I actually got bored around the second page because it wasn't at all what the submission makes it out to be. It's corporate fluff of the highest order and I lost interest in anything and everything the guy has to say from a point about two pages in (where they start talking about connected devices).
Firstly, I find it annoying that this is a "memo" (memorandum, which means something to replace/improve the memory and usually means only a short notice or reminder, not a huge diatribe like that hideous work linked to above), the same way that the first line references his other 8-9 pages of earlier "memo". Call it a bloody article, or opinion and have done with it. Just because the business world uses the word "memo" doesn't mean you can just use it out of context, or arbitrarily apply it in the hopes that such an essay might seem shorter, or you seem more intelligent or business-like.
The best writers in the world are concise. (I'm not one of them, by the way). The more you waffle, the more I have to look to find the actual hidden meaning and why you've veered off into such monologues and my guess here would be "I'm pretending to be resigning harshly but pretty please don't be mad at me in case I want to come back later".
When I write a resignation letter, it's basically the legal minimum required unless I am genuinely sorry to move on. I have no qualms about burning bridges because if it's got to the point that I want to resign, there's nothing more you can do to me and I *already* don't want to work with you or people like you, so if you spread the word to your friends that works in my favour. If the company changes, or the horrible people leave, I might be back and the company change is my explanation for the changing of my mind. But if the company still sucks, shame... I will just resign and have done with it. I told a former employer in no uncertain terms that I was resigning because I didn't trust that he could give what he was promising me (trying to make the job I had with him sound like it had a future) while we were discussing my resignation - he spoke this sort of bullshit and I could read between the lines. He actually tried to bad-mouth my new employer without even knowing them. Two years later, he didn't keep any of his promises to anyone who continued working there. It was virtually a "you'll never work in this town again" argument from him, and my basic reply was "Good, if working in this town means working with people like you." (My references from that place, however, were perfect - because my work was infallible - and I've never been out of work for even a day since I started out from uni).
Secondly, the corporate gobbledegook in the "memo" is extremely off-putting, especially when prefixed with PAGES of sucking up. There are entire sentences in there that convey no useful information at all. There are paragraphs that say something you could say in two to three WORDS. That sort of verbosity makes myself and others extremely suspicious because, underneath it all, I get the impression that he's not trying to say what he wants you to *think* he's saying.
It's like when a manager gathers all the staff, hands out a new 50-page contract with dubious wording, gives an enormously verbose speech about how fabulously everyone is doing and how the corporate culture will expand and move forward and how excited they are about the future. You must think people are stupid if they aren't already thinking "Yeah, so how many people are being sacked and / or when is the company going to announce bankruptcy?"
If you can't find every word you've used in the version of the OED (or whatever equivalent dictionary for your country) that you had at school, you're bullshitting, fluffing and talking nonsense. ("intrapreneurial" - Urk... where's my vomit bucket?). It means that there *isn't* a suitable word for what you want to say, you don't know what you're trying to say, or that you're avoiding all the words because they actually convey your meaning too well. I don't thi
"No." (actually, it's damn close, so close that anyone who knows both will assume they are the same.
"Ad Hoc, or IBSS, mode is a legacy protocol for Wi-Fi devices, and Wi-Fi Direct is a new innovation." (Adhoc is old, this is new! That's the difference! Imbecile!)
"Wi-Fi Direct brings important security features, ease of setup, and higher performance that is not currently available in Ad Hoc mode." (we took adhoc mode, formalised the out-of-spec "adhoc can use more than 11MBps" stuff that manufacturers have been doing for YEARS - a five year old card of mine does 54Mbps adhoc), officially added something like WPA to it (which you could always do anyway), and made it so that it's easier to connect that just... wow... telling it to connect to a network with a particular name by double-clicking on a list)
"With Wi-Fi Direct, a device can maintain a simultaneous connection to an infrastructure network - this isn't possible with Ad Hoc." (Hooray! Something new! But this is also nothing more than either timeslicing between two networks, one of which happens to be adhoc, or having a radio(s) capable of tuning to two networks simultaneously).
In shot, Wi-Fi Direct is decent ad-hoc, ten years too late, using stuff that people have been putting into drivers for years.
Then as a large business, just *recognising* the value of the Java brand should be enough to stop such disregard for its reputation. Seriously, the impression from any large tech site now is "Oracle is destroying Java". Whether you love it or not, Java is HUGE and everywhere, from Blu-ray players to mobile phones to household PC's and pissing away such a huge and recognised brand is bad business.
Question: If Java if that much of a loss, why not just push it out to the already-external organisations that would happily oversee it for you. Take control of the brand itself (ala Firefox vs Iceweasel), don't do anything with the code yourself, but actually encourage its use and distribution with your branding all over it for free? Same with OpenOffice - that way you get a "this came via Oracle originally" good reputation, you get to control naming rights ("nobody can call it Java or OpenOffice but us") but in a gentle, controlled way, and nobody gets angry and starts resigning / giving you bad press.
It's *hugely* incompetent to hold such an enormous, popular and well-known brand (loss-making or not) and then piss it away in pursuit of some "clear-out" of people who don't agree with you. Next year, Java will be dead and buried and "Coffee" (or whatever) will be on everyone's machine instead and you'll have zero control over it unless you want to start suing former customers for some obscure, irrelevant patents (*cough* Oracle vs Google *cough).
My dad knows what Java is (roughly) and that he "needs it" whenever he gets a new machine, and my dad can barely manage copy / paste. Wasting that sort of brand is like Coke sacking all its executives, suing people who drink it, turning it into a lemonade and still only ever calling it Coke. Then they wonder why people get pissed at them.
All I know is that since Oracle took over Sun, OpenOffice have deserted them, Java have deserted them, they're suing Google (which is a stupid move in the first place with such a weak set of patents stated), and they broke my Eclipse config because they rebranded the Sun Java installer to say "Oracle" and didn't bother to properly inform people at one of their largest external users of the changes. And now the Eclipse guys are ranting and raving at them for poor management of the Java process and brand. I don't really care, as a user, what their beef is. They're not telling me, they're just suing people, making silent changes that break stuff, and making threatening noises, while all I want is somewhere I can reliably download a supported OpenOffice / Java derivative that works. In the space of a few months, they've turned two of the largest IT brands in history into something that people now associate with being sued, and hoping for a fork that's disassociated from Oracle. That's *bad* for business, even if you never intend to use or do anything with OpenOffice / Java yourself.
Er... you mean you DIDN'T notice that? I thought it was one of the more obvious things, put in to see if the audience was awake.
In fact, last month I showed my gf these films for the FIRST TIME EVER (she's authentic rural-Italian, and their cinema is wildly different to UK/US cinema so although they "know of" our movies, they have rarely actually gone to see them). She spotted that straight away, no hint of hesitation. In fact, just before any big "revelation" she was there pointing it out as the characters were about to introduce it into the main plot. Not to mention the various paradoxes here, she was working out where/how the movie had to go before it got there.
And she spotted the actress change for Jennifer. Most people don't unless they watch them one after the other.
The "lone pines" thing? Please, I would worry about how you keep track of ANY movie if you didn't spot that. You're like my mother, who can't watch Sliding Doors without getting confused.
And if those fans / heatsinks really made economic sense, then every server room in the world (from little offices up to large datacenters) would be using them. If you're paying more than a handful of coins for them, however, you are wasting your money. The fact is that the replacement of a fan/heatsink with a item that isn't supplied by the systems manufacturer makes no sense and doesn't, actually, get you any worthwhile gain for the money you spend. You might save 2 degrees in temperature but for the money you spend on some of the systems I've seen you could do that by just cleaning the fans once a year.
A gain of reduced audio noise? I'll give you that. I myself own a fanless PSU (it's heatpipe-tech, not water-cooling or anything) that runs my server. It's absolutely 100% silent. Sadly my drives and other devices aren't, but I can see that in some ultra-specialist environments you need to make an almost-silent PC. However, putting your baseunit in a cupboard, or at least behind a bit of pretty wood that dampens sounds aimed towards the user is actually more effective and (nowadays) zero inconvenience (run your USB hub to your desk-top, done).
I use a silent PSU because it has no moving parts (however, it channels an awful lot of heat into the surrounding metal case which probably puts my motherboard temperature up by a degree or two, so I've not really "gained" anything there in terms of product life). It cost me £10 more than a standard PSU of the same wattage, back in the day, so it was an easy decision to make. But, to be honest, it's sitting in the same case as a processor fan that's been in the system since the same build, from new, and is still spinning after 5 years and including several months of inactivity somewhere in that. Fans do die but I've worked in schools using 10-year-old equipment that's on all day, every day, never cleaned and subject to the worse treatment (kids inserting Lego into the holes) and yet, when I took them to be scrapped, I used to remove their fans to add to my stock. They *all* still spun perfectly, and that was before I air-sprayed / oiled them. A fan alarm costs pence. I know, I have one that's independent of my motherboard and goes mad if the fans are slow or not spinning (like a UPS alarm, almost). The noise? I don't hear it when it's sitting inside it's not-acquired-for-that-purpose wooden cupboard (with the back chopped off to allow airflow).
So it's not that an expensive heatsink or fan will make my computer last longer (the temperature-failure link is dubious, as proved by many modern datacenters that don't bother with cooling and only see a slight increase in failures, and the cost of some of those setups is better poured into just taking better care of the damn thing), or that it will make it work faster (unless I overclock but already that's into the same dubious areas as played with your fuel mixture on your car - you rarely get an overall gain given some risk, reduced product life, etc.), or that it will make it use less energy (it's a pittance). Any of the reasons you can choose are VASTLY outweighed by the initial costs.
(I hate overclockers - I challenge any overclockers to ring up a significant number of CPU cycles gained by overclocking when you take into account their overall average computer usage. Yeah, you might get a handful of FPS better but the games aren't designed for that anyway so all you gain is stretched textures on a unnecessarily high resolution moving slightly faster than your perception would ever allow you to detect anyway).
Expensive fans, heatsinks, etc. do not make economic sense for 99.999% of users. That's ridiculously high a proportion. A 50p fan every year is actually much more sensible that spending the amounts of money that I've seen people drop on such stuff. Really. Now, expensive mouse... yes, I'll give you that. Expensive display. All the things that you actually use all the time and require to work with absolute precision - there is nothing more annoying that a slightly un
If we found a plentiful antimatter source, and built something never yet produced but only really theorised (i.e. an antimatter-based propulsion of any kind), and make it into a fairly compact but reliable propulsion system, of which one example is bought and attached to a particular extra-solar-capable chassis (of which the only two ever produced were made in the 70's and are currently used to transport a couple of LP's in a random direction that we have no control over any longer), etc. etc. etc.
As with anything to do with extra-solar propulsion, we won't see it for many, many decades and when we do, almost all our extra-solar attempts will be embarrassingly overtaken by the next-decade's attempt that will go faster (and the original mission will either have to keep going to somewhere that will be already colonised / studied even if it takes several generations, or turn back and spend their entire lives and those of their grandchildren trying to get back to Earth, or have to "merge" with the new attempt and thus have spent all their lives in a tin can when they could have just sat on Earth).
The best solution, if we were to put all our efforts to getting to any such system (which seems unlikely and extraordinarily risky), would be something based on the "water-in-the-desert" method. Go a bit of the way. Leave a small cache of supplies / fuel / resources. Return. Go again, but a tiny bit further, and leave more stuff. Go again and leave more stuff. When we have sufficient stuff cached, make a SECOND cache and so on.
In spacecraft terms, that means making something that can get to the moon easily. When we have that as an ordinary operational service, we can make trips to the next planet ready. When we have regular trips to all the planets, we can start veering slightly out of the solar system. When we have that ready, we can actually aim for the next best system by firing our best ships at it. They *will* get overtaken, but we can overtake them with an almost-empty ship with better technology, absorb their knowledge/resources and continue on the journey. Then the next ship will overtake that, pick them all up, melt down the old ship for repair-metal and continue. Eventually the people would get to some other system but we can't *ever* expect to just shoot something at the stars and expect it to work.
This isn't the Moon (a mere ten-times the Equator's distance, and your average reindeer can travel the distance of the equator about 2-3 times during his life, your car should be able to do about four-equators-worth of travel easily before it finally dies (all of mine have), etc.). This is another solar system (the NEAREST of which is 4.37 light years, which is 1,033,339,810 (and a bit) equators. A BILLION equators. And that's the NEAREST damn thing, and quite boring really.
50 years is way, way, way, optimistic for even a probe to another systems (hell, we've only "recently" done it with a probe out of the solar system at all, or a probe on another planet) - such a propulsion system would basically solve every energy need on Earth, so it's not a "small" development. To be honest, even 100, or 150, or 200 years, is being optimistic. Sometimes optimism pays off but we're not even just talking about doing something which we haven't done, at all, anywhere, in over 40 years - set foot on something that you could, theoretically, drive to within a few years in an ordinary car if you could pave a road there. We're talking about improving the entire accomplishments of all space travel by several (possibly dozen) orders of magnitude in only 2, 3 or 4 times the entire history of space travel itself (i.e. somewhere so far away that parts of a car would probably have destroyed themselves through their own radioactive half-life before it got even close).
If we could do that with cars, extrapolating from the 60's, then we'd all be driving 1000mph cars that get 500mpg (actually, probably a LOT more than that).
It's not *impossible*, it's just silver-suits and three-course-meal
Strangely, that would be an enormous selling point to many gamers if it were true. I'm not sure it is, but it would sell, just like the expensive fans, super-duper mice, and other "oxygen-free-cable"-style shit of an "enthusiastic" gamer.
Of the multitude of scientists I know, the person I'd actually prefer to have accompany me in any such catastrophe is my brother - a Scout leader, astrophysicist, mathematician and someone not afraid to spend years lying how and why to use a particular knot / bark of a tree to do a particular job. Astrophysics isn't really useful in that case, and even maths isn't required past possibly simple trigonometry, but he has skills that other people don't.
Most qualified people (and I work in education, so by definition that means a lot of qualified people with at least degrees) can't work out a simple practical problem without technology. A degree, or years of study, does not mean that you can know the subject and nowadays most likely means you skip all the slog-work and only brush over the basics.
I would put money on less than 1% of the people I know being able to think of, fashion and maintain a solar still, or a campfire without the aid of petroleum products, or a cutting edge, or clothes, or a shelter, or simple food from raw ingredients. Hell, a lot of people I know wouldn't know when meat was cooked, how to find some water when you're not near a river/sea, or be able to recognise the signs of hypothermia.
The skills needed to survive without technology do not necessarily coincide with knowledge of the results of those skills. I can name any number of "computer scientists" but I also know for a fact that only 2 or possibly 3 of the ones I graduated with would be able to fashion a computer from, say, bare wire, battery power and fully working semiconductor transistors, let alone a basic logic engine from primitive non-electrical equipment.
My father is an absolute expert with vehicles - he's maintained and repaired them for decades, everything from motorbikes to fleets of trucks. I wouldn't expect him to be able to fashion one from iron ore, or even with a furnace, or even be able to produce one which operates properly given all the modern assistance in the world. Hell, you can spend years fashioning a carburretor, let alone something that would run on any-old-petrol we could knock up.
The problem with modern knowledge is that it's *so* widespread that any one person knows a lot but can only do a little. It's been true for centuries that no one person can understand all of known science and it's *always* been true that people can't know everything about actually making ideas work. I can describe the function of a modern semiconductor. I have absolutely ZERO knowledge of how to actually make one. I wouldn't recognise iron ore if you hit me over the head with it, nor how to smelt it.
With some things, it's simple. Although even the cheapest loaf of bread currently requires road haulage, industrial ovens, North Sea gas, unnatural preservatives and ingredients from far-flung countries to make it to me, producing a bread analogue isn't that difficult (but, let's be honest here: do YOU know how to find yeast and then how to cook with it? Is yeast even necessary? How many people would it take to produce a pound of flour from the raw crop without any machinery? How do you plant that raw crop? When do you collect the seeds, plant them and harvest them?).
However, if we're talking something like... well, starting a fire, I've watched dozens of men attempt it and fail without petroleum assistance, some for many hours. A lot of the time that's in a controlled environment where they have ideal fuel sources.
The guy in the video can't even do a simple bow ignition of a fire, because lighting a match is SO simple that nobody even bothers to learn any other way. Reading a survival book does not make you a survival expert. The fact that he even *attempts* a bow without having done it before tells you that he's not that well versed in lighting fires. Lighting a fire isn't difficult, but your first few attempts with zero knowledge will fail miserably. And I can tell you from my / my brother's experience that with the next generation you can be waiting twice as long for t
Without fail, every single foreigner I've ever asked about Stonehenge finds it to be extremely uninspiring and a wasted journey / stop. And £14.95 an adult... are ya kidding me? You can get entry to any number of places for that. Hell, Tintagel Castle of something is infinitely more useful, pretty and interesting (and far cheaper) and that's just a pile of crumbling rocks falling into the sea.
Apart from there being virtually nothing at Stonehenge but some generic worn rocks in a vague circle, if you DO get past the barriers, there's much better stone circles elsewhere that are free. The "mystery" of how "they" made it isn't really a mystery for anyone who dabbles in such archaeology, or even that surprising - unusual at best.
One American friend had an organised day trip to Stonehenge from London when they visited (all the British people are now in fits of laughter). How/why I have no idea, but they were rather disappointed to say the least.
It's nice to see once, the best view now completely ruined by silly fences and borders and being from several hundred yards away as you drive down the hill to the East of it. But that's precisely what you do - see it once. I don't know of a single person that's seen it and *deliberately* gone back to stop there again (rather than passing by) - maybe I just don't know enough hippies.
Considering it's on quite a major road that many thousands of people drive down every summer to get to Devon/Cornwall, and that it's only a few hundred yards from said road (on one of the most dangerous turnoffs in the world because everyone is goggling at the stones rather than driving and not noticing the *one* guy miles in front who's stopping to turn to actually go TO them), the number of people you ever see inside the barriers is pretty pitiful. Unless, of course, you're there on the solstice when you REALLY don't want to be using that road at all unless you fancy day-long queues and not being able to get within a mile of the damn thing.
Stonehenge really is the most over-hyped, unimpressive place in Britain that I know. Keep driving, get to Cornwall and go look at dozens of standing stone sites for free (or much cheaper under the National Trust) or, even better, go look at something vaguely interesting like Tintagel, St Michael's Mount, or something vaguely recognisable.
No, because it wasn't likely when the Wright brothers started inventing that their invention would never reach its destination or do anything useful before they managed to build a better plane themselves.
How many generations of interplanetary probes did we have? How many generations of manned-moon missions? How many generations of extra-solar unmanned probes? 1, 1 and, er, 1. Spaceflight is 50 years old. With the BEST technology today, it would take MANY times that entire time before we got 50% of the way to the nearest star. Give it a generation or two. Then come back and kick last-generation-us's ass.
Typo - the icmp stuff was in the example I copied / pasted but I edited it out for something that has [IP you don't like here]. Must've pasted it again over the top without realising.
Your first assumption is wrong. Because there is a point of diminishing gains at which it can ONLY be worthwhile to go then. That's *not* now. Give it a few generations (more if the US wants to dismantle more of it's space budgets).
Second, those benefits will be few. Because, for a start, interstellar communication will be incredibly lagged and slow and unlikely to yield enough useful data. If it was useful, a probe would be much better. How are the best probes we've ever sent into the deepest part of space doing on collecting science and communicating back? Not too well. How much data have they sent us that we can use to build a replacement that does a better job? Not much. How many governments have thrown money after sending a probe that far on accomplishing the exact same thing already? Zero.
Your third point has merit, but again that suggests that (basically) 50% of the money we spent on doing such a mission would be wasted on poor attempts that we later improved, surpassed and overtook (literally).
Man's best spaceflight achievements were done on the basis of almost zero previous sojourns - first man in space, first man on moon, Voyagers, Mars Rovers (although we did have some stuff in orbit at the time). The fact that we'll "improve it later" doesn't mean we couldn't do that if we just waited anyway. Experience is good, but 25 years of technological advances in similar but unrelated fields is a hell of a lot better than the (possible) results of a single-shot mission (that might fail) which we won't be able to get significant data from because we will overtake it (and thus be travelling into the unknown before it ever would) before it can get that far.
Comcast slows all access to "ComCastSucks.com" to 1 byte per second, as well as all it's competitors websites, any newspaper who it doesn't agree with, and also refuses to share peer traffic with any game-console service / MMORPG except for the Xbox unless the user pays extra. What's the matter?! I didn't *BLOCK* anything!
There's your problem right there. Being able to shape traffic (which is effectively a temporary denial, but on millisecond-scales) is the same as blocking it for a short period of time.
The problem with net-biased (what's the opposite of net-neutral?) ISP's is not their ability to block things. It's their ability to make a service 100% unusable in practical terms even if they are 100% fine in theory. If only 1% of my TCP packets get to the destination, that's not technically "blocking" any particular website / protocol / service, but you try forming a reliable connection and downloading a webpage, or a file, or interacting with other users of the service.
Imagine the net ran through a router with an iptables rule of:
iptables -A INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type echo-request -m random --average 99 -j DROP
but ONLY on the websites / protocols that the ISP chooses (and / or is being paid by).
With current technology (and current technology discovery rates), anything we send past the outer planets will, almost certainly, be overtaken by something else that we send later way before it ever makes any new discoveries. The speeds and distances involved mean that waiting 100 years (twice as long as the entire history of spaceflight) is more sensible because then we'd be able to build something that would overtake ANYTHING that we could send today. And, to be honest, it's quite probably that even THAT would be overtaken LONG before it got anywhere interesting (e.g. nearest star).
If we tried to catch the Voyager's NOW, it would take probably 15-20 years if we could use all the best technology (and assuming everything just worked as we expect it to). By that time, they'd be another 15-20 years in front. And the point at which we overtake them will be a point at which we could probably launch something from Earth that would get to the same point in much less time (and probably, again, overtake both!).
Interstellar travel is nonsense at the moment. It's a waste of money to put even one remote probe out that far because by the time it gets to anything interesting from an interstellar point of view (Voyager took nearly 25 years to get out of the solar system), we could build something that would launch, travel and pass it and have better sensors too. Any notion of sending these 20-generation, half-the-speed-of-light fanciful starships to other stars is a waste - unless you WANT your great-grandaughter to watch someone overtake them, waving as they go, and realise you are several generations away from your destination, several generations away from the home planet, AND you never got to any real interstellar science while you were travelling.
When something is possible in a generation (or possibly two) then it's worth doing. But it's really embarrassing to spend billions in order to be overtaken by a faster, better, cheaper probe that will get to your destination years before you ever do anything useful and was sent by people who've not had to do with food shortages, oxygen problems, radiation, muscle-weakening, etc.
Given my contact with UK police officers (specifically London ones) in terms of security marking:
I was warned never to go into a police station soon after I'd done the marking because I *WOULD* be pulled as they have UV lights in reception (where they deal with ordinary queries) for just this purpose and I was lighting up like a Christmas tree. They get them as they enter the building. They even stopped the guy who works for the company because the same thing happened when he walked into a station to demonstrate the stuff for them. It's standard procedure to scan ALL recovered property (and even lost property) for UV tracers and has been for a long while.
When something fluoresces that's been recovered / handed in, and they suspect it's stolen, they send it to the labs unless it's just a postcode marker (and then they follow up with anyone who was found with it and/or anyone who comes to claim it) - by that time it's evidence and they have to follow the rules of preservation of evidence. UV lights are standard tests when they raid a property and / or catch someone they think is a thief - they check everything. It's part of the standard "put your belongings on the desk" procedure and also followed up to the issuance of a warrant to search their house under suspicious circumstances. The officers I saw even carried key-fob UV LED's to check things like driving licenses (apparently ours have a security marking that fluoresces). Even my driving instructors and examiner did the same before letting me in the car.
In London, all local police forces know and use SmartWater and will actually attend demo's by the SmartWater people to show how to mark property. Some of the local borough's give it away to their residents. Most security vans now have a big "SmartWater Inside"-type noticeboard, so they use it too. School insurers generally demand that SmartWater is deployed in all schools on any equipment of value. I know - I'm the guy who's had to do it for half-a-dozen schools as part of my IT work and come home covered in UV-flourescent flecks.
Just because your local cops haven't heard of it, doesn't mean that it's not well known in it's home country.
Because 90% of electronics can't run anything off the power supplied from a solar cell. Solar stuff is still inside the calculator / overnight trickle charger range of power.
Hell, it can take 8-10 hours to charge some AA's in some (not entirely dark) countries. If I have one as big as a folded out suitcase, I might *JUST* be able to get enough juice to start my car once if I leave it in direct sunlight for a few hours / days.
Seriously, your average laptop can pull 90W during booting (19V 4.5A isn't unusual on a PSU). To get even 10% of that, you need a good solar cell of a good size - a folded out briefcase sized solar panel gets you about 13W max (and that only at 12V so it would need to be converted up) with a standard product I can buy today - running in good light. On that briefcase I mentioned it says "During peak hours of sunshine, a mobile phone can be charged in an hour.". It weigh 4.5 kg.
You could SMOTHER your 19" screen laptop in solar cells (back and front and inside and out), add several kilos to the weight, leave it with direct sunlight from all directions, and STILL it would be hard pushed to do more than trickle-charge your battery or run an incredibly low power computing device. A single USB port sucks 5V at 500mA = 2.5W. Four USB ports and you're hitting the maximum of that briefcase which has a similar surface area, under theoretically ideal conditions.
Solar is a complete WASTE at the moment because it's nowhere near efficient enough, in terms of energy density, small scale deployments, etc. It can just about so what people now use it for: calculators, a very, very slow trickle charger, a couple of solar lights (almost always LED's so they are as low power as possible) running for a few hours at night after a day of sunshine. When it hits reasonable amounts of power, then you can begin to even think about anything like that.
If you want to get an idea of things like this, buy yourself one of those cheap wind-up / solar / battery torches that you can find cheap. Spend a week using the torch all day / listening to the radio from a 99p set of batteries. Then spend a week doing the same via solar. Then spend a week doing the same by only hand-cranking. The battery will last for possibly months. The solar cell will probably give you a good few hours - if you're lucky in your weather it'll be able to do 24/7 on such a low-power circuit. Hand-cranking will have you worn out by lunchtime. I guarantee you you will find a new respect for the amount of energy in the average set of batteries and the current efficiencies of things like solar cells and cheap electronics.
To summarise: Solar is shit. Most renewable energies are shit. But we're trying to make them better because we've been so spoiled in the last hundred years by simple things like zinc-carbon batteries, let alone anything more modern.
RPM Racing 1991 Never heard of it. Battle Chess 1992 Bought it. Twice I think. Battle Chess II 1992 Bought it once as part of a deal. Never played it. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I 1992 Never played it. Never bought it. Castles (Amiga port) 1992 Bought it, played it, liked it. MicroLeague Baseball (Amiga port) 1992 Never heard of it. Lexie-Cross (Macintosh port) 1992 Never heard of it. Dvorak on Typing (Macintosh port) 1992 Never heard of it. The Lost Vikings 1992 Played it once I think. Never bought it. Rock N' Roll Racing 1993 Never bought it. Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye 1994 Never heard of it. Blackthorne 1994 Never heard of it. The Death and Return of Superman 1994 Never heard of it. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans 1994 Bought it, played it, liked it. The Lost Vikings II 1995 Never bought it. Justice League Task Force 1995 Never heard of it. Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness 1995 Bought it, played it, liked it. Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal 1996 Never bought it. Diablo 1996 Bought it, played it, liked it. StarCraft 1998 Bought it, played it, liked it. StarCraft: Brood War 1998 Bought it, played it, liked it. Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition 1999 Never bought it. Diablo II 2000 Never bought it. Diablo II: Lord of Destruction 2001 Never bought it. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos 2002 Never bought it. Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne 2003 Never bought it. World of Warcraft 2004 Never played it, or even tried it, not even once. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade 2007 Never played it, or even tried it, not even once. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King 2008 Never played it, or even tried it, not even once. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty 2010 Highly unlikely to buy it. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm 2010 Highly unlikely to buy it. Diablo III Under development Highly unlikely to buy it. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm Under development Highly unlikely to buy it. StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void Under development Highly unlikely to buy it.
I think they lost it over 10 years ago. Why anyone still buys anything from them is beyond me. When the games were fun, when they were original, when they were affordable, and when I could "own" the game, yeah, they were quite good. Now though? I'd rather drop some cash for their 10+ year-old-games from a back catalogue than pay for even one month of their MMORPG or fight to install their latest games.
It's the same with most games companies - some good ideas, some really good games, some takeovers and then crap for the rest of their lives.
If you have a synth that's not very good, or you don't have a synth at all (Timidity springs to mind on Linux - think it's even got a Cygwin port) then why would you care about MIDI in a DOS game either?
First, you need a working sound setup in order to get audio. Second, you need a working video setup in order to get images. Third, it's not at all unreasonable to suggest you have a working MIDI synth setup in order to get MIDI sound. How more "pure" can you get in an open-source "emulator" that can't bundle copyrighted sound samples, etc. than by piping the MIDI direct and perfectly to your own system's synth through 20 years of emulated hardware?
Up until this year, I'd never owned a MIDI device. My Soundblaster did whatever it could do back in the day and otherwise I just had integrated sound ever since. I can't ever remember having to turn MIDI off because it was so hideous or refused by some application, or missing out on lots of music. Even today, all of my machines have a Microsoft synthesizer under Windows, or can work with Timidity under Linux, even if they have their own hardware synthesizers. I don't think I've ever had to do *anything* to play a MIDI file. It might not be the same quality but then what you're asking for is a modern-day, high-quality, software MIDI synthesizer that works on all sound cards. That's WAY outside the scope of DOSBox and the second one appears, DOSBox will be able to take immediate advantage of it (hint: It'll probably be a Timidity port). Thing is, nobody's really bothered to make one of those on Windows (at least not a popular / free one) because... well... why would you bother when you have Timidity and the Microsoft synthesizer?
That said, MIDI device quality varies - I now have a MIDI keyboard and so have been playing with various MIDI software and found that some of it actually doesn't like the Microsoft synthesizer (e.g. Piano Booster) but that's more about latency issues because it's extremely finicky about timing than anything else. The recommendation? Use a real synth or get a better software synth, or adjust a manual "delay" setting in the program. You can't expect DOSBox to pick up the slack just because it's vaguely related to gaming when no-one else really has a problem playing MIDI. That's like expecting DOSBox to run every app that Wine can, or to emulate some speech synthesizer hardware even if the DOSBox user doesn't own it. It's silly. It's also like expecting Linux to include it's own MIDI synthesiser.
You have pure MIDI data being thrown out of the program in an unaltered form. Use it. If your sound card is shit, doesn't have a decent synthesizer or otherwise can't handle that pure MIDI data in a way you like, then get a better sound card, or fix MIDI on your computer entirely. Plug in a MIDI device, or a USB sound card that *does* have a proper MIDI synth. You'll be hard pressed to find anything non-professional because, to 99.9% of people, a MIDI rendition is a MIDI rendition.
Besides that, there is no "definitive" rendition of a set of MIDI data. It's *always* depended on the exact synthesizer and sound fonts used. There is no one hardware to pick and say "that makes the right MIDI noise for this game", so emulation is a completely moving target anyway. If you had a Sound Galaxy NX Pro (great card!) you would get a different MIDI experience to a genuine SoundBlaster's. Plug that MIDI data out through the most expensive professional MIDI keyboard and it would sound totally different again.
MIDI is a steam of notes, instrument names and timings. That stream of notes and timings is passed, unaltered, to a device that can play them. DOSBox has done it's job. Everything else is a matter of turning those notes, names and timings into something approximating the sound produced by that instrument in real life playing at that frequency. It's an OS / sound system issue, not an application issue. If double-clicking a MIDI on a webpage sounds shit, then playing a DOSBox MIDI sound will sound shit to
Of everything. Because this is a fine mist that will stick to everything, even your hands, shoes, clothes, socks, the bag, the tools, the stolen property. So you'd need to do a job and then ditch everything you have in a forensically secure way. I've used a similar competing product called SmartWater.
The beauty of things like SmartWater is that its a suspension of fine molecules that can be *uniquely* identified to a particular user (i.e. you get a coded bottle with a unique number and a unique solution). The UV is just there to light up when people go through police stations but the chemical itself is, supposedly, uniquely identifiable.
Answering "How did you come to have UV marker solution on your clothes?" is easy. You were security marking your own equipment, you work with the stuff all the time, it must have been on something you picked up, maybe someone was playing a prank. Answering "How did you come to have a UV marker solution on the clothes you wore last night that is ONLY issued to Company X, when there was a burglary at Company X last night, when you claim to have been at home and never near Company X?" is a bit more tricky, especially if it's a fine mist that soaks into anything and everything it touches.
I've used the SmartWater stuff, which is very similar to this, and it's a wonderful deterrent. They claim to have a 100% conviction rate when property / people are found by police with SmartWater on them and given that they are often used in bank security vans, that's quite impressive. I don't know if that was true, or still is, but it's plausible. Basically if the police find the tiniest forensic trace of that stuff on property / people they question, they can take a sample, send it to the company, who will tell them who bought that EXACT pot of tracer ink. I also know from experience that a 50ml pot of SmartWater is enough to chemically mark every PC or electrical item in a school several times a year and last several years.
This stuff isn't just a UV-tracer. It puts you, forensically, at the exact scene of a particular crime. And given that I know of no lawsuits with any of these stuff being in question, they must have a pretty cast-iron chemical description that can satisfy a court of law or, at least, people who are caught with it on their clothes that it wouldn't be worth challenging.
It's also very good for equipment recovery. It basically guarantees identificiation / return of stolen property if it comes into police hands. Before, even if your stuff was security marked, it wasn't guaranteed that you would get it back (the first thing is that people try to file off the security marks - I've had police tell me of cases where they had to return goods with obviously filed-off security marks because they couldn't prove it WASN'T the suspected thieves and couldn't trace the actual owner), but with SmartWater once it's in police possession even the smallest tiny speck of SmartWater (which can be deployed even on hard-to-cleanse areas like across the PCB's of (unpowered) motherboards) or similar will link it to it's owner.
I manage school networks. I've yet to see a system that didn't use any and all available disk space within the server's / disk's / NAS's lifetime without having to enforce quota.
Bear in mind, then, that we're not talking gigabytes of porn, games, music, etc. and yet it all got filled. When the servers were specced, 500Gb was "enough" for 1000 users (ordinary, inner-city, secondary school). Now they're buying TB hard drives and RAID'ing them together, with many servers offering file storage, but it's still difficult to keep all profiles on a single server.
3Tb is nothing. I have set up systems for *primary* schools where a hot-copy of their server hard drives (for rapid-restore, slow-spool-to-tape/cloud, etc.) just in their current state tops more than 3Tb compressed. They don't do fancy video editing, or huge music recording, just documents, critical school databases (cleansed every September for anything over 4 years old), and their usual programs. Some schools buy networked content servers to save their Internet bandwidth (literally a 250Gb Linux cache with Apache so they access local Flash resources sucked from an online repository overnight), some do video editing or podcasting, etc. And we're still talking about PRIMARY schools here.
3Tb in RAID5 is only 6Tb. That's 6000Gb. In my job, that's about right for the next, say, 4-5 years and then we'll be back to the usual struggle. The average server has several hundred Gb of data today, not counting redundant information, empty space, etc. Run any sort of imaging / thin-client setup, and you're suddenly storing client images too. Have networked programs and you're storing those for everybody too. It's common to have network-setups of everything so that installation is quick and easy (e.g. Office can be installed with keys and pre-set options from a fileshare). Have backups and you often need staging areas for them to be written to (most places I've worked in, I've set it to backup to tape/off-site storage and also to save a copy for a quick local restore). That's before you even get into multiple servers, backing them up to each other (not backing up their backups, of course), things like VMWare snapshots or Ghost images, etc. Hell a decent clipart setup can run to two-figures of Gb. If you're into backing up very expensive course material, teacher training videos, etc. that you have school licenses for, that's 9Gb per DVD.
And a school isn't exactly an "unusual" scenario.
Personally, I've got about 3Tb of storage just in an old Linux machine that holds things I'd rather not delete (programming code, huge downloads, Wine bottles, QEMU images, etc.). It's got 6 drives and about 20-something partitions. I could probably use 3Tb drives in a RAID5 just to upgrade that one machine to something more secure and still not have much space left.
Some people use their computers for access. Some use them to process data and then discard it. Some use them for creation. Some use them for storage. Every single computer I've ever owned has run out of disk space before any other part of it was considered obsolete (and I go back to 20Mb hard drives). Hell, I could do several hundred Gb's just downloading everything I own on Steam into the client, let alone them backing that stuff up into its Steam-created restoration programs. My current laptop is 320Gb, of which about 10 is free and that's because I keep sacrificing games that I haven't played in a while to Steam backups.
3Tb is nothing, and by the time these are affordable (to me, that means under £100), I'll be wanting one in my laptop.
A cycle to detect hardware changes - like hotplug. So you want some sort of program running on the chip in order to perform this cycle on power-on / resume (let's call it a BIOS). And when you boot the machine in that program, it might not have ANY of the original hardware it thought, your boot drive may be on a device that wasn't invented when the OS was written / machine was built, the PCI ID's might have shifted, or just random fluctuations in the cable meant it was detected second instead of first amongst all the other devices. So it has to either hotplug or remember to initialise everything it last saw. Initialising hardware that isn't there is dangerous (read: permanent hang before you get anywhere), so you have to check it's there first. So now you have to check that everything you expected is there on boot before initialising it, relying on it being there or trying to continue in the boot anyway, because you might have moved the main OS onto a hard drive that the original BIOS didn't support. You just turned it into an ordinary "hotplug" generic system, you have to wait for buses to settle, timeouts to occur, etc.etc.etc. all the usual stuff before you can continue booting.
Caching hardware initialisation isn't what we're talking about here. That's possible but it still requires getting that cache from somewhere (like, say, initialising a disk to read it from, or some NVRAM). You then still have to check it's correct on any system where the hardware can fluctuare. We're talking about instead using hardware that needs the absolute minimum of intiailisation in the first place if that's what you want and LOCKING down what hardware you can boot from. If you don't do that, you have a generic system, if you do then *obviously* you can optimise it.
The early EEEPC's had one of the first solid state disks soldered to its board. Replacing that disk isn't possible (I'm not even sure it uses IDE interfaces). Thus the BIOS people can take some liberties in initialisation, startup times, things they do when booting, the order of boot etc. If / when you replaced that original disk with a hard disk or "modern" removable SSD (something that Asus did itself in later models), chances are nothing would boot / work without changing those assumptions. You either design to the hardware and avoid initialisations by taking your knowledge and assuming it to be true, or you have to probe, monitor, inspect and regenerate all the time.
I'm not saying you *can't* have a system that does that, I'm just saying that it's generally a trade-off rather than a binary decision, and it's sometimes a trade-off that can't have all the best parts (e.g. fast boot time and generic hardware for the boot drive). Laptops can do standby, hibernate and resume NOW, but you'll find if you look through something like the Linux resume code that it spends most of the resume time reinitialising hardware and making sure nothing too drastic has changed (try swapping the boot drive for a different model with the same data while a machine is asleep, or cutting the amount of RAM, or all manner of changes). Rare events but you have to constantly check for them every time you resume which means initialising a damn lot of things very carefully and making NO assumptions.
Standard, generic, PC components often require extensive initialisation code (hell, even my wireless needs a firmware dump because it's just a dumb device up until that point, same for lots of USB devices like the USB keys that pretend to be CD's). All that hardware (not all of it actually inside a PC) has to change before you can make a PC an insta-boot device, or you can just say "I only support this disk to boot from" and its equivalents, which locks you into a set of hardware. There's nothing wrong with either, depending on the circumstances, but wanting both isn't trivially possible without changing an incredible amount of hardware, protocols and electrical interfaces beforehand.
How many cycles does it take to initialise a SATA disk to the point it can be booted from? I have no idea. I'm guessing it's a non-zero amount, though. I know that things like USB, PCI and SCSI have implicit timing in their protocols that means there is an upper limit to just how quickly you can bring them up safely.
Computers needing to "boot" is a relatively modern invention caused in part by hardware hotplug, backwards compatibility modes and reliability checks.
Most of the boot process is:
- Moving out of legacy modes (e.g. enabling increased capabilities from basic instructions sets to full modern ones, enabling different memory access models, enabling 64-bit etc.), ramping up core speed, enabling things like DMA and moving from "safe" memory timings to those that the chips report they can support when the negotiations finally take place, bringing up the non-boot CPU's, etc.
- Contention. Doing only a certain number of things on the bus at any one time, making the buses serial, making the buses have sub-buses and other ideas. Sometimes there is no quicker way to do things. Sometimes it *will* take 1000ms before the disk will respond that it's up to speed.
- Checking that RAM does indeed do what it's told, that a boot loader is present, that a floppy is present (yes, even on some modern BIOS's), checking IDE/SATA channels and retrieving capabilities, checking memory timings, checking PCI and USB buses, checking that disks are spinning, etc.
Some of my servers take up to 3 minutes to get to the point where they can actually load the first byte from disk to begin loading it. A lot of this time is BIOS handoff to the BIOS on the RAID cards (and sometimes the network cards), those RAID cards checking, assembling and enabling the drives, etc. With two RAID cards, we've just nearly doubled boot time. Proper (reasonable) memory checks of several GB of RAM still takes a while, even for a simple test. And yet there's still a minute or so of absolute complete waste as we start in some 8086 legacy mode and slowly have to ramp up disks, cards and our own CPU's, not to mention external hardware like USB and DVD drives "just in case". And then the OS has to go and do it all itself again later anyway.
This is why things like the LinuxBIOS (now called Coreboot) project actually work better and faster - when we KNOW what the BIOS needs to do, we find that lots of it is done twice, lots of it are unnecessary, lots of it can be delayed until we actually NEED the DVD drive, some of it can occur in the background because it will ALWAYS take a long time to start etc. But how many fixed sets of hardware does that project actually work on? Few. Because not only is it tricky to do that sort of analysis, but it's tricky to lock-down exactly what the BIOS needs to do and do better than the original BIOS.
We can have an "instant on" computer. It's easy. My ZX Spectrum did it nearly 30 years ago. My calculator does it now. The Psion organisers all did it. Most portable games consoles manage it. The thing you have to realise though is that it means: booting into a single, fixed OS that's tricky to upgrade, making power management apply to every process perfectly, fixing a set of hardware down that we know can always boot into a certain configuration very quickly, changing the way that all our chips work so they start in their best mode, not their worst (and thus probably destroying things like OS installers as we know them and making them specific to a machine type - no more installers modern OS on old computers, or old OS on modern computers), removing any sort of consistency checks and having to rely on things not going wrong or the hardware being able to handle all hardware errors (e.g. ECC memory for everything with reporting of anything it can't handle), and building every component so it doesn't "negotiate" or "initialise" but just works (e.g. even a keyboard controller can take some time to come back online at the moment, not to mention graphics, disks, USB buses, etc.).
Instant-on computers are always possible, and some of them are very useful for certain things. But generic PC's and instant-on won't happen until CPU's, disks and bus negotiations take literally fractions of a second for any operation (and thus we still do as many instructions to initialise but they take clock cycles
Oh, just needed to add several completely unresearched points to this (given that you included several of your own earlier).
It's a popular belief that it's the *exclusion* of certain foods, especially during pregnancy / breastfeeding that forms intolerances in children. For instance, the recent spate of nut allergies is being ascribed to the almost global advice not to eat nuts during pregnancy or while breastfeeding. We didn't have that advice 50 years ago and we didn't have anywhere near as many nut allergies in infants. Some scientists are saying that this is absolute madness in medical terms to advise this because nuts would be part of our natural diet as they are for some apes (though probably not honey-roasted). Not exposing the child to the biological derivatives of digested nuts makes them unable to cope with them on initial exposure. Further isolation when a reaction DOES occur makes the child completely allergic. Whereas even the most dangerously nut-allergic person can be brought back to normality by tiny but gradually-increasing exposure to... guess what... nuts. Recent studies have shown that starting with microscopic quantities and gradually building immunity has allowed someone who was at risk of death from a nut reaction to get to the point where they were eating 8-9 nuts per day without any ill effects.
Things like asthma, hayfever, etc. are believed to be an over-exposure to modern pollutants OR an under-exposure to actual ordinary air with good old pollen in it. Carpets, with too much stored human dust, are pointed at as a factor in asthma but so are modern cleaning sprays. Carpets, dust and dirt have been around a lot longer. Antibacterial hand-wipes have not. Pollen's been around for millions of years, since before humans existed. It's unlikely that we're naturally *that* in contradiction with something we've always been constantly exposed to until recently.
It's over- AND under-exposure to any substances that causes problems, on the whole. Like everything in life - moderation is the key.
I deliberately and wilfully made my wife eats nuts during her pregnancy and breastfeeding, in ordinary quantities. I deliberately and wilfully pressed a nut to the skin of the leg of my 1 week old to see if she was allergic (better to know then than be caught off-guard later) and to develop her immunities if not. My wife is allergic to lots of things, and asthamatic (we can place some symptoms of hers to over-exposure to household cleaning spray when she was little, believe it or not). I have no allergy or reaction to anything (worse that happens is a bit of diahorreah for some dodgy food - I drink the water wherever I go, I happily crunch their ice cubes, eat the salad, etc.). My daughter has no allergy or intolerance that we can discover at all yet and eats everything under the sun (including things I don't like myself). Either that means it's genetic (thus avoiding any sort of food / drink unless you KNOW you're already intolerant is nonsense) or it's environment (and thus ordinary exposure to things that ordinary humans have been okay to eat/breathe for years is required).
In fact, my daughter had swine flu when she was less than a year old and we didn't realise what it was until I caught it from her and was diagnosed with it, because her symptoms were so well handled by her immune system. (I threw the government-issued Tamiflu in the bin and just quarantined myself - none of my family caught the bug and within a few days it was gone but the quarantine held and I never ended up infecting anyone else).
Talking of honey, it's also believed to be extremely beneficial in terms of hayfever and other similar allergies because local honey often contains significant amounts of local pollen and thus exposure (but not OVER-exposure) to local honey makes people more immune to their surroundings and thus less bad reactions. I know people who avoid honey when pregnant because of this crap and their children end up with hayfever.
I call crap, given that UHT milk is actually not as popular in the UK (less than 8% of all our milk compared to Spain at 95.7%) but we still have stupidly high instances of lactose intolerance (I work in a school and have to deal with the allergy / intolerance lists). It may be a *factor* but it's certainly nowhere near being a huge culprit as you make out.
It doesn't make the milk inedible (not significantly), or your own bacteria would get no nutrition from drinking it. It merely makes the milk almost sterile so that if it's then hermetically sealed it takes a LOT of time for bacteria to take hold in significant numbers (read: billions) again, like it would in normal milk in only a day or two outside the refridgerator. It's a preservative technique that uses "ultra-high" temperatures of about 130 degrees C that are achievable in a household kettle, or even more easily in a saucepan without burning the milk (so long as you keep stirring). Don't believe the crap you're spouting, there in no material change in the structure of the milk at all, except to reduce the number of bacteria already present.
Next time, do a wiki search or, even better, ask a food scientist before you assume that what someone tells you about some common household product is true.
Re:In the End...
on
Why Microsoft?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I wouldn't, even as a lowly intern (i.e. zero responsibility) for extreme amounts of pay. Make of that what you will. I did apply to Google for a datacenter job once but, let's be honest, so did a few thousand others no matter what the position. But MS? Beat a path to my door, offer me 50% stock, I don't really care - *if* I took the job it would be only to cash in on it immediately and I'd do the legal minimum necessary, but to actually WORK for them? Nope. Having said this I've probably ruined any chance of actually working for them anyway (as if being a Slashdot regular wouldn't rule you out immediately), and do I care? No, not really. Do they care? Probably not either.
I made a rule for myself when I left uni - never work for anyone that doesn't appreciate you. It's served me well through my own business (yes, I told customers to bugger off because I didn't like the way they were treating me - still made money, though!) and later employment and I've never had more than a week or so of unhappiness with a job in the 10+ years since - and you couldn't pay me enough to suffer that. I had workplaces change, even people change, to become less hospitable and almost immediately I provided the necessary minimum notice and left for somewhere else - usually for more pay, and more appreciation, and never have a problem finding the next job (I consider a 2-3 week window between jobs HUGE and the past three employments I've had my previous / new employers fighting over me for months and/or I have a definite job offer on the table before my existing employer even knows I'm looking - the new employer would know that I wasn't on notice when they offered the job, but they never cared about that, and I would eventually give due notice to my current employer, but I see that as my skills being in demand).
I trash Microsoft for making shitty products. I do it as a living, in fact. I also avoid Microsoft products where I can because of this (unfortunately, I work with established AD domains a lot on a contract basis so I can't really avoid Windows, but I have converted several schools to much better products - latest was an installation of OpenOffice in a private school that could EASILY afford site licences for Office but saw the actual benefits of Open software after several little chats). I would also avoid MS as an employer, because I know that even if the job is interesting, the tech is cool, the project was the best in the world, the colleagues were fabulous, the money was ludicrous, that I would have to eventually follow some horribly contrived mission statement, or ill-thought-out company policy (can you use Linux machines as an MS employee without working in their "Linux lab"? What about Firefox? What if I deliberately choose not to use the MS tools and/or develop cross-platform tools to get my job done? Can't see MS releasing those to the public, or even allowing them in the first place), or whatever new management fad is doing the rounds in those-above-me's golfing circles.
Not everyone sells out for the money. If they do, there's still a limit to what they would do for the money and that might be much lower than you think. But, to be honest, I hereby publicly state that MS can keep all their jobs. I actually make MORE money from going in, fixing up their messes and putting people on the alternatives, and I specialise in mainstream UK schools. The crappier they are, the more I make (Windows Vista and 7 "upgrades" have been an absolute god-send!). But, hell, I turn down jobs because I don't like the approaches of my predecessor there, or because the guy in charge that I would never have to talk to is a complete scumbag, or (another real-world example for me) because it means working for a school that think it's okay to spend £100,000 on upgrading a perfectly good network (and nearly the same again on a network manager) when the kids don't have exercise books to write in. That manager would have been me, but I told them to stick it and went to work for a primary school for 2 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually got bored around the second page because it wasn't at all what the submission makes it out to be. It's corporate fluff of the highest order and I lost interest in anything and everything the guy has to say from a point about two pages in (where they start talking about connected devices).
Firstly, I find it annoying that this is a "memo" (memorandum, which means something to replace/improve the memory and usually means only a short notice or reminder, not a huge diatribe like that hideous work linked to above), the same way that the first line references his other 8-9 pages of earlier "memo". Call it a bloody article, or opinion and have done with it. Just because the business world uses the word "memo" doesn't mean you can just use it out of context, or arbitrarily apply it in the hopes that such an essay might seem shorter, or you seem more intelligent or business-like.
The best writers in the world are concise. (I'm not one of them, by the way). The more you waffle, the more I have to look to find the actual hidden meaning and why you've veered off into such monologues and my guess here would be "I'm pretending to be resigning harshly but pretty please don't be mad at me in case I want to come back later".
When I write a resignation letter, it's basically the legal minimum required unless I am genuinely sorry to move on. I have no qualms about burning bridges because if it's got to the point that I want to resign, there's nothing more you can do to me and I *already* don't want to work with you or people like you, so if you spread the word to your friends that works in my favour. If the company changes, or the horrible people leave, I might be back and the company change is my explanation for the changing of my mind. But if the company still sucks, shame... I will just resign and have done with it. I told a former employer in no uncertain terms that I was resigning because I didn't trust that he could give what he was promising me (trying to make the job I had with him sound like it had a future) while we were discussing my resignation - he spoke this sort of bullshit and I could read between the lines. He actually tried to bad-mouth my new employer without even knowing them. Two years later, he didn't keep any of his promises to anyone who continued working there. It was virtually a "you'll never work in this town again" argument from him, and my basic reply was "Good, if working in this town means working with people like you." (My references from that place, however, were perfect - because my work was infallible - and I've never been out of work for even a day since I started out from uni).
Secondly, the corporate gobbledegook in the "memo" is extremely off-putting, especially when prefixed with PAGES of sucking up. There are entire sentences in there that convey no useful information at all. There are paragraphs that say something you could say in two to three WORDS. That sort of verbosity makes myself and others extremely suspicious because, underneath it all, I get the impression that he's not trying to say what he wants you to *think* he's saying.
It's like when a manager gathers all the staff, hands out a new 50-page contract with dubious wording, gives an enormously verbose speech about how fabulously everyone is doing and how the corporate culture will expand and move forward and how excited they are about the future. You must think people are stupid if they aren't already thinking "Yeah, so how many people are being sacked and / or when is the company going to announce bankruptcy?"
If you can't find every word you've used in the version of the OED (or whatever equivalent dictionary for your country) that you had at school, you're bullshitting, fluffing and talking nonsense. ("intrapreneurial" - Urk... where's my vomit bucket?). It means that there *isn't* a suitable word for what you want to say, you don't know what you're trying to say, or that you're avoiding all the words because they actually convey your meaning too well. I don't thi
Is this the same as Ad Hoc mode?
"No." (actually, it's damn close, so close that anyone who knows both will assume they are the same.
"Ad Hoc, or IBSS, mode is a legacy protocol for Wi-Fi devices, and Wi-Fi Direct is a new innovation." (Adhoc is old, this is new! That's the difference! Imbecile!)
"Wi-Fi Direct brings important security features, ease of setup, and higher performance that is not currently available in Ad Hoc mode." (we took adhoc mode, formalised the out-of-spec "adhoc can use more than 11MBps" stuff that manufacturers have been doing for YEARS - a five year old card of mine does 54Mbps adhoc), officially added something like WPA to it (which you could always do anyway), and made it so that it's easier to connect that just... wow... telling it to connect to a network with a particular name by double-clicking on a list)
"With Wi-Fi Direct, a device can maintain a simultaneous connection to an infrastructure network - this isn't possible with Ad Hoc." (Hooray! Something new! But this is also nothing more than either timeslicing between two networks, one of which happens to be adhoc, or having a radio(s) capable of tuning to two networks simultaneously).
In shot, Wi-Fi Direct is decent ad-hoc, ten years too late, using stuff that people have been putting into drivers for years.
Then as a large business, just *recognising* the value of the Java brand should be enough to stop such disregard for its reputation. Seriously, the impression from any large tech site now is "Oracle is destroying Java". Whether you love it or not, Java is HUGE and everywhere, from Blu-ray players to mobile phones to household PC's and pissing away such a huge and recognised brand is bad business.
Question: If Java if that much of a loss, why not just push it out to the already-external organisations that would happily oversee it for you. Take control of the brand itself (ala Firefox vs Iceweasel), don't do anything with the code yourself, but actually encourage its use and distribution with your branding all over it for free? Same with OpenOffice - that way you get a "this came via Oracle originally" good reputation, you get to control naming rights ("nobody can call it Java or OpenOffice but us") but in a gentle, controlled way, and nobody gets angry and starts resigning / giving you bad press.
It's *hugely* incompetent to hold such an enormous, popular and well-known brand (loss-making or not) and then piss it away in pursuit of some "clear-out" of people who don't agree with you. Next year, Java will be dead and buried and "Coffee" (or whatever) will be on everyone's machine instead and you'll have zero control over it unless you want to start suing former customers for some obscure, irrelevant patents (*cough* Oracle vs Google *cough).
My dad knows what Java is (roughly) and that he "needs it" whenever he gets a new machine, and my dad can barely manage copy / paste. Wasting that sort of brand is like Coke sacking all its executives, suing people who drink it, turning it into a lemonade and still only ever calling it Coke. Then they wonder why people get pissed at them.
All I know is that since Oracle took over Sun, OpenOffice have deserted them, Java have deserted them, they're suing Google (which is a stupid move in the first place with such a weak set of patents stated), and they broke my Eclipse config because they rebranded the Sun Java installer to say "Oracle" and didn't bother to properly inform people at one of their largest external users of the changes. And now the Eclipse guys are ranting and raving at them for poor management of the Java process and brand. I don't really care, as a user, what their beef is. They're not telling me, they're just suing people, making silent changes that break stuff, and making threatening noises, while all I want is somewhere I can reliably download a supported OpenOffice / Java derivative that works. In the space of a few months, they've turned two of the largest IT brands in history into something that people now associate with being sued, and hoping for a fork that's disassociated from Oracle. That's *bad* for business, even if you never intend to use or do anything with OpenOffice / Java yourself.
Er... you mean you DIDN'T notice that? I thought it was one of the more obvious things, put in to see if the audience was awake.
In fact, last month I showed my gf these films for the FIRST TIME EVER (she's authentic rural-Italian, and their cinema is wildly different to UK/US cinema so although they "know of" our movies, they have rarely actually gone to see them). She spotted that straight away, no hint of hesitation. In fact, just before any big "revelation" she was there pointing it out as the characters were about to introduce it into the main plot. Not to mention the various paradoxes here, she was working out where/how the movie had to go before it got there.
And she spotted the actress change for Jennifer. Most people don't unless they watch them one after the other.
The "lone pines" thing? Please, I would worry about how you keep track of ANY movie if you didn't spot that. You're like my mother, who can't watch Sliding Doors without getting confused.
And if those fans / heatsinks really made economic sense, then every server room in the world (from little offices up to large datacenters) would be using them. If you're paying more than a handful of coins for them, however, you are wasting your money. The fact is that the replacement of a fan/heatsink with a item that isn't supplied by the systems manufacturer makes no sense and doesn't, actually, get you any worthwhile gain for the money you spend. You might save 2 degrees in temperature but for the money you spend on some of the systems I've seen you could do that by just cleaning the fans once a year.
A gain of reduced audio noise? I'll give you that. I myself own a fanless PSU (it's heatpipe-tech, not water-cooling or anything) that runs my server. It's absolutely 100% silent. Sadly my drives and other devices aren't, but I can see that in some ultra-specialist environments you need to make an almost-silent PC. However, putting your baseunit in a cupboard, or at least behind a bit of pretty wood that dampens sounds aimed towards the user is actually more effective and (nowadays) zero inconvenience (run your USB hub to your desk-top, done).
I use a silent PSU because it has no moving parts (however, it channels an awful lot of heat into the surrounding metal case which probably puts my motherboard temperature up by a degree or two, so I've not really "gained" anything there in terms of product life). It cost me £10 more than a standard PSU of the same wattage, back in the day, so it was an easy decision to make. But, to be honest, it's sitting in the same case as a processor fan that's been in the system since the same build, from new, and is still spinning after 5 years and including several months of inactivity somewhere in that. Fans do die but I've worked in schools using 10-year-old equipment that's on all day, every day, never cleaned and subject to the worse treatment (kids inserting Lego into the holes) and yet, when I took them to be scrapped, I used to remove their fans to add to my stock. They *all* still spun perfectly, and that was before I air-sprayed / oiled them. A fan alarm costs pence. I know, I have one that's independent of my motherboard and goes mad if the fans are slow or not spinning (like a UPS alarm, almost). The noise? I don't hear it when it's sitting inside it's not-acquired-for-that-purpose wooden cupboard (with the back chopped off to allow airflow).
So it's not that an expensive heatsink or fan will make my computer last longer (the temperature-failure link is dubious, as proved by many modern datacenters that don't bother with cooling and only see a slight increase in failures, and the cost of some of those setups is better poured into just taking better care of the damn thing), or that it will make it work faster (unless I overclock but already that's into the same dubious areas as played with your fuel mixture on your car - you rarely get an overall gain given some risk, reduced product life, etc.), or that it will make it use less energy (it's a pittance). Any of the reasons you can choose are VASTLY outweighed by the initial costs.
(I hate overclockers - I challenge any overclockers to ring up a significant number of CPU cycles gained by overclocking when you take into account their overall average computer usage. Yeah, you might get a handful of FPS better but the games aren't designed for that anyway so all you gain is stretched textures on a unnecessarily high resolution moving slightly faster than your perception would ever allow you to detect anyway).
Expensive fans, heatsinks, etc. do not make economic sense for 99.999% of users. That's ridiculously high a proportion. A 50p fan every year is actually much more sensible that spending the amounts of money that I've seen people drop on such stuff. Really. Now, expensive mouse... yes, I'll give you that. Expensive display. All the things that you actually use all the time and require to work with absolute precision - there is nothing more annoying that a slightly un
If we found a plentiful antimatter source, and built something never yet produced but only really theorised (i.e. an antimatter-based propulsion of any kind), and make it into a fairly compact but reliable propulsion system, of which one example is bought and attached to a particular extra-solar-capable chassis (of which the only two ever produced were made in the 70's and are currently used to transport a couple of LP's in a random direction that we have no control over any longer), etc. etc. etc.
As with anything to do with extra-solar propulsion, we won't see it for many, many decades and when we do, almost all our extra-solar attempts will be embarrassingly overtaken by the next-decade's attempt that will go faster (and the original mission will either have to keep going to somewhere that will be already colonised / studied even if it takes several generations, or turn back and spend their entire lives and those of their grandchildren trying to get back to Earth, or have to "merge" with the new attempt and thus have spent all their lives in a tin can when they could have just sat on Earth).
The best solution, if we were to put all our efforts to getting to any such system (which seems unlikely and extraordinarily risky), would be something based on the "water-in-the-desert" method. Go a bit of the way. Leave a small cache of supplies / fuel / resources. Return. Go again, but a tiny bit further, and leave more stuff. Go again and leave more stuff. When we have sufficient stuff cached, make a SECOND cache and so on.
In spacecraft terms, that means making something that can get to the moon easily. When we have that as an ordinary operational service, we can make trips to the next planet ready. When we have regular trips to all the planets, we can start veering slightly out of the solar system. When we have that ready, we can actually aim for the next best system by firing our best ships at it. They *will* get overtaken, but we can overtake them with an almost-empty ship with better technology, absorb their knowledge/resources and continue on the journey. Then the next ship will overtake that, pick them all up, melt down the old ship for repair-metal and continue. Eventually the people would get to some other system but we can't *ever* expect to just shoot something at the stars and expect it to work.
This isn't the Moon (a mere ten-times the Equator's distance, and your average reindeer can travel the distance of the equator about 2-3 times during his life, your car should be able to do about four-equators-worth of travel easily before it finally dies (all of mine have), etc.). This is another solar system (the NEAREST of which is 4.37 light years, which is 1,033,339,810 (and a bit) equators. A BILLION equators. And that's the NEAREST damn thing, and quite boring really.
50 years is way, way, way, optimistic for even a probe to another systems (hell, we've only "recently" done it with a probe out of the solar system at all, or a probe on another planet) - such a propulsion system would basically solve every energy need on Earth, so it's not a "small" development. To be honest, even 100, or 150, or 200 years, is being optimistic. Sometimes optimism pays off but we're not even just talking about doing something which we haven't done, at all, anywhere, in over 40 years - set foot on something that you could, theoretically, drive to within a few years in an ordinary car if you could pave a road there. We're talking about improving the entire accomplishments of all space travel by several (possibly dozen) orders of magnitude in only 2, 3 or 4 times the entire history of space travel itself (i.e. somewhere so far away that parts of a car would probably have destroyed themselves through their own radioactive half-life before it got even close).
If we could do that with cars, extrapolating from the 60's, then we'd all be driving 1000mph cars that get 500mpg (actually, probably a LOT more than that).
It's not *impossible*, it's just silver-suits and three-course-meal
Strangely, that would be an enormous selling point to many gamers if it were true. I'm not sure it is, but it would sell, just like the expensive fans, super-duper mice, and other "oxygen-free-cable"-style shit of an "enthusiastic" gamer.
Of the multitude of scientists I know, the person I'd actually prefer to have accompany me in any such catastrophe is my brother - a Scout leader, astrophysicist, mathematician and someone not afraid to spend years lying how and why to use a particular knot / bark of a tree to do a particular job. Astrophysics isn't really useful in that case, and even maths isn't required past possibly simple trigonometry, but he has skills that other people don't.
Most qualified people (and I work in education, so by definition that means a lot of qualified people with at least degrees) can't work out a simple practical problem without technology. A degree, or years of study, does not mean that you can know the subject and nowadays most likely means you skip all the slog-work and only brush over the basics.
I would put money on less than 1% of the people I know being able to think of, fashion and maintain a solar still, or a campfire without the aid of petroleum products, or a cutting edge, or clothes, or a shelter, or simple food from raw ingredients. Hell, a lot of people I know wouldn't know when meat was cooked, how to find some water when you're not near a river/sea, or be able to recognise the signs of hypothermia.
The skills needed to survive without technology do not necessarily coincide with knowledge of the results of those skills. I can name any number of "computer scientists" but I also know for a fact that only 2 or possibly 3 of the ones I graduated with would be able to fashion a computer from, say, bare wire, battery power and fully working semiconductor transistors, let alone a basic logic engine from primitive non-electrical equipment.
My father is an absolute expert with vehicles - he's maintained and repaired them for decades, everything from motorbikes to fleets of trucks. I wouldn't expect him to be able to fashion one from iron ore, or even with a furnace, or even be able to produce one which operates properly given all the modern assistance in the world. Hell, you can spend years fashioning a carburretor, let alone something that would run on any-old-petrol we could knock up.
The problem with modern knowledge is that it's *so* widespread that any one person knows a lot but can only do a little. It's been true for centuries that no one person can understand all of known science and it's *always* been true that people can't know everything about actually making ideas work. I can describe the function of a modern semiconductor. I have absolutely ZERO knowledge of how to actually make one. I wouldn't recognise iron ore if you hit me over the head with it, nor how to smelt it.
With some things, it's simple. Although even the cheapest loaf of bread currently requires road haulage, industrial ovens, North Sea gas, unnatural preservatives and ingredients from far-flung countries to make it to me, producing a bread analogue isn't that difficult (but, let's be honest here: do YOU know how to find yeast and then how to cook with it? Is yeast even necessary? How many people would it take to produce a pound of flour from the raw crop without any machinery? How do you plant that raw crop? When do you collect the seeds, plant them and harvest them?).
However, if we're talking something like... well, starting a fire, I've watched dozens of men attempt it and fail without petroleum assistance, some for many hours. A lot of the time that's in a controlled environment where they have ideal fuel sources.
The guy in the video can't even do a simple bow ignition of a fire, because lighting a match is SO simple that nobody even bothers to learn any other way. Reading a survival book does not make you a survival expert. The fact that he even *attempts* a bow without having done it before tells you that he's not that well versed in lighting fires. Lighting a fire isn't difficult, but your first few attempts with zero knowledge will fail miserably. And I can tell you from my / my brother's experience that with the next generation you can be waiting twice as long for t
Or you could just drive past.
Without fail, every single foreigner I've ever asked about Stonehenge finds it to be extremely uninspiring and a wasted journey / stop. And £14.95 an adult... are ya kidding me? You can get entry to any number of places for that. Hell, Tintagel Castle of something is infinitely more useful, pretty and interesting (and far cheaper) and that's just a pile of crumbling rocks falling into the sea.
Apart from there being virtually nothing at Stonehenge but some generic worn rocks in a vague circle, if you DO get past the barriers, there's much better stone circles elsewhere that are free. The "mystery" of how "they" made it isn't really a mystery for anyone who dabbles in such archaeology, or even that surprising - unusual at best.
One American friend had an organised day trip to Stonehenge from London when they visited (all the British people are now in fits of laughter). How/why I have no idea, but they were rather disappointed to say the least.
It's nice to see once, the best view now completely ruined by silly fences and borders and being from several hundred yards away as you drive down the hill to the East of it. But that's precisely what you do - see it once. I don't know of a single person that's seen it and *deliberately* gone back to stop there again (rather than passing by) - maybe I just don't know enough hippies.
Considering it's on quite a major road that many thousands of people drive down every summer to get to Devon/Cornwall, and that it's only a few hundred yards from said road (on one of the most dangerous turnoffs in the world because everyone is goggling at the stones rather than driving and not noticing the *one* guy miles in front who's stopping to turn to actually go TO them), the number of people you ever see inside the barriers is pretty pitiful. Unless, of course, you're there on the solstice when you REALLY don't want to be using that road at all unless you fancy day-long queues and not being able to get within a mile of the damn thing.
Stonehenge really is the most over-hyped, unimpressive place in Britain that I know. Keep driving, get to Cornwall and go look at dozens of standing stone sites for free (or much cheaper under the National Trust) or, even better, go look at something vaguely interesting like Tintagel, St Michael's Mount, or something vaguely recognisable.
Nice extrapolation into nonsense.
No, because it wasn't likely when the Wright brothers started inventing that their invention would never reach its destination or do anything useful before they managed to build a better plane themselves.
How many generations of interplanetary probes did we have? How many generations of manned-moon missions? How many generations of extra-solar unmanned probes? 1, 1 and, er, 1. Spaceflight is 50 years old. With the BEST technology today, it would take MANY times that entire time before we got 50% of the way to the nearest star. Give it a generation or two. Then come back and kick last-generation-us's ass.
Typo - the icmp stuff was in the example I copied / pasted but I edited it out for something that has [IP you don't like here]. Must've pasted it again over the top without realising.
Your first assumption is wrong. Because there is a point of diminishing gains at which it can ONLY be worthwhile to go then. That's *not* now. Give it a few generations (more if the US wants to dismantle more of it's space budgets).
Second, those benefits will be few. Because, for a start, interstellar communication will be incredibly lagged and slow and unlikely to yield enough useful data. If it was useful, a probe would be much better. How are the best probes we've ever sent into the deepest part of space doing on collecting science and communicating back? Not too well. How much data have they sent us that we can use to build a replacement that does a better job? Not much. How many governments have thrown money after sending a probe that far on accomplishing the exact same thing already? Zero.
Your third point has merit, but again that suggests that (basically) 50% of the money we spent on doing such a mission would be wasted on poor attempts that we later improved, surpassed and overtook (literally).
Man's best spaceflight achievements were done on the basis of almost zero previous sojourns - first man in space, first man on moon, Voyagers, Mars Rovers (although we did have some stuff in orbit at the time). The fact that we'll "improve it later" doesn't mean we couldn't do that if we just waited anyway. Experience is good, but 25 years of technological advances in similar but unrelated fields is a hell of a lot better than the (possible) results of a single-shot mission (that might fail) which we won't be able to get significant data from because we will overtake it (and thus be travelling into the unknown before it ever would) before it can get that far.
Comcast slows all access to "ComCastSucks.com" to 1 byte per second, as well as all it's competitors websites, any newspaper who it doesn't agree with, and also refuses to share peer traffic with any game-console service / MMORPG except for the Xbox unless the user pays extra. What's the matter?! I didn't *BLOCK* anything!
There's your problem right there. Being able to shape traffic (which is effectively a temporary denial, but on millisecond-scales) is the same as blocking it for a short period of time.
The problem with net-biased (what's the opposite of net-neutral?) ISP's is not their ability to block things. It's their ability to make a service 100% unusable in practical terms even if they are 100% fine in theory. If only 1% of my TCP packets get to the destination, that's not technically "blocking" any particular website / protocol / service, but you try forming a reliable connection and downloading a webpage, or a file, or interacting with other users of the service.
Imagine the net ran through a router with an iptables rule of:
iptables -A INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type echo-request -m random --average 99 -j DROP
but ONLY on the websites / protocols that the ISP chooses (and / or is being paid by).
With current technology (and current technology discovery rates), anything we send past the outer planets will, almost certainly, be overtaken by something else that we send later way before it ever makes any new discoveries. The speeds and distances involved mean that waiting 100 years (twice as long as the entire history of spaceflight) is more sensible because then we'd be able to build something that would overtake ANYTHING that we could send today. And, to be honest, it's quite probably that even THAT would be overtaken LONG before it got anywhere interesting (e.g. nearest star).
If we tried to catch the Voyager's NOW, it would take probably 15-20 years if we could use all the best technology (and assuming everything just worked as we expect it to). By that time, they'd be another 15-20 years in front. And the point at which we overtake them will be a point at which we could probably launch something from Earth that would get to the same point in much less time (and probably, again, overtake both!).
Interstellar travel is nonsense at the moment. It's a waste of money to put even one remote probe out that far because by the time it gets to anything interesting from an interstellar point of view (Voyager took nearly 25 years to get out of the solar system), we could build something that would launch, travel and pass it and have better sensors too. Any notion of sending these 20-generation, half-the-speed-of-light fanciful starships to other stars is a waste - unless you WANT your great-grandaughter to watch someone overtake them, waving as they go, and realise you are several generations away from your destination, several generations away from the home planet, AND you never got to any real interstellar science while you were travelling.
When something is possible in a generation (or possibly two) then it's worth doing. But it's really embarrassing to spend billions in order to be overtaken by a faster, better, cheaper probe that will get to your destination years before you ever do anything useful and was sent by people who've not had to do with food shortages, oxygen problems, radiation, muscle-weakening, etc.
Given my contact with UK police officers (specifically London ones) in terms of security marking:
I was warned never to go into a police station soon after I'd done the marking because I *WOULD* be pulled as they have UV lights in reception (where they deal with ordinary queries) for just this purpose and I was lighting up like a Christmas tree. They get them as they enter the building. They even stopped the guy who works for the company because the same thing happened when he walked into a station to demonstrate the stuff for them. It's standard procedure to scan ALL recovered property (and even lost property) for UV tracers and has been for a long while.
When something fluoresces that's been recovered / handed in, and they suspect it's stolen, they send it to the labs unless it's just a postcode marker (and then they follow up with anyone who was found with it and/or anyone who comes to claim it) - by that time it's evidence and they have to follow the rules of preservation of evidence. UV lights are standard tests when they raid a property and / or catch someone they think is a thief - they check everything. It's part of the standard "put your belongings on the desk" procedure and also followed up to the issuance of a warrant to search their house under suspicious circumstances. The officers I saw even carried key-fob UV LED's to check things like driving licenses (apparently ours have a security marking that fluoresces). Even my driving instructors and examiner did the same before letting me in the car.
In London, all local police forces know and use SmartWater and will actually attend demo's by the SmartWater people to show how to mark property. Some of the local borough's give it away to their residents. Most security vans now have a big "SmartWater Inside"-type noticeboard, so they use it too. School insurers generally demand that SmartWater is deployed in all schools on any equipment of value. I know - I'm the guy who's had to do it for half-a-dozen schools as part of my IT work and come home covered in UV-flourescent flecks.
Just because your local cops haven't heard of it, doesn't mean that it's not well known in it's home country.
Because 90% of electronics can't run anything off the power supplied from a solar cell. Solar stuff is still inside the calculator / overnight trickle charger range of power.
Hell, it can take 8-10 hours to charge some AA's in some (not entirely dark) countries. If I have one as big as a folded out suitcase, I might *JUST* be able to get enough juice to start my car once if I leave it in direct sunlight for a few hours / days.
Seriously, your average laptop can pull 90W during booting (19V 4.5A isn't unusual on a PSU). To get even 10% of that, you need a good solar cell of a good size - a folded out briefcase sized solar panel gets you about 13W max (and that only at 12V so it would need to be converted up) with a standard product I can buy today - running in good light. On that briefcase I mentioned it says "During peak hours of sunshine, a mobile phone can be charged in an hour.". It weigh 4.5 kg.
You could SMOTHER your 19" screen laptop in solar cells (back and front and inside and out), add several kilos to the weight, leave it with direct sunlight from all directions, and STILL it would be hard pushed to do more than trickle-charge your battery or run an incredibly low power computing device. A single USB port sucks 5V at 500mA = 2.5W. Four USB ports and you're hitting the maximum of that briefcase which has a similar surface area, under theoretically ideal conditions.
Solar is a complete WASTE at the moment because it's nowhere near efficient enough, in terms of energy density, small scale deployments, etc. It can just about so what people now use it for: calculators, a very, very slow trickle charger, a couple of solar lights (almost always LED's so they are as low power as possible) running for a few hours at night after a day of sunshine. When it hits reasonable amounts of power, then you can begin to even think about anything like that.
If you want to get an idea of things like this, buy yourself one of those cheap wind-up / solar / battery torches that you can find cheap. Spend a week using the torch all day / listening to the radio from a 99p set of batteries. Then spend a week doing the same via solar. Then spend a week doing the same by only hand-cranking. The battery will last for possibly months. The solar cell will probably give you a good few hours - if you're lucky in your weather it'll be able to do 24/7 on such a low-power circuit. Hand-cranking will have you worn out by lunchtime. I guarantee you you will find a new respect for the amount of energy in the average set of batteries and the current efficiencies of things like solar cells and cheap electronics.
To summarise: Solar is shit. Most renewable energies are shit. But we're trying to make them better because we've been so spoiled in the last hundred years by simple things like zinc-carbon batteries, let alone anything more modern.
Blizzard Games:
RPM Racing 1991 Never heard of it.
Battle Chess 1992 Bought it. Twice I think.
Battle Chess II 1992 Bought it once as part of a deal. Never played it.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I 1992 Never played it. Never bought it.
Castles (Amiga port) 1992 Bought it, played it, liked it.
MicroLeague Baseball (Amiga port) 1992 Never heard of it.
Lexie-Cross (Macintosh port) 1992 Never heard of it.
Dvorak on Typing (Macintosh port) 1992 Never heard of it.
The Lost Vikings 1992 Played it once I think. Never bought it.
Rock N' Roll Racing 1993 Never bought it.
Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye 1994 Never heard of it.
Blackthorne 1994 Never heard of it.
The Death and Return of Superman 1994 Never heard of it.
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans 1994 Bought it, played it, liked it.
The Lost Vikings II 1995 Never bought it.
Justice League Task Force 1995 Never heard of it.
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness 1995 Bought it, played it, liked it.
Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal 1996 Never bought it.
Diablo 1996 Bought it, played it, liked it.
StarCraft 1998 Bought it, played it, liked it.
StarCraft: Brood War 1998 Bought it, played it, liked it.
Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition 1999 Never bought it.
Diablo II 2000 Never bought it.
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction 2001 Never bought it.
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos 2002 Never bought it.
Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne 2003 Never bought it.
World of Warcraft 2004 Never played it, or even tried it, not even once.
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade 2007 Never played it, or even tried it, not even once.
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King 2008 Never played it, or even tried it, not even once.
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty 2010 Highly unlikely to buy it.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm 2010 Highly unlikely to buy it.
Diablo III Under development Highly unlikely to buy it.
StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm Under development Highly unlikely to buy it.
StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void Under development Highly unlikely to buy it.
I think they lost it over 10 years ago. Why anyone still buys anything from them is beyond me. When the games were fun, when they were original, when they were affordable, and when I could "own" the game, yeah, they were quite good. Now though? I'd rather drop some cash for their 10+ year-old-games from a back catalogue than pay for even one month of their MMORPG or fight to install their latest games.
It's the same with most games companies - some good ideas, some really good games, some takeovers and then crap for the rest of their lives.
If you have a synth that's not very good, or you don't have a synth at all (Timidity springs to mind on Linux - think it's even got a Cygwin port) then why would you care about MIDI in a DOS game either?
First, you need a working sound setup in order to get audio.
Second, you need a working video setup in order to get images.
Third, it's not at all unreasonable to suggest you have a working MIDI synth setup in order to get MIDI sound. How more "pure" can you get in an open-source "emulator" that can't bundle copyrighted sound samples, etc. than by piping the MIDI direct and perfectly to your own system's synth through 20 years of emulated hardware?
Up until this year, I'd never owned a MIDI device. My Soundblaster did whatever it could do back in the day and otherwise I just had integrated sound ever since. I can't ever remember having to turn MIDI off because it was so hideous or refused by some application, or missing out on lots of music. Even today, all of my machines have a Microsoft synthesizer under Windows, or can work with Timidity under Linux, even if they have their own hardware synthesizers. I don't think I've ever had to do *anything* to play a MIDI file. It might not be the same quality but then what you're asking for is a modern-day, high-quality, software MIDI synthesizer that works on all sound cards. That's WAY outside the scope of DOSBox and the second one appears, DOSBox will be able to take immediate advantage of it (hint: It'll probably be a Timidity port). Thing is, nobody's really bothered to make one of those on Windows (at least not a popular / free one) because... well... why would you bother when you have Timidity and the Microsoft synthesizer?
That said, MIDI device quality varies - I now have a MIDI keyboard and so have been playing with various MIDI software and found that some of it actually doesn't like the Microsoft synthesizer (e.g. Piano Booster) but that's more about latency issues because it's extremely finicky about timing than anything else. The recommendation? Use a real synth or get a better software synth, or adjust a manual "delay" setting in the program. You can't expect DOSBox to pick up the slack just because it's vaguely related to gaming when no-one else really has a problem playing MIDI. That's like expecting DOSBox to run every app that Wine can, or to emulate some speech synthesizer hardware even if the DOSBox user doesn't own it. It's silly. It's also like expecting Linux to include it's own MIDI synthesiser.
You have pure MIDI data being thrown out of the program in an unaltered form. Use it. If your sound card is shit, doesn't have a decent synthesizer or otherwise can't handle that pure MIDI data in a way you like, then get a better sound card, or fix MIDI on your computer entirely. Plug in a MIDI device, or a USB sound card that *does* have a proper MIDI synth. You'll be hard pressed to find anything non-professional because, to 99.9% of people, a MIDI rendition is a MIDI rendition.
Besides that, there is no "definitive" rendition of a set of MIDI data. It's *always* depended on the exact synthesizer and sound fonts used. There is no one hardware to pick and say "that makes the right MIDI noise for this game", so emulation is a completely moving target anyway. If you had a Sound Galaxy NX Pro (great card!) you would get a different MIDI experience to a genuine SoundBlaster's. Plug that MIDI data out through the most expensive professional MIDI keyboard and it would sound totally different again.
MIDI is a steam of notes, instrument names and timings. That stream of notes and timings is passed, unaltered, to a device that can play them. DOSBox has done it's job. Everything else is a matter of turning those notes, names and timings into something approximating the sound produced by that instrument in real life playing at that frequency. It's an OS / sound system issue, not an application issue. If double-clicking a MIDI on a webpage sounds shit, then playing a DOSBox MIDI sound will sound shit to
Of everything. Because this is a fine mist that will stick to everything, even your hands, shoes, clothes, socks, the bag, the tools, the stolen property. So you'd need to do a job and then ditch everything you have in a forensically secure way. I've used a similar competing product called SmartWater.
The beauty of things like SmartWater is that its a suspension of fine molecules that can be *uniquely* identified to a particular user (i.e. you get a coded bottle with a unique number and a unique solution). The UV is just there to light up when people go through police stations but the chemical itself is, supposedly, uniquely identifiable.
Answering "How did you come to have UV marker solution on your clothes?" is easy. You were security marking your own equipment, you work with the stuff all the time, it must have been on something you picked up, maybe someone was playing a prank. Answering "How did you come to have a UV marker solution on the clothes you wore last night that is ONLY issued to Company X, when there was a burglary at Company X last night, when you claim to have been at home and never near Company X?" is a bit more tricky, especially if it's a fine mist that soaks into anything and everything it touches.
I've used the SmartWater stuff, which is very similar to this, and it's a wonderful deterrent. They claim to have a 100% conviction rate when property / people are found by police with SmartWater on them and given that they are often used in bank security vans, that's quite impressive. I don't know if that was true, or still is, but it's plausible. Basically if the police find the tiniest forensic trace of that stuff on property / people they question, they can take a sample, send it to the company, who will tell them who bought that EXACT pot of tracer ink. I also know from experience that a 50ml pot of SmartWater is enough to chemically mark every PC or electrical item in a school several times a year and last several years.
This stuff isn't just a UV-tracer. It puts you, forensically, at the exact scene of a particular crime. And given that I know of no lawsuits with any of these stuff being in question, they must have a pretty cast-iron chemical description that can satisfy a court of law or, at least, people who are caught with it on their clothes that it wouldn't be worth challenging.
It's also very good for equipment recovery. It basically guarantees identificiation / return of stolen property if it comes into police hands. Before, even if your stuff was security marked, it wasn't guaranteed that you would get it back (the first thing is that people try to file off the security marks - I've had police tell me of cases where they had to return goods with obviously filed-off security marks because they couldn't prove it WASN'T the suspected thieves and couldn't trace the actual owner), but with SmartWater once it's in police possession even the smallest tiny speck of SmartWater (which can be deployed even on hard-to-cleanse areas like across the PCB's of (unpowered) motherboards) or similar will link it to it's owner.
I manage school networks. I've yet to see a system that didn't use any and all available disk space within the server's / disk's / NAS's lifetime without having to enforce quota.
Bear in mind, then, that we're not talking gigabytes of porn, games, music, etc. and yet it all got filled. When the servers were specced, 500Gb was "enough" for 1000 users (ordinary, inner-city, secondary school). Now they're buying TB hard drives and RAID'ing them together, with many servers offering file storage, but it's still difficult to keep all profiles on a single server.
3Tb is nothing. I have set up systems for *primary* schools where a hot-copy of their server hard drives (for rapid-restore, slow-spool-to-tape/cloud, etc.) just in their current state tops more than 3Tb compressed. They don't do fancy video editing, or huge music recording, just documents, critical school databases (cleansed every September for anything over 4 years old), and their usual programs. Some schools buy networked content servers to save their Internet bandwidth (literally a 250Gb Linux cache with Apache so they access local Flash resources sucked from an online repository overnight), some do video editing or podcasting, etc. And we're still talking about PRIMARY schools here.
3Tb in RAID5 is only 6Tb. That's 6000Gb. In my job, that's about right for the next, say, 4-5 years and then we'll be back to the usual struggle. The average server has several hundred Gb of data today, not counting redundant information, empty space, etc. Run any sort of imaging / thin-client setup, and you're suddenly storing client images too. Have networked programs and you're storing those for everybody too. It's common to have network-setups of everything so that installation is quick and easy (e.g. Office can be installed with keys and pre-set options from a fileshare). Have backups and you often need staging areas for them to be written to (most places I've worked in, I've set it to backup to tape/off-site storage and also to save a copy for a quick local restore). That's before you even get into multiple servers, backing them up to each other (not backing up their backups, of course), things like VMWare snapshots or Ghost images, etc. Hell a decent clipart setup can run to two-figures of Gb. If you're into backing up very expensive course material, teacher training videos, etc. that you have school licenses for, that's 9Gb per DVD.
And a school isn't exactly an "unusual" scenario.
Personally, I've got about 3Tb of storage just in an old Linux machine that holds things I'd rather not delete (programming code, huge downloads, Wine bottles, QEMU images, etc.). It's got 6 drives and about 20-something partitions. I could probably use 3Tb drives in a RAID5 just to upgrade that one machine to something more secure and still not have much space left.
Some people use their computers for access. Some use them to process data and then discard it. Some use them for creation. Some use them for storage. Every single computer I've ever owned has run out of disk space before any other part of it was considered obsolete (and I go back to 20Mb hard drives). Hell, I could do several hundred Gb's just downloading everything I own on Steam into the client, let alone them backing that stuff up into its Steam-created restoration programs. My current laptop is 320Gb, of which about 10 is free and that's because I keep sacrificing games that I haven't played in a while to Steam backups.
3Tb is nothing, and by the time these are affordable (to me, that means under £100), I'll be wanting one in my laptop.
A cycle to detect hardware changes - like hotplug. So you want some sort of program running on the chip in order to perform this cycle on power-on / resume (let's call it a BIOS). And when you boot the machine in that program, it might not have ANY of the original hardware it thought, your boot drive may be on a device that wasn't invented when the OS was written / machine was built, the PCI ID's might have shifted, or just random fluctuations in the cable meant it was detected second instead of first amongst all the other devices. So it has to either hotplug or remember to initialise everything it last saw. Initialising hardware that isn't there is dangerous (read: permanent hang before you get anywhere), so you have to check it's there first. So now you have to check that everything you expected is there on boot before initialising it, relying on it being there or trying to continue in the boot anyway, because you might have moved the main OS onto a hard drive that the original BIOS didn't support. You just turned it into an ordinary "hotplug" generic system, you have to wait for buses to settle, timeouts to occur, etc.etc.etc. all the usual stuff before you can continue booting.
Caching hardware initialisation isn't what we're talking about here. That's possible but it still requires getting that cache from somewhere (like, say, initialising a disk to read it from, or some NVRAM). You then still have to check it's correct on any system where the hardware can fluctuare. We're talking about instead using hardware that needs the absolute minimum of intiailisation in the first place if that's what you want and LOCKING down what hardware you can boot from. If you don't do that, you have a generic system, if you do then *obviously* you can optimise it.
The early EEEPC's had one of the first solid state disks soldered to its board. Replacing that disk isn't possible (I'm not even sure it uses IDE interfaces). Thus the BIOS people can take some liberties in initialisation, startup times, things they do when booting, the order of boot etc. If / when you replaced that original disk with a hard disk or "modern" removable SSD (something that Asus did itself in later models), chances are nothing would boot / work without changing those assumptions. You either design to the hardware and avoid initialisations by taking your knowledge and assuming it to be true, or you have to probe, monitor, inspect and regenerate all the time.
I'm not saying you *can't* have a system that does that, I'm just saying that it's generally a trade-off rather than a binary decision, and it's sometimes a trade-off that can't have all the best parts (e.g. fast boot time and generic hardware for the boot drive). Laptops can do standby, hibernate and resume NOW, but you'll find if you look through something like the Linux resume code that it spends most of the resume time reinitialising hardware and making sure nothing too drastic has changed (try swapping the boot drive for a different model with the same data while a machine is asleep, or cutting the amount of RAM, or all manner of changes). Rare events but you have to constantly check for them every time you resume which means initialising a damn lot of things very carefully and making NO assumptions.
Standard, generic, PC components often require extensive initialisation code (hell, even my wireless needs a firmware dump because it's just a dumb device up until that point, same for lots of USB devices like the USB keys that pretend to be CD's). All that hardware (not all of it actually inside a PC) has to change before you can make a PC an insta-boot device, or you can just say "I only support this disk to boot from" and its equivalents, which locks you into a set of hardware. There's nothing wrong with either, depending on the circumstances, but wanting both isn't trivially possible without changing an incredible amount of hardware, protocols and electrical interfaces beforehand.
How many cycles does it take to initialise a SATA disk to the point it can be booted from? I have no idea. I'm guessing it's a non-zero amount, though. I know that things like USB, PCI and SCSI have implicit timing in their protocols that means there is an upper limit to just how quickly you can bring them up safely.
Computers needing to "boot" is a relatively modern invention caused in part by hardware hotplug, backwards compatibility modes and reliability checks.
Most of the boot process is:
- Moving out of legacy modes (e.g. enabling increased capabilities from basic instructions sets to full modern ones, enabling different memory access models, enabling 64-bit etc.), ramping up core speed, enabling things like DMA and moving from "safe" memory timings to those that the chips report they can support when the negotiations finally take place, bringing up the non-boot CPU's, etc.
- Contention. Doing only a certain number of things on the bus at any one time, making the buses serial, making the buses have sub-buses and other ideas. Sometimes there is no quicker way to do things. Sometimes it *will* take 1000ms before the disk will respond that it's up to speed.
- Checking that RAM does indeed do what it's told, that a boot loader is present, that a floppy is present (yes, even on some modern BIOS's), checking IDE/SATA channels and retrieving capabilities, checking memory timings, checking PCI and USB buses, checking that disks are spinning, etc.
Some of my servers take up to 3 minutes to get to the point where they can actually load the first byte from disk to begin loading it. A lot of this time is BIOS handoff to the BIOS on the RAID cards (and sometimes the network cards), those RAID cards checking, assembling and enabling the drives, etc. With two RAID cards, we've just nearly doubled boot time. Proper (reasonable) memory checks of several GB of RAM still takes a while, even for a simple test. And yet there's still a minute or so of absolute complete waste as we start in some 8086 legacy mode and slowly have to ramp up disks, cards and our own CPU's, not to mention external hardware like USB and DVD drives "just in case". And then the OS has to go and do it all itself again later anyway.
This is why things like the LinuxBIOS (now called Coreboot) project actually work better and faster - when we KNOW what the BIOS needs to do, we find that lots of it is done twice, lots of it are unnecessary, lots of it can be delayed until we actually NEED the DVD drive, some of it can occur in the background because it will ALWAYS take a long time to start etc. But how many fixed sets of hardware does that project actually work on? Few. Because not only is it tricky to do that sort of analysis, but it's tricky to lock-down exactly what the BIOS needs to do and do better than the original BIOS.
We can have an "instant on" computer. It's easy. My ZX Spectrum did it nearly 30 years ago. My calculator does it now. The Psion organisers all did it. Most portable games consoles manage it. The thing you have to realise though is that it means: booting into a single, fixed OS that's tricky to upgrade, making power management apply to every process perfectly, fixing a set of hardware down that we know can always boot into a certain configuration very quickly, changing the way that all our chips work so they start in their best mode, not their worst (and thus probably destroying things like OS installers as we know them and making them specific to a machine type - no more installers modern OS on old computers, or old OS on modern computers), removing any sort of consistency checks and having to rely on things not going wrong or the hardware being able to handle all hardware errors (e.g. ECC memory for everything with reporting of anything it can't handle), and building every component so it doesn't "negotiate" or "initialise" but just works (e.g. even a keyboard controller can take some time to come back online at the moment, not to mention graphics, disks, USB buses, etc.).
Instant-on computers are always possible, and some of them are very useful for certain things. But generic PC's and instant-on won't happen until CPU's, disks and bus negotiations take literally fractions of a second for any operation (and thus we still do as many instructions to initialise but they take clock cycles
Oh, just needed to add several completely unresearched points to this (given that you included several of your own earlier).
It's a popular belief that it's the *exclusion* of certain foods, especially during pregnancy / breastfeeding that forms intolerances in children. For instance, the recent spate of nut allergies is being ascribed to the almost global advice not to eat nuts during pregnancy or while breastfeeding. We didn't have that advice 50 years ago and we didn't have anywhere near as many nut allergies in infants. Some scientists are saying that this is absolute madness in medical terms to advise this because nuts would be part of our natural diet as they are for some apes (though probably not honey-roasted). Not exposing the child to the biological derivatives of digested nuts makes them unable to cope with them on initial exposure. Further isolation when a reaction DOES occur makes the child completely allergic. Whereas even the most dangerously nut-allergic person can be brought back to normality by tiny but gradually-increasing exposure to... guess what... nuts. Recent studies have shown that starting with microscopic quantities and gradually building immunity has allowed someone who was at risk of death from a nut reaction to get to the point where they were eating 8-9 nuts per day without any ill effects.
Things like asthma, hayfever, etc. are believed to be an over-exposure to modern pollutants OR an under-exposure to actual ordinary air with good old pollen in it. Carpets, with too much stored human dust, are pointed at as a factor in asthma but so are modern cleaning sprays. Carpets, dust and dirt have been around a lot longer. Antibacterial hand-wipes have not. Pollen's been around for millions of years, since before humans existed. It's unlikely that we're naturally *that* in contradiction with something we've always been constantly exposed to until recently.
It's over- AND under-exposure to any substances that causes problems, on the whole. Like everything in life - moderation is the key.
I deliberately and wilfully made my wife eats nuts during her pregnancy and breastfeeding, in ordinary quantities. I deliberately and wilfully pressed a nut to the skin of the leg of my 1 week old to see if she was allergic (better to know then than be caught off-guard later) and to develop her immunities if not. My wife is allergic to lots of things, and asthamatic (we can place some symptoms of hers to over-exposure to household cleaning spray when she was little, believe it or not). I have no allergy or reaction to anything (worse that happens is a bit of diahorreah for some dodgy food - I drink the water wherever I go, I happily crunch their ice cubes, eat the salad, etc.). My daughter has no allergy or intolerance that we can discover at all yet and eats everything under the sun (including things I don't like myself). Either that means it's genetic (thus avoiding any sort of food / drink unless you KNOW you're already intolerant is nonsense) or it's environment (and thus ordinary exposure to things that ordinary humans have been okay to eat/breathe for years is required).
In fact, my daughter had swine flu when she was less than a year old and we didn't realise what it was until I caught it from her and was diagnosed with it, because her symptoms were so well handled by her immune system. (I threw the government-issued Tamiflu in the bin and just quarantined myself - none of my family caught the bug and within a few days it was gone but the quarantine held and I never ended up infecting anyone else).
Talking of honey, it's also believed to be extremely beneficial in terms of hayfever and other similar allergies because local honey often contains significant amounts of local pollen and thus exposure (but not OVER-exposure) to local honey makes people more immune to their surroundings and thus less bad reactions. I know people who avoid honey when pregnant because of this crap and their children end up with hayfever.
Your body is a wonderful biolog
I call crap, given that UHT milk is actually not as popular in the UK (less than 8% of all our milk compared to Spain at 95.7%) but we still have stupidly high instances of lactose intolerance (I work in a school and have to deal with the allergy / intolerance lists). It may be a *factor* but it's certainly nowhere near being a huge culprit as you make out.
It doesn't make the milk inedible (not significantly), or your own bacteria would get no nutrition from drinking it. It merely makes the milk almost sterile so that if it's then hermetically sealed it takes a LOT of time for bacteria to take hold in significant numbers (read: billions) again, like it would in normal milk in only a day or two outside the refridgerator. It's a preservative technique that uses "ultra-high" temperatures of about 130 degrees C that are achievable in a household kettle, or even more easily in a saucepan without burning the milk (so long as you keep stirring). Don't believe the crap you're spouting, there in no material change in the structure of the milk at all, except to reduce the number of bacteria already present.
Next time, do a wiki search or, even better, ask a food scientist before you assume that what someone tells you about some common household product is true.
I wouldn't, even as a lowly intern (i.e. zero responsibility) for extreme amounts of pay. Make of that what you will. I did apply to Google for a datacenter job once but, let's be honest, so did a few thousand others no matter what the position. But MS? Beat a path to my door, offer me 50% stock, I don't really care - *if* I took the job it would be only to cash in on it immediately and I'd do the legal minimum necessary, but to actually WORK for them? Nope. Having said this I've probably ruined any chance of actually working for them anyway (as if being a Slashdot regular wouldn't rule you out immediately), and do I care? No, not really. Do they care? Probably not either.
I made a rule for myself when I left uni - never work for anyone that doesn't appreciate you. It's served me well through my own business (yes, I told customers to bugger off because I didn't like the way they were treating me - still made money, though!) and later employment and I've never had more than a week or so of unhappiness with a job in the 10+ years since - and you couldn't pay me enough to suffer that. I had workplaces change, even people change, to become less hospitable and almost immediately I provided the necessary minimum notice and left for somewhere else - usually for more pay, and more appreciation, and never have a problem finding the next job (I consider a 2-3 week window between jobs HUGE and the past three employments I've had my previous / new employers fighting over me for months and/or I have a definite job offer on the table before my existing employer even knows I'm looking - the new employer would know that I wasn't on notice when they offered the job, but they never cared about that, and I would eventually give due notice to my current employer, but I see that as my skills being in demand).
I trash Microsoft for making shitty products. I do it as a living, in fact. I also avoid Microsoft products where I can because of this (unfortunately, I work with established AD domains a lot on a contract basis so I can't really avoid Windows, but I have converted several schools to much better products - latest was an installation of OpenOffice in a private school that could EASILY afford site licences for Office but saw the actual benefits of Open software after several little chats). I would also avoid MS as an employer, because I know that even if the job is interesting, the tech is cool, the project was the best in the world, the colleagues were fabulous, the money was ludicrous, that I would have to eventually follow some horribly contrived mission statement, or ill-thought-out company policy (can you use Linux machines as an MS employee without working in their "Linux lab"? What about Firefox? What if I deliberately choose not to use the MS tools and/or develop cross-platform tools to get my job done? Can't see MS releasing those to the public, or even allowing them in the first place), or whatever new management fad is doing the rounds in those-above-me's golfing circles.
Not everyone sells out for the money. If they do, there's still a limit to what they would do for the money and that might be much lower than you think. But, to be honest, I hereby publicly state that MS can keep all their jobs. I actually make MORE money from going in, fixing up their messes and putting people on the alternatives, and I specialise in mainstream UK schools. The crappier they are, the more I make (Windows Vista and 7 "upgrades" have been an absolute god-send!). But, hell, I turn down jobs because I don't like the approaches of my predecessor there, or because the guy in charge that I would never have to talk to is a complete scumbag, or (another real-world example for me) because it means working for a school that think it's okay to spend £100,000 on upgrading a perfectly good network (and nearly the same again on a network manager) when the kids don't have exercise books to write in. That manager would have been me, but I told them to stick it and went to work for a primary school for 2 years.