Microsoft's view seems to be that they pay more taxes than we do so they should have a bigger say in how it's spent.
Although in a way it's almost touching how they never distinguish between what's good for them, and what's good for computer users (ok, so it's a weird and creepy way).
Somewhere in the institutional thinking I think they're actually convinced it's one and the same thing.
I think you need to polish your logic and/or maths skills.
aside from that needs are rarely absolute, and wants even more so.
in my case, my friends and I often borrow projection units from our employers for the weekend and play 4 player playstation games on the PS2 blown up onto a wall.
We like doing that.
I don't like it enough to pay $10,000 for a unit of my own.
I might well like it enough to chip in $150 each with my friends and spend a weekend arseing around trying to build one.
I frequently spend money on things I don't need, be it the ps2 or my motorcycle.
I'll bet this will have the same flaw as wind power and for the same reason.
The flaw is that you don't get more power out than it takes to build the turbine.
Which makes wind turbines an exercise in carbon trading (and an erratic form of power storage), not power generation.
The problem is that the power you get from a turbine is the cube of it's speed.
So hydro and all the steam variants (nuclear, coal, gas, oil) put vast amounts of power onto a single turbine which turns very fast indeed, it generates a lot of power, far more than it took to make the turbine, and people are willing to pay the other costs.
Wind turbines, turning much slower, wear out before they return the energy investment.
Until they find significantly better ball bearings, or better turbine design, or possibly a superconducting breakthrough which might improve a lot of things, wind isn't going to be a large scale improvement.
Ditto these sea-power things,
I'm sure they'll generate power, and like wind they may be adopted widely as carbon trading to meet emissions standards, but they won't generate more power than it took to make them.
Viable sea-power (and possible wind, windmills are great) involves using the waves to push water uphill, and then running a hydro turbine.
until we get that lubrication/turbine/superconducting breakthrough of course... after that all bets are off.
Re:soviets never did anything small in those days.
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
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· Score: 2
It's a question of where you introduce the simplicity and complexity.
Having built simple and effective rocket engines they tried to bundle them together to make a huge rocket.
That created complexity.
The Americans built more complex gimballed rocket engines, which allowed them to build a simpler overall rocket (Saturn V) with fewer engines.
So the russians created complexity by combining many simple components
Where the americans had a simpler design of more complex components.
I think the moral is that elegance and efficiency of design is important throughout any significant engineering project.
But to say "beer is made of wheat" is like saying "Computers are made by apple".. a computer may be made by apple.. but in a random sample you're unlikely to see one.
"wheat beer" is a bit of a technical stretch of the term beer by many standards.. (for all that it's good)
Ignoring that the vast majority of beer is made of barley...
Having once brewed beer up from raw malt (and malting the grain is a long and painful process in itself) I'd be more worried out for a man who lives near a liquor store.
a) It's a hack, nerds love hacks. b) He built it himself, nerds love doing things themselves that other people pay for. c) If you don't think rollercoasters are cool then I'll cry for you tonite as I try to sleep. d) nerds love cool stuff
it's an electronic round ignition system that lets them stack lots of rounds in each barrel and lots of barrels together and then fire them in a way it won't just all blow up.
but the effect isn't all that different from a claymore mine.
I'm pretty sure they advertise a potential 1,000,000 rounds a minute (as opposed to your seconds), and have built "proof of concept" but not the actual 1,000,000 round a minute "guns".
Not to demean metal storm's work, or the other points you made, just wanted to clear it up a little.
the first time I saw googlebots in my access logs i nearly fell over, we hadn't asked anyone to index our site.
but I have to admite to being very impressed, every month the googlebots come to visit, they don't disrupt the site (the National Library of Australia hit us with a denial of service attack called "Pandora" when they tried to suck down the enitre site in one go, complete with recursing loops), and they rank us very highly (perhaps too highly, there are more authoritative sites in our region, we do more comment).
anyway I suspect the author forgot that most users of search engines aren't website owners hoping to be indexed, but people doing searches.
Sites that have been regularly updated for a couple of years tend to be a better source of information than those slapped up yesterday.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, i seem to have forgotten about the american congenital irony bypass.
I was trying to interpret MS's internal thinking, not to justfy it.
Microsoft's view seems to be that they pay more taxes than we do so they should have a bigger say in how it's spent.
Although in a way it's almost touching how they never distinguish between what's good for them, and what's good for computer users (ok, so it's a weird and creepy way).
Somewhere in the institutional thinking I think they're actually convinced it's one and the same thing.
I think you need to polish your logic and/or maths skills.
aside from that needs are rarely absolute, and wants even more so.
in my case, my friends and I often borrow projection units from our employers for the weekend and play 4 player playstation games on the PS2 blown up onto a wall.
We like doing that.
I don't like it enough to pay $10,000 for a unit of my own.
I might well like it enough to chip in $150 each with my friends and spend a weekend arseing around trying to build one.
I frequently spend money on things I don't need, be it the ps2 or my motorcycle.
I have $500 for something I want.
I don't have $10,000.
OK?
"I'd rather spend $10k on something worth it than $500~~$1000 on something not worth it."
If I had a lazy $10k i'd agree
But all my $10k's are going to be pretty busy for the forseeable future.
as it is i might just have a lazy $500.
that makes this more interesting to me than your companies new toy.
and that the training providers have stock for this purpose? and are sending out the spam at the same time as the price cuts are announced?
doesn't seem like a coincidence to me
sounds like a faulty pin eh?
Could also have been they didn't like the connotation of BOM and bomb?
my ps2 is the australian model but i've ben watching DVD's on it just fine
straight out of the box.
I've had two spam faxes in the office today (we never get spam faxes here, so thats significant in itself)
The gist of them is that if I sign up for an MSCE course I'll get a free X-Box
It shows every sign of a truly desperate company trying to shift stock, and certainly makes it look like the X-Box is a tacky trinket.
So for you to win the customers must lose?
and you can live with yourself?
wow.
Countries and peoples do not get to to be Superpowers without a sense of manifest destiny.
It's a launch of a manned space capsule, not a satellite
in theory they could have put a real person in there.
Chinese want to be the third nation to put people into space, taking what they see as their palce as equals with russia and the USA.
But I'm sure they've got their sights on No.1
The BSA are the mongrels who send quasi-legal threatening letters to every business in the country demanding we tell them what software we're using.
I Can't see them being against this.
I think in prison a pretty little thing like you would get it the other way around.
ever wondered why this hasn't happenned already?
The last thing the southern states want is thirty million more northeners in the union....
he does?
does anyone have a link to a pic?
If you reasonably believed that the vendor had legitimate title then thats enough.
Especially as the release of the code under the GPL doesn't reduce the rights of the company to the code in their backup tapes.
I'll bet this will have the same flaw as wind power and for the same reason.
The flaw is that you don't get more power out than it takes to build the turbine.
Which makes wind turbines an exercise in carbon trading (and an erratic form of power storage), not power generation.
The problem is that the power you get from a turbine is the cube of it's speed.
So hydro and all the steam variants (nuclear, coal, gas, oil) put vast amounts of power onto a single turbine which turns very fast indeed, it generates a lot of power, far more than it took to make the turbine, and people are willing to pay the other costs.
Wind turbines, turning much slower, wear out before they return the energy investment.
Until they find significantly better ball bearings, or better turbine design, or possibly a superconducting breakthrough which might improve a lot of things, wind isn't going to be a large scale improvement.
Ditto these sea-power things,
I'm sure they'll generate power, and like wind they may be adopted widely as carbon trading to meet emissions standards, but they won't generate more power than it took to make them.
Viable sea-power (and possible wind, windmills are great) involves using the waves to push water uphill, and then running a hydro turbine.
until we get that lubrication/turbine/superconducting breakthrough of course... after that all bets are off.
It's a question of where you introduce the simplicity and complexity.
Having built simple and effective rocket engines they tried to bundle them together to make a huge rocket.
That created complexity.
The Americans built more complex gimballed rocket engines, which allowed them to build a simpler overall rocket (Saturn V) with fewer engines.
So the russians created complexity by combining many simple components
Where the americans had a simpler design of more complex components.
I think the moral is that elegance and efficiency of design is important throughout any significant engineering project.
personally I'm against ANYONE's hegemony.
I think most thinking people are, and should be.
Slashdot's failings or otherwise aren't really relevant to that.
I didn't say there weren't any, far from it.
But to say "beer is made of wheat" is like saying "Computers are made by apple".. a computer may be made by apple.. but in a random sample you're unlikely to see one.
"wheat beer" is a bit of a technical stretch of the term beer by many standards.. (for all that it's good)
Ahh the humour of ignorance,
Ignoring that the vast majority of beer is made of barley...
Having once brewed beer up from raw malt (and malting the grain is a long and painful process in itself) I'd be more worried out for a man who lives near a liquor store.
you must lead a charmless life.
a) It's a hack, nerds love hacks.
b) He built it himself, nerds love doing things themselves that other people pay for.
c) If you don't think rollercoasters are cool then I'll cry for you tonite as I try to sleep.
d) nerds love cool stuff
I think you're talking about metal storm...
Their website is here.
it's an electronic round ignition system that lets them stack lots of rounds in each barrel and lots of barrels together and then fire them in a way it won't just all blow up.
but the effect isn't all that different from a claymore mine.
I'm pretty sure they advertise a potential 1,000,000 rounds a minute (as opposed to your seconds), and have built "proof of concept" but not the actual 1,000,000 round a minute "guns".
Not to demean metal storm's work, or the other points you made, just wanted to clear it up a little.
They certainly are Australian.
the first time I saw googlebots in my access logs i nearly fell over, we hadn't asked anyone to index our site.
but I have to admite to being very impressed, every month the googlebots come to visit, they don't disrupt the site (the National Library of Australia hit us with a denial of service attack called "Pandora" when they tried to suck down the enitre site in one go, complete with recursing loops), and they rank us very highly (perhaps too highly, there are more authoritative sites in our region, we do more comment).
anyway I suspect the author forgot that most users of search engines aren't website owners hoping to be indexed, but people doing searches.
Sites that have been regularly updated for a couple of years tend to be a better source of information than those slapped up yesterday.