Posts by MrColdWaterOfRealityMan

Gates: Renewable energy can't do the job. Gov should switch green subsidies into R&D

Wrong emphasis and too late.

And had Mr. Gates pushed for a humanlike scalable AI years ago, we'd have answers to this problem (and literally millions of others) by now.

And had Mr. Gates pushed for a humanlike scalable AI years ago, we'd have answers to this problem (and literally millions of others) by now.

Developers, developers, developers! But WILL they support Windows 10?

Perhaps if Microsoft stops treating developers like dogshlt...

Oh, where to begin. No automatic conversion from one technology to another (VB6 to VB.net, Winforms to anything...). Abominations like Powershell syntax, instead of the rational, courteous approach of extending VBScript or JScript. Documentation and code samples? Oh, download the entire Windows xx devkit to find them, because we all want to do that. Need to download anything else like code samples? Let's see how many times we can make you click and guess which obfuscated named item might be the correct thing...

Frankly, Microsoft should just stop bothering. Developers are not an income stream. They never will be. Since Microsoft is *incapable* of paying attention to the human infrastructure that actually makes them money if it doesn't show up on a bean counter spreadsheet somewhere, they should just release some open source platform that works with all of it products and leave the rest to the developer community. Java-ize it.

Untangling .NET Core: Open source for Windows, Mac, Linux

Removing support is the same as killing it.

Technology moves on. The web happened. Phones happened. If you've poured money and expertise into VB6 or Windows forms with no automated upgrade path to ASP, WPF or Silverlight, you were screwed when your customer base demanded web features, phone features or some other technology features. Microsoft's only answer was "recode."

Wrong answer.

Yes, Microsoft still supports multiple obsolete frameworks. Thanks for nothing. Thanks for not planning ahead. Thanks for a complete lack of even the slightest effort towards backwards compatibility because it might have made some developers miss lunch or it didn't suit the sensibilities of a manager/ former C++ programmer trained in the 70s. Thanks for pushing me into Java or Python and the LAMP stack.

Microsoft: We plan to CLEAN UP this here Windows Store town

Penny wise. Pound foolish.

Had Microsoft wanted to get apps into the Window store, they would have designed their languages so that all Microsoft apps written in any language could be converted quickly, easily and automatically to any other Microsoft platform. Known, trusted applications could have been moved from vb6, winforms, asp.net and so on to Windows apps. Had this been done, Microsoft could have had thousands of such apps in its Windows store in days.

Instead, the brain dead managers of Microsoft said to all Windows developers, "Too bad about your investment in time, money. Not our problem, though. Recode."

By making migration difficult and expensive, Microsoft is no paying the price for their own shortsighted stupidity. The "managers" at Microsoft elected a strategy of short term gain, rather than long term coherent vision which would have been more profitable in the long run.

Indian military pondered attack on Venus and Jupiter

Well, to be honest, I never liked Jupiter all that much either.

RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon

Correct, except for that little math/energy thing.

First off, "peak oil" isn't about quantity of oil left and never has been except in the minds of those with a vested interest in telling us all not to worry our little heads about such matters.

Second, the author of this breezy little missive might actually want to review some numbers. I'd start with the book referenced here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil.

Numbers. Pesky things.

The "Peak oil" that matters is defined by price, energy return and suppy chain viability. This is a fancy way of saying that when oil prices are high enough, and energy return on that oil low enough, the supply chains of goods and services used to find, extract, refine and deliver petroleum products breaks down.

I'm sure I too could produce a pretty report that reassured all and sundry that there was just no problem if I ignored energy return, assumed that all available hydrocarbons could be made into useful something, made some very happy assumptions about production costs, and ignored oil price feedback in my economic models.

Look, I'd love to believe that techno-capitalists are about to ride in and save us all with magic fusion power. I'm all for drilling more and I'm sure that nuclear power plants can be designed safely. THat said, I can do arithmetic, have a healthy skepticism of numbers generated by governments or financial institutions, and like any PC user whose system *hasn't* sped up in the last decade, am aware of diminishing returns on technology, which we've hit in the petroleum industry.

So, I'm staying with my estimate of about 40-ish years of usable oil left, with price increases and supply shocks in our near term future. Nothing from those reliable folks at Citigroup has persuaded me otherwise.

Top CEOs agree: US is down the crapper

How obtuse can these "leaders" be?

This situation was *caused* by the very CEOs who are now complaining. It's happening because:

1) Outsourcing put domestic technical jobs at constant risk.

2) Outsourcing suppressed salaries.

What would *possibly* motivate an intelligent, rational person to pursue a career where their salary will be permanently capped by offshore labor rates?

Lack of education in science and engineering cause outsourcing, which suppresses salaries and increases job risk, which leads to a lack of interest in science and engineering degrees. The death spiral started when outsourcing started in a big way. If salaries were higher and managers actually hired domestic talent, there would be interest and motivation. As it stands today, you'd be better off using your brain to be a financial whiz, a doctor, a lawyer or *anything* else but an engineer.

And it was all started by CEOs looking for a quick buck.