This.

I just have to wonder, honestly, how they're still in business.

They must have a hardcore, resistant-to-change, corporate user base keeping them afloat. Because frankly I don't know anyone in the industry anymore who likes Oracle or wants to do business with them.

(Even the hosting companies I deal with replaced MySQL with MariaDB, behind the scenes. No issues with the changeovers, and better performance.)

Don't misunderstand me: for enterprise-scale users they might have something to offer. But for just about everybody else, they pretended they were going to offer and just dropped the ball. How many times now?

I have no problems with local network streaming. But I consider it a convenience, not enough of a necessity to pay for.

No, I was not familiar with them. But I am taking a good look at them now. Thanks.

What about the case with John Morse in Colorado? His camp spent 11 times the amount that the opposition did, and lost anyways.

I have a "server" machine on my home network, with some big hard drives (inexpensive today). It is set up so on local network I can simply access the drives as though they were in my work machine, other than network latency of course. When away from home, I can use SSH and SFTP. (In fact I use SSH forwarding so I can access both the server and my regular work machine.)

Very simple. Easy to set up. Probably more secure than Microsoft anything. And no third parties involved.

I don't need "streaming" anything. I don't need DLNA or other kinds of streaming services. If I am away from home, I just download the file and view or play it locally. Disadvantage: that can take a while. Advantage: no blips or burps or freezes in my media, because IT'S LOCAL, not streaming.

I can also sync folders, if I want, via BitTorrent Sync. Again, no third party involved.

So, really: I don't need "cloud services". They offer me nothing I don't already do myself, and they add unreliability, privacy risks, and so many other things I really don't need to dick around with.

I would also like to find an NAS that doesn't have all those fancy bells and whistles, and doesn't make me pay for them. I just want it to "look like" a local drive on my home network. That is all. I will take care of the rest.

If my hypothesis requires 100x the energy of what the LHC can provide to verify, it is still falsifiable. It is only when my hypothesis requires more energy than than any machine could conceivably provide (i.e. infinite, or it changes to always be out of range, etc) that it becomes unfalsifiable in principle.

"Does the Higgs boson exist?" is not in itself a complete hypothesis unless it also contains a definition of what the Higgs Boson is. A hypothesis that the Higgs boson is actually a black widow spider and in fact does exist but doesn't do what physicists thought is a semantic problem (and probably an intentional one). When you say "Does the Higgs Boson exist?" there is an implicit assumption that it is the one proposed by Higgs. If there is any ambiguity, then that needs to be disambiguated.

is the big bang exlainable by a deity?

Way to pretend to answer the question while really ducking it. Have you considered a career in politics?

I committed an error in my earlier comment. You mentioned Arrhenius, but I was thinking of de Saussure, whose apparatus was what gave Fourier the "trapping radiation" idea.

But as we now know, de Saussure's apparatus was in effect a real greenhouse, and "radiative trapping" was not what caused it to warm.

So Fourier's whole idea about "atmospheric trapping of radiation" was pure speculation, based on his mistaken assumptions about how de Saussure's device worked.

Except that it isn't a matter of actual fact. McMillen is offering an opinion.

> I'm confused when you say "none of your postdictions was true." What Marlin wrote is an accurate statement of what happened.

Really, this happened?:

>> the PC and its BIOS. Only IBM would be making them to this day and they'd cost $5000 for a base model.
>> Only major corporations and well heeled geeks would own them.
>> The Internet would likely still be Darpanet go on

I'm pretty sure you can get a PC from Walmart for under $300, and that we're using the internet right now. So no, what he said did not happen.

IBM had a number of patents on the BIOS, such as the way it loaded BIOS modules from adapter cards. Compaq and some other manufacturers found a different way of accomplishing the task in order to steer around the patents. Other manufacturers used IBM's BIOS and paid for it.

a big reason why Argentinian noise right now, when Britain has no carriers at all, is troubling

Not really. Thatcher's massive cuts and a rapid transition from a manufacturing economy to a financial services one was a change that gave the Argentinians that the UK was militarily finished and without the manufacturing base to sustain a prolonged war, so they thought the UK would just roll over without a fight over the islands. Argentina also had leading figures in the US government on their side so thought there was zero risk. After all, what was some shopkeeper's daughter going to do without US help to the big macho Junta?
There has been no sudden changes recently so nobody in under the impression that the UK has suddenly become "weak".

It would make perfect sense in a world with less capable missiles.

and the total lack of recent development on the Australian hypersonic engine

There is still stuff going on - slowly - due to the same low levels of funding that meant that the scramjet model I saw in 1986 that went in a shock tunnel is not very different from the one that got some time on a rocket a couple of years back.
NASA funded some of it back in the 1980s but I'm not sure where the money came from since. I could be wrong but the US military only seems to have been running their experiments in the last decade.

You are looking at my example the wrong way. The lead in that glass is vitrified and as hard to get out of the glass as in the drinking glasses. The lead on the boards, or in batteries, is not, and can more easily be transported as dust or in water to where it can be metabolised.

Yes, I've seen it cleaned up. I've even seen (and been on, and led) teams who track their technical debt, measured in terms of estimated person-days to clean it up, and deliberately schedule periods of time focused on debt paydown, both short sprints and longer-term efforts.

I've even seen organizations mismanaged like yours which have turned around and began deliberately managing their technical debt. It starts with the engineers educating management about technical debt. Unless the managers are fools (and most of them actually aren't, they just seem that way because engineers and managers don't communicate well), they quickly grasp the idea and its consequences. Even then, you can still have managers that care only about the short term, because they expect to be promoted and out of the mess before the note comes due, and there's really not much you can do about them except to quietly try to manage it yourself. But given a reasonably-intelligent manager who is interested in next year and the year after, teaching them (gently, non-confrontationally and above all non-condescendingly) about the concept of technical debt will help them to understand and work with you.

One key to making it work is that you must be able to quantify technical debt. That means being able to make reasonably-accurate estimates of its impact and cost to fix. That, in turn, means that you have to be capable of making reasonably-accurate estimates of how long it takes your team to accomplish a given piece of work (feature or debt paydown). And you have to establish a track record with the manager so that he or she trusts you and your estimates.

I'm not saying it's easy, but it absolutely can be done... and it'll make your time at work much less stressful. It may or may not result in any decisions being changed, but when you're sure that management understands your concerns, and considers them to be perfectly valid and important, it makes it much easier to accept when they decide to take the shortcut anyway. And if the team is visibly and conscientiously tracking technical debt (e.g. as a regular part of weekly status reports), most managers will begin seeing it as a variable to manage, including by finding opportunities to pay it down, and by understanding when it impedes new work.

Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.