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Comment Re:I find this approach unsettling (Score 1) 79

Many of the 3rd stage boosters from Apollo are either in a heliocentric orbit, or smashed into the surface of the moon after the Command Module separated from them.

Historically, we aren't very good at not littering bits of spacecraft all over the place when we do these kinds of things.

Comment Re:Good for Business! (Score 1) 106

Fred Meyer wanted to lease out unused space on their campus to a prospective company looking to open a call center in Southeast Portland (22nd and Powell) and the City wanted them to pay to install a traffic light and rebuild the intersection at 22nd to handle the "increased traffic." However, the anticipated traffic was still going to be less than it was 10 years ago when Fred Meyer was owned by an equity management firm and not a division of Kroger. So, kiss those added jobs and economic development goodbye, because the City didn't want to work with business to put in a damn traffic light - that building is still sitting empty, un-renovated, being used for storage of office furniture.

TriMet loves to run bus routes that deliver terrible service out to places that they have no interest in serving, just so every business within a mile of the route has to pay the TriMet payroll tax. They've been doing this long enough that suburbs are considering opting out of TriMet and starting their own transit agencies in order to save their local businesses money and get better service at the same time. Trimet is now a pension organization that also happens to operate a bus and train service, poorly.

These are two examples that happened in the last 5 years, or are continuing to happen.

Comment Re:Good for Business! (Score 0) 106

It's going to take a lot more than a fiber service to help Portland bring in business.

The first step is to fire all the meddling council members that have their own pet agendas and screw any business that wants to locate in the city. See: Columbia Sportswear moving their headquarters from inside Portland to the suburbs after the City jerked them around over a piece of property they wanted to buy right on the river. See: exactly zero Fortune-500 companies headquartered in the City (Nike doesn't count - they're in unincorporated Washington County).

Randy Leonard and Sam Adams being shown the door is a good start - toss the rest of them out, and start being less business-surly (note, you don't have to go all the way to friendly, just stop screwing everyone in every way possible).

Comment Re:Apple Actually Cares About Privacy (Score 1) 323

What I'm saying is that while it may be fun to trot out things like the "640K should be enough for everyone" to bust on Bill Gates that is an urban myth and he never said it. Instead, bust on him for things that he *did* do (like hire someone else to pirate CPM). Same for Apple and Jobs (I just have a somewhat better memory for the Microsoft end of things, hence using MS-centric example).

The thing that is funny about the old days of Apple, is that people misrepresent what happened back then too. Everyone claims that Apple ripped off Xerox when they started working on GUI with Lisa / Mac, when one of the alumni of Xerox PARC (and a member of the original Macintosh team) says otherwise. Oh, and Lisa and Mac were already specified to be graphical bitmapped systems before Xerox allowed the Apple team to come in not once, but twice, mostly allowed because Xerox had given Apple VC money.

Never mind that there is a massive gulf between research, and product development. Best example from this particular topic: the original Apple mouse. It went from being a tricky, finicky, expensive piece of lab equipment into a cheap, mass produced, reliable, and easy to use piece of equipment that everyone just accepts as always being there under Apple's development. More info including interviews, design sketches, and documentation here.

For some reason, everyone likes to put research of an idea without actually turning it into something useful on a mile-high pedestal, but turning that idea into something that people can actually use to accomplish things doesn't mean shit. Research is important, but so is development of that research into a useful thing.

Comment Re:Yosemite (Score 1) 411

Yeah, because every tech rag on the Internet isn't going to be writing articles about the new OS for the next 5 months, and using every trick they know to raise them up in Google PageRank.

The PowerMac G3 results are going to shrink to irrelevance in a matter of days. For example, it's Wednesday morning now, and I just repeated your search: the Wikipedia article is now #9, and next week it will be off the first page.

Comment Re:Instead of a new TV I guess (Score 1) 270

Yeah, he looks great if you have your head up your ass and only pay attention to SEC filings.

However, since the time that he took over, he sold the future to pay for the 10Q filings of today. Microsoft is now a barely-player in the mobile space that they were in before Apple (sans Newton), Google, or RIM; their operating system that ran the world is now diminishing in importance, and Office isn't even the vehicle for vendor lock-in it used to be. They have a family of game consoles that may have turned a few bucks in profit somewhere after a decade, but I doubt it because of the massive hardware failures and ill-will caused by the RROD fiasco, and their amazingly short-sighted ideas for the current generation. They've tried the connected TV thing about half a dozen times and failed every time. They had the "tablet computer" for 10 years before Apple showed them what they should have been selling, and why they weren't selling.

At the end of Ballmer's tenure, Microsoft is basically the same company it was when he took over - a company that makes all it's money from Windows and Office. He did nothing to change that, and Windows and Office aren't nearly the must-haves they used to be. The Internet now runs on *nix, front to back - Apache serving the pages, Android / iOS consuming them. Not a line of Microsoft code to be found.

Oh, but yeah, he was a great CEO.

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