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I just have to say, I would have completely forgotten about 3-2-1 Contact until reading the reference in this article. I "learned" BASIC exactly the same way. Excellent :)

Easier with friends than family. I have found it very dismaying to see the garbage shared by my extended family (both left and right). In this sense FB has definitely not brought the family together.

GFN has been a bear, very hit or miss. Current generation of hardware is either 1080 or 2060. If they start adding 30xx (which they have hinted at in this past) that would be great.

we had our house neutral chewed through by mice in the electric meter - caused really bad problems :(

Just for the record, mockery has been a significant part of the Internet since the days of Usenet, so don't take it personally :)

+1 for this, almost as bad as ZeroTurnaround several years ago.

I don't think this is really news, or surprising. At some point any cloud-based service supporting public sharing of user-generated content will be used, either obviously or non-obviously, for malicious purposes - content hosting, C&C, etc. For the service providers, this becomes a very difficult game of cat and mouse.

But the important different IMHO is that a knob / buttons don't require you to take your eyes off the road. In that 1 second you look down, you could cause an accident due to inattention.

Not sure that's a culture that only exists at Google... pretty much true at the higher levels of almost any big company that I've worked at.

We are an early GCP enterprise customer and Diane has met us numerous times. A class act.

I'm sure IBM's marketing department would love you to believe that ;-)

That's great of you, I often do this as well and have never received any acknowledgement or thank you :(

Actually this is exactly what major investment managers do with cash. There are services provided by major banks (e.g. State Street) to the IM industry that do automated sweeps into multiple bank accounts (hundreds or thousands of accounts in some cases), repos etc. Keep in mind that typically mutual funds, CITs, etc. are structured as separate corporate entities with separate cash books, so even though (name your major fund company e.g. Vanguard, Fidelity etc) may have trillions in assets, each individual fund may have a much smaller amount under its name.

While I can't speak about Tether, hypothetically speaking if you had a single legal entity with $2B in cash, I would expect it to be well diversified in very safe and managed pools, either bank accounts (up to FDIC limit), repos, CDs, or other safe short-term instruments.

Source: investment management industry knowledge and personal experience with the same.

Yes, they offer their dataset to companies as a paid service.

Source: my prior company paid for their entire data set and I personally used in a data science project.

Yes, it was actually a lot more in depth than my day job. But I chose to write a deep technical book rather than a shallow "cookbook".

Unfortunately most readers today are more interested in the latter than the former.

Author here of a technical book published with Packt several years ago. I had the first mover advantage as the only book of significance covering a Java library that was (and is) very widely used.

Total page count was ~350-400. It took me approximately 600-800 hours of research, authoring, editing, and final to complete the book. I had a full-time job and so spent about 6-9 months of nights and weekends.

I actually haven't added up the total of royalties but it was probably somewhere over $15-20k on sales of several thousand copies.

I wasn't in a position at the time to capitalize on the consulting / speaking gigs that folks have mentioned, and had I thought more about it I would have put myself in that position.

It definitely has been worth the experience as folks mentioned both in terms of resume-building (a book is a great thing to bring to interviews) as well as general reputation.

Also, if you are truly building a quality technical book, the level of research and knowledge required to do a good job was (for me) at least 5x the depth of my day-to-day work. As goes the old adage, you think you know something well until you try to teach it -- this was definitely true of my research efforts.

Summary - not worth it financially, but it definitely changed my career overall for the better.

If anyone wants to know more details, please reply here or PM me and I'm happy to answer as best I can.