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Microsoft Research Projects Showcased
prostoalex writes "Seattle Times reporter visited the Microsoft Research expo hosted by the company. The inventions of the future include a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications, a software package that translates the sign language into readable English, e-mailable identification documents and some enhancements to Microsoft's operating systems."
MS stability isn't all that far from Linux stability. I'd pretty safe-feeling with both the NT kernel and the Linux kernel. GNOME software and Explorer -- *application software* both have instabilities.
Granted, so much crap is tied into Explorer that Explorer dying is generally worse than the GNOME panel crashing, but if you compare each chunk to its Linux equivalent, it's not *that* far away.
If MS hadn't made a couple of totally stupid moves, tying functionality into Explorer instead of doing it the right way, in the kernel, Explorer crashing away wouldn't be such a big deal (Explorer simulates symlinks, Explorer works around stupid MS file-locking semantics in XP, Explorer provides the high-level widgets for many other applications...)
May we never see th
Umm, you pre-order the elevator already, when you press the button in the waiting area. The only problem is that you're only telling the micro-processor that controls it "up or down". If I'm on the 5th, and going to the 10th, and there's an elevator on the 4th floor which already has 5 people in it who are going to the 10th, and 2 others for the 15th, it would make sense for that elevator to stop, rather than another elevator at the 4th which has 3 people destined for the 11th and 12th. Right now your average elevator just says "people who want to go up should get on elevators that are already going up, and vice versa". Now, we could have the same capability by just having the floor number buttons in the elevator waiting atrium, but the cell-phone capability has two potentials: