It's as if there's something genetic in MBA types that makes them abuse English so awfully as this summary exemplifies.

It's a good thing that tomorrow is Bloomsday.

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BMO

That's what it is really about. The unit of computational resource is a standardized, empty server. It's not "maintained", it's wiped and reloaded. If something goes wrong with it, its load is sent elsewhere, and eventually the unit will be replaced by someone who unplugs it and plugs in another one. Nobody in the data center really has to have much of an idea of what's going on with the computers. Their concerns are power, cooling, cabling, and physical security.

Most of them will be paid at security-guard levels.

Bit saddened about the demise of Songbird

I'm not. It was crap. Crap software should go extinct or be improved. It never improved. A music player built out of a web browser engine was the most convoluted way I could think of to make a music player.

I think it failed not because most people who want to listen to music aren't techies and they're happy ( and I'm talking about people using MS Windows on their computers ) with Windows Media Player

I'm a techie and I despised Songbird. It was better to simply use Play (a sox front-end) and a music list. That's what techies do. They find a simple solution that doesn't put a load on their machines like Songbird did. Songbird was a load, in multiple senses of the word.

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BMO

Apple, Microsoft and Google don't need to grow to survive. They can continue to operate profitably at their present size. AAPL has a P/E ratio of 10. MSFT, 18. GOOG, 26. Those are all reasonable price/earnings ratios for successful mature companies. F (Ford Motor) is at 10, and IBM is at 13. Both are century-old companies, still doing well.

Now look at Facebook, P/E of 514. And that's after the stock declined 37% since "the world's most hyped IPO." Facebook just doesn't generate much profits. Facebook's traffic and revenue peaked in 2012. In revenue terms, Facebook was never that big. It's in the class with Adobe, not the big boys like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. If Facebook didn't have a two-tier stock structure that gives most of the votes to Zuckerberg, he would have been fired by now.

That's Facebook, the biggest success in "social". Everybody else is doing worse. Zynga just had a big layoff. Social looks like the first dot-com boom and crash - the players were talking about "clicks now, worry about the revenue later". Well, "later" is here.

The fundamental problem with "social" is that the revenue model is to crank up the ad density, which annoys the users. In the last year, Facebook introduced "sponsored stories" and Twitter introduced "sponsored tweets". Myspace tried that strategy. It didn't end well.

And have the light hardwired to the camera power so it's physically impossible for software to turn it off.

And electrical tape or paint doesn't block light. Right?

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BMO

If the U.S. Government has the signing key to Windows Update, and can mess with upstream routers, it can put spyware on any Windows machine worldwide. No "exploit" needed.

Somebody needs to start doing security analyses of everything that comes in via Windows Update. Comparing the updates that are sent to different computers is a good first step.

The USAF has been working on "stealth helicopters" for years. They haven't been able to make them silent, but they can make them sound like wind noise, eliminating the distinctive "whap-whap-whap" blade sounds.

How..wasteful.

I read a rectangular thing that has access to almost all the information in the world.

Of course, some people read becasue they like to read, and some people read because they want to brag about their book collection.

Google+

I suspect the number is actually much higher, but they just don't know it. The infrastructure was used by a lot of companies and apps.

Correct.

This has been tried before. It's called a ground level power supply. Trams in Bordeaux use it. The sections are powered on and off in 8-meter sections. When a section is off, it's grounded. For safety, there are two levels of switching. The 8-meter sections each have their own power control box, and there's a second level of control which monitors a number of sections and will cut power for many sections if something is live that shouldn't be. The trams have battery backup so they can get through dead sections. Bordeaux only uses the system in their scenic historic area. Once out of that area, the trams raise pantographs to connect to overhead wire. Two other small cities in France have installed that system, but only short sections in the city center use that system. Dubai is putting in 14km of a similar system.

Drainage, water, and ice are big problems. (Not in Dubai, though.) So is cost. There's a lot of high-voltage switchgear involved.

The courts are aware as we need to get a court order.

The FISA court is secret and accountable to nobody, and it's not like we didn't hear about this before as "Total Information Awareness."

TIA got shouted down publicly, but I'm not betting it ever went away. Black budgets and all that.

Even if Snowden is lying and that he exaggerated his authority, the evidence to the contrary of what the politicians are saying is pretty much overwhelming, taken as a big picture.

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BMO

They would if they built and owned it, like say.. an author.

no. Stuff takes time to develop and make available. You need to be able to protect yourself before other people have access, so it's tricky. 14 years with a 7 extension cost 10k and doubling ever 5 years.

This means that authors have time to deal with the business aspect. It's long enough where a corporation wont just wait 5 years and take the material, and if someone is making money, they can continue to make money, be eventually the cost to renew will be more then they make.