Cloud has no real definition. I consider a "cloud" application to be an application that is relatively easy to pick up and move to a different hosting vendor.

The "vendor" definition of "cloud" is YOU paying a subscription for proprietary or difficult-to-migrate resources instead of buying a box.

Use LAMP as your "cloud" platform and tell IBM to shove their patent where their the lamps don't shine.

You can go with a gas or propane powered refrigerator. My family has one at a cottage which is too remote for electricity. Works pretty well though I can't vouch for it being particularly efficient. Uses ammonia as the coolant. I understand they are often used in RVs too.

+1, informative

thank you

So what? There are print shops for that unless you are printing a LOT of photos. And very few people print a lot of photos these days. Unless you have a very specific need for an inkjet there is really no reason not to buy a color laser these days. I use laser's exclusively. On the rare occasion I want to actually print a photo I can get it done at my local print shop, drug store or even Walmart.

The high end copiers are laser based and they'll do pretty much as nice a job as most inkjets.

i was talking about a more local electrical arrangement

but yes, long distance, that's a complicated topic, what distance are you really talking about and what other interconnections do you need? dc does have advantages in many cases, especially very long distance

but now we are very far away from the topic of a guy charging his laptop and running some LED lights

The advantage of AC has always been that it is easy to change the voltage up and down with a transformer; DC requires more equipment and some losses to convert.

That being said, transferring AC power between separate grids requires making sure the phase of the power transmitted matches from the two grids (so that the power from the two grids doesn't cancel or ring), which is difficult and expensive. This is not a problem for DC, so DC lines are used in cases such as where power is transferred from another grid to increase the capacity of an existing grid, or between countries that use different frequency power.

Capacitance between the AC phases (usually 3 phases are transmitted at once over a line) or between the line and the surrounding soil or water causes losses that are not a problem with DC. Therefore, undersea high voltage lines tend to be DC.

Overall line loss is also lower per 1,000 km, so very long distance transmission lines sometimes use DC.

http://www.quora.com/When-and-...

thank you, dc genuinely has greater fire hazard implications than ac

as for health, it is a bit more nuanced and complex than i said:

Direct current (DC), because it moves with continuous motion through a conductor, has the tendency to induce muscular tetanus quite readily. Alternating current (AC), because it alternately reverses direction of motion, provides brief moments of opportunity for an afflicted muscle to relax between alternations. Thus, from the concern of becoming "froze on the circuit," DC is more dangerous than AC.

However, AC's alternating nature has a greater tendency to throw the heart's pacemaker neurons into a condition of fibrillation, whereas DC tends to just make the heart stand still. Once the shock current is halted, a "frozen" heart has a better chance of regaining a normal beat pattern than a fibrillating heart. This is why "defibrillating" equipment used by emergency medics works: the jolt of current supplied by the defibrillator unit is DC, which halts fibrillation and gives the heart a chance to recover. ...

One of the reasons that AC might be considered more dangerous is that it arguably has more ways of getting into your body. Since the voltage alternates, it can cause current to enter and exit your body even without a closed loop, since your body (and what ground it's attached to) has capacitance. DC cannot do that. Also, AC is quite easily stepped up to higher voltages using transformers, while with DC that requires some relatively elaborate electronics. Finally, while your skin has a fairly high resistance to protect you, and the air is also a terrific insulator as long as you're not touching any wires, sometimes the inductance of AC transformers can cause high-voltage sparks that break down the air and I imagine can get through your skin a bit as well.

http://physics.stackexchange.c...

this experiment is fine if you're doing little LED lights and laptops, but if you're running something like air conditioning or a washing machine you're building a fire hazard and a mortality risk

the decision to use AC over DC was not random nor taken lightly, there are many factors involved (heck, it was a major engineering, corporate, and PR war between Edison and Westinghouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), but the right decision was made

for our modern world where some people only care about their laptop and smartphone, it does indeed seem silly and wasteful to convert to AC then back to DC, especially if you've ever tried charging electronics in a car. but there are of course many other uses for electricity, and the navel gazing small electronics crowd is but a minor topic

but i do see a time in the future as more people use local solar and other renewables, that a small DC subsystem is made available in the house for electronics like computers

I think the hope is that if we keep bashing Flash that eventually it will go away forever. We're almost there but some lazy/cheap websites still cannot be bothered to update and ban flash entirely. Frankly if Adobe were a responsible company they would simply abandon flash altogether and that might finally move things along but that's almost certainly a pipe dream.

Fork English, it's ilojical and suks!

The amount of money Google makes from this is almost negligible. Something north of 95% of Google's revenue comes from advertising so whatever they are charging to access Google Play it doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Microsoft on the other hand basically makes all their revenue from software sales so they pretty much have to charge something for it since they lack a supporting revenue stream. (unless you want to count desktop software sales but that would be kind of dumb of them)

Marketing isn't some magical pixie dust you can waive over a company to make people want their products. Marketing at its core is relationship development and that takes a lot of careful work and time. Microsoft has mostly done a terrible job developing relationships with customers. They've been the beneficiary of a monopoly so their survival never depended heavily on people having warm fuzzies when they think about Microsoft. Apple on the other hand has been arguably brilliant at it, almost from their beginning. Think about how many Apple stickers you've seen on the backs of cars. Probably quite a few - I see them regularly. People LOVE Apple even when they shouldn't. Apple has one of those brands like Harley-Davidson that people have almost a fetish for. Now how many Microsoft stickers have you seen? Probably none. By and large people don't love Microsoft or their products. Microsoft has the money to change this I suppose but it will take a lot of careful effort and time and frankly I doubt they have the corporate culture to pull it off.

No we are talking about the book value of the company and to some degree the intrinsic value. The secondary market value of the company is a separate concern.

Wrong. It decreases the assets of the company and increases expenses. It also affects the equity of the company because assets decreased and so equity must decrease also if you aren't adding liabilities. The write off also means that the expected future earnings from the asset are reduced which reduces the net present value of the enterprise. The notion that the only thing that is affected is the profits in that one financial period is demonstrably wrong and any accountant should be able to easily show you why.

If you have an impaired asset you record the difference as a loss but it is no different than any other investment gone south. Put in simple terms what you are suggesting is selling a $2 bill for $1 to try to intentionally realize a $0.15 tax savings. The company is worse off by $0.85 so worrying about the $0.15 in reduced tax is idiotic. Any reduced tax liability should be small consolation for shareholders in the face of a $7 billion writedown.

It does not improve the bottom line at all. That is an accounting fact. It has other effects but improving the bottom line isn't one of them.

You are talking about the Big Bath tactic. That is an earning management tactic to try to prop up the stock price by showing artificial profits in other financial periods. It is a fairly transparent and rather shady technique used to try to take advantage of the short memory of investors but make no mistake that it does nothing to improve the bottom line. Whether you take the hit all in one quarter or over time is irrelevant to the effect on profitability. Writing off an investment - any investment - reduces the value of the company.

Disclosure: Among other things I am a certified accountant.

No but you aren't in a large crowd. I know I can count the number of Windows Phones I've seen in the wild on my fingers. Windows Phone was pretty much a solution nobody asked for several years later than anyone cared. Android and iOS already were large and dominant and developers weren't really looking to support a third platform. Technically it's probably fine but it offers nothing that people care about that the competition doesn't already have.

Furthermore Google is basically giving Android away so the handset makers have no incentive to care about Windows. Why would Samsung want to pay Microsoft for a product nobody wants anyway? Microsoft lacks the design culture and brand to compete with Apple on the high end (through vertical integration) and Google is undercutting them on price on the low end. Frankly I think Microsoft is screwed in the mobile phone market. I just don't see a path to profitability for them.

How is it censorship if a person wants to have information about themselves not be in search results?

I didn't mean to imply that wanting something could possibly be censorship. Censorship is something you might do in order to get want: do you rebut the false information (or pollute/dilute the true information) or do you point a gun at someone's face?

And escalating to violence is not always necessarily the dumbest move. Like I said, "loose lips sink ships." But c'mon, own up to censorship label whenever you do it, and understand the sword-beats-pen outlook that you're helping to re-popularize.

But more importantly: think about whether or not a policy of forceful response can work or if it really is expedient. Go through the thought experiments, where someone says something you don't like and you respond by whacking a few moles. (Or in this case, whacking an unrelated mole who is pointing at another mole.) Does this lead to a winning scenario, Ms Streisand?

If swords-over-pens still completely loses, then yes: I do think "suck it up and take it" is a superior strategy, since it's no worse for the person being maligned and has significantly less collateral damage. That doesn't mean it's the only option, but if we're going to pretend that we have only a mere two options, then it's the better of the two.