in fact, given the increased US involvement and the general unrest in the Middle East it probably pushed back their goals somewhat
Really? You've heard about this caliphate they are creating in what used to be Iraq before the US tore it to pieces?
If anything, I'd say 9/11 was a win/win for those involved.
The most bad-ass server I've ever had the pleasure of working with was a Digital VAX 11/750 generations ago. It was *built* to be reliable from the very first rivet.
Oh sure, my pocket phone has far more power, memory, and storage. Despite the ample square footage of my "McMansion" house, It would not have fit in my kitchen. It ate power like global warming really was a myth. But as a server, it was in its own class.
It would automatically detect memory that was failing and rebuild from memory (like ECC) but then would remap that address so it would no longer be used.
You could upgrade its CPUs one at a time without shutting it down.
It was like a hoover with data, versioning files was intrinsic to how the O/S worked.
One time, the A/C in the computer room went out. It mapped *everything* in RAM to disk as the temperature rose and the chips became unreliable. We literally pulled the plug on it because it was completely unresponsive, as all operations were working directly off HDD. When the A/C was fixed and it was powered up late that night, it spooled all of RAM out of the HDD swap, and everybody's workstation resumed exactly where they had left off that afternoon - we couldn't find any data loss at all.
I will forever bow in deference to the greatest server I have ever had the pleasure of working on. How HP managed to acquire such a legacy and turn its back... part of me cries inside.
Sad as it is, you're not far from the truth. Sharks hate and love each other in equal parts, and when they find out someone under them fooled them, they do understand he's too dangerous to be there. But firing him can be dangerous, too - if he can fool you, who knows what else he's capable of? Making him an ally (temporarily, of course, there's no such thing as friendship among predators) is the wisest course of action.
That, in a nutshell, is why the biggest assholes get promoted instead of fired - because the ones making those decisions are the exact same kind of human trash.
A pass for, or to do, what exactly?
Um, to. .
He hasn't exactly done much since. Not that he did a whole lot before...
So, exactly how "[absurd" was my "analogy]", please?
So then are you done calling for impeachment?
As I was explaining to my dad during the daily call on the way home, the way politics works, you don't bring anything to a vote unless you know what the outcome will be. While, in a absolute sense, I don't doubt that orders of magnitude more information exists than would be needful to demonstrate "high crimes and misdemeanors"
Contrary to some less than informed opinion, "high crimes and misdemeanors"--the legal standard for impeachment--refers not to indictable criminal offenses but to profound breaches of the public trust by high-ranking officials. Once the standard is understood, it becomes easy to see that the president and his underlings have committed numerous, readily provable impeachable offenses. Yet, even if a president commits a hundred high crimes and misdemeanors, impeachment is a non-starter unless the public is convinced that the president should be removed from power. The real question is political: Are his lawlessness and unfitness so thoroughgoing that we can no longer trust him with the awesome power of the chief executive?
Thus, November can be reviewed as a No-Talent Rodeo Clown Referendum: the same fickle electorate that returned Pres'ent Obama to the White House could just as easily. .
I couldn't get the article to load
Google cache?
It annoys the hell out of me that my books are so damned expensive, which is why I wanted Mars, Ho! to be 100,000 words. I'd hoped that possibly Baen might publish it so it would be, oddly, far cheaper. I can buy a copy of Andy Wier's excellent novel The Martian from Barnes and Noble or Amazon for less than I can get a copy of my own Paxil Diaries from my printer, and Wier's book is a lot longer.
is the electron ACTUALLY doing that, or was that simply a mathematical/logical proof that correlates highly with what we see?
Ummm. physics has been all about testing for discrepancies between the two for at least a century now. There's a nobel prize waiting for anyone who can show an electron not behaving itself in accordance with the standard model.
What's happening Instead is that Amazon is using its marketing clout and its "brand recognition" to carve out a monopoly for itself.
Face it: anyone who can set up a website can sell e-books. You don't need a warehouse, you don't need fulfillment services. You just need a web-server and an e-shop.
You also need customers however, and that's where Amazon's added value is. It has a big catalog of paper books and lots of customers who'll turn to Amazon *first* if they're looking for a book. Any book. And yes, that makes it easier to sell e-books too.
In all other respects Amazon's added value is practically zero here, and it takes a lot of chutzpah to propose to charge 30% of the book price for that.
What Amazon noticed however is that *their* turnover is highly price-elastic and that they're well positioned to make money at high turnover rates. Needless to say that their turnover is an *aggregate* of sales of lots and lots of different titles. That doesn't mean that each separate title has the same price elasticity, or that its profit is maximised by adopting their uniform price.
Amazon simply wishes to grow its business by throttling direct sales and specialised retail channels and would like more or less uniform prices (like any other supermarket).
Nothing wrong with that of course, but it's 100% self-serving.
Nice rant, but like all hyperboles, it left reality far behind in the second sentence.
I've used DOS originally, then some Windows and hated it pretty much from the start, so I switched to Linux as soon as I heard about it, I think it was 1997 or so. Do you know why I've been a Mac users for about 10 years now? Because it simply works. I don't have to spend half of my time on just maintaining the system and searching for obscure failure cases. I love my iMac and my iPhone because they allow me to focus almost all of my time on actually doing the work that I want to do.
To most people in this world, computers are a tool. Just like cars. Most people who own a car use it to get from A to B. Some people own cars so they can tinker with them on the weekend and replace parts just because they can - but they are a tiny minority.
I love that I could get a system running from scratch, compile my own kernel and base tools and so on. I've done it and it was a great experience. At the same time, I'm very happy that I don't actually have to do it. I'm tired of tinkering with the machine, I have actual work I want to get done. I have places A and B that I want to get to.
that Apple has banned some of the most profitable types of app, [...] For example alternative web browsers
Uh... because web browsers are certainly the most profitable software outside the app store. It's a real shame that all those multi-billion dollar browser makers cannot port their cash cows to iOS. Why does Apple not realize that thousands of jobs depend on the sales of web browsers?
The App Store only rewards Zynga for this behaviour.
The App Store doesn't give a fuck. Users reward Zynga by flocking to their copycat games while at the same time complaining that all games have become the same and there's no innovation anymore.
MESSAGE ACKNOWLEDGED -- The Pershing II missiles have been launched.
