He's particularly well-off considering his paying gig amounts to a sinecure.

I'm surprise the Nobel committee allows people to sell their medals. When people win Oscars, for example, the Academy won't let them keep their statue unless they sign an agreement giving the Academy a $1 buyback option on it. The statues all have a little plaque in the back saying, in so many words "this statue is bound by contract and cannot be sold without the written permission of the Academy."

The term "Irish race" is pretty well-attested in 19th and early 20th century Amercian usage, along with German Race and a bunch of others.

Race is culturally constructed, and the lines Americans draw with race are historically determined by either slavery and its legacy, or immigration. Skin color is a more important pretext to race now than it was in the past, because now most immigrants to the US aren't coming from Europe.

The whole article is sortof an exercise in textual essentialism.

What does style tell us about what these things mean? It's a literary crit technique that might be applicable here, but he clearly either doesn't know what he's talking about or he's a dilettente who has absorbed the surface features of computer languages without groking the underlying concepts.

Sony has an infirmary on the studio lot, there's always a doctor and paramedics on staff.

They respond to all accidents on the lot and they come out of someone faints, stuff like that. I've gotten flu shots there.

They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders.

Folders wouldn't work as well as tags for semantic data snarfing. Also it's one of those "competitive features" that they can rightly claim no other email client provides in the same way -- that it also totally effs up IMAP/POP folders and drags you to the web interface as much as possible is a bonus.

But they would go on "reinventing" e-mail forever, with colors, tabs, bars, circles, ovals, shapes, and probably in far future odors.

You can tell somebody at the Googleplex still smarting over the Wave debacle.

Java doesn't have unsigned integers as a primitive type. (Speculative but I'd guess this is what's going on.)

Yes, in fact the view count will become self-aware on August 29, 2015. In a panic, they tried to pull the plug...

Yeesh, anybody who can physically access the machine probably should be a sudoer on it, anybody who can get to the side door of a computer has ultimate root: he can plug in a different boor partition.

I mean, use chmod, but don't fool yourself into believing you don't also need to use glue and a padlock and a tamper seal.

He's been rather prescient about a couple things, but the lesson of Cassandra is that merely being right doesn't count for shit.

What's important is that you know how to persuade people, and can get your opinion to carry the day with others. "You'll all be sorry," is a pretty inept sales pitch; you always have to be prepared to offer a better alternative, and not just better in the final analysis, better today.

I think my monthly costs, when amortized out daily, comes to about 20 minutes...

Anyone who prefers Obj-C just doesn't want to learn something new. Apple didn't invent a new language because of hipness reasons, they did it because their platforms are saddled with this shitty language which is missing modern conventions and is difficult to learn and use.

I'm mostly with this. My biggest problem with swift is there are still some holes in the compatibility with C code -- I was doing a project that called into CoreAudio to do some conversions, and the CoreAudio API required me to give it a function pointer for a callback, and Swift (shock!) cannot pass a function as a C function pointer, you have to write it in C. Little things like this are a irritating PITA, particularly when you can bang out 3 dozen classes in CoreData and Foundation and otherwise not have any problems, and suddenly you hit a dead end.

The problem with being able to allow/deny individual permissions is the app developers now have 2^n configurations to test, instead of just one.

Most of these permissions are for facilities that may not be available, let alone permitted, under real-world conditions. GPS might not be available where you are, the contacts database might not be available, network access apart from port 80 might be unavailable.

This isn't the same as screen size of hardware chipsets, this is runtime allocation of OS resources -- you always have to check to make sure that the OS can give you them, and then handle failures gracefully.

Repeat after me: "Android is an ad-presentment platform." Effective privacy controls would interfere with that.

It's the LTO drive itself that kills you, the drive and the SCSI card will set you back a couple $K to start.

It starts to make sense once the "backup bandwidth", the frequency of backups times the size of the archive, exceeds a couple TB/week, but it just makes no sense to spend $2K to keep a backup of $500 worth of drives, particularly in a situation where you just don't need to have the weekly tapes from two years ago and the last working tree is the only one worth keeping.

If you take the MTBF for a large hard drive, the averaged cost of failure per year might be like $50 per TB per year. (Total POOMA numbers, but it's probably the right order of magnitude.) HDDs have low fixed costs but a higher cost per gig, tapes have a much higher fixed cost but lower cost per gig, so wether one or the other is more economic depends on how much you're backing up, the level of reliability you need, so many different factors.

Never underestimate the latency of your archive room attempting to restore a station wagon full of tapes...