Microsoft: It has little to no chance to make an impact in Japan and has yet to make that big of an impact in North America or Europe (and don't say this is because of shortages, if there were serious shortages you'd see sustained $1000 systems on eBay and you wouldn't find them in stores anywhere).
Who are you kidding? Microsoft has sold about five million consoles in eight months. That's more than the PS1, PS2, original Xbox, or any other console at this stage in the cycle. The sales curve for the 360 is steeper than the iPod.
I've been sitting and coding for so many years now, and despite consultations from ergonomic experts and an osteopath, I still haven't been able to find a furniture arrangement that's good for my back.
Once I get around to it I'll be buying a dentist's chair. The keyboard and trackball can be mounted to a tilted swivel tray, and a pair of LCDs a bit higher up, or I'll go to goggles. Finally, there will be a vibration mat placed along the length of it to keep my muscles stimulated.
It'll be slow getting in and out, but I believe it'll be worth it. Until I have to move offices.
Is this really an insightful post? A half-remembered factoid from somebody who is clearly ignorant of Microsoft's business plan calling it dumb? I know that this is slash-weHateMicrosoft-dot, but c'mon!
You have it backwards. There hasn't been an exploit yet that Microsoft didn't relase a patch for first. That bears repeating: Every single exploit of Microsoft software came out after a patch was released for it.
Indeed, most of the exploits were probably written based on system diffs of pre- and post-patched machines.
There is the concept of scapegoating at play here. Do you really thing that Anderson had anything personally to do with the actions that night? Even remotely indirectly it's a big reach.
Internal Union Carbide documents, released in the discovery phase of a civil lawsuit against the company, indicate that he and other executives had been warned by engineers of the poor safety mechanisms. A 1973 document, signed by Anderson himself, notes that the technology that would be used in the Bhopal factory was "unproven." A safety review conducted by Union Carbide experts in 1982 warned of a "serious potential for sizable releases of toxic materials" at the factory.
You can read part of the class action complaint against Anderson here.
Below is one email messages regarding the caging list, mistakenly sent to georgewbush.org and reprinted here http://www.georgewbush.org/deadletteroffice/, where can can find the actual "Caging" list (search for "caging.xls"):
-----Original Message----- From: Ohio 23rd [mailto:ohio23rd@yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 4:56 AM To: shollings@ohio.gov; cday@georgewbush.org; wanda.price@sbcglobal.net Subject: NEED DISTRICT UPDATES ASAP!!!!!!!
Carl, Sandra, and staff:
We have redlined the district (that gets us about 70% of their voters) for challenges but we need the updated voter maps ASAP! We're still working off of 2000 maps. This is the THIRD email I've sent out on this people. Let's get it together the electoin is TUESDAY!!!!
The more we challenge the more we get! William Ohio 23rd District Supervisor ohio23rd@yahoo.com w.fold@sbcglobal.n et
I think the major reason "PDAs" are dying is because virtually every cellphone on sale these days has most of the functionality PDAs are generally used for, with the exception of efficient note taking (a feature I rarely see my PDA-owning friends using in practice)
Are you kidding? Show me a cell phone with WiFi, Exchange, a Game Boy Advance emulator, full MPEG player functionality, Word, Excel, and proper mapping software. That's just some of what I have on my iPAQ.
Why doesn't the article mention the reason Drexler thinks the "Gray Goo" scenario won't happen? It simply says why he initially wrote about it and that in his latest paper he proposes "a manufacturing model in which nanomachines could duplicate themselves without the risk of runaway replication."
He even goes so far as to say that the threat "is well within the realm of physical law."
So what's the change here? There may be some voluntary standard to prevent this from happening? This doesn't sound like a reversal to me.
I don't know about a totally car free zone, trucks still need to be able to make deliveries for instance. But we definatly need more walking streets like in Europe.
The zone could be enforced based on the clock like in some European cities. For example, the road barriers go down around midnight and come up around five. This allows for freight delivery, refuse pickup, street sweepers, etc.
Is Parrot something akin to the JVM /.NET runtime engine? If so is the plan for it to be as robust as the JVM /.NET runtime: i.e. could the same type of applications that people are building for Java /.NET be just as easily built with Parrot?
On a related note, you can already write Perl that targets the.NET runtime: Visual Perl, from ActiveState.
Of course, this research is of no consequence. Governments are not going to moderate their behavior in response to this knowledge when it's much easier to maintain the status quo and drag out that old line, "More study is needed."
Re:Sun Should Embrace and Extend
on
How C# Was Made
·
· Score: 1
Boy would I ever like to see property accessors like in C#. I mean, the compiler knows which side of the assignment the property is on -- why do I have to prefix get_ or set_ to let it know what it should be able to figure out?!
Re:Sun Should Embrace and Extend
on
How C# Was Made
·
· Score: 1
..the ability to define a method as accepting an undefined number of parameters...
Actually,.NET is neither "brilliant" nor "cutting-edge"--it's a modest evolution from Java, which is itself 1970's technology.
This is analogous to saying about the first teleporter, "Teleporters are neither 'brilliant' or 'cutting-edge' -- it's a modest evolution from telecommunications, which is itself 19th century technology."
If it's so prosaic, why hasn't it been done (properly) before.NET? Simply because the concept has occured before does not mean that the implementation is uninteresting or unimaginative.
Maybe it's because I stumbled across the calendar when I was first learning Perl several years ago, but I've always had a soft spot for this. Not a day goes by in December where I don't learn something truly useful.
A sufficient production volume to achieve $100 per kilowatt could readily come from using fuel cells first in buildings--a huge market that accounts for two-thirds of America's electricity use. The reason to start with buildings is that fuel cells can turn 50 to 60-odd percent of
the hydrogen's energy into highly reliable, premium-quality electricity, and the remainder into water heated to about 170F--ideal for the tasks of heating, cooling, and dehumidifying. In a typical structure, such services would help pay for natural gas and a fuel processor to convert it into what a fuel cell needs--hydrogen. With the fuel expenses thus largely covered, electricity from early-production fuel cells should be cheap enough to undercut even the operating cost of existing coal and nuclear power stations, let alone the extra cost to deliver their power, which in 1996 averaged 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Electric or gas utilities could lease and operate the fuel cells most effectively if they initially placed them in buildings in those neighborhoods where the electrical distribution grid was fully loaded and needed costly expansions to meet growing demand, or where fuel cells' unmatched power quality and reliability are valued for special uses like powering computers.
Once fuel cells become cost-effective and are installed in a Hypercar [his term for an aerodynamic, lightweight, fuel cell vehicle, described in more detail in the book], the vehicle becomes, in effect, a clean, silent power station on wheels, with a generating capacity of around 20 to 40 kilowatts. The average American car is parked about 96 percent of the time, usually in habitual places. Suppose you pay an annual lease fee of about $4,000 to $5,000 for the privilege of driving your "power plant" the other 4 percent of the time. When you are not using it, rather than plugging your car into the electric grid to recharge it--as battery cars require--you plug it in as a generating asset. While you sit at your desk, your power-plant-onwheels is sending 20-plus kilowatts of electricity back to the grid. You're automatically credited for this production at the real-time price, which is highest in the daytime. Thus your second-largest, but previously idle, household asset is now repaying a significant fraction of its own lease fee. It wouldn't require many people's taking advantage of this deal to put all coal and nuclear power plants out of business, because ultimately the U.S. Hypercar fleet could have five to ten times the generating capacity of the national grid.
Slashdot Mirror
Skype didn't blame Microsoft for the outage, they attributed it to a bug in their software. Did the subby even read TFA?
Microsoft: It has little to no chance to make an impact in Japan and has yet to make that big of an impact in North America or Europe (and don't say this is because of shortages, if there were serious shortages you'd see sustained $1000 systems on eBay and you wouldn't find them in stores anywhere).
Who are you kidding? Microsoft has sold about five million consoles in eight months. That's more than the PS1, PS2, original Xbox, or any other console at this stage in the cycle. The sales curve for the 360 is steeper than the iPod.
I just showed this to my kindergarden-aged daughter, and she wants to know why they didn't make it fun.
Snow Crash would, imo, make a *fantastic* sci-fi.
Educational software circa 1985:
You have died
--little wagon--
of dysentery.
Educational software circa 2005:
The villagers have given you the secret of a new Technology!
I've been sitting and coding for so many years now, and despite consultations from ergonomic experts and an osteopath, I still haven't been able to find a furniture arrangement that's good for my back.
Once I get around to it I'll be buying a dentist's chair. The keyboard and trackball can be mounted to a tilted swivel tray, and a pair of LCDs a bit higher up, or I'll go to goggles. Finally, there will be a vibration mat placed along the length of it to keep my muscles stimulated.
It'll be slow getting in and out, but I believe it'll be worth it. Until I have to move offices.
Is this really an insightful post? A half-remembered factoid from somebody who is clearly ignorant of Microsoft's business plan calling it dumb? I know that this is slash-weHateMicrosoft-dot, but c'mon!
Using stem cells to regrow heart tissue may work someday.
From what I hear, a stem cell for heart muscle has yet to be identified. This is a huge problem in healing infarcts.
You have it backwards. There hasn't been an exploit yet that Microsoft didn't relase a patch for first. That bears repeating: Every single exploit of Microsoft software came out after a patch was released for it.
Indeed, most of the exploits were probably written based on system diffs of pre- and post-patched machines.
This is especially true given that the non-doped mind has millions of years of "trials".
There is the concept of scapegoating at play here. Do you really thing that Anderson had anything personally to do with the actions that night? Even remotely indirectly it's a big reach.
Internal Union Carbide documents, released in the discovery phase of a civil lawsuit against the company, indicate that he and other executives had been warned by engineers of the poor safety mechanisms. A 1973 document, signed by Anderson himself, notes that the technology that would be used in the Bhopal factory was "unproven." A safety review conducted by Union Carbide experts in 1982 warned of a "serious potential for sizable releases of toxic materials" at the factory.
You can read part of the class action complaint against Anderson here.
Below is one email messages regarding the caging list, mistakenly sent to georgewbush.org and reprinted here http://www.georgewbush.org/deadletteroffice/, where can can find the actual "Caging" list (search for "caging.xls"):
n et
-----Original Message-----
From: Ohio 23rd [mailto:ohio23rd@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 4:56 AM
To: shollings@ohio.gov; cday@georgewbush.org; wanda.price@sbcglobal.net
Subject: NEED DISTRICT UPDATES ASAP!!!!!!!
Carl, Sandra, and staff:
We have redlined the district (that gets us about 70% of their voters) for challenges but we need the updated voter maps ASAP! We're still working off of 2000 maps. This is the THIRD email I've sent out on this people. Let's get it together the electoin is TUESDAY!!!!
The more we challenge the more we get!
William Ohio 23rd District Supervisor
ohio23rd@yahoo.com
w.fold@sbcglobal.
I understand that Snow Crash was initially to be a graphic novel. Has there been any consideration given to producing it as a movie?
I think the major reason "PDAs" are dying is because virtually every cellphone on sale these days has most of the functionality PDAs are generally used for, with the exception of efficient note taking (a feature I rarely see my PDA-owning friends using in practice)
Are you kidding? Show me a cell phone with WiFi, Exchange, a Game Boy Advance emulator, full MPEG player functionality, Word, Excel, and proper mapping software. That's just some of what I have on my iPAQ.
Why doesn't the article mention the reason Drexler thinks the "Gray Goo" scenario won't happen? It simply says why he initially wrote about it and that in his latest paper he proposes "a manufacturing model in which nanomachines could duplicate themselves without the risk of runaway replication."
He even goes so far as to say that the threat "is well within the realm of physical law."
So what's the change here? There may be some voluntary standard to prevent this from happening? This doesn't sound like a reversal to me.
I don't know about a totally car free zone, trucks still need to be able to make deliveries for instance. But we definatly need more walking streets like in Europe.
The zone could be enforced based on the clock like in some European cities. For example, the road barriers go down around midnight and come up around five. This allows for freight delivery, refuse pickup, street sweepers, etc.
I sometimes suspect that .NET may be the only hope of getting functional programming adopted by the maininstream.
Haskell is available for .NET now, using Mondrian.
Or, you can can access the Framework's libraries with Hugs98 for .NET.
Is Parrot something akin to the JVM / .NET runtime engine? If so is the plan for it to be as robust as the JVM / .NET runtime: i.e. could the same type of applications that people are building for Java / .NET be just as easily built with Parrot?
On a related note, you can already write Perl that targets the .NET runtime: Visual Perl, from ActiveState.
Of course, this research is of no consequence. Governments are not going to moderate their behavior in response to this knowledge when it's much easier to maintain the status quo and drag out that old line, "More study is needed."
Boy would I ever like to see property accessors like in C#. I mean, the compiler knows which side of the assignment the property is on -- why do I have to prefix get_ or set_ to let it know what it should be able to figure out?!
This has been in since 1.0
Actually, .NET is neither "brilliant" nor "cutting-edge"--it's a modest evolution from Java, which is itself 1970's technology.
This is analogous to saying about the first teleporter, "Teleporters are neither 'brilliant' or 'cutting-edge' -- it's a modest evolution from telecommunications, which is itself 19th century technology."
If it's so prosaic, why hasn't it been done (properly) before .NET? Simply because the concept has occured before does not mean that the implementation is uninteresting or unimaginative.
Maybe it's because I stumbled across the calendar when I was first learning Perl several years ago, but I've always had a soft spot for this. Not a day goes by in December where I don't learn something truly useful.
Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has been proposing something like this for a while now, but with an interesting bootstraping step. Quoting a bit from Natural Capitalism (full text is available online):
A sufficient production volume to achieve $100 per kilowatt could readily come from using fuel cells first in buildings--a huge market that accounts for two-thirds of America's electricity use. The reason to start with buildings is that fuel cells can turn 50 to 60-odd percent of the hydrogen's energy into highly reliable, premium-quality electricity, and the remainder into water heated to about 170F--ideal for the tasks of heating, cooling, and dehumidifying. In a typical structure, such services would help pay for natural gas and a fuel processor to convert it into what a fuel cell needs--hydrogen. With the fuel expenses thus largely covered, electricity from early-production fuel cells should be cheap enough to undercut even the operating cost of existing coal and nuclear power stations, let alone the extra cost to deliver their power, which in 1996 averaged 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Electric or gas utilities could lease and operate the fuel cells most effectively if they initially placed them in buildings in those neighborhoods where the electrical distribution grid was fully loaded and needed costly expansions to meet growing demand, or where fuel cells' unmatched power quality and reliability are valued for special uses like powering computers.
Once fuel cells become cost-effective and are installed in a Hypercar [his term for an aerodynamic, lightweight, fuel cell vehicle, described in more detail in the book], the vehicle becomes, in effect, a clean, silent power station on wheels, with a generating capacity of around 20 to 40 kilowatts. The average American car is parked about 96 percent of the time, usually in habitual places. Suppose you pay an annual lease fee of about $4,000 to $5,000 for the privilege of driving your "power plant" the other 4 percent of the time. When you are not using it, rather than plugging your car into the electric grid to recharge it--as battery cars require--you plug it in as a generating asset. While you sit at your desk, your power-plant-onwheels is sending 20-plus kilowatts of electricity back to the grid. You're automatically credited for this production at the real-time price, which is highest in the daytime. Thus your second-largest, but previously idle, household asset is now repaying a significant fraction of its own lease fee. It wouldn't require many people's taking advantage of this deal to put all coal and nuclear power plants out of business, because ultimately the U.S. Hypercar fleet could have five to ten times the generating capacity of the national grid.
I wonder -- what's the feasibility of walking by the display and discharing enough power at the RFID tags to make them give up thier magic smoke?