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The investors you refer to typically manage money on behalf of their investors and are actually under constant scrutiny. If they run mutual funds, their performance is measured every day, and if they underperform for a number of quarters in a row, their investors will absolutely “fire” them by withdrawing money from their funds.
You're probably looking for the Arrow IPC format [1], which writes the data in close to the same format as the memory layout. On some platforms, reading this back is just an mmap and can be done with zero copying. Parquet, on the other hand, is a somewhat more complex format and there will be some amount of encoding and decoding on read/write. Flight is an RPC framework that essentially sends Arrow data around in IPC format.
The difference, though, is that the money that Khan Academy has raised is donations. They're not investors who are seeking a (financial) return on their capital. Education is a tough space for startups trying to make money: http://avichal.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/why-education-startu...
Okay, I mean some automatic updating software is bad. Adobe's is very annoying, and Windows Update frequently requires rebooting. But some are great -- like Chrome! On a Mac, probably the best thing about the app store is that it consolidates all my software updates (well, not all of them yet) into one place. So the UX is lacking in some places, but it's getting better, and I certainly don't agree with quote's implication that automatic updating doesn't exist on PCs or that software updates don't (in the majority of cases) keep adding value to a PC over time.
"One selling point the staff are pushing is that unlike traditional PC’s, Chromebooks get better over time with automatic software updates."
That seems a bit disingenuous. PCs get better over time with software updates as well.
I've always loved the Chinese naming for Coke. The article translates it as "delicious happiness," but it's actually more clever. The first two characters (ke kou) mean thirsty. The third character is the same as the first but means "can be" in the context. The fourth character (le) means happy. So all together, it literally means "[when you are] thirsty, [you] can be happy." As the other examples in the article show, it's quite easy to do the transliteration poorly, and a good one is far from inevitable. It's hard not to appreciate the amount of cleverness that went into "ke kou ke le".
Fair enough, the real rights owner may have uploaded the books and videos themselves. I just think there's some irony here that Hotfile suddenly cares about copyright.
For example, while claiming to remove files that are copies of the movie The Box, Warner removed several files related to the alternative cancer treatment book "Cancer: Out Of The Box," by Ty M. Bollinger. Another title deleted by Warner was "The Box that Saved Britain," a production of the BBC, not Warner.
This is really bizarre. Hotfile might technically be right in suing Warner Bros. for pulling content they don't own the rights to, but it's not as if Hotfile had a legitimate claim to having those files on its servers. Those files are copyrighted by someone, and surely the real rights holders would want their intellectual property removed from Hotfile if they knew about it. And now that Hotfile admits knowledge of these files, aren't they compelled to remove them anyway?
[edit]
Perhaps I should have said ironic instead of bizarre. I don't disagree that there's a legal case here.
This is why I think it was shortsighted for Instapaper to reject outside funding. As much as I like Instapaper, it is very much still a single-platform app with very limited scope (text-only), and the app hasn't been updated in several months. Meanwhile its competitors (like Readitlater and now these guys) are getting funded, rolling out features, and attacking this market with much greater resources.
There is Simplenote (http://simplenoteapp.com), which is a pretty no-frills web app that also integrates with a number of native apps (including Notational Velocity if you're on OS X).
Well, it is Android in the sense that it shares the same API and thus runs Android apps from the Amazon Appstore.
So... you can use brute force to break encryption? Is that news? It doesn't sound like there was any security hole in the implementation or a leaked cryptographic key, so in what sense is the encryption "cracked"?
This is extremely interesting. One thing I didn't understand was how this location database is being built. Is Google collecting GPS signals and WIFI hotspots so that the two can be associated to pinpoint your location? If so, does that mean Android phones are periodically sending your location back to Google? Do Apple, Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft do the same thing?
I'm sure some parts of Oracle's database are very good. The part I work with (OLAP), though, is ludicrously bad. New bugs are introduced with almost every database patch, and the behavior of existing functions have changed without notice. For this privilege, Oracle charges license fees by the core.
I've always found the tags on Engadget to be completely useless, and I was wondering why they even waste their time with them. SEO makes a lot of sense.
I'm going to miss the Engadget Podcast. After Paul Miller left, I thought it might still have a chance, but now all three are gone!
Why would a cloud-based filesystem be useful beyond storing your home folder? It's not like you need group collaboration on your kernel binaries. You also can't really run different computers off of the same harddrive image (unless you are a corporation and buy multiple, identical machines).
Most of the home pages for these writing tools are missing the most important thing: a full screenshot of the app! Why all the tiny crops, screencasts, and written descriptions?
Another one:
5. Google’s services need to support every platform
Google services need to support every platform eventually, but nothing stops them from releasing something working on a single platform first. As I recall, Google Chrome was available only for Windows when it was first released.
I think this article suffers from hindsight bias. No, Google is not going to come with with every successful app or web service in the industry, and no, not every product it releases is going to be wildly successful. But saying Google has an innovation problem because it can't build an app like Instagram is like saying Warren Buffet has an investing problem because he didn't buy stock in Apple right before the iPhone was released.
Google's process isn't geared to create novelty hits in the app store, and Buffet's method doesn't lead him to pick high flying tech stocks. But Google and Buffet are still doing fine.
I think a related part of Apple's pricing advantage comes from the fact that they are good at taking technologies developed for the iPhone and using it in other places instead of reinventing the wheel for every product.
The iPod touch, Apple TV, and iPad are all variously stripped, screenless, and scaled versions of the iPhone. They share the same processor and underlying OS. This allows Apple to not just sell a lot of stuff, but to sell a lot of the exact same stuff. So not only are their marginal costs lower from buying in bulk, their fixed costs of research and development are lower, too.
Could an iPad's cost $499 or an Apple TV $99 if they didn't sell the iPhone? Probably not, and definitely not if they wanted to keep the kind of margins they command right now.
This reminds me of an old Joel Spolsky blog post [1] about exactly this for programmers. The gist is that for tasks that require a great deal of attention and focus (like programmaing and, here, legal analysis), task switching is extremely expensive and should be avoided whenever possible. A bit of management advice from the post regarding this principle:
Good managers see their responsibility as removing obstacles so that people can focus on one thing and really get it done.
At a very general level, accumulating savings while carrying debt only makes sense if you can get a greater (risk-adjusted) return on your savings than the interest rate you need to pay on your debt. So if your return on your savings is lower than the interest on the debt, paying off your loan with your savings is like getting the difference between the return and the interest rate for free -- i.e. you should definitely pay off your debt.
Of course, there are lots of complications to this general rule in the real world. The US, at least, taxes the returns on your savings (capital gains and dividends) and gives you tax benefits for your debt. When saving in a 401k, employers often match your contribution, which amounts to a guaranteed 100% return on your investment for the portion that's matched.
Liquidity is also a concern. For example, if you have a 30-year mortgage on your house at 5%, you probably wouldn't want to put all of your savings into paying down that mortgage since you can't get it out again until you sell your house. If you have a sudden need to raise cash, you'd need to get a home equity loan, which can be tricky if your house value has plummeted or if interest rates are high.
Thus the full answer is that, well, it depends on a lot of life factors, and although paying off your debts is generally good advice, especially for very high interest loans like credit cards, there are many factors to consider other than the spread between the return on your savings and the interest rate on your debt.
From an economics point of view, it's basically another way of saying that wealth maximization is different from utility maximization. While the two are frequently correlated, it's not necessarily so.
The snowball strategy could be perfectly rational for people who gain more utility from the small but frequent accomplishments of paying off debt earlier than they do from maximizing their overall lifetime wealth.
It's not what I would do, but as they say, there's no accounting for taste.
Chrome actually does have a method of blocking Javascript. It might still be in the beta channel for now, but if you go to Options->Under the Hood->Content settings, there is a Javascript tab that lets you disable javascript except for whitelisted sites.
It's not really misformatted. The roles of periods and commas are swapped in some countries. In fact, all of these countries in green use commas for the decimal separator rather than periods:
Not so fast on those tax benefits. Yes, you can depreciate your real estate and not pay taxes on them that year. However, if you later go on to sell that property for a gain, there is something called recaptured depreciation [1]. In essence, you will pay taxes on those gains at the orginary income tax rate until all the depreciation you reported is covered. Only the remaining gains can be taxed at the much lower capital gains rate.
I agree that there is a strategy here. However, every strategy needs to be evaluated relative to the cost, and from my point of view, the price that Intel is paying to execute this strategy is too high.
If we look at MFE's peak earnings from FY2009, it's $173m. So a $7.7b price tag is just under 45x. In other words, it'll take 45 years of FY2009 earnings to merely regain the initial investment. Now let's be more generous and give Intel a low discount rate of 5% and assume that those earnings grow compounded 10% each year. It will still take 25 years for Intel to make back that investment.
Of course, the investment gets better if there are synergies that will provide additional boost to Intel's earnings, but what are they? I don't really buy (2) since Intel has shown that they are capable of getting their software onto your computer when they want to (see their integrated video drivers that download through Windows Update).
But even if they couldn't, they could have just continued collaborating with McAfee without buying them. That's essentially the exact same thing as what's happening now, minus the big transfer of wealth from Intel shareholders to McAfee shareholders.
I suppose that I'm just not convinced that Intel couldn't have rolled their own solution for less than $7bln. Even if they really needed to buy McAfee, a 60% premium over the market price is pretty steep, and it's hard for me to see how that adds more value to Intel shareholders than a 7% special dividend or buyback. So far, I haven't seen an argument that's made me think, "Oh yes, that IS something I'd pay $7 billion for."
Yes, it's clear that Intel wants to make security a top priority. However, this article still doesn't explain why acquiring McAfee in particular makes any sense, especially at a cost of $7.7 billion.
Yes, it does say that the "McAfee purchase gives Intel an instant foothold on countless PCs," but these are not the PCs that Intel is after. These PCs already have Intel chips on them. Intel presumably wants security as a headlining feature for their next generation chips to entice users to upgrade.
In addition, Intel can gain an even wider-reaching foothold into your PC by bundling a driver and distributing it through Windows Updates, as it does already with its integrated video solutions. They presumably wouldn't need to pay Microsoft $7.7 billion for the priviledge of making Windows more secure.
Aside from the foothold in your PC, then, what is left of the "long-term, strategic buy"? There might be some patents and some talented developers, but for a company that already spends $5 billion on R&D every year, it's hard to understand why Intel couldn't come up with an in-house solution.
No, the real reason why Intel bought McAfee is probably much more pedestrian: Intel is simply sitting around with too much cash earning too little return.
Alumimum is commonly found in most (all?) anti-perspirants. It's definitely not something limited to Old Spice. If you want to avoid aluminum, you'll probably have to stick to using deodorants that are not also anti-perspirants -- it might be the case that Old Spice doesn't sell anything like this.
The prices of these ebook readers are finally dropping to match their value proposition. $200+ is way too much for a battery, a 3G radio, and an e-ink screen, especially considering that ebooks do not sell at any significant discount to their paper versions.