"China" is a rather vague definition.

Chinese manufacturer's make products, which are sold to customers in the US (in this example), in US Dollars. But these aren't much good to the manufacturer (i.e. he doesn't really want to pay his employee's in USD, or at least the Chinese government wouldn't approve of that), so he sells the USD to the People's Bank of China, who use these dollars to buy Treasury Bonds. In return, the People's Bank gives the manufacturer the amount of Yuan that it thinks is appropriate.

By that definition, does a Pension also qualify as a Pyramid scheme ?

Sorry, but Nokia is not (and never was) developing anything Android related. Nokia's software strategy for smartphones were Series 60 Symbian and Meego.

Well, this depends on their target audience.

If you have C/C++ code, porting it to ARM should be a huge deal. Yes there will be some differences, yes, there will be bugs - but in terms of effort its manageable. And more importantly, every single vendor has to do this effort, so Microsoft doesn't have to do anything.

Because Microsoft are saying this now, with no product that anyone can "buy" right now (or even soon), this probably means the audience for this news is *Developers* (the single intelligent word that Mr Balmer has uttered in the last 20 years, so good, he had to say it multiple times for it be considered a quote). They are now selling the ARM architecture to developers. If the developers buy this story, the applications will follow.

And of course, some developers will be more prepared than others. Don't expect an ARM version of Photoshop anytime soon, but an ARM version of Firefox is something that could be cranked out very easily.

Wikipedia tells me that .NET (and therefore managed code) is nearly 10 years old (13 February 2002)

I'm pretty sure that someone in Redmond was thinking about supporting multiple platforms when they started architecting their software compiler strategy back then. It just took their management structure 5 years to wake up to the idea.

Now people have to go in and remove all of that crud which is blocking porting their SW to a different architecture ...

DLL Hell was yesterday, tomorrow is P/Invoke hell.

Aha,

so more like a "we put our own money in there, so it has to be a good thing".

reading the article properly helped a little bit ! :)

Did evil just become even more evil while I was sleeping over New Years ?

Goldman Sachs aren't exactly known for their "good values".

Why the hell does an investment bank, who normally act as a "service provider" want to take a direct stake in a Social networking company ?

... great now this post will make this article appear as "fake" when you want to really find articles which are relevant to Britney and Lindsay ...

I'm sorry, but lets take a step back here ...

This sounds like a glitch in the search algorithm than anything else. Publishing trends is interesting, and can allow us to learn more about what we (as a species) do with the internet. This information is clearly abused by a few (who then go out and write fake page which use the popular keywords to attract attention to their page), but this is an abuse of the Trends information that google provides, not something inherently evil.

Google (or any search engine) could just tweak their results to reduce the importance of sites which are written *after* a topic became trendy. At least to give the existing articles a head start. Or I can imagine a million other ways in which they could tweak the algorithm.

But I don't think what the article is implying (that google should stop publishing Trends) should be taken seriously.

Or even better,

Check the stats on their own database (i.e. the App Store).

I found this just now: http://www.iappphone.com/stats/

The top 5 "Submitters"

Brighthouse Labs - 1855
Iceberg Reader - 1369
Molinker Inc. - 1011
FidesReef - 825
iLike inc - 588

From 15 minutes of research, its pretty clear to see that Brighthouse Labs, Molinker and FidesReef were (/are) definitely polluting the App Store.

In some cases, its very clear why Apple have introduced the "In App Purchasing" - most of these should probably disappear when all the duplicated Apps get merged back to a common one.

But from Apples point of view, they're still trying to prove that their platform has the most Apps. They've already put the "technology" into place - so now all they need to do is rush in and save the day, by forcing the developers to merge their Apps.

But seriously, with power comes responsibility. They're finding out that its not always easy to walk that tightrope.