That's the best description of those craptacular add-ons from OEM suppliers I've seen yet. Circusware, hehe. I remember the first time installing a retail copy of Windows on a home built PC. Startling in how clean it was. No trial anti-virus or AOL logos (okay, it was a while ago).
I thought it was interesting that Michael Dell asked how much people would pay to get a clean copy of the OS without all the bundled crapware. You can read it in this article: Zdnet blog
I would've asked how much it was worth to him to get me to stop building my own PC's and buy another Dell? The arrogance of the position that I would have to pay extra to get rid of crap I didn't want in the first place really chaps my undies. Screw you, Mikey. You can take your cheap ass hardware and OEM circusware, along with your call center techs who don't speak English as a native language, and stick it all right up your ass. Don't act like you have a right to my business. If you want my money, earn it you arrogant bitch.
They replaced the hand crank with some yo-yo thing. I find that hugely annoying, even if the yo-yo thing works better. They totally trashed my dream of bringing a bright green wind up laptop to a vendor demo and annoying the hell out them cranking my obscenely bright laptop in the middle of their presentation and sending mesh text messages to my co-workers.
I asked for a hand crank, instead I get some yo-yo thing. Humpfh.
I think many Linux users were caught off guard to hear the home server was coming. Mainly because many people using Linux already turned some tired, old box into a home server years ago. A server that has a web interface, does incremental backups, file and print sharing and just generally most of the things Microsoft is touting for their home server.
Some of you even have your home server running your zone heating system and performing other automation tasks.
Yes, the home server idea caught me completely off guard. And people say MSFT is behind the curve in technology.:>
Umm, who are you to judge who is "real christian" or not (where's that part in the bible about judging others).
You can have an opinion without judging someone. For instance, a real Christian in my book would remember Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world."
Quite a few of the right wing extreme in the US seem to spend the bulk of their time trying to advance their beliefs and lifestyle through force of legislation. Those who mix politics and religion corrupt one and pollute the other.
So who's judging who when I say a "real Christian" wouldn't try to enforce their beliefs by means of corrupt and secular government?
do not believe for one minute that ABC would follow through with their ridiculous (alleged) threat.
I think you're right, they're just trying to stop the bleeding.
The lawyers are just doing what they're paid for doing, it's ABC/Disney management that fumbled the response. This is not how you respond to this type of criticism if you're guilty...and they're guilty. This is knee jerk. All it's done is to hang a lantern on the protest so it might be seen by a wider audience. They made him a hero. Hopefully they sober up before actually filing a court case. Then those radio clips would be evidence in a court case and open the door for discovery. Public suicide.
More proof that, in my opinion, top executives are not worth the millions they're getting. Lose money, bungle incidents like this, still collect a golden parachute.
It's also possible the ABC/Disney execs don't know what exactly is going on. This could have been bungled entirely within the confines of ABC's radio division. This smells a lot like mid-manager knee jerk trying to save their job after losing a major sponsor. You know how information gets filtered on the way up the chain. Who knows what bs story they fed up the pipeline?
Also doesn't stop him from sending transcripts to sponsors and potential sponsors. Maybe the rest of us to could dash off a quick note to FedEx letting them know their support of right wing hate speech doesn't make them look good.
You don't want your customers to design your product,' he said. 'They're really bad at it.
I would disagree with that statement. Most users I work with know exactly what they want, after seeing what they don't want. That's why, in my opinion, organizations that put a huge amount of effort into requirements gathering are, for the most part, wasting their time. Your users won't know what they want until they see what they asked for. A prototype. I know, a lot of you hate prototype development, but user satisfaction is a lot higher with the end product.
The mistake companies make with prototypes is saying, "Well, just fix this and that and throw it up on the server." When your prototype app wasn't built to scale, it's a disaster. We have one in production that has SQL statements being passed in the URL string (I didn't build that prototype) for that very reason. Management started playing with the prototype and didn't want to invest the time in building a solid system. "It does what we want," is what I get when trying to explain why it's a hunk of junk that's going to fall down and die one day.
The really funny part is they get mad at me for telling them the truth. Okay, whatever.
And you'll find some of the same people on the Bush presidential campaigns (and Bob Corker in TN). And some of the "think tanks" also get the bulk of their funding from Saudi Arabia. Think that's a coincidence? The oil companies hooked up with the Saudis and Bush.
The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new.
Wasn't one of MSFT's big reasons for not switching to OpenOffice was retraining costs? That users would have be trained all over on simple tasks? But when it's Office requiring all the retraining, well that's different. I guess it's a matter of who is getting the training dollars.
Is it just me or does their ribbon look like tabbed browsing in Firefox?
The only innovation I've seen from MSFT lately is squeezing revenue from their customers.
With results like that, is there really a good basis for argument against these cameras?
Cameras don't stop crime, cops on the street do. Who's to say that had they taken the money spent on cameras and video handling systems and used it to put more police on the street that the killer wouldn't have been apprehended sooner? Or a host of other, less serious crimes prevented?
Kind of reminds me of the "if it saves one life it's worth it" line of argument. I don't agree. Sometimes the overall cost to society has to be weighed against that one life. If we banned automobiles we'd save almost 500 lives the first weekend. Does that make it worth it? If we made everyone endure a strip search before getting on an airplane...not that we're not close as it is...we would probably, somewhere down the road, save one life. Is it worth it?
So if we spent the money to put surveillance cameras on every corner we'd probably stop a crime here or there and, like in this story, catch a killer somewhere along the line. Is it worth it? I'm not at all sure it is.
In many cases, the environment at a company is colored by the behavior and the policies of the boss (or bosses).
I've found that, to a greater or lesser degree, most companies are a reflection of those at the top. I think that happens sometimes from a natural tendency to hire people like yourself. The best managers aren't always the best people, but I'll take my chances selecting the best people for positions of authority. You can teach someone management skills but you can't teach them character.
And I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment above that shitty managers are frequently shitty people.
AFAIK Web services are used already in many applications
It's been the year of web services for the last five years. It's just a freaking tool. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, sometimes not. We've got some mid-managers at one of my contracts that think web services are the solution to every IT problem and overlook other more secure and convenient solutions in their headlong quest to implement the tech buzzwords of yesteryear.
Not coincidentally these are the same people who took a working application built by three people and turned it into a barely functional application managed by a committee of 30 people. But they got them some web services. Yessirreee. They got them some web services.
This points out one of the problems with an economy based on brain share products. Valuation. You may be able to get a dollar for it in the US but only a penny in Russia. How are you ever going to enforce valuation in another economy when the product doesn't have intrinsic value based on hard assets? It's insane to even try, but insanity doesn't stop the recording industry.
Companies can get away with it here because our Congress is corrupt and we're wealthy. It doesn't bother us to spend 10 bucks on a CD, but that's a week's pay in some places. Same principle applies to movies, software and most entertainment products.
The day will come when one of these countries we're into for a couple hundred billion in trade deficit, maybe a country that provides most of our manufacturing is going to call bullshit.
SharePoint is going to me Microsoft's collaboration tool of choice and not only does Linux not play with it, it doesn't have a competing offering.
Do you mean there's no open source competitive offering? Because there are products like Stoneware. That used to run on Linux, haven't checked up on it in a couple years but it offers web portal features, single sign-on, application framing. I'm not sure what else you'd want a competing product to do.
The point is that on Slashdot saying something postive about MS is instantly suspect, but saying something postive about Linux isn't.
All things being equal I'd agree with you, but all things aren't equal. MSFT spends millions on PR firms that make their living generating positive "press hits" for their clients. Slashdot readers aren't the only ones justified in being cynical of what they read about MSFT and MSFT products online, including this forum, and in trade magazines.
Not every positive comment about a MSFT product is a PR press hit, but there are enough of those out there we have a right to be cynical. Many of us have been burned enough over the years that MSFT has earned that instant suspicion. If on occasion a genuine positive comment gets tarnished, well that's just too damn bad, isn't it?
...it is difficult to port everything to another operating system overnight.
Don't try. You'll give yourself ulcers, users will hate you and the budget will go through the roof. Anyone who says it's easy is lying, but it can be done on a three year plan. Start moving critical apps to web-based alternatives, replace IE with FF and Outlook with Thunderbird/Sunbird and move off Exchange. In a hospital setting the most time consuming are likely to be a million Access databases scattered across the enterprise and linked spreadsheets. Even at the end of three years there may be a few Windows-only apps that you'll need to keep. You can run those on a kiosk in most instances. I just got done moving the primary application for a medical office from a network app to a web-based application. We had to write it from scratch...took three months. At first it was rough but now they wouldn't trade it. We're almost ready to pull the plug on Exchange. They'll be ready to swap out their desktop OS by this time next year, sooner if we pushed it. It's a small office but if you take it in small bites you'll be surprised how fast it can go. I also work on a lot of defense related projects and was surprised to see one big contractor using Thunderbird and FF.
I keep hoping for better enterprise support for applications like Gmail. That would make some of those bites go faster. But just try to get anyone from Google enterprise sales on the phone. Ha!
If Windows XP isn't routinely connected to the internet and used to surf with IE, it's a fairly reliable OS. Works great as a stand alone kiosk.
A NMCI laptop takes over 10 minutes to boot and load the dozens of background processes and roving preferences. Once booted the machine is near useless performance wise.
That is so true. The Navy needed technical standards, not NMCI. The organization is too big and diverse for a one-size-fits-all solution. Application development has all but stopped outside of San Diego and EDS is running...or should say ruining...most of that. Layers of process and bureaucracy between the users and a usable product. What used to take months and cost thousands, now takes years and costs millions.
One example project...a working system built by just three developers in less than a year, part of the way through deployment when EDS moved in to take it over. Now there are 30 people on the project and they're scoping requirements...of a completed product in the middle of roll out. It's taken them almost two weeks to set up a test server.
When you take the billions invested, then add the man-hours wasted with people waiting on the help desk line the cost would be staggering. And I've never called when they weren't experiencing higher than normal call volume. When you have to play that message all the time, that means the normal call volume exceeds your capacity.
I will say this, though, after the 20-30 minute normal wait to get to a help desk operator, I've been very satisfied with them. That's the one part of the program that does work but doesn't justify the cost. I consider NMCI one of the great defeats in Naval history and casualties are 250 million US taxpayers.
It would seem like hardware compatibility and applications would be where you want to focus if you're trying to build a Windows or OS X alternative. Not to slight anyone working on either project or start a KDE/Gnome flame fest, but I'm not using Linux for the UI. I'm using it for easy of licensing, because it doesn't phone home to momma every time I connect to the internet, because I don't have to activate it and because all the really interesting developments in IT seem to be happening in OSS. A lot of reasons that don't have anything to do with the desktop UI.
This discussion is overlooking that both the KDE and GNOME desktops are to the point a reasonably competent person can pick it up and start working. Both teams have done an amazing job and the improvements happen in big steps. Though I still support Windows development at customer sites, my own business runs on Linux. I have one cold and lonely XP box on my network that doesn't get to see the internet unless I'm running updates. That you can set up and run a business network without any software from MSFT or Apple is really quite amazing.
This is the second example, but certainly not the last, where China has set a defacto standard for us. Here's what they did with DVD formats.
When a country owns all your manufacturing capacity, you can't really tell them no. Who else is going to make stuff for you? Plus we owe them billions on the trade deficit.
And this is only the warm up act. DVD formats and cables, little stuff. Wait until we start rolling over on the big stuff! ROFL! Maybe we'll wake up to obvious one of these days.
I had some questions about implementing Gmail on an enterprise basis. What about local backups of the email store? Delegating? SoX compliance? Working offline?
What a bonus to be rid of Exchange! All the expense and overhead for supporting that pig and the added pleasure of giving Outlook the boot. Replace the office suite with OpenOffice or a hosted service and you could kiss Windows b-bye, except maybe a few kiosks scattered around for Windows only applications.
But just try getting in touch with a real person at Google. You'd think they'd want that to be easy.
No. This is an economic end-run around the DVD forum.
Economics probably play a big part in the decision, but really it doesn't matter why they did. It's more significant they CAN do it. They make all our DVD players, who's going to tell them they can't? A country that owes them 100's of billions of dollars? Hahahaha! Right.
I predicted this would happen years ago when we outsourced almost all our electronics manufacturing to the Asian rim, though I didn't see this coming. I'll bet the MPAA is reaching for the antacids tonight. Makes sense when you think about it. Also makes me wonder how many electronic components in our military hardware are manufactured in China or Korea.
It left a zig-zag contrail in the southern sky and the separation / ignition of one of the upper stages was clearly visible.
Because going straight up is just too easy.
Also aboard the rocket is NASA's GeneSat-1 satellite, which carries a harmless strain of E. coli bacteria as part of an experiment to study the long-term effects of space on living organisms.
Until they get hit from all the radiation from the sun spots this week. Let me be the first to welcome our new E. coli overlords.
The delay added "a couple hundred thousand dollars" to the $60 million price of the mission, Air Force Col. Scott McCraw, the mission director, said Friday. Included in the total is the cost of the rocket and the two satellites and $621,000 the Air Force will pay the spaceport.
Anyone know how that compares to Ariane or what the Russians can boost them for? Two birds for 60 mil seems pretty reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the best description of those craptacular add-ons from OEM suppliers I've seen yet. Circusware, hehe. I remember the first time installing a retail copy of Windows on a home built PC. Startling in how clean it was. No trial anti-virus or AOL logos (okay, it was a while ago).
I thought it was interesting that Michael Dell asked how much people would pay to get a clean copy of the OS without all the bundled crapware. You can read it in this article: Zdnet blog
I would've asked how much it was worth to him to get me to stop building my own PC's and buy another Dell? The arrogance of the position that I would have to pay extra to get rid of crap I didn't want in the first place really chaps my undies. Screw you, Mikey. You can take your cheap ass hardware and OEM circusware, along with your call center techs who don't speak English as a native language, and stick it all right up your ass. Don't act like you have a right to my business. If you want my money, earn it you arrogant bitch.
We can outsource NASA!
My impression is they've become arrogant and bloated over the years. A little low-cost competition shouldn't hurt them too bad.
They replaced the hand crank with some yo-yo thing. I find that hugely annoying, even if the yo-yo thing works better. They totally trashed my dream of bringing a bright green wind up laptop to a vendor demo and annoying the hell out them cranking my obscenely bright laptop in the middle of their presentation and sending mesh text messages to my co-workers.
I asked for a hand crank, instead I get some yo-yo thing. Humpfh.
I think many Linux users were caught off guard to hear the home server was coming. Mainly because many people using Linux already turned some tired, old box into a home server years ago. A server that has a web interface, does incremental backups, file and print sharing and just generally most of the things Microsoft is touting for their home server.
Some of you even have your home server running your zone heating system and performing other automation tasks.
Yes, the home server idea caught me completely off guard. And people say MSFT is behind the curve in technology. :>
Ready!
Fire!
Aim!
Umm, who are you to judge who is "real christian" or not (where's that part in the bible about judging others).
You can have an opinion without judging someone. For instance, a real Christian in my book would remember Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world."
Quite a few of the right wing extreme in the US seem to spend the bulk of their time trying to advance their beliefs and lifestyle through force of legislation. Those who mix politics and religion corrupt one and pollute the other.
So who's judging who when I say a "real Christian" wouldn't try to enforce their beliefs by means of corrupt and secular government?
do not believe for one minute that ABC would follow through with their ridiculous (alleged) threat.
I think you're right, they're just trying to stop the bleeding.
The lawyers are just doing what they're paid for doing, it's ABC/Disney management that fumbled the response. This is not how you respond to this type of criticism if you're guilty...and they're guilty. This is knee jerk. All it's done is to hang a lantern on the protest so it might be seen by a wider audience. They made him a hero. Hopefully they sober up before actually filing a court case. Then those radio clips would be evidence in a court case and open the door for discovery. Public suicide.
More proof that, in my opinion, top executives are not worth the millions they're getting. Lose money, bungle incidents like this, still collect a golden parachute.
It's also possible the ABC/Disney execs don't know what exactly is going on. This could have been bungled entirely within the confines of ABC's radio division. This smells a lot like mid-manager knee jerk trying to save their job after losing a major sponsor. You know how information gets filtered on the way up the chain. Who knows what bs story they fed up the pipeline?
Also doesn't stop him from sending transcripts to sponsors and potential sponsors. Maybe the rest of us to could dash off a quick note to FedEx letting them know their support of right wing hate speech doesn't make them look good.
You don't want your customers to design your product,' he said. 'They're really bad at it.
I would disagree with that statement. Most users I work with know exactly what they want, after seeing what they don't want. That's why, in my opinion, organizations that put a huge amount of effort into requirements gathering are, for the most part, wasting their time. Your users won't know what they want until they see what they asked for. A prototype. I know, a lot of you hate prototype development, but user satisfaction is a lot higher with the end product.
The mistake companies make with prototypes is saying, "Well, just fix this and that and throw it up on the server." When your prototype app wasn't built to scale, it's a disaster. We have one in production that has SQL statements being passed in the URL string (I didn't build that prototype) for that very reason. Management started playing with the prototype and didn't want to invest the time in building a solid system. "It does what we want," is what I get when trying to explain why it's a hunk of junk that's going to fall down and die one day.
The really funny part is they get mad at me for telling them the truth. Okay, whatever.
And you'll find some of the same people on the Bush presidential campaigns (and Bob Corker in TN). And some of the "think tanks" also get the bulk of their funding from Saudi Arabia. Think that's a coincidence? The oil companies hooked up with the Saudis and Bush.
Raise your hand when you think you spot a trend.
The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new.
Wasn't one of MSFT's big reasons for not switching to OpenOffice was retraining costs? That users would have be trained all over on simple tasks? But when it's Office requiring all the retraining, well that's different. I guess it's a matter of who is getting the training dollars.
Is it just me or does their ribbon look like tabbed browsing in Firefox?
The only innovation I've seen from MSFT lately is squeezing revenue from their customers.
With results like that, is there really a good basis for argument against these cameras?
Cameras don't stop crime, cops on the street do. Who's to say that had they taken the money spent on cameras and video handling systems and used it to put more police on the street that the killer wouldn't have been apprehended sooner? Or a host of other, less serious crimes prevented?
Kind of reminds me of the "if it saves one life it's worth it" line of argument. I don't agree. Sometimes the overall cost to society has to be weighed against that one life. If we banned automobiles we'd save almost 500 lives the first weekend. Does that make it worth it? If we made everyone endure a strip search before getting on an airplane...not that we're not close as it is...we would probably, somewhere down the road, save one life. Is it worth it?
So if we spent the money to put surveillance cameras on every corner we'd probably stop a crime here or there and, like in this story, catch a killer somewhere along the line. Is it worth it? I'm not at all sure it is.
In many cases, the environment at a company is colored by the behavior and the policies of the boss (or bosses).
I've found that, to a greater or lesser degree, most companies are a reflection of those at the top. I think that happens sometimes from a natural tendency to hire people like yourself. The best managers aren't always the best people, but I'll take my chances selecting the best people for positions of authority. You can teach someone management skills but you can't teach them character.
And I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment above that shitty managers are frequently shitty people.
AFAIK Web services are used already in many applications
It's been the year of web services for the last five years. It's just a freaking tool. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, sometimes not. We've got some mid-managers at one of my contracts that think web services are the solution to every IT problem and overlook other more secure and convenient solutions in their headlong quest to implement the tech buzzwords of yesteryear.
Not coincidentally these are the same people who took a working application built by three people and turned it into a barely functional application managed by a committee of 30 people. But they got them some web services. Yessirreee. They got them some web services.
This points out one of the problems with an economy based on brain share products. Valuation. You may be able to get a dollar for it in the US but only a penny in Russia. How are you ever going to enforce valuation in another economy when the product doesn't have intrinsic value based on hard assets? It's insane to even try, but insanity doesn't stop the recording industry.
Companies can get away with it here because our Congress is corrupt and we're wealthy. It doesn't bother us to spend 10 bucks on a CD, but that's a week's pay in some places. Same principle applies to movies, software and most entertainment products.
The day will come when one of these countries we're into for a couple hundred billion in trade deficit, maybe a country that provides most of our manufacturing is going to call bullshit.
SharePoint is going to me Microsoft's collaboration tool of choice and not only does Linux not play with it, it doesn't have a competing offering.
Do you mean there's no open source competitive offering? Because there are products like Stoneware. That used to run on Linux, haven't checked up on it in a couple years but it offers web portal features, single sign-on, application framing. I'm not sure what else you'd want a competing product to do.
The point is that on Slashdot saying something postive about MS is instantly suspect, but saying something postive about Linux isn't.
All things being equal I'd agree with you, but all things aren't equal. MSFT spends millions on PR firms that make their living generating positive "press hits" for their clients. Slashdot readers aren't the only ones justified in being cynical of what they read about MSFT and MSFT products online, including this forum, and in trade magazines.
Not every positive comment about a MSFT product is a PR press hit, but there are enough of those out there we have a right to be cynical. Many of us have been burned enough over the years that MSFT has earned that instant suspicion. If on occasion a genuine positive comment gets tarnished, well that's just too damn bad, isn't it?
I've talked to those guys, they've already gone as far as they can with small scale tests. They're ready to try a production test.
Just can't understand why it's taking so long to get behind this idea. At least the few million it would take to do production testing.
Don't try. You'll give yourself ulcers, users will hate you and the budget will go through the roof. Anyone who says it's easy is lying, but it can be done on a three year plan. Start moving critical apps to web-based alternatives, replace IE with FF and Outlook with Thunderbird/Sunbird and move off Exchange. In a hospital setting the most time consuming are likely to be a million Access databases scattered across the enterprise and linked spreadsheets. Even at the end of three years there may be a few Windows-only apps that you'll need to keep. You can run those on a kiosk in most instances. I just got done moving the primary application for a medical office from a network app to a web-based application. We had to write it from scratch...took three months. At first it was rough but now they wouldn't trade it. We're almost ready to pull the plug on Exchange. They'll be ready to swap out their desktop OS by this time next year, sooner if we pushed it. It's a small office but if you take it in small bites you'll be surprised how fast it can go. I also work on a lot of defense related projects and was surprised to see one big contractor using Thunderbird and FF.
I keep hoping for better enterprise support for applications like Gmail. That would make some of those bites go faster. But just try to get anyone from Google enterprise sales on the phone. Ha!
If Windows XP isn't routinely connected to the internet and used to surf with IE, it's a fairly reliable OS. Works great as a stand alone kiosk.
A NMCI laptop takes over 10 minutes to boot and load the dozens of background processes and roving preferences. Once booted the machine is near useless performance wise.
That is so true. The Navy needed technical standards, not NMCI. The organization is too big and diverse for a one-size-fits-all solution. Application development has all but stopped outside of San Diego and EDS is running...or should say ruining...most of that. Layers of process and bureaucracy between the users and a usable product. What used to take months and cost thousands, now takes years and costs millions.
One example project...a working system built by just three developers in less than a year, part of the way through deployment when EDS moved in to take it over. Now there are 30 people on the project and they're scoping requirements...of a completed product in the middle of roll out. It's taken them almost two weeks to set up a test server.
When you take the billions invested, then add the man-hours wasted with people waiting on the help desk line the cost would be staggering. And I've never called when they weren't experiencing higher than normal call volume. When you have to play that message all the time, that means the normal call volume exceeds your capacity.
I will say this, though, after the 20-30 minute normal wait to get to a help desk operator, I've been very satisfied with them. That's the one part of the program that does work but doesn't justify the cost. I consider NMCI one of the great defeats in Naval history and casualties are 250 million US taxpayers.
It would seem like hardware compatibility and applications would be where you want to focus if you're trying to build a Windows or OS X alternative. Not to slight anyone working on either project or start a KDE/Gnome flame fest, but I'm not using Linux for the UI. I'm using it for easy of licensing, because it doesn't phone home to momma every time I connect to the internet, because I don't have to activate it and because all the really interesting developments in IT seem to be happening in OSS. A lot of reasons that don't have anything to do with the desktop UI.
This discussion is overlooking that both the KDE and GNOME desktops are to the point a reasonably competent person can pick it up and start working. Both teams have done an amazing job and the improvements happen in big steps. Though I still support Windows development at customer sites, my own business runs on Linux. I have one cold and lonely XP box on my network that doesn't get to see the internet unless I'm running updates. That you can set up and run a business network without any software from MSFT or Apple is really quite amazing.
This is the second example, but certainly not the last, where China has set a defacto standard for us. Here's what they did with DVD formats.
When a country owns all your manufacturing capacity, you can't really tell them no. Who else is going to make stuff for you? Plus we owe them billions on the trade deficit.
And this is only the warm up act. DVD formats and cables, little stuff. Wait until we start rolling over on the big stuff! ROFL! Maybe we'll wake up to obvious one of these days.
I had some questions about implementing Gmail on an enterprise basis. What about local backups of the email store? Delegating? SoX compliance? Working offline?
What a bonus to be rid of Exchange! All the expense and overhead for supporting that pig and the added pleasure of giving Outlook the boot. Replace the office suite with OpenOffice or a hosted service and you could kiss Windows b-bye, except maybe a few kiosks scattered around for Windows only applications.
But just try getting in touch with a real person at Google. You'd think they'd want that to be easy.
No. This is an economic end-run around the DVD forum.
Economics probably play a big part in the decision, but really it doesn't matter why they did. It's more significant they CAN do it. They make all our DVD players, who's going to tell them they can't? A country that owes them 100's of billions of dollars? Hahahaha! Right.
I predicted this would happen years ago when we outsourced almost all our electronics manufacturing to the Asian rim, though I didn't see this coming. I'll bet the MPAA is reaching for the antacids tonight. Makes sense when you think about it. Also makes me wonder how many electronic components in our military hardware are manufactured in China or Korea.
Hey, Microsoft, you're next! HAHAHAHAHA!
It left a zig-zag contrail in the southern sky and the separation / ignition of one of the upper stages was clearly visible.
Because going straight up is just too easy.
Also aboard the rocket is NASA's GeneSat-1 satellite, which carries a harmless strain of E. coli bacteria as part of an experiment to study the long-term effects of space on living organisms.
Until they get hit from all the radiation from the sun spots this week. Let me be the first to welcome our new E. coli overlords.
The delay added "a couple hundred thousand dollars" to the $60 million price of the mission, Air Force Col. Scott McCraw, the mission director, said Friday. Included in the total is the cost of the rocket and the two satellites and $621,000 the Air Force will pay the spaceport.
Anyone know how that compares to Ariane or what the Russians can boost them for? Two birds for 60 mil seems pretty reasonable.
What's the fine for making TSA look stupid?