These are commercially available for schools already. Whiteboard manufacturers are buying this off the shelf to integrate with their existing whiteboard systems; they use IR emitters/sensors and hooks up via USB as a standard USB HID multitouch device.
Generally any company that sells their engine offers up the dev tooks (i.e.SDK) for free - because it's good, free, time proven marketing. There are only a couple of high end game engines that are completely closed source.
Whoops! You are correct, sir. My apologies. I think they had a 50% off sale on L4D in early spring and then did a press release about how dropping the price of a game inside of a year can significantly boost overall sales numbers. That's probably what I am thinking of.
This is code for "damn, November 2011 is looking pretty crowded with AAA title games - we might reevaluate the situation and climate - not to mention our customer's wallets - and release at a later date."
Not that I blame them. I can think of at least five AAA games coming out this fall, and I don't even follow gaming news all that closely. Christmas titles are getting as much pre-marketing as presidential candidates these years. After Valve has proven with three titles now (L4D, L4D2, Portal 2), a spring release can still be extremely profitable. Sounds like other studios might start caching in on the developing year-round release cycle.
My vintage 2001 Powerbook G4 (550mhz of fury! blazing 100mhz FSB!) has a 24x CD-R built in. I would boot it up every 6-8 months to burn an ISO or two. In college/immediately post college none of my cars had CD players, and by 2007 everyone had transitioned to iPods anyways.
The advent of cheap 512mb thumb drives circa 2005 made it a lot easier to avoid CD-Rs.
I bought a SATA DVD-R for about $20 so I could install Windows 7 from disc. Prior to that I'd been using a 4x IDE CD-ROM drive from 1997 (the kind with a headphone jack, back, forward, play and stop buttons in addition to the standard eject button on the front) that came out of some off the shelf PC at a big box store. I'm not even sure I have a floppy drive in my junk box any more.
I have no beef with getting rid of physical media wherever possible. As long as future computers can boot from an onboard ROM and connect to a server and download a copy of the OS (local server, internet linux distro, commercial OS, whatever) I'm fine with that. It feels very old fashioned to actually handle media these days, except to plug in a wired cable... and even that is becoming less common.
I saw quite a few forums roll over and die sunday night, which was an impressive feat. Facebook didn't slow down (for me) but it was impressive nonetheless for what amounted to bedtime for most americans.
It's a miracle at all that we allow international campaign funding. It's no accident that we give Israel billions of dollars each year in military and economic aid, then give them discounts on US military technology in return for tens of millions of campaign donations each year. Somewhere there's a debate between Al Gore and Bush where one says "I love Israel *smile*smile*" and the other retorts "I love Israel too *smile*smile*" and the crowd laughs. Why wouldn't we give the same assistance to impoverished hot button countries like Lebanon, Yemen and Serbia?
Let's keep as much international influence out of this as possible, mmkay? Let's keep the natural born citizen rule in place (I've got no beef with Obama) and look towards going the other direction and finally ending international campaign donations instead.
I am increasingly amused by the increasing use of lizards, lizard-men and in particular (2008 texas presidential primary) The Lizard King in political discussions. Keep up the good work Michael.
Was BB OS 6 a huge, completely new codebase from OS 5? Because OS 5 was warmed over OS4, which looked outdated when it was released in 2007(?). That's at minimum, 4 years of crufty code. IIRC, OS4 is just warmed over OS3. The huge problem with Blackberry devices is that they're running on the mobile phone equivalent of Windows ME. People, companies and everything in between have moved on. It sucks that you probably have a sizable investment in RIM stock, but this day was long coming. You should have sold all your stock along with everyone else when the Bold was released two years ago, a warmed over version of the curve.
I had a curve for two years, and while reliable, it is definitely not a modern mobile computing platform. Unless OS 8 is some sort of blackberry branded version of Android, they're done.
I'm not sure these really count as "clouds". You've got a tremendous amount of hot, humid air moving inland (it's been blowing about 15-20mph near-constant for two weeks now here in north Texas) where it meets the cold air on a line roughly dallas to littlerock to chicago, which can't hold that kind of humidity, dumping stupid amounts of moisture (rain) out of the air. The resulting process kicks up more wind. The fact that you end up with something on a satellite photo that resembles something remotely like a puffy rain cloud from space is slightly better than a mere coincidence. You can't "break up" humidity falling out of cold air with a fucking bomb.
If you wanted to go improbable solution, the best idea would be for everyone to go outside, plug their hair dryer in to an extension cord and point it at the cold front, warming it up and pushing it further northwest.
p.s. Get Off My Lawn, I've been playing Crysis 2 on my Regan-era iPaq since last year in glorious 16-shade greyscale LCD.
Call me when they port over Quake 3 to the Apple Newton like John Carmack promised at Quakecon 2001. He must be too busy porting Rage to the iPhone still.
In the case of Excel 2007, not all the features are available unless you stretch the window over 1200px wide. If you've got multiple windows open for a project and you want to easily color code things, you're going to need either a giant monitor, or multiple ones.
In fact, I would suggest that Clippy demonstrates that Microsoft will remove features that people do not like. After all, they did get rid of the stupid paperclip after everyone complained.
I have a sneaking suspicion that whoever made that call in 2000 was not in that position for the release of Word 2007.
Leather is a renewable resource that has a bonus of being incredibly durable for a century or more. Many Model A/Model T fords are still using their original leather clutches. Artificial leather isn't sustainable and in most cases the production of it creates toxic byproducts.
I'll even volunteer my own skin sample if we can get this party started! Why use animal skin when you can test several strains of real human skin, rather than approximate animal skin? There are few long term uses for manufactured animal skin, but thousands of commercial applications for human skin...
We've been streaming since January. Internet + Netflix + Hulu Plus = 45.97 here in Dallas. Neither of us is home very often during prime time TV so the 24 hour delay doesn't have much of an effect. We will probably buy True Blood on Amazon streaming when the next season hits, if it's available.
The other bonus is that with streaming, you don't need gobs of hard drive space to store torrented HD episodes indefinitely. Still waiting on Hulu Plus to offer Hulu Plus Plus without ads (we'd gladly pay $25/mo for this... are you listening?)
The pint is the unofficial standard full serving of a beverage for an adult male. Many people grew up with the 12oz aluminum can, but most beverages sold at convenience stores these days are 473-500ml. You can order half liters, and more often liters of beer (on tap) in quite a number of restaurants and bars in Texas, particularly those with west Texas and German roots. The pint still reigns supreme though.
Quoting Fahrenheit is more accurate in most cases, though. Adjusting my thermostat from 76 to 78F in the summer saves me about $20/mo, while still being bearable inside. When we have guests over we'll bump it down to 77F (half a degree Celsius). Do metric thermostats work in tenths of a degree? It seems strange to say "I bump my thermostat up 1.1 degrees in the summer".
Just mandate all signs have both MPH and KPH when replaced, and abolish using MPH on speedometers in new cars manufacturered 5 years from that date. In 20 years remove MPH from new replacement signs, and require any remaining (20+ year old!) signs to be replaced at that point (vanishingly few).
You can buy a 3 ton press off amazon for about $100 us - free shipping even! Must supply own sharp penetrating object, however. I was shocked to see that the final hand powered device shown in the article (not the video) is essentially the 7 ton press my friend has in his garage for car bodywork/repair, and costs around $80 at harbor freight tools.
I'm not sure you even need a sharp penetrating object; simply warping the case/platters out of straight should be sufficient to destroy the data in most cases. Poking a hole in the platter is sure to impress your boss, but it seems overkill once you've already warped the disk.
Bad Company 2 for Xbox/PS3 has the same system in place. You're stuck on the same shitty six maps from launch if you don't pay the $10 used game tax. Once you pay the $10 used game tax, you can play the 14 other multiplayer maps they've released since then.
The problem with buying used multiplayer games 2-3 months after release is that the community is largely dead, and it's just not a good value due to the lack of player base. The $10 tax helps keep the used copy's final cost in line with the new game's price.
Slashdot Mirror
These are commercially available for schools already. Whiteboard manufacturers are buying this off the shelf to integrate with their existing whiteboard systems; they use IR emitters/sensors and hooks up via USB as a standard USB HID multitouch device.
Generally any company that sells their engine offers up the dev tooks (i.e.SDK) for free - because it's good, free, time proven marketing. There are only a couple of high end game engines that are completely closed source.
Whoops! You are correct, sir. My apologies. I think they had a 50% off sale on L4D in early spring and then did a press release about how dropping the price of a game inside of a year can significantly boost overall sales numbers. That's probably what I am thinking of.
This is code for "damn, November 2011 is looking pretty crowded with AAA title games - we might reevaluate the situation and climate - not to mention our customer's wallets - and release at a later date."
Not that I blame them. I can think of at least five AAA games coming out this fall, and I don't even follow gaming news all that closely. Christmas titles are getting as much pre-marketing as presidential candidates these years. After Valve has proven with three titles now (L4D, L4D2, Portal 2), a spring release can still be extremely profitable. Sounds like other studios might start caching in on the developing year-round release cycle.
My vintage 2001 Powerbook G4 (550mhz of fury! blazing 100mhz FSB!) has a 24x CD-R built in. I would boot it up every 6-8 months to burn an ISO or two. In college/immediately post college none of my cars had CD players, and by 2007 everyone had transitioned to iPods anyways.
The advent of cheap 512mb thumb drives circa 2005 made it a lot easier to avoid CD-Rs.
I bought a SATA DVD-R for about $20 so I could install Windows 7 from disc. Prior to that I'd been using a 4x IDE CD-ROM drive from 1997 (the kind with a headphone jack, back, forward, play and stop buttons in addition to the standard eject button on the front) that came out of some off the shelf PC at a big box store. I'm not even sure I have a floppy drive in my junk box any more.
I have no beef with getting rid of physical media wherever possible. As long as future computers can boot from an onboard ROM and connect to a server and download a copy of the OS (local server, internet linux distro, commercial OS, whatever) I'm fine with that. It feels very old fashioned to actually handle media these days, except to plug in a wired cable... and even that is becoming less common.
I saw quite a few forums roll over and die sunday night, which was an impressive feat. Facebook didn't slow down (for me) but it was impressive nonetheless for what amounted to bedtime for most americans.
It's a miracle at all that we allow international campaign funding. It's no accident that we give Israel billions of dollars each year in military and economic aid, then give them discounts on US military technology in return for tens of millions of campaign donations each year. Somewhere there's a debate between Al Gore and Bush where one says "I love Israel *smile*smile*" and the other retorts "I love Israel too *smile*smile*" and the crowd laughs. Why wouldn't we give the same assistance to impoverished hot button countries like Lebanon, Yemen and Serbia?
Let's keep as much international influence out of this as possible, mmkay? Let's keep the natural born citizen rule in place (I've got no beef with Obama) and look towards going the other direction and finally ending international campaign donations instead.
I am increasingly amused by the increasing use of lizards, lizard-men and in particular (2008 texas presidential primary) The Lizard King in political discussions. Keep up the good work Michael.
Was BB OS 6 a huge, completely new codebase from OS 5? Because OS 5 was warmed over OS4, which looked outdated when it was released in 2007(?). That's at minimum, 4 years of crufty code. IIRC, OS4 is just warmed over OS3. The huge problem with Blackberry devices is that they're running on the mobile phone equivalent of Windows ME. People, companies and everything in between have moved on. It sucks that you probably have a sizable investment in RIM stock, but this day was long coming. You should have sold all your stock along with everyone else when the Bold was released two years ago, a warmed over version of the curve.
I had a curve for two years, and while reliable, it is definitely not a modern mobile computing platform. Unless OS 8 is some sort of blackberry branded version of Android, they're done.
I'm not sure these really count as "clouds". You've got a tremendous amount of hot, humid air moving inland (it's been blowing about 15-20mph near-constant for two weeks now here in north Texas) where it meets the cold air on a line roughly dallas to littlerock to chicago, which can't hold that kind of humidity, dumping stupid amounts of moisture (rain) out of the air. The resulting process kicks up more wind. The fact that you end up with something on a satellite photo that resembles something remotely like a puffy rain cloud from space is slightly better than a mere coincidence. You can't "break up" humidity falling out of cold air with a fucking bomb.
If you wanted to go improbable solution, the best idea would be for everyone to go outside, plug their hair dryer in to an extension cord and point it at the cold front, warming it up and pushing it further northwest.
Butterfly in a hurricane...
Aw, give the guy a break. He's just following modern TV newscaster's usage of the term.
The second "your" in your post should be "you are" or "you're". The rest of your contrations look good though.
p.s. Get Off My Lawn, I've been playing Crysis 2 on my Regan-era iPaq since last year in glorious 16-shade greyscale LCD.
Call me when they port over Quake 3 to the Apple Newton like John Carmack promised at Quakecon 2001. He must be too busy porting Rage to the iPhone still.
Let me warm up my beowulf cluster.
...Right after I finish getting these grits out of Natalie Portman's maternity pants.
In the case of Excel 2007, not all the features are available unless you stretch the window over 1200px wide. If you've got multiple windows open for a project and you want to easily color code things, you're going to need either a giant monitor, or multiple ones.
I have a sneaking suspicion that whoever made that call in 2000 was not in that position for the release of Word 2007.
Leather is a renewable resource that has a bonus of being incredibly durable for a century or more. Many Model A/Model T fords are still using their original leather clutches. Artificial leather isn't sustainable and in most cases the production of it creates toxic byproducts.
I'll even volunteer my own skin sample if we can get this party started! Why use animal skin when you can test several strains of real human skin, rather than approximate animal skin? There are few long term uses for manufactured animal skin, but thousands of commercial applications for human skin...
We've been streaming since January. Internet + Netflix + Hulu Plus = 45.97 here in Dallas. Neither of us is home very often during prime time TV so the 24 hour delay doesn't have much of an effect. We will probably buy True Blood on Amazon streaming when the next season hits, if it's available.
The other bonus is that with streaming, you don't need gobs of hard drive space to store torrented HD episodes indefinitely. Still waiting on Hulu Plus to offer Hulu Plus Plus without ads (we'd gladly pay $25/mo for this... are you listening?)
The pint is the unofficial standard full serving of a beverage for an adult male. Many people grew up with the 12oz aluminum can, but most beverages sold at convenience stores these days are 473-500ml. You can order half liters, and more often liters of beer (on tap) in quite a number of restaurants and bars in Texas, particularly those with west Texas and German roots. The pint still reigns supreme though.
Quoting Fahrenheit is more accurate in most cases, though. Adjusting my thermostat from 76 to 78F in the summer saves me about $20/mo, while still being bearable inside. When we have guests over we'll bump it down to 77F (half a degree Celsius). Do metric thermostats work in tenths of a degree? It seems strange to say "I bump my thermostat up 1.1 degrees in the summer".
Just mandate all signs have both MPH and KPH when replaced, and abolish using MPH on speedometers in new cars manufacturered 5 years from that date. In 20 years remove MPH from new replacement signs, and require any remaining (20+ year old!) signs to be replaced at that point (vanishingly few).
You can buy a 3 ton press off amazon for about $100 us - free shipping even! Must supply own sharp penetrating object, however. I was shocked to see that the final hand powered device shown in the article (not the video) is essentially the 7 ton press my friend has in his garage for car bodywork/repair, and costs around $80 at harbor freight tools.
I'm not sure you even need a sharp penetrating object; simply warping the case/platters out of straight should be sufficient to destroy the data in most cases. Poking a hole in the platter is sure to impress your boss, but it seems overkill once you've already warped the disk.
Bad Company 2 for Xbox/PS3 has the same system in place. You're stuck on the same shitty six maps from launch if you don't pay the $10 used game tax. Once you pay the $10 used game tax, you can play the 14 other multiplayer maps they've released since then.
The problem with buying used multiplayer games 2-3 months after release is that the community is largely dead, and it's just not a good value due to the lack of player base. The $10 tax helps keep the used copy's final cost in line with the new game's price.