Byte Harvest

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[memecenterz]

[nevver]

Albert Einstein

[parislemon]

Looks can be deceiving.

[parislemon]

Fascinating map. Also sort of crazy: California isn’t (yet) Apple country.

Chevron had $220 billion in revenue last year to Apple’s $170 billion. But Apple had far more net income — roughly $14 billion more, nearly double Chevron. That’s how profitable Apple’s business is.

[byteharvest]

Also sort of crazy that Amazon's revenue still trails Costco.

[byteharvest]

(From the wall of an investment bank in Vienna.) Unless this tag line translates into two German words, time to get a better marketing team. ;)

[penllawen]

So to recap:

"Please don’t update unless you’re using ePrint." (I am trying to set up ePrint. It fails with a generic error message that the Internet suggests is fixable via a firmware upgrade.)

"There is a serious problem." (No explanation of problem.)

"HP is working on a fix." (Dated SEVEN MONTHS AGO.)

And the “live support” link goes to a premium service because of course it does.

This is the worst thing in the world.

[parislemon]

Undecided if this says more about the state of HP or the state of printers.

[byteharvest]

When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple... Awesome!

[spytap]

[byteharvest]

spytap:

The future is so great!

Please try again FCC... 

[thenextweb]

[byteharvest]

thenextweb:

"Your Amazon Drone delivery was unable to be completed because…"

(Image: @QuantumPirate)

[byteharvest]

Microsoft has marked down Google Drive and Dropbox for not having "remote access". Apparently, their users need to drive up to a Google or Dropbox datacenter to access their files. Who knew?... :-) 

[byteharvest]

"Future" Timeline of Elop's Reign at Microsoft

June 13, 2014: After a ten month search, Microsoft board names Stephen Elop, the former CEO of Nokia, as the company's next CEO. A spokesman brushes of light hearted comments from the media about the omens of making the announcement on Friday the 13th. 

August 19, 2014: In his first press conference as Microsoft's CEO, Elop announces that he will not dignify conspiracy theories about him acting as a mole and willfully damaging Nokia's fortunes before its takeover by Microsoft, his prior and future employer, by commenting on the allegations. 

January 21, 2015: Elop's memo about the need to accept the dominance of iOS and Android against Windows leaks to the media. The memo underlines his concern that  lack of a native Office suite for these operating systems is already hurting the services side of Microsoft. 

January 23, 2015: As the furor over the leaked memo grows, Microsoft calls a seemingly hasty press conference. Elop announces native versions of Office for iOS and Android to be released in a year. Microsoft also sunsets Windows version of Office, to be effective immediately, citing the small market share of Windows PCs in an era where most computing devices are mobile and pointing out the need to focus on the gargantuan task of porting the productivity suite to two new operating systems. 

June 12, 2015: Microsoft issues an earning warning due to sharp drop off in sales of its Office suite. Elop claims he is unfazed and calls the falling market share "bitter, but vital medicine" to secure the company's long term future. He seems particularly happy to be vindicated that his actions at Nokia were undertaken in good faith, as he is obviously implementing a similar turnaround plan for his alleged pay master. He later admonishes business reporters for failing to understand that it is not possible right a ship this size without setting it on fire first. 

[parislemon]

Twitter leaves more than $1 billion on the table

Dan Primack:

Twitter itself obviously wanted a bit of price pop for PR and employee morale purposes, but here’s something else employees could be thinking about today: Had Twitter priced at $45.10 per share and used the extra proceeds to give out holiday bonuses, it would have worked out to more than $580,000 per employee. How’s your morale feel now?

It is interesting that Facebook maximized the amount of money it made by going public, and it was viewed as a “failure”. While Twitter clearly left a ton of money on the table, and that’s viewed as a “success”.

This is a case where perception is reality. But let’s be clear, the real winners today are the same ones who were the real losers of the Facebook IPO: the bankers.

[byteharvest]

When it exploded about 18.5 miles above the ground, the space rock shone 30 times brighter than the sun and sent out so much ultraviolet light that eyewitnesses directly below it developed serious sunburns, Jenniskens said.

Los Angeles Times, on the asteroid that blew up over Chelyabinsk in February. Wow!… 

[byteharvest]

Then What?...

Overheard a dad and his young son in a souvenir shop in Kauai:

D: Oh look, a coconut piggy bank! Awesome.  

S: What is that? 

D: It is a piggy bank made out of coconut shells. 

S: What is a piggy bank?

D: You put your money into it through this slot. 

S: Then what?... 

:-) 

[brooklynmutt-deactivated2021090]

What would aliens say when told Earthlings shift clocks twice a year to fool themselves into thinking there’s more sunlight.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson)

[byteharvest]

Finally… How many decades it takes to reverse a ban based on unfounded safety "concerns" by those who has no financial incentives to act (or collect evidence), but who would be the first ones to be blamed if anything goes wrong, even if the link between the tragedy and the action is nothing more than a figment of an imagination? Well, the first flight I can remember taking was in 1993 and the ban had been in effect for a while.  Now the calendar says 2013. 

[byteharvest]

Elephant & Castle, what a wonderful name for a destination, so tempting to just hop on the bus. I have no idea what the neighborhood actually looks like or how it came to be named as such and I don’t wanna look it up, lest the reality, inevitably, fails to measure up to the fairy tale images the name conjures up. :-)

[byteharvest]

Frank Shaw of Microsoft calls iPad “[a] device that lacks precision input” in his blog explaining why he thinks Apple’s now-free-with-device-purchase iWork software suite pales in comparison to MS Office due to lack of mouse support. I suppose that means MS still has not figured out how to make a full featured Office suite for touch based operating systems and it will rely on a mouse for quite a while.

Of course that is par for the course for a company who criticizes iWork for being incompatible “with the rest of the world”, without noticing the irony that MS Office does not run on three quarters of the computers on sale right now, you know, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.