There’s certainly always opportunities for improvement. There is a group of people with whom our market share is less. You take any country, including this one, and you say, how are we doing? The truth of the matter is, we do quite well. Even among college students, we do quite well. Do we have an opportunity for improvement? We do. Some of that is marketing some of that is phase of life.

It is important to remember that 96 times out of 100 worldwide, people choose a PC with Windows, that’s a good thing. Even in the toughest market, which would be the high end of the consumer market here in the US, 83 times out of 100 people choose a Windows PC over a Mac.

Ballmer also remarked that Apple has gained a few “couple of tenths of a per cent of market share”, but when the audience chuckled, he was prompted to correct them:

Every couple of tenths matter. They matter when we’re increasing our Bing market share, too.

Ooooooh, you are good, Mr Ballmer, you are good. There were many other piercing questions about the iPhone, Android. Check them out at: [Techflash]

It’s all designed to shave about $US300 million off its annual $US1.8 billion operating expenses. Instant messaging client, ICQ, is also up for sale, and Mapquest could be next. As always, we’re surprised that AOL still exists. [Business Insider]

We believe there are only two significant brands in the film industry—”Disney” and “Steven Spielberg”. We would like to establish “Pixar” as the third. Successful brands are a reflection of consumer trust, which is earned over time by consumers’ positive experiences with the brand’s products. For example, parents trust Disney-branded animated films to provide satisfying and appropriate family entertainment, based on Disney’s undisputed track record of making wonderful animated films. This trust benefits both parents and Disney: it makes the selection of family entertainment that much easier for parents, and it allows Disney to more easily and assuredly draw audiences to see their new films. Over time we want Pixar to grow into a brand that embodies the same level of trust as the Disney brand.

This letter was available on the Pixar website until 2006, when Disney, utterly trounced by Pixar in the world of animated features, bought the company. [The Pixar Touch via David Cho]

Earlier this month, we posted “15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid“, their answers and then 15 more questions. Three million pageviews later, here are…

Answers To 15 More Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid

Question: Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?

Answer from reader Olivier Coudert: The cheating husband problem is a classic recursion pb. Once all the wives know there is at least one cheating husband, we can understand the process recursively. Let’s assume that there is only one cheating husband. Then his wife doesn’t see anybody cheating, so she knows he cheats, and she will kill him that very day. If there are two cheating husband, their wives know of one cheating husband, and must wait one day before concluding that their own husbands cheat (since no husband got killed the day of the announcement). So with 100 cheating husbands, all life is good until 99 days later, when the 100 wives kill their unfaithful husbands all on the same day. Job: Product Manager. Photo: symmetry_mind

Question:If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?

Reader ru offers this answer: The trick here is that .95 is the probability for 1 or more cars, not the probability of seeing just one car. The probability of NO cars in 30 minutes is 0.05, so the probability of no cars in 10 minutes is the cube root of that, so the probability of seeing a car in 10 minutes is one minus that or ~63 per cent Job: Product Manager

Question: Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one torch and it only has enough light left for 17 minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a torch, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in one minute, another in two minutes, the third in five minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

Answer from an anonymous reader: One and two across (two minutes); one goes back (three minutes); five and 10 go across (13 minutes); two goes back (15 minutes); one and two cross (17 minutes) — and everyone’s safe and sound. Job: Product Manager. Photo: Jule_Berlin

Question: You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. Your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?

Answer: Ignoring seasonal upticks in births, there’s about 1/365 probability that any other person has the same birthday as you and 364/365 chance that any other random person does not. Do not take this bet. Job: Product Manager

Question: If you look at a clock and the time is 3.15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)

Answer from reader Matt Beauchamp: 7.5 degrees. Every minute on the clock represents 6 degrees (360 degrees/60 minutes). Every hour, the hour hand moves from one number to the next (in this case, it is moving from 3 to 4) which represents 30 degrees. Since it is exactly 1/4 past the hour, the hour hand is 1/4 of the way into its 30-degree trip or 1/4 or 30 degrees… which is 7.5 degrees. Job: Product Manager

Question: What is the probability of breaking a stick into three pieces and forming a triangle?

Since this question doesn’t say the sticks must intersect at their tips to form the triangle, the answer has to be 100 per cent. Any three sticks of any size can make a triangle. Job: Product Manager. Photo: markhillary

Question: There’s a latency problem in South Africa. Diagnose it.

This is obviously an extremely vague question, and there isn’t really one correct answer. A good answer is one in which the interviewee demonstrates familiarity with the term “latency” and enough imagination to come up with an interesting problem with an interesting solution. Job: Product Manager Photo: warrenski

Question: How many lines can be drawn in a 2D plane such that they are equidistant from three non-collinear points?

Answer from reader Denis: Three. Take any two of the points. Draw a line that is parallel to the line segment made by those two points and halfway between that line segment and the third point. Repeat for every combination of two points. Job: Software Engineer. Photo: Caveman 92223

Question: What’s 2 to the power of 64?

1.84467441 × 1019 This is a pretty easy answer to figure out when you’re not sitting in an interview with no calculator around. Job: Software Engineer.

Question: Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organise your shirts for easy retrieval?

There’s no one answer to this. The interviewer wants to test the interviewee’s imagination and creativity with problem solving. We feel like reader “Dude” might impress a Google interview with this answer: Organise them according to types of clothes like a HASH and then organise each type into a 2-3-4-Tree or RedBlack Tree. Job: Software Engineer. Photo: Brymo

Question: You are given a game of Noughts and Crosses. You have to write a function in which you pass the whole game and name of a player. The function will return whether the player has won the game or not. First you to decide which data structure you will use for the game. You need to tell the algorithm first and then need to write the code. Note: Some position may be blank in the game, so your data structure should consider this condition also.

Answer from reader Dude: The data structure that is required is a two-character dimensional array. Call the function to check the six conditions if there are any winners, the sixth condition is to see if there are any more spaces left. If there is a winner the characters X or O are associated with the players, in this case you need a flag. If there is a winner return the value to the calling function to end the game. If not the run the game. Job: Software Engineer Photo: frozenchipmunk

Question: How long it would take to sort one trillion numbers? Come up with a good estimate.

Here’s another question without one answer. The idea is to test the interviewee’s creativity. We like the simple answer two readers came up with: Merge Sort for sorting. O(1,000,000,000,000 Log 1,000,000,000,000) — Average Case Scenario; O(1,000,000,000,000 Log 1,000,000,000,000) — Worst Case Scenario. I’d guess you can do one billion operations per second, thus 3000 seconds. Job: Software Engineer

Question: Design an algorithm to play a game of Frogger and then code the solution.

The object of the game is to direct a frog to avoid cars while crossing a busy road. You may represent a road lane via an array. Generalise the solution for an N-lane road. Here’s the only answer we found for this one, from site Glassdoor.com: “One approach is to write a recursive algorithm that determines when to ‘wait’ or to ‘jump’ to the next lane, depending if there is an approaching obstacle in the next lane.” Job: Software Engineer

Question: How many resumes does Google receive each year for software engineering?

This is another question that’s about testing the job candidate’s ability to frame the problem in a simple way and then creatively solve it. Our answer: A candiate for Quantitative Compensation Analyst should know that Google hired about 3400 people in 2008. Figure 75 per cent (or 2550) of those hired were engineers and that, like Harvard, Google only accepted 3 per cent of those who applied. 2550 is 3 per cent of 85,000. Job: Quantitative Compensation Analyst

Question: You are given a list of numbers. When you reach the end of the list you will come back to the beginning of the list (a circular list). Write the most efficient algorithm to find the minimum number in this list. Find any given number in the list. The numbers in the list are always increasing but you don’t know where the circular list begins, ie: 38, 40, 55, 89, 6, 13, 20, 23, 36.

Here’s our favourite answer from reader “dude”: Create temporary pointers and start from the root. (Most of the time circular lists have front and back pointers.) Check if front is larger or if back is larger. If front is larger then you know you are at the end of the list and at the front of the list. If front is larger then traverse the opposite direction and compare numbers. If there is no root or a pointer pointing to any part of the list then your data is lost in memory. Job: Quantitative Compensation Analyst

The quote, from Italy’s Il Sole 24 Ore, is a sort of sad double entendre: The question is set up as a broad query about the state of the consumer electronics industry, but Stringer’s answer sounds more like an off-record confession about his own company than a cool assessment of its industry. From Sony’s point of view, the CE industry hasn’t started to turn around; from Sony’s point of view, Sony hasn’t started to turn around: whichever was meant, these aren’t the most reassuring words to hear from the head honcho of one of the largest electronics companies in the world.

Anyway, cheer up Howard! People will buy your consoles to play games and sim-kill civilian hostages for Christmas! It’s how things are. [Reuters via Digital Daily]

The story was the subject of much hyperventilation last week which revolved mostly around a few impassioned quotes:

Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that’s been in use since 1980 and wasn’t invented by Microsoft. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft’s description of its “invention”.

This from Groklaw, a site that specialises in free and open source software legal affairs, i.e. exactly this kind of thing. But for whatever reason — zeal? clicks? — their reading of the patent, which we picked up, turned out to overblown. Says Sudo maintainer Todd Miller, via Ars:

I’ve already received a number of questions about US patent 7,617,530 that some people seem to believe might cover sudo. I don’t think that is the case,” he wrote. “Sudo simply doesn’t work this way. When a command is run via sudo the user is actively running the command as a different user. What is described in the patent is a mechanism whereby an application or the operating system detects that an action needs to be run with increased privileges and automatically prompts the user with a list of potential users that have the appropriate privilege level to perform the task.

So, if not this, then what does the Microsoft patent cover? Back to Ars:

Specifically, it describes a user interface which displays accounts that have the necessary rights to perform an action when the user is blocked from performing an action that requires higher access privileges.

These are similar, but not patent similar.

Turns out though, that there is a Linux tool called PolicyKit just like what Microsoft patented, which prompts users to switch to a higher-level user account when they hit against a permissions barrier. It was created after the patent was filed. So, Microsoft, on all counts: not guilty. [ArsTechnica]

According to Strategy Analytics, Apple made a $US1.6 billion profit in iPhone sales alone, while Nokia only made $US1.1 billion on whatever they are trying to pass as smartphones these days. However, Betanews’ Joe Wilcox was quick to point out that the $US1.6 billion profit was for all Apple sales:

the numbers don’t add up to Apple’s overall handset profitability exceeding Nokia’s during third quarter, unless someone is making the bold assumption that all, or nearly all, Apple profits came from iPhone. They surely do not. What? Apple made only $US700,000 on iPod, Macintosh, retail and software — $US1.6 billion — on iPhone. No way.

Sounds logical? Wrong! says John Gruber, grubbing in with one of his grubby-grubby arguments:

Perhaps if Wilcox had actually read more than just the first paragraph of Apple’s press release announcing the company’s earnings, he’d understand:

“Adjusting GAAP sales and product costs to eliminate the impact of subscription accounting, the corresponding non-GAAP measures for the quarter are $US12.25 billion of “Adjusted Sales” and $US2.85 billion of “Adjusted Net Income.”

That’s where Gruber says the $US1.6 iPhone profit comes from. If you use non-GAAP accounting — which spreads the quarter’s income along the total projected life of the product — Apple wins hands down:

…it’s pretty safe to say that the iPhone accounts for nearly all of the difference between Apple’s GAAP and non-GAAP reported profit, which difference came to $US1.18 billion for the quarter [...] take Strategy Analytics’s estimate of $US1.6 billion in profit, divide by 7.4 million iPhones, and you get $US216 in profit per iPhone, which, again, sounds like it’s in the ballpark.

The fact, however, is that nobody has a single clue about what Apple’s real numbers are: Wilcox, Gruber and Strategy Analytics are building their cases over a lot of assumptions. So I’m going to pull a King Solomon here, smack all of them and send them to the principal. [Cnet, Betanews, and Daring Fireball]

Here is the full quote in context from the program Warren Buffett and Bill Gates: Keeping America Great.

“Well, he’s done a fantastic job,” Gates said. “Apple is in a bit of a different business where they make hardware and software together. But when Steve was coming back to Apple, which was actually through an acquisition of NeXT that he ran, Apple was in very tough shape. In fact, most likely it wasn’t going to survive.”

He continued: “And he brought in a team, he brought in inspiration about great products and design that’s made Apple back into being an incredible force in doing good things. And it’s great to have competitors like that. We write software for Apple, Microsoft does. They compete with Apple. But he, of all the leaders in the industry that I’ve worked with, he showed more inspiration and he saved the company.”

Awww…how touching. [AppleInsider]