They had the money. I've dabbled some in angel investing myself, for the same reason, and I know others in the same boat.
What's really high risk about starting your own company? Especially when you aren't taking out any loans to do it.
Emotional investment. You are much more likely to throw good money after bad if you are emotionally attached to a bad investment.
You almost always want to use other people's money to start a company; it spreads the risk over a larger pool. Even if you angel yourself to get the ball rolling, if the company fails -- and most do in the first year -- then you'll still have living money, and the ability to angel your next company - or someone else's. Or don't hire yourself to run your own company beyond your level of competence. In fact, I would typically recommend that you angel other people, rather than angelling yourself, and have other people angel you instead. You need this type of interaction to get an external reality check on whether your idea or product or business plan or management ability is crap.
Their big example in the article is SolidWorks, and it was pretty clear that they went with an acquisition exit strategy (they sold out to Dassault Systèmes for $310M), rather than staying entrepreneurial.
Most of the space exploration done by the U.S. has been done on the watch of a Republican president, including all of the Apollo missions.
You mean like Apollo 1, 4-8, and all of the other tests and development that happened before Nixon came in in 1969? If you just wanted to use the launch dates, Carter seems to have done well with Voyager and Pioneer...
Or maybe it is just that there has been a steady stream of missions of various sizes, most of which were projects longer than a president's term, and Republicans have been in the White House more often than not between Apollo 11 and the Mars Rovers.
Kennedy was as much a hawk as anyone else when it came to the communists, including political assassinations in Vietnam, an attempted assassination of Castro, the Cuban missile crisis vs. the former Soviet Union, and the Bay of Pigs.
Make no mistake: Kennedy and Johnson don't qualify as what we think of today when we talk about Democrats.
I don't have to install a plugin. I have to install an extension instead. Can someone tell me how/why this is better/different? FFS!
A) people don't like Silverlight
B) the rumor is Microsoft is dropping Silverlight
If (B) is true then you probably want some sort of alternative. For example, depending on how they code, the plug-in could be fairly modular. If that company / group goes belly-up then hopefully by then there are more modules to pick from.
It's an extension to the HTML5 specification, not an extension to the browser.
There is no plug-in, it's a protocol change that all HTML5 compliant browsers which meet the W3C specification are expected to implement.
They will probably be a fixture at car shows for all time, and in Korean gadget reveals, but they seem so out of place at a software conference.
To be fair, this was a cloud expo, not a software conference, and they had 7000 attendees and 104 vendors, 37 of which paid the bucks for the larger booth in order to be counted a sponsor. It's definitely not a CES or an E3, and clouds hardly shout "sexy technology!" from the rooftops. Google I/O and Apple's WWDC are both significantly more impressive conferences, and they intentionally cap at 5,500 and 5000, respectively. I'm guessing this cloud expo didn't sell out in literally seconds.
To put this in perspective, the old UniForum conference did double that attendee count in 1997, and fielded about double the vendor sales staff because they had about double the vendors.
And where was the political outrage towards Apple when they opened their own stores, for causing "unfair" competition with the other retailers?
(Obligatory computer analogy in this car thread.)
There were tons of complaints by tons of people; they were unable to buy the laws because the resellers were not franchisees. Here's a short list of pissed off people:
The current Apple pissing contest is over the changes to the repair referral channel. They're going to lose to Apple's wishes there, too, since what Apple sells is a holistic customer experience rather than selling only consumer devices.
wow. The fact that NASA has more interplanetary probes out there than all of the other nations combined, means nothing to you, eh?
NASA's been stymied by the neo-cons, BUT, that is about to change over the next 2 years. The neo-cons continue to pour money into the SLS, but it will not fly humans until 2022. OTOH, SpaceX will have their Falcon Heavy available at end of this year, or early next year. At that time, Musk is supposed to announce how much longer to develop the Dragon Rider (human rated launch capsule), and is saying that he will introduce information about MCT. MCT is what others of us know as BFR (big fucking rocket), but the new name is Mars Colonial Transport. if the inside info is to be believed, it will be ready by 2020, and will launch 150-200 tonnes, while the neo-con's SLS will take only 70 tonnes and will cost 3-5x the costs to launch.
So, I fully expect that NASA WILL get back on track, assuming that we can keep neo-con's dirty stinking paws off NASA for about 1 year or so.
Most of the space exploration done by the U.S. has been done on the watch of a Republican president, including all of the Apollo missions.
You should also be aware that the backdrop for the majority of the space program was military, and based in the cold ware; when the U.S. lost their "best enemy" with the end of the cold war, that's when funding dried up, and that's when military contractor consolidation took a particularly big bite out of our technical capability with the demise of the DC-X program and the X-33 program.
It's unlikely that we are going to have cheap access to space any time soon, in any case, since as soon as someone can pull a John Travolta and buy a used SSTO spacecraft instead of a Boeing 707–138 is the day some idiot lofts a load of ceramic coated rebar and effectively ends up with the functional equivalent of a bunch of tactical nuclear weapons they can deorbit onto ground targets at will. Believe me, an Andy Griffith equivalent is not going to be launching a cement mixer body on top of a texaco gasoline tanker any time soon. Private launches will be heavily regulated for the foreseeable future.
It's already in Chrome OS on Samsung ARM-based ChromeBooks. They beat Windows to the punch a while ago.
The only thing new here is that it's now also in Windows 8.1 preview IE11.
What it's likely never going to be is generic to a non-locked down browser implementation, which means it's not going to be on a BSD or Linux system without some form of lockdown. Otherwise it's too easy to do unencrypted frame grabbing to de-DRM the content, which is precisely what they don't want.
Of course, it's not like you couldn't just hook up one of these in place of the flat panel LCD and capture it unencrypted anyway:
[...]since Sony is probably not going to give back any of the new stuff they've written[...]
I expect that they will donate back all of their tactical code, and enough of the pieces of their strategic code to make the tactical code desirable to integrate from the FreeBSD community. I expect they will NOT donate back ALL of their strategic code.
The business case for them doing this is that they will be able to offload the maintenance burden for the tactical code, which does not benefit them commercially, to the FreeBSD community, while keeping their proprietary intellectual property to themselves.
Apple did the same thing when doing the UNIX conformance; my team donated back code and test sets to more than 150 Open Source projects to enable them to be standards conformant, and, in the case of the test sets, to continue to be standards conformant going forward.
This would get a lot more press, if Apple employees were ever allowed to publish anything without VP approval. If Sony is smart, they will absolutely crow about their contributions back to the community, since the secrecy buys them nothing, and being candid aboit it gets them nothing but good press. It's too bad Apple was never candid about its contributions.
No, it's more like an auction where you can program your appliances to stop bidding on electricity when the price gets too high. Allowing the price to fluctuate in response to demand gives people a greater opportunity to economize than exists with flat rates. If the fall of communism is any indication, the "one price fits all" model just doesn't work very well in the real world.
And the best parts of smart meters!
First, the utility can program them for differential rates, so if you are being antisocial to the grid by installing solar at your house, they can pay you less for the electricity you are generating than they charge you for the electricity you are consuming, which is something that's not possible without a smart meter!
Second (and this is the great part!), they can charge you less for electricity when you aren't there during the day to use it, and more, when you are home at night, and have no choice but to use it, since even with huge storage capacity, there's no way you are going to be able to recharge your car while you are asleep after lighting up your house and appliances after getting home from work, because, hey! The sun isn't out at night!
Good thing it's illegal for them to force you to install a smart meter in most places in the bay area...
Arizona doesn't reformulate their gas. California dilutes their gasoline with alcohol and other additives, and before that, MTBE, primarily due to lobbying by Chevron, since it allows them to manipulate the gas market in California by not allowing out of state refineries to ship gas into California.
You will find the same mileage improvements in states that do not reformulate during winter months (so called "winter gas" vs. "summer gas") if you refill your tank there during those months.
By the way, California gas is significantly worse for your engine, fittings, and gaskets than non-reformulated gas. This is one of the reasons there is a separate "aviation gasoline": to prevent an engine failure due to a hose or gasket failure due to it being eaten away by the alcohol or other substances.
Here is the reference for my statement about Arizona not reformulating:
"EPA published a separate notice approving Arizona's opt-out from the federal reformulated gasoline program, effective 90 [days] after the effective date of this final rulemaking."
Exaflop computing isn't that widely applicable, except to highly parallel algorithms, and we more or less have that covered by adding bunches of PCs together
The "bunches of PC's" works great for some algorithms, but not all.
I just said that.
Furthermore the economy of it depends largely on people donating computing power. There are limits to how far you can go with that. "Exaflop computing isn't that widely applicable" reminds me of the 1950's prediction that 5 computers could satisfy the entire world's needs.
No, it's not. Google has Exaflop capability; they're using it for search, indexing, and data transfer. These are all highly parallelizable operations.
I'm saying it's not as widely applicable to as many problems as, say, even one vector processor (and I mean Cray's idea of vector processing, not Intel's highly watered down version of it) that was clockable in the terahertz range. To my mind, people aren't actually building real supercomputers these days... Seymore Cray, this guy is not. Gallium Arsenide SOI is not.
You can add a bunch of slow systems together, yes.. because doing that is a well understood process, and pretty much any idiot can do it with downloadable software, as long as they have the infiniband and other necessary equipment on hand. And with it, you will be able to solve the problems that are highly parallelizable, because, hey, it's not like you can solve product dependent linear algebra with the damn things, since that has to run serially, so you are only going to have one node busy at a time, while the next node waits on the results from the first node.
To get useful work done on interesting problems, you have to go to either higher processing speeds, which are applicable to everything, or you go to dataflow processing, which is also applicable to a subset of problems, like cluster computing, but while those two overlap, they are not an identity set. RandCraw mentioned Thinking Machines, and there were other companies working in the same area. I don't count nCubed, though; even though I worked for a company that shared a building with them, it was a Larry Ellison tax boondoggle, so I seriously disagree with the Wikipedia article on where funding for that architecture should have gone.
More than half the people here are opposed to this because it's vaguely associated with the military. Get a grip. The military ties are a hook to get funding, since defense is the sacred cow of the federal budget. Better money spent on this than turkeys like the F-35. Technology like this is so general and widely applicable that it's useful no matter what excuse is used for development.
Exaflop computing isn't that widely applicable, except to highly parallel algorithms, and we more or less have that covered by adding bunches of PCs together, rather than actually building faster computers capable of solving linearly dependent problems, which are the new interesting problems.
Frankly, I think this guy is a little more interested in keeping people who want to build exaflop computers employed than he is in actually solving problems (surprise: he happens to be a member of the group that would be employed by this type of funding). I also think that IBM is feeling a bit hurt because of the recent supercomputer purchase contract they lost out on because they wanted too much mone for the thing (surprise: he happens to have more than a little involvement with IBM).
Why is it bad to give them real estate subsidies? Real estate taxes are not the primary revenue generator of city income.
I think you are confused. I was answering the question of "What's the appeal?"; you appear to be defending the adversary position to the position in the article. I didn't take a position on that one way or the other, so I'm a bit confused as to why you are defending this position to me.
I'm not sure you realize how important it is that NYC diversify its economy. 20% of our tax base comes from wall street. Not simply the corporate taxes, but the salaries and bonuses. When they take a hit, the city can face some very real financial trouble.
This is a different problem; this is called "spending more money than you take in". California has the same problem; in fact, very few states do not operate on a deficit in the current economy, and the ones which don't are the red states, like Texas, which are inherently fiscally conservative, and tend towards social conservatism, as well: if you don't pay for large social programs, you can save that money for a rainy day.
The goal of these tax breaks are not to attract one or two big companies, but to foster a community of startups by reducing capital requirements.
The best part is that its working. The economy in NYC has been very strong relative to the rest of the country, but recently its felt incredibly vibrant. Much of this is the product of a growing community of test startups.
I think you are rephrasing what I already stated as the goal. I think you are reply to the wrong posting.
The graph is showing the one that doesn't matter, since you can always target a subset of the APi which is supported by all the versions of the OS; that's the same for both iOS and Android, and it's just common sense code portability. The first product I worked on out of college was TERM software for a small company called Century Software in Salt Lake City, Utah, At one point, we had greater market penetration for async communications software on UNIX systems than UUCP, and UNIX systems came with UUCP for free. We also ran on VMS, BTOS, CP/M, MP/M, Mac OS, and half a dozen other non-UNIX platforms, as well as the 140+ UNIX platforms we ran on.
The secret to this success was to have as small a porting surface as possible, and that's eminently possible with both iOS and Android, although that type of design and coding tends to not be taught in colleges and universities these days, it's still eminently possible. It's just a matter of API contracts.
The other axis is hardware differences, and you can't ignore those for either iOS or Android. Those are the ones you can't get around with API contracts, because they touch on different device capabilities - the most important of which is screen aspect ratio, and that's the very thing that iPhone 5 broke, and it's the very thing the original iPad broke. Sure, there are other important parts to this; there the "I" in "I/O" as well, in particular, of all the sensors, there's keyboard inputs, but for the most part, that has fallen out to touch interfaces, which pretty much everyone other than Blackberry has agreed upon, and GPS. All the other sensors are much less useful to most apps.
If you talk to a Rovio engineer (and I have) on this issue, they effectively target a dozen iOS hardware platforms: to get the best user experience, and to get where they are today, with "Angry Birds" being the top selling mobile game of all time, they've had to adjust to aspect ration, resolution, and OS version. Being a game has meant having a much larger porting surface, in terms of OS interaction. And yeah, this means several dozen Android platforms, as well as their other platforms, but the difference between a dozen and several dozen isn't as large as the difference between 1 and a dozen.
Rather than pointing to Apple infographics, you'd be much better off pointing at the biggest success story in the industry, and doing as they do, rather than doing as Apple would have you do, since it's more important to be a top seller than it is to be portable, if the end goal is popularity with users and income.
You need to read the fine article. The locations in Brooklyn are subsidized, both through actual rent subsidy, and temporary tax exemptions being extended to tech companies: NYC wants these businesses moving in, and they want it in a rather large way, since they don't see bodegas, taxi companies, or a lot of other non-tech businesses as being a growth industry for increasing the tax base.
Without a huge investment in a redevelopment effort to knock down buildings and grow things up, about the only thing they can do is try to increase tax revenue by incentivizing higher income businesses to locate in the area -- and right now, that means tech companies.
The article specifically complains about these types of companies being preferentially subsidized.
About the only things worse that NYC could be doing to itself right now, besides reducing the caffeine intake for software engineers by limiting cup sizes, I mean, would be to be extending these subsidies to the Wall Street folks instead, or passing something like California's Prop 13, and having it apply to non-residential, non-parking structure commercial properties, as it does in California right now (thank you, Kaiser Family Trust -- NOT). There's a reason that San Francisco has built up huge numbers of un-rented high value per square foot commercial properties, and is knocking down older buildings an parking structures everywhere they think they can get away with it.
A battery pack swap will cost between $60 and $80, about the same as filling up a 15-gallon gas tank,
It costs $47.25 to fill up a 15 gallon tank here. However this isn't California, thank God.
Actually, it's $52.35 in California, if you go to one of several Bay Arco stations not in San Francisco or Los Angeles. So even in California, it's between ~$8.00 and $28.00 higher than filling up a 15 gallon gas tank. So swapping out the battery pack can be up to 150% the cost, if it comes in at the high end of things. I guess electric vehicles are only cheaper to operate if you build some more nuclear plants to make cheaper electricity.
If you want to reduce pressure on the court system, reduce the number of offences, or reduce the incentives people have to commit offences.
I'm curious: would you also abolish differential penalties for juvenile offenders?
One of the primary motivations for older gang members to indoctrinate juveniles into gangs in the first place is that the differential penalties means a juvenile offender can commit a felony, and as long as it's not serious enough to get them tried as an adult, they face much smaller penalties that adult offenders, with exactly the same profitability to the gangs. So as a 25 year old gang member, I'm highly incentivized to recruit 15-17 year olds to do things like trafficking narcotics to weapons violations. They get paid better money that they could get flipping burgers, usually by an order of magnitude, I get the rest of the profit, and hey, if they get cause, a year in juvie is something hey can do standing on their head, and be well rewarded for taking the fall.
In most countries other than the U.S., where you have a year from first public disclosure to file for a patent, disclosure automatically nullifies your ability to file for patents.
Do you really think the USA side would need specific hardware installed from the Russian side to setup a hotline (or vice versa).....Or do you think they would use their own hardware and it is just the actual line that is common?
In fact, yes, they do, because the US doesn't trust that the Russian encryption isn't crackable, and vice versa. So as of 2010, there's been a joint encryption agreement in place for the White House/Kremlin hotline, and the same technology is being deployed in this case as well. Specifically the GRU and SVR in Russia, and their opposite numbers in the US. The agreed upon solution was to use cryptosystems from both countries on the communications.
"More recently, the United States and Russia agreed on new joint encryption arrangements for the forty-year-old hotline between the Kremlin and the White House. Moreover, American and Russian banks already cooperate in secure digital communications for international transfers of staggeringly large sums of money."
Yeah - for your PERSONAL stuff that takes you 20 minutes to migrate or backup.
You've clearly never managed an enterprise software product. The entire point of enterprise software is that it affords deep integration into your workflows and internal processes and systems throughout the company.
I'd be more impressed with a number of products if they permitted you to continue running them on their cloud services, after they have ben generally end of lifed. I doubt that anyone would be continuing to run Google Reader or similar products which were nothing but money-losing propositions, but there are other products that have been EOL'ed that I could imagine an enterprise wanting to keep something around for an extra 6-8 months to actually get their business processes migrated some place else.
If you're going to kill something like this, something on which a business has become dependent for day to day operations, and you are in the business of selling cloud services, you might as well open source the thing, since it's already tied to your back end cloud services anyway, and the worst thing that's going to happen, since those services are based on a proprietary platform, is the company gives you more money. Absolutely worst case, you don't open source it, but you time limit the contract so no one takes your sources and ports them over to OpenStack.
they have quite a few other products that either manage to substantially offset their costs or give profits.
No, they really don't. 95+% of their revenues are generated by advertising. They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising. Go look at their financial statements.
I think this is something that's frequently lost on people, Google has one main product, and they have a couple of vehicles that they use to deliver that product: primarily search, and secondarily AdWords/AdSense, with gmail at a distant third place. It's not even possible to argue Android, since nearly all productization of Android is done by code freezing the source tree, and the partners, not Google, productizing it to bring it to market. This might change with the purchase of Motorola Mobility, but I wouldn't count on it.
Sometimes the chain between annoying local ordinance and the threat of violence is a long one, but it is always there. Otherwise, what reason would the store have to obey the law at all?
Philosophical agreement with the law and/or the law agreeing with the laws of physics?
Slashdot Mirror
They had the money. I've dabbled some in angel investing myself, for the same reason, and I know others in the same boat.
What's really high risk about starting your own company? Especially when you aren't taking out any loans to do it.
Emotional investment. You are much more likely to throw good money after bad if you are emotionally attached to a bad investment.
You almost always want to use other people's money to start a company; it spreads the risk over a larger pool. Even if you angel yourself to get the ball rolling, if the company fails -- and most do in the first year -- then you'll still have living money, and the ability to angel your next company - or someone else's. Or don't hire yourself to run your own company beyond your level of competence. In fact, I would typically recommend that you angel other people, rather than angelling yourself, and have other people angel you instead. You need this type of interaction to get an external reality check on whether your idea or product or business plan or management ability is crap.
Their big example in the article is SolidWorks, and it was pretty clear that they went with an acquisition exit strategy (they sold out to Dassault Systèmes for $310M), rather than staying entrepreneurial.
Most of the space exploration done by the U.S. has been done on the watch of a Republican president, including all of the Apollo missions.
You mean like Apollo 1, 4-8, and all of the other tests and development that happened before Nixon came in in 1969? If you just wanted to use the launch dates, Carter seems to have done well with Voyager and Pioneer...
Or maybe it is just that there has been a steady stream of missions of various sizes, most of which were projects longer than a president's term, and Republicans have been in the White House more often than not between Apollo 11 and the Mars Rovers.
Kennedy was as much a hawk as anyone else when it came to the communists, including political assassinations in Vietnam, an attempted assassination of Castro, the Cuban missile crisis vs. the former Soviet Union, and the Bay of Pigs.
Make no mistake: Kennedy and Johnson don't qualify as what we think of today when we talk about Democrats.
I don't have to install a plugin. I have to install an extension instead. Can someone tell me how/why this is better/different? FFS!
A) people don't like Silverlight
B) the rumor is Microsoft is dropping Silverlight
If (B) is true then you probably want some sort of alternative. For example, depending on how they code, the plug-in could be fairly modular. If that company / group goes belly-up then hopefully by then there are more modules to pick from.
It's an extension to the HTML5 specification, not an extension to the browser.
There is no plug-in, it's a protocol change that all HTML5 compliant browsers which meet the W3C specification are expected to implement.
Think of it as the new "blink tag".
They will probably be a fixture at car shows for all time, and in Korean gadget reveals, but they seem so out of place at a software conference.
To be fair, this was a cloud expo, not a software conference, and they had 7000 attendees and 104 vendors, 37 of which paid the bucks for the larger booth in order to be counted a sponsor. It's definitely not a CES or an E3, and clouds hardly shout "sexy technology!" from the rooftops. Google I/O and Apple's WWDC are both significantly more impressive conferences, and they intentionally cap at 5,500 and 5000, respectively. I'm guessing this cloud expo didn't sell out in literally seconds.
To put this in perspective, the old UniForum conference did double that attendee count in 1997, and fielded about double the vendor sales staff because they had about double the vendors.
On the one hand, I can't watch netflix on linux, because the DRM isn't supported.
Or Amazon premium content or Youtube premium content or Google Play premium content, all of which use Adobe FlashAccess DRM.
Of course you could always just buy an LVDS capture card and remove the DRM...
And where was the political outrage towards Apple when they opened their own stores, for causing "unfair" competition with the other retailers?
(Obligatory computer analogy in this car thread.)
There were tons of complaints by tons of people; they were unable to buy the laws because the resellers were not franchisees. Here's a short list of pissed off people:
All U.S.: http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Apple-dealers-biting-back-Mac-sellers-say-2636871.php
Australia: http://www.macworld.com/article/1027780/australia.html
France: http://www.padgadget.com/2011/12/30/apple-reseller-sues-apple-in-france/
Portugal: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2012/07/portuguese-reseller-interlog-fails-sues-apple-for-hefty-sum
LA and Boston: http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/22/apple_repair_consultants_upset_over_changes_to_apple_retail_referral_policy
The current Apple pissing contest is over the changes to the repair referral channel. They're going to lose to Apple's wishes there, too, since what Apple sells is a holistic customer experience rather than selling only consumer devices.
wow. The fact that NASA has more interplanetary probes out there than all of the other nations combined, means nothing to you, eh?
NASA's been stymied by the neo-cons, BUT, that is about to change over the next 2 years. The neo-cons continue to pour money into the SLS, but it will not fly humans until 2022. OTOH, SpaceX will have their Falcon Heavy available at end of this year, or early next year. At that time, Musk is supposed to announce how much longer to develop the Dragon Rider (human rated launch capsule), and is saying that he will introduce information about MCT. MCT is what others of us know as BFR (big fucking rocket), but the new name is Mars Colonial Transport. if the inside info is to be believed, it will be ready by 2020, and will launch 150-200 tonnes, while the neo-con's SLS will take only 70 tonnes and will cost 3-5x the costs to launch.
So, I fully expect that NASA WILL get back on track, assuming that we can keep neo-con's dirty stinking paws off NASA for about 1 year or so.
Most of the space exploration done by the U.S. has been done on the watch of a Republican president, including all of the Apollo missions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Solar_System_exploration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States
Also, Elon Musk is a registered independent, neither a Republican nor a Democrat:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
You should also be aware that the backdrop for the majority of the space program was military, and based in the cold ware; when the U.S. lost their "best enemy" with the end of the cold war, that's when funding dried up, and that's when military contractor consolidation took a particularly big bite out of our technical capability with the demise of the DC-X program and the X-33 program.
It's unlikely that we are going to have cheap access to space any time soon, in any case, since as soon as someone can pull a John Travolta and buy a used SSTO spacecraft instead of a Boeing 707–138 is the day some idiot lofts a load of ceramic coated rebar and effectively ends up with the functional equivalent of a bunch of tactical nuclear weapons they can deorbit onto ground targets at will. Believe me, an Andy Griffith equivalent is not going to be launching a cement mixer body on top of a texaco gasoline tanker any time soon. Private launches will be heavily regulated for the foreseeable future.
If it's still MS only, who gives a shit?
It's already in Chrome OS on Samsung ARM-based ChromeBooks. They beat Windows to the punch a while ago.
The only thing new here is that it's now also in Windows 8.1 preview IE11.
What it's likely never going to be is generic to a non-locked down browser implementation, which means it's not going to be on a BSD or Linux system without some form of lockdown. Otherwise it's too easy to do unencrypted frame grabbing to de-DRM the content, which is precisely what they don't want.
Of course, it's not like you couldn't just hook up one of these in place of the flat panel LCD and capture it unencrypted anyway:
http://www.unigraf.fi/product/ufg-04-lvds-quad
http://www.goepel.com/?id=2392&L=4
http://www.teledynedalsa.com/imaging/products/fg/OR-64L0-00080/
To heck with the WOPR!
I want that acoustic coupled modem that was capable of autodialing! That's technology indistinguishable from magic, baby!
[...]since Sony is probably not going to give back any of the new stuff they've written[...]
I expect that they will donate back all of their tactical code, and enough of the pieces of their strategic code to make the tactical code desirable to integrate from the FreeBSD community. I expect they will NOT donate back ALL of their strategic code.
The business case for them doing this is that they will be able to offload the maintenance burden for the tactical code, which does not benefit them commercially, to the FreeBSD community, while keeping their proprietary intellectual property to themselves.
Apple did the same thing when doing the UNIX conformance; my team donated back code and test sets to more than 150 Open Source projects to enable them to be standards conformant, and, in the case of the test sets, to continue to be standards conformant going forward.
This would get a lot more press, if Apple employees were ever allowed to publish anything without VP approval. If Sony is smart, they will absolutely crow about their contributions back to the community, since the secrecy buys them nothing, and being candid aboit it gets them nothing but good press. It's too bad Apple was never candid about its contributions.
No, it's more like an auction where you can program your appliances to stop bidding on electricity when the price gets too high. Allowing the price to fluctuate in response to demand gives people a greater opportunity to economize than exists with flat rates. If the fall of communism is any indication, the "one price fits all" model just doesn't work very well in the real world.
And the best parts of smart meters!
First, the utility can program them for differential rates, so if you are being antisocial to the grid by installing solar at your house, they can pay you less for the electricity you are generating than they charge you for the electricity you are consuming, which is something that's not possible without a smart meter!
Second (and this is the great part!), they can charge you less for electricity when you aren't there during the day to use it, and more, when you are home at night, and have no choice but to use it, since even with huge storage capacity, there's no way you are going to be able to recharge your car while you are asleep after lighting up your house and appliances after getting home from work, because, hey! The sun isn't out at night!
Good thing it's illegal for them to force you to install a smart meter in most places in the bay area...
Annoyingly filming other people. The subjects are obviously annoyed and almost go hit him. I hope you see why Google Glass is a ridiculously bad idea.
I guess you're the guy who took the baseball bat to the ATM for filming you, right?
Arizona doesn't reformulate their gas. California dilutes their gasoline with alcohol and other additives, and before that, MTBE, primarily due to lobbying by Chevron, since it allows them to manipulate the gas market in California by not allowing out of state refineries to ship gas into California.
You will find the same mileage improvements in states that do not reformulate during winter months (so called "winter gas" vs. "summer gas") if you refill your tank there during those months.
By the way, California gas is significantly worse for your engine, fittings, and gaskets than non-reformulated gas. This is one of the reasons there is a separate "aviation gasoline": to prevent an engine failure due to a hose or gasket failure due to it being eaten away by the alcohol or other substances.
Here is the reference for my statement about Arizona not reformulating:
http://www.epa.gov/region9/air/phoenixcbg/
"EPA published a separate notice approving Arizona's opt-out from the federal reformulated gasoline program, effective 90 [days] after the effective date of this final rulemaking."
Exaflop computing isn't that widely applicable, except to highly parallel algorithms, and we more or less have that covered by adding bunches of PCs together
The "bunches of PC's" works great for some algorithms, but not all.
I just said that.
Furthermore the economy of it depends largely on people donating computing power. There are limits to how far you can go with that. "Exaflop computing isn't that widely applicable" reminds me of the 1950's prediction that 5 computers could satisfy the entire world's needs.
No, it's not. Google has Exaflop capability; they're using it for search, indexing, and data transfer. These are all highly parallelizable operations.
I'm saying it's not as widely applicable to as many problems as, say, even one vector processor (and I mean Cray's idea of vector processing, not Intel's highly watered down version of it) that was clockable in the terahertz range. To my mind, people aren't actually building real supercomputers these days... Seymore Cray, this guy is not. Gallium Arsenide SOI is not.
You can add a bunch of slow systems together, yes.. because doing that is a well understood process, and pretty much any idiot can do it with downloadable software, as long as they have the infiniband and other necessary equipment on hand. And with it, you will be able to solve the problems that are highly parallelizable, because, hey, it's not like you can solve product dependent linear algebra with the damn things, since that has to run serially, so you are only going to have one node busy at a time, while the next node waits on the results from the first node.
To get useful work done on interesting problems, you have to go to either higher processing speeds, which are applicable to everything, or you go to dataflow processing, which is also applicable to a subset of problems, like cluster computing, but while those two overlap, they are not an identity set. RandCraw mentioned Thinking Machines, and there were other companies working in the same area. I don't count nCubed, though; even though I worked for a company that shared a building with them, it was a Larry Ellison tax boondoggle, so I seriously disagree with the Wikipedia article on where funding for that architecture should have gone.
More than half the people here are opposed to this because it's vaguely associated with the military. Get a grip. The military ties are a hook to get funding, since defense is the sacred cow of the federal budget. Better money spent on this than turkeys like the F-35. Technology like this is so general and widely applicable that it's useful no matter what excuse is used for development.
Exaflop computing isn't that widely applicable, except to highly parallel algorithms, and we more or less have that covered by adding bunches of PCs together, rather than actually building faster computers capable of solving linearly dependent problems, which are the new interesting problems.
Frankly, I think this guy is a little more interested in keeping people who want to build exaflop computers employed than he is in actually solving problems (surprise: he happens to be a member of the group that would be employed by this type of funding). I also think that IBM is feeling a bit hurt because of the recent supercomputer purchase contract they lost out on because they wanted too much mone for the thing (surprise: he happens to have more than a little involvement with IBM).
It could also have mentioned "2008"... the year the black and white plastic case Mac laptops and the replacement batteries from ATG were sold.
Best Buy has been fighting this recall of the third party batteries they sold to these consumers for about 5 years now.
Why is it bad to give them real estate subsidies? Real estate taxes are not the primary revenue generator of city income.
I think you are confused. I was answering the question of "What's the appeal?"; you appear to be defending the adversary position to the position in the article. I didn't take a position on that one way or the other, so I'm a bit confused as to why you are defending this position to me.
I'm not sure you realize how important it is that NYC diversify its economy. 20% of our tax base comes from wall street. Not simply the corporate taxes, but the salaries and bonuses. When they take a hit, the city can face some very real financial trouble.
This is a different problem; this is called "spending more money than you take in". California has the same problem; in fact, very few states do not operate on a deficit in the current economy, and the ones which don't are the red states, like Texas, which are inherently fiscally conservative, and tend towards social conservatism, as well: if you don't pay for large social programs, you can save that money for a rainy day.
The goal of these tax breaks are not to attract one or two big companies, but to foster a community of startups by reducing capital requirements.
The best part is that its working. The economy in NYC has been very strong relative to the rest of the country, but recently its felt incredibly vibrant. Much of this is the product of a growing community of test startups.
I think you are rephrasing what I already stated as the goal. I think you are reply to the wrong posting.
There are two axis for fragmentation.
The graph is showing the one that doesn't matter, since you can always target a subset of the APi which is supported by all the versions of the OS; that's the same for both iOS and Android, and it's just common sense code portability. The first product I worked on out of college was TERM software for a small company called Century Software in Salt Lake City, Utah, At one point, we had greater market penetration for async communications software on UNIX systems than UUCP, and UNIX systems came with UUCP for free. We also ran on VMS, BTOS, CP/M, MP/M, Mac OS, and half a dozen other non-UNIX platforms, as well as the 140+ UNIX platforms we ran on.
The secret to this success was to have as small a porting surface as possible, and that's eminently possible with both iOS and Android, although that type of design and coding tends to not be taught in colleges and universities these days, it's still eminently possible. It's just a matter of API contracts.
The other axis is hardware differences, and you can't ignore those for either iOS or Android. Those are the ones you can't get around with API contracts, because they touch on different device capabilities - the most important of which is screen aspect ratio, and that's the very thing that iPhone 5 broke, and it's the very thing the original iPad broke. Sure, there are other important parts to this; there the "I" in "I/O" as well, in particular, of all the sensors, there's keyboard inputs, but for the most part, that has fallen out to touch interfaces, which pretty much everyone other than Blackberry has agreed upon, and GPS. All the other sensors are much less useful to most apps.
If you talk to a Rovio engineer (and I have) on this issue, they effectively target a dozen iOS hardware platforms: to get the best user experience, and to get where they are today, with "Angry Birds" being the top selling mobile game of all time, they've had to adjust to aspect ration, resolution, and OS version. Being a game has meant having a much larger porting surface, in terms of OS interaction. And yeah, this means several dozen Android platforms, as well as their other platforms, but the difference between a dozen and several dozen isn't as large as the difference between 1 and a dozen.
Rather than pointing to Apple infographics, you'd be much better off pointing at the biggest success story in the industry, and doing as they do, rather than doing as Apple would have you do, since it's more important to be a top seller than it is to be portable, if the end goal is popularity with users and income.
What's the appeal? -- you need to RTFA
You need to read the fine article. The locations in Brooklyn are subsidized, both through actual rent subsidy, and temporary tax exemptions being extended to tech companies: NYC wants these businesses moving in, and they want it in a rather large way, since they don't see bodegas, taxi companies, or a lot of other non-tech businesses as being a growth industry for increasing the tax base.
Without a huge investment in a redevelopment effort to knock down buildings and grow things up, about the only thing they can do is try to increase tax revenue by incentivizing higher income businesses to locate in the area -- and right now, that means tech companies.
The article specifically complains about these types of companies being preferentially subsidized.
About the only things worse that NYC could be doing to itself right now, besides reducing the caffeine intake for software engineers by limiting cup sizes, I mean, would be to be extending these subsidies to the Wall Street folks instead, or passing something like California's Prop 13, and having it apply to non-residential, non-parking structure commercial properties, as it does in California right now (thank you, Kaiser Family Trust -- NOT). There's a reason that San Francisco has built up huge numbers of un-rented high value per square foot commercial properties, and is knocking down older buildings an parking structures everywhere they think they can get away with it.
A battery pack swap will cost between $60 and $80, about the same as filling up a 15-gallon gas tank,
It costs $47.25 to fill up a 15 gallon tank here. However this isn't California, thank God.
Actually, it's $52.35 in California, if you go to one of several Bay Arco stations not in San Francisco or Los Angeles. So even in California, it's between ~$8.00 and $28.00 higher than filling up a 15 gallon gas tank. So swapping out the battery pack can be up to 150% the cost, if it comes in at the high end of things. I guess electric vehicles are only cheaper to operate if you build some more nuclear plants to make cheaper electricity.
If you want to reduce pressure on the court system, reduce the number of offences, or reduce the incentives people have to commit offences.
I'm curious: would you also abolish differential penalties for juvenile offenders?
One of the primary motivations for older gang members to indoctrinate juveniles into gangs in the first place is that the differential penalties means a juvenile offender can commit a felony, and as long as it's not serious enough to get them tried as an adult, they face much smaller penalties that adult offenders, with exactly the same profitability to the gangs. So as a 25 year old gang member, I'm highly incentivized to recruit 15-17 year olds to do things like trafficking narcotics to weapons violations. They get paid better money that they could get flipping burgers, usually by an order of magnitude, I get the rest of the profit, and hey, if they get cause, a year in juvie is something hey can do standing on their head, and be well rewarded for taking the fall.
This is about the stupidest thing for inventors.
In most countries other than the U.S., where you have a year from first public disclosure to file for a patent, disclosure automatically nullifies your ability to file for patents.
Do you really think the USA side would need specific hardware installed from the Russian side to setup a hotline (or vice versa).....Or do you think they would use their own hardware and it is just the actual line that is common?
In fact, yes, they do, because the US doesn't trust that the Russian encryption isn't crackable, and vice versa. So as of 2010, there's been a joint encryption agreement in place for the White House/Kremlin hotline, and the same technology is being deployed in this case as well. Specifically the GRU and SVR in Russia, and their opposite numbers in the US. The agreed upon solution was to use cryptosystems from both countries on the communications.
"More recently, the United States and Russia agreed on new joint encryption arrangements for the forty-year-old hotline between the Kremlin and the White House. Moreover, American and Russian banks already cooperate in secure digital communications for international transfers of staggeringly large sums of money."
See this 2010 report for details, specifically, the executive summary beginning on page 7:
http://www.ewi.info/system/files/USRussiaCyber_WEB.pdf
Yeah - for your PERSONAL stuff that takes you 20 minutes to migrate or backup.
You've clearly never managed an enterprise software product. The entire point of enterprise software is that it affords deep integration into your workflows and internal processes and systems throughout the company.
I'd be more impressed with a number of products if they permitted you to continue running them on their cloud services, after they have ben generally end of lifed. I doubt that anyone would be continuing to run Google Reader or similar products which were nothing but money-losing propositions, but there are other products that have been EOL'ed that I could imagine an enterprise wanting to keep something around for an extra 6-8 months to actually get their business processes migrated some place else.
If you're going to kill something like this, something on which a business has become dependent for day to day operations, and you are in the business of selling cloud services, you might as well open source the thing, since it's already tied to your back end cloud services anyway, and the worst thing that's going to happen, since those services are based on a proprietary platform, is the company gives you more money. Absolutely worst case, you don't open source it, but you time limit the contract so no one takes your sources and ports them over to OpenStack.
No, they really don't. 95+% of their revenues are generated by advertising. They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising. Go look at their financial statements.
I think this is something that's frequently lost on people, Google has one main product, and they have a couple of vehicles that they use to deliver that product: primarily search, and secondarily AdWords/AdSense, with gmail at a distant third place. It's not even possible to argue Android, since nearly all productization of Android is done by code freezing the source tree, and the partners, not Google, productizing it to bring it to market. This might change with the purchase of Motorola Mobility, but I wouldn't count on it.
Sometimes the chain between annoying local ordinance and the threat of violence is a long one, but it is always there. Otherwise, what reason would the store have to obey the law at all?
Philosophical agreement with the law and/or the law agreeing with the laws of physics?