USC players Hayes Pullard, Marqise Lee and Coach Lane Kiffin during Pac-12 media Day at Sony Studios July 26, 2013. (Brad Graverson/Los Angeles News Group)
USC coach Lane Kiffin said Friday he was unaware athletic director Pat Haden made a video where he announced he supported Kiffin, "100 percent."
Haden said, "I anticipate the media will ask me if our football coach is on the hot seat this year. ... he is not."
Later, Haden said, "He's a dynamic playcaller in my estimation. I firmly believe we'll bounce back strong."
Haden's video was a preemptive strike before Friday's Pac-12 media day at the Sony Pictures Studios Lot in Culver City. Haden did not attend media day because he is on vacation.
"I didn't know there was going to be a video," Kiffin said. "Obviously it's a positive, not a negative. I'm not surprised by it because I deal with Pat (and school president Max Nikias) on a daily basis."
Some noted in jest that Haden's announcement that he is 100 percent behind Kiffin is 50 percent less than last November when he said, "Lane is my head coach, 150 percent."
Kiffin to call plays
In a move that was anticipated, Kiffin said he decided to call plays this season. During spring practice, Kiffin said he would consider giving up those duties to pay more attention to the entire team.
But he decided to remain the Trojans' playcaller for the fourth straight season.
"I made a decision that it's in the best interest of our football team for me to continue to call plays," Kiffin said. "We have a unique relationship with the skilled guys, offensive guys, it's important because you're communicating with them so much and I think there's an impact in recruiting."
That means offensive coordinator Clay Helton will not call plays despite his new title. Helton was quarterbacks coach last season.
Two quarterbacks?
Kiffin said he might pick a starter in a week or a month but he also did not rule out playing two quarterbacks to start the season.
"It's not ideal," Kiffin said. "But all decisions are made in the best interest of the football team. Even though I don't like it. I'm not going to say it never happens."
Kiffin said he did not know if he would redshirt freshman Max Browne if Browne does not win the starting job.
Running is priority
One thing Kiffin did in the off season was study tapes of last year's games to determine what made USC finish with a 7-6 record.
"In critical situations, there was an inability to run the ball," Kiffin said. "That impacts the whole game. When you add that to the unbelievable amount of turnovers we had, it really hurts."
USC picked third
The Trojans were picked in the media poll to finish behind UCLA and Arizona State in the South Division. Oregon was picked to win the North Division and win the Pac-12 title game.
"It's a total difference," wide receiver Marqise Lee said of the lower expectations from a year ago, when USC was selected No. 1 in the nation. "We still have to play the games though. Last year Notre Dame started unranked but went to the championship game."
Source: http://www.dailybreeze.com/sports/ci_23741668/pac-12-media-day-usc-coach-lane-kiffin?source=rss
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The sessions posted cover everything from iAd, iTunes Connect, working with WebKit, UIKit, app sandboxing, and much, much more.
A Google engineer concluded on his Google+ page?last week that a cloud platform can’t be built without some form of lock-in. That’s evidently true but there really is one main reason for making such a point. Google wants to show that it is not much different from its competitors when it comes to this?hot topic with cloud customers. The post by Google Engineering Director Peter Magnusson has to be read with a dash of skepticism. Magnusson does focus on the lock-in issue with Google App Engine (GAE), but he also uses the topic to show the difference between its managed services and the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from a provider like AWS. He says without restrictions Google could not offer the service that it does. What they do try to do is offer alternatives such as from services like AppScale. Reading into what Magnusson says, it appears that some customers are not accustomed to the restrictions that come with Google App Engine: The run-time environment is different and customers can’t make systems calls, write directly to the file system, or choose their own operating system. In the end, Magnusson says that lock-in is inevitable for Google to offer the service that it does with GAE: You can?t build an innovative platform without some measure of lock-in. For example, the Datastore is unlike any other NoSQL or NearSQL service or stack out there. It has multi-datacenter synchronous replication, cursors, distinct queries, projection queries, zigzag merge join, transactional tasks, automatic sharding/load balancing, managed secondary indexes, and multi-row and multi-machine transactions. Our developers don?t want us to dumb down those features to some lowest common denominator; they want us to build more features that leverage the unique underlying software systems. GAE comparess to other PaaS providers such as Cloudbees,?Heroku,?and AppFog, acquired in June by CenturyLink. ?Google abstracts the actual hands-on work of managing the infrastructure that is a hallmark of other services. That means there are certain aspects of Google’s app service that have to be restricted. These restrictions allow Google to take responsibility for a customer’s firewall, most?denial of service attacks, viruses — the list goes on. The upside, Magnusson argues, is that for most mobile and web apps, instances can be started quickly, allowing apps to scale fast. Google manages that scale and the problems that arise when, for example, an app has to be moved to another data center.
