gnok

It's a time of great change right now and fear is a natural response. The world is going to be a very different place in 4 years time. Try not to let the fear of an unknown future affect your experience in college. College is a great time to learn who you are, to learn what you like and what you dislike, make friends, understand people, pick up new skills and hobbies and drop old ones. I don't know you and where you're headed, but I know you're going to have a great time. Enjoy it and let the future come to you.

The COD part is somewhat cultural. Very few people in India will trust a credit card based system that requires you to hand over your credit card number online and accept delivery at some point in the future. Cash usage in general is disproportionately higher than other forms. I think direct payments from bank accounts is next. Cards rank a distant third.

I suspect a lot of us are very uncomfortable with that claim. I think the moonshot and the kernel are both independently amazing feats that don't need to be compared against one another for validation.

I don't know anything about Loom, but perhaps the first step to building a HIPAA compliant image store is to simply build an image store? Perhaps Loom's roadmap or eventual plan is to build an image store for a very specific business purpose? Perhaps its more than just cat pictures?

I don't know either way, but I sure wouldn't assume its designed for the exclusive purpose of "helping hipsters heap hi-res headshots of healthy hobos" (nice alliteration btw).

I don't mean to imply that Yahoo is more successful than Google at acquisitions (We know that isn't the case). I just don't think Google is a good benchmark for acquisitions. I think they as good or as bad as Yahoo.

I think Yahoo's problem with acquisitions has been that they are moderately successful initially and then drift away over time. ViaWeb, GeoCities, Musicmatch Jukebox, Konfabulator, delicious and Ludicorp (of Flickr fame) come to mind. Other than Flickr, none of the others are still around, but they weren't disappointments soon after acquisition either.

I meant the converse, sorry. I was responding to the idea that "a sign of progress" within a year is the same as "making it succeed in the long run".

I disagree. We don't know what Yahoo wants to do with Tumblr. All we have are rumors, a WSJ report and tons of idle speculation. Without knowing what the intended end game is, I don't see how we can call the acquisition a "success" or "failure", much less the CEO's. I also don't agree that "a sign of progress" is "making it succeed in the long run".

Google is no genius with large acquisitions either. Motorola and Blogger come to mind immediately, but there are others too.

I think we can all agree that Yahoo has been mismanaged at least until recently. I just don't think a CEO's performance is a boolean value that depends on an undefined "any sign of failure" on a large acquisition with a 1 year time frame.

I really like Safari's Reader and that feature alone keeps me on Safari. Readability and other similar plugins on Chrome are nice, but I don't find them as well done as Reader.

I beg to differ. For a lot of people, it isn't about the "thinking". Its the reality of their wallets.

A point often neglected in such comparisons (regardless of the actual conclusion), is that paper towels are useful for more than just drying hands. What if I'm at a restaurant and I wish to wipe my trousers because I spilt a sauce on them? Or what if I just walked in from a walk and I want to wash and wipe my face? Or what if I just ate something oily and I wish to wipe that away (oil doesn't evaporate noticeably and will stick around until wiped away).

I don't quite think autotools were invented to replace Makefiles. Autoconf and friends _configure_ the build environment by discovering locations of dependencies, feature sets, available compilers and build tools and other build conditions. This information is then used to generate the appropriate Makefile.

Makefiles solve a different problem; which is of local build dependencies, looking for changes, packaging and suchlike.

CMake, as it happens, was written because Autotools were particularly ineffecient at the configuration problem. Make happens to be very efficient.