MS Money was discontinued in 2009. There won't be another release. Makes a bad gift. Wait - that's not irony, is it? Can I get an irony check over here?
The Earth doesn't make a good mining base for interplanetary industries. Far too much gravity. The point of mining in space is not to bring stuff back to Earth. It's to make stuff in space so you don't have to have lift it out of that well.
When I was a kid, oh, those many decades ago, there was a radio observatory just outside of town where they discovered this "microwave background pattern of the universe" thing. It was, roughly, here. They called it "Project Orion" back then - though I understand the name has been appropriated since. The site itself was called "Big Ears on the Desert." I have no idea if it's still there. The last time I was there was over 20 years ago, and I wandered about an empty campus for a couple hours and went home. (It was a holiday weekend. The computers were still humming, the dishes were still tracking. I overcame my innate urge to geek on the console.)
The guys from there did come into town now and then. They were a talkative bunch. Full of ideas and theories, and "but don't tell." They had great computers, and I hoped to work with them, but it was not to be. They had visitors from all the tech world - I met a guy on the design team for the Straw Man implementation of ADA there. IIRC I stole his girlfriend. Fun times.
If you get out that way, let us know how it went. If anybody knows the answer to this question, they do.
If the universe is so curved and the curvature is universally similar, then the cosmic background microwave radiation would the mass of our predecessor galaxy in the long view. The frequency would tell us the angle of curvature, and the rate of expansion. The differences in background frequency would tell us both the size of the universe and our location within it. The doppling of the background from that understanding would then be a map to all the mass that is. It would answer a lot of questions. Unfortunately no current analysis of the available data gives these answers. The analysis has been attempted since the '70s, and no reasonable explanation for varying curvatures of space have been found that bring the picture into resolution. I'm not saying that you're wrong - only that that solution has been thoroughly picked over and the proof isn't found yet.
It may be possible with modern computational techniques that use a sliding curvature to find optimal focus using known masses that this will yield a map of the Universe that's static and well understood, thereby defining the curvature constant. That outcome seems unlikely, but I have to give you that it's possible.
Sorry, but it took a really long time to compose my response to the parent. Please refer below.
Also: if the curvature of space is recursive and uniform in all directions, and we can see ourselves from here, then the microwave background pattern of the Universe is not an echo from the Big Bang. That signal must then be ourselves at whatever distance the curvature loops back, and the pattern is doppled by the masses along the loop which gives us a way to map all that is.
The Universe is really good about recycling stuff. From what we know of the preservation of mass/energy and the evolution of galaxies and stars, the stuff that galaxy was made of was is still there mostly - except for tiny fraction of mass that's been converted to energy - a small fraction of which is the light that we see. The stars have gone Nova or Supernova, faded to red giants, or collided with other stars to be reignited and reborn as a new class of star while throwing off much mass that cools to become dust or wayward planets. The Galaxy core has swallowed much, as have the thousands of black holes that live within that galaxy, and those black holes have evaporated much back out, most of the mass would still be free from any black hole and would exist as stellar systems composed of stars orbited by planets, comets, asteroids and dust. Between the stars will be bits of dust and gas as usual, but mostly vast cold empty space. Given the standard distribution it's likely that galaxy has had several collisions with neighboring galaxies, with considerable mixing, and flung some of its stuff into the cold dark abyss but gained much more in the merger. It may have settled into a standard galactic form, or be involved with a messy galactic collision as our galaxy is. Still it's likely that there are stars there, as much as here and in as good variety, with worlds and comets circling the stars, and moons about the worlds. Life is no more likely to arise here than there. There are doubtless many millions of stars in that galaxy that humans would find habitable yet. Without data we have no reason to believe or disbelieve that in that mass of stars there is not now life looking back at the mass of stars our predecessor galaxy was those billions of years ago, wondering if there is intelligent life here or if there might be someday.
"There" is somewhat of a tricky term since it's a good bit further away now than it was when the light that we see left there. Across such distances "now" has a rather fluid meaning as well - what time it is there depends somewhat on the path you take to get there and even at the speed of light the straightest path isn't necessarily the shortest. Also, "is" is a bit of a struggle. The universe has expanded so much in that time that the light that leaves here now cannot fall upon the stuff those stars were made of, ever. And if that stuff has escaped our light cone, can it be said to still "be"?
And yet if we look in the opposite direction we can see galaxies nearly as far away as this - and someday we may beat this range in that direction. We can be sure these galaxies on the distant edge of vision from here and diametrically opposed have never seen each other and never will: there was no time for that light to get from the one to the other before the expansion of the Universe flung them so far apart that they have always existed in separate light cones. In the imaginary experiment where in a static reference frame we could transport instantaneously to the stuff these distant galaxies have become there is no reason to believe that the view from there is any different than from here: stars and galaxies, as far as our current telescopes can see both back toward us, and the other way also. For certain if we could jump that distance twice and looked back, we would see the other side of this same galaxy, as each sun shed its light in all directions.
If we could repeat that jump over and over some think we might end up where we started, as the curvature of space itself bends back in some way until if you go far enough, you come home. Among these some think that in this distant galaxy the Universe is so tightly curved that we're already looking at our galaxy from the other side, somewhere out there in the sky. Others that more leaps are required.
Some thinkers take the divergent view that that the Universe is flat - or curves the other way, and eventually instead we would come to the End, whereafter is nothing but light flung into the dark neve
Been like this for years. The Astroturfers have been onshored again from Bangalore because they now have enough budget for their own manned moon mission. The English grammar is better but the spelling is worse. You should see Facebook and Twitter, where you can buy 10,000 fans, followers, and likes, retweets and fan comments for $30. The automation on that is just atrocious. Some genius once said "A resource that is free and unlimited will become worthless." The Internet is almost there.
We need Steve Ballmer's vision and leadership at Microsoft to complete Microsoft's history. And by complete I mean "conclude". He is perfect right where he is. At the end, may the praise for his service to mankind be sung for a thousand years. I know of noone else who could pull off such a challenge.
Aleksandr Ponosov was charged with illegal use of unlicensed (pirate) copies of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office on 12 computers being used in the school (article 146.3 of the Russian Criminal Code) and of damnification of 266,593.63 rubles (about 10,000 USD) to Microsoft Corporation. The charges could result in 5 years of imprisonment.
....
As a result of the pilot programs, in October 2008, Russian officials mandated that all schools use open source software.
We know who you are and what you're selling. For those who need documents for the assertions in the grandparent post there's always Google or Groklaw. What happened to you? I recall there was a time when most people had respect for you - when you were on the side of progress. Can you remember where you were and who you were with when you sold out? That information would be helpful to those of us who have yet to take that meeting. From the Wiki page it seems the date was some day after July 2006, if that helps. Not so long ago.
Many of the people who have discovered things great and small that astonish and delight are still living. It's not too late to look them up on the internet and personally thank them.
Cool. It took me three hours to burn through the lite version, but the kids were "helping". While I'm glad I get 150 levels with the Android Full ad supported version, I'd like to buy the Full version so I can let the kids play with less supervision. The ads present a lot of risk that the kids might follow some clicks and buy stuff while I'm not looking. They are kids after all. They don't know where money to buy stuff comes from.
C'mon guys. If you want to silence the comment you can do a lot better than one troll mod every two hours. You can't be running out of mod points, can you? What, are your astroturfers on sabbatical? The question was: "Can Apps really damage a Cellular network?" The comment was topical, interesting and informative I think, and responsive to the parent. It provided information that was responsive to the question in TFS. It even had two links in context. What troll links in context twice? Cmon. Trolls don't work that hard.
Just to add fuel to the fire: there are no Android viruses in the wild. There are no iPhone viruses in the wild. There are currently no OS-X or Linux viruses spreading in the wild. Viruses and malware are a Windows problem. Once you let go of the Windows, you have few problems this way. That's not to say Linux and OS-X, or iOS are invulnerable to hacking - they're not - their inherent security can be overcome by an unwise admin or end user too. But they come with reasonable defaults that prevent malware from spreading in the default configuration by limiting user access and services, which Windows does not. In fact, to secure Windows from remote exploits is to disable all of the features that make it preferable to Linux or Mac to the average user. It's almost as if those systems are willing to wait for y'all to figure something out: Security is more important than utility. The data is all the value and if you can't secure it you are lost.
When I was a kid not only were there no cellular phones - you weren't even allowed to own your own wired phone in the US. You had to lease it from AT&T for a monthly fee because Alexander Graham Bell founded that company (sort of - read the prior link for the historic details), and he invented the telephone (this much is not in doubt). It's only recently that we're allowed in the US to bring our own phones to the wireless network, and they've pretty much handled that by making sure that each phone generally works with only one wireless network. We're pretty accustomed to being molested by our communications providers. Only a few years ago it was common to charge more than a dollar a minute to talk to your neighbor across the street if the street was one of the imaginary lines that separated Regional Bell Operating Companies. It was cheaper to call across the country, or even a foreign country, than to organize a meeting of the Parent-Teachers Association (PTA). Back then I bought Karma by subscribing to a cheap long-distance company and performing the contemporary version of bittorrent by serving as a "filebone hub" on an antique mail and data network called "FidoNet". It was like the Internet except in batch mode and we had parties called Get Togethers (GTs). Back then I was fiending for Internet because I had had it in the military, but couldn't get it because it wasn't available to the general public - only businesses, schools, folks who could afford CompuServ and so on. Get Togethers were a lot of fun because we got drunk, and sometimes naked, in person rather than over video chat. CUCME (see you, see me - an early video chat program) wasn't invented yet - it was the late '80's, or very early '90s. We still stayed anonymous in person mostly - everybody had a "handle" - which nym is taken from a completely irrelevant radio network (Citizen's Band) which will occur later. But I digress.
Anyway, there was this Georgia peanut farmer, whose name was Thomas Carter (not the former US President Jimmy Carter, as some (formerly including me) believe), who wanted to make phone calls from his tractor in the field. He was electronics savvy, so he rigged up a Citizen's Band radio that would allow him to dial the phone and talk on it, and this was the Carterfone and he sold copies of it, as any right-minded entrepeneur would. And of course AT&T shut him down because they didn't own this thing and so could prevent him from using it on their network. He sued, and it was many years later that his lawsuit resulted in the breakup of the US phone monopoly. That led to AT&T becoming at first just the vestigal long-distance portion of the former phone company, and later just a brand.
Non-Sequitur: The breakup also led to Unix - which was invented by Bell Labs (a division of AT&T at one point which invented not only Unix and C, but a great many other useful things), being divided into parts. The Unix name was sold to The Open Group, which certifies Unix to this day. The Unix source code and OS was sold first to Novell, which sold it to a quite respectable Linux.com called the Santa Cruz Operation, which burned through their.com millions and sold it off to a spinoff of Novell called the Canopy Group. Actually, they sold it to a spinoff of the spinoff. This story goes on for a long time, and is slowly grinding to an end documented here. Unix was the coolest thing that AT&T ever did, and I wanted to work that in even though the code is now owned by a gang of bastards who are determined to ruin every last bit of its utility. But I digress again. Forgive me, it's late.
AT&T's motto was: "We don't have to care. We're the PHONE COMPANY." The company that owns the AT&T brand now has nothing to
Slashdot Mirror
MS Money was discontinued in 2009. There won't be another release. Makes a bad gift. Wait - that's not irony, is it? Can I get an irony check over here?
Nine whole days ?
The Earth doesn't make a good mining base for interplanetary industries. Far too much gravity. The point of mining in space is not to bring stuff back to Earth. It's to make stuff in space so you don't have to have lift it out of that well.
Liberate Titan!
There is no point. That's the joke. But it sure is fun.
When I was a kid, oh, those many decades ago, there was a radio observatory just outside of town where they discovered this "microwave background pattern of the universe" thing. It was, roughly, here. They called it "Project Orion" back then - though I understand the name has been appropriated since. The site itself was called "Big Ears on the Desert." I have no idea if it's still there. The last time I was there was over 20 years ago, and I wandered about an empty campus for a couple hours and went home. (It was a holiday weekend. The computers were still humming, the dishes were still tracking. I overcame my innate urge to geek on the console.)
The guys from there did come into town now and then. They were a talkative bunch. Full of ideas and theories, and "but don't tell." They had great computers, and I hoped to work with them, but it was not to be. They had visitors from all the tech world - I met a guy on the design team for the Straw Man implementation of ADA there. IIRC I stole his girlfriend. Fun times.
If you get out that way, let us know how it went. If anybody knows the answer to this question, they do.
If the universe is so curved and the curvature is universally similar, then the cosmic background microwave radiation would the mass of our predecessor galaxy in the long view. The frequency would tell us the angle of curvature, and the rate of expansion. The differences in background frequency would tell us both the size of the universe and our location within it. The doppling of the background from that understanding would then be a map to all the mass that is. It would answer a lot of questions. Unfortunately no current analysis of the available data gives these answers. The analysis has been attempted since the '70s, and no reasonable explanation for varying curvatures of space have been found that bring the picture into resolution. I'm not saying that you're wrong - only that that solution has been thoroughly picked over and the proof isn't found yet.
It may be possible with modern computational techniques that use a sliding curvature to find optimal focus using known masses that this will yield a map of the Universe that's static and well understood, thereby defining the curvature constant. That outcome seems unlikely, but I have to give you that it's possible.
Sorry, but it took a really long time to compose my response to the parent. Please refer below.
Also: if the curvature of space is recursive and uniform in all directions, and we can see ourselves from here, then the microwave background pattern of the Universe is not an echo from the Big Bang. That signal must then be ourselves at whatever distance the curvature loops back, and the pattern is doppled by the masses along the loop which gives us a way to map all that is.
Unless it hit something. 10 trillion years is a long time to avoid a collision, even if you're a good driver.
The Universe is really good about recycling stuff. From what we know of the preservation of mass/energy and the evolution of galaxies and stars, the stuff that galaxy was made of was is still there mostly - except for tiny fraction of mass that's been converted to energy - a small fraction of which is the light that we see. The stars have gone Nova or Supernova, faded to red giants, or collided with other stars to be reignited and reborn as a new class of star while throwing off much mass that cools to become dust or wayward planets. The Galaxy core has swallowed much, as have the thousands of black holes that live within that galaxy, and those black holes have evaporated much back out, most of the mass would still be free from any black hole and would exist as stellar systems composed of stars orbited by planets, comets, asteroids and dust. Between the stars will be bits of dust and gas as usual, but mostly vast cold empty space. Given the standard distribution it's likely that galaxy has had several collisions with neighboring galaxies, with considerable mixing, and flung some of its stuff into the cold dark abyss but gained much more in the merger. It may have settled into a standard galactic form, or be involved with a messy galactic collision as our galaxy is. Still it's likely that there are stars there, as much as here and in as good variety, with worlds and comets circling the stars, and moons about the worlds. Life is no more likely to arise here than there. There are doubtless many millions of stars in that galaxy that humans would find habitable yet. Without data we have no reason to believe or disbelieve that in that mass of stars there is not now life looking back at the mass of stars our predecessor galaxy was those billions of years ago, wondering if there is intelligent life here or if there might be someday.
"There" is somewhat of a tricky term since it's a good bit further away now than it was when the light that we see left there. Across such distances "now" has a rather fluid meaning as well - what time it is there depends somewhat on the path you take to get there and even at the speed of light the straightest path isn't necessarily the shortest. Also, "is" is a bit of a struggle. The universe has expanded so much in that time that the light that leaves here now cannot fall upon the stuff those stars were made of, ever. And if that stuff has escaped our light cone, can it be said to still "be"?
And yet if we look in the opposite direction we can see galaxies nearly as far away as this - and someday we may beat this range in that direction. We can be sure these galaxies on the distant edge of vision from here and diametrically opposed have never seen each other and never will: there was no time for that light to get from the one to the other before the expansion of the Universe flung them so far apart that they have always existed in separate light cones. In the imaginary experiment where in a static reference frame we could transport instantaneously to the stuff these distant galaxies have become there is no reason to believe that the view from there is any different than from here: stars and galaxies, as far as our current telescopes can see both back toward us, and the other way also. For certain if we could jump that distance twice and looked back, we would see the other side of this same galaxy, as each sun shed its light in all directions.
If we could repeat that jump over and over some think we might end up where we started, as the curvature of space itself bends back in some way until if you go far enough, you come home. Among these some think that in this distant galaxy the Universe is so tightly curved that we're already looking at our galaxy from the other side, somewhere out there in the sky. Others that more leaps are required.
Some thinkers take the divergent view that that the Universe is flat - or curves the other way, and eventually instead we would come to the End, whereafter is nothing but light flung into the dark neve
Been like this for years. The Astroturfers have been onshored again from Bangalore because they now have enough budget for their own manned moon mission. The English grammar is better but the spelling is worse. You should see Facebook and Twitter, where you can buy 10,000 fans, followers, and likes, retweets and fan comments for $30. The automation on that is just atrocious. Some genius once said "A resource that is free and unlimited will become worthless." The Internet is almost there.
We need Steve Ballmer's vision and leadership at Microsoft to complete Microsoft's history. And by complete I mean "conclude". He is perfect right where he is. At the end, may the praise for his service to mankind be sung for a thousand years. I know of noone else who could pull off such a challenge.
Just so we all know where we are here, a little orientation:
The FUD about Vista has been thoroughly debunked
- recoiledsnake.
Closed = Integrated = Cathedral. Open = Fragmented = Bazaar. Eric Raymond is once again revealed as a visionary whose prophecy has long legs.
Dave is the VMS guy that worked on NT. He's still there working on Azure, presumably. We might want to keep an eye on that though.
He could have adopted the responsibility for filling the role himself. Hm. Steve Ballmer: Chief Software Architect. Has a nice ring to it.
Aleksandr Ponosov was charged with illegal use of unlicensed (pirate) copies of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office on 12 computers being used in the school (article 146.3 of the Russian Criminal Code) and of damnification of 266,593.63 rubles (about 10,000 USD) to Microsoft Corporation. The charges could result in 5 years of imprisonment.
As a result of the pilot programs, in October 2008, Russian officials mandated that all schools use open source software.
Followup article
Let me put that a nicer way: "Who are you, and what have you done with our Florian?"
We know who you are and what you're selling. For those who need documents for the assertions in the grandparent post there's always Google or Groklaw. What happened to you? I recall there was a time when most people had respect for you - when you were on the side of progress. Can you remember where you were and who you were with when you sold out? That information would be helpful to those of us who have yet to take that meeting. From the Wiki page it seems the date was some day after July 2006, if that helps. Not so long ago.
Ars has a backgrounder on it that Slashdot posted in their 40th anniversary of the Carterfone decision article.
Many of the people who have discovered things great and small that astonish and delight are still living. It's not too late to look them up on the internet and personally thank them.
Cool. It took me three hours to burn through the lite version, but the kids were "helping". While I'm glad I get 150 levels with the Android Full ad supported version, I'd like to buy the Full version so I can let the kids play with less supervision. The ads present a lot of risk that the kids might follow some clicks and buy stuff while I'm not looking. They are kids after all. They don't know where money to buy stuff comes from.
I know that format is hard to read. I'm glad at least one person enjoyed it. Thanks.
C'mon guys. If you want to silence the comment you can do a lot better than one troll mod every two hours. You can't be running out of mod points, can you? What, are your astroturfers on sabbatical? The question was: "Can Apps really damage a Cellular network?" The comment was topical, interesting and informative I think, and responsive to the parent. It provided information that was responsive to the question in TFS. It even had two links in context. What troll links in context twice? Cmon. Trolls don't work that hard.
Just to add fuel to the fire: there are no Android viruses in the wild. There are no iPhone viruses in the wild. There are currently no OS-X or Linux viruses spreading in the wild. Viruses and malware are a Windows problem. Once you let go of the Windows, you have few problems this way. That's not to say Linux and OS-X, or iOS are invulnerable to hacking - they're not - their inherent security can be overcome by an unwise admin or end user too. But they come with reasonable defaults that prevent malware from spreading in the default configuration by limiting user access and services, which Windows does not. In fact, to secure Windows from remote exploits is to disable all of the features that make it preferable to Linux or Mac to the average user. It's almost as if those systems are willing to wait for y'all to figure something out: Security is more important than utility. The data is all the value and if you can't secure it you are lost.
When I was a kid not only were there no cellular phones - you weren't even allowed to own your own wired phone in the US. You had to lease it from AT&T for a monthly fee because Alexander Graham Bell founded that company (sort of - read the prior link for the historic details), and he invented the telephone (this much is not in doubt). It's only recently that we're allowed in the US to bring our own phones to the wireless network, and they've pretty much handled that by making sure that each phone generally works with only one wireless network. We're pretty accustomed to being molested by our communications providers. Only a few years ago it was common to charge more than a dollar a minute to talk to your neighbor across the street if the street was one of the imaginary lines that separated Regional Bell Operating Companies. It was cheaper to call across the country, or even a foreign country, than to organize a meeting of the Parent-Teachers Association (PTA). Back then I bought Karma by subscribing to a cheap long-distance company and performing the contemporary version of bittorrent by serving as a "filebone hub" on an antique mail and data network called "FidoNet". It was like the Internet except in batch mode and we had parties called Get Togethers (GTs). Back then I was fiending for Internet because I had had it in the military, but couldn't get it because it wasn't available to the general public - only businesses, schools, folks who could afford CompuServ and so on. Get Togethers were a lot of fun because we got drunk, and sometimes naked, in person rather than over video chat. CUCME (see you, see me - an early video chat program) wasn't invented yet - it was the late '80's, or very early '90s. We still stayed anonymous in person mostly - everybody had a "handle" - which nym is taken from a completely irrelevant radio network (Citizen's Band) which will occur later. But I digress.
Anyway, there was this Georgia peanut farmer, whose name was Thomas Carter (not the former US President Jimmy Carter, as some (formerly including me) believe), who wanted to make phone calls from his tractor in the field. He was electronics savvy, so he rigged up a Citizen's Band radio that would allow him to dial the phone and talk on it, and this was the Carterfone and he sold copies of it, as any right-minded entrepeneur would. And of course AT&T shut him down because they didn't own this thing and so could prevent him from using it on their network. He sued, and it was many years later that his lawsuit resulted in the breakup of the US phone monopoly. That led to AT&T becoming at first just the vestigal long-distance portion of the former phone company, and later just a brand.
Non-Sequitur: The breakup also led to Unix - which was invented by Bell Labs (a division of AT&T at one point which invented not only Unix and C, but a great many other useful things), being divided into parts. The Unix name was sold to The Open Group, which certifies Unix to this day. The Unix source code and OS was sold first to Novell, which sold it to a quite respectable Linux .com called the Santa Cruz Operation, which burned through their .com millions and sold it off to a spinoff of Novell called the Canopy Group. Actually, they sold it to a spinoff of the spinoff. This story goes on for a long time, and is slowly grinding to an end documented here. Unix was the coolest thing that AT&T ever did, and I wanted to work that in even though the code is now owned by a gang of bastards who are determined to ruin every last bit of its utility. But I digress again. Forgive me, it's late.
AT&T's motto was: "We don't have to care. We're the PHONE COMPANY." The company that owns the AT&T brand now has nothing to