I don't care what the damn reason is. I'm sure they'd escort my ass the hell out the door too if I did whatever you did. The difference is, Scott, that you get to weep all over the steering wheel of your Porsche on the way home, wallow in a bathtub full of money when you get there and stare at your real Monets hanging on the wall. So fuck you, man.
BTW kids, the CIO role in MS is not a top exec spot. It's second tier. MS doesn't give shit for people who don't move PRODUCT. He MUST have been stealing. Guaranteed.
Ya pays ya money ya makes ya choice. I have yet to hear a cogent argument for WHY divulging your life on Facebook is a necessity. You do seem to have a lot of power over what you do and do not divulge. Now in terms of tracking your movements elsewhere - yeah that's a given but the FB generation didn't discover that. I mean you could Google underage porn too - if you think no one is flagging that you are dull.
Sorry but in the online service wars that pit MS against anyone else, always bet on anyone else. MS I'm afraid is never up to the task and frankly they never seem eager enough to succeed. For Google - online IS their business. For MS, online is a diversion they pour a few billion of their parked cash into. If MS is building two DCs for 1.2 billion dollars (the actual figure are 600 per not 500) total then it's a placeholder. Intel thought they would get into the outsourcing business in 1999 and spent 1 billion 1999 dollars building one commercial DC. Which they quickly shutdown. By comparison, Google spent $600 million for one satellite DC in Lenoir NC last year. It's not even a major hub.
I mean if was going be a turrist and such I'd probably not keep my emails, sent or received. But this is really to go after people for any other reason - tax evasion, child support and the ever popular catch up 'gang related activities'.
I figure that's where all my customers are hanging out so why not be there. It has nothing to do with my social activity and everything to do with their social activity.
Almost every cell phone has some rudimentary web ability but the phones that affect a real computer browser web experience are EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE and all rebated according to the size of the DATA plan you buy not the phone plan. An iPhone, Nokia N95, HTC Active or Mogul, a Cingular 8225 - these are all $400-500-600 devices.
So either Google figures those customers are price insensitive or, they figure that the phone companies will do this for free to cannibalize their own incredibly profitable network services. I mean why offer picture mail at those inflated prices when anyone can post up something in Picasa?
No I think this will be ANOTHER service cost addr to the service you get. Which I guess is ok for some people. But I already bleed enough money to the phone company.
Yes thank you. My utility and bank stocks pay on average about 10% return year over year in dividends gross appreciation before taxes. That's a 10% ROI every year since about the time you were born, which was what, 1990? That MS pays a dividend once in a while (I'm an MS stockholder, thanks) is not really representative of a good return, only that it's 'nubby' in spots.
Thanks again, teen blogging raving asshole guy. Kiss noise. Tell your handlers at MS's PR department to send a grown up next time.
When volume sales are way way down. But for you market watchers pointing out that MS hasn't been crushed in the stock market, allow me to point out that whatever MS has done since mid 1999 (that's 8 years) hasn't done anything positive to the stock either. The stock market likes Microsoft's cash flow but hasn't seen fit to reward them with higher prices either. Microsoft is a cash flow driven safe utility like bet. Worse even than utilities because they don't pay dividends. So in the 1st calendar qtr 2008 you WILL see a big backlash against MS when it has become clear that the Great White Hope of Vista has not panned out the way they expected. It will at best, be another lukewarm Win98/ME.
Over at Casa de Gelfling, XP will in fact be the last turn of the Windows crank. I may not even patch it SP4 because SP4 is probably no more than a collection of patches already there + some unwanted DRM crud I don't need. I'm thinking that since I will keep XP running a few more years, by the time it's time to upgrade, it will also be time to upgrade the hardware and that means either Apple hardware or a nice Ubuntu or Linspire box.
I'll give you an analogy. I was in Footlocker yesterday. They were running a 2 for $79.99 sale. I had one pair of the 2/79.99 and other pair marked $39.99. Same price different deal. They would not honor the 2 for 79.99 and wanted to charge me 39.99 + 79.99. So I put one pair back and bought only the pair marked $39.99. The cashier was actually shocked, that I would not pay full price as if this one pair of shoes came with super powers, unlimited free supermodel sex and immortality. That's what I think Microsoft is doing. They're offering weird deals that are not that good and then they are genuinely amazed that customers aren't biting.
Operating systems are all becoming pretty much interchangeable and equally useful for the most part. And for the vast VAST majority of customers there is nothing in their application suites or capabilities that prohibit them from purchasing any of them. I for one would happily pay $50 to Linspire for a non-free copy of their OS. I would happily pay for a subscription for Ubuntu support. I would happily pay for a mini Mac or lower end Mac of some kind with a preloaded OS that does what I need it to do or I can download what's not included. I'm pretty sure I could get by. In a couple-three years I'm sure that there will be scanners, digitizers, print servers, NAS boxes and all the other oddball stuff I need today. And when that happens I will toss out all my Redmond OS CD's and never look back.
The price premium for laptops with even small SSD's is astonishing. Almost $1000. As much as I love the idea of an SSD laptop and ever bigger storage for phones and PDA's the price has to become realistic before anyone will buy these in volume.
If you take the screen, battery, keyboard out of my Thinkpad what's left is 9"x7"x0.5". That's 229mm x175mm x13mm. That's just my rough estimate. If you took that form factor and put it in a case that you could open up w/o wrecking it you would have a great standard small formal machine. Mine has 2-USB, 1 S-video, 1-SVGA, 1-LPT, 2-PCCard, 1-DVD, 1-speaker out, 1-mic in, 1-Docking port.
Seems to me that a no screen, no battery, no keyboard 'laptop' form factor in a case you can open combined with a planar you can add things to using the mini-PCI bus or just coupling it through a docking base would be the solution. In fact you could use a dumb coupling through the docking port via a flat cable and build all the expansion electronics and devices into the back of an outboard monitor. Basically you take the PC in the montor design and break it in two so that the basic PC is separate from the expansion bay in the monitor. Keyboard and mouse through a USB port or Bluetooth. With some work you could get the PC to be barely larger than it's own AC power adapter, sans drives.
Space exploration would then have to tow the mark vis a vis an acceptable ROI. What is a good ROI for the Hubble or sending satellites to comets? I'm guessing it's zero. Unless you're talking about geomapping, climate studies, telecommunications, all that near earth stuff, the 'return' on space is nil. And I don't have a problem with either accepting that it's nil, or giving up on it because it's nil. Let's just be clear that's what our intentions are. BTW I am firmly convinced that when the Shuttle program finally closes down and the Indians and Chinese have done their nationalistic things with manned orbits, it will signal the end of manned spaceflight for the remainder of the 21st century. Because the return on that investment is almost nil.
Because a private company would have sucked their profit out a long time ago and shut the whole thing down before it became interesting or enlightening or even heroic.
Been to a Knicks game recently? Empty sold out games. Every seat belongs to some corporation or group that doesn't worry if the seat gets used. So if you're lucky enough to get a ticket to go you and 27 other people will be cheering. Add to that the $10 beers, $30 in parking, I can only hope that the NBA, the NFL and MLB eventually alienate all their fans and everyone stops going. That way GE, Merrill Lynch and Home Realtors association, as owners of all the tickets can just dictate terms like they wish they could. All the athletes will wind up working for the sponsors not the teams.
I no longer use Acrobat reader given its massive clunkiness. Foxit is much better with one odd exception. OLE embedding in MS Office docs is not handled the same way as Acrobat so embedded PDFs are always opened by Adobe not Foxit.
They're the folks screaming about how 'artists' need to get paid, no? Well, when no one wants to pay for live tickets anymore because of the price I'm sure the RIAA will get right on that lawsuit thing. Oh yes I'm sure.
Almost all aftermarket Rims, are out of true in at least 2 dimensions if not all of them. My mechanic makes a fortune dealing with problems associated with these $4000 rims including tire wearout, alignment problems and a whole host of expensive problems.
Make it cheaper and stop being assholes with the ever changing slot design. And hey here's an idea, make a chip that runs somewhere south of the temperature of the sun.
Colleges aren't blind to the nationality of their admissions either, nor are they blind to their fully funded no financial aid checks being waved in their faces.
But yes, American students find hard sciences 'hard'. They'd rather flip real estate or be the bankruptcy lawyer for the people who do. Soon we will be a nation of people who do nothing but sell insurance to each other.
I just spent 30 minutes on the phone to the payroll 'dept' (outsourced) of the company I work for. After about the 20th security question just to TALK TO A HUMAN BEING I was told to go do whatever I wanted to do on the website instead. When I mentioned that I needed to setup a payroll deduction I was met with the audio equivalent of a blank fucking stare. But hey my call may be monitored for quality.
You have GOT to be fucking kidding me.
Phone voting? You're serious? We might as well not have elections.
We're on year 5 of no merit increases and only token bonus amounts. The rationale we get from HR (since outsourced, of course) is that we're ALL overpaid and there is this mysterious midpoint in the salary 'range' that has yet to catch up. So on and on the no increases will continue. On the upside my CEO got 37 million dollars last year while sending thousands of jobs to India. Here's a totebag, now make sure you attend that diversity seminar.
Slashdot Mirror
and not available in any store. It's kind of a bait and switch, Wal*Mart version.
They are beautiful to look at but they
Leak
Rattle
Have doorways that are too low (FLW was short & made his doors an evil joke on the world)
Are Hard to heat and cool.
I don't care what the damn reason is. I'm sure they'd escort my ass the hell out the door too if I did whatever you did. The difference is, Scott, that you get to weep all over the steering wheel of your Porsche on the way home, wallow in a bathtub full of money when you get there and stare at your real Monets hanging on the wall. So fuck you, man.
BTW kids, the CIO role in MS is not a top exec spot. It's second tier. MS doesn't give shit for people who don't move PRODUCT. He MUST have been stealing. Guaranteed.
Ya pays ya money ya makes ya choice. I have yet to hear a cogent argument for WHY divulging your life on Facebook is a necessity. You do seem to have a lot of power over what you do and do not divulge. Now in terms of tracking your movements elsewhere - yeah that's a given but the FB generation didn't discover that. I mean you could Google underage porn too - if you think no one is flagging that you are dull.
Sorry but in the online service wars that pit MS against anyone else, always bet on anyone else. MS I'm afraid is never up to the task and frankly they never seem eager enough to succeed. For Google - online IS their business. For MS, online is a diversion they pour a few billion of their parked cash into. If MS is building two DCs for 1.2 billion dollars (the actual figure are 600 per not 500) total then it's a placeholder. Intel thought they would get into the outsourcing business in 1999 and spent 1 billion 1999 dollars building one commercial DC. Which they quickly shutdown. By comparison, Google spent $600 million for one satellite DC in Lenoir NC last year. It's not even a major hub.
I mean if was going be a turrist and such I'd probably not keep my emails, sent or received. But this is really to go after people for any other reason - tax evasion, child support and the ever popular catch up 'gang related activities'.
I figure that's where all my customers are hanging out so why not be there. It has nothing to do with my social activity and everything to do with their social activity.
Almost every cell phone has some rudimentary web ability but the phones that affect a real computer browser web experience are EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE and all rebated according to the size of the DATA plan you buy not the phone plan. An iPhone, Nokia N95, HTC Active or Mogul, a Cingular 8225 - these are all $400-500-600 devices.
So either Google figures those customers are price insensitive or, they figure that the phone companies will do this for free to cannibalize their own incredibly profitable network services. I mean why offer picture mail at those inflated prices when anyone can post up something in Picasa?
No I think this will be ANOTHER service cost addr to the service you get. Which I guess is ok for some people. But I already bleed enough money to the phone company.
And oh - GSM means no Sprint.
Yes thank you. My utility and bank stocks pay on average about 10% return year over year in dividends gross appreciation before taxes. That's a 10% ROI every year since about the time you were born, which was what, 1990? That MS pays a dividend once in a while (I'm an MS stockholder, thanks) is not really representative of a good return, only that it's 'nubby' in spots.
Thanks again, teen blogging raving asshole guy. Kiss noise. Tell your handlers at MS's PR department to send a grown up next time.
When volume sales are way way down. But for you market watchers pointing out that MS hasn't been crushed in the stock market, allow me to point out that whatever MS has done since mid 1999 (that's 8 years) hasn't done anything positive to the stock either. The stock market likes Microsoft's cash flow but hasn't seen fit to reward them with higher prices either. Microsoft is a cash flow driven safe utility like bet. Worse even than utilities because they don't pay dividends. So in the 1st calendar qtr 2008 you WILL see a big backlash against MS when it has become clear that the Great White Hope of Vista has not panned out the way they expected. It will at best, be another lukewarm Win98/ME.
Over at Casa de Gelfling, XP will in fact be the last turn of the Windows crank. I may not even patch it SP4 because SP4 is probably no more than a collection of patches already there + some unwanted DRM crud I don't need. I'm thinking that since I will keep XP running a few more years, by the time it's time to upgrade, it will also be time to upgrade the hardware and that means either Apple hardware or a nice Ubuntu or Linspire box.
I'll give you an analogy. I was in Footlocker yesterday. They were running a 2 for $79.99 sale. I had one pair of the 2/79.99 and other pair marked $39.99. Same price different deal. They would not honor the 2 for 79.99 and wanted to charge me 39.99 + 79.99. So I put one pair back and bought only the pair marked $39.99. The cashier was actually shocked, that I would not pay full price as if this one pair of shoes came with super powers, unlimited free supermodel sex and immortality. That's what I think Microsoft is doing. They're offering weird deals that are not that good and then they are genuinely amazed that customers aren't biting.
Operating systems are all becoming pretty much interchangeable and equally useful for the most part. And for the vast VAST majority of customers there is nothing in their application suites or capabilities that prohibit them from purchasing any of them. I for one would happily pay $50 to Linspire for a non-free copy of their OS. I would happily pay for a subscription for Ubuntu support. I would happily pay for a mini Mac or lower end Mac of some kind with a preloaded OS that does what I need it to do or I can download what's not included. I'm pretty sure I could get by. In a couple-three years I'm sure that there will be scanners, digitizers, print servers, NAS boxes and all the other oddball stuff I need today. And when that happens I will toss out all my Redmond OS CD's and never look back.
The price premium for laptops with even small SSD's is astonishing. Almost $1000. As much as I love the idea of an SSD laptop and ever bigger storage for phones and PDA's the price has to become realistic before anyone will buy these in volume.
Finally something we can use to clear the streets around the Belltower. No man I DON'T SMOKE and I DON'T have any SPARE change.
If you take the screen, battery, keyboard out of my Thinkpad what's left is 9"x7"x0.5". That's 229mm x175mm x13mm. That's just my rough estimate. If you took that form factor and put it in a case that you could open up w/o wrecking it you would have a great standard small formal machine. Mine has 2-USB, 1 S-video, 1-SVGA, 1-LPT, 2-PCCard, 1-DVD, 1-speaker out, 1-mic in, 1-Docking port.
Seems to me that a no screen, no battery, no keyboard 'laptop' form factor in a case you can open combined with a planar you can add things to using the mini-PCI bus or just coupling it through a docking base would be the solution. In fact you could use a dumb coupling through the docking port via a flat cable and build all the expansion electronics and devices into the back of an outboard monitor. Basically you take the PC in the montor design and break it in two so that the basic PC is separate from the expansion bay in the monitor. Keyboard and mouse through a USB port or Bluetooth. With some work you could get the PC to be barely larger than it's own AC power adapter, sans drives.
Space exploration would then have to tow the mark vis a vis an acceptable ROI. What is a good ROI for the Hubble or sending satellites to comets? I'm guessing it's zero. Unless you're talking about geomapping, climate studies, telecommunications, all that near earth stuff, the 'return' on space is nil. And I don't have a problem with either accepting that it's nil, or giving up on it because it's nil. Let's just be clear that's what our intentions are. BTW I am firmly convinced that when the Shuttle program finally closes down and the Indians and Chinese have done their nationalistic things with manned orbits, it will signal the end of manned spaceflight for the remainder of the 21st century. Because the return on that investment is almost nil.
Because a private company would have sucked their profit out a long time ago and shut the whole thing down before it became interesting or enlightening or even heroic.
Been to a Knicks game recently? Empty sold out games. Every seat belongs to some corporation or group that doesn't worry if the seat gets used. So if you're lucky enough to get a ticket to go you and 27 other people will be cheering. Add to that the $10 beers, $30 in parking, I can only hope that the NBA, the NFL and MLB eventually alienate all their fans and everyone stops going. That way GE, Merrill Lynch and Home Realtors association, as owners of all the tickets can just dictate terms like they wish they could. All the athletes will wind up working for the sponsors not the teams.
I no longer use Acrobat reader given its massive clunkiness. Foxit is much better with one odd exception. OLE embedding in MS Office docs is not handled the same way as Acrobat so embedded PDFs are always opened by Adobe not Foxit.
They're the folks screaming about how 'artists' need to get paid, no? Well, when no one wants to pay for live tickets anymore because of the price I'm sure the RIAA will get right on that lawsuit thing. Oh yes I'm sure.
Go figure - someone who runs around saying "I'm cool I'm good I'm hip" is really just a bottomline driven corporate husk.
Almost all aftermarket Rims, are out of true in at least 2 dimensions if not all of them. My mechanic makes a fortune dealing with problems associated with these $4000 rims including tire wearout, alignment problems and a whole host of expensive problems.
Dog Body Heat = 1 standard human commuter unit.
Make it cheaper and stop being assholes with the ever changing slot design. And hey here's an idea, make a chip that runs somewhere south of the temperature of the sun.
Colleges aren't blind to the nationality of their admissions either, nor are they blind to their fully funded no financial aid checks being waved in their faces.
But yes, American students find hard sciences 'hard'. They'd rather flip real estate or be the bankruptcy lawyer for the people who do. Soon we will be a nation of people who do nothing but sell insurance to each other.
I just spent 30 minutes on the phone to the payroll 'dept' (outsourced) of the company I work for. After about the 20th security question just to TALK TO A HUMAN BEING I was told to go do whatever I wanted to do on the website instead. When I mentioned that I needed to setup a payroll deduction I was met with the audio equivalent of a blank fucking stare. But hey my call may be monitored for quality.
You have GOT to be fucking kidding me.
Phone voting? You're serious? We might as well not have elections.
We're on year 5 of no merit increases and only token bonus amounts. The rationale we get from HR (since outsourced, of course) is that we're ALL overpaid and there is this mysterious midpoint in the salary 'range' that has yet to catch up. So on and on the no increases will continue. On the upside my CEO got 37 million dollars last year while sending thousands of jobs to India. Here's a totebag, now make sure you attend that diversity seminar.
Bastards, all of them.