The base issue is that they hired a "manager" who didn't want to use any type of linux personally, and focused on cost reduction "while selling" not taking in account that once all the "expensive" people left there would not be anything to sell. Another issue is the disconnect between the interest of the company, or the investors and of the people representing the investors within the investment fund. ex: I buy a hot startup for 10 Million, the VC gets 5% (cheap) of 10M yearly "management fee" (maybe paid now, maybe delayed pay). The hot startup is not so hot goes down to 1M Option A) the VC sells right now and gets at least 1M, for the fund manager it's "game over", and no cigar (lost money you see) (at least for this revenue stream) Option B) the VC waits a little bit more, the fund manager gets what ever % of the "management fee" is paid up front, and gets to play one more year... guess what is the fund manager's prefered choice.

It seems that the kind of people who where supposed to buy the HTC felt that : Ok so I'm spending all my time on FB, but it's rude to rub it in .... And didn't want to be tagged: Facebookista ... Moreover I guess there was some kind of subliminal feeling that if the phone had "Facebook Home" on top you might not see the other allerts like viber, watsapp, SMS, etc.... On the technical side the phone seems to be not bad, maybe it will find a second market as a cheap cyanogen platform ...

Part of it is that they've been at it for a long time... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions'_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_Edition,_with_Source_Code Lions was at the UNSW, getting student to have access to code seems to be a tradition there. I also met a couple of very talented people who got their degrees there in the late 70's early 80's and worked with some of them... It just shows that the right way to run an university is not to worry too much about the curriculum and do the unexpected, even the vaguely illegal. BTW it seems the equivalent document he wrote about the pdp11 unix C compiler is not avaiable, it's sad it was very interesting.

It's true, with all these pesky Open Source stuff out'n'away, we'll have peace, the peace of the graveyard ....

>> Unfortunately for all of us, some people continue to give us a really bad reputation in the executive suite." The only reason the executive freak out at this is because most of then have absolutelly no idea what could happen, and how it could happen... When a sales rep leaves with his or her client, an acountant make some creative acounting and buy a condo with some "reimbursment", a Marketing manager exposes the company to serious bad mojo because he can't keep his pants on, etc .... they understand what happen. But realising that they should pay the guy that has root password on the ERP server the same as the CEO since he has actually more power that the CEO, this would be scary... So nobody should do any kind of "bad stuff", and revenge no matter how justified it is, is rarely worth the time needed to execute it. (that is why we do have courts of justice, in theory at least they help "outsourcing" revenge, and make it more "educative", not that the actual implementation always work...)

Well you invested in some hardware to do the mining, and then got some return on investment, so what makes this different from for instance
buying a bakery, flour and various other things, and then selling bread, except of course that there is not much added work into the bitcoin mining opperation.

Why should it be tax free and other form of return on investment should be taxable ?

Now if you think that your government is not using its tax money wisely, you're free to try to elect somebody else, even try to get elected, but bitcoin mining is in no way "special".

On one hand it is "cool", but it is also trying to fix a human issue through technological means, and that does not work that well.

You are living in the same illusion as the people who claim that the internet treats censorship as a bug and routes around, it does not.
You can partially avoid censorship, more or less the same way as it was possible to avoid it 50 years ago, by taking risk, being prudent, and changing strategies very regularly.
But china is still a dictatorship, and our democratic advanced societies are rather less open to free speech than 20 years ago.
Moreover we live in a flood of data, where dissent is tolerated because it can be drowned by lolcats.

So instead of looking for ways to avoid taxes, make sure that they serve some useful purpose...

But appart from this

OS360 => CP/M => BSD UNIX 4.1 => other UNIX => Linux => ain't decided yet, but needs to be open source/free software

What is remarquable in this poll, is that there are so few options left ....
It's kind of depressing, I miss the years when you could discuss the relative merits and innovations of
Unix/VMS/G-COS/VM-CMS/ITS/SAIL/TENEX/MULTICS/VOS/etc ........

vs "on now Linux is too complicated but should I upgrade to windows 8" ....

You're kidding, they are all about gay mariage ! hermaphrodites you know !!!

Apparently they are starting late, probably still drinking cafe....

I'm like many other professionalls a "lapsed" Fan of LaTeX, truth be told I started with troff -man and the various ancillary tools of the Unix environment
What I recognize is that LaTeX (and the roff familly) enables you to create content that is WAY better looking in many ways.

So why don't I ? in part because I recognized that my investment in *roff was quietly dying off.... so I had to change to something
Partly because Open Office gave me a "free option" so I "could" go to a wysiwyg solution.

And because I started to need to exchange documents with people who would write part of it, and if you are not working in academia this means that the probability of working with LaTeX friendly colleage is quite low.

So what would make me come back...

If I could have an heuristic tool that reads my .odt (or even the .docx version or the .pdf) analyse the structure, and creates a LaTeX document that has the same content but NOT really the same layout but as close as possible the same structure.

There are a couple of tools pdf/odt/word to LaTeX but they all try to convert the original document into LaTeX that looks just like the original document.
What I think would be a game changer would be to have a new document, able to leverage the embedded knowledge in the more common LaTeX templates, and create a tweakable MUCH better looking, new document.

I would then be happy to use LyX as an entry point for WysiWyg tweaking, and finallly jump into emacs to really finalize my document...

A friend of mine drives a Ferrari, it's an embarrassingly efficient chick magnet, the on board computer screen is crap, but you know what, nobody cares ...

The vertu owner is happy to have a very good looking phone and concierge service, the technology will be obsolete in any case because the economics of small run productions implies a longer sales life.
The electronics have just to be "good enough", and with android they have all the toy apps everybody has so they will not be dissed by somebody telling them my "xyz" can do this and you can't...
And for the rest explaining that your phone "is worth the cost", (letting the listener "imagine" the cost), using the concierge service to book a very expensive and hard to enter restaurant will "do the job" (you'll have also to pick up the tab of course...)

Now if you feel this is a little bit crass, you're either just jealous, or not the kind of person who gets all wet seeing an i ....
you could try this http://www.johnsphones.com/ it's a little bit ridiculously expensive compared to a cheap entry prices samsung dumbphone, but it looks cool, a great conversation piece, and way cheaper than a "vertu"...

 

It's just that they remember LSE and shudder ....

It's not "un NullPointerException" but UNE NullPointerException, pronounced oone NullePooeintaireHexhepcion, of course...

And the Spaceship operator is called "encore un dinosaure nostalgique de Fortran IV" (refereing to IF(),, )

In practice the US benefits by being able to select the best foreign students, sells them overprices education at a tremendous cost and then it will have the opportunity to keep a good percentage of them.

And of course it would be much more dangerous for the US to reject this slice of the world population, because they would be perfectly able to build a similar teaching / research structure if they would need to...

He should not have the time/need to look at your code...
He should be busy writing his own code, he might bitch about your API definition, and you have then two choices:
a) tell him to suck it and that "if it aint broken don't fix it", you need the API as they are
or
b) Listen and maybe it will really make future extensions easier, so negotiate...

50K code is actually quite small so although refactoring can always "help" (in theory) but unless you are explicitly trying to win the obfuscated C award it's probably small enough to make it more valuable to add news feature than to "streamline it"...

Unless you hit some roadblock and it is now "too slow", "break randomly", etc.... then you should probably urgently look at it and fix it yourself (after all 10 years o experience with the code base should make this faster for you).

But either he refuse to deliver what you ask, then fire him, or you leave him to much time after delivering his module, and he looks at your code out of boredoom...
So the best you can do is tell him : sure our code is crufty, we just hired you so that we can ease the tension and have some time to refactor, so "write you own f**g code, and let us play around with our stuff, or do you need some API that's missing ? ... write some specs and you'll get it ...