Wow, so naive. The Third Reich was established in 1933, WW2 started in 1939. It didn't have time to invent much or to build industry anew. 90% of the technology came from US - directly from US government or through companies like Standard Oil and Ford. Thousands of factories got sold on the cheap in the US after the Great Recession started and all the equipment moved to Germany. A process quite similar to the outsourcing of the last 25 years or so.
Yes IBM. But if you are considering reading this book I would suggest that it might be a waste of time, unless you are a true disbeliever or are doing research on the topic.
Mr Black is angry at IBM and does not try to hide it in his writing. He writes as if he is a prosecutor trying to convince a jury in court. Very frequently and repetitively, he describes the Holocaust and explains why what the reader just read proves that IBM or some of its executives are guilty of murder. I find it insulting to have these conclusions handed to me, even if I don't disagree with them. The repetition gets boring quickly.
It will target as wide a group as possible. It`s just a small backdoor, that lets the agency that should not be named to install a full rootkit at will.
It would be pretty ironic, but maybe it would kick Microsoft to do something similar. If they already have fancy buses to shuttle all their workers around, why don't they lay a nice fiber network to give them all fast internet (and allow more reliable working from home).
When MS announced the Xbox One, I was actually on their camp. I bought into the whole idea of digital distribution as the future of gaming.
However, not once have MS done anything to actually improve the US internet speed or infrastructure since. Its like MS sold me on the vision of a future, but came back to tell me that they don't actually have a plan to make the vision possible.
Fuel costs are temporarily down because Europe's economy is so weak, but I wouldn't count on fuel staying this low. Also Chinese labor is not such a bargain as wages rise.
"According to the suit, Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another $1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."
I believed MSFT offered a lot, Hejlsberg told that to Borland, Borland offered him to stay and MSFT then offered 1.5 mil more, which Borland passed.
By the way, I didn't like much OWL. The transition between OWL 1 and OWL 2 was a mess, if I remember they were practically incompatible (and also if I remember correctly, only the name was the same, I believe different companies made 1 and 2 (!) independently) whereas it was easier to upgrade the code that depended on one MFC version to the next. I liked VCL from Delphi, then also accessible from C++ Builder, but VCL lacked Unicode for too long.
At the time of Delphi 2, VCL was very nice. Delphi 2 was really, really nice way to make native Windows applications rapidly.
I don't have any inside info, but the common perception in the industry at the time was that Microsoft raided Borland's talent, and thereafter Microsoft's development tools started getting better. Borland at the time was easily the most innovative programming tools company. They had "Visual" tools long before Microsoft, so it's not surprising that Redmond focused their wallet on disrupting that narrative.
That doesn't surprise me. Google and the hacker/startup community have vastly different and often opposing interests.
In the end Google is the biggest advertising agency in the world. Advertising makes money by pushing people to make irrational choices - buy products and services that they don't need; buy from the vendor with bigger marketing budget, rather than superior engineering; overspend on stuff they need - e.g. cars, etc.
Google is not an "advertising agency", that is a specific thing. What they are is a mainly ad supported medium which is what most internet services are, same as TV/Radio/Newspapers/Mags etc.
Airing out philosophical and theoretical disagreements with the ad model is merely a rationalization after the fact in this situation.
Nobody is innocent. The government has enemies both internal and external.