catfish's comments

Back in 89 while stationed in Hawaii I worked for a small PC shop whose owner was a HUGE AMIGA FAN. Commodore worked their dealers hard, and just prior to Christmas that year he was required to stack 250 machines in inventory which just about broke the bank.

Meanwhile I was hired to build PC clones for a few hours everyday. While I was there he would argue constantly about the superiority of the Amiga vs. the PC and though I knew he was right (486 PC's had just hit the scene) I would argue right back about the fact the PC's were winning due to the velocity of change in hardware, storage, video, etc.

Anyway we got to the point with it that his wife started yelling at both of us to cut the crap, so not wanting to piss her off since she signed the checks I shut up and let him drone on.

As Christmas approached we were selling PC's 10 to 1 over Amiga's and his anxiety about not moving the Amiga's hit the roof. About a week prior to Christmas I came in one day and started building the PC's on order (about 30+ on order) and he was forced to help me with building them out.

He was pissed, completely off his rocker angry, and started verbally hammering me beyond what I could take. I finally decided enough was enough.

I turned to him and I said "I know one thing the PC can do that the Amiga can't do." And taking the bait like the fish he was, sez to me "Nothing can beat the Amiga". I sez, "There is defintely one thing it does better", and he SHOUTS "WHAT?"

Sez me, "It makes money!" and then I turned to the stack of nearly 200 remaining Amiga's sitting in the shop shelves and pointed at them and laughed long and loud.

He fired me on the spot.

Not exactly on point for this article. But a great story in the timeline of "our thing". I should mention that I did own a Commodore 64 and the Amiga before I switched to the PC. I loved them both and if it wasn't for the C-64 assembler module I would not have built the companies I created years later. The 6502C was the best learning chip ever!

2 centavos...

This is not correct. Dragon was in production before the NASA contract was signed. SpaceX was paid to develop a commercial crew variant called Dragon V2.

Spacex was from its start conceived by Musk to develop low cost systems that will be used to colonize Mars. He has said this from the start.

Nasa contracts were never necessary for SpaceX to succeed as they have contracts world wide to lift payloads to space for many nations. These contracts help to accelerate the company timeline for crewed missions to the Moon and Mars.

BEATTY is wrong of course. SpaceX entire premise is the mission to Mars. By the time Orion ferries its first astronaut to space, SpaceX will be the low cost operator to the ISS.

Orion uses a parachute to land, Red Dragon will use Super Draco based thrusters to land.

Nasa throws away the tanks used to get Orion to Space, SpaceX will land the tanks and reuse them to lower overall mission cost.

Nasa spent 60 billion dollars to get this far, won't be ready to test its new SLS system for 3-5 years, won't fly a human for 10+ years. SpaceX will fly astronauts to space by 2017.

SpaceX spent 3 billion getting this far and resupplies the ISS. Multiple times.

Beatty is short sighted and underestimates Elon Musk.

Meet the new boss, same as the old one...

You must own an orange phone with shitty maps! lol...

Satire is a contribution. Where those in power fail the truth test, satire has served since the dawn of print, to cast the light of truth on the half truths of the powerful.

You gotta understand, your talking about users. They don't actually understand logic. They work from emotion only.

At Orange, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. Except when we feel that someone else is doing it better in which case we strive to eliminate the obviously superior product from our walled garden.

With the launch of our shitty Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers but we are doing everything we can to make shitty Maps better, except to provide you what you want right now, a working map.

We launched shitty Maps initially with the first version of Orange. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better shitty Maps including features such as really bad directions, never understands your voice integration, Flyover the wrong location and vector-based maps.

In order to do this, we had to create a new version of shitty Maps from the ground up, and though its not ready for prime time we are so worried about our competition that we dumped them prematurely from our walled garden and forced this abomination on you.

There are already more than 100 million Orange devices using the new shitty Maps, with more and more joining us every day. And you know that this is because we reduced your choice to our inferior product, which is what we have the right to do since we own your phone and you don't.

In just over a week, Orange users with the new shitty Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations and some actually did find a few locations. The more our customers use our Maps the sooner we will make another billion dollars and we greatly appreciate the fact you have no real choice now that you have our phone in your pocket.

While we’re improving shitty Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the Orange Store, but good luck finding them as we also created a new nightmare in our Apps store that makes replacing our shitty apps more difficult than ever. We know that the huge majority of Orange users won't have a clue as to what we mean by bookmarking, and of course that is just fine with us. Just use our maps anyway, just like we planned.

Everything we do at Orange is aimed at making our products the only product you use. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until EVERYONE in our walled garden is tired of the BS and gets an Android.

A single email does not change a process nor a corporate culture of indifference.

Apple = Big Brother

As a long long time user of Yahoo services like Mail, and Groups, I have a ton of ideas that I wish I could offer. But, alas I am not an employee, just an old fart coder dog and business owner. After 32+ years in the biz what could I possibly know?

Why is this at #5 on the list with 9 points? I don't get how something as lame as this makes it to the first page with 1 comment and 9 points?

Please GOOGLE, please come compete with ATT and TIME Warner in San Diego. I am ready to pay....

I didn't know that Microsoft made phone software... Does anyone use it?

Did anyone else notice that Yahoo did not post a single story on its front page about the blackout yesterday. I had to dig down to the News page to see a story about it. No wonder they are spiraling down...

Wildcat BBS - I ran 8, 1200 baud modems - 9 phone lines - Earth Station 1 BBS...

Simpler days indeed. Anyone else attend the 1BBSConn in Denver hosted by Boardwatch magazine? Those were the days, oh yeah baby!

And of course I did this on a 40mb ST251- RLL encoded seagate hard drive, on 2 Tandy 286's running 1 full mb of memory using QEMM to get that pesky extra 384k of memory to load instances of Wildcat.

Brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it. Thank you DWTF for a lovely memory lane flashback!

BINGO!!!

Good point colinm,

I briefly checked and didn't see a phone app there, so maybe they could use your idea!

They even have a "we're hiring" link. That might be your vector to getting their attention. Better to buy than build.

You might even get them to buy you out...

apartheid is not politics

Correct. And Yes.

If its not effective for all, forever, its just a blip on the time line. A thousand years from now we will remember Einstein.

Jobs? Not so much...

Cost 600 bucks. How does that help civilization. Oh maybe a few well pampered hipster's children get access to it, but how does that work for the rest of the world that averages 2 bucks a day income levels?