I don't think anyone (including Microsoft) is saying they invented the technology. That doesn't make the product any less interesting. Sometimes it takes a big company to realize ideas of people who have little chance of bringing the idea to fruition. A table-top computer is hardly a novel idea, but something a lot of people have been waiting for a long time.
The GNOME in the title of the article refers to the GUI component for interacting with the HAL file system encryption component. They're just making a GUI to interact with the system-level encryption.
Hey, the same Blade Runner line came to me when I saw the article title.
I believe I've read that animals with faster heartbeats (ie. smaller animals) have shorter lifespans than those with slower heartbeats. I think of this as all animals having a finite number of heartbeats and so if your heart beats faster you arrive at the end more quickly. I've also wondered whether athletes shorten their lives by training regularly with elevated heart beats. Similar to mechanical and electrical devices made by man, the human body is made of parts which will fatique and fail over time. Maybe Alzheimer's follows a similar course in that the more you use your brain the quicker you burn it out. In this respect it would have less to do with education and intelligence and more to do with use. eg. a highly intelligent person who uses their brain efficiently may last longer than a less intelligent person who wastes too many cycles on routine tasks.
Tell that to a gazelle being pursued by a lion. When the chase has ended and it's fight-or-die for the gazelle are you saying the gazelle would be better off rolling in some fresh mint leaves and offering itself up to the lion, that way not cheating itself into becoming like the lion? That's crazy talk. Have you heard of survival of the fittest? It may be nice to think that there would be no bullies in our advanced society and any one that pops up would be swiftly dealt with by the law enforcers, but that's just not reality. It could perhaps be closer to reality if you approve of a totalitarian regime, but then you've just swapped a low level bully for a higher one.
And instead of that plan being "Ask Slashdot" I'd try "Ask Google". If you don't get anything useable on the first page of search results then try searching on something ingenius like "business plan".;-)
It might seem a little primitive having to do a whole heap of pen up, pen down, move, and rotate commands to draw a dialog box, but imagine how impressed future employers will be when they see on your resume that you developed an enterprise scale distributed system with it.
Wasn't there an expected pandemic many years ago where a vaccine was quickly developed and proceeded to be deliverered to all Americans, but in the aftermath it was determined that the actual virus only killed one person and the vaccine killed hundreds?
I recall reading about it, but don't remember any other details other than the person killed as a result of the virus may have been a navy guy.
Supporting my other response, the final paragraph of the article is: "What we did here [with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005] is we said we're not going to deliver our next release until we've got a whole big bunch of stuff done, including the integration of the.Net runtime into SQL Server, which was a huge piece of work for both of those two teams. So you tie them both up."
So it seems that they're turning to agile now, but hadn't used it for VS2005 or SQL2005.
There isn't enough information to determine whether or not use of scrum was a success of failure. You're leaning toward failure, but it's just as possible that they switched methodologies toward the end in an attempt to get a late product out the door.
I didn't mean that the development of the product was done in response to Google but rather this latest announcement. Of course, it takes more than a few weeks to develop something like this (I'm talking Live Office, I haven't looked at their Live Windows which sounds pretty lite on functionality).
Webserver hosted applications are nothing new and of course Microsoft has dabbled in this. However I believe that the recent Google rumours could have prompted Microsoft to dust off some of this stuff. We slashdotters do have experience and memory (are you not a slashdotter yourself?). I remember them looking into this circa 1997 with ActiveX. Of course the ability (and motivation?) to support non-IE browsers was not there, and that movement started with a lean towards thick-clients, however it was clearly recognition that accessing rich applications through a browser was up and coming. It's only now with Ajax that this is gaining momentum. Until now it seems that Citrix over a browser was the way to go [not]:-)
Your criticism doesn't make any sense. If a beta is a full product, that's good isn't it? If no showstoppers are found you'd expect it to quickly become a release candidate and then soon after that to be released. That sounds like a pretty good use of the beta cycle to me. So in what way has Microsoft not been honest in their use of the term "beta"?
They could have had these products in the works for quite some time, though it seems a safe bet that this is in response to the recent Google rumours. Who cares, though? Reacting to the needs of the market is what smart businesses do. Microsoft seems to be going through a stage of re-inventing themselves somewhat. Becoming leaner and quickly responding to the market is what they need to do to survive. Good on them.
Yes, a CS degree is just as necessary for a musician working on game soundtracks as it is for the receptionist at a games company. A PhD in particle modelling or artificial intelligence certainly wouldn't hurt either.
Yes, the reason why I left. I was a little naive on that first job. I had little doubt that I'd have been sacked for refusing to work the extra hours. I knew nothing of unfair dismissal laws and such at that time and was more concerned with having a good reference for gaining future employment, but as I've said I didn't even get that.
Actually, that wasn't about the money, on my end anyway. It was my first job, I was young and happy to have an IT job and my weekly pay packet wasn't too bad with so much overtime at time-and-a-half rates. It was not having a life and sacrificing too many things due to deadlines (good friend's 21st's for example) with no appreciation or understanding from the boss that made me leave, and I'm so glad I did.
I forgot to mention that I agreed to stay for 3 months after saying I was going to leave to train up my replacement, and then part time for 1 month after that. And after all of that they would not give me the written reference that I had to continually ask for. If it wasn't for the recruiter for my new job some months later having a long-ish conversation with my old boss they probably wouldn't have tripped up.
It's good money for a little while, but get out when you start to catch fire. Note: the money will be a fading memory a few years later but the frustrations won't. However, I can't say that it's not a good learning experience, in something. Of course, if you need the extra money then working overtime, especially for time-and-a-half, sure beats finding a second, possibly lower-paid, job.
I left a job after only 18 months after having it out with the boss over getting another developer. He said his approach was deliberate because "people work best under pressure". Averaging 65 hours per week for 18 months with many larger peaks, the worst being 95 hours in a week, is far beyond "people work best under pressure". The icing on the cake was when they tried to give me a bad phone reference but contridicted themselves enough that the recruiter knew they were full of it. Luckily I'd worded the recruiter up that I didn't know what they'd say since they were sore I'd left and I'd been having trouble for 4 months getting a written reference out of them. Unsurprisingly, they are no longer in business.
What's wrong with a hand operated air raid siren?
on
The Mind of an Inventor
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· Score: 5, Funny
It would also make calls unintelligible within 4 feet.
But check out the resemblance here (it's uncanny)
on
From TR-1 to iPod mini
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· Score: 1
Damn, I was thinking about doing this 10 years ago. The difference is that mine was inverted (the sphere would be built into the floor, the top protruding just a little, and you'd stand on top). I knew it was not very practicle, but it never occured to me to build it above ground and stand inside:-)
I was also thinking of having robotic arms that could come into range of the person to act as objects that could be felt. ie. if the person walked up to a wall in the virtual world a piece of panel could meet with their hand if they reached out to touch it. There would obviously be some safety limits required. This additional feature would be easy to implement in my under-the-floor version but quite difficult in the stand-inside-the-sphere version.
We keep hearing about the use of Open Source Software in movie production. Even if you forget about full applications like Ardour being used, scripting languages such as Python are used to control other processes whether they be based on Open Source or not. Sure the whole thing could be done on commercial software only, but it's a case of if it's there use it, and clearly Open Source is being used.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anyone (including Microsoft) is saying they invented the technology. That doesn't make the product any less interesting. Sometimes it takes a big company to realize ideas of people who have little chance of bringing the idea to fruition. A table-top computer is hardly a novel idea, but something a lot of people have been waiting for a long time.
The GNOME in the title of the article refers to the GUI component for interacting with the HAL file system encryption component. They're just making a GUI to interact with the system-level encryption.
Hey, the same Blade Runner line came to me when I saw the article title.
I believe I've read that animals with faster heartbeats (ie. smaller animals) have shorter lifespans than those with slower heartbeats. I think of this as all animals having a finite number of heartbeats and so if your heart beats faster you arrive at the end more quickly. I've also wondered whether athletes shorten their lives by training regularly with elevated heart beats. Similar to mechanical and electrical devices made by man, the human body is made of parts which will fatique and fail over time. Maybe Alzheimer's follows a similar course in that the more you use your brain the quicker you burn it out. In this respect it would have less to do with education and intelligence and more to do with use. eg. a highly intelligent person who uses their brain efficiently may last longer than a less intelligent person who wastes too many cycles on routine tasks.
I thought all of the RX-7's produced throughout the 80's and 90's were rotary.
Tell that to a gazelle being pursued by a lion. When the chase has ended and it's fight-or-die for the gazelle are you saying the gazelle would be better off rolling in some fresh mint leaves and offering itself up to the lion, that way not cheating itself into becoming like the lion? That's crazy talk. Have you heard of survival of the fittest? It may be nice to think that there would be no bullies in our advanced society and any one that pops up would be swiftly dealt with by the law enforcers, but that's just not reality. It could perhaps be closer to reality if you approve of a totalitarian regime, but then you've just swapped a low level bully for a higher one.
And instead of that plan being "Ask Slashdot" I'd try "Ask Google". If you don't get anything useable on the first page of search results then try searching on something ingenius like "business plan". ;-)
It might seem a little primitive having to do a whole heap of pen up, pen down, move, and rotate commands to draw a dialog box, but imagine how impressed future employers will be when they see on your resume that you developed an enterprise scale distributed system with it.
Wasn't there an expected pandemic many years ago where a vaccine was quickly developed and proceeded to be deliverered to all Americans, but in the aftermath it was determined that the actual virus only killed one person and the vaccine killed hundreds?
I recall reading about it, but don't remember any other details other than the person killed as a result of the virus may have been a navy guy.
Supporting my other response, the final paragraph of the article is: "What we did here [with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005] is we said we're not going to deliver our next release until we've got a whole big bunch of stuff done, including the integration of the .Net runtime into SQL Server, which was a huge piece of work for both of those two teams. So you tie them both up."
So it seems that they're turning to agile now, but hadn't used it for VS2005 or SQL2005.
There isn't enough information to determine whether or not use of scrum was a success of failure. You're leaning toward failure, but it's just as possible that they switched methodologies toward the end in an attempt to get a late product out the door.
I didn't mean that the development of the product was done in response to Google but rather this latest announcement. Of course, it takes more than a few weeks to develop something like this (I'm talking Live Office, I haven't looked at their Live Windows which sounds pretty lite on functionality).
:-)
Webserver hosted applications are nothing new and of course Microsoft has dabbled in this. However I believe that the recent Google rumours could have prompted Microsoft to dust off some of this stuff. We slashdotters do have experience and memory (are you not a slashdotter yourself?). I remember them looking into this circa 1997 with ActiveX. Of course the ability (and motivation?) to support non-IE browsers was not there, and that movement started with a lean towards thick-clients, however it was clearly recognition that accessing rich applications through a browser was up and coming. It's only now with Ajax that this is gaining momentum. Until now it seems that Citrix over a browser was the way to go [not]
Your criticism doesn't make any sense. If a beta is a full product, that's good isn't it? If no showstoppers are found you'd expect it to quickly become a release candidate and then soon after that to be released. That sounds like a pretty good use of the beta cycle to me. So in what way has Microsoft not been honest in their use of the term "beta"?
They could have had these products in the works for quite some time, though it seems a safe bet that this is in response to the recent Google rumours. Who cares, though? Reacting to the needs of the market is what smart businesses do. Microsoft seems to be going through a stage of re-inventing themselves somewhat. Becoming leaner and quickly responding to the market is what they need to do to survive. Good on them.
Yes, a CS degree is just as necessary for a musician working on game soundtracks as it is for the receptionist at a games company. A PhD in particle modelling or artificial intelligence certainly wouldn't hurt either.
Yes, the reason why I left. I was a little naive on that first job. I had little doubt that I'd have been sacked for refusing to work the extra hours. I knew nothing of unfair dismissal laws and such at that time and was more concerned with having a good reference for gaining future employment, but as I've said I didn't even get that.
Actually, that wasn't about the money, on my end anyway. It was my first job, I was young and happy to have an IT job and my weekly pay packet wasn't too bad with so much overtime at time-and-a-half rates. It was not having a life and sacrificing too many things due to deadlines (good friend's 21st's for example) with no appreciation or understanding from the boss that made me leave, and I'm so glad I did.
I forgot to mention that I agreed to stay for 3 months after saying I was going to leave to train up my replacement, and then part time for 1 month after that. And after all of that they would not give me the written reference that I had to continually ask for. If it wasn't for the recruiter for my new job some months later having a long-ish conversation with my old boss they probably wouldn't have tripped up.
It's good money for a little while, but get out when you start to catch fire. Note: the money will be a fading memory a few years later but the frustrations won't. However, I can't say that it's not a good learning experience, in something. Of course, if you need the extra money then working overtime, especially for time-and-a-half, sure beats finding a second, possibly lower-paid, job.
I left a job after only 18 months after having it out with the boss over getting another developer. He said his approach was deliberate because "people work best under pressure". Averaging 65 hours per week for 18 months with many larger peaks, the worst being 95 hours in a week, is far beyond "people work best under pressure". The icing on the cake was when they tried to give me a bad phone reference but contridicted themselves enough that the recruiter knew they were full of it. Luckily I'd worded the recruiter up that I didn't know what they'd say since they were sore I'd left and I'd been having trouble for 4 months getting a written reference out of them. Unsurprisingly, they are no longer in business.
It would also make calls unintelligible within 4 feet.
Retails box #1
Retails box #2
They say they include a Be Box, a VoIP box. Surely BeOS is inside, or will this remove all memory of Be, Inc. from our minds?
Damn, I was thinking about doing this 10 years ago. The difference is that mine was inverted (the sphere would be built into the floor, the top protruding just a little, and you'd stand on top). I knew it was not very practicle, but it never occured to me to build it above ground and stand inside :-)
I was also thinking of having robotic arms that could come into range of the person to act as objects that could be felt. ie. if the person walked up to a wall in the virtual world a piece of panel could meet with their hand if they reached out to touch it. There would obviously be some safety limits required. This additional feature would be easy to implement in my under-the-floor version but quite difficult in the stand-inside-the-sphere version.
This Miguel fellow should take a look at Python.
ie. is a double helix a barred spiral with vertical expansion?
We keep hearing about the use of Open Source Software in movie production. Even if you forget about full applications like Ardour being used, scripting languages such as Python are used to control other processes whether they be based on Open Source or not. Sure the whole thing could be done on commercial software only, but it's a case of if it's there use it, and clearly Open Source is being used.
Please :-)