josephby

I've been using Pipedrive (http://bit.ly/1kpPlYZ - my referral link) for over a year now. Nice integration with Google Calendar and great mobile Apps.

“The court’s intervention is now necessary to restore clarity and certainty in this area and to prevent the unraveling of marketplace built upon the licensing of rights rather than the expropriation of such rights through technological chicanery,' the brief states."

The hypocrisy of an industry built, in large part, on the suppression of fair use rights through "technological chicanery" is amazing. I just threw up in my mouth a little.

"Yahoo filed suit in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) this morning demanding the right to publicly disclose the number of user data requests that we receive from the U.S. Government under national security statutes."

This is either a first step or a smokescreen, depending on how one looks at it. It's good to know "the number" in order to determine the scope of the problem. It would be better if service providers could actually stop governments from using overly-broad requests to go after user data of indeterminate intelligence-fighting value.

...and then you can depend on the kindness of strangers to fund that wonderful journalism.

Alternate title: "Attention Silicon Valley: Office and Windows are Not Quite Dead Yet"

Thanks; so basically if you bork your box your options are (1) netboot, and failing that (2) reinstall the OS. Reasonable enough, for the price. I suppose that this is why we have Chef and Puppet

Too many secrets.

Nonsense. This is why we pay taxes. #getoffmylawn :)

Anyone try this yet? Do they include any sort of remote console access?

This also explains why we're seeing services like KISSmetrics, Dropbox for Teams, etc. moving to annual, pre-paid pricing rather than monthly with free versions

It's interesting that many of these businesses are basically real estate holding companies. I wonder how many of these businesses are just tax-minimization or financing schemes used by larger companies for things like deferred compensation?

Coming to the valet parking area of a Moscow Night Club near you.

Having lived in SF and worked on the peninsula for 5 years, I can say that a lot of the earthquake proofing stuff is bunk.

Even if one agreed that limiting building heights to 10 stories significantly reduced quake-related casualties, there are plenty of places around San Francisco that should have higher-density buildings -- I'm looking at you, Mountain View.

This article appears to conflate individual and household incomes.

"The IRS reports that the highest wage in the bottom half of earners is about $34,000. To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four."

The article seems to incorrectly equate household and family incomes. For example, if that bottom half includes people in dual earner households, then some of those who have an income of $34,000 are likely in households with incomes that are well above the poverty line.

One thing that the author omitted: "empty" apartments can be furnished and rented out on airbnb, letting landlords run lucrative unlicensed hotels. I have to imagine that there's some crafty service provider out there who lets landlords outsource the whole messy business of listing properties on airbnb, maintaining a social identify, distributing keys, collecting rent, and getting the place cleaned between visitors. If not, I smell a market opportunity.

I was also surprised by how misleading FB's ad metrics can be. They'll happily quote advertisers a "cost per click," except that most of those clicks keep users in Facebook.

Spot on. If you start with the wrong metrics, and blindly chase any metric, you're on the road to disaster.

The adoption of commodity apps is now completely driven by fashion. There's no "best" photo sharing or video sharing App - what you use (snapchat vs. instagram vs. facebook vs. flicker vs. 500px...) is completely dependent on your sense of taste, and how the App is perceived by your peers and in the culture.

There is no "best" social network in the same sense that there's no "best" pair of jeans for everyone.

Optimizely is a fantastic product; no doubt it creates a lot of value for its customers. That said, it's very difficult for tool vendors (Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely, Unbounce, etc.) to capture a lot of that value. This deal makes sense in so far as Google, Adobe, etc. will need to buy up all the players in this space so as to beef up their advertising or web tool offerings.

I can't help but think that they should have left some of those tanks in, say, Poland, just to keep Putin honest. Just' sayin.

"Taxation: How do governments collect taxes on transactions in Bitcoin? The answer is they don't, and they can't."

Grossly misleading.

You tax something at the point at which it gets exchanged into an externally viewable good or service. If either party refuses to disclose the value of the transaction, then the state just assigns one and uses its monopoly on force to collect.

That said, an increasing dependence on opaque stores of value would likely shift taxation away from income and towards consumption.

One less reason to ever leave your apartment.

Touche. :)

Nice; pickydomains is another good site to crowdsource names with available domains. Using Mechanical Turk and Soundcloud to test for "spellability" is brilliant. That said, in an age of omnipresent search, and social distribution, I wonder if spellability is much less important than it was ca. 2000.

"A well-managed company’s workers want to be productive, and managers trust them to decide how and where they will perform best. If that’s not happening, the boss needs to find out why. You can shackle a Yahoo to his desk, but you can’t make him feel the buzz."

Amen.

As a former Yahoo who now leads a distributed team that works from home, I feel that this article is spot on. Telecommuting isn't the problem; the problem is poor management that has allowed many employees - both onsite and remote - to remain at the company despite consistently mediocre performance.

That said, fixing the management problem will take time; calling everyone into the office, and keeping them there, is a short term fix to at least make the unproductive employees more visible so that they can be dealt with quickly.

Objectively, not that large :) ~100MB CAD drawings for instance.

Oh, so THAT's why the power went out at the Super Bowl.

The headline is bogus; UW was never "BlackBerry Focused." If anything, the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering programs sent a disproportionate number of graduates to Microsoft, IBM, and (eventually) Google through the '90's and early 2000s. BlackBerry looms large because of proximity, but its very misleading. I can't help but think that the New York Times would've noticed this if they'd looked at the recruiting numbers.

I've never heard of this before, but it's absolute crap. I'd take five minutes and fill out the the FCC complaint form at http://www.fcc.gov/complaints (choose Wireless Telephone > Billing, Service, Privacy ... > Online Form). Send them back a letter with the bill (including the reference number that the FCC gave you). The correspondence will be handy if they ever try to cut you off or send you to collections.

It's amazing how Slamming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_slamming) refuses to die.

From the company:

"As part of our major investment in next-generation infrastructure project within our SaaS facilities we began in the fall of 2012, many changes to our environment were required as part of our migration into this new environment.

One of these changes required a sophisticated process of migrating data to our new enterprise storage solution. We made a decision that it would serve our clients best to migrate this data over time, with the help of our vendors using technologies purpose-built for live migration. This methodology prevented the requirement for long, multi-day maintenance windows due to the large volumes of file data that need to be transferred. Effectively this “file virtualization” technology (“ARX”) would allow the seamless use of both source and destination storage during the migration with no impact to users.

The issues currently being experienced have been determined to exist within the ARX technology. We are currently seeing different impact to different customers. For customers whom we had yet to begin the migration of their data, or for customers for whom we had completed the process, we were able to remove the ARX solution from their environment, resulting in a complete restoration of service.

For customers who are in midst of their data migration, the ARX cannot be removed, and we have initiated a separate restoration process that applies to a portion of customers. This process involves a configuration change to the internal format of metadata within the ARX. This change has shown to have a positive impact on the clients for whom this process has completed. However, this configuration change takes time to process, and we are targeting noon EST today for completion with clients seeing ongoing improvements as it makes progress."

Full contents here -- http://desire4community.com/all-hands-on-deck/

I admire the fortitude it takes to try doing a live migration for something like this; in hindsight, I'm sure everyone agrees that a well-scheduled maintenance outage isn't the worst thing that can happen. Here's hoping that all of the schools recover quickly. Good luck guys.