codingthewheel

Lost me at "renowned".

Respectfully disagree - Compete and Alexa both depend on toolbars, and no techie in his right mind wants to install such a thing. Quantcast doesn't use a toolbar, but it's heavily biased towards Quantcast-aware publishers who place the QC script on their pages. Long story short: these sites are bad for measuring traffic, but especially bad for measuring tech / power user / early adopter traffic.

45% might even be understating it. Android's share of the smartphone market is already around 30% in the US (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Android-Tops-iO...). That's a bigger piece of the pie than either iPhone or RIM. Unless Apple aggressively targets the low end, a majority Android share (50%+) of the smartphone market shouldn't surprise anybody.

We will backtrace you.

I've never (almost never) posted a link to one of my sites in an HN comment. I'd rather not have naked links in this venue. Apologies.

I had a chuckle at this. The use of "pointy-haired" was at least creative. And yeah, I believe parents have the right to spy on their kids, especially when it comes to the net. Largely, I'd add, because of people like you (trolls).

Yeah, I completely agree. I'm sure he doesn't need my or anybody else's money or respect. But I wonder if the message he's trying to get across is the one that's actually getting across. Looking at it from a gaming standpoint, can his play here can ever have a positive expectation?

Not only that, but there are legit reasons to include a keylogger as part of a laptop build out. Every computer has, or should have, this kind of auditing capacity. The question is a) whether it's turned on by default and b) whether any information is being transmitted on the sly. In all likelihood, this was either some sort of mistake, or the keylogger is intended for use by the computer's owner -- not by Samsung.

EDIT: Sorry for scaring people. Listen, I HATE keyloggers and other invasive software. Here:

http://bit.ly/2U3iAH

My point was that I can see a legit need for low-level auditing by whoever owns the PC. Including such a package that's turned off by default, might be better than forcing a worried parent to sift through 12 keyloggers on Google, half of which are malware, a quarter of which don't work, in order to find out if her 12-year-old is composing YouTube dances and uploading them to 4chan.

Difficult to see how publicizing this stuff could be beneficial for Mr. Allen. At that level, and sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar fortune, it almost never behooves you to say anything negative about anybody -- least of all one of your former partners. I also think complaining about not getting a bigger share of MS stock, when you've got 14 billion in the bank...not exactly the stuff of which Jedi are made.

Cool site! Nice work.

It would add a little oomph if you could add some sort of subtle visual tracking (in the CSS for example) to highlight the stuff that moves. Between refreshes it's often hard to see what's changing.

I think most blog comment forms have a "website " field for a reason, though. There's a tactic quid pro quo there. Leave a comment, add value to the discussion, maybe a few people will click on your link. And the vast majority of bloggers I know are happy to get comments. A well-placed comment on an unknown or up-and-coming blog can make the author's day.

Not until well after their IPO and the bubble bursts on the absurd 40, 50, 75 billion-dollar valuations we're seeing now, IMO. Entering search actually brings on some risk, because if they screw it up, or if it doesn't take, a lot of Facebook's future equity goes up in smoke.

You should probably move away to avoid the air pollution in California.

He's publishing online; of course he wants eyeballs. But not many people know that the Nook can do double duty as an entry level tablet, with access to the full Android market. Given the cheaper price, I'd say this is a worthwhile article, in the sense that it will probably steer certain people away from overpaying for designer tech they don't need.

Strictly by the numbers: iOS/iPhone is one of the least rewarding platforms/devices to target -- when revenue's the goal. These apps don't perform well vis a vis, say, boring old Windows or iOS/Mac or, increasingly, Android apps. If you're thinking about getting into iOS development with an eye towards Angry-Bird style profits, please read this first (and then the other dozen pieces of research on the same topic):

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/06/full-an...

Relevant quote:

That number times $1.95 per paid app gives the 'most typical app' the total revenues in its lifetime - the full two years of App Store existence - of $1,948 dollars. This is before Apple takes its cut of 30%, so we are left with $1,363 over two years or $682 per year. This is so 'successful' that half of all of the developers of the 164,250 apps - will actually earn LESS THAN THIS. Before you start to cry, remember, there is that Angry Bird game that had 4 million paid downloads and the Bewelled 2 game with 3 million paid downloads. Thats your math there, they are totally skewing the averages, and you are stuck in the 'long tail' indeed. Half of all developers will earn less than $682 per year. Do you still think this is a good business idea?

EDIT: The mathematics are a little depressing, just something to keep in mind. Certainly a successful app is a successful app. Getting there on iOS seems to be a lottery proposition.

Paul, granted that it's sort of a part of your job to shill for Chrome, and granted that Chrome is a better browser than IE in its current state, but why all the hate for IE8 specifically? Most devs I know who've spent time with the IE lineup would prefer 15 years of IE8 to another 1 year of IE6. End of story, so far as that goes. (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much.)

And the "only" solution is hardly getting them onto a new browser. Moving them to say, Firefox, is only one solution. Another solution would be for MS to produce a standards-compliant browser. IE8 and IE9 are both major steps in this direction. Of course, Chrome itself isn't 100% compliant, and had the advantage of being developed much later in the game, against a well-framed open source stack. And of course, Chrome borrowed all sorts of tricks from IE...

Anyway, there are at least 3 or 4 good solutions for that crowd, only one of which involves Chrome. By the way, I use Chrome and Firefox exclusively. I dislike the piling-on against IE for piling on's sake. To represent IE8 as another IE6 is a little disingenuous, IMO. For what it's worth.

affecting companies like Amazon, and companies like SalesForce that have made a significant investment iOS investment, one has to wonder whether building iPhone apps is safe

This. iOS remains, by the numbers, one of the worst places for freelance developers to spend their time. Profits are diminutive in the average case, and app store policies impose additional risks that have forced entire shops to leave the iOS ecosystem or change how they do business inside it.

I felt the same way, but I interpreted it as the writer's subtle mockery of his earlier "hotshot" self. Towards the end he notes that he made no money off the deal, and that he deserved to make none.

Very true and Facebook didn't pioneer the use of real names, either. Not by a long shot. Come to think of it, I can't think of a single feature Facebook truly, actually pioneered -- I can think of a great many they popularized.

Ebert's a bit of a crotchety Luddite clinging to the old ways. This rant, coupled with his diatribe last year about how "video games can never be art"...

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_neve...

...should be interpreted with a grain of salt.

Sanitize everything, use multiple redundant sanitizer libraries (there are several out there that handle different things), and use a whitelist, rather than a blacklist, based approach. If you want to allow the use of <a> tags, enforce that they adhere to the exact format of a safe <a> tag, otherwise encode or strip them. One look at the XSS cheatsheet page should be enough to convince any sane developer of the futility of a blacklist-based approach.

There's no security on the client side often even when you connect that client to a server.

Think of a world in which, instead of shipping binary executable code to users, we shipped them full source code. They'd be able to go in and selectively edit out the "licensing" stuff, remove the lines where the app dials home, etc.

This is actually the world we live in, but we call this source code "executable code". Now we pretend that executable code is "obfuscated" or "cryptic" or "difficult to understand" but that's just so we can keep our sanity. Executable code is transparently open, well documented, and perfectly editable on any major OS, including Win and *nix, regardless of what sort of checksums or digital signing you do to ensure local files haven't been changed, all the security experts in the world can't put Humpty Dumpty back together on the client side, or keep him from shattering to a million pieces in the first place.

How does the Android app store suck? And how is it amazing that there's an Android market at all--?

Maybe this used to be the case. Speaking as a user of and developer for both iOS and Android devices, I think this argument is a little outdated. It just doesn't bear out in practice. I think this has become a mantra that iOS developers and users tell themselves because they think, wrongly, that Android poses a threat to them. It does not. Not to them.

Anyway, it's usually easier to get an app released for Android, by far, than to release the equivalent app for iOS. Everything from the development language to the approval process conspires to make this so. (If you think you can get an Objective C app to market quicker than an equivalent programmer can get a Java app to market, you're either a genius or you're in for a rude awakening. Add App Store woes on top of that. Arbitrary bannings. And the like. These things matter. They cost you time and energy. And they're much more prevalent on iOS than Android.)

What about the user being able to find, purchase, and download apps? It's painless on Android, and it's painless on iOS.

Number of apps? There you may have a point. Android doesn't have the number of apps that iPhone has - merely tens of thousands rather than a hundred or two. And counting.

Fragmentation. Eh. There's less of this than you might think. Developing for Android is very similar to developing for a PC. You're never 100% sure about the hardware you're running on, and yet, most PC applications manage to run just fine. This is what hardware abstraction is all about. Android does an excellent job of it, and most of the time, you program without worrying about the hardware.

So while I think the author has some interesting observations about Google's larger strategy, the "Android app store is broken" argument doesn't really hold water anymore, at least not for me. If anything, Android apps are a breath of fresh air.

Single-word domains from the common vocabulary usually make for shitty brands.

Probably because business efforts behind these domains are rather transparently profit-seeking and wired for the short-term, make a quick buck, approach.

Also there's a good amount of technological quackery that goes on in the hyping of these domains to not-so-tech-savvy investors who don't realize that a typical 14yo kid understands intuitively that "sex.com" is probably a crap parked site or link directory, whereas pornhub.com, on the other hand, provides a service that 14yo will love.

"..and we've got a GREAT domain name, pets.com, I mean, if you want a pet, where you gonna go? We're right there."

Labors of love are what win and enable you to eventually fleece your customers and have them thank you for doing it -- not having a 13 million dollar domain.

Yes.

If a human can view it, you can always, always, always copy it, reproduce it, and share it. No matter how much HDCP you throw at it, no matter what specialized hardware you devote to it...in the words of Mr. Universe..."you can't stop the signal."

(And all the King's horses, and all the King's men, couldn't put the industry's shitty paranoid ineffective wannabe DRM back together again.)

Um, if Netflix Instant charged users per movie, it would've been a failure. The reason people love Netflix Instant is: one low monthly fee; unlimited, unmetered use of the service.

This is night and day different from what Hollywood wants to do, and what Intel is trying to enable them to do: force consumers to buy physical discs, or force consumers to rent from a hardware-enforced DRM'd digital kiosk.

Yes, fair enough. Agreed. I would revise this to say that I think Android will ultimately be the more accessible of the two platforms - mostly because of the different price pointing strategies. Why should Apple give up the hefty premium people are willing to pay to use Apple products? Their attitude might be "let other manufacturers cater to the cheap flip-phone crowd. We build best in class devices here, and our customers know that, and are willing to pay for the value we provide."

Except the demographics actually point to Android being the go-to platform for the non-geeks. Android, not iOS, will be the platform that puts iPhone-like functionality into the hands of millions. And as of today, Android devices very much "work out of the box". Given the lower price points (and increasing quality) of Android devices, I think it's pretty clear which device is designed for "real people" and which is designed for tech enthusiasts and early adopters.

I suggest you actually learn about the platform before performing the argumentative equivalent of throwing bits and pieces of monkey scat into the fray in the vain hopes of upvotes, or just out of sheer orneriness and wrong-headedness.

http://source.android.com/

Many mathematically unbeatable games of chance (lotto, progressive slots, video poker, blackjack, etc.) can become +EV under the right circumstances. That said, the analysis is not quite as simple as quoted:

"Tomorrow's Mega Millions jackpot is $208 million; the odds of winning are 1 in 176 million ∴ the EV for each $1 ticket is positive 18¢!"

...because (as the later tweets point out) you don't know how many tickets will be sold, and the math needs to take into account the possibility of "split jackpots" in which two or more people win the big prize(s).

A more rigorous analysis of "when is it rational to purchase a lotto ticket" in the general case can be found here:

http://psyllogism.wikidot.com/articles:lottery