It was openly discussed when we first adopted Slack. Part of the deal was that they wanted a video & audio capability, which Chime had. Note there's a difference between Chime the app and Chime SDK. Slack uses the SDK that gives the audio and video capability. Chime App wraps that into a desktop app.

Yeah, a bit of hyperbole from the article and dreaming from the suspect. Virginia is us-east-1 in Amazon - one of at least 20 regions now. Within us-east-1 there's 6 or 7 availability zones. Each zone would be more than one DC. Even if he managed to completely level one DC, it would be somewhere in the noise level of the amazon capacity loss, let alone the entire internet.

JIT is always faster than Ahead-of-time, for the very reason that it now knows what the optimal code paths are. HP did a huge amount of research into this back in the late 90s with the Dynamo project

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hpl.hp.com%2Ftechrep...

And there's more on it. On average, dynamically optimised code ran 30% faster than statically optimised. And, the dumber the original code was written the better the optimisations were.

"Few multiples" of $10K won't buy you much in the range of around half the orchestral instruments. You'd be flat out trying to pay $30K for a pair of Clarinets or a trumpet, but the less popular instruments can get very, very pricey. As a bassoonist, many of our top of the line instruments are rather expensive. A good Fox or Heckel will be around $30K - 50K USD before custom keywork is factored in (can add up to $10K to the base price). My Fox Contra was, 10 years ago USD $30K so it would be significantly more than that to replace it now. If I was to purchase the same instruments here in Oz about triple that price in AUD.

Double basses and 'cellos also are upwards of $50K in the USA for good ones. Harpsichords also up over $30K for a reasonable one that wasn't assembled from a kit (lots in kit form for $15-20K). Harps also waaay up there in price. That's just from instruments I'm personally familiar with that I either play or someone in my family plays.

It's when they start taking over pizza delivery franchises that you have to really begin to worry.

Friend of mine just moved into a new house that has NBN on it in NW Sydney. Fibre goes all the way to a termination box inside the garage and then he has standard cat6 ethernet ports connected to the fibre modem. No ability to have a fibre switch in there according to him.

That seems to describe a lot of badly written multithreaded code that I'm having to currently "fix".

Major problem there is the same as the mobile market - you have to write very fundamentally different code for a mobile and desktop. Some fascinating figures came out of this year's Siggraph. On the desktop you typically have up to 300W of power dedicated to graphics hardware. On a mobile device you have at most 1W (phone) or 5W (tablet). Those numbers will _never_ go up because anything more than that starts to fry your pocket or hand. So, the optimisation techniques that one uses to write a desktop app or game are extremely different to those written for a mobile device. There's just no getting around that at all.

One of the other interesting factors is that from a developer and graphics perspective now, except for the desktop gaming market, D3D is all but gone. I saw one mention of D3D at Siggraph this year, and that was because the chair of the panel was from MS. All those tablet/phone game writers were way over in the OpenGL ES camp. MS is trying to force the issue again like it's 1999 and now allowing OpenGL drivers on Win8, so you'll see how quickly the game studios will react to that - Even Valve were demoing OpenGL games this year that had better performance on Linux than on Windows on the same hardware according to their statements at one talk. Apart from business desktops, I don't see much more future market for the Microsoft and PCs. The games of interest are now appearing on mobiles and those developers are definitely not in the MS camp.

Summed up, it's a failed strategy and will do more to make people move away from MS than towards it.

You'd be surprised at how often point #2 cannot be assumed to be true. There are some personality types that just cannot see big picture stuff, despite how much you work on training them to see it. These are the detailed-oriented people who become fixated on minutae that they can't see big picture stuff.

Have a look at what the Motesorri style of teaching does. I have a few relatives that are teachers (active and retired) in traditional schools and the younger ones are sending their kids there, rather than through the traditional system.

Tufte's ideas are good for presenting simple information. He gets many things right (eg if the visualisation doesn't work in black and white, adding colour won't fix it). However, many in the infovis community are outright sceptical, if not dismissive of his ideas for analysing high dimensional datasets.

Where his ideas really work is once you have "the answer" that you want to present to someone else. However, the basic exploration of the data to find interesting keypoints, is not what he specialises in. There's whole communities devoted to techniques for datamining and presentation, principly infovis/Visual Analytics.

The infovis community has been dealing with these subjects for years. There's many different visualisation techniques around. Here's a list of the past conferences and the papers:

http://conferences.computer.org/Infovis/

Plenty of good products out there, but the one that I like most is from Tableau Software (http://www.tableausoftware.com/).