Let's not forget the importance of the NOS, which enabled ad hoc collaboration in the age of the overbearing mainframe. NOS was and is a force multiplier. The best, most forward looking was probably Banyan Vines, which had a complete and stable directory structure more than a decade before Novell and Microsoft. It suffered for lack of application support, shut out by Microsoft hegemony. That's also what killed Novell in the end.

Cuban has been a top-rated stock picker for decades, since long before broadcast.com. And his Dallas Mavericks won an NBA championship, no mean feat.

Yeah he's a business operator. But his record of success probably compares favorably with that of techie VCs more respected by the geekie /. community. His perspective is not worthless.

Answer to sig:

How do Liberals define Evil? Sociopathy.

...will get you through times of no money better than....

I don't really need to finish that thought, do I?

So will I be modded down for stating the obvious? Oh that's right--it's still (mostly) illegal. Too bad. Especially if you're a friend or family member of one of the half million or so people killed in the War on Drugs these last 40 years.

That level of piracy can only be sustained by deliberate government inaction. In other words, they're conspiring to steal and under WTO regulations, the government should be fined an amount that exceeds the value of the theft. Treble damages might apply.

Why is it exactly that we in the US don't more aggressively pursue WTO remedies? Could it be that we also violate WTO regs wrt agricultural protectionism? Or are we that afraid of the Chinese?

And yes, breaking software with an upgrade can happen to anyone and even happens to the Mac. My 12" Powerbook DVD player software died last year after a recommended graphics update. Lots of panicked complaining on the Apple's bulletin board, but dead silence from Apple. A fix from them took more than a month, during which VLC was the only workaround.

Reading that analysis in the TFA, it seems that (a) a systemwide crash was inevitable and (b) just about anyone who knew how Skype functions at the network level really, really should have anticipated that exactly this would happen. So the real problem here is the kind of systemic human failure to act in the face of an emergency that we've seen time and time again, from the Deepwater Horizon to 9/11 to the Columbia and the Challenger.

In reality, the "name school" for advanced degrees depends on the field of study. E.g., for certain branches of chemistry, Michigan State and the University of North Carolina stand out. The insiders who will hire you will know which school and which program are which, so don't be seduced the general fame of a particular institution, like MIT.

Getting into those programs at Mich. St. or UNC or wherever can be competitive, more so than undergraduate. So if you're planning to pursue graduate studies, it helps to have cared and worked hard as an undergraduate regardless of where you went, more so than the name.

Pure hypocrisy. The bikini store isn't a corporate behemoth like Time Warner, whose SI Swimsuit app remains on the App Store. If there is an app expressly designed for prurient interest, the SI Swimsuit app is it.

I'm sure that Apple insisted on all-you-can-eat data pricing. And remember, that price went up to $30/month with the release of the iPhone 3G. By that time, AT&T had to know what they were in for wrt data demand. There's no way around it: AT&T has simply mismanaged this product offering. No trivial matter; it's central to their corporate future.

What should frustrate all of us is that Japanese and Korean networks handle several times as much data per user without any of the hassles or failures that are ubiquitous here. Yes, those countries are more densely populated, but even in our cities we have dead spots and overcapacity problems. It's not like this can't be done. Rather, it's that our MO's can't be bothered to do it, and our government refuses to hold them accountable to even a marginally acceptable standard of service.

There's more at stake than our convenience here. Ultimately, for us to be competitive as a nation, we need our networks to be reliable enough for mission critical tasks. Unfortunately, it appears likely that the gap between us on the one hand, and Europe and the Far East on the other, will only get wider. Yet another aspect of our infrastructure that, relatively speaking, is declining to third-world parity. Where's the outrage?

The "Yao Ming" laptop is a top ten invention of the millennium so far. You have an older one. Mine has 2GB RAM. I'm posting with it right now. It's my everything workhorse (I'm a small business network consultant). It has survived more abuse than I can recount, and it bothers me enormously that there's nothing like it available any longer.

I will eventually break down and buy a 13", but it's a lot bigger. I don't imagine that the rumored Mac tablet will be sufficient for what we do.

As for the poster who suggested that thinness is everything, I must respectfully disagree. Thinner = flimsier. How is it you have no extra room in your backpack with a 12" v a 14" machine. What else are you carrying anyway? LPs?

I'm old enough and smart enough to know that every living person over the age of about 4 knows something useful that I don't. Managing one's existence with the handicap of illiteracy requires smarts and resourcefulness that those of us who can read can scarcely imagine.

The Question Box inventor, Rose Shuman, is the daughter of a lifelong friend of mine. The invention solves two problems: how to bring information to illiterate villagers who lack even mobile phone access, and how to employ some of the educated daughters of conservative families who won't allow them to work outside the home. Invariably, the answering voice of these Question Boxes is just such a woman. She needs only an Internet-connected computer to perform this service in the privacy of her bedroom a few hundred miles away.

The log of their questions is also useful in two ways: it allows us naive Westerners to appreciate better the native intelligence of these villagers, and it allows a wider audience of people to suggest ways to improve the service and to make more efficient the flow of empowering information to the nearly infinite variety of people who desperately need it.

I decommissioned a document management system at my client, a smallish law firm, because the system was too complicated, insecure, and expensive. Updating it to run w/ the latest version of MS-Office would have cost thousand$ just for the s/w. We replaced it with Google Search, and we defined a file hierarchy and naming convention for all documents created after the switchover. Client is very happy, their file access is more efficient, and they saved a bundle of money on administration, not to mention all the h/w and s/w they never bought.

Obviously documents are the lifeblood of any law firm. These guys only have about 100,000 or so, less than the aerospace company in question, but the lesson applies. It's extremely unlikely the IT admin of the aerospace company has the resources to manage, much less install, a proprietary document management system.

The ONLY reason to have a formal document management system with a database (like Microsoft SQL *ugh*) is to control access. But access control is something that really, really should be done through the directory. So unless you're NASA or another organization with many, many millions of documents and a legally mandated auditing requirement, there's no reason to make this more complicated than necessary. And even then....

Of course, if we're talking about images with no searchable text, that's another story.

5.) Good writing contributes immensely to lucid and efficient thinking...and working.
4.) Real-world problem solving only comes with real-world experience. They have to suffer through it to appreciate it.
3.) Collaborative classroom experience is indeed helpful background for the collaborative environment of the real world. That is unless you're the PHB.
2.) IM can and should be a tool for professional collaboration.
1.) Unless someone gets us out of Iraq, you're going to end up defaulting on your mortgage. Seriously, how well do you think McCain is going to work out for us? He's got dementia. He can't tell Sunni from Shiite or Al-Qaeda from Iran. He graduated second from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. Oh, let's hire HIM.

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"Never lose your sense of outrage." -- I. F. Stone