*shrug* - I live near Portland, and even under a fully cloudy day (we get those as often as you do), you can still eke out enough light to get a good amount of output - just have to oversize things a bit.
However, I never said that it were any sort of universal solution, and I agree with your post otherwise.
...so how much of that cost was in fending off lawsuits, and putting up with bucketloads of other legal (and not-so-legal) obstruction?
Seriously - they were working on this thing 20+ years ago. Most of the time it was held up, off and on, due to lawsuits, protests, demands for still more environmental impact statements...
Shit, I wouldn't be surprised if at least $5bn of the total cost-to-date wasn't spent in legal fees, money paid to contractors (and their employees) who were forced to sit idle while awaiting the outcome of an injunction, and various other BS shenanigans.
Dunno about the others, but I call bullshit on this bit:
Solar panels huge enough to collect loads of energy also cool the ground underneath them; changing climate patterns. And they kill what lives under them. (And if you put them in space, then you have the little problem of transporting the energy.)
Err, no. * The panels themselves bear and handle the heat. It isn't as if you're instantly piping all the heat somewhere else, since the panels are bolted to the ground.
* Shade does not automatically kill everything. You won't find plants under one which demand full sunlight, but anything else (especially animals) would probably appreciate and take advantage of the shade. Finally, if you park the panels in the desert (where nearly nothing grows anyway), it's not even a worry.
Pretty much, yeah. When you're one of the big guys in the prez' coterie, you get what you want, and Reid (D, NV) got what he wanted....of course, we still have to figure out where to put all the $#@%^! nuclear waste, but you know, at least Reid got what he wanted.
I propose we bury it in LA County, specifically Hollywood - earthquakes be damned.
If you seize or sink domestic-flagged ships on the high seas (and especially strand the crew), it would be tantamount to having the US Army blow up the local meth lab. I trust you can see why that would be a very stupid idea. (Now seizing the domestic vessel once it docks into its local home port? Different story altogether, and I could certainly agree to that, once sufficient evidence is obtained of the deeds which would trigger it).
If you seize or sink foreign-flagged ships (especially in international waters), you risk actual no-shit war. Sure, the Chilean embassy wouldn't raise too much practical objection over losing a small commercial ship or two, but I'm pretty sure that the Chinese and Russian governments would raise a very large stink over it.
* They're allegedly "all in" with the thing. They know that the Surface Pro (the one which can run 'actual' windows programs) won't sell much more than any other Windows tablet has since 2001, so if they're going to do tablets, the RT is pretty much it.
* They went out of their way to totally screw up the UI in Windows 8 just to accommodate tablets. They risked enterprise acceptance, long-time customer expectations, and more... just for tablets. This reinforces the first point, but also means that if they fail, it'll be a damned hard time explaining why they would eventually put the UI back (not marketing mind, but Ballmer's own political reasons, since he and the recently-departed Sinofsky put so much of their reputations into the damned thing.)
* They didn't sell the remaining Kin or Zune units at fire-sale prices, did they? (I'm honestly not 100% certain, but I believe they did not).
Finally, HP did it because they really weren't all that invested in the things - that is, HP didn't bet the company on a tablet paradigm. Microsoft however appears to be doing just that.
I started with NTP. My last employer ran a realtime BI system which stupidly required that all clocks on all affected machines be within 10 seconds of each other (including desktop machines). Instead of spending a way-over-budget $25k (plus support costs) on four stratum1 NTP source appliances (over two sites - main and backup per site), I bought four solid-but-cheap Dell servers, and ran CentOS with only ntpd and some scripting on them to coordinate timing among all four.
The $20k invoice became $5k. It ran flawlessly from implementation onwards (just over 3 years- it's still running just fine as far as I can tell from friends who still work there), and once I also pointed out what was 'underneath' the VMWare farms, management decided that this Linux thing wasn't so bad after all. Funny thing, the CFO didn't really care - he just wanted solid results for cheap.
I began replacing a lot of the windows-based services with Linux, and got the server count up to around 30% by the time I left, which in turn knocked around $250k off of the company's EA licensing negotiations (...the best part? Seeing the MSFT sales-critter's face during negotiations when I told him that the SharePoint farm licenses were next).
I can agree on Exchange running better since 2007, but two things come to mind in your post:
1) "If they understood that better" is meaningless. I build systems to meet requirements and demands, not the other way around. Most businesses operate the same way.
2) Starting with Exchange 2010, things have gotten far too complex just for the sake of complexity, and with little benefit (and definitely less benefit than the increased requirements justify). This is especially true in smaller implementations, where a small business doesn't need a minimum of four different servers (or two really beefy ones) just to do their email, tasklists, and calendaring.
As for GP? Zimbra, Open-Xchange, or even a home-rolled solution of Postfix-spamassassin-{favorite webmail app, there's dozens} and a calendaring app would do the job to satisfaction - depending on business size, complexity, and requirements.
Hell, I've even seen a rather novel small biz implementation of an MTA with a CMS-based front-end for webmail/calendaring/tasks, and Thunderbird at the desktops.
Employers count on our fear of being unemployed to bully the prospective employee to sign away their rights.
that tactic falls flat awful quick when the prospective employee is not in fear, no?
I recall turning down prospective employers who tried that tactic on other points, and since I was already working, I politely turned them down. You would be amazed at what an employer does when you're the one who turns down their offer. Most will try to negotiate to some extent, some will move on to the next candidate, and some (rare, but) will act like a jilted prom date.
Besides, consider it this way: if they're that willing to screw you over on minor stuff like patents before you work for them, imagine to what depths of screwing they'll plumb once you're already an employee and have no other option at the moment...
Actually, I suspect it's geared more towards the female spouse wanting a career first and foremost.
Not a sexist thing at all, mind you - back in the day, women usually got married young, moved into the new home, and started having kids. Now, a typical woman fully expects to have some sort of good career going first before even thinking of having children (which also explains why women have their first/only kid later in life in recent times). These days, it seems the only females who have kids before 25 are the teenaged poor and those who end up on MTV's reality TV circuit.
Also, guys in general don't get out of it that easily either. They want to spend more time playing the field, partying, 'self-actualizing' (or whatever term you prefer), and taking advantage of all that liberated vagina floating around out there. This means more birth control in spite of there being more sex. Sex has become less of a reproductive urge and more of a recreational activity. Nothing wrong with sex itself mind you, but how it is approached by society in general is going to have a huge impact on the birthrate.
As funny as Idiocracy was, there were some good kernels of truth underlaying it...
I didn't mean as history - I meant as it was once preached, as "science".
The point is, at one time eugenics was considered scientific fact. Would you demand that it be taught, and that failure to do so would constitute an "abuse"?
Also note that the word "abuse" has legally actionable consequences, both civil and criminal.
I don't know about you, but there is enough bad mojo going on in this world without getting CPS involved over whether the 'proper' science was taught.
If ice is hanging around at the poles, then it stands to reason that the poles never see sunlight. If you could get up a colony in the permanent dark area, but plonk down some temperature-tolerant solar panels in the areas which get lit (and a couple of reactors to keep things warm during the 'night' periods)? It is (minus radiation concerns) theoretically doable.
Freak out over... * the bigger pile of driver support that will be required for all of these versions, per machine class/type/model/etc * the pile of code-writing and resources (and maintenance!) for same required to make all these aforementioned versions * support and training costs going through the roof
Laugh all you want at the Linux alternative, but watch as the Windows editions get pricey too...
That's nice for the consumer side, but I daresay the enterprise and OEMs (who have to support said enterprises) will scream bloody murder at being pushed in that direction...
The executive failed to deliver the impossible: a complete mapping system built from the ground up in a year or so. The result is that he gets sacked.
This is where the word "no" comes up. As an executive, part of your job is to say "no" to impossible projects and explain why the answer is no. That's why you get paid the mega-ducats, FFS.
They do. Check out the Intel Corporation sometime... most of the folks I worked with in my department had grey beards, grey hair, and were unashamed to show their age.
It wasn't a question of how many hours you cranked out per week, but how much of the project load you could devour before deadlines passed. The older devs were damned quick and had way low bug rates, and the older EE's were more readily able to catch potential screw-ups before they became actual ones.
As an example, crack open a copy of, oh, Quake 3 sometime. You'll notice that quake3.exe is a tiny little thing. The rest is the sound files, meshes, maps, cut-scenes, networking modules, etc... otherwise known as assets.
Look at it another way - the old game Dead or Alive Extreme (the one with the bikini chicks) had a tiny executable that few people actually gave a damn about, while the.3ds (3D Studio Max) mesh-models of the bikini-clad girls in the game were passed around like mad a long time ago.
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*shrug* - I live near Portland, and even under a fully cloudy day (we get those as often as you do), you can still eke out enough light to get a good amount of output - just have to oversize things a bit.
However, I never said that it were any sort of universal solution, and I agree with your post otherwise.
...so how much of that cost was in fending off lawsuits, and putting up with bucketloads of other legal (and not-so-legal) obstruction?
Seriously - they were working on this thing 20+ years ago. Most of the time it was held up, off and on, due to lawsuits, protests, demands for still more environmental impact statements...
Shit, I wouldn't be surprised if at least $5bn of the total cost-to-date wasn't spent in legal fees, money paid to contractors (and their employees) who were forced to sit idle while awaiting the outcome of an injunction, and various other BS shenanigans.
Dunno about the others, but I call bullshit on this bit:
Solar panels huge enough to collect loads of energy also cool the ground underneath them; changing climate patterns. And they kill what lives under them. (And if you put them in space, then you have the little problem of transporting the energy.)
Err, no.
* The panels themselves bear and handle the heat. It isn't as if you're instantly piping all the heat somewhere else, since the panels are bolted to the ground.
* Shade does not automatically kill everything. You won't find plants under one which demand full sunlight, but anything else (especially animals) would probably appreciate and take advantage of the shade. Finally, if you park the panels in the desert (where nearly nothing grows anyway), it's not even a worry.
* Energy transport from space to Earth is actually a solved problem.
Pretty much, yeah. When you're one of the big guys in the prez' coterie, you get what you want, and Reid (D, NV) got what he wanted. ...of course, we still have to figure out where to put all the $#@%^! nuclear waste, but you know, at least Reid got what he wanted.
I propose we bury it in LA County, specifically Hollywood - earthquakes be damned.
Umm, no.
Seriously, no.
If you seize or sink domestic-flagged ships on the high seas (and especially strand the crew), it would be tantamount to having the US Army blow up the local meth lab. I trust you can see why that would be a very stupid idea.
(Now seizing the domestic vessel once it docks into its local home port? Different story altogether, and I could certainly agree to that, once sufficient evidence is obtained of the deeds which would trigger it).
If you seize or sink foreign-flagged ships (especially in international waters), you risk actual no-shit war. Sure, the Chilean embassy wouldn't raise too much practical objection over losing a small commercial ship or two, but I'm pretty sure that the Chinese and Russian governments would raise a very large stink over it.
Actually, it is being done, and is being enforced.
Problem is, often the cost of fines and such are lower than the potential profits.
I doubt they do it, for a few reasons:
* They're allegedly "all in" with the thing. They know that the Surface Pro (the one which can run 'actual' windows programs) won't sell much more than any other Windows tablet has since 2001, so if they're going to do tablets, the RT is pretty much it.
* They went out of their way to totally screw up the UI in Windows 8 just to accommodate tablets. They risked enterprise acceptance, long-time customer expectations, and more... just for tablets. This reinforces the first point, but also means that if they fail, it'll be a damned hard time explaining why they would eventually put the UI back (not marketing mind, but Ballmer's own political reasons, since he and the recently-departed Sinofsky put so much of their reputations into the damned thing.)
* They didn't sell the remaining Kin or Zune units at fire-sale prices, did they? (I'm honestly not 100% certain, but I believe they did not).
Finally, HP did it because they really weren't all that invested in the things - that is, HP didn't bet the company on a tablet paradigm. Microsoft however appears to be doing just that.
That's easy - start little.
I started with NTP. My last employer ran a realtime BI system which stupidly required that all clocks on all affected machines be within 10 seconds of each other (including desktop machines). Instead of spending a way-over-budget $25k (plus support costs) on four stratum1 NTP source appliances (over two sites - main and backup per site), I bought four solid-but-cheap Dell servers, and ran CentOS with only ntpd and some scripting on them to coordinate timing among all four.
The $20k invoice became $5k. It ran flawlessly from implementation onwards (just over 3 years- it's still running just fine as far as I can tell from friends who still work there), and once I also pointed out what was 'underneath' the VMWare farms, management decided that this Linux thing wasn't so bad after all. Funny thing, the CFO didn't really care - he just wanted solid results for cheap.
I began replacing a lot of the windows-based services with Linux, and got the server count up to around 30% by the time I left, which in turn knocked around $250k off of the company's EA licensing negotiations (...the best part? Seeing the MSFT sales-critter's face during negotiations when I told him that the SharePoint farm licenses were next).
I can agree on Exchange running better since 2007, but two things come to mind in your post:
1) "If they understood that better" is meaningless. I build systems to meet requirements and demands, not the other way around. Most businesses operate the same way.
2) Starting with Exchange 2010, things have gotten far too complex just for the sake of complexity, and with little benefit (and definitely less benefit than the increased requirements justify). This is especially true in smaller implementations, where a small business doesn't need a minimum of four different servers (or two really beefy ones) just to do their email, tasklists, and calendaring.
Don't you ever say that again. :(
As for GP? Zimbra, Open-Xchange, or even a home-rolled solution of Postfix-spamassassin-{favorite webmail app, there's dozens} and a calendaring app would do the job to satisfaction - depending on business size, complexity, and requirements.
Hell, I've even seen a rather novel small biz implementation of an MTA with a CMS-based front-end for webmail/calendaring/tasks, and Thunderbird at the desktops.
Employers count on our fear of being unemployed to bully the prospective employee to sign away their rights.
that tactic falls flat awful quick when the prospective employee is not in fear, no?
I recall turning down prospective employers who tried that tactic on other points, and since I was already working, I politely turned them down. You would be amazed at what an employer does when you're the one who turns down their offer. Most will try to negotiate to some extent, some will move on to the next candidate, and some (rare, but) will act like a jilted prom date.
Besides, consider it this way: if they're that willing to screw you over on minor stuff like patents before you work for them, imagine to what depths of screwing they'll plumb once you're already an employee and have no other option at the moment...
...unless you're on salary :(
...hell, most of us knew that back when we were using nibblers on Commodore 64 boxes to copy stuff onto blank 720k floppies. ;)
Senior management, apparently. ;)
Wrong agency (it would have to be CIA to get the hat trick.)
Good call anyway - American Dad was the first effing thing I thought of when I read TFA.
Actually, I suspect it's geared more towards the female spouse wanting a career first and foremost.
Not a sexist thing at all, mind you - back in the day, women usually got married young, moved into the new home, and started having kids. Now, a typical woman fully expects to have some sort of good career going first before even thinking of having children (which also explains why women have their first/only kid later in life in recent times). These days, it seems the only females who have kids before 25 are the teenaged poor and those who end up on MTV's reality TV circuit.
Also, guys in general don't get out of it that easily either. They want to spend more time playing the field, partying, 'self-actualizing' (or whatever term you prefer), and taking advantage of all that liberated vagina floating around out there. This means more birth control in spite of there being more sex. Sex has become less of a reproductive urge and more of a recreational activity. Nothing wrong with sex itself mind you, but how it is approached by society in general is going to have a huge impact on the birthrate.
As funny as Idiocracy was, there were some good kernels of truth underlaying it...
I didn't mean as history - I meant as it was once preached, as "science".
The point is, at one time eugenics was considered scientific fact. Would you demand that it be taught, and that failure to do so would constitute an "abuse"?
Also note that the word "abuse" has legally actionable consequences, both civil and criminal.
I don't know about you, but there is enough bad mojo going on in this world without getting CPS involved over whether the 'proper' science was taught.
Let's do something with your words, and see if you agree with your own premise afterwards...
You may teach your children as you like, but to never teach them about eugenics is abuse.
Suddenly your point is now open for debate, isn't it?
wee correction - certain areas at the poles never see sunlight.
It's easier in this context to make heat than to dump off the excess, afterall.
Depends on where you are.
If ice is hanging around at the poles, then it stands to reason that the poles never see sunlight. If you could get up a colony in the permanent dark area, but plonk down some temperature-tolerant solar panels in the areas which get lit (and a couple of reactors to keep things warm during the 'night' periods)? It is (minus radiation concerns) theoretically doable.
What are they going to do about it?
Freak out over...
* the bigger pile of driver support that will be required for all of these versions, per machine class/type/model/etc
* the pile of code-writing and resources (and maintenance!) for same required to make all these aforementioned versions
* support and training costs going through the roof
Laugh all you want at the Linux alternative, but watch as the Windows editions get pricey too...
That's nice for the consumer side, but I daresay the enterprise and OEMs (who have to support said enterprises) will scream bloody murder at being pushed in that direction...
The executive failed to deliver the impossible: a complete mapping system built from the ground up in a year or so. The result is that he gets sacked.
This is where the word "no" comes up. As an executive, part of your job is to say "no" to impossible projects and explain why the answer is no. That's why you get paid the mega-ducats, FFS.
They do. Check out the Intel Corporation sometime... most of the folks I worked with in my department had grey beards, grey hair, and were unashamed to show their age.
It wasn't a question of how many hours you cranked out per week, but how much of the project load you could devour before deadlines passed. The older devs were damned quick and had way low bug rates, and the older EE's were more readily able to catch potential screw-ups before they became actual ones.
What AC said...
As an example, crack open a copy of, oh, Quake 3 sometime. You'll notice that quake3.exe is a tiny little thing. The rest is the sound files, meshes, maps, cut-scenes, networking modules, etc... otherwise known as assets.
Look at it another way - the old game Dead or Alive Extreme (the one with the bikini chicks) had a tiny executable that few people actually gave a damn about, while the .3ds (3D Studio Max) mesh-models of the bikini-clad girls in the game were passed around like mad a long time ago.