Hey, freaky, death-threatening Muslims, you've got a lot of work ahead of you...

http://www.google.com/images?q=muhammad

Please catch all of these sucky programmers before they graduate, my company hires them, and I have to work with them. Make them change their majors early to philosophy, animal husbandry, underwater basketweaving, or anything else. Especially, weed out the diligent and responsible types that have no knack for solving technical and logical problems. They can become project managers, which is also a high-paying job.

I remember when programming was a calling, not just a career. Those were better days.

I always thought it was a terrible design to require installation of hardware-specific drivers for a remote printer. You know how you get some crummy nonstandard print status window popping up when you print? Like it will be this hyperbranded thing with a zazzy, colorful diagram of your printer and "buy toner online now" button on it. Almost indistinguishable from a pop-up advertisement except that there is a progress bar showing your print job going through. As far as I can tell, that is the only reason for there to be local drivers for remote printers--so manufacturers can bring up their fancy nonstandard dialogs out of some paranoid necessity to convince you your printer is not a commodity item. In fact, they would probably prefer you called it something other than a "printer", i.e. your "HP-SmartPaperDuplicator TM".

So, yes, this is one thing Google seems to be getting right--a standard print dialog with no local drivers for remote printers.

I would guess that Google shrugs off "Just 21% of Android users purchase one or more paid apps per month, compared with 50% of iPhone users". A lot of the free apps are ad-supported. Google bought AdMob which seems to be the dominant way to deliver ads to Android phone apps. From Google's point of view, having lots of free ad-supported apps is just fine. I agree with O'Neil that the incentives for investing in development for Android are bad now, but that must be more a function of the smaller number of Android devices out there than the Android Market working poorly. More Android phones will get released and there will be more money in the pot for developers.

A more sophisticated search interface to the same selection of Android Market games would be good. I feel like you need one interface for newcomers, (the current one) and another interface for power users, i.e. Let's see all the titles from one publisher or have some tags or subgenres to look through. Still, I have never had much trouble finding anything with keyword searches. So I don't know what all the whining is about.

Hardware compatibility is a BFD, and yeah, it's only going to get worse. Unsophisticated developers will always be inclined to test just on whatever phone they have. And there is no practical way to make Android SDK developer-proof at this point. I don't want the solution to be filter-by-hardware queries on Android Market. It is possible to write one app that runs on all devices, it's just that developers don't write the apps correctly. There might be some automated testing tools that run on the submission side that check for more obvious errors like "Force closes" on hardware X. Maybe also some sort of automated collection of it-works-on-hardware-x votes from users downloading an app will earn an app a certain gold star, which in turn can be used to filter out "doesnt-work" apps from an individual users search results.

But holy jeezus, do not do not do not let the goddamn carriers run the app store. Oh my god, the horrors we have put up with. If BREW were a physical object, I would happily defecate on it.

I agree and would mod you up if I could. Run the same set of tests again but pinch the subject on the arm every 5 seconds. The subjects will be a little agitated and distracted and maybe give similar results.

India is a democracy with a much better record of treating its citizens as free human beings. It also doesn't seem to have the taste for global imperialism that China does. In China, you can disappear for protesting on the street. In China, you put in an application if you'd like to move to another city. In China, the internet is filtered. India should be a great friend of the United States. Americans have a lot in common with them, and in that part of the world, America could use more friends.

As far as I can tell, Cisco wasn't involved in the decisions. It looks like the writer went to the two ISPs for comment, but came up dry--well, except for that one anoymous comment. Then the writer asked Cisco what they thought about the whole thing to fill out the piece. Probably the ISPs are afraid of being targeted in retaliation and want to keep a low profile.

Maybe if this was based on an open standard defining how to implement the same services on a non-Google platform, this would all be more palatable.

I'm not worried. We are pretty soon going to have a bunch of people that are heartbroken about their data from 10 years ago being lost. The travel photos, the e-mailed love letters, the brilliant blog posts. And these people will create demand for longer-term storage and data collection techniques we don't have now. Why should it happen in the near future if it hasn't already? Because we first needed a generation of people that use computers and the internet as the primary way of expressing their life. Nobody was in that boat ten years ago. Now anybody reading this is. So consumer-grade "lifetime" storage options will enjoy a more prominent place on the market. And if you can get some old data to stick around for a half century or more, the value of it bumps up to "time capsule" status. Which means somebody might think to archive your mess of media around the time you die. Maybe some younger cousin of yours will take care of it. Heck, funeral parlors might offer data archival as a service 20 years from now.

That is an interesting question. As a US engineer working with Japanese engineers, I am constantly comparing things they do to how we do, and wondering where general differences are and how they came about.

• Here is a map of the Tokyo rail system: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Greater_Tokyo_rail_network.png
• And here is a map of the London rail system: http://www.tandrag.com/images/uploads/London_Rail_Animation_thumb.JPG

You may notice that the London map is heavily organized around separate lines. The Tokyo map is much more interconnected, like they threw that slime on the ground and planned it out by nature. It may be that the Tokyo engineers were allowed to use a purer approach than the Londoners, less confined by politics. In Seattle, I know that when we talk about where our fledgling light rail system is going to go or not go, it is done piecemail with major battles fought over a single line at one time. I.e. We connect from downtown Seattle to the airport, hitting these neighborhoods. The concept of the route has to be simple enough to be explained in one sentence for it to succeed on a ballot. If some engineers rolled in to town promising some system that maximizes coverage of all points in most efficient way, etc., that goes down in flames. When your bosses are grumpy, cheap, and have a short attention span--then rail networks get built piecemeal without the advantages of overall planning.

It's a little sad that somebody, in pursuit of an audience, had to angle the story towards "we could be using mold to make design decisions." Your mass transit planners are not going to call in a consultant with a suitcase full of mold, obviously. The paths chosen for rail have so many political factors that the "most efficient" model has little relevance.

But just stop thinking of utility for a moment. Look at those pictures of the mold growing to reach all points and form little roads between them. That is fantastic! "Because you could then plan light rail and freight logistics and--" STOP! No, don't jump on to the practical applications yet. Take a moment to think about that simple little organism doing that complicated thing and how cool that is. Those pictures are breathtaking.

And after that, maybe try to write a matching algorithm to see if you can predict which paths will form by the slime. And then see if that algorithm offers something that the human-designed ones don't have already. And then maybe integrate and devise new algorithms based on what was learned. And then see what practical applications there are for these algorithms. This is what the scientists and engineers will actually end up doing if it is possible. Can we stop acting like bored little brats that every scientific observation isn't immediately useful?

Yes, you could use Sikuli to fire up a text editor, individually press the keys to write all the lines of code, launch the compiler/linker/whatever. So it meets your weird definition of completeness. However, I suspect you could not use Sikuli to write a program that writes a Sikuli program to write Sikuli. I could be wrong, though.

Come on, let's cut through the default Slashdot snark. The image capture aspect of Sikuli is brilliant! I don't like the tagline "program anything with Sikuli" because 99% of software should be written in something else. But think of writing test scripts that can use the image matching features. If the software works as advertised, then you could throw together UI test cases way faster than anything else I've seen. System administration tasks should be a good match too. The resulting code would be brittle and hard to maintain, but for quick one-off scripts, sure... I can see it.

I think I get what you're saying... When someone casually lists some heinous action in a list of considered options, it makes it seem like that person is nearly ready to do that heinous thing. I.e. if I say, "stomping on babies is logistically impractical," then it sounds like I'm morally ambivalent about babystomping, right? Still, you have to consider the tone of voice that people use when writing papers for their academic peers. If you want to be taken seriously and get your paper published, you don't voice your moral opinions in the paper. And in social sciences, knowledge is probably advanced more easily if the moralizing is left out. That's for something for Mr. Sunstein to do on a PR visit to the Colbert Report or Daily Show, I suppose. It's all about context.