The problem with this statement is that historically and on average, female dominated industries (like nursing and teaching) don't pay as well as male dominated industries (like engineering). And when they start to, like nursing did a few years ago when there was a shortage, more and more men go into them.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this, it's the free market at work, but government contracting isn't the free market, for various reasons good and bad.

First of all, the Sparc 1 was pretty ancient 10 years ago. In 2000, Sun was barely even selling anything but sun4u based machines. I think they still sold a few sun4m machines like the sparc 20, but it certainly wasn't state of the art.

In 2000, the technical reason you bought Sun or SGI over a Pentium III running Linux was the I/O subsystem. There were also political reasons, like you wanted VC. Remember, that was the height of the dot-com bubble, and it looked better when they toured your office to have a bunch of Sun stuff in the server room.

Yes, The Pentium III could run Seti@home just as fast as a Sun, but there was no comparison in the I/O subsystem, which was, and still is, what most servers need to do fast. Linux hardware RAID support was spotty at best. LVM existed, but wasn't as good a clone of Solaris as it is today. This was also pre-HyperTransport. PC (Intel and AMD) bus technology was years behind Sun/DEC/SGI in those days, the CPUs were fast, but they couldn't get data to them fast enough.

More recently, all that has changed. Every RAID vendor supports Linux, and most do it well. PC busses designed for servers use similar architectures to older unix servers, and have ramped up the speeds (Intel hired all the DEC engineers). A "PC" based server, engineered by a company that knows what they're doing (ie not some gamer building a server optimized for FPS) can definitely compete with anything out there on the technical level, and it's got the backing of real vendors behind it, which is needed in a corporate environment.

While the study proves a fairly obvious hypothesis, what your social network could say about you could go a lot deeper than that. It's not much of a leap to determine religion, politics, sexual orientation or various other things that people don't fully consider, or could even be used to violate equal opportunity housing or hiring laws. I think there are a lot of great things about social networking, and facebook in particular, but the how it's changing cultural views and expectations of privacy is shocking and fast, and I don't think we'll have perspective on whats happening for years to come.

All correct, though it wouldn't be realistic to run a Swing app targeted towards a "normal" screen and input devices anyway. The Android UI classes (and xml layout files) make writing an app targeted towards a small screen (or various sizes of small screens) much easier, so it seems like a reasonable trade off to me.

To make another comparison, Android's API is more like Java SE than Java ME is, which is kind of sad.

Sounds like a good plan. Now if they can only find a neutral 3rd party dumb enough to pay anything close to $1 billion for it. How about Computer Associates, isn't that where bad software goes to die?

Yeah, this GUI doesn't seem to take into account the reason sophisticated users (ie people that don't maximize one window) have multiple windows open is that they /need/ multiple windows open, and they need to be able to arrange and size them so they can see all or at least a substantial subset at once. Handling the increasing number of windows that out day to day work requires (is this just me?) is something that current desktops are failing at, but 10/GUI's software doesn't seem better to me.

A lot of posts are pointing to this feature, or that feature. The fact is, Android 1.0 was may be 50% done. 1.5 is starting to come out of beta. I was annoyed with Sprint when their CEO said that Android wasn't ready for prime time, but he may have been right. Maybe 2.0 will actually be something worth getting behind. I hope so, because I have a couple apps in the market and a couple more in the works.

The thing I find most ironic is the comparison between iPhone and Android. They both lack a lot of the same things, but for some reason Apple is being heavy handed, but with Google it just hasn't been implemented yet, which is somehow excusable. Calendar and Bluetooth APIs (prior to iPhone 3.0) are the best examples. Android doesn't have either of these, and in fact removed them from 1.0 even though they were in the betas. On either device, the end result for the developer and end user is the same. Want a calendars or events in your app? Write your own in a walled garden or require your users to hack their phones. But iPhone is at least making progress, gives developers reasonable early access, and keeps its promises.

Yeah, I wasn't sure where to put the ???. But, I think that "open" doesn't always mean "open" in the same sense that we'd all like it too. Mostly I was poking fun at Google's Open Handset Alliance, which may be "open", but at the end of the day has most of the same restrictions that the iPhone does in practical terms. But that's another topic entirely.

1. Competitor is kicking your ass at X
2. Form Open X Alliance
3. Profit!