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sdz's comments

sdz | 3 years ago | on: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

The investors you refer to typically manage money on behalf of their investors and are actually under constant scrutiny. If they run mutual funds, their performance is measured every day, and if they underperform for a number of quarters in a row, their investors will absolutely “fire” them by withdrawing money from their funds.

sdz | 3 years ago | on: Demystifying Apache Arrow (2020)

You're probably looking for the Arrow IPC format [1], which writes the data in close to the same format as the memory layout. On some platforms, reading this back is just an mmap and can be done with zero copying. Parquet, on the other hand, is a somewhat more complex format and there will be some amount of encoding and decoding on read/write. Flight is an RPC framework that essentially sends Arrow data around in IPC format.

[1] https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/ipc.html

sdz | 14 years ago | on: Google's first retail store

Okay, I mean some automatic updating software is bad. Adobe's is very annoying, and Windows Update frequently requires rebooting. But some are great -- like Chrome! On a Mac, probably the best thing about the app store is that it consolidates all my software updates (well, not all of them yet) into one place. So the UX is lacking in some places, but it's getting better, and I certainly don't agree with quote's implication that automatic updating doesn't exist on PCs or that software updates don't (in the majority of cases) keep adding value to a PC over time.

sdz | 14 years ago | on: Google's first retail store

"One selling point the staff are pushing is that unlike traditional PC’s, Chromebooks get better over time with automatic software updates."

That seems a bit disingenuous. PCs get better over time with software updates as well.

sdz | 14 years ago | on: Why Your Business Needs a Chinese Name

I've always loved the Chinese naming for Coke. The article translates it as "delicious happiness," but it's actually more clever. The first two characters (ke kou) mean thirsty. The third character is the same as the first but means "can be" in the context. The fourth character (le) means happy. So all together, it literally means "[when you are] thirsty, [you] can be happy." As the other examples in the article show, it's quite easy to do the transliteration poorly, and a good one is far from inevitable. It's hard not to appreciate the amount of cleverness that went into "ke kou ke le".

sdz | 14 years ago | on: File Hosting Service Hotfile Sues Warner Bros. For Copyright Fraud and Abuse

For example, while claiming to remove files that are copies of the movie The Box, Warner removed several files related to the alternative cancer treatment book "Cancer: Out Of The Box," by Ty M. Bollinger. Another title deleted by Warner was "The Box that Saved Britain," a production of the BBC, not Warner.

This is really bizarre. Hotfile might technically be right in suing Warner Bros. for pulling content they don't own the rights to, but it's not as if Hotfile had a legitimate claim to having those files on its servers. Those files are copyrighted by someone, and surely the real rights holders would want their intellectual property removed from Hotfile if they knew about it. And now that Hotfile admits knowledge of these files, aren't they compelled to remove them anyway?

[edit]

Perhaps I should have said ironic instead of bizarre. I don't disagree that there's a legal case here.

sdz | 14 years ago | on: Spool Is Instapaper On Steroids

This is why I think it was shortsighted for Instapaper to reject outside funding. As much as I like Instapaper, it is very much still a single-platform app with very limited scope (text-only), and the app hasn't been updated in several months. Meanwhile its competitors (like Readitlater and now these guys) are getting funded, rolling out features, and attacking this market with much greater resources.

sdz | 15 years ago | on: Apple’s iOS 4 hardware encryption has been cracked

So... you can use brute force to break encryption? Is that news? It doesn't sound like there was any security hole in the implementation or a leaked cryptographic key, so in what sense is the encryption "cracked"?

sdz | 15 years ago | on: How Google Controls Android: Digging into the Skyhook Filings

This is extremely interesting. One thing I didn't understand was how this location database is being built. Is Google collecting GPS signals and WIFI hotspots so that the two can be associated to pinpoint your location? If so, does that mean Android phones are periodically sending your location back to Google? Do Apple, Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft do the same thing?

sdz | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?

I'm sure some parts of Oracle's database are very good. The part I work with (OLAP), though, is ludicrously bad. New bugs are introduced with almost every database patch, and the behavior of existing functions have changed without notice. For this privilege, Oracle charges license fees by the core.

sdz | 15 years ago | on: Hey Google. You should compete with Dropbox.

Why would a cloud-based filesystem be useful beyond storing your home folder? It's not like you need group collaboration on your kernel binaries. You also can't really run different computers off of the same harddrive image (unless you are a corporation and buy multiple, identical machines).

sdz | 15 years ago | on: Looking at Different Writing Tools for Macs

Most of the home pages for these writing tools are missing the most important thing: a full screenshot of the app! Why all the tiny crops, screencasts, and written descriptions?

sdz | 15 years ago | on: Why Google can’t build Instagram

Another one:

5. Google’s services need to support every platform

Google services need to support every platform eventually, but nothing stops them from releasing something working on a single platform first. As I recall, Google Chrome was available only for Windows when it was first released.

I think this article suffers from hindsight bias. No, Google is not going to come with with every successful app or web service in the industry, and no, not every product it releases is going to be wildly successful. But saying Google has an innovation problem because it can't build an app like Instagram is like saying Warren Buffet has an investing problem because he didn't buy stock in Apple right before the iPhone was released.

Google's process isn't geared to create novelty hits in the app store, and Buffet's method doesn't lead him to pick high flying tech stocks. But Google and Buffet are still doing fine.

sdz | 15 years ago | on: Daring Fireball: Apple's Pricing Advantage

I think a related part of Apple's pricing advantage comes from the fact that they are good at taking technologies developed for the iPhone and using it in other places instead of reinventing the wheel for every product.

The iPod touch, Apple TV, and iPad are all variously stripped, screenless, and scaled versions of the iPhone. They share the same processor and underlying OS. This allows Apple to not just sell a lot of stuff, but to sell a lot of the exact same stuff. So not only are their marginal costs lower from buying in bulk, their fixed costs of research and development are lower, too.

Could an iPad's cost $499 or an Apple TV $99 if they didn't sell the iPhone? Probably not, and definitely not if they wanted to keep the kind of margins they command right now.

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