"Lost at a bar" probably means that someone left it on the bathroom counter, and another patron came in and swiped it as soon as he saw it, then realized it wasn't a normal phone and tried to sell it to tech sites for cash. Or maybe the bartender decided not to wait for the owner to claim it.

Not everyone is morally responsible. If the choices are 1) pre-planned conspiracy, or 2) average people behaving badly, it's always the latter.

As far as I can tell, the author of this paper just figured out a way to offload a bunch of memory management tasks to an idle CPU core, and then counted it as a performance gain. OK?

So, monolithic single-threaded applications can be made faster on multi-core systems, at the cost of bulk-allocating more memory than is actually required, and only if there is enough idle CPU to run your memory-management thread in realtime on another core. I am not exactly blown away.

The press release tries to trump it up as some kind of major advancement in performance, but it's not a performance gain at all. If you ran four copies of these single-threaded benchmarks simultaneously, you'd probably see a net performance decrease.

Open source bugs get fixed because people notice and are bothered by the bugs. This is the biggest motivator of open source contributions - everybody has an itch to scratch. The bugs that get fixed fastest are the bugs that are encountered the most. And this is why the Microsoft guy is absolutely correct in his analysis.

Bad security is not a user-facing bug. Unlike functionality bugs, there is little incentive for community members to identify and fix security bugs. Sure, the Linux kernel and other key packages will attract expert eyes, but the average random piece of open-source software will not.

Security analysis is both complicated and un-glamorous. There are not a lot of people attracted to that kind of work. There are even fewer people who would do it for free. The position of the linked article is that it's better to pay people to think about security than it is to rely on the principles of OSS. I agree 100%.

You would be amazed what firmware can do. Sony recently announced a revision to the physical disc format that places the pits closer together to increase storage by a significant percentage... and all existing Blu-Ray drives will be made compatible via firmware.

There is a reason that these drives cost so much to manufacture. The physical hardware is incredibly generic, and nobody really knows the limits of its capabilities.

There's a pretty big difference between "one second" and "50ms". And your assumptions about what is noticeable and playable are pretty much wrong when it comes to console controllers.

http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2009/sep/07/measuring-input-latency-games/

LAME MP3s are still compatible with the original reference spec. Sure, VBR sounds even better, but even 128kbps CBR has jumped light-years ahead in quality past the original generation of MP3 encoders.

In theory, the BBC's new encoders could be making better use of error analysis, redistributing the bitrate to avoid highly-noticeable errors (such as macroblock artifacts) in exchange for increased error in less important/perceptible regions of the picture.

There is no theoretical reason that a perfectly encoded 9.6mbps stream has to look worse than today's average 16mbps stream.

In reality though, from the complaints it sounds like the BBC's new encoders are kind of shitty.

But those things require format changes. My point is that you can improve the decision making in the encoder without changing the output format at all.

If you play an 128kbps CBR MP3 authored with the latest LAME using an MP3 player from 1992, it will sound light-years better than the same MP3 from a 1992-era encoder. This is not because of new features; there is no new coding, no varible block sizes, just a better understanding of which frequencies are important for human hearing.

Lossy compression formats depend on an understanding of human perception. Nobody has a perfect model of the human brain, and nobody has a perfect algorithm for deciding what data to keep and what data to throw away.

If you have a better model of human perception than your competitors, then your encoder will yield higher quality output. If you spend 50% of your bits on things that nobody will notice, and I spend 25% of my bits on things that nobody will notice, then my 650kbps stream is going to look better than your 900kbps stream.

LAME did not win out as the MP3 encoder of choice just because it is free. It won out because its psychoacoustic model yields better-sounding MP3s at 128kbps than its competitors managed at 160kbps or even 192kbps.

I'll bet that you are actually being bothered by something else - perhaps near-inaudible high frequency buzzing from some electronic component - and have mentally associated it with Wifi. But because of the mental association, you will feel discomfort whenever you expect to, which is whenever you are near an active Wifi device.

Diagnosing the actual cause of the discomfort could be useful because if you can demonstrated to yourself that it is not Wifi, you might convince your brain to stop feeling uncomfortable :)

A competitor to OpenDNS that doesn't hijack the google.com domain results and redirect users to a private server, for one.

Also they get plenty of high-level aggregate data on website popularity from bookmarks and so forth, which they can't capture from search data alone.

Ignore the trolls who will spin conspiracy theories about logging individual behavior and tying it to accounts, they expressly deny it in the FAQ and it would open them to so many international lawsuits that they'd have to fire all their engineers and replace them with lawyers.

They state very bluntly that IP addresses are expunged from the logs after 48 hours, and that no data is shared with Google Accounts or other Google services. They still get to play with a lot of aggregated data, but this seems like a fairly non-evil way to do it. Good for them. http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#privacy

Excel and Word are practically their own operating systems. You can't blame their problems on anything other than the insane legacy of backwards compatibility with a sprawling 20-year codebase.

They aren't even suppressing this article! They suppressed a previous article where he meticulously detailed a flaw in the cashback system without giving MS a chance to fix it.

This whole thing is ridiculous and nothing but anti-Microsoft / anti-Bing bashing.

This has nothing to do with Microsoft. From the article: Butterfly Photo set a three month cookie on my computer to indicate that I came from Bing.

So, a disreputable web site is setting a cookie when you click on a sales link. How is this Microsoft's fault again? What does this have to do with Bing?

A/V and photography stores are notorious for ripping off customers, both in-store and on-line. Surprise surprise, you can find these disreputable sites using search engines. Trying to blame this on Bing is like trying to blame your phone book for recommending a sketchy car mechanic.

Citation Needed.

Please provide one example of where EA released an alpha build. Or one example of where EA purchased a game already in development and then immediately diverted funds.

As much as you would like EA to be the big bad wolf knocking over studios left and right, the facts are that almost every studio that has gone down in flames under EA's ownership has done so due to its own people dropping the ball.

If you read any of the ex-Pandemic posts you will see that it was local mismanagement which led to poor quality product, not EA interference.

Likewise if you read the Escapist's article on the acquisition of Origin, one the most important quotes is this:

Garriott: "We doubled the size of the company from 200 to 400 that first year. We went from 5-10 projects to 10-20, and staffed those projects almost entirely with inexperienced people. It won't surprise you to learn those projects were not well managed. That was totally Origin's fault. We failed, and we ended up killing half of those products. That's probably what set up the EA mentality that 'Origin is a bunch of [deleted],' pardon my French."

This is a common pattern. EA buys a studio and gives the studio exactly what it wants, and the studio immediately hires new people and doubles its burn rate, spending tons of cash on payroll. And yet at the same time, the number of quality products at the studio declines. Growing pains, inexperienced management, whatever the cause, the result is the same. EA buys a successful studio, gives them money, the studio stops being successful.

Of course the game will be shipped before the studio says it's 100% done, because the studio is never going to claim that a shitty or buggy game is 100% done. The fact that it is still not a good game after 24 months of very-high-budget development does not mean that EA should pay for another 12 months. It means that the studio failed.