an important fact to consider when they build the shuttle's successor.
Does anyone think our government will ever actually accomplish building a successor to the shuttle? Take the best design you can come up with, multiply the cost by 100 and divide the quality by 100. That's what it would end up being.
We, as a society, have lost the ability to manage. The technical know-how may still be there, but the culture of arrested adolescence and unrelenting backstabbing and politics will paralyze the U.S. government and any other large undertaking in this society until we can re-learn how to be grown-ups again.
The first CFLs I bought about 15 years ago lasted for years and years. Then they became popular. Of course, we can't have durable products, because then people wouldn't be buying them constantly. Why is it that no business can succeed (or wants to try) by selling products that don't break within minutes out of the box?
Our entire economy is based on generating absurd amounts of waste.
And the fact that MacBookPros still come with only one mouse button is as arrogant and stupid as anything Microsoft has ever done. Perhaps if they admitted that "one mouse button" was an idea that outlived its usefulness in the 1980's people wouldn't have that perception.
I used a MBP for a year. Overall: Great hardware. Great software. However, the keyboard kinda sucked and only having one mouse button was so retarded I couldn't believe it.
That is indeed one of the stupidest features ever put in Windows, and there is no reliable way to disable it. I don't want autolaunch. I've never wanted it. I never will want it. And yet, I'm stuck with it for all eternity on every Windows machine I will ever use.
A kneejerk defense of a theme park for the richest 1% of the world is not a reasonable perspective.
I never said anything about the beach thing. Perhaps your reading comprehension needs some work.
Oh, you're a dedicated science denialist, that makes much more sense
Oh, so you're saying all the data showing a cooling trend in the last decade is wrong? And all the politically and financially motivated "findings" are all correct? Or did the killer bees really sweep the county and reduce cows to mere skeletons? Or maybe the new Ice Age occurred and I missed it? Or perhaps I missed the pandemic of skin cancer caused by the ozone hole? Last I checked the Earth's atmosphere was something shy of 6 quadrillion tons. Assuming we could affect something that huge over a century and a half so radically, what idiot thinks we could possibly fix it in 10 years (or die according to Envirofraud Al Gore) without doing some serious Maui Wowie?
If you know so much about science, tell me where I'm wrong.
But Windows ME was the last gasp of the Windows-on-DOS tree. XP was the solid-as-a-rock Windows 2000 (based on NT) with improved GUI functionality and updated hardware support.
Vista-to-WIndows 7 will be comparable to 95-to-98 (or, shudder, 98-to-ME). I'm not saying it 7 will be another ME, but it can't be the kind of transition the DOS-based Windows to the NT-based Windows was.
Frankly, after seeing Vista, I honestly can't imagine what they could do to make 7 something I would want. Vista didn't do anything _I_ found to be an improvement over XP. I understand the new security improvements, but I don't care. I got a virus once... in 1989, and never suffered any security problems with Windows. I finally switched to Linux full-time early this year because I prefer using it.
But it's not fair to those companies who had to undergo a whole new round of development and testing for Vista, is it?
It's not their fault Microsoft's latest shovelware doesn't run their software (assuming they made a decent effort to stick to documented functionality, which was impossible back in the Windows 3.x days, but pretty reasonable now).
What are you talking about? Vista broke compatibility in a big way... with drivers and apps. In fact, it was the biggest compatibility break in Windows history. What did we get for that breakage? About 1/10th of one percent of what we got from the OSX breakage with the past.
Was it worth it? Not in my mind.
Besides, running an XP VM would probably blow Vista out of the water for old apps anyway. Microsoft is doing everything they can to force lock-in except providing a good product people want.
If things were really such that life as we know it is going down the drain in 30 years, I can guarantee there is absolutely nothing we could do about it. Get a sense of perspective.
I'll bet that catastrophic global warming will go the way of acid rain, global cooling, killer bees, the population bomb and the ozone hole in terms of being an armageddon that the environmentalists daydream about that simply never happens. It's just another fad among the types who are not happy unless we're all about to die. Who needs far-out Christian fanatics when the environmental fanatics are spreading their zealotry with the same mouth-foaming stridency?
Everything old is new again. DRM was soundly rejected by the marketplace in the 1980's, and yet it is being foisted upon us again, with the same dismal results.
I remember it very clearly in early 2000. They were taking a month off to focus exclusively on security problems. After that the security problems got worse (e.g., I remember getting thousands of spams a day from that virus attack in 2003). It wasn't until 2004 that things actually got better with XP SP2. Of course, IE doesn't count in that improvement and probably never will. I don't think it's possible to make it even remotely secure without removing most of its functionality, which is ironic since it is years behind every other browser out there.
I do like XP, but since they've decided to kill it, I have no use for Microsoft any more. I've been using Linux on and off for 10 years, mostly on for the last 3 and exclusively on since early 2008. I'm very happy with it and don't miss Windows at all.
Which is what Microsoft always says: You're gonna get screwed if you use our crappy browser, but at least we warned you.
No software is perfect, and everything has security flaws, but it seems to me, even 8 years after Microsoft (claimed they) took a serious position on security, they still seem to have an order of magnitude more problems than everyone else. Yeah, I know, they're the biggest target, but for crying out loud, Google wrote chrome from scratch* in less time than IE7 was in beta (or if not, it wasn't too far off) and came up with a browser that blows away IE in every single way except the number of desktops that have it installed.
Microsoft is at the point where they can do little but admit that there's nothing constructive they can do any more. It's been obvious for years to people in the know, but they've reached a point of diminishing returns: It obviously takes more effort to keep their bloated corpse of an operating system (and its 10-years-out-of-date browser) just working and free of 0-day exploits (leave alone catching up with the competition) than it would be to start over like Apple did with OSX.
How much longer will it take for MS to wake up? When the amount of effort needed for them to keep Windows limping along exceeds to man-power of the entire planet? It probably won't begin until the chair-tosser-in-chief is gone, and then it take years for them to recover. It used to be that Microsoft put as much effort into maintaining their monopoly as they did in their software. Now it seems maintaining their monopoly receives all but the smallest fraction of attention. The rest goes to plugging holes in the about-to-collapse dyke.
Plus in those days, a lot of the APODs were GIFs. 256 colors FTW! Also remember that 640x480 and 800x600 screen solutions were prevalent, so those tiny pictures were much bigger.
I did some artwork on my Amiga using that infamous HAM-mode graphics editor whose name escapes me now. There was a video mode that allowed you to cover the "whole screen" as opposed to the normal boundaries, but it was still only 320x240 and change in size. Seeing those images on a PC in 800x600 mode some time later made me realize how tiny they really were. Nowadays they'd look like large postage stamps.
But he's accomplished something significant in one particular field. How does that make him qualified to do anything outside of that field? And let's leave aside the potential that the Nobel prizes themselves are awarded based on a political basis.
Just because he's a smart guy and an accomplished scientist doesn't make him a good candidate any more than me, who am also a smart guy and an accomplished software developer (albeit significantly less accomplished than a Nobel laureate). I do like the idea of having someone presumably objective and informed in the post, don't get me wrong, but politics is a game where success (i.e., accomplishing something truly constructive, not just 'political success' which means acquiring power, money and/or fame) seldom depends primarily on being objective and well-informed.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait. You're implying that they sometimes do read the entries?
an important fact to consider when they build the shuttle's successor.
Does anyone think our government will ever actually accomplish building a successor to the shuttle? Take the best design you can come up with, multiply the cost by 100 and divide the quality by 100. That's what it would end up being.
We, as a society, have lost the ability to manage. The technical know-how may still be there, but the culture of arrested adolescence and unrelenting backstabbing and politics will paralyze the U.S. government and any other large undertaking in this society until we can re-learn how to be grown-ups again.
The first CFLs I bought about 15 years ago lasted for years and years. Then they became popular. Of course, we can't have durable products, because then people wouldn't be buying them constantly. Why is it that no business can succeed (or wants to try) by selling products that don't break within minutes out of the box?
Our entire economy is based on generating absurd amounts of waste.
And the fact that MacBookPros still come with only one mouse button is as arrogant and stupid as anything Microsoft has ever done. Perhaps if they admitted that "one mouse button" was an idea that outlived its usefulness in the 1980's people wouldn't have that perception.
I used a MBP for a year. Overall: Great hardware. Great software. However, the keyboard kinda sucked and only having one mouse button was so retarded I couldn't believe it.
That's what mods are for. Apparently, however, they enjoyed the joke!
If you ask me, Austin Powers was never funny.
That is indeed one of the stupidest features ever put in Windows, and there is no reliable way to disable it. I don't want autolaunch. I've never wanted it. I never will want it. And yet, I'm stuck with it for all eternity on every Windows machine I will ever use.
That's the most accurate description of Vista I think I've read yet.
The intent would be to show them we care and to give them positive reinforcement.
What if your kids never do anything right?
A kneejerk defense of a theme park for the richest 1% of the world is not a reasonable perspective.
I never said anything about the beach thing. Perhaps your reading comprehension needs some work.
Oh, you're a dedicated science denialist, that makes much more sense
Oh, so you're saying all the data showing a cooling trend in the last decade is wrong? And all the politically and financially motivated "findings" are all correct? Or did the killer bees really sweep the county and reduce cows to mere skeletons? Or maybe the new Ice Age occurred and I missed it? Or perhaps I missed the pandemic of skin cancer caused by the ozone hole? Last I checked the Earth's atmosphere was something shy of 6 quadrillion tons. Assuming we could affect something that huge over a century and a half so radically, what idiot thinks we could possibly fix it in 10 years (or die according to Envirofraud Al Gore) without doing some serious Maui Wowie?
If you know so much about science, tell me where I'm wrong.
But Windows ME was the last gasp of the Windows-on-DOS tree. XP was the solid-as-a-rock Windows 2000 (based on NT) with improved GUI functionality and updated hardware support.
Vista-to-WIndows 7 will be comparable to 95-to-98 (or, shudder, 98-to-ME). I'm not saying it 7 will be another ME, but it can't be the kind of transition the DOS-based Windows to the NT-based Windows was.
Frankly, after seeing Vista, I honestly can't imagine what they could do to make 7 something I would want. Vista didn't do anything _I_ found to be an improvement over XP. I understand the new security improvements, but I don't care. I got a virus once... in 1989, and never suffered any security problems with Windows. I finally switched to Linux full-time early this year because I prefer using it.
But it's not fair to those companies who had to undergo a whole new round of development and testing for Vista, is it?
It's not their fault Microsoft's latest shovelware doesn't run their software (assuming they made a decent effort to stick to documented functionality, which was impossible back in the Windows 3.x days, but pretty reasonable now).
What are you talking about? Vista broke compatibility in a big way... with drivers and apps. In fact, it was the biggest compatibility break in Windows history. What did we get for that breakage? About 1/10th of one percent of what we got from the OSX breakage with the past.
Was it worth it? Not in my mind.
Besides, running an XP VM would probably blow Vista out of the water for old apps anyway. Microsoft is doing everything they can to force lock-in except providing a good product people want.
It seems to be that falsely claiming you are officially abandoning your Fair Game doctrine would be perfectly fine under the Fair Game doctrine.
If things were really such that life as we know it is going down the drain in 30 years, I can guarantee there is absolutely nothing we could do about it. Get a sense of perspective.
I'll bet that catastrophic global warming will go the way of acid rain, global cooling, killer bees, the population bomb and the ozone hole in terms of being an armageddon that the environmentalists daydream about that simply never happens. It's just another fad among the types who are not happy unless we're all about to die. Who needs far-out Christian fanatics when the environmental fanatics are spreading their zealotry with the same mouth-foaming stridency?
I was remembering the "taking a month off" thing to be in 2000, but at least according to this it was early 2002.
It seems like it should have been a year. It's not like Microsoft accomplished anything in 2002.
You know, it's a little premature (and uncool) to refer to it as "Civil War I" until the second one actually starts. Give it a few years.
Everything old is new again. DRM was soundly rejected by the marketplace in the 1980's, and yet it is being foisted upon us again, with the same dismal results.
I remember it very clearly in early 2000. They were taking a month off to focus exclusively on security problems. After that the security problems got worse (e.g., I remember getting thousands of spams a day from that virus attack in 2003). It wasn't until 2004 that things actually got better with XP SP2. Of course, IE doesn't count in that improvement and probably never will. I don't think it's possible to make it even remotely secure without removing most of its functionality, which is ironic since it is years behind every other browser out there.
I do like XP, but since they've decided to kill it, I have no use for Microsoft any more. I've been using Linux on and off for 10 years, mostly on for the last 3 and exclusively on since early 2008. I'm very happy with it and don't miss Windows at all.
Which is what Microsoft always says: You're gonna get screwed if you use our crappy browser, but at least we warned you.
No software is perfect, and everything has security flaws, but it seems to me, even 8 years after Microsoft (claimed they) took a serious position on security, they still seem to have an order of magnitude more problems than everyone else. Yeah, I know, they're the biggest target, but for crying out loud, Google wrote chrome from scratch* in less time than IE7 was in beta (or if not, it wasn't too far off) and came up with a browser that blows away IE in every single way except the number of desktops that have it installed.
Microsoft is at the point where they can do little but admit that there's nothing constructive they can do any more. It's been obvious for years to people in the know, but they've reached a point of diminishing returns: It obviously takes more effort to keep their bloated corpse of an operating system (and its 10-years-out-of-date browser) just working and free of 0-day exploits (leave alone catching up with the competition) than it would be to start over like Apple did with OSX.
How much longer will it take for MS to wake up? When the amount of effort needed for them to keep Windows limping along exceeds to man-power of the entire planet? It probably won't begin until the chair-tosser-in-chief is gone, and then it take years for them to recover. It used to be that Microsoft put as much effort into maintaining their monopoly as they did in their software. Now it seems maintaining their monopoly receives all but the smallest fraction of attention. The rest goes to plugging holes in the about-to-collapse dyke.
* For certain values of "from scratch"
Try a travesty generator. People have gotten academic papers published using stuff like this to write the text.
Plus in those days, a lot of the APODs were GIFs. 256 colors FTW! Also remember that 640x480 and 800x600 screen solutions were prevalent, so those tiny pictures were much bigger.
I did some artwork on my Amiga using that infamous HAM-mode graphics editor whose name escapes me now. There was a video mode that allowed you to cover the "whole screen" as opposed to the normal boundaries, but it was still only 320x240 and change in size. Seeing those images on a PC in 800x600 mode some time later made me realize how tiny they really were. Nowadays they'd look like large postage stamps.
But he's accomplished something significant in one particular field. How does that make him qualified to do anything outside of that field? And let's leave aside the potential that the Nobel prizes themselves are awarded based on a political basis.
Just because he's a smart guy and an accomplished scientist doesn't make him a good candidate any more than me, who am also a smart guy and an accomplished software developer (albeit significantly less accomplished than a Nobel laureate). I do like the idea of having someone presumably objective and informed in the post, don't get me wrong, but politics is a game where success (i.e., accomplishing something truly constructive, not just 'political success' which means acquiring power, money and/or fame) seldom depends primarily on being objective and well-informed.
It's 2009 where you live? What timezone is that?!
In which you will be eaten by a grue.
I come on. Is it really that likely?
It depends. It needs to be pitch black. The LEDs from your router would drive it off.