Sour and Shirley Kraut might have their own opinions, Bitter Kraut is the gp.

That's just the opinion of a bitter kraut.

Oh well, Slashdot was nice. I guess I'm going back to where I was in 1997. Reading zdnet and hanging out on various newsgroups.

1998 will be the year of Linux on the desktop!

It's how my tenants pay rent in Canada.

To let them do it, I had to have a note on my account and they have to show their ID when they make the deposit. The bank wouldn't permit it any other way.

I would have thought the bank would have been happy to have random strangers deposting money into accounts, but no. Not in Canada.

Not sure what parts aren't true.

Incremental improvements in Sharepoint and SQL server are to be expected from Microsoft. In that time MySQL and Postgres exploded in capabilities, while DB/2 and Oracle kept their position as go-to for the top end databases.

Dropping out of their *substantial lead* in mobile phones, failing to produce a worthy successor to XP, failing to produce their next generation filesystem, fighting a dubious battle with Sony for video game consoles, watching Terraserver lose its lead in the marketplace. Losing IE's share to the upstart *Chrome* from a company younger than IE itself, watching MS Office erode to LibreOffice and fail to create a reasonable alternative to Google Docs for collaboration.

Some flops are okay, like RT. There's a handful of vague successes, like their user interface experiments, and some things I like, like OneNote. Some legitimate successful innovation like Azure, and some broad corporate successes like their incremental improvements in security management...

but overall this has been a dark and losing decade for MS.

There are now huge opportunities for them in non-cloud based data management. They have all the parts to do an awesome job at data self-determination control and privacy, but they're not even trying to move in that direction.

Meanwhile I find myself migrating from Windows to Mac because FOSS development tools on MS are becoming too alien to use properly on their platform... and MS made the decision to expire my certifications and end my Technet subscription. I'm running out of reasons to even consider MS for anything.

"There was concentration in decision making in the 80s so a platform could win by convincing 500 individuals who had the authority (as CIOs) to impose through fiat a standard on the centers of gravity of purchasing power."

Apple products were *far* more expensive in the 80's and 90's. And the OS wasn't that good.

OSX was a major change for Apple. It was a stable, modern platform with a future. The pricepoints of PCs dropping was the other major change. Now PCs are so cheap that even if a Mac is double the price, it's still affordable.

Then in the late 90's and 2000s, Microsoft scared away, aquired or killed companies which were developing apps for their platform. And finally, they put an idiot in charge and stopped innovating for more than a decade.

"... selling raw product instead of adding value..."

Mod parent up. Inco is another example of this. There's a pattern of this government and short term thinking. They're messing with the housing market, selling rights to resources and resource extraction companies, crushing scientific debate and discipline.

FTA: "A DFO scientist told the Star of recently trying to access several documents that were previously available in one of the closed libraries. They could not be found."

Cut off its air supply!

Gates found a better place for his skills.

".....So you're saying you killed your classmates ?"

Jokes like this aren't funny when the dead have names and faces.

I think the intent with projects like this is to show that it can be done using technology and know-how available in the place where the problems exist.

Producing limbs for $100's, is *not* going to pay for the labour and consulting for a "Westerner" to do it and sustainably maintain a Western lifestyle.

But there are plenty of people in Sudan who have the motivation and means to apply the method locally. The amazing part in my mind is that using a method like this, Sudan doesn't need to depend on expensive doctors and fabrication facilities in the Western world to produce custom limbs, they can do it themselves and share their results.

"Given these hard biological facts"... not even sure what that means.

It's like the difference between looking at a fax and a laser printed page. Worse actually, since the fax has discrete black dots, whereas the 96-120dpi display renders colour by mixing rgb at a higher horizontal resolution under a fine mesh.

And laptops are often used at less than 2'. Either you're reaching with your shoulders and killing your back, or you're looking down all the time and killing your neck. Horrible ergonomics.

The U.S. should invade Afghanistan to make homes for nesting eagles.

"They had developed this huge army, and we didn't like how they thought"

The U.S. and allies couldn't have reinforced Europe or delivered troops to Japan fast enough to hold back the Soviet army. It seems to me that dropping the bomb was to protect the armies of Western Europe and Japan from having to fight a losing battle against the Soviets.

If the Soviets would have taken the coast of Japan and the coast of France, it would have been a very different world. Japan was practically defeated when the bomb was dropped.

Dropping the bomb stopped the Soviet advancement. I don't think this was a political CYA.