The clustering doesn't indicate that there's a cartel, rather that the banks do not compete on price. The real compensation that the banks receive isn't from the fees. The real compensation is received in the form of quid-pro-quo from their top customers to whom they allocate shares. This is the same reason that the IPOs are usually very underpriced.
Reading his LinkedIn:
"lead the engineering effort" ... "designed the Windows Service Management API and lead the engineering effort behind that"
This is quite typical of Microsoft program managers. You will quite often hear the above in addition to things like "I shipped feature X." If you were to sit in a meeting for feature X you'd see that it's usually dev, test figuring everything out and the PM writing things down with an occasional contribution. Yet come credit-claiming time it's "I lead, I designed, I shipped."
This compares all the profits generated by all Apple hardware running either iOS or OS X to that generated by Windows for Microsoft through licenses sold.
A proper comparison would be to compare the profits of all PC manufacturers, XBox, Windows Mobile, etc... to those that the iPod/iPad/iPhone and Mac bring to Apple.
I am slowly getting tired of blog posts, startups, etc.. that imply that they are better simply because their service/website/code is better simply because they're using Ruby.
You can write almost anything in almost any language. Real innovation is coming up things like provisioning virtual servers a-la what Amazon did, and not by doing what someone else did and slapping a "look it's Ruby!" label on it.
There is no corporate mandate to use anything. You are free to use whatever tools you want, and nearly all internal sites work fine with Chrome/Firefox.
Definitely. It's not like they're a huge company with significant market shares outside of the US, and they most definitely don't have tens of thousands of engineers with years of experience building phones. They should just go back to being a paper mill.
Michael Chisari is the lead developer of the Appleseed Project, an open source, distributed social networking framework. Support the project by donating here
The base XMPP protocol plus the IM extension is pretty straightforward to implement. It's XML, so you don't have to write your own parsers, which get extremely complex and buggy, especially if you're doing beyond the trivial.
The extensibility is absurd only if you have a terribly-written library. With a semi-thought out and designed library you can write a simple code generator that will parse out the XSDs and generate your classes, structs, enums, and whatever else, greatly reducing the cost of implementation.
The problem with a "concise, specific protocol" is that it's only concise and specific if you never, ever plan to change anything. Let's say that you designed the best protocol ever. Then in the next release you realize that you really ought to add this one small thing to the protocol:
* How do you distinguish between the versions of the protocol?
* How do you bridge between clients that understand the new thing and those that don't?
* How do you tell the existing clients that they should upgrade?
* How long do you maintain the old version without the super-awesome new thing?
* Once you decide to deprecate the old version of the protocol what do you do with the older clients?
And oh, by the way, in the release following you decided that you need to slightly tweak the super-awesome thing you added to the protocol. Good luck.
I have never seen anyone try to hide their phone. I've seen people bring in and use their MBPs at work, some of them were even running Windows. No one cares.
College is totally worthless. Everyone is the very smart entrepreneurial type like we all of course are, and already posses the vast majority of skills that they'll ever need in life. Indeed, college for them would be nothing more than nights spent alone in their dorm room working on their next failed startup and leaving comments around the Internet about how much more successful they'd be if they stayed out of college. Man, now if only they could get invited to a party or talk to a girl.
A degree from a Tier-1 school and high GPA is a signal to potential employers that you are a hard worker and smart. This appears to hold well for "easy" majors who don't really use anything learned in college at work (except thinking and writing creatively) and less so for "hard" majors who do actually need to know stuff about biology, math, whatever to do well.
There's no answer to the "why" in the article beyond celebrity mentions and saying that businesses will pay.
A valuation of $5 billion would mean about $200 per user at the 25 million users mark, which would be reasonable were it a porn-site with paying members. But it's not, it's Twitter.