Blago is your standard corrupt Chicago politician.
And what is so unique about Chicago versus, say DC with guys like Marion Barry or any other big city in the USA?
The fact that it's not DC or whichever city the poster of the parent came from. There are basically three kinds of political cynics: Those who are cynical about all politicians. Those who are cynical about all politicians but the guy they voted for last November. And those who are cynical about Chicago/Florida/DC/insert your least favorite town here.
Palm didn't go out of business. They are about to be bought out by HP in part because they were low on cash and were likely to go out of business in the future but there is a distinction and it is fairly important for the purposes of this discussion. Palm has suffered from a lot of self-inflicted wounds over the past ten years: constant financial restructuring, giving up control of its operating system, falling behind technologically, and struggling to catch up in a brutal market full of much larger competitors.
Despite all this, Palm didn't actually go out of business, they actually did a very good job of catching up with their competitors, reaching parity with them in some areas and surpassing them in others. They also built a solid foundation on which they could grow in the future. If they hadn't done all this; Palm likely would have gone out of business for real, being bought out only for their patents instead of being bought by a company that wants to use their tech to build their own business.
Obligatory car analogy: It would be like trading in your 10 year old car for a new one that looks cool and is comfortable, but is completely autopiloted, and only lets you out at certain stops. Businesses have to apply to the car maker so the car would stop at their brick and mortar store. And without warning, this can be taken away, so if someone used to stop at a Target, they wouldn't have that option tomorrow and only get Wal-Marts. Continuing the analogy, someone patches the ECM with a steering wheel to allow manual control, but the next year's cars always come with protection against that.
We already have vehicles like that, they're called buses. It's a matter of choice and convenience. History shows that people will tend to choose convenience over freedom. Whether it's choosing Windows over Linux or choosing the iPhone over Android, people will tend to go with the easier more convenient platform. Luckily, history also shows that no technological monopoly survives the test of time in the face of relentless innovation. Just as IBM was supplanted by Microsoft, Microsoft is now in the process of being supplanted by Apple and Google. I'm guessing that of the two current 800 lb. gorillas, the mostly open Google will remain dominant for a longer time than the relentlessly closed Apple.
And so if Apple goes away that leads to more choice for consumers in what way? They get to choose between Microsoft and Microsoft? Because the reality is that Linux isn't truly consumer grade yet.
That depends on what platform you are talking about. TFA was inspired by someone complaining to Steve Jobs about the iPad which uses the iPhone OS. This is important because both the iPad and iPhone represent two consumer-oriented hardware platforms where Microsoft has failed. In fact, the biggest competitor for Apple's "i" products right now is Google's Android OS which is derived from Linux. So while your statement may be true on the desktop, on the realm of mobile gadgets, their is at least one flavor of Linux which is ahead of Microsoft in terms of consumer friendliness.
Well Microsoft has been pretty aggressive about pushing its Malicious Software Removal Tool onto computers. So if I were Microsoft and my software detects a rootkit that the MSRT can't remove, I think I'd probably put a higher priority on updating the MSRT so that it can remove the rootkit. And then I can start patching my other software bugs.
I find that most of Firefox's "bloat" comes from extensions. A brand new install of Firefox, particularly the more recent betas, starts up very quickly but as soon as you start installing certain extensions its start up time becomes very slow. This is in stark contrast with Chrome 4.x which is fast even with a lot of extensions. (I have 17 installed in Chrome on my netbook and it still flys.)
Re:Bill Gates was not replaced only by Ballmer
on
Microsoft's Lost Decade
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Steve Ballmer is a business guy and the CEO.
Ray Ozzie is the tech guy and the chief software architect.
Bill Gates was actually replaced by the two of them working in tandem.
Do these guys even research a little before they make these retarded articles about how an already huge company that tripled its revenue in 10 years is doing poorly?
You only need to read the part about how Bill Gates supposedly realized the threat of the Internet early on to answer that question. I think that most people who are familiar with that history believe the opposite—that in fact the rapid growth of the Internet caught Microsoft flat footed. When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft believed that closed online services were the future and integrated its MSN service into Win95 because of it. It was only the ability to leverage the power of its Windows monopoly which allowed MS to "strangle" Netscape. I put the word strangle in quotes because in fact Netscape did survive long enough to open-source its code, which eventually led to the birth of Firefox, and sue Microsoft.
If anything, it was the anti-trust suits in the US and Europe that really "broke" Microsoft at least in the sense that they forced it to become more bureaucratic and more sluggish in terms of its ability to adjust to sudden shifts in the market. Did this allow companies like Google and Apple to surpass MS in terms of industry influence if not in terms of profits? Maybe.
The problem with these theories is that they are always too simple. Microsoft is and was a huge, influential company. But even when they were unquestionably dominant, Bill Gates acknowledged that some young start up that no one had ever heard of back them might take their place as an industry leader and it looks like that's what happened with Google quietly assuming Microsoft's role as the 800 pound gorilla of computing simply because they were a younger, more innovative company run by younger, more innovative people. But that doesn't make for good copy; stories about the cult of the CEO and which head honcho is better do and that's why you see stories like this one.
People used to form alliances to fight Microsoft. Now Microsoft is joining an alliance to fight Google. What is it he wrote in The Road Ahead about death coming swiftly to the market leader?
In addition to what you said, it should be noted that the default glossy back cover on the Pre can quickly get coated with grease from your fingers and take on a slimy feel. The Touchstone back cover by contrast has a soft touch feel which is much nicer and makes the entire device feel much better in the hand. Palm should have included this cover with the Pre IMHO.
Finally, you can complain about slowness all you want but the only Android device I have experience with, the T-Mobile G1, is even slower than the Pre ever was before the 1.1.0 patch.
NoScript wouldn't be so bad if it included social whitelisting functionality. Perhaps you could propose it as a feature request. I personally would prefer to subscribe to a whitelisting server that covers most of the websites I frequently visit and leaves me the opportunity to recommend sites that should be whitelisted.
Or you could just click on the NoScript button in the status bar, select Options, and access NoScript's own Whitelisting facility. Or just click on the NoScript button to permanently whitelist your websites as you visit them. Does every single feature in our web browsers have to have a social component now?
You appear to imply that AJAX is inherently "poor website design". If a web site has, say, a private message system that simulates Gmail, how would you use that with NoScript? There are things that can't be done on the web, or at least can't be done in Windows Internet Explorer, without the use of script.
Use NoScript to turn the useful message system on permanently while leaving the slower (and often third-party dependent) ad system turned off? While it is true that some things require scripting, a lot of things could be better accomplished through clever use of DHTML and CSS and scripting them just makes your site slower. And a lot of scripting is just a way to shove ads in your face. Now, I don't mind looking at ads but it slows down the website I'm looking at, I get a lot less sympathetic.
Our own beloved Slashdot now relies on an Ajaxy, script-dependent forum system...
But you don't have to use it. Just use the classic Slashdot forum system (which I happen to prefer BTW) and you don't need to enable scripting for Slashdot. As far as I can tell, the only thing on Slashdot that is so scripting dependent that it is unusable with scripting turned off is the metamoderation system. I'd say that Slashdot is a pretty good example of how you can use scripting for enhancing your content but leaving it all available and usable for people who turn scripting off.
Forget about killing manatees. Is there some way that we can use this technology to send a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa and destroy any unique life that might have evolved in its subsurface ocean?
Interesting thought. Windows Me sucked and drove users to upgrade to XP. And even before that, flaws in Windows 95 drove users to upgrade to 98. And now Vista is perceived to suck (and to a certain extent it does) and may drive users to upgrade to Windows 7. As a marketing technique suckage appears to work.
I noticed this feature last night while using Chrome to look for drivers for an old eMachines desktop. I think that anyone who's ever fixed one of those old machines knows what comes up when you search for Windows drivers -- a bunch of links pimping something called "Driver Genius" and similar payware of dubious merit. I was using Chrome at the time and I noticed these little "promote" and "remove" icons next to the links. I have to admit that I felt a little bit of schadenfreude at being able to nuke all these links before finally being able to find a link to a page that actually pointed me in the right direction.
Well might not the end result of this be that Mars was once exactly like us?
When you look at how long mankind has to evacuate the planet it seems this could shorten that time quite a bit. The core of the earth will cool long before the sun goes red dwarf.
Maybe we should be looking into terraforming Venus.
Most scientists think that Mars was once a lot more like Earth in that it had flowing, a thicker atmosphere, and possibly life.
The sun won't go "red dwarf," it will turn into a red giant and will almost certainly swallow up Venus before it runs out of fuel and turns into a white dwarf. Long before any of that happens, the sun will have gotten hot enough to boil away Earth's oceans. The most common figures that I've seen is something like a 500 million to a billion years before the sun boils the oceans and makes Earth uninhabitable and five billion years before it turns into a red giant and swallows up Mercury and Venus. So we do have some time before we need to move.
We have a large shield around our planet, which has a special, secret password. No one can ever strip aweay our atmosphere, no matter how much they suck or blow.
Phoenix was designed to dig a few inches into the ground. The glaciers in the linked article are probably buried a lot deeper. It actually would be more realistic to send Bruce Willis and his oil drillers to Mars to dig for ice than it was to send them to the asteroid in that movie....
I know, but even if it's a failed planet -- might whatever reason it failed also be why Mars now lacks a proper atmosphere??
Our atmosphere is protected by the Earth's magnetic field because it deflects the ionized particles which make up the Sun's powerful solar wind. Earth's magnetic field is produced by the rotation of its liquid outer core. Mars by contrast has a completely solid core and no magnetic field. Combined with its smaller size and lower gravity (about a third of the Earth's gravity) this lack of a magnetic field is the reason why Mars' atmosphere eroded away.
The reason for the "failed planet" that produced the asteroid belt is probably Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity is strong enough to pull material out of asteroid belt on a regular basis. If you combined all of the material in the asteroid belt, the resulting "planet" would be less massive than Mercury.
Slashdot Mirror
For true cross-platform compatibility, you have to download the free Windows XP emulator.
The fact that it's not DC or whichever city the poster of the parent came from. There are basically three kinds of political cynics: Those who are cynical about all politicians. Those who are cynical about all politicians but the guy they voted for last November. And those who are cynical about Chicago/Florida/DC/insert your least favorite town here.
Palm didn't go out of business. They are about to be bought out by HP in part because they were low on cash and were likely to go out of business in the future but there is a distinction and it is fairly important for the purposes of this discussion. Palm has suffered from a lot of self-inflicted wounds over the past ten years: constant financial restructuring, giving up control of its operating system, falling behind technologically, and struggling to catch up in a brutal market full of much larger competitors.
Despite all this, Palm didn't actually go out of business, they actually did a very good job of catching up with their competitors, reaching parity with them in some areas and surpassing them in others. They also built a solid foundation on which they could grow in the future. If they hadn't done all this; Palm likely would have gone out of business for real, being bought out only for their patents instead of being bought by a company that wants to use their tech to build their own business.
We already have vehicles like that, they're called buses. It's a matter of choice and convenience. History shows that people will tend to choose convenience over freedom. Whether it's choosing Windows over Linux or choosing the iPhone over Android, people will tend to go with the easier more convenient platform. Luckily, history also shows that no technological monopoly survives the test of time in the face of relentless innovation. Just as IBM was supplanted by Microsoft, Microsoft is now in the process of being supplanted by Apple and Google. I'm guessing that of the two current 800 lb. gorillas, the mostly open Google will remain dominant for a longer time than the relentlessly closed Apple.
That depends on what platform you are talking about. TFA was inspired by someone complaining to Steve Jobs about the iPad which uses the iPhone OS. This is important because both the iPad and iPhone represent two consumer-oriented hardware platforms where Microsoft has failed. In fact, the biggest competitor for Apple's "i" products right now is Google's Android OS which is derived from Linux. So while your statement may be true on the desktop, on the realm of mobile gadgets, their is at least one flavor of Linux which is ahead of Microsoft in terms of consumer friendliness.
Well Microsoft has been pretty aggressive about pushing its Malicious Software Removal Tool onto computers. So if I were Microsoft and my software detects a rootkit that the MSRT can't remove, I think I'd probably put a higher priority on updating the MSRT so that it can remove the rootkit. And then I can start patching my other software bugs.
I find that most of Firefox's "bloat" comes from extensions. A brand new install of Firefox, particularly the more recent betas, starts up very quickly but as soon as you start installing certain extensions its start up time becomes very slow. This is in stark contrast with Chrome 4.x which is fast even with a lot of extensions. (I have 17 installed in Chrome on my netbook and it still flys.)
You only need to read the part about how Bill Gates supposedly realized the threat of the Internet early on to answer that question. I think that most people who are familiar with that history believe the opposite—that in fact the rapid growth of the Internet caught Microsoft flat footed. When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft believed that closed online services were the future and integrated its MSN service into Win95 because of it. It was only the ability to leverage the power of its Windows monopoly which allowed MS to "strangle" Netscape. I put the word strangle in quotes because in fact Netscape did survive long enough to open-source its code, which eventually led to the birth of Firefox, and sue Microsoft.
If anything, it was the anti-trust suits in the US and Europe that really "broke" Microsoft at least in the sense that they forced it to become more bureaucratic and more sluggish in terms of its ability to adjust to sudden shifts in the market. Did this allow companies like Google and Apple to surpass MS in terms of industry influence if not in terms of profits? Maybe.
The problem with these theories is that they are always too simple. Microsoft is and was a huge, influential company. But even when they were unquestionably dominant, Bill Gates acknowledged that some young start up that no one had ever heard of back them might take their place as an industry leader and it looks like that's what happened with Google quietly assuming Microsoft's role as the 800 pound gorilla of computing simply because they were a younger, more innovative company run by younger, more innovative people. But that doesn't make for good copy; stories about the cult of the CEO and which head honcho is better do and that's why you see stories like this one.
People used to form alliances to fight Microsoft. Now Microsoft is joining an alliance to fight Google. What is it he wrote in The Road Ahead about death coming swiftly to the market leader?
In addition to what you said, it should be noted that the default glossy back cover on the Pre can quickly get coated with grease from your fingers and take on a slimy feel. The Touchstone back cover by contrast has a soft touch feel which is much nicer and makes the entire device feel much better in the hand. Palm should have included this cover with the Pre IMHO.
Finally, you can complain about slowness all you want but the only Android device I have experience with, the T-Mobile G1, is even slower than the Pre ever was before the 1.1.0 patch.
I suppose this will get modded down because it's just a pointless scream in digital form but I just had to get it out.
Someone actually tried this....
No but I'd definitely pay extra for a fluorescent monkey.
Or you could just click on the NoScript button in the status bar, select Options, and access NoScript's own Whitelisting facility. Or just click on the NoScript button to permanently whitelist your websites as you visit them. Does every single feature in our web browsers have to have a social component now?
Use NoScript to turn the useful message system on permanently while leaving the slower (and often third-party dependent) ad system turned off? While it is true that some things require scripting, a lot of things could be better accomplished through clever use of DHTML and CSS and scripting them just makes your site slower. And a lot of scripting is just a way to shove ads in your face. Now, I don't mind looking at ads but it slows down the website I'm looking at, I get a lot less sympathetic.
But you don't have to use it. Just use the classic Slashdot forum system (which I happen to prefer BTW) and you don't need to enable scripting for Slashdot. As far as I can tell, the only thing on Slashdot that is so scripting dependent that it is unusable with scripting turned off is the metamoderation system. I'd say that Slashdot is a pretty good example of how you can use scripting for enhancing your content but leaving it all available and usable for people who turn scripting off.
Forget about killing manatees. Is there some way that we can use this technology to send a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa and destroy any unique life that might have evolved in its subsurface ocean?
I was thinking more in terms of the offspring of an SR-71 that got knocked up by a Cylon Raider.
Interesting thought. Windows Me sucked and drove users to upgrade to XP. And even before that, flaws in Windows 95 drove users to upgrade to 98. And now Vista is perceived to suck (and to a certain extent it does) and may drive users to upgrade to Windows 7. As a marketing technique suckage appears to work.
AFAIK, MSRT always asks you if you want to install it and even throws up a EULA, so it's pretty easy to avoid installing it if that is your wish.
I noticed this feature last night while using Chrome to look for drivers for an old eMachines desktop. I think that anyone who's ever fixed one of those old machines knows what comes up when you search for Windows drivers -- a bunch of links pimping something called "Driver Genius" and similar payware of dubious merit. I was using Chrome at the time and I noticed these little "promote" and "remove" icons next to the links. I have to admit that I felt a little bit of schadenfreude at being able to nuke all these links before finally being able to find a link to a page that actually pointed me in the right direction.
Most scientists think that Mars was once a lot more like Earth in that it had flowing, a thicker atmosphere, and possibly life.
The sun won't go "red dwarf," it will turn into a red giant and will almost certainly swallow up Venus before it runs out of fuel and turns into a white dwarf. Long before any of that happens, the sun will have gotten hot enough to boil away Earth's oceans. The most common figures that I've seen is something like a 500 million to a billion years before the sun boils the oceans and makes Earth uninhabitable and five billion years before it turns into a red giant and swallows up Mercury and Venus. So we do have some time before we need to move.
Hey! I have the same combination on my luggage.
Phoenix was designed to dig a few inches into the ground. The glaciers in the linked article are probably buried a lot deeper. It actually would be more realistic to send Bruce Willis and his oil drillers to Mars to dig for ice than it was to send them to the asteroid in that movie....
Our atmosphere is protected by the Earth's magnetic field because it deflects the ionized particles which make up the Sun's powerful solar wind. Earth's magnetic field is produced by the rotation of its liquid outer core. Mars by contrast has a completely solid core and no magnetic field. Combined with its smaller size and lower gravity (about a third of the Earth's gravity) this lack of a magnetic field is the reason why Mars' atmosphere eroded away.
The reason for the "failed planet" that produced the asteroid belt is probably Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity is strong enough to pull material out of asteroid belt on a regular basis. If you combined all of the material in the asteroid belt, the resulting "planet" would be less massive than Mercury.