No offense, but do you think that if it were possible to sit at the nickel slots and double your money even 80% of the time that someone else wouldn't have figured this out and exploited the heck out of it?
Are there really that many people thinking "Man, the orchestra would be worth going to if it only had some gadget to play with." It seems like this could possibily strengthen current audience interest, but draw new audiences?
Uh, yeah... when they built the new Kroger grocery store near me and installed the fancy in-cart computers with the LCD panels that could display a map of the store, direct you to specific items in the store, display a list of sale items in the aisle that you're in, etc I switched and started shopping at the new Kroger just because of their new 'toys'.
However, after a few weeks of watching people watch the LCD panel on their cart instead of watching where they were going and ramming their cart into an aisle display, a small child or my achilles tendons, I decided that the 'electronic toy attraction' had run out and went back to my old grocery. Shortly after that they got rid of the LCD panel displays at that Kroger...
It costs money to have change girls walking around 24/7. It costs money to have someone sitting in the change booth waiting to dump your bucket o' change into the counter and hand you the cash equivalent.
Now, you can sit down, put $20 into the machine and play to your hearts content and never touch a coin (which means they reduce the number of free moist towelettes they hand out to wash that 'coin residue' off your hands). If you happen to win then you take your barcoded receipt to a fancy change machine, insert the receipt into the bill acceptor and presto-chango out pops cash money.
Total number of employees you had to directly deal with? Zero. Total amount of money spent employing those Zero people? Zero dollars.
Don't believe me? Buy any book about Vegas and read it. Money is the only reason anything ever happens in Vegas.
Actually that's very wrong. Many slots pay out 98%-99% and advertise as such. So you lose $1 for every $100 you bet
Actually, you're very wrong. On average, most casinos pay out in the 90% - 95% range and somewhere in their casino they have at least one machine that pays out 98% and if you read the fine print in their ads you'll see that their slots pat out "UP TO 98%" or "AS MUCH AS 98%".
The actual pay out percentages are also based on the cash amount required to play the machine with higher value machines paying out higher percentages AND the number of coins that are played, as all big jackpots are based on the player playing the maximum number of coins at one time. If you sit down and play nickel slots at 5 cents per pull you will not see anywhere near a 98% return.
With the universally accepted gambling chips as an unregulated new currency (you can even leave them in the donation basket in a Las Vegas church)
Whoa, mister... you might want to double check your legal facts before you start misquoting things.
After a problem with some counterfeit chips several years back they passed a law in Nevada that it is illegal to use gambling tokens (AKA chips) as currency and they are not to be legally taken out of casinos. Casinos don't mind if you walk off with chips because the chips cost far less than they worth.
Legally you aren't supposed to use chips from one casino at another, but if they casinos are owned by the same corporation (i.e., you can use Circus Circus chips at the Luxor, Excalibur, etc. and vice versa) they will usually allow it, but they are not required to.
Yes, there are people who leave them in church collection baskets, but that doesn't make it legal, nor does it make them unregulated currency.
Why exactly should this delay the game?
If it was close to being ready, and according to their release date(s) they should have been pretty close, why are we expected to believe a delay until April?
That is per floating license, which means that any one user can be using it at that time. We currently have 4 such licenses and are planning to add 75 more next year.
Also, the price that I quoted includes multiple tools including Rational RequisitePro (requirements management database), TestManager (test scripts database), ClearCase LT (configuration management system), the Rational Unified Process (a series of HTML files that shows Rational's ideal development process), and then a bunch of support tools including reports generators, etc. Each individual tool is cheaper, but we are using all of those so it was cheaper to buy the entire suite.
Also, and most importantly for us, all of the Rational tools are 22CFR11 compliant (latest FDA guideline for electronic signatures and audit trails) which makes our lives much easier.
Rational Rose, the tool you refer to that looks like Visio on steroids is a separate tool not included in the suite we chose. We do have one floating license for it installed on our license server, but I don't think anyone has taken the time to learn it yet.
Our 4 licenses are currently supporting 8 different project teams with a total of about 45 people using the tools, but only 4 people at a time until we get more licenses.
All of the tools in our suite work together and have complimenting audit trails, so if I enter a requirement into RequisitePro, I can later write a test in TestManager that links to that requirement, and if the requirement changes then TestManager lets me know that I may need to modify the test for that requirement. Also, if I find a defect while running my test, I can enter it into ClearQuest and tie it to the original requirement. It also generates a trace matrix that shows me that every requirement has a corresponding test to verify/validate that requirement, also required by the FDA.
There is a certain amount of effort in setting up the system but it's not that difficult. I was able to pick it up just by using the tools and consulting the online documentation as needed. Once it's up and running it's pretty self-sufficient and except for people forgetting their passwords or accidentally deleting something they didn't mean to, it doesn't require a lot of administration.
If you don't need/want floating licenses, Rational also sells node-locked (single PC) licenses that are significantly cheaper.
As the current Rational administrator for where I work, I have to disagree with your opinion. Somewhat.
Rational is big, I'll give you that. However, there is no reason why your CQ team hasn't setup that database for you. I routinely setup up ClearQuest databases and it takes a grand total of about 4 minutes. After the database is setup it takes an additional few minutes to add the user data (login ID and password) but it doesn't take *that* long to do, especially if the users are already in the system for a different database.
The single biggest problem I see with Rational tools is their high cost. A floating license for the Rational Suite: Team Unifying Platform (our suite of choice) is $7242 which includes the first years maintenance, then ~$1500 per year for ongoing maintenance and support.
Diameter of the Moon is 2160 miles
Radius of the Moon is 1080 miles
Surface area of the Moon is 14,657,414.68 square miles
The light side of the Moon is ~7,328,707 square miles
Assume we can see a maximum of 75% of the light side at any time 3,664,353 square miles (and we can probably see even more)
Major Metroplis....Square miles...% of visible moon
Houston, TX..............617.............0.0002%
Los Angeles, CA........465.............0.0001%
Indianapolis, IN.........403.............0.0001%
Go out during the next full moon and look close at the moon and come back and tell me if you think you can honestly pick out an object that takes up even 0.0002% of it's visible area.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to look up at the moon and see piles of man-made crap instead of its current beautiful state. Power stations on the moon makes me want to vomit.
1) You must live way out in the country where there is no night time city lights to interfere with your view of the night sky.
2) You must have really good eyes or a decent telescope
3) You must have a really weak stomach.
You could build a kick ass solar power station the size of a major metropolis on the moon and not be able to see it with the naked eye.
The only drawback I see to solar power stations on the moon is the expense in buying 1,000,000 of those bright orange 50' extension cords so we can run the power back down to Earth.
it's OK when it stops you, but God forbid it ever touch me! Fairly hypocritical.
Well, duh... Are you new to Slashdot?
Simple Rules: 1) If its good for ME then it's good for EVERYBODY 2) If its bad for ME then its bad for EVERYBODY 3) If its bad for (MICROSOFT|RIAA|MPAA|SCO) then its good for EVERYBODY 4) If its bad for LINUX then its bad for EVERYBODY 5) If it involves Natalie Portman, Beowulf Clusters or Pants Full of Hot Grits then its good for EVERYBODY 6)If it involves the GOATSE guy its bad for EVERYBODY.
generally speaking, GPS receivers don't transmit, and GPS satellites don't track.
You meant to say that as far as you know, they don't do those things... Until you've actually got your hands on and reverse engineered a GPS satellite, it's hard to say for sure just what they're doing up there.
If you're that receptive to having strangers stick things up your ass, you could probably make enough to buy all the prizes in a few weeks in Hollywood.
If you read The National Lampoon's 'Bored of the Rings', Treebeard is replaced with the Jolly Green Giant, his name is Birdseye and he is lord of the Vee-Ates. ho ho ho.
Yeah, but after Handspring decided that stand-alone PDAs were a thing of the past and that integrated PDA/cellphones (without the Springboard slot) were the wave of the future, at least one of these products was cancelled before it ever launched. Nothing worse then spending a few million dollars co-developing a medical device and even getting FDA approval only to find out that your partner has decided to gut that market and doesn't give you any heads up until it's a done deal.
Windows ATM will most likley be based on Windows XP/Embedded, which Microsoft are selling for around $3 a processor
Where did you get that dollar figure? Two years ago when we looked at doing embedded Windows, the lowest dollar figure we could get was $35 per in quantities of 100,000.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you are the exception to the rule.
No offense, but do you think that if it were possible to sit at the nickel slots and double your money even 80% of the time that someone else wouldn't have figured this out and exploited the heck out of it?
Are there really that many people thinking "Man, the orchestra would be worth going to if it only had some gadget to play with." It seems like this could possibily strengthen current audience interest, but draw new audiences?
Uh, yeah... when they built the new Kroger grocery store near me and installed the fancy in-cart computers with the LCD panels that could display a map of the store, direct you to specific items in the store, display a list of sale items in the aisle that you're in, etc I switched and started shopping at the new Kroger just because of their new 'toys'.
However, after a few weeks of watching people watch the LCD panel on their cart instead of watching where they were going and ramming their cart into an aisle display, a small child or my achilles tendons, I decided that the 'electronic toy attraction' had run out and went back to my old grocery. Shortly after that they got rid of the LCD panel displays at that Kroger...
What are you doing on Slashdot?
I might never have gone to the symphony, but now that I know there are electronic toys to play with...
Money. It's all about the money.
It costs money to have change girls walking around 24/7. It costs money to have someone sitting in the change booth waiting to dump your bucket o' change into the counter and hand you the cash equivalent.
Now, you can sit down, put $20 into the machine and play to your hearts content and never touch a coin (which means they reduce the number of free moist towelettes they hand out to wash that 'coin residue' off your hands). If you happen to win then you take your barcoded receipt to a fancy change machine, insert the receipt into the bill acceptor and presto-chango out pops cash money.
Total number of employees you had to directly deal with? Zero. Total amount of money spent employing those Zero people? Zero dollars.
Don't believe me? Buy any book about Vegas and read it. Money is the only reason anything ever happens in Vegas.
Actually that's very wrong. Many slots pay out 98%-99% and advertise as such. So you lose $1 for every $100 you bet
Actually, you're very wrong. On average, most casinos pay out in the 90% - 95% range and somewhere in their casino they have at least one machine that pays out 98% and if you read the fine print in their ads you'll see that their slots pat out "UP TO 98%" or "AS MUCH AS 98%".
The actual pay out percentages are also based on the cash amount required to play the machine with higher value machines paying out higher percentages AND the number of coins that are played, as all big jackpots are based on the player playing the maximum number of coins at one time. If you sit down and play nickel slots at 5 cents per pull you will not see anywhere near a 98% return.
With the universally accepted gambling chips as an unregulated new currency (you can even leave them in the donation basket in a Las Vegas church)
Whoa, mister... you might want to double check your legal facts before you start misquoting things.
After a problem with some counterfeit chips several years back they passed a law in Nevada that it is illegal to use gambling tokens (AKA chips) as currency and they are not to be legally taken out of casinos. Casinos don't mind if you walk off with chips because the chips cost far less than they worth.
Legally you aren't supposed to use chips from one casino at another, but if they casinos are owned by the same corporation (i.e., you can use Circus Circus chips at the Luxor, Excalibur, etc. and vice versa) they will usually allow it, but they are not required to.
Yes, there are people who leave them in church collection baskets, but that doesn't make it legal, nor does it make them unregulated currency.
Why exactly should this delay the game? If it was close to being ready, and according to their release date(s) they should have been pretty close, why are we expected to believe a delay until April?
That is per floating license, which means that any one user can be using it at that time. We currently have 4 such licenses and are planning to add 75 more next year.
Also, the price that I quoted includes multiple tools including Rational RequisitePro (requirements management database), TestManager (test scripts database), ClearCase LT (configuration management system), the Rational Unified Process (a series of HTML files that shows Rational's ideal development process), and then a bunch of support tools including reports generators, etc. Each individual tool is cheaper, but we are using all of those so it was cheaper to buy the entire suite.
Also, and most importantly for us, all of the Rational tools are 22CFR11 compliant (latest FDA guideline for electronic signatures and audit trails) which makes our lives much easier.
Rational Rose, the tool you refer to that looks like Visio on steroids is a separate tool not included in the suite we chose. We do have one floating license for it installed on our license server, but I don't think anyone has taken the time to learn it yet.
Our 4 licenses are currently supporting 8 different project teams with a total of about 45 people using the tools, but only 4 people at a time until we get more licenses.
All of the tools in our suite work together and have complimenting audit trails, so if I enter a requirement into RequisitePro, I can later write a test in TestManager that links to that requirement, and if the requirement changes then TestManager lets me know that I may need to modify the test for that requirement. Also, if I find a defect while running my test, I can enter it into ClearQuest and tie it to the original requirement. It also generates a trace matrix that shows me that every requirement has a corresponding test to verify/validate that requirement, also required by the FDA.
There is a certain amount of effort in setting up the system but it's not that difficult. I was able to pick it up just by using the tools and consulting the online documentation as needed. Once it's up and running it's pretty self-sufficient and except for people forgetting their passwords or accidentally deleting something they didn't mean to, it doesn't require a lot of administration.
If you don't need/want floating licenses, Rational also sells node-locked (single PC) licenses that are significantly cheaper.
As the current Rational administrator for where I work, I have to disagree with your opinion. Somewhat.
Rational is big, I'll give you that. However, there is no reason why your CQ team hasn't setup that database for you. I routinely setup up ClearQuest databases and it takes a grand total of about 4 minutes. After the database is setup it takes an additional few minutes to add the user data (login ID and password) but it doesn't take *that* long to do, especially if the users are already in the system for a different database.
The single biggest problem I see with Rational tools is their high cost. A floating license for the Rational Suite: Team Unifying Platform (our suite of choice) is $7242 which includes the first years maintenance, then ~$1500 per year for ongoing maintenance and support.
Why didn't my link show up, darn it? The 15mW version is available at http://www.megalaser.com/
I have a green laser pointer (not from the above site) and believe me, it's worth it. I paid $179 for mine and have not regretted it.
These suckers are VISIBLE like you wouldn't believe. When they say you can see the beam in a dark environment, they are not kidding.
If you want to go really nuts, don't bother with the 15mW version at $349 it's a bit pricey, but I can only imagine what it's going to be like...
The little cable tucks inside of the wrist band. To the best of my knowledge the wrist band / cable is permanently attached to the watch.
Diameter of the Moon is 2160 miles
Radius of the Moon is 1080 miles
Surface area of the Moon is 14,657,414.68 square miles
The light side of the Moon is ~7,328,707 square miles
Assume we can see a maximum of 75% of the light side at any time 3,664,353 square miles (and we can probably see even more)
Go out during the next full moon and look close at the moon and come back and tell me if you think you can honestly pick out an object that takes up even 0.0002% of it's visible area.
If you can, then I apologize.
Did you account for the loss in length when knotting them together?
Surely you don't think friction alone is going to keep the plugs in the sockets with that much weight hanging on them, are you?
I don't know about you, but I don't want to look up at the moon and see piles of man-made crap instead of its current beautiful state. Power stations on the moon makes me want to vomit.
1) You must live way out in the country where there is no night time city lights to interfere with your view of the night sky.
2) You must have really good eyes or a decent telescope
3) You must have a really weak stomach.
You could build a kick ass solar power station the size of a major metropolis on the moon and not be able to see it with the naked eye.
The only drawback I see to solar power stations on the moon is the expense in buying 1,000,000 of those bright orange 50' extension cords so we can run the power back down to Earth.
Thanks! I knew I would forget one...
it's OK when it stops you, but God forbid it ever touch me! Fairly hypocritical.
Well, duh... Are you new to Slashdot?
Simple Rules:
1) If its good for ME then it's good for EVERYBODY
2) If its bad for ME then its bad for EVERYBODY
3) If its bad for (MICROSOFT|RIAA|MPAA|SCO) then its good for EVERYBODY
4) If its bad for LINUX then its bad for EVERYBODY
5) If it involves Natalie Portman, Beowulf Clusters or Pants Full of Hot Grits then its good for EVERYBODY
6)If it involves the GOATSE guy its bad for EVERYBODY.
Did I miss any?
I got the Back to the Future reference in case no one else did...
generally speaking, GPS receivers don't transmit, and GPS satellites don't track.
You meant to say that as far as you know, they don't do those things... Until you've actually got your hands on and reverse engineered a GPS satellite, it's hard to say for sure just what they're doing up there.
If you're that receptive to having strangers stick things up your ass, you could probably make enough to buy all the prizes in a few weeks in Hollywood.
Just an FYI.
Oh man, I kill me.
Well, somebody should.
If you read The National Lampoon's 'Bored of the Rings', Treebeard is replaced with the Jolly Green Giant, his name is Birdseye and he is lord of the Vee-Ates. ho ho ho.
Yeah, but after Handspring decided that stand-alone PDAs were a thing of the past and that integrated PDA/cellphones (without the Springboard slot) were the wave of the future, at least one of these products was cancelled before it ever launched. Nothing worse then spending a few million dollars co-developing a medical device and even getting FDA approval only to find out that your partner has decided to gut that market and doesn't give you any heads up until it's a done deal.
You have solder? Weak...
And so on...
Windows ATM will most likley be based on Windows XP/Embedded, which Microsoft are selling for around $3 a processor
Where did you get that dollar figure? Two years ago when we looked at doing embedded Windows, the lowest dollar figure we could get was $35 per in quantities of 100,000.