Padraig

The article makes a great case that Motorola is the real winner.

The buyout can't have been solely for the patents, because Motorola are losing patent battles. It's unlikely that it was just to own a phone manufacturer, because why buy a 3rd rate one at a 60% premium? So why? Because Motorola had Google by the balls and could have further fucked Android up for everyone else.

It's a shame how every discussion of a Daring Fireball article here collapses into 'Gruber is a fanboy', but it's particularly frustrating when it's an insightful article like this one. If he's half as bad as some of you make out, it should be easy to argue the points without resorting to attacking the man.

Has the documentation situation improved much in the last year? I tinkered around with it a few times and it really felt close to being great. But... aside from the 2 or 3 intro tutorials, I found the docs really lacking. I only made actual progress by reading the framework code.

Any suggestions on the best way to come at it?

Other factors like Facebook finding and removing spam accounts, users enabling privacy features, etc. seem like a much more likely cause.

I could see people getting bored / busy and not bothering to use it any more, but it's unbelievable that 1.5 million would delete their accounts in one month.

Right, sorry.

I'm getting very different numbers... I may be wrong though?

(7,000,000/8) = 875,000 bytes/s = 0.834 MB/s

0.834 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 72,057 MB/day

(EDIT: Tweaked numbers, had mistyped 0.834 as 0.844 — doesn't affect the point)

On this "Apple should buy / copy Dropbox" thing...

Dropbox is wonderful. I love it. But Apple is slowly moving away from exposing the filesystem to the user, so if they do anything, I don't think it'll look or work like Dropbox. For example, Dropbox's solution to syncing conflicting versions is to let you browse revisions on the website. I don't see Apple doing it that way.

I would foresee an SDK level feature with each app responsible for integrating and syncing its own data. This is possible now, if the app maker is willing to host a server but the overheads of running a server long term discourage it.

Who really thinks Apple is going to build it and give it away though? Sure, there'll be efficiencies in terms of code reuse and scale if Apple provide it, but it'll cost the developer somehow (and there'll probably be another storm in a teacup when they announce it. but that's another day's work.)

AFAIK, very little iTunes music is DRMed these days anyway.

There's plenty of room for 'respecting dangerous invisible shit that can kill you' between those two extremes of being a scaredy-cat and acting macho.

tl; dr's rarely do justice but I think that's a bit snipey.

The point I took from it was in the organisational culture in the team that looked after the reactor. A macho attitude celebrating exposure to radiation does not inspire confidence.

Sounds great but I am never going to pay a subscription for my IDE, or my FTP program or my Twitter client. Relationships require trust and effort from both parties and it's simply not a perfect model for every piece of software.

I don't want a relationship with a company. For most apps I want to buy and own a thing as it is now.

This "old and broken" model persists because it's something that customers get instantly and can commit to knowing in advance what their full investment will be.