I haven't actually bothered to look at a prospectus for a few years, but three years ago if you added up Bill, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer, you had over 40% of the company. Add in the employees who check the "yes Bill is my lord and master he will vote my shares" on the proxy statements, and you're well over 50%.
When Bill can no longer count on a firm majority of votes at a shareholder meetings, you'll know-- because the moment he can't, there'll be a vote to start issuing dividends.
Seriously, we're not very far from this. Flights routinely take off and land with only the most minor human intervention, and cars are being developed which use visual cues to pilot themselves down the road (a company in Australia has converted a Humvee for a test bed).
With a Humvee, they could get away with putting a Club on the wheel and a brick on the gas pedal. If they really believed that their software could do the job, they'd be installing it in a Geo Metro.
Ohhhhhhh. I would *love* to see some poor coder try to debug an object that was half written in c# and half in python, with just a bit of VB code in that one member, you know, the hairy one that does the date formatting.
You could do a time-lapse movie of it, so that people could watch as the guy rips all of his hair out over a period of several hours.
Excel's file format is open. The documentation for it is found in... gah... I can't remember the name of the blasted book, but it is freely available (it's from MS Press, of course). Of course, that documentation is wrong in a few places, and it doesn't include some things like the new mixed ANSI/Unicode string table format used in Excel 98 and later versions, but it's possible to figure all that stuff out.
How do I know? I wrote the file converters to go between the desktop and Windows CE versions of Excel, and what I used was the book.
Would you prefer that we talked about terrorists, all the time, to the exclusion of all other subjects? Oh, wait... when I say it that way, the inherent silliness of the idea is a little too clear, isn't it? Sorry.
Yes, if the technology isn't 100% reliable, it isn't worth installing at an airport. If you'd read the article, you would have seen the author's discussion of how this works-- or rather, how it doesn't work. The gist of it is that even if the system only screws up one time in ten thousand, you get thousands of "false positive" results for every time you find an actual terrorist, so the system will end up getting ignored.
These were actually tested during the 70s... the suits were made of a material similar to Spandex, covering the entire body, with a rigid helmet attached. They worked well enough that they got to the "stick people in a vacuum chamber" phase of testing, and nobody died.
I'm not sure why they didn't go ahead and design the next generation of space suits around this concept-- maybe NASA didn't think anybody would trust a suit that didn't make you look like the Michelin Man, or maybe some of the astronauts had embarassing beer guts, or maybe it just took too much custom work to fit each suit to an individual.
Comic strips, of the sort that appear in newspapers, are junk. Nothing new has come out of newspaper strips since about four years into the run of Bloom County. Everything else, every single thing, is the same old jokes.
Really, is anybody here going to be all that surprised to see Garfield push Odie off the edge of the table? Has the pointy-haired boss done anything shocking in, oh, the last ten years or so? Do I even want to mention "The Family Circle" in this context, or is that just too fat a target?
It's not the record companies that'd be doing the charging, though. It'd be the artists themselves. So, no, it's not in Universal Records' best interests for, say, Tool to put their next album up on the web as high-quality MP3s for two bucks a download... but who cares? In that scenario, Universal has no rights; they're simply not involved.
I've worked for Borg for most of eleven years now, off and on, and the only video I've ever gotten shown was the "hey, we've been around for fifteen years!" one they made back in '90.
I feel all deprived now.
As near as anybody can tell, there is no way other than brute force to break PGP's encryption. Thus, They CAN look at your encrypted mail-- IF They are willing to throw enough processor power at it. "Enough," in this case, means "a FUCK of a lot of computers working for a HELL of a long time." If they hooked up all the federally owned PCs in the country with something like the SETI Online client, they could probably break a key, oh, once a month or so.
Windows 1.0 was released in '85, Windows 3.0 (which is what really conquered the desktop) shipped in early '90.
In '88, three years after Win 1.04, hm... that's just about when Windows 2.03 came out. Nobody used it except for the people who'd gotten a taste of Excel on the Mac and couldn't bear to go back to 1-2-3. There wasn't a database program available, there wasn't a word processor except for Write, the only comm program was Terminal (whooo! Terminal!), and the only game that ran under Windows at *all* was Solitaire.
In '88, most people who wanted a task-switcher bought Quarterdeck. Some folks had IBM's product (TopView?). Nobody used Windows for task-switching.
Yes, well, it has always been cheaper to fly imaginary spacecraft than real ones.
Re:Is Hubble So useful? Adaptive optics is cheaper
on
Happy Birthday Hubble
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· Score: 1
The thing is, adaptive optics allow ground-based 'scopes to do many of the things Hubble can do now... but ten years ago, when Hubble went up, they couldn't. So even if Hubble's capabilities were unique for "only" six or seven years, that's still, well, six or seven years.
... a seventy-foot-high replica of an Altair, with and stoplights for the panel LEDs.... and it'll all work.
Swarms of employees will show up every morning, turn it on, and manually enter a copy of the first version of Microsoft Basic using a backhoe to flip the six-foot-long toggle switches. Then put in "Lunar Lander" or something and run that all day, and then shut it off to go home at night.
Just on Tuesday, I discover that my friend Laura is his boss (well, officially, anyways... some people don't really have a "boss" as such, y'know?), and now this. Wierd...
So far as the book goes, yeah, download it sometime when they're not so overloaded, and go read the thing. It's good stuff, maybe not as frequently useful as something like Fowler's Refactoring, but still good.
'Cos, that's what this is. The bill won't even get out of committee, and the guy *knows* that... but he can go back to his constituents at re-election time, and say "Look! I have been Fighting The Good Fight to Protect Your Children! R3-373kt M3!" (Well, okay, maybe he won't use the s00p3r-haxx0r-speak.)
Recycling CHEAP materials, like cardboard and most plastics, is a bad idea because those things are so cheap that the cost of transporting and processing quickly adds up to more than the value of the material saved. However, expensive things like metals are well worth the cost of hauling them about. Electronics, even old electronics, are worth even more dollars per pound than squished aluminum cans; therefore, there is at least a reasonable business case for recycling them.
The author makes two points in the original article: that Linux is improving due to being ported to every device under the sun, and that this means it will never be a serious competitor to, say, Windows on the desktop, or Solaris on Sun machines.
His second point is obviously incorrect: if Linux on x86-based PCs attracts more coder-hours of work than Microsoft can hire for Windows, Windows will eventually be enough worse than Linux that buying Windows will be an obvious bad idea, not just the bad-idea-you-can-gloss-over it is now. At that point, Windows' market share will start dropping.
His first point MAY be incorrect, and he presents no evidence that it is not. Just because billions of Linux variants are being created for new platforms doesn't mean that the core portions of Linux itself, the ones that don't change from one platform to another, are being improved. For example, I suspect that the majority of these ports are doing absolutely nothing for the window managers. Also, there is the question of whether any changes at all are leaking back from these efforts into the larger community; if the people doing a port don't bother to tell anybody about the changes they've made in a useful way, none of their work benefits Linux itself.
Virtual hosts are really common, and have been for as long as these censorware companies have existed. So, yeah, if the censorware can't deal with virtual hosts, AREN'T those big bad censors stupid?
What 'eventually?' Textbooks, and teachers, are ALREADY avoiding coverage of any subject that will make a significant number of parents fuss. (Which, in itself, is likely to make ME fuss; when my kids go through high school biology, I don't want to have to be the instructor for the unit on evolution.)
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I haven't actually bothered to look at a prospectus for a few years, but three years ago if you added up Bill, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer, you had over 40% of the company. Add in the employees who check the "yes Bill is my lord and master he will vote my shares" on the proxy statements, and you're well over 50%.
When Bill can no longer count on a firm majority of votes at a shareholder meetings, you'll know-- because the moment he can't, there'll be a vote to start issuing dividends.
I feel all nostalgic now... or maybe I just had one too many chili dogs at lunch.
With a Humvee, they could get away with putting a Club on the wheel and a brick on the gas pedal. If they really believed that their software could do the job, they'd be installing it in a Geo Metro.
Ohhhhhhh. I would *love* to see some poor coder try to debug an object that was half written in c# and half in python, with just a bit of VB code in that one member, you know, the hairy one that does the date formatting.
You could do a time-lapse movie of it, so that people could watch as the guy rips all of his hair out over a period of several hours.
Excel's file format is open. The documentation for it is found in... gah... I can't remember the name of the blasted book, but it is freely available (it's from MS Press, of course). Of course, that documentation is wrong in a few places, and it doesn't include some things like the new mixed ANSI/Unicode string table format used in Excel 98 and later versions, but it's possible to figure all that stuff out.
How do I know? I wrote the file converters to go between the desktop and Windows CE versions of Excel, and what I used was the book.
Would you prefer that we talked about terrorists, all the time, to the exclusion of all other subjects? Oh, wait... when I say it that way, the inherent silliness of the idea is a little too clear, isn't it? Sorry.
Didn't think Katz did that sort of thing, but I guess we're all tempted from time to time.
Yes, if the technology isn't 100% reliable, it isn't worth installing at an airport. If you'd read the article, you would have seen the author's discussion of how this works-- or rather, how it doesn't work. The gist of it is that even if the system only screws up one time in ten thousand, you get thousands of "false positive" results for every time you find an actual terrorist, so the system will end up getting ignored.
These were actually tested during the 70s... the suits were made of a material similar to Spandex, covering the entire body, with a rigid helmet attached. They worked well enough that they got to the "stick people in a vacuum chamber" phase of testing, and nobody died.
I'm not sure why they didn't go ahead and design the next generation of space suits around this concept-- maybe NASA didn't think anybody would trust a suit that didn't make you look like the Michelin Man, or maybe some of the astronauts had embarassing beer guts, or maybe it just took too much custom work to fit each suit to an individual.
Really, is anybody here going to be all that surprised to see Garfield push Odie off the edge of the table? Has the pointy-haired boss done anything shocking in, oh, the last ten years or so? Do I even want to mention "The Family Circle" in this context, or is that just too fat a target?
Crap. All of 'em. Complete and utter crap.
It's not the record companies that'd be doing the charging, though. It'd be the artists themselves. So, no, it's not in Universal Records' best interests for, say, Tool to put their next album up on the web as high-quality MP3s for two bucks a download... but who cares? In that scenario, Universal has no rights; they're simply not involved.
I've worked for Borg for most of eleven years now, off and on, and the only video I've ever gotten shown was the "hey, we've been around for fifteen years!" one they made back in '90. I feel all deprived now.
As near as anybody can tell, there is no way other than brute force to break PGP's encryption. Thus, They CAN look at your encrypted mail-- IF They are willing to throw enough processor power at it. "Enough," in this case, means "a FUCK of a lot of computers working for a HELL of a long time." If they hooked up all the federally owned PCs in the country with something like the SETI Online client, they could probably break a key, oh, once a month or so.
Windows 1.0 was released in '85, Windows 3.0 (which is what really conquered the desktop) shipped in early '90. In '88, three years after Win 1.04, hm... that's just about when Windows 2.03 came out. Nobody used it except for the people who'd gotten a taste of Excel on the Mac and couldn't bear to go back to 1-2-3. There wasn't a database program available, there wasn't a word processor except for Write, the only comm program was Terminal (whooo! Terminal!), and the only game that ran under Windows at *all* was Solitaire. In '88, most people who wanted a task-switcher bought Quarterdeck. Some folks had IBM's product (TopView?). Nobody used Windows for task-switching.
Yes, well, it has always been cheaper to fly imaginary spacecraft than real ones.
The thing is, adaptive optics allow ground-based 'scopes to do many of the things Hubble can do now... but ten years ago, when Hubble went up, they couldn't. So even if Hubble's capabilities were unique for "only" six or seven years, that's still, well, six or seven years.
They're gonna think, "whoops! Maybe we should've brought the BIG ray guns!"
... a seventy-foot-high replica of an Altair, with and stoplights for the panel LEDs.... and it'll all work. Swarms of employees will show up every morning, turn it on, and manually enter a copy of the first version of Microsoft Basic using a backhoe to flip the six-foot-long toggle switches. Then put in "Lunar Lander" or something and run that all day, and then shut it off to go home at night.
Just on Tuesday, I discover that my friend Laura is his boss (well, officially, anyways... some people don't really have a "boss" as such, y'know?), and now this. Wierd... So far as the book goes, yeah, download it sometime when they're not so overloaded, and go read the thing. It's good stuff, maybe not as frequently useful as something like Fowler's Refactoring, but still good.
'Cos, that's what this is. The bill won't even get out of committee, and the guy *knows* that... but he can go back to his constituents at re-election time, and say "Look! I have been Fighting The Good Fight to Protect Your Children! R3-373kt M3!" (Well, okay, maybe he won't use the s00p3r-haxx0r-speak.)
Recycling CHEAP materials, like cardboard and most plastics, is a bad idea because those things are so cheap that the cost of transporting and processing quickly adds up to more than the value of the material saved. However, expensive things like metals are well worth the cost of hauling them about. Electronics, even old electronics, are worth even more dollars per pound than squished aluminum cans; therefore, there is at least a reasonable business case for recycling them.
His second point is obviously incorrect: if Linux on x86-based PCs attracts more coder-hours of work than Microsoft can hire for Windows, Windows will eventually be enough worse than Linux that buying Windows will be an obvious bad idea, not just the bad-idea-you-can-gloss-over it is now. At that point, Windows' market share will start dropping.
His first point MAY be incorrect, and he presents no evidence that it is not. Just because billions of Linux variants are being created for new platforms doesn't mean that the core portions of Linux itself, the ones that don't change from one platform to another, are being improved. For example, I suspect that the majority of these ports are doing absolutely nothing for the window managers. Also, there is the question of whether any changes at all are leaking back from these efforts into the larger community; if the people doing a port don't bother to tell anybody about the changes they've made in a useful way, none of their work benefits Linux itself.
Virtual hosts are really common, and have been for as long as these censorware companies have existed. So, yeah, if the censorware can't deal with virtual hosts, AREN'T those big bad censors stupid?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Time to just admit, "We don't know." Then, since we don't know, and we really would like to, SEND somebody to find out.
What 'eventually?' Textbooks, and teachers, are ALREADY avoiding coverage of any subject that will make a significant number of parents fuss. (Which, in itself, is likely to make ME fuss; when my kids go through high school biology, I don't want to have to be the instructor for the unit on evolution.)