Tale of two guns I own, both purchased with the goal of being conceal carry pieces: Walther PPS #1 - 2300 rounds fired. Error: failure to eject last round properly: 1. No other jams and I've fed good ammo and cheap ammo through it. Had so much success a year ago I bought another as a spare. 1400 rounds through it, no failures to fire or eject. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'll trust my life with either of those weapons. I am confident that if/when I need them to go boom they will.
Also last year I bought a Ruger SR40c because I wanted something in.40S&W. Excellent sights, great trigger, very accurate and manageable recoil for me. But it had problems with double feeds, failure to eject, and light strikes. Put 600 rounds through it to "break it in" and still had problems through the 1000 round mark. Sent the gun back to Ruger and they replaced some parts and replaced the barrel. 500 rounds through the gun since I've got it back and other than it still hates winchester ammo (hard primer) seems to be okay if I'm shooting Hornaday Critical Duty or Defense ammo. I still refuse to carry it. It will probably take another 1000 rounds before I will even consider it again.
Then you've not shopped around as there are plenty of budget providers that offer PostgreSQL. I buy and sell vintage & antique furniture from estate sales on the side. Last year I took a break from IT projects, but I did write a simple mobile web app to display my stuff online using jQuery Mobile, Perl, and PostgreSQL using A2Hosting as my provider for like $6 a month.
This year I'm working on IT projects again. This one just so happens to be based around Wordpress for many reasons. In Q3 this year I've got it in my budget to hire two developers full-time to basically port everything we're using to PostgreSQL. Why? I've dealt with Oracle before. Many times before. And I don't think their corporate culture has changed any, it's just a question of when will they rake you over the coals for MySQL. MariaDB should be a drop in replacement. Should. I've never gone through any major DB change without problems. I'd much rather go to something that I know is stable and pretty well drama free. PostgreSQL offers that right now while the M*SQL community figures out which direction it's going.
I have to second this. Especially since they do have a 90 day free trial. We've been using Azure since the first of the year for both a mobile application as well as for Storage/CDN. Our main site, ironically enough given the mention in the article, is hosted via Pair Networks. But we found that our storage needs was growing much faster than our CPU/RAM usage on the servers. Off loading media to Azure has worked for us and now that the Azure supports Android cloud to device as well as APN and WPN it's made development life easier.
It's interesting today. A few months ago a group of modders released Diaspora, a Battlestar Galactica game based on the Freespace 2 Open engine. It takes a little bit to get working, especially for multiplayer. The younger people, I'd say those 25 and under, got frustrated at the game and gave up to go back to the craptastic browser game released by bugpoint. Why? They couldn't hit the magic "login" and play button. You had to do some set up first in the launcher to get the game to work and then there are a few features in the advanced menu to check/uncheck depending on your set up. That was "too hard" for most of them. Then when they got into the game they said it was "too hard" with "too many things" to remember and those of us with joysticks had too much of an advantage, yada, yada.
I guess I don't mind because I think I spent weeks getting Wing Commander Privateer to run on my computer from with a floppy with custom config.sys & autoexe.bat files. There were others, but Privateer was the one I remember the most frustration with.
Microsoft is going all in on the idea that the desktop is going the way of the dodo and that by 2015 EVERYTHING will have a touch screen. I've long made the argument that if touch really was the future of everything Apple would have had touch screen Macbooks and iMacs a long time ago.
I went to a developers event last fall for work. I understand that MS is wanting to unify all of it's UI's across it's various platforms. Whether it's a good/bad UI is subjective, but it was clear that was the goal. The other developers at the event joked in the elevator about the problems of touchscreens with desktops. And I will say some of their decisions when you listen to why the did what they did do make sense, but the problem is are those changes worth the cost? Especially to businesses where change, any change, adds up quickly in soft costs. Maybe if they had introduced Metro on the tablets and phones with a classic "windows start bar" desktop + "metro mode" when you click a button or key (what apple is doing in OSX with launchpad like or hate it) to get people used to the idea and changes to the interface before converting over in Windows 9 it would have gotten a better response. Instead they are trying to change how people have worked with computers in the office since 1995.
The truth is the desktop isn't going anywhere in the enterprise. The whole appification trend we've been seeing works for consumption of content. It doesn't work for content creation. Since most of my days are spend reading emails, texts, phone calls, looking at documents others create, and meetings, generally I leave the laptop on my desk and bring my iPhone & iPad. Same goes for a lot of our sales team. Most are carrying some kind of tablet/smart phone and find that's all they need and it's a lot lighter. But they are mostly consuming and in a pinch if you need to make a quick change to a document or write a brief email response tablets work great. Last year I tried to replace my laptop and got the keyboard case and the docking station for the iPad, but the apps just weren't there yet. Try creating anything more than a basic spreadsheet or report in Pages on an iPad. But I found if I'm going to have to compose a long email, document, or spreadsheet that I want a keyboard, mouse, and big monitor. Basically what I have sitting in front of me. And a lot of workers need because it makes their job easier.
Currently I have a 15" macbook pro on my desk with a 26" Acer monitor beside it and external keyboard and mouse. Then I at least have the option of working from other locations when I need to and I do travel places for days at a time. But the people who work in the office day in and out, they all have iMacs or Mac Mini's depending on what they're doing. Again, they are usually creating content, editing graphics & video and they want the large screens. They don't care about taking their work home at the end of the day either. Our graphics people aren't going to be editing photos of models on an iPad anytime soon.
Nerd that works in the fashion industry here, funny story on that one, but any rate we just bought a mid-range 3d printer. Reason, so the fashion designer could create 3D models of button designs and with a little paint get an idea of how it would look on a design sample. From there you can make a casting for a mold to send to a metal or glass maker to make the real thing. Right now we're making a little extra because other area designers are coming in to use it to prototype things like jewelry, belt buckle designs, etc.. I'm sure in a couple years they might have their own, but these are generally creative people. But they all seem to use Autocad.
Does the government make you have Libel insurance before you can own a printer, blog, or slashdot account? After all you could write something offensive against someone and get sued. You should have insurance for that.
Having to have mandatory gun insurance would meet the same fate as having to have mandatory libel insurance for buying a printer: both interfere with one's constitutional rights.
On another note you can buy Self-Defense liability insurance from the NRA. Provides reimbursement of up to $250k for civil trials and $50k for Criminal with a lot of caveats. I carry the policy incase I'm ever in a situation outside of my home. My state law is pretty clear: if they are in your home and not supposed to be: shoot 'em. It's justified against criminal and you're absolved of any potential civil liability as well under that Castle Doctrine. But if I was walking on the street and I was forced to defend myself, well different story.
Yeah, because all those people on the road are using their smartphones "for GPS" while driving now. It's no different than Bit Torrent. While there are valid uses for the technology, most people are using it for willful copyright infringement.
That's what makes android QA so damned expensive at our shop. If a client says we want iOS compatibility and Android compatibility we have to specify on the Android that it's the Nexus phone and tablet that we only QA against running latest version of android. If they want QA on Samsung devices, well it's $X,XXX per device and $YYY per OS version per device.
It was probably left on just in case some legacy remote system was still trying to access that machine for some reason and did not receive the update to switch to new host. It can happen. I know when we switched one of our API's to the new system we left the original API servers up and running for 10 months from the last system call made to that server group. At that point we figured all of our customers had transitioned to updated software. Why 10 months? I think it had something to do with hardware lease was up at that point anyway. The reason we let 3 load balanced servers sit sucking power & money? Because our customers were processing something like $20M worth of transactions a day. An hour of down time translated to $800k, actually it could be a lot more or less because transaction load was not even, of lost business for our clients. It cost a lot less than $800k to keep those servers up for a couple extra months just to make sure that every terminal of every customer was updated.
If google got into the hardware business watch how fast Samsung et. al. ditch Android either by forking it and creating their own incompatitable version or going elsewhere for a mobile OS.
Remember, kids these days are buying Samsung phones because they are "hip". Not because they are running Android. If Samsung could still create the hip factor with Windows 8 or their own version of the Android OS, which they have the size and ability to do, they would.
It's no different than Microsoft building their Surface tablets and all other Windows Tablets Makers saying, Fuck you we're not even going to get into the business.
I had a very simple rule about this. While a lot of my developers usually spent sometime in the office every day, if you looked at our commit logs, most new code was contributed between the hours of 10PM - 2AM. Personally I didn't care when people and where people worked so long as tasks were done on time and if you weren't going to make a deadline let me know early and often. My only rule was between the hours of 9AM - 5PM if I call you'd better damn well answer because something is broke and needs to be fixed ASAP. And then as manager I stuck to that. I never called them out of office unless they were really needed. If I wanted a progress report I texted or emailed. Guess what, it worked. Stuff got done, mostly on time. The couple hours of facetime helped a lot especially when trying to debug things.
But being in management is partially setting the expectations and adhering to them. As I said, I didn't call them twice a day for progress reports. So they knew if they saw my name and number on their phone something was wrong and it was urgent.
At the company I'm at now, we communicate via Facebook. Seriously, if I call or text someone I never get a response. Post to someone's wall or PM them and within 5 minutes I have a response.
My laptop becomes my secondary screen and I use the 23" monitor as my main screen with email, help files, and references on the smaller 15" laptop screen. When in this configuration I'm using an external ergo keyboard and mouse, which really did make a difference when it came to my wrists.
That's why you see the deals like HBO GO where you have to be a subscriber to access. Even Hulu has gone this route to appease the media interest and now you have Comcast, a provider, also in the content business.
At the same time Netflix is getting into the content business.
The last thing the cable companies want to happen is for HBO to realize that, "Hey people might pay us $15 a month to watch HBO online without the cable fee."
Honestly, if MLB.tv didn't blackout the local games both me and my father would ditch cable TV.
Actually the "Super Hornet" was always in the plans when the original Hornet was designed and built. The plane was originally built with this upgrade path in mind as a major MLU. And as far as shares, it shared about 80% of the tooling with it's older sibling. Some of the major components aren't interchangeable, i.e. engines, but a lot of the other stuff is the same between the two aircraft. McDonnell Douglas actually came in on time and under budget on the Super Hornet I believe the R&D for the Super Hornet was around $200M. With over 500 built that works out to what, $400k per airframe in R&D costs.
Airforce could have done the same thing with the F-15, which Boeing has done with the Silent Eagle anyway for export, and we could have had replaced old airframes at a fraction of the cost and probably had enough left over to build a successor to the A-10. Which if you read the after action reports from the past 25 years they all say the same thing: need more A-10's and B-52's. They've been the most effective aircraft on the modern battlefields.
Bullshit. My father was a VP at McDonnell Douglas. I spent more than half my life around the defense industry and it's all a political game. Little of it has to do with actually what we need to defend the country. The F-22 and F-35 are not about defense, they are about keeping the engineers and union factory workers at locheed busy.
Read the after action reports of conflicts for the past 20 years. They all said pretty much the same thing: Need more A-10's and B-52's. Today the A-10's role is increasingly being done by Drones like the Reaper. The B-52s are still flying. While you typically need a few fighters for air superiority and defense, you need a few. Not a lot, a few. The last credible air threat was in 1991. And that threat lasted how many hours before any birds in the air were shot down and every airbase the enemy had destroyed?
It's true the Air-Force needs new airframes. The F-15's and F-16's are getting too many hours on them. The question is why spend these huge amounts of money on the F-22 and F-35 when the era of the manned fighter is coming to an end. Sure there will need to be some manned fighters, but not as many. If we had been serious we would have launched a modernization program for the F-15 and purchased replacement airframes for those aging out. Sad thing is, Boeing did this anyway for the export market with the F-15S. And those planes are still cheaper than the F-22's and without the billions in overhead that the R&D cost.
Depends on the company. Look at Louis Vincent Gerstner, Jr. and IBM. He was not a technology guy. He was a management guy having come from RJR Nabisco. Some may loathe what he did to parts of IBM as geeks, but IBM is still around and going strong. Same can't be said for Sun, SGI, DEC, and other major hardware competitors of that era. I'm getting to the age where my technical skills are fading in the marketplace but my ability to go between the geeks in development and non-technical Sr. management types has become ever more valuable. I have 20+ years of industry experience now on the tech side covering mostly systems admin, but also some programming, plus I have a degrees in business and law. (Not a practicing attorney though I've got the JD, but was brought into a start up right after law school that eventually was sold and I never sat for the bar exam. Can't say it's hurt me that much). What I've found is that a successful technology companies needs both the business side and tech side that can work together. Thing is, the most successful CEO I worked for came from the printing industry and was running a "Technology" company. He didn't understand how the technical things worked, didn't want to know, other than what resources were needed to make it work. What he did understand was things like cash flow management, budgeting, and how marketing vs sales worked. As COO the technical side of the house was left to me and the programmers and technical support staff. And it worked out very well.
My "cloud" is running on perl. Has been for over 12 years now. Last major change to the code was adding support to return data in JSON as well as XML a few years ago. Now get off meh lawn.
It's not Apple and Microsoft. It's them plus a couple dozen more companies that are a part of the H.264 pool. Basically anyone who makes electronics is in the MPEG-LA pool. And H.264 was pretty good at the time not to mention being widely adapted by all kinds of devices from phones to computers to set top boxes to game consoles. It became the Defacto standard.
WebM and everything else had the problem of not being significantly better than H.264 with a lot more problems. Video people remember the nightmare of competing players, containers, and codecs in late 90's and early 2000's. H.264 put an end to that. The last thing they wanted to do was have to go back to having to recode video in more than one format.
If WebM/Theora offered a significantly more compelling technical reason, say offered same quality as H.264 with smaller file sizes or faster encode times, then it would have been widely adopted by the industry. But it didn't. The only motivation to use it was purely ideological. Also video people were used to things being expensive. Compared to other equipment and software, an H.264 license isn't that expensive. If you are doing professional video you are used to the licensing models with music, actors, etc.. And most people trying to make a living around video could care less about the ideology. If it's not better, they aren't going to use it. And they will pay to use a better product.
Slashdot Mirror
Tale of two guns I own, both purchased with the goal of being conceal carry pieces: Walther PPS #1 - 2300 rounds fired. Error: failure to eject last round properly: 1. No other jams and I've fed good ammo and cheap ammo through it. Had so much success a year ago I bought another as a spare. 1400 rounds through it, no failures to fire or eject. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'll trust my life with either of those weapons. I am confident that if/when I need them to go boom they will.
Also last year I bought a Ruger SR40c because I wanted something in .40S&W. Excellent sights, great trigger, very accurate and manageable recoil for me. But it had problems with double feeds, failure to eject, and light strikes. Put 600 rounds through it to "break it in" and still had problems through the 1000 round mark. Sent the gun back to Ruger and they replaced some parts and replaced the barrel. 500 rounds through the gun since I've got it back and other than it still hates winchester ammo (hard primer) seems to be okay if I'm shooting Hornaday Critical Duty or Defense ammo. I still refuse to carry it. It will probably take another 1000 rounds before I will even consider it again.
Then you've not shopped around as there are plenty of budget providers that offer PostgreSQL. I buy and sell vintage & antique furniture from estate sales on the side. Last year I took a break from IT projects, but I did write a simple mobile web app to display my stuff online using jQuery Mobile, Perl, and PostgreSQL using A2Hosting as my provider for like $6 a month.
This year I'm working on IT projects again. This one just so happens to be based around Wordpress for many reasons. In Q3 this year I've got it in my budget to hire two developers full-time to basically port everything we're using to PostgreSQL. Why? I've dealt with Oracle before. Many times before. And I don't think their corporate culture has changed any, it's just a question of when will they rake you over the coals for MySQL. MariaDB should be a drop in replacement. Should. I've never gone through any major DB change without problems. I'd much rather go to something that I know is stable and pretty well drama free. PostgreSQL offers that right now while the M*SQL community figures out which direction it's going.
I have to second this. Especially since they do have a 90 day free trial. We've been using Azure since the first of the year for both a mobile application as well as for Storage/CDN. Our main site, ironically enough given the mention in the article, is hosted via Pair Networks. But we found that our storage needs was growing much faster than our CPU/RAM usage on the servers. Off loading media to Azure has worked for us and now that the Azure supports Android cloud to device as well as APN and WPN it's made development life easier.
It's hard to provide certain features when the hardware doesn't exist in the older versions of the phone.
It's interesting today. A few months ago a group of modders released Diaspora, a Battlestar Galactica game based on the Freespace 2 Open engine. It takes a little bit to get working, especially for multiplayer. The younger people, I'd say those 25 and under, got frustrated at the game and gave up to go back to the craptastic browser game released by bugpoint. Why? They couldn't hit the magic "login" and play button. You had to do some set up first in the launcher to get the game to work and then there are a few features in the advanced menu to check/uncheck depending on your set up. That was "too hard" for most of them. Then when they got into the game they said it was "too hard" with "too many things" to remember and those of us with joysticks had too much of an advantage, yada, yada.
I guess I don't mind because I think I spent weeks getting Wing Commander Privateer to run on my computer from with a floppy with custom config.sys & autoexe.bat files. There were others, but Privateer was the one I remember the most frustration with.
We can't ban...oh wait someone just sent me an extra life in Candy Crush, must try and get to the next level!
Because it was never technically BSD. It's a Mach kernel with BSD-Userland.
/.'s been doing this for what...15 years now? It's just tradition at this point.
Microsoft is going all in on the idea that the desktop is going the way of the dodo and that by 2015 EVERYTHING will have a touch screen. I've long made the argument that if touch really was the future of everything Apple would have had touch screen Macbooks and iMacs a long time ago.
I went to a developers event last fall for work. I understand that MS is wanting to unify all of it's UI's across it's various platforms. Whether it's a good/bad UI is subjective, but it was clear that was the goal. The other developers at the event joked in the elevator about the problems of touchscreens with desktops. And I will say some of their decisions when you listen to why the did what they did do make sense, but the problem is are those changes worth the cost? Especially to businesses where change, any change, adds up quickly in soft costs. Maybe if they had introduced Metro on the tablets and phones with a classic "windows start bar" desktop + "metro mode" when you click a button or key (what apple is doing in OSX with launchpad like or hate it) to get people used to the idea and changes to the interface before converting over in Windows 9 it would have gotten a better response. Instead they are trying to change how people have worked with computers in the office since 1995.
The truth is the desktop isn't going anywhere in the enterprise. The whole appification trend we've been seeing works for consumption of content. It doesn't work for content creation. Since most of my days are spend reading emails, texts, phone calls, looking at documents others create, and meetings, generally I leave the laptop on my desk and bring my iPhone & iPad. Same goes for a lot of our sales team. Most are carrying some kind of tablet/smart phone and find that's all they need and it's a lot lighter. But they are mostly consuming and in a pinch if you need to make a quick change to a document or write a brief email response tablets work great. Last year I tried to replace my laptop and got the keyboard case and the docking station for the iPad, but the apps just weren't there yet. Try creating anything more than a basic spreadsheet or report in Pages on an iPad. But I found if I'm going to have to compose a long email, document, or spreadsheet that I want a keyboard, mouse, and big monitor. Basically what I have sitting in front of me. And a lot of workers need because it makes their job easier.
Currently I have a 15" macbook pro on my desk with a 26" Acer monitor beside it and external keyboard and mouse. Then I at least have the option of working from other locations when I need to and I do travel places for days at a time. But the people who work in the office day in and out, they all have iMacs or Mac Mini's depending on what they're doing. Again, they are usually creating content, editing graphics & video and they want the large screens. They don't care about taking their work home at the end of the day either. Our graphics people aren't going to be editing photos of models on an iPad anytime soon.
Nerd that works in the fashion industry here, funny story on that one, but any rate we just bought a mid-range 3d printer. Reason, so the fashion designer could create 3D models of button designs and with a little paint get an idea of how it would look on a design sample. From there you can make a casting for a mold to send to a metal or glass maker to make the real thing. Right now we're making a little extra because other area designers are coming in to use it to prototype things like jewelry, belt buckle designs, etc.. I'm sure in a couple years they might have their own, but these are generally creative people. But they all seem to use Autocad.
Does the government make you have Libel insurance before you can own a printer, blog, or slashdot account? After all you could write something offensive against someone and get sued. You should have insurance for that.
Having to have mandatory gun insurance would meet the same fate as having to have mandatory libel insurance for buying a printer: both interfere with one's constitutional rights.
On another note you can buy Self-Defense liability insurance from the NRA. Provides reimbursement of up to $250k for civil trials and $50k for Criminal with a lot of caveats. I carry the policy incase I'm ever in a situation outside of my home. My state law is pretty clear: if they are in your home and not supposed to be: shoot 'em. It's justified against criminal and you're absolved of any potential civil liability as well under that Castle Doctrine. But if I was walking on the street and I was forced to defend myself, well different story.
Yeah, because all those people on the road are using their smartphones "for GPS" while driving now. It's no different than Bit Torrent. While there are valid uses for the technology, most people are using it for willful copyright infringement.
That's what makes android QA so damned expensive at our shop. If a client says we want iOS compatibility and Android compatibility we have to specify on the Android that it's the Nexus phone and tablet that we only QA against running latest version of android. If they want QA on Samsung devices, well it's $X,XXX per device and $YYY per OS version per device.
It was probably left on just in case some legacy remote system was still trying to access that machine for some reason and did not receive the update to switch to new host. It can happen. I know when we switched one of our API's to the new system we left the original API servers up and running for 10 months from the last system call made to that server group. At that point we figured all of our customers had transitioned to updated software. Why 10 months? I think it had something to do with hardware lease was up at that point anyway. The reason we let 3 load balanced servers sit sucking power & money? Because our customers were processing something like $20M worth of transactions a day. An hour of down time translated to $800k, actually it could be a lot more or less because transaction load was not even, of lost business for our clients. It cost a lot less than $800k to keep those servers up for a couple extra months just to make sure that every terminal of every customer was updated.
If google got into the hardware business watch how fast Samsung et. al. ditch Android either by forking it and creating their own incompatitable version or going elsewhere for a mobile OS.
Remember, kids these days are buying Samsung phones because they are "hip". Not because they are running Android. If Samsung could still create the hip factor with Windows 8 or their own version of the Android OS, which they have the size and ability to do, they would.
It's no different than Microsoft building their Surface tablets and all other Windows Tablets Makers saying, Fuck you we're not even going to get into the business.
I had a very simple rule about this. While a lot of my developers usually spent sometime in the office every day, if you looked at our commit logs, most new code was contributed between the hours of 10PM - 2AM. Personally I didn't care when people and where people worked so long as tasks were done on time and if you weren't going to make a deadline let me know early and often. My only rule was between the hours of 9AM - 5PM if I call you'd better damn well answer because something is broke and needs to be fixed ASAP. And then as manager I stuck to that. I never called them out of office unless they were really needed. If I wanted a progress report I texted or emailed. Guess what, it worked. Stuff got done, mostly on time. The couple hours of facetime helped a lot especially when trying to debug things.
But being in management is partially setting the expectations and adhering to them. As I said, I didn't call them twice a day for progress reports. So they knew if they saw my name and number on their phone something was wrong and it was urgent.
At the company I'm at now, we communicate via Facebook. Seriously, if I call or text someone I never get a response. Post to someone's wall or PM them and within 5 minutes I have a response.
My laptop becomes my secondary screen and I use the 23" monitor as my main screen with email, help files, and references on the smaller 15" laptop screen. When in this configuration I'm using an external ergo keyboard and mouse, which really did make a difference when it came to my wrists.
I found this set up works wonders for me.
That's why you see the deals like HBO GO where you have to be a subscriber to access. Even Hulu has gone this route to appease the media interest and now you have Comcast, a provider, also in the content business.
At the same time Netflix is getting into the content business.
The last thing the cable companies want to happen is for HBO to realize that, "Hey people might pay us $15 a month to watch HBO online without the cable fee."
Honestly, if MLB.tv didn't blackout the local games both me and my father would ditch cable TV.
Personally I say databases should be run on AIX. But that ain't "sexy" in the IT industry to say that.
Actually the "Super Hornet" was always in the plans when the original Hornet was designed and built. The plane was originally built with this upgrade path in mind as a major MLU. And as far as shares, it shared about 80% of the tooling with it's older sibling. Some of the major components aren't interchangeable, i.e. engines, but a lot of the other stuff is the same between the two aircraft. McDonnell Douglas actually came in on time and under budget on the Super Hornet I believe the R&D for the Super Hornet was around $200M. With over 500 built that works out to what, $400k per airframe in R&D costs.
Airforce could have done the same thing with the F-15, which Boeing has done with the Silent Eagle anyway for export, and we could have had replaced old airframes at a fraction of the cost and probably had enough left over to build a successor to the A-10. Which if you read the after action reports from the past 25 years they all say the same thing: need more A-10's and B-52's. They've been the most effective aircraft on the modern battlefields.
Bullshit. My father was a VP at McDonnell Douglas. I spent more than half my life around the defense industry and it's all a political game. Little of it has to do with actually what we need to defend the country. The F-22 and F-35 are not about defense, they are about keeping the engineers and union factory workers at locheed busy.
Read the after action reports of conflicts for the past 20 years. They all said pretty much the same thing: Need more A-10's and B-52's. Today the A-10's role is increasingly being done by Drones like the Reaper. The B-52s are still flying. While you typically need a few fighters for air superiority and defense, you need a few. Not a lot, a few. The last credible air threat was in 1991. And that threat lasted how many hours before any birds in the air were shot down and every airbase the enemy had destroyed?
It's true the Air-Force needs new airframes. The F-15's and F-16's are getting too many hours on them. The question is why spend these huge amounts of money on the F-22 and F-35 when the era of the manned fighter is coming to an end. Sure there will need to be some manned fighters, but not as many. If we had been serious we would have launched a modernization program for the F-15 and purchased replacement airframes for those aging out. Sad thing is, Boeing did this anyway for the export market with the F-15S. And those planes are still cheaper than the F-22's and without the billions in overhead that the R&D cost.
Depends on the company. Look at Louis Vincent Gerstner, Jr. and IBM. He was not a technology guy. He was a management guy having come from RJR Nabisco. Some may loathe what he did to parts of IBM as geeks, but IBM is still around and going strong. Same can't be said for Sun, SGI, DEC, and other major hardware competitors of that era. I'm getting to the age where my technical skills are fading in the marketplace but my ability to go between the geeks in development and non-technical Sr. management types has become ever more valuable. I have 20+ years of industry experience now on the tech side covering mostly systems admin, but also some programming, plus I have a degrees in business and law. (Not a practicing attorney though I've got the JD, but was brought into a start up right after law school that eventually was sold and I never sat for the bar exam. Can't say it's hurt me that much). What I've found is that a successful technology companies needs both the business side and tech side that can work together. Thing is, the most successful CEO I worked for came from the printing industry and was running a "Technology" company. He didn't understand how the technical things worked, didn't want to know, other than what resources were needed to make it work. What he did understand was things like cash flow management, budgeting, and how marketing vs sales worked. As COO the technical side of the house was left to me and the programmers and technical support staff. And it worked out very well.
My "cloud" is running on perl. Has been for over 12 years now. Last major change to the code was adding support to return data in JSON as well as XML a few years ago. Now get off meh lawn.
Because round up is no longer under patent. You can buy generic glyphosate (round-up) these days.
It's not Apple and Microsoft. It's them plus a couple dozen more companies that are a part of the H.264 pool. Basically anyone who makes electronics is in the MPEG-LA pool. And H.264 was pretty good at the time not to mention being widely adapted by all kinds of devices from phones to computers to set top boxes to game consoles. It became the Defacto standard.
WebM and everything else had the problem of not being significantly better than H.264 with a lot more problems. Video people remember the nightmare of competing players, containers, and codecs in late 90's and early 2000's. H.264 put an end to that. The last thing they wanted to do was have to go back to having to recode video in more than one format.
If WebM/Theora offered a significantly more compelling technical reason, say offered same quality as H.264 with smaller file sizes or faster encode times, then it would have been widely adopted by the industry. But it didn't. The only motivation to use it was purely ideological. Also video people were used to things being expensive. Compared to other equipment and software, an H.264 license isn't that expensive. If you are doing professional video you are used to the licensing models with music, actors, etc.. And most people trying to make a living around video could care less about the ideology. If it's not better, they aren't going to use it. And they will pay to use a better product.