Yuck, death by hidden MBA.

Maggie was a ten pound hammer used on a five pound problem. Things needed to change and she changed them, then kept on changing them. If I understand my history correctly British Leyland was on strike more day than they were in production (during one of their incarnations). Mayor Giuliani was similar, he massively reduced NYC's crime problem and when that was dealt with he started focusing on things like jaywalkers.

Nearly every organization that I have come into contact with broke down in the exact same way. A few incompetents managed to redesign the system. So it goes off the rails of whatever purpose it originally had and begins to concentrate on navel gazing. More and more is spend on things like PR, conferences, communications, legal, and most important of all, who they let in. A simple way to detect if an organization has gone rancid would be the number of MBAs who are in "leadership" positions vs people who actually know how to solve the problems at hand.

It is not so much that an organization should not have MBAs but you never give them the keys, they should be limited to marketing and maybe a little bit of accounting. But once they are in the boardroom then the organization is a walking corpse.

Another simple test is whether the original founders would even be qualified at this point to pass muster as new hires.

Good monitor (or three), laser mouse, gaming keyboard, good sound system. They might not get you to $1200 but they will cost quite a bit.

My perspective is all a bit warped as I do OpenCL programming and have two bonkers video cards in my machine; plus I don't have any games on it.

I agree with you that XP is fine and is a symptom of Microsoft's larger problems. If XP had been continuously updated there would have been no reason for Windows Vista, 7, and 8. I actually wonder how much money MS makes from upgrades and how much it make from licenses on new machines? The main reason most people have had to upgrade from XP is that some new version of the software doesn't work on XP (either a driver or actual software).

But the reality is that Windows has moved on many times since XP so any product that won't run on the newer Microsoft operating systems is going to be a problem. Minimally people within any organization have bought new machines that will only run a newer OS.

This is one of the advantages of going web based. At least then there is less OS dependency. But even here the same problem has arisen; a web product is developed that only works with certain versions of the browser, so you end up in the same loop as my original post.

My theory is quiet simple. When you deploy a critical bit of internal code there must be one of two plans made. One is that it is rock solid and will never be touched; which would be fine for some code that runs a single machine in a factory or something. Or you must think of the code as a garden; in need of weeding, watering, and fertilizing as conditions demand.

But what makes the latter hard is that many mega IT consultancies will gouge the crap out of their clients during the "maintenance" cycle so most CFOs are wary about hearing anything being "planned" for maintenance beyond fixing critical bugs.

A hardcore gamer will have everything possible to reduce latency. This would be for either set up. Router, choice of ISP, wired vs wireless, laser mouse, etc.

If I came by and threw every single thing wired into your desktop into a fire (monitor, keyboard, mouse, router, etc) what is the total in receipts that you spent on that gear?

But seeing that a console uses the home TV then the cost of monitor and whatnot must be included. Technically you could even include the desk and chair. Basically my point was that most PC gamers don't take their activity lightly. While there are many hardcore console gamers you can just buy a cheap console and you are good to go.

Most people who I know that are PC gamers are generally pretty dedicated. They have special keyboard, mice, monitors, routers, network providers, etc. This is isn't even talking about their machines. Minimally they have a $200 video card if not pushing past $500. Then there are the special motherboard, overclocking, crazy cooling systems, even the glowy bits.

That all said, they are not building these systems to play tetris. They are going to get the latest and greatest games as fast as they come out. Then if the game is good they are going to play the crap out of that game.

What probably distinguishes this market from the console market is that gamers typically are chosey about their games. They aren't getting these games as gifts. They are looking at the reviews and the opinions of their friends. Thus the crappy games that typically are pumped out to exploit the fans of various blockbusters (which are 90%+ crap) just won't get much traction in this market. Thus a bomb is probably a total bomb in the PC world whereas there are going to be grandparents, fanbois, and parents who get suckered into buying the latest Harry Potter movie for their little Harry Potter fans.

This would apply all the way down to the bargain bin. Steam has a bit of a bargain bin but I suspect that a Playstation bargain bin at Walmart will do far better than the same bargain bin for PC games.

Quite simply to have a halfway decent gaming rig you are plunking down a minimum of $1200 with many doing a multiple of that. Thus these are people who are proven willing buyers.

And then there is Goat Simulator....

What non-US dropbox providers would you suggest? I am looking at opencloud and setting it up on my own server. But opencloud is seemingly a little not quite ready for primetime.

Ideally my data is stored encrypted on the server with password access limiting access to the data itself. But only decrypted on the client side. Also ideally it would have multiple user file sharing with all that implies.

But my dream feature is that you can access the data online (still client decrypted) through interfaces at least as capable as google docs(not terribly capable but good enough in a pinch).

To me having the data on the server encypted/decrypted on the client is the ultimate in two-factor security.

Other features such as versioning would be nice to haves.

The reason that I suggest Google instead of Dropbox is that I would like to see Dropbox punished for hiring that woman. All US data companies are basically now to be considered guilty until they are proven out of business.

In my area I don't think the local SAR have found anyone alive in years. Either they turn up themselves, or they turn up dead. But I bet that they have kick as safety briefings, training sessions, and paternalistic "we know what we are doing better than you civilians" crap.

Basically what I see with drones is not a few remote controlled toys with a camera but a flock of fast flying drones that are given hints as to where to look and fly at some optimal level over the trees looking for things that are interesting. Then slower quad copter drones then fly in to take a look at the interesting things such as deer, bears, and whatnot. Then if someone is found they are identified as either the lost person or a searcher. If the lost person is found, a heavy quad copter could fly in with some quick and dirty supplies including comm. Then the humans would go straight to the person, not only using an efficient route but one that was mapped out by the drones.

Keep in mind that a drone can use a nice combination of humans back at the base combines with cool sensors. They can look for colors that don't belong in the forest, the smell of sweat (a Vietnam war technology), infra red, things that look like people, etc. Then these images can be relayed back to base for verification. (Nope that is a sleeping bobcat, not a lost child).

If anything a bunch of humans tramping about might slow the drones down.

I think that any organization still using XP has failed an IT test. This does not mean that the IT people suck but that some aspect of IT sucks. It could be that the IT people can't proactively spend money to avoid expenses such as this and can only spend money when they have to. This is broken. I wouldn't be surprised if some dolts in these organizations are now saying that the budget to upgrade from XP has been eaten by these licensing costs.

What I have seen before is that some minor OS upgrade comes along and the various parties say, "Hey we need a minor upgrade to our software to keep up." this is then refused so after the next OS update they say, "He we pretty desperately need a medium sized upgrade to catch up." this is refused. This goes on and on until basically they are screaming, "We MUST upgrade now and the upgrade is a major overhaul of how everything works." then the worst thing in the world happens, they agree. The problem being that some sleazy mega-sized consulting company comes in and starts throwing around "best-practices" and $50 million later a completely useless system that is actually far worse than the 12 year old pile of crap they have is born. Then another $50 million is spent getting it to barely work.

The probable cost to have had a continuous stream of upgrades in the first place? Maybe $500,000 per year.

I don't know about that. I dropped Godaddy years ago because of what they were doing. And now I have dropped Dropbox for hiring a potential war criminal. It might not be a Watts riot but I know at least 3 people who have dropped Dropbox; this might not seem like many but that is a good chunk of people who I know personally who use it. Plus I will never recommend it again, which was how most of these people discovered it.

Plus depending on your use of Dropbox there are far better services. If you are simply storing and sharing files with a select few then Google drive gives you 15 GB which is a huge amount of storage in comparison.

Plus with someone like Rice onboard, how long before Dropbox ends up in an incestuous relationship with the NSA? So if I were any company that hadn't already dumped all US data providers it is now time to look into things like opencloud anyway.

If you have ever met the local SAR types I am willing to bet that they were instrumental in shutting him down. The last thing in the world they would want is their "Seniority" to be challenged by some upstart with easy to use technology. If you want to see the living defintion of a blowhard then go meet your local SAR.

I am not talking about professionals such as the coast guard but these local types who periodically call for hikers to be licensed and whatnot.

Think about how easy SAR could be with semi-intelligent drones. They could blanket an area, looking for heat signatures(or other sensory clues) from a very low altitude, and then when one was found could potentially fly right down to the source for a look. Also they could fly in dangerously poor weather, at night, and at little cost. Also the mathematical patterns they could be doing would be pushing up against 100% efficiency so there would be little human input required.

In what was there fluctuations? This might seem like a glib question but, I actually am interested in the answer. Their theory seems to cover the idea of where all the stuff (including space) came from. But where did the "thing" that was fluctuating come from? And no I am not implying religion.