February 26, 2010

PayPal to Open App Store for Developers

PayPal sees an opportunity for developers. The company thinks third-party developers could make good money offering apps to consumers and merchants that relate to PayPal’s services, but that the company doesn’t have the interest or resources to build for itself. “It could be an invoicing application for a merchant or

Fixing Independent Programmers’ No-Win Scenario

DeveloperWorld calls Joe Stack’s fatal flight into a government building ” callous, selfish, and inexcusable,” but also points out that he has a legitimate point about tax laws that treat programmers unfairly. Under Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, a “computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled

Network Knowhow: Partial Orderings

Have you ever tried to assemble a model, piece of furniture, or garbage disposal and run into instructions like this?“Clamp hose A onto connector B… [30 minutes of frustration later] … after removing connector cover C.”The problem isn’t really in the instructions (although they may be badly worded, too) but