I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders
Why? Are you a shareholder? Will you be after the buyout? Do you have any self-serving reason to shill for shareholders?
If not, you're trolling. Time wasted. Get a life.
Anyone who pulls out a Stripes reference in this day and age is alright in my book. I just wish I had mod points for you.
Stripes??? Really??? *sigh*
Kudos for your enthusiasm, but your are confusing your Ivan Reitman films. S'okay, there were a lot of years and with enough substances they might kind of blur.
Now, read carefully:
Bluto: What? Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Otter: [to Boon] Germans?
Boon: Forget it, he's rolling.
Bluto: And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough...
[thinks hard of something to say]
Bluto: The tough get goin'! Who's with me? Let's go!
[Bluto runs out, alone; then returns]
Bluto: What the fuck happened to the Delta I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you're gonna let it be the worst. "Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble." Well just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Wormer, he's a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer...
Otter: Dead! Bluto's right. Psychotic... but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!
Bluto: We're just the guys to do it.
Now get back to re-education. Boom chaka laka laka boom.
America used to be a free country and now where are we?
We are still in a position to change things if we want to. The thing about a democracy, you get exactly the government you deserve.
It's no exaggeration to say that all this can be fixed with one vote in Congress. Of course, if that's to happen, intelligent, thoughtful people have to be IN the Congress. For that to happen, we, the People, need to stop electing idiots.
You might argue that the two-party system is too corrupt, that some states or districts are locked-in to one party machine or another, that the game is rigged. You might say that politics is filthy and you don't want to soil your pretty hands. You might say you're scared that who-knows is listening (and recording), better to keep quiet in case the thought-police come after you. You might just give up and disconnect, feel smug and say "I told you so" when things get worse.
Well, if so, you'd be part of the problem. Shit happens because good people get too scared or demoralized to do anything.
There's plenty that can be done. It just involves sticking your neck out some, and spending some of your precious time. But that's how all the good things in the U.S. came around. Gandhi said "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." The deck was stacked pretty high against Dr. King (and he had the FBI wire-tapping him, too), but he saw a white Congress pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It think we just got lazy, riding comfy on the hard work and sacrifice of the people who came before us. Maybe that's why voter turnout is so abysmal in the U.S., permitting elections to be rigged by big-money. Maybe electronic freedom and privacy is the civil rights struggle of this generation. If that's the case, I'd rather struggle for it in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth, no matter how paranoid the Bourne movies make me feel. The press is still free, election rigging is a crime, and in 2014, all the idiots in the House can be replaced with better people (at least, if they're willing to step up to it).
Or you can disconnect your computer and bitch (anonymously, of course).
Your choice.
I sure can't wait for the next George Bush administration to decided what medical procedures I'm allowed to get.
Why do people always say this? Is it any better that some for-profit corporation decides what medical procedures you're "allowed to get"?
That's how it is now, and nobody likes it!
At least if the government is making the decisions, you know who to blame and have a right to at least some tiny chance of doing something about it. Like maybe electing a Congressman who isn't a complete idiot. When it's Big Private Insurer calling the shots, you're completely SOL.
(one other thing, it's never "what medical procedures I'm allowed to get"... that's FUD. It's what medical procedures will get paid for by someone other than you.)
All the while the organization has spent a fortune trying to find out why the numbers are different. That is despite the fact that as far as they can tell everything is implemented exactly right in the new system. So there is every possibility that it is the old system that is wrong. Management just can't accept that and take the leap of faith to declare the new system right and move on.
Oh, but imagine if they did. Imagine if they admitted that for years, decades even, accounting was faulty and everybody they did business with either paid too little or paid too much. In other words, nobody really knows how much money they have or how much they owe to who. Stock price plummets as investors panic and lenders quit lending. Directors want your head while all management scrambles to blame the other guy. Class-action suits. Weeks sitting through depositions where lawyers drill repeatedly to get you to admit you're either at fault or an idiot.
Yeah. Let's get a few more years out of that old system.
All good points, but bear in mind MSFT was not trying to get people to buy shares for the benefit of MSFT... this is not an IPO situation. At this point it is all shareholders trading amongst themselves. So whatever information is known, is known to all - and sellers as well as buyers both make their decisions on the same reports..
Correct that this is not an IPO, and shareholders are trading amongst themselves (i.e., a "secondary" stock market). However, MSFT and all corporations, public and private, have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, even minority shareholders. Telling the truth is part of that duty, and breach of that duty is grounds for a lawsuit.
Problem is, where a majority of a company's shares are held by people in league with management, suing is pretty much the only way for minority shareholders to voice their grievances (apart from voting with their feet; i.e., selling).
Winning the suit will not be easy - proving intent to deceive never is (without smoking-gun evidence). But that might not be the point. Just filing the suit (and talking about it in the press) gets your grievance heard, and maybe catch the attention of larger-stake shareholders, like state pension managers. Then, something might happen, maybe.
Clearly MS only hire the best and brightest engineers. The management and marketing folk however, were all bottom of their class....
I think you'll find that the "management and marketing folk" have resumes every bit as breathtaking as the engineers... but where an engineering degree all but guarantees you know how to add and subtract, degrees in management and marketing don't really prove anything except maybe you can pay tuition and produce a persuasive Powerpoint report.
Apologies to all the trench-level managers who get down and work for a living, but the biggest corporations hire MBA's by the bushel, and a top school and top grades are a must-have (with thousands of resumes coming in, that's the first part of the screening process). Yet big corps filled with "top" management/marketing talent like HP and Microsoft continue to make colossal fuck-ups and/or slide into who-cares mediocrity. Do the math. You see a pattern here? They don't.
Why oh why can't the bleeptards at LibreOffice recognize that proper document editing is done in a "Galley View" which MsoftWord refers to as "Draft" (previously "Normal" ) view? Displaying page boundaries, headers & footers, etc is of exactly zero benefit while one is composing the text of the document.
Personally, I'd like not to see text formatting either (bold, font size, etc) but I can live with that. At least until I find a company that supports LaTex, anyway. For that matter, why couldn't LibreOffice (and Micrsoft too) have a twin-pane editor like TexMaker? Do your typing in one pane and observe the fully rendered page in the other as desired?
grrrrrrumble
C'est a little off topic, but I so very much agree. Top reason I can't cut the M$Word cord for Writer. Please, LibreOffice people, please?
A full blown nuclear war with all the nukes we've ever had just isn't that big in comparison to say the eruption of Mount Tambora.
I think it depends on what you call "full blown". When the theory of Nuclear Winter became popular, the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Russia was at its height, and deterrence was based on Mutually Assured Destruction, where the scary part is "Assured". Ever since the only vehicles for nukes were bombers piloted by humans (ala Dr. Strangelove), it has been assumed that not all nukes would reach their targets, and further assumed that some that do will not properly detonate (fizzle). If your strategy is to "assure" that your targets are obliterated before those targets lob nukes at you, you need to counter these problems... with redundancy.
The worst case scenario was that only 1 in 5 nukes would reach their targets and detonate properly. Accordingly, in an all out preemptive attack, you assign 5 warheads for every target in order to assure success. Hence, destroy the world 5 times over.
Agreed that most nukes do not compare to Krakatoa or a decent sized meteor, but with entire arsenals going off at once (tens of thousands of devices) there is good reason for a lot of dust to be kicked into the atmosphere.
That was then. Nobody has kept their arsenals at the size they were since Reagan and Gorby. Nevertheless, no reason to push it, eh?
Simple. For myself, I want a Start menu that does not take me away from the work I was doing, and particularly doesn't inadvertently take me to a full-screen Metro app. My work involves cutting and pasting from many different apps at once... Word, Acrobat, GIMP, Outlook, LibreOffice and others, all on the screen (several screens) at once. When I need to browse through the apps I have installed, I don't want my screen(s) dramatically wiped clean, even temporarily. A good desktop environment doesn't impose itself on you... it stays out of the way. (OS X has had something similar to the Start Screen for some time now, called the Launch Pad, but nobody complains about it. Why? Because you don't ever have to see it, much less use it)
For the users I support, particularly over the phone, I want a linear, clear-to-read pop-up menu that launches from the same lower corner and with roughly the same layout on every PC so I can walk someone through getting a control panel or administrative tool open. I can just hear what it will be with the Start Screen:
"Okay, I pressed the Start thingee, something's happening, yes, I'm still here, no, everything's gone all my work is gone... what? everything disappeared... I just have a bunch of squares, all my windows are... what? ok, you want me to click on one of the squares? ok, which one? no, I don't see that one there, no. no, I don't see it. you want me to what? drag to the next page? page? what page? what's a drag? no, I don't think I have a touch screen. no. nothing's happening. ok, so click-and-hold-and-move-sideways, right. I'm clicking... clicking... wait, oh darn it, the mouse... I didn't have enough room on my desk. everything's gone again. yes, I must have clicked on one of those little squares. no, I don't know which one. no, I don't have my desktop back. all my work is still gone. I don't know where I am. I'm getting tired, and I have other things to do. maybe I should just reboot? I'm turning it off. no, no, this has wasted enough time, I'm very unhappy and I'm just going to have it replaced."
and that's why I'm not satisfied with third-party Start replacements... works for me, but it won't always be there anymore for the users I have to support.
Yes, it's different, but it's getting harder and harder to argue that it's not better. What is so great about the start menu that you refuse nothing less than a line-for-line copy?
There must be a reason nearly every Linux desktop, at least since FVWM, has copied some form of the Start menu... maybe because it works, works really well. Why don't YOU tell me, then, why the Start Screen is so much better, why it's so great that a universally understood desktop control interface should be completely removed.
Experimental support for UEFI-Boot (DVD: 32 and 64bit, CD: only 32bit) after installation on USB flash disk.
In order to create a bootable USB-medium (memory flashdisk, SD-card, digital camera with USB connector, cellphone with microSD,...), the program flash-knoppix can be started from a running Knoppix system. This program installs all needed Knoppix files onto the FAT-formatted flashdisk, and creates a boot record for it. If desired, the target medium can be partitioned and fornatted, or left in its inistal state, so that existing files stay intact. The KNOPPIX Live System starts and runs about factor 5 faster from USB flash disk than from CD or DVD!
It looks like you have to get a Knoppix system running first before you create the thumb drive, but with your Mac all that requires is a little time with Virtual Box (or equivalent). Give it a try and post the results!
The suggestions involved are klunky and the idea of splitting it into 3 OSes is going the wrong way. Windows RT is a disaster because it lacks app compatibility. MS needs to retire it and fully embrace x86 now that intel has fixed it with Haswell.
All that needs to be done to "fix" the start menu issue is make it so the task bar never goes away and the desktop background stays persistent but faded out. You click "START" and tada, the tiles appear right on top of your desktop. It is a simple solution, should be easy to present and works equally as well in mobile touchscreens as it does mice.
Kinda sounds like Launchpad on the Mac (you know, that thing that makes iOS-looking icons fly in over the desktop). You know what's so insanely great about Launchpad on the Mac? You can completely, absolutely ignore it if you want to. Like it's not even there.
THAT's what I'd like to say about Metro on Windows 8.
I disagree. The decision says it is "identification, like fingerprints." Why is additional identification required when fingerprints are adequate?
Because you can do a hellofa lot more with DNA than a fingerprint. Criminals can wear gloves. Rape kits don't collect fingerprints. But a little DNA is dropping off of you pretty much all the time, like that hair follicle you just shed or that coffee cup you just drank from.
and that's the rub. Whoever winds up with your sample can do all sorts of stuff with it. They can plant it at a crime scene. They can match you to your relatives. They can determine what diseases you have (or gonna have), even profile your likelihood to commit a crime. Insurance companies will go ape-shit to get access, and corporations may make clones of you for sweat shops, moon missions, and scientific experiments.
We're entering uncharted territory. I'm glad if DNA collection puts rapists and other deserving criminals in prison. But the potential for abuse, even with the best of intentions, is staggering. Welcome to the Future.
The SHIELD Act was introduced by Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR) on February 27, 2013.
It creates a "loser pays" system for certain types of lawsuits, in which do-nothing patent holders will be forced to pay the defendant's legal bills if they lose their lawsuit. However, losing defendants won't have to pay, so it's more like a "losing plaintiff pays" system.
How did they end up owning this patent? Alcatel-Lucent is not on the original patent.
Patents are property that can be bought and sold. Whoever has ownership of the patent has the power to enforce it by taking infringers to court, even if the owner had nothing to do with inventing the patented invention.
Also, now that the patent has been thrown out, what changes in here? I can't find anything in there showing its updated status.
That link goes to a google page (i.e., absolutely unofficial), and maybe nothing will change. The Patent Office may not get around to updating the patent on record, either. But barring a successful appeal to the Supreme Court, the patent is unenforceable. Alcatel-Lucent therefore cannot use the courts to compel a license fee out of anyone. In effect, this renders the patent worthless, i.e. dead.
anyone remember when Lucent actually innovated stuff?
It started its decline after Ma-Bell was forced to split up.
This much is true. Prior to the breakup in 1984, AT&T was a government sanctioned monopoly, permitted largely because telephones prior to the monopoly were balkanized in little, regional switching systems that often couldn't communicate with each other, making cross-continent communications unreliable (modern analogy: you can't call your friends on Sprint from your Verizon phone).
In return for being permitted to operate as a monopoly, AT&T was limited in the way it could distribute its profits, and was also required to set up telephone service in remote and rural areas. This resulted in an unusually powerful incentive to re-invest in R&D. Thus, the miracle mill of Bell Labs was flush with cash, resulting in what was the most reliable telephone system in the world.
The odd thing was that all that research mostly went into infrastructure, such as improving capacity, reducing copper, aggregating signals, and digitizing switching. Short of touch-tone and modularized equipment, the consumer hardly saw any upgrade from basic voice service under the monopoly regime
As passed by the Congress:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
As ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed
Note the slight variation in punctuation.
Don't see anything in there about protecting us from the government, whereas the militia part strongly implies that government is involved.
On the other hand, the text only says "Arms". It doesn't specify firearms, sidearms, swords, pick-axes, or bows/arrows, and at the same time it doesn't expressly rule out something like "nuclear arms" (as you might expect from the late 18th Century).
Hindsight is 20/20. At the time, even respected financial types declared publicly there would be no end to the housing boom, and therefore you're a fool not to buy in.
What was really annoying, is you had people like Alan Greenspan acting like this was free money and people should get in on it.
Greenspan! I thought it was him but I wasn't sure.
I think the problem is it's really hard to put the brakes on when everybody's making money. There were people making warnings (and others making short bets), but nobody wanted to listen. Economics is a good science, but like any science, sometimes there's a powerful temptation to make the facts fit the theory rather than the other way around, particularly when the theory makes you rich.
What's hard to remember is how MUCH money there was going around back in the bubble years. Didn't he call it "irrational exuberance" or some nonesense? Nobody wants to be the guy that says to shut it down, or be blamed for killing it before everyone got a piece of the action. So, they kick the can down the road until there ain't no more road.
Not so fast. It may seem now that the dumb and dumber dug their own graves, but back when the bubble was inflating, you were (almost) a fool not to get into the game. Those wack-out mortgages were repayable because the value of the home would appreciate enough to refinance. People were getting RICH as they bought and flipped well before any high interest kicked in. Can you say you would have stayed on the sidelines, paying rent (going up every year), when people all around you are getting wealthy?
Hindsight is 20/20. At the time, even respected financial types declared publicly there would be no end to the housing boom, and therefore you're a fool not to buy in. The "dumb and dumber" were just the unlucky ones who were doubled-down when the bubble burst. The grade 9 math (along with every mortgage salesman) told them that if prices kept going up at the pace they were, their mortgages would be just fine. Sure, there were a few people warning that the good times couldn't last, but since they can never tell when and how the end will come, nobody ever believes them (there's money to be made). Boom --> Bust. Repeat. Welcome to the human race.
You and your company got side-tracked by "app store envy". You thought you could be like Apple. You started clamping down on what was open, gripping too tight. Result? You have a lame Apple clone, and you alienated the people who liked you because of the numbered points above.
Wish I could mod parent up to 6.
Wall St. saw Apple's iTunes and app store cash machines and told Ballmer in no uncertain terms to get on the bandwagon. Amid youngster analysts making a name for themselves by squawking that the PC is dead (long live tablet/phone), investors punished Microsoft's stock price and demanded Ballmer do something drastic or find other work.
Windows 8/RT is an ill-advised, rushed to market, knee-jerk reaction to investor pressure, with the investor tag line of leveraging desktop dominance for future earnings on mobile. And why not? Microsoft has gotten away with a lot of mistakes simply because they have so many desktops out there. But the company has never bet before on making app developers pay to play on their platform. There's no guarantee it will work.
Shoulda stuck with what they do well. But public companies answer to shareholders, and they tend not to think that far ahead.
Blackberry makes business devices, and as a business device, tablets aren't doing much.
Depends on the business. I am starting to see a lot of tablets used in retail. Like restaurants where waiters take your order with a tablet, and I was at a high-end store where the saleswoman looked up inventory for a display item with a tablet she wore over her shoulder. They make great little billboards at the checkout, too. I think the market for tablets in business has barely reached its infancy.
Tablets are basically a big, cordless, full-color screen you can hold in one hand and operate with the other; a wireless walk-around smart terminal with multi-media picture, sound, Bluetooth, microphone and camera. In five years, tablets will be more light weight, more powerful, have longer battery life, and cheap enough that businesses can afford hundreds or thousands of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the "300,000" amount to be exaggerated.
Lots of them weren't actually broken. The ribbon was empty. The margin was set weird. The Shift-Lock was down, etc.
You know, user-error.
I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders
Why? Are you a shareholder? Will you be after the buyout? Do you have any self-serving reason to shill for shareholders?
If not, you're trolling. Time wasted. Get a life.
What's missing is remote control of the timing and strength of the shocks, and access to the computer's camera to see the user's faces.
Then, any sadistic netadmin can reproduce the Milgram Experiment for amusement and profit (forget about the danger... think of the fun) .
Anyone who pulls out a Stripes reference in this day and age is alright in my book. I just wish I had mod points for you.
Stripes??? Really??? *sigh*
Kudos for your enthusiasm, but your are confusing your Ivan Reitman films. S'okay, there were a lot of years and with enough substances they might kind of blur.
Now, read carefully:
Bluto: What? Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Otter: [to Boon] Germans?
Boon: Forget it, he's rolling.
Bluto: And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough...
[thinks hard of something to say]
Bluto: The tough get goin'! Who's with me? Let's go!
[Bluto runs out, alone; then returns]
Bluto: What the fuck happened to the Delta I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you're gonna let it be the worst. "Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble." Well just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Wormer, he's a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer...
Otter: Dead! Bluto's right. Psychotic... but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!
Bluto: We're just the guys to do it.
Now get back to re-education. Boom chaka laka laka boom.
America used to be a free country and now where are we?
We are still in a position to change things if we want to. The thing about a democracy, you get exactly the government you deserve.
It's no exaggeration to say that all this can be fixed with one vote in Congress. Of course, if that's to happen, intelligent, thoughtful people have to be IN the Congress. For that to happen, we, the People, need to stop electing idiots.
You might argue that the two-party system is too corrupt, that some states or districts are locked-in to one party machine or another, that the game is rigged. You might say that politics is filthy and you don't want to soil your pretty hands. You might say you're scared that who-knows is listening (and recording), better to keep quiet in case the thought-police come after you. You might just give up and disconnect, feel smug and say "I told you so" when things get worse.
Well, if so, you'd be part of the problem. Shit happens because good people get too scared or demoralized to do anything.
There's plenty that can be done. It just involves sticking your neck out some, and spending some of your precious time. But that's how all the good things in the U.S. came around. Gandhi said "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." The deck was stacked pretty high against Dr. King (and he had the FBI wire-tapping him, too), but he saw a white Congress pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It think we just got lazy, riding comfy on the hard work and sacrifice of the people who came before us. Maybe that's why voter turnout is so abysmal in the U.S., permitting elections to be rigged by big-money. Maybe electronic freedom and privacy is the civil rights struggle of this generation. If that's the case, I'd rather struggle for it in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth, no matter how paranoid the Bourne movies make me feel. The press is still free, election rigging is a crime, and in 2014, all the idiots in the House can be replaced with better people (at least, if they're willing to step up to it).
Or you can disconnect your computer and bitch (anonymously, of course).
Your choice.
let's hope so. However, much of these issues are normally tied to lack of funding. And I do not see CONgress learning from it.
Fixing CONgress is easy... stop electing idiots (ok, ok, easier said than done, but keep in mind, 2014 coming up).
I sure can't wait for the next George Bush administration to decided what medical procedures I'm allowed to get.
Why do people always say this? Is it any better that some for-profit corporation decides what medical procedures you're "allowed to get"?
That's how it is now, and nobody likes it!
At least if the government is making the decisions, you know who to blame and have a right to at least some tiny chance of doing something about it. Like maybe electing a Congressman who isn't a complete idiot. When it's Big Private Insurer calling the shots, you're completely SOL.
(one other thing, it's never "what medical procedures I'm allowed to get"... that's FUD. It's what medical procedures will get paid for by someone other than you.)
All the while the organization has spent a fortune trying to find out why the numbers are different. That is despite the fact that as far as they can tell everything is implemented exactly right in the new system. So there is every possibility that it is the old system that is wrong. Management just can't accept that and take the leap of faith to declare the new system right and move on.
Oh, but imagine if they did. Imagine if they admitted that for years, decades even, accounting was faulty and everybody they did business with either paid too little or paid too much. In other words, nobody really knows how much money they have or how much they owe to who. Stock price plummets as investors panic and lenders quit lending. Directors want your head while all management scrambles to blame the other guy. Class-action suits. Weeks sitting through depositions where lawyers drill repeatedly to get you to admit you're either at fault or an idiot.
Yeah. Let's get a few more years out of that old system.
until Lil Jon got crunk up in there and broke through and skeeted up the French lines. Britney Spears' forces then hit that baby one more time
LOL. Where are my mod points when I need them? :D
All good points, but bear in mind MSFT was not trying to get people to buy shares for the benefit of MSFT... this is not an IPO situation. At this point it is all shareholders trading amongst themselves. So whatever information is known, is known to all - and sellers as well as buyers both make their decisions on the same reports..
Correct that this is not an IPO, and shareholders are trading amongst themselves (i.e., a "secondary" stock market). However, MSFT and all corporations, public and private, have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, even minority shareholders. Telling the truth is part of that duty, and breach of that duty is grounds for a lawsuit.
Problem is, where a majority of a company's shares are held by people in league with management, suing is pretty much the only way for minority shareholders to voice their grievances (apart from voting with their feet; i.e., selling).
Winning the suit will not be easy - proving intent to deceive never is (without smoking-gun evidence). But that might not be the point. Just filing the suit (and talking about it in the press) gets your grievance heard, and maybe catch the attention of larger-stake shareholders, like state pension managers. Then, something might happen, maybe.
Anyway, not good news for Ballmer.
Clearly MS only hire the best and brightest engineers. The management and marketing folk however, were all bottom of their class ....
I think you'll find that the "management and marketing folk" have resumes every bit as breathtaking as the engineers... but where an engineering degree all but guarantees you know how to add and subtract, degrees in management and marketing don't really prove anything except maybe you can pay tuition and produce a persuasive Powerpoint report.
Apologies to all the trench-level managers who get down and work for a living, but the biggest corporations hire MBA's by the bushel, and a top school and top grades are a must-have (with thousands of resumes coming in, that's the first part of the screening process). Yet big corps filled with "top" management/marketing talent like HP and Microsoft continue to make colossal fuck-ups and/or slide into who-cares mediocrity. Do the math. You see a pattern here? They don't.
Why oh why can't the bleeptards at LibreOffice recognize that proper document editing is done in a "Galley View" which MsoftWord refers to as "Draft" (previously "Normal" ) view? Displaying page boundaries, headers & footers, etc is of exactly zero benefit while one is composing the text of the document. Personally, I'd like not to see text formatting either (bold, font size, etc) but I can live with that. At least until I find a company that supports LaTex, anyway. For that matter, why couldn't LibreOffice (and Micrsoft too) have a twin-pane editor like TexMaker? Do your typing in one pane and observe the fully rendered page in the other as desired?
grrrrrrumble
C'est a little off topic, but I so very much agree. Top reason I can't cut the M$Word cord for Writer. Please, LibreOffice people, please?
A full blown nuclear war with all the nukes we've ever had just isn't that big in comparison to say the eruption of Mount Tambora.
I think it depends on what you call "full blown". When the theory of Nuclear Winter became popular, the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Russia was at its height, and deterrence was based on Mutually Assured Destruction, where the scary part is "Assured". Ever since the only vehicles for nukes were bombers piloted by humans (ala Dr. Strangelove), it has been assumed that not all nukes would reach their targets, and further assumed that some that do will not properly detonate (fizzle). If your strategy is to "assure" that your targets are obliterated before those targets lob nukes at you, you need to counter these problems... with redundancy.
The worst case scenario was that only 1 in 5 nukes would reach their targets and detonate properly. Accordingly, in an all out preemptive attack, you assign 5 warheads for every target in order to assure success. Hence, destroy the world 5 times over.
Agreed that most nukes do not compare to Krakatoa or a decent sized meteor, but with entire arsenals going off at once (tens of thousands of devices) there is good reason for a lot of dust to be kicked into the atmosphere.
That was then. Nobody has kept their arsenals at the size they were since Reagan and Gorby. Nevertheless, no reason to push it, eh?
What exactly do you want the start menu back for?
Simple. For myself, I want a Start menu that does not take me away from the work I was doing, and particularly doesn't inadvertently take me to a full-screen Metro app. My work involves cutting and pasting from many different apps at once... Word, Acrobat, GIMP, Outlook, LibreOffice and others, all on the screen (several screens) at once. When I need to browse through the apps I have installed, I don't want my screen(s) dramatically wiped clean, even temporarily. A good desktop environment doesn't impose itself on you... it stays out of the way. (OS X has had something similar to the Start Screen for some time now, called the Launch Pad, but nobody complains about it. Why? Because you don't ever have to see it, much less use it)
For the users I support, particularly over the phone, I want a linear, clear-to-read pop-up menu that launches from the same lower corner and with roughly the same layout on every PC so I can walk someone through getting a control panel or administrative tool open. I can just hear what it will be with the Start Screen:
"Okay, I pressed the Start thingee, something's happening, yes, I'm still here, no, everything's gone all my work is gone... what? everything disappeared... I just have a bunch of squares, all my windows are... what? ok, you want me to click on one of the squares? ok, which one? no, I don't see that one there, no. no, I don't see it. you want me to what? drag to the next page? page? what page? what's a drag? no, I don't think I have a touch screen. no. nothing's happening. ok, so click-and-hold-and-move-sideways, right. I'm clicking... clicking... wait, oh darn it, the mouse... I didn't have enough room on my desk. everything's gone again. yes, I must have clicked on one of those little squares. no, I don't know which one. no, I don't have my desktop back. all my work is still gone. I don't know where I am. I'm getting tired, and I have other things to do. maybe I should just reboot? I'm turning it off. no, no, this has wasted enough time, I'm very unhappy and I'm just going to have it replaced."
and that's why I'm not satisfied with third-party Start replacements... works for me, but it won't always be there anymore for the users I have to support.
Yes, it's different, but it's getting harder and harder to argue that it's not better. What is so great about the start menu that you refuse nothing less than a line-for-line copy?
There must be a reason nearly every Linux desktop, at least since FVWM, has copied some form of the Start menu... maybe because it works, works really well. Why don't YOU tell me, then, why the Start Screen is so much better, why it's so great that a universally understood desktop control interface should be completely removed.
Experimental support for UEFI-Boot (DVD: 32 and 64bit, CD: only 32bit) after installation on USB flash disk.
...), the program flash-knoppix can be started from a running Knoppix system. This program installs all needed Knoppix files onto the FAT-formatted flashdisk, and creates a boot record for it. If desired, the target medium can be partitioned and fornatted, or left in its inistal state, so that existing files stay intact. The KNOPPIX Live System starts and runs about factor 5 faster from USB flash disk than from CD or DVD!
In order to create a bootable USB-medium (memory flashdisk, SD-card, digital camera with USB connector, cellphone with microSD,
It looks like you have to get a Knoppix system running first before you create the thumb drive, but with your Mac all that requires is a little time with Virtual Box (or equivalent). Give it a try and post the results!
The suggestions involved are klunky and the idea of splitting it into 3 OSes is going the wrong way. Windows RT is a disaster because it lacks app compatibility. MS needs to retire it and fully embrace x86 now that intel has fixed it with Haswell.
All that needs to be done to "fix" the start menu issue is make it so the task bar never goes away and the desktop background stays persistent but faded out. You click "START" and tada, the tiles appear right on top of your desktop. It is a simple solution, should be easy to present and works equally as well in mobile touchscreens as it does mice.
Kinda sounds like Launchpad on the Mac (you know, that thing that makes iOS-looking icons fly in over the desktop). You know what's so insanely great about Launchpad on the Mac? You can completely, absolutely ignore it if you want to. Like it's not even there.
THAT's what I'd like to say about Metro on Windows 8.
I disagree. The decision says it is "identification, like fingerprints." Why is additional identification required when fingerprints are adequate?
Because you can do a hellofa lot more with DNA than a fingerprint. Criminals can wear gloves. Rape kits don't collect fingerprints. But a little DNA is dropping off of you pretty much all the time, like that hair follicle you just shed or that coffee cup you just drank from.
and that's the rub. Whoever winds up with your sample can do all sorts of stuff with it. They can plant it at a crime scene. They can match you to your relatives. They can determine what diseases you have (or gonna have), even profile your likelihood to commit a crime. Insurance companies will go ape-shit to get access, and corporations may make clones of you for sweat shops, moon missions, and scientific experiments.
We're entering uncharted territory. I'm glad if DNA collection puts rapists and other deserving criminals in prison. But the potential for abuse, even with the best of intentions, is staggering. Welcome to the Future.
The SHIELD Act was introduced by Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR) on February 27, 2013.
It creates a "loser pays" system for certain types of lawsuits, in which do-nothing patent holders will be forced to pay the defendant's legal bills if they lose their lawsuit. However, losing defendants won't have to pay, so it's more like a "losing plaintiff pays" system.
Following up, another act introduced by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on May 2, 2013, seeks to dramatically lower the cost of patent litigation.
Call/write your congressman.
How did they end up owning this patent? Alcatel-Lucent is not on the original patent.
Patents are property that can be bought and sold. Whoever has ownership of the patent has the power to enforce it by taking infringers to court, even if the owner had nothing to do with inventing the patented invention.
Also, now that the patent has been thrown out, what changes in here? I can't find anything in there showing its updated status.
That link goes to a google page (i.e., absolutely unofficial), and maybe nothing will change. The Patent Office may not get around to updating the patent on record, either. But barring a successful appeal to the Supreme Court, the patent is unenforceable. Alcatel-Lucent therefore cannot use the courts to compel a license fee out of anyone. In effect, this renders the patent worthless, i.e. dead.
It started its decline after Ma-Bell was forced to split up.
This much is true. Prior to the breakup in 1984, AT&T was a government sanctioned monopoly, permitted largely because telephones prior to the monopoly were balkanized in little, regional switching systems that often couldn't communicate with each other, making cross-continent communications unreliable (modern analogy: you can't call your friends on Sprint from your Verizon phone).
In return for being permitted to operate as a monopoly, AT&T was limited in the way it could distribute its profits, and was also required to set up telephone service in remote and rural areas. This resulted in an unusually powerful incentive to re-invest in R&D. Thus, the miracle mill of Bell Labs was flush with cash, resulting in what was the most reliable telephone system in the world.
The odd thing was that all that research mostly went into infrastructure, such as improving capacity, reducing copper, aggregating signals, and digitizing switching. Short of touch-tone and modularized equipment, the consumer hardly saw any upgrade from basic voice service under the monopoly regime
The Second Amendment says as follows:
As passed by the Congress:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
As ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed
Note the slight variation in punctuation.
Don't see anything in there about protecting us from the government, whereas the militia part strongly implies that government is involved.
On the other hand, the text only says "Arms". It doesn't specify firearms, sidearms, swords, pick-axes, or bows/arrows, and at the same time it doesn't expressly rule out something like "nuclear arms" (as you might expect from the late 18th Century).
And thus, here we are
What was really annoying, is you had people like Alan Greenspan acting like this was free money and people should get in on it.
Greenspan! I thought it was him but I wasn't sure.
I think the problem is it's really hard to put the brakes on when everybody's making money. There were people making warnings (and others making short bets), but nobody wanted to listen. Economics is a good science, but like any science, sometimes there's a powerful temptation to make the facts fit the theory rather than the other way around, particularly when the theory makes you rich.
What's hard to remember is how MUCH money there was going around back in the bubble years. Didn't he call it "irrational exuberance" or some nonesense? Nobody wants to be the guy that says to shut it down, or be blamed for killing it before everyone got a piece of the action. So, they kick the can down the road until there ain't no more road.
Not so fast. It may seem now that the dumb and dumber dug their own graves, but back when the bubble was inflating, you were (almost) a fool not to get into the game. Those wack-out mortgages were repayable because the value of the home would appreciate enough to refinance. People were getting RICH as they bought and flipped well before any high interest kicked in. Can you say you would have stayed on the sidelines, paying rent (going up every year), when people all around you are getting wealthy?
Hindsight is 20/20. At the time, even respected financial types declared publicly there would be no end to the housing boom, and therefore you're a fool not to buy in. The "dumb and dumber" were just the unlucky ones who were doubled-down when the bubble burst. The grade 9 math (along with every mortgage salesman) told them that if prices kept going up at the pace they were, their mortgages would be just fine. Sure, there were a few people warning that the good times couldn't last, but since they can never tell when and how the end will come, nobody ever believes them (there's money to be made). Boom --> Bust. Repeat. Welcome to the human race.
You and your company got side-tracked by "app store envy". You thought you could be like Apple. You started clamping down on what was open, gripping too tight. Result? You have a lame Apple clone, and you alienated the people who liked you because of the numbered points above.
Wish I could mod parent up to 6.
Wall St. saw Apple's iTunes and app store cash machines and told Ballmer in no uncertain terms to get on the bandwagon. Amid youngster analysts making a name for themselves by squawking that the PC is dead (long live tablet/phone), investors punished Microsoft's stock price and demanded Ballmer do something drastic or find other work.
Windows 8/RT is an ill-advised, rushed to market, knee-jerk reaction to investor pressure, with the investor tag line of leveraging desktop dominance for future earnings on mobile. And why not? Microsoft has gotten away with a lot of mistakes simply because they have so many desktops out there. But the company has never bet before on making app developers pay to play on their platform. There's no guarantee it will work.
Shoulda stuck with what they do well. But public companies answer to shareholders, and they tend not to think that far ahead.
Blackberry makes business devices, and as a business device, tablets aren't doing much.
Depends on the business. I am starting to see a lot of tablets used in retail. Like restaurants where waiters take your order with a tablet, and I was at a high-end store where the saleswoman looked up inventory for a display item with a tablet she wore over her shoulder. They make great little billboards at the checkout, too. I think the market for tablets in business has barely reached its infancy.
Tablets are basically a big, cordless, full-color screen you can hold in one hand and operate with the other; a wireless walk-around smart terminal with multi-media picture, sound, Bluetooth, microphone and camera. In five years, tablets will be more light weight, more powerful, have longer battery life, and cheap enough that businesses can afford hundreds or thousands of them.