According to this report
http://www.pmagroup.com/RiskControl/BombThreatManagement.pdf
"In the past, the majority of bomb threats turned out to be hoaxes. However, today more of the threats are
materializing. Thus, management's first consideration must be for the safety of people. It is practically
impossible to determine immediately whether a bomb threat is real or a hoax."
Interesting a lot of people defending this guy - but threatening to blow up an airport is just stupid. this is nothing new with bomb threats though , even pre-9/11 when in primary school somebody called our principal and made a bomb threat, and the whole school had to be cleared for the day while it was searched, and even though no bomb was found the police still spent some effort to find the prankster, because even as a joke there is a necessity for such threats to be investigated, and is a waste of police resources and time.
don't even bother with proxy, just don't make bomb threats, it's not smart or funny.
However if the company knows in advance that demand is low, but that the few people that do want it have a significant need for it, then higher prices can be charged, and are necessary to cover cost of design, development, production and support staff, running the company, for a product that won't sell a lot.
When there is a low demand for a product that has low prices this is usually because company THOUGHT people would want it, but nobody did, and now they've produced a lot and have to get rid of it at a cheap price.
951,045 hospital beds in US vs Wii Fit: 22.5 millions copies(worldwide) sold since oct 30th 2009
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2009/091030e.pdf#page=6http://www.aha.org/aha/resource-center/Statistics-and-Studies/fast-facts.html
I was testing an earlier ChromeOS build in VMWare and although it worked OK when at home, on a network with proxy went to click the option to configure proxy, it opens up another tab in the browser - "Page cannot be displayed" - the proxy page couldn't be displayed unless I already had an internet connection working, and without setting the proxy I couldn't get an internet connection.
I lived in China for one year teaching high school students and one thing I noticed in general while students were brilliant at chemistry, maths, physics, etc. when solving text book problems, many seemed to be struggling with coming up with new concepts, and in some cases applying what they learnt into new areas. Many struggled when told 'I want x as the end result' without any explanation of the process to achieve the end result. It seems most of the science study was just pure memorizing of facts and figures.
I found the same later on when managing some staff from Asia, although very dedicated and hard working they required additional guidance on what processes to use to achieve a goal.
There seemed to be a strong sense of 'copy wherever possible' (why re-create it, if somebody already has?) My students had to do 'school', 'city', and 'provincial exams' The complained the provincial exams 'didn't allow copying' Another instance of this was when a foreign professor in Chinese university was fired when failing students for work that had obviously been copied from another source.
I think US / Europe still had lead on creativity which can be an important factor when coming up with new solutions / ideas. Not to say the Chinese can't, and it will be interesting to see how they go, but I don't think the number of PhD's alone will decide whether US or China has technology lead.
It will also depend on how much further China restricts internet access as the number of internet sites being blocked continues to increase, it certainly frustrates me that even though I have a large network of friends in China working in technology social networking / YouTube continues to be blocked there, and alternatives to access these sites such as proxies / VPN are illegal - and often if detected are blocked. For my friends in China who have studied overseas and since moved back to China they are constantly complaining about fact sites like facebook,twitter, youtube no longer work.
this is just not limited to MS, pretty much every vendor (including open source projects such as Linux) limit the amount of time support is provided for a product, if every single product ever produced by Microsoft continued to be supported FOREVER that would just be a waste of time and money. I much prefer some investment in current and future development then stuck in the past.
Microsoft is not stopping any one from creating competitors to DirectX. Just nobody has created something of the same caliber - you're free to create something with more power, better documentation, more flexibility then directX. OpenGL has failed to so far, that's not Microsoft's fault.
Use DirectX in your development and with less effort realism is added into games, less effort for sounds etc, and there are plenty of examples and very high quality documentation. (openGL documentation doesn't come close)
It's not Microsoft's fault nobody else has created something better...
keep in mind Microsoft had very clear support times for Windows XP, Windows XP is so old now, and has passed is now in extended support period. It is now two OS versions behind the current.
Not that the age really makes a difference but OpenGL is older, released in 1992, DirectX in 1995. The most recent version of DirectX was released in Oct 2009.
My sister's hotmail account was compromised by Chinese spammers, and the password as well as secret questions were changed. However hotmail support was able to recover the account by providing 'last successful logon location', where we usually used the service from, original secret question, details about emails inside.
I expect hotmail was chosen as a target for the simple reason high volume of accounts i.e 270+ million accounts, vs gmail 140 million.
yes things are moving to 'general computing platforms' but also moving towards 'not being good at any one thing' but being mediocre at many. while 'general computing platform' will likely to continue, i think there is some dissatisfaction i.e. mobile phone can browse the web, take photos, and videos. but it is never a good web browser, does not take good photographs, or record good videos. (some phones are more usable than others, but still even the best phones do not come close in capability to even budget versions of the 'specialized' versions of these components.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this report http://www.pmagroup.com/RiskControl/BombThreatManagement.pdf "In the past, the majority of bomb threats turned out to be hoaxes. However, today more of the threats are materializing. Thus, management's first consideration must be for the safety of people. It is practically impossible to determine immediately whether a bomb threat is real or a hoax."
Interesting a lot of people defending this guy - but threatening to blow up an airport is just stupid. this is nothing new with bomb threats though , even pre-9/11 when in primary school somebody called our principal and made a bomb threat, and the whole school had to be cleared for the day while it was searched, and even though no bomb was found the police still spent some effort to find the prankster, because even as a joke there is a necessity for such threats to be investigated, and is a waste of police resources and time. don't even bother with proxy, just don't make bomb threats, it's not smart or funny.
However if the company knows in advance that demand is low, but that the few people that do want it have a significant need for it, then higher prices can be charged, and are necessary to cover cost of design, development, production and support staff, running the company, for a product that won't sell a lot. When there is a low demand for a product that has low prices this is usually because company THOUGHT people would want it, but nobody did, and now they've produced a lot and have to get rid of it at a cheap price. 951,045 hospital beds in US vs Wii Fit: 22.5 millions copies(worldwide) sold since oct 30th 2009 http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2009/091030e.pdf#page=6 http://www.aha.org/aha/resource-center/Statistics-and-Studies/fast-facts.html
I was testing an earlier ChromeOS build in VMWare and although it worked OK when at home, on a network with proxy went to click the option to configure proxy, it opens up another tab in the browser - "Page cannot be displayed" - the proxy page couldn't be displayed unless I already had an internet connection working, and without setting the proxy I couldn't get an internet connection.
the additional issue is google is not popular with majority of chinese web surfers, year after year google has not increased market share, but lost market share to baidu.com http://www.digitaleastasia.com/2009/06/12/google-losing-market-share-to-baidu-in-china/ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-losing-market-share-in-china/3816/
I lived in China for one year teaching high school students and one thing I noticed in general while students were brilliant at chemistry, maths, physics, etc. when solving text book problems, many seemed to be struggling with coming up with new concepts, and in some cases applying what they learnt into new areas. Many struggled when told 'I want x as the end result' without any explanation of the process to achieve the end result. It seems most of the science study was just pure memorizing of facts and figures. I found the same later on when managing some staff from Asia, although very dedicated and hard working they required additional guidance on what processes to use to achieve a goal. There seemed to be a strong sense of 'copy wherever possible' (why re-create it, if somebody already has?) My students had to do 'school', 'city', and 'provincial exams' The complained the provincial exams 'didn't allow copying' Another instance of this was when a foreign professor in Chinese university was fired when failing students for work that had obviously been copied from another source. I think US / Europe still had lead on creativity which can be an important factor when coming up with new solutions / ideas. Not to say the Chinese can't, and it will be interesting to see how they go, but I don't think the number of PhD's alone will decide whether US or China has technology lead. It will also depend on how much further China restricts internet access as the number of internet sites being blocked continues to increase, it certainly frustrates me that even though I have a large network of friends in China working in technology social networking / YouTube continues to be blocked there, and alternatives to access these sites such as proxies / VPN are illegal - and often if detected are blocked. For my friends in China who have studied overseas and since moved back to China they are constantly complaining about fact sites like facebook,twitter, youtube no longer work.
this is just not limited to MS, pretty much every vendor (including open source projects such as Linux) limit the amount of time support is provided for a product, if every single product ever produced by Microsoft continued to be supported FOREVER that would just be a waste of time and money. I much prefer some investment in current and future development then stuck in the past.
Microsoft is not stopping any one from creating competitors to DirectX. Just nobody has created something of the same caliber - you're free to create something with more power, better documentation, more flexibility then directX. OpenGL has failed to so far, that's not Microsoft's fault. Use DirectX in your development and with less effort realism is added into games, less effort for sounds etc, and there are plenty of examples and very high quality documentation. (openGL documentation doesn't come close) It's not Microsoft's fault nobody else has created something better ...
keep in mind Microsoft had very clear support times for Windows XP, Windows XP is so old now, and has passed is now in extended support period. It is now two OS versions behind the current.
Not that the age really makes a difference but OpenGL is older, released in 1992, DirectX in 1995. The most recent version of DirectX was released in Oct 2009.
My sister's hotmail account was compromised by Chinese spammers, and the password as well as secret questions were changed. However hotmail support was able to recover the account by providing 'last successful logon location', where we usually used the service from, original secret question, details about emails inside. I expect hotmail was chosen as a target for the simple reason high volume of accounts i.e 270+ million accounts, vs gmail 140 million.
yes things are moving to 'general computing platforms' but also moving towards 'not being good at any one thing' but being mediocre at many. while 'general computing platform' will likely to continue, i think there is some dissatisfaction i.e. mobile phone can browse the web, take photos, and videos. but it is never a good web browser, does not take good photographs, or record good videos. (some phones are more usable than others, but still even the best phones do not come close in capability to even budget versions of the 'specialized' versions of these components.