I have a couple of cousins, one in Mumbai and another in Singapore. The Mumbai guy was very impressed and persuaded me to install WhatsApp. I could not see why I would use WhatsApp over email when I have a data plan on a smartphone. Some of my brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law from India send me WhatsApp messages. They find it easy and convenient to send phots through this App. Otherwise it is as useless as it gets. I would probably pay 1$ or two for it. Not sure how many of my correspondents from India would.
It is not true. India has a billion people and there will always be a rung or starta of the society that would think moving to America would better their lives. But the top crust of Indian elites, they are not enamored by America anymore. The top grads from IITs, IIMs they don't come here. Look at the US Graduate schools. It used to be full of students from top Indian schools. Not anymore. I have not seen any resume from an IIT grad in the last 10 years. The last IIT grad I managed to recruit was in 2000.
There are still great reasons to immigrate to USA from India. Less corruption, great clean water and air, reliable power supply etc. But for a young man from a top school contemplating US grad schools/jobs, the biggest stumbling block is the lack of domestic help. Indian girls refuse to marry and move to America because they have to do all the house work. They might be willing to cook and may be load the dishwasher. But cleaning toilets is considered the beneath their dignity. It is nearly impossible now a days to persuade Indian women without IT career prospects to immigrate to USA. Indian women with career in IT get to marry the top honchos in India and get to live a life of luxury.
I thank my lucky stars for immigrating in the early 1990s for my wonderful wife.
The bridge has not been designed to handle that load, it has been designed for lighter load (car, 40' truck, etc.).
But the bridge owner specifically sold me an all-you-can-drive plan where I pay a fixed amount every month and I get unlimited right to drive anything I want on that bridge as many times as I want. If you can't deliver unlimited bandwidth, don't sell it.
The non refundable tickets story looks phony. Facebook could afford to fly the founder on a private jet if needed. No matter whether this story is false or true, Facebook paid foolishly high sum for Whatsapp.
The main draw of Whatsapp is that it allows penny pinchers to save on texting fees. In the countries dominated by WhatsApp all incoming calls and texts are free by law. People only pay for outgoing texts. If you have WhatsApp account, from a dumb phone you can send an SMS paying for just one outgoing local text fee. If you have smart phone, it would come under your data plan. That SMS could be echoed to many people as incoming texts by WhatsApp, across countries if necessary. Thus you avoid international texting charges too. These users are tightwads and penny-pinchers extraordinaire. They are the ones who developed elaborate missed-call etiquette and protocols to avoid paying air-time charges. They would sign up, use the first year for free, and create a new account under a new user name and get one more year free. WhatsApp knew it and it did not care, it is able to count old users as new users and show phenomenal user base growth. You can not make any money off these users. They will dump WhatsApp the moment it tries to charge any fees. There is no compelling reason to use WhatsApp and the switching costs are minimal. It is not like Facebook where all your friends are and you have to be in Facebook to see it.
In a developed market with smartphones, where dumb phone market is shrinking, there is no way FB can make any money off WhatsApp. And it has spent 35% of cash on hand in this acquisition. Media is making a big deal of 19 billion dollar figure. But much of it is from overvalued FB stock so that is not relevant. What is important is, in the coming year it is going to be cash strapped. It is having huge buyers remorse. It is going to more circumspect in the next acquisition target. It will swing in the other direction and let a good deal slip in the coming year. That is the effect of WhatsApp on FaceBook.
No the goals of legislation and computer program are the same. Unambiguous description of what should happen when under what circumstances to whom.
But law is stuck in an archaic mode. It is using natural language with words having imprecise meanings and sentence structures that can not easily handle complexity. It is like the biology books before the widespread adaptation of pictures in print. Elaborate naming conventions, trying to unambiguously descrine leaves branching off the stem two at a time, or one at a time etc etc. It is as though the lawyers are deliberately ignoring the advances in mathematics and in the use of diagrams, or novel syntax to describe nested conditionals.
Yes, in practice the law becomes very fuzzy and is open to varying interpretations. But when it comes to the goal, law and code try to do the same thing, unambiguous description of outcomes for every eventuality. Wish I could get some grad students in law and computer science would collaborate to write existing laws in pseudocode and use lexical parsers to find the unhanded/undefined branches in the flow chart.
I don't really have as much problem with it there because iOS devices are generally not productivity devices so most apps are priced $0 to $10. Not $100 to over $1000 like many Windows productivity apps.
Oracle, PeopleSoft and other IT software are all moving to the browser as the user inteface to construct SQL queries and run the software in the servers. They would switch to linux rather than pay 30% tax to Microsoft. Almost all the IT development could be done using the browser as the user interface. No metro needed for them.
But there are other tools that can not run in the browser. Not just the creative studio from Adobe or the video editors. The CAD/CAM software is very expensive. ANSYS High Frequency Structures Simulator or Fluent fluid mechanics solver would run into 50K or more per seat with 20K a year in maintenance. Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsis, AutoDyne, Parametric, CATIA, Abacus, StarCC++ are all multi-thousand dollar per year software, You can bet none of them would ever migrate their interface to metro, nor would they pay 30% to Microsoft. I am very sure Microsoft has special deals for these vendors, because they would drop support for Windows if Microsoft plays hardball with them.
I am very very sure Microsoft will do very well with the non-touch devices. Who can even hold a candle to Microsoft when it comes to being out of touch with its customers?
Yet another set top box. Yet another walled garden. Yet another service that will not interoperate with other services. Yeah, it is "android", but if it is locked down and can only run apps that were pre installed in the factory, what is the point of it being android?
What advantage any of this will have over a Chromebook + HDMI cable + bluetooth keyboard & mouse combination?
The authors are using fMRI images and proper scientific study to show that coding and natural language processing activate different parts of the brain. Most likely to be true. I am wondering if they would compare coding ares of the brain with the parts activated by writing legal contracts or legislation. Both of code and legislation/contracts try to express.. let me switch to coding parlance... Both coding and writing legislation try to describe if () then {} else {} under some context.
Both try to make it as unambiguously as possible, both try to define the context under which the conditional will be evaluated and the consequent actions/outcome/behavior for the true and false paths.
Both work most of the time for the anticipated context. But when unusual and unanticipated conditions arise, codes trigger bugs and the legislation triggers loopholes. Bugs are sometimes confused with features. Loopholes too are sometimes intended to be there.
Both code and laws need to struggle with legacy issues and maintaining historic behavior sometimes takes precedence over fixing the bug/loophole.
The comic page cartoonists are happy people, finding joy in simple things and daily events happening around them. They are amused by such little things they lead a happy contented life. The only reason they share their joy, in whatever little morsels, with lesser mortals like us is, someday they will have a louse or a worm or bacteria named after them. Without an incentive like this they will throw away their crayons and pencils and walk away.
I will support naming organisms by hash functions when hash functions produce funny output on the far side of sanity-insanity dividing line.
The difference is just 35$. That is going to kill the middle tier devices? Being a windows box is going to be a bigger disadvantage than 35$ for that 500$ device. Basic problem is there is no killer must have app for that mythical 500$ device. Penny pinchers want a simple sub 200$ machine. Bells and whistles fanboi\s don't care that much about the price.
The problem for Microsoft is that it sells only to corporations and gamers. Both are not as price conscious as home users. But it has to fight a rear guard action to keep the home user in the fold. Otherwise they taste competing OS and see how others do it and demand Microsoft's feet to fire. They demand interoperability. There are people who have more powerful computing platforms in their pockets iPhones/androids/tablets than the corporation provided desktop they work on. The company workstation PC is hampered by layers and layers of IT clunkiness loaded on top of Microsoft cluelessness. I think this 15$ is just a PR stunt to fool the stock analysts, in reality Microsoft would be giving OS away for free without telling analysts.
I can only marvel at Google at its strategic moves. Sun tried to fight Microsoft with Java and got clobbered. Google rightly realized as long as MSOffice is delivering cash like a firehose, it would be impossible to fight it. It went on a long term plan with bare mininal Google Docs, then with Google apps to pinch the money supply. It leveraged the connectivity by making collaboration front and center of office tools. Microsoft did not reduce price fast enough, or introduce network features fast enough. They were resting in laurels and now MsOffice monopoly does not look as monolithic as it did when we were discussing the ODF vs OOXML fights.
It participated in the spectrum auction and made the telcos pay near market rates. It bought dark strands of the fiber network after the market crash to protect itself from local last mile ISPs from holding it for ransom.
It talked to WhatsApp, made an offer of 10 billion with lots of poison pills. It set the floor at 10 billion, leaving all the smaller players aside. It knew Facebook was despo and will buy WhatsApp, but it boosted the price and made Facebook pay dearlym 35% of cash on hand!. Please disregard the 19 billion dollar figure. That is based on overpriced FB stock price. That Facebook will be strapped for money in the coming year for other aquisitions is the key victory for Google.
WhatsApp's 450 million users includes millions who create new accounts every year when their old free for the first year accounts expire. Those users are penny, nay, paisa pinchers who use WhatsApp to avoid international texting charges between India and the Gulf countries and Singapore. They use WhatsApp to broadcast their texts to N recipients paying 1 outgoing text charge. In India incoming calls and texts must be free by law. Only the sender pays. 2 dollar per user? You can't chisel 2 rupees out of them. Anyway WhatsApp has no advantage when it comes to smartphones. Its explosive growth was due to it being the portal to the intenet for dumb phones via SMS. That market is done.
Unorganized linux tried to scare Microsoft with netbooks. Microsoft hit back and evenutally killed the netbooks market, though it had to extend XP's life to do so. But Google resurrected the netbooks markets, and is forcing Microsoft to engage in price war again. Given the drop dead simplicity of the Chromebook, and low cost by eschewing the bells and whistles of the tablet market, it is very difficult to see anyone make any serious money off them. But it hampers the others from raising their profit margins.
Google plays the strategic game stupendously well.
But the fact that 99.9% of Muslims oppose terrorism doesn't seem to be swaying the terrorists.
In fact, Al Queda is very strongly against terrorism. The only difference is they would define whatever is done by America, drone strikes, invading Muslim countries, making swimming compulsory for Muslim girls in American schools etc, as terrorism, and whatever they are doing as a fight for liberation.
I agree with you to some extent. Killers come in all stripes and they will kill and use any ideology to justify the bloodlust. Many ideologies have very bloody history, Judaism, Christianity, Islam among the religious and communism, fascism, naziism, marxism among the secular ideologies.
It is the responsibility of the non-killer practitioners of the ideology make sure their ideology is not used as justification for killing. Muslims are not the only oppressed people in the world. Hindus have suffered under Muslim invasion and then under Christian rule. They are not producing terrorists as much as the Muslims do. Buddhist lands have been occupied by Muslims, and they are churning out terrorists.
We have enough Muslims talking English to the West. We get it, "Islam is a religion of peace and not all Muslims are terrorists". But unless the moderates make some headway talking Arabic to fellow Muslims and reduce the number of terrorists who shout "Allah o' Akkubar" while they kill, we, the Western moderates, will have tough time containing our extremists.
From a legal/liability stand point this the only issue. If it can happen, they have take steps to correct it after they have become aware of it, and they have to show that they followed reasonable engineering practices in designing and testing it. In a car, the hydraulic line for the brakes could rupture, the teeth in rack and pinion can break and jam locking the wheels, the brakes can jam, the car can skid, the tires can burst. All of them CAN happen. But unless you can show it did happen, and the Toyota knew it could happen and still it did not enough you don't have a legal claim.
"We've demonstrated how as little as a single bit flip can cause the driver to lose control of the engine speed in real cars due to software malfunction that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe," Michael Barr, CTO and co-founder of Barr Group, told us in an exclusive interview. Barr served as an expert witness in this case
Emphasis mine.
Yes, a single bit flip can cause unpredictable behavior in any code. You could say that without any analysis. A single mistake in sign can get you a goose egg in the Algebra paper. So many people could have won the lottery if only one digit was different. These are well known. But can != did. Did that stack overflow? Did it actually happen? That is the question.
These cyber criminals are babes in the woods, compared to my brilliance. I pull wool over their eyes easily. See? I enter the password in the username textbox and the username in the password textbox when I created the account. That is the last place they will look while trying to hack my password. haa haaa. The jokes on you script kiddies...
This is what my Indian cousins tell me. India has huge number of plain dumb cell phone users. It also has a decent chunk of smartphone users. Whats App bridges the gap. It allows dumb phones and smart phones to interoperate. It allows sending SMS from smart phones/internet to dumb phones. In India and most Asian countries all incoming calls/texts are free. So a smart phone user can mix dumb phone numbers and smart phone numbers in the broadcast list and send out messages. Dumb phones have varying degrees of multimedia support and they get to see as much as their phones would support. It allows users to send out one text message to Whats App portal and it relays the messages to all other recipients. Thus you pay for one out going text but manage to send it to multiple people. Most importantly it allows text messages to travel across the internet to multiple countries helping you avoid international texting charges.
When my cousin visiting USA texted to his brother in Singapore, the Singapore brother was like, "what? you got money growing in trees? Why send regular text when you have Whats App?"
But dumb phones market share is shrinking, Smart phones don't ever pay for international texting rates, they have more options... So I don't see Whats App growing any bigger than what it is. I am not sure people would be willing to pay more than a dollar or two per year for Whats App in smart phones. But I could be, and frequently have been, wrong.
Bulk of that 16 billion dollars comes in the form of Facebook stock, which is already heavily overvalued. And some of the retention boni (*) are restricted stock. So over all this valuation of 16 billion is overvalued whole squared.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a couple of cousins, one in Mumbai and another in Singapore. The Mumbai guy was very impressed and persuaded me to install WhatsApp. I could not see why I would use WhatsApp over email when I have a data plan on a smartphone. Some of my brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law from India send me WhatsApp messages. They find it easy and convenient to send phots through this App. Otherwise it is as useless as it gets. I would probably pay 1$ or two for it. Not sure how many of my correspondents from India would.
There are still great reasons to immigrate to USA from India. Less corruption, great clean water and air, reliable power supply etc. But for a young man from a top school contemplating US grad schools/jobs, the biggest stumbling block is the lack of domestic help. Indian girls refuse to marry and move to America because they have to do all the house work. They might be willing to cook and may be load the dishwasher. But cleaning toilets is considered the beneath their dignity. It is nearly impossible now a days to persuade Indian women without IT career prospects to immigrate to USA. Indian women with career in IT get to marry the top honchos in India and get to live a life of luxury.
I thank my lucky stars for immigrating in the early 1990s for my wonderful wife.
WhatsApp does not enforce it strictly. They know what is going on, still they let it slide.
..They become Shimizu's Dream corporation staffers.
The bridge has not been designed to handle that load, it has been designed for lighter load (car, 40' truck, etc.).
But the bridge owner specifically sold me an all-you-can-drive plan where I pay a fixed amount every month and I get unlimited right to drive anything I want on that bridge as many times as I want. If you can't deliver unlimited bandwidth, don't sell it.
The main draw of Whatsapp is that it allows penny pinchers to save on texting fees. In the countries dominated by WhatsApp all incoming calls and texts are free by law. People only pay for outgoing texts. If you have WhatsApp account, from a dumb phone you can send an SMS paying for just one outgoing local text fee. If you have smart phone, it would come under your data plan. That SMS could be echoed to many people as incoming texts by WhatsApp, across countries if necessary. Thus you avoid international texting charges too. These users are tightwads and penny-pinchers extraordinaire. They are the ones who developed elaborate missed-call etiquette and protocols to avoid paying air-time charges. They would sign up, use the first year for free, and create a new account under a new user name and get one more year free. WhatsApp knew it and it did not care, it is able to count old users as new users and show phenomenal user base growth. You can not make any money off these users. They will dump WhatsApp the moment it tries to charge any fees. There is no compelling reason to use WhatsApp and the switching costs are minimal. It is not like Facebook where all your friends are and you have to be in Facebook to see it.
In a developed market with smartphones, where dumb phone market is shrinking, there is no way FB can make any money off WhatsApp. And it has spent 35% of cash on hand in this acquisition. Media is making a big deal of 19 billion dollar figure. But much of it is from overvalued FB stock so that is not relevant. What is important is, in the coming year it is going to be cash strapped. It is having huge buyers remorse. It is going to more circumspect in the next acquisition target. It will swing in the other direction and let a good deal slip in the coming year. That is the effect of WhatsApp on FaceBook.
But law is stuck in an archaic mode. It is using natural language with words having imprecise meanings and sentence structures that can not easily handle complexity. It is like the biology books before the widespread adaptation of pictures in print. Elaborate naming conventions, trying to unambiguously descrine leaves branching off the stem two at a time, or one at a time etc etc. It is as though the lawyers are deliberately ignoring the advances in mathematics and in the use of diagrams, or novel syntax to describe nested conditionals.
Yes, in practice the law becomes very fuzzy and is open to varying interpretations. But when it comes to the goal, law and code try to do the same thing, unambiguous description of outcomes for every eventuality. Wish I could get some grad students in law and computer science would collaborate to write existing laws in pseudocode and use lexical parsers to find the unhanded/undefined branches in the flow chart.
I don't really have as much problem with it there because iOS devices are generally not productivity devices so most apps are priced $0 to $10. Not $100 to over $1000 like many Windows productivity apps.
Oracle, PeopleSoft and other IT software are all moving to the browser as the user inteface to construct SQL queries and run the software in the servers. They would switch to linux rather than pay 30% tax to Microsoft. Almost all the IT development could be done using the browser as the user interface. No metro needed for them.
But there are other tools that can not run in the browser. Not just the creative studio from Adobe or the video editors. The CAD/CAM software is very expensive. ANSYS High Frequency Structures Simulator or Fluent fluid mechanics solver would run into 50K or more per seat with 20K a year in maintenance. Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsis, AutoDyne, Parametric, CATIA, Abacus, StarCC++ are all multi-thousand dollar per year software, You can bet none of them would ever migrate their interface to metro, nor would they pay 30% to Microsoft. I am very sure Microsoft has special deals for these vendors, because they would drop support for Windows if Microsoft plays hardball with them.
I am very very sure Microsoft will do very well with the non-touch devices. Who can even hold a candle to Microsoft when it comes to being out of touch with its customers?
What advantage any of this will have over a Chromebook + HDMI cable + bluetooth keyboard & mouse combination?
Bad programmers come from everywhere. But the bad ones coming from India are particularly irritating because they think their bad code is great code.
Both try to make it as unambiguously as possible, both try to define the context under which the conditional will be evaluated and the consequent actions/outcome/behavior for the true and false paths.
Both work most of the time for the anticipated context. But when unusual and unanticipated conditions arise, codes trigger bugs and the legislation triggers loopholes. Bugs are sometimes confused with features. Loopholes too are sometimes intended to be there.
Both code and laws need to struggle with legacy issues and maintaining historic behavior sometimes takes precedence over fixing the bug/loophole.
I will support naming organisms by hash functions when hash functions produce funny output on the far side of sanity-insanity dividing line.
Sufficiently advanced luck is indistinguishable from strategic mastery.
The problem for Microsoft is that it sells only to corporations and gamers. Both are not as price conscious as home users. But it has to fight a rear guard action to keep the home user in the fold. Otherwise they taste competing OS and see how others do it and demand Microsoft's feet to fire. They demand interoperability. There are people who have more powerful computing platforms in their pockets iPhones/androids/tablets than the corporation provided desktop they work on. The company workstation PC is hampered by layers and layers of IT clunkiness loaded on top of Microsoft cluelessness. I think this 15$ is just a PR stunt to fool the stock analysts, in reality Microsoft would be giving OS away for free without telling analysts.
It participated in the spectrum auction and made the telcos pay near market rates. It bought dark strands of the fiber network after the market crash to protect itself from local last mile ISPs from holding it for ransom.
It talked to WhatsApp, made an offer of 10 billion with lots of poison pills. It set the floor at 10 billion, leaving all the smaller players aside. It knew Facebook was despo and will buy WhatsApp, but it boosted the price and made Facebook pay dearlym 35% of cash on hand!. Please disregard the 19 billion dollar figure. That is based on overpriced FB stock price. That Facebook will be strapped for money in the coming year for other aquisitions is the key victory for Google.
WhatsApp's 450 million users includes millions who create new accounts every year when their old free for the first year accounts expire. Those users are penny, nay, paisa pinchers who use WhatsApp to avoid international texting charges between India and the Gulf countries and Singapore. They use WhatsApp to broadcast their texts to N recipients paying 1 outgoing text charge. In India incoming calls and texts must be free by law. Only the sender pays. 2 dollar per user? You can't chisel 2 rupees out of them. Anyway WhatsApp has no advantage when it comes to smartphones. Its explosive growth was due to it being the portal to the intenet for dumb phones via SMS. That market is done.
Unorganized linux tried to scare Microsoft with netbooks. Microsoft hit back and evenutally killed the netbooks market, though it had to extend XP's life to do so. But Google resurrected the netbooks markets, and is forcing Microsoft to engage in price war again. Given the drop dead simplicity of the Chromebook, and low cost by eschewing the bells and whistles of the tablet market, it is very difficult to see anyone make any serious money off them. But it hampers the others from raising their profit margins.
Google plays the strategic game stupendously well.
But the fact that 99.9% of Muslims oppose terrorism doesn't seem to be swaying the terrorists.
In fact, Al Queda is very strongly against terrorism. The only difference is they would define whatever is done by America, drone strikes, invading Muslim countries, making swimming compulsory for Muslim girls in American schools etc, as terrorism, and whatever they are doing as a fight for liberation.
I agree with you to some extent. Killers come in all stripes and they will kill and use any ideology to justify the bloodlust. Many ideologies have very bloody history, Judaism, Christianity, Islam among the religious and communism, fascism, naziism, marxism among the secular ideologies.
It is the responsibility of the non-killer practitioners of the ideology make sure their ideology is not used as justification for killing. Muslims are not the only oppressed people in the world. Hindus have suffered under Muslim invasion and then under Christian rule. They are not producing terrorists as much as the Muslims do. Buddhist lands have been occupied by Muslims, and they are churning out terrorists.
We have enough Muslims talking English to the West. We get it, "Islam is a religion of peace and not all Muslims are terrorists". But unless the moderates make some headway talking Arabic to fellow Muslims and reduce the number of terrorists who shout "Allah o' Akkubar" while they kill, we, the Western moderates, will have tough time containing our extremists.
True they have to redesign the system. But the courts is asking a different question, do they have a liability? Do they have to pay compensation?
From a legal/liability stand point this the only issue. If it can happen, they have take steps to correct it after they have become aware of it, and they have to show that they followed reasonable engineering practices in designing and testing it. In a car, the hydraulic line for the brakes could rupture, the teeth in rack and pinion can break and jam locking the wheels, the brakes can jam, the car can skid, the tires can burst. All of them CAN happen. But unless you can show it did happen, and the Toyota knew it could happen and still it did not enough you don't have a legal claim.
"We've demonstrated how as little as a single bit flip can cause the driver to lose control of the engine speed in real cars due to software malfunction that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe," Michael Barr, CTO and co-founder of Barr Group, told us in an exclusive interview. Barr served as an expert witness in this case
Emphasis mine.
Yes, a single bit flip can cause unpredictable behavior in any code. You could say that without any analysis. A single mistake in sign can get you a goose egg in the Algebra paper. So many people could have won the lottery if only one digit was different. These are well known. But can != did. Did that stack overflow? Did it actually happen? That is the question.
Suddenly Toyota lawyers sued this website http://stackoverflow.com/ and claimed they are victims too.
These cyber criminals are babes in the woods, compared to my brilliance. I pull wool over their eyes easily. See? I enter the password in the username textbox and the username in the password textbox when I created the account. That is the last place they will look while trying to hack my password. haa haaa. The jokes on you script kiddies...
When my cousin visiting USA texted to his brother in Singapore, the Singapore brother was like, "what? you got money growing in trees? Why send regular text when you have Whats App?"
But dumb phones market share is shrinking, Smart phones don't ever pay for international texting rates, they have more options... So I don't see Whats App growing any bigger than what it is. I am not sure people would be willing to pay more than a dollar or two per year for Whats App in smart phones. But I could be, and frequently have been, wrong.
Well, I was shooting for +1 funny, so did not rewrite it. But God being kind gave me +1 informative, and I now look silly.
(*) boni = plural of bonus