* Posts by Qassam ElShawarma

14 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2010

Microsoft has open-sourced PowerShell for Linux, Macs. Repeat, Microsoft has open-sourced PowerShell

Qassam ElShawarma

I'm confused

they reinvented crontab -e ?

'Leave EU means...' WHAT?! Britons ask Google after results declared

Qassam ElShawarma

Re: Seriously...

Actually, half the country has a below-MEDIAN IQ. #math

'We accidentally hit wrong button on Dell buyout – here's $194m for the cockup'

Qassam ElShawarma

Re: History revised...

Nope. That's not how it works actually. It's quite simple; under Delaware law, in certain cases, shareholders in a transaction have appraisal rights, where the courts determine the pricing of the transaction and if it was a fair shake for the share holders.

To exercise the appraisal rights, one of the requirements is that you vote no for the transaction and sue for them. This is no revision of history, it's the fact that the court took 3 years to resolve the lawsuit. It was filed at the time of the transaction.

What T. Rowe did was sue for appraisal rights, but since they voted yes, rather than no, by mistake, they are not eligible for the renumeration. Since they hold the stocks as trustees, they will pay the $194m to those who got screwed by that voting error out of their pockets.

Make more sense? In short - vote yes for the transaction and you don't get to complain about the pricing; vote no AND sue, and maybe, 3 years later once the courts decide in your favor, you collect the difference between the transaction price and the appraisal price.

AWS to crack $10bn annual sales this year says Jeff Bezos

Qassam ElShawarma

Re: hmmm @John Sanders

Nope. The other way around - AWS is bankrolling the retail operations. It was never about "using profitability" from retail, or "using spare capacity".

AWS is around 30% of margin; retail is around 1%.

WhatsApp straps on full end-to-end crypto for 1bn peeps

Qassam ElShawarma

the catch

is metadata.

nobody ever gave a crap about the content of the call or communication, but the patterns of communication? that's an advertising goldmine.

IBM slices heavy axe through staff in the US

Qassam ElShawarma

Sooo

90 days to clear desk and find new work + 1 month severance pay = ... let me see - 4 months severance pay.

That doesn't sound very bad.

This storage startup dedupes what to do what? How?

Qassam ElShawarma

Re: I'm a little confused

Yep; Merkle trees popped into my head as well.

It sounds like a hierarchical type of dictionary combined with hash trees for sync; really neat idea, but not sure how it's dedupe in the dedupe sense as opposed to some sort of inline compression - or a fancy type of RLE.

Might be me just semantically nitpicking.

Qassam ElShawarma

I'm a little confused

by your analogy - did you not just describe simple LZW compression trees? Or at the very least a variable sized dictionary?

How is this dedupe as opposed to simple compression?

Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 years (and you're officially old)

Qassam ElShawarma

How did Ballmer become CEO, again?

I never saw that old TV ad, but holy hell.

Emulex ends seven-quarter run of losses

Qassam ElShawarma

Perspective 3D graphs

are horrible ways to look at trends. please, avoid the eye candy and use visuals that simplify rather than confuse.

Yahoo! Mail users see crying baby who says firm is 'over capacity'

Qassam ElShawarma

Wait, people still use Yahoo! Mail?

Really? Why?

Worried dad invents pepper-spray iPhone case

Qassam ElShawarma

Re: Correct me if I'm wrong but...

Women have no pockets, they always use a purse; that's where they typically keep their pepper spray anyway.

Amazon to buy its Seattle HQ from Paul Allen for over $1bn

Qassam ElShawarma

Re: Amazon will be forking out... more than double the average rate... in the city

Or very simply had a lot invested in furnishings, infrastructure, etc. and figured that it would not be worth investing it again or paying to have it moved.

Microsoft secretly scoops up 15 companies

Qassam ElShawarma

Not surprising

Given Microsoft's recent track record of integrating companies they have acquired - perhaps the simply don't want the buzz going about a bunch of companies they have bought that might just fizzle like most of the ones that have gone the same path.

Microsoft seems to be still struggling with buying an innovative company without suffocating it. It will be interesting to see if they can resolve it - because a company like Microsoft which tends to suffocate internal innovation that lacks this capability cannot compete in the long term.