The monitors are on their side, so they are really 1600x2560. On their side they are 45cm each. It gives me a desktop where I can code long pages in the center screen and have debug and info to the left and right at eye level and info displays I need only occasionally at the top and bottom.
I have several generations of Dell monitors, U3011 and U3014. They have direct displayport. I have tried it with converter cables and it is a nightmare with having to edit x config files. The moment I switched over to pure display port, everything just worked.
The problem with multi-monitor setup, especially big ones is that on most normal video cards, the DVI outputs are often not equal. Typically one dual and one analog. And analog doesn't do a good job of telling your video card the capabilities of your screen.
Also since you need at least dual DVI to power a high rez screen, even if you have a Titan, it still can't power three screens because it simply lacks the outputs. There are some game video cards out there with multiple display ports but they are hard to find. The firepro series has several with either 4 or 6 DP ports.
When I found I didn't need to input timing information in x config anymore, I never went back.
What you are forgetting is that in a country, you don't need to control EVERYONE, you just need to control the majority. Then when the tiny informed minority calls for an uprising, nobody will show up because nobody knows about it. Then when the minority protests they just look like trouble makers.
The biggest issue is that everything but displayport sucks donkeyballs. So get a firepro card from AMD with 6 display ports and run it with the linux native driver. Works fine for me. I use XFCE myself with such a setup with 3x 2560x1600. I have tried to do it with HDMI and such but run into all kinds of weird issues where displayport just works right every time.
I am to lazy to search for mine but it isn't even a 3D card so it was pretty cheap and fits in any PC (no extra power needed). If you want 3D you are going to run into driver issues on Linux but AMD's work station cards can do the trick if you can afford them.
Why would you WANT your browser to determine what you like? I KNOW what I like. If I want my browser or a website to know what I like, I will TELL THEM.
Why not record your dreams and have them send to everyone you know by default. No thanks, if I want you to know my dreams, I will TELL YOUR. And then ONLY the parts I want YOU in particular to know and not every fucking website.
Really, you are like saying how much easier it would be for a rape victim to have the rape happen at a time of their choosing then to have the rapist determine when they will be raped. How about not raping me to begin with?
I do not WANT Google or facebook to track me. Me doing the tracking for them instead does NOT fix this.
This ONLY makes sense if you think the way to stop rapists is for all women to freely have sex all the time with would be rapists.
For sane people, this makes no sense. If I do NOT want to be tracked, I do NOT want my browser to do it for me.
And if I wanted to feed my interests to websites, ALL that would be needed is a simple form which is used to fill an OPTIONAL header with whatever I wanted to add.
There is NO NEED to analyze my browsing behavior to get my interests UNLESS you are trying to get around the fact that I do NOT want to tell my interests. Here is my fucking interest, NO FUCKING ADS, how about that? That enough interest for you?
The problem is that it is TRIVIAL to allow uses to configure their own interests on a site. Google does it with news. The PROBLEM is that website owners and advertisers don't WANT to serve you with your interests, they want to sell you stuff that pays them well. So you might say you interest is in foreign news, and they service you travel ads. Did you say you had an interest in travel ads? No but that is what they want to sell, so that is what they will push.
The best example is modern television. I check the tv guide, I see the time the program I want to watch airs, what do they serve me with 5 minutes in? Ads for other shows that I could easily find in the TV guide but that I clearly don't want to see because I am right now obviously trying to watch the goddamn program they interrupted to show me stuff I don't want to see.
Note the above is NOT about commercials for products that pay for TV, it is ads for other programs or in the case of Discovery and the like, ads for the program I am watching right NOW!
That is how interested content providers are in what I want to see.
Youtube is another classic example, doesn't matter how long I been watching, logged in or not, the home screen contains NOTHING I want to watch or have ever watched. I might be dutch but since I NEVER watch Dutch TV stuff (if you want to know how retarded Dutch tv is, we gave the world big brother) why does it keep showing me stuff when I never ever watch it? Because they don't want to serve my interests, they want to sell me something.
You know what one my recent greatest discoveries has been? Home delivery from the supermarket. I go online, keep my grocery list and have it delivered once a week. My health has shot up as I only buy want I need when I take inventory of my cupboards and fridge (yes I have become my mother) and order just what is needed and what I want. No price upgrading, no special deals to tasty to pass that you grab out of habit but don't really like all that much. Helps a lot that I do this AFTER I had dinner. I get what I want and the supermarket serves me with what I am interested in AND they make LESS money of me... OOPS (well the delivery costs and the money I save from candy goes to more fresh stuff but since that stuff is less advertised presumably they are less interested in pushing it).
I might bother to tell a content provider what I want, if they actually then gave me what I want. Right now it is about as wise as telling a woman what you REALLY think about the size of her ass when she tells you she really wants to hear your opinion. Install an adblocker (slashdot account) and go single and tracking free and you will live a far happier life. Just ask everyone here.
Just the services you need, no sysadmin telling you to use obsolete software versions or complaining that it is hard to upgrade storage or insisting to partition a raid up into small chunks for a server whose database will need all the storage within months but they want to create busy work for themselves by having to change the partitioning every week.
I flatly refuse to do development anymore on any internal servers no matter how they are handled, it just ain't worth my time. When it comes time to deploy and a sysadmin insists on getting his un-educated paws on it, I write an install script and then hand of ALL responsibility.
You want to be a respected sysadmin? ENABLE people and stop being the blocker.
Your typical sysadmin is like the cantine cook who refuses to let people make a meal after hours if they are working overtime. No doubt they are thinking they are just enforcing the rules but they are a hindrance in a company where people want to achieve things.
A good sysadmin enables what is needed in a safe and sensible way. A bad sysadmin just blocks everything to be safe.
A classic example is file exchange. Business often needs to exchange large files. A BAD sysadmin (99%) will limit email boxes to 1mb or less and ban 99% if attachments and offer NO other options. Then people hack around the sysadmin to enable them to do business and from that grows a culture to do all sort of stuffs because the boss no longer believes the sysadmin because he had to go around him himself to many times.
A GOOD sysadmin enables file transfer is a safe responsible way and is then respected and will find other sensible rules obeyed because his co-workers know they are not there to inflate the sysadmins ego but because they make good business sense.
I have had it so bad that I had to admin remote linux servers over gprs because port 22 was blocked outgoing because the sysadmin insisted all servers were internal and runnings windows. Luckily it was a telco so it didn't cost anything but it was a bit silly. Especially when EVERYONE started using developer sims to hook up their own modems to get around all the restrictions. Office of over 500 people an at least a 100 were using GPRS.
Good sysadmins enable, bad sysadmins disable.
Bad sysadmins get replaced with cloud computing and then bitch about immigrants.
The MS Phone fanboy is an amazing critter, he can come up with a new excuse at the drop of hat.
The NEXT version will fix everything
Nobody copy pastes anyway
The NEXT phone with stats of last generation phones of the competition will BLOW the competition away, when it launches in a years time
Once the phones start to sell, the apps will come
And now the king of the crazies. People will stop wanting apps and entertainment on their phones any day now so then Windows Phone will sell because their old smartphone more then capable of NOT being used for apps and entertainment and just making calls will need to be replaced...
What?
If people get tired of their smartphone... why would they buy another one? Oh I get it, they are tired of having a choice of apps to install and instead want a store that has a more limited selection... yeah... that happens. I do it all the time, I am at my local supermarket and think "screw this choice, I am off to the little convenience store at the train station".
Fanboys in general tend to be a bit blind but MS Phone fanboys like the parent are insane. And for that matter childish. Basically a guy with the nick "DogDude" posting on a geek/nerd site is complaing about people not being grownup and/or being to nerdy/geeky.
It reminds me a bit of the Windows fanboys complaining Slashdot is to Linux friendly. Well piss of then to your own website... oh wait, there isn't one that is any fun. DogDude must hate this place filled with people who laugh at his phone but he has nowhere else to go because his mom won't take him across state to the other guy who bought a MS phone.
Sucks to be you DogDuge but don't worry, one day you will have bought the hip phone that makes you the envy of all... well not really but keep the dream alive, you and Ballmer and Elop, the true believers!
Come on Nokia, are you that dumb (oh wait, you are) that you are actually telling Microsoft that if they don't hurry, you are going to go bust and they can buy what they want of you for loose chance?
The Windows Phone platform turns a lot of otherwise not so smart people into blittering idiots. Take this gem:
You can't compare Windows Phone sales to Android and iOS because it has only been on the market a fraction of the time.
The truth? Windows Phones is now the OLDEST smartphone OS now Symbian has gone the way of the Dodo. MS has been trying for WELL OVER a DECADE. Yes, they keep renaming it in an attempt to wash away the stench of defeat... actually defeat is not the right word, the would imply they stood chance, I can claim I was defeated in the 1 mile race but it sorta looses any meaning if I never made it across the starting line.
Nokia bet its future on an OS from a company that hasn't managed to sell for over ten years. Why would it chance NOW when there are to OSes selling like hotcakes and a bunch of upstarts and re-entries fighting for the scraps. It like betting on the boxer who knocked himself trying to get into the ring in the next round because the next fight is on top of mount everest and everyone is bringing guns so his losing streak is... is there ANYONE who can walk upright who thinks MS was a good bet for Nokia?
Symbian was not dead yet, the N900 and N9 sold faster then Nokia was willing to sell them and Android is available if they wanted it. They HAD OS'es with proven track records. They went for the OS that didn't sell and has never sold. That is beyond risk taking, that is even beyond putting it all on one horse, that is insane. Personally I think Elop is even more a Trojan then most people realize. MS never bet on Nokia, they wanted to ruin them while they experimented and then hope to buy the assests cheaply and make their own phones.
You can't mis-manage a company like this by accident.
This is MS final policy on DRM and everything else, until the NEXT time they change their mind...
It is one of MS biggest failings, they change their mind at the drop of a hat/stock price and have turned burning bridges into an art.
You only got to follow PC gaming and MS attitude towards it to see that MS has the attention pan of a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs being thrown around by Ballmer.
An image file is nothing more the instructions to a graphics program of how to produce an image. It is the image that is copyrighted NOT the graphics file. That why re-encoding a file doesn't change its copyright. You might as well claim that the light emitting from your screen isn't the copyright image...
IF you want to challenge this, you should seek the "recipe" route. US copyright does NOT allow recipes that are mere listings of ingredients to be copyrighted. Is an image/CAD/MP3 file not merely a listing of inputs to the cook/graphics program/CAD/music player? Bit X tells the speaker magnet to move to position Y and foila, sound emerges same as if I combine eggs with milk and heat, an omelet comes out.
But this idea is nothing new, smarter people then me have thought about this AND come to the conclusion it doesn't work like this. A movie file is NOT a recipe for a light show on your monitor. It isn't the instructions that are copyrighted, it is the art. A CAD file for a simple ball is not copyrightable, a figurine is.
And this makes common sense because right now it is NOT allowed to scan a figure and reproduce it. So why should a CAD file, which could easily be produced by scanning not be copyrightable under existing laws?
I am not making a judgement here on right or wrong, I think the copyright system sucks BUT as it is now, 3D printing of other peoples creations falls under copyright infringement if they did not give you permission or made the designs open to all.
There is a whole list and the most recent one was in Russia I believe.
But there is a problem, Dirty Harry justice. We don't mind how many people the criminal in a Dirty Harry story kills, just as long as they are blown away at the end. What hurts about 9/11 is that they got away with it. Had they been gunned down in a fight with the NYPD, they would have been considered losers.
You could taste some of that with the Russian school/theather hostage situation, lots of Russians killed but the "movie" ended with Muslims lying dead and that means case closed. Justice was served.
Go tell Hollywood if you don't agree. Humans are easily pleased.
Since when do the bleeding hearts and politically correct need evidence. The shocking truth is that profiling WORKS. As long as the profiling along racial lines is done non-racially. There is no nice way to say this but if you only search black people because you hate black people then profiling sucks because you are giving white people a clear pass to smuggle. But if customs officials through decades of experience know that they will catch more smugglers on a flight from the Caribbean then from Iceland... that is... serious smuggling because while it might upset the bleeding hearts, an undeclared bottle of scotch has less priority then a kilo of cocaine. You might not like that but that is how things work.
Purely random selection is a step up from racism and bigotry but it is a step down from good profiling. The pity is that the bleeding hearts and PC crowd always consider good profiling to be racist. They won't be satisfied until jails are filled with completely representative population, facts and evidence be damned. 0.0001 of people are quadriplegic so we damn well need some of them in jail for running away from the police or else RACISM!
You need to hold any claim that a certain profiling action is "broken" against the light and try to detect if the claim of "broken" is due to criminals escaping the net OR because it is capturing to many criminals of a certain group.
This is hard to understand for idiots, you can tell them apart because they often spout this line "the US is a police state because it has the highest amount of incarceration in the world"... if you believe that, you can fly, go jump of a building and see.
It is beyond idiocy to accept this line as is. Because it would mean that a nation that doesn't have a justice system at all, doesn't punish any crime, is a freedom state! Weeh, everyone to Somalia! Is the US sending people to jail for commercial or racial reasons OR does it have an effective justice system that just is very good at capturing criminals and punishing them? Simply put, if I lynch someone and am let go, my countries incarceration rate would be low. But would it be justice? The Arab Emirates is very freedom loving, instead of sending to jail four rapists, they send to jail 1 victim. Got to love that freedom! 4x better then the west!
You can tell idiots apart because they think you can leave out the qualifier of the reason for the high US incarceration rate. You might still come to the same conclusion BUT now you are using reason and evidence not just emotion.
Profiling sucks if it applies to you, if you for some reason fall into a group that has been determined to have a high chance to be involved in criminal activity. But going to a purely random system only appeals to little kiddies who think the justice system is a game in which the police has to play "fair". You can tell these kids aparts because they are the ones who object to the police going in with ten men to subdue 1 person. These kiddies can't see that policing ain't about giving criminals a fair chance, it is about giving criminals NO chance.
For airport security this means that you don't attempt to dole the misery of a search out evenly but attempt to make it apply ONLY to those doing something wrong. Profiling, good profiling does this fairly well. It can be improved by removing racism BUT not by removing race from the selection.
Bruce Schneier just displays his usual ignorance of the real world with his childish suggestion. But hey, enjoy your totally random strip search while a guy setting of every red flag in the world walks free because a random number generator decided so.
Why not go all the way and remove racism from the hiring process and use dice there to. RNG for applying for a loan/mortage. Screw credit history, you will be denied because the dice rolled the wrong way regardless of what you did.
For full disclosure, I have started using Linux in the windows 98 era for the sole reasons that downloads and music playing kept being interrupted by Windows crashing. I setup two PC's, one for browsing, music playing and downloading which was an "old" linux box (basically my retired windows gaming PC) and a windows PC purely for games and productivity. Over the years, I shifted more and more productivity to Linux and it became my work station with the Windows PC being used purely for gaming.
And then Windows got better and Linux got worse. Of late it is Linux who crashes or doesn't do stuff for no good reason with no text config files to edit or log files to debug. While Windows since 7 is if not perfect it is at least marginally stable and only pulls the phantom network card trick only twice a year.
For example, I recently installed xubuntu and configured my NAS as samba shares defined in/etc/fstab. Should work right? No. On boot I have to do sudo mount -a and then watch error messages scroll past that the shares are already mounted (but not visible and/or accessible in any way). When they are mounted, if I play a movie file and then wait 1 minute, xubuntu seems to "loose" the share and its filemanagement app takes 5 minutes of freezing to do anything.
Windows 7 isn't much better, instantly forgetting a mapped drive if it can't find it for a split second but that is an old bug. Simple samba mounts in/etc/fstab USED to work in Linux. Then they broke it. Regular Ubuntu is even worse because there.gfvs or whatever that horror is called tries to dynamically mount stuff you already defined in fstab and then get it wrong.
Attach a android phone and Ubuntu shows how out of touch it is by trying to mount a camera. Nobody has camera's anymore, everyone does have a smart phone. If you want to attract casual users maybe you shouldn't throw away standard desktop design and instead focus on allowing people to easily hookup their phone?
Active nvidia drivers, loose your icons... why!?! What does the video driver have to do with your desktop theme?
Suspend computer, resume, open video file. Crash of desktop, what is this, Windows 95?
I am addicted to sloppy mouse focus, something neither OSX nor Windows can handle, so I am stuck but I am startling to like the experience less and less.
Mostly because stuff that used to work, now doesn't. It seems the PC in general is going backwards. Come on Intel, get some multi-headed video support, with display ports already. This is fucking 2013 why am I dealing with issues that were solved half a decade ago?
And here is another rant, why does every desktop on Linux insist on including its own crappy media player that doesn't handle any files and crashes on 99% of files when there are two good reliable players available (vlc and mplayer).
The Linux culture of late seems to reason: App X is 80% complete, lets replace it with App Y which is 40% complete! Unity and Gnome 3 would have created far less outrage if they had been released when they had achieved full feature parity with Gnome 2. But they didn't. People had just gotten Gnome 2 setup to be workable and then it was replaced with a system that crashed, lacked basic features people had come to rely upon and only worked on a handful of machines.
That is like a 2 star Michelin restaurant just about to receive its 3rd star firing its kitchen staff and replacing them with monkeys and then wondering why their business went bankrupt. If these people ran a F1 race they would respond to a record setting test lap by rebuilding the car from scratch. With lego.
I quite like being called a pirate. It is glamorous and dangerous and a bit rebbelious. It is certainly more attractive then being called what I am, a sad fat old man on slashdot.
If it was labelled as copyright infringer it would be far less attractive. Just look at the piratebay. It is COOL, nice logo and all. Copyrightinfringementbay.org would be far less attractive.
The copyright industry seems to NOT only insist on making it easier, cheaper and a better experience to pirate, they also seem determined to make it more sexy.
Why not go all out and call us copyright infringers Ninjas! That will teach us!
How much food and such costs depends a LOT on where you life. Not all cities are equal in this regard.
I also notice the parent never mentions insurance. Why not?
Also what happens if he loses his job? Loses a limb? Child is born with a major handicap?
50k might not be a bad salary in some places but how would he do if the shit hits the fan? Or his wife drops three kids instead of one?
Or 50k is all he will be getting for the rest of his life, inflation be damned? That is what is happening at least in IT right now in Holland, programmers jobs, even the so called good payers, have been offering the same wages for several years now and no, inflation hasn't been zero. You can get poor just by earning the same salary year after year.
I am not complaining to much, but then I got zero responsibilities but people raising a family? They need more or they are just a paycheck away from the poor house.
Zimmerman and Travor BOTH choose to live in a gated community.
Don't whine about being stopped in the street by the security guard you yourself appointed.
If this had happened outside the gates, I would have felt different BUT this happened in a gated community and in such a place, you have to live by whatever rules that community sets because that is why gates are around it. Don't live in a gated community if you don't want to stopped by your neighbors.
I agree, but remember, both these men lived in gated communities. I have very strong feelings about gated communities. They talk to me about people who would rather pay a thousand in gates and wannabe cops rather then spend a 100 in extra taxes for real cops. Real cops are not perfect mostly because people don't want to pay for proper ones (would you take a cop salary?) but they are better then armed civilians trying to keep out wanna-be thugs especially when those wanna-be thugs are living in the same community.
Either side could have walked away that night but the real fight started far far earlier, when Travor was getting violent at school and Zimmerman was no longer willing to wait for an underfunded justice system to stop crime on his turf.
If Martin had known Zimmerman had a gun, would he have attacked him?
If Martin knew Zimmerman had a gun and feared getting shot in the back, attacking him was even more insane, he would have to close with a man who could whip out a gun in a split second and fill him with lead (WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN).
If Martin did not know Zimmerman had a gun, him attacking him is a clear case of aggression with murderous intent considering the near outcome of the fight as in if Zimmerman had NOT shot Martin, would Martin have stopped beating his victims head into the ground BEFORE he died or after?
To many people assume that because Martin was the one who ended up death, Zimmerman was the only one with murder on the mind that night.
1) Because it wasn't Zimmerman who attacked Martin. Martin's history showed a youth with a lot of issues with violence. Could this wannabe thug be resentful of having to life with this sister in this gated community and gone and confronted this wannabe cop who was part of the man? A lot of people are talking about the wannabe cop mentality of Zimmerman, it is then also fair to talk about the wannabe thug mentality of Martin, especially as he was forced to live in a gated community away from his friends.
2) Zimmerman had lost sight of Martin. Stop rehashing the media lies, use the evidence presented in court. Zimmerman was patrolling a gated community were the people had chosen to allow Zimmerman that right. When you life in a gated community, you forfeit certain normal rights because apparently you prefer security over freedom. Remember, these two where living in the SAME gated community. They were neighbors if people still talked to each other.
3) The stand your ground defense wasn't used in the case, just by the media, Zimmerman defended himself on ordinary self defense laws, because he was on the ground being beaten with intent to kill (as evidenced by wounds) by a much taller and fitter man.
This case has been handled incredibly badly by the media. If you followed the actual court case an entirely different story plays out.
If you want to know what I think happened? Two cats forgot that the point of a staring match is NOT to fight. Martin has a history of wanting to appear as a thug, intimidating others and using violence if that doesn't work. Zimmerman is a wannabe cop who wasn't going to let anymore hoodlums affect his community. They met late at night and neither backed down. Who said what first? I don't know, maybe Zimmerman called out. Maybe Martin wanted to show this white guy who owned this street.
Fact was they ended up on the ground, Travor was beating a much older and fitter man to death but it didn't end the way travor intended, Zimmerman had a gun.
Two men with to much anger/ego who weren't going to take it anymore. Either could have walked away. remember, Travor wasn't shot in the back, he wasn't shot from he a distance, Travor was shot while he was pouding an old far short man's head into the ground.
But hey, why should facts presented by the PROSECUTION matter to you. Much easier to just read one or two stories and spout lies.
I would go further, 7 wasn't a winner, it wasn't as big a loser.
Ballmer is overseeing a drugs operation in a city of billions where there is no law, everyone is a millionaire and all the other drug barons have long since gone from shooting themselves in the foot to traveling back in time and shooting their ancestors in the head.
MS didn't rise to dominance because of the brilliance of its leaders but because the competition made some of the biggest and most classic mistakes in business history. They have been discussed before but IBM just handing the PC business to a tiny upstart has to be rank in the top 3 biggest mistakes ever.
Windows and Office are gigantic sellers and unlike Intels Itanium, when MS goofs with a release, they don't have to factor in gigantic hard production costs of shifting a production facility back to old products, they just print different keys to ship to business. The actual physical Windows 8 boxes are a tiny fraction of their business. Large customers just get a load of keys and download the version they want. And when Intel is sued to keep making chips, MS can fume all it wants about still having to sell XP during Vista, the costs of doing so are trivial compared to keeping an unprofitable chip line open.
I am not saying the lack of sales on Vista and 8 don't hurt but they don't hurt as much as having to retire a physical production line and getting rid of unsold stock.
You might claim their are losing money in mobile and that is true enough but it is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. It is just not going to have an effect any time soon.
Basically right now MS is operating like a government that is ruling willing slaves. It collects what is essentially a tax on every PC and the public goes out of its way to re-inforce its shackles every day. Note that the Xbox One pre-orders didn't really hurt at all over the entire fuzz about always on online and always on kineckt. People were fuming on it on the internet while standing in line to get their pre-order in.
You can therefor judge Ballmer NOT by asking how good he has to be to keep the business running as normal (cash cow Windows/Offfice loosing money everywhere else) but just how bad he can be before the Windows/Office cash cow would take a massive hit.
And let us not forget the company rose to power on Dos, Windows 1-2-3 95 etc etc. It was normal for early Windows machines to crash several times a day, not to support common hardware, refuse to run older software and be downright insecure by design. And sales GREW!
That makes me think that MS could release a Windows 9 that killed you cat, impregnated your daughter and fucked you up the ass with a ten foot spiked dildo and people would either buy it because it is the latest version or totally burn MS by forcing MS to take their money for old software. I wish women would use that logic for dating "Date you? A nerd? No way, ever! Burn nerd, I am just going to have sex with you in ways you can never imagine AND pay you for it whenever you want but I am never going to go on a date because you are a nerd and I want to hurt your feelings". Well... I think I could live with that.
People made much about people demanding to buy downgrades from MS. I am sure Ballmer cried bitter tears of defeat and only had billions of dollars to console himself with.
No, the question isn't how good Ballmer has to be to keep MS running, it is just how fucking bad he would have to be to actually HURT MS in any serious way. I think he would have to start physically assaulting each and every customer.
Management: We have more work then we can handle, training is boring so we need to hire someone who is a good match for what we need, some experience with tool chain we use.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We have far more work then we can handle, there is no room for training so we need to hire someone who is a very good match for what we need, 2 year experience with the exact tool chain we use down to version number.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We are drowning in work, we never heard of the word training, the recruitment costs are sky high so we will be offering peanuts for wages and we need someone who is an exact clone of an employee who escaped years ago.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We outsource/hire immigrants and blame the total collapse of our business on the local work ethic.
Management: We deserve a bonus!
CEO: Me too!
Board of directors: Agreed, if you agree to raise our compensation.
Explain the Asian super companies then, or Siemens.
Or for that matter the largest company in the world, Shell. Which does far more then just sell petrol. or just drill for oil. Or indeed does many things that have nothing to do with oil.
Slashdot Mirror
The monitors are on their side, so they are really 1600x2560. On their side they are 45cm each. It gives me a desktop where I can code long pages in the center screen and have debug and info to the left and right at eye level and info displays I need only occasionally at the top and bottom.
I have several generations of Dell monitors, U3011 and U3014. They have direct displayport. I have tried it with converter cables and it is a nightmare with having to edit x config files. The moment I switched over to pure display port, everything just worked.
The problem with multi-monitor setup, especially big ones is that on most normal video cards, the DVI outputs are often not equal. Typically one dual and one analog. And analog doesn't do a good job of telling your video card the capabilities of your screen.
Also since you need at least dual DVI to power a high rez screen, even if you have a Titan, it still can't power three screens because it simply lacks the outputs. There are some game video cards out there with multiple display ports but they are hard to find. The firepro series has several with either 4 or 6 DP ports.
When I found I didn't need to input timing information in x config anymore, I never went back.
What you are forgetting is that in a country, you don't need to control EVERYONE, you just need to control the majority. Then when the tiny informed minority calls for an uprising, nobody will show up because nobody knows about it. Then when the minority protests they just look like trouble makers.
The biggest issue is that everything but displayport sucks donkeyballs. So get a firepro card from AMD with 6 display ports and run it with the linux native driver. Works fine for me. I use XFCE myself with such a setup with 3x 2560x1600. I have tried to do it with HDMI and such but run into all kinds of weird issues where displayport just works right every time.
I am to lazy to search for mine but it isn't even a 3D card so it was pretty cheap and fits in any PC (no extra power needed). If you want 3D you are going to run into driver issues on Linux but AMD's work station cards can do the trick if you can afford them.
Why would you WANT your browser to determine what you like? I KNOW what I like. If I want my browser or a website to know what I like, I will TELL THEM.
Why not record your dreams and have them send to everyone you know by default. No thanks, if I want you to know my dreams, I will TELL YOUR. And then ONLY the parts I want YOU in particular to know and not every fucking website.
Really, you are like saying how much easier it would be for a rape victim to have the rape happen at a time of their choosing then to have the rapist determine when they will be raped. How about not raping me to begin with?
I do not WANT Google or facebook to track me. Me doing the tracking for them instead does NOT fix this.
This ONLY makes sense if you think the way to stop rapists is for all women to freely have sex all the time with would be rapists.
For sane people, this makes no sense. If I do NOT want to be tracked, I do NOT want my browser to do it for me.
And if I wanted to feed my interests to websites, ALL that would be needed is a simple form which is used to fill an OPTIONAL header with whatever I wanted to add.
There is NO NEED to analyze my browsing behavior to get my interests UNLESS you are trying to get around the fact that I do NOT want to tell my interests. Here is my fucking interest, NO FUCKING ADS, how about that? That enough interest for you?
The problem is that it is TRIVIAL to allow uses to configure their own interests on a site. Google does it with news. The PROBLEM is that website owners and advertisers don't WANT to serve you with your interests, they want to sell you stuff that pays them well. So you might say you interest is in foreign news, and they service you travel ads. Did you say you had an interest in travel ads? No but that is what they want to sell, so that is what they will push.
The best example is modern television. I check the tv guide, I see the time the program I want to watch airs, what do they serve me with 5 minutes in? Ads for other shows that I could easily find in the TV guide but that I clearly don't want to see because I am right now obviously trying to watch the goddamn program they interrupted to show me stuff I don't want to see.
Note the above is NOT about commercials for products that pay for TV, it is ads for other programs or in the case of Discovery and the like, ads for the program I am watching right NOW!
That is how interested content providers are in what I want to see.
Youtube is another classic example, doesn't matter how long I been watching, logged in or not, the home screen contains NOTHING I want to watch or have ever watched. I might be dutch but since I NEVER watch Dutch TV stuff (if you want to know how retarded Dutch tv is, we gave the world big brother) why does it keep showing me stuff when I never ever watch it? Because they don't want to serve my interests, they want to sell me something.
You know what one my recent greatest discoveries has been? Home delivery from the supermarket. I go online, keep my grocery list and have it delivered once a week. My health has shot up as I only buy want I need when I take inventory of my cupboards and fridge (yes I have become my mother) and order just what is needed and what I want. No price upgrading, no special deals to tasty to pass that you grab out of habit but don't really like all that much. Helps a lot that I do this AFTER I had dinner. I get what I want and the supermarket serves me with what I am interested in AND they make LESS money of me... OOPS (well the delivery costs and the money I save from candy goes to more fresh stuff but since that stuff is less advertised presumably they are less interested in pushing it).
I might bother to tell a content provider what I want, if they actually then gave me what I want. Right now it is about as wise as telling a woman what you REALLY think about the size of her ass when she tells you she really wants to hear your opinion. Install an adblocker (slashdot account) and go single and tracking free and you will live a far happier life. Just ask everyone here.
Just the services you need, no sysadmin telling you to use obsolete software versions or complaining that it is hard to upgrade storage or insisting to partition a raid up into small chunks for a server whose database will need all the storage within months but they want to create busy work for themselves by having to change the partitioning every week.
I flatly refuse to do development anymore on any internal servers no matter how they are handled, it just ain't worth my time. When it comes time to deploy and a sysadmin insists on getting his un-educated paws on it, I write an install script and then hand of ALL responsibility.
You want to be a respected sysadmin? ENABLE people and stop being the blocker.
Your typical sysadmin is like the cantine cook who refuses to let people make a meal after hours if they are working overtime. No doubt they are thinking they are just enforcing the rules but they are a hindrance in a company where people want to achieve things.
A good sysadmin enables what is needed in a safe and sensible way. A bad sysadmin just blocks everything to be safe.
A classic example is file exchange. Business often needs to exchange large files. A BAD sysadmin (99%) will limit email boxes to 1mb or less and ban 99% if attachments and offer NO other options. Then people hack around the sysadmin to enable them to do business and from that grows a culture to do all sort of stuffs because the boss no longer believes the sysadmin because he had to go around him himself to many times.
A GOOD sysadmin enables file transfer is a safe responsible way and is then respected and will find other sensible rules obeyed because his co-workers know they are not there to inflate the sysadmins ego but because they make good business sense.
I have had it so bad that I had to admin remote linux servers over gprs because port 22 was blocked outgoing because the sysadmin insisted all servers were internal and runnings windows. Luckily it was a telco so it didn't cost anything but it was a bit silly. Especially when EVERYONE started using developer sims to hook up their own modems to get around all the restrictions. Office of over 500 people an at least a 100 were using GPRS.
Good sysadmins enable, bad sysadmins disable.
Bad sysadmins get replaced with cloud computing and then bitch about immigrants.
The MS Phone fanboy is an amazing critter, he can come up with a new excuse at the drop of hat.
And now the king of the crazies. People will stop wanting apps and entertainment on their phones any day now so then Windows Phone will sell because their old smartphone more then capable of NOT being used for apps and entertainment and just making calls will need to be replaced...
What?
If people get tired of their smartphone... why would they buy another one? Oh I get it, they are tired of having a choice of apps to install and instead want a store that has a more limited selection... yeah... that happens. I do it all the time, I am at my local supermarket and think "screw this choice, I am off to the little convenience store at the train station".
Fanboys in general tend to be a bit blind but MS Phone fanboys like the parent are insane. And for that matter childish. Basically a guy with the nick "DogDude" posting on a geek/nerd site is complaing about people not being grownup and/or being to nerdy/geeky.
It reminds me a bit of the Windows fanboys complaining Slashdot is to Linux friendly. Well piss of then to your own website... oh wait, there isn't one that is any fun. DogDude must hate this place filled with people who laugh at his phone but he has nowhere else to go because his mom won't take him across state to the other guy who bought a MS phone.
Sucks to be you DogDuge but don't worry, one day you will have bought the hip phone that makes you the envy of all... well not really but keep the dream alive, you and Ballmer and Elop, the true believers!
Come on Nokia, are you that dumb (oh wait, you are) that you are actually telling Microsoft that if they don't hurry, you are going to go bust and they can buy what they want of you for loose chance?
The Windows Phone platform turns a lot of otherwise not so smart people into blittering idiots. Take this gem:
You can't compare Windows Phone sales to Android and iOS because it has only been on the market a fraction of the time.
The truth? Windows Phones is now the OLDEST smartphone OS now Symbian has gone the way of the Dodo. MS has been trying for WELL OVER a DECADE. Yes, they keep renaming it in an attempt to wash away the stench of defeat... actually defeat is not the right word, the would imply they stood chance, I can claim I was defeated in the 1 mile race but it sorta looses any meaning if I never made it across the starting line.
Nokia bet its future on an OS from a company that hasn't managed to sell for over ten years. Why would it chance NOW when there are to OSes selling like hotcakes and a bunch of upstarts and re-entries fighting for the scraps. It like betting on the boxer who knocked himself trying to get into the ring in the next round because the next fight is on top of mount everest and everyone is bringing guns so his losing streak is... is there ANYONE who can walk upright who thinks MS was a good bet for Nokia?
Symbian was not dead yet, the N900 and N9 sold faster then Nokia was willing to sell them and Android is available if they wanted it. They HAD OS'es with proven track records. They went for the OS that didn't sell and has never sold. That is beyond risk taking, that is even beyond putting it all on one horse, that is insane. Personally I think Elop is even more a Trojan then most people realize. MS never bet on Nokia, they wanted to ruin them while they experimented and then hope to buy the assests cheaply and make their own phones.
You can't mis-manage a company like this by accident.
This is MS final policy on DRM and everything else, until the NEXT time they change their mind...
It is one of MS biggest failings, they change their mind at the drop of a hat/stock price and have turned burning bridges into an art.
You only got to follow PC gaming and MS attitude towards it to see that MS has the attention pan of a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs being thrown around by Ballmer.
Policy update to follow in: 3... 2... 1...
An image file is nothing more the instructions to a graphics program of how to produce an image. It is the image that is copyrighted NOT the graphics file. That why re-encoding a file doesn't change its copyright. You might as well claim that the light emitting from your screen isn't the copyright image...
IF you want to challenge this, you should seek the "recipe" route. US copyright does NOT allow recipes that are mere listings of ingredients to be copyrighted. Is an image/CAD/MP3 file not merely a listing of inputs to the cook/graphics program/CAD/music player? Bit X tells the speaker magnet to move to position Y and foila, sound emerges same as if I combine eggs with milk and heat, an omelet comes out.
But this idea is nothing new, smarter people then me have thought about this AND come to the conclusion it doesn't work like this. A movie file is NOT a recipe for a light show on your monitor. It isn't the instructions that are copyrighted, it is the art. A CAD file for a simple ball is not copyrightable, a figurine is.
And this makes common sense because right now it is NOT allowed to scan a figure and reproduce it. So why should a CAD file, which could easily be produced by scanning not be copyrightable under existing laws?
I am not making a judgement here on right or wrong, I think the copyright system sucks BUT as it is now, 3D printing of other peoples creations falls under copyright infringement if they did not give you permission or made the designs open to all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_attacks_on_airports
There is a whole list and the most recent one was in Russia I believe.
But there is a problem, Dirty Harry justice. We don't mind how many people the criminal in a Dirty Harry story kills, just as long as they are blown away at the end. What hurts about 9/11 is that they got away with it. Had they been gunned down in a fight with the NYPD, they would have been considered losers.
You could taste some of that with the Russian school/theather hostage situation, lots of Russians killed but the "movie" ended with Muslims lying dead and that means case closed. Justice was served.
Go tell Hollywood if you don't agree. Humans are easily pleased.
Since when do the bleeding hearts and politically correct need evidence. The shocking truth is that profiling WORKS. As long as the profiling along racial lines is done non-racially. There is no nice way to say this but if you only search black people because you hate black people then profiling sucks because you are giving white people a clear pass to smuggle. But if customs officials through decades of experience know that they will catch more smugglers on a flight from the Caribbean then from Iceland... that is... serious smuggling because while it might upset the bleeding hearts, an undeclared bottle of scotch has less priority then a kilo of cocaine. You might not like that but that is how things work.
Purely random selection is a step up from racism and bigotry but it is a step down from good profiling. The pity is that the bleeding hearts and PC crowd always consider good profiling to be racist. They won't be satisfied until jails are filled with completely representative population, facts and evidence be damned. 0.0001 of people are quadriplegic so we damn well need some of them in jail for running away from the police or else RACISM!
You need to hold any claim that a certain profiling action is "broken" against the light and try to detect if the claim of "broken" is due to criminals escaping the net OR because it is capturing to many criminals of a certain group.
This is hard to understand for idiots, you can tell them apart because they often spout this line "the US is a police state because it has the highest amount of incarceration in the world"... if you believe that, you can fly, go jump of a building and see.
It is beyond idiocy to accept this line as is. Because it would mean that a nation that doesn't have a justice system at all, doesn't punish any crime, is a freedom state! Weeh, everyone to Somalia! Is the US sending people to jail for commercial or racial reasons OR does it have an effective justice system that just is very good at capturing criminals and punishing them? Simply put, if I lynch someone and am let go, my countries incarceration rate would be low. But would it be justice? The Arab Emirates is very freedom loving, instead of sending to jail four rapists, they send to jail 1 victim. Got to love that freedom! 4x better then the west!
You can tell idiots apart because they think you can leave out the qualifier of the reason for the high US incarceration rate. You might still come to the same conclusion BUT now you are using reason and evidence not just emotion.
Profiling sucks if it applies to you, if you for some reason fall into a group that has been determined to have a high chance to be involved in criminal activity. But going to a purely random system only appeals to little kiddies who think the justice system is a game in which the police has to play "fair". You can tell these kids aparts because they are the ones who object to the police going in with ten men to subdue 1 person. These kiddies can't see that policing ain't about giving criminals a fair chance, it is about giving criminals NO chance.
For airport security this means that you don't attempt to dole the misery of a search out evenly but attempt to make it apply ONLY to those doing something wrong. Profiling, good profiling does this fairly well. It can be improved by removing racism BUT not by removing race from the selection.
Bruce Schneier just displays his usual ignorance of the real world with his childish suggestion. But hey, enjoy your totally random strip search while a guy setting of every red flag in the world walks free because a random number generator decided so.
Why not go all the way and remove racism from the hiring process and use dice there to. RNG for applying for a loan/mortage. Screw credit history, you will be denied because the dice rolled the wrong way regardless of what you did.
No one left behind!
For full disclosure, I have started using Linux in the windows 98 era for the sole reasons that downloads and music playing kept being interrupted by Windows crashing. I setup two PC's, one for browsing, music playing and downloading which was an "old" linux box (basically my retired windows gaming PC) and a windows PC purely for games and productivity. Over the years, I shifted more and more productivity to Linux and it became my work station with the Windows PC being used purely for gaming.
And then Windows got better and Linux got worse. Of late it is Linux who crashes or doesn't do stuff for no good reason with no text config files to edit or log files to debug. While Windows since 7 is if not perfect it is at least marginally stable and only pulls the phantom network card trick only twice a year.
For example, I recently installed xubuntu and configured my NAS as samba shares defined in /etc/fstab. Should work right? No. On boot I have to do sudo mount -a and then watch error messages scroll past that the shares are already mounted (but not visible and/or accessible in any way). When they are mounted, if I play a movie file and then wait 1 minute, xubuntu seems to "loose" the share and its filemanagement app takes 5 minutes of freezing to do anything.
Windows 7 isn't much better, instantly forgetting a mapped drive if it can't find it for a split second but that is an old bug. Simple samba mounts in /etc/fstab USED to work in Linux. Then they broke it. Regular Ubuntu is even worse because there .gfvs or whatever that horror is called tries to dynamically mount stuff you already defined in fstab and then get it wrong.
Attach a android phone and Ubuntu shows how out of touch it is by trying to mount a camera. Nobody has camera's anymore, everyone does have a smart phone. If you want to attract casual users maybe you shouldn't throw away standard desktop design and instead focus on allowing people to easily hookup their phone?
Active nvidia drivers, loose your icons... why!?! What does the video driver have to do with your desktop theme?
Suspend computer, resume, open video file. Crash of desktop, what is this, Windows 95?
I am addicted to sloppy mouse focus, something neither OSX nor Windows can handle, so I am stuck but I am startling to like the experience less and less.
Mostly because stuff that used to work, now doesn't. It seems the PC in general is going backwards. Come on Intel, get some multi-headed video support, with display ports already. This is fucking 2013 why am I dealing with issues that were solved half a decade ago?
And here is another rant, why does every desktop on Linux insist on including its own crappy media player that doesn't handle any files and crashes on 99% of files when there are two good reliable players available (vlc and mplayer).
The Linux culture of late seems to reason: App X is 80% complete, lets replace it with App Y which is 40% complete! Unity and Gnome 3 would have created far less outrage if they had been released when they had achieved full feature parity with Gnome 2. But they didn't. People had just gotten Gnome 2 setup to be workable and then it was replaced with a system that crashed, lacked basic features people had come to rely upon and only worked on a handful of machines.
That is like a 2 star Michelin restaurant just about to receive its 3rd star firing its kitchen staff and replacing them with monkeys and then wondering why their business went bankrupt. If these people ran a F1 race they would respond to a record setting test lap by rebuilding the car from scratch. With lego.
I quite like being called a pirate. It is glamorous and dangerous and a bit rebbelious. It is certainly more attractive then being called what I am, a sad fat old man on slashdot.
If it was labelled as copyright infringer it would be far less attractive. Just look at the piratebay. It is COOL, nice logo and all. Copyrightinfringementbay.org would be far less attractive.
The copyright industry seems to NOT only insist on making it easier, cheaper and a better experience to pirate, they also seem determined to make it more sexy.
Why not go all out and call us copyright infringers Ninjas! That will teach us!
How much food and such costs depends a LOT on where you life. Not all cities are equal in this regard.
I also notice the parent never mentions insurance. Why not?
Also what happens if he loses his job? Loses a limb? Child is born with a major handicap?
50k might not be a bad salary in some places but how would he do if the shit hits the fan? Or his wife drops three kids instead of one?
Or 50k is all he will be getting for the rest of his life, inflation be damned? That is what is happening at least in IT right now in Holland, programmers jobs, even the so called good payers, have been offering the same wages for several years now and no, inflation hasn't been zero. You can get poor just by earning the same salary year after year.
I am not complaining to much, but then I got zero responsibilities but people raising a family? They need more or they are just a paycheck away from the poor house.
Zimmerman and Travor BOTH choose to live in a gated community.
Don't whine about being stopped in the street by the security guard you yourself appointed.
If this had happened outside the gates, I would have felt different BUT this happened in a gated community and in such a place, you have to live by whatever rules that community sets because that is why gates are around it. Don't live in a gated community if you don't want to stopped by your neighbors.
I agree, but remember, both these men lived in gated communities. I have very strong feelings about gated communities. They talk to me about people who would rather pay a thousand in gates and wannabe cops rather then spend a 100 in extra taxes for real cops. Real cops are not perfect mostly because people don't want to pay for proper ones (would you take a cop salary?) but they are better then armed civilians trying to keep out wanna-be thugs especially when those wanna-be thugs are living in the same community.
Either side could have walked away that night but the real fight started far far earlier, when Travor was getting violent at school and Zimmerman was no longer willing to wait for an underfunded justice system to stop crime on his turf.
Zimmerman was the one on the ground as testified to by both witnesses and forensic investigators.
I have seen some people try to bend the truth but you break it then throw away half the pieces.
What is your agenda?
Why do people keep forgetting this happened in a gated community, in which BOTH lived?
If Martin had known Zimmerman had a gun, would he have attacked him?
If Martin knew Zimmerman had a gun and feared getting shot in the back, attacking him was even more insane, he would have to close with a man who could whip out a gun in a split second and fill him with lead (WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN).
If Martin did not know Zimmerman had a gun, him attacking him is a clear case of aggression with murderous intent considering the near outcome of the fight as in if Zimmerman had NOT shot Martin, would Martin have stopped beating his victims head into the ground BEFORE he died or after?
To many people assume that because Martin was the one who ended up death, Zimmerman was the only one with murder on the mind that night.
1) Because it wasn't Zimmerman who attacked Martin. Martin's history showed a youth with a lot of issues with violence. Could this wannabe thug be resentful of having to life with this sister in this gated community and gone and confronted this wannabe cop who was part of the man? A lot of people are talking about the wannabe cop mentality of Zimmerman, it is then also fair to talk about the wannabe thug mentality of Martin, especially as he was forced to live in a gated community away from his friends.
2) Zimmerman had lost sight of Martin. Stop rehashing the media lies, use the evidence presented in court. Zimmerman was patrolling a gated community were the people had chosen to allow Zimmerman that right. When you life in a gated community, you forfeit certain normal rights because apparently you prefer security over freedom. Remember, these two where living in the SAME gated community. They were neighbors if people still talked to each other.
3) The stand your ground defense wasn't used in the case, just by the media, Zimmerman defended himself on ordinary self defense laws, because he was on the ground being beaten with intent to kill (as evidenced by wounds) by a much taller and fitter man.
This case has been handled incredibly badly by the media. If you followed the actual court case an entirely different story plays out.
If you want to know what I think happened? Two cats forgot that the point of a staring match is NOT to fight. Martin has a history of wanting to appear as a thug, intimidating others and using violence if that doesn't work. Zimmerman is a wannabe cop who wasn't going to let anymore hoodlums affect his community. They met late at night and neither backed down. Who said what first? I don't know, maybe Zimmerman called out. Maybe Martin wanted to show this white guy who owned this street.
Fact was they ended up on the ground, Travor was beating a much older and fitter man to death but it didn't end the way travor intended, Zimmerman had a gun.
Two men with to much anger/ego who weren't going to take it anymore. Either could have walked away. remember, Travor wasn't shot in the back, he wasn't shot from he a distance, Travor was shot while he was pouding an old far short man's head into the ground.
But hey, why should facts presented by the PROSECUTION matter to you. Much easier to just read one or two stories and spout lies.
Trevor Martin:
- Kicked out his mothers house for violent behavior.
- Numerous violent incidents at school.
- Posing as wanna-be hoodlum.
George Zimmerman:
911 operators are NOT police officers and can't give orders.
911 operator did NOT order, just said Zimmerman did not need to continue to follow.
Zimmerman did NOT continue to follow as was proven in the case BY THE PROSECUTION!
You are a typical anon, ill informed and down right lying.
I would go further, 7 wasn't a winner, it wasn't as big a loser.
Ballmer is overseeing a drugs operation in a city of billions where there is no law, everyone is a millionaire and all the other drug barons have long since gone from shooting themselves in the foot to traveling back in time and shooting their ancestors in the head.
MS didn't rise to dominance because of the brilliance of its leaders but because the competition made some of the biggest and most classic mistakes in business history. They have been discussed before but IBM just handing the PC business to a tiny upstart has to be rank in the top 3 biggest mistakes ever.
Windows and Office are gigantic sellers and unlike Intels Itanium, when MS goofs with a release, they don't have to factor in gigantic hard production costs of shifting a production facility back to old products, they just print different keys to ship to business. The actual physical Windows 8 boxes are a tiny fraction of their business. Large customers just get a load of keys and download the version they want. And when Intel is sued to keep making chips, MS can fume all it wants about still having to sell XP during Vista, the costs of doing so are trivial compared to keeping an unprofitable chip line open.
I am not saying the lack of sales on Vista and 8 don't hurt but they don't hurt as much as having to retire a physical production line and getting rid of unsold stock.
You might claim their are losing money in mobile and that is true enough but it is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. It is just not going to have an effect any time soon.
Basically right now MS is operating like a government that is ruling willing slaves. It collects what is essentially a tax on every PC and the public goes out of its way to re-inforce its shackles every day. Note that the Xbox One pre-orders didn't really hurt at all over the entire fuzz about always on online and always on kineckt. People were fuming on it on the internet while standing in line to get their pre-order in.
You can therefor judge Ballmer NOT by asking how good he has to be to keep the business running as normal (cash cow Windows/Offfice loosing money everywhere else) but just how bad he can be before the Windows/Office cash cow would take a massive hit.
And let us not forget the company rose to power on Dos, Windows 1-2-3 95 etc etc. It was normal for early Windows machines to crash several times a day, not to support common hardware, refuse to run older software and be downright insecure by design. And sales GREW!
That makes me think that MS could release a Windows 9 that killed you cat, impregnated your daughter and fucked you up the ass with a ten foot spiked dildo and people would either buy it because it is the latest version or totally burn MS by forcing MS to take their money for old software. I wish women would use that logic for dating "Date you? A nerd? No way, ever! Burn nerd, I am just going to have sex with you in ways you can never imagine AND pay you for it whenever you want but I am never going to go on a date because you are a nerd and I want to hurt your feelings". Well... I think I could live with that.
People made much about people demanding to buy downgrades from MS. I am sure Ballmer cried bitter tears of defeat and only had billions of dollars to console himself with.
No, the question isn't how good Ballmer has to be to keep MS running, it is just how fucking bad he would have to be to actually HURT MS in any serious way. I think he would have to start physically assaulting each and every customer.
In reality management follows this reasoning:
Management: We have more work then we can handle, training is boring so we need to hire someone who is a good match for what we need, some experience with tool chain we use.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We have far more work then we can handle, there is no room for training so we need to hire someone who is a very good match for what we need, 2 year experience with the exact tool chain we use down to version number.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We are drowning in work, we never heard of the word training, the recruitment costs are sky high so we will be offering peanuts for wages and we need someone who is an exact clone of an employee who escaped years ago.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We outsource/hire immigrants and blame the total collapse of our business on the local work ethic.
Management: We deserve a bonus!
CEO: Me too!
Board of directors: Agreed, if you agree to raise our compensation.
Explain the Asian super companies then, or Siemens.
Or for that matter the largest company in the world, Shell. Which does far more then just sell petrol. or just drill for oil. Or indeed does many things that have nothing to do with oil.
Clearly, you are an idiot.