Like Sears, MS exploited an unique market position to enter many other markets.

This comparison is very accurate. If you spend much time on eBay or Craigslist, you're sure to see vintage products branded as Sears or Montgomery Wards. Crazy stuff that sometimes makes you scratch your head wondering why they ever thought it would be a lucrative product segment that they'd make any kind of money offering an in-house brand.

I once found an old snowmobile suit in a thrift store with a Montgomery Wards label. At the time, I wondered how many snowmobile suits were ever sold that Montgomery Wards felt they needed to get into the market. I guess they were playing hardball with the manufacturers at the time and cut a deal with one vendor to make MW-labelled suits and that positioned them to tell dictate pricing to the other venders lest they not be carried alongside the MW snomobile suits.

This is one of the most astute comments I have read about Ballmer's departure all day.

Continuing in this direction, I wonder if the timeliness of his announcement was based on the need to begin production of Surface 2.0. Board of directors wasn't willing to throw good $billions after bad. They got rid of the guy who was signing the checks for more Surface investment and are about to follow HP's example and bring in a CEO that will shut down tablet development and the mobile OS.

By no means am I agreeing with HP pulling plug on WebOS, but I do think Microsoft might be gearing up for more staggering losses than HP suffered if they continue with these products (Surface & WindowsRT). I expect to see WindowsRT open-sourced and tossed on the side of the road within weeks.

One of the frustrating things about custom ringtones in the iOS platform has been that for whatever reason, users weren't able to assign custom ringtones to the text notification until iOS 6. That had been a thorn in my toe for several years.

OP should check http://www.nagios.org/ now. It's up.

Thanks for the clarification on the Hague Convention. I remembered that wrong.

I didn't mention all the energy transfer stuff because I was trying to keep my response simple, but yeah, everything you're saying here is totally correct.

Not an expert on this but are not the bullets used for this sort of thing jacketed anyway?

In most states, game animals must be shot with an expanding bullet. Either soft point or hollow point. This is intended to increase the size of the wound channel and likelihood that the shot will be rapidly fatal.

In war, these bullets are banned by the Geneva convention. Wounds are hoped to be survivable by humans and the bullets are intended to poke a hole in enemy bodies that removes them from battle.

If these guys can't write great apps themselves, who is going to pay them for their valuable instruction? Very strange that they would pay for this slashvertisement knowing people would call them out on this.

I'm not one of these people who beat on the idea of capitalism but I do see it as a failing of the perception in that endless growth just isn't possible in the long term. Sadly it's endless growth that drives a majority of today's investors.

This is also the reason why manufacturing industries in America have shipped their jobs overseas. Once a company has reached its peak growth in sales, leadership is under pressure from investors to continue to demonstrate growing profits. So, they look around and quickly seize on their own labor force as ballast.

The American workers are / were thrown overboard to expand profit margins and satiate investors' demand for "growth".

Coincidentally Luka Magnotta had previously been accused of killing kittens on video and posting it to this type of site, if not the same site.

Not responding to the parent post, but I think there is a valid argument that the operator of the site hosting Luka's videos is guilty of collaborating with the killer. He didn't plan the murder, but he is acting as an instrument of Magnotta by delivering the infamy that was Magnotta's goal.

The mature and humane response would have been to say, "Hey Luka. You killed a guy to become infamous. I'm not going to assist you in this goal by publishing this video of the crime you committed to become infamous. I'm going to hand it over to the cops." Instead, this website operator responded by helping Luka to achieve infamy.

It is a waste of money for developers to go on bug hunts.

Nonsense. The outside world can only fuzz against the product looking for a security vulnerability and they are only paid for security vulnerabilities.

Bug hunts reveal architecture missteps that will break the product during upgrades or other usage. Internal developers are aware of the architecture, so they are more able to focus on searching and finding both security vulnerabilities as well as general bugs. A testing matrix cannot predict all the things that can possibly be impacted by an upgrade, so QA is not going to find every bug. And it gets really ugly when a company releases a patch and then immediately has to release a second one to fix the things the previous patch broke.

It's amazing our customers still find the product useful enough to pay for it. It's like a big building made of dried shit. It sort of works in some conditions. You know what happens if it rains a bit, but if you remove all the shitty bits there's not much building left... And to rebuild the building from scratch would take years.

Wow. Aren't you worried that by posting this online that you might get fired from your position on the Microsoft SQL Server dev team?

Seriously. Who cares about this guy's rant?!?!? Yes, this is the tired meme of the internet giving voice to annoying people.

Deal with it or avoid the internet.

EA doesn't own Scrabble. They've licensed it from Hasbro and are now responsible for the Facebook and mobile phone releases. The previous Facebook version was developed by Gamehouse. I wouldn't say either Gamehouse or EA have done good jobs with their releases. If they had, there would be no market for Words with Friends. That entire game is successful because of Scrabble fans who hate the versions made by Gamehouse and EA.

Oh, you're right. They are dying. Circuit City was proof of that.

Not sure if Microsoft is paying for floorspace. More likely they're providing sales staff working on the Microsoft payroll who were trained by Microsoft trainers. Commission is probably not paid on their sales, either... Best Buy keeps the commission that they would have otherwise paid to their own hourly sales associate.

Uhhh.. Actually Dell's purpose in promoting this as a console alternative is because they're having a real hard time selling desktop computers as just computers.