wayne

> Meanwhile at an office down the hall, Azure Maps has been humming along quietly since 2018, beating AWS to the punch by over two years.

Microsoft's actually been in the geo API game for significantly longer, pre-Google Maps. MapPoint started as a desktop GIS product in 2000 that let businesses create desktop maps, and they've had an online API since 2002... it started as a SOAP API: https://news.microsoft.com/2002/04/10/microsoft-announces-ma...

But it was pre-AJAX so Google Maps stole much of their mindshare. And it's been renamed so many times that no one can keep track of it (MapPoint, Bing Maps/Live Maps/MSN Maps, Azure Maps). Though the pricing and documentation has consistently been reasonable.

Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.

That might be true for a tech-competent company with a well-staffed security team, but for many companies and for individual data, I'd trust Amazon and Microsoft to secure my data more than I'd trust myself.

I setup a Thinkpad X-series with OpenBSD a few months ago and the hardware support was stellar. I researched ahead of time (lots of googling and reading HN and Reddit threads) and it seemed like the OpenBSD devs were using a handful of Thinkpad models so those worked perfectly. I've mostly used it to surf the web (Firefox) and code (Vim).

No one would say it's as seamless as using a Macbook, but being able to tinker with and customize everything has been half the fun.

Ditto on Chrome with an all-red screen and "Deceptive site ahead".

The main time I find myself using Apple Maps is when visiting China. Google Maps is blocked so the place data isn't as great, and the local apps are in Chinese, which I'm illiterate in.

I similarly find Apple Pay great for traveling, and easier to use than a credit card.

Wow! I've been trying to figure out for a year why my financial institution hasn't been able to deliver me electronic statements. Every month or so it's been auto-switching back to snail mail. I even switched email services and did extensive tweaks to my spam blockers to try to figure out what was happening. Them looking at the email image-loads never occurred to me... thanks for sharing that!

This level of API obfuscation reminds me of forever ago when MSN Messenger figured out AOL's AIM API, so MSN Messenger could send AIM messages, which annoyed AOL. AOL would make API changes to break MSN, but MSN would update the client and stay ahead. Eventually to make the API uncloneable, AOL changed their payload to exploit a buffer overrun in their own AIM clients that wouldn't be in the MSN clients.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

Ah, that was back when AA and Alaska were much closer partners, before the Virgin acquisition... I was surprised when reading the article that Alaska was so helpful.

https://thepointsguy.com/2017/12/last-call-alaska-american-a...

$1.3M for its COO (Sheryl Sandberg), not CFO.

A friend wrote an article about a NYC millennial who put herself through college collecting cans: http://bit.ly/2aj0IG7

He probably meant the other cofounder Mike Krieger. http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-cofounder-mike-krie...

If you found that interesting, here's Raymond Chen's addendum to the above article: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/08/26/10200...

(I found the main link via Raymond's post and found it a lot more interesting, but Raymond's post is worth a read if you enjoyed the article.)

They could also pull a Windows 7, which has the underlying version number 6.1, and decouple the real version number from the marketing version number: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...

Yeah, my guess is it was actually deleted but because of the PR hoopla they went to tape or did something equivalently time-consuming to recover the data. It's something that wouldn't scale to everyone, but worth a day of someone's time in this particular high profile case.

What's the high-level reason for such a big discrepency between WebKit browsers? E.g. I'm confused why some would have :nth-child support and other wouldn't. Do all these companies have their own local forks? Are some using old versions of WebKit?

According to 60 Minutes's interview with one of the engineers, the main failsafe equipment was damaged weeks before the explosion, and BP didn't bother repairing it and in fact increased drilling speed since they were slipping behind schedule.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6490509n

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/35642/

Similar past cases:

- Azia Kim from Stanford: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=5120

- Michael Godelia from Harvard: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/11/murky-past-trail...

Java to PHP: http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/

Why would you expect a research lab to ship a product? Seems like you were interviewing with the wrong group.

Entertainment and Devices made $375 million last quarter: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192686.asp

Anyone else have a deja vu moment while reading this? The article repeats this snippet of text twice, the second time adding the word "very":

"suggest that Google, and the U.S. generally, has [very] little leverage to press China to back down on Internet censorship or other issues."

I guess he had a one year retention contract.

Since it was an extraction from WordPress, which is GPL-licensed, maybe it was super hard to make this library LGPL since everyone who had contributed code had GPL-licensed it.

Microsoft's plan is to remove the feature from Office: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-22sta...

Your point is a good one but I think it's somewhat cheating to pick 1909-1947 as your arbitrary 38 year period since both world wars happened during that period. A world war has a way of spurring innovation in killing technologies more than anything else. I guess it's possible we have two more world wars between now and 2047, but that seems unlikely to me.

Also, in terms of running speed, Closure is a better form of compression than gzip since the JS engine still has to parse all that ungzip'd JS.

The rumor was for NBC Universal, which includes more than just a network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_Universal

> The only large – and lets say profitable and growing – startup that uses Java is LinkedIn.

Mint uses Java a ton too and they did ok: http://mint.jobscore.com/jobs/mint/javasoftwareengineerbacke...

If you want business-friendly maps, Microsoft's MapPoint terms were very startup-friendly last time I checked. You just pay as you go. The downside is you need to talk to a salesguy: http://www.microsoft.com/maps/