I sailed past Peleliu in 1994, the 50th anniversary of the battle. It was horrible to see that insignificant hunk of rock where so many young men died for... what, exactly? It was dubiously important in the first place and looked an awful lot like other rocky islands I'd seen, which drove home the utter futility and waste that it represents. It was a very emotional experience and I'm getting choked up now remembering it.

I'd be perfectly happy never seeing another battlefield in my life.

My thoughts exactly. I'd love to do the 8,000m peaks but unfortunately I don't do well above ~12,000ft so I have to keep to smaller mountains (just got done with Mt Washington and a few surrounding mountains last week).

Nope. Our customers have experienced all of the bad things you've heard about with Wipro and their ilk.

And yes, there are plenty of stereotypical brogrammer worker bees as well. I was just highlighting the fact that putting these types in charge just breeds more of them over time as they try to act like the boss.

So?

Hmm, let's put thousands and thousands of socially maladjusted techies together in one region, appoint a bunch of hypersocialized "brogrammer" types as their bosses, and see what happens. What could possibly go wrong???

I work in the "tech industry" but I work for a specialized IT services firm, which is almost the polar opposite of a bubble-fueled Internet startup. I watched the dotcom bubble inflate and pop, and now this one's on the way out too. By contrast, the people I work with are totally normal. Some have their quirks, but we have very few jerks. Steve Jobs may be the poster child for "tech visionary" but people conveniently forget that he was an absolute jerk and people hated to work for him. In my mind, anyone who emulates that is someone I definitely don't want to work with.

The "techie asshole" personality really does feed on itself. Take a bunch of recent grads with no real world experience and put them under someone trying to channel Jobs, Zuckerberg or similar. Pretty soon, everyone starts acting like that. I'm not surprised at how much sexual harassment goes on in these environments given this fact. It doesn't help that the press is falling all over itself to pump these guys up and give them superhuman status. Yes, smartphones are cool. Yes, people are walking around with $800 touchscreen computers in their pockets that let them do more than they used to. But in my mind, all these late-bubble-stage startups are doing is creating one-off websites competing for everyone's attention. No one's really inventing much new -- it's all about advertising, page views and the sale of your personal data. Some stuff that has come out in the last few years is extremely cool, but a lot of it seems a lot like the very late 90s when the bubble was the frothiest it had been and everyone is piling on hoping to cash out before the big pop.

I use HDMI from my tablet to TVs in hotel rooms when traveling.

Oh, please. How many people are paying to run Skype on a system that can't or won't be upgraded to Snow Leopard? Supporting Leopard means that Microsoft can't use APIs released in the last 5 years. They probably have to support x86-32 or PPC processors (which is the reason most people on Leopard are still on Leopard). They have to use relatively ancient tools to compile the packages.

All that, or they can just decide to never, ever upgrade the underlying protocol to handle new security requirements or additional features.

I can't for the life of me figure why MS would want to bother to keep supporting that old code. What's the return on investment for keeping someone's PPC Mac limping along? Or perhaps that's it: they want to make it easy for people to stay on stone age hardware to try and compel Apple to have to support it. Sounds conspiratorial, but I'm hard pressed to think on a non-conspiracy explanation that satisfies Occam's Razor.

Also, Microsoft is killing support for their own WP7, whose last release came out less than a year and a half ago. So much for your assertion, huh? Maybe they've just decided that supporting a 5 year old OS X version has a better business case than Windows Phone 7, which is very likely true.

Late 1970's tech vs 1960's SAM.

Sure, though somewhere on the net I've read a better technical explanation of how the modification was performed and how he Dani kept his equipment running despite intense NATO HARM coverage (basically he observed flight corridors, used short pulses of radar when he knew craft were along those corridors, and kept the main radar on the launcher off until the last second only using remote antennas that were positioned far enough from the launcher that a missile strike would not take out the crew or SAM)

The F117 that was lost in the Balkans NATO mission in 1999 was shot down by an S-125 modified to use longer wavelenths than the RAM paint on the aircraft would absorb. The issue has been known since then and it's very likely that the F22 and F35 low observability design characteristics have taken this into account as much as physics and material science will allow.

Oh, that weird-ass thing that Miguel invented to try to drag the Linux crowd away from multi-vendor, vetted languages? Yeah, I've heard of it.

When the original Panama Canal was built, there were huge engineering problems that couldn't be easily solved. What will be interesting to see is how quickly this one will be completed with modern technology, modern medicine against tropical diseases, etc. I thought there were plans to widen the existing Panama Canal - were those scrapped?

The other interesting thing to see is China making these huge investments in other countries. Having a competitor for the Panama Canal would really change international trade. I also heard China is investing heavily in Africa and the Middle East, basically for leverage against the US and Europe. It may be one telecom billionaire making the investment, but I'm sure the Chinese government is going to do anything it can to help.

One of the things most people see as a bug but I see as a feature with China is their ability to just do things. There's no debate, no fighting with Congress, etc...they can just tell millions of people to move out of the way of an infrastructure project (e.g. Three Gorges Dam.) That's going to be a huge advantage they have over the West during this century. Another big shift that China is basically just making happen by fiat is the forced urbanization of the country...moving peasant farmers off their land and into cities (which is what those "Ghost Cities" are supposed to be for.) Just look at the fights that happen when someone's land is claimed by eminent domain for a construction project in the US...none of that happens there, and anyone who complains is marginalized.

On one hand, some people might say they paid a huge amount of money for a product that had this (locked) functionality built in, and they have the right to hack it. On another, it's not a trivial amount of effort to write the software that does the analysis, so I could see why a company wants to protect its intellectual property. Otherwise, why would they bother? They would have to ship the device at a higher price to cover the cost of developing the features.

I think the solution here is for the companies to implement reasonable security. Cisco is famous (at least lately) for shipping crippled hardware that is fully capable of performing the functions that are unlocked by various licenses. They implement it as a soft key that ties in with the device serial number (i.e. pay your money, go online to Cisco, give them the license code and your serial number, and they give back another code to enter into the device. And presto, instant feature. Another example I have right here at work is an IBM DS3500 disk array. There are feature keys for everything -- volume snapshots, remote copy, SSD support, increased number of hosts, and a very mysterious, strangely named "Turbo Performance" option [1]. So this is nothing new -- my disk array is running the base configuration and I'm fully aware the controllers in it are shipped with these capabilities. It's weird having to buy $10K pieces of paper, but I see why they do it.

It seems like Tektronix was relying on security through obscurity and they assumed no one would try to build hardware keys to work around their feature protection. HP recently did something similar with the ProLiant and Integrity server line that Oracle/Sun did a while back -- they simply stated that no firmware upgrades would be available on their machines without a warranty or service contract. As someone why buys old hardware for fun, it makes it difficult to get it to the last firmware that HP released for it. But, fixing firmware isn't free, so there's that angle as well. I think the HP/Sun/Oracle stuff is aimed more at forcing you to buy service from them, so it's a little different.

[1] Side note - even the reseller who sold us the device couldn't tell us what Turbo Performance did. After a lot of digging, I figured out that this option is used when you add tons of disk shelves to the array, and it lifts an artificial performance cap on the controllers.

It has a huge Wife Acceptance Factor, for one. We have iPhone apps that let you select any of the movies I've ripped onto it and play them back directly to our Apple TV (or any of another of settop boxes). Throw music onto it and the songs show up in iTunes for people on our LAN. Save a file to a certain folder on our laptop home directories and it gets synced to the NAS (ala Dropbox), made available on our iPads, then backed up to Amazon Glacier.

In short, it does everything you'd ever want a NAS to do but smoothly and nicely. My DS412+ replaced the FreeBSD system I'd assembled and installed from scratch, because there's other stuff I'd rather be doing and because I couldn't possibly make the experience as pleasant as Synology has.