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Comment Let me know (Score 0) 284

Let me know when Bill gives away all his money. And I mean *all* of it. And then goes to work with a charity in Africa or India or somewhere, depending on the people around him for food, clothing, and housing.

Until then it's all bullshit. He's a greedy bastard and I don't buy the "charity! I'm actually a good guy!" for a minute.

Comment Disability Retirement (Score 1) 141

I'm on a disability retirement. I "work" on my pet project when I feel like it. But even that is more hobby than work.

Housework, now that's *work*. So is weeding the garden.

And that's about all I do that I officially call "work" nowadays. :P :P :P

How'd your Monday go? I slept in until 10AM. :P

Comment It's a bullshit excuse to start with (Score 2) 347

In both the US and Canada, data is supposed to be retained for 7 years by companies. It's standard practice to archive email at the SERVER before letting a client download it. Some places won't even allow email downloads, but force you to stick with protocols that leave the email on the server for safe keeping.

I don't buy it for a second. They didn't "lose" the emails and they can get them from the system backups for the email server ANY TIME.

Someone should be SHOT for this fraud.

Comment The innovation posts are amusing (Score 5, Interesting) 140

I find the innovation posts decrying the lack of innovation at Microsoft, Apple, etc. quite amusing.

Big companies have rarely been known for innovation, and often known for acquisition of the innovative. As far as I know, the sole exception is IBM at this point in time, though there was a time when HP did a lot of research and innovation as well.

But Apple has never been an innovator; they bought the ideas and companies that caught their interest and marketted them. The same with Microsoft. They bought DOS. They partnered with IBM on OS/2 leading to a lot of the technology behind Windows. They bought SQL Server from Sybase ASE (SQL Server is modified ASE 10.) I'm not even sure they coded Office instead of buying the pieces elsewhere.

"Innovation" in the minds of a lot of people is about bringing new products to market, not inventing technologies. And who is to say that researching something that never makes it to market isn't a waste of time and energy? What good did Nortel's patent portfolio do them in the face of incompetent and abusive management practices? They were the Canadian king of the telecom markets, right up there with AT&T, but management managed to kill them off. Yet one can't deny they invented a lot of key telecom technologies.

To sum up: Innovation is overrated. And in a world where it's "all been done before" such as IT, "innovation" is often no more than repackaging something that was done 20+ years ago that people forgot about.

Comment Of course (Score 1) 99

Of course they'll succeed with this critical mission. After all, the first thought a starving child has when they wake up with no food, parents with no jobs, and wondering if they'll eat today, all that matters nought. Their first thought is "I wish I had high speed internet."

The fact that the first thing these people would do is trade a free smartphone for food is also irrelevent.

After all, we're out to save the world through cat videos and LOLs. Screw rational thought.

Comment Personally (Score 1) 75

Personally I'd be far more interested in a memory card port so I could have as many saved games and downloads on them as I want. 32GB is a joke nowadays without an expansion option.

As many have pointed out, it's already not enough to play a large number of modern games. Who the hell would want to buy a game device that's obsolete by design?

Comment Re:Patching time (Score 1) 218

How, pray tell, does delivering a new DLL with new APIs "break" existing code? Microsoft has added those APIs for writing safer software; they didn't modify existing APIs to do it. But in order to "run on Windows", developers can't use those new APIs without ignoring the huge number of Windows 7 boxen out there, never mind the old Vista boxes.

Comment Whew! (Score 1) 155

Looks like I just escaped disaster by not owning a TV at all. Torrents, baby, torrents and streaming.

I honestly don't understand why people would buy a "smart" TV instead of a monitor, surround sound speakers, and plug it in to a laptop or computer. How many people really use OTA broadcasts nowadays?

Comment Re:It's Time To Move On. (Score 4, Insightful) 218

The question is not just whether an OS is secure, but how long it takes for patches to be rolled out. While Microsoft often sits on their laurels when it comes to releasing patches, the king of procrastination is Oracle, which has left known issues in the wild for decades.

Still, I don't disagree with the general intent of your post, which I read as "closed source is not necessarily worse than open source." But that's only up to a point -- timely patches are critical to maintaining the security of a system, and when Microsoft purposely omits patches for downlevel releases that are still under support, they do a great disservice to their customers, to the 'net community as a whole, and to their own reputation and therefore bottom line.

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