How is that not essentially calorie counting? If a diet says at 8:00am eat 10g Fat, 30g protein 30g carbs that's still a way of saying eat 330 calories
By making that platform more accessible to millions of potential users. Their main source of revenue are Ad's so anything to increase a user count would seem like a good direction to go in.
It's specific to Angular running in the browser opposed to Java running on a server. You'll certainly run into different performance bottlenecks especially in long running client side applications. What works on the JVM will be very different than what works on the browser especially across multiple vendor's JS runtimes and versions.
Not a problem that most people will have. If for some reason you do then hopefully you'll be able to monetize that popularity and hire someone who's actually really good it. ORM's are not optimal but they do let you make something quickly if you're not well versed in writing optimized queries, stored procedures, etc. For people like me dropping ORM's seem like a premature optimization.
Has this happened? It does make sense to me and seems like a good opportunity for a competitor but I can't think of a case where a very popular iOS app lost out to an android alternative.
There isn't a 'Best'. Getting a language & framework that will work for you is a personal thing. Just look at what's available (Rails/Play/Django/Node/etc) and implement a small but non trivial web app that has some similarities to what you're planning on building and see what you like the most. Ideally you will spend a bit of time researching on how to do something and you'll get an idea of what that language/framework's community is like.
Or just build it in PHP using Cake since if that's what you know the best you'll likely get it done faster. That way you can focus on the product instead of the stack, which in my opinion is more important.
Possibly, but like most technology there's is a set compromises you're willing to make. Rails and Django seem to be focused on getting something up and running ASAP and then dealing with whatever scaling issues you're going to have when you know exactly what they're going to be. Face it, a good amount of webapps out there won't need to be sharded. 37Signals just threw hardware at basecamp for a while (they still do?). Instagram made a few tweaks to django once they started growing rapidly, same with Disqus and i'm going to assume Pinterest did something similar as well. I would focus on the product rather than how to scale it in the early on. Once you hit the point of "How am I going to deliver this product to a group a users an order of magnitude high than I am right now" you'll hopefully have good test coverage and be able to make the right choice among sharding/read-slaves/better caching with the metrics you're able to collect.
"It’s just the slightly awkward first steps of a serious move by Nokia to differentiate itself."
This seems like the same old cell phone industry for me. Several years ago, camera megapixels were one of the most standout features on cell phones for consumers. It was simple enough to boost the number ever year and have a buyer go "Well 4 > 2, so this phone must be better" I'm not so sure if thats a valid strategy in this current market.
I understand certain pro users being skeptical on the whole 'Back to Mac' iOS-ification of OSX, me included but i'm already loving the Lion terminal. Nice implementation of full screen, 256 colors , no distractions and just one swipe away from all the 'consumer' things I want to do. There's a lot of fluff in this release, but the new Terminal alone made the $30 upgrade worth it for me. As for the Mac Pro disappearing, I couldn't care less. I would think this would impact high res image/video guys more since that seems like the Pro's target market. Developers seem fine on laptops with an external display.
You think it would require much more work than just a recompile? With the similarities between iOS/OSX and Apple's investment in the LLVM toolchain I see the switch going smoother than PPC -> x86.
I haven't heard of any stability or reliability issues regarding Apple's choice of storage in Air's, MacBook Pro's (w/ SSD), iPads, iPhones or any Flash-storage based product. A single blog post with it's extremely limited scoped is a weak reason to write off an entire group of storage tech.
How is that not essentially calorie counting? If a diet says at 8:00am eat 10g Fat, 30g protein 30g carbs that's still a way of saying eat 330 calories