skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you believe in Ballmer, they are ready to implode the desktop apps if people prefer to do it online. They just want to lead this market too.

It's better to have lots of people using your online version and not using the desktop ones, than lots of people using Google's version and none using your desktop offers.

Now, if it'll work, that's another story... but if it does, MS will keep being the market leader.

Perhaps this answer hasn't fully clarified why Ajax and not Silverlight. IMHO is to allow more stuff to run.

Nowadays is inconceivable a consumer device with network capabilities, screen and some form of input method to not have a browser. From mobiles to netbooks and desktops, people who make hardware have to put a browser. Silverlight, being a different piece of software, would have to be re-coded/compiled to each of these plataforms.

Besides the extra work required for MS, it's just another layer of difficult for end-users (installing the plugin). Simply not having this step is better.

But, someone could argue, MS could make vendors, even paying them, to ship with Silverlight. Or some form of stripped down Windows version, say, CE, which would bundle Silverlight.

Why not? MS today controls the OS market and the Office app market. But with so many plataforms, it'll be very, very complicated in the future to control the OS market. A version of Windows for mobiles, netbooks, desktops, tables, etc etc etc? IMHO MS knows that the future doesn't look as good as right now for them on the OS space.

So, they're throwing the towel on the OS market _as a whole_, I mean, for everything. Of course they'll keep Windows (for desktop), because it's such a huge cash cow. But they won't be able to control the rest, or at least is not something that you can bet your revenues on. Would you? I mean, if you were a MS executive, would you bet that in 2015 90% of the mobiles will be running Windows CE?

Maybe yes, maybe not. It's easier to just make the online Office stuff, and try to own its market, because you already do for the offline. MS knows what business want from their Office offers, so it's on the best position to make it work for online in the future (Google and Apple lovers: I've said best position, not that it will).

Anyway, long post. English is not my primary language so I am sorry if the above wall was hard to parse!
> The right way to address this would be to not setup a physical presence in those countries,

I thought this at first too, but in the end "those countries" include the USA, Canada, UK, etc.

To follow your comment that would mean the company couldn't incorporate at all and would have to have no physical presence in any country what so ever.
You know who else had a dead dog? Hitler.
Online Pay Per Click Advertising
Online Pay Per Click Advertising Add your websites using SonicZooms.com Pay Per Click Online Advertising
"they've got an internet connected box tethered to everyone's TV"

Teenage male bedroom TVs perhaps. Lets not get carried away here.
LI has always been a mystery to me. I find little reason to be there often, its a place I turn in need, or to do a little catch up but is so rare.

fb is a daily stop, while frivolous entertainment, i find it fun and therefore valuable.

the two a clearly different - linkedin is networking/contacts tool, fb is a social network.
Introducing YOS 1.0 - live today
Battle begins for online role players
Bingo:
http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/
Issuu Gets $5 Million Infusion, Adds Features And Premium Version
The thing that torqued me off about Vista was my buying a 64 bit laptop and getting a 32 bit OS with it. Enter Fedora, and I've been flying since. I really don't give a crap about most of the "cool" stuff they have there...Hey, I have semi-transparent term windows if I want! (Now, that is cool...)
Microsoft vows Windows 7 will fix Vista mistakes
services are where the money is at

In that case, it's still very hard to make money from the Linux desktop. The consumer desktop has no services (except maybe the Geek Squad) and service/support revenue for corporate desktops is probably even smaller than for servers.
The Changing Consumer Experience
Tip: http://thesaurus.reference.com//browse/proscribe
The tray is nowhere near configurable enough, and in many cases it relies on the app being polite enough to stay the hell out when you tell it to (many apps are not, in my experience). Notifications from the tray are the real bitch. When watching movies on the HTPC I built with Vista, it frequently interrupts the movie to tell me vitally important information like, "I'm going to check for new Logitech upgrades now!" "No upgrades available." Java does it, too. Infuriating.

Maybe there is a way to disable this crap, but I've been unable to figure it out. (But I can't work iTunes, either, so I could just be stupid.)
<mother> Imitation is the fondest form of flattery. </mother>
Unlike KDE, Gnome, OS X, etc, Windows' taskbar never shuts up. It always pops up annoying bubbles, makes clicking sounds, randomly shows and hides icons, and doesn't standardize the way you can add/remove icons.

OS X fails a bit in this area, too, as it's not intuitive to remove items from the menubar.
Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life
Census confirms the rise in video game industry jobs
Dude, he was trying to get a peak at everyone's report cards.

Report Cards!
You've missed the best part: They now have a million email addresses.
ruby 1.9.1 is mainly stability fixes to ruby 1.9, which had a few .. quirks.

for a less-than-complete guide to ruby 1.9 features, consider reading eigenclass's summary from way back: http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?Changes+in+Ruby+1.9
oh the tray. I hate the friggin tray on windows. All the annoying crapware is there like anti-virus and what have you. At least on os x and linux you put good programs there like dropbox, and things. I imagine that is what they are changing it to.
Facebook Connect Launch Scheduled For November 30
This is really, really, important.

Imagine, 2-3 years from now, when you have access to just about any book ever written through your web browser. If it's out of print, you get it right away for free. If it's being sold somewhere, you pay some sort of fee, and have it immediately.

This is what Google's settlement makes possible.
lol how is google supposed to know that a simple ad for determining the gender of a fetus is connected to gender discriminatory abortion companies in india?

people will say anything to stain a large company's image. i'd award some kind of libel/slander countersuit for such reckless media coverage. ridiculous.
And Apple copied the dock from RISC OS...
I'd say Eddie Van Halen is a perfect example of how you can work on something for years, master it technically, and still not have taste.
Memory Cache - Overview
Cache is a small and very fast type of memory. Cache, as a concept, means a type of buffer between the processor and the main memory.
I agree wholeheartedly with this and it is a problem I face 3 times a week in the class I teach. At a fancy elite university most students tend to do very well and study a lot. Here, not so much. I'm grading exams, and 1 student out of forty got the "harder" problem correct.

I study a lot for grad classes and its been one of most satisfying experiences I've had. Studying what you really love lights such a fire inside, i hardly believe it.
yeah because Apple invented simplicity?
and who cares? as long Apple doesn't sell its OS for PCs I don't care.
How to Debug with MPLAB
The debugging allows to check the value of variables at various points in the program and to check the routines requested results. MPLAB IDE (Integrated Development Environment) has been created by Microchip and it is an integrated tool-set for the development of embedded applications.
Windows 7: Windows 7 Walkthrough, Boot Video and Impressions
I'm still on the fence about CodeWeavers. A few great points have been made about the software which makes Windows emulation much, much easier but at the same time, their original code base came entirely from Wine; there's no GPL requirement to make it free, I kinda take the idea of using free code for profit as kind of a tightwad move.

But, they're free to do what they want with it, and this was not a bad move to at least give back to those who really jumped on the chance.
Internally developed applications can reach this level of complexity very easily.

Unit testing in development isn't enough.

At some point one also has to be able to do quality assurance and integration testing. In order to adequately unit test your source code, you'll need source control to verify how your source code differs from other copies.

In order to adequately do QA and integration, you need configuration control in order to adequately understand how your installed copy is configured differently from others.
That sounds like a pretty fundamental business problem: developers are acting alone without direction from supervisors?
Vista broke many XP applications, and customers (particularly enterprises with legacy software) avoided this by not upgrading. Now Windows 7 will be compatible...with Vista, not XP. This doesn't really fix Vista's mistakes: customers who didn't upgrade are once again faced with having stuff break when upgrading Windows.

I'm not saying change is bad, but why is Microsoft unable to grasp the idea of virtualizing legacy (especially with proven examples of this, such as Apple's Classic environment?). There is absolutely no reason to cause countless customer applications to break, much less to make them pay for the privilege of upgrading. Microsoft jeopardizes their revenues by again making Windows upgrades risky for businesses.
Most people I've seen keep their gaming consoles in the living room since that's where the best TV is.
What is adcenter? Is that their search advertising. No doubt they've failed at search, and all it encompasses.

And certainly they've failed at other things that are online. But it's not fair to say they've failed at everything internet related.
I heard there might be something akin to Facebook Connect for site logins, but it doesn't sound like that's in here. FB connect, OpenID and the like seem like an area with big potential. I think Facebook stands a good chance at taking that market outright since they have such a huge active user base already.

Yahoo could also become a lot more relevant to the average web user if these things gain some uptake. Good luck to them, I don't use many of their services but have to recognize the significant contributions to open source and the web they've been making recently.
A few banks in the entire world have failed. That qualifies as almost nobody.

Do they have anything like the FDIC over there? Even if retail banks did fail here, everyone would get 250k back per.
Sweet! I was just commenting in the YOS story about how FB Connect could easily become a market leader in cross-site logins. I've been wondering when they'd announce a release date.
You see rails apps saying 'hosted by engine yard' on gitnub.

Try this list:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts

and 'rails hosting' on google.
While I don't really agree with the "he did nothing wrong" tone of the article, I'm sure this is making a great lesson for the kid: never report technical problems or you'll be charged.

</srcm>
Sorry, this is a major pet peeve of mine: it should be "different from".
These times are great and many of us are loving the recession. For some ideas how to startups should take this positively, see http://kaljundi.com/2008/10/28/10-reasons-startups-love-rece...
Why VC Infatuation with Cleantech Will Hurt Silicon Valley
Why not take a more individualistic moral stand and stop doing business in China (or any other place that routinely violates human rights) and show the world that your principles demand you to forego current and future profits?

This joke is attributed to Rodney Dangerfield^W^WWinston Churchill (thanks gojomo):

A man approaches a beautiful woman in a bar, and without any small talk, asks her "If I give you a dollar will you sleep with me?" The woman is instantly angry and tells the man "Absolutely not!" Before she can get away from the man he asks her a second question. "Will you sleep with me for a million dollars?" Now the woman pauses and after some thought says "Yes, I will." The man responds "How about for twenty dollars?" Again the woman looks indignant and says "Of course not. What kind of a woman do you think I am?" The man replies "I thought we just settled that. I was just negotiating the price."

What country isn't guilty of committing any human rights violations? If a nation has committed even one, then it merely comes down to how you choose to define "routinely".

It's easy to shout "Ethics! Purity! Walk away and show them the light!" into your blog from the hollowed ground of your basement, but it's a whole different matter to actually make real changes in the world. There's a very valid case for walking the most moral legal line in a country that is being forced toward moral behavior in order to interact with the rest of the first world. If the "moral first world" all indignantly turn their backs on nations that don't meet some arbitrary self imposed definition of morality, you can expect the abandoned nations to fill the void their own way. Don't be surprised if you don't like the outcome.
Professional Reputation Management Services: Stress or Necessity?
Brain reacts to fairness as it does to money and chocolate
I originally thought about making a snarky comment asking if these policies applied to the US, but my pragmatic side won out.

There's a bit of difference for a country with laws and traditions to explicitly punish dissenters. The local police in China can probably call up a tech company and merely ask for information on a suspected dissident. In the US, they'd at least have to go to court with a plausible reason. I'm sure the big tech companies are in bed with the "intelligence" community in the US, but nothing we say is going to make them ruffle feathers in their primary market.

The ideal approach involves technical decentralization to put data out of the reach of any government. But if we're talking about preexisting companies looking to make money off of services that have already been designed, the only thing they might be willing to change is how they deploy.
Yet, legacy support is a factor of the bloat.
They did... Until the Icelandic government reneged. The UK government (lots of UK citizens had money there) then seized all their assets in the UK. It's a huge diplomatic mess.
The one command I remember was the most powerful command of the Z80:

LDIR (LoaD Increment Repeat)...aka Block Move in 1 instruction.

The IX, IY registers with index registers were cool too.

I'm showing my age...I was 12 when I was hacking Z80 assembly on my TRS-80
10 Reasons To Love a Downturn
I'm not sure if this fits your needs, but I would also take a look at WebFaction. http://www.webfaction.com/hosting/rails-hosting
Overstock.com accepts blame for ERP problems
"... consider reading eigenclass's summary ..."

"Last major update on 2007-10-12"

Casual lurking on ruby-core suggests that all sorts of things have changed since then.
it would be far easier to get 1% to pay $10 than 10% to pay $1
In fact, my father plays video games much more than I do.

And I consider myself a pretty "hard-core" gamer.
There isn't a general-purpose browser on the Xbox. Sadly enough.
Fifteen Random Questions About Windows 7
My understanding is that they are "Silverlight enhanced". Meaning that it is primarily HTML/Ajax, but some features may only be available with Silverlight. I have no idea how they are going to pull that off, but it seems reasoanble that complex PowerPoint animations or accurate page layout and print preview functionality would require Silverlight.
Would you use FB Connect for an app? I'm asking because the way they forced the FB Platform into oblivion makes me very wary. At any time they could decide to eliminate it and now you have no registered users. Considering that Facebook has had a history of being just open enough to encourage lock-in that one later regrets, I just wouldn't want to use it.
There is A LOT of innovation going on in the O/S. Depressingly, not a lot of that truly revolutionary work is going on in the commercial/productized OS world.

Sun is doing great stuff with ZFS.
Microsoft Research's Singularity is absolutely brilliant.
Apple and Google are pushing mobile operating systems further than ever.
I'm sure others could cite many more examples.
More comments from the last time this was submitted to YCN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163083
Yahoo! has been an OpenId provider since Jan 30 of this year (http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/yahoo-openi...). Also YOS supports OpenSocial, so it's very much similar to Facebook Connect (Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see any features FB Connect has that YOS doesn't). I'm not sure about the market share point you bring up because although FB has lots of users, Yahoo! has roughly 400M more ("500 million monthly users. 180 billion monthly page views. 233 countries."). Not to mention YOS is live and FB Connect isn't. Either way I'm excited for both!
Some slicehost articles that might be useful to you:

Setting up a Ubuntu Hardy Heron with Rails:
http://articles.slicehost.com/ubuntu-hardy
One advantage of YUI grids over Blueprint was the ability to easily switch to fluid layouts by modifying a single DOM id. Took another look at Blueprint, though, and saw a fluid plugin is now available.
Cocotron: Win32 cross-platform development using Apple XCode
Google Launches Google Apps Labs, Third Party Developers Welcome
"The only way to get the size of your JavaScript down is to selectively pull code out of libraries, and include only what you use."

Would it be possible to make some kind of library management system that automatically takes care of including only those parts of the libraries you use? (even if each library needed to supply its own "annotations" to guide the process)
Launch in Jan or early Feb. Can't really talk about. Except its for a BigCo, we have a really small (and kickass!) group, but working with bureaucracy is challenging sometimes.

Hired Engineer no. 2 from digg too ;-)
While I agree, let's forget it's about making things that people pay you money for, not just making things in general.
I won't downmod you, but you should be aware that that contention is pure grammar Nazi mythology:

From http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=351

"There is a tangled history here, summarized in the MWDEU entry for different from, than, to. The conclusion (p. 343):

"… all three expressions have been in standard use since the 16th and 17th centuries and all three continue to be in standard use. [though different to is specifically British]"

Each of the three can be defended on semantic grounds, and on the grounds of the practice of good writers. From MWDEU, p. 342:

"From the 18th century the OED lists Addison with different from, Fielding with different to, and Goldsmith with different than."

Fowler "stoutly defends different to", but some British style guides object to it passionately, which is where Buckroyd probably got his notion that it's non-standard. In the face of the facts, I'd hope that different to is not marked as an error in exams like the GCSE — but I suspect that it is, in a sad victory for usage mythology."
Jesus christ. What more proof is needed that microsoft don't get the internet? All in all the wii's opera browser is pretty functional.
Reddit? Is that you?
This is why I like paying for things, then you have a contract. Building a business on something that relies utterly on someone elses whim is silly. Not that they're bad people, mind; their agenda just differs from yours.
It's a huge deficiency. On the other hand, the voice chat, friends lists, instant messenging, game matchmaking, and online marketplace all work pretty well. Nintendo has a browser and an effective marketplace, but the actual game connectivity is lackluster.
In this case, nearly all of the changes are architecturally minor, and though this looks like a very nice Windows release, it largely looks that way precisely because it is not a radical reënvisioning of Windows à la Vista. What we have here is Vista 2.0, with the sucky parts removed, the good parts (yes, there were good parts) kept, and some new, surprisingly well-thought-out, but relatively small enhancements to replace some of the poor features. I am actually pretty confident Microsoft can deliver this one. If they're smart, they'll have a similar incremental improvement scheduled as Windows 8, and get on an OS X/Linux-style rapid release schedule.
Curious: did the school, in addition to bringing charges against the student, fire the IT person in charge?
Based on the trend so far, I propose the following, which I believe to be very optimistic:

Limit (t, now to infinity) Windows --> KDE
This is a big win for Yahoo. I think they're realizing developers are their best chance to stay in the game, so they're opening up anything and everything in an attempt to hold on.

Definitely a smart move.

I'm mostly interested in YQL (Yahoo! Query Language): http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/docs/.

I find it surprising they didn't go with an existing technology for querying (ala SPARQL: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/).

That being said there's lots of stuff developers can build leveraging this information. I've had a lot of fun experimenting with BOSS (http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/).

I think this is on the same page and is definitely a step in the right direction for Yahoo.
Readings in Distributed Systems
Dow Closes Up 10.9%, Nasdaq up 9.5%
The "...just negotiating the price" line is more commonly attributed to a drunken Winston Churchill.
PowerPoint Presentation - Putting the Fun in Functional
Volunteer by filming election fraud problems and posting on YouTube
Original article (from April) without obnoxious amount of AdSense framing:

http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/brain-reacts-to-fai...
I think it depends. In general, I think selling services is strangely easier than selling just a product. Products often represent "work" - the buyer has to learn about the product, sell it to their team, etc. If you basically say, "we're going to hold your hand at $125/hr every step of the way", it can make the sale easier.

Middle manager buyers don't care much about profit. They care about stuff that allows them to work less or look smarter/better/more capable to their peers.
If they had more to say they'd probably write less.
Uh, yeah, we noticed. Not really interesting, though.

Those of us with a firm grasp of technology have figured out how to obtain this information without it being posted here. And discussing it after the fact is just hand waving and making up stories to tell ourselves. If you can call movements like that beforehand with any degree of accuracy, feel free to post, but otherwise, I hope we don't see a string of "dow up blah blah, dow down blah blah, nikei up blah blah", and so on and so forth.
IPhones Finally Get Flash Capabilities
That's one of the goofiest articles I've ever read. So good corp-speak quotes, though.
Movie Reviews API from the New York Times
It's incredibly gratifying to finally have something to point people at when they ask what I do at Yahoo.

Please keep the comments coming here and on the blog post. Feel free to message me if things don't work. If I can't answer your question, I'll be able to at least bug the person who can. Direct feedback is always the best.
This was actually really annoying (rickroll with java script popups).
sweet deal!
You mean http://foos-hack.com/? That's true for both us.
It should drop almost accordingly by the end of week due to profit taking.
Hey pal, that wasn't cool or insightful.
Founder's postmortem on ClayValet, a human powered recommendation site
Designing with vision
10 Awesome Ruby on Rails Techniques
You cunt.

That was an awful rickroll
I've been hearing about this forever. Wake me up when I can use excel in my browser.