@ 1000 emails/day, that's 15000 seconds processing time, or over 4 hours. That seems a bit excessive, but being having your email delayed a cumulative 4+ hours/day.

So machines might replace drudge work that employs people in
mindless jobs? What do you think allowed civilization to ban slavery on a wide scale.

Think of all the slaves "out of work", or after them, remember all the serfs, servants and share-croppers that are now largely out of work.

Technology creates more opportunities to profit from less exploitation of inferior resources.

Transitions are a bitch (ex: USA Civil War et al).

And move all of the silicon valley employees out of the valley to hot-inland locations? Sure they can move the buildings, but they can't move the interactive mind-share that only goes on in a reasonably large urban area with weather that is conducive to outdoor activities much of the year.

If people have to stay indoors, they will be isolated and there will be less of the creativity spawning interactions between engineers of different companies.

Google would never have been as successful as it is today if it had been in Redmond. Think about how many companies buy each other and merge -- and think about how well MS's purchase of skype has paid off.

From San Francisco to Malibu, much of the CA coast is classic Mediterranean climate. Cross that with good access for mobilizing goods (people included) in and out of the area and you are reproducing the environment that spawned much of western civilization.

If the weather conditions get too far from idea, that climate might start looking like Seattle, if it goes wet, or if hotter like the Tigress, Euphrates and Nile river valleys that are now desserts due to over development and deforesting.

Who knows -- maybe Bush's sale of many coastal old-growth forests off the NW coast will eventually dry the climate up north and Silicon Valley will HAVE to move northward to maintain it's climate, but that's likely, at least a century away.

Just because someone has a token CoB title doesn't mean they really do much of anything or influence anything (doesn't mean opposite either).

My impression is Bill has been off doing his own thing outside of
MS, -- the company rather markedly changed directions and operations
after Bill left. I haven't seen a reversal.

As to your idea that the was "out of the blue"... there has been talk of him stepping down on the MSforums for the past few years.

If he was fired, why would ask him to stay on until they find a replacement? You are jumping to conclusions.

The linux core developers have built their reputation on ignoring anyone's advice/input. They have done well, but their process for allowing necessarily disruptive changes into the kernel is frightfully closed.

I, myself, suggested / pointed out security problems, only to be ignored and have 0-day exploits released a few weeks later. If I was seeing the problems, it was likely others were too -- and they were. I was told I didn't know what I was talking about.

I also suggested a login-user-id for user-tracking (implemented 6 years later as an audit id) and suggested going to a 64-bit word size for block-offsets (was told it would kill performance in the kernel and would never happen -- about 3-4 years before their backs were to the wall and were forced to do so on a much accelerated and uncomfortable-for-all schedule.

They rarely think *ahead* and tend to be *reactive* in development rather than pro-active. They fact that Linus has been a rigid task/whip master, a loyal core, has allowed him to push hard-enough to be good in the "reactive" role -- but that development mode burns people out. The last
great innovative change that went into the kernel was the O1 scheduler and the auto-grouping of tasks for the CFQ.

Now I see a reactive focus on increasing parallelization for multi-cpu's while not giving as much thought to how those increases need to have infrastructure to support 100-way parallelism (you can't have 100 writers on a 100-core intel cpu (they have such a beast w/each running at
1GHz) going to any disk subsystem other than a 400-disk RAID10, that can use that type of CPU parallelism...oh well...

They ARE better than the alternatives... feels like a US presidential election -- where you vote for one guy who isn't so great, because the alternative is much worse.

Oi.

IMO, you are wrong on 2 counts.
1) in thinking that bill gates still has any position of influence in the company; and
2) thinking he shouldn't (at all).

Bill Gates was NOT a saint, by any measure (no matter how much he "philanthropicizes" after the fact, much of his gains are ill-gotten to begin with (MS did bad things during his tenure). BUT -- he appeared to be the only visionary in the company in upper management.

Several of his plans fell through -- many of those failed in *execution*, something had begun turning over to Ballmer long before his retirement. Ballmer is business oriented only. Ballmer would be happy being the next IBM that is the backbone of companies everywhere and never having another consumer customer -- they want and want and don't pay nearly as well as corporations can be bilked.

Bill had more (anyone would have more than Ballmer) focus on appealing to consumers while still supplying the staples needed by business. His surface, which Ballmer killed, MS home-server -- another flop.

Win8 was Ballmer's parting "gift" -- getting rid of the desktop that caters to personal computer users -- and converting it into a large button filled panel that would be perfect for limiting flexibility and allowing companies to create single-task appliances that can be used by children.

Gates wasn't a saint -- but he was orders of magnitude better than Ballmer for the PC-market.

Standard argumentation technique.

Sure, my esteemed colleague, has never engaged in child abuse, or he would have been prosecuted, we all know this, but how clean is his past?

So emacs involves more double-key combos than VI and that's implicated
in increased incidence of RSI, but hey, lets not make this about Emacs vs.
VI... right? (not that I would agree with the underlying premise to to what, I am sure, all would recognize, as a complete lack of bias on my part. ;-)
*cough*

I agree with the above .. note taking on a computer helped my class grades alot. Even in non-CS classes, like a French language class, I'd
spend spare time in the class (and outside) typing in the vocabulary for the following week and having it given to me on a random answer quiz that it would keep re-drilling on the wrong ones.

I had it for the main test require fill in the blank -- which means I had to get the spelling and accents correct. If I didn't get it, I was told the right answer, and later given the same question again to see if I remembered.

It worked GREAT! up until the vocab lists became longer than I could type in / week...;-(... But 1200 words+ / week was a bit much... if it had been
my only class! -- yeah those were NEW words. The test could drill me just on old words, but also had the ability to fold in words from all or selected previous weeks.

---
Also on computer -- I can do handwriting and drawing....Drawing
might be useful.. but handwriting.

My notes were always "write-only"... I had such trouble reading my own writing that it made them next to useless as a study aid.

I could touch type considerably faster than I wrote.

peer to peer, or is it peerISP-CIA-ISPpeer

Encryption? like HTTPS? that was just said to be insecure?

Can't change the truth? Whose truth, yours? Mine? Fox News fair and balanced truth? If the truth of history has always been written by the winners, one thing you can be certain of: it's not the whole truth.

Depends on how you define 'practical purposes'...

For ma and pa, who only use outlook and word... maybe...

For people on slashdot? Unlikely.

Initially yes, but not only did he NOT stop the policies when he got in office, but when they came up for renewal, and all he had to do was NOT sign, and they wouldn't pass, he took the affirmative step of signing for a continuation of the Bush-regime.

The team was put with him after he came up with his initial findings and publications. He did the work that got him "his team" pretty much on his own,
though certainly not without inspiration of those who came before.

It's almost always the case the genius builds on that which came before -- its only the concurrent work that tends to dumb down the output.
The team they are talking about is one where one is a equal member of the team. The teams formed around genius's usually are more in a support role.

They are different though I would not argue that for high productivity a support team is useful... but for "out there" insight -- solitude where you can
get away from group think and think of things *outside the box* is vital. If you
are with a group -- you will get group think. It's only by virtue of these geniuses "alone-ness" and not being programmed by the masses into conventional-thinking, that they were able to come up with that which was beyond conventional.

my last camping trip had multiple electronics grade generators along that powered the electronics and all night partying.

They need to specify that camping as they define it, removes electronic backup.

I agree with the above **AND**, it's the increase in crowding (a result of "over population/unit area")....

Drawing from verbiage of a another article on team work being better than individual work.. -- having geniuses or loners being forced to learn to work in a team (crowd), and is a recipe for disaster.

There are *different* types of people that thrive in diverse environments. The closer you crowd them, the less they will thrive and the more conflict that will happen.

If they are unhappy due to economic problems it is all the worse.