Just a Few Things..

Why Apple Doesn't Make the iPhone in America [Apple]

2012-01-22T16:53:00.000-05:00

Why Apple Doesn't Make the iPhone in America [Apple]:

The answer is pretty obvious, right? It's cheaper labor! But is that the only reason why Apple (and other companies) outsource its workforce to China as opposed to keeping them in America? No. There's more. The NY Times has an excellent report on why Apple ignores America when it comes to making the iPhone and how that's better for Apple. More »

Is anyone really falling for this reasoning? At what point to you realize that the reason product from American companies are made in China and other placed across Asia isn't because they have better educated workers. Look at any major university (MIT, Georgia Tech, Stanford, etc) and the engineering departments are second to none on the B.S, MS, and PhD levels. The real problem is that these companies can't find educated workers here in the US who are willing to work for less then 25K.

Get paid while you learn Ruby/Rail..

2012-01-15T01:51:00.000-05:00

It’s a five-month, full-time, paid training program put together by JumpstartLab and LivingSocial. 24 attendees will be selected for the program and will divide time between classroom instruction, team project work, and open source / community contributions. Instruction will be led by Jeff Casimir and Matt Yoho from JumpstartLab.

http://workshops.railsbridge.org/2012/01/hungry-academy-get-paid-to-learn-rubyrails/

Sounds like an amazing program which needs to be expanded to other cities around the country. I'd love to see this make it's way into the inner city. It just might open up a few people to software development who wouldn't otherwise have shown and interest.

Jamaica Plans To Cut Ties With British Monarchy

2012-01-09T19:56:00.000-05:00

Jamaica Plans To Cut Ties With British Monarchy:

KINGSTON-Jamaican Prime Minister, Portia Simpson miller plans to cut ties with the British monarchy and declare Jamaica an independent republic.

Jamaica has been independent for almost 50 years as it left the British Empire in 1962, but the Jamaican constitution still lists Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II as the head of state.

Aljazeera reports:

Speaking at her inaugural address on Friday, Portia Simpson Miller, said her government would “initiate the process of detachment from the monarchy”, establishing a republic with a president as head of state, and breaking off links with the former colonial power.

Jamaica is a constitutional parliamentary democracy and also a Commonwealth realm.

“I love the Queen. She’s a beautiful lady and apart from being a beautiful lady a wise lady and a wonderful lady. But I think time come,” Simpson Miller said.

ClockworkMod gets touched for the very first time on a Galaxy Nexus (video)

2012-01-05T23:34:00.000-05:00

ClockworkMod gets touched for the very first time on a Galaxy Nexus (video):

If you've ever fussed with a bootloader on Android before, you probably know of ClockworkMod: the custom recovery that lets users backup, restore and flash ROMs willy nilly. Well, it's no surprise Google's newest flagship -- the Galaxy Nexus -- has gotten the CWR treatment, as it's been made specifically for idle geek hands. No, the big news here is that instead of fiddling about with the camera key, power button and volume rocker all just to navigate the menu, you can now simply use the power of touch. That's right, this beta build utilizes four softkeys at the bottom of the screen, making the entire affair that much more efficient. You can hit up the source now to take it for a test run, but remember -- flash at your own risk.

Continue reading ClockworkMod gets touched for the very first time on a Galaxy Nexus (video)

Portia Simpson And The PNP Win Jamaican Election In Landslide

2011-12-31T17:58:00.000-05:00

Portia Simpson And The PNP Win Jamaican Election In Landslide:
KINGSTON, Jamaica — On Jamaica’s rutted streets, the complaints have been chronic — home ownership is out of reach for most wage earners, the cost of electricity has skyrocketed, water service regularly fizzles out and decent jobs are scarce.

Fed up with chronic hard times, voters in this debt-wracked Caribbean nation on Thursday threw out the ruling party and delivered a landslide triumph to the opposition People’s National Party, or PNP, whose campaign energetically tapped voter disillusionment especially among the numerous struggling poor.

The win marks a remarkable political comeback for former Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, who was Jamaica’s first female leader during her year-and-a-half-long first stint in office that ended in 2007. The 66-year-old known affectionately as “Sista P” reached out to Jamaicans as a champion of the poor with a popular touch.

“She cares about the ghetto people,” said Trishette Bond, a twenty-something resident of gritty Trench Town who wore an orange shirt and a bright orange wig, the color of Simpson Miller’s slightly center-left party, which led the island for 18 years before narrowly losing 2007 elections.

As word of her election win emerged Thursday night, PNP supporters shimmied and shouted in the capital, Kingston, and motorists honked horns in celebration as they tore down the streets.

“I am humbled as I stand before you and I wish to thank the Jamaican people for their love, for their support and for giving the People’s National Party and the leader of the party her own mandate,” she said, after receiving hugs from numerous candidates, some crying.

Simpson Miller defeated Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who at 39 is Jamaica’s youngest leader and leads the center-right Jamaica Labor Party.

Holness said the defeat will prompt a time of introspection and reflection for party leaders to examine what went wrong.

“I wish the new government well. We hope for the benefit of the country that they will do a good job,” said Holness, who warned during the campaign that an opposition win would scare away foreign investment and dash hopes of economic progress.

While official results have not been released, elections director Orrette Fisher told The Associated Press that preliminary results showed Simpson Miller heading to victory.

“Based on the margins, it appears safe to say” that Simpson Miller’s party won, Fisher said shortly after Jamaican newspapers and broadcasters called the election for the PNP. He expected his office to release the official count and breakdown of parliamentary seats on Saturday.

News station TVJ said Simpson Miller’s People’s National Party won 41 seats in parliament and Holness’s Jamaica Labor Party 22.

Simpson Miller is beloved by her supporters for her folksy, plainspoken style. She became Jamaica’s first female prime minister in March 2006 after she was picked by party delegates when P.J. Patterson retired as leader. But she was tossed out of office a year later in a narrow election defeat.

This time around, she has pledged to lift debt-wracked Jamaica out of poverty, secure foreign investment, and create jobs. Specifics are few, however.

Her party will face deep economic problems in this island of 2.8 million people, with a punishing debt of roughly $18.6 billion, or 130 per cent of gross domestic product. That’s a rate about 10 percentage points higher than debt-troubled Italy’s.

Veteran opposition lawmaker Omar Davies said one of the first things the People’s National Party will do is get “a true assessment of the state of the economy,” a dig at Holness’ party which was accused of rarely providing citizens with a clear picture of the island’s dire fiscal straits.

Holness, who became prime minister two months ago after Bruce Golding, Jamaica’s leader since 2007, abruptly stepped down in October amid anemic public backing, won his parliamentary seat with 54 percent of the vote.

Simpson Miller has been a stalwart of the People’s National Party since the 1970s. She was first elected to Parliament in 1976 and became a Cabinet member in 1989. Partisans have long admired Simpson Miller as a Jamaican who was born in rural poverty and grew up in a Kingston ghetto, not far from the crumbling concrete jungle made famous by Bob Marley.

During her brief tenure as prime minister, her support waned amid complaints she responded poorly to Hurricane Dean and was evasive about a scandal regarding a Dutch oil trading firm’s $460,000 payment to her political party leading up to 2007 elections.

The two top candidates’ different styles were clear while they cast their votes.

Holness is largely seen as unexciting, but bright and pragmatic. He whisked into the voting center in the middle class area of Mona, barely interacting with voters. After being heckled by an opposition partisan, he said he was “very confident” of a Labor victory and departed after taking three questions from reporters.

By contrast, Simpson Miller hugged and chatted with supporters at a school in Whitfield Town and told election workers to help struggling elderly voters.

Her party, which experimented with democratic socialism in the 1970s, is still perceived as more focused on social programs than the slightly more conservative Labor. There are no longer stark ideological differences between the two clan-like factions that have dominated Jamaican politics since the onetime British colony began self-rule in 1944. Jamaica became independent within the British Commonwealth in 1962.

CPU Wars and c-Jump: the nerdiest card and board games ever

2011-12-16T21:29:00.000-05:00

CPU Wars and c-Jump: the nerdiest card and board games ever:

Board games and card games are kind of dorky to begin with. And there are plenty of titles out there that hold a special place in the heart of the nerd (just ask one about Settlers of Catan). But, there is a line, a line which even the nerdiest amongst us might not care to cross. For example, c-Jump -- a board game that teaches the basics of programming. Some of the spaces you'll land on in the course of your journey down the mountain include "goto jump;" and "switch (x) {". Then there's CPU Wars, for the three people out there that think Magic: The Gathering is too mainstream. In this card battle game you pit CPUs from throughout history against each other and attempt to collect all your adversary's processors. You can order c-Jump through ThinkGeek for $25 and pledge cash to CPU Wars over at Kickstarter. You'll find a video of the card game after the break.

Mobile gaming app Playd iPhone and Android Apps now available

2011-12-06T20:55:00.000-05:00

Mobile gaming app Playd iPhone and Android Apps now available:

Are you into gaming or mobile or social gaming or earning rewards or all of the above? If so you’re in luck as playd iPhone and Android apps are now available for you to download on both the iPhone app store and Android Market place. Playd allows you to you rate, share, and discuss the games you love with your friends!

In an email sent last night Playd founders say:

I’m proud to announce that Playd is finally born! We spent the entire summer building and collecting feedback from you guys and now you can see it in action. As gamers our work is never done. We are forever working on new features and partnerships to offer you guys the best experience.

Playd app features include verified check-ins, real-time game channels with your friends and tokens. With tokens you can earn you free swag, discounts, DLC, and more! Here are a few Playd screnshots.

For more about Playd visit: http://playd.it or follow @getplayd on Twitter.

CrunchBase Information

Playd

Information provided by CrunchBase

Disclaimer: Anthony Frasier, @AntyonyFraiser, cofounder Playd was one of the startups that participated in the NewME Accelerator. BlackWeb 2.0 and NewME Accelerator are owned and operated by Black Web Media.

Have you downloaded and “played” Playd? If so let us know what you think about the app in the comments below.

Going about your career as a maker of software.

2011-11-01T23:11:00.001-04:00

A sort of long winded read, yet he does make some pretty decent points as far as your contribution to a company and not under estimating yourself.

Dont call yourself a programmer

90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: A ton of people making social media software would have a fit reading this.

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Hard concept to grasp if your not ready

Don’t call yourself a programmer: At previous jobs i've watch many a programmer basically lay themselves off by not following these instructions

You are not defined by your chosen software stack: A few friends make fun of me for liking Java but it gets the job done even if it's not as glam as C#, If Python will get my task done faster then Ruby bring it on.

Ice Cream Sandwich: A Deep-Dive Tour With Android’s Chief Engineer [Android]

2011-10-22T01:07:00.000-04:00

Ice Cream Sandwich: A Deep-Dive Tour With Android’s Chief Engineer [Android]:

There are few things in this world I despise more than software updates. Downloading hundreds of files, waiting for the progress bar to fill, restarting the device - it's all a thankless chore. Usually. More »

hackNY Summer Lecture Series: Union Square Ventures

2011-09-27T02:50:00.000-04:00

hackNY Summer Lecture Series: Union Square Ventures:

In this post 2011 hackNY Fellow Akarshan Kumar describes the hackNY Summer Series lecture by the partners at Union Square Ventures.

On Monday, July 25, 2011, the hackNY fellows were hosted by Union Square Ventures in their swank new office on Broadway. We got a chance to speak to three of the firm’s partners, Brad Burnham, Fred Wilson and Albert Wenger, and also spoke to Gary and Christina about their experiences working with USV. With investments in companies like Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and Etsy, Union Square Ventures is one of the best VC firms in the country – we were excited to be there.

The partners spoke on a variety of topics – like what the firm looked for in prospective investments, the importance of a good team (as opposed to just a good idea), and what, according to them, were the characteristics of a good pitch (“A pitch is like a party” – Wilson).

Gary and Christina hung out with us later, and it was nice to hear their take too. Gary, having worked in a number of different environments, shared his perspective – “You should follow what you genuinely love doing… If someone doesn’t like what you are doing, it’s their problem, not yours.” Christina talked about her career-path post college and how (and more important, why) she left the Boston Consulting Group to come work for USV.

It was inspiring to see the entire team up close, and it was the perfect talk to begin our final week of hacking in New York.

MySQl Cluster 7.2 at OOW Demo Pod

2011-09-25T03:18:00.000-04:00

MySQl Cluster 7.2 at OOW Demo Pod:

Be sure to drop by the MySQL Demo Pod while you are attending Oracle Open World. There you will see a demo of the changes in MySQL Cluster 7.2. My favorite part of this release is that you can access the same data via SQL, LDAP, REST, memcached or via APIs. You get the best of both SQLand NoSQL worlds in one. At the Demo Pod, you can see how to see how Adaptive Query Localization speed up joins. Plus the demo will preview the latest and

greatest 7.2 DMR capabilities, and also demonstrate how MySQL Cluster

remains operational during node failures, upgrades and re-configuration

and how simple it is to create a live cluster using MySQL Cluster Manager. In the past, many cluster users avoid joins and simply used primary key or key/value pairs. But Adaptive Query Localization gets the data nodes to do more of the work in parallel.

And Cluster Administration has been greatly streamlined. So less typing gets you more performance.

So drop by the MySQL Demo Pod as you will want to see MySQL Cluster 7.2 in action. And there will be several session on cluster covering in detail things I have not mentioned here.

Red Hat continues to convert the masses to Linux.

2011-09-22T07:21:00.001-04:00

Red Hat swells sales and profits in fiscal Q2

This is definitely one of the better investment choices I've made over the years. Think I'll continue to hold onto this stock.

Major Online Poker Site's Owners Gambled with Players' Deposits [Gambling]

2011-09-21T22:48:00.000-04:00

Major Online Poker Site's Owners Gambled with Players' Deposits [Gambling]:

Even though they've been shut down for months, online poker sites are still finding new ways to get themselves into trouble. Full Tilt Poker—probably the most popular site for high-stakes players—is accused of taking players' deposit money and gambling with it. More »

yet another online pokersite currupted. At one point is it just not worth the risk of joining on of these?

Android > iOS (And Other Statistics)

2011-09-21T00:52:00.000-04:00

This is actually a pretty decent debate. Can you make decision though based on just page view from either device, probably not. Crawl the AppStore and you'll find it hard to find a decent stackexchange app, While in the Market you have a few really good options.

P.S - Android all day!!

Android > iOS (And Other Statistics):

As you can imagine, we’re sitting on quite a bit of data here about programmers and the technologies they use. We’ve used this for various things in the past (for instance, you can use your history on the site to promote yourself on Careers 2.0) but we’ve never done a deep dive into the data and presented what it says about the popularity of various technologies among developers.

Well, as you can tell from the title of the post, that ends today. Thanks to the help of our summer math intern Qiaochu, we pulled millions of data points around some of the most popular technologies and are now ready to settle the debate and declare with certainty which technologies developers prefer.* We’ll start with two matchups today, but we’ll be doing some more in the near future.

Before we get started, a quick note on the methodology (since I know it will get challenged in the comments): we looked at a number of different metrics and ultimately settled on using % of total users who are active (active being defined as asked, answered, voted, or commented on a question in that month) on the relevant tags. All of the other metrics you’d think of (page views, total votes, etc) tracked pretty closely with the users numbers but were much more likely to be skewed by “blockbuster” questions and were therefore deemed less reliable. And with that out of the way, on to the matchups!

#1 – Android vs. iOS

WINNER: Android

There have been endless articles written debating which platform is more popular with developers, Android or iOS. Some have claimed that iOS is more developer friendly, while the other side claims that Android is bound to win and so developers should focus on that. After analyzing all our data, the verdict is: Android is now more popular than iOS with developers.

As you can see below, iOS was running ahead of Android for several years, but peaked and stagnated in June 2010 (following the release of the iPhone 4). Android, on the other hand, has been on a tear since December of 2009 and overtook iOS as of the beginning of 2011. Unsurprisingly, iOS continues to stall (even declining somewhat) whereas Android continues its growth and is now approaching utilization by 10% of all SO developers.

#2 – Flash v. HTML5

WINNER: HTML5

This one is another biggie with most people coming down hard on one side or the other (and being fierce about it). But for most, the fact that HTML5 is the winner here isn’t the big surprise: rather, it’s how long its taken HTML5 to overtake Flash.

Flash has been on a long (but slow) slide downward as its fallen out of favor in the last few years. That said, there’s a lot of legacy support left for it and a lot of people who still really want it (can you say, restaurants) even with it’s inferior user experience; and as such, there’s still plenty of developers asking and answering questions about it on SO. HTML5 on the other hand has been on a slow and steady climb; not the rocket like growth that Android has shown.

Still, we can see that HTML5 is the rising star and Flash is on the way out, but it looks like it will still be around for a while before it does.

So there you go, Stack Overflow’s first round of technology face-offs. We’ve got more planned, but feel free to suggest any others that you’d like to see and we’ll try to fit them in.

*obviously this line is in jest – but we do still think this is a pretty good approximation and insight into how the usage of various technologies has evolved

2011-09-19T16:13:00.001-04:00

Three new APIs for Google Apps Script

Setting up a new machine for Ruby development

2011-09-06T20:00:00.000-04:00

Setting up a new machine for Ruby development:

It used to be a jarring experience to setup a new machine for development, but progress has paved the dirt road into a silky smooth autobahn. These are the tools we use today:

Homebrew: Remember how painful it used to be to get imagemagick installed? Now it takes about a minute. “brew install imagemagick”. Same story for git and other Linux dependencies.

rbenv/ruby-build: We have some apps running on Ruby 1.8.7, some on 1.9.2, and some on 1.9.3. ruby-build makes it easy to compile all three, rbenv makes it easy to switch between them on a per-project basis. We run rbenv in production as well, so all you need to do to change the Ruby version there is alter .rbenv-version—development and production is always on the same page.

Bundler: Not everyone at 37signals loved Bundler at first, but now that it’s stable, they’ve been won over. I now curse whenever I have to use an old application that hasn’t been setup with Bundler. Manually tracing down dependencies?! How prehistoric!

rake setup: All our apps has a rake setup task that’ll run bundler, create the databases, import seeds, and install any auxiliary software (little these days) or do any other setup. So when you git clone a new app, you know that “rake setup” will take care of you.

Pow: No more messing with Apache or nginx for local development. All it takes for Pow to add another app is a symlink. All the apps are always configured and available at basecamp.dev, highrise.dev, etc without messing with the hosts file either.

Thanks to Max Howell for Homebrew, Sam Stephenson for rbenv/ruby-build and Pow, and Carl Lerche/Yehuda Katz for Bundler. Thanks to them, starting from scratch has never been easier.

Just think on it for a sec..

2011-09-02T23:18:00.000-04:00

After a bad management decision (well, one in the line of many) at work this evening, I have come to wonder a few things.
How did the people who are in power come into power? What about them said that they had the skills and insight to organize and maintain? Who made that decision?
Did it happen all at once? Did we just say go ahead and ruin our days? Or was it more just a rising by a series of unfortunate events?
This line of questioning is not just limited to work. Turn on the news and it is there again to haunt me.

Michael Robellard's Blog: Developing Games on Google App Engine

2011-08-31T21:01:00.000-04:00

Michael Robellard's Blog: Developing Games on Google App Engine: Yesterday at the Cleveland Game Developer Meetup Tech Workshop I gave a talk on using Google App Engine for games. I discussed many aspect...

Great lead in for anyone looking to get involved with GAE.

The First Android 4.0 Phone Is the Samsung Nexus Prime, and It's Only on Verizon [Rumor]

2011-08-30T22:28:00.000-04:00

The First Android 4.0 Phone Is the Samsung Nexus Prime, and It's Only on Verizon [Rumor]:

Last week I was thrown into an anti-Verizon rage when I heard that Verizon wouldn't be picking up the Samsung Galaxy S II like the rest of the networks. But BGR claims they're getting something better: The Nexus Prime. More »

15 Websites To Download Free e-Books

2011-08-24T23:15:00.000-04:00

15 Websites To Download Free e-Books:

e-books Download Free

Diesel E-book Store

PDFee

Mega-PDF

EBooke

The Online Books

DevelopNew

BookGlutton

Authorama

Book-Bot

OpenPDF

PDF Gallery

PDFoo

uFindBook

Martview

Man Roots Six-Foot Nexus S Display At Best Buy [Video]

2011-08-20T00:39:00.000-04:00

Man Roots Six-Foot Nexus S Display At Best Buy [Video]:

Best Buy had a six-foot Nexus S on display that caught the eye of a customer waiting for his phone to be repaired. Instead of merely exploring the giant phone, he decided to go one step further and root it. More »

NewMe Accelerator, Aiming To Encourage Black Tech Entrepreneurs, Has Its First Demo Day

2011-08-05T00:35:00.000-04:00

NewMe Accelerator, Aiming To Encourage Black Tech Entrepreneurs, Has Its First Demo Day: "

Yesterday someone asked me whether the reason the poses in most of my avatar photos are silly is because otherwise I would have to deal with people constantly bringing up the fact that I don’t “look” like I should work in technology, meaning that I’m a (relatively not nerdy) woman. While I had never consciously thought about it about it, the answer is yes (“silly” at least is off-putting, while “woman” just means “has no idea about tech”).

The concept of minority in Silicon Valley is a bit unique, White, Asians and Indian males are relatively well represented while Latinos, Blacks and women are not. For some reason we as a community tend to be exclusive to an extreme, I mean, people used to give Arrington guff for being a lawyer (!).

If Mike and I have it “tough,” the entrepreneurs at NewMe, the first startup accelerator targeting black founders specifically, have it a thousand times tougher with regards to looking like they should work in tech (women represent 23.8% versus African-Americans at 1.5% of our work force respectively). As Central.ly co-founder Chris Bennett told me, “There aren’t minorities in tech, there just aren’t. One of the problems in the black tech community is that there isn’t yet a community.”

Co-founded by Angela Bennett (wow, female and a minority — a double whammy) and Wayne Sutton, NewMe attempts to remedy this, by giving Silicon Valley exposure to African American-led startups, by providing them with access to housing, resources, and mentorship from top Silicon Valley companies (for example, Google is an investor and the startups have been working out of Tagged’s offices). Instead of investment, the incubator aims to provide value by providing a supportive community.

When asked why there was such a dearth of minorities in the tech sector an what we could do to remedy it, Benton referred to investor Dave McClure’s answer when asked the same question at a tech event, that people invest in what they know, pattern matching whether they’re doing it or not.

According to Bennett, who is considering opening up the program to Latinos next, the solution is giving minorities more exposure, ” We can show more diversity in what founders look in the media, ” she said “So that a kid who reads CNN or the Huffington Post [or TechCrunch] can see that it’s accessible. We need founders that are more successful, raising money and having exits, and it can’t just be one person, it needs to be several people.”

Said mentor, and Foursquare head of monetization, Tristan Walker, “The more we can expose the Valley to what we don’t know the better off everyone is within the stack, from venture capital, to entrepreneurs to consumers, and that’s what the valley is about, sourcing the best products and ideas and talent.”

Here is a list and brief description of each NewMe startup in its first cohort, below.

Pencil You In

Similar to Styleseat, but with more of a focus on appointment setup functionality, Pencil You In is like an Opentable for salon appointments.

Kloud.co

Described by the founder as a Greplin meets Dropbox, Cloud.co imports your “online universe” and lets you search through cloud services like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and Dropbox — creating folders of what you were looking for and any other contextual information.

Playd

Playd, allows you to check in to your favorite games like you’d do for venues Foursquare, whether they’re PC-based, mobile or on console.

FetchMob

Like a more casual TaskRabbit based only around shopping, FetchMob lets people crowdsource their shopping trips by asking their surrounding community for help.

BeCouply

Mobile app and social network BeCouply aims to solve the problem of how and where to socialize as a couple, by connecting couples and letting them share dates, activities and photo moments with the similarly partnered.

Cued

Launching in the fall, Cued hopes to give its users relevant location-based activity recommendations, through using data from your already existing social shares.

goKit

goKit is basically an About.me for people with multiple personas, attempting to give people an easily set up outlet to express the multiple parts of their online identity.

Vouch

Vouch is like a Hashable for recommendations, an app that allows people to take their offline person recommendations online with Twitter-based #vouches.

AisleFinder

AisleFinder solves the problem of never knowing what aisle the items on your shopping list are in, using mechanical turk to acquire data about in-store item location.

Central.ly

Similar to OwnLocal Centrally wants to be the one stop web promotion shop for small to medium-sized businesses who want to create websites with the least amount of hassle.

Image: AisleFinder founder Curtis Pope

Google Rips Into Microsoft, Apple, Oracle For “Bogus Patents” And Trying To “Strangle” Android

2011-08-03T19:12:00.000-04:00

Google Rips Into Microsoft, Apple, Oracle For “Bogus Patents” And Trying To “Strangle” Android: "

In the past, I’ve been critical of Google for trying to dance around directly calling out their competitors who are actively attempting to screw them. Today, they’re no longer dancing.

In a post just put up on the main Google Blog, Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond takes shot after shot at Google’s competitors. By name, he calls out Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. What’s this all about? What else? Patents.

“I have worked in the tech sector for over two decades. Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” is the way Drummond kicks off his post. He goes on to lay out what he believes is a “hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.”

He talks about not only the recent Nortel patent auction (which Google lost while a group of rivals including Apple and Microsoft won), but also the Novell patent sale (which was also bought by a group including Microsoft and Apple), Microsoft’s insistance that Android OEMs pay them a $15 licensing fee for each device, and the lawsuits against Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. “Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it,” Drummond writes.

While Drummond says that their rival’s “anti-competitive strategy” is driving up the price of patents on the market to insane levels, he believes the law will eventually prevail and “this patent bubble will pop”.

“In this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it,” he notes, going on to say that the Department of Justice is currently looking into if Apple and Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nortel patents was for anti-competitive means.

“We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio. Unless we act, consumers could face rising costs for Android devices — and fewer choices for their next phone,” is how the post ends.

Damn. Them’s fighting words.

Black Tea Party group to rally against the NAACP

2011-07-21T22:10:00.000-04:00

Black Tea Party group to rally against the NAACP: "theGRIO REPORT - The 'rally to expose the failed big government agenda and lies of the NAACP' will be held directly outside of the Los Angeles Convention Center...

The NAACP was founded in a New York City apartment in 1909 by a ethnically diverse group of Americans. In its early years, as the organization became involved in the civil rights struggles throughout the 20th Century, it relied on numerous contributions and work on behalf of white Americans to help its cause. Shelton asserts that not all members of the NAACP board are African-American and cites that diversity is not only beneficial to the organization, but a part of its mission.

'Our mission statement is to eliminate racial discrimination and racial prejudice in America,' said Shelton. 'It doesn't say black, it doesn't say, white, yellow, green or red for that matter.'

Shelton pointed out that several local NAACP branches nationwide are actually led by white Americans and in some communities with varying demographics the problems facing Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and Latino Americans can even garner more citizen-oriented resolutions than those of African-Americans.

Peterson also said the NAACP is 'no different than the Ku Klux Klan'. Shelton argued that the KKK explicitly advocates for white supremacy and has utilized violence and death to get it's point across murdering thousands of African-Americans, while the NAACP advocates legal, non-violent organization. Shelton drew a contrast saying that the Klan advocates for segregation, while the NAACP fights for integration and equal protection under the law.

A major pillar of this Sundays rally is the hypocrisy and misguided priorities of the NAACP. BOND Action says that while the NAACP fights for more black news anchors on prime-time networks, the organization has remained silent on 'black thugs attacking white Americans'. Peterson says the NAACP has allowed many in the black community to fall back on race to evade responsibility for their crimes and other authority figures. In addition, Peterson believes the youth-targeted programs at next week's convention will lead black youth to believe this is a racist society, they need more affirmative action and they require dependent government programs.

'You can go to the average public school around the country and the black children, especially in the urban areas, are absolutely out of control,' said Peterson. 'White teachers are not allowed to discipline them because the kids cry racist, and the reason they do this is because they hear organizations like the NAACP and others say 'Well they're only doing this because your black'.'

The youth branch of the NAACP is currently it's fastest growing demographic, and the organization asserts that its youth focused programs at next week's convention are based on success, leadership and other academic scholarships. The organization rebutted Peterson's allegations that the NAACP advocates only for the educational goals of African-Americans and says it's committed to quality education for those of any race. Shelton also suggested success based on merit, citing the nation's numerous merit-based academic awards and the NAACP's own ventures, such as ACT-SO (the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics)

Addressing the critique of his organization on crime, Shelton stated, 'thugs are thugs'. The NAACP does not condone any criminal actions by persons of any race and maintains that those crimes be prosecuted under the law. Meanwhile, Shelton noted that African-Americans continue to be unfairly stopped and searched by law enforcement agencies nationwide, despite an imbalance between stops that result in a criminal charge and those that do not.

Peterson also addressed concerns about the NAACP's stance on black representation in the media, by saying this is no longer a problem and blacks are 'everywhere' in films, television and commercials. BOND Action also cites the recent NAACP battle with parents in New York over the close of several local schools in favor of public schools. The NAACP believes it is best to better serve the black community through consistent, funded reforms to these schools, rather than BOND Action and the parent's decision to leave it up to the focused charter schools.

Peterson's overall aim of this rally and his organization is to get black Americans to stop depending on the government and 'so-called black leaders' and instead focus on creating strong, close black families. The only way Peterson believes to achieve this is through truth.

'We want black Americans to wake up and start looking for information themselves, thinking for themselves and stop thinking in a tribal mode,' said Peterson. 'They're not a tribal people, they're individuals.'

Hilary O. Shelton says that the NAACP is not a monolithic organization and would like to inquire as to Peterson's aims. The policy and priorities of the organization are not decided by their Bureaus in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, or even the board, but the people. The organization creates policy utilizing all 2200 of their members who vote through a democratic process similar to that utilized in both houses of the United States Government, says Shelton. While the NAACP attends both the Democratic and Republican conventions and meets with members of both parties to advocate its agenda, it maintains that each of its proposals are conceived and voted on by it's members.

The week long convention titled 'Affirming America's Promise' will focus on various programs highlighting health and disease prevention, youth empowerment and leadership, reducing the harm to our environment, the upcoming redistricting battles in 2012, and numerous workshops with some including members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The NAACP says all are welcome to attend and respects the free speech of Jesse Lee Peterson and BOND Action to hold their rally outside.

'We believe that's absolutely important,' said Shelton. 'We're sure it will be a well disciplined rally because, as he says, the Tea Party is respectful of the values of a civilized America and we hope that's the case here'.

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Want to get a certain cross section of black folks to do something that goes against there own best interest?? Get there local Pastor/Reverend on board with you ploy.. Game over.

Replace Google Chrome’s Default New Tab Page With The Visually Pleasing Incredible StartPage

2011-07-19T21:16:00.000-04:00

Replace Google Chrome’s Default New Tab Page With The Visually Pleasing Incredible StartPage: "

Startpages are productivity tools meant to give you quick one-touch access to your favorite websites and information. Startpages are also personalized gateways and as such we tend to be quite picky when we go hunting for one. Usually the choice boils down to the degree of personalization (for instance, tie-ins with other web services) and looks. Thankfully, the choices are many and varied. Along with biggies like My Yahoo and iGoogle, you have Pageflakes and Netvibes as preferred ones. But smaller players are also inching in.

So, if Google Chrome is your favorite browser, give the Google Chrome Incredible StartPage featured extension a try. Startpages ideally need to be uncluttered, but none of us would mind a touch of visual chutzpah thrown in. Incredible StartPage is not as full featured as the well-known names of its tribe because it is designed to replace Chrome’s default ‘New Tab’ page. But as we will see, there’s a fair bit more…

The Visual Theme

The Chrome Web Store has quite a few startpage extensions but Incredible StartPage seems to be one of the popular ones with a good installed user base. One reason can be attributed to its easy-on-the-eye looks. Incredible StartPage has a theme based interface which is customizable to a fair degree. It uses Flickr API to grab images and display it as wallpaper and it gives you a few categories to choose from. Pick from clouds, sunset, nature, star, or go for a custom image from an URL. Click on the arrows to move ahead or back for more photos. Background and font color can also be tweaked.

It’s Not Only about Looks

As you are familiar with, this is how a default ‘new tab’ looks like:

Incredible StartPage gives it a facelift by turning it into the one you can see in the first screenshot.

The startpage is divided into three main panels:

The biggest panel is for displaying your bookmarks and apps against the backdrop of a Flickr image. You can click on Advanced Options and set it up to show it all in three columns.

The first frame on the left (Closed) displays all your recently closed tabs. You can go into Advanced Options and set a number for the maximum items you want displayed. A way to get into the browsing history would have been helpful here, but that’s absent. Clear it all with a click on the Clear button. The one quirk is that though this panel displays a previously opened Extensions tab, it won’t let you open it from here.

The frame that holds your bookmarks is where you probably will click most often. Of course, you can make your browsing more efficient by dragging and dropping some of the more frequently used ones to the Flickr image adorned My Bookmarks panel on the right (as shown by the hand icon in the screenshot below). This way you can keep the ones with which you start the day close by for one-click access. In fact, you can choose any folder and set it to be displayed as the main one on the bigger My Bookmarks panel.

Probably, the feature which puts an extra notch on this startpage as a productivity enhancer is the Notes feature. Scribble anything on the yellow Post-It style note and it stays there across your browsing sessions and even if you clear your cache. Quite handily, you can post your notes to your Gmail and Google Calendar accounts.

That sounds like a nifty way of setting up quick tasks and reminders. I also use it to share links with friends as clicking on Post to Gmail opens up a new tab with the note pasted into the main letter body.

Incredible StartPage consumes a bit of memory (around 15K), but that’s not much when you trade it off against the beautiful facelift and the productivity. What’s your take?"