Plastic not as strong as steel!

On a related subject. Plastic doesn't hold up to the extreme heat generated by multiple rounds as well as steel.

If you didn't see this coming, you are on track to earn a Darwin.

Microsoft:
3 months ending 2013-06-30:
Revenue: 19.896 Billion USD
Cost of goods/revenue sold: 5.602 Billion USD
Gross Profit: 14.294 Billion USD
Source:
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&fstype=ii&ei=wcBTUtihB8z2qQHI8AE

Out of their costs of goods sold, these researchers got 0.00049982%.
Me thinks their contribution to M$ is more than a few 10,000ths of 1%. They did what the 5.6 billion spent on internal people failed to do. And M$ doesn't have to pay their healthcare.

The cost of the meeting (hourly pay, room, overhead, etc.) for a bunch of execs at Microsoft to figure out how little to give these guys most likely cost more than 28,000 USD.

One can't help but to note that they gave the Google employees just enough to pay for dinner in downtown Palo Alto.

What a joke. Face book should fire the guy costing 150,000 USD a year ( take home pay and all in cost to FB are not the same ) who wrote the offending code.

500 USD for a bug is an insult. How much do their QC people make a month? They failed, and they are getting a lot more than 500 USD.

We can start another war and re-build the data set.

One solar flare pointed in the wrong direction and they will fry before they get there. Without science fiction, there is no practical shielding tech that offers a solution (a room with 6 inch think lead walls is heavier than you think). Keep in mind, if you have a heavy shielding solution and you get that thing up to speed, slowing down becomes a problem. You could end up flying right past Mars. You could bring some big thrusters to slow you down. Oh wait, that is more weight. Or you could use some superconducting magnets to deflect the charged particles. But then you'll have figure out how to get the spaceship to run without computers. Computers and huge magnetic fields don't mix. And superconducting magnets are extremely heavy. Don't worry. We'll just do it the way they do it in Star Wars.

Are they going to land on the surface? I doubt it. The atmosphere makes it very hard to land anything larger than the rover without making a new crater. If you landed, you would have supplies for a few hours before death. You can't do it with parachutes. You need a big rocket to slow you done. Oops. A lot more weight.

It goes on and on. Mars is distraction. Money and energy should be spent on more practical projects. We'll all be dead from a antibiotic resistant super-bug before we have any hope of putting someone on Mars.

China's whole tax system works on a printed documents called a fapiao (fa-piao).
Every company in China has at least one dedicated machine with a special dot matrix printer to print fapiaos.
The software to print fapiaos only runs on Windows XP.

It can not be understated how critical fapiaos are to China's tax system. Big companies use them to pay the 17% VAT (some services and logistics companies pay less than 17%). If you lose the fapiao you get from your supplier, you might as we have lost actual cash. You must have it to offset the VAT you owe. During your annual tax review, you must have fapiaos to keep your taxes low. These are so important, there is a booming business in faking fapiaos. This is mostly done through fake transactions. Faking the actual fapiao is not so easy these days. Each fapiao carries a unique number and can the traced.

If you go out to eat, you can demand a fapiao. For westerners, this can be submitted to reduce your taxes. The top tax rate is 45%, so fapiaos are very valuable. For local Chinese, they submit them as a business/company expense. For people working in restaurants, this is a source of extra cash. If a customer doesn't ask for a fapiao, the employees can print one anyway. On the black market, these can be sold for 5-10 cents on the dollar. The same applies to cab drivers. Many passengers don't take their receipt. The receipt is a valid fapiao that can be used to reduce taxes. The cab drivers will sell them for extra cash. Just ask. :)

Does no one remember Nokia?

Their new strategy will be to strike a deal with M$ and then develop solely for the Windows Phone because everything else is a waste of time.

They would know that people who execute a lot of trades get big discounts. HUGE discounts. If you are doing more than 20,000 or 100,000 trades a month, you start to trade at a fraction of the cost of a normal investor.
http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=commission&p=futures3

With this fee structure, a HFT can get in and out and make money. A normal trader would lose money on the exact same trade. For the average guy, the trade might be profitable, but the trade commission is greater than the profit. Exchanges give a lot of incentives to traders who bring big volume.

I have a major issue with a system where two different traders make the exact same trade, but one loses money while the other makes a profit.
I'm not suggesting eliminating the lower fees for more active traders. I would like to see the gap between the highest commission and the lowest commission close. This simple change would work wonders to level the playing field. If the highest commission was limited to 130% of the lowest commission, the high frequency traders would lose most of their advantage.

One area the US has dominated is all things internet. We don't focus on manufacturing things, so the internet is somewhat important to us. We provide a huge number of great services to the world. We might find that we have done billions in dollars in damage in the name of fighting terrorism. This is self inflicted. We may have already done more damage than any terrorist could ever dream of doing. Governments around the world may start to ban using internet companies based in the US or with US operations for their government workers. Public companies around the world have a duty to keep non-public data non-public. MS 360 is all about the cloud. This product might be DOA. Skype, Linked In, Facebook, etc. You don't want your banking data, business plans, unreleased financial data, etc. being accessed illegally. What is worse, is that this might have nothing to do with terrorism, and more to do with spying:
www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

What to do now? Invest as fast as you can in every little internet company outside the US that provides services that might compete against the US giants. Once they get a little momentum, they could take off and make huge profits.

It was for the US to lose. We chose this path. The traitors should be shot for treason (This is slashdot. Irony never seems to be understood. I'm not talking the guy in HK), but that will never happen.

So the Microsoft Studios Creative Director's views have no impact on what he does at work? He has nothing to do with Microsoft. Wow. Then why is he a director? These Microsoft Corp. Comm. people are more disconnected from reality than I expected.

By the way, the new Windows 360 Office for 2013 ( or whatever it is called ) is moving towards always on cloud connectivity. And directors at Microsoft are actually idiots who have no impact on product direction. Give me a break. First, fire the Creative Director for speaking the truth. Next fire the Microsoft Corp. Comm. for regurgitating canned responses that makes the company look dumb.

I think I got a lemon. I know other people with similar Thinkpad models and they haven't had as many problem as I have. I do use this thing 12+ hours a day 7 days a week. The surface of common keys shows all the wear I've put on it in 1 1/2 years.

I agree. The weight is nice. I would have a lot of trouble switching to a machine without a ThinkPad keyboard and red dot mouse. I haven't tried the battery in the ultra bay. Perhaps I should buy one. Speakers on the T420s are much better than the previous generation, but still short of being great.

On my last ThinkPad ( I think it was a T40? ), one of the two screen brackets broke. I wasn't amused. I get 5+ years out of Nokia phones. The damn things would never break on me - even long after I was ready to upgrade. I'd like to see ThinkPads run the same way. I want to retire the machine and upgrade when I'm ready. Not buy a new one because the old one is shot. I'm careful with equipment. I don't think the problems are due to rough handling.

I remember my first ThinkPad. It cost my employer more than 1 month of my salary. Of course I promptly spilled a cup of coffee all over the keyboard. I was amazed how the in-house IT guy had it cleaned up and going again in 30 minutes. The machine was designed with common problems in mind. It was great!

I've been using Thinkpads since 1997. I currently have a T420s. The machine cost 2K USD with Windows tax for Win7 Professional and Office Professional. It is 1 1/2 years old. Here is my list of problems:

1. The side USB 2.0 port came off the mother board. I'm super careful, but ports get tugged on from time to time. Last week I opened up the machine, and the connection had been tacked to the mother board with two tiny bits of solder. I used a solder gun and 10 minutes to fix it myself. Ports need strong connections to something solid!
2. Same with the power cable. The connection is bad. I have to pull the power cable wire to the left to get it to keep the power on.
3. The computer doesn't always go to sleep when the lid is closed. If I don't notice, I close the machine, put it in my bag, the machine overheats and then it blue screens.
4. There is 1 USB 3.0 port on the back. I know USB 3.0 was new when the machine came out 1.5 years ago, but it has never worked. USB 2.0 peripherals that work in the other ports don't work in the USB 3.0 port.
5. The machine occasionally freezes/locks up for 5-10 seconds at a time (random timing, but it happens about once ever 30 seconds). Removing the battery, disconnecting the power and letting the machine site for 10-15 minutes seems to fix this problem. I've run the Lenovo diagnostics program. I've watched the diagnostics program freeze and sputter. Then it tells me everything is 100% good to go. I have no idea where the problem is coming from. Mother board, Video, CPU, RAM (I've switch out the RAM, it didn't help). Once the problem goes away, I have about 1 week before it comes back. This started in the last week of the 1 year warranty.
6. "Access Connections" is a train wreck. When it works, it is ok. If you want to delete a location, you highlight it, hit "delete" and it deletes the record above. At this very minute, "Access Connections" shows no connection. I'm running on Win7's network connection. Tomorrow it might be working normally again. What if you are in a new location and mistype the password? If the log in fails, it should ask you if you want to re-enter the password. Instead you have to go modify the record.
7. Battery life is crazy. I run on batteries about 6 times a year. The rest of the time I'm plugged in. Last time I was in an airport, I had 45 minutes until the machine shut down. That is with a dimmed screen. I would rather have 1 light battery for daily use (so I can get from my desk to a conference room) and a heavy battery for travel. When I know I want 6 hours of work time during a flight. Instead I have something in the middle that does both functions poorly.
8. After about a year, the fan got loud. I think the bearings are shot.
9. Track pad went out two months ago. I could care less. I use the little red dot 100% of the time.
10. (design gripe) The screen is 900 pixels from top to bottom. Once you add Window's bars, application boarders, menus, I'm working in this tinsy tiny window. My cell phone has 900 pixels up and down! Left and right I have huge fields of unused white space. Most documents and websites are much taller than they are wide. Therefore Lenovo gives you a screen that is much wider than it is tall. I've been wondering if I can write business plans(or Java) the same way they wrote ancient Chinese - up to down instead of left to right. It would fit the screen much better. Lenovo thinks their business laptops are used for nothing other than watching movies. I think this shows how well they understand their customers these days.

I am their ideal client. I will happily pay a 2-400 USD premium for a "business laptop". I want to run databases, huge Excel spread sheets, occasionally write a little code. If I could pay a little extra for a more reliable machine, it is worth it to me. The cost of unplanned downtime is higher.

Mod up parent.

It's being tracked that freaks techies out. Not the ads.

I generally think that IT people are hired for their thirst for knowledge and self motivation. If someone can't gain the skills needed on their own with a test environment and a book / youtube / manuals, there is a problem. Actually I would encourage any such person who requires a class to go join a big company that will spoon-feed them, wipe their ass for them and maybe offer them union membership.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to everything. For nuclear control systems it might be a good idea to go to the class. For the latest version of XYZ from Microsoft, people shouldn't need to sit in a class. This was true 5 years ago. Today we have stackoverflow & stackexchange. If you need help, go get it.

The people who bought these should be punished. Publicly. Then they should be barred for life from public service.
Then the people who hired these fools should be punished. Publicly. And barred for life from public service.

Come on people. Firing is easy. It is hiring that is hard.