As an ASP, Unisys will host SimDesk on the Unisys ES7000, the only enterprise server taking advantage of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server operating system's support for 32-processor scalability.
Not exactly a "big defeat" for Microsoft. They still make money on licensing servers.
Actually, MS Office programs are largely written and maintained by very small numbers of programmers. Microsoft is supposed to use the "Operating Room" paradigm from Fred Brook's The Mythical Man-Month on MS office, which means that most of the staff is in some kind of support role: Documentation and the like.
There is nothing magic about MS office. People commission software of equal or greater complexity all the time. Anhyone know how large the core team is on OpenOffice?
I also remember a German company coming out with a fanless case of the same form factor. It was fanless because it used heat-pipes to cool the CPU that exported heat to huge heat-sinks on the sides. Does anyone know where to find this?
Long range WiFi, Stationkeeping + Some more links
on
Wi-Fi From The Sky
·
· Score: 5, Informative
To make this viable, they will need Phased Array Wi-Fi as covered here earlier. This will increase their range to many miles. There is also a paper about stationkeeping for a group of such balloons.
Funny you mention that. I just heard a local public radio blurb about a Cincinnati company that is applying this to multi-perspon emergency worker and police radio communications and conference calling. Here's an article (not from the same comapny) about using this for cockpit displays. A PDF about NASA research on the subject. (Goes into exactly how we can fool the ears into spatial localization.) A chapter from a book about auditory cueing using spatial localization.
Most of this seems to be geared towards increasing Situational Awareness in the context of aircraft cockpits.
Here is a link to a calculation someone did concerning the energy density requred for a "laser pistol" and comparing it to a can of Potato Cheese soup. It's about the same.
The subject matter of this book is slightly different, since it has an emphasis on real-time. If you're just interested in crunching a large problem as fast as possible, then latency is not an issue.
BTW, if anyone wants to take a gander at Numerical Recipes in C/Fortran they are available here.
Other kinds of grad students in different niches also use these.
There is a formulary and clinical drug database program that is very popular with young doctors and medical students. It's called ePocrates, and it updates itself automatically when you are online and you hotsync. This is very useful because the books are very heavy, and the info changes almost daily.
I'd say this is a genuinely useful application.
(I am not an employee of ePocrates. Just a friend of a med student.)
Professor Cramer is the real deal. A physics professor at Washington University who is also a sci-fi fan and writer. He is also an excellent pop-science writer who can get his point across without dumbing things down. Enjoy.
Someone did this as a Master's project when I was in grad school 5 years ago. Not new. Not news.
Also, this is another case of "Stupid people deserve to be caught."
But for the most part, the degree of similarity that this program is looking for - the commas are in the same place, the semicolons are in the same place, the spacing is the same...
It wouldn't take a lot of thought to alter these factors. Like I used to tell my undergrad students when I was a graduate TA, if you're not smart enough to answer the questions, you're probably not smart enough to cheat either.
Even in the case of "the mistakes are the same" -- if your verification and debugging skills are that bad, you still deserve to be caught!
Does this support hyperlinks? I think you'd want something like that for modern doc.
I think a friend of mine used to use this back in 1995 to simultaneously support printed/web versions of documents in his one-man consulting busimess. If this is indeed the same package, then it's likely to be quite mature.
M$ Word also supports features like this. (Structure oriented document writing) But Word lets you cheat and also do traditional word processing stuff.
EROS is an operating system that doesn't boot. Instead, it just loads a memory image from disk, which can be lightning fast when it's arranged as one contiguious file to eliminate seek times.
This isn't new. There are already development environments out there that you can download for and develop for free, then pay for stuff if you go commercial. VisualWorks Smalltalk has been available on Linux for years now, and lets you do real OO, and RAD. It has a faster VM than the best Java JITs, and better GC. It has had true WORA across 11 platforms (not the mythical WORA that many Java implementations have) for years.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are probably Win32 apps!
Check out this Unisys Newsletter. It says:
As an ASP, Unisys will host SimDesk on the Unisys ES7000, the only enterprise server taking advantage of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server operating system's support for 32-processor scalability.
Not exactly a "big defeat" for Microsoft. They still make money on licensing servers.
From the SimExplorer page on the SimDesk site:
Several patents have been filed for SimExplorer, including a recycle bin available on the Internet. SimExplorer moves deleted data to a virtual recycle bin and allows users to recover or restore that data if it was deleted by mistake. Previously, this functionality was only available on Microsoft© platforms: SimExplorer now makes it possible on all computer platforms.
Sorry, but it's already out there for multiple platforms. All they did was put it behind the familiar "Recycle bin" interface. This isn't so different from the Amazon one-click patent.
They are quite progressive about this subject. Here is a research paper on the German law.
Actually, MS Office programs are largely written and maintained by very small numbers of programmers. Microsoft is supposed to use the "Operating Room" paradigm from Fred Brook's The Mythical Man-Month on MS office, which means that most of the staff is in some kind of support role: Documentation and the like.
There is nothing magic about MS office. People commission software of equal or greater complexity all the time. Anhyone know how large the core team is on OpenOffice?
Take a look at the "Mediabox".
I also remember a German company coming out with a fanless case of the same form factor. It was fanless because it used heat-pipes to cool the CPU that exported heat to huge heat-sinks on the sides. Does anyone know where to find this?
Skystation
Some more links on the story itself:
A very well written review.
Check it out here.
Funny you mention that. I just heard a local public radio blurb about a Cincinnati company that is applying this to multi-perspon emergency worker and police radio communications and conference calling. Here's an article (not from the same comapny) about using this for cockpit displays. A PDF about NASA research on the subject. (Goes into exactly how we can fool the ears into spatial localization.) A chapter from a book about auditory cueing using spatial localization.
Most of this seems to be geared towards increasing Situational Awareness in the context of aircraft cockpits.
[facetious]
The 'xxx' would tend to attract content that wan't so safe for kids, no?
[/facetious]
Here
I especially like the "Horse Masturbation Preventer". (Seriously, look at the page!)
Here is a link to a calculation someone did concerning the energy density requred for a "laser pistol" and comparing it to a can of Potato Cheese soup. It's about the same.
Never underestimate the Power of Cheese!
The subject matter of this book is slightly different, since it has an emphasis on real-time. If you're just interested in crunching a large problem as fast as possible, then latency is not an issue.
BTW, if anyone wants to take a gander at Numerical Recipes in C/Fortran they are available here.
Other kinds of grad students in different niches also use these.
There is a formulary and clinical drug database program that is very popular with young doctors and medical students. It's called ePocrates, and it updates itself automatically when you are online and you hotsync. This is very useful because the books are very heavy, and the info changes almost daily.
I'd say this is a genuinely useful application.
(I am not an employee of ePocrates. Just a friend of a med student.)
Here is another article from John G. Cramer's Alternate View Articles in Analog Sci-Fi Magazine.
Professor Cramer is the real deal. A physics professor at Washington University who is also a sci-fi fan and writer. He is also an excellent pop-science writer who can get his point across without dumbing things down. Enjoy.
Star Wars Galaxies may turn out to be exactly this. (Official Lucasarts SWG Site)
Someone did this as a Master's project when I was in grad school 5 years ago. Not new. Not news.
Also, this is another case of "Stupid people deserve to be caught."
But for the most part, the degree of similarity that this program is looking for - the commas are in the same place, the semicolons are in the same place, the spacing is the same...
It wouldn't take a lot of thought to alter these factors. Like I used to tell my undergrad students when I was a graduate TA, if you're not smart enough to answer the questions, you're probably not smart enough to cheat either.
Even in the case of "the mistakes are the same" -- if your verification and debugging skills are that bad, you still deserve to be caught!
Does this support hyperlinks? I think you'd want something like that for modern doc.
I think a friend of mine used to use this back in 1995 to simultaneously support printed/web versions of documents in his one-man consulting busimess. If this is indeed the same package, then it's likely to be quite mature.
M$ Word also supports features like this. (Structure oriented document writing) But Word lets you cheat and also do traditional word processing stuff.
EROS is an operating system that doesn't boot. Instead, it just loads a memory image from disk, which can be lightning fast when it's arranged as one contiguious file to eliminate seek times.
This isn't new. There are already development environments out there that you can download for and develop for free, then pay for stuff if you go commercial. VisualWorks Smalltalk has been available on Linux for years now, and lets you do real OO, and RAD. It has a faster VM than the best Java JITs, and better GC. It has had true WORA across 11 platforms (not the mythical WORA that many Java implementations have) for years.