These postings get sadder and sadder every day. It's like this developer is dating a girl who's just not that into him and he doesn't get that yet: You left her 10 messages but she didn't call you back tonight. I'm sure she'll call you tomorrow. She was just busy.

One thing I've found is that reading about people's lives on the internet has widened my conception of what kind of lives are possible. Other than reading the biographies of exceptional people, people's life paths used to be totally dictated by TV and local society, where people's lives were generally restricted to: working for someone else, having traditional heterosexual relationships, getting married, having kids, getting old and dying. If this was unsatisfying to you, the only real option that was advertised was: work for someone else, have a traditional heterosexual relationship, get married, have kids, and spend your free time imagining how much more awesome life would be if you were working for someone else, having a traditional heterosexual relationship, and getting married except as a member of Starfleet in the 24th century. (In recent years, or on premium cable channels, those possibilities were opened somewhat.)

The "open" internet has taught me all about startups, open relationships, polyamory, child-free living, "dropping out", entheogenic spirituality, transhumanism, anarchism, libertarianism, socialism as anything except a caricature drawn by its enemies, progressive metal, Lisp, and tons of other things. None of these are new ideas, and they're not all great ideas either, but where else would a shy, sheltered kid from a hick town learn about them? It's the long tail applied to everyday human experience, and the full consequences of that are going to be indescribably big.

An Open Letter To iPhone Developers:

1) Apple doesn't care about you, personally. No one knows you exist. They don't need you to sell iPhones. Even if they needed third-party apps (which is debatable), if you left the platform, there would be a hundred thousand more people scrambling to take your place.

2) You are presumably developing for the iPhone instead of doing, oh, Enterprise Sales because you don't want to do Enterprise Sales or you are not good at doing Enterprise Sales. You are doing Enterprise Sales. The Enterprise doesn't care about the product you're selling enough to devote more than 5 minutes a week from a call center in India to the deal. If you have doubts as to whether this is a good sign, consult with your local Enterprise Sales engineer and ask what stage in the pipeline he thinks you are probably in.

3) If you stopped developing for the iPhone and started developing web applications or desktop applications or, indeed, almost any other type of software, you wouldn't have to ask anyone's permission to sell your software or improve your software.

4) It seems that you're spending an awful lot of engineering time trying to get permission to market your software to people who think it is worth $2, on the outside. Here's a thought: how about spending that time actually marketing software itself, and charge anywhere from 15 to 500,000 times as much.

The distinction is most probably legal. The transaction couldn't close until payment was received - and the paper check could be "received" but a wire transfer couldn't until the next day.

Likewise, they could put the funds on their balance sheet at the moment the check changed hands. I'm sure they also had accounts payable, so this allowed them to be solvent despite the fact that the check hadn't yet been deposited.

please don't link to secondary sources! The real article about that topic is quite interesting. Read it here: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141222/iPhone_owners...