Enough articles have been written about engineering crunch in the valley while some solutions like increasing equity grants to engineers have been suggested, the bigger issue of the broken recruiting pipeline has not gained the attention it deserves. Its a job of recruiters to source potential candidates and most recruiters are compensated in form of a percentage (usually 20-30%) of the annual base salary of the hired individual.
One of the biggest challenges to Intel’s x86 hegemony in the consumer market has been the emergence of smartphones where ARM-based processors have 90% market share. The PC market where Intel has a stronghold is declining at (estimated) 10% annual rate. While a lot of coverage has been to given to Intel’s decline in the consumer market, I believe Intel has a tough road ahead in server market too. One major advantage Intel has is the amount of (legacy) code which has been written for x86 (the same thing which keeps Cobol on life support), this advantage is diminishing rapidly due to following trends.
A short summary of bitcoin Electronic money is all about ledger (transactions) which tells who sent money to whom, in standard financial system, central/federal/reserve bank (different nations have different names for these) and by extension, financial institutions are “trusted” to maintain that ledger. Any work which requires a “trusted” party can in principle, be done using cryptography without requiring a “trusted” party and bitcoin is manifestation of that applied to ledger. For more thorough treatment have a look at original paper or this blog post.
Background A security company reverse engineered Snapchat’s android client and found all the api endpoints ( source). Bigger issue: The published proof of concept of using “find friends” feature to find whether a phone number is registered on Snapchat or not, and if it is, then its associated username and location of the user. Their claim was that despite informing Snapchat about the hole, Snapchat did nothing about it. As expected, someone published data of 4.6M registered users ( source) using the proof of concept provided. Snapchat responded saying that soon users will be able to opt-out of find friends feature.
This blog post is a HOWTO guide for using github while collaborating during hackathons. It does not cover git in detail.
This blog post contains a collection of small tips for engineers migrating from GNU/Linux to Mac OS X for software development. Note: In another post, I wrote about why there is a dearth of a good GNU/Linux laptop.
The book is 50% story of Jobs and 50% history of the Valley. From the beginning of Apple to it becoming the world’s most valuable company, the book covers everything in depth (and is a bit too long) Some of the key things in the book are Steve Job’s fruitarian diet, journey to India, love for absolute minimalism, extreme (positive as well as negative) treatment of employees, relation with Bill Gates (and Microsoft), battle with Google, battle with cancer and a strong belief that normal rules simply don’t apply to him....
Let us say an average American drives 15, 000 miles per year; The exact average being 16550 miles.
There are two choices while writing on this topic. One is to write a detailed and accurate port. The other is to write a short post. I preferred the second approach and had added appropriate links to dig further. Target Audience? Someone who is planning to use FOSS, free and open-source code, as a building block for their software development. Someone who wants to contribute to FOSS Someone who wants to release source code of their project in public
Wikileaks released a set of United States diplomatic cables on Nov 28, 2010, popularly referred to as Cablegate. Let’s consider the events which happened afterward.