The first time I used bit manipulation in web apps was for declaring user roles and permissions. A single integer field in your database can be used to declare any combination of up to 32 different capabilities/permissions for users by setting the individual bits in the value. Also, when dealing with colors as an integer value, you can isolate your ARGB values using bit shifting.
I didn't see anything in there advocating overabundance on either side, simply the irony of selling an alternative to one overabundance to a mass of people willing to engage in an equally or similarly harmful overabundance of something else.
I was checking the app out earlier and was curious to see what they're doing and what kind of data they're collecting, and they're really doing nothing out of the ordinary or worthy of distrust. They're using Flurry and Crittercism like everyone else, reverse geocoding your location with Google Maps API, and just serving up standard JSON data to power the app...again, just like every other app on your phone. One of the things I found interesting is that they're not using any kind of security model to protect the location of the media files online. If you clear the app data or start from a fresh download and trace the calls with a proxy like Charles or Fiddler, the entire album data is served up including full url's to the audio files on AWS. I don't know the etiquette around here, so I'll leave out the actual url and data, etc., but it's easiest enough to find for the crowd here.
I think it's brilliant. They're sending back events to the api when you stop and start tracks, and they're sending all of the information that the phone will give them - location, device/os info, storage/free space. This is probably the most real usage data a major artist has ever received on how, when and where their music is played by home listeners, and I wouldn't be surprised if this sets a major trend. They can pick which singles to release based on this data, decide where to spend the most money promoting concerts, etc.
That doesn't give you the phone number though, nor does it excuse them using the phone number (as I'm inferring from the wording in the article). TelephonyManager.getDeviceId() returns the IMEI/MEID/ESN, not the phone number. When most developers require READ_PHONE_STATE for a unique id, this is what they use.
The first comment is a self promoting alternative (daPulse) whose website looks very similar and whose product, much like the one being promoted, just looks like a slightly different Yammer. This seems to be an unnecessarily crowded space.
EDIT: Not the first comment...just the top one at the time I read the article (didn't realize comments on TC are sorted as newest first by default)
aguynamedrich, What Yammer did well is reinvent the social intranet for making announcements inside the firewall. It allowed for one person inside a company of 1000s to broadcast to the entire company.
What Yammer never had a chance to perfect before being purchased/killed was how to be the place where people actually work... The way people work has changed in the last few years. People are working 24/7, using multiple devices, working in distributed teams, in teams that are cross-company etc... These changes making communicating in real-time a necessity which is why Hall is focused on real-time communications.
So how do you guys solve the issue of most "enterprise social software" being nothing but a fairly shallow replacement for / complement to, email?
(Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a startup that's also playing in this space (depending on how broadly you define "this space"), and I don't really know if we're competitors or not!)
Looks cool, but also looks just like it's aspiring to be Android Bootstrap which already exists. I don't use either, because application setup isn't really the big pain point of Android development. I'd love to see this effort being focused on something with more value, but I applaud the effort regardless.
Edit:
I judged too quickly, and this is really cool. I did a quick setup from both Android Bootstrap and Android KickstartR. Android KickstartR worked with very minimal effort, and while there were a few things I had to do manually in Eclipse because of some weirdness in the latest Android toolkit (set JDK compiler to 1.6 to fix attribute errors, rename the projects...the usual), it worked and it wasn't so think with someone else's coding and project setup style that I could easily get cranking on this. When I set up from Android Bootstrap, it flat out didn't work with a simple Import from Eclipse and when I browsed through the source files, it looks really thick with boiler plate code. Bootstrap looked more like an app in a box and less like an actual bootstrap or kick start for my own app.
This KickstartR thing can go a long way actually if it maintains the lightweight feel. I don't like that AB uses Roboguice for that reason (as an example of what I mean about lightweight vs heavy-handed in this case). The second you introduce that by default, as seems to be the case in AB, you're now tied to that whether you like it or not. I personally gave Roboguice a try and just didn't think it added value for me and wasn't my style. I have other ways of achieving the same benefits that fit my style better, so I'd rather not have it, or at least have the option to remove it.
Something cool for this KickstartR would be to support arbitrary libs and not just the really popular ones. For example, I published my own lib which currently only I'm using AFAIK. But regardless, I use this lib in all of my own work. It would be nice to add a reference from that here, especially since I publish a jar with my library so it would be as easy as copying my jar into the libs directory. A former coworker of mine did the same, and I'd love to grab his libs in the process as well (as well as things like http-request, etc).
I'm the author of android bootstrap. Its built to work with maven and particular libs that are very common. Its very opinionated and will evolve over time. Each tool has their own value prop. Bootstrap is one for a example app or template while kickstatr is different. These tools are very useful and save a ton of time. Try to get roboguice 2 working with action bar sherlock with maven in under 10 minutes without a template/generator. Yeah good luck. Now you'll see the value of both/either.
Can I find your library on github/googlecode ? You could post an issue or fork the project on github for including your library. I can't promise you that I'll include it, but why not :)
The bit about building a web app in C is totally off-topic from your claim that 100 lines of python would equal 100 hrs of Java. If you can only write good software in a short amount of time in one or two languages, that's just a reflection of you as a developer and not the language, and I'd seriously challenge you to show me something you've written in 100 lines of python that I couldn't hire a single senior Java developer to write in the same amount of time (lines of code doesn't equal cost, so I'm not interested in debating lines of code nor do I think it's a valid measure of anything).
I'll give you a short story that approaches this issue from both sides. A client walks into a consulting shop with a piece of really bad client/server software written by a different consulting shop. The server is written in Ruby/Rails and the client in Java (Android). Both client and server code is horrible even though the server is written in Ruby (a supposedly beautiful/compact/expressive language) and the client in Java (super ugly long winded grandpa language, or whatever). The client paid the original consultants about $60k in total. One Ruby engineer and one Java engineer rewrote the entire thing in a few days for 1/20 the cost without really reusing an ounce of the original code. Ruby didn't stop the original server engineer from delivering horseshit in too much time, and Java didn't stop the second client engineer from delivering a clean/functional/performant app in just a few days.
So, you're suggesting the following analogy: The crime level of a region relates to the region itself the same way that the quality of software relates to the language the software is built on? You're comparing a property of an object to the object itself and a property of an object to another property. Pretty awesome you'd make that mistake in a thread where you're agreeing with someone's criticism of OO principles.
That's not always the case. I have grown overwhelmingly comfortable writing all my utilities and demos in Visual Studio, but I no longer work for a Microsoft shop, which is where I've always gotten my VS licenses. On any new computer I purchase for myself or at a non MS-centric job, I rely on Visual Studio Express, and this news really sucks for me.
For years I did all my hobby development with the SDK command line C++ compiler. But I do that on Linux now anyway. Every time I think about making some of it portable to MSVC again MS pulls something like this to remind me why I left.
This article is from nearly two years ago and claims that Facebook was very secretively working on its own mobile OS. If this is indeed the case, a lot of their somewhat recent acquisitions make a little more sense (GoWalla, Karma, Instagram obviously, and LightBox).
The fact that their valuation gets beat down on the lack of ad revenue in the ever growing mobile space turns into a bullish signal if they release a high quality phone with a high profit margin. I wondered why they were splitting up their mobile app into many recently on Android as well, and this tells me that it's possible they want to create a suite of "necessity" apps as the basis for their platform.
