Randomlings

Posted by: stak
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Posted on: 2011-02-28 05:54:43

Danny Hillis TED talk. Awesome because it's the first time I've seen somebody tackle this problem from an analytical point of view rather than a statistical point of view. As I've complained about before, I don't like how statistics are currently being used in complex human fields like biology. Instead of doing statistical analyses of how many people get heart disease after increasing their cholesterol intake, we should find the exact chemical pathway that starts at cholesterol and ends at heart disease. (Not that I believe cholesterol causes heart disease specifically; just an example). This is a step in right direction.

RIM recently got pwned by Jaime Murai in a scathing blog post. They responded with promises to do something. If you ask me, one of the first things they should do is copy Microsoft (I can't believe I'm saying this) and dogfood their developer program. There's a huge gap between the APIs that are available to RIM employees and those that are exposed to third-party developers. Unless RIM-internal devs start feeling the pain that third-party devs have to go through, the situation isn't going to improve. I recently discovered while trying to write a BB app that there's no publicly available StringTokenizer class in the API. I'm pretty sure I remember there being one in net.rim.device.api.util, but it just isn't exposed.

GeoHot is fighting Sony in court, and asking for donations. Donate. Sony sold people PS3s which could run Linux, and then removed that functionality via an update months later. This is the equivalent of selling you a couch, and then coming in a couple of months later and taking all the cushions back. If this sort of crap is legal then we're all doomed. It's one thing to license software with restrictions on distribution; it's entirely another to sell hardware and then destroy its value.

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