maxidog

Lol, thanks for that, was worried I was being too negative!

I studied “computation” at Oxford 92-95 while CAR Hoare was still there and basically all they taught us about computers were these formal methods. They actually thought it would revolutionise programming and looked down at anything else as “hand-waving”. Think the syllabus was abandoned only a few years later thank goodness.

Actually it goes straight back to the Apple TV remote without having to unlock. Not sure what the time limit is but it works after the device has gone to sleep and otherwise locked itself.

6% return peak bubble to peak bubble is in no way reassuring.

Am I unusual in being constantly surprised when people assume time's arrow in everyday conversation? I can never quite accept the sheer oddness and asymmetry of it.

Nope, that really was the end of the story.

Yes, it works for writes and support is built-in to current processors. It's faster than conventional file access.

Is that fundamentally different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-mapped_file ?

Especially weird considering the hack is totally unnecessary. You can take a picture without making a shutter sound using AVFoundation.

Gizmodo says this uses GPS but there's no way that's accurate enough, is there?

What a pros-and-cons evaluation of a culture misses is that cultures are "self-modifying code", with the weakest attributes constantly being revised. Few cultures are modernising as quickly as Korean. After all, Korean Air decided that Korean Air had a problem.

Where this process of introspection and change falls down is with expats and their children, who have detailed knowledge of and an exaggerated respect for the culture they left behind but are unable to play a role in changing it. Culture becomes a museum exhibit to these people. (I would be surprised if 'The Korean' lives in Korea.) As someone who knows lots of Koreans but few Korean Americans, I can say that after a few bottles of soju and speaking their native language, nobody is more aware of and passionate about resolving the problems in their own culture than a Korean.

I was 99% sure our advisors had screwed us before they came in with the 20% lower offer.

When I sold my company, our own advisers (not Goldman but a famous name) did something which in my opinion is much worse -- I'm 99% sure they told the winning bidder that we'd been prepared to accept a 20% lower bid from their competitor. The winning bidder, of course, then suddenly reduced their bid by 20% on the planned day of completion. The reason our advisers did this is that it was much more important to them to get future business from the buyer, a large multinational, than future business from me and my colleagues.

I feel sorry for the vendors in this case, but you don't do an all-share deal without being extremely cautious about the shares you're taking as payment. Even a pair of PhDs should have known that.

What interests me here is that we have a lot of news stories floating around at the moment lambasting financial companies for relatively minor misdeeds, because that's all journalists can pin on them without getting sued. If the real truth about what goes on begins to leak out the public reaction could be very interesting.