"Like support the Ubuntu Edge for $60 and get a Ubuntu T-Shirt."

They do now. $50 gives you an Edge T-shirt as well as recognition as founder.

If you had a response time of a week for issues, and you had to work enough unpaid overtime that you left rather than facing an intolerable work situation then quite obviously you were not able to handle it with the staffing at hand.

My son was entering middle school, and we asked him what kind of a girlfriend he thought he'd have. And I swear to god this is what he said: "Of course nobody wants an ugly girlfriend, but it's more important for a girl to be smart than beautiful. It'd be better to go out with an ordinary looking girl that you like than a beautiful idiot."

Of course, that was back when he was 12, before the hormones really kicked in.

And I think a lot of you are confused by that. Samsung is just selling hardware. Apple is selling hardware AND creating an ongoing income stream from its ecosystem. Apple focuses on and accomplishes far higher customer retention numbers to sustain a longer purchasing cycle by consumers as the market matures. And it shows in the margins and the premium that Apple is STILL able to command for its products (despite what the emotionally-driven people on slashdot think).

From a business perspective, Apple is beating the holy crap out of its rivals and as the market matures pure hardware makers such as Samsung are being forced into more defensive positions. It's obvious just looking at the relative margin numbers.

Statistics can be very misleading, particularly the idiotic 'global market share' statistics the media seems to love to quote. The simple fact of the matter is that Apple is not diving head-first into lower economic zones. It's dipping its feet in from the higher zones but from Apple's perspective there's just no point trying to run after customers who don't won't provide any meaningful ongoing income to either Apple or Apple Developers. This also supports Apple's premium pricing model because, to be frank, the consumers of its products tend to be the same consumers who spend significant amounts of money just on telco. In the U.S. and other economically mature zones, Apple's premium is barely 1 month's phone bill. Not enough of a reason for those people to switch to a cheaper device.

China is certainly different in this regard, but Apple's business model is still generating enormous revenue and profits so to say that they are somehow 'losing' in China is losing sight of the bigger picture. Apple will tune its model but they will always sell at a premium to other devices. There's no reason for them not to.

-Matt

Actually Samsung doesn't. You are quoting a widely disseminated piece that itself quoted incorrect statistics and had a misleading title. The original was corrected but the media tends to only propagate the more sensationalist titles and articles.

Part of the problem in today's world is being able to distinguish truth from fiction. Even when using valid data, it is always possible to quote a particular statistic out of context to make it appear that the data supports a story when, in fact, it doesn't.

In this particular situation the roles are actually reversed. Samsung has become more defensive, willing to chop margins to try to gain footholds in markets, and Apple pretty much beats the shit out of all of its competitors when it comes to margins and real profit.

-Matt

Having bean a lead developer in a company that was an Oracle reseller (pretty much a necessity in some markets), your characterization of Oracle is partly wrong; the part that isn't wrong is a gross oversimplification.

I've visited some of the places where Oracle's developers work, and as you might expect I am (or rather *was*) pretty familiar with their product. Trust me, they pour an almost unthinkable amount of money into developing unique and useful technology. As you might suspect they don't do it out of the goodness of their heart; they don't even do it out of pride in the product. They do it in order to encourage large, institutional customers to make their systems dependent on features they can only get from Oracle.

There's good and bad aspects to this lock-in strategy. Some of the things Oracle simply does better than anyone else, such as transaction isolation (in an ACID environment). When you develop and test on Oracle, you can pretty much proceed like the user has exclusive access to the database -- no worrying about things like dirty reads or the like (although the DBA had better make sure he's allocated enough rollback segments). It's nice, but not critical; but it also makes switching to a different RDBMS inconvenient. Oracle has gone farther down this path than you probably ever imagined, right up to creating something they call "virtual private databases" -- super-long duration wrapping transactions that persist across database connections and function something like a fork in a source control system. I've known *very* large data acquisition and management operations (e.g. a commercial vendor of worldwide street data for GIS) that depend on capabilities they can *only* get from Oracle.

There are some things about Oracle I really like, like their transaction log management tools, which make it easy to find a past set of changes to your data and undo them with a wave of your magic wand, as if they never happened. For me that's a killer feature. On the other hand they've also done sleazy, bottom-feeder things to lock clients in, like making the way their JDBC drivers handle BLOBs incompatible with everyone else. They may have fixed that, but I don't think it was accidental this annoying incompatibility persisted so long.

I've also visited Oracle sales offices, and know about how they handle "channel" sales. It's all very numbers driven. Oracle's corporate culture is that they don't care about the customer, once he's good and locked in. Oracle's licensing is very complex, it take days of study to figure out what you're allowed to do with your Oracle installation. If a customer makes a mistake he doesn't get any slack; he's got to pay up fast. On the flip side, if a customer accidentally spends five or ten times what he needs (very easy to do), or if he licenses his installation in a way that won't allow for the growth he needs to plan for (also very easy to do), nobody is going to tell him. He's a sucker, and they've got quarterly targets to meet. It flies in the face of most people's instincts to treat customers this way.

Frankly, I find Oracle's corporate values detestable; but it's possible to work with them. They make sure it's *always* possible to work with them, because they want your money. But *don't* expect your Oracle salesman or reseller to take care of you, to look out for you, to warn you if you are about to make a mistake that's in their favor, or to have pity on you if such a mistake leaves you strapped over a barrel. Oracle's business strategy is *built* upon exploiting locked-in customers. You must approach a relationship with Oracle in a defensive posture -- as indeed you should with any agreement other than free software licenses.

And that would be one feasible setting. I expect a fair number of people to choose to disclose nothing at all.

But if I am in control over what is disclosed, I would probably elect to show some information. Keywords on the kinds of thing I'm interested in and that sort of data. If I control the information flow I'd be happy to use it to get better, more relevant information back.

Yes - but what kind, right? There are many girls with cups and other specialities you may not want to stumble upon accidentally - or particularily be on the lookout for, interests depending.

Seriously, this kind of thing would be a good step toward a system where you will have control of what to release to sites and advertisers; and where you may actually want to do so, since it benefits you along with them.

Well, I don't know about engineering simulations, but I've worked with systems that did public health simulations. What laymen *think* a computer model can do is predict the future. And maybe in some cases a model can come close to doing that. But the real value of models is to generate questions and hypotheses for investigation.

The problem with models is that they're only as good as the input data you feed them, and in many cases the data is unknowable or based on assumptions you aren't sure of. And that leads to a practical application of a model. You don't say, "I know that X is true, therefore Y will or will not happen" because you almost certainly don't know everything you'd need to know to make such a positive prediction. Rather, you say, "If you are worried about Y, you'd better check on X."

Tthat Halliburton destroyed the documentation when it knew that documentation was needed for the DWH investigation makes me wonder whether simulation results suggested Transocean (the operators of DWH) ought to be paying attention to certain preventable factors that contributed to the disaster. Even if that didn't let Transocean off the hook, it might change the distribution of damages and fines paid by the responsible parties.

It's not just lawyers. I've tried for years to get my writer friends to use some form of version control, but in vain. One of the great benefits of version control is makes it safe to try radical things with your codebase (e.g. novel or story) because even without branching you can simply recall the state of your work at any point in the past.

I myself used a literate programming tool to generate manuscripts, synopses, excerpts, and even alternate versions, but eventually I gave up because the dominant workflow task in writing, other than sitting down and banging out text, is exchanging manuscripts in MS Word format.

Newsflash: People write major systems in Java that work pretty well. People do mission critical, bet-the-company stuff in Java, and it works. *Your* mileage may vary, but it always does.

This doesn't mean it' the best choice for everything, because *nothing's* the best choice for everything

And it doesn't mean Java doesn't have serious flaws. There's something deeply ingrained in Java that encourages over-engineering. But every language has its pitfalls.

Psst... I live in Massachusetts, where we have had Obamacare since back when it was Romneycare (but after it was Bob Dolecare). The sky has not fallen. Initially there has been some supply pressure as people who were priced out of the market for certain services (adolescent mental health care was a biggy) lined up to get services they could now afford. That's a problem, but not an entirely a bad thing.

People always piss and moan about change, but change was coming in health care, even without Obamacare. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend change wasn't coming, but health care spending as a percent of GDP rose from about 5% of GDP in 1960 to 17.9% of GDP in 2009. That's twice what socialist paradise Sweden pays. Do you think things would remain the same when spending reached 25% of GDP? 30%? Or even remained at 17.9%?

"ok, so basically a language nobody gives a flying fuck about......ok, just wanted to clear that up...."

You know, there's good ways to make people care about and like a project. Constructive responses, attempts to help the curious potential new convert - even a simple straightforward admission that some particular thing is not (yet) possible can go a long way towards creating a good feeling about it.

That's not what I got from posting about my small, idiosyncratic corner case. I've gotten a mix of verbal abuse (including all-new to me words for feces), diatribes about why the alternatives all suck, and people basically telling me I'm an idiot for wanting to do something odd or off-beat.

This may surprise you, I know, but it does not make me more likely to jump on the bandwagon, try to find a solution with the software or want to communicate with the user community in any way. It makes me a lot less likely to want to do so.

Avoiding Qt and its user community, and just continue with GTK2 seems like a good short-term solution to me. Longer term I'll just focus more on Android I guess. People in that development community are really friendly and approachable.

Next time I'll just raise my little finger and then the angry comments will *really* start to fly :-)

In anycase, my brother worked for Apple for a number of years and it can be quite a high-stress environment. Probably the highest-stress environment of any company, anywhere. But ex-Apple employees often take away a good chunk of change plus lots of great ongoing contacts which works naturally well when moving onto to another job that might then do (more) business with Apple in the future. The Apple ecosystem extends far beyond the consumer!

-Matt