Perl is the only way to go for serious CGI scripts. It’s so powerful, Python is limited and clunky by comparison. And a new language with syntactically important whitespace? Seriously? It will never displace Perl!
If that's the case, if Google could cause massive disruption by pulling out of the EU, they have effectively monopoly power in that market. So if that's the case, the suit is anything but disingenuous.
Misleading headline: most people don't install an app every month, but what about the apps they already have on their phone?
Edit: it's misleading because the article actually says 65% of smartphone users download zero apps in an average month. That doesn't mean most people never download apps. Just not every month.
Warren Buffett looks for investments with an economic moat around their economic castle. If a startup could get close to doing that much damage to Facebook, maybe Facebook's business isn't very defensible.
I understood the article, thanks. I'm just not convinced.
The debate hinges on this: is UX a special basis of competition that can't be disrupted? Will consumers pay a premium for better UX forever? Will the cheaper alternative never be "good enough"? Won't people put up with a few minor annoyances? What if it saves them money?
I think UX is a hygiene factor: when it's bad it annoys you to the point where you do something about it, but when UX is good enough, most people start worrying about other things.
That's different from design: I think some people will continue to pay a premium because they love Jony Ive designs and they can afford it. And some will pay for a status symbol. And some will need the performance. But none of that is the mass market.
But it isn't his money: VC funds raise money from other investors (aka limited partners). It's like asking a banker or hedge fund manager if there's a stock market bubble. They won't say yes because if investors pull their money out of equities, the banks and hedge funds are screwed.
Worse, Facebook makes a lot of mobile advertising money from app install ads. If startup investors cut back the flow of money, that advertising revenue dries up. There will be a glut of unemployed developers just as Facebook starts reporting declining revenues. Facebook will need to start reducing costs, not hiring, and definitely no acquihires (startups with viable business models might be a different story).
Google might clean up with their pick of the best surviving startups and the best devs going cheap, because they have more diverse sources of advertising revenue, but they might also be under pressure to control costs if investors panic and flee tech.
That's exactly what you would expect if a "low end disruption" is just getting started. The low-cost disruptor picks off some but not all of the market, and doesn't immediately compete for the most attractive customers (because that fight's too hard for them at the moment).
That's what puts the incumbent in an "innovator's dilemma": do you chase the high end and high margins, and if so which high-end niches do you chase (gamers who want graphics performance, design-lovers who want a precision machined marvel of industrial design) or do you go lower cost and high volume? The latter is a race to the bottom, so the incumbents tend to pick the former and retreat up-market. It's not unusual for the incumbent's profits to increase temporarily when this happens because of their focus on the most profitable customers.
The problem is it doesn't last: the low-cost producers who are already good enough for the low end of the market continue to improve, until they become good enough for the middle of the market too, and grab more and more market share and more and more profit share. And then, looking for even more growth, they head for the top end of the market (or get disrupted themselves).
Ironically, if there wasn't an up-market to retreat to, there would be no dilemma. Android and iOS would have to compete head to head for the same customers with the same requirements (rather than one taking all the budget consumers and the other taking the gamers and others with higher requirements).
As it is, we could be seeing a low-end disruption, and the high-end consumers will be the last to notice.
But it rules out other kinds of tricks like storing info in file names. If all the metadata is counted in the length of the tar file, these tricks don't stand a chance. There's way more than 1 byte of overhead per file in the file system and Mike needed a rule that counts all of them.
If anyone can build a big enough quantum computer (enough qubits) and prevent it decohering (that is, keeping it quantum long enough) to run Shor's algorithm, standard public key crypto like RSA would be broken. That has been known in theory since the 90s.
But if anyone ever builds such a quantum computer it isn't necessarily the end for public key crypto because there is a workaround that will work on classical computers, and that is to avoid trapdoor functions that can be broken by Shor's algorithm. So if a quantum computer comes along that can break, say, 256 bit RSA, we can save public key crypto by everyone switching to a different algorithm. That's the idea of post-quantum cryptography. And although RSA might be broken by a future quantum computer we can still have some sort of public key cryptography.
From the looks of this blog post, though, one of the new post-quantum public key algorithms can be broken. At least it could be if anyone ever makes a big enough quantum computer. And there's still the possibility that someone will find a trapdoor function that will be quantum resistant, so it isn't the end for all public key crypto.
tl;dr One more public key scheme might have fallen to a quantum algorithm. But the quantum hardware isn't there yet, so it's OK for now.