Extremophile

I'm thinking more along the lines of "Life that will use radio signals (or similar) to communicate in such a way that we have a chance of detecting them without either of us leaving our solar systems".

But that's a bit wordy.

Even if you grant Snowden every consideration, how can he have any credibility as long as he's in Russia?

It was and it wasn't. One or two devices on a Mac SCSI bus was pretty PnP but beyond that, especially when adding non-disk devices like scanners, the Mac SCSI bus quickly could get into voodoo territory -- devices that disappeared from the chain, drives that wouldn't mount and general unreliability.

Usually over time you could get it stable, but that often meant "over time" -- re-ordering the chain physically, numerically and swapping expensive cables in and out to try to find a stable setup.

I often wonder if the 25 pin connector, which IIRC was non-standard, didn't contribute to the problem. SCSI seemed to work better on PCs which used the standard 50 pin connector.

I'm kind of curious what the space program would look like today if we hadn't sent people into space and had only used remote landers. About half the current Slashdot audience is critical of manned space exploration and prefers robotic exploration only. Would we be more or less down the road of space exploration if we hadn't done a manned moon mission?

It cost a lot of money to send people to the moon vs. just robotic stuff, but I wonder if there would be as much interest in it if we had never sent humans to the moon.

I heard it argued recently that capitalists aren't interested in increased economic activity, only in increasing their share of economic activity. Suppressing labor markets and high unemployment helps.

Yeah, but how many people were editing 4k video in 2007? I'm sure the 3 people at the time weren't worrying about scheduling their Fusion ioDrives across workloads, either, just pounding them into submission. Wider adoption usually means mixed workloads where scheduling scarce resources matters more and is more complicated.

FWIW I don't know if I agree with the article premise -- it seems like most of these resource scheduling decisions/monitoring/adjustments are being made in hypervisors now (think VMware DRS, as only one example). And a lot of storage resource allocation isn't even done at the hypervisor level, it's done in the SAN which simply allocates maximum storage bandwidth to to the host and figures out on its own which storage to use.

I was a network manager at a large-ish company and took a job at a smaller consulting company.

I work much harder at the small company than I did at the large company. The only time I worked harder at the large company was when doing large, time-sensitive projects (ie, get to pause/finish stage or network is broken).

The upside of the large company workload was that I think I my knowledge was much higher resolution, because I had time to focus and dig into details. At the consulting job, I have much more experiential knowledge but very little time to focus on details.

I think there's an old joke:

Q: "How many people work at Microsoft?"

a: "About 20%"

New since, umm, the 1960's? 1980's, anyway. The US has tested several different ASATs over the years, and has long had countermeasures. I assume other countries have countermeasures as well.

Does Microsoft promote people into Windows/Office executive positions more or less permanently, or does it rotate people in and out of those jobs so that nobody is wed to the success of those products permanently?

If those were the jobs people strived for and then hung onto, it's easy to see how the most ambitions people would work to get into those jobs and then use their skills (political and otherwise) to maintain those products pre-eminence and power to keep those jobs and suppress disruptive technologies that might displace them.

If those products were seen as self-sustaining and needing only slight guidance, then maybe Microsoft could have kept merely average people in those positions and/or made them less lucrative to push more ambitions and talented people into other areas of the company that could have benefitted from more aggressive and ambitious people who could have furthered more innovative stuff.

My guess is that Windows & Office were seen as the jewels and where the "best" people went, where they got fat and rich and did everything to suppress anything which might disrupt their fortunes. It almost sounds like the politics of Rome or the kind of thing that cripples an aristocratic society over time by preventing disruptions and innovations that would topple the established order.

Maybe someday we'll read a "Rise & Fall of the Microsoft Empire" that portrays Gates as Augustus and Ballmer as Nero or Commodus.

Of course I am postulating that a hacker can break it.

No. You are postulating that a hacker that can break it WOULD TURN TO CRIME INSTEAD OF MAKING $150,000+ A YEAR WORKING FOR A COMPANY THAT MANUFACTURES THOSE CARS.

Why would the car be the only computer in human creation immune to hacking you completely absurd asshat?

No one except you has claimed that.

I'm saying that the skills needed to crack that system are very rare AND very valuable IN LEGITIMATE BUSINESS SETTINGS.

So WHY would someone who could make a lot of money LEGALLY use those very rare skills in a crime? Why would that person WANT to become a criminal?

For those of us old enough to remember The USS Vincennes.

What bothers me is that whatever value the Metro interface has as a touch interface -- and it has been generally well reviewed on Windows phones, although I personally haven't used it in that scenario -- it's seriously unpopular in a desktop environment and on Windows 8 it doesn't seem to add any value and in many ways is extremely annoying.

And it's not like I'm the only one with this opinion or experience.

Microsoft's continuing push of this kind of interface on its desktop operating system seems to be more hubris and denial -- they're pushing whatever their business agenda is, not what anyone sees as a valuable improvement in anyone's user experience. They want one UI across all devices so they can be a phone/tablet/desktop consumer company. They're not doing it because somehow big, touch tiles help improve the windows desktop experience.

No matter what CPU they had chosen, wouldn't they have had to migrate off it to x86 eventually? It's not like any of the alternatives like MIPS or Alpha have endured or kept up with Intel.

Maybe in hindsight they should have gone x86 off the bat but at the time RISC had a lot of hype and interest even from Microsoft.

Although a switch to MIPS instead of PowerPC might make one of my favorite alternative history stories, an Apple/SGI merger in the early 90s, more plausible as merging MacOS and IRIX would have been simpler.

Isn't there a kind of general problem in urban academic settings where you have senior, often male, academics surrounded by young students, some of whom are in a dependent client relationship with the senior academics. Senior academic uses authority, persuasion and more than a little red wine to bed the younger students?

Now let's all go out in the field and camp. Maybe overseas. In a remote location. Where you can't leave or even make a phone call. Limited privacy, communal living. Long nights with alcohol and/or drugs.

I kind of hate to use the phrases "going tribal" or "Lord of the Flies" but it's not hard to see how this situations can turn kind of ugly pretty quickly.

And it's not also hard to see how it's not just driven by the gross, predatory senior academic. You might add in the attractive but less talented student who uses her sexuality to compete, or the smarter but less attractive students with less social sophistication who gets in over her head.

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