And if you or one of your friends had access to 'the good stuff' you could be in the cloud for quite awhile...

Those stories have stayed with me better than most other SF, over a period of 45 years. I bought a compilation from those New England folks that republish not long ago and read them all again.

When watching the shows I was impressed by how well Watson could look things up. Most of the questions were of that variety, where a simple Google search would easily find the answer.

Any question requiring logic or reasoning usually when to Ken Jennings or that other guy.

Can I prove it ? No. I just remember my thoughts at the time when watching the show. If you want 100% certainty you'll have to pay me to do an analysis...

The Rediscovery of Man, NESFA Press, 24.95 for all of Cordwainer Smith's short fiction, including Scanners Line In Vain.

They have reprinted much of the classic SF and have a website located at http://www.nesfa.org/press. No financial connection, just a satisfied customer. Also reprints by Fredric Brown, Murray Leinster, Anthony Boucher, Algis Budrys and many more.

Firefox 9.01 on SuSE didn't get me there, the "sign this petition" stayed greyed out even after 5 logins.

Opera worked though, so I 'Voted'

I mean, c'mon, do a google search before you name a flagship product, at least check to see if the name has already been used.

The BBx folks (company name BASIS) have been around for over 25 years and have many thousands of sites using their products in the US, Eurozone, and the far east. A large VAR base and some great new products built with Java that run almost anywhere, from server to PC to hand held phone or tablet..

Maybe the RIM folks think they'll get away with it because they're bigger ?

but some of the more recent SF has gotten the short straw, maybe because the folks that read SF 30 years ago haven't read any recently. Me ? Still have an Analog subscription (with a few interruptions over the years), and still see some of the good 2/3/4 parts series turning into books that are worthwhile. Stories that resonated with me while I was growing up have been sort of imprinted, so I understand where the bias comes from for the 40/30 year old classic stories.

Now about that 'wave a wand' or 'cast a spell' stuff ? Not interested.

sitting on the floor, indian style, with a laptop balanced on your knees, I forget what the booth was (maybe the SourceForge booth?) at one of the Linux conferences at the Javits center many years ago, constantly work work working to find content to post on /. ? I remember seeing two guys surfing the internet like they were top graduates of the Evelyn Wood speed reading course, just flashing pages back & forth, an almost hypnotic combination of color and graphics. One of the booth people told me 'those guys run a site called slashdot, you probably never heard of it. They're here because we can get them a fast internet connection, theirs went down.'

Many thanks for the good reading material over the years, and for not being M$ butt kissers, and for being mostly irreverent, and for calling a spade a spade (even if it wasn't), and... and... and...

I had the wonderful experience of seeing SAP, which was German manufacturing software at the time (1998), sold to an extremely large travel tour operator. SAP kept trying to shoehorn the tour operator into their software. Everything was an 'operation'. Why ? Because that was the only SAP function that would come close to providing the tour operator the functionality they needed. Tour pricing ? The morons ended up reading most of the pricing table each and every time they had to calculate a price.

SAP is smart, they sell upper management only, frequently in bed with consulting organizations like Accenture & such (the culprits that I saw in action at the tour company). After the years go by management is forced to continue so they don't have to acknowledge how big their f#&kup was. Don't believe me? I was there. I watched it all happen. I have talked to the culprits and the victims and the grunts.

After six (!) years this travel company finally had something which would run, pretty much, and the tour pricing was right, most of the time. About the time I left their system uptime was around 85%. All of this is after having a team of 16 programmer/analysts (and spending and spending for OJT), also after spending millions for more and more hardware because SAP is such a resource hog, They went from one big server and a few disks to a super SAN and 60 dual processor blades and lots of other hardware I can't remember at the moment. They still have a crew of 16 programmers to keep this crap system patched & running but it is not pretty by any means. Now that they have customized their system to make it actually work, they have to do partial re-writes every time SAP comes out with a new version (big upgrade $$ for SAP to be sure). I used to feel bad for them, but if management is stupid enough to believe the salesman and not do due diligence before the purchase, it's their own darn fault.

On second thought, SAP is German for "Our Shit Doesn't Stink, To Be Sure!"

As an applications programmer I can tell you that we have network consultant's at our customer's sites. They get paid T&M, and little config issues we handle ourselves.

By getting network support from a third party:
1) Network will stay up with few hiccups
2) Your transition to Network Dude will leave you with hair on your head
3) Your education will not interfere (too much) with the operation of the network
4) You'll get book learning and practical OJT
5) PHB won't have to bitch about downtime or cover his own butt

they must be running a windows server...

At 40 cents a minute, it is way cheaper than all other Sat phones, and would be great for marine use.

Too bad they will only target the US, that leaves any cruising boats out of the picture once they venture away from the shores of the US (_sigh_).

Looking at the photos in the referenced article, the fourth picture, showing the solar sail fully extended with all kinds of nice wonderful colors (photo from a perpendicular angle) cannot have been shot from the same camera as the other photos. Different color saturation, different focus, different depth, different starfield luminosity, a rather idealized picture of the earth. Offhand, I think this is an artistic or fictional or Photochop representation, and, it is not labeled as such.

It's nice that the Japanese have launched a sail, but that hoked up photo just killed it for me.

Yup, the site acts slashdotted 8 minutes after this posted up...

I probably won't be buying one of these anytime soon, but that is only because of my extensive music & stereo collection combined with 7 Linux & windoze machines at home. At this price, they should start selling well, Maybe they'll be the new hot xmas gift this coming season.