laujen

An idea I will throw out there: I always wondered why anyone should be able to hold onto an idea (patent it) if they don't use it. I can't help but wonder if the best way to fix the patent system isn't to overhaul it -- which would be nearly impossible to do due to entrenched interests -- but instead invalidate all patents if they aren't used within a certain time period by the rights holder. In other words, use it or lose it.

I think what he is saying is that the agreement with Apple says we can't form legal agreements that include Apple's SDK and APIs, which in app purchase is apart of. This could or could not be covered under those mechanisms.

You might be right. The way Lodsys is going after us is for the button (or something) that connects to the mechanism that performs the in app purchase. Either way, as everyone else here has pointed out, it really is a sticky widget.

I added this article that John Gruber at Daring Fireball had linked to analyzing the rock and hard place iOS developers are in with this patent claim: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546140

(Disclosure: I'm one of them and potentially in violation.)

They have to. How many people over 30 are willing to quit their family and community for 3 months to go live, eat and breath YC? I would love to be in a YC environment. The people you'd meet and the experience would be unbelievable. But I'm 37, have two young kids and a wife, and that "start-up" needs my attention, too.

This is a small feature but could be an indicator of very big things for Apple. If the iCloud rumors are true then there could be a huge opportunity for keeping your desktop and smartphone/tablet in sync, and this would be a big advantage for Apple and MS since they control desktop environments.

For example, say I have a Pages document open and go to leave the house, the same document could automatically be available on my iPad in the exact same state I left it in without me having to do anything.

I think this was written up here on Hacker News a few weeks ago but it is relevant for this discussion and thought I'd link to it if anyone is interested. It is 24,000 five-letter domain names that are available: http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-...

(I'm not the author but I bookmarked the site for some new projects. I didn't find anything that jumped out at me on a first pass but maybe something will for you!)

Either commit completely to the vision or don't bother. I don't see how you start a company half way.

Why does any if this matter, bubble or not? The tech community has spent an inordinate amount of time discussing it. What I see is a lot of companies building businesses the right way -- customers first. If the funding dies down, which it will one way or the other, these companies who have put customers first and will be able to survive. As for the knock-offs and clones, well, if they go away will anyone care?

IBM is a services company now, though, and Apple is a products company. Those two numbers aren't really, hmm, apples to apples comparable.

That's a shame because there is some really interesting stuff happening around town.

We actually had some winners in the 90s but many of them either lost their winnings in the dot bomb or never invested in other companies. A few of those winners are guiding their second or third start-ups, too.

Excellent answer. Companies need capital and product and customers. Figure out which ones the rest of your team aren't bringing and bring it.

I'm in Portland, Oregon, and think this is actually the biggest problem with our start-up culture. There just aren't enough people who have been there/done that before that are investing in the next generation. There are investors around and the government has stepped in to fund some investment groups to bridge the gap, but until we have a round of winners really supporting the next round of companies I think our community will struggle.

Does anyone know what happens to video uploaded through Blogger? Google says it puts it in Google Video but there is no options for me to download the video that has been uploaded. I'd email Google but... oh ya... They don't do support.

Twitter is beyond the scale of most businesses. This -- whether Scala or Java or PhP or RonR or Python -- is the best choice for our code base generating millions of hits per day is a problem many of us would love to have!

I apologize. You are correct, the HP48gx is RPN only. Don't know why I thought otherwise. I had it in my head for some reason that 48 did both (it kind of does but not really) and that it gave the answer as 4.

For the record, the TI-83 is -4 and the HP48 is 4. TI-83 (or now TI-84) is the dominant calculator in US math classes.

That Math Forum post is excellent. Thanks!

This is very good news for us developers. Hopefully a fixed set of screen dimensions and expectations can be established so we know what we are writing for. Every time a big name Android app gets released, a laundry list of which devices it works on and which ones it doesn't gets made, too. I hate this. Either our software needs to run on Android or it doesn't.

Apple's events are almost always an hour. With that in mind, it is hard to see how any of these hardware announcements, event LTE, would take up an hour long presentation.

I don't think it is on purpose. I don't really pay attention, either. But the people you naturally find and the people who get read the most are the ones who have been around the longest and therefore get their posts on the front page. It's a virtuous cycle, I think.

This isn't anti-Hacker News. I really love the site and read it every day and try to contribute as much as I can, but I find the dynamic of which posts get elevated very interesting. I assume HN favors long-time users who have posted a lot and as a relative newcomer here my stuff just languishes. I have so desperately wanted to do an experiment where two people, a long time user and a new user, post the same article and see which one bubbles to the top. In other words, I don't think we don't get the most interesting stuff on the front page; what we actually get is the stuff posted by the most highly rated users. Anyone have thoughts on this? (Again, not trying to be negative even if it sounds that way. It is just an observation.)

This has raised a lot of discussion here in the NW about Cascadia fault line, which runs off the coast and causes an 8.0 or higher earthquake about every 250 years. It has been 311 years since the last one.

This is a beautiful piece of link bait. His advice might make sense if you live in New York, but it doesn't work at all in most places in the country. If you live in the suburbs you can't find places to rent. If you have kids and care about where they go to school, you don't want to follow this advice. If you live in a city like Cleveland or Detroit or a hundred other Midwest towns where the price of a house can approach $50k, it may not be worth it either.

I'll miss Josh's writing for one. Always enjoyed his articles even if I didn't always agree with him. Hope he surfaces again soon. Keep writing, Josh!

I'm blown away by this. I lived through those days as a Windows Mobile and Palm developer and had this weird feeling of deja-vu when the Nokia-MS news broke. Now I know why!

Elegant devices, seamless integration, simplicity -- what Apple's ads are all about today -- are brand advertising. That is the brand's promise and differentiation wrapped up in one tidy package.

Toshiba and Lenova, yes. Dell has no channel expertise except through their site. The problem with tablets is they are not a cookie cutter device. Dell could sell PCs off the web because one PC was like every other PC with a different logo on it. Dell will struggle with tablets because it isn't a box with a logo on it and customers will want to hold it and play with it before buying.

As I commented on his post, the net effect is that Android and Windows Phone licensees, whose main experience is selling through carriers, will struggle with tablets. It is hard to build channel expertise. Apple and HP have a ton of it. Samsung has some but the division that is building tablets is their smartphone division, which only has carrier experience.

My guess is the company knows how bad the situation is and is trying to build a growing developer community around its devices... by making Android software run on them. I can't figure out why else RIM would do this?