josephcooney

I think Best Buy and co. do that to prevent them having to make good on "price matching" promises - everyone sells a different model (that really only differs by the model number), so since no-one sells "the same" model they can SAY they price-match without ever actually having to. I believe they do this for TVs too.

GCHQ are probably pretty far ahead of the game as far as disinformation goes. Consider what the UK government did to cover up operation overlord.

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

I seem to recall a story where they put fake plans in the pocket of an army coat, which they put on a recently deceased person dressed in full military uniform (of military service age), and then strategically dumped it where they knew the germans would find it. Or maybe that was just a spy movie I watched.

To be fair, the company executing on Labour's vision - NBNCo - was also going much slower than originally projected too.

Not the first time this has caught people out. (slightly NSFW) http://www.messandnoise.com/discussions/4112452

I refuse to believe some of these are "accidental".

What's the difference?

From your description that sounds very similar to NGEN-ing your .NET apps during install time, which is a bit fiddly but one .NET deployment option.

Would the actions of the founder's partner have been excusable/understandable either way? I don't think so, and if not then it isn't relevant (IMO).

The C# compiler targets the CLR (a virtual machine), so doesn't need to be re-targeted. They had/have commercial versions of the CLR for ARM (.NET Compact Framework), x86, x64 and Itanium. They probably also have one for PowerPC for running XNA games on xbox 360. Porting the BCL to a target platform, and building a static linker is probably more of a task though.

How is it relevant to the story?

Looks like google has succeeded in comoditizing their ccompliments, which their competitor (Microsoft) used to be able to make money off. If I were MS I'd be trying to figure out how to launch a free competitor to adwords.

It CAN be like Java or .NET if you build on top of it with packaged apps, or it can be like the new C runtime if you statically compile bits of chrome in to your application, as a 'stack' that you build on, which is what the author is describing.

This is from the same team that brought us the 'scroogled' campaign? I doubt they know what Rap Genius is....

Fetching information from a data store of some kind, and presenting it as a web page would be a good one.

I think VB3 had all that too.

I liked at the 21:00 minute mark how he was telling us how awesome faxes were. Surely iOS could do more with faxes.

Couldn't resist. http://vimeo.com/17346855

Edna is, without a doubt, my favourite character in this movie. And one of my favourites of all time. The short film "jack-jack attack" is also very good. I think I enjoy that almost as much as the full movie.

I absolutely agree with your position re: property etc, but for how many generations has the practice you're describing (keeping your surname after marriage) been common for, though? One...maybe.

This seems like "cryptanalysis, circa 1600".

Or C# http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+groovy%2C+clojure...

Yep. Someone should remove the word 'global' from the HN title. I don't think it means what they think it means.

Have you read "The Man in the High Castle" by PKD? It kind of deals with this...

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. - Sigmund Freud

I found the one simply entitled 'after' amusing....http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/images/enlarge/00076101...

Is this just a function of the relative popularity of the services?

If you have a C# back-end and a web front-end being able to write validations in this, that can run in both places, is one obvious use-case that I can think of.

I think interpreting Orwell's books literally seems misguided. Animal Farm wasn't _REALLY_ about farm animals...was it.

Increasing the number of points of failure absolutely does increase the chances of failure, even if each 'point' is more reliable. 1 server with a 98% uptime is more reliable than 5 servers with a 99% uptime, if all 5 have to be working for everything to 'work'.

Superfund is an interesting term which I only came across recently in the context it is being used here. In Australia it means something very different - a shorthand for Superannuation Fund.

Have you tried the mercurial command line? I find it very easy to use, it has a low barrier to get entry, and works the same on all platforms.

And Dell often throw in the on-site support option for free for a year or so, if you buy their higher-end models