If APK says the sky is blue, you should assume that it's any colour BUT blue, unless and until you look out the window and verify this for yourself.

In addition, be sure that you actually *open* the window before you look, in case the glass has been tinted.

He wants more than fame, he wants to establish Russia as a global power, again. Problem is, his economy is mostly natural resourced exporting - which means it's pretty weak on manufacturing or services.

Snowden was probably ordering a pizza and his recorded voice was mixed and dubbed into the phone call.

In any case, everything you need to know about Putin's "Open Russia" you can tell from his control of all media.

Gecko != Firefox

BTW, I was using ChatZilla at around this same time.

> Russia & China got nothing from Snowden.

Do belly-laughs count? I bet they got a number of those.

> His material is being carefully vetted by journalists and experts before any is released

Of course, since russia, china, and several others players all have their own NSA and CIA-like entities, I would assume they have made attempts, and probably been successful by now, at obtaining the entire archive... or at least, what they didn't already have of it from their own operations pre-snowden.

With Manning, I would easily make the case that nothing was revealed, because any intelligence service that couldn't get their hands on those state department cables would have to be totally incompetent and barely even trying. NSA internal docs, a bit less likely... but I wouldn't doubt they had some of it.

Now, I don't doubt that they have all of it....oh well.... its their own fault for abusing their technical abilities, NSA brought this leak upon itself.

> Bruce Schneier is one helping them in their analysis.

This is one of the few reasons to suspect they have a chance of having not been compromised; if they follow his advice of course. Discipline is hard. I remember some of the security experts expressing being quite impressed by OBLs ability to maintain an effective air gap for so many years while so prolifically using email.

I think the theory behind caching is that what *should* work best is just keeping a list of the most frequently accessed blocks on flash, since, well, that's what you access most frequently. I would be nice to have a config tool that would be able to flag file(s) or directories as "always-cache".

I think the parent is mostly right in that most of the hybrid drives just have too little flash to really provide a lot of meaningful acceleration. 8 GB just doesn't cut it against 750 GB of platter. More flash capacity would also allow you to reserve some meaningful space to cache disk writes.

Excel is about the only component in the MS Office suite that is still arguably superior. When it came out on the Mac almost 30 years ago it was revolutionary. And this is from someone who was quite adept at Visicalc and Quattro. OTOH, it is my wish that no one use MS Powerpoint anymore. It is dated and ugly. MS Word is truly useful in a few use cases, buy mostly it is just that people know how to use to get simple tasks done and teaching them how to complete those tasks differently is cost prohibitive.

Due to the way MS products are licensed, and the cost of training, and the fact that the average person gets confused easily with software, it is cheaper for large organizations to buy the MS products for use by the minority of users that actually need it.

OTOH, you could grab a notebook and start watching lectures for free on youtube. Sure you can't ask questions or go to the TA for help, but you can get lectures from physics classes taught by Leonard Susskind (and others of course, but I watched some of his) on youtube right now.

I have a notebook somewhere with several pages of notes that I took while watching his Quantum Mechanics lectures...mostly while riding the bus back and forth to work (I stopped after I stopped taking the bus)

Of course, while there are the obvious disadvantages of not having tests to gauge progeress and help available.... you do have the ability to pause and rewind thelectures; which is really huge.

Because most telecommuters are do-nothings, which is why they are just as "effective" at home as they are at work?

I'm only being slightly facetious here. In my experience, home is almost never a place conducive to doing good work, way too many distractions and way too disassociated from the normal work environment and its easy access to communication with co-workers.

I say this having been a telecommuter myself for a time (not by choice, but by circumstance) and finding it demoralizingly difficult to be effective, and seeing the same thing in just about every person I've ever worked with who was a telecommuter.

Sure I've worked with people who still managed to get good work done from home; but in every case, those were the superstars who actually got *more* good work done at work. Working at home took away some of their productivity as it does for everyone else I've known, but they were so good to begin with that it just knocked them down to better-than-average instead of superstar status.

Well that's my opinion anyway.

if you are talking about throw away worker drones or server machines, then no. There is no data on these machine, the costs to swap them out are minimal. I recall a place that had racks of a few hundred machines, a dedicated person to swap them out, and two died a day. Putting anything but the cheapest product in there would have been a waste of money. But the data machines, those were special. Probably cost more than the combined servers the fed to.

Likewise, worker bee machines that are pretty much dumb terminals are not going to use SSD. But other machines that people actually do and store work on, that may be something different.

Look, tape is on the order of penny per gigabyte. Hard disks are somewhere between 5-10 cents a gigabyte. SSD is about 50 cents a gigabyte. Many people still back up onto hard disk even though tape is more reliable. We are going to use SSD because there are benefits that justify the order of magnitude increase.

And I'd recommend a sit-stand desk to anyone at all. Even if you don't stand all the time (I don't), being able to spend part of your day standing will make you feel better without discomfort, in fact being able to switch back and forth is more comfortable than sitting.

Obviously not, but you may not realize how open the company is internally. Larry Page stands up in front of the entire company every week, for example, and takes -- and answers -- live questions. There are no negative consequences for asking hard questions, and hard questions do get asked. Sometimes the executives duck or dance around them, but not very often, and questions that aren't really answered continue getting asked until they do get answered.

In addition to that, other than things like acquisitions there are very few "top-level executive decisions" at Google. Most decisionmaking is driven from the bottom up.

You're probably still not impressed. Whatever. I'm just giving you my perspective and opinion. I would think that an intelligent insider's viewpoint would be of use to you; you're certainly free to dismiss it, whether or not that makes any sense. Time will tell, and I'm quite confident that the future will bear out my statements.

Not according to YouTube employees who made the transition.

This is why it's not a "standing desk" but a "sit-stand desk". The idea is that you alternate between sitting and standing, changing position every hour or two.

Then it's not the same as mine. I've also followed the company from the beginning... and I have the benefit of the insider view.

YouTube was a very obvious acquisition. What YouTube needed to survive and grow was low-cost scalability and a way to monetize the views it was getting. What Google had was massive data centers and network connectivity, plus a proven revenue model. YouTube also needed a better search engine, and Google was interested in finding ways to index and search non-textual content. It was an ideal match, technologically.

I can't but help think that there needs to be some way to share or combine spectrum between carriers. It seems grossly inefficient to have a geographic footprint served by multiple carriers over a wide spectrum but have phones that can only talk on part of it due to arbitrary division by the carriers.

It also seems like it creates such ridiculous barriers to entry that competition is inherently limited because the requirements to being a carrier are so large -- you need radio spectrum and broad coverage.

I think there should be some kind of scheme where handsets work on all possible spectrum and carriers are forced to allow connections from all devices. When a subscriber from carrier A gets on tower run by carrier B, carrier B needs to handle their connection and backhaul at some defined cost. A system of backend accounting to balance the cross-carrier connection charges could take into account the usage of each other's infrastructure, with charges reduced depending on the carrier's infrastructure investment at the specific cell site (ie, if carrier A has a backhaul presence but not RF presence at a site, their usage costs would be proportionally less.

It would be in the carriers best interest to have their own towers to offset backend costs. The benefit to consumers would be better coverage, since any one cell tower could offer maximum spectrum coverage resulting in fewer overall towers needed.