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Comment Re:Simple marketing strategy is simple. (Score 1) 66

If i were a shareholder id be very alarmed at Microsofts decision to hobble an already proven revenue stream with an on-again off-again business machine OS.

If you were a shareholder, and did your homework, you would know that the Xbox already runs Windows. The original Xbox OS was derived from Windows 2000, the Xbox 360 OS was derived from the original Xbox OS, and the Xbox 180 OS was derived from the Xbox 360 OS.

Comment Not Like Sun (Score 4, Interesting) 300

What killed Sun wasn't just aimless dicking around, it was the endless cycle of purchasing companies that had stuff they were missing, then laying off all of the top-paid employees — the ones who understood the products they'd just bought. Then they failed at an iteration of their Ultrasparc processor, it took them so long that by the time it came to market it would have been old and slow, so they skipped it. They never recovered in the land of single-thread performance, instead optimizing for the kind of workload which was already at the time increasingly being handled by cheap x86 clusters. This was an obvious road to destruction, and many of us pointed this out at the time, not that anyone expected Sun to listen to the people in the trenches by that time when they had proven conclusively that they were interested in no such thing.

Solaris provided only two innovative features probably ever: containers and ZFS. Both were too little too late to save Sun, and ZFS got open-sourced anyway, eliminating any potential competitive advantage.

Comment Re:Amazing that this was ever contracted out (Score 2) 98

It always amazed me that tech companies would contract this work out in the first place.

Contracting it isn't the biggest problem. Paying bottom dollar is. That means that you don't get the best people. Paying people more means they're less motivated to engage in profitable hijinks when someone asks them to plug something into your network, or photograph your documents. That's because happiness stops increasing dramatically with money after you reach middle class. Once your needs are met, bribery is less effective. Obviously not ineffective, of course. That's where loyalty used to come in. Problem is, corporations don't treat you with any, but they still need it from you. Solution? Treat employees like humans and pay them enough to live on.

Comment Re:Funny Quote from Article (Score 2) 247

At least now you have a much wider variety of civilian applications, some even not related to tracking, to point to in addition to the system's primary role.

To be fair, the system's primary role is arguably figuring out where you are without a sextant. They'd have done it even if they couldn't have used it for bombs and cruise missiles because it didn't work at higher speeds or something.

Comment Re:Ok then... (Score 2) 247

There are ways to go about it, but this isn't it...

I'm curious, which ways are that?

Find ways to avoid taxes (as opposed to evading them) like incorporating and writing everything off. Wars run on taxes.

Also, sneaking in and smashing something that's insured will just delay the inevitable. If you must take direct action, make it meaningful, and not just a fuckoff waste of time.

Comment I guess I really hit the target with that one (Score 1) 734

Everybody run out and incorporate right now. Apparently it's cheap in Oregon. Then you can write everything off, declare losses, and pay no taxes just like the rich. They're apparently terrified that you're going to do this, why else double-downmod this innocuous comment?

Incorporate now if you want the same rights as your corporate masters, or at least a subset of them.

Comment Re:Containers.. (Score 1) 44

I'm using WebVirtMgr for KVMs (libvirt) but it doesn't do LXCs, though libvirt does. Proxmox does both, but I don't want to pay for it (at my scale, it doesn't make sense) ... what else is out there, something which can handle both KVMs and LXCs and hopefully LXDs even, although if I want that I'll probably just use a KVM

Comment Re:Given the depth of surveillance (Score 1) 54

My guess is the robo-call companies pay them big bucks to harass everyone, so the telcos have no motivation to do shit about the problem.

You can also pay for the privilege of not being harassed. You can block ten numbers, you can block numbers without caller ID, and you can get caller ID. And you can pay for each of these features.

Comment Re:Really? Come on now, you should know better. (Score 1) 362

What I wanted to show by bringing up this example is that in current airplane design, there are circumstances in which automation is known to fail (in this case, unreliable/defective sensors). In these circumstances, the systems are designed to give control back to the pilot. The rationale for this is quite clear.

Yes, like I said, it's to make the passengers feel good. Because as we have seen, the pilots depend on the same sensors that the autopilot does. Airliners aren't fighters, you don't fly by the seat of your pants. By the time your inner-ear-gyro tells you that there's a problem, you're already screwed. Which was precisely what happened.

How in the shit are pitot tubes still icing anyway? Why is heating the tube not a thing which works? Heating elements are not new technology. We should really be able to manage this by now.

Comment Re:I have said it before (Score 1) 384

you mean the basic engineering error where the project manager wouldn't sign off due to the mistake made in concrete formulation so he was fired and a more lenient approver installed in his place?

How about the basic engineering error of siting a reactor somewhere even ancient Japanese could have told you was a mistake? How about the basic engineering error of not protecting your on-site backup power, which is mandatory for maintenance? How about the basic engineering error of storing spent fuel rods on top of reactors? All of those are more significant than the formulation of the concrete.

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