kvb

19 ms·

151.
by kvb 13y ago
Note that generics are not identical to branded drugs; I believe the FDA has a +/-20% bioavailability tolerance. For medications with broad dose-response curves (e.g. most painkillers, probably lots of other classes of drugs) this isn
152.
by kvb 13y ago
I can certainly see how being an Oracle puppet would make it hard to trust his coverage of the Oracle/Google spat. I don't see how it affects his take on the contents of the NZ bill, particularly since the text of the bill is ava
153.
by kvb 13y ago
I don't get it. Let's stipulate that he is an Oracle puppet. Why would that incentivize him to lie about what the bill actually covers? Regardless of his incentives, is he wrong that not all software patents would be prevented
154.
by kvb 13y ago
Is that relevant to the merits of his argument?
155.
by kvb 13y ago
I believe "pesticide" traditionally encompasses both herbicides and insecticides.
156.
by kvb 13y ago
Rather than implying that Microsoft's system is broken, it seems that another possibility is that you had a shitty manager. Is there a performance review system that ensures that good employees are fairly rewarded?
157.
by kvb 13y ago
What's the alternative? If there were some objective measure of performance then this would be an easy problem to solve, but that's not the world we live in. When you've got 100K employees, trying to come up with a consiste
158.
by kvb 13y ago
People may say that, but as I understand it that's a misrepresentation of the situation at Microsoft: the curve is only enforced in much larger units. Disclosure: I recently started in a full time position at Microsoft.
159.
by kvb 13y ago
I think the point was, how many of those billion dollar businesses did he inherit? Doesn't the emergence of, say, SharePoint, show that he didn't just extract money from existing profitable businesses? Microsoft seems to have do
160.
by kvb 13y ago
In the ML family of languages (e.g. OCaml, F#) declarations are only visible to code that occurs syntactically later. This has obvious disadvantages, but also the benefit of making dependencies obvious.
161.
by kvb 13y ago
That's not how async/await work at all. They let you write the code as if it were synchronous, but it's still asynchronous, which is the whole point.
162.
by kvb 13y ago
I often write synchronous methods that include control flow that nests three deep (say try/finally, if/then/else, and a for loop). Often it's easier to read this code than it would be if everything were split out into s
163.
by kvb 13y ago
Even at Microsoft there are several open source projects (though maybe fewer than you'd hope for a company their size). See F# for one compelling (IMO) example. And it's not the same thing, but Microsoft publishes way more resea
164.
by kvb 13y ago
Did Google provide the APIs required for MSFT to show ads? Did Google's obligations to content owners not apply to the other platforms where ad-free official clients existed?
165.
by kvb 13y ago
What's a "local" search? Is the behavior you describe observed when "Files" or "Settings" are selected in the "What to search" box, or only when it's set to "Everything" or the we
166.
by kvb 13y ago
No, group policy is used in enterprises to disable things on a company-wide basis. By all accounts (even the original article) it's easy for end users to disable.
167.
by kvb 13y ago
The full title actually ends with "Let's hope so."
168.
by kvb 13y ago
There were plenty of things that doomed Surface RT's initial rollout to failure. It may have done well with focus groups, and I'm not convinced that it was an objectively poor product to the extent that it was guaranteed to fail.
169.
by kvb 13y ago
Consumer market, or more generally speaking? They have lots of products doing very well in the market, as their billions of dollars per quarter in profit indicate. SharePoint, Dynamics, Visual Studio, ...
170.
by kvb 13y ago
One problem is distribution. They don't have the network of stores that Apple does, and they didn't make Surfaces available in other retailers until quite a while after release. This made it impossible for most people to try bef
171.
by kvb 13y ago
Which tablet/device in this price range is best for editing Libre/Open Office documents?
172.
by kvb 13y ago
This is only true to the extent that they can monetize that discoverability. The problem is that Amazon can freeload by offering a lower price without facing the high costs of retail real estate, etc. and people will discover books at B&am
173.
by kvb 13y ago
Well, with real property there are things like adverse possession [1]. This isn't exactly "use it or lose it", but it does contain the idea that if rights aren't exercised there may be implicit acquiescence to another&#
174.
by kvb 13y ago
No, but I'm having a hard time envisioning a regulatory body akin to the FDA for all software. And even ingredient lists contain terms like "natural flavors" which hide some arguably important aspects of the composition.
175.
by kvb 13y ago
In a post-copyright world, how can you force someone to release their modifications to your code? You couldn't argue that they were violating the terms of your copyright, because there is no copyright (in such a hypothetical world)!
176.
by kvb 13y ago
Revenue was up this quarter. The surface fiasco dinged profit a bit, but financially they're still in great shape. Microsoft is not really fundamentally about Windows anymore, they've now got a diverse portfolio of businesses.
177.
by kvb 13y ago
There have been a few other interesting applications, such as use by surgeons where physically using a computer would be unhygienic (e.g. see http://www.zdnet.com/blog/health/xbox-kinect-helps-surgeons-... ).
178.
by kvb 13y ago
I thought it made the dates look even less "fishy".
179.
by kvb 13y ago
Your first link indicates the acquisition wasn't completed until October 2011.
180.
by kvb 13y ago
Complicating the "Microsoft corrupted the virtuous Skype" story is the fact that Skype appears in the PRISM slides dating to before Microsoft's purchase of it.

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