Too late.

If it's already been exploited to install other malware, removing the loader for that malware isn't going to get rid of the malware that came in while the door was being held open by Superfish.

Then the year of the Linux desktop would be 3 years away instead of 5 years away.

VCs tend to be impressed by polish.

Typically, if you take an idea to a VC, unless you have some IP tied up, or there is significant work entailed to get to a first mover advantage, they are already thinking about one of their go-to teams that can take your idea and run with it. Frankly, ideas are a dime a dozen, and beyond that, the only thing that matters is an ability to execute, and that means they are not investing in your product, per se, they are investing in your market segment and the team.

Usually, they will prefer their team to the team that you have put together because they are familiar with their team. Their team has a track record, and they have an existing relationship with the teams they typically work with on new projects. It's one of the reasons there are so many serial entrepreneurs, and so few new entrepreneurs that make it past the friends-and-family or angel funding stage of their startup into series A financing.

If you are a new entrepreneur, or someone with a proven technical track record, who has never been on "The VP Gravy Train", unless you are already profitable (and are therefore trying to give away a very large chunk of your company and control of your board of directors, in exchange for capital to bring your venture to scale), you need every advantage going into the meeting that you can lay your grubby little hands on.

Packaging of yourself is therefore almost as important as the content of the presentation itself.

So yeah, they're "impressed by a good looking laptop", if that's part of the overall package impression that convinces them that your team is the right team, and that they won't need to replace you, the founder, with one of their go-to CEOs, or one of their VPs they've been cultivating to take a CEO position at some point in the future, and "Gee, I think it's time we gave Frank a shot at a CEO position; what do you think, other managing partners of this large venture fund?".

If you are a technical person, you will be lucky to last in the C suite much beyond (mostly) losing control of your board of directors, which is going to happen some time between closing Series A and closing Series B. Typically, your series B will be contingent on you losing control to the point that they can replace you at any point their confidence falters, and they decide "It's time to bring in adult supervision".

PS: One of the reasons there are so few women in higher up positions is that the women haven't taken their paydays from being an early employee, and acted as their own angel investor in a new company that has been successful. You kind of have to be a gambling addict to get to that point in the game, so that you are a known quantity. That said, technical companies in the Fortune 500 have done 2X as well asall of the other Fortune 500 companies, in terms of percentages, so tech is about 2X as egalitarian as any other industry in that regard.

Low margin vs. High demand

There's room for both low margin, and there's high demand items in consumer electronics.

When I needed a Windows laptop, before Bootcamp existed so that Windows could run on Apple hardware, I bought a Sony Vaio: it was the most beautiful non-Apple laptop on the market at the time, and when you are going into a VC to pitch your idea to them, you want to dress to impress, and that includes the machine on which you are giving your powerpoint on your business plan.

Vaio's were a high demand item because they had very good esthetics. A lot of other Sony products were higher margin than their competitors as well, because they were aimed at the high esthetic market.

The PlayStation is really a terrible product, comparatively speaking; the XBox is a much better product, based on Microsoft being able to leverage it to get game onto their desktop platforms as well (at some point), and potentially onto Windows Phones, as well (at some point), because the underlying platform technology is Windows on all three.

I think the person writing the article is a gamer who has drank the PlayStation Kool Aid, and wants Sony to concentrate on it, even though Sony is one PSN hack away from losing out on a holiday season, as they did previously. A single product company is just too vulnerable to single point of failure due to externalities.

It's a dumb idea because it would be a bad business decision on their part.

The differential diagnosis: If you are also bleeding from your ears, it was the Kardashians.

Probably because we don't feel that it's abuse; once we've paid for a certain diameter of pipe to the rest of the Internet, it's their job to let us send or receive whatever we want over that pipe, without editorializing.

Of course, if they really want to editorialize, and demonstrate a technical ability to do so, I'm going to hold them legally responsible any time my 13 year old son is successful in accessing porn over this pipe that they are supposedly capable of exercising content control on, since by *not* exercising control on that particular content, they are responsible for the porn.

Kinda Apples and Oranges. UL testing is fairly straight-forward. The quick explanation - they stress the device in various ways and see if it catches on fire. Checking a crypto setup to a reasonable level of satisfaction can't be done externally. The code for the entire system must be examined, and that is relatively difficult to do.

-Matt

How did the American Indians detect the Europeans?

I suggest we *not* do that...

Also how did the Poles detect the Mongols?

Let's *not* do that, either...

Almost all of the microarchitecture changes and die shrinks come out of Haifa, Israel. Not Hillsboro. The Itanium came out of Santa Clara, California. Willamette came out of Hillsboro (the Pentium 4, which was arguably a pretty big failure, with 35%-50% of the 115W power consumption lost to leakage power). There was also the well-know SMT issue, where the dispatch ordering was (effectively) random, meaning the IPC between SMT cores never really scaled very well. Prescott never really scale above about a max of 3.8GHz, when it was (in theory) designed to allow derivatives of the microarchitecture to run at speeds of up to 10GHz.

Generally, most of the machine-building companies I've worked for (Apple, Google) tend to skip the Hillsboro designs for anything but prototypes, and they wait for the every other year die shrink out of Haifa for the actual shipping product.

You mean the "shirked responsibilities" that would be being paid to the lowest bidder in Topeka or Wichita Kansas, rather than in Oregon, were it not for the tax breaks?

The people who build data centers don't care where they are located physically; they care about taxes, land costs, and power costs. If power were more reliable in Kabul Afghanistan, and the local government a bit more stable, they'd be located there, instead.

Because everyone wants to live next door to a data center because of all the jobs there, or why? Why would it be more expensive to live near a data center, than not, if there were no economic benefit to doing so?

If only there were some way to make Oregon economically desirable to businesses...

So you can give the tax breaks, and have the data center built locally, and employ construction workers, ongoing site maintenance workers, etc., which you don't count as employees because they are contractors, yet they have jobs.

Or you can *not* give the tax break, and have a vacant lot, as the data center is built in Kansas or wherever instead.

Pick one.

Sure it can.

It *does*, therefore it can. Proof by example.

Where are the big arrows coming into California from Mexico, China, and Russia, among other countries? That map seems incomplete.