If I didn't need that Windows boot to run Oracle and Sybase ASE, that box would have been reformatted and reinstalled with Debian or Ubuntu this afternoon.

FUCK Windows.

Recently I was having trouble with my Debian box, an old 3.8GHz single core creaker. So I shifted my emails, my personal data, and my development tasks over to run on my Windows 7 laptop.

That was two weeks ago to the *day*. Today I had to do a system restore because some drive by hit it (even with Adblock Plus running, as well as firewalls, anti-virus, and a hardware firewall.) My folk's Windows 8 system got hit twice, and the 8.1 upgrade has been hit once -- and they don't *do* surfing, other than a half dozen reputable websites, and their email and games. So they are *not* going to porn sites or anyplace else famous for infections.

Today I was so frosted over the drive-by forcing me to waste an hour recovering the machine that I took another stab at addressing the overheating CPU on my Linux creaker, and discovered I could unclip the fan from the CPU cooler so I could clean out the cooler fins *properly.* That box is over 10 years old now, and since I switched to Linux, it's been disabled exactly ONCE -- and that because Ubuntu's upgrade process couldn't deal with a running DB/2 UDB instance in the startup scripts and crapped out *horribly*, leaving the box corrupt (I've been on Debian since.)

Windows?

I don't give a rat's fat ass what version number MicroSquishy uses. Windows is CRAPWARE and there is no way on Earth I will EVER use a Windows box as a general surfing platform again. Running builds and compiles in a restricted environment? Playing music? Sure.

But let it loose on the Internet again? Never. Ever. EVER.

Note that the article and book discuss what educated theologians think, not what the followers think.

Philosophy and "what if" questioning are a big part of religious educations. The general public, not really.

So while the Pope and Dalai Llama might be willing to welcome ET with open arms, wingnuts like Westoboro Baptist are going to have apoplectic fits about "devils" and "demons."

Rank of this problem in things we need to worry about: 4,534,211.

Low-cost terahertz radar imaging is going to be very useful in handheld devices. You really can see a short distance into many materials. Great for seeing pipes and electrical wiring in walls. The day will come when that's a standard tool one buys at Home Depot.

Until that's working, a cooled IR imager would be useful. Those are great for finding heat leaks in houses, but currently cost too much.

No, the point of being a telecom company is to connect your customers together, move their data where they want it efficiently, and get them to pay you for it. Telecom workloads not only include digging ditches for your access line and running wavelength division multiplexors across them, they also include things like routing IPv4/IPv6, firewalls, load balancing, intrusion detection, preventing and mitigating DDOS, hosting CDNs, routing lots of private networks that all run RFC1918 addresses and maybe VLANs, MPLS, maintaining really large BGP tables, fast rerouting around failures, etc.

We're virtualizing that stuff instead of buying big expensive custom-built routers for the same reasons you're virtualizing your compute loads instead of stacking up lots of 1U machines. Internet-scale routers are blazingly expensive, and we want to use Moore's Law to do the compute-bound parts of the workload cheaply and efficiently and let us build new services quickly because we only have to upgrade the software, while using expensive custom hardware only for the things that really need it, plus a lot of that hardware is getting replaced by things like Openflow switches and SDN, which we'd like to take advantage of, and buying expensive dedicated-purpose hardware means you're often stuck overbuilding because the scale of your different types of workloads changes faster than you can redesign hardware.

Also, the transition of lots of enterprise corporate computing from traditional data center structures to clouds means that the communication patterns change a lot faster, and we need to keep up with them. This stuff does seem to be driven a lot more by the needs of the users (telecom and data center) than by the manufacturers of virtualization software or traditional hardware.

And yes, every bit of business buzzword bingo does flow across our desks.

I'm not sure you can save anything with a dumb TV any more. These features are so cheap that they're being replicated by a $25 stick. Adding at least basic "smart" features is kind of a no-brainer for the manufacturer.

Too bad they suck at it. At least, in my experience: the built-in version of Netflix on my TV is so bad that I bought a Roku. It's a few years old, and maybe they've improved it since then, but on mine it's slow and awkward. Perhaps in the future they'll just spend $25 and wire in one of these things.

Now they've gone back to trying to just blow the plane up. It's not impossible to get explosives past security, but they've resorted to complex ways to hide them, and they seem to suck at it. They get derogatory names like the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber because they failed.

Their incompetence suggests that they were individuals rather than concerted efforts, as the 9/11 hijackers were. Those were coordinated attacks on multiple targets, and a fair bit of effort was put into training them. It's certainly clear that they won't be able to get control of the cockpit any more, even if they threaten to kill the passengers.

That change alone probably accounts for the lack of hijackings, though having to risk passing through even theater security also means the chance of capture, and thus potentially turning into an intelligence bonanza. So the core of al Qaeda seems to have given up, and instead of unaffiliated nuts going to Cuba we get unaffiliated nuts trying to blow things up.

Then eBay can become a bank. In exchange for more regulation, they get to do lending and can borrow from the Fed.

Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.

During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor.

No, Microsoft, wrong conclusion. See, your data told you the $deity's own truth, that start menu usage has dropped. Most people pretty much use desktop shortcuts 90% of the time, so your stupid fisher-price jolly candylike tiles may look like crap but don't seriously impact that specific usage pattern. More accurate data collection won't change that.

What your data didn't tell you? That remaining 10% of the time doesn't just mean people "forgot" they had a shortcut and decided to use the start menu for the fun of it. Using the start menu drastically beats having to hunt down actual executables somewhere on the HDD, particularly for administrative-type tasks that might go six folders deep into the Windows directory, and have insanely long command-line arguments as a bonus (ie, a lot of the control panel apps).

Data doesn't equal knowledge. The stats can tell you "how often", but not "why".

"No legal supply raises price of goods."

I don't think that gonna make the news at 11.

How are they supposed to make money if they can't have the price arbitrage?

Net metering already gives them price arbitrage, as I've said over and over. During the day they buy from me at standard offer, and sell at peak usage rates; then at night they buy from the ultra-cheap baseline capacity generators and sell to me at standard offer rates. The KWH may "net" under that scenario, but make no mistake, the dollars do not and the utilities make a fortune off it. They just want even more.


Renewables demand a smart, gear and maintenance intensive grid

National security - The real kind, not the political theatre kind - Demands a smart gear and maintenance intensive grid. That we don't already have one that can easily handle distributed generation speaks volumes about what the utilities have spent the past century doing with all those profits.


but the money for all that investment to the tune of tens if not hundreds of billions apparently is supposed to fall out of the sky.

You missed the part where their biggest fear involves millions of private citizens paying tens of thousands of dollars each to upgrade one tiny section of the grid at a time. That works out to half a trillion dollars. How much more do you want?

Hmm. $5,000 up-front in order save $14/month?

Not "just" $14/month - Did you miss the part about the utilities wanting to do away with net metering, an arrangement that lets the power companies resell my nice cheap standard-rate excess capacity at peak-usage rates? Yet still selling a similar load of nice cheap off-peak hours back to me? "I'll pay you to roll this boulder up that hill; but then I'll take a turn, and you can pay me the same to roll it back down!"

That would effectively make solar financially pointless for most middle class people (the ones who can both afford solar yet still have an incentive to save on their electric bill; the ones who work and therefore don't use much electricity in the middle of the day). So try more like $140 (though that obviously depends where you live), your normal electric bill minus 10-15%. That works out to more like a 2.9-year payback, rather than 29.

There's is a bit on information to extract from that:
"The system isn't being used to only do major, hundreds of dollars, deals."

And also:
"On average, buyers are way past the free shipping minimum amount".