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Something like this document involving funding revolutionary groups? Or maybe could be explained with NSA/GCHQ manipulation in social networks? That the first report blames the owner of the site of the other report could give an idea of how complex is putting blame on someone lately, but in case of doubt, don't attribute to stupidity what can be explained with NSA's malice.

Nonsense. You can easily hire top people, you just have to be willing to pay them enough. Whatever you're offering, keep doubling it and see if you're still not getting great candidates walking in the door. This is what Netflix do: They routinely offer salaries at significantly above market rate, and they have far less trouble hiring software engineers than the other Silicon Valley firms who complain about a lack of talent.

Now, you may say, "but we can't afford to offer salaries that high!" and maybe that's true, but it means that the candidates you want are out of your price range, not that they're not out there. For companies that can't pay, the solution is obvious: Encourage as many people as possible to enter STEM fields, thus increasing the pool of candidates, which in turn increases the smaller pool of elite candidates. Greater supply and equal demand causes a drop in price, and companies an now hire better talent for mediocre wages.

This equation is the only reason by tech companies have been attaching themselves to these ludicrous campaigns to teach everybody to code. Not because they really believe their some social benefit to every school kid being able to make their own smartphone app, but because they want to increase their profits by lowering their wage bill. This is hardly wild speculation, given we know for a fact that tech CEOs spent most of the 2000s illegally conspiring to lower wages via mutal non-recruitment agreements: http://pando.com/2014/01/23/th...

Yes.

http://pando.com/2013/12/16/bi...

Yeah, look how evil regulation stopped companies from honestly competing on worker's wages, just recently!.. Oh, wait, it was the other way around.

See, you've got a false equivalency. A company has much more negotiating power than a worker. People need food, to get food they need money, and to get money they need to work.

Acting all high and mighty and walking out of an interview works much better when you're the one with a billions in cash to keep you going and hundreds of applicants, not when you're the one with a family to feed and a dozen viable jobs for you around.

Meanwhile less big companies like TomTom get sued for infringement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.

And HTC pay Microsoft a $5 license for every Android device

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/10/microsoft-collects-license-fees-on-50-of-android-devices-tells-google-to-wake-up/

Actually I'm surprised that Google doesn't have a formal license fee for Android. They could charge for a license that they'd guarantee would cover all patents. Some would go on the patents they know the rest would go to fighting patent lawsuits in the future.

E.g. suppose Google knows that most licensees for Android pay $5 in license fees. They set up Android Licensing Inc which offers a patent indemnity license for say $10 per device. If you pay the license Android Licensing Inc will fight patent violation lawsuits for you. They could build in a patent pooling clause too.

You'd also be free to take your chances. Of course it's debatable how many Android OEMS would actually go for this. The big ones - Samsung, HTC, Sony etc have already negotiated their own arrangements and would presumably not want to patent pool. The small ones probably take their chances and negotiate licenses as they need to.

Probably they missed their chance to do this back when Android was announced. If they set it up as an industry consortium with patent pooling and a board of directors that governed the standard they could have done this. Android doesn't actually work like that - Google license the base OS for free but Google Apps are licensed.

http://source.android.com/faqs.html#how-can-i-get-access-to-the-google-apps-for-android-such-as-maps

Someone discussed this here

http://pando.com/2012/01/28/how-google-can-save-android-close-it-license-it-swim-in-the-profits/

By licensing Android, Google could begin to extract even more money from smartphones--which, I thought, was the whole point of being in business.

Won't licensing Android turn phone makers away from Google's OS? That may have been a worry a few years ago, before manufacturers had committed to the OS. But now Google and major handset makers are stuck on the Android train. They've built their entire businesses around the OS, and many of their customers love it. And, anyway, phone makers know that Android isn't really free in the first place--not to Google and not to handset makers. In addition to the cost of developing the OS, Google has lately been spending billions on patents to protect it. Nearly every handset maker, meanwhile, has signed licensing agreements with Microsoft to settle patent suits. Estimates suggest that each copy of Android costs phone makers $10 to $15 in licensing fees to Microsoft. That's still a bargain--Windows Phone 7 costs $20 to $30 per copy.

So here's Google's opportunity: It could charge phone makers $10 per Android license, raising the total per-copy cost of Android to between $20 and $25. Sure, Samsung, HTC and others may balk, but what are they going to do about the added cost? Going to Windows would be more expensive and confusing to their businesses. As an inducement, Google could also begin settlement negotiations with Microsoft and other patent litigants to reduce Android's licensing costs. Given all this, phone manufacturers would stick with Android--and Google would make a killing.

The reason I think they won't do this is that Samsung sell most Android phones. There have always been hints that Samsung would fork Android for its own ends and I think if Google tried to make them

A few years ago I was building a team to build a system (Pando, http://www.pando.com/ that needed to be efficient and small on both Mac and Windows (i.e. C++ code), plus a Java server side. I talked to plenty of recent graduates of CS programs, and it was easy to staff the server side work (Java, PHP), and at least find people who wanted to learn Mac development (ObjC), but nobody knew anything about C++/Win32 or was even willing to learn it. Luckily I found a fantastic old-school developer who did a great job, but it was quite an eye opener to find that schools weren't training CS students anything about what I thought was Microsoft's core asset (Win32).

Use a P2P network that they didn't build, didn't buy or contribute to, didn't ask permission to be on, all in order to promote their content and make money.

While the overall population of programmers may be shifting slowly away from Windows, the shift new developers coming out of school is much more dramatic. My company (Pando Networks) ships an application on Windows, Mac and Linux, and when we recruit new developers from school we see ZERO experience with Windows development coming from the universities. Schools are completely focused on modern, portable languages (e.g. Java, Ruby), and they're writing mainly "web apps", so few students have more than a passing acquaintence with C++, a few played with .Net on servers, and none have written a "Windows app". If our experience is typical, I'd say that MS has completely lost the next generation of softare developers.

From the corporate IT perspective, I think that this also the case. IT would rather implement Web apps, which are easy to deploy and support. So while the developers might use Windows computers on their desktops, and perhaps as the servers, that doesn't particularly affect the software - Java, PHP, etc., are effectively the same on all platforms. And even the developers writing .Net server software are less tied to Windows than they would have been if they were writing a Win32 client/server app.

Can't speak for the others, but......

http://www.pando.com

dimes

in concocting goofy company names.

QinetiQ sounds like the fusion of Qbert and Compaq. They ought to move out to Silicon Valley, so they can rub shoulders with the guys from qoop. Or perhaps New York would be better, given that pando makes their home there.