Call me old-fashioned but I shy away from unique platforms precisely because they are, well, unique, as you don't have a lot of vendor choice should you decide to migrate for whatever reason.
RT (of course) gives such a different view from Western media, it may as well be a completely different story. Right now, for example, it tells how "armed extremists sent from Kiev tried to seize government buildings in Crimea".
Comparatively few people will read this story. Even fewer will care enough to continue the crusade against the attacker for any prolonged period of time to raise awareness among the potential future audience that this account was stolen.
High chance the story will be quickly forgotten and the account will be re-used.
On a related note, I've run into a similar problem in C++, but opposite effect. A lambda won't keep my object alive if I try to capture a shared_ptr member, because C++ lambdas, similarly to blocks, by default capture implicit reference to "this", rather than individual instance variables.
This reminds me of a story of Sir Isaac Newton and South Sea Company bubble. He got out early, then watched all his friends get rich, jumped back in again with both feet, lost a fortune. Even smart people are not immune to bubbles.
I think what GP is saying is that in emerging markets, or at least in Thailand, there is no "compromise" market segment (and it's not going to appear regardless how much Apple "want" it). Normal people get ultra cheap phones, rich people get high-end iPhones, which is why 5c is a miss.
> It might be an interesting failure scenario for algorithmic trading.
It's not how auto trading works. Traded instrument ranges are preset before the algo is started. I've never heard of an algo that tries to pick stocks to trade dynamically based on a name, it would be astoundingly risky.
I think it's more likely that LinkedIn mobile app grabs your phone contacts, if you happen to give it permissions to do so.
I've noticed that the "People you may know" section started to contain faceless placeholder entries with emails from my address book (though, I'm not sure if/when I've given the iOS app the address book access).
Note the article is from 2000. Joel mostly talks about big and mature desktop software (big as in Microsoft Excel). Average startup's code is small, narrowly focused, has a (relatively) short lifespan, so it can be rewritten from scratch by 1 or 2 people.
If you've ever worked with legacy systems older than 10 years, you'd notice that they become a victim of their own "success". You can't throw away features added over years, because a lot of users depend on it, and if you tried to rewrite it, you'd have to rewrite bug-to-bug.
I worked on such systems, and I did try rewriting, and gave up because of sheer volume of work and the knowledge of institutional lore that was required to do it. On the other hand I'm currently embarking on our startup's "rewrite" and things are much much easier, because the feature set is small and I can freely throw away stuff that didn't work.
> I really enjoyed the pre-Microsoft Nokia, I had account in their dev forums, and loved their SDKs, community, Sybian, whatnot.
Really?
I thought their SDK circa 2007 (especially the emulator) and API docs were terrible, and Symbian C++ was a real pain to work with. Also, segregation between regular developers and Nokia partners (who paid to have access to extra private APIs) put unnecessary barriers to development.
I have been using it full-time circa 2006-2009. I guess that counts as "past decade".
1. There was no out of the box support of my particular NVidia video card, so I've had to build the driver from source and fiddle with my system to install it.
2. I've had userspace processes freeze on network activities and become impossible to kill, because of a kernel deadlock in my wireless driver.
3. Proper smooth fonts required work at the time (freetype did not ship with good subpixel hinting).
4. Proprietary media codecs did not work out of the box and required a third-party repositories.
5. The whole KDE four-point-not-really-zero debacle.
A minimalistic XMonad+Vim+terminal setup was decent and worked for me, but eventually I got sick of desktop Linux and moved to OSX.
I realise that many things have been fixed in the meantime, but it was not a flawless experience back then. If I was to give desktop Linux another shot today, I'd be cautiously optimistic, but not expect a miracle.