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The Almighty Buck

Billionaire Donors Lavish Millions On Code.org Crowdfunding Project 84

theodp (442580) writes "Whether it's winning yacht races, assembling the best computer science faculty, or even dominating high school basketball, billionaires like to win. Which may help explain why three tech billionaires — Code.org backers (and FWD.us founders) Mark Zuckerberg, VC John Doerr, and Sean Parker — stepped up to the plate and helped out Code.org's once-anemic Hour of Code Indiegogo crowdfunding project with $500k donations. When matched by Code.org's largest donors (Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and others), the three donations alone raised $3,000,000, enough to reach the organization's goal of becoming the most funded crowdfunding campaign ever on Indiegogo. On its campaign page, Code.org remarked that "to sustain our organization for the long haul, we need to engage parents and community members," which raises questions about how reliant the K-12 learn-to-code movement might be on the kindness of its wealthy corporate and individual donors. Code.org started shedding some light on its top donors a few months back, but contributor names are blank in the 2013 IRS 990 filing posted by the organization on its website, although GuideStar suggests the biggest contributors in 2013 were Microsoft ($3,149,411) and Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi ($1,873,909 in Facebook stock). Coincidentally, in a Reddit AMA at Code.org's launch, CEO and Founder Hadi Partovi noted that his next-door-neighbor is Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Board member Brad Smith, whose FWD.us bio notes is responsible for Microsoft's philanthropic work. Just months before Code.org and FWD.us emerged on the lobbying scene, Smith announced Microsoft's National Talent Strategy, which called for "an increase in developing the American STEM pipeline in exchange for these new [H-1B] visas and green cards," a wish that President Obama is expected to grant shortly via executive action."

Comment Re:damn (Score 2, Insightful) 550

There is a difference between "attacks" and valid criticism. Calling everybody that criticizes systemd and its adoption into Debian a "troll" or an "attacker" is unfounded and represents an extreme form of trolling itself. One could get the rather strong impression that the systemd advocates do not want any dialog or have sufficient valid arguments to deal with the criticism voiced. Instead they revert to this form of primitive emotional manipulation.

Data Storage

Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X 327

MojoKid (1002251) writes One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgrade flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM. Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. We say "effectively" because while third-party SSDs will still work, they'll no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command. Being able to perform TRIM and clean the SSD when it's sitting idle is vital to keeping the drive at maximum performance. Without it, an SSD's real world performance will steadily degrade over time. What Apple did with OS X 10.10 is introduce KEXT (Kernel EXTension) driver signing. KEXT signing means that at boot, the OS checks to ensure that all drivers are approved and enabled by Apple. It's conceptually similar to the device driver checks that Windows performs at boot. However, with OS X, if a third-party SSD is detected, the OS will detect that a non-approved SSD is in use, and Yosemite will refuse to load the appropriate TRIM-enabled driver.

Comment Re:another idea (Score 1) 127

AMD produces CPUs in Dresden, Memory and chipsets are fully produced outside the US, ARM is British, the CPUs for china's supercomputer are made there, etc. These are global companies, sometimes non-US domestic ones, but never only US companies. You mindless patriotism blinds you to reality.

Result of your proposed move would be that the US would not get components, not the other way round.

Comment Re:Put the SMART stats to the test (Score 1) 142

Unfortunately, the Google paper is mostly unusable as it has severe methodical errors and basically only shows its authors do not have a clue. What of it is usable confirms things however. (Not the only really badly researched and written paper to come out of Google either...)

Comment Re:Put the SMART stats to the test (Score 1) 142

And that is how you do it if you know what how HDDs work. Most people have not the least clue about the mechanics, physics and electronics involved and hence are posting a lot of techno-mythical nonsense here.

Personally, I had suspicious disks in RAID6 and checked then once a day. (Data was also backed up elsewhere.) Except for one freak disk that suddenly had 150 reallocations, but then continued to work for 3 years, they all died pretty soon, but I never needed those backups.

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"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell

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