MS created opportunity, and they never dumped product at zero retail.
So how much did you pay for your copy of IE?
Browsers weren't always a free add-in.
Same for cd and dvd burning software, same for video playback software, same for anti-virus software, until MASV (Microsoft Antivirus for DOS 6.0) - the one that (arguably correctly) identified the upgrade program for Win95 as a virus.
Microsoft is quite happy to dump product at zero retail to kill the competition.
What's the distinction between Windows RT tablets and iPad that makes on general purpose and the other not?
Care to elaborate?
That one's easy:
1. Window RT tablets - Zero market share, so "obviously not tied to a particular market", such as "people who want a tablet."
2. The Win8 Metro UI in all its clunkiness, to guarantee that #1 (above) stays true.
3. Steve Ballmer, to guarantee more bloopers like #1 and #2 (above).
Hey, any tablet manufacturer that wants to get Nokia Disease is free to waste their time developing the tablet equivalent of a Zune...
There's just one problem with your scenario - XP isn't going to die on April 8th, 2014. People with their original install disks will just keep re-installing it whenever it craps out - it's not like it's hard to bypass activation, and if they've paid for it, they have a legal right to do so when Microsoft shuts down the activation servers.
Or they'll just clone an existing "known-good" VM image.
There's plenty of software that doesn't need to be upgraded, and stuff that just won't work if upgraded, so I expect XP to be around long after it's officially dead. After all, there are still plenty of DOS and Win3x apps running tools, process controls, etc.
1. What does that have to do with the stupidity that this "engineer" is proposing?
2. Do you really believe that the way that the government+NASA is operating that they could actually land someone on the moon by the end of the decade?
Bullcrap. You obviously haven't even tried it. Look at the real-world numbers from people who have. It's a major cpu+resource suck, while giving reduced functionality. Dress it in a red shirt and beam it down so it can die nice and quick.
I tried it, and it really is the worst product Microsoft has ever made. Metro is awful, and the Win8 desktop is a step backward. And it's a memory and resource hog.
Please, don't take my word for it - download it yourself. It makes Unity look almost good.
There were also shareware programs for Windows 3.0, and DOS always supported two monitors (ega/vga + hercules/mono). Anyone who used any Borland compiler seriously at the time would have known this. Other software, susch as Lotus 123 and dbase also supported dual monitors under DOS, as did batch file programming (change the display mode to switch between monitors - mode mono vs mod co80).
The point is that no ion drive can provide that acceleration. And once you get to a significant portion if C, you won't be able to with any design anyway - even a bussard ramjet.
No - they were segmented because they had to be shipped by barge, and the segment size was dictated by the largest barge that could navigate the waters from the factory.
In the original bid process, Thiokol's bid was the least acceptable - but they got it anyway after a review - so pork cost 7 lives and a $2 billion orbiter, as well as several years delay.
We could have boosted the whole space station into orbit with 5 Saturn launches. The money spent on the shuttle program would have paid for between 500 and 1960 moon shots. In other words, up to two missions to the moon every week for 18 years.
(1) We're not ready for the next step, and (2) we are nowhere near the limitations of probes, and (3) we will never go to other stars - it's far cheaper (and more practical) to send data than people.
The fact is that the F22 and F35 have no mission that is "theirs" today. The world has changed. The cold war is over, and a hot war, say, with China, isn't going to be won by either - they can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. How good is a fighter after it's shot it's load?
An upgraded F15 and F18 are good enough, and at $100 million and $66 million a piece, a comparative steal.
An "Enterprise-type" starship is a misnomer at best. An ion drive to get to even the closest star would have to be a "generation" ship. It would take generations of people, born, liviing, dying, to reach the nearest stars.
At a glance the proposed ship is meant only to tour around the solar system dropping of rovers and probes to the various planets and asteroids.
Which we can already do far cheaper, and a lot better, than any "Star-shippy" stupidity.
The two Mars Rovers cost $300 million and $200 million (the first one is always more $$$). 8 years later, one of them is STILL working. Take his 1 trillion, divide it by 20 years, and that's 50 billion a year. For 50 billion a year, you could seed the solar system with 2 to 4 rovers a WEEK for the next 20 years. Think of what a couple thousand rovers working simultaneously 10 years from now would mean.
You could even make them somewhat self-supporting financially by letting people pay to control them for a few hours at a time. Telepresence to allow for actually doing stuff like assembling remote stations such as mini rail launchers on the moon... maybe some lunar solar mining and refining.
I don't remember who said it, or the exact wording, but I think it was something like: "If aliens showed up, we would stop fighting amongst ourselves and unify as Humans very quickly".
Nope. Various factions would try to get any aliens to side with them against others, along the lines of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". We saw this with the Indians in North America, we saw this with pretty much every previous invasion... why would it be different this time?
Except, of course, for that large segment of humanity that would be busy denying that there are aliens, that it's a government conspiracy, right up until they have their pinhead brains sucked out of them (which they'll quickly say was an indication that they were "the chosen" and that having your brains sucked out is actually "the rapture" or something like that...
And the rest who will be too busy watching Jerry Springer-type shows with Alien trailer-trash hooking up, then breaking up with human trailer-trash and glomming on all the details about how they were "probed by aliens".
And then there's the slashdot crowd, who will be posting about how they welcome their alien overlords, blahblahblah PROFIT!, set us up the bomb, with nathalie portman and hot grits down their trekkie uniform.
Nope - the only thing that will unite humans quickly is free booze.
Everything that could be done with the "Enterprise" is already much more likely to be done with unmanned probes. The "Starship Enterprise" is as much a waste of money as the space shuttle program was a waste because it failed to build on the success of the Saturn series.
The simple fact is that we're now back to begging the Russians to use "outdated" technology to do the job because the shuttles were a pork-barrel program that ended up crippling NASA financially and politically.
The shuttle itself was "defective by design", the seals that led to the Challenger disaster only needed because the SRBs were pork-barrelled out to a location that was far enough away that couldn't ship single-piece SRBs to the launch site, so they had to be built in segments.
Additionally, medding by the DoD led to the requirement that the shuttle be capable of doing near-high-polar-orbit missions, leading to a lowering of cargo capacity (high-polar orbits can't take advantage of the equatorial boost of the earth's spin).
Any trillion-dollar program is going to end up with the same problems. And yet, as the skate-board sized Mars Rovers showed, you can do real, long-term exploration - today - for half a billion for a pair of probes.
NASA's $18 billion could send out a probe a week every week, year-round. When a probe can work for almost a decade... you do the math.
In the meantime, the real action is with cheaper remote-guided probes and missiles and cheaper vehicles such as the choppers that ferried the Seal team that killed bin laden.
The F35 is a total waste of money, and will never have a real mission.
An "Enterprise-type" starship is a misnomer at best. An ion drive to get to even the closest star would have to be a "generation" ship. It would take generations of people, born, liviing, dying, to reach the nearest stars.
The alternative would be some sort of 2001-type hibernation, which also would not be anything like the Enterprise.
"Beam me up Scottie, there's no intelligent life in this article."
People have been asking for the ability to moderate the stories once they hit the front page, not just the comments and the firehose.
The stupid "like" and "+1" buttons don't have the same effect. If there are 100 +1s, that means nothing by itself - for example, if the story has 1,0000 -1s or "hates" it helps put any up-rating into context.
So a "200 people liked this story, 5,000 said it sucked" would be appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you're correct - this is just another OPM (Other_People's_Money) investor scam.
Coming soon to a venture capital fund-raiser near you - DarkSquare!
They'll take all those wires that nobody's using and push the Internet through them!
It'll be *HUGE*. Be the first sucker^W savvy investor to get in on the ground floor! What could go wrong?
So how much did you pay for your copy of IE?
Browsers weren't always a free add-in.
Same for cd and dvd burning software, same for video playback software, same for anti-virus software, until MASV (Microsoft Antivirus for DOS 6.0) - the one that (arguably correctly) identified the upgrade program for Win95 as a virus.
Microsoft is quite happy to dump product at zero retail to kill the competition.
That one's easy:
1. Window RT tablets - Zero market share, so "obviously not tied to a particular market", such as "people who want a tablet."
2. The Win8 Metro UI in all its clunkiness, to guarantee that #1 (above) stays true.
3. Steve Ballmer, to guarantee more bloopers like #1 and #2 (above).
Hey, any tablet manufacturer that wants to get Nokia Disease is free to waste their time developing the tablet equivalent of a Zune ...
There's just one problem with your scenario - XP isn't going to die on April 8th, 2014. People with their original install disks will just keep re-installing it whenever it craps out - it's not like it's hard to bypass activation, and if they've paid for it, they have a legal right to do so when Microsoft shuts down the activation servers.
Or they'll just clone an existing "known-good" VM image.
There's plenty of software that doesn't need to be upgraded, and stuff that just won't work if upgraded, so I expect XP to be around long after it's officially dead. After all, there are still plenty of DOS and Win3x apps running tools, process controls, etc.
Two questions
1. What does that have to do with the stupidity that this "engineer" is proposing?
2. Do you really believe that the way that the government+NASA is operating that they could actually land someone on the moon by the end of the decade?
Bullcrap. You obviously haven't even tried it. Look at the real-world numbers from people who have. It's a major cpu+resource suck, while giving reduced functionality. Dress it in a red shirt and beam it down so it can die nice and quick.
I tried it, and it really is the worst product Microsoft has ever made. Metro is awful, and the Win8 desktop is a step backward. And it's a memory and resource hog.
Please, don't take my word for it - download it yourself. It makes Unity look almost good.
Come on people, fix your spam filter.
There were also shareware programs for Windows 3.0, and DOS always supported two monitors (ega/vga + hercules/mono). Anyone who used any Borland compiler seriously at the time would have known this. Other software, susch as Lotus 123 and dbase also supported dual monitors under DOS, as did batch file programming (change the display mode to switch between monitors - mode mono vs mod co80).
The point is that no ion drive can provide that acceleration. And once you get to a significant portion if C, you won't be able to with any design anyway - even a bussard ramjet.
In the original bid process, Thiokol's bid was the least acceptable - but they got it anyway after a review - so pork cost 7 lives and a $2 billion orbiter, as well as several years delay.
Nope - the original spec was single spun body, not segmented. The air force also developed a single spun body version, same as military boosters. NASA - It's all pork all the way down.
We could have boosted the whole space station into orbit with 5 Saturn launches. The money spent on the shuttle program would have paid for between 500 and 1960 moon shots. In other words, up to two missions to the moon every week for 18 years.
(1) We're not ready for the next step, and (2) we are nowhere near the limitations of probes, and (3) we will never go to other stars - it's far cheaper (and more practical) to send data than people.
We've had ion drives for ~ half a century - they will never make a good drive for a starship - better to use a light sail or a bussard ramjet.
You're not talking 1G acceleration - you're talking "so small you wouldn't notice it if you tried".
The fact is that the F22 and F35 have no mission that is "theirs" today. The world has changed. The cold war is over, and a hot war, say, with China, isn't going to be won by either - they can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. How good is a fighter after it's shot it's load?
An upgraded F15 and F18 are good enough, and at $100 million and $66 million a piece, a comparative steal.
Which we can already do far cheaper, and a lot better, than any "Star-shippy" stupidity.
The two Mars Rovers cost $300 million and $200 million (the first one is always more $$$). 8 years later, one of them is STILL working. Take his 1 trillion, divide it by 20 years, and that's 50 billion a year. For 50 billion a year, you could seed the solar system with 2 to 4 rovers a WEEK for the next 20 years. Think of what a couple thousand rovers working simultaneously 10 years from now would mean.
You could even make them somewhat self-supporting financially by letting people pay to control them for a few hours at a time. Telepresence to allow for actually doing stuff like assembling remote stations such as mini rail launchers on the moon ... maybe some lunar solar mining and refining.
"This space mission brought to you by Soylent Green."
As long as you're the first one to be decanted, "what could possibly go wrong?"
Nope. Various factions would try to get any aliens to side with them against others, along the lines of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". We saw this with the Indians in North America, we saw this with pretty much every previous invasion ... why would it be different this time?
Except, of course, for that large segment of humanity that would be busy denying that there are aliens, that it's a government conspiracy, right up until they have their pinhead brains sucked out of them (which they'll quickly say was an indication that they were "the chosen" and that having your brains sucked out is actually "the rapture" or something like that ...
And the rest who will be too busy watching Jerry Springer-type shows with Alien trailer-trash hooking up, then breaking up with human trailer-trash and glomming on all the details about how they were "probed by aliens".
And then there's the slashdot crowd, who will be posting about how they welcome their alien overlords, blahblahblah PROFIT!, set us up the bomb, with nathalie portman and hot grits down their trekkie uniform.
Nope - the only thing that will unite humans quickly is free booze.
The simple fact is that we're now back to begging the Russians to use "outdated" technology to do the job because the shuttles were a pork-barrel program that ended up crippling NASA financially and politically.
The shuttle itself was "defective by design", the seals that led to the Challenger disaster only needed because the SRBs were pork-barrelled out to a location that was far enough away that couldn't ship single-piece SRBs to the launch site, so they had to be built in segments.
Additionally, medding by the DoD led to the requirement that the shuttle be capable of doing near-high-polar-orbit missions, leading to a lowering of cargo capacity (high-polar orbits can't take advantage of the equatorial boost of the earth's spin).
Any trillion-dollar program is going to end up with the same problems. And yet, as the skate-board sized Mars Rovers showed, you can do real, long-term exploration - today - for half a billion for a pair of probes.
NASA's $18 billion could send out a probe a week every week, year-round. When a probe can work for almost a decade ... you do the math.
Just like all those billions wasted on the F-22, another fighter that is obsoleted by real-world events.
In the meantime, the real action is with cheaper remote-guided probes and missiles and cheaper vehicles such as the choppers that ferried the Seal team that killed bin laden.
The F35 is a total waste of money, and will never have a real mission.
An "Enterprise-type" starship is a misnomer at best. An ion drive to get to even the closest star would have to be a "generation" ship. It would take generations of people, born, liviing, dying, to reach the nearest stars.
The alternative would be some sort of 2001-type hibernation, which also would not be anything like the Enterprise.
"Beam me up Scottie, there's no intelligent life in this article."
People have been asking for the ability to moderate the stories once they hit the front page, not just the comments and the firehose.
The stupid "like" and "+1" buttons don't have the same effect. If there are 100 +1s, that means nothing by itself - for example, if the story has 1,0000 -1s or "hates" it helps put any up-rating into context.
So a "200 people liked this story, 5,000 said it sucked" would be appreciated.