Big deal
Then again, the author made plenty of "make me" apps, but apparently no "make me black"…
3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourcing-own-jobs-oversea,14329/
This was from 2009.
So, suppose just for instance that a rogue bank employee went to the German government with a CD full of Germans trying to hide their money in Swiss banks. Since revealing the name of bank customers is a crime in Switzerland, Switzerland will not help with the investigation.
This is of course a purely hypothetical example!
Android should let users block any apps they want from network access.
I hear you say: "yes but poor developers need ads revenue to survive and apps need network access to fetch ads". Fine. Provide an API which allows apps to fetch ads in a [i]controlled[/i] manner.
I mean, this is not paranoia. There [i]are[/i] people out to get you. It is now standard on non-mobile machines to get a warning whenever a program accesses the web for the first time, giving you the choice to block it. I see no reason why it should not be the case for phones.
Create on github a separate project called vert.ks, inform contributors of the change. Let vert.x disappear for lack of maintenance. That is what Open Source is about…
Possibly, learn in the process that VMware is better than you at maintaining the project, and that contributors will not move.
Google for an address like "17 baker street london": You will get a map on top of the page, created by Google Maps. As you would expect, clicking on that map brings you to Google Maps.
You might think this is obvious. But Google for "AAPL": You will get a chart on top of the page showing the evolution of the Apple stock; but clicking on that chart brings you nowhere. You actually have to choose between three (tiny and hard to see) options below the graph, which are Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money. No assumption is made that since you are searching on Google, you necessarily want the Google product.
Note that this behavior could be argued to be worse for the user than just linking the graph to Google Finance. After all, the user who mostly does not care probably expects that he can click on the graph to get more information. He does not know that he has to click on one of the tiny links, he might indeed spend a few seconds figuring that out. This normally counts as bad user experience.
There might be many reasons why the assumption would be made that you want Google Maps, instead of Bing Maps or (god forbid) Mapquest. Probably, Google Maps is much more popular than its competitors, which might not be the case for Google Finance.
Of course, Bing and Yahoo do the "natural" thing and link to their own products…
"…helping to reassure consumers that the movies and TV shows they watch online are legitimate and secure, not stolen…"
This reminds me a lot of the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage whose stated goal was to reassure users that their Windows software was not pirated. Completely ignoring the fact that mostly, end users and consumers don't give a shit about whether their copy is legitimate, they just don't want to be assumed guilty.
I noticed some time ago that googling for a stock market ticker like GOOG or AAPL, you get a graph of the stock price. However, clicking that graph has no effect: you need to choose from one of the three links below it, which bring to the finance products of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft respectively...
If you search for a place, you only get a map which links to Google Maps. No link to Bing maps.
Ever since Apple started patching iTunes specifically to stop Palm devices from working with it, it has been going downhill.
Ideally, any piece of a system should be replaceable with that from a competitor... Fat chance of that happening, unless regulations are somehow put in place.
I wonder how many downloads are necessary to jump to the top of the charts. I suspect that a percentage in the single digits in a day would be plenty enough. I.e. you could probably have 80% rabid fanbois swearing never to install the maps app of the enemy, and still have the app get to the top if half of the remaining users download it.
The problem with this is that Google has more users, and thus get more feedback and corrections. Especially since corrections are vastly easier to report using a desktop web site, which Apple does not have. It have to say I do not understand why Apple is not creating a web site for their maps, like Nokia has done with here.com. It should give their maps a lot more users at a comparatively small price.
EDIT: HOLY $#*! I CAN EDIT MY POST!!1! Adding GO icon!
Lessee what Reuters says on the subject this week:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/04/us-un-internet-treaty-idUSBRE8B316I20121204
"A U.S. and Canadian proposal to protect the Internet from new international regulation has failed to win prompt backing from other countries, setting up potentially tough negotiations to rewrite a telecom treaty."
"The idea, also supported by Europe, would limit the International Telecommunication Union's rules to only telecom operators and not Internet-based companies such as Google Inc and Facebook Inc."
"That could reduce the prospective impact of efforts by other countries including Russia and some in the Middle East and Africa to obtain more powers to govern the Internet through the ITU, an arm of the United Nations. Those efforts, slated for discussion next week, could make Net anonymity - or the ability to remain anonymous online - more difficult to maintain and could bolster censorship, critics say."
This article implies rather clearly that the role of the summit is to write new regulations…
That under the current system, what these companies do is perfectly legal, and that they must change the law if they want things to change.
Of course, they would not go out and say it that way. They will claim that "companies do not report their tax practices transparently", when in fact those tax practices are completely transparent, it is just that they do not approve of these practices. They will even accuse the HMRC of not doing their job of "policing the tax system", when in fact the HMRC can only apply the laws that have been given to them.
However, I assume that the law was written the way it is for a reason, and that this reason will crop up when they attempt to rewrite the law to make it impossible to do what the companies are currently doing…
Technically, I understand their desire to make money, but I want to scream at the fact that, in this day and age, one would purposefully design a system to be incompatible. I may be wrong, but it seems that Apple is particularly prone to do this, like when they expressly stopped Palm devices to connect to iTunes.