Yeah, sure. Two $400 computers, 2 percent operating margin in a good year.... they stand to make a whole sixteen bucks off each person every three years! $5.33 per customer per year, or almost 45 cents a month. And all they have to do is manage hundreds of thousands of employees, a gobal supply chain, international finance and 32,000 tax jurisdictions each with different rules. That's a lot to get excited about.
Wait, no. The other thing. They'd stand to make more money than their entire PC business running Google ads on their website. They get a lot of hits. Why just one little rectangle on support.dell.com ought to rake in MILLIONS in pure profit. Hey, then they could even stand to make more money by making their product even crappier as failures ran their hit count up - if that were physically possible, I mean. Sort of a hypothetical there. I was getting carried away, sorry.
If they don't move in mobile they're dead and they know it. So they'll put their unpopular mobile interface on their popular desktop OS, because that will make their mobile problems all better. And people like ARM tablets, so they'll put their unpopular phone OS on ARM tablets and trick people into believing it will run their copy of QuickBooks - dispelling the last vestiges of trust anybody might ever have had. But just to be sure, they'll also make a bunch of full desktop OS tablets that can run that quickbook app (because those sell in the hundreds), front it with the despised Mobile interface and create plenty of confusion about which is which. And then they'll blame the stupid victims for misunderstanding their clear communication. Oh, goodness. Somebody up in the executive suite has the most acute sense of humor I've seen since Sam Kinnison died.
Re:Congratulations! We have a winner!
on
Windows 8 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
You have no idea how much many of us are going to enjoy watching you guys squirm and flail about for the next two years. No doubt HP's early look at W8 had a lot to do with them deciding to opt out of selling Windows PCs. I can just barely imagine Leo Apothaker, having waited patiently through the show turning to the presenter and asking: "What else have you got? Is that it?" You guys have no idea what you've done. This is going to be delightful.
Twitter got tired of being stalked and mod-bombed by sockpuppets and left for greener pastures. I do believe you'll find him on techrights if you're really looking. A shame, that. I do believe he was one of slashdot's most prolific article submitters ever and the quality has gone downhill since.
You've got some gall to bring up standards. Why don't you go back and see if you can get W8 adopted as a standard by ISO.
Re:Congratulations! We have a winner!
on
Windows 8 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
That seems unlikely. You guys never did "get it" and you never will. I guess that's what you get when you take some of the brightest minds on the planet and con them into playing Survivor: Redmond for all their adult lives - or until they get voted off.
Re:BSODs are very often hardware related
on
Windows 8 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
The problem with putting that stuff in is that things come to rely on it. So you can't take it out. I didn't say MS was worried about those dead legends still. They're dead. That's the point.
Congratulations! We have a winner!
on
Windows 8 Roundup
·
· Score: 2
Buzzword Bingo veteran Davide Marney brings us this contemporary rendition of word salad without mentioning any of our three Buzzkills "vertical cloud synergy." Congratulations Davide! Please step up and claim your prize: a free download of Windows 8 Developer Preview (applause)
As we saw with Vista, people are going to buy it by the metric boatload regardless. In fact, many are on software assurance and contractually obligated to do so. It's an even-number release, so the people who would skip it are going to, and install the next release instead. No matter what on release day almost every PC on earth is going to come with a paid license for it, want it or not, even if the software actually installed is something else. This version is about getting the throwaway version out of the way. Why should they care at all about what's in it? It could be a blank disk and move 200M units. If it's even worse than Windows ME, what are you going to do - not buy it? Good luck with that.
So why should they put even five minutes' thought into what it could be? That would be a waste.
Re:BSODs are very often hardware related
on
Windows 8 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
No. Linux always runs better because it's not trying to prevent Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker, WordPerfect, CorelDraw and 100 other programs from working properly. You wouldn't believe the hideous workarounds required to pull that off.
Seriously... what's with all the idiotic hate
on
Windows 8 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
It's a messaging problem. People don't like change. Hopefully the company sticks with "you'll get over it."
Until you have a cost for the full cycle of nuclear, including disposal of waste fuel, plant and equipment, refinery dross that can actually, reliably be executed, you cannot claim that nuclear is "economical" at all because you don't know what it costs at all. It comes with an unpriced back-end balloon payment that could be literally anything. So back at ya bud. Apparently by your definition economical nuclear power is science fiction too. Or perhaps the authors' preferred term of "speculative fiction" likes you better. Speculative in the sense that in some speculative potential future we might agree on a safe way to be rid of the stuff, and that's good enough for the story we're telling you today.
It doesn't matter whether it's bad, or good, or even the same. They will release it, and millions will buy it. It will be included on every new PC. It will be adopted across the enterprise. You really have no choice so you may as well relax and enjoy it.
And of course they know this, which makes one wonder if they're just mailing it in at this point. I mean, why bother?
What if - just as an intellectual exercise - instead of paying for recycling this containment you simply dug a hole. How deep a hole could you dig with that much money? Would it be deep enough to tap geothermal energy? I think so.
Look, I'm not a big fan of fossil fuels for electricity either. But your tendency to ignore both hydro and geothermal is annoying. Neither of those things is science fiction. Calling them that doesn't strengthen your argument - it makes you look silly.
They do have this effect on some few people. It must be horrible to have that condition. Not everybody needs ramps to get into a public building either, but they're still required on new construction.
Measured in gold almost everything is approaching its lowest price in living memory. The value of a US dollar is fast approaching 1/2000th a troy ounce of gold. The only things that seem to be keeping up with gold right now are silver and Apple stock.
They are encouraging first time submitters. There has been a dearth of timely submissions lately. I'm for it. A bunch of the most prolific submitters like "twitter" have been harassed away, and somebody's got to submit this stuff.
I wonder if declining power requirements of homes have anything to do with declining power needs of computers, the migration to LCD TVs, proliferation of heat pumps and so on - or if it's just a tough economy finally driving folks to adjust the thermostat.
After 50 years of neutron bombardment, even the concrete and steel of the containment is radioactive. What are you going to do with THAT? Bury an entire nuclear reactor in hard steel containers in the desert? What is that going to cost? Until you factor in the full amount of these costs we have no idea at all about what nuclear energy costs. The cost could even be prohibitive. We just don't know.
If they want us to respect their engineering, they have to think about these obvious details before they break ground on a plant. If your plan is to "wing it" I don't want you building a nuclear plant in my area.
And for goodness sake don't accumulate 50 years worth of spent fuel and store it in the shed out back like it was rusty farm implements.
Nuclear does not just have bad PR. It also has no plan to dispose of the radioactive waste created - not just the fuel, all reactors create many tons of radioactive steel or concrete also. Or if there is such a plan, I don't know it. Please feel free to post it in reply.
Under every square meter of the Earth's surface is an abundant natural resource of clean, sustainable baseload power. In every nuclear reactor are hundreds of metric tons of low-grade nuclear waste - not even including the fuel - that we have no plan whatsoever to dispose of, nor any idea how much that will cost. One of these things does not seem like a good idea.
Please, let me be the first among us to say "Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on too."
AC's are what they are, and slashdot is engineered to accept them so that no voice is silenced. I'm OK with that. But to come in here, on this day, and piss on the memory of a man who never did harm and blessed us all with the wealth of ages because you couldn't figure out one of the simplest websites on earth? Fuck you. I mean that sincerely. Die in a fire, please.
To do it right they should slashdot it forever and put a link on the slashdot footer to Project Gutenberg.
The guy did more for the preservation of knowledge than you or I could ever hope to do. Even Richard Stallman owes him a debt that can't be repaid - for the idea that we own the knowledge that we share, and its value increases with its commonality. His ideas are the inspiration for the free software movement, Google Books, and many other things.
The first time I downloaded an eBook from Michael Hart, his site was on The List - and The List was under a meg. I read it a dozen times, and have gotten hundreds since. My Android tablet is now configured to search for books "Project Gutenberg first." Over the years I've given back what I could, when I could, but to be honest I got more than I gave. The man had Vision, with a capital V. I'll never forget the premise: that with digital technology replication is costless so if an ebook is worth $1 and distributed to all the people of the world, that work creates billions of dollars worth of knowledge.
Now's a good time to remember and give again what I can.
The passing of a dear friend is seldom more painful than when you owe them something you cannot repay. Farewell, Michael Hart. If the best I can do now is to do what I can to help push your vision forward, I owe you that.
Ooh. I've gained a stalker. This is a rare privilege. Do they pay you extra for that? I haven't had a slashdot stalker in years. Tell me about yourself.
This is probably a difficult time to remind you ACs of facts you would know if you were regulars here, or at least subscribers who could read past comments. I have five kids and an adorable grandson. Each of them expresses themselves better than you do, and knows to capitalize the first word of a sentence.
We are working on recognizing a joke when they see it. I can't be sure, but I think even the toddler is ahead of you on that one.
99.999999999% and then some of all the life forms on Earth are bacteria. Assuming you're human, the bacteria in your own body outnumber the not-bacteria cells more than 100:1.
The bacteria own the the biosphere, from the highest reaches of the atmosphere to miles beneath the surface. The mass of bacteria outweigh all of the algae in the seas, plus all the trees, plus every other plant and animal living by 10x. Even if you break those down into individual cells, bacteria outnumber those cells by 10:1.
The bacteria control the absorptoin of CO2, the temperature and the flow of ice
We deem ourselves the masters of this world when it is only a lease, let for the nonce. Unless we 'scape this world we are no better than our single-celled brethren, and share their fate.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, sure. Two $400 computers, 2 percent operating margin in a good year.... they stand to make a whole sixteen bucks off each person every three years! $5.33 per customer per year, or almost 45 cents a month. And all they have to do is manage hundreds of thousands of employees, a gobal supply chain, international finance and 32,000 tax jurisdictions each with different rules. That's a lot to get excited about.
Wait, no. The other thing. They'd stand to make more money than their entire PC business running Google ads on their website. They get a lot of hits. Why just one little rectangle on support.dell.com ought to rake in MILLIONS in pure profit. Hey, then they could even stand to make more money by making their product even crappier as failures ran their hit count up - if that were physically possible, I mean. Sort of a hypothetical there. I was getting carried away, sorry.
If they don't move in mobile they're dead and they know it. So they'll put their unpopular mobile interface on their popular desktop OS, because that will make their mobile problems all better. And people like ARM tablets, so they'll put their unpopular phone OS on ARM tablets and trick people into believing it will run their copy of QuickBooks - dispelling the last vestiges of trust anybody might ever have had. But just to be sure, they'll also make a bunch of full desktop OS tablets that can run that quickbook app (because those sell in the hundreds), front it with the despised Mobile interface and create plenty of confusion about which is which. And then they'll blame the stupid victims for misunderstanding their clear communication. Oh, goodness. Somebody up in the executive suite has the most acute sense of humor I've seen since Sam Kinnison died.
You have no idea how much many of us are going to enjoy watching you guys squirm and flail about for the next two years. No doubt HP's early look at W8 had a lot to do with them deciding to opt out of selling Windows PCs. I can just barely imagine Leo Apothaker, having waited patiently through the show turning to the presenter and asking: "What else have you got? Is that it?" You guys have no idea what you've done. This is going to be delightful.
Twitter got tired of being stalked and mod-bombed by sockpuppets and left for greener pastures. I do believe you'll find him on techrights if you're really looking. A shame, that. I do believe he was one of slashdot's most prolific article submitters ever and the quality has gone downhill since.
You've got some gall to bring up standards. Why don't you go back and see if you can get W8 adopted as a standard by ISO.
That seems unlikely. You guys never did "get it" and you never will. I guess that's what you get when you take some of the brightest minds on the planet and con them into playing Survivor: Redmond for all their adult lives - or until they get voted off.
The problem with putting that stuff in is that things come to rely on it. So you can't take it out. I didn't say MS was worried about those dead legends still. They're dead. That's the point.
Buzzword Bingo veteran Davide Marney brings us this contemporary rendition of word salad without mentioning any of our three Buzzkills "vertical cloud synergy." Congratulations Davide! Please step up and claim your prize: a free download of Windows 8 Developer Preview (applause)
As we saw with Vista, people are going to buy it by the metric boatload regardless. In fact, many are on software assurance and contractually obligated to do so. It's an even-number release, so the people who would skip it are going to, and install the next release instead. No matter what on release day almost every PC on earth is going to come with a paid license for it, want it or not, even if the software actually installed is something else. This version is about getting the throwaway version out of the way. Why should they care at all about what's in it? It could be a blank disk and move 200M units. If it's even worse than Windows ME, what are you going to do - not buy it? Good luck with that.
So why should they put even five minutes' thought into what it could be? That would be a waste.
No. Linux always runs better because it's not trying to prevent Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker, WordPerfect, CorelDraw and 100 other programs from working properly. You wouldn't believe the hideous workarounds required to pull that off.
It's a messaging problem. People don't like change. Hopefully the company sticks with "you'll get over it."
Ah, Microsoft, where 90% market share means you just don't have to care.
Until you have a cost for the full cycle of nuclear, including disposal of waste fuel, plant and equipment, refinery dross that can actually, reliably be executed, you cannot claim that nuclear is "economical" at all because you don't know what it costs at all. It comes with an unpriced back-end balloon payment that could be literally anything. So back at ya bud. Apparently by your definition economical nuclear power is science fiction too. Or perhaps the authors' preferred term of "speculative fiction" likes you better. Speculative in the sense that in some speculative potential future we might agree on a safe way to be rid of the stuff, and that's good enough for the story we're telling you today.
It doesn't matter whether it's bad, or good, or even the same. They will release it, and millions will buy it. It will be included on every new PC. It will be adopted across the enterprise. You really have no choice so you may as well relax and enjoy it.
And of course they know this, which makes one wonder if they're just mailing it in at this point. I mean, why bother?
What if - just as an intellectual exercise - instead of paying for recycling this containment you simply dug a hole. How deep a hole could you dig with that much money? Would it be deep enough to tap geothermal energy? I think so.
Look, I'm not a big fan of fossil fuels for electricity either. But your tendency to ignore both hydro and geothermal is annoying. Neither of those things is science fiction. Calling them that doesn't strengthen your argument - it makes you look silly.
They do have this effect on some few people. It must be horrible to have that condition. Not everybody needs ramps to get into a public building either, but they're still required on new construction.
Measured in gold almost everything is approaching its lowest price in living memory. The value of a US dollar is fast approaching 1/2000th a troy ounce of gold. The only things that seem to be keeping up with gold right now are silver and Apple stock.
They are encouraging first time submitters. There has been a dearth of timely submissions lately. I'm for it. A bunch of the most prolific submitters like "twitter" have been harassed away, and somebody's got to submit this stuff.
I wonder if declining power requirements of homes have anything to do with declining power needs of computers, the migration to LCD TVs, proliferation of heat pumps and so on - or if it's just a tough economy finally driving folks to adjust the thermostat.
After 50 years of neutron bombardment, even the concrete and steel of the containment is radioactive. What are you going to do with THAT? Bury an entire nuclear reactor in hard steel containers in the desert? What is that going to cost? Until you factor in the full amount of these costs we have no idea at all about what nuclear energy costs. The cost could even be prohibitive. We just don't know.
If they want us to respect their engineering, they have to think about these obvious details before they break ground on a plant. If your plan is to "wing it" I don't want you building a nuclear plant in my area.
And for goodness sake don't accumulate 50 years worth of spent fuel and store it in the shed out back like it was rusty farm implements.
Nuclear does not just have bad PR. It also has no plan to dispose of the radioactive waste created - not just the fuel, all reactors create many tons of radioactive steel or concrete also. Or if there is such a plan, I don't know it. Please feel free to post it in reply.
Under every square meter of the Earth's surface is an abundant natural resource of clean, sustainable baseload power. In every nuclear reactor are hundreds of metric tons of low-grade nuclear waste - not even including the fuel - that we have no plan whatsoever to dispose of, nor any idea how much that will cost. One of these things does not seem like a good idea.
Please, let me be the first among us to say "Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on too."
AC's are what they are, and slashdot is engineered to accept them so that no voice is silenced. I'm OK with that. But to come in here, on this day, and piss on the memory of a man who never did harm and blessed us all with the wealth of ages because you couldn't figure out one of the simplest websites on earth? Fuck you. I mean that sincerely. Die in a fire, please.
To do it right they should slashdot it forever and put a link on the slashdot footer to Project Gutenberg.
The guy did more for the preservation of knowledge than you or I could ever hope to do. Even Richard Stallman owes him a debt that can't be repaid - for the idea that we own the knowledge that we share, and its value increases with its commonality. His ideas are the inspiration for the free software movement, Google Books, and many other things.
The first time I downloaded an eBook from Michael Hart, his site was on The List - and The List was under a meg. I read it a dozen times, and have gotten hundreds since. My Android tablet is now configured to search for books "Project Gutenberg first." Over the years I've given back what I could, when I could, but to be honest I got more than I gave. The man had Vision, with a capital V. I'll never forget the premise: that with digital technology replication is costless so if an ebook is worth $1 and distributed to all the people of the world, that work creates billions of dollars worth of knowledge.
Now's a good time to remember and give again what I can.
The passing of a dear friend is seldom more painful than when you owe them something you cannot repay. Farewell, Michael Hart. If the best I can do now is to do what I can to help push your vision forward, I owe you that.
Holy hell but it's dusty in here all of a sudden.
Ooh. I've gained a stalker. This is a rare privilege. Do they pay you extra for that? I haven't had a slashdot stalker in years. Tell me about yourself.
This is probably a difficult time to remind you ACs of facts you would know if you were regulars here, or at least subscribers who could read past comments. I have five kids and an adorable grandson. Each of them expresses themselves better than you do, and knows to capitalize the first word of a sentence.
We are working on recognizing a joke when they see it. I can't be sure, but I think even the toddler is ahead of you on that one.
99.999999999% and then some of all the life forms on Earth are bacteria. Assuming you're human, the bacteria in your own body outnumber the not-bacteria cells more than 100:1.
The bacteria own the the biosphere, from the highest reaches of the atmosphere to miles beneath the surface. The mass of bacteria outweigh all of the algae in the seas, plus all the trees, plus every other plant and animal living by 10x. Even if you break those down into individual cells, bacteria outnumber those cells by 10:1.
The bacteria control the absorptoin of CO2, the temperature and the flow of ice
We deem ourselves the masters of this world when it is only a lease, let for the nonce. Unless we 'scape this world we are no better than our single-celled brethren, and share their fate.