Same thing was said for a book seller and cloud services.

Regarding this story though, first thing that came to my mind was occupying the space that will soon to be created by Blackberry's downfall.

a.k.a. game theory

ron pearlman was cool guy

Impossible, we all know by now that apple only innovates and never imitates. I think apple will go for 6.9" or 7.1".

Read

Another case of CS guys now knowing about existing EE research.

Because you are new to games, and don't know what to play, and everybody seems to play this thing called "angry birds".

Because it is the cool crowd who plays it.

Because it is like that popular tv show (enter name) that everyone seems to like, so you have to seem to like it to blend in

Because you just finished Demon's Souls and you need to play something "light"

Because he plays it (if you are a girl)

This should cover 500mil people.

Yes, you mean like the time when google also started showing full size background images like bing.

Or the right side summary bar.

I think Google takes Bing more seriously than people think. I dont blame them since Bing is the only potential competitor.

Not really. Working with major video publishers, we have learned that HTML5 means iPad. Noone cares about webm or ogg, we are asked to create MP4 for VOD and/or MPEG-TS for live streams and that is it. They are very happy with RTMP and FLV video for browsers and for now they only care about iPad when it comes to tablets

As a developer I find HTML5 a pain in the butt because video players behave differently on different devices and browsers. iPads do not allow more than one video play at the same time (note that I have long accepted HTML5 video=iPad). So not only does it put a limitation on the application you are designing, you also need to to maintain browser compatibility in your code.

You may say "well flash sucks, you need developers, build environments, maintenance, etc.", and you would be right. But we have already done those, they are in place, they are well known and well documented. And guess what, they work great.

If you are to propose a replacement for Flash video I think you need to make a really good case first.

It seems to me like you are creating hypothetical scenarios of total failure. Most of the practical failure scenarios can be handled gracefully when you have facebook's resources under your command. After all they are not sending men to Mars. We have studied and now well understand distributed database problems for more than 30 years. There is pretty much nothing technologically interesting about Facebook (and Twitter for that matter).

The sad part is someone writes his ramblings and puts a flow chart or two and it becomes a story on /.

...was going to be boring at some point. Apparently that point is now.

On the bright side something good may come out of this "dumb-down-the-product" approach made popular (and commercially perfected) by Apple. It worked great for them so since MS is trying to re-invent themselves, why not follow the same paradigm.

On the other hand, the pro users (a slight super set of the little crowd here at /.) think that the old one worked just fine, why mess with it, rightly so

I think noone is really wrong or right here. Only time will tell if MS can pull this off.

Regretful because he was caught. If he wasn't caught, probably he would have been quite happy.

There must be a better way than ec2

Personal experience: Disk IO: not dependable, network IO excellent.

4000 British pounds sterling = 6302.8000 US dollars
Assuming for each "experiment" you run 20 instances in parallel for 15 minutes (partial hours count as full hours, so remember to round up even if you use for a minute), you spend 40$ per session.

You get to make 160 experiments, and you are over budget.

Or if you adjust everything optimally, e.g., end the experiment at 59 minute mark, and assuming your "parallelization" uses 5 instances, then you get to make 640 experiments. But real life is far from optimal, especially with those pesky grad students.

If she weren't that ugly I could have watched that.

I don't agree with the before/after images. Advances in technology and reduction in tech and hardware prices will be major factor in those designs. Do you really think Samsung made 1 inch tablets because they thought it would look nice? Once you move to touchscreens, guess what, you dont need arrow buttons on the device anymore.