if the author is to be believed, all she did was take the claims of people who were working at Area 51 at the time and wrote a book on what they said to her. Blame those guys.
No, I blame the author, who wrote a book based entirely on 100% unsubstantiated, unverified nonsense.
I recently heard an interview with Annie Jacobsen and this book is a huge load of crap. It's all based on third-hand information ("I was told by someone, who was told by someone...."). She claims that the aircraft was being remotely piloted by the Soviets and contained people, who appeared to be 12-13 years old, who had been genetically engineered by Josef Mengele (who went to work for the Soviets after the end of WWI) to look like aliens.. Of course she had no explanation of how Mengele genetically engineered a few 12-13 year old people in the 2 years between the end of WWII and the crash at Roswell. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and technology for genetic engineering didn't exist at that time. She never did answer questions about the people in the aircraft -- did the US recover them? Were they alive? Were they dead? She just changed the subject and started talking about something else.
The entire interview was nothing but weasel words and lots of backpedaling whenever she was asked about specific details.
The problem with Ballmer is that he's a strictly corporate type, with no real vision of his own. All of his decisions are informed by corporate thinking, which means he looks at already established and emerging markets and reacts to them. Unfortunately, by the time MS has created a product in reaction to the market the market is already dominated by someone else and/or the public rejects the MS product due to the perception of MS being uncool.
MS has had very little forward-thinking tech make it to the mainstream in the past 20 years considering the size and and intellectual resources at its disposal, and I believe this is what Einhorn is addressing. What MS needs is a leader who can leverage the best and brightest in the company and allow the best ideas (and there's a lot of great ideas floating around in their labs) to see daylight and be marketed properly.
The problem is not a lack of vision -- the problem is a lack of a strong competent leader.
For example, a group within Microsoft developed a tablet before Apple came out with the iPad. When the head of the division went to Ballmer for funding to bring the product to market Ballmer killed it. Why? Because the tablet ran a version of Windows and Microsoft's Windows group complained that the tablet group was infringing on "their territory". It's this type of thinking and management incompetence that has caused Microsoft's problems.
So now when a novice user, who doesn't know any better, has to choose between the more expense Mac vs a cheaper PC, will the remaining key selling points be enough to entice them to pay the higher premium? Many people switch solely on the reason of not dealing with virii/malware, but now that they will have to deal with that (whether or not it's true is irrelevant as in many novices minds Macs are now vulnerable) they might just stick with their PC.
Bottom line - this is going to really hurt Apple a lot more than most people realize, as they will no longer have the novice users switching just to avoid virii and malware. Apple's "cloak of invulnerability" has been removed...and whether the remaining key selling points will sustain them remains to be seen.
Anyone with a basic understanding of computers has long known that "no Mac viruses" has simply meant "nobody gives a shit about Macs"
"TVs and Blu-ray players can't possibly provide the flexibility to serve as the platform for delivering rapidly evolving technologies to the early adopters who represent the testbed for all this innovation."
WTF does that even mean? A TV that can make an IP connection to the Internet can play streaming video just as well as any other device.
Apparently this is all based on a post by David Regev on a Mozilla Lab blog. It is not an official statement from Mozilla, but they don't seem to be disagreeing with it either. After reading it I can only say that he is insane. Here are some of my favorite parts:
"The location bar has to go. It has many problems. For one, it’s always visible and constantly takes up a large amount of space."
A lot of space? What? It's a few pixels. Are you using a 15 inch monitor from 1987?
it’s hard to read, since people don’t really understand URLs.
WTF?
"it’s modal: it has a mode for displaying the current page’s location and a mode for entering your next destination. It’s not always immediately obvious which mode you’re in and what the current text is indicating"
WTF? If you put your cursor in the URL bar and start typing something it's pretty easy to figure out what "mode" you are in.
Regev suggests to replace the URL bar with a browse command
LOL. The latest GUI innovation -- a command line!!
Nothing gets under my skin more than devs who like to follow the latest trends without considering whether what they are doing actually delivers concrete value to the end user or at least makes the codebase more maintainable in a real measurable way. Newer is not always better.
I understand when a commercial software company (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) does this. They must constantly release "new" versions of their products in order to generate sales. Constantly changing things, re-arranging the entire program and constantly "fixing" things that aren't broken is stupid, but I understand why they do it.
Using this approach with Firefox, however, makes absolutely no sense at all. Firefox is given away for free. There is no sales revenue. Mozilla may get money from Google for making them the default search engine in Firefox, but that will happen regardless of any changes that are made toFirefox.
Firefox 2.0, which was released several years ago, was feature-complete as a web browser. Since then, their focus should have been strictly on things that are "under the hood" -- (a) fix any security holes or other bugs that are discovered (b ) improve rendering speed (javascript, etc).and memory use (3) When needed add new stuff that comes along (HTML 5, etc).
That's it. Period.
There is no need to constantly fuck with the user interface, adding pointless crap, removing useful features.
- Ask me where I want to save things instead of just dumping things in a folder
That option already exists, and has for a long time. Tools -> Options -> General -> Always ask me where to save files
- history off by default (who uses that?)
I do. A lot.
So how about a fork of Firefox for sane people?
I have thought the same thing for a long time. I would love to see a fork of Firefox that undoes all the stupid bullshit and all the "we have to imitate Google Chrome" nonsense. However, if you spend some time with Firefox's train-wreck source code (some of which dates back to 1999), and the insanely complicated, convoluted build process that would make Rube Goldberg vomit, you will quickly lose interest in creating your own fork of Firefox.
The only people opposed to multiple monitors are people who have never done serious work on a multi-monitor setup. But there's a bigger issue. If your employer wont provide you with a second (or third) monitor, or, takes away one of your monitors to give to the accounting department, all because they won't spend a lousy $200 then you've got a much bigger problem.
Rent movies cheaply (ie Redbox for $1), Rip to HDD, return movie, then encode to DivX or other bitrate-efficient codec. Only costs $1 per movie, and is 100% offline and thus untraceable.
As much as I hate these lawsuits, I really don't feel sorry for the people getting sued. There are plenty of ways to get movies really cheap, or even free, without getting sued. And seriously, are you really that desperate for "entertainment" (and I use that term VERY loosely) that you're downloading some shitty Sylverster Stallone movie? WTF?
Paying out extortion money, which guarantees that there will be more extortion demands in the future, does absolutely nothing to maximize shareholder value. Also, what amount of dividends does Redhat pay to it's stockholders? Answer -- zero. So much for "shareholder value".
Seriously. Does he really not understand that paying the troll only serves to perpetuate the troll and results in everyone having to continually pay out extortion settlements.
It has been revealed that the whole problem began when a PSN admin inserted a Sony music CD. The installed rootkit then allowed hackers to access the network.
Myspace could try to reinvent itself as a simple, open platform that promises not to make their service an ad-serving platform.
Not going to happen. Whoever buys MySpace will have spent $100M and they are going to be looking for a return on their investment. That means ads, ads and more ads.
You don't have permission to access/blog/2011/04/ocr-quality-of-google-docs on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Nice link, asshole.
Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around
on
Novell Completes Sale
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.
Microsoft really had nothing to do with Wordperfect's death. They were far and away the number one DOS word processor and felt they could ignore that newfangled Windows thing that came along. By the time they realized that Windows wasn't a passing fad, it was too late. And it didn't help that their intial Windows versions were crap.
Novell bought Wordperfect for $800 Million and just a couple of years later sold it to Corel for $200 Million. Then a few years later Corel (the entire company) was sold for $200 million.
Funny you should say that, because there's a post from Linus Torvalds on kerneltrap.org in which he says that that Linux is Unix. Unfortunately, the entire kerneltrap.org site seems to be down right now, but if it ever comes back up you can find his post here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/11
This incident illustrates once again why you need to put your stuff on your own servers and not someone else's. All computer systems will fail occasionally. There's no such thing as 100% uptime. However, when your own servers fail you can get your own people working on it right away and it's their number one priority. When your stuff is on someone else's servers, you're at their mercy. It will get fixed when they get around to it, and, they have more customers than just you, so you might not be first on the priority list. Or second. Or third. Or tenth.
Slashdot Mirror
if the author is to be believed, all she did was take the claims of people who were working at Area 51 at the time and wrote a book on what they said to her. Blame those guys.
No, I blame the author, who wrote a book based entirely on 100% unsubstantiated, unverified nonsense.
I recently heard an interview with Annie Jacobsen and this book is a huge load of crap. It's all based on third-hand information ("I was told by someone, who was told by someone...."). She claims that the aircraft was being remotely piloted by the Soviets and contained people, who appeared to be 12-13 years old, who had been genetically engineered by Josef Mengele (who went to work for the Soviets after the end of WWI) to look like aliens.. Of course she had no explanation of how Mengele genetically engineered a few 12-13 year old people in the 2 years between the end of WWII and the crash at Roswell. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and technology for genetic engineering didn't exist at that time. She never did answer questions about the people in the aircraft -- did the US recover them? Were they alive? Were they dead? She just changed the subject and started talking about something else.
The entire interview was nothing but weasel words and lots of backpedaling whenever she was asked about specific details.
1. Bill Gates is Chairman of the Board of Directors
2. Bill Gates is Microsoft's largest shareholder
3. Steve Ballmer was Best Man at Bill Gates' wedding
Unless Steve Ballmer gets hit by a bus, he isn't going anywhere.
The problem with Ballmer is that he's a strictly corporate type, with no real vision of his own. All of his decisions are informed by corporate thinking, which means he looks at already established and emerging markets and reacts to them. Unfortunately, by the time MS has created a product in reaction to the market the market is already dominated by someone else and/or the public rejects the MS product due to the perception of MS being uncool.
MS has had very little forward-thinking tech make it to the mainstream in the past 20 years considering the size and and intellectual resources at its disposal, and I believe this is what Einhorn is addressing. What MS needs is a leader who can leverage the best and brightest in the company and allow the best ideas (and there's a lot of great ideas floating around in their labs) to see daylight and be marketed properly.
The problem is not a lack of vision -- the problem is a lack of a strong competent leader.
For example, a group within Microsoft developed a tablet before Apple came out with the iPad. When the head of the division went to Ballmer for funding to bring the product to market Ballmer killed it. Why? Because the tablet ran a version of Windows and Microsoft's Windows group complained that the tablet group was infringing on "their territory". It's this type of thinking and management incompetence that has caused Microsoft's problems.
So now when a novice user, who doesn't know any better, has to choose between the more expense Mac vs a cheaper PC, will the remaining key selling points be enough to entice them to pay the higher premium? Many people switch solely on the reason of not dealing with virii/malware, but now that they will have to deal with that (whether or not it's true is irrelevant as in many novices minds Macs are now vulnerable) they might just stick with their PC.
Bottom line - this is going to really hurt Apple a lot more than most people realize, as they will no longer have the novice users switching just to avoid virii and malware. Apple's "cloak of invulnerability" has been removed...and whether the remaining key selling points will sustain them remains to be seen.
Anyone with a basic understanding of computers has long known that "no Mac viruses" has simply meant "nobody gives a shit about Macs"
"TVs and Blu-ray players can't possibly provide the flexibility to serve as the platform for delivering rapidly evolving technologies to the early adopters who represent the testbed for all this innovation."
WTF does that even mean? A TV that can make an IP connection to the Internet can play streaming video just as well as any other device.
Apparently this is all based on a post by David Regev on a Mozilla Lab blog. It is not an official statement from Mozilla, but they don't seem to be disagreeing with it either. After reading it I can only say that he is insane. Here are some of my favorite parts:
"The location bar has to go. It has many problems. For one, it’s always visible and constantly takes up a large amount of space."
A lot of space? What? It's a few pixels. Are you using a 15 inch monitor from 1987?
it’s hard to read, since people don’t really understand URLs.
WTF?
"it’s modal: it has a mode for displaying the current page’s location and a mode for entering your next destination. It’s not always immediately obvious which mode you’re in and what the current text is indicating"
WTF? If you put your cursor in the URL bar and start typing something it's pretty easy to figure out what "mode" you are in.
Regev suggests to replace the URL bar with a browse command
LOL. The latest GUI innovation -- a command line!!
Nothing gets under my skin more than devs who like to follow the latest trends without considering whether what they are doing actually delivers concrete value to the end user or at least makes the codebase more maintainable in a real measurable way. Newer is not always better.
I understand when a commercial software company (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) does this. They must constantly release "new" versions of their products in order to generate sales. Constantly changing things, re-arranging the entire program and constantly "fixing" things that aren't broken is stupid, but I understand why they do it.
Using this approach with Firefox, however, makes absolutely no sense at all. Firefox is given away for free. There is no sales revenue. Mozilla may get money from Google for making them the default search engine in Firefox, but that will happen regardless of any changes that are made toFirefox.
Firefox 2.0, which was released several years ago, was feature-complete as a web browser. Since then, their focus should have been strictly on things that are "under the hood" -- (a) fix any security holes or other bugs that are discovered (b ) improve rendering speed (javascript, etc).and memory use (3) When needed add new stuff that comes along (HTML 5, etc).
That's it. Period.
There is no need to constantly fuck with the user interface, adding pointless crap, removing useful features.
When you lack inspiration, fix something that isn't broken!
Sadly, this seems to be exactly the philosophy of the Firefox developers. Along with "we must imitate everything Google Chrome does".
- Ask me where I want to save things instead of just dumping things in a folder
That option already exists, and has for a long time. Tools -> Options -> General -> Always ask me where to save files
- history off by default (who uses that?)
I do. A lot.
So how about a fork of Firefox for sane people?
I have thought the same thing for a long time. I would love to see a fork of Firefox that undoes all the stupid bullshit and all the "we have to imitate Google Chrome" nonsense. However, if you spend some time with Firefox's train-wreck source code (some of which dates back to 1999), and the insanely complicated, convoluted build process that would make Rube Goldberg vomit, you will quickly lose interest in creating your own fork of Firefox.
notice that the grant is only for non-profit organizations."
You mean like the National Football league which makes billions of dollars a year and is a 501(c)6 designated nonprofit organization?
The only people opposed to multiple monitors are people who have never done serious work on a multi-monitor setup. But there's a bigger issue. If your employer wont provide you with a second (or third) monitor, or, takes away one of your monitors to give to the accounting department, all because they won't spend a lousy $200 then you've got a much bigger problem.
And how is the world economy going to function with a currency that maxes out at 21 million?
And that 21 million won't be reached for another 130 years. Bitcoin is some sort of retarded joke.
You seem to be saying that stealing the porn on someone's PC is more egregious than stealing financial information/credit card numbers etc...
Depending on the porn . . . . yes.
Rent movies cheaply (ie Redbox for $1), Rip to HDD, return movie, then encode to DivX or other bitrate-efficient codec. Only costs $1 per movie, and is 100% offline and thus untraceable.
As much as I hate these lawsuits, I really don't feel sorry for the people getting sued. There are plenty of ways to get movies really cheap, or even free, without getting sued. And seriously, are you really that desperate for "entertainment" (and I use that term VERY loosely) that you're downloading some shitty Sylverster Stallone movie? WTF?
And really, we should change our legal system such that the losing party pays all costs.
Sure. Right On!!
Because in every legal case the person who is right always wins and evil scumbags with lots of money always lose.
His job is to maximize shareholder value.
Paying out extortion money, which guarantees that there will be more extortion demands in the future, does absolutely nothing to maximize shareholder value. Also, what amount of dividends does Redhat pay to it's stockholders? Answer -- zero. So much for "shareholder value".
Seriously. Does he really not understand that paying the troll only serves to perpetuate the troll and results in everyone having to continually pay out extortion settlements.
WTF?
It has been revealed that the whole problem began when a PSN admin inserted a Sony music CD. The installed rootkit then allowed hackers to access the network.
Myspace could try to reinvent itself as a simple, open platform that promises not to make their service an ad-serving platform.
Not going to happen. Whoever buys MySpace will have spent $100M and they are going to be looking for a return on their investment. That means ads, ads and more ads.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /blog/2011/04/ocr-quality-of-google-docs on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Nice link, asshole.
Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.
Now I remember, Corel bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around.
Microsoft really had nothing to do with Wordperfect's death. They were far and away the number one DOS word processor and felt they could ignore that newfangled Windows thing that came along. By the time they realized that Windows wasn't a passing fad, it was too late. And it didn't help that their intial Windows versions were crap.
Novell bought Wordperfect for $800 Million and just a couple of years later sold it to Corel for $200 Million. Then a few years later Corel (the entire company) was sold for $200 million.
And Linux Is Not UniX.
Funny you should say that, because there's a post from Linus Torvalds on kerneltrap.org in which he says that that Linux is Unix. Unfortunately, the entire kerneltrap.org site seems to be down right now, but if it ever comes back up you can find his post here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/11
you own a Casio F-91W wristwatch.
Coming soon, more standup comedy from Mohammed Foxworthy.
This incident illustrates once again why you need to put your stuff on your own servers and not someone else's. All computer systems will fail occasionally. There's no such thing as 100% uptime. However, when your own servers fail you can get your own people working on it right away and it's their number one priority. When your stuff is on someone else's servers, you're at their mercy. It will get fixed when they get around to it, and, they have more customers than just you, so you might not be first on the priority list. Or second. Or third. Or tenth.