And it is not just the IT industry whose jobs are at risk. The problem (IMO) started with financial institutions moving bill processing offshore. Help center jobs followed suit. Data entry/keyboarding jobs moved offshore. Currently many of the xrays that your doctor may use in diagnostics are being interpreted by a foreign radiologist. Many of the mundane architectural design jobs (like portions of big shopping centers) are also outsourced to offshore. Even the states are jumping on this bandwagon -- the unemployemnt & welfare accounts of at least 28 US states are being handled off- shore.
Welcome to globalization. It is the inexorable movement of high dollar cost jobs to those geographic regions with the cheapest labor pool. Imagine the consternation of Mexican labor being replaced in their own country by cheaper Asian workers, only to then have their plant(s) shut down, disassembled, and shipped overseas. What we are seeing in the death of the middle class in every "advanced industrialized nation", but most predominately here in the USA. That boost in your 401k valuation may even have come from your own job going offshore.
If you don't want to get used to the continued destruction of the middle class, you need to light a fire under your politicians, and start organizing shareholders against the "fatcat" corporate interests. Those "fatcats" have a vested interest in going offshore for their labor -- it puts more bonus (blood) money in their pockets.
There is no equivalence. For instance, DEC VMS was used as the design "core" for Microsoft's Windows NT. I have known of DEC VAX hardware that ran continuously for 5 years without a warm reboot, let alone a system shutdown. The Microsoft OS often needed to be rebooted daily.
The hardware that Microsoft runs on is not as reliable as the old DEC VAXs, as a rule. The short term emulation of a legacy system is not the same as replacing it. For exammple, an IBM z/390 running MVS might be able to run 1000 linux servers, but in terms of reliability (the proverbial 5 Nines), that z/390 could not be replaced with 1000 linux boxes, or even 2000.
The old adage "They just don't make things the way they used to." applies here. New hardware costs are way down, as are HW/SW maintenence costs, but the reliability of the new gear is underwhelming.
I could hibernate through the second G.W. Bush administration, and wake up when there are jobs again. (Presuming Dubya doesn't get us all blown up first.)
HP basically abandoned me in their support department with an Omnibook 800CT that kept having memory/system board failures. I would no more buy another HP "anything" than I would another Microsoft "anything". (Thank goodness HP spun off their electronic test equipment division...)
I bought an Apple 14" Powerbook to replace it, (1 GHz/1 GB) and have never regretted it. If I ever feel compelled to install linux on it (dual-boot), there is always "Yellow Dog Linux".
where an employee's personal inventions are ALWAYS owned by the employee, NEVER by the employer.
In the USA, the employer basically OWNS the employee (and any useful employee thoughts.)
If I weren't such a dummy with the German language (written & spoken), I might have emigrated there long ago. Personal freedom in the USA is rapidly slipping away, especially with the "corporate national socialist" regime in power today.
EDS has a major US government contract to upgrade many/most of the US Marine Corp. computers (desktops AND servers). The contract is in very big trouble, being plagued with huge cost overruns and failure to supply the equipment in a timely manner.
EDS keeps popping up in the news here, and the news is rarely good. I think the company really went downhill after H. Ross Perot sold it off. Too bad, really...
Microsoft, the proverbial 900 pound gorilla, doesn't need or use industry standards, right? They make their own standards by adopting, embracing, and extending those standards to fit their ultimate business plan (total Borg- like domination). Whether they fix bugs in their software or not, address vulnerabilities in their code, adopt better security procedures: none of this really matters. Total hegenomy does.
Microsoft went from ignoring the Internet, to building the browser (and Internet) into their entire product line. The Internet will not survive Microsoft: Microsoft will become the Internet. Give them 10 years, tops, to make Microsoft the only vehicle to enter the 'net. Mbone, or its 2015 equivalent, will be the only access any other vendor will have to what now passes for the Internet. "Embrace and extend" will mean a MS-centric Internet protocol and MS-centric Internet filesystem.
The current MS IE/OS vulnerabilities are only a bump in the road for total Microsoft dominance. DRM in BIOS, secure computing, etcetera, will shut out all other players. Get used to it!
The "eBay police" (and problem resolution retards) are a total sham, as they always favor the scammers that pay the highest advertising fees.
What more eBay scammers really deserve are victims with enough time on their hands, and enough malace aforethought, to hunt them down in person. Monies can more readily be recovered in person, particularly after the scammer gets kneecapped... as it provides a wonderful incentive to make restitution ( before the second barrel of "00" gets used... )
The wealthiest portions of the IT industry
basically "ignored their duty" to make political
donations in the 1990's. How dare they! The
pigopolists like Microsoft would never have come
into the crosshairs of the DoJ if they had been
"sharing the wealth" more amongst the polititians.
The anti-trust settlement against Microsoft was
finalized under a GOP administration that has
gone out of its way to be friendly (with out-
stretched hand) with big business. It was no
accident that Microsoft's "punishment" was as
moderate as it was: -- they could not have
written the punishment they received better
themselves (oops, oh, wait).
Money is the "mother's milk" of politics, and
those with the biggest teats get the most out
of our wonderful "representative" government
in the USA. I believe it was Samuel Clemmens
that once stated "We have the best system of
government that money can buy!" And the Bush
administration has made it known (from the start)
that they are "open for business"...
This voyage of discovery is not merely "fishing" for new genomes. It is also not merely a new "gold rush" for patentable genomes. What it is is the basis for new bio-weapon research.
We are, after all, talking about the Bush/Cheney administration. An administration that slashes the NASA budget in favor of ABM pipedreams, halts the war on terror in favor of the conquest and Balkanization of an oil-rich country, and stifles funding for "After School Lunches" and the "No Child Left Behind" programs in favor of corporate welfare.
The software industry, as a whole, does not do DoD-level security checks on their new employees. And with more software employers migrating operations overseas, there will be an even greater risk that these new employees will not get any vetting. When closed source software companies migrate their operations to places like China or India or Russia, vetting the employee or thorough screening of the code will not be a top priority. Time-to-market pressures and hold total costs down are factors that are contrary to security, whether that is employee or code quality. To top even these concerns, there is the issue of theft of IP to contend with, with the prospects of future competition from ex-employees that have your company's code.
The argument against F/OSS in favor of closed source commercial code is totally without merit. With more development of Microsoft or Oracle or other closed source programs moving overseas, the risk of trojaned code goes up, not down.
As more F/OSS becomes adopted in the commercial and government marketplace, the pressure on closed source software to keep NRE and TCO costs down will result in even sloppier code than the IT industry has experienced to date.
F/OSS begins to look far more attractive as the closed source software companies continue to hide behind EULAs and Declarations of Suitability as their software turns to trojaned mush. The trend is accelerating, so get used to it.
Nigeria's ICT and the 419er's will form a perfect business intelligence feedback loop. The information gleened from their new "credit bureau help desk(s) and the 419 scammers will make all currently known "directed scam" operations into an art form.
I can't wait for the email offers to begin rolling in. I know they will be utterly irresistible (easy credit / low interest/ variable APR / new business opportunity/ pay off my student loans working from home, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...
I might just as well put on my tinfoil hat now, and burn my modem cable...
This article has convinced me that we must be living in the "end of days"...
I'm still waiting for decent DSL, since I'm on 30 year old buried POTS wiring that's 5 (plus) miles away. Fiber to terminal point will not happen here before hell freezes over, since the Baby Bells are not spending that kind of money.
However, with that kind of bandwidth to the internet, I could set up some homebrew web sites, and telecommute to work, and go back to (online) school all at the same time.
I hate to be repetitious, but that kind of infrastructure would allow some really great collaborative (beowolf?) computing.
Just as the EU has caved to USA demands for information on travelers from (and within) Europe, every country that has visa-less entry to the USA will have biometric passports, AND information on those travelers made available to the US authorities.
If you never travel outside Canada, never do any business with USA companies, don't use any credit cards, have no criminal record (at all) then, and only then, might you NOT be in the MATRIX.
I have been running the Slackware 9.1 linux
release since it came out. Excepting some
early problems with XFS on IDE RAID, the only
times I have rebooted has been to boot from
a newer 2.6.x kernel.
I would like to point out that if you start
out with a well designed distro to begin with
(, and not some distro that breaks when you
add a new piece of software), the 2.6.x kernel
is pretty darn stable (knock on wood here).
Of course, YMMV.
which has been adopted by both SUN and Apple. This system allows for the modification and extension of the BIOS. It is based upon the FORTH programming language, which is both compact (minimum of 32 keywords as a core), as well as highly extensible.
Need to add discovery of new hardware, and the loading of the appropriate drivers?
Need to add a new BOOT device to the startup?
Working on an embedded system that requires adaptible startup processes?
OpenBOOT is an IEEE standard, albeit it hasn't has such an active development core in the past couple of years. If you want to see the power and flexibility of this strategy, look at the console BOOT prompt on any SUN or newer Apple computer.
The Bush/Cheney team has an overriding concern: preserving their constituents' (the HAVES and HAVE MORES) big tax breaks!
I always knew that Bush's much touted space initiatives (back to the Moon, and on to Mars) were pure hogwash. There is no way that these "neo-conservatives" would spend big government money on such esoteric matters. Not more money for pure research, either. If there isn't a quick commercial payoff for his corporate pals, then it is a big negative.
Too bad, but it looks like Bush (excuse, Cheney) will be pulling the plug on the rescue and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. (Not an area of Halliburton proficiency.)
This "Sport" class license is, indeed, perfect for those inclined to terrorist acts. Just imagine: A small, lightweight plane that can be folded up and stuck in a U-Haul trailer, powerful enough to carry 2 people (or one with a WMD payload), with a small enough radar image to be nearly undetectible, and can take off and land virtually anywhere. What could be more perfect for the job?
BTW: After the demise of the USSR, they seem to have "misplaced" about 80 of the approximately 100 "suitcase nukes". They are about the size of a small footlocker, weigh about 65 pounds, and came in a nice olive drab paint scheme. Yield is about 5 kilotons of TNT, which would be perfect for an urban or industrial air burst (about 1000 feet up). The blast wave would knock buildings down in about a 1/2 mile radius, and start many buildings on fire in a 2-1/2 mile radius. The USSR made these things pretty well, so there wouldn't be an excessive amount of radiation at ground zero, providing that the terrorists didn't also make use of some of the hundreds of cesium-60 seed sterilizers that they have also lost track of.
Of course, the passanger seat could also be replaced with an aerosol tank and sprayer for the other WMD candidates: biological or chemical agents.
It is inconceivable to me that the TSA, FAA, and HSA would not have had some overriding logic against making it even easier for these types of acts. One must draw the cynical conclusion that the manufacturers of these ultralights are big campaign contributors to the Bush/Cheney reelection effort. Like Ashcroft, Mueller, and Tenet said numerous times: "It isn't a matter of IF there will be another terrorist act (in the USA), but of WHEN." And these fscking idiots are helping to make it so.
Ohh, pleeeeze! Does anyone on '/.' really believe that MS has not been using whatever means available (FUD, SCO Group, IP patents) in order to halt the spread of FOSS? AFAIK, anyone who signs with the devil MS for access to the source code for their crappy software will be unemployable in the field, excepting with MS. Regardless of how much BSD (or GNU/ Linux) code that MS has adopted as their own, once it has "passed through the bowels of the beast", it is forever tainted by them (and their $50B legal slush fund).
IMHO, any coder that sets eyes on MS bloat-code would have (effectively) signed a lifetime non-compete with Microsoft. The same phrase I would use for the crack dealers passing out free samples on the corner to newbies applies here: "Just say no!" (and quickly pass by, with eyes averted...)
considering that USA passports were only good
for 7 years back then in 1992 (and now still
only good for 10 years).
If this wanted character has been globetrotting
all this time, on which country's passport has
he been traveling? (Please, don't tell me he
was using a Micro$oft Passport account!)
The HST provides the best telescope data, period. The bean counter idiots in charge of NASA intend to replace HST with an inferior IR space-based telescope. The same contractors that have been working on HST are working on the "replacement". There is far more money to be made developing a new telescope than there is for "maintenence" on the HST. The development of a bleeding edge robotic servicing mission also is more profitable for the contractors than a manned mission.
It all boils down to money, and where that money would be spent. Space robotics have a huge potential in military applications, so the R&D money spent by NASA can be parlayed into bigger profits for these same contractors. The best hope for the continued survival of HST would be to farm out the repairs to China or India, but the political costs would be too great.
The money misspent on the ISS has drained the NASA budget at a time when pure science is being sacrificed for dual-use applied science and political expediency. The ISS has become a fiscal "black hole", with budget overruns that make the original projected costs of the shuttle program look like kindergarten.
When real scientists running NASA were replaced with politically "inspired" professional bean counters is when NASA started going downhill. And the Bush "back to the moon" initiative is pure BS, as there is no valid scientific value, nor the money to waste, for such a mission directive.
Slashdot Mirror
just not here (duhh!).
And it is not just the IT industry whose jobs
are at risk. The problem (IMO) started with
financial institutions moving bill processing
offshore. Help center jobs followed suit.
Data entry/keyboarding jobs moved offshore.
Currently many of the xrays that your doctor
may use in diagnostics are being interpreted by
a foreign radiologist. Many of the mundane
architectural design jobs (like portions of
big shopping centers) are also outsourced to
offshore. Even the states are jumping on this
bandwagon -- the unemployemnt & welfare accounts
of at least 28 US states are being handled off-
shore.
Welcome to globalization. It is the inexorable
movement of high dollar cost jobs to those
geographic regions with the cheapest labor pool.
Imagine the consternation of Mexican labor being
replaced in their own country by cheaper Asian
workers, only to then have their plant(s) shut
down, disassembled, and shipped overseas. What
we are seeing in the death of the middle class
in every "advanced industrialized nation", but
most predominately here in the USA. That boost
in your 401k valuation may even have come from
your own job going offshore.
If you don't want to get used to the continued
destruction of the middle class, you need to
light a fire under your politicians, and start
organizing shareholders against the "fatcat"
corporate interests. Those "fatcats" have a
vested interest in going offshore for their
labor -- it puts more bonus (blood) money in
their pockets.
There is no equivalence. For instance, DEC VMS
was used as the design "core" for Microsoft's
Windows NT. I have known of DEC VAX hardware
that ran continuously for 5 years without a
warm reboot, let alone a system shutdown. The
Microsoft OS often needed to be rebooted daily.
The hardware that Microsoft runs on is not as
reliable as the old DEC VAXs, as a rule. The
short term emulation of a legacy system is not
the same as replacing it. For exammple, an IBM
z/390 running MVS might be able to run 1000
linux servers, but in terms of reliability
(the proverbial 5 Nines), that z/390 could not
be replaced with 1000 linux boxes, or even 2000.
The old adage "They just don't make things the
way they used to." applies here. New hardware
costs are way down, as are HW/SW maintenence
costs, but the reliability of the new gear is
underwhelming.
I could hibernate through the second G.W. Bush
administration, and wake up when there are jobs
again. (Presuming Dubya doesn't get us all
blown up first.)
HP basically abandoned me in their support ...)
department with an Omnibook 800CT that kept
having memory/system board failures. I would
no more buy another HP "anything" than I would
another Microsoft "anything". (Thank goodness
HP spun off their electronic test equipment
division
I bought an Apple 14" Powerbook to replace it,
(1 GHz/1 GB) and have never regretted it. If
I ever feel compelled to install linux on it
(dual-boot), there is always "Yellow Dog Linux".
where an employee's personal inventions are
ALWAYS owned by the employee, NEVER by the
employer.
In the USA, the employer basically OWNS the
employee (and any useful employee thoughts.)
If I weren't such a dummy with the German
language (written & spoken), I might have
emigrated there long ago. Personal freedom
in the USA is rapidly slipping away, especially
with the "corporate national socialist" regime
in power today.
the Pentagon brass (Rumsfeld?) has watched the
"Universal Soldier" movie a few too many times.
EDS has a major US government contract to
...
upgrade many/most of the US Marine Corp.
computers (desktops AND servers). The
contract is in very big trouble, being
plagued with huge cost overruns and failure
to supply the equipment in a timely manner.
EDS keeps popping up in the news here, and
the news is rarely good. I think the company
really went downhill after H. Ross Perot
sold it off. Too bad, really
Okay, it is OT.
...
Microsoft, the proverbial 900 pound gorilla,
doesn't need or use industry standards, right?
They make their own standards by adopting,
embracing, and extending those standards to
fit their ultimate business plan (total Borg-
like domination). Whether they fix bugs in
their software or not, address vulnerabilities
in their code, adopt better security procedures:
none of this really matters. Total hegenomy does.
Microsoft went from ignoring the Internet, to
building the browser (and Internet) into their
entire product line. The Internet will not
survive Microsoft: Microsoft will become the
Internet. Give them 10 years, tops, to make
Microsoft the only vehicle to enter the 'net.
Mbone, or its 2015 equivalent, will be the only
access any other vendor will have to what now
passes for the Internet. "Embrace and extend"
will mean a MS-centric Internet protocol and
MS-centric Internet filesystem.
The current MS IE/OS vulnerabilities are only
a bump in the road for total Microsoft dominance.
DRM in BIOS, secure computing, etcetera, will
shut out all other players. Get used to it!
Resistance is futile
shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me.
... as it ... )
The "eBay police" (and problem resolution
retards) are a total sham, as they always
favor the scammers that pay the highest
advertising fees.
What more eBay scammers really deserve are
victims with enough time on their hands,
and enough malace aforethought, to hunt
them down in person. Monies can more
readily be recovered in person, particularly
after the scammer gets kneecapped
provides a wonderful incentive to make
restitution ( before the second barrel of
"00" gets used
The wealthiest portions of the IT industry basically "ignored their duty" to make political donations in the 1990's. How dare they! The pigopolists like Microsoft would never have come into the crosshairs of the DoJ if they had been "sharing the wealth" more amongst the polititians. The anti-trust settlement against Microsoft was finalized under a GOP administration that has gone out of its way to be friendly (with out- stretched hand) with big business. It was no accident that Microsoft's "punishment" was as moderate as it was: -- they could not have written the punishment they received better themselves (oops, oh, wait). Money is the "mother's milk" of politics, and those with the biggest teats get the most out of our wonderful "representative" government in the USA. I believe it was Samuel Clemmens that once stated "We have the best system of government that money can buy!" And the Bush administration has made it known (from the start) that they are "open for business" ...
This voyage of discovery is not merely "fishing"
for new genomes. It is also not merely a new
"gold rush" for patentable genomes. What it is
is the basis for new bio-weapon research.
We are, after all, talking about the Bush/Cheney
administration. An administration that slashes
the NASA budget in favor of ABM pipedreams, halts
the war on terror in favor of the conquest and
Balkanization of an oil-rich country, and stifles
funding for "After School Lunches" and the "No
Child Left Behind" programs in favor of corporate
welfare.
With this cluster, Intel will have doubled
the number of Itanium 2 sales for the YEAR!
The software industry, as a whole, does not
do DoD-level security checks on their new
employees. And with more software employers
migrating operations overseas, there will be
an even greater risk that these new employees
will not get any vetting. When closed source
software companies migrate their operations to
places like China or India or Russia, vetting
the employee or thorough screening of the code
will not be a top priority. Time-to-market
pressures and hold total costs down are factors
that are contrary to security, whether that is
employee or code quality. To top even these
concerns, there is the issue of theft of IP
to contend with, with the prospects of future
competition from ex-employees that have your
company's code.
The argument against F/OSS in favor of closed
source commercial code is totally without merit.
With more development of Microsoft or Oracle or
other closed source programs moving overseas,
the risk of trojaned code goes up, not down.
As more F/OSS becomes adopted in the commercial
and government marketplace, the pressure on
closed source software to keep NRE and TCO
costs down will result in even sloppier code
than the IT industry has experienced to date.
F/OSS begins to look far more attractive as
the closed source software companies continue
to hide behind EULAs and Declarations of
Suitability as their software turns to trojaned
mush. The trend is accelerating, so get used
to it.
Nigeria's ICT and the 419er's will form a
/ / ...
...
...
perfect business intelligence feedback loop.
The information gleened from their new "credit
bureau help desk(s) and the 419 scammers will
make all currently known "directed scam"
operations into an art form.
I can't wait for the email offers to begin
rolling in. I know they will be utterly
irresistible (easy credit / low interest
variable APR / new business opportunity
pay off my student loans working from home,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera
I might just as well put on my tinfoil hat
now, and burn my modem cable
This article has convinced me that we must
be living in the "end of days"
I'm still waiting for decent DSL, since I'm
on 30 year old buried POTS wiring that's 5
(plus) miles away. Fiber to terminal point
will not happen here before hell freezes over,
since the Baby Bells are not spending that
kind of money.
However, with that kind of bandwidth to the
internet, I could set up some homebrew web
sites, and telecommute to work, and go back
to (online) school all at the same time.
I hate to be repetitious, but that kind of
infrastructure would allow some really great
collaborative (beowolf?) computing.
Just as the EU has caved to USA demands for
information on travelers from (and within)
Europe, every country that has visa-less entry
to the USA will have biometric passports, AND
information on those travelers made available
to the US authorities.
If you never travel outside Canada, never do
any business with USA companies, don't use
any credit cards, have no criminal record (at
all) then, and only then, might you NOT be in
the MATRIX.
The MATRIX has you, too!
I have been running the Slackware 9.1 linux release since it came out. Excepting some early problems with XFS on IDE RAID, the only times I have rebooted has been to boot from a newer 2.6.x kernel. I would like to point out that if you start out with a well designed distro to begin with (, and not some distro that breaks when you add a new piece of software), the 2.6.x kernel is pretty darn stable (knock on wood here). Of course, YMMV.
which has been adopted by both SUN and Apple.
This system allows for the modification and
extension of the BIOS. It is based upon the
FORTH programming language, which is both
compact (minimum of 32 keywords as a core), as
well as highly extensible.
Need to add discovery of new hardware, and the
loading of the appropriate drivers?
Need to add a new BOOT device to the startup?
Working on an embedded system that requires
adaptible startup processes?
OpenBOOT is an IEEE standard, albeit it hasn't
has such an active development core in the
past couple of years. If you want to see the
power and flexibility of this strategy, look
at the console BOOT prompt on any SUN or newer
Apple computer.
Who says that history does not repeat itself?
FROM:
(A) oracles reading goat's entrails
TO:
(B) Oracle Databases reading cow's entrails.
We have come a long way, baby!
The Bush/Cheney team has an overriding concern:
preserving their constituents' (the HAVES and
HAVE MORES) big tax breaks!
I always knew that Bush's much touted space
initiatives (back to the Moon, and on to Mars)
were pure hogwash. There is no way that these
"neo-conservatives" would spend big government
money on such esoteric matters. Not more money
for pure research, either. If there isn't a
quick commercial payoff for his corporate pals,
then it is a big negative.
Too bad, but it looks like Bush (excuse, Cheney)
will be pulling the plug on the rescue and repair
of the Hubble Space Telescope. (Not an area of
Halliburton proficiency.)
This "Sport" class license is, indeed, perfect
for those inclined to terrorist acts. Just
imagine: A small, lightweight plane that can
be folded up and stuck in a U-Haul trailer,
powerful enough to carry 2 people (or one with
a WMD payload), with a small enough radar image
to be nearly undetectible, and can take off and
land virtually anywhere. What could be more
perfect for the job?
BTW: After the demise of the USSR, they seem to
have "misplaced" about 80 of the approximately
100 "suitcase nukes". They are about the size
of a small footlocker, weigh about 65 pounds,
and came in a nice olive drab paint scheme.
Yield is about 5 kilotons of TNT, which would
be perfect for an urban or industrial air burst
(about 1000 feet up). The blast wave would
knock buildings down in about a 1/2 mile radius,
and start many buildings on fire in a 2-1/2 mile
radius. The USSR made these things pretty well,
so there wouldn't be an excessive amount of
radiation at ground zero, providing that the
terrorists didn't also make use of some of the
hundreds of cesium-60 seed sterilizers that they
have also lost track of.
Of course, the passanger seat could also be
replaced with an aerosol tank and sprayer for
the other WMD candidates: biological or chemical
agents.
It is inconceivable to me that the TSA, FAA, and
HSA would not have had some overriding logic
against making it even easier for these types
of acts. One must draw the cynical conclusion
that the manufacturers of these ultralights
are big campaign contributors to the Bush/Cheney
reelection effort. Like Ashcroft, Mueller, and
Tenet said numerous times: "It isn't a matter
of IF there will be another terrorist act (in
the USA), but of WHEN." And these fscking
idiots are helping to make it so.
Ohh, pleeeeze!
Does anyone on '/.' really believe that MS
has not been using whatever means available
(FUD, SCO Group, IP patents) in order to
halt the spread of FOSS? AFAIK, anyone
who signs with the devil MS for access to
the source code for their crappy software
will be unemployable in the field, excepting
with MS. Regardless of how much BSD (or GNU/
Linux) code that MS has adopted as their own,
once it has "passed through the bowels of the
beast", it is forever tainted by them (and their
$50B legal slush fund).
IMHO, any coder that sets eyes on MS bloat-code
would have (effectively) signed a lifetime
non-compete with Microsoft. The same phrase I
would use for the crack dealers passing out free
samples on the corner to newbies applies here:
"Just say no!" (and quickly pass by, with eyes
averted...)
considering that USA passports were only good for 7 years back then in 1992 (and now still only good for 10 years). If this wanted character has been globetrotting all this time, on which country's passport has he been traveling? (Please, don't tell me he was using a Micro$oft Passport account!)
a wireless mesh network of Fiats ...
...
that catch colds (viruses) and spread them.
Be afraid, very afraid
(but not in the good old USA, since
Fiats aren't imported here any more:
they can't meet Federal safety standards.)
And speaking of safety, isn't Fiat the least
bit concerned about Microsoft's BSOD ?
(Blue windScreen Of Death)
The HST provides the best telescope data, period.
The bean counter idiots in charge of NASA intend
to replace HST with an inferior IR space-based
telescope. The same contractors that have been
working on HST are working on the "replacement".
There is far more money to be made developing a
new telescope than there is for "maintenence" on
the HST. The development of a bleeding edge
robotic servicing mission also is more profitable
for the contractors than a manned mission.
It all boils down to money, and where that money
would be spent. Space robotics have a huge
potential in military applications, so the R&D
money spent by NASA can be parlayed into bigger
profits for these same contractors. The best
hope for the continued survival of HST would be
to farm out the repairs to China or India, but
the political costs would be too great.
The money misspent on the ISS has drained the
NASA budget at a time when pure science is
being sacrificed for dual-use applied science
and political expediency. The ISS has become
a fiscal "black hole", with budget overruns
that make the original projected costs of the
shuttle program look like kindergarten.
When real scientists running NASA were replaced
with politically "inspired" professional bean
counters is when NASA started going downhill.
And the Bush "back to the moon" initiative is
pure BS, as there is no valid scientific value,
nor the money to waste, for such a mission
directive.