That was true for 1986 NASA, certainly. Post-Challenger there were major changes (extensions) to the list of abort options - including a new bail-out capability - which made the loss of two engines crew-survivable for the entire ascent, and the loss of all three main engines survivable for most of the ascent. (See the Wikipedia article for details.) As it turns out, we have higher expectations 30 years on. Whodathunkit?

I used to have a Samsung Galaxy S III. But the glacial pace of updating to Samsung's version of Android convinced me at the end of my initial T-Mobile USA phone contract to replace it with an iPhone 6 (64 GB Space Gray). And I'm very happy with the choice, because at least I get timely updates to add functionality and fix bugs (I started at 8.0, then updated to 8.0.2, 8.1, 8.1.1., 8.1.2, 8.1.3, 8.2 and now 8.3), thanks to Apple being the arbiter of when to get updates, not the cellphone carrier or handset manufacturer.

Nah, just go to a pictograph alphabet. Draw the characters. Easy, simple. I don't know why it isn't used. All my friends use pinyin on QWERTY for input of Chinese characters. But I've never seen one have a draw system. Shouldn't be that hard, the number and types of strokes are pretty consistent. Perhaps it's that Chinese printing is easy, but most don't print. Chinese cursive is inconsistent and confusing.

It's been like this since the P4/Foster Xeon:
Desktop->workstation/1P server->DP server->MP server.

This is the final spin of the Haswell line, Broadwell-EP Xeon's are set to launch at the end of the summer.

The analogy I come up with is:

Would the government need a warrant to compel your mother to turn over all the letters she's sent to you over the years, so they can retro-actively track your location in an attempt to link you to crimes?

I worked for a telco (still do, but outside the US now), and the official policy was to comply, without question, to all court orders (warrants being a subset of court orders). Without a court order, we would be breaking the law (both state and federal) to even confirm Bob Smith was a customer, whether it's the local police, sherrif, state cops, or US President asking. But a court order to turn over records (if any), releases us from from any and all legal liability. It might not be able to stand up in court, but that's not our problem.

Uh, it's nearly as much CPU power (141 cores at 5.2GHz, but even more CISC that x86) as the current mainframe, zSeries hasn't been about brute CPU in decades, it's about balanced CPU and I/O combined with high QoS and absolute stability. As an example the Z13 has nearly 1GB of L4 cache in the I/O coprocessors.

Sounds pretty bad, glad I never had the option to buy from them, so never even faced the temptation.

I've never lived in Comcast's or TWC's coverage areas. I've never had cable.

The issue wasn't that I had to send a letter, but that ATT lied to me for almost a year. They claimed something was "impossible" then did it in a few hours, when I stopped asking nicely. It was a small technical tweak on my line that didn't even need a truck roll. And it was to change it back to the original config. It worked great when I signed up, then they broke it and refused to acknowledge they broke it, until they fixed it. They violated the contract (and law) by changing my service, and lied for months about it, then lied for months after that in reasons why they wouldn't fix it.

I can't compare to Comcast. Never had them. I can tell you what my experience with ATT was. If yours was worse, share it. Otherwise, I don't understand why you are posting just to whine.

I am an MBA. And you don't understand anything because you are too tied up in the "us vs them" ideology.

Something like Steam's daisy wheel perhaps? It wouldn't be perfect since the only inputs would be cardinal directions instead of two separate input surfaces, but probably at least as fast as graffiti and probably more accurate.

You're thinking of the local water company with it's water filtering plants and pipes that lead directly to your home. That is not where fracking is happening. Fracking is done out where there isn't public water and sewer.

Hate to break it to you, but yes, fracking very much IS happening right in the middle of where there are water and sewer service. Both Cleveland and Pittsburgh, the 31st and 23rd largest MSA's in the country are right in the middle of the shale boom and both states have their department of natural resource (exploitation) overruling local control so there's plenty of drilling happening in the middle of communities (my town of 30k took the DNR to the state supreme court to try to block projects after we had several leaking wells contaminate drinking water and local streams)

Cisco is all about software defined, from the Nexus 1000V (full on virtual), to the fact that every single Nexus switch sold today can be controlled through a robust REST based API Cisco has bought the software defined religion. The issue for them is that if you take away their special sauce then you can get 90% of the performance for 10% of the cost and probably 5% of the annual support costs through merchant silicon. Then again as a midsized enterprise I have zero need for a software defined featureset (the 1000V has some potential uses for us, but since it requires Enterprise Plus on the VMWare side and that would be a high 5 to 6 figure expense there's no way it's worth it) , I need a reliable and well supported platform with lots of other folks hitting on it harder than me so that they can find the bugs and have them fixed before I go to the next featuretrain upgrade. There's a reason that folks go with the big players, and it's not that they offer better phone support (dear lord do the not), it's that due to some sort of corollary to the many eyeballs theory if you have many defacto testers you find the bugs faster and get them ironed out before a large percentage of your userbase runs into them (generally).

He's probably talking about a fresh install, not an upgrade. During the first stage GUI installer it won't even ask you if it detects a SLIC key, there are ways around it but it's basically doing the hokey pokey blindfolded for all the advanced user friendliness it provides (ie we know better than you mere mortal)

When I ordered a Dell through the corporate account, we had a choice to order Windows OEM, or Windows Volume. They'd inform MS of the order, as per our agreement, but we could retire a piece of hardware at the same time, and we'd have our licensed volume OS delivered installed (with our corporate image), at something like a $10 cost. But then, this was a 10,000 person company, with a 4 year refresh, so a few thousand computers a year.

Having the corporate image pre-installed on the PCs was great, and only an option with volume licensing. So there is value somewhere, but not for the 100 seat company, they are almost always better buying with OEM installed.

The real reason MS pushes for no no-OS option is they know so many OEM licenses exist that someone retiring a computer could buy one with no OS, then move the OEM onto it, and at least appear compliant at a glance. Move the sticker or swap the case, not a huge deal for a 100 seat place with 3-person IT, generally 2 help desk to do the grunt work, and one "manager" to hire the consultants to do the real work. The help desk guys sit bored, and can spend all day swapping hardware to avoid a license cost.

Volume licensing is often more expensive. A copy of XP from release day to last supported day costs a whole lot less to buy a single retail copy, than to volume license it for most companies. Volume licensing is usually a license rental, while a retail copy is a license purchase (as much as you can purchase a license). This makes a large difference to cost. Even better is when you compare "cheap" licenses to volume. OEM is cheaper than retail, so if you use the OEM options when buying new PCs, you'll get cheaper licenses.

Volume sucks. It's good if you have an unlimited budget and prefer ease of license management. But "unlimited budget" doesn't describe anywhere I've ever worked.