The developer of Python for iOS, Jonathan Hosmer, mentions that he is prevented by App store policy to provide the functionality of importing external sources into the app.
Users have already been taught to choose among different desktop apps. How? By clicking on installed shortcut links on their desktop. The same can be done with internal web apps.
Treat these legacy web apps just like desktop apps in that launching them requires clicking an icon specifically for that web app somewhere on their machine that opens the web app in the appropriate browser. Those browsers (like IE6) could be locked down to only work for certain URLs. For everything else, the user would then just need to use a more modern web browser such as Firefox 5.0.
An ambitious startup could find many other (and probably better) ways to solve this problem. The issue with legacy web apps that run only on IE6 always struck me as a potential business opportunity for any startup interested in targeting the enterprise space. With Firefox's recent shift to an accelerated release cycle, it has made this problem even more pronounce.
>> "...Had they not bothered introducing LINQ in the first place, they'd have had their 100x performance boost from the get go..."
Except that when StackOverflow started it was a small startup with just three developers and a small user base. They probably made the decision early on to tradeoff any premature performance optimization with the ability to quickly iterate and ship the product by using Linq-2-Sql instead of hand-writing every single CRUD operation.
Now that their business (i.e. web traffic) has grown exponentially and have a larger group of developers they can now go back and optimize and performance tune the code including doing complete re-writes as necessary.
This is an important takeaway for anyone building a startup.
I like the mention of the improvisation concept of "yes and" as being a huge influence on her professionally. She describes how this can take good ideas from two people and create something newer and better.
Some of the best collaborators I have had were of the "yes and" attitude while the worst were of the "no but" or "no because" variety.
>> "...And there's little to stop...Amazon (AMZN), with its own Amazon Web Services, from making a greater push into Dropbox's territory...."
Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding.
I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product.
Comparing the price of each tool individually yes. However, if you add them all up then it really starts to be costly if you want to use most of those tools. You are limited in what you can budget for as an individual developer and are forced to look at the marginal cost of each new purchase as well as the opportunity cost of not buying some other tool unrelated to your purchase.
(Just in your example, we are already at $1335 not including the price of Visual Studio itself since the free express edition does not support add-ins such as ReSharper and other productivity tools)
IANAL, but I don't think so. What law would that be? If I walk into any retail store and pay with cash, is the store owner required by law to get my personal info? No, they are not.
Perhaps in heavily regulated industries such as banking that might be different but search engines are not government regulated (for now).
>> ...This is getting tiresome; trusted services going down...
That statement from the OP rubbed me the wrong way. Trusted services going down are a fact of life. It is going to happen. I agree Skype's last outage was three years ago which is a good track record compared to more traditional services that you might pay a lot more for. Other "trusted" services like electricity, water, heat, transportation fail from time to time even in the most modern of cities. The key is how a company responds to it, triages it, and communicates it to their customers (i.e. with frequent updates)
Hopefully, Skype provides a postmortem describing what happened and how they fixed it.
Unfortunately, I'm unaware of how to do this natively but I recommend using Dummynet which has a Windows port of the FreeBSD networking tool. Oddly, their website appears to be down so here is the Google cache:
You need to install the drivers but once done you effectively use the same commands with ipfw as on FreeBSD (as described in another thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2005190). I just used it for the first time the other day to test a web app browsing with a 400ms delay on a WinXP machine. It worked like a charm.
Yes, but network effects are not limited to just social media and the internet as a whole. Physically clustering together smart, ambitious individuals produces tremendous side effects in opportunities and innovation that are difficult to impossible to recreate with today's technology. This might change but, for now, they are not on equal ground.
The writing style of both the posted question and Joel's response gave off such a "Dear Abby" advice column vibe that it was a pleasant, surprising piece to read on a usual by-the-numbers Q&A site. If he ever returns to blogging, a "Dear Joel" format might be an entertaining read.
I use both but Chrome is certainly my primary browser. On any clean install of Ubuntu I immediately download and install Chrome while treating the default OS browser, Firefox, with a status of second class citizen.
This was precisely how it was for me years ago on Windows but with Firefox in the Chrome role and the default OS browser, IE, in the now Firefox role.
Although the author discounted Python, I'd still recommend it. Python has a turtle graphics module that is based on Logo, a Lisp-based language that has been traditionally used to teach kids programming (myself included):