I think this gives Google the opportunity to put a more refined, united vision of Android into the marketplace.
Motorola, LG, Samsung, HTC -- each of them had an illusory vision that they could brand Android via UIs, themes, skins, non-removable apps into a product that people would identify with their company.
Ultimately this has failed Android in that it continues to get dinged by reviewers as being perceptibly less polished and unified than Apple's iPhone and thus a lesser experience, often despite better hardware features that many Apple's fans would love (SD ports, larger screens, etc etc).
Owned by Google, Motorola's new marketing message is "Pure Android" -- phones with a unity of design and polish to match Apple's, without the third-party & carrier clutter.
LG, Samsung and HTC will be given the chance to release the same "pure android" smartphones and they probably will, because their other option is to go back to being what they were before, makers of buy-1-get-3-free shitphones that carriers used to bulk up the bottom end of their phone offerings.
I'm sure someone from Google will give them all a pep talk that tells them that they aren't competing with Motorola, they are competing with Apple and Microsoft (if WinMo sells anything anymore) and that a 'standard' and 'pure' Android is cheaper to make than an in-house flavor and that the chances of them becoming a "brand" people seek out for phones is essentially zero.
Well, from experience, it was one of two situations:
1) Guy was smart, but hard to get along with and generally not well liked. He was offered a package to resign which included two months of consulting both as a sweetener and to aid in a more orderly transition to a replacement. His entitlement, lack of people skills and resentment finally boiled over.
2) Guy was smart, but ultimately grew tired of a management team that was cheap, expected too much work and treated IT as if it was a service on par with the janitorial staff. Quits unexpectedly and management's disconnect with IT rears its ugly head as a system crisis occurs and nobody can deal with it. Employee agrees to come back on lucrative consulting terms and wreaks havoc.
Now with option 2, you have two other possibilities -- havoc wreaked was intended to be permanent, a "fuck you" revenge, OR havoc wreaked was intended to be temporary, designed to get management's attention and reclaim his resigned position at an increased salary/title/etc by heroically fixing the problems that he inflicted.
The hosting companies, ISPs, credit card processors and banks that make it possible to actually make money off of spam.
Sure, some of it is purely criminal -- viruses, malware, etc. But that's more easily filtered and is something of a seperate problem.
The problem with just going after the "spammer" is that the life support system that makes it possible to be a spammer and actually make money off it stays intact and they just become the vendor to the next douche-bag spammer.
A RICO prosecution targeting everyone involved would be highly beneficial. Even if the above accessories to spam weren't actually prosecuted, an FBI investigation involving grand juries, subpoenas and a host of negative publicity might have a deterrent effect on its own, discouraging those businesses from dabbling in spam businesses.
If spam can be pushed further to the margins, its less profitable and higher risk. From a technical perspective, it makes it easier to identify ISPs and hosting companies willing to accommodate it, making them easier to null-route or block, and thus raising their costs for access.
You may not be able to stop spam 100%, but you may make it economically non-viable.
The way a lot of modern construction is done in the west, there's lots of reasons to not build cities no one lives in yet, but I wonder if there's any percentage in building "spare" cities like this for some undefined future use.
The living and commercial spaces are priced high enough that the space is nearly empty, but a few people/entities are given cut-rate access to keep it minimally occupied to keep key systems working (water? power?) and maintained.
At some point in the future (10 years? 20?) when the capacity is needed due to expansion/disaster/growth, you have cities ready to be occupied completely by millions without having to actually build them at a higher cost.
It sounds crazy, and probably is, because I'd imagine that the slow rot that occurs with most structures is worse when they are unoccupied, but somehow in a planned command economy it seems like there's some angle here beyond just propping up the economy, speculation or corrupt local officials.
Why stop at 128MB RAM? With RAM densities as they are, why not 4 or 8GB (or more) of RAM?
With RAM->SSD->HDD, for most operations in many systems you'd quite often be running as a RAM disk. The RAM->SSD times should be fast enough on writes to alleviate a lot of panic about cache loss in a power outage.
I wonder why there isn't either a single unit disk drive that does this automatically -- acts as an SSD and mirrors all writes to the HDD.
Also nice would be a SSD aware RAID controller that would allow an intelligent RAID-1 mirroring between an SSD and a mechanical disk or three-way mirroring (SSD mirrored to HDD mirror), with the intelligence and cache to make all the HDD writing transparent to the system. At a larger level would be a smart storage system that kept frequently accessed blocks on SSD for reads, some capacity for writes but kept it all mirrored to HDD for reliability.
Since HDD capacities are so much greater, an even better concept would be a hybrid disk whose capacity was its mechanical size, but with some kind of intelligent caching system that used, say, 75% of an SSD for the most commonly read disk blocks and 25% for writes but mirrored the writes to the mechanical disk.
This way you get all the "reliability" of a mechanical disk with the speed of a SSD.
I just assumed a tax-free municipal bond fund of some kind because you then escape at least Federal income taxes on the income. The yields are worse than other fixed income securities, but the tax benefits offset it, and most have a ten year return of something approaching 4-5 percent; although it can be worse in some years and the whole government finance crises could make returns get worse and/or increase defaults, which are generally rare for muni bonds.
$5 million makes retirement pretty easy, regardless of investment return because you could pull $100k a year out of the principal and still have over a million in cash after 30 years without any investment at all. Doesn't do anything for inflation, though.
I still think the best option are tax-free munis, a reasonable base annual allowance (with drawdown for poor yield years) and principal reinvestment for good years.
Stop worrying about money? Property taxes? Food? Healthcare? Maintenance on the house? Utilities? Insurance?
You're looking at a $1k a month nut just to keep the operation going.
If you're a poor student, I see where this sounds like salvation, but it really isn't. My dad lives like a swamp rat in a converted bus (conveniently, he lives in a swamp in central Florida) and even he talks about "winning" when he's able to make rent + utilities + healthcare + other expenses = $2k a month.
No, but I expect to live another 30 years and it would be a bitch to run out of money.
The other bitch is inflation which would require you to draw down principal any way to keep up.
But if you didn't care about exhausting the principal, you could probably draw down another $20k a year in addition to what inflation would require. Inflation may not be that bad, but food, fuel and medicine can get pretty ugly.
You'd still be on a $65k/yr lifestyle and you'd be totally out of money in 25 years.
Even if they weren't, how would you live the rest of your life on $1,000,000? Even never touching the principal, you might turn $35-40k a year from a tax-free bond fund, assuming you get a decent return. Assuming you suck it up hard and keep working for the next 5 years and plow that back into the principal, you're still praying for good years to get you to $50k.
If your house is paid for, you have no health issues and your property taxes are zero you might be able to sit in place, but it's gonna be more "hood rich" than even all that comfortable. Forget traveling or any meaningful upgrades to your lifestyle.
Really, to live a comfortable lifestyle you need to look 5 to 10 million dollars as a starting point -- and that assumes you live somewhat modestly on the dividends and plow some of it back into the principal on a regular basis so inflation doesn't kill you -- that gives you something like $250-500 per year in cash.
A lot of non-profits won't take donated systems anymore because it's a nuisance to deal with so many antiquated systems. Non-profits need working and reasonably contemporary systems to do their work, a bunch of 256 meg Win 98 systems is really more of an insult than a benefit.
Sounds more than a bit far out and almost totally misinformed.
China's military options for collecting on their debts are almost zero. Where will China export the goods it needs to keep its economy going if they start a war with the United States?
Further, China buys US treasuries to keep their currency valuation down so that they can continue to be the low-cost contract manufacturer to the world. Without keeping their currency low, the strength of their economy would push their currency higher, making them uncompetitive as exporters and pretty much derailing the vast majority of their economy.
A derailed economy REALLY scares the Chinese leadership, as their number one focus is maintaining order and putting a couple hundred million people out of work does not help with order.
The US is almost totally in control when it comes to Chinese owned debt. Its denominated in our own currency. Any threat to dump it would probably be met by a US threat to simply void it. They could stop buying it, but it would have a deleterious impact on their currency valuation.
What's missing from the recent coverage over the the debt ceiling dust up is the sentiment of many Republicans that Government is too big and by squeezing it from a revenue side they hope to stop its expansion and try to shrink it. This has been a long-term Republican strategy, but its largely been a failure. It may have slowed some expansion, but generally speaking the net outcome has been to cause deficits to be run up.
I largely think that some tax increase is necessary. I'd personally like to see a tax increase across the board, including low-income earners. I'd eliminate the earned income tax credit that basically allows some 40 percent of the population to pay no taxes -- I don't think a reasonable tax on them would amount to much, but I think it creates a free ride which is a poor tax policy. I think it would also philosophically undermine the "40 percent of Americans pay no taxes" line which is used to refute increasing taxes on the wealthy who can frankly afford to pay them.
More importantly, we need to have a long discussion in this country as to what's vital from the government (roads, infrastructure, safe food and medicine as a start) and what's merely nice if we can afford it.
Well, it's the annoying habit insurance companies have collecting on insurance premiums and not paying claims, in all realms, not just health insurance. Health claims are just more pernicious because it deals with life and death.
I've personally had pretty good luck with car insurance, but my claims have almost always been totally one-sided (as in rear-ended or parked) and the fault 100% of the other driver.
I'm no fan of the telecommunications/infotainment oligarchy, but 10 years ago I paid $85/month for 768k/768k DSL and one static IP. That's $112 in current purchasing power.
I now pay $69 for 10m/3m with 5 static IPs. That's a 33% reduction in price for nearly 7 times the product.
I think the "Ten Year Rule" needs to be amended as "Ten Years or Five Great Films".
Eastwood's directed a lot of half-assed films in his years -- Space Cowboys? Honkytonk Man? He's really only be given the directorial laurel in the last ten years, since maybe Mystic River.
Scorsese is a great mob film director, but short of "The Departed" he hasn't had a lot of critical success since Casino and IMHO, hasn't had a ton of success in films that weren't mob films -- although his remake of Cape Fear was pretty good.
Lynch has talent, but does he even have 5 great films? He's more auteur than filmmaker of great films.
The Coen Brothers are talented, but are that many of their films great? IMHO, not, there's more than a couple of marginal films in their library.
The only one on the list who seems to have defied the odds is Woody Allen, and it depends on whether or not you care for most of his catalog of the last 15 years, as IMHO, "Husbands and Wives" is kind of the last great "Woody Allen" film. I've liked his recent efforts, but they're somewhat different from a "Wood Allen" film.
I've spent the last two days flat on my back with some kind of horrible food poisoning. Lacking a DVD player in the bedroom, I trolled Netflix streaming looking for something good. Not only was I sick, I was bored, too!
You can sometimes find art house / foreign titles of quality, but quite often its really schlocky B movies in the 2-3 star range. The "best" selection is often StarzPlay, but even then its a lot of older titles in heavy rotation on the various Starz & Encore cable channels.
I've gotten some value out of it -- all the Rockford Files seasons are available on streaming, and I recently noted that the original Star Trek now is, too (in HD, no less), but those are only distractions.
You still need the DVD subscription to get any real value out of Netflix unless you have some unusual tastes that can be satisfied with streaming.
I know the space shuttle couldn't be used as a ship for interplanetary travel with a crew, but could an unmanned shuttle serve any purpose -- say as a permanent space station/orbiter around the moon, Mars or some more distant location like Io?
I'm sure there's a lot to count against it, but in their favor, they are paid for -- any retrofit costs would be the only expense, and without the crew and life support requirements the shuttle would lose weight, making it easier to launch beyond earth orbit. But because the shuttle has a lot of extra space, it might make it attractive to add research gear, a daughter satellite/probe, extra fuel, etc.
There's also whatever human space travel research value to be had from simply flying it to Mars and seeing what would happen along the way.
The other idea that occurred to me, why not leave one permanently attached to the ISS? With a crew habitat module, it could have added a lot of extra space to the ISS without the cost of adding another module.
I drove a diesel VM Rabbit in the early 80s. Upside? Great mileage, I think I got nearly 50 mpg on the highway -- a trip from Minneapolis to Madison, WI and halfway back before needing to refuel.
The downside of that car was near zero acceleration and it was impossible to start in the winter if it wasn't plugged in overnight (a real challenge when you live in an apartment or want to stay at a friends -- I used to carry a 100 ft extension cord).
GM released a series of diesel powered cars in the 1980s that used a bad 350 gas motor converted to diesel that had all kinds of problems, not to mention being way noisier and smellier than a gas engine.
I had a delivery job using a 6.2L GM diesel pickup, and that ran well but was not at all practical for typical urban use.
And then there is our fuel problem -- high sulfur diesel was our fuel standard until the last couple of years and this meant none of the high-tech, low-tolerance diesel engines Europe has had, we were stuck with truck diesels.
And then there's the other fuel problem -- fewer urban stations carry diesel, which means you kind of have to plan ahead.
Too many people drone in corporations and enable this kind of clusterfuckery. If something like a corporate death penalty was a reality, people would ask more questions about their place of work and possibly refuse to cooperate with any of the abuses that take place.
While many of these abuses are the result of skulduggery by select executives, actual execution of these schemes involves the culpability of many.
"I was just following orders" wasn't acceptable at Nuremberg and it shouldn't be acceptable now.
Even if a market is dominated by three players, is the term triopoly even intellectually honest? Really what you're starting to discuss is either a cartel or price fixing, both of which are usually illegal.
A friend is a history professor and he has a story (apocryphal?) about a history professor who had an exact-size copy made of some 13th century king's armor from his teens (Richard the Lionhearted?), and the armor was a good fit on a modern football linebacker.
Anyway, the idea is that the elite soldiers -- from nobility, raised to fight from a young age, the best possible diet for the era (high in protein) -- were in outstanding physical condition and very, very strong. The armor the football player put on was for a teenager, so the thinking is the adult sized armor was even larger and the actual adult who filled it was bigger than a football player (who are all really huge).
My friend has told me this story more than once, I need to pin him down on facts. But it's an interesting story.
There is almost no thought going into preserving the UNIX culture because we took in to many immigrants from Windows/Mac and didn't make them natives before giving them commit access our key cultural artifacts. There is probably a lesson here for the larger political immigration arguments in the 1st world but that gets kinda offtopic.
What a great metaphor, and quite apt, I might add.
As to the larger question, there was a time when there were people who really had no "PC" experience outside of launching a terminal emulator to connect to a timeshare system of some kind and thus were largely pure of mind when it came to UNIX.
Now so many of these people cut their teeth on Macs and Windows, often for years, that they don't know any different -- it's become like a burned in image on a monitor; all you can hope is that you can turn up the brightness enough that you don't notice it.
I think you could make an argument that for all its flaws, both Macs and Windows "work well enough" that making desktop linux work like them isn't the worst thing.
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I think this gives Google the opportunity to put a more refined, united vision of Android into the marketplace.
Motorola, LG, Samsung, HTC -- each of them had an illusory vision that they could brand Android via UIs, themes, skins, non-removable apps into a product that people would identify with their company.
Ultimately this has failed Android in that it continues to get dinged by reviewers as being perceptibly less polished and unified than Apple's iPhone and thus a lesser experience, often despite better hardware features that many Apple's fans would love (SD ports, larger screens, etc etc).
Owned by Google, Motorola's new marketing message is "Pure Android" -- phones with a unity of design and polish to match Apple's, without the third-party & carrier clutter.
LG, Samsung and HTC will be given the chance to release the same "pure android" smartphones and they probably will, because their other option is to go back to being what they were before, makers of buy-1-get-3-free shitphones that carriers used to bulk up the bottom end of their phone offerings.
I'm sure someone from Google will give them all a pep talk that tells them that they aren't competing with Motorola, they are competing with Apple and Microsoft (if WinMo sells anything anymore) and that a 'standard' and 'pure' Android is cheaper to make than an in-house flavor and that the chances of them becoming a "brand" people seek out for phones is essentially zero.
Well, from experience, it was one of two situations:
1) Guy was smart, but hard to get along with and generally not well liked. He was offered a package to resign which included two months of consulting both as a sweetener and to aid in a more orderly transition to a replacement. His entitlement, lack of people skills and resentment finally boiled over.
2) Guy was smart, but ultimately grew tired of a management team that was cheap, expected too much work and treated IT as if it was a service on par with the janitorial staff. Quits unexpectedly and management's disconnect with IT rears its ugly head as a system crisis occurs and nobody can deal with it. Employee agrees to come back on lucrative consulting terms and wreaks havoc.
Now with option 2, you have two other possibilities -- havoc wreaked was intended to be permanent, a "fuck you" revenge, OR havoc wreaked was intended to be temporary, designed to get management's attention and reclaim his resigned position at an increased salary/title/etc by heroically fixing the problems that he inflicted.
Guy Fawkes is real part of their history.
The hosting companies, ISPs, credit card processors and banks that make it possible to actually make money off of spam.
Sure, some of it is purely criminal -- viruses, malware, etc. But that's more easily filtered and is something of a seperate problem.
The problem with just going after the "spammer" is that the life support system that makes it possible to be a spammer and actually make money off it stays intact and they just become the vendor to the next douche-bag spammer.
A RICO prosecution targeting everyone involved would be highly beneficial. Even if the above accessories to spam weren't actually prosecuted, an FBI investigation involving grand juries, subpoenas and a host of negative publicity might have a deterrent effect on its own, discouraging those businesses from dabbling in spam businesses.
If spam can be pushed further to the margins, its less profitable and higher risk. From a technical perspective, it makes it easier to identify ISPs and hosting companies willing to accommodate it, making them easier to null-route or block, and thus raising their costs for access.
You may not be able to stop spam 100%, but you may make it economically non-viable.
The way a lot of modern construction is done in the west, there's lots of reasons to not build cities no one lives in yet, but I wonder if there's any percentage in building "spare" cities like this for some undefined future use.
The living and commercial spaces are priced high enough that the space is nearly empty, but a few people/entities are given cut-rate access to keep it minimally occupied to keep key systems working (water? power?) and maintained.
At some point in the future (10 years? 20?) when the capacity is needed due to expansion/disaster/growth, you have cities ready to be occupied completely by millions without having to actually build them at a higher cost.
It sounds crazy, and probably is, because I'd imagine that the slow rot that occurs with most structures is worse when they are unoccupied, but somehow in a planned command economy it seems like there's some angle here beyond just propping up the economy, speculation or corrupt local officials.
Why stop at 128MB RAM? With RAM densities as they are, why not 4 or 8GB (or more) of RAM?
With RAM->SSD->HDD, for most operations in many systems you'd quite often be running as a RAM disk. The RAM->SSD times should be fast enough on writes to alleviate a lot of panic about cache loss in a power outage.
I wonder why there isn't either a single unit disk drive that does this automatically -- acts as an SSD and mirrors all writes to the HDD.
Also nice would be a SSD aware RAID controller that would allow an intelligent RAID-1 mirroring between an SSD and a mechanical disk or three-way mirroring (SSD mirrored to HDD mirror), with the intelligence and cache to make all the HDD writing transparent to the system. At a larger level would be a smart storage system that kept frequently accessed blocks on SSD for reads, some capacity for writes but kept it all mirrored to HDD for reliability.
Since HDD capacities are so much greater, an even better concept would be a hybrid disk whose capacity was its mechanical size, but with some kind of intelligent caching system that used, say, 75% of an SSD for the most commonly read disk blocks and 25% for writes but mirrored the writes to the mechanical disk.
This way you get all the "reliability" of a mechanical disk with the speed of a SSD.
I just assumed a tax-free municipal bond fund of some kind because you then escape at least Federal income taxes on the income. The yields are worse than other fixed income securities, but the tax benefits offset it, and most have a ten year return of something approaching 4-5 percent; although it can be worse in some years and the whole government finance crises could make returns get worse and/or increase defaults, which are generally rare for muni bonds.
$5 million makes retirement pretty easy, regardless of investment return because you could pull $100k a year out of the principal and still have over a million in cash after 30 years without any investment at all. Doesn't do anything for inflation, though.
I still think the best option are tax-free munis, a reasonable base annual allowance (with drawdown for poor yield years) and principal reinvestment for good years.
Stop worrying about money? Property taxes? Food? Healthcare? Maintenance on the house? Utilities? Insurance?
You're looking at a $1k a month nut just to keep the operation going.
If you're a poor student, I see where this sounds like salvation, but it really isn't. My dad lives like a swamp rat in a converted bus (conveniently, he lives in a swamp in central Florida) and even he talks about "winning" when he's able to make rent + utilities + healthcare + other expenses = $2k a month.
No, but I expect to live another 30 years and it would be a bitch to run out of money.
The other bitch is inflation which would require you to draw down principal any way to keep up.
But if you didn't care about exhausting the principal, you could probably draw down another $20k a year in addition to what inflation would require. Inflation may not be that bad, but food, fuel and medicine can get pretty ugly.
You'd still be on a $65k/yr lifestyle and you'd be totally out of money in 25 years.
Yes, lottery winnings are taxed.
Even if they weren't, how would you live the rest of your life on $1,000,000? Even never touching the principal, you might turn $35-40k a year from a tax-free bond fund, assuming you get a decent return. Assuming you suck it up hard and keep working for the next 5 years and plow that back into the principal, you're still praying for good years to get you to $50k.
If your house is paid for, you have no health issues and your property taxes are zero you might be able to sit in place, but it's gonna be more "hood rich" than even all that comfortable. Forget traveling or any meaningful upgrades to your lifestyle.
Really, to live a comfortable lifestyle you need to look 5 to 10 million dollars as a starting point -- and that assumes you live somewhat modestly on the dividends and plow some of it back into the principal on a regular basis so inflation doesn't kill you -- that gives you something like $250-500 per year in cash.
A lot of non-profits won't take donated systems anymore because it's a nuisance to deal with so many antiquated systems. Non-profits need working and reasonably contemporary systems to do their work, a bunch of 256 meg Win 98 systems is really more of an insult than a benefit.
Sounds more than a bit far out and almost totally misinformed.
China's military options for collecting on their debts are almost zero. Where will China export the goods it needs to keep its economy going if they start a war with the United States?
Further, China buys US treasuries to keep their currency valuation down so that they can continue to be the low-cost contract manufacturer to the world. Without keeping their currency low, the strength of their economy would push their currency higher, making them uncompetitive as exporters and pretty much derailing the vast majority of their economy.
A derailed economy REALLY scares the Chinese leadership, as their number one focus is maintaining order and putting a couple hundred million people out of work does not help with order.
The US is almost totally in control when it comes to Chinese owned debt. Its denominated in our own currency. Any threat to dump it would probably be met by a US threat to simply void it. They could stop buying it, but it would have a deleterious impact on their currency valuation.
What's missing from the recent coverage over the the debt ceiling dust up is the sentiment of many Republicans that Government is too big and by squeezing it from a revenue side they hope to stop its expansion and try to shrink it. This has been a long-term Republican strategy, but its largely been a failure. It may have slowed some expansion, but generally speaking the net outcome has been to cause deficits to be run up.
I largely think that some tax increase is necessary. I'd personally like to see a tax increase across the board, including low-income earners. I'd eliminate the earned income tax credit that basically allows some 40 percent of the population to pay no taxes -- I don't think a reasonable tax on them would amount to much, but I think it creates a free ride which is a poor tax policy. I think it would also philosophically undermine the "40 percent of Americans pay no taxes" line which is used to refute increasing taxes on the wealthy who can frankly afford to pay them.
More importantly, we need to have a long discussion in this country as to what's vital from the government (roads, infrastructure, safe food and medicine as a start) and what's merely nice if we can afford it.
Well, it's the annoying habit insurance companies have collecting on insurance premiums and not paying claims, in all realms, not just health insurance. Health claims are just more pernicious because it deals with life and death.
I've personally had pretty good luck with car insurance, but my claims have almost always been totally one-sided (as in rear-ended or parked) and the fault 100% of the other driver.
I'm no fan of the telecommunications/infotainment oligarchy, but 10 years ago I paid $85/month for 768k/768k DSL and one static IP. That's $112 in current purchasing power.
I now pay $69 for 10m/3m with 5 static IPs. That's a 33% reduction in price for nearly 7 times the product.
How is that not an improvement?
I think the "Ten Year Rule" needs to be amended as "Ten Years or Five Great Films".
Eastwood's directed a lot of half-assed films in his years -- Space Cowboys? Honkytonk Man? He's really only be given the directorial laurel in the last ten years, since maybe Mystic River.
Scorsese is a great mob film director, but short of "The Departed" he hasn't had a lot of critical success since Casino and IMHO, hasn't had a ton of success in films that weren't mob films -- although his remake of Cape Fear was pretty good.
Lynch has talent, but does he even have 5 great films? He's more auteur than filmmaker of great films.
The Coen Brothers are talented, but are that many of their films great? IMHO, not, there's more than a couple of marginal films in their library.
The only one on the list who seems to have defied the odds is Woody Allen, and it depends on whether or not you care for most of his catalog of the last 15 years, as IMHO, "Husbands and Wives" is kind of the last great "Woody Allen" film. I've liked his recent efforts, but they're somewhat different from a "Wood Allen" film.
I've spent the last two days flat on my back with some kind of horrible food poisoning. Lacking a DVD player in the bedroom, I trolled Netflix streaming looking for something good. Not only was I sick, I was bored, too!
You can sometimes find art house / foreign titles of quality, but quite often its really schlocky B movies in the 2-3 star range. The "best" selection is often StarzPlay, but even then its a lot of older titles in heavy rotation on the various Starz & Encore cable channels.
I've gotten some value out of it -- all the Rockford Files seasons are available on streaming, and I recently noted that the original Star Trek now is, too (in HD, no less), but those are only distractions.
You still need the DVD subscription to get any real value out of Netflix unless you have some unusual tastes that can be satisfied with streaming.
I know the space shuttle couldn't be used as a ship for interplanetary travel with a crew, but could an unmanned shuttle serve any purpose -- say as a permanent space station/orbiter around the moon, Mars or some more distant location like Io?
I'm sure there's a lot to count against it, but in their favor, they are paid for -- any retrofit costs would be the only expense, and without the crew and life support requirements the shuttle would lose weight, making it easier to launch beyond earth orbit. But because the shuttle has a lot of extra space, it might make it attractive to add research gear, a daughter satellite/probe, extra fuel, etc.
There's also whatever human space travel research value to be had from simply flying it to Mars and seeing what would happen along the way.
The other idea that occurred to me, why not leave one permanently attached to the ISS? With a crew habitat module, it could have added a lot of extra space to the ISS without the cost of adding another module.
Would that really make much difference in terms of fuel consumption?
I drove a diesel VM Rabbit in the early 80s. Upside? Great mileage, I think I got nearly 50 mpg on the highway -- a trip from Minneapolis to Madison, WI and halfway back before needing to refuel.
The downside of that car was near zero acceleration and it was impossible to start in the winter if it wasn't plugged in overnight (a real challenge when you live in an apartment or want to stay at a friends -- I used to carry a 100 ft extension cord).
GM released a series of diesel powered cars in the 1980s that used a bad 350 gas motor converted to diesel that had all kinds of problems, not to mention being way noisier and smellier than a gas engine.
I had a delivery job using a 6.2L GM diesel pickup, and that ran well but was not at all practical for typical urban use.
And then there is our fuel problem -- high sulfur diesel was our fuel standard until the last couple of years and this meant none of the high-tech, low-tolerance diesel engines Europe has had, we were stuck with truck diesels.
And then there's the other fuel problem -- fewer urban stations carry diesel, which means you kind of have to plan ahead.
Streaming content is a tiny fraction of what's on DVD. If they "kill" DVDs, they will kill all the content that matters.
I like Rockford Files and the occasional 10 year old action movie I've seen 10 times, but not enough to pay for it as my only content choices.
Plus, what am I going to watch on the airplane?
"Only a few are guilty; all are responsible."
Too many people drone in corporations and enable this kind of clusterfuckery. If something like a corporate death penalty was a reality, people would ask more questions about their place of work and possibly refuse to cooperate with any of the abuses that take place.
While many of these abuses are the result of skulduggery by select executives, actual execution of these schemes involves the culpability of many.
"I was just following orders" wasn't acceptable at Nuremberg and it shouldn't be acceptable now.
Even if a market is dominated by three players, is the term triopoly even intellectually honest? Really what you're starting to discuss is either a cartel or price fixing, both of which are usually illegal.
....back then?
A friend is a history professor and he has a story (apocryphal?) about a history professor who had an exact-size copy made of some 13th century king's armor from his teens (Richard the Lionhearted?), and the armor was a good fit on a modern football linebacker.
Anyway, the idea is that the elite soldiers -- from nobility, raised to fight from a young age, the best possible diet for the era (high in protein) -- were in outstanding physical condition and very, very strong. The armor the football player put on was for a teenager, so the thinking is the adult sized armor was even larger and the actual adult who filled it was bigger than a football player (who are all really huge).
My friend has told me this story more than once, I need to pin him down on facts. But it's an interesting story.
There is almost no thought going into preserving the UNIX culture because we took in to many immigrants from Windows/Mac and didn't make them natives before giving them commit access our key cultural artifacts. There is probably a lesson here for the larger political immigration arguments in the 1st world but that gets kinda offtopic.
What a great metaphor, and quite apt, I might add.
As to the larger question, there was a time when there were people who really had no "PC" experience outside of launching a terminal emulator to connect to a timeshare system of some kind and thus were largely pure of mind when it came to UNIX.
Now so many of these people cut their teeth on Macs and Windows, often for years, that they don't know any different -- it's become like a burned in image on a monitor; all you can hope is that you can turn up the brightness enough that you don't notice it.
I think you could make an argument that for all its flaws, both Macs and Windows "work well enough" that making desktop linux work like them isn't the worst thing.