In today's business world any company that has publicly held stock is on a 3 month cycle. The only relationship to a midlife crisis that Microsoft may have is that their products are running out of steam. They will not see the kinds of growth they have seen in the past. I fully expect to see the decline accelerate when they release their new updated packages. I don't think they will see companies planning major upgrades to the new packages. Partially due to the licensing changes they have been pushing the last few years and partially due to available open source replacements. The 3 month cycle causes companies to start and stop initiatives faster and faster. Saw this start to happen at AT&T several years ago and now they are being bought out by SBC. Something similar is in store for Microsoft but it will take many years for them to get to the point AT&T reached.
I think Microsoft knows this. They scheduled a major dividend this past year. This allows the ones with stock to get some of their money out of the company prior to it imploding. Expect to see more of this as long as they have money in the bank.
As far as media centers an option this is starting to get pretty good is mythtv. Besides providing an open source alternative it is doubtful that mythtv will ever suffer from the issues that Tivo is now encountering. Tivo recently started enabling flags that prevent the owners of Tivo's from recording certain shows, time shifting shows, or keeping copies of shows for more than the time limit assigned by the producers of those shows. Mythtv does a good job of flagging commercials as well.
That is a good trick to use. The problem I found with using that was during test and debug I would end up with a number of changes which required addition/deletion of cards in the deck. Can only get so many diagonal lines across the deck.:)
During regular classes they let us feed our decks through the reader as well as pull the listings from the printer. During finals they would barracade the reader/print room and have the interns handle the decks. I think it was an attempt to keep people from breaking the readers and printers during the crush.
You have identified how we can reverse global warming! We need to induce the major volcanoes of the world to erupt and throw massive amounts of ash and gases into the air. The result will be an overall cooling of the earth.
The trick is to get them to create the volcanoes in someone elses backyards.:)
This is an example of why states are mandating use of open source solutions. Microsoft depricates these older encryption standards in their newer systems. So anything that is stored for extended periods of time will end up not being able to be recovered or read. In an open system you would most likely be able to find a package that supported those older encryption standards. With Windows you would have to find someone to write a program to decode those files for you.
Back in college we had to scramble to get the card punch system that had a ribbon that was legible. Otherwise we were left sorting cards by reading the hollerith code to find that card that needed to be replaced. They even had blank punch cards in the vending machine if you ran out.
Still remember the poor guy that dropped his card deck on the floor during finals week. Never did find out if he found all his cards and got them sorted in time.
At one job I bought my own small white board since they would not get one for me.
As to the news article question: a good chair, lots of bookcase space for your technical books, several work surfaces (desk tops), at least one large white board. As far as hardware goes you will want at least two systems. One you write your code on and one you can test it on. The test box is the one you will be able to re-image easily. The work system is where you have subversion or cvs setup along with a good backup system (DVDs are pretty good but you may need a good tape drive system depending on how much code you write.)
You can use a KVM switch for the two systems but you may want to use separate monitors so you can run the program and switch back to your work system while the code runs.
Of course the coolest system would be the one from the movie Swordfish, but you would want to be able to arrange the monitors differently.:)
Wow! You had round wheels as a kid? I can still remember the first family in our area that got a pointy stick. It was many many years before the first round wheels showed up. There were lots of those square wheels around but they never caught on that much. Took to many people to carry them around. And the date was over when you dropped one on your dates foot.
Someone should release a destructive virus that is capable of spreading to most systems out there. This would clearly identify the idiots that run systems that are not secure enough to be allowed on the internet. Once those systems are destroyed those users should then be barred from owning a computer ever again.
I am here in Orlando just north of the airport. Charlie came through and tore our part of town up pretty bad. Then we had Frances come through followed by Jeanne (sp?). The fourth one to hit the state that year ran up the west coast and nailed the panhandle so we did not get anything from that one.
I know my sister on the other side of Orlando near Universal never lost power and did not have the losses we had. So some areas were spared while others were hit harder. I lost two major trees in the back yard, one maple tree and the other an oak tree. Luckly when the tops were ripped out of them they fell into the conservation area behind the house and not on the house. Did have one large branch that hit the patio but no damage from that.
All in all we were very lucky. Most of the houses in my neighborhood had serious roof damage. I only lost a few tabs. The store up on Curry Ford had its entire roof and facade ripped off during the storm. They are just now getting it rebuilt.
Lots of trees in this area were knocked down which probably took the power/phone/cable services with it.
The first hurricane, charlie, was the worst. The other two did not cause near the damage, at least in our area of town. But we still lost power for a day or two on those.
One thing I learned was that I had things pretty much set to ride out the storms here and the weeks that followed. However, after watching the Katrina results I realized that I did not have a good plan for full evacuation either prior or after the storms go through. I am starting to plan for that now.:)
When the hurricanes hit last year (direct hits by three of them over about a months time) we found that cell phones failed almost immediately then a few hours after the power went out the land lines failed, their battery backups exhausted.
We were without power for about a week. During that time the only communications we had were one channel that came in over the rabbit ears on the TV or the radio. The generator and transfer switch I had was able to power much of the house (no A/C) but the cable service and cable modem where down.
Personally I think having separate infrastructure for various services would be better. Using the power grid for not only power but communications puts a lot of things in one basket. One failure ala the L.A. outage yesterday would cut power as well as other communications. With the trend toward voice over IP/broadband if the power goes out you would lose telephone type services as well.
Currently if the power goes out land line phones will continue to work, assuming you have a phone that does not require power:)
Bundling data and phone services with power should also come with a much more resiliant infrastructure where a cable cut (L.A.) does not plunge millions into the dark.
It's not really an argument against global warming. It is an arguement against the knee jerk reaction the tree huggers have when the topic comes up. Very little that people can do will ultimately affect the climate, at least in the short term. If we survive another 1000 years or so we may actually learn how to control the weather and be able to regulate the the environment. Until then the best way to insure our survival is to get enough people off the planet that self supporting colonies can survive. Right now everything is in one basket.
I find it funny that anyone with a different view from the tree huggers is labeled "uneducated and ill-informed". They don't seem to provide any realistic solutions, and no I don't consider reducing our technology to 19th century levels realistic. Fighting against nuclear power and development of other technologies that may eventually result in the very changes the environmentalists want to see just delays the results that everyone would like to see.
So you don't think the earth goes through heating and cooling cycles? What evidence do you have to support that wacked out idea? The climate on this Earth will change over time. It has changed in the distant past and it will change in the future. Humans have a relatively short experience to draw on here on Earth. The Earth's climate has changed many times over the past several million years. Early in mans history there was a small ice age. For the past couple of thousand years things have warmed up. People may or may not have contributed to the warming cycle to a greater or lessor extent. The only way you are going to reduce or eliminate humans affects on the climate is to get rid of most of the people. So crank up your genocide machines and start fragging people. That is the only cure for what you percive to be the big problem.
Of course that is not a real solution. The real solution is to get enough people off this planet so the humans can survive if something major happens to this world. And eventually something major will happen. Either an astroid or comet will hit or there will be a major volcano (Utah is a good bet) that will erupt and cause a quick climate change. I suspose then you will complain that no one did anything when you would not let anyone design and build the technology that might avert such disasters. Instead you want to limit people to living on organic farms eating only plants. And that means you are going to have to figure out a way to reduce the worlds population. Good luck on that one.
Better try to embrace the changes that are coming.
Probably about when you tree huggers realize that things will change over time regardless of what you or anyone else do. About the only way our impact on the Earth can be reduced is to get off this planet and use resources from other worlds. Until then about the best you can hope for is that a virus comes along and kills off most of the people on the planet. Of course then you will probably complain that no one is around to clean up the corpses.
If you had put a:) on that I would think you were just trying to be funny. As is I think you actually think that there have not been ice ages in the past. Such ice ages have been shown to have happened. Obviously you have graduated from a school that teaches ID as part of science class. Shame you were not taught better.
When are people going to accept the fact that the Earth goes in cycles? There have been and will be ice ages and warming cycles regardless of what humans do. Here is a report showing that the Earth is giving off more CO^2 that previously expected. So we change the models and get a new estimate on when things will become really dicey. Hopefully by that time we will have established self sustaining colonies in space and on the Moon and other planets. Only by getting humans off the planet will survival be better assured.
The huge volcanoe that will erupt in Utah shortly along with a few other disasters will push us into another ice age quicker than most think.
A concerted effort to achieve relatively cheap routine access to space needs to be initiated. Hopefully the private sector will do what NASA has been unable to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like they discovered the ring around ur anus.
Can see the bumpter sticker now:
"Your SUV is so big it is causing global warming on Mars."
"Save Mars, mess up Earth first."
"Ban Mars Rovers, they cause global warming."
"It's a natural cycle, stupid!"
So the article basicly says they plan to make chips that don't suck so much.....
:)
power that is.
Is this a duplicate post? Or was someone else doing their job by asking /.? Seems like a poor way to get a job done.
/.? Could be a resume generating event......
Wonder if his boss will read his question on
Did you know that elevators smell different to midgets. :)
In today's business world any company that has publicly held stock is on a 3 month cycle. The only relationship to a midlife crisis that Microsoft may have is that their products are running out of steam. They will not see the kinds of growth they have seen in the past. I fully expect to see the decline accelerate when they release their new updated packages. I don't think they will see companies planning major upgrades to the new packages. Partially due to the licensing changes they have been pushing the last few years and partially due to available open source replacements. The 3 month cycle causes companies to start and stop initiatives faster and faster. Saw this start to happen at AT&T several years ago and now they are being bought out by SBC. Something similar is in store for Microsoft but it will take many years for them to get to the point AT&T reached.
I think Microsoft knows this. They scheduled a major dividend this past year. This allows the ones with stock to get some of their money out of the company prior to it imploding. Expect to see more of this as long as they have money in the bank.
As far as media centers an option this is starting to get pretty good is mythtv. Besides providing an open source alternative it is doubtful that mythtv will ever suffer from the issues that Tivo is now encountering. Tivo recently started enabling flags that prevent the owners of Tivo's from recording certain shows, time shifting shows, or keeping copies of shows for more than the time limit assigned by the producers of those shows. Mythtv does a good job of flagging commercials as well.
That is a good trick to use. The problem I found with using that was during test and debug I would end up with a number of changes which required addition/deletion of cards in the deck. Can only get so many diagonal lines across the deck. :)
During regular classes they let us feed our decks through the reader as well as pull the listings from the printer. During finals they would barracade the reader/print room and have the interns handle the decks. I think it was an attempt to keep people from breaking the readers and printers during the crush.
You have identified how we can reverse global warming! We need to induce the major volcanoes of the world to erupt and throw massive amounts of ash and gases into the air. The result will be an overall cooling of the earth.
:)
The trick is to get them to create the volcanoes in someone elses backyards.
This is an example of why states are mandating use of open source solutions. Microsoft depricates these older encryption standards in their newer systems. So anything that is stored for extended periods of time will end up not being able to be recovered or read. In an open system you would most likely be able to find a package that supported those older encryption standards. With Windows you would have to find someone to write a program to decode those files for you.
Damn I feel old.....
Hell, I hope not! Don't need another scare like that! :)
And no you don't get an allowance!
Back in college we had to scramble to get the card punch system that had a ribbon that was legible. Otherwise we were left sorting cards by reading the hollerith code to find that card that needed to be replaced. They even had blank punch cards in the vending machine if you ran out.
:)
Still remember the poor guy that dropped his card deck on the floor during finals week. Never did find out if he found all his cards and got them sorted in time.
At one job I bought my own small white board since they would not get one for me.
As to the news article question: a good chair, lots of bookcase space for your technical books, several work surfaces (desk tops), at least one large white board. As far as hardware goes you will want at least two systems. One you write your code on and one you can test it on. The test box is the one you will be able to re-image easily. The work system is where you have subversion or cvs setup along with a good backup system (DVDs are pretty good but you may need a good tape drive system depending on how much code you write.)
You can use a KVM switch for the two systems but you may want to use separate monitors so you can run the program and switch back to your work system while the code runs.
Of course the coolest system would be the one from the movie Swordfish, but you would want to be able to arrange the monitors differently.
Wow! You had round wheels as a kid? I can still remember the first family in our area that got a pointy stick. It was many many years before the first round wheels showed up. There were lots of those square wheels around but they never caught on that much. Took to many people to carry them around. And the date was over when you dropped one on your dates foot.
"It's like people who's entire political philosophies are capable of being summed up by bumper stickers. You just feel sad for them."
/. You might hurt their feelings. :)
Don't denigrate the Democrates on
How about a dictionary and classes in english, like those given in schools. Should be all that is needed.
The plan to have so many versions of Vista with different costs for each and different capabilities will confuse everyone.
Of course the names of the new versions of Vista will cause additional confusion:
Debian
Fedora
RHEL
Suse
Mandrake
Gentoo
Someone should release a destructive virus that is capable of spreading to most systems out there. This would clearly identify the idiots that run systems that are not secure enough to be allowed on the internet. Once those systems are destroyed those users should then be barred from owning a computer ever again.
I am here in Orlando just north of the airport. Charlie came through and tore our part of town up pretty bad. Then we had Frances come through followed by Jeanne (sp?). The fourth one to hit the state that year ran up the west coast and nailed the panhandle so we did not get anything from that one.
:)
I know my sister on the other side of Orlando near Universal never lost power and did not have the losses we had. So some areas were spared while others were hit harder. I lost two major trees in the back yard, one maple tree and the other an oak tree. Luckly when the tops were ripped out of them they fell into the conservation area behind the house and not on the house. Did have one large branch that hit the patio but no damage from that.
All in all we were very lucky. Most of the houses in my neighborhood had serious roof damage. I only lost a few tabs. The store up on Curry Ford had its entire roof and facade ripped off during the storm. They are just now getting it rebuilt.
Lots of trees in this area were knocked down which probably took the power/phone/cable services with it.
The first hurricane, charlie, was the worst. The other two did not cause near the damage, at least in our area of town. But we still lost power for a day or two on those.
One thing I learned was that I had things pretty much set to ride out the storms here and the weeks that followed. However, after watching the Katrina results I realized that I did not have a good plan for full evacuation either prior or after the storms go through. I am starting to plan for that now.
When the hurricanes hit last year (direct hits by three of them over about a months time) we found that cell phones failed almost immediately then a few hours after the power went out the land lines failed, their battery backups exhausted.
:)
We were without power for about a week. During that time the only communications we had were one channel that came in over the rabbit ears on the TV or the radio. The generator and transfer switch I had was able to power much of the house (no A/C) but the cable service and cable modem where down.
Personally I think having separate infrastructure for various services would be better. Using the power grid for not only power but communications puts a lot of things in one basket. One failure ala the L.A. outage yesterday would cut power as well as other communications. With the trend toward voice over IP/broadband if the power goes out you would lose telephone type services as well.
Currently if the power goes out land line phones will continue to work, assuming you have a phone that does not require power
Bundling data and phone services with power should also come with a much more resiliant infrastructure where a cable cut (L.A.) does not plunge millions into the dark.
It's not really an argument against global warming. It is an arguement against the knee jerk reaction the tree huggers have when the topic comes up. Very little that people can do will ultimately affect the climate, at least in the short term. If we survive another 1000 years or so we may actually learn how to control the weather and be able to regulate the the environment. Until then the best way to insure our survival is to get enough people off the planet that self supporting colonies can survive. Right now everything is in one basket.
I find it funny that anyone with a different view from the tree huggers is labeled "uneducated and ill-informed". They don't seem to provide any realistic solutions, and no I don't consider reducing our technology to 19th century levels realistic. Fighting against nuclear power and development of other technologies that may eventually result in the very changes the environmentalists want to see just delays the results that everyone would like to see.
So you don't think the earth goes through heating and cooling cycles? What evidence do you have to support that wacked out idea? The climate on this Earth will change over time. It has changed in the distant past and it will change in the future. Humans have a relatively short experience to draw on here on Earth. The Earth's climate has changed many times over the past several million years. Early in mans history there was a small ice age. For the past couple of thousand years things have warmed up. People may or may not have contributed to the warming cycle to a greater or lessor extent. The only way you are going to reduce or eliminate humans affects on the climate is to get rid of most of the people. So crank up your genocide machines and start fragging people. That is the only cure for what you percive to be the big problem.
Of course that is not a real solution. The real solution is to get enough people off this planet so the humans can survive if something major happens to this world. And eventually something major will happen. Either an astroid or comet will hit or there will be a major volcano (Utah is a good bet) that will erupt and cause a quick climate change. I suspose then you will complain that no one did anything when you would not let anyone design and build the technology that might avert such disasters. Instead you want to limit people to living on organic farms eating only plants. And that means you are going to have to figure out a way to reduce the worlds population. Good luck on that one.
Better try to embrace the changes that are coming.
Probably about when you tree huggers realize that things will change over time regardless of what you or anyone else do. About the only way our impact on the Earth can be reduced is to get off this planet and use resources from other worlds. Until then about the best you can hope for is that a virus comes along and kills off most of the people on the planet. Of course then you will probably complain that no one is around to clean up the corpses.
If you had put a :) on that I would think you were just trying to be funny. As is I think you actually think that there have not been ice ages in the past. Such ice ages have been shown to have happened. Obviously you have graduated from a school that teaches ID as part of science class. Shame you were not taught better.
When are people going to accept the fact that the Earth goes in cycles? There have been and will be ice ages and warming cycles regardless of what humans do. Here is a report showing that the Earth is giving off more CO^2 that previously expected. So we change the models and get a new estimate on when things will become really dicey. Hopefully by that time we will have established self sustaining colonies in space and on the Moon and other planets. Only by getting humans off the planet will survival be better assured.
The huge volcanoe that will erupt in Utah shortly along with a few other disasters will push us into another ice age quicker than most think.
A concerted effort to achieve relatively cheap routine access to space needs to be initiated. Hopefully the private sector will do what NASA has been unable to do.
I have several gmail accounts I can give you. Once you have serveral of these you can assign gmail accounts to the rest of your users. :)