The numbers I found in a quick search suggest that EU-wide there is still a small population growth, but pretty close to zero. The import/export balance (PDF, see graphs on page 2) for raw and processed products combined seems to be roughly zero as well, but in terms of raw materials the EU is still net importing agricultural products. To say Europe is going to "become almost entirely dependent on the outside world" doesn't match these figures though.
=== Europe, Stay away from the obesity vendors and there will be enough food to last 10 more generations. You do not want GMO crops. a) If you bring them, your pollination from bees and other flying insects will drop substantially b) You will have, perhaps, a higher yield crop, but not repetitive. You will be forced to purchase seeds every year. c) Genetically modified wheat is stated (I have no proof) to show that GMO wheat is much more absorbed by the body and leads to weight gain, for the same quantity of ingested food. d) Your pasta loving Italians are slim today, but with GMO, in 20 years they will be as Obese as Americans and Canadians. Welcome to heart-attack and other chronic illness land.
I just send all my broken storage media to the Nixon Presidential Library, labelled "18 1/2 minutes" in a box with a return address for "Flasback Data Recovery Specialists: We Recover Anything, Confidentiality Guaranteed. Austin, TX." They replace all the 1s and 0s with pure silence. Nothing beats that.
=== Best way to clean a hard drive. Give it to my grandson. He can dismantle it, use a platter with the dog as a frisbee, strip away the electronics for projects, and don't worry. He once wanted some oxide, and scraped the platter surface to remove it all.
This really isn't a bad idea. You could surely speed up construction on the most heavily trafficked roads.
If you think that construction companies, union workers and prevailing wage workers are not already soaking this government project, then you have no idea how government contracts work in California. if it a State, County or Federal project ultimately makes no difference. By offering more money from another source, it just cues those involved that they can charge extra to do what have been contracted to do already. Be it $5.00 per person or $50,000.00 per person adding the thought of having private money contributed to do a job that the government supposedly gave to the lowest bidder, which has already missed its time target and is overbudget is insane.
If you think that is bad, come to Montreal Quebec. We have a tribunal (commission) in place trying to resolve the municipal and provincial fraud that has been taking place. As much as 30% to 100% above quotes, for extras. A water meter project estimated at 1.2 million was called for tenders and the lowest was 3 million. It was discovered that the bidders had agreed on the sharing of the projects. Then there was the 3% man. He took 3% cash from each contract winner towards the current political party. Illegal funding for sure. But this continued when the new broom came in. We thought the new broom would sweep clean.
So now with all those illegal payments, etc. The revenue department is after corps and personal for income tax evasion. Moreover, the rule is the provincial government had to hire the same gang, because they controlled asphalt and cement manufacturing.
Is it maffia or greed? What do you think (I think both). Love those pictures of the 50 foot yachts.
It's not mindless cynicism. It is a recognition that US politics operates on a purely tribal basis.
You have Democrats who really honestly believe Obama is a peacenik who has reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan every single year of his presidency. I'm not joking -- I saw this exact comment in my local paper's comment section by a die-hard Obamabot.
You have Republicans who believe that forcing people to pay premiums to private for profit insurance companies is Marxism (as opposed to crony capitalism or corporatism, the softer brother of fascism). I see this in my local paper's comment section all the time from the mainstream-GOP-subverted Tea Baggers.
Combined, the purely tribal Democrats and Republicans probably account for about 60% of the population. The remainder will be largely filled by people who vote for a "lesser evil" and a few single digit percentage pointers who support "fringe" third parties. I'm in that last group, have been actively engaged with the fringe, stood out in the sleet and rain holding signs for that fringe, will not vote for any candidate affiliated with either the DNC or the GOP under any circumstances -- I am the fringe -- and I know there is no hope short of a scandal so egregious that one of the parties basically has to reinvent itself. Seriously, Obama's presidency should be all the demonstration one needs that to most people, policies are irrelevant, only party affiliation matters.
Why does everyone think that the President walks on water and has absolute power. Every president relies on his staff. A president is an orchestra leader. And some of his musicians are excellent, others don't deserve to be there.
As the leader, he tries to be on top of everything, to listen to briefings and to make the best decisions, subject to constraints. And from what I have seen, the constraints are that socialism is a very dirty word. Socialism means old age pension, Obamacare, medicade, public schools and low cost universities and fairness.
Socialism does not mean communism, nor does it mean the government owns everything. It does often mean that a person has a right to fair compensation, and that wealth should be creating jobs domestically.
Its not that, its the fact that time and time again he has ignored all the data including their testers, the press, and most importantly their customers, and its cost the company billions.
I mean why in the fuck even HAVE a beta tester program if you are gonna go "LA LA LA" to every single problem the testers point out? And while you certainly can't always go by the press, as for one thing they all seem enamored so much with smartphones they actually believe people are gonna give up their desktops and laptops for them, but when you have virtually the entire press and blogosphere saying "THIS REALLY SUCKS!" ya know what? it probably DOES really suck and needs to be fixed.
Yet time and time again he has given the finger to all that aren't drinking the koolaid and its cost them billions.They blew billions of the Vista launch only for it to become the punchline of jokes when all they needed was to fix the more serious issues before launch, blew 8 billion on Skype only to realize they had no damned idea how to monetize it and to make matter worse forced a good chunk of their most loyal users to switch (see the recent uptick in yahoo, I can tell you its the former Hotmail and Windows messenger users jumping ship) because they tried to hamhandedly jam Skype in where it just didn't fit, and of course the billions spent on windows 8 ads when practically every single beta tester and tech blogger was saying its gonna fricking bomb, which what do you know, it did.
I am a Linux user and I love Balmer. I think he is doing a fantastic job.
Honestly i don't even know who to compare Ballmer to as i can't think of a CEO that completely ignored everything they were being told, never before have I seen a company so large just whip out a gun and shoot themselves in the head like that. Everyone said Elop was a plant but look at who he learned from folks, Ballmer could be the subject of textbooks dedicated to showing how NOT to run a successful company. When he took over from Gates they were on top of the world, had a monopoly and money to burn, but under Ballmer it became a "lost decade" because he simply didn't know what to do with the company.
In retrospect, it's interesting that the bomber didn't kill more people when they actually had the chance. During their escape, they held up a convenience store and stole a car --- without shooting the robbery victims. An interesting artifact of human psychology, even at its most twisted: the terrorists willing to blow up random strangers weren't willing to look a shopkeeper or driver in the eye and shoot them; in panicked flight and personal contact with potential victims, they showed far more restraint and respect for human life than their premeditated impersonal cold-blooded murders just hours before.
=== We must ask what motivated them. If they became religious fanatics, then their anger is against the population at large, and not against individuals, who are, in their mind, entities. The mass at the marathon is nameless to them. They have no feelings to the mass at all.
There could also be another (far fetched) reason. We hear on the radio and see on the news, where a drone struck down three terrorists. What we never hear of, is the collateral damage. The number of innocent women, children and husbands, who had the misfortune to be in the range of the USA drone bomber. Do realize, drone killings almost all have collateral damage. We should ask how many innocents are killed for each suspected terrorist that is killed? Now, if the terrorist organizations want to convey a message, their method is to hypnotize/brainwash unhappy and religiously unfulfilled young people into performing a revenge action. Not all the world views life as valuable as we do.
When we who do not live in the USA see America, we see it as 85 gun killings per week. News media rarely, or never reporting great events, only tragedies. Lately, we see this and a very negative mental combative attitude -- manifested by money and politics. Whatever has happened to good mornings, and kindness? .
Since when is "ruinously expensive" an obstacle for the government? A couple of months ago Massachusetts locked down the roads of the entire state, threatening drivers with arrest, for a fairly typical winter storm. This kind of thing is already becoming the new normal, just like it's become normal for police to be indistinguishable from combat soldiers.
=== I live in Quebec, and when you have a drivng winter storm, visibility is about 30 to 50 feet. Headlights reflect off the falling snowflakes, making driving an attempted suicide situation. Mass is south of Quebec, so, where our roads are frozen solidly down to bare pavement, those of Mass, for the most part started out with slush. Add salt to the deposit that the plows could not remove and you have a disaster waiting to happen. Bravo to your leaders in taking the decisions that life is more important than the dollar, or your freedom to have a major vehicle accident.
It made common sense to have people stay inside. The area quarantined can be managed that way, and it allowed the circumfrerence of the search to become smaller and smaller.
In a bar or night club, you usually get your hand stamped, particularly if you pay an admission fee. That handstamping concent may have been used if and only if the authorities believed that further casualties would not occur.
The next question to answer is WHY? We all have opinions, so what is yours?
Actually, think of it a being "Business Recycling." IBM is selling it, because it can no longer run it as a successful business. Lenovo is buying it because they believe they can.
When large trash day comes around here at the ranch, there are always folks picking up stuff that I no longer need, but they think that they can do something useful with.
=== IBM makes its money from large corporations, in the form of consulting fees, ERP and database support, High performance hardware beyond 64bit addressing and more. They also feel that with cloud services, that small business marketplace does not match their corporate objectives. Cut staff, keep the cream, and let the PC stuff for others. IBM does not want to make pennies from this marketplace, they want to make dollars from a smaller employee population, and from employees who are in 3rd world countries.
Why does this even need a warning? If you're too stupid not to understand to either A) not ingest these, or B) not give them to someone not old enough to know better, then by all means, swallow them all, then go get an MRI.
=== Tell this to a 5 year old or younger child. Show them and tell them to read the instructions. Some parents just unpack the toys and throw carton, wrappings and instructions in the trash.
To get the Energy Star certification, the bulbs need to have a projected lifetime of 25000 on-hours (where lifetime means the bulb can emit no less than 70% of its rated light output during that time). If there's going to be planned obsolescence, it's going to be from better bulbs replacing them even though they're still working.
As it is with CFL's it will likely be true with LED's. Sure the bulb will last that long or meet those requirements. The cheap electronics controlling it though is another story and is the reason many of my CFL's from various brands have failed. YMMV.
I will stay with incandescents for the following reasons. My situation is different from yours. a) Leds are focused. If you put them in a lamp, the projection is towards the ceiling. b) CFLs have short lives. Only if you leave them on 24/7, will you get the lifespan they advertise. c) CFLs lightt intensity drops with ambient temperature. They wont start if much below -10C or -10 F. d) In summer darkness arrives after 9pm, and daybreak at 4am. We hardly use lights in summer. e) In winter darkness arrives at 4pm, and daybreak at 7:10am. We use lights. f) My home is electrically heated. Any heat from the bulb is displacing the heat produced from the electric baseboard.
So, for northern Climates where homes are electrically heated, CFLS and LEDs are worse than regular incandescents. Disposal of incandescents is less poluting than the other two.
Win8 bashing aside, I think there may be a new netbook revival coming. I actually think netbooks did a lot of cause these issues. People bought these $300 el cheapo WinXP / Win7 machines instead of shelling out $1000 for a quality machine. And they found that these things actually work pretty OK for what they are. So well that their expectations have adjusted - they'll shell out no more than $300-$400 for their new PC. This is after HP already cranked out tons of $799 el cheap PC's which set expectations low already.
Then Intel comes in with $1000+ Ultrabooks, proclaiming a new birth of PC's. That didn't work.
Which tells me that should Wintel produce a next generation of $350 netbooks, with touch and Bay Trail, perhaps some nicer design, they'd sell a lot of those. And this would be bad for Microsoft and its partners, because they really want you buying $1200+ PC's. A race to the bottom would be bad for the Wintel industry. But they'd sell.
My wife is one of these users. She bought this crappy Acer Aspire some 4 years ago. She refuses to buy a quality PC - she even refuses to buy a tablet! But now she's looking for a replacement *netbook*, and if one came out she'd buy it in a heartbeat.
=== After struggling with a 7 inch tablet and my grubby fingers, I gave up and put it away. It was nice to hold, performed adequately, but I just could not type an email on it. Browsing was great, again responding to an email or slashdot was horrific. Spelling errors, and accidental misinterpretation of a finger press and bammn the window closed with a flush.
I returned to my laptop, big as it was, and to my netbook, The netbook battery persists for about 4.5 hours, (Fedora 18), and the laptop about 3.5 hrs (Windows 7). But with those two, typing and grammatical errors disappeared.
The tablet is actually a "Monkey see, Monkey do" phenomen. My friend got one so I need one. But after a while,... it collects dust. What does persist however, is the smartphone. It will continue to grow in use and functionality.
Regarding PCs. Ever since the 4 gig memory limit was surpassed with dual core systems, the market place has been filling up. Machines will last and not become obsolete for at least 10 years. People who invested in W7, which for all intents and purposes, meets the needs of 99.999% of people will not upgrade. The laptop in most homes is used as a desktop, and therein is another reason for slow sales. --- Long life with more than ample memory.
My view is that the ubiquitous Desktop PC should not cost the $800 to $1200 that is being asked. Something is really wrong. Families ask "Do I buy a big screen TV for that money or a fancy PC? The answer is obvious". There are other products competing for your discretionary dollar.
Well the story assumes that Apple hasn't already secured their supply. This story from 2005 reports how Apple made 5-year deals with 5 different manufacturers to secure their supply. The deals have since run out but it doesn't take a grand strategist to guess that Apple may have negotiated new deals. Remember Apple is very secretive so that may not announced to the world all their plans. Also, Apple has been known to front money to their suppliers in exchange for guaranteed supplies. Today they are sitting on billions in cash.
I doubt such a deal could remain secret due to SEC filings from Apple. Not to mention the fact that the suppliers will want to say "Look at us! We just got a billion dollars!" so that they may boost their stock prices. If we haven't heard about Apple making such a deal, then it probably hasn't happened. And it may not happen easily. Everyone is using flash storage now, and there is likely to be a lot of concern over supply. The big players may not want to make a deal with Apple to guarantee a supply so that they do not artificially limit the supply for their own products. Of course with a few extra billion, you could possibly increase your production significantly.
=== When your customer is rich, and the competition is limited. You can charge more. But you must be able to deliver volume and quality. Apple with deep pockets will pay more for product than another less financially endowed company.
It took SAMSUNG 2 years to build a fab in China recently. That was considered neck-breaking speed to have one built. China is the easiest place to build b/c of poor labor and environmental laws, but you can't simply clear land, pour concrete, complete a building, and get the equipment online much faster. Even if you purchased an old fab, it would take at least a year or two b/c the old equipment wouldn't be of the quality necessary -- nor would the air filtration, etc. It'd take you almost as long to re-furb an old fab as it would to build a new one to get it to where you'd want it to be.
All companies that build fabs have the kind of money to make these things happen. Pouring more into it won't make it happen any faster as speed is always a priority in the industry. You build a fab, expect to get so many years out of it of high profit, then switch gears to low profit as you build another fab for the higher profit things... and then re-tool the old fab or sell it when the cycle starts over.
Gah, Slashdot needs a better way to log in so I don't have to post as AC w/ out wiping what I just wrote and finding the post to reply to... oh well.
=== You forgot to mention electricity, water, sewers, roads, and rubber stamping of building permits. Oh yes, building materials and warehousing shelving, etc. etc. etc. Two years is reasonable for a priority project where nothing can go wrong that can't be quickly fixed.
Many years ago I worked for a very large organization. Employees were given free meal-tickets (tax free lunch). They were carefully distributed by the managers. Then the government stepped in and stated that the lunch was a taxable benefit. Step2 was to purchase the meal-tickets for 35 cents each. Again the government stepped in and stated that the meals were being subsidized, as a meal in a fastfood could be a few bucks. Ergo, they wanted the organization to add the benefit to the salaries. So, the organization sublet the cafeteria to a private organization that charged regular price and any taxes. The cafeteria became open to the public as a for-profit venture.
If anything is free, the government will find a way to tax it. That includes fresh-air.
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
The question is whether the benefits of criminalization, the avoidance of widespread use, can be achieved without criminalization.
=== It is not in the governments interest to reduce the deaths of smokers. Smokers pay taxes and die early enough in life to limit pension fund payouts, and extended medical expenses.
The exchange rate makes it a reasonable destination, but I don't want to be treated like dirt.
=== Since GWBush, and the stupid invasive searching for some explosive that I could hide in my rectum, an explosive that could not bring down a plane, I really decided that stupidity was taken to the most extreme for aircraft travel, or even train travel.
So, since 2006, I stopped visiting the USA. I did go once in the last seven years, by car, from Quebec, Canada, to Atlantic City. We were thee families, and we went for sun, sand and Casino. However, I will not be going again. I felt so bad for the average American Citizen, living more poorly than our Canadian poor. And we could see it in the housing, clothing, and general appearance (healthwise) of the poorer USA citizens.
The desire to not satisfy an inspector that delights in finding nothing dangerous in the past 7 years is a testiment to the tremendous waste of money and harassement to the average traveller.
The exchange rate makes it a reasonable destination, but I don't want to be treated like dirt.
=== Since GWBush, and the stupid invasive searching for some explosive that I could hide in my rectum, an explosive that could bring own a plane, I really decided that stupidity was taken to the most extreme for aircraft travel, or even train travel.
So, since 2006, I stopped visiting the USA. I did go once in the last seven years, by car, from Quebec, Canada, to Atlantic City. We were thee families, and we went for sun, sand and Casino. However, I will not be going again. I felt so bad for the average American Citizen, living more poorly than our Canadian poor. And we could see it in the housing, clothing, and general appearance (healthwise) of the poorer USA citizens.
The desire to not satisfy an inspector that delights in finding nothing dangerous in the past 7 years is a testiment to the tremendous waste of money and harassement to the average traveller.
We are responding properly. NK barely has nukes and they are starting the brinksmanship game already. Not responding to that would be a mistake.
=== It may be true, but then why advertise what the USA is doing in South Korea with this level of detail. All that the newspaper should have written was "The USA, is working with South Korea to secure the latter's security".
Why let NK know about stealth bombers being used. It means that the bombers are no longer stealth, and their locations will be identified. NK may be ratcheting up to show its strength, but they have not attempted any incursions into SK or to attack third parties.
Change for change's sake is hardly progress. When I have to search for a damned TERMINAL window, one of the more used things in Linux, it's pretty damned sad. Why must I remember the name of every app I might want to use? Why can I not be given a selection of apps so that I can find that one I use least often who's name escapes me? Why must I be trapped in a Win8 like HELL trying to use my computer?
Sorry, the "new" Gnome sucked ass and I along with MANY others avoid it like the plague. Enough apparently that the Gnome team heard the cries of agony and gave us a way to, in theory, alleviate the damned pain. Should that not be evidence enough that it was a bad damned UI decision?!
=== Its been 1 year since I stopped using Gnome DE and switched to Cinnamon. I have no regrets. I also save having painful tendons. I can now start favourite applications with 1 mouse click. Show me how I can do that with Gnome. With Cinnamon, the max is 2 mouse clicks. With Gnome, it maxes out at 4. At end of day, with Gnome, I had horrible pain from using Gnome 3.6.
To be fair, I will try Gnome 3.8 until Cinnamon comes along with their improvements. Gnome has failed the desktop user.
Chapter 1 - Male and Female are created simultaneously.
Chapter 2 - Adam and Eve are created in that order.
One of the two accounts must be false - they are mutually exclusive factual statements.
Genesis is a collection of myths with no more truth to them then the parables.
=== Did not the Children of Adam and Eve marry (if that is the proper word) humans from outside the garden. So, there had to be "strangers"
Moses did not have to be found in a basket and adopted. He was the true and trusted son of Pharaoh. He was so trusted that he was the emissary to China for Pharaoh. Moses brought back the Chinese Lunar calendar, which the Jews adopted.
Canada's legal system just pronounced on the subject of text messaging. Before police needed a search warrant. Now the supreme court has ruled that they need legal wiretap orders. (Search Warrants were just signed by the senior police commander, if there was suspected proof of wrongdoing. Now text messages are protected from warrants, the next thing hopefully will be emails).
Slashdot Mirror
The numbers I found in a quick search suggest that EU-wide there is still a small population growth, but pretty close to zero. The import/export balance (PDF, see graphs on page 2) for raw and processed products combined seems to be roughly zero as well, but in terms of raw materials the EU is still net importing agricultural products. To say Europe is going to "become almost entirely dependent on the outside world" doesn't match these figures though.
===
Europe, Stay away from the obesity vendors and there will be enough food to last 10 more generations. You do not want GMO crops.
a) If you bring them, your pollination from bees and other flying insects will drop substantially
b) You will have, perhaps, a higher yield crop, but not repetitive. You will be forced to purchase seeds every year.
c) Genetically modified wheat is stated (I have no proof) to show that GMO wheat is much more absorbed by the body and leads to weight gain, for the same quantity of ingested food.
d) Your pasta loving Italians are slim today, but with GMO, in 20 years they will be as Obese as Americans and Canadians. Welcome to heart-attack and other chronic illness land.
Do one overwrite with zeros for magnetic media.
I just send all my broken storage media to the Nixon Presidential Library, labelled "18 1/2 minutes" in a box with a return address for "Flasback Data Recovery Specialists: We Recover Anything, Confidentiality Guaranteed. Austin, TX." They replace all the 1s and 0s with pure silence. Nothing beats that.
===
Best way to clean a hard drive. Give it to my grandson. He can dismantle it, use a platter with the dog as a frisbee, strip away the electronics for projects, and don't worry. He once wanted some oxide, and scraped the platter surface to remove it all.
This really isn't a bad idea. You could surely speed up construction on the most heavily trafficked roads.
If you think that construction companies, union workers and prevailing wage workers are not already soaking this government project, then you have no idea how government contracts work in California. if it a State, County or Federal project ultimately makes no difference. By offering more money from another source, it just cues those involved that they can charge extra to do what have been contracted to do already. Be it $5.00 per person or $50,000.00 per person adding the thought of having private money contributed to do a job that the government supposedly gave to the lowest bidder, which has already missed its time target and is overbudget is insane.
If you think that is bad, come to Montreal Quebec. We have a tribunal (commission) in place trying to resolve the municipal and provincial fraud that has been taking place. As much as 30% to 100% above quotes, for extras. A water meter project estimated at 1.2 million was called for tenders and the lowest was 3 million. It was discovered that the bidders had agreed on the sharing of the projects.
Then there was the 3% man. He took 3% cash from each contract winner towards the current political party. Illegal funding for sure. But this continued when the new broom came in. We thought the new broom would sweep clean.
So now with all those illegal payments, etc. The revenue department is after corps and personal for income tax evasion. Moreover, the rule is the provincial government had to hire the same gang, because they controlled asphalt and cement manufacturing.
Is it maffia or greed? What do you think (I think both). Love those pictures of the 50 foot yachts.
It's not mindless cynicism. It is a recognition that US politics operates on a purely tribal basis.
You have Democrats who really honestly believe Obama is a peacenik who has reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan every single year of his presidency. I'm not joking -- I saw this exact comment in my local paper's comment section by a die-hard Obamabot.
You have Republicans who believe that forcing people to pay premiums to private for profit insurance companies is Marxism (as opposed to crony capitalism or corporatism, the softer brother of fascism). I see this in my local paper's comment section all the time from the mainstream-GOP-subverted Tea Baggers.
Combined, the purely tribal Democrats and Republicans probably account for about 60% of the population. The remainder will be largely filled by people who vote for a "lesser evil" and a few single digit percentage pointers who support "fringe" third parties. I'm in that last group, have been actively engaged with the fringe, stood out in the sleet and rain holding signs for that fringe, will not vote for any candidate affiliated with either the DNC or the GOP under any circumstances -- I am the fringe -- and I know there is no hope short of a scandal so egregious that one of the parties basically has to reinvent itself. Seriously, Obama's presidency should be all the demonstration one needs that to most people, policies are irrelevant, only party affiliation matters.
Why does everyone think that the President walks on water and has absolute power. Every president relies on his staff. A president is an orchestra leader. And some of his musicians are excellent, others don't deserve to be there.
As the leader, he tries to be on top of everything, to listen to briefings and to make the best decisions, subject to constraints. And from what I have seen, the constraints are that socialism is a very dirty word. Socialism means old age pension, Obamacare, medicade, public schools and low cost universities and fairness.
Socialism does not mean communism, nor does it mean the government owns everything. It does often mean that a person has a right to fair compensation, and that wealth should be creating jobs domestically.
Its not that, its the fact that time and time again he has ignored all the data including their testers, the press, and most importantly their customers, and its cost the company billions.
I mean why in the fuck even HAVE a beta tester program if you are gonna go "LA LA LA" to every single problem the testers point out? And while you certainly can't always go by the press, as for one thing they all seem enamored so much with smartphones they actually believe people are gonna give up their desktops and laptops for them, but when you have virtually the entire press and blogosphere saying "THIS REALLY SUCKS!" ya know what? it probably DOES really suck and needs to be fixed.
Yet time and time again he has given the finger to all that aren't drinking the koolaid and its cost them billions.They blew billions of the Vista launch only for it to become the punchline of jokes when all they needed was to fix the more serious issues before launch, blew 8 billion on Skype only to realize they had no damned idea how to monetize it and to make matter worse forced a good chunk of their most loyal users to switch (see the recent uptick in yahoo, I can tell you its the former Hotmail and Windows messenger users jumping ship) because they tried to hamhandedly jam Skype in where it just didn't fit, and of course the billions spent on windows 8 ads when practically every single beta tester and tech blogger was saying its gonna fricking bomb, which what do you know, it did.
I am a Linux user and I love Balmer. I think he is doing a fantastic job.
Honestly i don't even know who to compare Ballmer to as i can't think of a CEO that completely ignored everything they were being told, never before have I seen a company so large just whip out a gun and shoot themselves in the head like that. Everyone said Elop was a plant but look at who he learned from folks, Ballmer could be the subject of textbooks dedicated to showing how NOT to run a successful company. When he took over from Gates they were on top of the world, had a monopoly and money to burn, but under Ballmer it became a "lost decade" because he simply didn't know what to do with the company.
In retrospect, it's interesting that the bomber didn't kill more people when they actually had the chance. During their escape, they held up a convenience store and stole a car --- without shooting the robbery victims. An interesting artifact of human psychology, even at its most twisted: the terrorists willing to blow up random strangers weren't willing to look a shopkeeper or driver in the eye and shoot them; in panicked flight and personal contact with potential victims, they showed far more restraint and respect for human life than their premeditated impersonal cold-blooded murders just hours before.
===
We must ask what motivated them. If they became religious fanatics, then their anger is against the population at large, and not against individuals, who are, in their mind, entities. The mass at the marathon is nameless to them. They have no feelings to the mass at all.
There could also be another (far fetched) reason. We hear on the radio and see on the news, where a drone struck down three terrorists. What we never hear of, is the collateral damage. The number of innocent women, children and husbands, who had the misfortune to be in the range of the USA drone bomber. Do realize, drone killings almost all have collateral damage. We should ask how many innocents are killed for each suspected terrorist that is killed?
Now, if the terrorist organizations want to convey a message, their method is to hypnotize/brainwash unhappy and religiously unfulfilled young people into performing a revenge action. Not all the world views life as valuable as we do.
When we who do not live in the USA see America, we see it as 85 gun killings per week. News media rarely, or never reporting great events, only tragedies. Lately, we see this and a very negative mental combative attitude -- manifested by money and politics. Whatever has happened to good mornings, and kindness?
.
Since when is "ruinously expensive" an obstacle for the government? A couple of months ago Massachusetts locked down the roads of the entire state, threatening drivers with arrest, for a fairly typical winter storm. This kind of thing is already becoming the new normal, just like it's become normal for police to be indistinguishable from combat soldiers.
===
I live in Quebec, and when you have a drivng winter storm, visibility is about 30 to 50 feet. Headlights reflect off the falling snowflakes, making driving an attempted suicide situation. Mass is south of Quebec, so, where our roads are frozen solidly down to bare pavement, those of Mass, for the most part started out with slush. Add salt to the deposit that the plows could not remove and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
Bravo to your leaders in taking the decisions that life is more important than the dollar, or your freedom to have a major vehicle accident.
It made common sense to have people stay inside. The area quarantined can be managed that way, and it allowed the circumfrerence of the search to become smaller and smaller.
In a bar or night club, you usually get your hand stamped, particularly if you pay an admission fee. That handstamping concent may have been used if and only if the authorities believed that further casualties would not occur.
The next question to answer is WHY? We all have opinions, so what is yours?
Actually, think of it a being "Business Recycling." IBM is selling it, because it can no longer run it as a successful business. Lenovo is buying it because they believe they can.
When large trash day comes around here at the ranch, there are always folks picking up stuff that I no longer need, but they think that they can do something useful with.
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IBM makes its money from large corporations, in the form of consulting fees, ERP and database support, High performance hardware beyond 64bit addressing and more. They also feel that with cloud services, that small business marketplace does not match their corporate objectives. Cut staff, keep the cream, and let the PC stuff for others. IBM does not want to make pennies from this marketplace, they want to make dollars from a smaller employee population, and from employees who are in 3rd world countries.
...Magic was discovered today and practical and affordable applications for it are now only 30 years away!
You have to wait for all the myriad of patents to be filed.
Why does this even need a warning? If you're too stupid not to understand to either A) not ingest these, or B) not give them to someone not old enough to know better, then by all means, swallow them all, then go get an MRI.
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Tell this to a 5 year old or younger child. Show them and tell them to read the instructions. Some parents just unpack the toys and throw carton, wrappings and instructions in the trash.
To get the Energy Star certification, the bulbs need to have a projected lifetime of 25000 on-hours (where lifetime means the bulb can emit no less than 70% of its rated light output during that time). If there's going to be planned obsolescence, it's going to be from better bulbs replacing them even though they're still working.
As it is with CFL's it will likely be true with LED's. Sure the bulb will last that long or meet those requirements. The cheap electronics controlling it though is another story and is the reason many of my CFL's from various brands have failed. YMMV.
I will stay with incandescents for the following reasons. My situation is different from yours.
a) Leds are focused. If you put them in a lamp, the projection is towards the ceiling.
b) CFLs have short lives. Only if you leave them on 24/7, will you get the lifespan they advertise.
c) CFLs lightt intensity drops with ambient temperature. They wont start if much below -10C or -10 F.
d) In summer darkness arrives after 9pm, and daybreak at 4am. We hardly use lights in summer.
e) In winter darkness arrives at 4pm, and daybreak at 7:10am. We use lights.
f) My home is electrically heated. Any heat from the bulb is displacing the heat produced from the electric baseboard.
So, for northern Climates where homes are electrically heated, CFLS and LEDs are worse than regular incandescents.
Disposal of incandescents is less poluting than the other two.
Win8 bashing aside, I think there may be a new netbook revival coming. I actually think netbooks did a lot of cause these issues. People bought these $300 el cheapo WinXP / Win7 machines instead of shelling out $1000 for a quality machine. And they found that these things actually work pretty OK for what they are. So well that their expectations have adjusted - they'll shell out no more than $300-$400 for their new PC. This is after HP already cranked out tons of $799 el cheap PC's which set expectations low already.
Then Intel comes in with $1000+ Ultrabooks, proclaiming a new birth of PC's. That didn't work.
Which tells me that should Wintel produce a next generation of $350 netbooks, with touch and Bay Trail, perhaps some nicer design, they'd sell a lot of those. And this would be bad for Microsoft and its partners, because they really want you buying $1200+ PC's. A race to the bottom would be bad for the Wintel industry. But they'd sell.
My wife is one of these users. She bought this crappy Acer Aspire some 4 years ago. She refuses to buy a quality PC - she even refuses to buy a tablet! But now she's looking for a replacement *netbook*, and if one came out she'd buy it in a heartbeat.
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After struggling with a 7 inch tablet and my grubby fingers, I gave up and put it away. It was nice to hold, performed adequately, but I just could not type an email on it. Browsing was great, again responding to an email or slashdot was horrific. Spelling errors, and accidental misinterpretation of a finger press and bammn the window closed with a flush.
I returned to my laptop, big as it was, and to my netbook, The netbook battery persists for about 4.5 hours, (Fedora 18), and the laptop about 3.5 hrs (Windows 7).
But with those two, typing and grammatical errors disappeared.
The tablet is actually a "Monkey see, Monkey do" phenomen. My friend got one so I need one. But after a while, ... it collects dust.
What does persist however, is the smartphone. It will continue to grow in use and functionality.
Regarding PCs. Ever since the 4 gig memory limit was surpassed with dual core systems, the market place has been filling up. Machines will last and not become obsolete for at least 10 years. People who invested in W7, which for all intents and purposes, meets the needs of 99.999% of people will not upgrade. The laptop in most homes is used as a desktop, and therein is another reason for slow sales. --- Long life with more than ample memory.
My view is that the ubiquitous Desktop PC should not cost the $800 to $1200 that is being asked. Something is really wrong. Families ask "Do I buy a big screen TV for that money or a fancy PC? The answer is obvious". There are other products competing for your discretionary dollar.
Well the story assumes that Apple hasn't already secured their supply. This story from 2005 reports how Apple made 5-year deals with 5 different manufacturers to secure their supply. The deals have since run out but it doesn't take a grand strategist to guess that Apple may have negotiated new deals. Remember Apple is very secretive so that may not announced to the world all their plans. Also, Apple has been known to front money to their suppliers in exchange for guaranteed supplies. Today they are sitting on billions in cash.
I doubt such a deal could remain secret due to SEC filings from Apple. Not to mention the fact that the suppliers will want to say "Look at us! We just got a billion dollars!" so that they may boost their stock prices. If we haven't heard about Apple making such a deal, then it probably hasn't happened. And it may not happen easily. Everyone is using flash storage now, and there is likely to be a lot of concern over supply. The big players may not want to make a deal with Apple to guarantee a supply so that they do not artificially limit the supply for their own products. Of course with a few extra billion, you could possibly increase your production significantly.
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When your customer is rich, and the competition is limited. You can charge more. But you must be able to deliver volume and quality. Apple with deep pockets will pay more for product than another less financially endowed company.
It took SAMSUNG 2 years to build a fab in China recently. That was considered neck-breaking speed to have one built. China is the easiest place to build b/c of poor labor and environmental laws, but you can't simply clear land, pour concrete, complete a building, and get the equipment online much faster. Even if you purchased an old fab, it would take at least a year or two b/c the old equipment wouldn't be of the quality necessary -- nor would the air filtration, etc. It'd take you almost as long to re-furb an old fab as it would to build a new one to get it to where you'd want it to be.
All companies that build fabs have the kind of money to make these things happen. Pouring more into it won't make it happen any faster as speed is always a priority in the industry. You build a fab, expect to get so many years out of it of high profit, then switch gears to low profit as you build another fab for the higher profit things... and then re-tool the old fab or sell it when the cycle starts over.
Gah, Slashdot needs a better way to log in so I don't have to post as AC w/ out wiping what I just wrote and finding the post to reply to... oh well.
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You forgot to mention electricity, water, sewers, roads, and rubber stamping of building permits. Oh yes, building materials and warehousing shelving, etc. etc. etc.
Two years is reasonable for a priority project where nothing can go wrong that can't be quickly fixed.
What brand of SSD.
Many years ago I worked for a very large organization. Employees were given free meal-tickets (tax free lunch). They were carefully distributed by the managers. Then the government stepped in and stated that the lunch was a taxable benefit.
Step2 was to purchase the meal-tickets for 35 cents each. Again the government stepped in and stated that the meals were being subsidized, as a meal in a fastfood could be a few bucks. Ergo, they wanted the organization to add the benefit to the salaries.
So, the organization sublet the cafeteria to a private organization that charged regular price and any taxes. The cafeteria became open to the public as a for-profit venture.
If anything is free, the government will find a way to tax it. That includes fresh-air.
I guess that LInux now outsells Window 8
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
The question is whether the benefits of criminalization, the avoidance of widespread use, can be achieved without criminalization.
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It is not in the governments interest to reduce the deaths of smokers. Smokers pay taxes and die early enough in life to limit pension fund payouts, and extended medical expenses.
I haven't traveled to the USA.
The exchange rate makes it a reasonable destination, but I don't want to be treated like dirt.
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Since GWBush, and the stupid invasive searching for some explosive that I could hide in my rectum, an explosive that could not bring down a plane, I really decided that stupidity was taken to the most extreme for aircraft travel, or even train travel.
So, since 2006, I stopped visiting the USA. I did go once in the last seven years, by car, from Quebec, Canada, to Atlantic City. We were thee families, and we went for sun, sand and Casino. However, I will not be going again. I felt so bad for the average American Citizen, living more poorly than our Canadian poor. And we could see it in the housing, clothing, and general appearance (healthwise) of the poorer USA citizens.
The desire to not satisfy an inspector that delights in finding nothing dangerous in the past 7 years is a testiment to the tremendous waste of money and harassement to the average traveller.
I haven't traveled to the USA.
The exchange rate makes it a reasonable destination, but I don't want to be treated like dirt.
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Since GWBush, and the stupid invasive searching for some explosive that I could hide in my rectum, an explosive that could bring own a plane, I really decided that stupidity was taken to the most extreme for aircraft travel, or even train travel.
So, since 2006, I stopped visiting the USA. I did go once in the last seven years, by car, from Quebec, Canada, to Atlantic City. We were thee families, and we went for sun, sand and Casino. However, I will not be going again. I felt so bad for the average American Citizen, living more poorly than our Canadian poor. And we could see it in the housing, clothing, and general appearance (healthwise) of the poorer USA citizens.
The desire to not satisfy an inspector that delights in finding nothing dangerous in the past 7 years is a testiment to the tremendous waste of money and harassement to the average traveller.
We are responding properly. NK barely has nukes and they are starting the brinksmanship game already. Not responding to that would be a mistake.
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It may be true, but then why advertise what the USA is doing in South Korea with this level of detail. All that the newspaper should have written was "The USA, is working with South Korea to secure the latter's security".
Why let NK know about stealth bombers being used. It means that the bombers are no longer stealth, and their locations will be identified. NK may be ratcheting up to show its strength, but they have not attempted any incursions into SK or to attack third parties.
Change for change's sake is hardly progress. When I have to search for a damned TERMINAL window, one of the more used things in Linux, it's pretty damned sad. Why must I remember the name of every app I might want to use? Why can I not be given a selection of apps so that I can find that one I use least often who's name escapes me? Why must I be trapped in a Win8 like HELL trying to use my computer?
Sorry, the "new" Gnome sucked ass and I along with MANY others avoid it like the plague. Enough apparently that the Gnome team heard the cries of agony and gave us a way to, in theory, alleviate the damned pain. Should that not be evidence enough that it was a bad damned UI decision?!
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Its been 1 year since I stopped using Gnome DE and switched to Cinnamon. I have no regrets. I also save having painful tendons. I can now start favourite applications with 1 mouse click. Show me how I can do that with Gnome. With Cinnamon, the max is 2 mouse clicks. With Gnome, it maxes out at 4. At end of day, with Gnome, I had horrible pain from using Gnome 3.6.
To be fair, I will try Gnome 3.8 until Cinnamon comes along with their improvements. Gnome has failed the desktop user.
Chapter 1 - Male and Female are created simultaneously.
Chapter 2 - Adam and Eve are created in that order.
One of the two accounts must be false - they are mutually exclusive factual statements.
Genesis is a collection of myths with no more truth to them then the parables.
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Did not the Children of Adam and Eve marry (if that is the proper word) humans from outside the garden. So, there had to be "strangers"
Moses did not have to be found in a basket and adopted. He was the true and trusted son of Pharaoh. He was so trusted that he was the emissary to China for Pharaoh. Moses brought back the Chinese Lunar calendar, which the Jews adopted.
Canada's legal system just pronounced on the subject of text messaging. Before police needed a search warrant. Now the supreme court has ruled that they need legal wiretap orders. (Search Warrants were just signed by the senior police commander, if there was suspected proof of wrongdoing. Now text messages are protected from warrants, the next thing hopefully will be emails).
www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/03/27/canada-supreme-court-text-messages_n_2961046.html