I suspect that the only way Microsoft will be able to survive and prosper in the long run is if they break it up into a number of smaller companies, many of which may not last long.
The very size of the company not only gives it an "inertia" that makes it difficult to change, the very size and wealth of the company probably gives it a false sense of security and a feeling that it doesn't have to change.
I've used something called XDesk for quite a while on my remaining windows machine. Before settling on that, I tried just about every one I could find and felt this handled just about everything better than the others.
I do turn some of the "bells and whistles" off. For example, I really don't need to see representations of the individual windows. From my point of view, that usually just gets in the way.
I believe the purchase provided updates for one year. Since I really don't use windows all that much these days (mainly OpenBSD and Linux), I never bothered to purchase another year's worth of updates. So my version is not the latest by any means.
In the summertime from the time when I was a kid up through junior high and sometimes when I was in high school, I often didn't see anyone outside of my immediate family, my grandparents who lived across the field, and sometimes a cousin or two except at church on Sunday mornings.
I wasn't bored often. When I was, it was usually while driving a tractor for days on end at a couple of miles per hour.
Actually, we are exporting farms and farmer's jobs, too.
Are you familiar with the Trans Texas Corridor? It's a roadway with the first phase to be built across Texas from Mexico to Oklahoma. The purpose? To haul merchandise from Mexico in to the U.S. to sell to Americans. That merchandise can pretty much include just about anything from low tech articles, high tech articles, and even agricultural products.
I think the Trans Texas Corridor is a major step in the direction of impoverishing Texas and the rest of the United States.
There are even worse consequences resulting from our loss of manufacturing capability.
As we are more ane more dependent on other countries, we are more and more at the mercy of those countries and their neighbors. A war could leave us sitting here without any ability to respond.
Think about World War II. A very large factor in our winning World War II was our ability to ramp up our manufacturing quickly to military production. Even with all that we faced serious shortages and had to suffer through the accompanying rationing.
Think of what would have happened if we had lost 75% of our manufacturing capabilities in critical areas during the 1930's. Instead of quickly ramping up military production, we would have to build the plants and redevelop our capabilities. It would have taken years to be at production levels that we achieved within one year. Without supplies from the U.S., Great Britain may easily have fallen to the Germans. Without being able to manufacture weapons of war, we would have have lost the war in the Pacific and would have been pushed back to our shores with the Pacific Islands largely in the hands of the Japanese.
It was our great strengths in manufacturing that enabled us to win World War II. If it had taken an extra five years to ramp up production, we would have been fighting on U.S. soil.
In the article, Mr. Roberts said we'd be a 3rd world country by 2024 (20 years from 2004). That number sounds very believable. We'll know we are in serious trouble before that but if we wait until then, it will be too late for us to do much about it.
All the ones I've had trouble with were 200 GB and larger.
I've had several 120 and 160 GB drives without a problem.
I've noticed that the reviews on disk drives on NewEgg list increasingly more problems with drives that are DOA or that fail in relatively short times when the drives are bigger than 160 GB.
Of the four SATA drives I've bought, all 200 GB or larger, two have failed. I've already replaced one of them, but not the other.
Most of the recent complaints I've heard about disks that were either DOA or died after a short time were larger than 160 GB. 160 GB and less seem to have far fewer complaints.
So far, I'm not too impressed with SATA drives at all.
Of the four I've bought in the last year and a half, two have failed. I've already replaced one and need to send the other back for a warranty replacement.
Failure seem high on those SATA drives that other people I know have, too.
but it's a bit like claiming a driver went from Point A to Point B, 100 miles apart, in one hour must have been speeding
That's nearly right.
More accurately, it's like claiming someone who managed to cover the distance from Point A to Point B, 100 miles apart, in one hour must have been driving and is therefore guilty of speeding.
I think that the nuclear winter scenario has been largely debunked. It's just not going to happen.
Now if the nuclear attack coincided with a major supervolcano eruption, we would have serious problems. But it would be the supervolcano, not the nuclear weapons that did it.
Since the days of the Yankee Traders the US government has meddled in the politics of other nations to ensure access to favourable trade for its merchants.
Only merchants with a great deal of political pull.
Your run of the mill merchants are thrown to the wolves. If anything, their demise makes it better for the ones with powerful friends to intercede on their behalf.
I didn't cheat in grad school at all and knew very few who did.
In fact, the only time I ever cheated on a test was the color blindness test for my military physical. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to read the numbers in the colored dots so I memorized the sequence as I stood in line waiting for my turn. For some reason, when I got to the head of the line, the army seargeant giving the test started going backwards through the book instead of forwards. I got the first two or three in the backwards sequence but then I missed a couple. He started choosing pages randomly in the book and I couldn't get any of them even the ones I already had.
There was an occasion in grad school where I could easily have cheated to help someone else. We had weekly homework to turn in each Monday in my Calculus of Variations class. The morning of the first homework assignment, an engineering student asked if he could see my homework to compare my answers to his. It was not unusual to check your answers against each others and then if there was a difference to go through the work and find out what either of you did wrong. So I let him borrow my homework for that purpose and he disappeared to an empty room down the hallway for an hour or two. When he came back, it was obvious he had copied my homework.
So the next week I didn't do the homework. He showed up on Monday morning and asked if he could see my homework and I told him I hadn't done it yet. This continued through the entire semester. Every Monday morning, he would ask to see my homework and I'd tell him I didn't do it yet but I would before the end of the semester.
Finally, the week before the last homework assignment was due, I did all the homework for the whole semester except the one I had already turned in and on Sunday night, I went up to the Math Department mailroom and put it in the prof's mailbox. The next morning the engineering student showed up and asked if I'd done my homework yet. When I told him I had done all of it the previous week, he was very visibily relieved. But he quickly became very upset when he asked to borrow it and I told him I had already turned it in.
Where I work, we have a nearly normal kitchen in the office. I usually cook my own meals from scratch and keep a variety of things in one of the refrigerators and one of the freezers.
A local high school kid would raid the freezer regularly. He'd come in, grab something out of the freezer, and leave before anyone could see what he had. For example, one time his sister wanted some fish, so he came in and stole a package of rainbow trout that I had in the freezer.
I don't have to worry about him for a while. He's just turned 19, will never graduate from high school, and is now in a Texas prison. Prior to being transferred to prison, he was in the county jail for about three months with nothing to eat but tv dinners.
In the early 60s, my sister was upset that some girls in her dorm would eat candy that she put in the dorm refrigerator. So she made some candy using goat droppings and put them in the refrigerator.
She nearly got kicked out of college for that, but she really didn't care because she was getting ready to be married in a few months and wouldn't be back the next semester anyway.
We had some kind of dinner at a local restraunt following the wedding rehersel. Our waitress at the restraunt was one of the girls who ate the goat dropping candy from the dorm refrigerator.
Back in the 60s, the television store in my hometown in the Texas Panhandle was the top television store for that brand (I think it was RCA) in the nation in terms of market penetration. Nearly everyone around who had a television had that one brand.
One of the big stores in Chicago was impressed and sent an executive down to see if they could learn something they could use in Chicago. So he flew into Amarillo, met the district sales representative for that brand, and they got in the sales reps car and drove to the store a couple of hours away.
When they walked into the store about 11 am, they didn't see anyone at all. They figured that maybe the employees were drinking coffee or something and so they waited.
Then they noticed a sign that said "If you see a tv you like, take it home and try it out". Another sign instructed people bringing in a tv for repair to write down what was wrong with it and put the paper on the tv. Another sign said "If you brought your tv in for repair and you see it here, it is fixed. The repair cost is on the tag. Leave the money in the cigar box on the counter or sign the tag and leave it in the cigar box and we'll bill you for it."
About an hour after they arrived, one of the town's more idle citizens walked into the store and they asked him where the owners were. He replied, "Oh, they're out harvesting wheat. They should be back by 8 or 9 tonight to close the store for the night."
The visitors figured that nothing that we did here would work at all in their Chicago stores.
There is a big difference between cross-breeding plants and genetically modifying plants.
We can usually assume that a cross between two strains of a plant, both of which are quite safe to eat, is going to be safe to eat. If we had a cross-breed from two strains, one of whic was not safe to eat, you can bet there would be some testing before it was made publically available.
In the case of genetic engineering, genes are being introduced that have, to our knowledge, never existed in any strain of that particular plant. Consequently, sufficient testing should be performed to determine whether or not it actually is safe to eat.
It's been around for many thousands of years, and just about every single commercial crop in the world right now has been genetically modified, either through selective cross-breeding, or via a test tube.
You kind of redefined the meaning of "genetic engineering", didn't you?
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I suspect that the only way Microsoft will be able to survive and prosper in the long run is if they break it up into a number of smaller companies, many of which may not last long.
The very size of the company not only gives it an "inertia" that makes it difficult to change, the very size and wealth of the company probably gives it a false sense of security and a feeling that it doesn't have to change.
I've used something called XDesk for quite a while on my remaining windows machine. Before settling on that, I tried just about every one I could find and felt this handled just about everything better than the others.
I do turn some of the "bells and whistles" off. For example, I really don't need to see representations of the individual windows. From my point of view, that usually just gets in the way.
I believe the purchase provided updates for one year. Since I really don't use windows all that much these days (mainly OpenBSD and Linux), I never bothered to purchase another year's worth of updates. So my version is not the latest by any means.
Lookout out the windows at home, there are number of large commercial windmills (1.25 megawatt capacity each) to the north, northeast, and east.
I don't see them as an eyesore but I do think they'd look better if they were all painted different colors instead just a boring off-white.
We have a windmill, but it is for a backup water supply, not electricity and is usually used just to water the garden.
Boredom is only a state of mind.
In the summertime from the time when I was a kid up through junior high and sometimes when I was in high school, I often didn't see anyone outside of my immediate family, my grandparents who lived across the field, and sometimes a cousin or two except at church on Sunday mornings.
I wasn't bored often. When I was, it was usually while driving a tractor for days on end at a couple of miles per hour.
I took an 87% pay cut to move to the boonies.
Actually, we are exporting farms and farmer's jobs, too.
Are you familiar with the Trans Texas Corridor? It's a roadway with the first phase to be built across Texas from Mexico to Oklahoma. The purpose? To haul merchandise from Mexico in to the U.S. to sell to Americans. That merchandise can pretty much include just about anything from low tech articles, high tech articles, and even agricultural products.
I think the Trans Texas Corridor is a major step in the direction of impoverishing Texas and the rest of the United States.
There are even worse consequences resulting from our loss of manufacturing capability.
As we are more ane more dependent on other countries, we are more and more at the mercy of those countries and their neighbors. A war could leave us sitting here without any ability to respond.
Think about World War II. A very large factor in our winning World War II was our ability to ramp up our manufacturing quickly to military production. Even with all that we faced serious shortages and had to suffer through the accompanying rationing.
Think of what would have happened if we had lost 75% of our manufacturing capabilities in critical areas during the 1930's. Instead of quickly ramping up military production, we would have to build the plants and redevelop our capabilities. It would have taken years to be at production levels that we achieved within one year. Without supplies from the U.S., Great Britain may easily have fallen to the Germans. Without being able to manufacture weapons of war, we would have have lost the war in the Pacific and would have been pushed back to our shores with the Pacific Islands largely in the hands of the Japanese.
It was our great strengths in manufacturing that enabled us to win World War II. If it had taken an extra five years to ramp up production, we would have been fighting on U.S. soil.
In the article, Mr. Roberts said we'd be a 3rd world country by 2024 (20 years from 2004). That number sounds very believable. We'll know we are in serious trouble before that but if we wait until then, it will be too late for us to do much about it.
All the ones I've had trouble with were 200 GB and larger.
I've had several 120 and 160 GB drives without a problem.
I've noticed that the reviews on disk drives on NewEgg list increasingly more problems with drives that are DOA or that fail in relatively short times when the drives are bigger than 160 GB.
Of the four SATA drives I've bought, all 200 GB or larger, two have failed. I've already replaced one of them, but not the other.
You may have a point there.
Most of the recent complaints I've heard about disks that were either DOA or died after a short time were larger than 160 GB. 160 GB and less seem to have far fewer complaints.
So far, I'm not too impressed with SATA drives at all.
Of the four I've bought in the last year and a half, two have failed. I've already replaced one and need to send the other back for a warranty replacement.
Failure seem high on those SATA drives that other people I know have, too.
You got it exactly right.
That's nearly right.
More accurately, it's like claiming someone who managed to cover the distance from Point A to Point B, 100 miles apart, in one hour must have been driving and is therefore guilty of speeding.
You found a bigger list than I found.
At the very least, I'd prefer it to handle any electronic book format already around and have the capability of upgrading to new formats later.
Many scientific papers are readily available only as postscript files so that would be very useful. I see more and more djvu files as well.
It might be a good value if it handled more formats.
But considering the limited number of formats available, it's nearly useless.
China might take advantage of the opportunity to sieze Taiwan while the U.S. is busy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
I think that the nuclear winter scenario has been largely debunked. It's just not going to happen.
Now if the nuclear attack coincided with a major supervolcano eruption, we would have serious problems. But it would be the supervolcano, not the nuclear weapons that did it.
Only merchants with a great deal of political pull.
Your run of the mill merchants are thrown to the wolves. If anything, their demise makes it better for the ones with powerful friends to intercede on their behalf.
It might be easier to just electrify the roadways themselves.
That would take care of hitchhikers and wild animals, too.
I didn't cheat in grad school at all and knew very few who did.
In fact, the only time I ever cheated on a test was the color blindness test for my military physical. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to read the numbers in the colored dots so I memorized the sequence as I stood in line waiting for my turn. For some reason, when I got to the head of the line, the army seargeant giving the test started going backwards through the book instead of forwards. I got the first two or three in the backwards sequence but then I missed a couple. He started choosing pages randomly in the book and I couldn't get any of them even the ones I already had.
There was an occasion in grad school where I could easily have cheated to help someone else. We had weekly homework to turn in each Monday in my Calculus of Variations class. The morning of the first homework assignment, an engineering student asked if he could see my homework to compare my answers to his. It was not unusual to check your answers against each others and then if there was a difference to go through the work and find out what either of you did wrong. So I let him borrow my homework for that purpose and he disappeared to an empty room down the hallway for an hour or two. When he came back, it was obvious he had copied my homework.
So the next week I didn't do the homework. He showed up on Monday morning and asked if he could see my homework and I told him I hadn't done it yet. This continued through the entire semester. Every Monday morning, he would ask to see my homework and I'd tell him I didn't do it yet but I would before the end of the semester.
Finally, the week before the last homework assignment was due, I did all the homework for the whole semester except the one I had already turned in and on Sunday night, I went up to the Math Department mailroom and put it in the prof's mailbox. The next morning the engineering student showed up and asked if I'd done my homework yet. When I told him I had done all of it the previous week, he was very visibily relieved. But he quickly became very upset when he asked to borrow it and I told him I had already turned it in.
It would be more fun in assembly.
In one network course I took a few years ago, I was tired of writing code in C and C++ so I did some of the class projects in assembly instead.
Where I work, we have a nearly normal kitchen in the office. I usually cook my own meals from scratch and keep a variety of things in one of the refrigerators and one of the freezers.
A local high school kid would raid the freezer regularly. He'd come in, grab something out of the freezer, and leave before anyone could see what he had. For example, one time his sister wanted some fish, so he came in and stole a package of rainbow trout that I had in the freezer.
I don't have to worry about him for a while. He's just turned 19, will never graduate from high school, and is now in a Texas prison. Prior to being transferred to prison, he was in the county jail for about three months with nothing to eat but tv dinners.
Now if only they'd take his twin brother, too.
In the early 60s, my sister was upset that some girls in her dorm would eat candy that she put in the dorm refrigerator. So she made some candy using goat droppings and put them in the refrigerator.
She nearly got kicked out of college for that, but she really didn't care because she was getting ready to be married in a few months and wouldn't be back the next semester anyway.
We had some kind of dinner at a local restraunt following the wedding rehersel. Our waitress at the restraunt was one of the girls who ate the goat dropping candy from the dorm refrigerator.
Back in the 60s, the television store in my hometown in the Texas Panhandle was the top television store for that brand (I think it was RCA) in the nation in terms of market penetration. Nearly everyone around who had a television had that one brand.
One of the big stores in Chicago was impressed and sent an executive down to see if they could learn something they could use in Chicago. So he flew into Amarillo, met the district sales representative for that brand, and they got in the sales reps car and drove to the store a couple of hours away.
When they walked into the store about 11 am, they didn't see anyone at all. They figured that maybe the employees were drinking coffee or something and so they waited.
Then they noticed a sign that said "If you see a tv you like, take it home and try it out". Another sign instructed people bringing in a tv for repair to write down what was wrong with it and put the paper on the tv. Another sign said "If you brought your tv in for repair and you see it here, it is fixed. The repair cost is on the tag. Leave the money in the cigar box on the counter or sign the tag and leave it in the cigar box and we'll bill you for it."
About an hour after they arrived, one of the town's more idle citizens walked into the store and they asked him where the owners were. He replied, "Oh, they're out harvesting wheat. They should be back by 8 or 9 tonight to close the store for the night."
The visitors figured that nothing that we did here would work at all in their Chicago stores.
There is a big difference between cross-breeding plants and genetically modifying plants.
We can usually assume that a cross between two strains of a plant, both of which are quite safe to eat, is going to be safe to eat. If we had a cross-breed from two strains, one of whic was not safe to eat, you can bet there would be some testing before it was made publically available.
In the case of genetic engineering, genes are being introduced that have, to our knowledge, never existed in any strain of that particular plant. Consequently, sufficient testing should be performed to determine whether or not it actually is safe to eat.
You kind of redefined the meaning of "genetic engineering", didn't you?