I misread the title at first, thinking they wanted to buy back the Xbox itself. My first thought was "No, I got 33% of the refurb/retail-used price by donating it to Goodwill and taking the tax deduction."
And my kids grades are slightly higher. Win-Win.
I picked up a Win8 phone back while working at MSFT, in an effort to be a good corporate citizen. Never really used it much, so it stayed in pretty good clean shape. When one of my teen kids broke or screwed up their phone (all too often), it was handy to have a spare they could use. It was also handy to have around when they misbehaved by spending too much time or data using their phones; swapping this one in curtailed their usage just by being itself. Fewer apps, limited access because they aren't bought into the Live/msft account ecosystem, generally iffy UI, etc. I find it very useful. They don't appreciate that.
TL;DR: My kids refer to the spare Windows phone as "the punishment phone"
(Disclaimer: longtime slashdotter, inveterate geek, about 25 years in tech, spent about 1/3 of that consulting or as fte for msft. Been on both sides of the win/linux fence, and for a time Big Beige over in Redmond was good to me. Donor to Mint too.)
I find this crap unconscionable. My brother got caught by it just a few days ago, and called me in desperation because declining the eula after it ran the unprompted install has put the machine in to a blank bluescreen reboot loop. He's shipping the hdd to me to recover a few gigs of pictures and music. He does not want WIn10 because (his words, not mine) -- "We tried it out at work, and the new interface is shit. It's ugly. I don't want it." And then a family friend emailed in the same desperate situation. AND THEN ANOTHER. I've got THREE of these kerfuxxored computers queued up to de-Win10/fix/help out this weekend. Jesus.
So here's the question: What kind of fool would I be to reinstall Win7 or even Win8, after I get his data off the borked drive? Win10 is unacceptable to these customers, but MSFT is unapologetic about their the-customer-is-wrong-fuck-them mission, so this is bound to happen again.
Answer: No damn way am I reinstalling Windows. Mint Linux seems like the obvious choice for the foreseeable future. Mint is pretty, fast as hell, stable, reasonably securable, runs Office 2010 just fine under Wine/Playonlinux, and *everything* else is easier/faster/more stable natively. Mint takes under 15min for a complete install/update and scripted app install, compared to 3-5hrs each for Windows+apps+drivers on bare metal (plus a f#@kpile of $$$ for licenses they can't find/etc). And given that MSFT is hell-bent on forcing Win10 (because of the telemetry-based revenue stream if nothing else), with any Windows reinstall it's likely I'd quickly be right back to the beginning on one or all of these.
Linux is what I've used myself for years, and I knew it was fast/stable/etc/etc but I was always hesitant to push my geeky preferences on others who just want crap to work. In recent years I knew that the ease-of-use equation had tipped away from Windows despite the bluster from Redmond, but still I didn't push. The real surprise for me now is that run-o-the-mill users are so utterly hacked off at MSFT that they're clamoring for what I have: they just want a good stable system with control and no bullshit surprises.
"SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded upon landing on a drone ship" is not quite accurate...
In December, SpaceX lanuched a Falcon9 rocket with a series of successes: successful launch of the whole rocket, successful landing (on land) of stage1, successfully reaching orbit on stage2, insertion of 11 satellites into sustainable orbits, etc etc. It was a good day for them.
A couple weeks ago, they launched another (slightly older design) Falcon9, *mostly* successfully: Launch was good, stage 1 separation and return to landing spot (this time on a modified barge) was successful, stage 2 was good, payload was good, etc etc. The failure was that immediately after landing on the barge, the stage 1 fell over because one of the landing legs failed to lock. So yeah, the stage 1 exploded...
Ooo. "vitiate" is my new word of the week. Sounds like good sport to me....
To borrow a phrase from Mr. Universe: "You can't stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and porn goes everywhere."
That ain't than half of it. This was epically bad timing not because of its placement on a specific weekend, but because Disney tanked an opportunity for a 100-year anniversary of one of the seminal pieces of science fiction.
The original John Carter story, "A Princess of Mars" was published in 1912.
The "John Carter" movie was released in 2012.
The utter morons who marketed this thought "Ooo, old = bad. Give it a new name, and pretend it's some fantasy epic we thought up."
So instead of marketing something like this is the story from which virtually every modern scifi epic draws ( the princess, the alien sidekick, the man out of place, teleportation, gravity technology, planetary migration, resource wars, solar power, etc etc -- *all* drawn from Princess of Mars).... No, instead we have people seeing the movie with no context and panning it because it seemed derivative -- a full century later. What a sad waste of an opportunity to celebrate the whole history of scifi.
No, this report is silly. We used this kind of vector as standard structured attack fare at @stake and foundstone a decade+ ago. It was in our basic reports to explore alt input -- you know, feeding stop-A in barcode to a manufacturing robot, or feeding a break and shellcode to a POS station, one re-labelled product at a time on the belt.
Didn't Microsoft fold their app-running browser into their more widespread OS a while back?
Wasn't there some issue with that? So foggy... I wonder how that will turn out...
It's irrelevant to the core logic of the issue, but misspellings and grammar errors are a pretty good indicator of the quality of a piece of work.
A "mute" item would be "(1) refraining from making sound or (2) silent" -- one that does not make an actual audible sound.
A "moot" item is one that is "(1) of no importance or (2) merely hypothetical."
There are many other errors that seem to indicate this whole document was whipped up in a hurry by a pissed off individual without review, but the high-school-level error "mute point" sticks out like a sore thumb.
Seeing this kind of minor but highly-visible mistake in the headings and TOC of a formal document... does not lend credibility to the whole.
Microsoft's highest achievement was stealing the late Steve Jobs' distortion field when they announced the Surface. It kinda went like this: "Holy shit, it's an iPad for Windows! And it has a kickstand we stole from Archos! Running a tiled window manager we lied about market-testing! And some people have to do real work on it, so we made up this floppy disaster of a keyboard, because hinges are so yesterday!"
Yeah, we see how that went. Sad missionaries from Redmond trying to balance a flipped-back keyboard on their knees, or seeking a flat table when they have to type... Truly, the specs of the tablet were good, but a limp, flaccid keyboard was just unfathomably stupid on a device intended to run Office. Sure, the thousands they distributed to employees at the time were greeted with interest, but after a few days with the floppy felt touch keyboard, more than half just got boxed back up and stuck on a shelf while something with a HINGE got used everyday.
And now they tacitly admit the floppyboard sucked, by claiming they invented/reinvented/discovered the hinge. Brother, please. How about just saying "yeah that was a screwup, but we've come up with something nice"?
Open access to the source code of consumer routers is an excellent idea. However, one of the bigger problems is that often elections take statistically bizarre turns, sometimes affecting access to other data... Why not start with mandated open access to source code of voting machines. It doesn't have to be open source per se, but at least inspectable so that outright fraud can be addressed....
In the immortal words of Stan Lee: "'Nuff said."
disclaimer: I have a household member who's worked as an engineer at HP under Carly.
The unending wellspring of universal hatred for Carly as a leader from those who worked under her (especially at HP) is impressive, and remains constant even from people whose politics are somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan. She did what she was told, she laid waste to that not-so-micro economy, and she shows no regrets whatsoever -- for either the human or financial disaster in her wake. There's no surprise, then, to find she was unquestioningly supportive of what she perceives to be rungs above her on the ladder of power. Godwin's Law is entirely appropriate for examples of where this leads; don't mistake "comfortable sociopath" for "hawkish."
Carly is precisely the sort of person who should never be allowed to have power over others, or even a sharp knife at dinner: Total obedience and no discernible ethics at all.
We can tell if you're working for an aging government agency if you still use the word "cyber" to describe anything since the 1980's.
The funny part is "Cyber" is Hill-speak for "newfangled stuff" and the linguistic contortions are hideous: "His section is going to focus on cyber (and get the modems working right)" or "We're going to call in specialists who understand cyber (so that the VCR won't blink 12:00)." Cyber fits right into totally, grody, bitchin', illin', schweet, and wigging out. Living through the 80's was horrible the first time, and these guys just won't let go.
The sad part is that it actually has a negative impact on recruiting for intel roles, on top of the fact that a
Not good.
...And KBB consumer reviews of the Aztek are 8.2/10 over those product years, which just go to show that opinions are all over the map. It's a slow morning, so...
Just the numbers: 119,700 Azteks sold
estimated they needed to sell 30,000 per year to break even (150,000)
sold 23,940 per year on average = about 6060 cars short of hitting that mark (30,300 total)
avg mfr invoice minus holdback for those 5 years = about $17.5k
530m shortfall over 5 production years = 106m/year loss
GMA (just the cars, not the rest of GM) had a 2001-2004 net income/profit of about $1 billion/year over net revenue of $150 billion/year before badder things happened in the larger economy.
BUT, consider that the same assembly line made the Buick Rendezvous (the blander version of the Aztek) which substantially exceeded targets of 30k/year at about 57.9k/year. The two products off the same assembly line, same tooling, same costs totalled up, were a net positive (about 82k/year over a combined break-even point of 60k/year) -- meaning GM had a net profit from that production and assembly line, exceeding break-even production by 35%+. They didn't actually lose money.
One might argue that's a way of shuffling losses, but if you dig into GM's reports and strategy, they say (GM AR 2003, p 6):
>> GM brought brand differentiation to the world back in the
>> 1920s, when Alfred Sloan created the price ladder of GM
>> marques that offered “a car for every purse and purpose.”
>>
>> Those lessons are now being applied in North America to
>> our volume leader, Chevrolet, to our performance-oriented
>> brand, Pontiac, and to Buick, which is restoring its reputation
>> for refined, dignified elegance.
GM's Pontiac brand was *supposed* to be the edgy just-break-even part of the business (e.g. the subsequent GTO), the product and assembly lines were specifically structured that way, and GM's balance sheet was combined in a way to handle that. The whole notion of the Aztek/Rendezvous::loss/proft rests on the dumb assumption they were going to sell the edgy-version vs mass-market version of the same car at a 50/50 ratio. Want to see what killed Pontiac? Look at page 19 of that 2003 Annual Report, which shows in page-filling bold type the demise of Pontiac and Saturn were just speed bumps in GM's idle mismanagement:
>> Here’s what’s new
>> about GM’s strategy this year:
>> Nothing.
>> Our 2003 plan is the same as 2002.
>> We’re getting better, year by year.
Wow. Bankruptcy was about a year away.
Net net is that Edmonds can print hyperbole about a car they hate, and weirdos like me can spend a Sunday morning rattling on about what we like, but the long and short of it is that the Aztek was wasn't really significant in GM's 9-million-vehicles-per-year business, any more than the Newton MessagePad killed Apple. IMHO what is significant is the design influence, the things we talk about years later, and the encouragement to go do ballsy things despite the risk of failure.
Coffee, I need coffee.
-J
Friction is a drag.
