Since when are more features equivalent to a better product ?

The only feature of use to me is an autoscaling platform and on that front, the only credible offering is Google App Engine.

the database is cloud SQL

The database is cloud SQL which is a managed version of MySQL that Google maintains, patches and replicates for you.

If you prefer the NoSQL camp, Google has also wrapped their datastore as an independent product called cloud datastore so you can call it from PHP on App Engine too.

another one on the list: Nymgo

VoIP outfilt Nymgo lately rejected my payment (which already went through with the bank) and started asking me for all sorts of private documents. Of course, their support never replied when I said "no way" and their support escalation procedure was equally a memory hole. Avoid them.

PaaS

Go home with your servers, or maybe go for a PaaS like Google AppEngine. It scales automatically. Failovers are automatic too. Data is automatically replicated across two or three datacenters. I do not know how cheaper or more expensive it would be compared to Rackspace (well, it's hard to be more expensive than Rackspace) but at least you get more than dumb VMs. And you get none of the "maddening problems" mentioned above.

(disclosure: I work at Google)

(disclosure II: independently of that, PaaS is the future, the rest is legacy)

PayPal censorship

Another example:

A while ago, PayPal blocked payments to my book selling business because they did not like the books I was selling. They asked me to "fix" my catalog before they would reinstate the payment. Seriously, this happened. I was shocked. The debate about the written word like the works of the Marquis de Sade being broadly available or "on the index" is an interesting debate but that debate was closed 100 years ago. PayPal has no standing for reopening it. I do not even understand how PayPal could think they have a right to censor books. But they did and still do.

Avoid PayPal like the plague

right to delete credit card details

I would love to be able to tell businesses to delete my credi card details. Or even better, I would love them to be forbidden from storing them in the first place. You want my credit card ? I'll need an invoice first.

Samsung out = bad news

If even Samsung is bailing out of WinRT, there seems to be a really big problem. Usually Samsung plays the early adopter role quite benevolently. They do not mind experimenting with a couple of devices and they do not care about OS consistency much either.

Equal airtime for both sides of a debate: OK, if both parties are there for debating

In the US, some networks give equal airtime to evolutionists and to creationists. Creationists are actually pushing for the "equal airtime" rule to apply to education too. But let us not forget that the creationist camp is not there for the scientific debate. They have no arguments and no evidence to show. Their only goal is religious propaganda. They need to discredit science globally because scientifically-educated audiences never buy their nonsense (sorry, "holly scriptures").

No equal airtime for people who want the airtime to push their agenda and have no scientific evidence to offer.

For climate change, I understand the situation is more difficult for journalists as they have to sort scientific arguments for one side, for the other, and then also the arguments of whackos and lobbies of all kinds who push for the removal of any evidence they do not like. It's not an easy task, but not a reason either to give up and just give equal airtime to all.

is this an article or a troll post ?

Everyone is looking for the "correct" climate model. Why is it that any scientist studying a positive feedback mechanism is labeled an idiot while anyone studying a negative feedback loop is a genius ?

go civil society, go

Yes, the long slide of copyright and patent law towards the american standard seems to be slowing down with at least some MPs realizing that 1) their voters do not support it and 2) it is probably not such a great idea for the long-term production of new IP.

Scared Orlowskis, short on arguments are now flying into conspiracy territory with headlines like "who's done it ?" , "who is pulling the strings from the shadows ?" and so on. Good.

The answer is simple: civil society. Yes, such a thing exists. We, the people also have economic and societal interests that we would like to promote alongside the purely economic interests of corporations.

For example, we love arts: music, movies, paintings, live performances. We want more of them, we want new ones and yes, we can pay. But we know that only true artists can deliver new works of art. So the money needs to go to them, not some greedy middlemen. We also want to have useful access to these works of art, without unworkable DRM schemes and territorial restrictions. Thank you for mentioning Apple in your article. They are the ones who killed DRM on digital music making it actually useful.

An example from Japan: a Japanese law prohibits replays of Anime series on TV. This amounts to artificially dialing the economic value of an anime after its first airtime to zero. Pretty extreme isn't it ? Yet, the Japanese have found it a useful incentive for the creation of new works. Now compare this to the author's life +70 years copyright in the USA ? It's a different option and yet, you will have a hard time labeling the Japanese as evil communists or dumb freetards.

So yes, I welcome this fresh look at IP law. I think it was badly needed. The way Orlowski likes to describe it, "more IP versus less IP" is a reduction that does not do it justice. The real issues at stake have to do with the dynamism of the arts and entertainment scene and, for patent law, with the dynamism of our industry. Those are important topics, well worth having a fresh look at. Let us think them through and implement an IP system that works for society as a whole and not copy the US and the dead-end their neo-conservative policies have brought them to.

big iron love

"I love big Iron"

I used to love big iron too. Even configuring it was kind of fun... until I found better things in life. Now I send my code to App Engine end work on my underwater basket-weaving skills instead ( http://xkcd.com/1052/ ).

MS = perfection in 1992 ? Are you kidding ?

"In 1992, Microsoft had around 11,000 employees and executed its desktop Windows strategy to perfection. "

The intel 386 chip with a proper 32 bit protected mode came out 1986 (!). MS did not have a half-decent (preemptively multitasked as the chip designers intended) OS until Windows 95, a full 9 years later ! OK, you could count NT on its technical merits released in 1993 so only 7 years later. That's a bloody eternity in computer time. I remember in those times the long long long wait for a real operating system that would actually use the 80386 in a non-catastrophically crappy way.

What does this really tell us?

Notice that the data match occurs in a region where ALL hypothesis produce roughly the same data. I wonder what the probability is of this data matching by chance. After all, if ANY hypothesis you consider in your model produces a curve that matches your data, something is probably amiss.

not in beta but in R&D

Claiming that Siri is in beta is trying to make people believe it will get better once released. However, the underlying tech is simply not nailed down yet. This is ongoing R&D and I would even say that the R&D is pretty much stalled. We are at 20% of where we need to be to have a computer truly understand spoken language and chances are in 10 years, we will be at 21%. If what Apple claimed in their advert was true, it would be a groundbreaking, earth-shattering, mind-boggling advance in AI science. Unfortunately, it is just marketing hyperbole. They deserve to go down for false advertisement.

self-heling technology

I like the Microsoft "self-healing" technology described as "restarting the VMs on other boxes". i once had an IT tech who would similarly believe that REFORMAT-RE-IMAGE-REBOOT was an efficient self-healing woodoo magic.

DRM not needed

I disagree with the comments saying that DRM is required to enable a movie rental service like Netflix.

It is the same argument as used a couple of years ago to explain that DRM was required to make a music purchase service like iTunes work. "Otherwise you could copy the music off your neighbour's computer instead of buying it, gov'ner - duh." went the argument. iTunes is now a thriving DRM-less music service.

For netflix rentals, all you have to do is enable streaming in the time window the user has paid for. He comes later, the "watch now" button is not there anymore. No need to change the HTTP or HTML spec for that. Of course some people will record the stream but ... This has been debated over and over and SETTLED with iTunes.

gameplay is everything

This review is completely misses the point of the game which is not in exploration or event fancy visuals. It is the first game since prince of persia 1 with credible and entertaining sword fighting mechanics. While swords appear in many games, it's mainly dull hack'n'slash. Here parrying actually works and you have to master it in order to win.

And by the way, I spent countless hours on Infinity Blade 1 and 2 without ever making an in app purchase. You can regard in-app purchased in this game as a "please donate" button, nothing more.

Universal human rights

It is frightening to see how many human-rights bashers there can be in this forum. I would have expected this from brain-washed chinese but not here. It shows that you guys have never lived under a dictatorship, and certainly never fought your way out.

So, yes, having an official paper stating "universal human rights" is useful. You can show it to your local dictator and publicly shame him as a dictator. It is useful because all dictators want you to believe how free and happy you are under their rule. All stalinist countries called themselves "democratic".

And yes, it is useful for the human right to be "universal" because otherwise your beloved leader tells you that these rights are good for some, but not for you because <insert bullshit of choice here>.

And yes also, these "universal rights" are something we, humans, made up. They also represent a choice and there are different choices possible. They are universal because they are minimal and their creators believe that choosing not to respect these basic rights usually ends up in dictatorship.

An example of a different choice of society is the asian (mostly Chinese/Confucean) model. Voices against "unversal human rights" are strong in Asia because they do not fit the traditional chinese society where the needs of an individual are deemed inferior to the needs of a group. In this model, when the group can be better off without you than with you, you are expected to remove yourself from the gene pool and if yuo do not, the group will help. This is also a working, stable and productive form of society, although I doubt any of the human-rights bashers above would enjoy living in it.

I am a proponent of "universal human rights" because they are needed tool in averting repressive regimes, driving the progress of democracy, and ultimately reducing the sufferings inflicted by wars and conflicts.

this guy must have an MBA

What is a "hadoop developper" anyway?

In my previous company, where I was recruiting the developers, we were building software for all mobile platforms of the day + maintaining a website with a database + building Mac and PC client software too.

There was no question of having "palm" or "SQL" or "Java" or "anything" developer. The skillset required was:

- good skills in algorithmics (this must come from school training - cannot be grafted on later)

- good analytical mind for problem solving

- good interpersonal skills for teamwork, learning and adapting

- ability to demonstrate mastership in some tech speciality (the math behind 4G network protocols for one hire - whatever, just show us you are good at something)

additional plusses were:

- be a team driver on methodology

- be a team driver on new tech (have useful knowledge to share and skills to do so)

Absolute NO-NOs:

- hackers (try to force a hacker into a 1.5 year dev project ...)

- script kiddies (great superficial knowledge in one area, no depth - out!)

bad stiching indeed

I wanted to post about the bad results too. I am not the first one apparently....

Iaas = obsolete

Startups are buit on AppEngine (or other PaaS). They don't have money to spend on installing and configuring servers, let alone networking. Any startup, that goes Iaas, it's competitor based on a PaaS will outdistance them.

True story from 2011: two startups, same product, one on AppEngine, the other one using node.js + mongoDB (in order to "be cutting edge and cool") on a IasS. The first one launched. The second one launched, crashed under load and is now spending valuable engineering resources on scaling their servers instead of working on features.

who needs it?

We now have HTML5 for cross-platform apps based on a "heavy" runtime, and native SDKs for programming "close to the metal" (or will have whenever Microsoft decides what the native API for Windows is, it looks like they have finally done so in Win8).

Not much space left for alternatives in the middle.

meh?

iOS and Android already have their dev environments. Who wants another layer of SW on top of that ?

If you do not want to code natively for the platform, then make a web app.

The Market save us all!

Another article that forgets that capitalists markets do not work for non-renewables. They work great for renewable stuffs, like wheat for instance. Market prices can adjust supply and demand across seasons. Speculators buy wheat after harvest and resell it in the winter. For other produce like cherries, people eat them in spring when they are abundant and make do without cherries the rest of the year when the cost is prohibitive. It works because the next year, there is more wheat and more cherries.

For a resource in fixed supply, like oil and gas, market forces optimize the speed of exhaustion! As we exhaust our limited supply, the stuff becomes rare hence expensive which is an incentive to go grab whatever there is left. The situation is even worse for overfishing. The last fish is going to fetch a million so you can be sure there will be a race to catch it.

-1 to Andrew for not mentioning this and chanting "markets markets markets" with the liberal crowd.

patents worked well until the rules were broken

Prior to the US and EU patent offices discarding the rules of the patent game, the system was quite stable. They did so on their own, with the help of the "patent community" i.e. patent attorneys who profit from there being more patents. It was done without any legitimacy at all but for some obscure reason, US courts sided with the USPTO and the EU patent office started to ape them. Could it be that courts and patent offices are run by legal experts, the same that profit from there being more patents ?

To sum up the situation before, a patent had to describe a physical invention, i.e. the embodiment of an idea into a physical machine. And the invention had to be non-obvious for the man of the art. The "physical" part was not there to exclude software, but to exclude theories, mathematical formulas or other pure ideas.

So for example, you could not patent centrifugal succion by itself (when you rotate a cylinder, the centrifugal force creates a gradient of pressure inside, with low pressure - succion - in the middle). You could however patent a centrifugal pump, or a centrifugal succion cleaning machine.

The system stood on good legs: ideas were assimilated to science where publication is the norm. Patent protection was deemed necessary only when a specific implementation of an idea was considered because it required setting a manufacturing operation into motion which requires time. The protection provided the time.

Benefit for investors: possibility to implement and productize.

Benefit for society: inventions are described publically and become public after a period of exclusivity

The USPTO first abolished the first rule by allowing patents on pure ideas which created a flood of over broad patents since no specific implementation was required. The "one-click" patent was born and patent trolls followed. Under the volume, it was forced to abolish the second principle too because it did not have the resources to asses non-obviousness anymore.

Again, the goal was plain and simple: more patents of lesser quality results in more patent litigation and counseling hence more money for the "patent community", which is why the "patent community" did it.

Such is the sad story of the biggest "robbery of the 20th century".

It also shows us the way back to normal: reinstate the old rules.

"plain silly not to support .epub" - even sillier not to understand why

.epub is the source format of .azw. Amazon is not asking to "convert" epubs to azw. They are asking you to compile them. The compiled format is much more efficient on the device and it is one of the reasons the device can be cheap and have a long lasting battery.

By the way, epub has always been designed to be a source format to be compiled before distribution. It is based on HTML and you all know how badly browsers deal with HTML pages 1MB long, as books are. It does not work well even on dektop workstations with gigabytes of ram.

It is only Adobe who started pitching their support of epub as "native" by which they meant non compiled. It wasn't better in any way, just way slower but it sounded so cool to publishers.

So saying that the kindle is not compatible with epub is as silly as saying that a PC is not compatible with C++. Indeed, a C++ file does nothing if you click on it but it is not menat to and C++ is still the #1 choice for writing PC software. So is epub on Kindle.

funny how it works

1) Lobby your way to a system that ensures pork flies in your direction (here: patent system, for the benefit of lawyers and no one else)

2) Ignore those who cry foul, just make sure it stays there.

3) Even the Orlowskis of the world at one point start lambasting people for not complying with the protection scheme.

you pay, they deliver

This sounds like good engineering. If they deliver significant performance increases with their HW/SW co-design, then surely plenty of people will be ready to pay for a better product. I cannot see what is wrong with designing something better ans selling it for a premium.

That's my heater

260 MWh / 365 / 24 ≈ 30KW

The heater in my home is 20KW. I did not know it could run 2/3 of Google datacenters. I think I'll buy another and out-power Google next year :-)

I agree

Couldn't agree more. If I type a query on Google, I have already made my choice of search engine: Google. I don't care about other search engines and I do not want to see results from any other search engines. Actually, I think Google is currently too lenient. It should ban search engines from its results altogether, unless you are explicitely looking for "search egine".

Long live the ribbon

I like the ribbon in Office as well. Of course, retarded secretaries howled because they had to learn their Office again. They were already howling when their IBM typewriter was being decommissioned in favor of a computer. For new users however, the ribbon is way better than crawling through text menus.

Congrats to Microsoft for having the guts to upset their existing users and do something disrupting, innovative, and simply better.

And also shame on all the commenters asking for "choice" in UIs. I am fed up with UIs that give you 10 bad choices. You spend an hour trying all 10 options, only to realize they are all crap and that they are there because the UI designer was not able to make one decent UI. 10 turds is not a replacement for one good product.

legacy

Here is Job's legacy to the tech world:

- make products that actually work, even in their details

- do not ship something unfinished

- do not ship products in response to a tech fashion

- make products that respond to a consumer need

- design products by using them, not through market analysis data

Wow! Who would have thought. This is pure genius. I just wish the rest of the tech industry would listen.

Top service from Dell

I had a good experience with Dell and their crapacitors. We had 10 of them in the office. Over time, some 8 of them failed. We called Dell each time and as soon as we said "blown capacitor", we had a tech in the office changing the motherboard. No question asked about date of purchase or warranty whatsoever.

It is bad that they sold us bad kit in the first place but every tech company shipped kit with crapacitors in them back then. It was an industry-wide cock-up and I found that Dell did a good job of crisis management.

fad-based business

The author forgot that Facebook's business is entirely based on fashion. While Facebook remains fashionable, it has users and ad revenue. When it is not fashionable anymore, it dies.

There is nothing in the Facebook proposition that will keep users around, once the hype is gone.

Friends ? I have friends, real ones at that, and I do not need facebook to keep in touch.

Games ? Real games in 3D are better and do not need facebook either.

Communications ? Well email and Skype work quite well, thank you.

So if I was to bet on the 2020 Facebook valuation, I put my chip on $0 rather than $1T

rant against regulation ?

I agree with most of this article but what is the purely ideological rant agains any kind of regulation at the beginning ? It says more or less this:

*free markets favor innovation, innovation can resolve energy crisis, thus hail free markets.*

If that is not a purely ideological statement then I have never seen one.

Free markets also generate waste: for example all the cars we junk to buy new ones just because fixing them in the European free market costs too much money. Ask the Africans: they can make a Renault truck run 40 years. Some of this waste has to be regulated away. Markets will take care of it only when scarcity kicks in and in many fields, we do not want to wait that long.

Good segway to another example: free markets do not solve "tragedy of the commons" situations. Prime example: overfishing. Free market laws state that overfished fish, as it gets rare, becomes more expensive. A great incentive to sail out and grab what is left before your competitors do. In the end we are all left with no fish at all.

in an article calling on common sense, I would expect a more balanced opinion on the free market / regulation equilibrium.

less financial bubles: good

Can the author explain in plain terms what is wrong with a 0.003% tax on financial transactions, or, to put it in a different way, why is it so disastrous to earn 0.003 points of profit less on a transaction. Everyone who makes a real investment is expecting 1%-20% out of it (sometimes X00% for high-tech startups). So now it becomes 0.997%-19.997%. I do not see much change here.

The volume of transactions will go down dramatically, but the author fails to explain why that is a bad thing. The piece about the Swedish experiment is pathetically self-referencing. It says that hte tax has reduced financial activity and was therefore wrong. But where is the link between financial activity and societally positive effects ? I am not saying there is none. I am just pointing out that the author does not explain it.

His stance is the classic arrogant finace-boy attitude: "If X is bad for my artifical market world, then let us scare the hell out of everone to protect my income".

Shallow arguments, scaremongering - smell like a tea party doesn't it ?

So dear mr author, you seem to be an intelligent person so give us the real answers please:

- what is the real effect of a reduction of financial activity on the businesses and industries that need financing? I tend to think that approximately 1% of financial transactions are involved in financing real activities. The rest are zero-sum games played between finance boys that have no useful purpose for society, but that have real risks involved (financial bubles that can crash the real economy). Disprove this if you can.

- why does a 0.003% tax reduce financial transactions so dramamtically ? Isn't it an indication that the transactions displaced by the tax were extremely low profit and were therefore unlikely to be related to the financing of real activities.

- where do the enourmous profits of the banking sector come from? Why can banks afford to pay so many finance boys to play zero-sum games ? Is it not because thay take the money to do so from the worker's wallets ? Did you think about the positive effect of the Tobin tax on the worker's wallets because of this ?

Thank you in advance for your answers.

sunny with chance of flying pigs

Give Nokia and Microsoft some time to execute on this deal. Granted, behemoths like those are not well known for their speed or excellency of execution. And yet, Microsoft has managed to deliver WP7 that is not just a me-too product. It is innovative, well thought-out and feels genuinely different from iOS or Android. So it's pigs flying time and maybe Nokia+Microsoft will manage to give the Apple & Google world some solid competition.

The assets are there. Microsoft has a solid smartphone OS and even a decent app portfolio. The OS has some bits lacking like multitasking and a real-time kernel to be able to run the phone radio on the same chip as the rest of the phone. However, nothing a couple of of competent software engineers cannot solve. Nokia on the other hand knows how to make phones. They have a massive industrial design and manufactionring operation in place and their brand is not that bad.

With this deal, Nokia will be the #1 WP7 maker and most probably the only one in the long term and that is just what they need: an genuinely different and innovative operating system that is exclusive to Nokia phones.

So I do see how this makes sense. If Apple and Google look at the cards Nokia+Microsoft have in their hands, they have reason to be afraid.

Now the real question is: will Nokia+Microsoft be able to play those cards smartly and win. Oh look, there is a flying pig above the building over there !