tybris

One bad idea leads to another. Selling information by the bit is a bad idea.

I don't think either the PC or tablets in their current forms will be the productivity tool of the future. The floor's open to new contenders that can help people deal with data and complexity.

Well, that's how physics works. Physics is stupefyingly strict about its methods. Most sciences don't put quite as much value into models. The problem is that in a desire to strictly follow the method, physicists have become complacent with regards to extraordinary claims. Sure, the universe is full of dark matter, connected by tiny strings, in between folded up dimensions, but gravity is leaking away into parallel universes, since that's what the model predicts (rather than it just being a mathematical anomaly arising from botched assumptions). It's comparable to an economic model that describes inflation as the work of invisible leprechauns who increase prices during the night. Sure, it might make accurate predictions, hell, it might even be true, but you should not put any value into it unless there is evidence that the universe actually works in the extraordinary way the model claims it does.

Biology has followed a much better path over the past century, and biologists are rapidly building up an extremely thorough understanding of how biological systems work without relying heavily on algebraic models. Physics fails to provide explanations for even the most basic physical phenomena like motion. It's effectively just assumed to exist as a law because some authoritative physicist said so and all other models rely on it.

In all other sciences, if you find a model that predicts something as self-contradictory as a black hole or dark matter, you shrug, figure your assumptions are wrong, and start over. In physics you announce the splendiferous wonders of the universe.

Yes you must. Everyone should want to be like Elon Musk.

A quick collapse of the price would be best for everyone, except for the "muppets" who bought FB shares in the IPO. Especially for Facebook, who would otherwise see an exodus of employees who can make more in terms of vesting credit at companies whose share price does go up. I do think a market cap of >$50 billion is sustainable based on the size of the warchests at Microsoft and Apple. If they could only ever buy one company, it would be Facebook.

Not wrong. Facebook and the investors that sold stock in the IPO got $38*the number of shares. Whatever happens after the IPO is essentially irrelevant to them, except their remaining shares have gone down in market price. That probably doesn't hurt much if you realize that a day earlier there was no market price, and you got a great deal on the shares you did sell. Morgan Stanley is probably also not being harmed in this transaction (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenshoe ). They do have reason to support the IPO price level. Otherwise, it will be much harder for them to find investors for the next Internet IPO, which means lower prices, which means lower underwriter fees.

The people on the wrong end of the deal are those that bought Facebook shares pre-IPO or in the hours after the IPO. The people on the right end are all early Facebook investors selling shares and the underwriters.

The catch is: that is not true.

touché

I always wonder what obvious truth about the universe we fail to see because of just such an event in our past.

Actually, I think information theory is the only branch of science that has something genuinely useful to say about computers. Unfortunately, it has few people working on it in the context of computer systems. The world is dying for useful models of (real) CPUs and complex networks based on information theory, but that's not really happening. Computer "scientists" rather spend their time building example systems that no one will ever use, or creating theoretical models that have no connection to reality. No idea what the purpose of either is.

I think the world record in questionable speculation was broken here.

End of the article: "PS: Amazon was nice enough to refund the bandwidth charges, as they considered this activity accidental and not intentional. Thanks TK!"

What if Facebook is now being used by nearly all Internet users? Should you expect it to keep growing? No. Is it bad for business? Hell no.

Probably something like that. One problem with the Public folder is that people can easily guess URLs to files you might not want to share with them. I recall http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1/test.png used to show a wireframe for the Dropbox Desktop client.

This has been possible using the Dropbox API for quite a while now. Is the announcement that they added it to the context menu?

Sure, many software engineers are over their creative prime by the time they hit 40 and move into management, training, recruiting, etc. With 15-20 years experience in the complexities of software engineering under the belt, they are probably pretty good at it. What does that have to do with English majors?

Stowe was just speaking at AWS summit, lots of AWS goodness there: http://aws.amazon.com/live/

"80% of the funds collected are dispersed to the software vendor and AWS Marketplace charges a service fee of 20%."

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/help/200904140/ref=help_l...

Nginx 0.8 with support. Sure, 1.0.15 would be better, but enterprises generally care more about support than about having the latest version (see Red Hat).

So suddenly you can have managers telling their sysadmins they've set up a new SQL server? That's pretty big.

"Everything is worth what its purchaser is willing to pay for it"

I think the simultaneous rise of successful social networks like Facebook played an incredibly large role in making people want to have the Internet with them all the time.

Seems like sarcasm.

Works for me in Ireland.

I don't think SpaceX is really seeking attention. They don't depend on consumers or the aerospace industry at large. Musk certainly doesn't strike me as the kind of person who craves attention. The interview on the Daily Show was the first I had ever seen with him.

It's not like they built new DCs, networks, and fleet management tools for EC2 hosts. It's all running in the same computing environment.

Literally kill? I certainly hope not.

At this point, Instagram's primary value is in its brand. I never used it, but heard about it so many times that I was under the impression it had been around for years. It might have 30 million uploaders, but hundreds of millions of people are aware of it. For an 18-month brand that is perhaps the most meteoric rise in history. If you consider WPP's brand value estimates (Apple $153 billion, Google $112 billion, Facebook $19 billion), the number might not be so weird.

It seems to be the way of the world. The Google Cloud Storage API is an exact copy of the S3 API. If you can't beat them, join them.