Pronouncing "Java" like "Yava" is definitely a Dutch thing - I was building a Java based financial system for a bank in the Netherlands and it took a while to get used to the way they pronounce it too :)
Unfortunately the Hero looks like it has some "lag" issues when navigating around the screen in the production models out in Europe right now. I hope it's a software fix to make it better, but I imagine we're going to have to wait for a faster processor to take advantage of that slick UI it has.
Also, T-mobile said that they won't be carrying the Hero because they are releasing the "myTouch" that Arrington was talking about in that article.
Let's hope someone gets on the ball in the US and gives the iPhone a run for it's money with Android. I think it will eventually happen, but we're probably going to have to wait another year.
Being a large company doesn't mean you can "easily replicate" things. The major reason startups can wiggle their way into a market and become a player is because large companies can't react in time to what an agile startup is doing in their space.
That's fair. Context is important here. I had facebook basically consuming twitter's functionality in mind. I was also attempting to point out how little innovation many ideas actually contribute.
Digression :: Has anyone noticed that myspace has recently ripped off a lot of facebooks features too?
I honestly think healthcare / health insurance is a major reason.
It's hard to be "ramen AND medical bills profitable" if you or one of your founders has an urgent medical issue when you're trying to bootstrap yourselves with no insurance.
The Obama administration should look at this issue and provide significantly reduced healthcare to bootstrapped startups.
I for one know I couldn't have done it if it weren't for socialized (yes I'll use that evil term) medicine here in Canada. Fortunately, I haven't been sick. But I have gone to the doctor a few times over the past few years for routine checkups/physicals. Actually, I did go once when I had a terrible bronchial infection that I just couldn't seem to kick even after a few weeks. My doctor gave me a bunch of free asthma inhalers when she heard I was self-employed. The next year I got a free flu shot and didn't get sick. This was important because had I gotten the flu it would have ended up in a huge amount of lost productivity on the project I was working on and possibly resulted in public failure for the stakeholders involved (we were constantly catching up the whole way). Although to be fair, not getting the flu may have been coincidence as the flu shot prevented a strain that was not prevalent this year. Flu vaccine manufacturers always have to guess which strain they think will be dominant and target it.
The routine physicals have led to me getting back into shape. My doctor also did some blood work and discussed some changes I needed to make in my diet to reduce the risk of developing some conditions that afflict other family members. This is a major benefit of having a family doctor that everyone goes to. When your other family members aren't insured and consequently don't see a doctor, your doctor doesn't have as complete perspective of potential risks to your health. Incidentally, I'm now earning more and contributing more to taxes, so I feel like the money spent on covering my healthcare was a worthwhile investment. And no, I didn't have to wait 6 months for a physical, I waited precisely 9 days for the next schedule window that was convenient for me. The flu shot was a walk-in procedure when I had an empty patch in my schedule.
Healthcare shouldn't only be about tending to urgent matters. Not getting your yearly physical is potentially like having a memory leak. You won't know something is wrong until it's potentially too late and when you do find out, it will be a major dilemma. All too often, even when healthcare costs are covered, people just don't bother going. If you're a startup founder, don't neglect your health, and make sure you take care of your body as well as you would your car.
9oliYQjP: you're one very interesting person but with a bad user name. Do you mind putting a note in your profile with a more pronouncable name? Everytime I read a comment of yours I am distracted by the machine generated name, which I somehow pronounce in my head as "Nine Olly Qiyuu Jay Pee".
Heh, it is a machine generated name. I am by no means well-known or a public figure, but some of the people I deal with regularly are. I have had the unfortunate experience of having people digging up dirt on some of these people try to use comments I posted to the Internet against them (e.g., an extreme example of a similar situation is how difficult it was for Obama to shake the notion that Reverend Wright's opinion was also his own). Around the same time I had to undergo a security clearance. It got me thinking about the breadcrumb trail I'd been leaving online. If I could change my cryptic alias to something more readable I would. It just so happens the easiest way to randomly come up with a username was to use the script I use to randomly generate passwords with.
I've spent the past few years SEuO (search engine unoptimizing) my personal online presence including quitting Facebook and started signing up to new services with different aliases so that people can't so easily aggregate what I say. It's kind of embarrassing how paranoid that sounds, but there's the rationale. I don't mind defending my opinions, but I'm loathe to put my friends in a position, as one was, to try to explain my opinion when they might not share it. On the other hand, it's quite liberating being able to say what I want without having to worry about the political costs associated with those comments.
It sounds like you haven't actually tried to obtain affordable private medical insurance. I have. A few years ago, I spent almost two years working sans paycheck on a startup and found it easy to satisfy one of my prerequisites, which was an affordable high-deductible medical insurance policy.
The notion that medical insurance has to be expensive is a myth. The notion that medical insurance has to cover every bout of the sniffles is a myth. My policy had a $1000 deductible, which meant I was on the hook for routine medical visits (I didn't have any in two years), but that policy relieved me from worries about financial ruin due to any potential major medical problems. The high-deductible policy that I purchased was less than half the cost of my former employer's COBRA plan. It was well within the realm of ramen profitability. It doesn't take much effort to be an informed consumer in the medical insurance marketplace, but many people (it seems) can't be bothered to try.
That is quite the generalization. Out of the same national lab comes MPICH for example which is installed on nearly every large supercomputer that needs a message passing library. It's very robust, portable, performant, and popular.
National labs are far more like normal companies than you might imagine. The software efforts are done by small teams that vary in their aims, funding, talent, competitional pressure, and enthusiasm. Pretty much like any other software environment...
Take a look at the error rates discussed in this story about NASA and I don't know how you could generalize that "government employees build crappy software": http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print
HTML 5 is part of the death-recipe for these native RIA technologies, but there is one other major missing piece at the moment - a fast and dependable javascript engine that can be assumed to exist on client machines.
HTML 5 just provides the UI / Drawing capabilities, but it will have to rely on Javascript perform the processing logic that is necessary in most Rich Internet Applications.
So, when it can be assumed that HTML 5 is fully implemented AND there is a fast enough Javascript engine to rival native code (similar to .NET in silverlight, actionscript in Flash, and Java in JavaFX) - then then open web will truely take over.
We're also missing an IDE as "good" (relatively) as Flash, because at the moment there's no end to end production tools that can produce the rich experiences users can expect from Flash.
As we all know, XML is just another word for Productivity! One less thing to compile and throw those pesky errors before we put it straight into production.
I can't wait to show this to the IT guys... if they ever get back from their 4 hour lunch break.
"Photo-slide shows" on the web need to die, anytime I see one, I never click on it. These ad-spam on these things is nearing the annoyance levels of most porn sites..
Any bets on how long it will take before the Chinese government shuts this out of China too?