But he has a terrible attitude. He says "Windows are in the Windows era that is where we are, we were and always will be" because in Ballmer's own words "that is what we are paid to do" and by 'do' he means 'say' of course. I wish that he had more vision and wasn't just trying to milk the Windows cow. For example he killed the courier tablet because of infighting between the office team and the courier team. He needs to have a vision, and from his world he can't see anything but Windows, Windows Server and Office. With its huge stash and incredible access to talented people, Microsoft could be doing more independent development and less 'me too' products which usually are second best - Zune (iPod), Bing (Google), Games for Windows Live (Steam), Windows Phone (Android), Office 365 (Google Docs), MSN (AOL), MSNBC (CNN).

Microsoft and most companies limit the length of the call because many financial professionals need to be on dozens of these calls over the course of a month. If all of the meetings were all day affairs a lot of the meetings would lose attendance because the financial professionals need to do other work. Therefore they include the important bits in the 30 min - 1 hour call. Berkshire Hathaway is the exception to this rule, but it tends not to be that widely held by professional investors as they can directly invest in the same companies as Berkshire does.

Quake III was released in 1999. Quake III was ported to windows mobile in 2005. So mobile games are still about 7 years behind. When Quake III came out it was the best game ever, however now the bar has moved and it isn't good enough. By the time this chip comes out we will have next gen consoles that will do shader based antialiasing and horizon based ambient occulsion in most games. PS3 graphics will be noticeably dated (just look at how many PS3 games use no anti-alaising or texture filtering and run at less than 720P).

Sorry but, you don't know what your talking about. Even if unvested, options have very real value that can be extrapolated from the strike price of the option and the current valuation of the company (which is possibly around $10 bn given current IPO rumors). The board can grant new options, but once you are granted options, they cannot rescind them any more than they can ask for your pay back. My guess here is that management was surprised how high their IPO valuation is and there best bet now would be to dilute the company under the table than ask the employees for their options back.

Most games are rendered at less than 720p resolutions, with no anti-aliasing, poor shaders and poor texture filtering. Current consoles are not good enough at pushing pixels on 2d displays.

Not a feasible solution. If spectrum is sold by market, devices wouldn't be able to roam nation wide and a wireless router that you buy in one state would be jamming cell phone signals (or worse air traffic controll) when you move to another. I think the real answer is going to be localized networks with small cube transmitters on top of telephone poles transmitting at about 2-5 times the power of a Wifi hotspot. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/02/07/1820240/alcatel-lucent-shrinks-mobile-cell-tower-to-small-cube.

You need to be in NYC as the programmer is usually in a team with the Ph.D in Econ Guy, the crazy math Statistics and Stochastic Calc Guy and the Finance Guy.

"We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas." I wouldn't be surprised if schools are still teaching the use of the card catalog.

The problem is that fixed focus cameras are also good enough for facebook. Redoing the focus in post production isn't something 99% of people would ever do for a facebook photo. They usually go straight from the camera to the upload with zero image editing.

Don't forget, we also just came out of a crazy bad recession. This would have been a bad time to release a new console and it is harder for the companies to justify console development costs when investors are demanding cost cutting. Additionally, TSMC has been stuck for over a year on the 40 nm node. The cancellation of the 32 nm process may have impacted some of the plans of the console makers. If they were planning on a chip that simply wouldn't be feasible/economical without a die shrink, then now have to wait for 28 nm to become a widely available and high yielding process, but so far this process is not ready for production silicon. TSMC won't be able to produce the quantity or yield of parts that the console makers will need on 28 nm until at least early 2012.

To get away from the word "sport" you could say: There are plenty of games that are fun, but there is a niche for a game that is competitive. The gist of what the Blizzard guy is saying is that a balanced challenging competitive environment isn't created by just throwing every fun unit that you can think of into the game. Unbalanced games devolve into single strategy borefests, while well balanced games let a variety of strategies be viable. Basically, single player could have more powerful effects if nukes could blow up entire bases or if the mothership's void lasted longer. However these "I win" spells would look cool but not be fun in multiplayer after the first five times (or when you are on the receiving end).

That is fine if you are working in project management, but what about sales or reporting? Fully fleshed out reports often aren't fit for external consumption. If a sales guy puts a 20 page detailed report on a prospects desk, that is going straight into the waste bin when he leaves and the sale is lost. A great example of reports for perpetuity are quarterly earnings presentations by publicly traded companies. They are both presentable and very much crafted to be part of the permanent public record.

PowerPoint is great for presenting data in ways that aren't possible with white board and marker: - Excel and PowerPoint can make better charts and tables than freehand * Histograms, org charts and pie charts are more understandable than handwritten or oral raw data * Charts can contain more (accurate) data than can be memorized in a practical timescale - Some data in a presentation may be needed "for the record" * Hard copies allow clients/prospects/listeners to not focus on taking notes * For proposals, terms and conditions must be offered in writing * Some presentations satisfy legal requirements (e.g. due diligence) * Written (legal & compliance) disclaimers may need to accompany discussions

a large part of what these companies are paying for is that they are only two hops from the servers for the stock exchange. The idea is that the router of that data center is directly wired to the exchange (which is in the same or an adjacent building) without any ISP in between.

Higher spreads increase the amount of money that the market makers (Wall St) make off the trade and decrease the amount of money that goes to the investors (the buyer and the seller of the stock).