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Comment This is confusing to me... (Score 3, Interesting) 58

This is confusing to me. My job is literally installing Dynamics software for people. (Disclaimer: If you're offered that job, consider suicide as a better career path.)

Microsoft has put tons of money into their enterprise products. They're absolute piss and crash after a fresh install, but the work is still there. What good would acquiring Salesforce be for Microsoft? The only thing I can think of is that their software sucks so bad, they're going to eliminate their competitors by buying them. Because taking one gigantic, bloated, aging set of codebases (which have trouble even talking to each other!), and buying someone else's gigantic bloating, aging set of codebases, and finding some way to merge them into something new... that seems insane.

Comment Re:Which is why we disguise cell towers (Score 2) 216

I was under the impression that my private business with my cellular phone provider was just that, private, and without a warrant this information in the form of 'papers and effects' was supposed to be subject to 4th Amendment protections unless sought via warrant process...

Let's see, how does that go? Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Ammo?

We seem to be at Jury...and it's not going well.

What's that other one? "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Hmm, what to do, what to do...?

Strat

Comment Re:Mainframe era? (Score 3, Interesting) 46

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.

Comment Re:Is this Google's fault? (Score 4, Insightful) 434

Seriously. This is the only sentence in TFS that matters:

The author also says OEMs and carriers can no longer be trusted to handle operating system updates, because they've proven themselves quite incapable of doing so in a reasonable manner.

This has nothing to do with Google. Maybe Google is at fault for not making updates mandatory, but that would have been a completely different set of issues.

Comment Re:so if they had been aboveboard about ownership. (Score 1) 71

The fact that they seeded the files did raise questions about distribution and permission (on comment sites like this one, anyway), but that issue was never adjudicated. The lawyer attacking Prenda (Morgan Pietz) showed evidence that the seeder's IP address was linked to the offices of Prenda Law (the law firm nominally representing the holding company), which raised questions as to why the attorneys representing the plaintiff were distributing the plaintiff's material (they were in fact the same people, if different legal entities - although, again, never conclusively proven). The various Prenda and holding company stakeholders eventually invoked their fifth amendment rights to not incriminate themselves, which raised further eyebrows since to that point it was not a criminal proceeding against them. There were several hearings where they were all ordered to appear, but they were never all in the same place and seemed to blame whoever wasn't there, while never actually admitting that any wrongdoing had taken place.

I'm not positive on your other question, I believe that an attorney is not ethically allowed to represent himself if he is also the beneficiary of the settlement, so they would have needed to hire a different attorney to represent them. Being attorneys themselves, they figured they would skip that step and just conceal their relationship to the court (note: courts do not appreciate this). That's what I think, anyway, it seems like if they were just able to say that they own the copyrights and be done with it then they would have done that, so I think the reason they didn't is to avoid paying fees to another attorney when they thought they could do the job themselves.

Submission + - Mysterious X-rays at the center of the galaxy

schwit1 writes: The x-ray space telescope NuSTAR has detected high energy x-rays at the center of the Milky Way coming from no obvious source.

In and of themselves, X-rays from the galactic center aren't unusual. But the X-rays NuSTAR detects don't seem to be associated with structures already known to exist. For example, a supernova remnant named Sgr A East emits low-energy X-rays but not high-energy X-rays. The high-energy blotch doesn't correlate with structures seen in radio images either, such as the dust and gas clouds of Sgr A West that are falling toward the supermassive black hole.

Instead, Perez and her colleagues propose that thousands of stellar corpses could be responsible for the high-energy X-rays: massive (and still-growing) white dwarfs, spun-up pulsars, or black holes or neutrons stars feeding on low-mass companion stars.

All of their proposed solutions, however, have serious problems explaining all of the data.

Comment Re:Not the first, but more useful for today (Score 2) 288

I used to work at a place that got a virus similar to your code. A user got it from a bad floppy and the EGA monitors kept blowing up (the user's and 2 more I hooked it up to). I finally hooked it to a Hercules monochrome monitor and the screen came up. I looked up the virus on a virus vendor's BBS system and printed removal instructions and removed it.

Submission + - Astronaut drink the first home-brewed coffee in space

schwit1 writes: In addition to drinking the first home-brewed coffee in space, the astronauts also used a 3-D printed mug, though the printing took place not in space but on Earth.

Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, dressed in a "Star Trek" captain's uniform, became the first person in space to sip from a freshly-made cup of coffee on Sunday (May 3), using the International Space Station's newly-installed espresso machine.

Submission + - Extreme secrecy eroding support for Obama's trade pact (politico.com)

schwit1 writes: Classified briefings and bill-readings in basement rooms are making members queasy.

f you want to hear the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the Obama administration is hoping to pass, you've got to be a member of Congress, and you've got to go to classified briefings and leave your staff and cellphone at the door.

If you're a member who wants to read the text, you've got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving.

And no matter what, you can't discuss the details of what you've read.

"It's like being in kindergarten," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who's become the leader of the opposition to President Barack Obama's trade agenda. "You give back the toys at the end."

For those out to sink Obama's free trade push, highlighting the lack of public information is becoming central to their opposition strategy: The White House isn't even telling Congress what it's asking for, they say, or what it's already promised foreign governments.

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