As a former Cisco employee (quit for a better job, although Cisco was a company I liked working for) I'll tell you that Cisco has a bottom 5% policy that every year the bottom 5% are let go.

But... it never seems to be enforced. So year over year there are more and more bottom 5%ers accumulate, and then Cisco has a layoff like this...

Isn't their range only like 100 miles? He'd have to plug in, and I can only imagine that would draw even more attention.

Japan can pre-warn about earthquakes by as much as 30 seconds to a couple minutes. Enough time to seek shelter. Unlike our system, I believe their system is automated and goes off when their computers detect the impending quake.

Did you get this Amber Alert? On the iPhone the klaxon was something like the Star Trek red alert, or an air raid siren, or a hybrid of the two. It was VERY loud. I had no idea what the fuck it was. My phone was in another room, and I thought something in my home had caught fire, or the AC had failed and was delivering some sort of catastrophic failure sound that I didn't know it was capable of making.

It really was that bad.

I disagree. This message could have easily been implemented for Smartphones to include photos of the kids/kidnapper, and stock photos of a blue NIssan Versa. (Or at the least, include a link to a page with those things on it.)

The other problem with this of course is that the kidnapper ALSO got the Amber Alert and is now aware he needs to change vehicles. The second he does that the Amber Alert is useless, and if he thought to do it BEFORE the Amber Alert when out then it is doubly useless. With a photo of the suspect and children? He is going to have to stop for gas at some point, regardless of what vehicle he is in.

There's this thing called rounding, and you would round 557 to 600, and sorry I didn't bother to google mapping directions from SF to Boulevard for pin point accuracy. The point is, it is very far away from where I live, and therefore most likely completely irrelevant.

The message was completely irrelevant for those of us 600+ miles away. I don't even own a car, I live in an urban area. I literally have NO idea what a Nissan Versa looks like. Literally NONE. I NEVER look at license plates on vehicles while I'm walking. NEVER.

These messages have ZERO relevance. Send me a pic of the kids or the kidnapper. I don't give a shit about the fucking make/model of a car that is 600 miles away (the distance from Washington DC to Florida btw).

I can only imagine what people in the far Northern side of the state in Shasta or Humboldt thought of it all. 900 miles away something happened and they are also getting this message.

I live in San Francisco, which is 600 miles from San Diego where this alert originated from. For you east coasters that is the equivalent of an Amber Alert in Florida being sent to everybody all the way to Washington DC.

I quickly researched how to turn off Amber Alerts on my phone, I won't be bothered by them ever again. (On an iphone Settings > Notifications, scroll to very bottom where you find Government Alerts, turn off Amber Alerts, leave on Emergency Alerts since that might actually carry important info.) And that of course is the real issue, by sending such an irrelevant and incredible annoying/distracting message they are inviting large swaths of the population to turn them off. Rules should be established around relevancy (ie, does somebody 600+ miles away need to be a recipient?) in order to keep the system useful.

Americans are the largest group of English speakers on the planet. You can hold onto whatever piddly rules you want, but we are the majority of the spoken language. Sorry you lost the war sweet cheeks.

I think at this point Microsoft has developed a reputation for failing at new things. When I think "Microsoft" and "New" I get immediately skeptical. So I suspect at this point Microsoft trying something new that requires consumers shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars is a red flag for the consumer to either "wait and see" or "avoid avoid avoid".

I mean how many loyal customers can be left who have a Zune, a Windows phone, a Kin phone, a Windows Millenium, Windows Vista, and now Windows RT device collecting dust in their home? Considering that this represents more than half of new products microsoft has released in the last 15 years and it is really clear that it does not pay to be an early adopter.

I don't agree.

In the case of the Mac there are pre-installed Apple made applications, but they are applications that have tight integration with the OS for handling certain types of media, and generally these apps are not loaded on startup. There are no third party trial bloatware installs.

As for Linux, I suppose every distribution includes different applications and it is your job to clean up and keep or get rid of the things you don't want.

You can use WINE to play DirectX games on a Linux or Mac, however it is a subpar experience.

I just don't understand who the core audience for windows is any more. Who are they trying to sell to?

Office workers? Great, Windows is a pretty good system for that usage since office workers have admins that can unf*ck their system when they pick up a virus off browser exploits.

What about the 90% of home users who aren't computer professionals? Are they better off with a Windows operating system that comes preloaded with so much bloatware it can make in Intel i7 chip work hard just to boot? What about when good old Mom or Dad accidentally downloads that trojan horse "anti-virus" that takes over her system to the point where it is unusable? Is Windows still a good value for them then? Wouldn't they have been better off buying a mac with it's easier to use interface, bloatware free on day 1, and far fewer viruses circulating?

Gamers of course are stuck with windows since so many games use Direct X instead of OpenGL.

What about programmers? Windows is SH!T for programming (unless of course you are developing windows applications.) Mac OSX and Linux are both far superior for programming. (OSX after all is a posix compliant Unix Operating System under the hood.) Considering how limited DOS was (and, apparently no longer even present in the current windows) programming from the command line in a Unix/Linux machine is a far far superior option.

So if you're an office drone, or a gamer you're really the only two people who still have a reason to have Windows.