if you look carefully you'll note TFA says explicitly:

"Chris Stevens used to write reviews and make funny videos for CNET UK. He left to start an app company, Atomic Antelope, which made the smash-hit Alice for the iPad apps. Now he's written a book about the app development scene, Appillionaires. This is an exclusive extract."

So this is just self-serving masturbatory ego-stroking hipster scenester BS. Of course Angry Birds is right up there w/ penicillin in importance. No one had EVER written a mobile game before it's hard to even imagine society before it. sheesh.

This is the thread i'm "voting" in. OnStar was ALWAYS creepy. If there was ever any doubt then the commercial a few years ago about their remote disable that shut down the "stolen" SUV on the highway should have struck fear into the heart of any red-blooded nerd.

Your timing is somewhat off. Guede was tried and convicted before the Knox trial even happened. Otherwise i'd say your overview is accurate. Don't forget also the generally exculpatory physical evidence like how the supposed murder weapon knife the shape of which doesn't match blood stains at the scene and the infamous "bra clasp" that was apparently kicked around the crime scene for weeks before someone picked it up to analyze it.

yeah... the Knox trial and verdict was a real wake-up call. You expect that kind of thing in Iran or Pakistan... not in Europe. I'm surprised that there wasn't more outrage about the outcome in Italy itself. After all for every random American that gets screwed by their so called justice system there's probably 1000 Italians who suffer the same fate but no one ever hears about them outside the country.

Unless you're going to deploy like 100 APs or more i an skeptical that the vendors will work with you for such an effort.

Actually doing this correctly is going to be hard and expensive. Anyway, i'd read up on smalnetbuilder's methods and just run, say 10 or 20 concurrent client machines o a 3 or 4 AP set-up. make some of those clients mobile and walk around the space to see that hand-offs happen ok.

graph it all and look for major priods of drop-out etc. Again, though, unless you're doing a massive deployment or this is mission critical more than normal office lan this is not likely to be a cost effective exercise. I've previously had a good experience with Cisco APs

You'll also note that their demo fridge (2nd pic in TFA) has had its compressor and coils removed as well before being sent in.

Yeah, the world of enterprise software/hardware pricing and licensing is "interesting" that way. You really have to look at TCO type numbers rather than initial price due to the various schemes that marketing departments have come up with.

Sad thing is though that even though you have to pay for support in order to get the patches and upgrades, if you actually have any problems the support is usually pretty useless if you already have decently good people in-house. Say you run into a bug with Oracle DB... are they going to fix it ? Maybe if you're the federal government or something. Otherwise it's like anywhere else. For a long while they'll tell you it's not their fault. Then if you're persistent enough and jump through enough hoops they'll admit that it is a real bug.... and then it'll sit there for months and years. By the time it's fixed it's irrelevant for your project and probably for your product overall. Heck at today's pace your company may already be gone altogether by the time they get around to doing something about it (though really only big slow moving companies buy Oracle nowadays so that's not as true as it was during bubble 1.0). Smaller companies are usually better since they actually care about your small company 5 and 6 figure purchases unlike the big guys.

Thanks for the explanation. I went to their "about" page( http://web.syllable.org/pages/about.html ) and after about 3 paragraphs of mythology and squishy backstory they still said nothing about what the project is, what problem it solves or what it does differently than other OSes. It probably says so further on but skimming didn't yield anything and it sounded too much like an infomercial to continue.

If it wasn't so late at night maybe i'd have more focus, but that page really needs a punchier intro.

Creepily enough... i just read that the CIA ran a vaccination program in Pakistan to secretly collect blood in their search for Bin Laden.

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/14/u-s-catching-bin-laden-justifies-cia-vaccination-ruse/?hpt=hp_t2

But that's ok because you see they were looking for bad people. "the government" only throws out all the rules when they're looking for "bad guys".. Fortunately i'm a good guy and thus i don't have anything to worry about.

Since when is WiFi considered "OTA"? Wi-Fi is a fine feature but it is a lame marketing tactic to use it in a context where it suggests that you have cell coverage when you don't.

Well, in the meantime we can just issue more H1Bs and outsource some more. That'll help motivate the kids.

The use-cases around sim cards already suck.

a) Why do I have to remove my battery in order to swap my sim card ? (on a G2, but also on my G1 and my blackberry Pearl). some security is good so that someone can't easily swipe my sim card, but there's NO reason why these things shouldn't be physically hot swappable in devices (as smart cards are already hot swappable electrically and in terms of interface )

b) Why don't phones support multiple sim cards concurrently ? Perhaps, you know... your business line and your personal line ? i remember some such beasts existed like 10 years ago, but haven't heard anything since. Or using one for data and one for voice etc. At least have both installed and allow for a sw selection. (I don't fully understand the cell to tower protocol, so don't know how actively a unit has to listen on its assigned channel, so don't know if one radio can actually register on multiple networks or multiple ids at the same time).

anyway... this move is totally about more control by apple.

I'd say that these amounts are little more than chump change. Google software developers cost google probably ~$150k - $300k fully loaded.

From TFA "So far this year, Google has spent more than $77,000 on bug bounties."... so since we're about 1/4th through the year we're talking about 1/2 FTE for ~50-100 bugs that made it all the way through whatever QA and security engineering they already do. This $77k is negligible. It would probably cost them at least 10x that (and probably more like 50x ) to find all those in-house.

Don't forget though that this is what HIS grandmother is saying about HER. It may be true, but on the other hand in-law conflicts, especially mother-in-law daughter-in-law conflicts can be quite strained. (yes, it's a stereotype... but it's also often true)

You're not addressing GP's point though. If all of the managers were chosen for their technical expertise then it's likely that their employees won't highlight technical expertise as an important feature of their manager because they don't have any managers who DON'T have said expertise. They probably don't know what it's like having non-tech managers.

E.g. i'm sure few employees would say that they really appreciate that the air they breathe at work has adequate oxygen in it. Does that mean you should then cut that in half because it's not important ?

Back to TFA there's this sentence: " What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions..." Well, let me tell you... i've worked with some pretty darned smart / good finance people and CEOs and Product Managers. Very few of them (ok. none of them) could ask relevant questions about technical problems to help me work through technical issues. Why ? because they didn't know anything about the subject. Heck they didn't even understand some of the nouns in what i was saying. Go ahead... go ask your finance guys about how you're trying to figure out why the cache hit rate in your application is 20% lower than you expected or something. About 30 minutes in you'll be 5 steps away from your original point and explaining how the internet is like a series of tubes! (which btw, i actually think is a reasonable first order approximation ).

One problem in TFA is that it looks at "deep technical expertise" as meaning having greater depth and breadth than all the people working for you. That's going to be pretty hard. You may start out that way, but as you get more people, if it's still true then either you're Donald Knuth, or you're not hiring A players OR you're working at a large company where your group has a very narrow focus. e.g. if you're the manager of the Oracle optimization group then yeah, you can be the best at that. If you're the Dir. of Engineering at a small company it's a heck of a lot less likely that you can be "the best" Photoshop guy, DHTML guy, Java guy, Ruby guy, DB guy, sys admin guy, network guy and architect guy all in one. If you are... especially after a year or two in your role then your people are just not good enough. There should be no way you could keep up with 7 guys focused on only 1 or 2 disciplines each when your own main focus is management anyway.

With people who have worked for me and with my peers i could "dominate" the jr guys but with the Principal engineer types I had enough base knowledge and experience to be able to ask intelligent questions and come up to speed quickly enough on the things my guys were struggling with. But the only reason i CAN ask good questions is because i have actually do have strong core knowledge in dev and admin and also, due to experience or nature or whatever, i'm pretty darned good at debugging code and systems. If i didn't have that all i could offer is stuff like "do you best" and "huh, do you need more resources on this project?" and things like that.