The military asked Boeing and Lockheed to develop a new launch vehicle to replace the shuttle and TitanIV. The told them that they could recover some of the cost by launching civilian sats. At the time there where export limitations on what you could launch from Russia. Those restrictions have bee lifted and now they must compete with Russia and the ESA. The debate as to who is more subsidized between Launch Alliance, Russia, and the ESA is one I sure don't want to get into but right now the US companies are not doing well in that price war.
The unedited video would be less biased. You are correct that even presenting the unedited video would still be lacking some information. Things like had the Apache's taken any fire in the area. Or had the ground forces taken any fire in the area. Sure some degree of bias does exist but the prologue of this video as well as the url are really over the top. If you look back to my original post I clearly stated. Wikileaks needs to clean up it act.
The attack on the van is an interesting question. If the van had been marked it would have been a clear war crime. With the van unmarked is was it fair to classify it as a combatant? In this type of combat there are a lot of fuzzy areas and this is one of them. On a battle field an unmarked vehicle rendering aid is a valid target. You say that since that was the questionable act it should have been the target of the emotional appeal. Even then I do not think so. Let the evidence stand on it's own merit with out added commentary or the inflammatory URL. But to not call into question the tactics of Wikileaks when they are clearly showing bias is wrong. You have a problem with the inflammatory URL, I have problems with the URL, prologue, and cometary. The fact is their are problems with how Wikipedia choose to present news. The boost the profile of what they think is interesting with inflammatory language and not just this time. If they want to act just like every other news service then that is fine. I just want to dispel the belief that they are any less biased than NPR, FOX, or CNN. Actually I feel that the in this case they are showing more bias than NPR or CNN would and are at the FOX level.
Again with an emotional plea. Of course it is tragic that this gentleman died and that his child is an orphan. But him having a child or even being a reporter has nothing to do with was the Apache crew justified in shooting or if it was a war crime. You are using one emotional manipulation to justify another. Suppose instead we showed vets with their kids saying how they wouldn't have gotten home without that Apache crew protecting them? You would claim that was just emotional manipulation as was the prologue added to this video. Justice is supposed to be blind and only look at the facts. This video contains a prologue that is designed to push the viewer into agreeing with the conclusion of the people that edited the video. Even the URL that it was listed under is inflammatory. If you don't think that is biased then you don't understand the meaning of the word. To be unbiased they should just present the video without commentary and let each of us decide for ourself. Any commentary changes it from unbiased information to editorial content that reflects the views of those making the commentary. Even your comment that me seeing the bias shows that I am biased is just silly. Claiming I have lost all sense of humanity is just insulting. However to be an unbiased source of news (and they are very rare) you really should let the viewer decide without adding emotional manipulation. Let the evidence speak for it's self or admit that you are a biased source.
Frankly No. I also saw the video. From the resolution of the images I can honestly say that the they did look like they where armed and when the camera man was ducking around the the corner with his camera he did look like a shooter setting up an ambush.
Other looked like they where caring weapons and the video cometary did say that they where caring AK-47s.
In that situation with that data I can see how the crew could open fire. The van was not an Ambulance and was not marked with the Red Crescent or Cross.
If you can not see how they could decide to shoot then yes you are not being reasonable.
Yes I can understand how this error was made. I happened to be visiting family in Northern Ireland in the 80s during the troubles. I was with some other teens when a bomb went off a few blocks down. I didn't run fast enough and was knocked down by a British solder because I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was shortly let go but I understand how errors can happen even when I was the target of that error. I was lucky that I wasn't hurt too bad but yes I could have been dead for no other reason than I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That is what happens in insurgent fights like Northern Ireland back then or Iraq now.
Yes of course because you are so enlightened that you understand these things while the unwashed masses must be guided to understanding. It must be made clear to them because they are not as smart as you or as not as caring.
You see most people can not just be shown facts because they will not understand... Do you really want to go down that road. Manipulation must always be wrong if it is ever wrong. I am sure that if they showed a bunch of solders holding their children on their laps saying how there children would never have known their daddy if the gunship crews hadn't had protected them you would be all right with it? Manipulation and bias is manipulation and bias. You are okay with it or you are not. If you are ok with it when is supports your view then you have been enlisted as a manipulator.
And this video doesn't push opinion? Gee so you think that the URL collateralmurder isn't biased? Showing times when they are no biased doesn't remove times when they clearly are. Even the times when they behave as you show in their examples shows bias. They have decided that that leak isn't worth pushing while this video is. The fact that they made a special project page for this video and of course put it at the top of the page right next to their fund raising request is not bias at all. Or the fact that they only put the edit version with inflammatory prologue on the front page isn't an example of bias on their part.
No they don't they have one marked as the short version and one as the full version. The short version has the prologue on it and is put on the top of the order. There should be only one and that is the unedited on with out the commentary. There is no reason for their to be two versions at all except to allow for manipulation disguised as making it clearer. Wikileaks can not make any claim as to being unbiased. They are clearly in this case taking on the job of judge, jury, and prosecutor. Please even the URL you posted is inflammatory. collateralmurder.com! Gee no slanting there at all. So just how is this in your own words "doing a good job at providing unbiased information"?
This is as bad as any hatchet job by 60 minutes or Fox News. I think you need to review what unbiased really means. There is no way anything posted under the url of collateralmurder can be considered unbiased when the url and title on the page are clearly biased as to what the actions shown constitute. I can not believe that you posted a link to the url and still defend any claim of being unbiased!
But they did and do present the data in a biased way. Look at the prologue they added to the video. Just what does a picture of the dead reporters son holding his fathers picture have to do with truth? That is a classic case of "what about the kids" that gets so often bashed on Slashdot when it is convenient. For the most part what I have seen of Wikileaks they are the Nation Enquirer of the internet. They present the data in the most inflammatory way possible and it is often incorrect, incomplete, and biased. They do not just present the data but comment on and embellish.
I am not for taking them down but my goodness they need to clean up their act. Between releasing all sorts of personal data they got from the 9/11 pager traffic to the prologue and added commentary they added the the Apache video just released they show that they don't care anymore about being unbiased or responsible than Fox news does.
"Look how long the F-22 lived on life support." The F-22 is still in production and in service..... It hasn't been killed. They have just not done a follow on order.... yet... The way the F35 is going I wouldn't bet on not seeing an FB-22 or FB-22b in the next year or two announced.
". All they've been doing for the last 40 years on that front is delivering animations of ships and missions that never pan out and holding press conferences about how *one day* we're going to the moon and/or Mars (promises which get pushed back every few years). The cancellation of Constellation was just a tacit admission of what anyone with eyes, ears, and any memory at all has known for a long time." It is called surrender. We did have Skylab which was big leap in Space station. Did you know we have a second Skylab? It is sitting in Washington DC. You can go see it. We also have another Saturn V to launch it. We had plans to launch it and make in an international space station. With visits not just by Apollo but the Soviets and eventually the Shuttle. The Shuttle was going to fly to it and Skylab a and refuel them and add to them. This was supposed to start in the 70s....... I really don't like giving up. We stopped work on the X-33 because things got hard. We didn't go forward with DC-X. We didn't build the Shuttle-C heavy lift vehicle. We built and tested very large monolith solid rocket boosters before we built the Shuttle with it's segmented SRBs that took out Challenger. Heck we even built and tested the F-1a engine that made even more thurst than the F-1 in the Saturn V but never flew it. Frankly I didn't like the Ares 1 It reminded me way to much of the P-75 Eagle from WWII. What I had hoped for was a new Saturn Ib inspired booster using a single F-1a for the first stage with a J2 based second stage. Maybe even an aerospike motor eventually. Of course using modern materials and electronics. With the F-1a in production it would have been a logical step to build a Saturn V class vehicle as well. I would have even been happy with a modern updated shuttle with the thermal protection system from the X-33! But yes I am ticked and I fear we as a nation are lost. And to those MORONS that say. Things are bad here and we should fix things here before wasting money on space. WE FREAKING DID THAT STARTING IN 1970!!!! DID IT HELP! REALLY DID KILLING NASA IN THE EARLY 70s MAKE ANYTHING BETTER! Not from what I have seen!
Really as long as a Desktop environment has the features you need it can not be over simplified. I have not used KDE4 yet but I did use KDE3 a good bit. Frankly I liked both KDE3 and Gnome about the same. The thing is I really came to like Ubuntu for it's simplicity and unified look and feel. It is a little plain but very functional.
Why is simple Two kids with Gameboys, Mom or dad with a netbook, and Pandora streaming for the driver.
From a European point of view it may not make a lot of sense but the distances in the US change that. To give you an example when my wife and I drive to her mothers house for Christmas it takes two days to get there and the trip is around 2000 Km each way. In fact it is close to a 10 hour drive just to leave our state! To put that in EU terms the distance from where I live in South Florida to my Mother in Law's home in Dallas TX it twice the distance from Paris to Berlin. There are much longer distances in the US that people may have to cover. Before you go off on the take a train tangent. The US does have trains but they are limited. The place in the US that does have good train service is the North East coast where the population density is close to what you see in most of the EU. I live in a part of the US where the population density is lower. Even if they build out all the High Speed rail that are currently planing there will still be no connection between where I live and my Mother in Law's home town. Frankly the distances in the US are really just vast. The only other nations that have same distances and economic development currently are Canada and Australia. So you are right. For you it really makes no sense. For me and my wife since we have not children yet and both have smart phones it really doesn't make a lot of sense now. But for a lot of people I know it would well fit into the category of "Really nice to have".
If you are in a car with a bunch of kids it may be useful for them to entertain themselves. Also when my wife and I evacuated from Hurricane Frances it would have been great if one of use could have hit nhc.noaa.gov to get updates.We where in a panic that some friends of ours where going to get trapped in their cars by the storm. It would have been a comfort to know that it slowed way down and weakened. Frankly the radio wasn't a lot of help with info.
Is this a good thing? Well yes and no. There is X amount of resources and to put those resources into making IE use Hardware rendering vs getting the GDI to use at least some hardware rendering is not good IMHO. The real issue is that in many ways this may force developers to force their users to upgrade Windows. If you use the new Hardware accelerated APIs your code will not run on XP. So does that mean you build two versions of your application and support them both? Trust me that it is already a real pain to support XP, Vista, Vista 64, Windows 7, and Windows 7 64 users. If you had to update and support two different apps as well as all those OSs you are in for a world of hurt. Over all they should put effort into making 99% of the current software run faster before they make one of their own apps run faster IMHO.
Way to many Europeans lately have been saying stuff like this. Since they are no longer living in fear of the Red Hoard at the gate they almost seem to look forward to the US getting smacked down. Have an effect on Europe? Yea like making it implode. Even now Europe is just barely keeping it together. You have the immigration problem which is causing racial problems that frankly Europe never had to deal with. Russia is starting to get ideas that this whole freedom and friendship thing just wasn't a good plan. Rapidly falling birth rates in many EU nations. Let me give you a little history lesson that the US learned in 1941. Before 1941 most people in the US didn't care what happened in Europe. They where a ocean away and really not our problem. We had gotten suckered into a bloody war where we really had nothing to gain that cost 126,000 American lives. Not a lot compared to what the European powers lost but then It was their war and not ours. The US tried to build a just peace in 1918 but France and the UK refused and said "You know those loans we took out? Well we will not pay them back if don't let us sock it to Germany". BTW Both the UK and France never paid those back anyway. So the US left Europe in disgust and went back to our Hemisphere. Well you guys did a great job setting the world on fire again and we ended up fighting another war in Europe. This time we lost around 291,000 men but at least this time we had a reason. We learned then that it is a small planet. After the war we did throw our weight around and worked hard to build a just peace in Europe. We also gave BILLION and trust me in the 1940s a Billion dollars was a lot more money than it is today. This is not say the EU owes the US. But the world would be a much worse place had the US kept living in the fantasy that what happens in Europe and Asia doesn't matter. I fear now that the EU has become way too much like the old Europe where you think you are the center of the world and what happens in the US and Asia doesn't matter. If the US collapses you better get ready because I fear from what I have seen of history Europe will burn again and the barbarians will be at your gates and the US will not be have the strength to save you again.
Doesn't really matter. Verizon costs too much and in my area Sprint is very good. But they should be forced to live up to the Unlimited part of their advertising. Really folks what part of UNLIMITED do you not get. We must start enforcing some truth in advertising in the country.
That is exactly what I thought. But then when I have to write windows code I didn't use windows calls for the most part. First I used WFC and then QT as an abstraction layer.
I do understand the need for backward compatibility. That is kind of my point. Even Microsoft will be hard pressed to stop using GDI for things like Word or their other apps. But it should be possible to use some hardware acceleration through GDI.
Nope the MOL was dead before the Shuttle. The driver for the Shuttle's size probably was the KH-11. Also had a single orbit return to US requirement which drove the Shuttle to the delta wing with large cross range.
When I see people post things like this I have to wonder. They are making such big predictions based on history but they seem to know very little of it. They seem happy at the thought of the "American" Empire "which it really isn't" falling.
So you look forward to the Barbarians destroying civilization and a fall in the to dark ages that lasts for centuries? Because if you look at history that is what happens when the great empires fell in the past.
I think you are so wrong that it isn't funny but then you should really hope that in this case I am right.
I do understand but then for many programs it should just be a recompile. I can honestly tell you that very few applications ever plot individual pixels "At least where I work". You can never depend on a pixel to be a certain size or even a certain resolution. "On one of my programs I had to put in fake resolution dependency. I had one person that kept putting their PC in 640x480 and then saying that they couldn't see enough info on the screen." So I just don't buy it. Even GDI calls should use hardware acceleration when possible. The simple truth is that even now NOBODY but Microsoft is going to write code that only runs on Vista and 7. Way too many people are still on XP and will for a long time.
"PC games do have their own graphics routines, don't they?" Yes and no. Games use DirectX which is part of the OS. But Games are not your typical application. They often go into a full screen mode and are not often run in a Window. They also have "game engines" but those tend to interface to DirectX, OpenGL, or what not. A browser is not a video game. It has to play nice with other applications and is rarely the primary user of CPU cycles. Nobody cares how much memory a game uses or how many cycles it takes. Browsers are applications and not games. However even with games the OS should be handling this. When I say draw a line, do a gradient fill, or render this font the OS should draw that line, do that fill, or render that font in the fastest way possible that is "safe". I shouldn't have to use some super wacked new API and I should never have to go right to hardware! If Microsoft would make the effort to speed up the rendering calls of the OS then not only would IE render faster but EVERY PROGRAM ON YOUR SYSTEM would render faster. Of course what could be happening is that MS does have some new graphics API that is faster and they are using it in IE and it is available to everybody. If so then the old APIs should just be stub code to the new APIs and still give very application a performance boost. And to answer your question. "I don't see the need to bash MS for trying to get back in the competition. " I am bashing MS for not speeding up their OS graphics calls so EVERY application I CHOOSE to run renders faster.
The whole reason we have big and complex OSs like Windows, Linux, and OS/X is so that our software doesn't have to deal with the hardware. It is abstracted so when new and faster hardware comes out every program can benefit from it.
Well over in NJ the cost of real estate is probably a lot less than on Wall Street. Not as cheap as say NC or eastern WA but a heck of a lot cheaper than Wall St. There X86+Linux probably gives you the best bang for the buck.
Kind of shocking to be honest but then just how do you get the most performance per M^2 today? Or maybe they already have monster machine rooms left over from the Mainframe days.
Slashdot Mirror
The military asked Boeing and Lockheed to develop a new launch vehicle to replace the shuttle and TitanIV.
The told them that they could recover some of the cost by launching civilian sats. At the time there where export limitations on what you could launch from Russia.
Those restrictions have bee lifted and now they must compete with Russia and the ESA.
The debate as to who is more subsidized between Launch Alliance, Russia, and the ESA is one I sure don't want to get into but right now the US companies are not doing well in that price war.
The unedited video would be less biased. You are correct that even presenting the unedited video would still be lacking some information.
Things like had the Apache's taken any fire in the area.
Or had the ground forces taken any fire in the area.
Sure some degree of bias does exist but the prologue of this video as well as the url are really over the top.
If you look back to my original post I clearly stated. Wikileaks needs to clean up it act.
The attack on the van is an interesting question. If the van had been marked it would have been a clear war crime. With the van unmarked is was it fair to classify it as a combatant?
In this type of combat there are a lot of fuzzy areas and this is one of them. On a battle field an unmarked vehicle rendering aid is a valid target.
You say that since that was the questionable act it should have been the target of the emotional appeal. Even then I do not think so. Let the evidence stand on it's own merit with out added commentary or the inflammatory URL.
But to not call into question the tactics of Wikileaks when they are clearly showing bias is wrong. You have a problem with the inflammatory URL, I have problems with the URL, prologue, and cometary. The fact is their are problems with how Wikipedia choose to present news. The boost the profile of what they think is interesting with inflammatory language and not just this time.
If they want to act just like every other news service then that is fine. I just want to dispel the belief that they are any less biased than NPR, FOX, or CNN. Actually I feel that the in this case they are showing more bias than NPR or CNN would and are at the FOX level.
Again with an emotional plea. Of course it is tragic that this gentleman died and that his child is an orphan. But him having a child or even being a reporter has nothing to do with was the Apache crew justified in shooting or if it was a war crime.
You are using one emotional manipulation to justify another.
Suppose instead we showed vets with their kids saying how they wouldn't have gotten home without that Apache crew protecting them? You would claim that was just emotional manipulation as was the prologue added to this video.
Justice is supposed to be blind and only look at the facts. This video contains a prologue that is designed to push the viewer into agreeing with the conclusion of the people that edited the video. Even the URL that it was listed under is inflammatory. If you don't think that is biased then you don't understand the meaning of the word.
To be unbiased they should just present the video without commentary and let each of us decide for ourself. Any commentary changes it from unbiased information to editorial content that reflects the views of those making the commentary.
Even your comment that me seeing the bias shows that I am biased is just silly. Claiming I have lost all sense of humanity is just insulting.
However to be an unbiased source of news (and they are very rare) you really should let the viewer decide without adding emotional manipulation.
Let the evidence speak for it's self or admit that you are a biased source.
Frankly No.
I also saw the video. From the resolution of the images I can honestly say that the they did look like they where armed and when the camera man was ducking around the the corner with his camera he did look like a shooter setting up an ambush.
Other looked like they where caring weapons and the video cometary did say that they where caring AK-47s.
In that situation with that data I can see how the crew could open fire.
The van was not an Ambulance and was not marked with the Red Crescent or Cross.
If you can not see how they could decide to shoot then yes you are not being reasonable.
Yes I can understand how this error was made.
I happened to be visiting family in Northern Ireland in the 80s during the troubles.
I was with some other teens when a bomb went off a few blocks down. I didn't run fast enough and was knocked down by a British solder because I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was shortly let go but I understand how errors can happen even when I was the target of that error. I was lucky that I wasn't hurt too bad but yes I could have been dead for no other reason than I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That is what happens in insurgent fights like Northern Ireland back then or Iraq now.
Yes of course because you are so enlightened that you understand these things while the unwashed masses must be guided to understanding.
It must be made clear to them because they are not as smart as you or as not as caring.
You see most people can not just be shown facts because they will not understand...
Do you really want to go down that road.
Manipulation must always be wrong if it is ever wrong.
I am sure that if they showed a bunch of solders holding their children on their laps saying how there children would never have known their daddy if the gunship crews hadn't had protected them you would be all right with it?
Manipulation and bias is manipulation and bias. You are okay with it or you are not. If you are ok with it when is supports your view then you have been enlisted as a manipulator.
Yes you are.
Also judgmental and polarizing. What is worse is probably also unteachable.
The fact that you can not even imagine a middle ground where people feel the crews made a tragic error because of limited info is in it's self tragic.
And this video doesn't push opinion? Gee so you think that the URL collateralmurder isn't biased?
Showing times when they are no biased doesn't remove times when they clearly are. Even the times when they behave as you show in their examples shows bias. They have decided that that leak isn't worth pushing while this video is.
The fact that they made a special project page for this video and of course put it at the top of the page right next to their fund raising request is not bias at all. Or the fact that they only put the edit version with inflammatory prologue on the front page isn't an example of bias on their part.
No they don't they have one marked as the short version and one as the full version. The short version has the prologue on it and is put on the top of the order.
There should be only one and that is the unedited on with out the commentary. There is no reason for their to be two versions at all except to allow for manipulation disguised as making it clearer.
Wikileaks can not make any claim as to being unbiased. They are clearly in this case taking on the job of judge, jury, and prosecutor.
Please even the URL you posted is inflammatory. collateralmurder.com! Gee no slanting there at all.
So just how is this in your own words "doing a good job at providing unbiased information"?
This is as bad as any hatchet job by 60 minutes or Fox News. I think you need to review what unbiased really means. There is no way anything posted under the url of collateralmurder can be considered unbiased when the url and title on the page are clearly biased as to what the actions shown constitute. I can not believe that you posted a link to the url and still defend any claim of being unbiased!
Nope it is classic yellow journalism.
But they did and do present the data in a biased way.
Look at the prologue they added to the video. Just what does a picture of the dead reporters son holding his fathers picture have to do with truth?
That is a classic case of "what about the kids" that gets so often bashed on Slashdot when it is convenient.
For the most part what I have seen of Wikileaks they are the Nation Enquirer of the internet. They present the data in the most inflammatory way possible and it is often incorrect, incomplete, and biased.
They do not just present the data but comment on and embellish.
I am not for taking them down but my goodness they need to clean up their act. Between releasing all sorts of personal data they got from the 9/11 pager traffic to the prologue and added commentary they added the the Apache video just released they show that they don't care anymore about being unbiased or responsible than Fox news does.
"Look how long the F-22 lived on life support."
The F-22 is still in production and in service..... It hasn't been killed. They have just not done a follow on order.... yet... The way the F35 is going I wouldn't bet on not seeing an FB-22 or FB-22b in the next year or two announced.
". All they've been doing for the last 40 years on that front is delivering animations of ships and missions that never pan out and holding press conferences about how *one day* we're going to the moon and/or Mars (promises which get pushed back every few years). The cancellation of Constellation was just a tacit admission of what anyone with eyes, ears, and any memory at all has known for a long time."
It is called surrender.
We did have Skylab which was big leap in Space station. Did you know we have a second Skylab? It is sitting in Washington DC. You can go see it. We also have another Saturn V to launch it.
We had plans to launch it and make in an international space station. With visits not just by Apollo but the Soviets and eventually the Shuttle. The Shuttle was going to fly to it and Skylab a and refuel them and add to them. This was supposed to start in the 70s.......
I really don't like giving up. We stopped work on the X-33 because things got hard. We didn't go forward with DC-X. We didn't build the Shuttle-C heavy lift vehicle.
We built and tested very large monolith solid rocket boosters before we built the Shuttle with it's segmented SRBs that took out Challenger.
Heck we even built and tested the F-1a engine that made even more thurst than the F-1 in the Saturn V but never flew it.
Frankly I didn't like the Ares 1 It reminded me way to much of the P-75 Eagle from WWII.
What I had hoped for was a new Saturn Ib inspired booster using a single F-1a for the first stage with a J2 based second stage. Maybe even an aerospike motor eventually.
Of course using modern materials and electronics. With the F-1a in production it would have been a logical step to build a Saturn V class vehicle as well.
I would have even been happy with a modern updated shuttle with the thermal protection system from the X-33!
But yes I am ticked and I fear we as a nation are lost.
And to those MORONS that say. Things are bad here and we should fix things here before wasting money on space. WE FREAKING DID THAT STARTING IN 1970!!!! DID IT HELP! REALLY DID KILLING NASA IN THE EARLY 70s MAKE ANYTHING BETTER!
Not from what I have seen!
Really as long as a Desktop environment has the features you need it can not be over simplified.
I have not used KDE4 yet but I did use KDE3 a good bit. Frankly I liked both KDE3 and Gnome about the same. The thing is I really came to like Ubuntu for it's simplicity and unified look and feel. It is a little plain but very functional.
Why is simple Two kids with Gameboys, Mom or dad with a netbook, and Pandora streaming for the driver.
From a European point of view it may not make a lot of sense but the distances in the US change that. To give you an example when my wife and I drive to her mothers house for Christmas it takes two days to get there and the trip is around 2000 Km each way. In fact it is close to a 10 hour drive just to leave our state! To put that in EU terms the distance from where I live in South Florida to my Mother in Law's home in Dallas TX it twice the distance from Paris to Berlin. There are much longer distances in the US that people may have to cover. Before you go off on the take a train tangent. The US does have trains but they are limited. The place in the US that does have good train service is the North East coast where the population density is close to what you see in most of the EU.
I live in a part of the US where the population density is lower. Even if they build out all the High Speed rail that are currently planing there will still be no connection between where I live and my Mother in Law's home town. Frankly the distances in the US are really just vast. The only other nations that have same distances and economic development currently are Canada and Australia. So you are right. For you it really makes no sense. For me and my wife since we have not children yet and both have smart phones it really doesn't make a lot of sense now. But for a lot of people I know it would well fit into the category of "Really nice to have".
1. RVs
2. Passenger
If you are in a car with a bunch of kids it may be useful for them to entertain themselves.
Also when my wife and I evacuated from Hurricane Frances it would have been great if one of use could have hit nhc.noaa.gov to get updates.We where in a panic that some friends of ours where going to get trapped in their cars by the storm. It would have been a comfort to know that it slowed way down and weakened. Frankly the radio wasn't a lot of help with info.
Is this a good thing? Well yes and no.
There is X amount of resources and to put those resources into making IE use Hardware rendering vs getting the GDI to use at least some hardware rendering is not good IMHO.
The real issue is that in many ways this may force developers to force their users to upgrade Windows.
If you use the new Hardware accelerated APIs your code will not run on XP. So does that mean you build two versions of your application and support them both? Trust me that it is already a real pain to support XP, Vista, Vista 64, Windows 7, and Windows 7 64 users. If you had to update and support two different apps as well as all those OSs you are in for a world of hurt.
Over all they should put effort into making 99% of the current software run faster before they make one of their own apps run faster IMHO.
Way to many Europeans lately have been saying stuff like this. Since they are no longer living in fear of the Red Hoard at the gate they almost seem to look forward to the US getting smacked down.
Have an effect on Europe? Yea like making it implode. Even now Europe is just barely keeping it together. You have the immigration problem which is causing racial problems that frankly Europe never had to deal with.
Russia is starting to get ideas that this whole freedom and friendship thing just wasn't a good plan.
Rapidly falling birth rates in many EU nations.
Let me give you a little history lesson that the US learned in 1941. Before 1941 most people in the US didn't care what happened in Europe. They where a ocean away and really not our problem. We had gotten suckered into a bloody war where we really had nothing to gain that cost 126,000 American lives. Not a lot compared to what the European powers lost but then It was their war and not ours.
The US tried to build a just peace in 1918 but France and the UK refused and said "You know those loans we took out? Well we will not pay them back if don't let us sock it to Germany".
BTW Both the UK and France never paid those back anyway.
So the US left Europe in disgust and went back to our Hemisphere. Well you guys did a great job setting the world on fire again and we ended up fighting another war in Europe. This time we lost around 291,000 men but at least this time we had a reason. We learned then that it is a small planet. After the war we did throw our weight around and worked hard to build a just peace in Europe. We also gave BILLION and trust me in the 1940s a Billion dollars was a lot more money than it is today.
This is not say the EU owes the US. But the world would be a much worse place had the US kept living in the fantasy that what happens in Europe and Asia doesn't matter. I fear now that the EU has become way too much like the old Europe where you think you are the center of the world and what happens in the US and Asia doesn't matter.
If the US collapses you better get ready because I fear from what I have seen of history Europe will burn again and the barbarians will be at your gates and the US will not be have the strength to save you again.
Doesn't really matter. Verizon costs too much and in my area Sprint is very good.
But they should be forced to live up to the Unlimited part of their advertising.
Really folks what part of UNLIMITED do you not get. We must start enforcing some truth in advertising in the country.
That is exactly what I thought. But then when I have to write windows code I didn't use windows calls for the most part. First I used WFC and then QT as an abstraction layer.
I do understand the need for backward compatibility.
That is kind of my point. Even Microsoft will be hard pressed to stop using GDI for things like Word or their other apps.
But it should be possible to use some hardware acceleration through GDI.
Nope the MOL was dead before the Shuttle.
The driver for the Shuttle's size probably was the KH-11. Also had a single orbit return to US requirement which drove the Shuttle to the delta wing with large cross range.
When I see people post things like this I have to wonder. They are making such big predictions based on history but they seem to know very little of it.
They seem happy at the thought of the "American" Empire "which it really isn't" falling.
So you look forward to the Barbarians destroying civilization and a fall in the to dark ages that lasts for centuries?
Because if you look at history that is what happens when the great empires fell in the past.
I think you are so wrong that it isn't funny but then you should really hope that in this case I am right.
I do understand but then for many programs it should just be a recompile.
I can honestly tell you that very few applications ever plot individual pixels "At least where I work". You can never depend on a pixel to be a certain size or even a certain resolution.
"On one of my programs I had to put in fake resolution dependency. I had one person that kept putting their PC in 640x480 and then saying that they couldn't see enough info on the screen."
So I just don't buy it. Even GDI calls should use hardware acceleration when possible. The simple truth is that even now NOBODY but Microsoft is going to write code that only runs on Vista and 7. Way too many people are still on XP and will for a long time.
"PC games do have their own graphics routines, don't they?"
Yes and no.
Games use DirectX which is part of the OS. But Games are not your typical application. They often go into a full screen mode and are not often run in a Window. They also have "game engines" but those tend to interface to DirectX, OpenGL, or what not.
A browser is not a video game.
It has to play nice with other applications and is rarely the primary user of CPU cycles.
Nobody cares how much memory a game uses or how many cycles it takes.
Browsers are applications and not games.
However even with games the OS should be handling this.
When I say draw a line, do a gradient fill, or render this font the OS should draw that line, do that fill, or render that font in the fastest way possible that is "safe". I shouldn't have to use some super wacked new API and I should never have to go right to hardware!
If Microsoft would make the effort to speed up the rendering calls of the OS then not only would IE render faster but EVERY PROGRAM ON YOUR SYSTEM would render faster.
Of course what could be happening is that MS does have some new graphics API that is faster and they are using it in IE and it is available to everybody. If so then the old APIs should just be stub code to the new APIs and still give very application a performance boost.
And to answer your question. "I don't see the need to bash MS for trying to get back in the competition. "
I am bashing MS for not speeding up their OS graphics calls so EVERY application I CHOOSE to run renders faster.
The whole reason we have big and complex OSs like Windows, Linux, and OS/X is so that our software doesn't have to deal with the hardware. It is abstracted so when new and faster hardware comes out every program can benefit from it.
Well over in NJ the cost of real estate is probably a lot less than on Wall Street. Not as cheap as say NC or eastern WA but a heck of a lot cheaper than Wall St. There X86+Linux probably gives you the best bang for the buck.
Kind of shocking to be honest but then just how do you get the most performance per M^2 today? Or maybe they already have monster machine rooms left over from the Mainframe days.