tybris

I now own over a dozen books that are more expensive than a Kindle.

Yep. They're betting on Facebook and that might cost them. Business is about taking risks and the job of the people at the top is to assess those risks, and they're usually in a better position to do so than anyone else.

In the businesses that I've worked for we always took rational decisions based on the numbers, feedback from customers, our capacities, deals, etc. If you know those things, the vast majority of business decisions that companies take are really quite understandable.

There are several reasons they might have taken this decision, one might be that it was part of a deal they made with Facebook. Spotify is probably aware that like most websites, they are a fad, and they need a way to survive. They've chosen to become a cleaner fish for a much larger animal that will provide them with food and protection, in return for a valuable service. It's neither a good, nor a bad business decision. It's a rational one.

The problem with going up against Google is that they offer a superior product to end-users for free. I have no doubt that the iPad will remain a superior product to the Amazon Tablet. However, I also have no doubt it will keep costing more than the Amazon tablet. Consumers care about that extra ~$250.

Like Google, the iPad is currently the low-end and the high-end of the market, but unlike Google, it's vulnerable on the low-end. That's where Amazon will attack it and with ~100 million customers, their credit card numbers ready to go, good brand-loyalty, a huge content store, and so much experience in on-line/cloud services that even Apple uses them, they'll likely have quite a bit of success.

Did you look that up on Excite or on Altavista?

Why? I don't see the precedent. Android phones are overtaking iPhones. Why wouldn't Android tablets?

50 million very, very quiet users.

By that logic, you would have to open every single port on your firewall if you wanted to set up a web server. Fortunately, your OS just looks at the client IP/port to distinguish multiple TCP streams.

> it's about proving something people need and want, and getting them to pay for it.

HP sells more stuff that people want than almost any other company (printers, desktops, etc.). Yet they're failing.

Successful technology companies (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dell, Oracle) have business and technology interwoven like yin and yang. Business fuels technology, technology drives the business. You get there by building your business and your technology hand in hand. If you stop building, you'll fail on both. That's what you don't learn in an MBA.

Whatever happened, there is one thing we can be sure about: No laws of nature were violated in this experiment.

Because the board in older companies usually consists of people with MBAs from expensive schools who just don't get technology (hint: it's not about cutting costs, it's about building technology).

Meh, this is just about wording.

I fully expect this to be another Java decade, for the following reasons:

1. Android

Java now serves the full stack for mobile apps. The world's largest Internet company, the world's largest on-line retailer, and the world's largest computer manufacturer are all comitted to a Java-based front-end platform.

2. GWT.

Java now serves the full stack for web apps. In the GWT world, writing an application in JavaScript instead of Java is like writing it in Assembler instead of C. In many ways, GWT is still in its infancy, but it is already capable of feats like the Quake 2 port that seem inconceivable in hand-written JavaScript.

3. Google

Google has been a driving force behind the advance of JavaScript over the past few years, but its flagship products have put Java firmly at the centre of its universe. The costly Oracle lawsuit might make them reconsider their course, but would they really after paying $12 billion for Motorola just to protect Android?

4. The cloud

Utility computing will drive an ever-increasing abundance of on-line services that will make desktop applications fade away. While never popular on the desktop, Java is well-established on the back-end and has solutions for most of the practical problems that come up in the cloud. It will be the logical choice for many new cloud-based projects.

5. Platform-independence

As we move towards an ever-increasing heterogeneity of platforms, using a language that is slightly different on each of them is not the way to go. JavaScript has an extremely limited standard library, and no standardized library format, or even a standardized inclusion format. Without plug-and-play libraries, you are doomed to use whatever your platform provides.

6. JavaScript is unsuitable for multi-core.

Multi-core is now the standard, even on mobile devices, yet JavaScript remains inately single-threaded. A parallelized event system could be hacked on top of it, but that brings us back to 5. Java is arguably not well-suited for parallelism, but capable at least. You can ignore multi-core for a while, but only until someone really starts to make you look bad.

7. Abundance of Java tools, libraries, software, books, schools, programmers

This should perhaps be #1, but Java is simply what much of the world knows and uses and you get major leverage from that.

I do think there is a niche for JavaScript becoming a popular scripting language, in favour of Perl, PHP and Bash, which have become outdated due to their focus on local I/O, rather than web I/O. I also think scripting languages are about to become a whole lot more important with the advance of utility computing. Definitely, JavaScript will explode, but the decade will still belong to Java.

The collapse of Lehman brothers was an event that threatened the stability of the global financial system. The default of Greece is a minor nuisance that is mainly relevant because of fear that Italy and Spain might be next.

Actually, 0.39 Lehmans.

Greek debt is around $240 billion and Lehman assets were around $613 billion.

Of course, that number does not even consider that countries only partially and temporarily default, instead of fully and permanently like limited corporations, and that everyone who owns Greek debt has had a generous advance warning. This is really a comparatively minor crisis.

It means they're bankrupt.

Interesting, nice foresight. Remind me of my college days when I could design stuff like DDoS resilient distributed voting systems without the burden of having to build and test it (although I would not have gotten away with that in my MSc thesis), truly understanding the issues, or being in a constant inner-struggle over the purpose of computer science.

Seems like a fair price for a small IT company with a single product and an unpopular subscription model, but in today's market Dropbox should be able to get a better deal.

Why? Most of the contents of these papers have made their way into books and programming languages. There's nothing wrong with getting it from a secondary source.

Apart from whether or not this is fair, I really hate the EU taking any part in this. I know their authority is not well-defined, but in my view they are overreaching. I've flipped from pro-EU to anti-EU on my voting agenda.

Do you mean that in a "he's clearly just promoting S3" or a "woah, the CTO of Amazon has time to code neat tools" kind of way?

I learned the same. I was quite disappointed later to find that, while all the sewage here goes through treatment, it does not get directly pumped back into the water pipes, but instead gets pumped back into the rivers. Although pragmatically speaking that makes more sense, since surface water is surface water, and completely separating these systems avoids any risk of contamination.

I've switched back to Windows from Ubuntu. I found one of the big reasons for me to use Linux was how much easier it was to move around / manage files between my desktop and other machines using the command-line.

With Dropbox, that has become less relevant for me. I just have a Linux server sitting somewhere that is kept automatically in sync with my Windows desktop and I can open an SSH session with a single click. With the pain of moving stuff back and forth in Windows gone, I no longer care for the pain of stuff like getting Flash or a Java plug-in to work in Linux.

You don't actually have to build something to file a patent. You just imagine what it might look like. You can do that pretty quickly.

At least it's too awkward to be fake.

Are you trying to turn this into an intelligent design argument?

Human life is short, so instead of going through lengthy trial-and-error, like nature does, our brains evolved to make complex predictions about our environment based on past observations and simulation. That's what we call intelligence. It's not necessarily the best way to build something complex, but it is fast enough to be useful in a life time. I don't see any reason to assign additional meanings to the word like "how well a system is built" or to personify evolution into something other than a trial-and-error process.

"As part of our efforts to continually improve our Rackspace Cloud offerings, we will be performing maintenance on our Cloud Servers environment. The maintenance window has been rescheduled and will now occur on Friday November 12th, 2010 from 10:00 pm US-CDT (3:00 am GMT) and end Saturday November 13th, 2010 at 10:00am US-CDT (3:00 pm GMT). This maintenance is required to update our billing systems. These changes will not affect nor change any of your current billing fees."

Ok, scheduled down-time is better than unscheduled down-time, but it's still down-time.

I was thinking flying cars and stuff. I didn't know the future was going to be this awesome.

Dig a hole and fill it up. Our economy is saved!

What the government needs to get better at is extract money from the economy in a way that creates, rather than destroys economic value. This is what almost every business does, why can't the government?

If you are starting up, where are you going to get the capital, expertise, and people to operate and maintain those systems? You have better things to do.