I had a job in the 1990s working for a company most of you would have never heard of, but we got most of our money from the airline industry. It was a good job and I left it in the early 2000s basically to chase a higher paycheck. I can tell you that it was amazing to see how resistant to change and cheap our airline customers were. I'm not going to go into specifics but I can tell you all that if you knew what they were paying us to do for them, your jaw would drop. I don't want to name it because they may still be stupid enough to pay for it today, but basically they were paying us to do something for them that they could have done themselves for a fraction of the cost - that's how change resistant they are. Updating computer systems costs money and they don't like to spend money. Delta Airlines did a major IT upgrade in the 2010s and this was after major meltdowns that hurt them. Remember how in recent years Southwest Airlines kept having major iT meltdowns? Well, that was Delta in the 2010s and earlier. Delta finally got a CEO who pushed through a major upgrade. And Southwest has finally started upgrading their ancient scheduling system that kept melting down and cost them a fortune in lost revenue. So yeah, I'm not surprised at all that American Airlines only uses 2 digits for a person's age. American is easily the worst run major airline in the USA, being change resistant, cheap and stupid, so I would expect nothing less.

I'm trying to remember the particulars about something that happened a very long time ago...
I remember reading that the reason that Bill Gates got the contract with IBM to write the OS for their PC line was that Gates actually met with IBM staff and showed them around the Microsoft offices and was very interested in getting the contract. One of his competitors blew off meeting with IBM because he had vacation scheduled and his attitude was something like "Hey IBM. You can talk to me after I get back from vacation." Was Kildall that guy?

My best friend works in IT for a privately held company in a major US metropolitan area. I have forgotten the name of his company. Almost none of you would have heard of it anyway. Their business segment is so specialized that probably almost none of you who read this comment would even work for a company that might use his company for what they provide. Anyway, he's been there roughly 10 years. About 5 years ago, they started laying off some US based staff and replacing them with offshore people who live and work in India. They even replaced one of my friend's US based colleagues who was an Indian guy with a Green Card. About 2-3 years ago the company decided that the offshore India staff "cost too much" so they made 100% of them go on contracts that they can cancel at any time. They have started slowly but surely replacing the India based staff with people in Nepal. Now the based in India staff are seriously worried about losing their jobs to people in Nepal. All I can say is that the race to the bottom to cut salaries on IT workers can't end in anything good. I have no idea who this company would go to next if people in Nepal get "too expensive".

I'm not a lawyer. But I ask my lawyer friends questions all the time so I do know some stuff.

Another post says that the couple had started a divorce but had not entered into any negotiations. So the article is very unclear, but based on the seemingly weird reactions of the judge and the husband, this seems to be correct - the couple actually was headed for divorce, just not today. The judge gave the wife a hint, that while he isn't going to undo the court ruling because from his perspective the proper procedure was followed and it's not his fault that a dumbass jumped the gun on the forms, she does have the ability to potentially undo the divorce by suing her lawyers instead. My guess is that they won't make that clear to her.

I don't need to watch that. Let me bottom line it for you.

If the United States continues as a democracy, the tax system will never change. It's simply not possible in our current state of democracy to make major changes like revamping the tax system.

If the United States turns into a Republican Party led single party dictatorship, then it's possible depending on who is running things that the tax system will go away completely, perhaps change to a flat tax system, or make whatever changes the head guy wants, which could include no taxes at all on businesses and more taxes on individuals, particularly lower income people.

My God, you're stupid. Absolutely nothing is as you depict it. You must be a Russian or Chinese troll.

First, Russia. Russia could have joined NATO. They didn't want to. You know why? Because the whole Russian psyche thing is about how they are better than everybody, including their friends in China, and they don't need anybody's help. Having actually spent a good deal of time in the past in Ukraine, I can tell you that most Ukrainians just want to live in peace and be part of the EU. Russia doesn't want them to exist because having presidents who don't stay in power forever shows Russians that they could have that too. The whole "NATO caused this" excuse is just wrong.

Second, just so your dumb ass knows, the CCP has literally never ruled Taiwan. They could also live in peace with Taiwan and turn China into a giant democracy but they don't want to. The CCP wants to stay in power forever. That makes democratic governments, particularly ones that show that such governments can actually work for ethnic Chinese people, a threat to China. I'm going to be blunt here - China would destroy the entire world if they could before the CCP would give up power. Again, they could be just like India, but they don't want to because their leaders don't want to live in a world in which Chinese people aren't held down by Communism. Taiwan doesn't belong to the CCP and it never has. Taiwan's actual status was deliberately left unsettled and vague by the treaties that ended WW2. Your Puerto Rico example doesn't work. Puerto Ricans have voted on their status and the US didn't interfere.

Believe me when I tell you that there is no future in which China and Russia in their current forms survive and there isn't another World War about it. And that shit will all be because they started it.

I really don't get how you can say that ant modded up to 5 points here, so let me help you. There are pros and cons to both from China's perspective, but they vastly prefer Trump. Here's why.

1. Xi doesn't understand democratic societies, so he sometimes makes mistakes in dealing with them. He understands dictators. If Trump becomes president again, it's possible that there will never again be another presidential election in the USA. That is something Xi understands and can deal with.
2. Despite some talk between them, Trump's relationship with Kim of North Korea was mostly stable, something that China will like.
3. Trump is hugely isolationist so the US will back away from allied countries, which benefits China.
4. Trump was desperate to get a trade deal, any kind of trade deal, from Xi 4 years ago and Xi mismanaged this. Trump will want some kind of bs trade deal that he can take to the US public and claim he "won" against China, even if it accomplishes nothing. "Do whatever you want to Taiwan" may be a price he is willing to pay to get even a bad trade deal. Trump might also signal China that in exchange for even a bad trade deal, they can send all the military hardware they want to Russia to end the war in Ukraine in Russia's favor. This will also be in China's benefit as it will solidify Putin and Putinism as a political method for Putin's eventual successor to follow. Xi understands Putinism.

The only plus to a Biden presidency for China is that Biden won't attack China and while it's unlikely that Trump will, it's not impossible that Trump would completely flip out against China for who knows what reason.

No they didn't. This is no more true than claiming that Trump won the 2020 election.

Well, that's why you think the cheating is true. My cousin is exactly the same as you.

You're right in that's not why she lost. She lost because the stupid FBI director said about 1 week before the election that he had new emails to investigate about Hillary and that drove around 100% of the undecided voters into the Trump camp. That's why she lost.

I wish I could mod you up, but I don't comment a lot and I don't get a lot of points. I'm pretty sure that studies have shown that if you don't have kids or a spouse/partner who depends a lot on your income that you'd be better off putting that money into a 401K/IRA in the USA.

Here's a brief summary of guesses on what happened.

1) Murder-suicide by pilot. Pilot supposed had a personal flight simulator at home that had a suspicious flight path on it. Malaysia Airlines refuses to agree to this, but most investigators think it's what happened.
2) Some kind of decompression event happened and the plane continued on autopilot until it crashed although everybody on it was already dead.
3) US military supposedly shot it down for getting too close to Diego Garcia. But absolutely nobody has provided any evidence to support this. Seems hard to believe the US would actually do this after the 1980s uproar when the Soviets shot down a civilian Korean Air jet.
4) One guy is convinced the plane was hijacked and flown to Kazakstan. But he has no explanation for the parts of the plane that washed up and no real explanation as to why it was hijacked beyond Russia did it for some unknown reason. His best wild guess is that Russia wanted to capture 20 employees of a chip manufacturer, but 8 of the 20 were Chinese citizens. Hard to believe Russia would kidnap Chinese citizens.

They apparently have US managers with no direct reports. I'll explain shortly.

Back in the first part of the 2000s, I had a job in a US branch of a European telco. I'm not going to name the company because frankly most Americans have never heard of who I worked for and I don't want to give them even bad publicity. I want to keep it so Americans don't know who they are. My entire department got laid off. They did give us 6 months of warning before the layoffs took place, which I appreciated, and I left for another job. My manger kept his job and had 2 employees when we all left. Those were 2 older guys who had previously been laid off, got temporarily rehired, and their job was to stay for another year to shut down and ship out all the computers we had in our small computer room. My manager kept his job for I guess maybe 10 more years and retired. As far as I know the 2 older guys were gone about 1 year after us and my manager never again had direct reports, but he kept his job. Other managers in this US office were retained with no direct reports anywhere. I to this day have no idea what exactly these managers did, but our European management was convinced that they were so critical to the company that they had to stay while the employees who did the real work could go.

My ex-sister-in-law has a relative who for 20+ years has been a manager at some US IBM office, but he hasn't had any direct reports for more than a decade now. Yet he remains gainfully employed. All I can tell you is that when your company thinks it needs to keep all the managers and get rid of all the employees, good things don't follow.

I spent almost 14 years recently working for a Fortune 500 company. My severance package doesn't allow me to name them - yet. But I can tell you that they often made decisions on finding another company to blame if stuff went wrong. For example, my department used completely free Linux versions for years but eventually they made us switch to a commercial variant so we had someone to blame if anything went wrong with it. When I was last there, we were starting to move a few customers to AWS instead of putting them in our own owned and managed data centers. The AWS environment really sucked for the few customers on it as it wasn't as fast as what we did ourselves, but management loved it because if anything went wrong at all on it, we could blame Amazon and it would buy us time to fix it. So some of those companies may just be looking to pass the blame off and that's the real reason they haven't looked beyond VMware.

I sadly have no mod points to give you, but this was a great post and I'm hoping someone else will do so.

Sigh. As an old friend of mine used to say, "I buy them books and I buy them books and what do they do? They eat the pages."

No, of course I don't mean a VM running on that ancient hardware. I meant just copy the system to a VM running on some modern hardware. There may be a really good reason for not doing it, but your reply didn't help except with the sort of vague reference to old cards that might possibly need to physically exist.

Does anybody know a good reason why they wouldn't use VMs for this? You can easily clone your existing system into a VM and the VM would offer so many advantages like not having to worry about repairing really ancient hardware.