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8Bn. That makes my eyes water. That's ludicrous.
That Microsoft even considered acquiring a chat app for 8Bn makes me incredibly sad. Think of what startups with essentially no funding can achieve. Yet here's Microsoft essentially saying "We don't think that 8 Billion dollars, our experience, our pool of talent, and our overwhelming market share will be enough to create something better than Slack". For 8 Billion you hire every top notch developer, architect, and man-bunned marketing dude for a million bucks a year each and get them to build something beyond imagining.
Wow.
(And secondly: they bought Skype. It's shite. Truly awful. Why bother going down that path again?)
cheers
Chris Maunder
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When companies start throwing around that kind of dosh for tech acquisitions, it's not because they want the software or the developers. It's because they're buying the users. It's so the day after the acquisition, Microsoft can send out a Press Release saying that "Microsoft is now has xyz million users of our online collaboration tools" or some other equally fuzzy marketing speak.
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Totally. My point is that Microsoft can get that many users automatically by "bundling" it with the OS (not that they would bundle it because they'd get into trouble again, but, y'know, "encourage it's use" n' stuff).
For 8B you could get pretty creative and persuasive.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
For 8B you could get pretty creative and persuasive.
I can get incredibly creative and persuasive for 10% that!
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My bid is 9%
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Only hire the best. The quality of the people that work at your company will be one of the biggest factors in your success – or failure. "Naega jeil jal naga"
Because everyone needs a little K-Pop in their lives now and then, don't they?
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Quote: … but the one thing I keep coming back to, that I believe has enduring value in almost all situations, is the audition project:
Quote: The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship. They can size up Automattic while we evaluate them.
Were I unemployed and looking for a job I might go for something like that (It'd be short term cashflow if nothing else); but if I were looking for a new job while at my current employer it'd be a total non-starter. Not for time management reasons (burning a week of leave or doing stuff on weekends would be annoying but manageable); but because I have to vet any outside work through my employer - both for ethics/conflict of interest reasons and so they can (at least in theory) choose to bid on the work themselves (although given overhead rates I find it hard to believe they'd find any takers for something that is small enough to be doable after hours "we'll put Dan on it too but will charge you 2 or 3 times as much per hour") - and if I said I was working on something like that they'd probably offer to "help" me out by firing me so I could concentrate on my new project full time instead. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I'm with you - if I needed the cash ($25/hour is a pittance for any engineering work) then yes, I would go for it. I could see a small weekend-long project but 3-8 weeks? That's crazy.
I could easily see potential conflicts with your existing job, let along IP issues. I would rather spend that time working on a side project and use that to get interviews. Although that would be "free" I would at least have a portfolio to show off as opposed to something that would be effectively owned by them and probably under some sort of NDA.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
-- Marcus Brigstocke, British Comedian
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I'd guess the high end's probably people trying to spread the load out as much as possible to minimize the impact on their day job; 3 weeks minimum and some people taking one week off to concentrate on it (but no mention of taking more than that), suggests a 50-60 hour sized task to me. A main lump that fits into a week, and a non-farcical hours on either side. Still not something that'd really appeal unless I was sold on the company already (or really hurting for rent money); and unless the bulk of their attrition occurs early in the cycle lot of time to put in without a guarantee at the end.
OTOH quitting your current job, working for a week or two and then getting sacked for not meeting expectations would suck even worse. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Research into compulsory password changes found that they didn't necessarily improve security, according to the FTC's Chief Technologist, Lorrie Cranor Post-It! notes deemed insecure
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Completely agree with these words:
Quote: Rather than forcing password changes, then, it's probably better to make people use longer (generally stronger) passwords, and to enforce the use of some non-alphabetic characters. As a way of increasing password security over the long term, education probably beats compulsion.
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Another problem is too many passwords. At least now a lot of sites let you use facebook. I do not like facebook, but at least I have a hope of being able to log on. I try to use the same password as much as I can, and if I don't I am always having to recover the password. Sort of defeats the purpose. Maybe some day there will be something better, but passwords were not a great idea when they were invented, and that is when you only had to remember one. Now there are passwords for all sites. What makes things ever worse is that you cannot see what you are typing. Makes sense if someone is watching over your shoulder, but that is seldom a problem. Understand when entering my Pin at the ATM, but otherwise, no.
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In a scathing editorial in The Guardian, Epic Games cofounder Tim Sweeney spoke out about Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, calling it a "fiasco" and "the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made." So... I'll put you down as "undecided" then?
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Was it ever alive?
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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It's a sad day for the Internet: Ray Tomlinson, widely credited with inventing email as we know it, has died from a suspected heart attack on his 75th birthday. Ray@RIP
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I'm not sure if that is a good deal, but, C# came back to its owner once again.
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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I think it's a very good deal if it means the full version of Xamarin (not including support) will be part of VS Community Edition.
/ravi
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I got my fingers crossed for that. 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Probably not happening 
i cri evry tiem
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Security guru Bruce Schneier has issued a stark warning to the RSA 2016 conference – get smart or face a whole world of trouble. Well, that's never happened before in the history of mankind
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We're absolute idiots in this cowboy country.
The local news is most moronic as they try to inform the public about things of tech.
"She can tell you bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye"
We're so dead. 
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IoT is greatly used by heavy industries like utilities, oil, and gas and less by service-oriented industries, according to a new survey by Gartner. All told, about 43% of businesses are planning to adopt IoT technology by the end of the year. The remaining 57% of things will continue to use AOL
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Updates to the .NET Framework 4 are delivered as highly-compatible in-place updates, which helps keep users’ applications running on the latest and most secure versions of the .NET Framework. Some deviation from previous behavior has beeen seen when applications depend on specific behaviors that are not guaranteed or documented. Historically, these differences have been difficult to find, and so we are introducing the .NET Compatibility Diagnostics to help identify these changes during .NET version upgrades. Because backward compatibility is difficult?
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