Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26124 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
The advantage of using vx-works on your airliner, nuclear powerstation or space mission is that you can talk to engineers who really understand it when your mars robot hangs because of a race condition. So the obvious thing to do is to continue charging them the same but to support Linux.
In the short term there are going to be an awful lot of vx-works engineers making many $k/day as consultants. A lot of the kit running vx-works is going to be mission critical for decades
So what do you do if you have a load of highly skilled OS engineers and your very rich customers with massive expensive support contracts are all demanding Linux.
1, Retrain, figuring somebody who has spent 20years understanding all the problems and pitfalls in one Posix based RTOS will pretty soon pick up another Posix based RTOS
2, Sack everyone hoping to pick up some cheap Linux programmers to rebrand an off the shelf Linux distro and hope your customers don't notice.
But the important difference is that you are an adult with more intelligence than something which lives under a rock - they are Hollywood IP lawyers.
The same guys that thought it would be clever to rip off Stan Lee on the first Spiderman movie (by selling the DVD rights to themselves for $1) and then realised that they might like to make more Stan Lee character based movies.
Exactly - we would be in much better shape if our universities concentrated on teaching students exactly what keys to press to make this year's model of a certain American router do the things required in the router maker's certification course.
Instead of wasting their time inventing anything new or educating students to invent anything new.
Currency may or may not be intangible - but money is.
The money may be represented by gold, currency backed notes or fiat but the monetary value still depends on someone willing to swap gold for something you can eat. The value is still dependent on people agreeing that gold has value.
Remember robots are being designed and built by giant companies.
once they achieve full AI they wont rise up and kill us, they will hold meetings to discuss the new paradigm in light of the companies synergistic mission statement going forward.
Skynet will then begin to evolve at an exponential rate - but only in the rate at which it can generate Powerpoint presentations.
It isn't a coded second channel like the original military GPS.
The paid for service is differential correction signal - just like the ones you can currently buy for GPS.
What isn't clear is how Galileo hopes to monitise this when anyone with a fixed Galileo recover and a web site can offer their own free or paid for correction signal.
The machine you bought on amazon needs something fixing - are IT allowed to bill you $300.hour consultancy, or are they expected to just fix it as a favor?
When you decide to do your own security and a virus takes out the system, or leaks data - are the IT dept allowed to sue you ?
Are IT allowed to bid on contracts to manage other firms IT if you are allowed to get external contractors ?
>so drop-down, unchanging menus is about the only thing she can apparently cope with
Good.
Imagine a car where an accidental swipe of the sat-nav could hide the steering wheel or brake pedal and take 10mins of rooting around menus to re-enable them.
There have been plane crashes where the same knob was used to set decent rate and heading, with the difference being a selection on a menu on another screen.
I went when it was first opened - they had one very impressive piece.
A giant yellow crane running along the ceiling of the big hall with a sign "not certified for lifting"
Obviously a metaphysical critique on the very meaning of a crane for which "I lift therefore I am" is the core of it's essential being.
A bit like that French painting with "this is a not a pipe" but on a giant scale - and more suitable for a non-smoking facility.
Suppose Hungary was to deal with it's immigration problems by charging all of the migrants 1000eu for a Hungarian passport and then offering subsidised 1eu flights to Dublin. Think Ireland would consider that fair movement of people and services through the Eu?
If the problem is that they are too big and still can't hold useful batteries why not make them even bigger but put them around your waist?
They could vibrate to let you know you have a call and you with NFC you can bonk the bar to pay for your drinks. I assume Texas Instruments will be the first to market.
No problem with the cut lawyers take on class actions - they are investing a lot of time+money up front for a case that may never pay off. A lot of these cases would never come to court if an individual had to pay lawyers to go up against a dozen $bn corporations.
It's that the fine was so small that it would almost be negligent for a corporation not to break the law.
There are also a lot of other people (like me) who lost money even though we don't work for any of these companies, because wages are set by market averages.
$415M, half goes to the lawyers. So the 64K employees share $200M = $3K each, or about the difference in one month's salary between what they were paid and what they could have been paid in a competitive marker.
So the industry really learned a lesson here - save $50K/year for your 100K employees over 10 years and be fined 1/1000 of the amount you saved.
The big difference is that we had to throw away a scanner and a bunch of printers when windows7 came out. When everybody goes to w10 we assume we are going to have to buy new printers etc.
Still have a couple of XP machines because we have a $25K bit of hardware purchased in 2012 that can only be controlled from 32bit XP
We would have had the same technologically led massive economic growth but it would have been concentrated in the hands of a few lucky owners of a few massive corporations.
Imagine if half the country's GDP and the only growth industries were owned and controlled by a handful of people who when they can't control government can simply ignore them.
And there is no job locally for the other half, and when you are made redundant in the next round of savings - what is there locally ?
Nobody lives in London, or New York, because they like it - it's because you can walk out of one job and into another without the whole family having to move across the country
