Last two companies most of the dev staffs have worked from home. Some have been in other states. But it was software and we could track things like did we make milestones, how often and what did they check into the repository, etc.. They were, however, all salaried. Frankly I never cared if it took them 4 hours or 8 hours to solve a problem or add feature so long as it was delivered on time according to what the project needed.

The other rule was quite simple: If the phone rings between 9AM and 5PM office time you'd better damn well answer it. I'm not calling you to chat I'm calling you because something is broke and needs to be urgently fixed. And I stuck to that. if I wanted a status update I'd send an email.

Wife and I are shopping for a new carrier and new phones. I'm getting another iPhone. I've had one since the 3G and like other Apple products I own, it stays out of my way and lets me get work done.

But she has Samsung devices, Tablet & Phone, but every time we went in to ask questions there was someone in front of us returning a Samsung S4. Well we noticed something. We've gone to 6 different stores and every time we waited the person in front of us was returning a Samsung device, less than 30 days old, and requesting a swap for something different. Some seemed to get a HTC phone, other elected to dump Android and go to Apple.

When we asked sales people about it, more than one told us right now to get the HTC or even Motorola over Samsung at the moment. Apparently while Samsung has a since marketing campaign, their quality control has suffered. As result they are seeing a lot of returns because the phones don't work.

The other thing with the S3 and S4 is that the phones are frankly larger than what she wants to carry. They have an S4 Mini, but she is afraid it will be like her SII and suffer from lack of updates.

I believe she had an early HTC and had problems with it before her Samsung. It's enough that she's now debating switching to an iPhone 5S.

As someone who has been using PhoneGAP/Cordova for about 3 years now it really depends on what the app has to do.

There was a rush a few years ago that a lot of my clients "wanted an app". Oftentimes all this app had to do was pull RSS feeds + add push notifications. For simple apps like that HTML5/JS/CSS/Cordova works great.

However when you start getting beyond simple "Feed & Form" Apps and need to more complex things. For instance, I had a client that wanted an app that needed a decibel meter. That had to be written in native code. While I could access the microphone I couldn't get more information beyond that.

This. I think Samsung was waiting to see how well Amazons and others did. The biggest threat to Android was never Apple & iOS, but Samsung. The question in my mind has always been, what happens if Samsung forks and derives their own OS without google...

The world is changing. I've been doing "year in review" stuff with clients websites the past month. A trend I am noticing is that mobile users are now half or more of all traffic to many of the sites I manage. One in particular it's 2/3's of the traffic and increasing with almost half of all visits from iOS users. It is getting to the point where we're sitting down next month and drawing up requirement docs for building an iOS and hopfuly Android App by the end of the year.

FreeBSD's goal is to create a solid Unix based general server OS. And it's around a lot in the storage markets and routing markets, it's just not usually called FreeBSD. I know more than a few Solaris shops that have been converting over to FreeBSD after the Oracle purchase because FreeBSD had DTrace and ZFS support that Linux didn't have at the time.

OpenBSD's goal is security above all else.

I'm shopping for a new gaming computer on a budget. And even models shipping with this APU still usually have a R9 270x dedicated card as well, for a price point of about $850 USD.

Where this gets interesting is if MANTLE gets widely adopted. Suddenly it can treat those 6 or 8 GCN nodes on the APU as additional GPU Processing power to be used in the queue. While maybe not as powerful as a second video card, it should give a boost in performance at no additional cost.

Of course assuming game developers start using Mantle...

Actual law is a horrible example because there has been a bubble of lawyers now and it's kept starting legal salaries actually fairly low. I know because my and I have talked about this and she is a lawyer and I went to law school, but ended up starting a tech company I sold instead. Financially we are well off enough that when we have kids she could take a couple years off. But if she does she can kiss having a comfortable job as in house corporate counsel good bye. And she has a JD & MBA.

It's so competitive here that if she left the chances of her finding another one is next to nil. There are about 25 well qualified applicants with JD/MBA's for every corporate counsel job in the area.

And frankly the only people who get those jobs are already corporate counsel somewhere else and are just moving companies or in rare cases move from outside counsel to in house.

Depends on your traffic. I run a content rich site for a client of mine and we realized something as we did our quarterly review: Mobile users are now 60% of all traffic to her site. Of that, the biggest block of users are from iPad at almost 30% of all traffic. iPhone makes up another 18% and all Android devices make up about 13% of our traffic. There is another 6% of traffic that is iPods. So as it stands right now iOS is over 50% of all traffic.

Think we are going to ignore iOS? Think again. Instead we've decided that it's time to add a native mobile app for iOS targeting specifically iPad.

The open formats lost this round. Sorry, but with H2.64 we've finally had a "Standard Codec" and format that allows content creators to encode the media once and just about reach everyone. If the open standards offered a significant technical advantage, i.e. better compression without loss of quality or faster encoding vs H.264 then they'd be open to listening. But as I've talked to a lot of content creators over the past few years, many of whom remember the days of creating a quicktime video, a Windows Media video, a Real Player video and none of them wish to go back to it. And for these people the cost of paying for a H.264 encoder license is trivial compared to royalties they have to pay for images, video, and music.

And in the world of professional print graphics name me one other real world replacement...

That's why they can go to a subscription model...

There is no replacement for Photoshop...

Seriously. At my last company we wrote point of sale software just as PA-DSS certification was coming into play and we got our software PA-DSS certified. One of the things the QSA is supposed to test is that things like the PIN are stored encrypted in RAM. Eventually we encouraged all our customers to use the Ingentico PIN pads which they customer used and should contain encryption from the processor and run the transaction without our software ever seeing any card data. Just a transaction id and amount...

I remember this because this situation expressly came up in a project meeting when one of the young programmers questioned why it had to be encrypted in RAM. I then showed him a program that could dump and even search the contents of RAM. He wasn't aware that such a thing existed. Although I was rather shocked at how little about operating systems and hardware young CS graduates knew these days. Of course I cam from the systems admin side...so...

Every computer in this house has Windows on it, even my macs for work have a bootcamp partition with Windows 7 Pro. They also all are Windows 7 despite the fact that I have no less than 5 free copies of Windows 8 from work or developers conferences/seminars.

I remember being at those conferences and all the programmers and developers saying the something: we understand the logic behind having a unified UI across every platform....but the problem is every platform is different in terms of interface. Although I think part of the situation was that MS was expecting that all PC's moving forward would be sold with touch screens whether they were laptops or desktops. Which increasingly I'm seeing more and more all in one desktops with touch screens and tablet/notebook hybrids. Touch interface is great for tablets and phones. Not so much for desktops though. I saw this working for a company that wrote point of sale software. Initially we had a lot of users that had touch screens and on their next round of updates actually went to standard monitors and then keyboard/mouse for input.

At least Apple has stuck with having OSX & iOS as separate operating systems. It's true under the hood they share a lot of the same code, but their UI's are optimized for different input methods. Apple introduced launchpad giving OSX a iOS like App launcher, but you have to click an icon or button on the keyboard to bring it up. They haven't changed how OSX is used much in a decade.

Likewise, many people have now in business are used to the start button because that's what they have used for 15 going on 20 years. Hell there are kids entering college who never knew using a computer without a start button. The big mistake Microsoft made was wholesale change. It takes a lot of time to retrain people in the business world when you go messing with the basic UI.

If Microsoft had left windows 8 with a standard UI with start button and then a "Metro launcher" like Launchpad making it optional to bring up the tiles to get people used to it and then eventually transitioned to the new UI over 9/10 there would have been a lot less fussing.

I'm about to just go back to using the family domain I have with a no-frills shared hosting account and set up my own IMAP mailbox via Cpanel again.

And what do people think the patriots were keeping in Concord? Hint: it' wasn't muskets and powder the British was after. It was a bunch of artillery cannons...