Re: Launch
"The Host of Countdown", eh?
Either a hacker handle or a song by Europe.
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
Has anyone seen the Fujitsu-Siemens server series lately?
Not bad kit per se (except the entry-level with the Promise RAID ... kill it with fire!), but a bit pricey (don't even mention the maintenance contracts) and as usual for this class of machines, the BIOS was a permaclusterfuck of inconsistent shite unfit for any sort of purpose, which was "ameliorated" in an Al Capone way by the stripped-down Windows-based management interfaces on CD that introduced even more inconsistency.
What happened to it?
Roswell?
Read it here: The Day After Roswell by "the very credible Lt Colonel Corso of the US Army" himself!
According to amazon, it came out on "January 1, 0010", which probably means it rode the X-Files wave and someone had some Y2K trouble with his 'puters.
It is a waste of a perfectly good tree except for the reprinted article from the 60's I think flogging the idea of a nuke-flinging US moonbase. "Nuke them from on high", indeed.
> Don't these idiots *ever* learn from history?
That's not how it works. Decisions are ALWAYS local. They become global (to the detriment of most) only if a specific lever is legislated into existence to satisfy these local interests.
More on this in The Great Deformation.
Or maybe not.
To all available evidence, we have got all the particles down pat, there is bugger all up to the Planck scale, Stringers can go shove it, and the way forward is currently in precision measurements on neutrinos and muons. That and some hard-as-nails work in continuous group theory.
El Reg, please insert stock chart graphics.
Twitter shares fell sharply on Wall Street today, wiping out about a quarter of the value of the micro-blogging site within minutes of trading opening in New York.
Such things can quickly transform into the next stock market bubble pop, followed by woeful crackle and snaps. Then admonitions of "no-one could have foreseen..." and Paul Krugman flaming out in the NYT. Better be careful.
he realized that the browser was the most important app in any computer
He realized that monopolizing access to "The Interwebs" via a proprietary and "enhanced" portal application fused to the underlying OS like a facehugger would make sure that Microsoft would stay a factor in the age of interchangeable commodity browsers and standards as people would need to have Windows to get the "enhanced" Internet.
Hope this helps, you can go back to erasing Stalin's ex-colleagues out of photographs.
Nothing is more disgusting than Gates and his proprietary shit sandwiches.
Gates's brilliance was to understand when the PC was a nascent industry "what he was selling", "to whom he was selling it".
Not at all. He just sold what he had at that time like a good hustler. There was no industry and it wasn't seen as "nascent" by anyone. Microsoft then got pulled along in the slipstream of the PC industry, made possible because IBM forgot to license the whole crud properly. They then decided to plunder rivals' ideas and maybe work on OS/2 with IBM... the rest is a long history.
surely bringing back the person who built the company can only be a better change and a likely source of improvement
I don't know how many logical fallacies are covered under a heavy sauce of delusion and wishful thinking in that kind of statement. It is the same logic that brings retired politicians, financial gurus, generals on retirement in the Harz mountains or popstar has-beens back into action because they have been "in it once" and "we don't have anyone else".
You just need to remember Bill Gate's "The Road Ahead" (retconned to reality in the 2nd edition) to know that he ain't some kind of super-luminary who knows what the future is bringing or even how to get there. Basically his contribution to the industry was his butthurt Open Letter to Hobbyists.
Where your job is to reduce the numbers of 1%'ers and the money they have gets redistributed to the 99% lifting them from poverty and eventual full slavery before it's too late?
This game has been tried a few times before. There is the quadro pack, which includes all of the "Hitler", "Stalin", "Mao" and "Pol Pot" earliers successes. I especially like the add-ons where you can drive trains (look for 'Thomas the Gas Engine'). The versions of "Zimbabwe" and "Commandante Chavez" are rather lackluster (and frankly, the subtitles need a refresh), but more recent.
(Why do I know that video even exists? OMG what I am I doing with my life.)
Ukrainian clusterfuck with special slavic/post-communist-industrial-wasteland tack!
It's is still actually good after all those years (7 years already! time flies like a banana), once you apply the patch set (Zone Reclamation Project et al.)
There will always be profiteurs from war. Politicians and others.
"On March 18, 1914, on the very brink of the coming disaster, Philip Snowden, disease-wracked, crippled socialist labor leader rose in Commons to make a speech. When he had done, he had rocked the British Empire with his disclosures. For two years a young Quaker socialist named Walton Newbold had been tracing with infinite pains the tortuous trail of the international arms makers. And Philip Snowden had in his possession the fruits of that long quest when he rose to speak. One by one he pointed out cabinet ministers, members of the House, and named high-ranking officials in army and navy circles, persons of royal position, who were large holders of shares in Vickers and Armstrong, in John Brown and Beardmore, shipbuilders.
The profits of Vickers and Armstrong had been enormous, and the most powerful persons in the state and the church and the nobility had bought into them to share in the profits. Vickers had among its directors two dukes, two marquesses, and family members of fifty earls, fifteen baronets, and five knights, twenty-one naval officers, two naval government architects, and many journalists. Armstrong had even more — sixty earls or their wives, fifteen baronets, twenty knights, and twenty military or naval architects and officers, while there were thirteen members of the House of Commons on the directorates of Vickers, Armstrong, or John Brown. "It would be impossible," said Snowden, "to throw a handful of pebbles anywhere upon the opposition benches without hitting members interested in these arms firms."
Ministers, officers, technical experts moved out of the government, out of the cabinet, the navy, the army, the war office, the admiralty, into the employ of the munitions manufacturers.
Snowden quoted Lord Welby, head of the Civil Service, who only a few weeks before had denounced the arms conspirators. "We are in the hands of an organization of crooks," said Lord Welby. "They are politicians, generals, manufacturers of armaments and journalists. All of them are anxious for unlimited expenditure, and go on inventing scares to terrify the public and to terrify the Ministers of the Crown.""