw McCain speak over the last couple of months, I have come away with the feeling that he wasn't happy about what he was saying.

For example, in the debate, when he never looked at Obama... and in all of the slanderous and patently outright ridiculous TV advertisements and speeches... and even at the RNC when he made his acceptance speech... it just seemed like you are watching someone who doesn't like what he's been doing.

McCain's acceptance speech, when he was again freed from the confines of his (obviously terrible) campaign advisors, showed me the McCain of last year... the one who has honor and integrity and is not afraid to say what he thinks (most of the time).