Zynga stock plummets below value of its cash and real estate - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-zynga-stock-plummets-20121005,0,5240403.story?twitter <comment><USER2> So heartbreaking. The front-line folks at Zynga were worked to the bone, by so many insider accounts. Now all the stock they were counting on has had most of its value evaporate.

But that's life, right? Counting on equity is, simply, a gamble.

Except when you've rigged the table, as Pincus and his cronies have.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/10/05/zynga- kee...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/10/05/zynga-keeps- crashing-but-mark-pincus-is-having-a-great-year/)

They got to play by different rules than the folks whose hard work got them to IPO. Instead of being subject to lockup, like the rest of Zynga, they got to cash out early, before the true state of their company was fully appreciated by the market.

So what's the lesson?

Don't trust people willing to fuck people over to make a buck. You're not special. If there's a buck in it, you'll get fucked too.

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark- pinkus...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark-pinkus- faceboo/)

<comment><USER3> Is it really _heartbreaking_ that some Silicon Valley developers, one of the highest paid professions in one of the highest paid areas of the world, only made a decent salary instead of a fantastic total compensation package?

It's unfortunate, sure. And quite a few parts of the Zynga story are downright distasteful, especially the options clawback last year.

But let's not get hyperbolic - they played the startup lottery hoping to get rich, and lost.

<comment><USER2> I think that's easy for you to say. But I bet it really, really hurts for the many folks who genuinely worked their asses off to see Zynga succeed. You put in that kind of effort only to watch your boss get rich while you get screwed?

You take Pincus and company, tie their fates to that of the employees, and everyone loses together? Fine, whatever. Like you said, they played the lottery. But the mismatch of fates is, to me, what makes this story pretty damn sad.

<comment><USER3> A few years ago, I saw a documentary that broke my heart.

A woman in China had an unnecessary, experimental operation done at a hospital, without her consent. It caused kidney failure, and she needed a transplant.

There was a match with a family member, but the hospital refused to pay for it, even though it could have been sued into bankruptcy in the US. For the want of $7,000 USD, she was dying.

Watching her sit with her young children on her lap, deathly sick with her husband by her side, the expression of finality and despair on their faces - I'm not ashamed to admit that it made me tear up.

Now that, to me, is _god damn heartbreaking_. I don't disagree with the direction of your sentiment, just the magnitude of the word you are using. It's close to the strongest feelings you can have on a subject. Did you really feel a pang in your heart when you read the article?

Because to me, those two stories aren't even on the same planet.

<comment><USER4> Your comment is one of those which I so very much hate about HN, because you already _know_ it's wrong, you're just writing it because you like to argue and insult others.

By this stupid logic, you can never be happy, because there's always someone with more reasons to be happy, while the victims of a serial killer probably had it better off than a child who dies of starvation in Africa.

(Of course, you're a smart person, so I'm sure you're aware of how stupid this line of arguing is.)

You seem to be pretty strongly in support of someone who by all means cheated his employees. If that's the case, I certainly hope future employees have the foresight to do some research on who you are before agreeing to work for you.

<comment><USER3> That's reductio ad absurdum. Yes, taken to an extreme, it stops making sense, but all I'm arguing for is a little perspective on how lucky we are as gifted developers. I might be wrong, but I'm certainly not arguing just for the sake of it.

Your assertion that I support cheating employees just because I didn't _explicitly say otherwise_ is quite insulting, and it's what makes me feel the need to reply to you. I think the deal they got it shitty, and I certainly wouldn't start taking money off the table before my employees could.

I think you're reading an attitude into my comments that just isn't there. I suggest we continue this conversation by email, to avoid polluting HN with what will no doubt be a long thread - mine is in my profile if you'd like to.

<comment><USER5> I think you're ignoring the role of psychology. I think you do this very explicitly in your first comment:

> _some Silicon Valley developers, one of the highest paid professions in one > of the highest paid areas of the world, only made a decent salary instead of > a fantastic total compensation package?_

The relevance of the integrity of the managers to the ways people make decisions that determine the course of their lives is not something to be taken lightly. This applies even if the consequences themselves do not appear to be so dire. There is a distinctly painful feeling that comes along with devoting your life to someone who abuses that. For those familiar with this perception, the idea that you could ignore it is preposterous. From your perspective, whatever it may be, it could beyond your imagination and experience.

You might say this:

> _Is it really 'heartbreaking' when someone's 17-year-old cat dies? It's a > normal and expected outcome; plus, not only were they lucky enough to afford > a pet and keep it in good health, the animal itself hasn't lost much, > considering it's limited cognitive capacity._

And yet anyone who has been through or even near this situation would find the argument to be incredibly callous, because the formation of human emotion has so much more to it than simply evaluating one's present situation.

I understand the sentiment that perhaps nobody is entitled to a fantastically large amount of money and that people living what we call the good life are a small minority in the world. However, that just isn't the story here.

Connections between humans are what make society possible. It's reasonable to care when they are abused.

<comment><USER3> The comment you quote was trying to point out that they will recover from this, and have a fantastic career ahead of them.

It was not meant to be a comment on how it feels _today_ , or to suggest that we shouldn't feel empathy for them because of their future position.

I just meant that in a few years they'll look back on this and laugh, which makes it story _much_ less sad. Do you disagree with that?

Look, I'm coming from the perspective of an outsider. OP seemed to suggest it is heartbreaking to read about Zynga, which is what I was responding to. If one of my close friends was working there, I would absolutely feel a different way.

Similarly, if I read about a kid's cat dying on the internet, it might just make me feel a bit down. When my dog died, heartbroken was exactly how I felt.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I'm sure everyone will eventually recover from being worked to the bone and having faith in someone who essentially cheated them.

Well, okay, maybe some of them might have been under a lot of stress and that might affect their personal life and even health or life expectancy.

Maybe some of the talented people who might have a fantastic career ahead of them won't recover and become jaded or leave the industry altogether.

Maybe none of that is heartbreaking, strictly said. It's "highly unfortunate" or "really sad", perhaps.

What really grates is your decision to nitpick about the choice of words because you saw something that was even sadder on TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious. It's been a long time since I visited San Francisco, so maybe things have massively changed, but I recall that it used to have things like coffee shops, restaurants, fast food places, bookstores, groceries, movie theaters, and all the other kinds of things you'll find in pretty much any city in the US.

These places employed baristas, waiters, bus boys, burger flippers, sales clerks, stock boys, and such. Such people typically work fixed shifts, and so unlike many developers have time to find people to start families with and have children.

Based on some of the comments here, it would seem that getting by on just a developer's salary in San Francisco is near impossible--you have to have stock money to keep you afloat.

So how come waiters, sales clerks, etc., can work in San Francisco and make ends meet for not only themselves for for a family, but single developers making more than the combined income of that entire working class family cannot? One comment mentioned that the developers might have student loans to pay off, but that's countered by the working class family might have to pay a lot to add their kids to their health insurance.

Same question for New York, and any other place where people consider $100k/year too low to be a living wage for a programmer.

<comment><USER8> A lot of lower wage people commute from a distance to work those jobs. There have been articles about this phenomenon for years:

[http://peninsulapress.com/2012/08/28/low-wage-jobs-drive- sil...](http://peninsulapress.com/2012/08/28/low-wage-jobs-drive-silicon- valley-employment-growth-forcing-more-workers-into-long-commutes/)

<comment><USER9> You are probably technically correct, but missing the point of the parent comment. The point is that this thread seems to see developers as the little guy getting screwed by circumstances & The Powerful while from a different (more "average") perspective these are relatively well off people that earned very well complaining that they didn't do outrageously well.

It's good to keep in mind that the world doesn't owe you much. Where you are would be a massive victory for many. Where you started is where many work their whole lives to get closer to. Perspective plays trick on us. We think where we are is normal, slightly above us is where we ought to be.

<comment><USER10> _We think where we are is normal, slightly above us is where we ought to be._

' _massively_ ' above us is where we ought to be, is the way lots of SV denizens think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really really hope that results like this will serve as a wake-up call to the community that is the valley. We've gone from creating microchips, putting a PC on every desk, opening up and connecting the web to the whole world with pioneers and visionaries, to nowadays creating low-quality browser games which are used to scam users out of private information/money led by ex-wall-street banker deploying sweatshop-like environments, and stealing stock back from employees while scamming public investors at the same time.

Allowing things like this to happen, accepting that this kind of behavior is okay and enabling these kinds of characters to thrive is exactly why the valley has become so frothy. The transformation of Silicon Valley into Hollywood, where anyone with a big enough mouth and large enough ego can thrive is nearly complete. But I'll sure fight tooth and nail until the day I get squeezed out of this place - voting with my dollars and my labor, and a small but convinced voice in what is right and what is wrong.

</comment><comment><USER12> OK, I have done a bit of math:

Book value (all assets - all liabilities): $2.46 per share

Book value less expected write off of $90M: $2.34

Book value less all intangibles: $2.01

Current Assets (essentially cash) less all liabilities: 0.78

Current market value: $2.35

So, the market is valuing it at exactly next quarter's expected book value. This means that they still believe there is some value in the intangibles (I don't) or the business (I don't).

For giggles, here are the some numbers for Research in Motion.

BV: $18.15 per share

BV less intangibles: 11.81

Current assets less all liabilities: 6.22

Market value: 7.76

<comment><USER13> You don't perceive value the business? They still generate $300M in revenues per quarter. That sounds more like an emotional valuation rather than an objective valuation.

<comment><USER12> Yes, and they spend nearly $400M per quarter to generate that revenue. Using more precise numbers, their net loss over the last 4 quarters was about $0.73 per share. By my rule of thumb of awarding a P/E of 10, that makes the business worth -$7.30 per share.

Now in reality, that is a very simplistic analysis, and in point of fact, I do perceive some value in the business, just not very much. It is something that is very hard to quantify (as are other intangibles like copyrights and trademarks). In the end, I do have to go with my gut a little bit (as you say "an emotional valuation"). I don't personally have much use for Zynga's games or their business model, so I am aware that I might undervalue them somewhat, but what the the numbers tell me is that they are a poor business to invest in even at this "low" price. Other non-financial comments on this story and elsewhere reinforce my opinion that when it comes to doing business, Zynga has a lot to learn.

<comment><USER14> The most damning thing in all of this is that while the obvious salvation for Zynga is to be a roadkill acquisition by Facebook (where immediately much of their overhead is removed through reduced transaction costs), the market is placing a negative expected value on it.

Aside from no faith in management, what else could be the reason for the discount? Their business model is so bad that reducing the transaction costs can't fix it? They have hidden liabilities related to their copycat culture that haven't surfaced yet? Shareholder litigation? Or just simply a massive burn rate?

<comment><USER15> > _"Aside from no faith in management, what else could be the reason for the > discount?"_

At _this_ point Zynga could be liquidated and still produce value. But the lower-than-book valuation implies the fear that Zynga will eat into its assets (re: cash) before that has a chance of happening, thus lowering its value.

So, basically, no faith in management...

<comment><USER16> From the parent level comment: The book value doesn't take into account an expected write off of $90m, which would drop the price per share to lower than the share price

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read HN all the time, but I have never commented before. I am a (relatively new) Zynga employee and I wanted to add my thoughts.

Personally, I am stil very happy to be working at Zynga. I enjoy my work and my team, and I am compensated very well. Also, all of the benefits from working at Zynga (the food, the atmosphere, the very good health benefits, etc.) are still available. The only negative I see is that this job might not last for more than a year, and my stock isn't worth very much.

As for everyone hating all of the Zynga employees: everyone I have met and whom I have worked with in my two months at Zynga has been very smart and very nice and incredibly fun to work with. I don't understand why people on Reddit and HN love to demonize the employees of Zynga. I would feel very sad if my friends or I were to be laid off.

<comment><USER18> > _" I don't understand why people on Reddit and HN love to demonize the > employees of Zynga."_

I apologize if I give offense while attempting to shed some light on why people have a problem with your company (and those who choose to work there). It's difficult to be honest about this question without coming across as mean, but I will try.

1) wholesale copying other companies' games (see [http://www.scribd.com/doc/101954002/EA-v-Zynga-Complaint- Fin...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/101954002/EA-v-Zynga-Complaint-Final) for a legal complaint and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4335287> for discussion.) From that thread: _"they must realize that every day they go to work and rip off someone's original work."_ It's hard to respect someone who knowingly makes their living this way.

2) The game mechanics of Zynga games often hinge on what might be viewed as "bad" use of psychology -- manipulative, addictive, and in a sense abusive of the friends functionality of facebook. It's hard to respect someone who knowingly treats people so callously.

3) Common opinion is that the games themselves range from mildly awful to completely terrible, and are successful almost entirely due to the "bad" psychology above. It's easy to respect someone like notch, who got rich making an awesome game. It's hard to respect people like Pincus, who got rich by making games that are fundamentally lame.

Again, no offense meant to you or your friends. Maybe you're on a team that doesn't do any of the above bad stuff. But the parts of Zynga most of us are familiar with do all of that bad stuff. I hope this helps clarify why you might see so much hate directed that way.

<comment><USER19> Honestly, this is ridiculous.

1\. The vast majority of the games industry borrows heavily from titles which have come before, so Zynga isn't unique in this regard, nor should it be singled out.

2\. The establishment of addiction-creating feedback loops is practically a games industry science. Again, this is hardly unique to Zynga.

3\. Subjective statements about quality aside, I think it's safe to say that Minecraft has highly addictive qualities, and therefore Notch can't really be put on a pedestal here in the context of your second assertion.

<comment><USER20> Your points stick for a subset of games, but I don't think bringing Minecraft into the mix makes sense.

Other "addicting" games that Zynga can be compared to are things that have been in the casual space for years, or a decade-plus. Things like Bejeweled and the casual flash-game portals that (used to be) everywhere.

Zynga is in the business of shallow gaming experiences that focus on extracting money from users. I think when most people think of _good_ game companies, they are thinking of companies that make games with depth that don't require a refill (via money) to keep having "fun" or progressing.

<comment><USER21> Are you sure you're not confusing PopCap and Zynga? PopCap make Bejewled, and create games that are much deeper than the Zynga games I've tried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could someone who didn't see this coming please explain to me how there was another outcome for this company?

I'm being completely serious. When I read headlines like this I just assume this happened at least nine months ago. I'd like to hear some reasoned defense of how this company was going to survive.

<comment><USER23> Well, it makes a _ton_ of money ($1.3b ttm revs). Is, by far, the leading web- based/social gaming company. Is an excellent acquisition target. Has, by far, the most DAUs/MAUs. Is in an easy-to-monetize industry. Would be in the best position to take advantage of relaxed gambling laws. And on and on. What don't you get?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome. Let them collapse, and may a hundred new and better companies bloom in the exodus.

<comment><USER25> Yep. And maybe a few hundred devs will struggle to pay their mortgage.

Yes, Zynga has many issues. But before we get all cold-hearted and rejoice at the wonderful invisible hand that will correct all, can we for a moment remember that it's going to affect mostly the people in the trenches? Who often had little to no say in the outcome?

<comment><USER26> The idea of getting into a mortgage based on non-vested or non-lockup-expired stock options reminds me of Japanese professionals getting into mortgages based on their salary + overtime pay (overtime was effectively eliminated during and after the financial crisis, which left these people unable to meet their monthly mortgage payments).

<comment><USER27> Your comment is so isolated from the real world, and the very fundamentals of humanity, that I have to wonder how old you are and if you even have a girlfriend. Let alone kids.

The comment you wrote is something I would have written 17 years ago on a Prodigy bulletin board forum after I just finished reading some selected essays of Ayn Rand.

<comment><USER28> Wait so you think it's reasonable to bank on some uncertain future benefit to pan out, and expect people to be 'heartbroken' when it doesn't go through? Come on, you don't mean that, do you?

When I worked for a startup, I only considered my salary in my financial decisions. This also meant that I could switch jobs and be reasonably certain that my standard of living wouldn't change. We were offered equity as well, and the agreement we had to sign had several provisions that I could only describe as being pro-founder/anti-employee. For example:

1\. Upon termination of employment (for any reason), the company can buy back your shares at book price, whether you like it or not. In other words: You'll never see a big payout from your work if you go.

2\. There should be no expectation of a market for the shares in the company, and there may never be one. Again, good luck selling those shares.

3\. The founder has the right to sell his shares, but employees have no tag- along right. So even if the company is sold, you will probably not be able to cash in at that point, since your labor/skill are part of the sale.

4\. The employees' shares are subject to dilution. How much dilution? Who knows, maybe 1%, maybe 99%, whatever's good in the view of the founders.

This stuff is pretty standard, too. What I don't get though is how people will make multi-decade (i.e. mortgage, kids) financial decisions on a benefit that's this uncertain. Instead of actual equity, they could just say "we'll give you more money later if we get rich and feel like it". At least it would be more honest.

<comment><USER21> I can't believe people are actually willing to sign those kinds of agreements. If you can't sell you shares and the company can basically buy them back at will, the ownership is just theoretical. It's like getting monopoly money with the added clause that you may exchange it for real money if the owners get rich and want let you perform the exchange.

Please tell me that at least some companies have reasonable agreements with their employees/shareholders. Otherwise it's like someone else said a few months ago, Silicon Valley is just overrun with sleazy leadership types who do their best to screw over their employees.

<comment><USER28> I couldn't believe it either, and left that place pretty quickly. I still talk to a lot of people that work there, and I get the feeling that they live in this bubble where they assume everything will work out for the best. To them, I'm just cynical.

I hope that this isn't the rule in most places, but I wouldn't know :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Aren't they something like 15% of FB's revenue, and FB is more like 85% of theirs? Seems like FB would just keep on screwing with their visibility on the site to drag their numbers down to the muck, then buy Zynga with change they find between their couch cushions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> see also: [http://www.valuewalk.com/2012/10/zynga-inc-znga-poker- chief-...](http://www.valuewalk.com/2012/10/zynga-inc-znga-poker-chief-tired- of-gambling-and-exits-the-company/)

        Troubles seem to be following the struggling game maker, Zynga Inc
        (NASDAQ:ZNGA), this time now with the exit of Laurence "Lo" Toney, an executive
        who oversaw the company's hugely popular online poker game.

        Tony's exit was revealed via his LinkedIn profile, where he changed his current
        profession to "mentor at MuckerLab," a Los Angeles startup accelerator, and
        lists Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) among his previous professions.

        [...]

        Tony now joins the list of top-level executives who left Zynga Inc
        (NASDAQ:ZNGA) in the past couple of months. In September, Chief technology
        officer Allan Leinwand and chief marketing and revenue officer Jeff Karp
        resigned, while in August, chief operating officer John Schappert and chief
        creative officer Mike Verdu left the company. Not only this, but the game maker
        also witnessed the exit of two vice presidents, Bill Mooney and Brian
        Birtwistle, at the end of August.

</comment><comment><USER30> Stock price plummeting below asset value indicates that investors believe that Zynga is now in the business of burning money instead of making money.

</comment><comment><USER31> Article does not mention debt- Does Zynga have any? If so, it explains some of this.

<comment><USER32> This is a good question.

There is somethin like $600MM of ST liabilities, though vs $1.2B of cash & equivalents (/securities).

Not sure what that is, but that is (potentially) a big deal.

Although it seems to be on the BS QoQ

[http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA&fstype=ii](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA&fstype=ii)

LT Debt = $100MM, so not as significant an issue.

<comment><USER33> Those $600MM are detailed in their Quarterly report:

-$450MM are deferred revenues (i.e., people bought things in their games but they don't recognize everything as revenue right away, a common procedure with online video games).

-$40MM are customer deposits, which according to them "represent amounts received for unredeemed game cards as well as advanced payments from various customers."

-$120MM are things like transaction taxes, compensation related liabilities and accounts payable.

So, it's not really debt, just working capital.

<comment><USER32> \- Interesting note.

To the tune of $450, though, these constant amount in deferred revs is reasonably large source of working capital/liquidity @ ~5x their bank line. But valuation of the type implied in the headline should (most likely) be done on some concept of net cash, I would think. It cost you money to liquidate the assets before you get your hands on the cash.

Gross margin less SGA is only 30% of revenues, so maybe only $300mm-ish needs to be shaved off the cash balance from deferred revs. These liabilities must be incurred to realize the future revenues wigthout refunding back the pre- pays, good 1st approximation.

So, $1.0 to 1.1B is closer to the floor value. They are at $1.9B market cap a5 $2.50, so almost 2.0x coverage of this right now. (options, etc might swing this a bit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why is there no discussion of obligations? A company could have a lot of cash and real estate, but debt obligations could wipe out a ton of that value. I realize the discussion is about Zynga's deteriorating future but it seems that in order to draw any conclusioons from the stock price being lower than cash+real-estate a discussion of obligations is required.

</comment><comment><USER35> Can someone explain to me why a company would be priced below its "fundamentals"?

<comment><USER36> My thoughts exactly.

It's a good headline, buut won't the market correct this naturally to account for the fact it's worth "less" than it's assets or is Zynga going to just keep dropping?

<comment><USER37> > It's a good headline, buut won't the market correct this naturally to > account for the fact it's worth "less" than it's assets or is Zynga going to > just keep dropping?

Not unless equities investors decide to act rationally, and there's little evidence for that. Stocks falling below the true value of company assets is such a common occurrence that cagier, usually bigger, players will locate and "greenmail" such a company into buying their own stock with company assets to correct the difference between market valuation and basic value.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenmail>

So I guess the answer to your question is "yes" but exactly how this happens is sometimes rather complicated.

Obviously if a company can be located whose physical plant and inventory value is higher than its stock valuation, such a company is vulnerable to a takeover by anyone able to detect this peculiar state of affairs and act on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> ... according to one analyst. Paraphrased from the article: J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth wrote (Zynga's) assets are worth $2.46 per share... In afternoon trading Friday, Zynga stock was at $2.35.

<comment><USER39> Totally reasonable thing to trade at if investors believe the company is destroying value instead of creating it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So when do the corporate raiders come to perform a hostile takeover and liquidate Zynga for the cash and real estate?

<comment><USER41> Zynga is structured such that Mark Pincus has a majority of the voting shares (50.15% to be exact). This means he cannot be fired nor can any takeover occur without his consent.

<comment><USER42> And he's already cashed out a significant portion of his stock, so he has no personal motivation to ever sell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> fitting fate for the CEO, Mark Pincus, whose been quoted as saying he "doesn't want to fucking innovate. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

quora discussion on this: <http://b.qr.ae/hFgaYd>

<comment><USER44> Peter Thiel discussed the underlying worldview for why people think and act like Pincus at his startup class, which Blake Masters wrote up here:

[http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23435743973/peter- thiels...](http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels- cs183-startup-class-13-notes-essay)

Worth a read. I think Pincus' overall approach is actually dominant right now in tech, not an outlier. Most people just aren't so crude about discussing it.

<comment><USER45> Where is the mention of Pincus or Zynga? I couldn't find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Should FB buy them? Much of Zynga's trouble has been that their interests and Facebook's didn't align.

My first thought was "Why bother? FB can just wait and pick up the good staff in the wind down." But the exact opposite of that logic has led to acquihires.

<comment><USER47> I don't think Facebook is much interested in gaming. If anything they'd buy another social network company.

<comment><USER48> I think that Facebook _gets_ that the current batch of skinner-box games have a limited lifespan as users (and Facebook itself) build up their immunities to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does this mean they're undervalued and it's a good time to buy Zynga?

<comment><USER50> there expected to have a low quarter coming up, the price will most likely drop then, but they're mau has been fairly consistent so it might not be too bad

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> they said the same with Nokia about valuation. They were saying only it's patents are worth 7 B ... but at some point all NOK was valued at 6.1 B . It has recovered since, but the idea is that you can burn your cash real quickly if you're not earning new income

</comment><comment><USER52> It is baffling that analysts can essentially divide their guidance by 2 overnight. With such "guidance", it's easy for small investors to get fleeced. And with everyone in the industry gloating about how we saw it coming, it's only going to make us all look a little less trustworthy. It's a shame too, because many called out Zynga's business model as unsustainable, even though that didn't get much coverage in the financial or mainstream press.

</comment><comment><USER53> "We're addressing these near-term challenges by targeted cost reductions and focusing our new game pipeline to reflect our strategic priorities."

Methinks someone has been raiding that bingo variant for phrases.

</comment><comment><USER54> I have been waiting to see this company die and I hope the end is near. They may try and save it with virtual currency gambling as their next con on the human brain but it is inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER55> who could have seen this coming? :)

<comment><USER30> I believe that those who cared about company values did see this coming. See this one comment in Hacker News about a year ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3225688>

<comment><USER55> yeah, sorry, behind the sarcasm that was my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Didn't they try to ease stock away from those who owned it pre-IPO? How has that panned out now? … Was it converted to less valuable cash at the time, or is the cash more valuable now? (or was it that they got nothing in exchange for losing the stock)

</comment><comment><USER57> Developers and Designers getting screwed over by the business monkeys and other scum... as usual. Further fuelling my hate for non-creative garbage.

<comment><USER58> It's unfortunate that you cherry-pick Zynga as representatives of "non- creatives".

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Are they renting any co-working space? Heard the offices are nice.

</comment><comment><USER60> It's some kind of poetic justice that Zynga before the IPO was compared to game makers that have historically produced kickass games, like Blizzard.

</comment><comment><USER61> this is really sad

</comment><comment><USER62> Bazynga

</comment><comment><USER56> Damn

<comment><USER63> Sometimes this is a good opportunity to invest BUT in this case I would steer clear. I think their business model is questionable which brings into question their profitability. If they continue losing money, they could burn through their book value in no time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Who cares about unsophisticated investors who buy at the IPO or employees, or long-term stability? This company was a short term deal like many others in the web startup space. Hype worked. Virtual goods? It makes me laugh everytine I say it. Pincus and other investors made heaps of cash from this, no doubt. Mission accomplished. Call it sa success. Time to close up shop and on to the next one.

Facebook is much the same way. Some people have made fortunes. Who cares about public investors, Wall Street and employees? They'll survive.

It's just business.

<comment><USER15> You realize that capitalism can't function when people keep stealing capital, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I have held Zynga throughout the year. The extent of leadership fail here is unprecedented. n number of remediation tactics should have taken hold early to prevent where we are now. Here is a copy of my e-mail to Pincus (still gone unanswered):

"Mark -

Can we have a man-to-man? Seriously, please explain to me, a small shareholder in Zynga, exactly what the fuck you have been doing with my investment? Clearly, the answer is not building value in any meaningful way. Any third year entrepreneur will have trouble seeing your performance this year amounting to anything other than a collected check, a leveraged office, a leased plane ($3K a wet flight hour?!? What is that a fucking citation X?!?) and an overpaid security team. If the plan is to ride this thing to the nines, let me know so that I can pull out and forget any thoughts of a really well integrated ecosystem of gaming.

BTW: If you see the OMGPOP/Draw Something team, tell them to get the fuck off of their asses (if they're still around) and do something about long-tail gamification model if they want to do something about user retention.

That's all, k thx bye _drops mic_."

<comment><USER66> This reads like most of the e-mail I get, and I don't even run a publicly traded company!

<comment><USER67> I don't even want to know what most of your email looks like, although I can't say I'm not at least a little curious.

<comment><USER68> most popular tumblr of all time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FleetDB - <AUTHOR> http://fleetdb.org/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps a little editorializing of the headline is appropriate when it's one word that doesn't tell me a single thing about the link?

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks rather neat!

I like to think that I know enough Clojure to decipher that the database and metadata is locked during compaction. Is this true? See [http://github.com/mmcgrana/fleetdb/blob/master/src/clj/fleet...](http://github.com/mmcgrana/fleetdb/blob/master/src/clj/fleetdb/embedded.clj#L99)

I wrote something called LogStore based on the general notion of log- structured data (then learned about the work of Ousterhout et al. in the 90s). For what it's worth, I avoided the need to lock the metadata and the database during compaction, allowing the log to grow during compaction.

Instead of working through the locked metadata (offset per entry) and rewriting the entries to a new file, the compactor works from the end of the log file to the start of the log file. Each record descriptor is actually written after the record data to help the compactor easily skip over older versions of records it has processed already during the compaction iteration.

Once the compactor reaches the start of the file, it checks to see if the file grew (more appends, new data) since the beginning of the compaction, and starts over from the new EOF but stopping at the previous EOF. This repeats until the compactor fully catches up.

Then the database is temporarily locked, the new metadata is swapped in, and the existing log file is overwritten with the compacted log file.

<comment><USER4> The database and metadata are not locked during compaction, at least to the extent that you seem to think they are.

When a compaction is requested, the compact query enters the write queue. When the query reaches the head of queue, an asynchronous compaction is started on a snapshot of the database at that time, to a file in /tmp. Also, a buffer is added to the database metadata in which subsequent queries will be stored. After this essentially instant operation, the database can proceed to process write queries as normal. While the compaction is ongoing, write queries are appended to the buffer mentioned above. When the compaction thread that was spawned earlier finishes writing its snapshot, it inserts into the write queue a request to finalize compaction. When this request reaches the head of the queue, it appends all the buffered queries to the compacted database file. Finally, it swaps the compacted file in /tmp to the regular database path. So writes are blocked once for an instant and once for however long it takes to write those buffered queries, which shouldn't be long either. Note that reads are never blocked by compaction; indeed they are never blocked in general.

<comment><USER5> How do you recover from a compaction thread that hung or silently died? You could end up w/ quite a buffer to append in one go.

edit: very nice project, btw. I always fancied writing a db in lisp.

<comment><USER4> Right, there are actually two potential problems here: 1) the initial compaction takes a long time and there are a correspondingly large amount of buffered writes to append and 2) the compaction never finishes, either because compaction hung or died - and then we are adding to the buffer indefinitely.

I don't think that 1) will be that much of a problem: the amount of writes that the db can process in the time it takes to do a compaction of even a large db should be small compared to the rate at which they can be appended to the compacted file.

2) is more problematic; I'll need to add a timeout-like guard to prevent a runaway write buffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So what does this offer over a key-value store (such as BerkeleyDB) other than the JSON query/object abstraction layer?

</comment><comment><USER7> What happens if/when the database runs out of RAM? Does the OS then start swapping to disk?

<comment><USER4> Yes; the current version of FleetDB is designed for datasets that fit in RAM.

<comment><USER8> Is it not true that a major purpose of a DB is to handle datasets the are too big for RAM? If the items fit in RAM, isn't speed ~1/1000th (ie ratio of RAM access to HD access time) the issue it was?

<comment><USER9> If everything fits into RAM, you can use my proprietary ArrayDB storage system which has bindings for every non-toy programming language known to man. In fact, if you're a programmer, you already know the API for ArrayDB. No downloads, no installation, minimal investment and training required!

<comment><USER3> I wonder how many people googled "ArrayDB" because of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like the first schema-free database written in Clojure has arrived

<comment><USER4> Clojure is very compelling for implementing a main-memory database; if you use the persistent data structures and concurrency primitives in the right way, you get atomicity, consistency, and isolation essentially for free.

<comment><USER5> Do the index maps contain pointers back to the base records? The examples I saw on the implementation page showed a nested copy of the data; I assume this is just a projection?

<comment><USER4> That's a good question; indeed the index maps just contain pointers back to the records.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks neat, certainly something to watch.

</comment><comment><USER12> congrats mark!

</comment><comment><USER13> Stopped reading at "optimized for agile development."..</comment>


Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Developers - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/open-source-betrayed-industry-leaders-accuse-amazon-of-playing-a-rigged-game-with-aws-67177bc748b7 <comment><USER2> Uh, its always been like this. AWS has never had a truly "standards compliant" platform. When you go AWS, you are vendor locked.</comment>


Ask HN: Programmers, how many of you got started tinkering in PC hardware? - <AUTHOR> It recently occurred to me that all of the programmers I know, almost all of them got their start by tinkering in hardware, pulling apart old computers, etc.
Without having done any research on the topic, I'm wondering how many others outside of my personal circle got their start in pulling apart old computers/hardware tinkering etc.
I'm growing to suspect, in spite of rapid adoption of more CS-oriented programs being introduced in schools worldwide, if the relative lack of readily available "hackable" consumer hardware compared to the amount available 10-20 years ago may have an impact on the next wave of programmers - will there be more? Less?
If there's been any research/discussion on this before, by all means let me know. Very interested to read. <comment><USER2> That was the reason the Raspberry Pi was made iirc</comment>


Game 1 - 2013 World Chess Championship - Carlsen vs Anand - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5sQR-6WCFA

<comment><USER2> this looks like an interesting chess game

</comment><comment><USER2> I like chess.

</comment><comment><USER2> chess is good!

</comment><comment><USER2> chess

</comment><comment><USER2> chess

</comment><comment><USER3> chess

<comment><USER3> I second! chess !</comment></comment>


Show HN: Real Time Bitcoin Prices,Charts,Trades and Updates - <AUTHOR> https://realtimebitco.in/ <comment><AUTHOR> Please add your helpful reviews and suggestions here

<comment><USER2> You should specify from which exchange your are gathering trade data.

<comment><AUTHOR> okay @askz thanks for that suggestion..anything else that i can do it to make it better like a feature ?</comment></comment></comment>


FCC votes to overturn net neutrality rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39973787 <comment><AUTHOR> quote: "Americans have until mid-August to share their views with the FCC"</comment>


Ask HN: What podcasts are you listening to? - <AUTHOR> What are your favorite tech and non-tech podcasts? <comment><USER2> The History of Rome - actually completed, relistening to the republic / early imperial parts. It's amazing. Well worth the 40 or so hours. Really can't give it enough credit. Romulus to Augustus to Romulus Augustulus in absolutely loving detail,

Revolutions - Mike Duncan's (creator of THoR) new project. He's just finishing up the French Revolution, already covered the English Civil War and American Revolution. Preparing to go on hiatus to research the Haitan Revolution.

The History of Byzantium - Picks up in 476 where THoR left off. Currently in the eighth century with the Byzantines recovering from the Muslim conquests a bit. Different guy, but still very good.

12 Byzantine Rulers - Finished this one, it's a very short series but gives a nice overview of Byzantine history. Much less in depth than THoB.

Norman Centuries - Second project by the 12BR creator, similar concept but covering the Normans. Incredibly interesting, covers the Norman conquests of England, southern Italy, their attacks on the Byzantines, and their crusader state holdings

The History of Britain - finished / inactive, it's pretty good, but never really hit its stride.

/r/AskHistorians podcast - Have only listened to a few episodes. Great content, but I'm not personally a fan of the format.

My list to start is The History of the Crusades, Hardcore History, History of English, History of England, The Lesser Bonapartes, and the BBC inquiry podcast. Hard to find time!

<comment><USER3> Is there stuff like this for more 'modern' events? These suggestions are great and I like stuff like HH but was wondering if there was anything that covered like 1920's events or cold war or something in that same period (up until maybe 80-90's or so?)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> * The art of manliness

* The Tim Ferriss show

* 99% invisible

* Waking up with Sam Harris

* .NET rocks

* Hanselminutes

* The Agenda with Steve Paiken (Canadian current affairs)

* This american life

</comment><comment> tefo-mohapi (I'm biased on this one) But if you're looking to catch up on African Tech & Startup news check out AfricanTechRoundUp.com (Comes out weekly. SoundCloud and iTunes).

I listen to:

1\. The Monocle Weekly 2\. The Combat Jack Show 3\. Tim Ferriss Show 4\. The Entrepreneurs by Monocle 5\. African Tech Round-Up

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't forget Dan Carlin's Hardcore History!

</comment><comment><USER5> * Freakonomics

* Radiolab

* Comedy Bang Bang

* Planet Money

* This American Life (sometimes)

* Everything by Gimlet Media (when I remember)

</comment><comment><USER6> Previous HN discussion 3 months ago with some good gems: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799631)

</comment><comment><USER7> \- Startups for the Rest of Us

\- Radiolab

\- Bootstrapped Web

\- The Tim Ferriss Show

</comment><comment><USER8> Harmontown - a podcast by the creator of the brilliant tv shows Community and Rick and Morty. I'm not sure it will make sense on it's own, but if you really love Community, think that Dan is a genius, and want to understand how he thinks - it's awesome. Also very funny.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have been listening to Partially Derivative and Talking Machines, both data science related. Talking Machines is more industry focused whereas Partially Derivative is more fun. Also Reply All, a show about the Internet. Non tech I listen to the History of Philosophy podcast.

</comment><comment><USER10> Haven't seen these mentioned yet:

\- Escape Pod (SF short stories)

\- Risky Business (hilariously sarcastic infosec news and interviews)

\- Savage Lovecast (sex and relationship from "America's only advice columnist")

\- Intelligence Squared (Oxford-style debates on current topics)

<comment><USER11> Not hating, long time fan, real long time... But have you noticed a downward drop in quality from the Escape Pod family of casts? I mean it's free, so I'm not complaining, but it makes it hard to listen to.

<comment><USER10> Their narrators? Yeah, it's possible - there have been a few stories in the past year that were just unlistenable due to either poor recording quality or just a terrible voice.

On the other hand, when Steve Eley read _everything_ , that wasn't great either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just (try to) follow one now - Talking Machines. They have great content on ML, esp contemporary work. Each episode leads to enough followup on the material that I don't have much time to follow another podcast :)

</comment><comment><USER13> The Urbanist (Monocle24) : [http://monocle.com/radio/shows/the- urbanist/](http://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-urbanist/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I only recently discovered what I was missing with podcasts, so I'm still finding good ones. Here's the current list:

\- America's Test Kitchen

\- Motley Fool Money

\- Smart Passive Income

\- Paul's Security Weekly

\- Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project

\- This is Only a Test

<comment><USER15> I was very sad to hear Will Smith is leaving 'This is Only a Test' & Tested but am happy to hear he is still going to be on 'Still Untitled'

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Giant Bombcast and Giant Beastcast

8-4 Play

Retronauts

Back in my Play

Pop Culture Happy Hour

I have many others, but these are the ones I look forward to week after week.

I listen to podcasts to take a break and relax, so I typically don't listen to tech related or focused podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER17> \- Talking Machines

\- a16z podcast

\- Software Engineering Radio

\- re/code decode

\- JavaScript Jabber

\- Talk Python to Me

\- The Changelog

\- Startup School Radio

\- Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders

\- Full Stack Radio

<comment><USER18> Oh I listen to Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders too! Great stuff there for sure

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> * Death Sex & Money

* Reply All

* KCRW Good Food

* Freakonomics

* KCRW's DnA: Design & Architecture

* From the Top

* This American Life

* Return to Soil

</comment><comment><USER20> I use Pocket Casts on android to listen. Highly recommended.

Ordered by how often I listen.

Marketplace

Planetmoney

RadioLab

This American Life

Startups for the Rest of Us

Reply All, (Statup S1 & S2)

Occasionally other public radio podcasts

</comment><comment><USER21> \- Developer Tea

\- 60-Second Science

\- BrainStuff

\- Exponential Wisdom

\- The Tim Ferriss Show

\- The One You Feed Podcast

\- The Art of Manliness (sometimes)

\- NPR: TED Radio Hour (sometimes)

\- You Are Not So Smart (sometimes)

\- This American Life (sometimes)

</comment><comment><USER22> The Ashish Walia Show . . . . Great podcast for people interested in building startups!

</comment><comment><USER23> Besides many of those already mentioned, I like:

* Slate's culture gabfest

* JavaScript Jabber

* Econtalk w/Russ Roberts

* Hardcore History

* School Sucks Podcast

* Inc Uncensored

</comment><comment><USER24> \- Roderick on the line \- Rich Roll podcast \- Snap Judgement

</comment><comment><USER25> Skeptic's Guide to the Universe

</comment><comment><USER26> The Skeptics Guide to the Universe

</comment><comment><USER27> Chasing Product

Rocketship Podcast

Startup School Radio

Startups for the Rest of Us

TechZing

Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

</comment><comment><USER28> \- Startups for the Rest of Us

\- More than just code

\- Release Notes

\- Iterate

\- Epicenter Bitcoin

\- Startup (by gimlet media)

\- Robotics Podcast

\- Changelog

</comment><comment><USER29> beats, rye, types wait, wait, don't tell me this american life planet money

</comment><comment><USER30> * Software Engineering Radio

* Hanselminutes

* The Changelog

* Talk Python to Me

* PBS NewsHour

</comment><comment><USER31> \- Waking up with Sam Harris

\- Harmontown

<comment><USER8> Oh, a fellow Harmenian here =) Greetings)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> \- Snap Judgement

\- Ted radio hour

\- NPR's Hidden Brain

\- Planet Money

</comment><comment><USER33> \- Talk Python to Me

\- The Changelog

</comment><comment><USER34> 92Y Talks [http://92ytalks.libsyn.com/rss](http://92ytalks.libsyn.com/rss)

All About Books [http://feeds.feedburner.com/all_about_books](http://feeds.feedburner.com/all_about_books)

Authors on Tour Live! [http://feeds.feedburner.com/AuthorsOnTour- Live](http://feeds.feedburner.com/AuthorsOnTour-Live)

Conversations with Richard Fidler [http://abc.net.au/queensland/conversations/conversationspodc...](http://abc.net.au/queensland/conversations/conversationspodcast.xml)

Freakonomics Radio [http://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio](http://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio)

Get-It-Done Guy's Quick and Dirty Tips to Do More [http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/xml/getitdone.xml](http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/xml/getitdone.xml)

Great Lives [http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/greatlives/rss.xm...](http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/greatlives/rss.xml)

HBR IdeaCast [http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/harvardbusiness/ideacast?fo...](http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/harvardbusiness/ideacast?format=xml)

Listen to Lucy [http://podcast.ft.com/rss/18/](http://podcast.ft.com/rss/18/)

MIT Press Podcast [http://feeds.feedburner.com/mitpresspodcast](http://feeds.feedburner.com/mitpresspodcast)

Plain Simple Management (now defunct but worth listening to back issues) [http://feeds.feedburner.com/PlainSimpleManagement](http://feeds.feedburner.com/PlainSimpleManagement)

TED Radio Hour [http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510298](http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510298)

The Accidental Creative [http://feeds.feedburner.com/accidentalcreative/podcast](http://feeds.feedburner.com/accidentalcreative/podcast)

The Engaging Brand [http://www.blubrry.com/feeds/engaging.xml](http://www.blubrry.com/feeds/engaging.xml)

The Moth Podcast [http://feeds.themoth.org/themothpodcast](http://feeds.themoth.org/themothpodcast)

The PMO Podcast [http://www.botinternational.com/thepmopodcast.xml](http://www.botinternational.com/thepmopodcast.xml)

Thinking Allowed [http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/ta/rss.xml](http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/ta/rss.xml)

==

I've also found it useful to download YouTube videos and convert them to MP3s so I can listen to them later.

Some of the channels I've subscribed to are:

GoogleTechTalks [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtXKDgv1AVoG88PLl8nGXmw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtXKDgv1AVoG88PLl8nGXmw)

Harvard Business Review [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWo4IA01TXzBeGJJKWHOG9g](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWo4IA01TXzBeGJJKWHOG9g)

Talks at Google [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbmNph6atAoGfqLoCL_duAg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbmNph6atAoGfqLoCL_duAg)

TED Talks [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug)

TEDx Talks [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsT0YIqwnpJCM- mx7-gSA4Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsT0YIqwnpJCM-mx7-gSA4Q)

The School of Life [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog)

</comment><comment><USER35> \- Radio Diaries

\- Radiolab

\- Freakonomics

\- Invisibilia

\- Love + Radio

\- Criminal

\- Serial

\- Meanwhile in the Future

\- TED Radio Hour

\- Tim Ferriss Show

\- The Truth

\- Mystery Show

\- Planet Money

\- Fresh Air

\- This American Life

\- WTF with Marc Maron

\- The Moth

\- Strangers

\- Skeptoid

Loads of great stuff from the BBC:

\- Click

\- Seriously

\- Desert Island Discs

\- Great Lives

\- In Our Time

\- Kermode & Mayo

\- Witness

\- Thinking Aloud

<comment><USER36> Hey The Truth! I've acted in a couple episodes of that. Thanks for listening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> planet money

sawbones

savage lovecast

writing excuses

stuff you should know

Freakonomics Radio

StarTalk Radio</comment>


Arduino board adds Sigfox low power wireless for IoT - <AUTHOR> https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/distribution-world/arduino-board-adds-sigfox-low-power-wireless-iot-2017-04/ <comment><USER2> I have made a project with the SigFox network and I absolutely love it.

I have also worked with LoRa and wrote a blog post comparing working with both networks: [https://raed.it/blog/iot-network-sigfox-vs- lora/](https://raed.it/blog/iot-network-sigfox-vs-lora/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would think that LoRa, with similar footprint and bandwidth, would be a better adder for hobby boards, as you could own both ends of the system and not have to interface with a third-party (SigFox), 2-years subscription included not withstanding.

<comment><USER4> LoRa is in the pipeline but it requires you to either setup your own gateways or join somebody else's network ($$). SigFox is setting up networks globally and this board also comes with geolocation included in the subscription. So if you want to make a low power sensor node that works now this is s good product

<comment><USER5> Massimo this is great. LoRa client support and maybe also an Arduino LoRa Gateway it will be amazing for rolling out nodes in agriculture. These areas are often not served by existing networks so a DIY-solution will always have its spot.

<comment><USER4> There is a Shield + Gateway coming out soon , the Lora Alliance will use it as a dev kit. In the summer we'll have a MKR format board. SigFox is good becaue it can deliver now on a lot of use cases

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple years ago, for a RHoK event, we imagined a network of seismic/motion sensors using cellphone brains on top of poles that could be dropped from planes and penetrate enough in the soil to remain steady and signal land movements before landslides.

This could be a really cool way of deploying (or dropping) a network with a mesh backbone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Might be a very newbie question, but is there something like this for WiFi? I mean, something that like SigFox can run "6 months on 2 AA batteries" for WiFi for Arduino?

EDIT: I meant the same amount of data as with Sigfox, i.e. about 10K a day (specifically I just want to fetch some local weather data basically, maybe some traffic data as well).

<comment><USER7> 6 months might be way too long for WiFi. A lot of factors come into place to achieve at least one month. Just to mention the most obvious is the frequency of data transfer.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that's missing from my original post, but I meant about the same amount of data as with Sigfox but for WiFi.

So, max will be about some 10K per day.

<comment><USER8> ESP8266 is a popular low-power WiFi chip, you can use it with a separate micro-controller but for many applications you don't need one. "ESP8266 consumes less than 12uA in sleep mode and less than 1.0mW (DTIM=3) or less than 0.5mW (DTIM=10) to stay connected to the access point." [0] Elsewhere it says it can wake-up and transmit within 2ms but I'd take that with a grain of salt.

I'm having trouble finding the same details about the MKRFOX1200 but for the transmitter "Low current consumption: 32.7mA during telegram transmit [...] Typical OFF mode current: 5nA." [1] The processor part is a SAMD21.

My guess is it's possible to get comparable idle/sleep power draw regardless of transmission method but WiFi will require more power to establish a connection and transmit the first byte.

[0] [https://cdn- shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/ESP8266_Specificati...](https://cdn- shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/ESP8266_Specifications_English.pdf)

[1] [http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-9372-Smart-RF- ATA8520_Data...](http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-9372-Smart-RF- ATA8520_Datasheet.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I see, thank you for the thorough explanation. Also because my first guess would be to turn on an off the antena whenever I needed data, but after what you described I see that's not as straightforward and depending on the number of updates it may actually be better to leave it on for longer periods of time.

<comment><USER8> I'm really ignorant about radio and even electricity so don't let my googling and wild-ass guesses scare you off. There are many helpful "maker" fora populated by people who can provide educated advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tried to look for subscription costs, €1 to €15 per device per year according to: [https://novemberfive.co/blog/internet-of-things-lora-vs- sigf...](https://novemberfive.co/blog/internet-of-things-lora-vs-sigfox/)

<comment><USER10> The article says it comes with a 2-year subscription for upto 140 messages per day.

I can see this being useful for collecting field data of sorts, but unfortunately probably only in select urban areas. Coverage outside a few major cities is spotty or nonexistent.

<comment><USER4> I believe it's possible to have an agreement with sigfox to run a base station. We have it in the office, it's a 1 Rack unti device so it doesn't take a huge amount of space and it has a pretty long range

<comment><USER10> Are there any possibilities to have "private" base stations that don't need a subscription? (Or in exchange for running a public base station, I get unlimited communication to my own base station?)

<comment><USER11> There is a network emulator (USB key), but we're not 100% happy with it. Which is why it's not advertised for sale yet.

But if someone is interested to give it a try in not-yet-covered areas in the US or elsewhere, let me know : email@example.com ; I could mail one for free in exchange of test feedback

———

Hosting a public base station in exchange of discount/free subscriptions is something that could be considered. Again, feel free to reach out :) One thing to consider : Public base station means that other users will rely on it for their own devices, with a need for reliability (uptime, backhaul connectivity, ..)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Little reason to run anything other than ubiquitous Wi-Fi imho.

You can run an ESP8266 or ESP32 chip, or the Realtek RTL8710 chip which is $2 from Pine64, and probably have enough input and output pins to do the job.

<comment><USER13> Completely different use case. LoRa and Sigfox is for extremely low-bandwith, low-power, mostly one way communication (think sensor data).

You pretty much cannot do this with WiFi due to power usage.

<comment><USER12> It depends what you mean by low power. What is your definition of low power?

The WiFi enabled chips I mentioned have low power modes where you can wake up either periodically or based on an interrupt , with most of the chip turned off in the meantime. I'd have to read the docs to know about power usage in different modes. The RTL8710 claims 30 mA...

<comment><USER14> With good programming you can get many 8bit microcontrollers into the micro and nano amp range.

<comment><USER12> Sleeping for 60 seconds, waking up, then sleeping again gets the RTL chip at least, into about 0.3 average milliamps. The 8195 is very similar to the 8710 [https://www.amebaiot.com/en/ameba-arduino-power- management/](https://www.amebaiot.com/en/ameba-arduino-power-management/)

<comment><USER13> Yes, but that still doesn't give you years in battery life as with LoRa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious what the fundamental underlying tech is that is driving Lora and Sigfox? E.g. cdma has a few core ideas that make the magic work. What is the equivalent fundamental concept that is driving the low-power, long-range, low- bw communication?

<comment><USER11> Sigfox relies on

* Ultra Narrow Band (100Hz) modulation

* Low data rate (100 bits/s in Europe, at 14dBm/25mW) + lightweight protocol

* High receiver sensitivity, mostly SDR based

We've got a few youtube videos explaining this ... but mostly targeted for a generic audience. The "radio signal modulation" may have enough tech details to match what you're looking for : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvM6KEDIdE&index=6&list=PLc...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvM6KEDIdE&index=6&list=PLcw1TnahFRW_EOHxnhEX9ETv3Sf4tUUfd)

We're also working on a publication of a standard UNB IoT protocol, Sigfox being one of its implementations. Should come within a few weeks.

There is a draft about the network architecture here : [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zuniga-lpwan- sigfox-s...](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zuniga-lpwan-sigfox- system-description/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If only the US had decent coverage!

<comment><USER11> Working on it! It's a pretty big country ...

So far, you have solid coverage in some metro areas only : SF/North Bay, Chicago, NYC, Atlanta, Houston (Miami & others are getting there)

Check out sigfox.com/coverage to get insights on the current production coverage (Sorry for the colours ...)</comment></comment>


iPhone not doing so hot in UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/11/iphone_uk_flop/

<comment><USER2> This doesn't surprise me. I'm in a different part of Europe that's getting the iPhone in a few days, and I won't be rushing out to buy it. Sure, it looks like a nice piece of kit, but if I'm going to upgrade from my RAZR...

1\. 3G please. Since the iPhone is expensive I expect it to be able to act as a decent modem for my MacBook Pro when I'm on the road. EDGE has a theoretical top speed of 200Kbps, but is more like 90Kbps in practice. Whereas I can go out and get a 3G+ (up to 36Mbps) modem for my computer for 9 EUR plus a contract.

2\. Poor camera at price point. The Nokia N95 is similarly priced but has a much better camera (5 megapixel with a Zeiss lens and a flash).

3\. While we're on the topic of the similarly priced N95 it also has GPS and is 3G+ and EDGE so satisfies point #1. And it has WiFi. The N95 probably loses on the screen and the "Apple experience" of very well integrated applications. Also, it's kind of ugly.

4\. Non-interchangeable battery. This is a big deal for anyone like me who travels a lot.

So the iPhone looks expensive, nicely packaged, but not compelling. I'll wait for v2.

John.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any theories about why it did so much better in the US? Do US buyers have lower standards? Are they richer? Do they like the Apple brand more? Or is there something broken about the iPhone they launched in the UK?

<comment><USER4> Pretty much summed up on the second page of the link, the market is much more competitive here: people are used to 3G, cheap contracts and discounted handsets, and there are established competing devices. Basically, the US mobile market is quite backwards compared to Europe, so the iphone looks more attractive there. Also, there are probably more, and more fanatical Apple fans in the US.

<comment><USER5> i think it has to do with alot of things

the iPhones data plan is pretty competitive in the US

People don't usually buy non-contract phones here so it isn't as much of a deterrent to have to get one.

also what i think is the mom factor. My mother who has never ever shown interest in getting a smart phone of any sort can't wait for her iPhone because she can check her email and surf the web while she's away from her desk. It's not that this technology hasn't existed, she just never knew it did. I don't think that "mom factor" is as prevalent in the UK because it seems like people use their phones differently there because of all the non- contract competition. She has a palm but doesn't really completely understand how to use it all, She see's the iPhone as something she'll actually use as opposed to the palm that her office got her that collects dust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> its a great bit of kit but too expensive, especially as they'll be better versions in 6 months

I'll keep my Sony Ericsson</comment>


Saudi Arabia's crown prince promises country will return to moderate, open Islam - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-saud-moderate-islam-vision-2030-conference-a8017181.html <comment><USER2> This would be great if it happened.

A large part of why Saudi Arabia went extermist, from what I read, is due to the militant extremist seizure of the Grand Mosque, the holiest site in Islam, in 1979

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure)

The Saudi Arabia responded to the seizure by making the country much more extreme. They also supported thousands of extremist madrassas in many Muslim nations, and this did a great deal to help groups like Al Queda and ISIS recruit members.

</comment><comment><USER3> "return"...</comment>


FBI Examining Whether Russia Is Tied to JPMorgan Hacking - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-27/fbi-said-to-be-probing-whether-russia-tied-to-jpmorgan-hacking.html

<comment><USER2> And if it is?

Well of course there is Russia then there is Russia. Russia the government, or some criminal organization. One could make sarcastic remark "But what is the difference?". And there would be some dose of truth in there.

Besides that, it is interesting how this immediately got to the "retaliation for sanctions" spin. Maybe they have a mole /informant that tipped them off Russian government is behind this using a criminal organization as a front?

<comment><USER3> While the article may be based on facts, the propaganda machine is running wild obviously.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I can write a blog post like "I am examining whether HN is tied to JPMorgan hacking". It's likely not, but the words were used in one sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's start more wars! Wait? What about ISA...?</comment>


Linux brings over €10 million savings for Munich - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR10-million-savings-for-Munich-1755802.html <comment><USER2> I love Linux, and love Windows too (especially for games). It does make me happy to hear about Linux deployments like this.

That said: _Everyone who switches one way or the other claims savings_. Their breakdown of savings raises questions. They have 15,000 machines and TFA says they'd be paying €280 a seat for Office upgrades and €173 a seat for Windows upgrades. I have worked for Windows companies with less seats, in the commercial space, that paid less.

I also want to know what the workers think. I've tried OpenOffice but find the spreadsheet unusable compared to Excel. My low productivity in OpenOffice makes Office a bargain.

<comment><USER3> Power Excel users use the keys (rather than the mouse). The new Office button bar forces you to loose all spacial understanding of where obscure menu items lie - fortunately, Microsoft retained key-compatibility with previous versions (even though those keystrokes no longer make any sense w.r.t. the visual interface).

The debate that Microsoft has on cost per seat is dwarfed by retraining costs - which may actually be lower for LibreOffice than the transition onto the ButtonBar in Office 2010. Of course, Windows is going to move to Windows 8, and Linux desktops will be more familiar than ever...

Personally, I've moved over to LibreOffice, writing a Python addin to get Bloomberg compatibility. My users are on LibreOffice for word-processing (practically no-one has noticed), for spreadsheets I'll let them flip back to Microsoft Excel if they have 'power user' problems/mindsets - but often find that they are taken aback by the button strip anyway.

<comment><USER4> I didnt't seriously start using Excel until the 2007 version, but I must say that the Ribbon is much better than the old system. The discoverability of keyboard shortcuts are much higher when you only have to press the alt key to reveal them.

Of course I also use some other shortcuts that are not on the ribbon, but that's just a bonus.

<comment><USER5> They aren't shortcuts, they're replacements for mouse clicks, and you have to do the same number of key presses as mouse clicks.

I don't have Windows open in front of me (still the holiday weekend). In Word, to paste text from the clipboard, unformatted, into the document by "pressing the alt key to reveal" the so-called shortcuts go something like this:

\- alt

\- H (I think, to further reveal or expose the Home "shortcuts")

\- V (to expose the paste functions)

\- S (because we want to paste Special)

\- U (unformatted)

\- and maybe U again to get the other flavor of Unformatted.

That's five or six keystrokes, and that's not a shortcut. It feels like passive aggressiveness on Microsoft's part: "Oh, you don't like clicking? ... There, I fixed it."

<comment><USER6>
        CTRL + V
        CTRL
        T

<comment><USER5> Yes, _those_ are shortcuts, but the thing you enable with the alt key are not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Business economics vs. national economics

a purely business economic point of view does not make sense in public spendind. No highway is econimical for itself. One must consider the national economic benefits. With free software, it is clearly higher than for proprietary. The license fees fund the stakeholders of an American monopoly. Expenditure on migration, training, adaptations benefits local companies and people, improves and promotes the local know-how and the common good free software.

<comment><USER8> No, a million times no.

This is the kind of thinking that makes the public sector a quagmire of inefficiency. The IT department of the city of Munich has exactly one mission and that is to enable the employees of the city to service the citizens of Munich in the most efficient manner - not playing politics on behalf of the free software movement (or Microsoft, for that matter).

By the same yardstick, the city of Seattle should stick with Microsoft everything to protect local jobs, in spite of evidence of superior alternatives.

<comment><USER7> "The IT department of the city of Munich has exactly one mission and that is to enable the employees of the city to service the citizens of Munich in the most efficient manner"

Exactly. It is more efficient for Munich as a City to support local business than to transfer money to american sharehoulders, if they think faresighted instead of shoresighted. Because part of the money comes back as taxes.

National economy is not a profit business but a money circuit. Therefore the efficienty laws are different. The goal max. efficiency is the same, but the ways to accomplish this are totallly different, because the economic systems are different.

<comment><USER8> The city shouldn't maximise for profit, that's clear. But in this case they might be optimizing for a vague political goal at the cost of quality of service. Stuff like, a planning permission taking longer to process, but, hey, we benefited the local open source community.

I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm saying that's the kind of unintended consequences you risk running into when you muddle the mission goal.

By the way, any contract of any meaningful size must be tendered EU-wide. It's illegal for a city to demand that its providers are local.

<comment><USER7> The quality of service in Munich is excellent. The goal is not vague but a very clear strategic one. Be not dependent on a foreign monopoly. Support and adjucate your own people. That is the constitutional duty of any government. And Munich excells in this regard with the help of Free Software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was present in a hearing by the Bundestag (German Parliament) of the director of LiMux project.

I particularly remember two of his points:

The main goal of the project was to reduce vendor lock-in, not financial savings. It is unacceptable for a governmental entity to be so dependent on a single corporation (especially if the majority of that company doesn't fall under the countrie's control).

The main problem of the migration was that so many third parties insist on exchanging data through office documents (even though they are often ill suited for that), instead of providing an API or a simple data file format.

(for those of you who can speak German, here is the protocol: [http://www.bundestag.de/internetenquete/dokumentation/Intero...](http://www.bundestag.de/internetenquete/dokumentation/Interoperabilitaet_Standards_Freie_Software/PGISF_2012-09-21/PGISF_2012-09-21_Expertengespraech_Interoperabilitaet_Protokoll.pdf) )

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, does every city of that size that uses Windows pay that much to Microsoft?

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how the quality of their Linux systems compares to an equivalent Windows set-up. Do they have more crashes? Is it harder to train people to use Linux? More problems with program compatibility? Is Linux as easy to use, or are there inefficiencies? Saving money is one thing, but time = money so if using Linux wastes time then is it really an advantage?

Maybe I'm just looking for problems. I'm a bit biased; I happen to think it's a matter of self-respect to spring for quality software instead of just always using the cheapest option. It's one reason why I would prefer to use MS Office over OpenOffice, because Office 2010 is a quality app with a polished interface whereas OpenOffice and its variants look to me pretty much like crap on a stick. I also like the idea of rewarding quality software and promoting more of its kind with your money. We should all be happy when smart people making good products get paychecks.

<comment><USER12> These questions are worth asking.

However, like you, I'm a bit biased too - except the opposite way. To me, some of the questions you raise _(Do they have more crashes? [..] More problems with program compatibility?)_ are points I would traditionally associate with Windows rather than with Linux.

 _Is it harder to train people to use Linux?_ is an interesting question. I think if people are already used to working with MS products staying with these products should provide an advantage it terms of training. However, I would expect a significant portion of the staff to use only a minimal feature set available in their setup, typically writing letters, etc. For them, I wouldn't expect the transition from MS Office to an open source office suite any harder than, say, the transition from traditional MS Office to the ribbon- based interface.

 _Is Linux as easy to use, or are there inefficiencies?_ \-- The whole "this year is the year of Linux on the desktop" joke will probably never get old, but I think everyone has to admit that Linux has come a long way in the last 15 years. For your average user, I would say there aren't any major differences between a Linux desktop and that of a commercial vendor, once the system has been set up. Of course, that still leaves the question whether Linux systems are _set up_ as efficiently as Windows systems...

I personally think that MS Office at least _looks_ way more polished than any of the open source alternatives, and I would expect it to be a good deal ahead of the latters in application as well. But I can't say for sure because I've used Open-/LibreOffice exclusively for many years now. It's totally fine for whatever I want to do with it, and I would bet that it is absolutely sufficient for 90% of the use cases an average admin person has.

So all in all MS products might still be a (good) notch ahead in terms of product quality, but I think that advantage is somewhat neglectable because Linux alternatives have certainly matured enough for the particular use case of a city administration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The first item on the list of related articles: Freiburg to switch back to MS Office (3 days ago)

[http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Freiburg-to-switch- ba...](http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Freiburg-to-switch-back-to-MS- Office-1753898.html)

<comment><USER14> Note that they were using OpenOffice, not a more modern fork, and that they were running it in parallel with MS Office 2000, so using some form of Windows.

They're in for a rude UI awakening when jumping to MS Office 2007 or later...

<comment><USER15> LibreOffice all the way :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The hardware update savings struck me as a bit contrived. Maybe they didn't technically need to upgrade hardware in connection with OS upgrades, but hardware needs to be updated periodically regardless. Seems like they are just disassociating the timing and claiming savings.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure whether you were aware that almost every major Windows release has required significant new hardware purchases? Corporate IT usually delays rolling out each new Windows (preferable, but senior management gets impatient), but that just spreads the increased TCO over the hardware refresh cycle.

2006: Vista premium required new hardware because it required WDDM1.0, and the first cards to support it were the NVidia 8800's [1] [2] and ATI R520 core [3]. Note the whole "Vista capable" fiasco [1] [5], hence Vista premium is the relevant point.

Windows 7 hardware requirements were the same as Windows Vista.

2012: Windows 8 requires at least 8 GB of RAM [4] even though Microsoft claims it has the same requirements as Vista (1 GB RAM). That also means the 32-bit version of 8 is crippled from the start. UEFI Secure Boot, also "not a requirement," will increase the hardware TCO for IT departments purchasing machines meant to have Windows 7 – they first have to disable Secure Boot.

It's understandable that machines from 2006 will not still be around in 2012, but Microsoft is definitely the cause of the increased hardware TCO.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/vista-users- frustrations...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/vista-users-frustrations- with-nvidia-come-to-a-head/405)

[2] <http://www.anandtech.com/show/2116>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R520>

[4] [http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open- sauce/57536-...](http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open- sauce/57536-installing-windows-8-without-secure-boot)

[5] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista#Vist...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista#Vista_capable_lawsuit)

<comment><USER18> Easy there, tiger. I just upgraded a Dell Latitude E6500 with 4Gb of RAM and an Athlon 5050e desktop also with 4 Gb from XP to Windows 8 Pro. Anecdotally, both boot faster and run Office 2010 faster than when they were running XP. This major upgrade has required no new hardware, except for a Logitech QuickCam Pro for which there is no 64-bit driver. I can probably run the desktop for another 5 years now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Companies and public services who use commercial closed software usually pays someone for creating it - will they now send money upstreams to the different software projects that makes it possible? GNU, Linux foundation, Document Foundation, GNOME, KDE and Mozilla?

</comment><comment><USER20> I spent the summer working with a lot of old time programmers who were in the field since the early 70s. To me Linux was a privilege to them it was stingy: they wanted PowerPoint, Outlook and did their work in Putty.

</comment><comment><USER21> Please do promote this, dudes! The more local governments will use Linux, the better users you shall have for your software or services!

</comment><comment><USER22> I brought this up previously[0] in a discussion where Helsinki didn't go with LibreOffice as they found it would have been $21M Euros _more_ expensive than staying with Microsoft. I'm reproducing my bullet points here as I think the claimed savings in this situation are actually false savings. They supposedly took training into consideration but I think they ignore loss of productivity inherent in the switch as well as compatibility issues. Consider the total costs of all the following:

* How will incompatibilities be handled with their existing documents? Is LibreOffice absolutely 100% feature complete identical to Microsoft Office? If not, what proportion of documents use incompatible features? How much effort is required to determine this incompatibility? How much effort is required to redo these documents to fix the incompatibility? How many employees are required to be on such a conversion team and how long will the conversion take? Can the conversion even be done?

* How is interaction done with external users who send Office documents? What happens when users outside their office send them Office documents which make use of incompatible features? Will this require maintaining an ongoing conversion team? What is the opportunity cost inherent in the delays in getting documents converted?

* How is installation of LibreOffice done? Can it be setup on a centralized WSUS server and automatically deployed to every user as Microsoft Office can, or does it require an army of people manually installing it on thousands of PCs? How are updates for both version upgrades and security patches handled? What is the typical update schedule for LibreOffice (security-related patches, compatibility upgrades, etc.) and will this need to be done manually as well? How many man-hours per year will this take?

* LibreOffice doesn't include an email product. What alternate solution would they use? What is the cost to convert all Outlook email and archives to this new solution? Can the new solution make use of all calendaring and other Exchange-related features that Outlook has? Can the new solution be deployed on WSUS and kept up to date automatically, or does this too require an army of people manually installing and doing updates? Can they maintain the security permissions they currently use, such as restricting the ability for users to forward internal communications outside the office?

* LibreOffice doesn't have a Visio, Project, or OneNote replacements. What are they going to use for these? How do they convert existing documents and interact with external users who send them Office documents? Is it even possible?

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4235508>

<comment><USER3> Sorry, but a lot of these points look like Microsoft-playbook FUD. I'm guessing that you're trying to get more hits via SEO on a hacker-friendly website.

However, most of the people here are Linux by default on their servers, and whatever comes natively on their laptop - which for most web developers seems to be OSX these days.

To address your points (quickly) :

Incompatibilities : DOCX isn't even compatable between Microsoft products, and we recently noticed that gmail converts it silently to DOC : Making it a broken format if the documents are ever sent over the web to a client.

Interaction : Not as much of a problem as Microsoft would like. Clients seem quite ready to accept formatting snafus as Microsoft's problem. For WYSIWYG, use PDF. For editing, formatting is flexible. Conversion team HA!

Installation : LibreOffice on Linux is a much more scriptable solution that Windows/Office. Purely because of licensing issues. Difficult to take a lecture on security...

Email : Selecting a decent email client is pretty easy. Particularly since Microsoft Outlook's implementation of IMAP is so broken. If you're interested in restriction employees from forwarding emails, I guess that's something that could be handled by some sort of corporate email relay - which will probably run quite nicely on a UNIX system.

Visio, Project, or OneNote : Actually, not everything has to be bought from Microsoft, does it? This is kind of scraping the barrel, unless your solution requires all software to be bought from Microsoft.

I'm pretty certain you'll have plausible-sounding rebuttals to all these points. But (short of downvoting me off the page) my off-the-cuff response will be linked to your copy-paste effort for everyone to see.

<comment><USER23> _Sorry, but a lot of these points look like Microsoft-playbook FUD. I'm guessing that you're trying to get more hits via SEO on a hacker-friendly website._

Your post was great aside from this indulgence of paranoia. (Well, that and the denial of OneNote, because even though I'm a 100% Mac user at this point I still miss OneNote; there really is no alternative and I'm still sad about it.)

And I did downvote you because of it, though IIRC it gets wiped because I chose to respond to you instead. Accusations of FUD and the "Microsoft playbook" aren't right.

<comment><USER3> If I was wrong in suggesting Astroturfing, then I apologize. And thanks for un-downvoting me.

Looking at what developers are choosing (when given a free choice) also makes me think that Microsoft is losing ground. They used to be able to claim "It's better" - a much more enticing sales pitch than "You can never leave".

On the enterprise front, going forward, it's going to be easier to get management interested in web/intranet delivered solutions via the PC (or iPad) browser. Far fewer worries about roll-out, hardware upgrades, etc.

One of the big arguments that Microsoft (and its partners) has always been switching/training costs. And with the Office 2010 button bar, coupled with Windows 8 'tiles', I think they've created a massive own-goal. It's pretty easy to roll a rock-solid Fedora/XFCE/LibreOffice/Thunderbird/Firefox image, which will feel very familiar indeed to users.

<comment><USER24> I wanna know why people use MS Office, anyway: 99% of the communications are: Please click this link to open this Word doc on a web server.... couldn't we just post up a HTML page instead? I bang my head at work every time someone does the above. It's a big waste of time, and money. And don't get me started on SharePig</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Art of Approximation: MIT course on back-of-the-envelope calculations - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/6.055/

<comment><USER2> Open CourseWare capture of the Spring 2008 class: [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and- Compute...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer- Science/6-055JSpring-2008/CourseHome/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sanjoy's got a book coming out soon on this called _Street-Fighting Mathematics_

<comment><AUTHOR> Pre-ordered! Thanks for the tip.</comment></comment>


Why Google won't create the next Twitter or Facebook or Posterous - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.posterous.com/why-google-wont-create-the-next-twitter-or-fa

<comment><USER2> Maybe they won't create it, but they'll buy it.

Most large companies correctly believe that the capital required to create a new phenomenon from the ground up would be too expensive than to simply buy it once one looks promising. The number of startups and capital expended just to create such a phenomenon (a big phenomneon, not mediocre in the grand scheme of things) is huge, so acquisitions are a good deal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is Posterous grouped with Twitter and Facebook in the title?

<comment><USER4> sorry Snopes should have been in there too.

<comment><USER5> Why should Snapes be in the same sentence as Facebook or Twitter? Boy, the ego!

<comment><USER6> > Why should Snapes be in the same sentence as Facebook or Twitter?

You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of programming. I don't expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering data model with its shimmering algorithms, the delicate power of liquids that creep through data streams, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses ... I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death -- if you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you make Google Maps and Gmail, it's OK that you don't do fail whale/pillow throwing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why the implicit assumption that Google _should_ be creating such things?

<comment><USER6> His point is that Google won't be able to achieve their own goal of solving the next Big Problem if they only focus on looking for Big Problems to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> To a certain degree he does have something. Big companies CAN work on problems startups can't. Lots of people can come up with ideas, but certain concepts aren't going to get huge VC funding easily if they are complex and require infrastructure. More complicated = More likely to fail. Having to establish that infrastructure is just one more potential failure point.

Google acquires startups that they think are interesting. Maybe they can have it both ways to a certain degree.

</comment><comment><USER10> Focusing on problems that impact lots of people does not make Google Microsoft. Google is still innovating quickly -- see pubsubhub, chrome, wave, android, maps, gmail, etc.

You can argue that Google's products lack the personality of startups, or that Google hasn't excelled in social applications, but taking a quote, bringing up successful startups, and then saying -- i heard that at microsoft therefore google is microsoft -- is absurd.

</comment><comment><USER11> Google's Orkut is popular among BRIC nationals.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think he doesn't take into account the little side projects that people do at Google. plus Wave looks a lot better than facebook to me and people will move in droves soon because people are not so wedded or happy with facebook

</comment><comment><USER13> Or because few of those sites have a clear method for making money or any profound use beyond pure leisure.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why is GOOG always compared with MSFT ? They are way more innovative than MSFT IMHO. Atleast I love most of their products. Also they are into many other things like Google got the APPtitude competition, Google summer of code, Google CodeJam etc. As a B.tech Computer Science student most of us dream of google and not M$. Sorry if my opinion is rude and crude !!</comment>


How a solo entrepreneur slow-launched his SaaS product to $20K/month - <AUTHOR> http://threadling.com/drip-slow-launch/

<comment><USER2> Nice read :)

TL;DR:

* Used Skype with early users

* Offered a drip campaign

* Offered a personal assistant to help you get on board</comment>