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  HP To Apple: You Win.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world. That phrase was one of the first things that jumped to my mind today when I heard the news that HP was not only killing off their TouchPad and Pre webOS-based products, but also trying to spin-off their PC business. The largest PC busine...

   HP,Apple,Palm,Competition,webOs     2011-08-19 07:38:41

  What I learned from a month of blogging and 250k visits

Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. I put out an article most days and up to 3 per day when I was experimenting with new channels.It has been fascinating.That being said, this is not a post about blogging tactics. It’s about what the experience has taught me about startups.Find the customers first, then build for themIt took me a long time to understand YC’s motto that you should:Make something people want.The first time I heard that, ...

   SEO,Promote,Website,Advice,Traffic     2011-11-10 10:58:40

  Dieter Rams' 10 principles of good web design

Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality”  â€“ D...

   Web design,Principle,Innovation     2012-02-08 10:29:32

  Please Steal These webOS Features

When Apple introduced the first iPad in 2010, I bought one immediately. I didn’t know what I’d use it for, but I was sure that I would find some use for it. I never did. I played around with it, wrote some code for it, but eventually stopped using it. I would pick it up from time to time to read something or watch a YouTube movie, but even that was a rare occurrence. I have since picked up an iPad 2, and I’m using it a lot more than the first iPad, but again, I’...

   WebOS,Feature,HP,borrow     2012-02-22 05:45:49

  I hate cut-and-paste

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (o...

   IDE,Editor,Cut and paste,Shortcut,Blame     2011-10-24 11:33:46

  Tricks with Direct Memory Access in Java

Java was initially designed as a safe managed environment. Nevertheless, Java HotSpot VM contains a “backdoor” that provides a number of low-level operations to manipulate memory and threads directly. This backdoor – sun.misc.Unsafe â€“ is widely used by JDK itself in packages like java.nio or java.util.concurrent. It is hard to imagine a Java developer that uses this backdoor in any regular development because this API is extremely dangerous...

   Java,Directly memory access,Tricks,JVM     2012-02-13 05:31:19

  What do programmers really do?

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. â€“ PicassoMany people (including my mother-in-law) think that computers are becoming so smart that programmers will be no longer needed in the near future. Other people think that programmers are geniuses who constantly solve sophisticated math puzzles in front of their monitors. Even many programmers don’t have clear idea what they do.In this post I want to provide some explanation to uninformed people what programmers rea...

   Programmer,Work,Computer     2011-05-20 11:49:32

  Audio API in Android development

Mobile devices of the first generation were not capable of playing any sounds except monophonic ringtones. Today any smartphone platform supports playback, record and to some extent manipulation of digital sound, often up to CD quality.Android is no exception to that. Even older 1.5 devices can do a lot of things with digital audio. However, due to lack of guidance, a developer who is doing his first audio feature might miss some of the available API facilities, or might choose the approach that...

   Audio,Android,MediaPlayer,AudioTrack,Sou     2011-04-21 11:32:32

  Fun With Numbers

Yesterday the NPD Group issued a report on U.S. tablet sales in the U.S., from January through October of 2011. Worth noting up front is that the numbers in this report are about sales — actual tablets sold to actual customers — not “shipments” from the factory to stores and warehouses.Much-reported on is that second-place went to HP, after its fire sale on the discontinued TouchPad. What hasn’t gotten much commentary is the extraordinarily contort...

   Tablet,iPad,TouchPad,HP,Market share,2011     2011-11-24 09:12:58

  Steve Jobs attacks Android just for show?

Steve Jobs has a famous statement which says Android is a stolen product. What does Google CEO Larry Page think about this statement? Recently, Page said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that Apple hates Android just for show. He believes people should not look only to the competitions, but should focus on the potential cooperation opportunities to make the world better.The following is overview of the interview:Q: When you took over as CEO, one of your goals was to take the cle...

   Steve Jobs,Android,Larry Page     2012-04-08 08:30:33