vtail

Many people underestimate the cost to do (proper) system administration, as well as cost/time/skill required to do (proper) scaling

Which reinforces Steve Jobs's point that there is no working mobile Flash implementation yet.

"Journalists are terrified of this company too.

Why? Just ask Jason Chen - the editor at tech blog Gizmodo who got his hands on the next iPhone. Apple's response? They sent in the police, who smashed down Chen's front door, ransacked his house -- while he was out -- and carted off computers and files. When Chen returned home from dinner with his wife, they frisked him too."

This is the kind of argument they are making to support the point????

Well, Microsoft has created their own tests. They argue that tests like Acid3 are testing edge cases and as such are not really useful to test browser behavior in the real world.

What I don't understand is why they don't use the latest Chrome beta to do this tests - e.g. Chrome 5.0.375.29 beta passes all tests for Dom Level 2 Style.

> I believe in doing the right thing as much as the next person but where do we draw the line with expecting too much ethical behavior from people?

I personally believe that law is applicable in this case. If you find someone's phone in the bar, returning it to the bartender is a natural and simple choice, at least in my world.

Selling the phone to the highest bidder was clearly wrong. Even if taking the phone was impulsive decision, holding an "auction" was a well calculated move.

You can read about e.g. New York Times Co vs United States and decide for yourself whether shield law benefits the society or not.

Your intuition regarding California Law is wrong.

"One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft."

CAL. PEN. CODE § 485

I usually buy them in batches, esp. if friends recommend them. Knowing that I have some unread books stimulates my reading :)

These were annual figures. I figured out that average Kindle ownership time is about a year assuming growing sales.

That's a valid point, although you should note that 800M is a gross number; what Amazon may report in their digital book sales is just their 30% share of the sell.

I clearly need to investigate it some more.

Well, do you know that both of these books are available for free? http://www.gutenberg.org/ and http://calibre-ebook.com/ are your friends.

Yes, that's a fair comment. Anecdotally, though, I bought a dozen or so books in the very first week - that's why the iBooks number looks so low to me.

I estimated number of books sold per Kindle as 27 - discussion is here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1315532

I made this estimate as a follow-up for this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1315149. Please suggest how to make this more accurate, and whether you believe the assumptions above.

What's interesting is that they have only sold 1.5M books, or 1.5 books per device. Amazon Kindle should be safe.

As always, WolframAlpha is your friend:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3+millilight+seconds

558.8 miles or 899.4 kilometers

They even have "comparisons", e.g. for 30 millilight seconds:

~~ 1.4 x Amazon River length (~~ 6400 km )

I was specifically referring to their non-enterprise customers. For them, their statement says that "a fraction of our consumer base–home users" [is affected].

Enterprise customers are in a different league: even if individual users are extremely unhappy, it's the IT department who makes the final decision about switching vendors.

I'm extremely unhappy about using Lotus Notes for email/calendar where I work, but can do nothing about it, other than whining on the internet.

I understand. "Fully loaded cost" in my calculation above includes office space, equipment etc. - usually it ~30% on top of annual salary.

> I think this is a pretty good example of how "Enterprise Software" will continue to quickly lose favor with customers. My personal opinion is that the "Enterprise Software" market is now more than ever about sales and marketing rather than innovation and and delivery.

How so? According to McAfee, the problem only affected less than 0.5% of their non-enterprise customers. I'm sure only small fraction of those affected will decide to switch their vendor; the rest of non-technical crowd will simply ignore this.

> My personal opinion is that the "Enterprise Software" market is now more than ever about sales and marketing rather than innovation and and delivery.

> Just look at the release budgets for enterprise software - sales and marketing are at the top, while R&D and support are at the bottom.

We have actual data to debate this: McAfee's annual financial statement, http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MFE&fstype=ii.

In 2009, McAfee spent $839mn on SG&A and $325mn on R&D. Sure, the R&D number is less than SG&A, however:

- SG&A number includes administrative expenses, paying rent for buildings, providing customer support etc.

- $325mn on R&D is a huge number. Assuming fully-loaded annual developer cost of $200k, it's 1.6k developers working full-time on this product. I'm not sure how many open-source software project have similar number of at least part-time developers involved. Even taking into account "A Mythical Man-Month" etc. is still a significant resource.

Having a decent anti-virus product requires, among other things:

- Having full-time dedicated security experts - and by experts I mean people who literally have decades of experience in the field. You cannot become a security expert overnight.

- Dealing with thousands of different software/hardware environments at customer machines

- Regularly updating virus databases, monitoring threats 24/7 and providing rapid updates for every new virus/trojan

- Providing decent customers support to all of your non-technical customers who don't know much about computers.

I don't know how well McAfee handles all the tasks above - I'm not their customer, and not affiliated with them in any way. I just want to emphasize that anti-viruses are non-trivial, and there is no existing open-source business model today that can handle this complexity.

I think what would certainly help Python community is to have a prioritized list of specific small tasks that could be done to improve Python, grouped by contributor's skill level, e.g. tasks for complete newby, tasks for C hackers, tasks for folks who are good at writing docs etc., along with some information on how to get started. (I'm not sure if you have it already).

That will require some additional effort from Python core developement group - somebody would need to go through the bug tracker, categorize the tasks etc. - but it will probably mitigate some of the issues mentioned by jesse above ("Don't know how", "Don't know where" etc.)

Do you suggest that Apple's secrecy policy justifies buying stolen property??

He also quotes that there are only 57 websites in the world that have >1bn pageviews/month - anybody has the full list?

I have a proposal for HN: replace those triangles with 'Facebook recommend' buttons :)

I agree with you that my analogy is poor, and that revenue per employee is an important metric.

My point was that showing craigslist there is misleading, for the reasons I listed in my other comment.

It still amazing how well Google scales, and comparing it to craigslist shadows this fact.

"Dividing revenue by employee gives us a better look at which companies are the most efficient. And that’s what you see in the chart at the top of this post."

craigslist's numbers are misleading here. Sure, they're extremely efficient by the above metric, because they were lucky enough to become a de-facto standard marketplace. I challenge anybody to find another example of a software company with 30 employees that is nearly as successful.

MSFT revenue per employee is $631k, between eBay and Facebook.

Source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=microsoft+revenue+/+num...

(PS. Do I deserve extra karma for posting this cool WolframAlpha link ? :)

Interesting comparison, yet there are so many wrong implications that can be made from it that I don't Even know where to start.

Compare to: short guys in glasses earn 100x as much as tall athletic guys. "Proof": compare Warren Buffett and Bill Gates with the local college basketball team.

Because grading a work by student you like gives you positive utility :).

Yes, as both the title of the article and it's text clearly tell.

"He donated the the money to buy the company to Charter School Growth Fund. The acquisition price was not disclosed. He also invested $10 million in DreamBox to expand to more schools and subjects beyond math. He will become chairman of the DreamBox board, while continuing his role at Netflix, and DreamBox’s co-founder and chief executive, Lou Gray, will leave the company."

He = Reed Hastings

True, but what worked for Facebook/Zynga will not necessarily work for Joe's homepage/Heyzap.

Facebook is a destination for people to socialize and sometimes play with their friends, so games there are complementary goods.

Most other sites (news, personal finance, technical documentation etc) have different objectives, and it's not clear why games will be complementary.