mabhatter

The barn door is about to be wide open in this one. When private App Stores hit on iPhone because of the recent-pending legislation, you're going to have no control at all over what developers do with your data because you'll have 12 different App Store EULAs on your devices.

This is about letting you use a biometric token like YubiKey to authenticate your account.

You comment hits the core of the "problem". Traditionally What "China" wants has been 100% decided by its rulers.. While the people were TOLD what they wanted. Even now China's rulers think about what's useful for their minions to manufacture for outsiders with near contempt that their own people may want something.

A good microcosm of this is iPhone. It took four years for the government to bless iPhone for Chinese people to use... Even though it is nearly 100% made by Chinese people in China. That rigid disparity between what people of a country WANT and what they MAKE doesn't exist like it does in China anywhere else. That's what makes China such a tough nut to crack.. The near absolute control of what the people are "allowed" to like and buy.

My town is on an aggressive knock-down strategy as well. One problem they ran into was people trying to "save" houses on the chopping block after the tax sale. Since then they are clearly tagging the houses where the PROPERTY is for sale but the HOUSE is condemned.

In certain neighborhoods, the city wants the excess houses GONE. They don't want them fixed up and barely hanging on.. The city wants to collect enough empty lots that NEW BUILDING is worth while... And just sit on empty lots until then.

The problem for somebody like this owner.. When is he city happy to take your tax sale money but leave the block on their "knock-down" list.. And why isn't the list more public.. Who's getting benefits of knocking Dow YOUR HOUSE but not others?

The B-2 bomber pilots are closer to computer hackers... Hacking is long hours spent quietly trolling for marks and acquiring programs and contacts for your "bag of tricks".. With a few hours of frantic planting the hooks and grabbing what you can before the connection is cut. Ideally, you're like the bomber pilots.. The first time you get noticed is when the bombs are going off and you're already got the data.

How about Polos and Kakis?

It begs the question "where the hell is my tuition going?"

I was taking at a private "degree mill" part time classes at $180 per credit hour. The school required 7 students to teach a 4 credit class during normal hours. So at the minimum number of students the school was just making enough money for overhead... Most clases were 10-15 students. It was a private school, so tuition covered almost all their bills, no state funding.

Now ask where sutdents in State Funded Colleges money is going when there are 50 students (and more!) in a class? Where the hell is the undergrad tuition money going if the school only pays "minimum wage" for adjunct or grad school staff?? Where is State and Federal dinging going if Undergrads are paying more than their share of the university bills? It's not gping to TEACHING... And it's not going to "student contact" professors either, and its not "healthcare" or "retirement"... There's a giant money hole in the system.

Lets take alcohol away from everybody that claims Social Security!!!

I cannot wait til we can sin-tax old people because they are on Social Security!!!

You still write the council and get permission.. You just have yo "buy your place in line" from somebody that already has one.

They trashed Mach and Rapsody and bought out NEXT to get Steve back full time. OSX is mostly updated NEXT, right down to Objective C and API names.

Earth isn't entirely self sufficient and needs light from an external source....

It's working in the same constraints the origins ed evolved for... Just smaller

Bingo. Airlines have most of the commercial piloting jobs. The BIGGEST provider of employees is the US Military. A civilian pilot just doesn't stand a chance in that market versus kids that come out of service with 8+ years of high quality military training and thousands if hours of heavy duty piloting experience. (And the military wasn't paying them much over $16k anyway) There are FAR MORE entry level pilots (which takes $50k of civilian school and practice) than there are jobs to go around.

This article is painfully wrong.

The motivating factor for airline wages is experience, and availability of airplanes to fly. Experienced pilots come primarily from the US military. For a civilian trying to get into that market you are essentially a liability the first five years of flying. Military guys come out with 8-20 years experience... And thousands of hours, And Uncle Sam paid all their practice time. As a civilian you are only worth $16k per year because that's what the military pays junior flyers. (Which sucks because jet instruction is hundreds of dollars per practice hour to fly the smallest little Lear, easily $20k out of pocket) There are are only a fixed number of jets in commercial service.. There are far more entry level pilots than available jobs, several times over.

At the Top end, the number of qualified pilots thins out dramatically... It takes thousands of flight hours and hundreds of instruction hours. So those pilots are worth $300k... Probably more except a fair number of them would be living off Military retirements.. Which forces wages below the actual cost of acquiring the skills.

Commercial piloting is an MLM scheme... Lots of people are willing to work for crap wages just to get wings and a shot at the bigger planes you can ONLY get from airlines. There is zero leverage for new employees.

Also, if airline are only paying pilots 5% of operating expenses, then pilot wages were NEVER the problem... They're just easy to blame. If you are running a business so close to the red you cannot have 5% wiggle room your business model has far bigger problems than Unions wanting slightly better wages. Blaming the employees because you cannot pay a fair wage is just being a pussy of a business owner.

The performance is in the SYSTEM architecture. Even a mid sized POWER box can address Hundreds of gigs of RAM, Petabytes of direct attached disk and rooms full of tape stored data. You can make an x86 box do that, but it's not really supported at the "plug bits and go" level. You put POWER boxes in place and don't reboot them for years. (Unless you are smart and do your HA/DR tests like a good kid)

For example a Google plays around with racks of disposable X86 boards like candy. When their app becomes "fixed" rather than growing exponentially, they'll want to move to something like POWER because it's DESIGNED to work with dozens of CPUs sharing Petabytes of attached disk easily. Not the silly kludges like Blades, SANS or iSCSI or virtual machines people play with now to hide x86 OS vendor scaling limitations.

This sucks.

It means IBM doesn't want to do HARD engineering anymore. They just want to do sales and handling of stuff for high markup. This is the last really cool thing to go before the finish dismantling that former technical giant.

POWER was never about flops/watt it was about the IBM ecosystem. It's calling in for support on your hardware/software and getting elevated to somebody in the same department that will actually write the fix. It's having actual field engineers that went to the factory and learned how the stuff is put together. It was never cheap... But it was good.

ibm's POWER hardware is the last of the "old iron" lines. X86 stuff just doesn't hold a candle in the "well built" category. My company went from an "open platform" IBM solution back to old fashioned POWER hardware because it was just better built and the "open" platform just resulted in finger pointing between BLADE, SAN, LAN, and OS people... And that was IBM support with their name on the box.. When it's truly mixed support it's going to be very terrible.

It's not like AIX or System i will ever get ported to non-IBM machines for better value. It's not like Apple is gonna dust off OSX and let me build racks of POWER servers either. Betting on "Linux" is a cop out. People use Linux on POWER when they have investments in POWER iron for their mainline business apps.. ROG, COBOL, etc.. And they don't want to pay AIX/enterprise licensing for web/email servers.

This is just the "last call" to show they tried to let the world love them more... And nobody will come. Then they close it down.

Intel was almost dumb enough to put those on the used manufacturing line from x86 chips... Almost. Then Intel "knifed the baby" by moving those designers to Atom and selling off their ARM stake... At one point StrongARM was the top of the hobbiest Boards available, long before Raspberry got their idea.

there's a fundamental problem here if the "CTO" can talk down to an owner like that. Obviously YOU didn't hire the CTO, because he doesn't see YOU as his boss. There's already another conversation with this guy that you weren't part of. for sanity sake, get a lawyer to claw back what you can, and cut anchor at the next funding round. If you're straight forward that you want out then that might even make the new funders feel better. Just be sure to drop hints that this CTO needs to be cut out of ownership....

but the CTO wouldn't be saying that unless there was another "conversation" out there. Why is this guy CTO anyway while a Co-owner is left at coder? You don't bring somebody in as "CTO" without a promise of a cut of the pie... and that cut is going to come from you obviously.

That's the way OSX is RIGHT NOW. As a User I can run any program I want and mucky-muck my crap up. But Apps from the Mac App Store live in neat little bundles and are forbidden to do the mucking around in OS bits. So the OS is an "appliance" that I can just replace at a whim. If I go off the tracks to load apps that NEED to overwrite OS space, then I know who did it.

Personally, I but App Store versions whenever possible and I have next to zero problems with my Macs an order of magnitude less than my locked down PC at work even. VERY few apps need to color outside the lines and I like the push for them to explain themselves or get blasted by the next OS update.

But they used recycled connectors as a way of using the legal argument their product was a "customer modification" of a licensed and paid for product. You sent them YOUR charger and they modified it to work with their device.

They STILL got shut down by Apple because the Mag Safe also used circuitry inside the brick that they "hacked" to make their brick work like.. Basically DRM and DMCA for power bricks shut them down.

Not really... Because companies in Silicon Valley poach employees on purpose to interrupt other companies. It's a real problem in a lot of industries.

I'd note you don't see Microsoft in this because they stayed in Washington and bought employment laws they like. So they can force employees to sign non-competes in Seattle while they poach from California that won't allow companies to do that.

Working in an auto state, I've seen that in other industries and it's actually kind of sickening. In the auto industry it's in bad taste to do that. Many auto suppliers have no-poaching in their business contracts. Which ties up a lot of the industry because everybody does business with everybody. As an EMPLOYEE you can apply to another job, but recruiters aren't allowed to cold-call between companies.

I've worked in an office where we would get cold call agents during work. They'd call all the extensions in the office and it was just offensive being put on the spot like that. I can't imagine working at Apple or Google and getting calls like that... And the work environment becomes "awkward" for the rest of the day because everybody knows everybody got a call... There's nothing good about that type of hiring practice.

The bigger problem is that these companies all want "rockstars" at age 22 AND ones that will be "company men".

Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs would get in the DOOR at a tech company today. They didn't finish college... Or the RIGHT college. Their own companies would buy their startup and boot them.

It's a culture of childishness that they have so much money and resources they don't have to value WISDOM that employees might bring. In fact they actively ROOT OUT those employees in their hiring processes.. That's why all the games.. They don't want employees that won't play. They have myopic NIH syndrome hard.

America car companies issue recalls all the time. That is what's getting Toyota in trouble from the start. A company I worked for was involved in those decisions made with days of discovering a slightly wrong raw material grade was shipped. Because that wrong part didn't meet the spec and MIGHT cause a problem in the part after it wore down five years from now. They paid for testing and proved the raw material was equivalent in performance and didn't have to recall. But it happened in days/weeks long before the parts would have had any failures.

American companies took to using recalls as "preventive" measures decades ago. They learned to have a lot of them without the government forcing them so that the really nasty ones get buried in the shuffle and the mechanic just replaces the parts he's told...

Toyota fought the government hard every step of the way, even in making the design materials and manufacturing information hauled off to Japan... mostly because the pedal issue already had large lawsuits before Toyota even acknowledged looking at the problem. If they issued a recall, all that was going to hit the lawsuit train.... Not to mention in Japan companies just don't get hauled over the coals like this... They thought they'd fight it.

The big thing is that developers move to "adult" companies. The pay is less, but they get to act like grown ups, take vacations, have families... Sure the work is more boring. Who doesn't love EDI or Factory planning!!! But getting those business skills down and implementing what the accountants want is like 50% of "computer" jobs that mostly are never, ever advertized.

I'm 40 and still looking at more school and something to keep busy another 20 years after the kids move out.

I was explaining to my kids he other day this great silly game and they already knew what it was. The first thing they said was people play that all the time at school. The top reviews are "tounge in cheek" to the addictiveness of the game.

And you needed to kick people off after a certain point so others could use it.

"Essentially, we're back to where we were with video arcades, before consoles at home gave us unlimited play."

you just nailed it... most of these companies executives were alive in the time of arcades... they all LOVED the play per quarter model. Most of the big companies have backdoors into Vegas gambling as well... keep you pulling that lever.. that's their BUSINESS. The idea that you played the games for just one bit of money was always a temporary thing.

to be fair, you have to make the game for the market. If the market will only bear $2 then you need to make a simpler game... not "play the horses" that you can beat them into spending more money. That's why the App Store and Mac market in general was full of much smaller game companies for so long. People were putting "more love than money" into games. But along come the big companies that want to sink half a million dollars and then complain that they won't get it back. that's not reasonable expectations... but they're too rich to be told that.

for me though the evidence of intent is in having $39 and $99 level tiers. There's no way to expect that to ever be "reasonable" for a mobile game. I could go with up to about $20 in IAP. For instance the Settlers of Catan iPad game is rather expensive at $9 up front with expansions at $2 - $3 each that match the paper version of expansions and you can easily sink $20 in to get all the pieces, but you don't NEED all the pieces to play the same game that's in the paper version box. Many other games do a very fine job of using it to unlock new "expansions" as they add extra additional effort to the game every few months. Those ultra expensive tiers are nothing but "click bait" to see if children and/or stupid people will "just pay it".

I did half to laugh that the reviewer clearly never played games like farmville. That worked out really well with it's timers and everybody checking in a few times a day to manage their items. so he's a little overreacting. That said, this new game looked really nice but I won't be buying...and I was already skeptical because it's EA. EA has plugged $50 games with this kind of stuff. I wasn't really holding my breath here. I don't want to play "dungeon-ville" I want to play an RTS.

The problem is that somebody could probably put this together for say $20 without using servers at all. But the App store buyers are so stingy with expensive games, only really established games like Final Fantasy can get away with more than $10. So they have to have some other way to get the $20 or even $10 or they can't make ANY GAME to sell you because they have bosses.