TimGebhardt

There's evidence that bigger and bigger banks don't achieve more efficiency: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/10/big-banks-are-not-mor...

Except that Tim Cook has said on shareholder calls that they have more cash than they know what to do with. At that point they should distribute more to shareholders.

Seconded. My wife takes our twin two year olds to the library twice a week for library story time and to play with the gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine. Both my wife and my kids like seeing their friends (and nobody has to get snacks or clean up their house for an afternoon playdate).

For the newest versions of Windows (Server 2012, Windows 8) .NET comes installed -- I forget if it's installed by default or installs as a Windows component. If it's the latter you install it from the same screens you install IIS or the SMTP server from.

After you install it updates to the .NET framework show up in the "optional" windows updates.

There are certainly standalone installers as well: http://www.microsoft.com/net/download

But if you're producing client-side software that's dependent on the .NET framework then you most certainly will make your installer "bootstrap" the installation of the correct framework for your OS language and hardware.

Funny coming from the guy who said he'd shut down Apple and return all the money to shareholders: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html

How's that Apple company doing anyway? :)

That's all fine and well for people like us that don't necessarily do hard labor for 30-40 years. But those that have to do physical labor aren't actually living longer. The rise in life expectancy is due to a fall in infant death rates and the wealthy living longer because they have access to really good health care.

According to my recruiter's stats he told me that 93% of those that accepted counter-offers from their original company were looking for a job again within 6 months. The two scenarios were a) The company extended the counter offer to keep the employee long enough to carry out the contingency plan (i.e. hire someone to take his place and then fire the guy who they couldn't count on to stick around) or b) all the reasons why the guy wanted to quit are still there, except maybe the money one -- and rarely does someone quit solely over money. People will deal with less money if they love getting up and going to work in the morning.

Moore's law was simply an observation or a prediction about the computing market at that time: That the number of transistors on a chip would need to double every 18 months if the chip manufacturers hoped to get people to buy the next gen. He argued that people/companies wouldn't upgrade their existing equipment for a measly 10-50% increase in performance. They'd need to double performance if they wanted to get rapid turn over to the next generation of products.

He's with another woman that he met online and married six weeks after his divorce was final. Now he's not paying any child support. http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-from-war...

We do know what happened to the father according to previous blog posts: http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-from-war... tl;dr; he left her for some woman he met online and married her six weeks after his divorce was complete. And now he doesn't pay the soccer mom child support and is engaging her in a grueling custody battle.

Funny, not much of a father to mention.

Then down the line the smart people from those firms can disrupt the existing players at their own game or a new game when the current-elite get lazy or can't innovate. That's how the market's supposed to work.

Summary: Author hopes we don't find life on Mars because if it's dead that provides an ill omen for the human race. He thinks if life on Mars wasn't sustainable then he repeats the whole argument that there must be some reason why advanced civilizations can't manage to get off the original rock they're assigned to and that's why we haven't seen any other intelligent life.

Just replace it with Smarch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RCs2RKiLlA http://simpsonswiki.net/wiki/Smarch "Smarch is the thirteenth month of the year, according to Springfield Elementary School calendars. It has 28 days."

I think OOP really took off in industry because it was easy to sell third-party modules. You could "plug in" this module that you purchased and it was easy to hook up. Markets have a way of doing that: the solution that wins isn't necessarily the "best" solution but the one that's easiest to sell.

The classic name for the "Keep moving the extremes so people's opinion converge on the gradually moving middle" is called the Overton window and politicians try to employ it all the time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Well don't forget that they were doing tablets all the way back in 2002. They just didn't have the foresight or guts to revamp the ecosystem around it. So the tablets didn't work because they needed to take advantage of the existing mouse-based Windows ecosystem of software, most of which was just too cumbersome to use on a tablet with a stylus.

It took the internet about 10 years to really take off too and there were a lot of visionaries in the early 90s that just couldn't survive until the hockey stick growth really started to take off and validate their assessments.

For a while it was because they had pre-purchased all of their fuel at 2000ish oil prices using long-term futures contracts. The bet turned out to be extremely lucrative for them. However, most of their contracts are either expired or set to expire soon so I expect their prices to revert to the mean.

They do a couple of other clever things, like only fly a single type of plane to take advantage of economies of scale, and only fly out of airports that have cheaper gate licensing fees. But the futures contracts really helped them through the industry's rough patch so that they could expand and aggressively grow while their competitors were declaring bankruptcy.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1074147,00....

So... the takeaway is to stop adding bugs to programs you write? Heh, I've been trying to do that since day 1.

Seriously, now, it appears that experts are more akin to taking the scientific method approach to debugging: isolate and bisect down to the point of the bug. Novices just haphazardly change stuff until stuff appears to work.

I think a lot of us can think of friends and co-workers who fit these profiles.

Because other companies don't announce news on Friday at 4:00pm...

Or because the White House doesn't make important news announcements on Christmas Eve when nobody's paying attention...

I don't think this is a Zynga dick-move. I think this is a typical company move to bury a non-flattering story.

Hmm, my comments don't really reflect this, but I agree with you. I think the end result of a system like this would be that software patents would be next-to-nothing worthless and people just wouldn't bother, except perhaps in the cases of truly innovative works of software (I can't even think of any worth patenting right now...).

Would Apple really file their rubber-band scrolling patent at a value of $1bil, then pay some multiple of that per year when it's so easily avoided by their competitors? Probably not.

And if they do then more power to them. But it would put an upper bound of the amount of silly patents that a single large company could file and maintain (think IBM, MSFT, Apple, etc). Right now it costs a company hardly nothing to file all these and maintain them but they have a huge potential upside if your competitor steps on that patent landmine.

- Chicago: 12:00 PM (Noon)

Maybe they were all AS400 admins that really have nowhere else to go?

@andrewcooke: There is an analogous situation to property taxes though -- Rezoning a property. If you can acquire land zoned for something cheaper like residential or agriculture and get the city to re-zone it to commercial it's almost always worth a lot more. Overnight the property is worth a lot more and the property taxes will jump, so you'll either need to get the money to develop it yourself or sell it off to a developer who can do so.

And as far as the cost of entry, there are countless fields where patents could only conceivably be filed by someone with a lot of capital: auto, aerospace, medical, pharma, etc. There are certainly lone inventors working in these spaces trying to file patents but it's unlikely they're working on stuff where you need access to enormous wind tunnels or a medical testing population.

EDIT TO ADD: And aren't we as software developers going on and on about how software patents are worth anything? The cost of entry isn't very high at all and therefore they'd be worthless. Patents were supposed to protect the little guy from losing his large up-front research and development costs to the big established guys.

I would also love to have 1 sq mile of land in downtown Manhattan on which to develop a high-rise.

But I'm just a little guy. The darn property tax system is set out to screw me.

This is really the whole reason that corporations were invented: so that people could pool their resources together to achieve things that a single person could not achieve. In fact, they used to just be temporary and when the original stated project on the charter was complete then the corporation disbanded.

If a little guy company wants to own a patent under this scheme either a) they have to file the patent with a lower value so they can make the annual "property tax" but that may cap their wins in the future if it's infringed on. or b) get funding from investors to make the property tax payments. Or c) sell or license the patent to a larger entity that could benefit from it. In the case of (c) if it's truly as valuable as they say it is to the patent office then they should be able to find a suitable buyer.

Flat capped taxes on things produce market inefficiencies such as you see in the domain name arena: It costs very little to hold onto things that might be valuable one day. If instead there was a sliding scale to renew a domain based on it's value then you wouldn't really see domain squatters. They'd be forced to sell their domains to someone that could make more productive use out of the resource. Same with land and property taxes. And maybe the same for patents? I kind of like this idea.

From high horse: Well one more reason Android is better than iOS.

Coming down from high horse: Oh crap, my phone's software is programmed by an advertising company...

Conclusion: My life is being bought and sold out of my control.

Maybe because he played a US president in a movie about a meteor hitting the Earth?

Great, now I've got the Mythbusters intro running in my head like an earworm... I reject your reality and substitute my own.

You're talking about Dunbar's Number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

"Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150."

Or if you're really brave you could just replace the 72-pin reader:

http://www.amazon.com/Nintendo-NES-Cartridge-Slot-Replacemen...

https://nuxx.net/wiki/NES_72-Pin_Edge_Connector_Replacement

I did it on mine in college -- and then I did it for my suite-mate after he noticed that I never had any problems with my NES -- and then I did it for everyone on my floor who had an NES... :) Works like brand new.

How am I missing the point? You make it sound like the marketing was really innovative, whether or not the product was (it was a great product that could speak for itself, you're absolutely right). It (the marketing) was different and fresh for the period of time, same as the product.

I'm not saying that the iPhone isn't innovative or that it's success is solely due to clever marketing. I'm saying I'm getting tired of these threads where people think that Steve Jobs heard the word of God like Muhammad and recorded his schematics and source code and the iPhone came right out of left field. It was a combination of a great product, at the right time, with the right sales pitch. All of us would be so lucky as to find the product-trifecta.