The source is unhappy they were let go. The 'inefficiencies' terminology was not attributed in the original source article, which includes a copy of the memo; I'm surprised no one has posted a link to the source article yet, so here it is:
According to the original source article, more people than just the mobile team were let go.
I can understand them doing this, particularly since they referenced Web 2.0 in their hiring of Rob Malda (cmdrtaco), HTML5 is enough along that it can be used to deliver the content in a reasonable way, using a centralized paywall, and trying to maintain 7 iOS apps and 100's of Android apps, due to minor variations in platform, makes a browser-based experience a no-brainer, in terms of the money they spend on development.
Overall, I think this does not bode well for non-game, non-vertical market app writers, so for all the people who are thinking that going to app writing is going to be a really lucrative payoff, this is probably the beginning of a trend, and they should consider some other line of work.
Consider that if there are $1B in RSUs converted from being RSUs into normal income for employees, that's $1B of employee income that gets taxed at the ordinary income tax rate, rather than $1B of corporate profits being taxed at the (much lower) corporate tax rate.
So instead of 15% of $1B, the taxes collected go up to 28% of $1B.
The reason this ends up paid by the employee instead of the company is because of the FAS rules that the government has established that incentivize RSUs in place of non-qualifying stock options.
One up side for the employee is that they realize a lower basis price for their stock (the pice at time of grant of the RSU, rather than time of exercise of an option), and it gets held as a long term capital gain instead of a short term, so it's "only" 28% instead of 35%. The employee could do this themselves with stock options by exercising early in the new year, and then the next year, selling all or part as long term gains between the previous years date of exercise and April 15th in order to pay the previous year's tax burden.
A second upside for the employee is that, even though they are being taxed at a higher effective rate on a smaller effective gain, it pulls out the risk of something like the.bomb. In other words, it reduces their downside risk should the stock lose value.
I had a number of friends at Netscape who were left holding the bag when between the exercise and hold of stock options for tax purposes, or just because they thought the stock would increase in value, and the stock crashed, leaving them with an AMT at exercise of millions, with no money to pay the AMT because they had relatively worthless stock and no cash. One friend was looking at a $27M debt to the state of California and the Federal government, and no way to pay it. The were going to send him to prison for tax evasion, so he took some of his savings, went to a gun shop, bought a gun, and put a bullet through his head.
Needless to say, I am against the government realizing the value of an asset until the asset holder sells (i.e. AMT is a great evil and needs to go away; until I have sold a stock obtained through option or RSU, I have not gotten income, and the government shouldn't either, since I don't have money to pay the taxes on the thing until it's been sold).
Also needless to say, in the context of this article, I do not pity the government for its significant, almost double, gain in tax revenue from income tax revenue that it gets by collecting it from individuals rather than the corporation.
Thanks for your well-reasoned post. Unfortunately, it is not 100% backed up by facts. The Google founders were NOT sidelined. Instead they consciously chose an experienced CEO to "run business" while they (I guess) focused more on technology. Now one of the founders wants to "do CEO". But the "adult CEO" type is still somehow on board. I assume to "help out" in case the original founder CEO messes up.
I class Larry and Sergey as closer to a Steve Jobs and a Steve Woznik; their anecdote puts them in the "rare individual" category more than contradicting anything I've said; if anything, it supports that particular point.
You'll notice that Larry wasn't CEO for a long time, and that "adult supervision" was brought in for the later stages; Eric Schmidt remains as a mentor. Larry was able to learn the ropes, and so far has done an OK job with the advice of the board, which means he appears to be growing into the role.
Also, I find it quite despicable to start a business with the objective of "flipping it to a VC" and "do serial entrepreneurship". It displays a very flimsy attitude and is entirely based on some cynical "get rich quick" philosophy. Basically you encourage screwing customers instead of building long-term relationships. Or alternatively, abandoning products/technologies after having sold them for top dollar to an established corporation.
I think you somewhat missed the point on the transition between steps: some people are very capable of starting new businesses: they can build machines that can make products. Other people are very capable of managing those machines into things that can be operated hierarchically, without needing the person who started it micromanaging all the employees. Other people are capable of templating the engine (read: reworking the machine components so that it operates more efficiently/effectively).
A really good entrepreneur can build a new business, and loves to do that; it's their passion. But if they are crappy at letting go of personal control of every little thing that happens in that business, they've either created a single small business which is never going to grow past 20 employees (if they are lucky), and then hang on for dear life, making their employees lives miserable, or they're going to go onto something new, leaving the business in the hands of someone capable of growing it.
The VC "flipping" that you mention happens only if you don't take it to IPO, and only if the business has taken VC funding. It could very well sit at the medium sized business for forever, if there aren't investors expecting a relatively short term payback.
But every business has a so-called "exit strategy", even if it's "I've built a 10 person family restaurant, and I will exit by leaving the business to my child". Don't get all rankled by the name "exit strategy".
Maybe you could make some money out of my latest invention:
I looked at this the first time you posted it; frankly, I'm afraid that it's a solution in search of a problem, and the problems you express in the paper about the scientific journals current publication methods are not problems perceived by the scientists currently publishing in them, the publishers of the journals, the reviewers, or the subscribers. Here are the high point:
o Peer reviewers are generally paid a stipend for their reviews, and the reviews are generally done double-blind to eliminate personal bias.
o Publication costs for this sort of thing are generally high, since the more esoteric a journal is, the fewer subscribers, which causes subscription costs to be correspondingly high. Generally there are aggregate publishers which are subscribed to by large organizations, such as universities, and any alumni can go to the library at their local university and look at them without charg
You aren't an entrepreneur, you are a programmer. This isn't a right or wrong thing, it's just an observation.
A programmer takes an idea, and builds a product.
An entrepreneur takes an idea, and builds a business.
The difference is that product ideas are a dime a dozen, and programmers to implement product ideas can be hired. It's really hard to go out and hire someone to be an entrepreneur for your product idea.
The major thing an angel investor looks at is the entrepreneur: can they build the initial business? Do they have the drive to mortgage their cat, sell their car and lease one instead, work 80 hour weeks, and, in short do everything in their power to create a business?
The main thing a VC looks at is your team -- or more importantly, the machine: has the original entrepreneur built a machine that can operate to successfully generate a product, market the product, meet accounts payable, collect accounts receivable, and so forth.
Typically, a business goes through four phases:
(1) Get the idea (for the business, NOT the product); generally, this is one or two people This stage is self-funded by the founders (including family contributions), or unfunded (Google started in a dorm room using Stanford networking resources and crappy hardware).
(2) Entrepreneur; generally, this means growing to 1-15 employees, who can handle being micromanaged. Some entrepreneurs are capable of micromanaging up to 20 employees, but a lot of them, especially first, second, and third timers, can reach their limit at about 8 employees. This stage is usually self-funded (in the case of a serial entrepreneur), or angel-funded. The entrepreneur may or may not be the founder(s) at this point.
(3) Company; generally, this means going from 8+ employees to 100+ employees. This stage is usually VC funded. The VCs will typically want to replace certain cogs in the machine that is your business in order to build a better machine capable of reaching the fourth and final stage. A founder should expect to be kicked out at some point in this stage, unless they have an executive track record, or are in a bolt-on position that can't actually negatively impact day-to-day operations. The typical bolt-on for a technical type is CTO, and the CTO may be asked to stay away from the office; nice VCs will give them "new product development make-work to keep them away from the office.
(4) Exit; if VCs are involved, this almost exclusively means either IPO or acquisition: this is where they get their money + profit back. It's almost unheard of for a VC to remain involved, except perhaps on the board of directors following an IPO, or as part of the acquisition/merger deal that permitted them to exit.
It is an incredibly rare person that can take a company through all four stages, and even among them, it's even more incredibly rare for the people along the way to permit them to do so. If you look at Steve Jobs, he wasn't really capable of step 4 for a very long time, since he was stuck at step 3. He would have been stuck at step 2, but he was willing to micromanage his direct reports and a couple of people on pet projects, rather than everyone in the company. He only became able to go to stage 4 when he matured, and that only happened after two more startups: NeXT, and Pixar, and it took him being thrown out of Apple to get to that point.
The point is, you need to find an actual entrepreneur; I'd suggest finding a mentor, but if you are focussing on a tiny piece of the machine that a true entrepreneur would need to build (a business is a machine; an organization requires design and systems engineering to build said machine), and doing it via an "Ask Slashdot", then you are probably not cut out to be your own entrepreneur.
No, own your own WEBSITE. That's the only way to be sure. The downside isn't cost, you can get hosting for $15 per year. The downside is nobody will read it -- but they don't anyway.
Me, I just use slashdot. It's good enough for my purposes.
Frankly, this is just moving the problem that the article poster was complaining about: instead of losing your blogging platform out from under your content, you could just as easily lose the web site hosting services out from under the blogging platform you run yourself on your hosted web site. So the next thing you should do is run your own web server to avoid the hosting dropping out from under your blogging platform that you run yourself on your hosted site, right? That ends with a reductio ad absurdum of running your own ISP, then running your own Internet. Only then will your content be totally under your own control.
Mike Allton, the OP, styles himself as a "Social Media and Internet Marketing Consultant", and this story is more or less him stirring up some publicity for himself as a consultant (IMO), which is fine and good, he has a right to make a buck, but the death of this platform isn't really news.
The really useful only take-away I had from this thing was that the backups don't include hosted image contents if they are reimported on several of the half a dozen alternate hosting platforms (e.g. WordPress), making it important, if you use the minority platform that's going out of business, to not only do the backup, but to also do the import prior to April 30th.
This is incorrect. What is actually stored on the Apple servers in Virginia is metadata. This includes device keys for devices authorized on the account, and rights certificates to RE- download already downloaded content from the content distribution network.
Please quit speaking about things for which you have no understanding.
Please quit speaking about things the people you eat lunch with didn't write. Like iCloud.
How were they in the same position SCO was in? SCO was suing IBM for copyright infringement, and then later breach of contract for stuff that IBM had nothing to do with and where there was possible infringement they themselves (i.e. Caldera) was mostly responsible. SCO got rid of their entire technology team and made themselves a copyright troll.
Apple was suing Samsung for Samsung products that Apple played no part in. Apple continues to be a major technology provider and innovator.
One can agree or disagree with Apple's infringement claims, but the analogy with SCO is unfounded.
They are both cases of intellectual property law out of control. They are both using the courts and intellectual property law to try to compete in their respective markets, rather than reaching an agreement and then going back and competing by building better product.
These lawsuits were started before Cook was CEO -- the point is that he basically inherited lawsuits that Jobs started.
And while it's tempting to follow up with "he should just drop all the lawsuits," it's not that easy -- aside from spooking the public and investors, an exit from legal action wouldn't guarantee that others would do the same. Samsung has at least made some grandstanding that it will never, ever settle. That could just be talk, but Samsung isn't exactly known for its humility or compassion toward competitors.
So basically what you are saying is that they are in the same position SCO was in, and so they have no choice but to keep up at it until someone sets up another Groklaw.com and they spend all their money and go out of business?
Not so long ago, the U.S. changed the way it taught the three pillars of traditional education: reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The read and writing are very closely coupled, and the ability to write, as well as the size of your vocabulary, directly correlate with whether you were taught to read via the "Whole Language" method, or whether you were taught via the "Phonics" method.
The "Whole Language" method effectively treats the letter combination which makes up a word as if it were an ideogram, and you end up treating English ideogrammatically. The end result of this method of teaching is severalfold for the student taught:
(1) The student can read words for familiar ideograms very quickly; this translates to a perception of rapid initial progress in reading, which does not follow a linear curve when increasing vocabulary usage occurs over grade levels of reading. For most people this isn't an issue, since newspapers tend to use a vocabulary of at most 300 words for most of their stories (i.e. they write their stories in language somewhere between a 5th and 6th grade reading level).
(2) The student will often fail to be able to read words which they have not encountered before, unless the meaning can be derived from context and the first letter of the word. This is because students are still taught the "ABC Song" mnemonic, which can more often get a first letter match, compared to subsequent letters.
(3) Their ability to write words which they have heard spoken verbally, but have never seen written in verbally paired context, is either damaged or non-existant.
(4) When using texting, and to a lesser extent, blogging, and email communications, the student is more likely to engage in use of an abbreviated phonetic alphabet (sometimes called "text-speak").
Contrarily, learning phonetic processing of words leads to a slower apparent ramping to an observed ability to read, but suffers none of the other drawbacks.
The "Whole Language" method came out of the newly minted discipline of child psychology in the 1960's, and took over from the phonetic method in the late 1960's or early to mid-1970's, with California leading the way, and the other educational systems following later -- the delay in adoption depended on how conservative the school or district was when it came to adopting new methods of teaching.
Luckily, the "Whole Language" approach has since been largely discredited, but the children who were taught to read "in the gap" were effectively handicapped in their ability to read, unless they relearn it phonetically with unfamiliar words -- typically most easily achieved by learning a language other than English phonetically, where that language shares most or all of the phonemes with English.
Unfortunately, this "gap" lasted into the mid to late 1990's for some states (mostly, again, the educationally conservative states, who were slow to adopt the "new" phonetic method, after have been late to adopt the "Whole Language" method.
There are a number of interesting scholarly articles on this, apart from the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_reading:_whole_language_and_phonics and I encourage you to seek them out, since the Wikipedia article fails to provide date-bands by at least state, or within a state, by school district, which would otherwise allow you to understand the age range you could expect to have been "damaged" by use of the "Whole Language" teaching method.
NB: Some schools, notably Parochial schools (otherwise known as "religious schools"), and Montessori style schools, which had to simultaneously teach multiple grade levels within the same classroom t the same time, never adopted "Whole Language". Catholic schools in particular, which had an emphasis on teaching both Latin and English, and private schools with a foreign (usually romance) language requirement ended up with an additional teaching burden which was do
The 'passing off' tort doesn't apply in this situation, unfortunately. Now, if the European crowd were pushing their own Python programming language, or in some way trying to trade off PSF's brand, then yes, it would.
However, no 'passing off' is occurring in this situation - that the European company is attempting to register the name for its own use means that tort does not apply.
captcha: communal
I believe the broad scope of the application would also apply to a computer language named 'Python' by the company. This makes it appear that 'Python' the language is their own.
So basically they would be "passing off" the Open Source project as their work. According to my reading of the PDF of the law, this appears to meant it applies.
Starship design optimises for minimum mass (mass, material choice), maximum available space (size), and optimum use thereof (shape). With an asteroid you have no control over material, are bounded in size and shape, and the minimum mass is achieved by sculpting out the shape of a conventional starship.
You mean *our* proposed starship designs, and mostly because of our technological level, and how fleeting our lives are, such that we have this unreasonable desire to travel at relativistic speeds so that we can get places within our lifetimes. A group mind, or inherited memories, or just plain better longevity, would render the speed issues moot for any form of interstellar travel: "Gentlebeings, please return your tray tables to their upright, locked position; the pilot indicates we will be landing in only another 15,000 years". A tech level that is one above ours on the Kardashev scale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) would have no problem flinging a bunch of its people on a 100,000 year journey on a giant rock.
Note that I do not believe that this is a case of aliens, only that the parent is offering rather humanocentric arguments against it. My personal opinion here is based on Occam's razor: a meteor is the simplest explanation which fits the observed facts, as reported so far.
Is this "story" to try and get money for an hour worth of lawyer time, or just publicity for Python itself, since people are starting to not care about it that much, and they want more developers?
Try doing two-factor authentication with those apps that were not written by Google themselves, and tell me where you found the Google published SDK that allowed you to do it.
Similarly, Chinese banks implement an alternate ("software clipper chip") asymmetric key encryption, also in a captive browser frame.
The software that initially implemented this was developed in Germany, and there are a number of major banks all over the world which require ActiveX controls to implement secure banking. This is why if you search for "banking activex firefox" or "banking activex safari" or "banking activex opera", you will see lively discussioms with people bitching about not being able to do banking.
Now, there have been several researchers who have published exploits, which indicate, that it's possible to attck through the ActiveX control, and therefore this type of thing in reality provides no security any longer. But moving a bank or a government is like trying to move a mountain.
Before you fault them, realize that when you are logging into your Google account, you are also doing so in a captive browser frame -- which is why there aren't programmatic ways to log into Google accounts.
Those numbers must be using the new method? The new method assumes California reformulated gasoline rules, which while great for reducing pollution from cars manufactured before 1981 (when Oxygen sensors became mandatory), tends to reduce the gas mileage by 20% or more.
If it's calculated with the new EPA method, per the above, then that's truly impressive, since on unreformulated gasoline, that'd work out to 70.58 MPG, which puts it slightly under the 72 MPG from the 1992 Honda CRX/HF.
But it's nice to know that it holds the worlds record, even though it should actually have gone to the Honda.
Every document stored in iCloud (music, tv shows, movies, contacts, apps, books,pages documents, etc.) are downloadable. If you couldn't, it would make for a shitty cloud (you can upload all you want, but you can never access your files? How does that even make any sense).
This is incorrect. What is actually stored on the Apple servers in Virginia is metadata. This includes device keys for devices authorized on the account, and rights certificates to RE- download already downloaded content from the content distribution network.
While there are some aspects of cloud storage for user-generated content, the tv shows, movies, apps, and books are neither user generated, nor are they stored with your account. They are stored in encrypted content form in the Content Distribution Network (historically, for iTunes, Apple has contracted with the Inktomi CDN in order to make this encrypted content available).
Within the CDN itself, music is also encrypted so that someone can't just rape an Inktomi server and get an unencrypted copy of all the music in the iTunes Music Store.
When you "restore" a tv show on your device from iCloud "backup", what actually happens is that iTunes is contacted and provides the knapsack key http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle–Hellman_knapsack_cryptosystem , which is then used with the device ID of the authorized device in order to generate an encrypted device key, which can then be used to decrypt the data from the CDN, and that's what gets downloaded to your machine. For music, the data is not reencrypted, for the other media, including TV shows, it's reencrypted as part of the streaming download so that the tv show or other media is tied to your authorized device.
You can also store all of Apple's iCloud documents in other services. Gmail contacts, Amazon Music Locker, Dropbox, etc. I'm not sure you are aware of how iCloud works from the user's point of view.
And I'm positive that you are not aware of the implementation details for the iCloud. Yes, for user generated content, which is the vast minority of content on an iPhone/iPad/iPod, that actually gets replicated off into the "iCloud" servers in virginia, along with the other metadata for the "more important" media content (it's more important because Apple gets $$$ from you for access to that content).
The practical upshot is that Apple doesn't care if you store that minor account of content on their servers in Virginia, or spread it to hell and gone all over the Internet, so long as you pay for the content stored in the CDN in the first place, and can't access it without authorization keys to decrypt the CDN contents, said keys being stored in the metadata. Having to store a pissy number of key/value pairs in XML so that your address book contents replicate to all your devices you purchased from Apple is nothing, compared to the amount of data they are carrying around in X.509 certs containing FairPlay keys in them to secure the CDN contents from unauthorized access.
People seem to believe that all cloud services are "the cloud", and that they can all just automatically "share data" between these services, when in fact, there is a huge amount of back end tying with the cloud content and the front end device, and the amount of user generated data is tiny, at best, compared to, for example, the same thing happening for YouTube or Amazon paid content (both secured by Adobe Access http://www.adobe.com/products/adobe-access.html , or any of the other protected content out there protected by other systems, such as Apple's.
For apple, you'd buy new hardware, pay for another copy of the same OS you already had [baked into the increased price for Macs], and... Re-buy a new copy of Office [assuming that was what you used].
Apple does not charge for the OS, they charge for the hardware. Apple considers the OS a cost center, and there is no "funny money" internal accounting happening to cause part of the purchase price of a Mac to end up in the coffers of the software development organization. It's possible to do things like this when the OS and the hardware production are controlled by a single company, rather than the OS being OEM'ed out to a third party, like Microsoft.
One of the reasons Apple dropped the upgrade price on Mac OS X was that the software organization was getting "too uppity": they had started to be a profit center, beginning with the Tiger upgrade cycle, and it looked like it was getting "worse", from the point of view of the hardware folks. It's the same reason they don't charge for iOS upgrades on iPhone/iPod/iPad devices. As far as Apple is concerned, the OS development is funded out of the R&D budget; it does not fund itself.
I think the reason Apple pounces so hard on the Hackint0sh companies who attempt to build a business model out of supplying non-Apple hardware with Mac OS X preinstalled, or sell software to allow the running of Mac OS X on commodity hardware, is that the OS itself then has a set market value, and if that's the case, they end up having to change all their internal accounting practices, or get themselves sat on hard by regulators.
An immediate consequence to the OS having a fixed monetary value would be no more free iOS upgrades, due to Sarbanes-Oxley. This would effectively destroy the "walled garden" model, since bundled into the iOS updates are patches to keep those walls intact, and people accept those changes only because they get something else desirable out of the update as a whole.
NB: If you think I'm joking here, you should remember the iPod being charges for the 802.11n update, which was also due to FAS rules and Sarbanes-Oxley, since it added features to the device which did not ship with the device, which they couldn't legally do and continue to use their preferred set of FAS rules to implement their profit accounting. When they decided the OS had no value, they got out from under SOX with losing the ability to continue using their preferred FAS rules.
Please cite and example of a cloud service where this has become an actual problem.
I'm unaware of any cloud files storage service that locks you in such that you can't move to another. They all let you download your files (they'd be fairly useless if they didn't!).
Have you tried sync'ing your protected content on your iPad to a cloud other than the Apple iCloud? In order to understand why this isn't possible, you need to understand that what is commonly called "The iCloud" is actually a small amount of metadata that refers back to the actually encrypted data sitting in a CDN (Content Distribution Network). This is why Apple is so eager to index all your media files that you have already on your machine, and "upgrade it" to a higher bitrate -- the bitrate of the files already stored in the CDN backing the iCloud.
Similarly, any login services that's effectively forced on you to obtain credentials, such as the Google Web Login in ChromeBooks, ties you specifically to their back end services and credential infrastructure. Given that it's boot-to-login with signed code up to the point of actual login operations, there's no good technical reason that the login couldn't be via OpenID, or into FaceBook, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, LinkedIn, or some other credentialling authority whom you consider "trusted enough to verify my credentials for me". I'm almost positive that this is one of the reasons FaceBook is frequently rumored to be developing their own phone and/pr working with partners to get them to build a phone that would use FaceBook's credentials instead.
Now it's true that you could argue that people who buy into these ecosystems know what they are getting into, but that's nonetheless 5 examples of devices specifically tied to back end cloud services, with the easy potential for more devices as other vendors attempt to get into the Android/iPhone/Nook/Kindle/ChromeBook space themselves.
... when we solve the halting problem. I'm not entirely joking. The main problem with progress bars is that, quite often, it is not possible to accurately estimate how much time is needed to complete a problem (i.e. for the program to halt).
Disallow looping constructs in your installer programming language so that this isn'y an issue. The "D" language for DTrace managed to be able to do this for event tracing.
Personally, I would also insist on hard real time, a rate monotonic scheduler where you can dedicate a percentage of available compute resources to the task, and drivers which have been written to run in bounded time, along with hard disks which support I/O scheduling through their caches (sorry, you might have to go back to useful hardware capable of doing that, like SCSI III).
If you involve the network, don't do the install and the download at the same time; you don't want to anyway, since interpreting partial file contents prior to verifying the entire file is how most Outlook exploits have historically worked: it's just not a goo idea.
It's all doable, but it's generally not worth doing just to ensure that you get to know to be back from your coffee break in 6 minutes rather than 9 minutes.
I don't have an authoritative answer, but Chromium keeps telling me Adobe Flash is out of date with its bright yellow Load Anyway dialogue. I see that bar on a lot of sites which should not have any reason to use SWF, even though adblock removes the worst offenders.
Flash is often embedded in web pages with no UI in order to implement "super cookies" (LSO's or Local Shared Objects) in order to be able to track you even if you have cookies disabled, since people want to be able to see their videos. So they leave Flash enabled.
The workaround for the user is to install something like "ClickToFlash", but that can get annoying pretty fast, especially on sites like abc.com or cbs.com, which have very short timeouts on reading the data back out, and so claim you have flash disabled, even though you don't, because you don't click in under a second. So you enable the bypass for that website, and they are back to tracking you again.
The kid gloves are off. They're handing out actual jail time for people hacking phones/email for nude pics of Scarlett Johansson. If they find him/her, this dude's going to end up in gitmo over some addresses and phone numbers.
Are you sure we are on the same page?
I thought there was a kickstarter for nude pictures of certain celebrities?
why 3gb ram and not 4gb or 8gb++? at least have dual channel ram with 2 2gb sticks.
Because the defective Merom chipset in use in the Core2Duo systems did not support greater than a 4G memory mapping space, and 1G of that was taken up as I/O space, so it was unable to remap the extra 1G of physical RAM and.or move the I/O hoe, even though it had the physical address lines to do so.
The chipset was manufactured between Nov 2006 and Oct 2007, but was used far longer than that by many manufacturers, since Apple was soaking up almost the entire supply of the corrected chipset, which was manufactured between Nov 2007 and Oct 2009.
Intel screwed up, and then taped out anyway in order to meet market deadlines.
It typically wasn't a big deal for most people, since the 2G SIMMs were very unstable at that point, and even desktop systems rarely had more than 3 SIMM slots. This changed in 2009 when Hynix finally fixed their 2G SIMMs, but the company nearly bit the dust anyway, as by then it had defaulted on several loans and one debt-equity swap.
Most people only discovered the screwup in the Merom chipset that happened to be in their machine when they started trying to use 2 2G SIMMs in their Core2Duo machines with the old Merom, and were only seeing 3G of RAM show up to the OS.
If it doesn't have end-user exposure, no. Google translate will do the job well enough for non-English speakers, and almost every programmer is an English speaker in any case - or used to Google translations of CS technical papers, in any case.
If there's actually UI being exposed to an end user rather than a program, then of course there should be some way to localize the end user exposed content, although you should expect that most users won't end up using it, and will opt for English instead, unless it's for data input for text data for storage and retrieval.
For better or for worse, the primary language for IT is English. I generally think it's for the better, since there are concepts that the English language is better suited to representing, either natively, or with coined words/terms/phrases and/or "borrow words". For the last, French is probably the worst language, since they have "language police" whose sole reason for existing is to prevent "borrow words" entering the French language and "contaminating" it. The next most comparable language for "purity" is Japanese, which was represented by Matsumata Ohta when he attempted to prevent the C-J-K unification of the Unicode standard, and eventually got his way by pushing another Unicode code page so that you could, for example, grep -v the Chinese text out of a Chinese textbook on Japanese poetry. Double the storage size for a wchar_t, just so that they could keep the languages distinct in both encoding and rendering, rather than just in rendering.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client
Then compile and run anything you want on your ChromeBook.
The source is unhappy they were let go. The 'inefficiencies' terminology was not attributed in the original source article, which includes a copy of the memo; I'm surprised no one has posted a link to the source article yet, so here it is:
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/washington-post-layoffs-valentines-day_b96626
According to the original source article, more people than just the mobile team were let go.
I can understand them doing this, particularly since they referenced Web 2.0 in their hiring of Rob Malda (cmdrtaco), HTML5 is enough along that it can be used to deliver the content in a reasonable way, using a centralized paywall, and trying to maintain 7 iOS apps and 100's of Android apps, due to minor variations in platform, makes a browser-based experience a no-brainer, in terms of the money they spend on development.
Overall, I think this does not bode well for non-game, non-vertical market app writers, so for all the people who are thinking that going to app writing is going to be a really lucrative payoff, this is probably the beginning of a trend, and they should consider some other line of work.
The government actually gets MORE in tax revenue.
Consider that if there are $1B in RSUs converted from being RSUs into normal income for employees, that's $1B of employee income that gets taxed at the ordinary income tax rate, rather than $1B of corporate profits being taxed at the (much lower) corporate tax rate.
So instead of 15% of $1B, the taxes collected go up to 28% of $1B.
The reason this ends up paid by the employee instead of the company is because of the FAS rules that the government has established that incentivize RSUs in place of non-qualifying stock options.
One up side for the employee is that they realize a lower basis price for their stock (the pice at time of grant of the RSU, rather than time of exercise of an option), and it gets held as a long term capital gain instead of a short term, so it's "only" 28% instead of 35%. The employee could do this themselves with stock options by exercising early in the new year, and then the next year, selling all or part as long term gains between the previous years date of exercise and April 15th in order to pay the previous year's tax burden.
A second upside for the employee is that, even though they are being taxed at a higher effective rate on a smaller effective gain, it pulls out the risk of something like the .bomb. In other words, it reduces their downside risk should the stock lose value.
I had a number of friends at Netscape who were left holding the bag when between the exercise and hold of stock options for tax purposes, or just because they thought the stock would increase in value, and the stock crashed, leaving them with an AMT at exercise of millions, with no money to pay the AMT because they had relatively worthless stock and no cash. One friend was looking at a $27M debt to the state of California and the Federal government, and no way to pay it. The were going to send him to prison for tax evasion, so he took some of his savings, went to a gun shop, bought a gun, and put a bullet through his head.
Needless to say, I am against the government realizing the value of an asset until the asset holder sells (i.e. AMT is a great evil and needs to go away; until I have sold a stock obtained through option or RSU, I have not gotten income, and the government shouldn't either, since I don't have money to pay the taxes on the thing until it's been sold).
Also needless to say, in the context of this article, I do not pity the government for its significant, almost double, gain in tax revenue from income tax revenue that it gets by collecting it from individuals rather than the corporation.
Thanks for your well-reasoned post. Unfortunately, it is not 100% backed up by facts. The Google founders were NOT sidelined. Instead they consciously chose an experienced CEO to "run business" while they (I guess) focused more on technology. Now one of the founders wants to "do CEO". But the "adult CEO" type is still somehow on board. I assume to "help out" in case the original founder CEO messes up.
I class Larry and Sergey as closer to a Steve Jobs and a Steve Woznik; their anecdote puts them in the "rare individual" category more than contradicting anything I've said; if anything, it supports that particular point.
You'll notice that Larry wasn't CEO for a long time, and that "adult supervision" was brought in for the later stages; Eric Schmidt remains as a mentor. Larry was able to learn the ropes, and so far has done an OK job with the advice of the board, which means he appears to be growing into the role.
Also, I find it quite despicable to start a business with the objective of "flipping it to a VC" and "do serial entrepreneurship". It displays a very flimsy attitude and is entirely based on some cynical "get rich quick" philosophy. Basically you encourage screwing customers instead of building long-term relationships. Or alternatively, abandoning products/technologies after having sold them for top dollar to an established corporation.
I think you somewhat missed the point on the transition between steps: some people are very capable of starting new businesses: they can build machines that can make products. Other people are very capable of managing those machines into things that can be operated hierarchically, without needing the person who started it micromanaging all the employees. Other people are capable of templating the engine (read: reworking the machine components so that it operates more efficiently/effectively).
A really good entrepreneur can build a new business, and loves to do that; it's their passion. But if they are crappy at letting go of personal control of every little thing that happens in that business, they've either created a single small business which is never going to grow past 20 employees (if they are lucky), and then hang on for dear life, making their employees lives miserable, or they're going to go onto something new, leaving the business in the hands of someone capable of growing it.
The VC "flipping" that you mention happens only if you don't take it to IPO, and only if the business has taken VC funding. It could very well sit at the medium sized business for forever, if there aren't investors expecting a relatively short term payback.
But every business has a so-called "exit strategy", even if it's "I've built a 10 person family restaurant, and I will exit by leaving the business to my child". Don't get all rankled by the name "exit strategy".
Maybe you could make some money out of my latest invention:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/didipus/files/DiDiPuS.pdf/download
Or maybe not, because I donate it to everybody.
I looked at this the first time you posted it; frankly, I'm afraid that it's a solution in search of a problem, and the problems you express in the paper about the scientific journals current publication methods are not problems perceived by the scientists currently publishing in them, the publishers of the journals, the reviewers, or the subscribers. Here are the high point:
o Peer reviewers are generally paid a stipend for their reviews, and the reviews are generally done double-blind to eliminate personal bias.
o Publication costs for this sort of thing are generally high, since the more esoteric a journal is, the fewer subscribers, which causes subscription costs to be correspondingly high. Generally there are aggregate publishers which are subscribed to by large organizations, such as universities, and any alumni can go to the library at their local university and look at them without charg
You aren't an entrepreneur, you are a programmer. This isn't a right or wrong thing, it's just an observation.
A programmer takes an idea, and builds a product.
An entrepreneur takes an idea, and builds a business.
The difference is that product ideas are a dime a dozen, and programmers to implement product ideas can be hired. It's really hard to go out and hire someone to be an entrepreneur for your product idea.
The major thing an angel investor looks at is the entrepreneur: can they build the initial business? Do they have the drive to mortgage their cat, sell their car and lease one instead, work 80 hour weeks, and, in short do everything in their power to create a business?
The main thing a VC looks at is your team -- or more importantly, the machine: has the original entrepreneur built a machine that can operate to successfully generate a product, market the product, meet accounts payable, collect accounts receivable, and so forth.
Typically, a business goes through four phases:
(1) Get the idea (for the business, NOT the product); generally, this is one or two people This stage is self-funded by the founders (including family contributions), or unfunded (Google started in a dorm room using Stanford networking resources and crappy hardware).
(2) Entrepreneur; generally, this means growing to 1-15 employees, who can handle being micromanaged. Some entrepreneurs are capable of micromanaging up to 20 employees, but a lot of them, especially first, second, and third timers, can reach their limit at about 8 employees. This stage is usually self-funded (in the case of a serial entrepreneur), or angel-funded. The entrepreneur may or may not be the founder(s) at this point.
(3) Company; generally, this means going from 8+ employees to 100+ employees. This stage is usually VC funded. The VCs will typically want to replace certain cogs in the machine that is your business in order to build a better machine capable of reaching the fourth and final stage. A founder should expect to be kicked out at some point in this stage, unless they have an executive track record, or are in a bolt-on position that can't actually negatively impact day-to-day operations. The typical bolt-on for a technical type is CTO, and the CTO may be asked to stay away from the office; nice VCs will give them "new product development make-work to keep them away from the office.
(4) Exit; if VCs are involved, this almost exclusively means either IPO or acquisition: this is where they get their money + profit back. It's almost unheard of for a VC to remain involved, except perhaps on the board of directors following an IPO, or as part of the acquisition/merger deal that permitted them to exit.
It is an incredibly rare person that can take a company through all four stages, and even among them, it's even more incredibly rare for the people along the way to permit them to do so. If you look at Steve Jobs, he wasn't really capable of step 4 for a very long time, since he was stuck at step 3. He would have been stuck at step 2, but he was willing to micromanage his direct reports and a couple of people on pet projects, rather than everyone in the company. He only became able to go to stage 4 when he matured, and that only happened after two more startups: NeXT, and Pixar, and it took him being thrown out of Apple to get to that point.
The point is, you need to find an actual entrepreneur; I'd suggest finding a mentor, but if you are focussing on a tiny piece of the machine that a true entrepreneur would need to build (a business is a machine; an organization requires design and systems engineering to build said machine), and doing it via an "Ask Slashdot", then you are probably not cut out to be your own entrepreneur.
No, own your own WEBSITE. That's the only way to be sure. The downside isn't cost, you can get hosting for $15 per year. The downside is nobody will read it -- but they don't anyway.
Me, I just use slashdot. It's good enough for my purposes.
Frankly, this is just moving the problem that the article poster was complaining about: instead of losing your blogging platform out from under your content, you could just as easily lose the web site hosting services out from under the blogging platform you run yourself on your hosted web site. So the next thing you should do is run your own web server to avoid the hosting dropping out from under your blogging platform that you run yourself on your hosted site, right? That ends with a reductio ad absurdum of running your own ISP, then running your own Internet. Only then will your content be totally under your own control.
Mike Allton, the OP, styles himself as a "Social Media and Internet Marketing Consultant", and this story is more or less him stirring up some publicity for himself as a consultant (IMO), which is fine and good, he has a right to make a buck, but the death of this platform isn't really news.
The really useful only take-away I had from this thing was that the backups don't include hosted image contents if they are reimported on several of the half a dozen alternate hosting platforms (e.g. WordPress), making it important, if you use the minority platform that's going out of business, to not only do the backup, but to also do the import prior to April 30th.
This is incorrect. What is actually stored on the Apple servers in Virginia is metadata. This includes device keys for devices authorized on the account, and rights certificates to RE- download already downloaded content from the content distribution network.
Please quit speaking about things for which you have no understanding.
Please quit speaking about things the people you eat lunch with didn't write. Like iCloud.
How were they in the same position SCO was in? SCO was suing IBM for copyright infringement, and then later breach of contract for stuff that IBM had nothing to do with and where there was possible infringement they themselves (i.e. Caldera) was mostly responsible. SCO got rid of their entire technology team and made themselves a copyright troll.
Apple was suing Samsung for Samsung products that Apple played no part in. Apple continues to be a major technology provider and innovator.
One can agree or disagree with Apple's infringement claims, but the analogy with SCO is unfounded.
They are both cases of intellectual property law out of control. They are both using the courts and intellectual property law to try to compete in their respective markets, rather than reaching an agreement and then going back and competing by building better product.
These lawsuits were started before Cook was CEO -- the point is that he basically inherited lawsuits that Jobs started.
And while it's tempting to follow up with "he should just drop all the lawsuits," it's not that easy -- aside from spooking the public and investors, an exit from legal action wouldn't guarantee that others would do the same. Samsung has at least made some grandstanding that it will never, ever settle. That could just be talk, but Samsung isn't exactly known for its humility or compassion toward competitors.
So basically what you are saying is that they are in the same position SCO was in, and so they have no choice but to keep up at it until someone sets up another Groklaw.com and they spend all their money and go out of business?
Working around a treatable condition is pretty silly. How about just treating the dystonia? Standard treatment is sensorimotor retraining.
Not so long ago, the U.S. changed the way it taught the three pillars of traditional education: reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The read and writing are very closely coupled, and the ability to write, as well as the size of your vocabulary, directly correlate with whether you were taught to read via the "Whole Language" method, or whether you were taught via the "Phonics" method.
The "Whole Language" method effectively treats the letter combination which makes up a word as if it were an ideogram, and you end up treating English ideogrammatically. The end result of this method of teaching is severalfold for the student taught:
(1) The student can read words for familiar ideograms very quickly; this translates to a perception of rapid initial progress in reading, which does not follow a linear curve when increasing vocabulary usage occurs over grade levels of reading. For most people this isn't an issue, since newspapers tend to use a vocabulary of at most 300 words for most of their stories (i.e. they write their stories in language somewhere between a 5th and 6th grade reading level).
(2) The student will often fail to be able to read words which they have not encountered before, unless the meaning can be derived from context and the first letter of the word. This is because students are still taught the "ABC Song" mnemonic, which can more often get a first letter match, compared to subsequent letters.
(3) Their ability to write words which they have heard spoken verbally, but have never seen written in verbally paired context, is either damaged or non-existant.
(4) When using texting, and to a lesser extent, blogging, and email communications, the student is more likely to engage in use of an abbreviated phonetic alphabet (sometimes called "text-speak").
Contrarily, learning phonetic processing of words leads to a slower apparent ramping to an observed ability to read, but suffers none of the other drawbacks.
The "Whole Language" method came out of the newly minted discipline of child psychology in the 1960's, and took over from the phonetic method in the late 1960's or early to mid-1970's, with California leading the way, and the other educational systems following later -- the delay in adoption depended on how conservative the school or district was when it came to adopting new methods of teaching.
Luckily, the "Whole Language" approach has since been largely discredited, but the children who were taught to read "in the gap" were effectively handicapped in their ability to read, unless they relearn it phonetically with unfamiliar words -- typically most easily achieved by learning a language other than English phonetically, where that language shares most or all of the phonemes with English.
Unfortunately, this "gap" lasted into the mid to late 1990's for some states (mostly, again, the educationally conservative states, who were slow to adopt the "new" phonetic method, after have been late to adopt the "Whole Language" method.
There are a number of interesting scholarly articles on this, apart from the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_reading:_whole_language_and_phonics and I encourage you to seek them out, since the Wikipedia article fails to provide date-bands by at least state, or within a state, by school district, which would otherwise allow you to understand the age range you could expect to have been "damaged" by use of the "Whole Language" teaching method.
NB: Some schools, notably Parochial schools (otherwise known as "religious schools"), and Montessori style schools, which had to simultaneously teach multiple grade levels within the same classroom t the same time, never adopted "Whole Language". Catholic schools in particular, which had an emphasis on teaching both Latin and English, and private schools with a foreign (usually romance) language requirement ended up with an additional teaching burden which was do
The 'passing off' tort doesn't apply in this situation, unfortunately. Now, if the European crowd were pushing their own Python programming language, or in some way trying to trade off PSF's brand, then yes, it would.
However, no 'passing off' is occurring in this situation - that the European company is attempting to register the name for its own use means that tort does not apply.
captcha: communal
I believe the broad scope of the application would also apply to a computer language named 'Python' by the company. This makes it appear that 'Python' the language is their own.
So basically they would be "passing off" the Open Source project as their work. According to my reading of the PDF of the law, this appears to meant it applies.
Starship design optimises for minimum mass (mass, material choice), maximum available space (size), and optimum use thereof (shape). With an asteroid you have no control over material, are bounded in size and shape, and the minimum mass is achieved by sculpting out the shape of a conventional starship.
You mean *our* proposed starship designs, and mostly because of our technological level, and how fleeting our lives are, such that we have this unreasonable desire to travel at relativistic speeds so that we can get places within our lifetimes. A group mind, or inherited memories, or just plain better longevity, would render the speed issues moot for any form of interstellar travel: "Gentlebeings, please return your tray tables to their upright, locked position; the pilot indicates we will be landing in only another 15,000 years". A tech level that is one above ours on the Kardashev scale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) would have no problem flinging a bunch of its people on a 100,000 year journey on a giant rock.
Note that I do not believe that this is a case of aliens, only that the parent is offering rather humanocentric arguments against it. My personal opinion here is based on Occam's razor: a meteor is the simplest explanation which fits the observed facts, as reported so far.
It's protected in the UK under Common Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off , and therefore in the entire EU, due to treaty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_mark_law_of_the_European_Union
Is this "story" to try and get money for an hour worth of lawyer time, or just publicity for Python itself, since people are starting to not care about it that much, and they want more developers?
Try doing two-factor authentication with those apps that were not written by Google themselves, and tell me where you found the Google published SDK that allowed you to do it.
There is in fact legislation in Korea requiring the use of an ActiveX control as an anti-Phishing measure, and there has been since the 1990's, in order to implement the SEED encryption algorithm in a captive frame; here is a report on it: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/12295718818/south-korea-still-paying-price-embracing-internet-explorer-decade-ago.shtml
Similarly, Chinese banks implement an alternate ("software clipper chip") asymmetric key encryption, also in a captive browser frame.
The software that initially implemented this was developed in Germany, and there are a number of major banks all over the world which require ActiveX controls to implement secure banking. This is why if you search for "banking activex firefox" or "banking activex safari" or "banking activex opera", you will see lively discussioms with people bitching about not being able to do banking.
Now, there have been several researchers who have published exploits, which indicate, that it's possible to attck through the ActiveX control, and therefore this type of thing in reality provides no security any longer. But moving a bank or a government is like trying to move a mountain.
Before you fault them, realize that when you are logging into your Google account, you are also doing so in a captive browser frame -- which is why there aren't programmatic ways to log into Google accounts.
Those numbers must be using the new method? The new method assumes California reformulated gasoline rules, which while great for reducing pollution from cars manufactured before 1981 (when Oxygen sensors became mandatory), tends to reduce the gas mileage by 20% or more.
If it's calculated with the new EPA method, per the above, then that's truly impressive, since on unreformulated gasoline, that'd work out to 70.58 MPG, which puts it slightly under the 72 MPG from the 1992 Honda CRX/HF.
But it's nice to know that it holds the worlds record, even though it should actually have gone to the Honda.
Every document stored in iCloud (music, tv shows, movies, contacts, apps, books,pages documents, etc.) are downloadable. If you couldn't, it would make for a shitty cloud (you can upload all you want, but you can never access your files? How does that even make any sense).
This is incorrect. What is actually stored on the Apple servers in Virginia is metadata. This includes device keys for devices authorized on the account, and rights certificates to RE- download already downloaded content from the content distribution network.
While there are some aspects of cloud storage for user-generated content, the tv shows, movies, apps, and books are neither user generated, nor are they stored with your account. They are stored in encrypted content form in the Content Distribution Network (historically, for iTunes, Apple has contracted with the Inktomi CDN in order to make this encrypted content available).
Within the CDN itself, music is also encrypted so that someone can't just rape an Inktomi server and get an unencrypted copy of all the music in the iTunes Music Store.
When you "restore" a tv show on your device from iCloud "backup", what actually happens is that iTunes is contacted and provides the knapsack key http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle–Hellman_knapsack_cryptosystem , which is then used with the device ID of the authorized device in order to generate an encrypted device key, which can then be used to decrypt the data from the CDN, and that's what gets downloaded to your machine. For music, the data is not reencrypted, for the other media, including TV shows, it's reencrypted as part of the streaming download so that the tv show or other media is tied to your authorized device.
You can also store all of Apple's iCloud documents in other services. Gmail contacts, Amazon Music Locker, Dropbox, etc. I'm not sure you are aware of how iCloud works from the user's point of view.
And I'm positive that you are not aware of the implementation details for the iCloud. Yes, for user generated content, which is the vast minority of content on an iPhone/iPad/iPod, that actually gets replicated off into the "iCloud" servers in virginia, along with the other metadata for the "more important" media content (it's more important because Apple gets $$$ from you for access to that content).
The practical upshot is that Apple doesn't care if you store that minor account of content on their servers in Virginia, or spread it to hell and gone all over the Internet, so long as you pay for the content stored in the CDN in the first place, and can't access it without authorization keys to decrypt the CDN contents, said keys being stored in the metadata. Having to store a pissy number of key/value pairs in XML so that your address book contents replicate to all your devices you purchased from Apple is nothing, compared to the amount of data they are carrying around in X.509 certs containing FairPlay keys in them to secure the CDN contents from unauthorized access.
People seem to believe that all cloud services are "the cloud", and that they can all just automatically "share data" between these services, when in fact, there is a huge amount of back end tying with the cloud content and the front end device, and the amount of user generated data is tiny, at best, compared to, for example, the same thing happening for YouTube or Amazon paid content (both secured by Adobe Access http://www.adobe.com/products/adobe-access.html , or any of the other protected content out there protected by other systems, such as Apple's.
For apple, you'd buy new hardware, pay for another copy of the same OS you already had [baked into the increased price for Macs], and... Re-buy a new copy of Office [assuming that was what you used].
Apple does not charge for the OS, they charge for the hardware. Apple considers the OS a cost center, and there is no "funny money" internal accounting happening to cause part of the purchase price of a Mac to end up in the coffers of the software development organization. It's possible to do things like this when the OS and the hardware production are controlled by a single company, rather than the OS being OEM'ed out to a third party, like Microsoft.
One of the reasons Apple dropped the upgrade price on Mac OS X was that the software organization was getting "too uppity": they had started to be a profit center, beginning with the Tiger upgrade cycle, and it looked like it was getting "worse", from the point of view of the hardware folks. It's the same reason they don't charge for iOS upgrades on iPhone/iPod/iPad devices. As far as Apple is concerned, the OS development is funded out of the R&D budget; it does not fund itself.
I think the reason Apple pounces so hard on the Hackint0sh companies who attempt to build a business model out of supplying non-Apple hardware with Mac OS X preinstalled, or sell software to allow the running of Mac OS X on commodity hardware, is that the OS itself then has a set market value, and if that's the case, they end up having to change all their internal accounting practices, or get themselves sat on hard by regulators.
An immediate consequence to the OS having a fixed monetary value would be no more free iOS upgrades, due to Sarbanes-Oxley. This would effectively destroy the "walled garden" model, since bundled into the iOS updates are patches to keep those walls intact, and people accept those changes only because they get something else desirable out of the update as a whole.
NB: If you think I'm joking here, you should remember the iPod being charges for the 802.11n update, which was also due to FAS rules and Sarbanes-Oxley, since it added features to the device which did not ship with the device, which they couldn't legally do and continue to use their preferred set of FAS rules to implement their profit accounting. When they decided the OS had no value, they got out from under SOX with losing the ability to continue using their preferred FAS rules.
Please cite and example of a cloud service where this has become an actual problem.
I'm unaware of any cloud files storage service that locks you in such that you can't move to another. They all let you download your files (they'd be fairly useless if they didn't!).
Have you tried sync'ing your protected content on your iPad to a cloud other than the Apple iCloud? In order to understand why this isn't possible, you need to understand that what is commonly called "The iCloud" is actually a small amount of metadata that refers back to the actually encrypted data sitting in a CDN (Content Distribution Network). This is why Apple is so eager to index all your media files that you have already on your machine, and "upgrade it" to a higher bitrate -- the bitrate of the files already stored in the CDN backing the iCloud.
Similarly, any login services that's effectively forced on you to obtain credentials, such as the Google Web Login in ChromeBooks, ties you specifically to their back end services and credential infrastructure. Given that it's boot-to-login with signed code up to the point of actual login operations, there's no good technical reason that the login couldn't be via OpenID, or into FaceBook, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, LinkedIn, or some other credentialling authority whom you consider "trusted enough to verify my credentials for me". I'm almost positive that this is one of the reasons FaceBook is frequently rumored to be developing their own phone and/pr working with partners to get them to build a phone that would use FaceBook's credentials instead.
Now it's true that you could argue that people who buy into these ecosystems know what they are getting into, but that's nonetheless 5 examples of devices specifically tied to back end cloud services, with the easy potential for more devices as other vendors attempt to get into the Android/iPhone/Nook/Kindle/ChromeBook space themselves.
... when we solve the halting problem. I'm not entirely joking. The main problem with progress bars is that, quite often, it is not possible to accurately estimate how much time is needed to complete a problem (i.e. for the program to halt).
Disallow looping constructs in your installer programming language so that this isn'y an issue. The "D" language for DTrace managed to be able to do this for event tracing.
Personally, I would also insist on hard real time, a rate monotonic scheduler where you can dedicate a percentage of available compute resources to the task, and drivers which have been written to run in bounded time, along with hard disks which support I/O scheduling through their caches (sorry, you might have to go back to useful hardware capable of doing that, like SCSI III).
If you involve the network, don't do the install and the download at the same time; you don't want to anyway, since interpreting partial file contents prior to verifying the entire file is how most Outlook exploits have historically worked: it's just not a goo idea.
It's all doable, but it's generally not worth doing just to ensure that you get to know to be back from your coffee break in 6 minutes rather than 9 minutes.
I don't have an authoritative answer, but Chromium keeps telling me Adobe Flash is out of date with its bright yellow Load Anyway dialogue. I see that bar on a lot of sites which should not have any reason to use SWF, even though adblock removes the worst offenders.
Flash is often embedded in web pages with no UI in order to implement "super cookies" (LSO's or Local Shared Objects) in order to be able to track you even if you have cookies disabled, since people want to be able to see their videos. So they leave Flash enabled.
The workaround for the user is to install something like "ClickToFlash", but that can get annoying pretty fast, especially on sites like abc.com or cbs.com, which have very short timeouts on reading the data back out, and so claim you have flash disabled, even though you don't, because you don't click in under a second. So you enable the bypass for that website, and they are back to tracking you again.
The kid gloves are off. They're handing out actual jail time for people hacking phones/email for nude pics of Scarlett Johansson. If they find him/her, this dude's going to end up in gitmo over some addresses and phone numbers.
Are you sure we are on the same page?
I thought there was a kickstarter for nude pictures of certain celebrities?
why 3gb ram and not 4gb or 8gb++? at least have dual channel ram with 2 2gb sticks.
Because the defective Merom chipset in use in the Core2Duo systems did not support greater than a 4G memory mapping space, and 1G of that was taken up as I/O space, so it was unable to remap the extra 1G of physical RAM and.or move the I/O hoe, even though it had the physical address lines to do so.
The chipset was manufactured between Nov 2006 and Oct 2007, but was used far longer than that by many manufacturers, since Apple was soaking up almost the entire supply of the corrected chipset, which was manufactured between Nov 2007 and Oct 2009.
Intel screwed up, and then taped out anyway in order to meet market deadlines.
It typically wasn't a big deal for most people, since the 2G SIMMs were very unstable at that point, and even desktop systems rarely had more than 3 SIMM slots. This changed in 2009 when Hynix finally fixed their 2G SIMMs, but the company nearly bit the dust anyway, as by then it had defaulted on several loans and one debt-equity swap.
Most people only discovered the screwup in the Merom chipset that happened to be in their machine when they started trying to use 2 2G SIMMs in their Core2Duo machines with the old Merom, and were only seeing 3G of RAM show up to the OS.
If it doesn't have end-user exposure, no. Google translate will do the job well enough for non-English speakers, and almost every programmer is an English speaker in any case - or used to Google translations of CS technical papers, in any case.
If there's actually UI being exposed to an end user rather than a program, then of course there should be some way to localize the end user exposed content, although you should expect that most users won't end up using it, and will opt for English instead, unless it's for data input for text data for storage and retrieval.
For better or for worse, the primary language for IT is English. I generally think it's for the better, since there are concepts that the English language is better suited to representing, either natively, or with coined words/terms/phrases and/or "borrow words". For the last, French is probably the worst language, since they have "language police" whose sole reason for existing is to prevent "borrow words" entering the French language and "contaminating" it. The next most comparable language for "purity" is Japanese, which was represented by Matsumata Ohta when he attempted to prevent the C-J-K unification of the Unicode standard, and eventually got his way by pushing another Unicode code page so that you could, for example, grep -v the Chinese text out of a Chinese textbook on Japanese poetry. Double the storage size for a wchar_t, just so that they could keep the languages distinct in both encoding and rendering, rather than just in rendering.