The book is written by Bill Walsh - San Francisco’s 49ers Football team coach who transformed the worst-performing team of its era into the best-performing team. The book talks about the changes he brought in as well as his philosophy of leadership which is generic enough to apply outside of American Football. He is also known as the creator of the West Coast Offense.
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.
The book is the narration of the author’s life as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp.
I have used Cover and Aviate but could not stay with either and am back to Nova (which offer static screen of apps).
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.
The book Winners take all is a collection of interesting insights into how companies in the high tech sector succeed and fail. The book was written in 2006 (pre-iPhone era) so it’s interesting to see how some companies mentioned by the author (notably, Apple and Google) succeeded and how some others (notably, Symantec and Nokia) are struggling.
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.
I grumbled that I have to go through security check on a connecting airport. It turned out that my domestic flight had landed in the international section. There was no secure passage connecting it to the next terminal. I crossed the security checkpoint at LA airport, and after wearing my shoes, I was waiting for my bag to come out of the scanner. “Sir, is this your bag?” a tall African-American TSA personnel looking at me, said, “it turned the light red on the scanner, we need to recheck it....