Well, if you remember the original "Running Man" (both the Philip Dick story and the movie) you should recall that the Running Man is NOT supposed to have any advantages. In fact the Running Man is not supposed to live through it...
In btw, it is possibly the only meaningfull movie the Terminator ever made.
Their dynamic content is mostly through a non-MSFT application server.
First, they can go away any day with minimum effort.
Second, they can use higher level abstractions compared to ASP/PHP as a result of that. This is the other approach to the problem which is more typical of people with the size of eBay. Once your business is that big you are working from a different set of premises:
Hardware costs compared to cost of loss of revenue are much lower then in a little shop. At the far end of the scale (in banks) hardware costs are outright negligible.
You have enough money to invest in software/hardware/meatware high availability platform. So you no longer care a lot about the MTFB of a single component as you no longer have any single points of failure anyway.
So your major drive becomes to minimze the chances of revenue loss through a developer fsck-up when fixing bugs or adding new features. This is what you get through the abstraction offered by using a good application server. Your secondary goal becomes good profiling information inside your app which you once again get from the application server. And you do not care about the server platform as such because you approach it at an application server level. I suspect that the only migration cost besides hardware for eBay if they decide to move the lot to let's say AIX will be retraining operations. N?o development costs as such.
Back on subj, I strongly suspect that MSFT cannot shared source any of their SQL products. Too has been bought from someone else.
So, did working at RIM teach you to put a fixed timeout on the time it takes to complete a mail fetch operation even for protocols that report mail message size and hence allow you to _estimate_ how long it will take? By the way if you do not understand what timeout I am talking about it is the 150s limit to fetch in the RIM server software. The retarded piece of garbageware always cuts the connection regardless of data transfered after 150s and aborts all data. That is even for IMAP which allows partial fetch per part and has already given you full size and header information. Classic example of HOW NOT TO DO NETWORK PROGRAMMING
So did working at the RIM teach you to add the Sender header field to the reply-to mail recipients when a user hits Reply-to-All? Where exactly it is in the RFC822 that the sender is anything and you have to reply to him as well when replying to mail? And if you do not understand to what it leads here is a classic example of one of my least favourite politicians telling BBC to fuck off. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4247237.stm Good advertisement for RIM by the way
Or it is just the usual Retarded in Motion attitude of "We invented the email, the Internet and everything around it". At least this is the answer I am getting every time I try to file these as bugs. The answer is "our software is working correctly and shall not be changed".
It is nice that you talk about better code, but frankly you got the wrong company to present as an example. Because in order to produce good code you have to honour and understand the protocols and the specs you deal with and RIM is one of the most profound examples of people who do not.
It may belong to "us" without it being hacked. After all this is what "we" strive for. No civil liberties, detention of anyone without court order and without the right to see the evidence against themselves. This all combined with wasting an enormous amount of public money on gimmicks.
Sincerely, on behalf of Tony Bliar, Lavrentij Pavlocich Clark and many other named and nameless warriors against civil rights and freedoms.
I would not be quite so sure about it. Most stores which use it allow it only for customers with store account cards. They already have your shopping history and they have already done a credit check on you. So if something is astray they are likely to pick it up very fast.
Seconded, You also forgot Gulf War 1. The few (I will restrain from saying only) troops to see direct combat action on the ground were the french. Despite the fact that they had only light tanks and armoured personnel carriers they spearheaded the initial assault on the Iraqi at the end of the war and took nearly all of the ground combat casualties (excluding the ones from friendly fire). The American went behind them. No wonder the french told to Bush Junior to shovel the merde himself this time. They had more then enough during his father's rule.
To add to that do we like it or not the only allied commanding officer to make the Germans retreat before the battle of Moscow was French. To be most exact it was on the 28th of May near Caumont. It was a young french colonel called Charles de Gaulle. And the jerks and arseholes in the British and French high command did not believe the reports from the battlefield and left him without support which allowed the Germans to regroup and nullified the only allied success in the first phase of the war.
80$ per barrel is still considerably less then the retail price of diesel in the UK and many other countries. This is due to the tax on diesel. In most of these countries the tax on renewable fuel is lower and the removal of agricultural waste is more expensive as well, so it may end up being economically feasible.
So numbers which do not add up in the US may in fact add up nicely in the UK, Japan or some of the European countries. And from what I read in the article this is exactly what the company is planning to do. To go onto the right side of the ocean for this kind of technology (from a regulatory and economical perspective).
1. Intel Speedstep is available in any P4 if not disabled by the motherboard. I have it configured and running on all P4/Linux 2.6 systems I manage so that they can survive fan failures (improves fan life as well). What's news here?
2. Having good thermals when operating at full throttle is still not an excuse to have bad power management. My house server is an AMD running between 0.01 and 0.05 loadaverage 95%+ of the time. It is it running at under 36C, but I would still prefer it to be able to downclock so that it survives fan failures. P4 could do it day one. Athlon learned to do it only after AMD licensed some of the Transmeta technology and most motherboards still disable it. Looking backwards, I should have bought AMD for that one (yeah, I know, I am not being really fair as linux could not clock manage at that time).
The first posting manifested some of the sence of humour for which Britain used to be famous.
I am saying used to be because if you compare current comedy shows like the "Little Britain" with what used to be like the "Spitting Image" the British Sense of Humour is definitely on its way to extinction.
1. The Bulgarian government at the time was possibly getting more salary from the CIA funds them from their country. Even if they were not the primary goal of all politicians there is to get it into EU and get American bases on their territory. So they will keep their mouth shut and do nothing to jeopardise it. 2. All the cancer numbers for the western part of the country for 3-4 years were doctored. They were set to be the same as before and the disparity attributed to dead from natural causes. Dead from natural causes in a cancer ward in a hospital... Interesting concept... And if you ask where do I know this from - I have seen the numbers myself. 3. The only journalist I know to have started writing on it got run over in broad daylight in the middle of Sofia on the crossing of two main streets. All witnesses withdrew their statements. Case was closed due to lack of evidence. 4. I know personally at least a number of people in the pathology lab of the Medical academy which analyses samples who have been politely asked not to compile any statistics if they want to have funding for research ever again. 5. I saw the countryside there the autumn of the Kosovo campaign and next spring. In autumn all trees had lost their leaves 2 months prematurely on western facing slopes. By spring 10-20% of the conifers were dead. This does not happen just for nothing. 6. Even if asbestous does not travel for miles, fluorocarbons, hydrofluoric acid, toxic organics, etc travel for up to thousands of miles. And all of them went into the air when the serbian electronics and chemical plants were bombed.
The factories which you refer to were built with Asbestos, PVC, Fluorocarbons, so on, so fourth.
All of these went into the air and hit Bulgaria which was not even a combatant downwind.
As a result people are dieing even now without having anything to do with the war. In fact I have seen the die. People dieing from mesotelieloma are not a pretty sight. You choke on the limpha and blood which fills your lungs.
If you call killing by the most disgusting method available thousands of innocent people in a non-combatant country morally justified I will be very interested to know what is not morally justified according to your point of view.
Depleted uranium has the problem of "Journalist Blame" attached to it. It was heavily used in Gulf War 1 and the Serbian Bombings and the areas where it was used are suffering cancer rates between 10 and 50 times above the world average. This was erroneously blamed on it.
The reaility is that the cancer rates around Basra, parts of ex-Ugo, Western Bulgaria, Western Romania and so on are caused by the choice of targets for "shock and awe" campaigns.
The shock and awe campaigns blanket bombed into oblivion the industrial potential of the target countries - Iraq and Serbia. This industrial potential was mostly built in the late sixties and early seventies using enormous quantities of Asbestous and plastics that emit carcinogenous chemicals when burning. All this got released when they were bombed back into the stone age.
Which in turn resulted in tens of thousands of people to die, dieing or who shall die of cancer in the targeted areas and the areas downwind from it (Bulgaria and Romania on the Balkans and Iran in the Gulf).
This has been blamed by various shallow journalistic research on depleted uranium. It may have a role, but it is minor. The major reason is the war crime idea of "Shock and Awe" in first place.
It is not a question of messing or not messing around.
1. The burglar did not have a decent lawyer and was a prime example of genuine stupidity
2. I suspect that the victim did not have his cameras registered and signposted according to the data protection act and the rules for applying it. Now, it was the guy private residence so there is a question if the rules apply, but IANAL so I would rather not get there. I strongly suspect that the defence did not take any advantage of the fact and if it took and pressed it though the burglar would have been drinking a pint in the Baker's Arse and planning the next run.
3. The interesting bit here is that the system used is likely to have been GNU Motion (which means the machine running linux). He even left the thing running in debug mode where it shows the rectangle where the motion was picked up.
EU consideres this illegal only if it is used as an advantage against a competitor. And even then it is not punishable by a jail term. You just have to replay the tax breaks with interest. If you are not using this as an advantage to get an edge on a competitor you can get plenty of government subsidies, tax breaks and development grants. All you have to do is to make sure that none of your competitors complain about it.
For example most of the EU avionics industry is subsidised, but as there are no complains from within the EU nobody says a thing. As an example to the opposite RyanAir is now being meticulously gunned down to replay every single tax break it got from local councils for creating jobs by chosing obscure countryside airports, because the other airlines complained that it is unfair advantage.
Well, what if they do not refuse to carry it. Just carry it very slowly... After all only an idiot will block a VOIP port of a competitor. Anyone who really wants to have that competitor dead will simply assign it to the lowliest traffic priority class and apply a RED or another form of non-tail drop policy to it. After that the customers will run away and the victim will not for a single second understand what has been done to them.
You are assuming that The port is blocked. This is the most stupid neandertal approach, though when cablecos and telcos are concerned such approaches are what is to be expected.
The correct assumption is that the traffic is not blocked, but assigned to a low priority class and throttled. Even if this is not being done now, it will be the situation in a year or two. I have been following RFPs run by several major telcos and the ability to both define and apply such policies is a must. If you do not have it your equipment does not get past the initial phase. And they are not talking per interface classes and diffserv here. They want it on the scale of a whole counry network with an idiot friendly GUI to put in front of the droid in business development who will be defining the policy assigned to each product.
Basically Vonage and Co are zombies and they will rot away in a the next 2-3 years. As Don Corleone used to say "Nothing personal, just business".
Well, this way for cheap publicity (and desire to play god). There are plenty of other viruses that can be used as a template, but they chose the most inappropriate one. Reminds me of one of the first attempts to make a HIV vaccine in 1989. In that case some of the HIV surface proteins were introduced right into the region of genome instability of the polio virus. Forgot exactly which journal did I read that article, but I am still having shivers when I think about it.
One question that is asked every month on BSD stable is "how to remove the devil at bootup because it is bothering me (or more often - my boss)". No wonder GWB won the last election...
When software is concerned people have been trained into tolerating all kinds of crap. That is not the case as far as most other industries are concerned. If it breaks under warranty it is your right to require for it tow be fixed.
And the fact that the fault is in the software does not suddenly make it something that should be tolerated.
I think you misunderstand the SAIC business model.
As someone who had dealt with picking up the pieces after a major fubar by these clowns, I can tell you that it has nothing to do with economic reality or delivering a working product. All it has to do with an old boys school called Ma Bell.
If you want to have your systems compliant to the whatever regulations were left for interop after the breakup of Ma Bell you have to have the certified by Telcordia (they have a monopoly on this). If you want them certified by telcordia they have to be written by SAIC or with SAIC participation. If you look further you will notice that all PHBs in the telcos who want to get the certification, in SAIC and Telcordia are Ma Bell graduates.
It is a "I rub your back, you rub mine" ring that is enshrined in tradition and some of the US telecom regulations. It has nothing to do with delivering a working product as I have yet to see a single case where SAIC has delivered a working product (many have been accepted, but are they really working is another matter).
First of all 10$ are barely enough to transport a large monitor to a landfill site. Definitely not enough for recycling it.
The correct solution is the EU and Japanese one - the companies are made legally obliged to take care of recycling their goods (they sometimes manage to offload it to the reseller, but legally they are responsible for it). As a result if a company makes a product easier and cheaper for recycling it improves its margin.
With computers it is less evident, as the consumer electronics goods (recycling of) directive is relatively new and few companies have made design decisions based on it. However, it is possible to see where it is going when looking at cars where the legislation has been around for longer. As a result of the similar car legislation recent Japanese cars that are strictly for the European/Japanese market have less then 5% of the car made from non-recyclable materials (IIRC highest are Daihatsu at 98, followed by Toyota and Honda at 97%). Europeans are not far behind.
Computers are going down a similar path. This in fact is the reason why some companies have gone back to making separate US and EU models. This is also the reason (besides VAT) for the mystic difference between prices for some products in the EU and the US. The Mac mini price in the EU includes VAT and what it will cost Apple to take it back once its lifetime has expired and take care of it.
There are other aspects to this as well. Introducing such laws causes serious changes to the recycled material market. Recycling has a limited demand and capacity, so filling it with "newer" goods makes recycling old goods economically pointless. You can no longer scrap an old car and get money for it. You have to pay now. The situation with computers is likely to become the same.
Re:I read this and found it to be terribly funny
on
Microsoft in 2008
·
· Score: 1
Unrealistic? So WTF did Apple do with OSX?
True, I do not see Balmer doing it, but there is no particular reason for someone else to do it if put at the MSFT helm. It actually makes business sense, I would have used BSD for the purpose. They lift large chunks of code of it quite often anyway so in fact they have the experience of doing this (if you do not believe it find somewhere a full list of NT5/W2K betas and follow the TCP stack fingerprints around 1998-1999).
The difference between idle consumption and full throttle on an average desktop is around 70W.
I had to ban Seti at the office, because I had to replace the fans on machines running Seti (standard compaq desktops) every 4 months instead every 2 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, you are right. This one is King's. I got mixed up with Total Recall which is based on a P. Dick short story.
In btw, it is possibly the only meaningfull movie the Terminator ever made.
Their dynamic content is mostly through a non-MSFT application server.
First, they can go away any day with minimum effort.
Second, they can use higher level abstractions compared to ASP/PHP as a result of that. This is the other approach to the problem which is more typical of people with the size of eBay. Once your business is that big you are working from a different set of premises:
- Hardware costs compared to cost of loss of revenue are much lower then in a little shop. At the far end of the scale (in banks) hardware costs are outright negligible.
- You have enough money to invest in software/hardware/meatware high availability platform. So you no longer care a lot about the MTFB of a single component as you no longer have any single points of failure anyway.
- So your major drive becomes to minimze the chances of revenue loss through a developer fsck-up when fixing bugs or adding new features. This is what you get through the abstraction offered by using a good application server. Your secondary goal becomes good profiling information inside your app which you once again get from the application server. And you do not care about the server platform as such because you approach it at an application server level.
Back on subj, I strongly suspect that MSFT cannot shared source any of their SQL products. Too has been bought from someone else.I suspect that the only migration cost besides hardware for eBay if they decide to move the lot to let's say AIX will be retraining operations. N?o development costs as such.
So, did working at RIM teach you to put a fixed timeout on the time it takes to complete a mail fetch operation even for protocols that report mail message size and hence allow you to _estimate_ how long it will take? By the way if you do not understand what timeout I am talking about it is the 150s limit to fetch in the RIM server software. The retarded piece of garbageware always cuts the connection regardless of data transfered after 150s and aborts all data. That is even for IMAP which allows partial fetch per part and has already given you full size and header information. Classic example of HOW NOT TO DO NETWORK PROGRAMMING
So did working at the RIM teach you to add the Sender header field to the reply-to mail recipients when a user hits Reply-to-All? Where exactly it is in the RFC822 that the sender is anything and you have to reply to him as well when replying to mail? And if you do not understand to what it leads here is a classic example of one of my least favourite politicians telling BBC to fuck off. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4247237.stm Good advertisement for RIM by the way
Or it is just the usual Retarded in Motion attitude of "We invented the email, the Internet and everything around it". At least this is the answer I am getting every time I try to file these as bugs. The answer is "our software is working correctly and shall not be changed".
It is nice that you talk about better code, but frankly you got the wrong company to present as an example. Because in order to produce good code you have to honour and understand the protocols and the specs you deal with and RIM is one of the most profound examples of people who do not.
It may belong to "us" without it being hacked. After all this is what "we" strive for. No civil liberties, detention of anyone without court order and without the right to see the evidence against themselves. This all combined with wasting an enormous amount of public money on gimmicks.
Sincerely, on behalf of Tony Bliar, Lavrentij Pavlocich Clark and many other named and nameless warriors against civil rights and freedoms.
I would not be quite so sure about it. Most stores which use it allow it only for customers with store account cards. They already have your shopping history and they have already done a credit check on you. So if something is astray they are likely to pick it up very fast.
Seconded,
You also forgot Gulf War 1. The few (I will restrain from saying only) troops to see direct combat action on the ground were the french. Despite the fact that they had only light tanks and armoured personnel carriers they spearheaded the initial assault on the Iraqi at the end of the war and took nearly all of the ground combat casualties (excluding the ones from friendly fire). The American went behind them. No wonder the french told to Bush Junior to shovel the merde himself this time. They had more then enough during his father's rule.
To add to that do we like it or not the only allied commanding officer to make the Germans retreat before the battle of Moscow was French. To be most exact it was on the 28th of May near Caumont. It was a young french colonel called Charles de Gaulle. And the jerks and arseholes in the British and French high command did not believe the reports from the battlefield and left him without support which allowed the Germans to regroup and nullified the only allied success in the first phase of the war.
80$ per barrel is still considerably less then the retail price of diesel in the UK and many other countries. This is due to the tax on diesel. In most of these countries the tax on renewable fuel is lower and the removal of agricultural waste is more expensive as well, so it may end up being economically feasible.
So numbers which do not add up in the US may in fact add up nicely in the UK, Japan or some of the European countries. And from what I read in the article this is exactly what the company is planning to do. To go onto the right side of the ocean for this kind of technology (from a regulatory and economical perspective).
1. Intel Speedstep is available in any P4 if not disabled by the motherboard. I have it configured and running on all P4/Linux 2.6 systems I manage so that they can survive fan failures (improves fan life as well). What's news here?
2. Having good thermals when operating at full throttle is still not an excuse to have bad power management. My house server is an AMD running between 0.01 and 0.05 loadaverage 95%+ of the time. It is it running at under 36C, but I would still prefer it to be able to downclock so that it survives fan failures. P4 could do it day one. Athlon learned to do it only after AMD licensed some of the Transmeta technology and most motherboards still disable it. Looking backwards, I should have bought AMD for that one (yeah, I know, I am not being really fair as linux could not clock manage at that time).
Dupe and a lausy one.
The first posting manifested some of the sence of humour for which Britain used to be famous.
I am saying used to be because if you compare current comedy shows like the "Little Britain" with what used to be like the "Spitting Image" the British Sense of Humour is definitely on its way to extinction.
1. The Bulgarian government at the time was possibly getting more salary from the CIA funds them from their country. Even if they were not the primary goal of all politicians there is to get it into EU and get American bases on their territory. So they will keep their mouth shut and do nothing to jeopardise it.
2. All the cancer numbers for the western part of the country for 3-4 years were doctored. They were set to be the same as before and the disparity attributed to dead from natural causes. Dead from natural causes in a cancer ward in a hospital... Interesting concept... And if you ask where do I know this from - I have seen the numbers myself.
3. The only journalist I know to have started writing on it got run over in broad daylight in the middle of Sofia on the crossing of two main streets. All witnesses withdrew their statements. Case was closed due to lack of evidence.
4. I know personally at least a number of people in the pathology lab of the Medical academy which analyses samples who have been politely asked not to compile any statistics if they want to have funding for research ever again.
5. I saw the countryside there the autumn of the Kosovo campaign and next spring. In autumn all trees had lost their leaves 2 months prematurely on western facing slopes. By spring 10-20% of the conifers were dead. This does not happen just for nothing.
6. Even if asbestous does not travel for miles, fluorocarbons, hydrofluoric acid, toxic organics, etc travel for up to thousands of miles. And all of them went into the air when the serbian electronics and chemical plants were bombed.
The factories which you refer to were built with Asbestos, PVC, Fluorocarbons, so on, so fourth.
All of these went into the air and hit Bulgaria which was not even a combatant downwind.
As a result people are dieing even now without having anything to do with the war. In fact I have seen the die. People dieing from mesotelieloma are not a pretty sight. You choke on the limpha and blood which fills your lungs.
If you call killing by the most disgusting method available thousands of innocent people in a non-combatant country morally justified I will be very interested to know what is not morally justified according to your point of view.
Depleted uranium has the problem of "Journalist Blame" attached to it. It was heavily used in Gulf War 1 and the Serbian Bombings and the areas where it was used are suffering cancer rates between 10 and 50 times above the world average. This was erroneously blamed on it.
The reaility is that the cancer rates around Basra, parts of ex-Ugo, Western Bulgaria, Western Romania and so on are caused by the choice of targets for "shock and awe" campaigns.
The shock and awe campaigns blanket bombed into oblivion the industrial potential of the target countries - Iraq and Serbia. This industrial potential was mostly built in the late sixties and early seventies using enormous quantities of Asbestous and plastics that emit carcinogenous chemicals when burning. All this got released when they were bombed back into the stone age.
Which in turn resulted in tens of thousands of people to die, dieing or who shall die of cancer in the targeted areas and the areas downwind from it (Bulgaria and Romania on the Balkans and Iran in the Gulf).
This has been blamed by various shallow journalistic research on depleted uranium. It may have a role, but it is minor. The major reason is the war crime idea of "Shock and Awe" in first place.
I said that I would not like to get into this as IANAL:
1. He used it for the purposes of crime prevention and investigation which is not exempt as per this paragraph.
2. If the guy is a contractor, this is his office and he contracts via an LTD as most UK contractors do this exemption does not hold either.
As I said, the burglar had a sucky lawyer (if he had any lawyer at all).
It is not a question of messing or not messing around.
1. The burglar did not have a decent lawyer and was a prime example of genuine stupidity
2. I suspect that the victim did not have his cameras registered and signposted according to the data protection act and the rules for applying it. Now, it was the guy private residence so there is a question if the rules apply, but IANAL so I would rather not get there. I strongly suspect that the defence did not take any advantage of the fact and if it took and pressed it though the burglar would have been drinking a pint in the Baker's Arse and planning the next run.
3. The interesting bit here is that the system used is likely to have been GNU Motion (which means the machine running linux). He even left the thing running in debug mode where it shows the rectangle where the motion was picked up.
Not quite so.
EU consideres this illegal only if it is used as an advantage against a competitor. And even then it is not punishable by a jail term. You just have to replay the tax breaks with interest. If you are not using this as an advantage to get an edge on a competitor you can get plenty of government subsidies, tax breaks and development grants. All you have to do is to make sure that none of your competitors complain about it.
For example most of the EU avionics industry is subsidised, but as there are no complains from within the EU nobody says a thing. As an example to the opposite RyanAir is now being meticulously gunned down to replay every single tax break it got from local councils for creating jobs by chosing obscure countryside airports, because the other airlines complained that it is unfair advantage.
Well, what if they do not refuse to carry it. Just carry it very slowly... After all only an idiot will block a VOIP port of a competitor. Anyone who really wants to have that competitor dead will simply assign it to the lowliest traffic priority class and apply a RED or another form of non-tail drop policy to it. After that the customers will run away and the victim will not for a single second understand what has been done to them.
You are assuming that The port is blocked. This is the most stupid neandertal approach, though when cablecos and telcos are concerned such approaches are what is to be expected.
The correct assumption is that the traffic is not blocked, but assigned to a low priority class and throttled. Even if this is not being done now, it will be the situation in a year or two. I have been following RFPs run by several major telcos and the ability to both define and apply such policies is a must. If you do not have it your equipment does not get past the initial phase. And they are not talking per interface classes and diffserv here. They want it on the scale of a whole counry network with an idiot friendly GUI to put in front of the droid in business development who will be defining the policy assigned to each product.
Basically Vonage and Co are zombies and they will rot away in a the next 2-3 years. As Don Corleone used to say "Nothing personal, just business".
Well, this way for cheap publicity (and desire to play god). There are plenty of other viruses that can be used as a template, but they chose the most inappropriate one. Reminds me of one of the first attempts to make a HIV vaccine in 1989. In that case some of the HIV surface proteins were introduced right into the region of genome instability of the polio virus. Forgot exactly which journal did I read that article, but I am still having shivers when I think about it.
One question that is asked every month on BSD stable is "how to remove the devil at bootup because it is bothering me (or more often - my boss)". No wonder GWB won the last election...
Absolutely bloody right.
When software is concerned people have been trained into tolerating all kinds of crap. That is not the case as far as most other industries are concerned. If it breaks under warranty it is your right to require for it tow be fixed.
And the fact that the fault is in the software does not suddenly make it something that should be tolerated.
I think you misunderstand the SAIC business model.
As someone who had dealt with picking up the pieces after a major fubar by these clowns, I can tell you that it has nothing to do with economic reality or delivering a working product. All it has to do with an old boys school called Ma Bell.
If you want to have your systems compliant to the whatever regulations were left for interop after the breakup of Ma Bell you have to have the certified by Telcordia (they have a monopoly on this). If you want them certified by telcordia they have to be written by SAIC or with SAIC participation. If you look further you will notice that all PHBs in the telcos who want to get the certification, in SAIC and Telcordia are Ma Bell graduates.
It is a "I rub your back, you rub mine" ring that is enshrined in tradition and some of the US telecom regulations. It has nothing to do with delivering a working product as I have yet to see a single case where SAIC has delivered a working product (many have been accepted, but are they really working is another matter).
No.
First of all 10$ are barely enough to transport a large monitor to a landfill site. Definitely not enough for recycling it.
The correct solution is the EU and Japanese one - the companies are made legally obliged to take care of recycling their goods (they sometimes manage to offload it to the reseller, but legally they are responsible for it). As a result if a company makes a product easier and cheaper for recycling it improves its margin.
With computers it is less evident, as the consumer electronics goods (recycling of) directive is relatively new and few companies have made design decisions based on it. However, it is possible to see where it is going when looking at cars where the legislation has been around for longer. As a result of the similar car legislation recent Japanese cars that are strictly for the European/Japanese market have less then 5% of the car made from non-recyclable materials (IIRC highest are Daihatsu at 98, followed by Toyota and Honda at 97%). Europeans are not far behind.
Computers are going down a similar path. This in fact is the reason why some companies have gone back to making separate US and EU models. This is also the reason (besides VAT) for the mystic difference between prices for some products in the EU and the US. The Mac mini price in the EU includes VAT and what it will cost Apple to take it back once its lifetime has expired and take care of it.
There are other aspects to this as well. Introducing such laws causes serious changes to the recycled material market. Recycling has a limited demand and capacity, so filling it with "newer" goods makes recycling old goods economically pointless. You can no longer scrap an old car and get money for it. You have to pay now. The situation with computers is likely to become the same.
Unrealistic? So WTF did Apple do with OSX?
True, I do not see Balmer doing it, but there is no particular reason for someone else to do it if put at the MSFT helm. It actually makes business sense, I would have used BSD for the purpose. They lift large chunks of code of it quite often anyway so in fact they have the experience of doing this (if you do not believe it find somewhere a full list of NT5/W2K betas and follow the TCP stack fingerprints around 1998-1999).
Not funny actually.
The difference between idle consumption and full throttle on an average desktop is around 70W.
I had to ban Seti at the office, because I had to replace the fans on machines running Seti (standard compaq desktops) every 4 months instead every 2 years.
So 50000*70W = 3500KW = 3.5 MW.