Next up: Russians "deport" American astronauts from ISS, as they are the only country with a manned space flight program. How ironic; we spend many billions to build it, and then scrap our only way of getting to it. Nice plan. No wonder USA is number 37.
Someday USA might be a great country, but this decade and the next is not that day.
USA is now filled with religious, science-denying blowhards that will turn this country into a backwater 3rd world with nuclear weapons and offshore billionaires that own the government. Just look at Greenspan's comments. We'll all be shooting each other for food in a few years, while CEOs sit on piles of cash that guarantee they are comfortable for 6 or 7 generations.
They are making a 3-wheeled car, which doesn't make it a car anymore, but a Motorcycle or "autocycle" -- which will exempt it from a lot of the legal wrangling that forces most car makers to give up trying to sell in the American Market.
When Jobs was on stage and first introduced the iPhone, he stated that he would be happy if they captured 3% of the smartphone market (which itself at the time represented only 1% of the overall mobile phone market).
Apple took a big gamble to create a product that at the time, was mostly a niche product, I don't think anyone was expecting the iPhone to be the staggering sensation it became. Yet, Apple spent millions to develop the hardware and the operating system, both of which were, at the time, quite revolutionary.
Apple didn't capture a segment of an existing market, they *created* their own market -- people that had never bought a smartphone before were buying this thing.
Now let's contrast to MS; They launched the Zune, hoping to capture some segment of the market that would have otherwise have purchased an iPod. When it failed to do that after 2 years, they dumped the entire thing. They launched a smartphone geared towards teens and canceled it after a week, if I recall.
For MS, the product has to be a huge hit or it's a disaster, and there's no in-between for them. That's their failure, which is they are looking for the kind of success Apple had, or they kill the product before it can even get a foothold.
Contrast to Google, who suffered through years of crappy Android releases before the OS became a serious contender to the iPhone. Google (fortunately) stuck with it, but MS don't play that game. They want instant success or the product is dead.
What they could have done differently is had an overall vision to tie their products together. What if the Zune's OS became a launchpad to a phone OS, and they had used their existing PDA experience from Windows CE to make a really good product and stuck with it, even if sales were initially slow, but they kept improving it?
But either due to incompetence or interoffice politics, no microsoft product works with any other microsoft product, and they never seem to learn from their past products what works and what doesn't -- and that's why their stuff fails.
Miles just had part of his arm amputated after a slight accident packing up equipment. The former CNN science correspondent is currently working for PBS... http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/25/...
When bitcoin hit $1000 each, all the talking head "experts" on CNBC were pushing it as an investment vehicle. It was then that I was positive the whole thing was a scam. After all, if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that just about anything recommended by CNBC is wrong.
The F-35 is expected to cost over a trillion dollars over ten years and that's not including the billions in cost over-runs. And then the GOP has the gall to talk about shutting down PBS and the Post Office as a waste of government money.
This plane's engine is being built in Speaker John Bohener's state of Ohio. No wonder funding for it will never, ever be cut. The plane could cost 20 trillion, bankrupt the entire United States, and they'd still continue to fund it, by cutting all healthcare, schools, welfare, social security, and foreclose on every American whether they can or not.
This is the GOP mantra. Build more planes and ships we don't need so that defense contractors can be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams... Remember the kid that ran over 4 people in his pickup truck and got off with the defense of "affluenza"? his parents are government contractors. Follow the money. We're being fleeced by the military and then told that the USA is broke if we dare ask for any social service.
The pentagon's photocopier paper budget is bigger than PBS. But what did Mitt Romney promise to cut during his (failed) campaign?
We're headed for a third-world nation banana-republic where the military has everything and the citizens live in mud huts.
I once proposed a product at my company that we called "job security" -- it was simply a rackmount box with a metric fuck-ton of blinking lights, and ports on the back to connect ethernet cables that run nowhere.
And the idea behind it was that you buy the unit, install it in your datacenter, and when you're about to get laid off, you point frantically to the box and scream "Oh, yeah, well, who's going to run *that* for you?"
Frankly, this new product sounds like my idea with a bit more of a story behind it. I suppose had we actually *made* the box, we would have eventually figured out some technical sounding crap to go along with it -- my guess is that's the step represented as "?????" followed by "profit".
I work in the financial industry and I can assure you that mainframes are still in the loop, processing trades and generating reports, particularly commission reports for the brokers, but also breaks, and other reports that reference and affect millions of dollars in transactions, possibly billions of dollars.
Not only are mainframes part of the process, but the COBOL code does indeed go back into the 80's (I've seen comments in source that go back to at least 1983 -- and that's when they performed the first change to the code) -- some programs and jobs go even further back than that.
Mainframes are still being used because they get the job done and there's a huge investment in home-grown software that would require a significant expenditure to replace.
Secret Under The Sea, a sci-fi children's book from the early 60's predicted a scuba mask that extracted O2 from ocean water so that people could work for extended periods underwater -- of course in the book, the protagonist lives in a dome-shaped facility at the bottom of the ocean, something we definitely don't have and won't for another 100 years at least.
.... been black and carrying a dangerous pack of skittles, the shooter would get off with no jail time. This is Florida after all. One guy is dead, another in jail. That's two less Floridians.
If history has shown us anything, based on experiences from Microsoft products, Mr. Gates' condoms will come in only one size -- Mr. Gates' size. And you'd better be happy with that.
A product that 99% of slashdotters will never get to use, despite the coolness of it being nano-technology. Then again, 99% of slashdotters don't get to use supercomputers either, but Slashdot reports on them. Maybe when we get sex robots, but then again you really don't need a condom for a machine unlikely to get pregnant.
There was Windows "Millennium Edition" and there was also Windows 2000 -- Now, before you say that Win2K wasn't a "consumer" OS, it essentially was because a lot of people Upgraded to 2K not from NT but from Win98. And XP was the first merge of the 2k and "consumer" windows codebases, which is how we wound up with XP Pro, (there was never a Win98 Pro, for example)...
Anyhow, my point is; you make it seem as if this is all cut and dry, like MS is following a master plan, but the history of Windows releases is a little more complex and convoluted.
Maybe in America. There are other areas on the world where you can get soldiers as young as 6. They may not be as efficient, but they are cheaper than robots.
Let's be clear; the NSA has not broken the letter of the law, simply because there are judges, and a government backing those judges, that deems what the NSA is doing is appropriate and legal.
However; the NSA has certainly broken the spirit of the law, and certainly, those Americans that created the bill of rights and particularly the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, would be appalled at the government over-reach and how a government of the people and for the people has been corrupted into something else, something that smacks of evil.
So, whether you think Snowden is a hero or a traitor seems to hinge on whether you agree with the spirit or the letter of the law.
And the New York Times is foolish to appeal to the government to consider the spirit of the law, because it's the lawyers and accountants who have corrupted that law by many decades of "loopholing" the letter of the law, finding every legal out they can to avoid paying taxes or winning a case -- to the point where the spirit of the law is no longer a consideration, which is also why every piece of legislation is now thousands of pages long, and not four pages.
It's unfortunate that we no longer have a justice system in this country, which would observe the spirit of the law, we have a LEGAL system in this country, which only observes the letter. And by the letter of the law, Snowden is guilty of his crimes, which is why if you're looking for justice, you have to leave this country.
Nevermind "thanks Obamacare", now nobody is going to buy *any* technology from a US vendor because it's likely compromised by the NSA.
Just like you don't want to buy from a purely Chinese vendor because it's reporting back to the Chinese version of the NSA.
So, thanks to the NSA and China having a dick-measuring contest on why can spy more, the internet is essentially fucked. No privacy, no e-commerce, hell, no commerce (thanks Target), unless it's all cash.
So the only place you can trust is (ironically), Craigslist!
Slashdot Mirror
Next up: Russians "deport" American astronauts from ISS, as they are the only country with a manned space flight program. How ironic; we spend many billions to build it, and then scrap our only way of getting to it. Nice plan. No wonder USA is number 37.
Someday USA might be a great country, but this decade and the next is not that day.
USA is now filled with religious, science-denying blowhards that will turn this country into a backwater 3rd world with nuclear weapons and offshore billionaires that own the government. Just look at Greenspan's comments. We'll all be shooting each other for food in a few years, while CEOs sit on piles of cash that guarantee they are comfortable for 6 or 7 generations.
They are making a 3-wheeled car, which doesn't make it a car anymore, but a Motorcycle or "autocycle" -- which will exempt it from a lot of the legal wrangling that forces most car makers to give up trying to sell in the American Market.
Elio Motors. Google 'em.
BHENGAZI!!!!!!
(Thanks, obamacase!)
When Jobs was on stage and first introduced the iPhone, he stated that he would be happy if they captured 3% of the smartphone market (which itself at the time represented only 1% of the overall mobile phone market).
Apple took a big gamble to create a product that at the time, was mostly a niche product, I don't think anyone was expecting the iPhone to be the staggering sensation it became. Yet, Apple spent millions to develop the hardware and the operating system, both of which were, at the time, quite revolutionary.
Apple didn't capture a segment of an existing market, they *created* their own market -- people that had never bought a smartphone before were buying this thing.
Now let's contrast to MS; They launched the Zune, hoping to capture some segment of the market that would have otherwise have purchased an iPod. When it failed to do that after 2 years, they dumped the entire thing. They launched a smartphone geared towards teens and canceled it after a week, if I recall.
For MS, the product has to be a huge hit or it's a disaster, and there's no in-between for them. That's their failure, which is they are looking for the kind of success Apple had, or they kill the product before it can even get a foothold.
Contrast to Google, who suffered through years of crappy Android releases before the OS became a serious contender to the iPhone. Google (fortunately) stuck with it, but MS don't play that game. They want instant success or the product is dead.
What they could have done differently is had an overall vision to tie their products together. What if the Zune's OS became a launchpad to a phone OS, and they had used their existing PDA experience from Windows CE to make a really good product and stuck with it, even if sales were initially slow, but they kept improving it?
But either due to incompetence or interoffice politics, no microsoft product works with any other microsoft product, and they never seem to learn from their past products what works and what doesn't -- and that's why their stuff fails.
Because after all, if your door is locked, you *must* have something to hide.....
Miles just had part of his arm amputated after a slight accident packing up equipment. The former CNN science correspondent is currently working for PBS...
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/25/...
When bitcoin hit $1000 each, all the talking head "experts" on CNBC were pushing it as an investment vehicle. It was then that I was positive the whole thing was a scam. After all, if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that just about anything recommended by CNBC is wrong.
Screw dredging for gold.... If one of these suckers is worth 18 million bucks, I'm diving for that!
I love that game!
The F-35 is expected to cost over a trillion dollars over ten years and that's not including the billions in cost over-runs. And then the GOP has the gall to talk about shutting down PBS and the Post Office as a waste of government money.
This plane's engine is being built in Speaker John Bohener's state of Ohio. No wonder funding for it will never, ever be cut. The plane could cost 20 trillion, bankrupt the entire United States, and they'd still continue to fund it, by cutting all healthcare, schools, welfare, social security, and foreclose on every American whether they can or not.
This is the GOP mantra. Build more planes and ships we don't need so that defense contractors can be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams... Remember the kid that ran over 4 people in his pickup truck and got off with the defense of "affluenza"? his parents are government contractors. Follow the money. We're being fleeced by the military and then told that the USA is broke if we dare ask for any social service.
The pentagon's photocopier paper budget is bigger than PBS. But what did Mitt Romney promise to cut during his (failed) campaign?
We're headed for a third-world nation banana-republic where the military has everything and the citizens live in mud huts.
"No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM"
Except now, you can't buy any IBM hardware, right? So, how are you going to avoid getting fired?
I once proposed a product at my company that we called "job security" -- it was simply a rackmount box with a metric fuck-ton of blinking lights, and ports on the back to connect ethernet cables that run nowhere.
And the idea behind it was that you buy the unit, install it in your datacenter, and when you're about to get laid off, you point frantically to the box and scream "Oh, yeah, well, who's going to run *that* for you?"
Frankly, this new product sounds like my idea with a bit more of a story behind it. I suppose had we actually *made* the box, we would have eventually figured out some technical sounding crap to go along with it -- my guess is that's the step represented as "?????" followed by "profit".
I work in the financial industry and I can assure you that mainframes are still in the loop, processing trades and generating reports, particularly commission reports for the brokers, but also breaks, and other reports that reference and affect millions of dollars in transactions, possibly billions of dollars.
Not only are mainframes part of the process, but the COBOL code does indeed go back into the 80's (I've seen comments in source that go back to at least 1983 -- and that's when they performed the first change to the code) -- some programs and jobs go even further back than that.
Mainframes are still being used because they get the job done and there's a huge investment in home-grown software that would require a significant expenditure to replace.
Over 150 million of them contain phrases like:
"OMG, yur my BFF!"
http://www.amazon.com/secret-under-sea-gordon-dickson/dp/0590085883/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389883679&sr=8-1&keywords=secret+under+the+sea
Secret Under The Sea, a sci-fi children's book from the early 60's predicted a scuba mask that extracted O2 from ocean water so that people could work for extended periods underwater -- of course in the book, the protagonist lives in a dome-shaped facility at the bottom of the ocean, something we definitely don't have and won't for another 100 years at least.
.... been black and carrying a dangerous pack of skittles, the shooter would get off with no jail time. This is Florida after all. One guy is dead, another in jail. That's two less Floridians.
If history has shown us anything, based on experiences from Microsoft products, Mr. Gates' condoms will come in only one size -- Mr. Gates' size. And you'd better be happy with that.
A product that 99% of slashdotters will never get to use, despite the coolness of it being nano-technology. Then again, 99% of slashdotters don't get to use supercomputers either, but Slashdot reports on them. Maybe when we get sex robots, but then again you really don't need a condom for a machine unlikely to get pregnant.
There was Windows "Millennium Edition" and there was also Windows 2000 -- Now, before you say that Win2K wasn't a "consumer" OS, it essentially was because a lot of people Upgraded to 2K not from NT but from Win98. And XP was the first merge of the 2k and "consumer" windows codebases, which is how we wound up with XP Pro, (there was never a Win98 Pro, for example)...
Anyhow, my point is; you make it seem as if this is all cut and dry, like MS is following a master plan, but the history of Windows releases is a little more complex and convoluted.
Maybe in America. There are other areas on the world where you can get soldiers as young as 6. They may not be as efficient, but they are cheaper than robots.
How soon can we make that happen? Sounds like paradise, plus, we'll finally get rid of our do-nothing Congress.
Let's be clear; the NSA has not broken the letter of the law, simply because there are judges, and a government backing those judges, that deems what the NSA is doing is appropriate and legal.
However; the NSA has certainly broken the spirit of the law, and certainly, those Americans that created the bill of rights and particularly the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, would be appalled at the government over-reach and how a government of the people and for the people has been corrupted into something else, something that smacks of evil.
So, whether you think Snowden is a hero or a traitor seems to hinge on whether you agree with the spirit or the letter of the law.
And the New York Times is foolish to appeal to the government to consider the spirit of the law, because it's the lawyers and accountants who have corrupted that law by many decades of "loopholing" the letter of the law, finding every legal out they can to avoid paying taxes or winning a case -- to the point where the spirit of the law is no longer a consideration, which is also why every piece of legislation is now thousands of pages long, and not four pages.
It's unfortunate that we no longer have a justice system in this country, which would observe the spirit of the law, we have a LEGAL system in this country, which only observes the letter. And by the letter of the law, Snowden is guilty of his crimes, which is why if you're looking for justice, you have to leave this country.
The perfect formula for matchmaking:
Males: Enter income.
Females: Enter attractiveness.
Match up most attractive to highest earners.
Nevermind "thanks Obamacare", now nobody is going to buy *any* technology from a US vendor because it's likely compromised by the NSA.
Just like you don't want to buy from a purely Chinese vendor because it's reporting back to the Chinese version of the NSA.
So, thanks to the NSA and China having a dick-measuring contest on why can spy more, the internet is essentially fucked. No privacy, no e-commerce, hell, no commerce (thanks Target), unless it's all cash.
So the only place you can trust is (ironically), Craigslist!
So, you mean they will follow the law, when it is convenient for them?