It is neat, I'll give it that. However, we've been building pneumatic Lego 'engines' for decades. They are all over Youtube and other places. The sheer scale of this is impressive but I don't know that "genius" is the right word here.
With this business philosophy, one could have regional offices that collect this knowledge and store documents of it in little cannisters. When someone in one region needs to access the knowledge from a different region, they could send a request and have that cannister (with the relevant document inside) sent along a pneumatic piping system, just like at the bank teller window. One could call this business The National Tube Service, or simply The Tubes(tm).
On 12/12/12, the wheels were set in motion for the 12/21/12 Apocalypse.
A chain reaction of low-orbit and geostationary satellite collisions cause flaming satellite debris to rain down from the sky in a cataclysmic event. Now that Twinkies have been phased out, not even cockroaches have survived.
I've had several collections of 'throwaway' computers, with my last 486 and P100 going to that big recycling heap in the sky a few years back.
Right now, I've got nothing super old, but I've been keeping an AMD K6-II alive through the ages. It was my first IBM-compatible machine (after a C= plus/4) and I still use it regularly as a development box (Debian Stable in console mode all around. vi, gcc, perl, ssh, ftp, lynx. What more do you need?).
It is fortunate to have 2(!) USB ports on an add-in interface, so I can still plug a MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and modern optical mouse. Most of the hardware is original and all works, but the three things I've had to replace periodically are the optical drives (several), cpu fan (twice) and memory (twice). Up until about 5 years ago, compatible parts were plentiful from old computers, but I haven't seen the right sized fan or any SDRAM for the picking in ages, and it's now getting harder and harder to find IDE anything, even used.
I still enjoy the hell out of my i5 (and other smatterings of computers lying about) but I'll be sad when I have to put the ol K6 down.
He speaks of compromising a $300 billion industry
Just because there is some 'industry' where some arbitrarily large amount of money is exchanged, it doesn't mean it has any right to exist at all.
This is different, but about as justifiable as the "too big to fail" arguments of yore.
"The Cloud" is only good as secondary backup if you don't care that it becomes public.
Encrypt it all you want. Access to your data is the hardest hurdle and by using the could you give it away.
But.. but.. but... smartphones and virtualization and...and...and...free community wireless internet over dark fiber!!!
(Yes, I'm just being silly. Having a slow day at work and the free coffee sucks)
Further proof that tablets and the Cloud(tm) are the paradigm shift into the new memesphere. Nobody needs big, bulky Iron from folks like IBM, HP, EMC, etc.
We'll do it all now on clustered iPads! With Retina Displays! Surfing the web is dead, now we're Hangliding in The Cloud(tm)!!!!
Perhaps Linux needs a minimalist leader. Throw everything out. Then step by step, bring back features and see what works, and what doesn't. In the process make sure that everything has a consistent look and feel.
Believe it or not, that used to be Ubuntu. Back 8 or 10 years ago, there were all these distributions that offered 'choice!' by loading the biggest Gnome or KDE desktop crammed to the gills with EVERY and I mean EVERY app that was available. Stable, beta, working or not. You opened a panel and there were 17 calculators to choose from, 23 IRC clients, about 15 web browsers, 7 different terminal apps... you get the idea. Most of it was half-broken shit.
The beauty of Ubuntu in the beginning (I thought) was that they cut out all of that. You got a nice, slick installer that installed Debian Unstable (which we'd all known for years was fine for everyday use) with a slick graphical installer. You booted up to a nicely themed Gnome desktop with only the best ONE of each type of application installed. They were smart about choosing what apps to include by default, and I felt that their choices resonated very closely with experienced linux users who generally all agreed on the best app for a particular usage. The whole Debian repository was mirrored and available, but you didn't have to dig through a bunch of crap to find the stuff that you most likely would have chosen to install yourself. Configs were all clicky-clicky, but all your fave debian cli tools like aptitude still worked as expected.
I really thought that Ubuntu was going to become the polished distro that brought Year Of The Linux Desktop(tm) from fantasy to reality. I still think that they had a real chance to pull that off. (At least up until about 8.0, then it started to get weird).
My $0.02 plus tax.
We're talking about Sweden, Finland and Russia.
40 years is a metric century.
So first Facebook's algorithm hides my posts from my friends for reasons known only to Facebook.
Now Facebook is testing the option so I can pay so that my posts they hid will actually show to my friends.
In a way, I really hope Facebook goes through with this, maybe it'll be the straw that finally breaks the camels back and we can get a new social network that actually cares about its users.
While I agree that the new features are silly and a thinly veiled attempt at capitalizing upon the public, shall we all remember that when we post things on Facebook, we are voluntarily using a free service on the Internet? At any point we are all free to delete our account, ignore the parts we don't like, or otherwise not participate in it as a social networking site.
Shit, we may even decide to go outside, into the Big Blue Room and talk to actual people, face to face!
Enjoy your 30's buddy
You ain't ever gonna get that back
Unfortunately I'm all too aware of this.
Or, you know, actually worked a job.
Where did the idea come from that students should just play during the 20-30 working hours a week that they're not in class?
20-30? I wish. For me it's more like 40-60. And after talking to many of my fellow classmates, I'm fortunate. At least I don't have children.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
