Viewing profile — sdz

The investors you refer to typically manage money on behalf of their investors and are actually under constant scrutiny. If they run mutual funds, their performance is measured eve…

You're probably looking for the Arrow IPC format [1], which writes the data in close to the same format as the memory layout. On some platforms, reading this back is just an mmap a…

The difference, though, is that the money that Khan Academy has raised is donations. They're not investors who are seeking a (financial) return on their capital. Education is a tou…

Okay, I mean some automatic updating software is bad. Adobe's is very annoying, and Windows Update frequently requires rebooting. But some are great -- like Chrome! On a Mac, proba…

"One selling point the staff are pushing is that unlike traditional PC’s, Chromebooks get better over time with automatic software updates." That seems a bit disingenuous. PCs get …

I've always loved the Chinese naming for Coke. The article translates it as "delicious happiness," but it's actually more clever. The first two characters (ke kou) mean thirsty. Th…

Fair enough, the real rights owner may have uploaded the books and videos themselves. I just think there's some irony here that Hotfile suddenly cares about copyright.

For example, while claiming to remove files that are copies of the movie The Box, Warner removed several files related to the alternative cancer treatment book "Cancer: Out Of The …

This is why I think it was shortsighted for Instapaper to reject outside funding. As much as I like Instapaper, it is very much still a single-platform app with very limited scope …

There is Simplenote ( http://simplenoteapp.com ), which is a pretty no-frills web app that also integrates with a number of native apps (including Notational Velocity if you're on …

Well, it is Android in the sense that it shares the same API and thus runs Android apps from the Amazon Appstore.

So... you can use brute force to break encryption? Is that news? It doesn't sound like there was any security hole in the implementation or a leaked cryptographic key, so in what s…

This is extremely interesting. One thing I didn't understand was how this location database is being built. Is Google collecting GPS signals and WIFI hotspots so that the two can b…

I'm sure some parts of Oracle's database are very good. The part I work with (OLAP), though, is ludicrously bad. New bugs are introduced with almost every database patch, and the b…

I've always found the tags on Engadget to be completely useless, and I was wondering why they even waste their time with them. SEO makes a lot of sense.

I'm going to miss the Engadget Podcast. After Paul Miller left, I thought it might still have a chance, but now all three are gone!

Why would a cloud-based filesystem be useful beyond storing your home folder? It's not like you need group collaboration on your kernel binaries. You also can't really run differen…