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User: MightyMartian

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Comments · 19,559

  1. Re:Manager on New Microsoft CEO Vows To Shake Up Corporate Culture · · Score: 1

    The issue, in the long term, is does it really matter? Microsoft still had a big chunk of the enterprise workstation and groupware market, but in many other ways they're becoming irrelevant. Despite throwing boatloads of money at the search and tablet markets, they're not moving those products. To make up for that they're hiking the prices of the very enterprise offerings they need to survive. Volume licensing, Server, Exchange, SQL Server and the like have Alli been jacket up to fund their failures. The last batch of Server licenses I bought may very well be the last.

    Let's be blunt. Microsoft is all but irrelevant in the mobile and tablet markets. About the only thing they have going for them is the scam patent tax they have on Android devices.

  2. Re:Wha? on New Microsoft CEO Vows To Shake Up Corporate Culture · · Score: 1

    I think we can sum up the whole letter with "We're going to keep imitating Google and Apple."

  3. Re:Manager on New Microsoft CEO Vows To Shake Up Corporate Culture · · Score: 0

    OOXML is a great example of a standad, and of how to move a standard through an international standards committee.

    (This is irony, for those who may be impaired in its recognition)

  4. Re:Tannenbaum's predictions... on Prof. Andy Tanenbaum Retires From Vrije University · · Score: 1

    X86 went away fifteen years ago. Every "x86" COU built since the last 1990s runs an x86 layer, but underneath is a very different bear.

  5. Re:Aaaaahahaha ... gotta love it: on Prof. Andy Tanenbaum Retires From Vrije University · · Score: 1

    At the time, the closest the DOS world had to multitasking was TSRs. Beside my first PC was my CoCo 3 with OS/9 level 2 with 512k of RAM with a true preemptive multitasking kernel running on an 8 but 6809 CPU. Microsoft's dominance at the time meant in many ways the most common 16 bit opposing system in the world was only marginally better than a CPM machine from 1980.

  6. Re:A legend of OS design on Prof. Andy Tanenbaum Retires From Vrije University · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Minix was really the first of its kind; a Unix-like OS that you could run on cheap (relatively speaking at the time) commodity hardware and that you could get the source code for. A lot of the computing we take for granted now comes from Tanenbaum's work.

    My first Minix install was on a 386-SX with a whopping 4mb of RAM I borrowed from work back in the early 1990s. I quickly abandoned Minix for Linux once it came out, but for several years I had Minix running on an old 386 laptop just for fun.

  7. Re:His epitaph in future years: on Prof. Andy Tanenbaum Retires From Vrije University · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I really miss the good old days when technical debates were over the merits and faults of such simple things as different kinds of kernels, and not about whether or not every single thing you do online is being stacked into half a dozen nation's permanent data storage facilities.

    The Linus vs. Tanenbaum dustup is from a simpler, more positive age.

  8. Re:another language shoved down your throat on Python Bumps Off Java As Top Learning Language · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's rubbish. Most of the major platforms have had Java ported to them. Including various obscure systems is ludicrous. If I want a program that I'm almost guaranteed will run without recompile on Linux, Windows, BSD and even many mainframes, then Java remains the best solution. I'm not saying, from a programming perspective, that it's all that great, but from a platform neutral perspective for most of the systems that a programmer will encounter, it remains the best.

    Have fun running an x86-64 Linux binary natively on a Windows 8 machine. I can. however, write a Java program that I can almost guarantee will in fact run on x64 Linux or Windows.

  9. Re:another language shoved down your throat on Python Bumps Off Java As Top Learning Language · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, it is popular because, despite a good many flaws, it remains the best cross platform solution we have.

  10. Re:Superman logo is a Trademark on DC Entertainment Won't Allow Superman Logo On Murdered Child's Memorial Statue · · Score: 1

    Thank goodness, too, otherwise I'd confuse Superman with Supperman.

    I feel totally protected.

  11. Superman on DC Entertainment Won't Allow Superman Logo On Murdered Child's Memorial Statue · · Score: 5, Funny

    Superman, standing for truth, justice and IP rights!

  12. Re:Not surprising. on When Beliefs and Facts Collide · · Score: 0, Troll

    Talk to me agitation when you've read the IPCC report. I won't debate with John Regurgibots.

    In other words, fuck out you lying ignoramus

  13. Re:Not surprising. on When Beliefs and Facts Collide · · Score: 3

    Or we can analyse the fallacy involved in you trying, without any justification, to tie climatologists to eugenicists. It seems your Just as guilty of the behaviours laid out in the article ad, say, Creationists

  14. Re:Not surprising. on When Beliefs and Facts Collide · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you shot all the people you believe are demon possessed, there will be far less people you believe to be demon possessed. That doesn't make demon possession real.

    Eugenics is based in part on gross oversimplifications of genetics and in part on the absurd idea that attributes like economic status are biologically heredity.

  15. Re:Not surprising. on When Beliefs and Facts Collide · · Score: 5, Interesting

    True, but some of us are willing to accept that the universe doesn't give a fuck about ideology.

    When AGW first became a big issue in the 1990s I was talking against it as a big scam on Usenet; particularity my old haunt talk.origins. it was when one of the regulars, a biologist (why any scientist would waste his time debating Creationists I'll never understand), pointed out to me that the theory was reasonably well supported, there were a boatload of papers and that science isn't the product of emotional need, and I finally accepted that AGW, even if it suggested things that I didn't like, was legitimate science.

  16. Re:Not a good thing on Oklahoma's Earthquakes Linked To Fracking · · Score: 1

    The analogy seems fine to me. In both cases you have a large amount of potential energy (in one case gravity, in the other frictional forces) and in both cases a catalyst of relatively small amounts of energy can upset the system and cause a much larger release of energy.

  17. Re:Earthquakes are deep, oil wells are not. on Oklahoma's Earthquakes Linked To Fracking · · Score: 2, Funny

    Oil company employee finds no problem with oil extraction. News at 11.

  18. Re:My power rule? on Oklahoma's Earthquakes Linked To Fracking · · Score: 1

    If extraction is causing property damage, then property owners should be compensated. If other forms of environmental damage are being caused by these practices, the practices should be evaluated.

  19. Re:Not a good thing on Oklahoma's Earthquakes Linked To Fracking · · Score: 2

    I'm not clear why it should. If you have geological structures under stress, there is already considerable energy in the system, and it may only take a small amount of additional energy to release the much larger amount being pent up.

    If you have a bowling ball balanced at the top of a cliff, the energy released by it falling and hitting the ground far below is far greater than the energy required to push it over the cliff.

  20. Re:So, it's true on New Class of Stars Are Totally Metal, Says Astrophysicist · · Score: 1

    Huh? It's been demonstrated many times in many different ways that gravity is by far the weakest of the fundamental interactions. Gravity makes little difference at the atomic and subatomic levels. Atoms are not mini-solar systems. The forces that bind atomic nuclei and bind electrons to atomic nuclei are fundamentally different from gravity. Here's a tip; at least at the temperatures and densities you will find virtually everywhere in the universe today; gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak interactions are very different.

    Christ pal, your claim was known to be rubbish eighty years ago. To see someone making a claim that atoms are mini solar systems in the 21st century isn't too far different from someone claiming the Sun orbits the Earth.

  21. Re:So, it's true on New Class of Stars Are Totally Metal, Says Astrophysicist · · Score: 1

    No, they really are not. Gravity has very little effect at the atomic level, but at the level of solar systems is the primary force.

  22. Re:Star? on New Class of Stars Are Totally Metal, Says Astrophysicist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Stellar fusion can occur with atomic elements up to iron. There are a number of metals that are lighter than iron. If I'm reading this right, stellar fusion could conceivably be triggered by heavier metallic elements if they were "selected for" by the properties of vortices during the formation process.

  23. Re:Perl still works, and PHP is fine on Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Web Language That's Long-Lived, and Not Too Buzzy? · · Score: 1

    How about is awful and inconsistent library?

  24. Re:Touch Server on Windows 9 To Win Over Windows 7 Users, Disables Start Screen For Desktop · · Score: 1

    Yes, it's great that Exchange can be scripted (and I've written some neat ones), but the Powershell long-winded command names is highly annoying and basically require an IDE to anything beyond the most cursory scripts. Meanwhile, I can code Bash scripts a lot more quickly.

    I'll be blunt. After coding in Powershell for a couple of years now, and appreciating how, since Server 2008, Microsoft has opened up a lot of its core functionality in its various server products to scripting (although, oddly enough, I still can't dump Exchange 2010 public folders to a PST file like I can mailboxes), I still come to the conclusion that Microsoft just doesn't get CLIs and CLI scripting. Powershell opens up a lot of options, but is absurdly long winded about it. Bash is still a superior CLI shell.

  25. Let's not even get started on the fucking .NET updates, each one of which has to apparently rebuild the libraries from scratch. I just dread .NET updates. As much as I hate having to redistribute Java every time there's an update, at least the installer just replaces Java entire rather than the agonies of an actual lib-by-lib update.