That quote makes the case...

I think the quote from Jobs at the end of the article makes the case right there.

Maybe not CIA, but...

He may not be CIA, but I doubt this was faked. It's a weird gentlemen's agreement, but members of the diplomatic services have diplomatic immunity, diplomatic pouches which are not to be examined by customs (which is not necessarily a pouch but can run up to pallet sized), and so on. It's practically common knowledge that a large percentage of these people do some spying. They aren't from a spy agency necessarily, though, so I'd expect technique to be relatively sloppy.

As for the wig and so on, as Matt Bryant says, they don't get magic face-changing hardware, and this stuff wouldn't actually surprise me. First, the super-high-tech spy-grade face changer box doesn't exist. Second, if it did exist.. if a spy got caught with some gear, which is more likely to be able to be explained away? Some makeup and a wig (could be for a girlfriend, or you just claim to be a little "metrosexual" and want to touch up your face every now and then), or a super-high-tech spy-grade face changer box (good luck explaining it)?

A little too "cloudy"

This is all a little too "cloudy" and vague. Will this app retrieve these applications and run them on the phone? If so, will they be ARM, or are they accomodating Microsoft's inability to do anything serious except for x86 and running these under x86 emulation? Will this instead be a fancy remote desktop solution with the apps running on VMWare's systems? Or will the enterprise be expected to license stuff from VMWare to run on their own servers, and this mobile phone application is to help coordinate all that?

Why?

I still don't know why I would want this. Gross. (Note I know it doesn't HAVE to make burning rubber or fart smell, but most artificial scents are pretty bad, and I wouldn't want them squirting out of my phone.) Plus it looks easy to break off.

Microsoft?

Yeah, the windows updates are pretty big but not compared to streaming movies. One reason Netflix is so high up the list is they will stream content up to about 5mbps, which is probably a higher mbps than I would wish to download similar content at.

Sucks to be you...

Sucks to be you, Bod (reception-wise.) Here in the States, I recently went on a 1000 mile road trip (well 2000 round trip), and had slacker streaming virtually the whole way. I had 4G (LTE) about 50-60% of the way (6-20mbps usually, I did see 80mbps in New Jersey..), 3G (EVDO) for the rest (typically 400kbps-1mbps, but over 2mbps at times... peak on this is 3.1mbps in a 1.25mhz channel). I had maybe 5 miles of no service, and 4 or 5 miles 1x (which is 144kbps peak.. realistically, 80-100kbps.) Oddly the biggest dead zone we encountered was NOT in the mountains, it's dead for a good 3 or 4 miles at the ohio/indiana state line. It's a surprise for me to not see at least 3G on my travels, seeing no service is quite rare.

Would they need a "blue" for phones?

Would they need a "blue" for phones? It seems the main features of blue will be restoring the start button and allowing the choice of UI instead of forcing TIFKAM as is appropriate for a desktop. A phone's not a desktop so I would not think these are important features to wait for.

Redundant and alarmist

This law was redundant and alarmist. Redundant, because SAR ratings are in fact available for every phone, even in the store, and one can pick a lower SAR phone if they wish to. Alarmist, because the people wanting cigarette pack like warnings fail at science.

1) They invariably call it "radiation" to make it sound like it's like you're holding a brick of enriched plutonium up to your head (or even worse, eating it.)

2) They just don't understand the physics. If you lie your hand onto a hot stove, you'll be burned. If you lie your hand onto a 150 degree (fahrenheit) stove (66 celsius) you might be able to keep it on there but get blisters and damage (if it doesn't happen at 150, fine, let's say 160 or 170.) If it's 70 degrees in the room (21 celsius) and you lie your hand on an 80 degree stove (27 celsius), nothing will happen at all. That is simply direct exposure to various intensities of infrared; it's just the same with RF -- touch a ham antenna with 1000 watts running through it and you will get RF burn, and probably at lower power you'll get similar damage and not notice. But cell phones are well below the limit where I'm worried.

Tech demo

It's simply a tech demo, mainly to develop the MIMO technology I would guess. I would also guess you would have 64-MIMO at the base station and something more reasonable like 2x2 MIMO in the device. The main point of MIMO in a system like this, your phone will get a good signal from a few of the MIMO elements, someone else's phone might get a good signal off a few others, so if the equipment takes advantage of this the spectrum can be reused with little or no interference. Before WiMax and LTE came out there were all sorts of pie in the sky tech demos too, but they allowed them to develop practical 4G and brag about the process.

and so in effect the spectrum is reused without interference if this is all handled right.

Micro and macroeconomics

I took intro to microeconomics and macroeconomics classes in 1999. It was interesting, because the classes taught sound market principles, then I looked at the market and by then it had gone wild for at least the last 5 years. But it was strange, because "by the book" a sound market value for a company is like 6:1 to 12:1 price to earnings (stock price is about 6-12x yearly earnings), maybe 20:1 for something like an old school phone company where there's lots of physical assets. Noone in this class seemed to see the current market (20-50:1 P/E being typical on many stocks in 1999) as a problem, but a sign of a booming economy (even though "by the book" this was a classic bubble.)

Blunderbuss

" I'm no expert (far, far from it), but I'd guess it's almost as effective as the early blunderbuss pistols."

Probably not. Guns like blunderbusses would use wadding, in recognition of the poor tolerances of the gun, to help hold in the pressure. This gun does not. Nevertheless, if this were as effective as a blunderbuss that may be all people are looking for -- if someone wants maximum effectiveness they can just go buy a Tech 9 or an AK-47.

So, I do have to laugh at anyone getting worked up over this design. As people have said, it's not a particularly effective weapon. I would think the anti-gun types would encourage this type of gun, people who otherwise might buy a fully harmful Saturday Night Special may instead print themselves a nice harmless Liberator instead. 8-)

Anyway, *shrug* I view it as a proof of concept. In this case, apparently "proof" that more needs to be done to make this effective.

Atari...

The Atari supports adding device handlers, so you could have a USB keyboard as K:, S: screen handler (for stuff that printed to screen instead of writing directly to video RAMM), the physical (floppy) drives would show as D1: and D2: while D3-D8: at least were reserved for other drives. A RAM disk may be at D8: while a SDcard may be D7:. Oh and casette was C:. I think the Commodore had a similar capability of adding on drives at least. Reimplementing the Commodore and Atari video hardware will be difficult, however; among other oddities, the Atari's video hardware would run a "display list", which could change video modes every 2 scanlines. Certain games and applications took full advantage of this.

The issue to me is...

That the authors being ostensibly represented did NOT sign up for a class action suit. This authors guild claims to represent the authors of every book under copyright. Quite a few authors HAVE in fact said "Hey, that's great!" and yet are represented in this class action suit. I would say, cases against Google may not have to be brought individually, but the individual authors who have a concern with this should form a class.

"I was pretty shocked.. maybe I shouldn't of been but basically they said this car has problems - range limits, issues with not leaving it plugged in over night - "it's not a car without issues - if you want a problem free car look elsewhere". Is one approximate quote from the consumer reports guy.

At the same time the same guy says "this car is better than any other car we've EVER (EVER!) reviewed"

that makes absolutely no 3@$#@ sense WTF."

This really isn't contradictory. Every report I've seen is that it handles great, accelerates very well, while still having low operational costs, has nice controls, nice ammenities, and is nice to ride in too. I.e. very good if you exclude the simple fact common to EVs that you can't charge any of them up in a few minutes like you can gas up a car, so you wouldn't want to go on a cross-country trip in one (in the US, where "cross-country" is over 2500 miles.)

AMD?

He may just do that, ditch the system and get one with AMD processors. *shrug*.

"And coincidentally, Detroit can probably be privatized pretty cheaply, and much of the city does look like a set from a certain 80s sci-fi movie franchise."

No it doesn't. When I was there about 5 years ago, Detroit looked far worse. After going to Detroit, the movies looked like pretty nice buildings with some movie dirt thrown on; the actual Detroit had destroyed roads, block after block where the abandoned buildings had collapsed and turned back into fields of grass, broken water mains, still-standing abandoned buildings with no windows. I expected to see gangbangers and so on but they have even left portions of the city. I went to visit a friend, and the nearest onramp to his house was a pile of rubble with "road closed" sign at the end -- it had collapsed, and the rubble was just left to sit. The next onramp had holes through it. When I drove on the highway (which is all overpass, a.k.a. elevated roadway), I could look out the window and see *through* the bridge, the tires were in fact in some cases not running on concrete at all but on the metal rebar that is supposed to be embedded under the concrete. The road I was on was so rough I hit my head on the roof a few times, and this was a 1985 Celebrity, not a car with "tight European suspension.". I would not have even considered driving a semi (a.k.a. a lorry) on these roads, I'd guess it would have been too likely to fall through! I know three other people that have been there -- one hit road debris and destroyed half of their front end, $1500. The second had an Acura with low-profile tires and cracked all 4 rims, bought replacements in Detroit, and had to replace *those* when he got back. The third came much more recently and said the roads had been fixed -- apparently some of the stimulus money congress didn't give to the banks was spent specifically on Detroit's roads (although not on the rest of the city.)

As for this switch -- sounds like a good idea, but I do bet nothing comes of it. Nothing wrong with open source development, but for hardware like this the fabrication technology for one-off builds is probably at least 10 years behind what a proudction run can use, and it's much more difficult to develop and debug something where you never even get to test it (I doubt there'll be much test silicon out and about.) There's software to run on a commodity PC and do switching and routing, but I do doubt this is what Facebook has in mind... making a "cheap and cheerful" 1gb router is just not even an issue, facebook could fix bugs in pfsense or something like this and call it a day. But once you get past that to 10gb and up gear you start needing custom ASICs and so on to maintain line speed.

What I use Linux for...

Betacam's question has been answered... but... web surfing, watching videos, e-mail, bittorrent (occasionally), software development (python, c, c++, Java, Android development). I have VirtualBox set up to run other stuff as needed. (Really, For something like VS I'd rather have it contained in it's own VM than mucking up the rest of my system anyway.) If you have to debug network issues, using Windows is like trying to do it with a butter knife instead of a scalpel, the linux utilities are MUCH MUCH better for this. I upgraded some Cisco kit via tftp upgrade off my netbook, that was fun 8-) Libreoffice in fact works fine for all the word processing and so on I've had to do, people like to make out like it's a complete basket case but really it's not. It's nice to have no worries about viruses and spyware, even if I engage in "risky" online behavoir, and have ALL software update in one place instead of having loads of seperate updaters remind me of updates. Believe it or not, a Linux desktop can actually be a joy to use (as long as you don't use Unity -- eww!) and so long as you aren't reliant on some Windows-only app you would not miss Windows after a while. I'm not about to suggest someone that uses Quickbooks or Photoshop frequently switch to Linux, unless they are comformtable running their main apps in a virtual machine.

Side note, Photoshop is not web-based -- the so called "cloud" versions of Adobes apps, if you read the recent article and comments, are actually essentially the traditional versions of the apps with more restrictive rights restrictions system installed. The DRM disables your applications if it can't phone home, or if it does phone home and finds you haven't made your monthly payment.

"Just got done pinning a channel to my start screen (try not to be jealous android users)."

I'm managing not to be 8-)

Anyway, I second the I'm with Gordon Pyra on this one -- I think most likely, the app writers just were not familiar with youtube APIs (I mean, if you've never written a youtube app before -- I sure haven't -- then you'd have no reason to know them), just assumed some stuff wasn't possible, then found out actually it is.

"Can someone please explain to me what the fundamental difference is between a fiat currency and a virtual currency with no intrinsic value whatsoever?"

http://tapastic.com/episode/3686

(Transscript -- at a bank or stock brokerage office:

"I'm thinking of putting some money into Bitcoin. Do you know anything about it?"

"Well, that would be a very risky venture. Bitcoin is quite volatile! It's a virtual currency controlled by shadowy people in an unregulated environment, without any real guarantee of return. You never know when the

value will drop, or be forced down be nefarious forces, or your money stolen by unscrupulous lowlife scum!"

"So how is that any different than the regular banking system or the stock market?"

"When you use Bitcoin, I can't charge you fees."

)

"And you do CMYK properly?"

Yes, Gimp has supported CMYK for quite a while, and on recent distros (including Ubuntu) they also have color correction support (monitor and printer). I really don't know about feature parity over all, both gimp and photoshop have many addons so I'm sure there's features missing going either way.

Anyway, hate to say it but I guess you have 3 options; 1) Freeze your system in time and use what you have. 2) Pay Adobe more and more money. 3) Suck it up and deal with something else.

Pure research...

I really view these hypersonic missiles as pure research. Someone at the military may be deluded into thinking it's useful but I think it really isn't... the materials research, control systems research, and so on, could trickle down into something useful, and would not need hypersonic speeds to be useful.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

The linked article makes an excellet case against the medallion system. However, it seems to me this is a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situation. Here's the situation here in Iowa City:

1) First, we had very little regulation. For years we had Yellow Cab, Big 10, and a handful of small cab companies (a few with a few cars and a few others that were actually one person with a cell phone and car.) When the economy really started to crap out a few years ago, EVERYBODY realized cab driving was easy money -- in a town with 50,000 people (30,000 students and 20,000 natives or so), we ended up with *27* cab companies. This made it more difficult to make money of course. But, even with that glut, it still proved impossible to get a useful cab ride after 2AM -- I tried to get a friend of mine a cab, and there were so many drunk students willing to hail a cab to haul them like 4 or 5 blocks that the cabs just loop between downtown and within 4 or 5 blocks of downtown; in over an hour, no cab would give a ~2 mile cab ride, so they finally had to drive home.

2) Solution? The city now requires the operators to have a landline and 24/7 service. (I dont know the landline requirement would hold up in court, since laws requiring a single vendor are illegal and we have a landline monopoly here, unlike most of the US), stricter insurance requirements, and so on. This was intended to eliminate the guys(/chicks) that just had a cell phone and a vehicle operating as a cab. What *really* happened? On paper, over a dozen cab companies went away but in reality, the number of cabs barely reduced at all, most of these cab companies all merged as "Big 10 Aardvark". Quite simply, the businessman who got organized first now collects $700 a month insurance plus $700 a month or so "service fees" to let cabs legally claim they are operating out of his office and dispatch number. But, in reality they will probably not get a single dispatch and actually use their own cell phones to get calls. Essentially, this didn't reduce competition much at all while raising expenses. And of course it's still impossible to get a cab after 2AM.

vnc viewer

There's javascript vnc viewers already for remote desktops. The actual video decode stuff does sound cool though.

Yes it's not the same...

Yes, doing this for a week is not the same for doing it year after year. But, it did open people's eyes to your plight. I think some people just would assume living on quid a day just means not eating out, without realizing just how hard it is to get by.

At least they are profitable...

I figure at least they are profitable. That's a bad sales drop, but the real problem companies are those ones where profits go up and up each quarter, but they keep managing to lose money. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a good sign for HTC, but they aren't actually in trouble yet. As volatile as the market is, I expect someone else will slip up and HTC's time will come again.

This won't help buying a new one...

This won't help buying a new Apple model though, only if you are buying one that was on the market enough for it's stability to be characterized. I won't claim this is UNIQUELY an Apple problem... but.... based on my past experience, one Apple model will run nicely, rock solid, and may even run reasonably cool, really quite nice. The next model (which, since Apple is alergic to model numbers, may look exactly the same...) may prove to have design flaws, implementation flaws, and build problems, may run like a space heater, and may basically be a basket case of crashes and failures.

Props where they are do to Apple for currently having a stable model available -- don't mess it up! 8-)

False economy...?

If the company use is basically websites + normal office stuff, then every platform has a web browser and openoffice or libreoffice. Not a problem. Big problem -- if the company says BYOD, but really means "you will pay for the configuration we want, instead of us buying it for you", then that doesn't work for me at all. My own device will run the OS and software I want, not whatever corporate wants. If they wish to supply a VM I'm fine with that, but my device means MY device.

A few additional problems:

-- What about viruses and security? Some of these devices that run Windows WILL get viruses and spyware eventually (home users do not follow proper security practices, and all to often do not run a proper virus scanner. As it is their own device, they may engage in high risk behaviors, i.e. bittorrent, porn sites, etc., that are highly likely to get a Windows computer infected.) Don't forget, at that point, they do not own that computer, the Russian or Chinese owners of the spyware effectively own it... and they can and will get all corporate information the user of the computer accesses.

-- If the machine breaks, who is responsible? You may think it's vital to get a broken computer up and running immediately, whereas the owner (who, after all, owns the device in a BYOD scenario) may not. Recall, if you expect the IT department to handle this... the IT department now, instead of being expected to support say a fleet of Dell model xyz computers (where they can even keep a spare or two on site), will not be as efficient being expected to work on whatever random model of kit the user has.

-- What about silliness? What if someone mainly types up documents and prints them, but decides that shiny new Ipad is just as good for it as their previous computer... but they can't type worth a damn on that little touchscreen, and can't print. It sounds dumb, but I've seen people glacially plodding at these before (tablets in general) while CONVINCED they are just racing through those screens. Or they get some $75 tablet that just isn't powerful enough, or bring their shit old Win98 system (believe it or not a few still are in the wild...)

Don't get me wrong, this is no guaranteed fail. But, I think in most cases it will be.

Let's try that here in the US.... (Note, $1 is worth about 75 eurocents., I get $7.80!)

Loaf of bread -- 99 cents. (Hard to find compared to ~$1.50 bread but it exists.)

--- looking good! Under budget!

Dozen eggs -- 99 cents on sale (usual price $1.50) (National average is $1.92 though!)

--- Hey this isn't looking too bad!

Milk -- $3.00/gallon or about $1.50 a quart (yes, a quart is half the cost instead of a quarter the cost.) National average is $3.43 right now.

-- Hmm....a little over budget perhaps, but not bad.

Kilo of chickpeas -- these are $1.79 a pound -- $4 a kilo.

-- Oh hell.

Kilo of rice -- average now is 0.71 a pound (but not sold in individual pounds, usually at least 2 pounds.) $1.57 a kilo or so

--OK...

100 pack of Lipton "tea" -- $4.89 (1.45 for 30 bags). I'm not tea afficionado but the general bags of tea you find on the shelf here in the states are vile and undrinkable.

-- Whatevs.

Welp, using the lowest prices that puts me at $10.50, and I have not bought bones, onion, garlic, paprika, and herbs yet. I don't think you can just buy bones here anywhere, and herbs? Heh. The big scam recently around here is they stock these tiny tiny spice containers for like $1 or $2 a piece -- did I mention they are tiny? They hold 5 grams. Fresh garlic cloves and onions (whichever type you'd like) are in fact available too, although it might be hard to use the onion up before it turned.

-- No flavor for you.

Of course you're $1.20 in the hole anyway after bread, eggs, milk, chickpeas, and rice so it may not matter.

-- Indeed. Might have to load up on 30 cent Ramen noodles i guess. Just get them at a Chinese grocery store and not the generic "salt flavored" ramens from the normal grocery store. That's some good eating! 8-)

Just to follow the spirit rather than the letter... well, chickpeas ARE in fact as cheap or cheaper (usually MUCH cheaper) than peanuts, or soybeans... almonds of course are right out...i.e. I'm not overlooking some other staple that just happens to be cheaper in the US.

Microsoft destroyed the netbook

"I think that the problem with Netbooks is that the vociferous naysayers were exposed to the early tiny screen Linux models and found them wanting and have slagged off Netbooks ever since. If they'd tried the much better later models they'd have a different opinion. But then again, the anti-MS brigade never got over the fact that most people wanted to ditch Linux and have something that could run Windows."

What *I* didn't get over was that Microsoft destroyed the netbook. A netbook that has a faster CPU, more RAM, more hard disk sapce, and a large screen, plus cash sent straight to Microsoft, so it's like double the cost? That is not a netbook any longer, that is a low end notebook computer, which had already been on the market for years and were uninteresting despite them referring to these still as netbooks. Then, these still proved barely adequate to run WIndows 7 due to it's bloat (while they ran Linux fine.) So they put even MORE CPU power, more RAM, more hard disk space, and yet more cost. Yeah.

I'm waiting to see the actual specs on these supposed $200 Android thingies -- if I can get Android the hell off and normal Linux the hell on, these should work a treat (although I'd prefer an ARM model to an Atom one I think.)

How about a good OS?

These guys really should be sticking Ubuntu on (with the "traditional" interface pre-installed, instead of a downloadable option, since Unity is awful). It wouldn't even matter if it was ARM or not then.

Those who say the Linux desktop rquires excessive command prompt use, firstly it's simply not true -- the GUI covers most uses. Secondly, take a real look at Windows -- a command prompt, powershell, config in various text files as well as a registry (regedit is technically a GUI, but come on....) Here's the thing....

There's really 3 ways to go about this:

1) Have everything doable via GUI. This would end up with a lot of menus, submenus, and tabs, with huge amounts of buttons, checkboxes, knobs, and so on. If you consider regedit to be a GUI it may fit in this category. But really I have seen no system that uses this, and I don't think it'd work well.

2) Have everything doable via GUI, Apple style. Apple style means "if it's not in the GUI, you can't do it." I'm aware of the unix base of OSX, but I'm also aware that much of OSX's GUI doesn't really have any extra configurability sitting underneath it.

3) Everybody else. Windows and Linux *both* have extensive options not available via GUI (and face it, regedit is technically a GUI but not really friendly by any stretch.) They both cover typical options without the necessity of a GUI. They both have people that falsely claim that people have to constantly fiddle around outside the GUI to get basic every day tasks done.

Seems dubious...

I don't like the US carriers, and I like Android updates. But, unfair and deceptive? Really? *shrug*

Also, they may be disappointed in the result -- in general, one would not be getting an update from 2.3.x to ICS or JB, it'd be 2.3.5 to 2.3.6 or so. Think about it, newer android versions use (slightly) more ram and so on, and if the carriers pushed an update like that, THEN they'd get flack about making people's current phones useless due to "bloat" of the updates. In reality, the US carriers *are* terrible about this, some phones have real bug fixes from the carrier but nothing from the cell co. But, it's just not going to be some huge game changer.

I don't understant this at all...

There's loads of IT and comp sci guys with no work (a few cohorts and I have founded our own IT company so we aren't in this position.). There's few listed IT and comp sci jobs. These companies seem to manage to go DIRECTLY to claiming they can't find anybody and hire H1-Bs, without the intermediate step of even seeking hiring in-country. And now they want to raise the cap? Most odd.

Unless things have radically changed, the standard procedure to get an H1-B employee hired a few years ago was... a) List loads of requirements, to the point that nobody will actually have the skills. (Maybe throw in "5 years experience with Office 2013" for good measure.) If anybody DOES claim "Yes I have every skill" you call them out for lying at the interview phase. b) THEN go say you couldn't find anybody qualified and seek an H1-B. c) When THEY claim they have every single requirement, "Great, you are hired!" d) Probably do about a ream of paperwork. The red tape is ineffective at keeping this system from being gamed, but nevertheless it's still there.

"I was hoping that maybe they just emulated ActiveX; then maybe I thought it would automatically detect when it needed IE, but you have to do it manually. So what good is this?"

If you look at usage stats, there's all these businesses that run IE6 because they'll have one or two horrible ActiveX "IE6 required" intranet apps sitting around. So, the IT admin puts those sites into the legacy browser support plugin, and can let the users use a browser from this century (so long as it's Chrome....) They get IE6 on the few sites that need them, while avoiding the security and compatibility implications of having anyone try to use IE6 on the open internet.

Too bad they don't have a firefox plugin for this, I really don't like Chrome's user interface too much. That said, I have nothing that needs a plugin like this anyway *shrug*.

"I also strongly get the feeling that both Amazon and Microsoft doesn't really expect (hope?) people to dive in so deeply but instead solely focus themselves on virtual low prices instead."

Also, they don't specify the specs because they in fact are not specific. Now that they've been at this for a few years, the spec on a brand new machine on the rack is pretty different from the ones they bought 2 years ago. But, my understanding is those 2 year old machines are also still on the rack. I read an article about someone finding pretty high performance differences between one Amazon instance and the next (on the order of some running at 50% of the performance of other supposedly equivalent instances.) The average seemed to work out (i.e. it wasn't like you'd order 10 machines, and end up with them physically all running on the older models.) They seem to just assume you'll "burst your cloud" or whatever and order more VMs without looking too specifically at the performance of your existing VMs.

FPGAs and ASICs...

Not to piss of Intel's parade, but they first say how it's a problem that current switches use all these FPGAs and ASICs, then provide a solution with... FPGAs and ASICs. Yeah.

That said, sounds like it's got useful features and probably won't be a bad piece of kit.

Done before and done again...

It's been done before and will be done again -- whomever at the company decided IT doesn't need in on a decision, picks some random vendor, then (most likely) then expects IT to sort everything out for them. (Of course, IT may be able to salvage the situation depending on just what is going on.) The advantage of some cloud vendor talking to marketing -- what will cloud computing do for marketing? If they don't plan it out, absolutely nothing -- just like a PC without software, it'll sit there doing nothing -- but it can be made to sound so impressive that it's a no-brainer to pick it (to a non-technical person.)

Want to avoid this situation? You'll have to suck it up and interact with these people, otherwise they will see you as out of the loop (and in fact you *will* be out of the loop) and decide to just make decisions like this on their own. Also, remember that you are providing services for them -- if something seems unnecessary but the users really want it, figure out what it'll cost and if they still want it, give it to them.

Shoot it

If a drone started circling over my house, I'd get a slingshot and shoot it down. Anything buzzing over my property is mine for the taking. (Given I'm in the good ol' USA, my lot rent agreement does specifically prohibit shooting off guns outside, since otherwise it'd technically be allowed by default.)

Bitcoin as a metric...

Personally, the interesting use I've seen for Bitcoins (which doesn't require possessing any), is as another data point in comparing currency values. Of course this is not useful when the Bitcoin goes through it's own wild fluctuations... but a lot of the time, it's more stable than even gold or silver. So, OK, say the yen went up in value relative to the US Dollar and Euro. Did the yen increase in spending power, or did the US Dollar and Euro both simultaneously decrease? Compare it to other currencies? Quite a few are indexed to the US Dollar or Euro, and a lot that aren't formally end up following the USD, Euro, or Yen closely anyway, muddying the information. Enter the bitcoin -- it's not indexed to anything, so compare the bitcoins per euro, yen, and dollar, and it becomes much clearer just what happened.

Regarding the bitcoin as a currency -- I have not been able to prove to my own satisfaction that there is no shortcut for making bitcoins. I don't think there is but couldn't prove it. I also couldn't determine just what inherent value these bitcoins have -- but then again, the US Dollar has the same problem now (with nothing but promissary notes and IOUs in the federal reserve to back the dollars now being printed.)

Aww man....

Aww man, I just got most of videos shrunk with H.264 AVC. Oh well. (Actually I don't feel that bad about it, most shrunk by 75% or more, and the H.265 support in mencoder is, well, non-existant as far as I know.)

"All those pretty words and not a single mention of WebM "

That's because it's an article about H.265

"WebM is superior to H265 in that it's good enough, not that much difference in performance, but has a totally open license. "

Actually, there's a pretty big difference in performance. If you look at comparisons, it's pretty comparable to H.264 (one review says VP8 is better, the next H.264 -- suggesting to me they are pretty close.) H.265 will achieve much lower average bitrate for the same quality compared to H.264. WebM still wins on the licensing terms though 8-)

Pot, meet kettle

Does Microsoft permit other app stores on win phone 8? I don't think they do. And as a convicted monopolist, they should really not be in the position of calling out others for things thehy are doing themselves.

Anyway, I don't think google is behaving anticompetitvely, but the EU can certainly decide.