Except that Tim Cook has said on shareholder calls that they have more cash than they know what to do with. At that point they should distribute more to shareholders.
Seconded. My wife takes our twin two year olds to the library twice a week for library story time and to play with the gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine. Both my wife and my kids like seeing their friends (and nobody has to get snacks or clean up their house for an afternoon playdate).
For the newest versions of Windows (Server 2012, Windows 8) .NET comes installed -- I forget if it's installed by default or installs as a Windows component. If it's the latter you install it from the same screens you install IIS or the SMTP server from.
After you install it updates to the .NET framework show up in the "optional" windows updates.
But if you're producing client-side software that's dependent on the .NET framework then you most certainly will make your installer "bootstrap" the installation of the correct framework for your OS language and hardware.
That's all fine and well for people like us that don't necessarily do hard labor for 30-40 years. But those that have to do physical labor aren't actually living longer. The rise in life expectancy is due to a fall in infant death rates and the wealthy living longer because they have access to really good health care.
According to my recruiter's stats he told me that 93% of those that accepted counter-offers from their original company were looking for a job again within 6 months. The two scenarios were a) The company extended the counter offer to keep the employee long enough to carry out the contingency plan (i.e. hire someone to take his place and then fire the guy who they couldn't count on to stick around) or b) all the reasons why the guy wanted to quit are still there, except maybe the money one -- and rarely does someone quit solely over money. People will deal with less money if they love getting up and going to work in the morning.
Moore's law was simply an observation or a prediction about the computing market at that time: That the number of transistors on a chip would need to double every 18 months if the chip manufacturers hoped to get people to buy the next gen. He argued that people/companies wouldn't upgrade their existing equipment for a measly 10-50% increase in performance. They'd need to double performance if they wanted to get rapid turn over to the next generation of products.
We do know what happened to the father according to previous blog posts:
http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-from-war...
tl;dr; he left her for some woman he met online and married her six weeks after his divorce was complete. And now he doesn't pay the soccer mom child support and is engaging her in a grueling custody battle.
Then down the line the smart people from those firms can disrupt the existing players at their own game or a new game when the current-elite get lazy or can't innovate. That's how the market's supposed to work.
Summary: Author hopes we don't find life on Mars because if it's dead that provides an ill omen for the human race. He thinks if life on Mars wasn't sustainable then he repeats the whole argument that there must be some reason why advanced civilizations can't manage to get off the original rock they're assigned to and that's why we haven't seen any other intelligent life.
I think OOP really took off in industry because it was easy to sell third-party modules. You could "plug in" this module that you purchased and it was easy to hook up. Markets have a way of doing that: the solution that wins isn't necessarily the "best" solution but the one that's easiest to sell.
The classic name for the "Keep moving the extremes so people's opinion converge on the gradually moving middle" is called the Overton window and politicians try to employ it all the time:
Well don't forget that they were doing tablets all the way back in 2002. They just didn't have the foresight or guts to revamp the ecosystem around it. So the tablets didn't work because they needed to take advantage of the existing mouse-based Windows ecosystem of software, most of which was just too cumbersome to use on a tablet with a stylus.
It took the internet about 10 years to really take off too and there were a lot of visionaries in the early 90s that just couldn't survive until the hockey stick growth really started to take off and validate their assessments.
For a while it was because they had pre-purchased all of their fuel at 2000ish oil prices using long-term futures contracts. The bet turned out to be extremely lucrative for them. However, most of their contracts are either expired or set to expire soon so I expect their prices to revert to the mean.
They do a couple of other clever things, like only fly a single type of plane to take advantage of economies of scale, and only fly out of airports that have cheaper gate licensing fees. But the futures contracts really helped them through the industry's rough patch so that they could expand and aggressively grow while their competitors were declaring bankruptcy.
So... the takeaway is to stop adding bugs to programs you write? Heh, I've been trying to do that since day 1.
Seriously, now, it appears that experts are more akin to taking the scientific method approach to debugging: isolate and bisect down to the point of the bug. Novices just haphazardly change stuff until stuff appears to work.
I think a lot of us can think of friends and co-workers who fit these profiles.
Hmm, my comments don't really reflect this, but I agree with you. I think the end result of a system like this would be that software patents would be next-to-nothing worthless and people just wouldn't bother, except perhaps in the cases of truly innovative works of software (I can't even think of any worth patenting right now...).
Would Apple really file their rubber-band scrolling patent at a value of $1bil, then pay some multiple of that per year when it's so easily avoided by their competitors? Probably not.
And if they do then more power to them. But it would put an upper bound of the amount of silly patents that a single large company could file and maintain (think IBM, MSFT, Apple, etc). Right now it costs a company hardly nothing to file all these and maintain them but they have a huge potential upside if your competitor steps on that patent landmine.