I remember a few years ago the saving interests in Australia was around 8% plus. That was risk-free rate, if you take a bit more risk on other financial products, 10% might be achievable. Not feasible for 20 years though.
Just to point out: these days you don't have to use the dosbox/qbasic combo in order to have a qbasic-compatible environment. There is an open-source implementation called qb64 that is both qbasic compatible and cross-platform (Windows, Linux and Mac).
Also, in qbasic, line number is optional. With SUB and FUNCTION, you can actually do structured programming like what other programming languages such as Pascal does.
Nuclear missles or "90000 tons of diplomacy" are both certain kinds of deterrence, nothing more, nothing less. If US does not have those carrier combat groups, China wouldn't care either.
You can still do QBasic though. There is an open-sourced implementation called QB64 [1]. QB64 is also cross-platform that can run on Windows/Linux/Mac/Android.
Wow, amazing! Though it does seem a bit creepy to me, as the stories in old sci-fi novels, where a big corporation X built and operated a robot army taking over the governments and ruling the world, tend to become reality at a increasingly fast pace.
I thought for coding tests implementations are supposed to be done from scratch on. Or at least the guy who wrote the working parser should be on top of the list.
Palm's Treo series were pretty good smartphones back then. Though some braindead CEOs split the company into one hardware and one software company, while neither had the sufficient resources to put a new generation of smartphone OS through.
I haven't seen any trend of bashing China, unless of course reporting honestly is bashing.
Well, this is a bit subjective, in my book selective reporting that focuses on negativity is bashing.
I am all for more budgets for NASA. Quite frankly, I don't follow NASA's missions very often. For the past decade I did hear from time to time that NASA sent rovers to some planets. Meanwhile, I kept hearing the flip-flop stories about the water on Mars. It gave me impression that NASA either went hugely under-budget on their Mars' missions or they spread themselves too thin. That was my point (admittedly I may need to soften my tone in my comment). Not sure if NASA had a vision problem, in my opinion, it may have made more impact and (hopefully) got more funding if they narrowed down their scope of missions and obtained more decisive results.
Not surprised. He has been bashing China for a while, which is the trending topic in the mainstream media anyway. Though I do wish some of the media agencies strike out of the group-thinking, and examine what NASA has been up to for the past decade, and what needs to be improved in terms of space exploration.
Big corps like IBM share surprisingly similar traits as an military army. The general in charge of the army commonly only deals with the grand strategies and communicates with a few of his high-rank colonels. He has no idea who is the most skilled soldier or lieutenant, or captain. To him, they are only a number, a faceless expendable resource. Throughout the long history of wars, a lot of times low level heroic soldiers managed to win some battles but the army still lost the war simply due to the stupidity of the general.
How exactly is Dart dangerous? It's open source, unlike C#.
One nit to pick here: C# is open sourced, though the .NET framework is not. Anyway, let's focus our discussion on Dart.
Somehow I had an impression that GOOG might have a plan B that would push Dart to replace JS on the web and Java on the mobile and a walled-garden that unifies current ChromeAppStore and PlayStore. JS would be totally marginalized and obsoleted. I'm not a fan of JS, but throwing away the enormous efforts done for the past decade is too much a churn and waste for me to swallow. I could hopefully be totally wrong though.
I think Bing is a lost battle. The real question is what can they do on Azure, and can they move people to a cloud-based Office suite.
Bing is actually doing surprisingly well, considering the team competes with probably the most successful department and the foundation of GOOG. IMHO it's likely one of very few successful strategic moves of MSFT in competitive markets. Without Bing, GOOG would pretty much print money and pour money on whatever futuristic projects they feel like. Oh, well, they're already doing these stunts, it would only get worse without Bing. Azure and Office-in-the-cloud alone cannot compete with freebies backed by big pockets.
Creating another browser that everyone needs to optimize their websites for separately - not so great.
I agree on the pains caused by browser fragmentation, but I do think it's still a good thing to have IE especially the new versions around. The recent move of GOOG pushing for Dart is a dangerous sign that GOOG is starting to flex its muscle and do whatever they want. Mozilla alone stands no chance in such a challenge, in a same sense they couldn't in a battle against MSFT about 2 decades ago.
I would prefer a strong Microsoft that keeps improving Bing and its web/mobile advertisement branch, which can counter-balance GOOG on web/mobile sphere. A GOOG with almost infinite cash flow from Ads would be as bad as MSFT in 90s. It's already the case that nowadays GOOG has become increasingly more arrogant.
Adobe is the monopoly in the desktop graphics tool market. Not sure why no VC targets it at this moment, which does seem like a slow dinosaur to attack on.