And these are the people who are making decisions about the future of the Internet?

Finally, a good (helpful/positive) use for fracking technology.

I remember the good old days (1980s) when universities would place ads for faculty positions in something along the lines of the Dubuque Iowa Telegraph Herald. Of course, the candidates who would be visiting campus to give lectures, etc. were already lined up, but you have to follow the rules...

Bummer! You need a physical, easy to hit, ESC key for vi / vim.

It kinda makes you wonder how many engineers were consulted about the new design. I'm guessing Steve Jobs would have taken input from them into consideration.

I guess I'll be mapping the backquote key to ESC if I buy a new MacBook Pro.

Maybe Dan declined.

For those not familiar with Dan: semiwiki.com

These phones are absolutely safe if the battery is removed and they are powered by a wired supply.

Give them to researchers to create a cell-phone supercomputer or other possible projects.

...on a budget of $15 million?

Let's say you pay everyone $10,000/year. We'll figure a conservative 200% overhead on an employee for office space, equipment, paper, insurance, etc., so $30,000/employee/year. For 500 employees, that's $15 million/year.

Apple's a pretty smart company.

From the article:

    "Analysts and investors have favored disposing of the business, which they said didn't add much to the chip sales and was too dependent on the shrinking PC market."

In shared computing environments (the cloud) and in small-form-factor networked computing (IoT), creating new security mechanisms which may require hardware/software co-design is the future. The statement above pretty much ignores this, hence my comment.

The sort of thing I am referring to is already present in hardware acceleration for encryption and Intel's trusted platform module (TPM), the latter causing some controversy for being a closed system which might be doing evil things. :-/

Breaking these two apart is a short-sighted business decision. It is not the sort of thing a far-sighted, research-driven company would/should do.

Thinking the security future is PC-based is short-sighted at best. Security in the future is going to be about hand-held devices, moving data (between devices, cloud, etc.), and the small, connected devices we like to call the Internet-of-Things.

These markets will make the PC security market looks small.

I didn't realize it worked as well as Google's. I compared them back when I used Google Desktop, and it was not as good (~2008). Maybe it is better now--I'll try it again.

Now if Google will bring back Google Desktop, which did this sort of deep-dive local searching for Windows (was it Linux also?) machines.

This would make a good (affordable) Silicon Valley apartment. The 610 sq. ft. place I rented back in 2005 for $700/month now goes for $2100/month. If I were a recent college graduate starting out in Silicon Valley, a very small apartment similar to these hotel rooms would be a great way to start saving to get into something I could own.

For those wanting to add "passed DoD background check" to their resume, this might be an opportunity to do it for free (as in no up-front monetary cost).

A good software engineer should be able to learn a new language in a week or so. If there is something inherent in the language which makes this not possible, e.g. pointers, generics, functional v. procedural, etc., then the software engineer has a gaping hole in his/her knowledge and may need some additional training.

That point aside, I think the discussion here makes the decision C, mostly because of unknown future support for Rust--it is too new to know.

Unless C has an easily describable deficiency which will be covered by a different language, there is no argument here.

An engineer not being willing/able to learn C does not count as a deficiency in C. The same is true for Rust.

Also, if one particular engineer has a strong preference for Rust, for the preference to be an informed decision, the engineer must already be familiar with C, so there should be no problem for that engineer to work in C if the decision goes that way.

Who is APK?