I doubt it. I suspect IBM will be about where they are now. Profitable, well out of the mind of most in the public. They might decline a bit further. I don't think they have anything that would come organically from their development that's going to change their fortunes dramatically. If it does make a comeback, it'll be some lucky acquisition, or else being rooted in very boring, but stable markets as other market bubbles burst and cause investors to gain an appreciation for slow and steady.

While I agree that IBM in general is not all they claim to be, they continue to be profitable. Just not as profitable as they historically were and not as much as investors and executives demand from the 'IBM' brand. They aren't losing money by any means, though they act in many ways like a company that is losing money.

That is another interesting facet of IBM. They tend to have huge big-name initiatives that they expect to change and dominate the industry. Those things in the last decade have pretty much all flopped and been money losers, buoyed by profit from all sorts of boring places that are seemingly not worthy of IBM executive gushing.

IBM in general is an odd institution. On fronts that can be profitable, but must settle for a more modest margin, they have the strategy of trying to offload. Lenovo is mostly built upon their old, failing PC business and is now the global leader and modestly profitable. I expect the same thing of x86 servers. This seems highly inconsistent with their purchase of softlayer. They are trying to get into the ring with Amazon, a company notorious for operating on razor-thin to negative margins for the sake of market share. Surely they must realize that the IaaS business cannot bring about IBM-level margins so long as EC2 lives.

    It looks like this is more of a competitor trying to sabotage them, rather than a legitimate complaint. Yes, Slashdot could have gotten in trouble for running it. Honestly, they should have seen it, did the difficult step of "Look at the site first" and realized it was a non-story.

    He's bitching about not being able to contact the company, yet http://kahntools.com/contact-us

Address
6320 Canoga Ave. Suite 640
Woodland Hills, CA 91367

Phone
Office: (818) 884-7000
Toll Free: (855) 585-7500
Fax: (818) 530-4249

Hours of Operation
9:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Monday â Friday

Email
Customer Service: sales@kahntools.com
General Inquiries: support@kahntools.com

and I found separately through the magic of g00gle...

https://www.facebook.com/kahntools

Ack! No. The 5.500000 has seven significant digits. The zeroes following the decimal point count since by convention it means that the measurement has been taken to be that precise.

10K probably has infinite significant figures as that's an expression of an exact running distance, not an estimate. The 3.4 miles is probably an estimate (I haven't heard any of any 3.4 mile standard runs - but then I'm not a runner), so it would have two significant figures. But even if 10K and 3.4 had infinite significant digits the number of decimal places you use for the answer would hinge on how precise of a number you use for the conversion between the two units.

Er, I love Old Boy myself. But how on earth would you classify it as a comedy? (Though I must admit the dude jumping to his death through the car while holding onto his pet poodle as the main character just smiles and walks away did make me chuckle).

This excellent blog article describes a technique developed by Judea Pearl decades ago to do exactly this. Would be interested to understand how this is different/better.

Shhh.. Talk like that will get the attention of DHS.

I used Familiar Linux back in the day, when my Compaq iPaq became little more than a paperweight. When it was new, I had bought the iPaq with the battery sleeve that had 2 PCMCIA card slots. I did use it for a couple things. One was a little wifi scan tool, kind a primitive Wifi Analyzer. The other was the fancy IR remote that you mentioned.

Since it was so limited, even though it was a little Linux box, it eventually just ended up sitting on my desk until the batteries died, and a few years later it end up in a box in the closet. I haven't seen it in a few years, so it got misplaced one of the times I've moved. No big loss, other than the huge amount I had paid for it when it was new.

Since I can do everything with my Android phone that I ever did with the iPaq, there really isn't a reason to even try to resurrect one.

Their consumer drives have gone to absolute shit. I was buying them because they were marginally cheaper than the other choices. I ended up with a couple dozen running over the period of about a year. As each matured to about 1.5 years old, they started dying. Seagate reduced their warranty for consumer drives down to 1 year, so now they're all paperweights.

I guess they're ok, if you want to build a computer that you only want to use for 1 year. Maybe building out a machine for someone you don't like, or you like repeat business from angry customers who lose all their data yearly.

One of these days, we're going to have a thermite fueled funeral pyre. I'll post the YouTube video. :)

At least these "archive" drives get a 3 year warranty, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they start trimming that down over time as they find out what their real failure rates are like.

I've only ever been asked once, over countless flights before and after 9/11. That was in 2000, to board a flight leaving the US for Europe. Unfortunately, I was using it on the first flight, and my battery died. I told the agent "The battery is dead, but I can plug it in if you'd show me where an outlet is". That was the end of it.

It wouldn't have "seeped out", but you're on the right track. hydrogen + oxygen + energy = water. and water + energy = hydrogen + oxygen. We understand a lot of the surface chemical processes on this planet. We don't understand all the subterranean processes, but we have an idea.

Non-terrestrial bodies can carry water. Landing on a single comet and saying "no comets have Earth-like water" is like saying "We've only found life on Earth, therefore no other life exists."

I think some people have a very homogenous view of the universe. Once you've sampled a few, you've sampled them all.

Even on the Earth, there isn't a lot of water. This may give a better visualization.

http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html

Betteridge's law of headlines. No is always the answer. :)

Slashdot's archive policy used to be much longer. I think it was at least 6 months. I'm not sure why they changed it. It may be for the sake of managing comment spam posts. It looks like they're removing them now. At least I haven't noticed posts for knockoff merchandise lately. I still read at -1, since people still downvote perfectly good comments.

Even on Facebook, we sometimes have running conversations for weeks. There, it's all in who your friends are. The ones I friend can usually keep a conversation going. Sometimes well beyond when it should just die.

Well ... I worked for a company who dealt with lots of PII (like, info on *every* person in the US). We put together a system to monitor what TOR nodes existed, and compared attacks to TOR nodes. It was significantly used as an attack vector, not only because of the anonymity, but because the attacker could change IPs frequently. Not a single legitimate user used TOR.

We decided it was worth protecting our users, and the PII of everyone in the US, to refuse any traffic from TOR.

Banks doing the same thing does seem like it's in the best interest of the customers.

If you are a legitimate user, and some 3rd party logs into your account and transfers money out, would you prefer the bank to say "Sorry, it was some random person, and we have no way to find or prosecute them. They will likely do it again." or "The intruder was found and prosecuted."

Depending on the theft, you may or may not get your funds back. If someone goes in and transfers funds as you, some banks aren't willing to refund the transaction. Transfers aren't handled like credit card transactions, which are easily refunded.

Even if your bank does give you the stolen money back, that means they've absorbed the cost. So your loss ($1 or $1M) and refund, is now added to the fees, because the bank's operating expenses are higher.

I'd prefer the "inconvenience" of not being allowed to use TOR and other anonymous relays, and not have the bank have a huge and expensive fee schedule to make up for losses that are impossible to recoup from the thieves.

Well, I do still log in occasionally, and comment. I gave up on submitting stories a long time ago, since I've had all of one published ever, and countless other good ones ignored.

Conversations on any story dry up pretty quickly. There's usually a 3 day lifespan at best. So after today, I doubt there will be many (if any) more comments.