lelandriordan

I agree that they overpaid but I think you are missing something big: they didn’t buy LI to improve Windows Phone, they bought it to integrate with Outlook and give their Enterprise SAAS products like Dynamics an edge in the war with Salesforce. I work at a financial firm and LI is essential to the long sales process for our applications.

This does not make them middle class. They are choosing to live in the expensive area and thus paying heavily for it. They could move 20 miles outside of the city, commute longer, keep the same high paying job and live in a mansion. The fact that they have a choice is what makes them not in the middle class. They see value in paying the extra cost to live in the expensive area and thus they choose to pay the premium.

People in the true middle class would not have the luxury of choice. They have no option to live in the wealthy area because they are not wealthy.

This article nails it. I remember when Quora first came out, I thought that it was a great idea, like a stack overflow for the masses. Fast forward to now though and I find myself avoiding it at all costs. Quora seems willing to try any and everything to fix itself except for solving its most glaring and obvious problem, its closed ecosystem. On mobile it is ridiculous when you do a search in browser and click a Quora link it forces you to install the app to see the answer. If you do make the mistake of installing the app you are then inundated with useless notifications about things you don't care about. I know that there is good information hidden in there, but its a terrible strategy to make people jump through hoops to access it. Meanwhile Stack Overflow became Stack Exchange with sub-sites for more and more topics thus transforming itself into what Quora could have/should have been in the first place. Its open nature has driven its growth to a top 200 Alexa rank while Quora seems destined to continue its semi-annual pivoting.

While this looks good aesthetically, this is a prime example of needlessly using JavaScript for the hell of it. This is like an anti best practice. It loads 4 extra resources (Angular, Angular Cookie, Angular UI Bootstrap and the custom bootstrap.js) for no legitimate reason. And the CSS is inexplicably written using selectors like the following: "#page-wrapper:not(.active)". Why not target "#page-wrapper" and then "#page-wrapper.active" instead?

This plugin seems to solve a problem and target a market that doesn't exist. It is also dangerous since it relies on WordPress itself being reachable in the event of catastrophe.

WordPress users that aren't developers don't use VMs or update their site's code frequently. Typically they either use simple hosts like Dreamhost/Media Temple or managed hosts like Pressable/WP Engine that already integrate forms of easy backup. If they don't there are a [plethora of backup plugins](http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/free-wordpress-backup-plugin...) and [services](http://vaultpress.com/) that not only cover code but also the DB. And since these novice users rarely change their site's code, they have no reason to use version control in the first place.

At the other end of the spectrum, WordPress developers don't need this either. Git is pre-installed on most VMs and integrated into almost all the major cloud providers and staging sites take 10 minutes to set up. And most importantly they are abstracted from WordPress itself making them way more secure. For example, what if the admin becomes unreachable after a hack? Doesn't this defeat the entire purpose of Versionpress since you won't be able to access the plugin page to revert back? Combining backup and version control together in the WordPress admin is a recipe for disaster.

Lastly, whats the point of raising $30K since this is a premium plugin that's almost done anyway? If the picture isn't a rendering, then it seems like the plugin is already well under development. Isn't this more like a presale?

I know everyone likes to bash MS around here but is there any actual proof of Bitlocker's insecurity that is more recent than 2008? If you look at wikipedia it seems like the only known real vulnerability requires someone with physical access to boot via USB into another OS within a few minutes of turning the computer off. When is this a real risk for anyone? I am not a security expert but unless you are doing things shady enough to get raided by the FBI, it seems like Bitlocker is pretty secure. The same problem occurs in other encryption programs on Linux and OSX. Also, it may not be open source like what we want, but MS lets its partners and enterprise customers audit the code subject to an NDA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitLocker_Drive_Encryption#Secu...

Thats Lenovo's fault not Microsoft's, drivers haven't been a problem in ages. I have both a Macbook Retina and desktop gaming PC. I hand built the PC and all of the drivers automatically downloaded and installed. The only thing I ever did after that was update AMD Catalyst for my 280x's, but that was my choice; it worked fine before I updated. You probably updated to 8.1 before Lenovo updated its drivers or bought an old touchpad that was actually meant for Windows 7 and is no longer supported by them. Touchpad's are also a niche product use case, 99% of users use mice, laptop track-pads or touchscreens. Thus touchpads will never be a priority for driver development teams.

As for the learning curve, have you ever seen a lifetime Windows user try someone else's Mac? Hot Corners drive them absolutely crazy, or they will accidentally pinch to zoom or they will scroll by mistake and not realize whats happening. There is always a learning curve, even in the most user friendly operating systems like iOS. And what actual computer do you have? The problem is people use a $400 Dell and then compare it to a $2000 Retina or $1200 Air. The Surface Pro 3 is a premium Apple like device, and what do you know, early reviews from places like The Verge say its the best possible Windows 8 experience. My Mac and my PC cost about the same, and I love each of them for different reasons. Each OS has its own pros and cons.

As for metro, what are you doing that causes Metro to show up? On my desktop, I have almost never seen it since 8.1 came out. Once you enable boot to desktop and pin your most widely used programs to the taskbar, the only time it ever shows up is when you are looking for a rarely used program. Even then it is actually pretty good when you think of it as nothing more than an advanced start menu replacement. And in the next update MS is making an option to do just that: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2138443/rejoice-the-start-men.... The real problem is Windows doesn't automatically detect what hardware is connected and change the settings to ones like these automatically.

I had the Sidekick/Hiptop 2 back in high school because my mom had T-Mobile through her work. To this day I have not been stopped by more people asking about a device (not even the original iPhone I saved up for as a freshman in college). T-mobile was spotty at best in the DC area so nobody else I knew had it, everywhere I would go people would say things like "It has a browser!?!" or "I thought only Treos and Blackberries had email!?!". It was a sad day when my mom changed companies and we switched to AT&T(aka Cingular). I salute you Danger, I wish there were more small innovative hardware companies like you these days.

I'd never heard of it so I didn't dig too deep but it seems like a VOD site, not a streaming platform. On the homepage there are zero live channels and nothing mentioned about live broadcasting, only VODs. Had you suggested something like MLG.tv or Azubu, actual Twitch competitors, I don't think you would have been down voted.

For years he's been trying desperately to buy an NBA team and bring it back to Seattle to revive the stolen Sonics. So far each time he has tried, (the Sacremento Kings, Minnesota T-wolves, among others) a local billionaire or the hometown has stepped in to deflect his offers.

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/steve-ballmer-nba/

OSX v10.1 came out around the same time and nobody seems to say the same thing about Apple which dropped support years ago. Ubuntu is used by tons of huge corporations and its LTS versions are only supported for 5 years yet nobody blames Canonical. Yes XP runs enterprise but 13 years is more than reasonable to stop support. Its not like MS suddenly dropped this on these companies either, they gave years of warning to them but the companies didn't listen and now blame MS. And if these huge companies are planning their IT infrastructure decades at a time, in an OS industry that is only around 30 or so years old, they need to rethink their strategy and hire a new CTO.

I bet its a lot bigger than you think. For example, you can handle a ton of views on something like WordPress or Ghost with DO's smallest offering. Especially if you use it in combination with caching and and a reverse proxy like Cloudflare.

You can't just take away the pre-built directives as they are a core module of "vanilla Angular" as stated on the front page of the API docs. From controllers (ngController), to models (ngModel), to looping (ngRepeat), to the actual app itself (ngApp), directives are fundamental to using Angular. Taking away core directives would be like taking away selectors from jQuery, or models from backbone; without them, the framework is pretty much useless.

There is a new movement to use Bitcoin nodes to greatly increase the speed of Tor. Its called Toroken. It was just announced this week: http://www.dailydot.com/technology/toroken-tor-bitcoin-anony...

I completely agree. By talking to the guy making the cards and not the boss, you are essentially showing him a product that makes a big part of his value as an employee obsolete. Buying it would be like cutting off a big portion of his value to the company and future as an employee. To his boss however, it could be a huge savings, he saves on wages and he no longer needs someone with good Photoshop skills to do the same job, thus he can probably find someone cheaper.

I am a bitcoin miner and I have made a 8 BTC profit this year taking into account electricity fees. A common misconception is that you need to actually mine bitcoins to mine bitcoins. Instead over the last few months smart miners have been ditching their Bitcoin ASICS and instead have been using old GPU rigs and new scrypt(aka Litecoin) asics to mine through auto profit switching alt-coin pools. These pools automatically mine the most profitable alt-coins like Litecoin and Dogecoin, then take the earnings and automatically trade them on exchanges for Bitcoins. While obviously profits are down compared to last fall, I am still making a nice ROI everyday, even from the very first GPU rig I ever built.

This week CEX/Ghash.io the largest bitcoin mining pool just launched their own auto-switching pool https://ghash.io/MULTI (Warning must sign up through CEX.IO). This will probably be the biggest one soon as its hashrate has tripled today already, but for the last few months the big three have been the following:

http://www.clevermining.com/ http://wafflepool.com/ https://www.scryptguild.com/

This is an always up to date profitability comparison of these pools vs. straight Litecoin mining made by Bitcointalk user Suchmoon: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VOAhFX1XRizdaTp71qnY...

There is no foul play going on, Mercedes planned this from the start. They knew that coming back into the sport they had no chance to catch the dominant Red Bull cars so for the last 5 years the team has been solely focused on developing a car for this season's rule changes. Mercedes intentionally made the decision to have a worse team the last few years to put more money toward R&D for this season. This sacrifice culminated in them having a better designed car than any other team this year with their innovative turbo/compressor placement:

http://www1.skysports.com/f1/news/12472/9243875/revealed-how...

Your engine point is moot, because it is up to the team to implement the supplied engine and there are huge monetary differences between teams. A team buying supplied engines is always at a disadvantage in terms of time and design because they didn't design the engines. They have to adapt their car to the engine, while the manufacturer team can develop both in concert. Its similar to Android vs. the iPhone, Apple's products use similar parts but the experience was better because its OS and hardware were developed together, instead of hooked together at the end like Android phones. Also, F1 is not fair in terms of money. Manufacturing teams, Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes etc, have R&D budgets multiple times the size of the smaller teams. Even though, Force India buys Merc engines, they have a fraction of the budget to figure out how to optimize it, and terrible drivers in comparison.

Yes. MS said that they would match any AWS price change.

Please do Flywheel next time too

The same reason that the US Dollar (a piece of paper) is worth over 10x more than a South African ZAR (also a piece of paper)

Apple's 30% cut

I have used Bing for years as my primary search engine simply because of Bing rewards. MS essentially pays me to do search (I get about $10 in Amazon gift cards a month from Bing Rewards Gold). At first I found myself first searching on Bing and then going back to Google. Over time however as I have made tens of thousands of searchs, Bing pretty much nails what I want everytime. It took like a year but the gap is pretty much closed. Now I feel like Google's are a little worse because they have way less data and Bing has way more.