I have a 1st gen Roku, and a Chromecast. When I stream Netflix with the Roku, I seem to top out at 2, maybe three quality bars. While there's no on-screen metric for the same stream in Chromecast, the picture is noticeably better. Perhaps the Chromecast is getting a higher-quality, lower-bandwidth stream, or there's some sort of throttling based on the streaming device going on?

Wouldn't getting access to Blizzard's servers make this a whole lot easier? Couldn't you just mine the player data and make Blizzard record the conversations that take place in-game, rather than actually walk around in WoW?

Managers are going to think like managers. The "upside" of stack ranking is

A) It fosters competition, which should also foster a better product (I don't actually agree this is the case, though)
B) It helps weed out the worst employees
C) It's easy to understand from a high level

It's an example of something that sounds good from the outside, but in actuality it has a ton of problems. Once you've had an organization the size of MS try it for as long as they did and see the results, no other company should need to go down that route... I would think Yahoo would be smarter than this.

I have a liberal arts degree, but have always worked in IT/Project Management. You know what is more important than an IT degree? Critical thinking skills and general creativity. This is what you learn in liberal arts. The technical ins and outs? Thanks to Google, any unknown information is a couple searches away.

I loved the movie "Sunshine", but I thought they missed a golden opportunity with physics and gravity. In the film, they ship is transporting a bomb roughly the size of Manhattan. The bomb is at the front of the ship, with a long crew compartment behind it, kind of like a bus. The bomb itself was large enough to have it's own gravity. In the film, the crew compartment's gravity is what you would think of on a bus- you can walk the length of it with the gravity being on the "floor".

With just some changes to set design, they should have had the center of gravity been the bomb, so that the crew compartment needed to be climbed up and down, like a bus on it's side.

Way, way past time to acquire. I had friends that just sold their 3 bedroom, mid-century home for well over a million dollars.... The house will likely be torn down and replaced with something larger. Had the house been newer or bigger, the property would have got for more. The 1+ million was essentially for the lot.

This reminds me of the book Oryx and Crake. This is essentially the first private, corporate community. There will be many more like them in the future.

These people will not be part of the community in which the buildings exist. They will not give back to the community. Hell, I bet some tax loopholes will ensure their money doesn't even make it into the local economy.

And the work is rewarding because Facebook has a mentality that they are changing the world. They are, of course, but not in the ways that they tout. They say they are making the world more connected. However, I feel way less connected to my friends and Family now that I see their updates on Facebook. All they have done is created a super awesome database of private information and given the keys to the Government, all while creating a new sort of loneliness among people.

Myst did run directly from the disc. Riven, the sequel, ran on five discs, each one containing one of the five islands. which meant frequent disc changing if you were jumping around. I can't imagine doing that today.

Riven did a much better job of incorporating the puzzle into the story. most of the puzzles were just broken or locked objects. you just needed to figure out what was wrong with them.

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), which is basically anything that you find in a supermarket, has always struggled with how to approach the internet/digital. Their model for the last fifty years has been to blast ads all over TV, which was easily segmented into specific groups depending on the product. I spent some time working with these companies, and by and large they are not sure how to approach the internet.

Buying up lots of banner ads isn't the same as buying lots of time during specific shows. No one wants to sit through their commercials, and tracking Return on Investment on their ads is entirely different than what they are used to, and the jury is still out on effectiveness of those ads. Facebook lets anyone come along and build out some very, very specific segments and advertise their niche product. Also, as TV watching drops, CPG HAS TO find a better way to reach people online.

Because CPG still hasn't found something that "clicks" in the online space, and this looks like an experiment for Crest to see if this is an area that makes sense for them to explore long term... they can't reach people on TV because people are playing games, so why not advertise to them in the game?

Like previous attempts, it just doesn't really make sense to the audience. CPG still has some work to do to find a way to reach people, and there is a LOT of money to be made by the person that figures it out.

Star Wars may be the brainchild of Lucas, but Gary Kurtz is what gave it its soul. My theory is that once Kurtz and Lucas split after Empire, the franchise was toast. Kurtz wanted Jedi to be much darker, Lando and the Falcon were to be destroyed during the battle, and no happy teddy bear celebration at the end. In my mind, this would have been a much more powerful film.

If you look at the tone of Jedi, especially the Ewoks, it is easy to see that Lucas was starting to get no critical feedback of his ideas. Kurtz filled this role. Without him, the franchise falls apart and we wind up with the crap that was the prequels. Lucas is a terrible director on his own. Just awful.

This is why I have high hopes for Ep. 7- Lucas is out the door, and Abrams probably understands what Star Wars means to the fans better than Lucas ever did. I just hope that Ford's role isn't too similar to Nemoy's role in Abram's Star Trek movie... a star cameo that helps our protagonist when he needs it most.

IT departments won't go away, but it will be less common for a small or medium sized business to have dedicated IT people, because the services the business relies on will not need full time people.

For example, the onsite maintenance and administration time of Google Apps is much, much lower than using Microsoft Exchange. Google has an army of people maintaining the servers, but the end business doesn't have to incur this cost.

Beyond money and desire- do they have the talent? Startups actually put ads on public transportation and billboards out here trying to recruit developers. In a market where the chances of making it rich at a startup are actually fairly high, it's hard for Yahoo to capture or retain talent in the face of Google, Facebook, or one of the thousands of startups.

I wonder if things would have been different under Microsoft management. Would Microsoft have folded it's better Bing technologies under the better-known Yahoo! Brand? (For example, Bing maps could have been the improved Yahoo maps) Would Microsoft have cut this number of people from Yahoo, or would none of those cuts ever happened?

Reddit isn't that small anymore- they had two billion pageviews in December.