I live in Philadelphia, PA... home of Comcast, and their new crystal palace they are building with your hard-wasted dollars (the Comcast Center, look it up on emporis.com).
What is so funny about my internet connection is that my apartment tower is on Verizon DSL. Some areas can get Verizon FIOS, but getting Verizon permission to cut up the street and the access tubes to the subway is a major ordeal... the City of Philadelphia is stuck between Verizon wanting to expand their network, Earthlink using city light poles to setup low-cost WiFi, and Comcast not wanting ANY of this to happen.
And here I am... not even able to get BASIC cable! My building manager signed a deal with the Verizon infidels and Comcast is not even allowed near my skyscraper. So even between a choice between two monopolies, I only have one legal choice: the Verizon infidels [or, suck off someone's unprotected wifi like a Thai whore].
I'm tired of paying $70 a month for a crappy always-goes-down, DNS-server-sucks ADSL!
Death to the Verizon infidels! DEATH TO THE VERIZON INFIDE....
New customers of the z/Series machines might not even use ISPF/RACF/TSO and all the other subsystems they get with z/OS and instead run their machine as a pure Linux environment with many little Linux VMs running on the same hardware.
This is identical to buying a huge 16-way x86 Xeon server with hyperthreading, installing VMware ESX server, and running a bunch of Linux VMs on the machine. You can do this on IBM hardware cheaper than on Intel hardware [yes, believe it... it's true].
For big database customers of DB2, no other platform runs DB2 better for you than a big z/Series box when you look at the high-speed I/O channels IBM has on the machine. To setup pure-fiber SANS between an HP SAN and a big HP or Dell server cluster costs the same money and has more points of failure than a single z/Series box running 3 or for VMs with participating DB2 instances.
There's still customers running CICS/IMS, etc... but nobody is out there writing new apps on these platforms. WinTel people aren't aware of this because they don't ever interact with mainframe people except to integrate old software.
You can even run.NET code on the mainframe (SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 plus MONO installed), including ASP.NET 2.0 code.
The mainframe is nothing but a bigger, powerful more fail-safe server. Think of it that way.
Even as far back as 2000, Albertsons grocery stores had cheap inkjet printers (at several locations in San Antonio, TX), for as low as $65 setup in those display piles you pass as you enter and leave the store.
Seems like a steal, right?
Even Wal-Mart was hocking them in bulk outside their electronics department. Seemed like we couldn't get enough inkjet printers.
Now that you actually use an inkjet after a year, you realize how painful the cartridge price stings and how often you have to replace it. Many new printers (like the later EPSONSs and HPs) refuse to print ANYTHING until the printer stops reporting that the cartridge is low. Sometimes this is enforced in the print driver on Windows (so if you print on Linux you are able to get around it), but in many cases, that is on the printer's firmware so you can't easily get around it.
I learned my lesson. I bought an HP 3050 LaserJet (top-fed ADF scanner, fax built-in). There are two stores already here in Philadelphia (Center City/Downtown) which do NOTHING but toner cartridge recharge and recycling.
And I also love STAPLES pickup/dropoff toner service, as well as their green box toner cartridges.
For the love of having cheap color, which first attracted me to inkjet, I have since discovered that I print color so infrequently, it is easier to just take a USB stick to a Kinkos and get the color output done professionally when I need it done for non-business printouts.
Remember Microsoft telling us OS/2 would be a better DOS than DOS?
Then Microsoft turns around and screws their own deal with IBM by releasing Windows 3.0 as a separate product with a hacked together back end and the original Presentation Manager front end, then divorcing themselves from IBM after it actually became marketable and successful.
Come on... like Manuel Labor needs to use a PC all day. There's tons of people working all sorts of jobs that require no interaction with a computer what--so--ever!
Consuela doesn't need to get on the internet to turn the bedsheets at the Holiday Inn.
IBM has a program going evidenced at activities underway in its Boulder, Colorado location for its (botched) implementation of LEAN. (similar to LEAN manufacturing, reference wikipedia)
However, IBM is using staff cutting and IBM India augmentation to achieve the efficiencies that are documented in LEAN-M, whereas IBM's implementation of LEAN is really just a pony show that is masquerading as an internal offshoring program.
The number of decimated IGS units in total will probably be something closer to 30K-40K employees.
For the record, IBM has also made a settlement in a class-action in respect to its Cash Balance pension changes which were instituted after Y2K. Many people at Alliance@IBM (the organization which is trying to unionize existing IBM employees) fear that IBM is trying to put the pension fund itself into default so that those obligations can be wiped off the balance sheet, which would also be an instant win on IBM's stock EPS.
IBM is not only ditching employees, it is also ditching customers. IGS was known for signing a lot of non-profitable contracts in anticipation that future work would be coming from those same clients (in addition to ancillary project-related purchases by clients for things such as networking and hardware and all the labor that goes with that).
That apparently didn't come to fruition. IBM will be giving some sad news in the next few years to come of its accounts as it lets those go, and those resources who were working on them.
and you call the control center that is monitoring the satellite's orbital decay, you get a Bangalore employee named "Bob" who asks you to reboot your PC.
As a Philadelphia Verizon customer (cell/DSL) with Vonage for home phone [Vonage doesn't publish their phone registration records to telemarketers plus the long distance benefits are amazing]....
I am really caught between two nasty options. Ditch Verizon and hope I can get by with radio wifi (Philadelphia has Earthlink wireless), or allow Vonage to die and make other arrangements.
I like both companies, but I can't believe Verizon "invented" anything concerning VoIP... and was just granted a rubber stamp patent... which it is wielding to shut down a thorn in their side competitor from New Jersey.
Considering I live in a high rise tower and I see at least 10 unsecured WAPs... I could switch to AT&T wireless, drop Verizon, and use free Internet and pay a lot less money to the Verizon monopoly that controls most of the Northeast.
If you are counting the number of patches... and you are saying Windows has the fewest number in the last 6 months than MacOS or RedHat... does that mean Windows is more secure?
What is this, 3rd grade?
I could stop patching Windows forever and it will be the bestest Operating System EV-ER! Like OMGWTFBBQ!
Seriously, Microsoft releases in cycles, has to perform a buttload of testing (because of the DNS patch which screwed over a lot of customers), and is slow to react to 0day problems that are brought up with theories and proofs. [They do a lot better when there is an active attack going on, I'll give you that].
I get SuSE patches for hundreds of installed packages just about every other day and install most of them automatically. The kernel I'll patch up once every 6 months or so.
Does that make me less secure than Windows? I don't know. I sure feel more secure about putting a fresh openSuSE 10.2 box on the internet unfirewalled than putting a Vista box on the Internet unfirewalled [I wonder if MSFT has actually performed this test with Vista... to see how long it takes before a basic Vista install gets compromised with the software firewall turned off].
Aside from the Top 40 which I rarely even bother to listen to anymore [and I haven't listened to XM/Sirius or FM radio in years... now I'm stuck on an iPod or listening to AM talk radio], the dance music/club craze that was big in the 90s, died down--is now coming back up again, at least on the East Coast.
I buy and scour Shoutcast for a DJ here in Philadelphia, and I must say... DanceRecords.com and several other Philly stores (Sound of Market, Funk-O-Mart, plus 100 other local shops) are pushing more and more fresh vynil lately (you used to have to request a press from a label or get a press made from a CD so that way you could spin it).
Now just about any title you see in a shop already has an album press available including a buttload of new singles which are available on LP-only and are only meant to go to clubs and get zero radio play.
It's nice to see local DJs finally taking back some of the music industry market from what Clear Channel had stolen in the last 13 years.
I live in Philly, and the indie band craze has really taken storm here. The days of going to a bar and listening to recorded music is now left to just the gay dance clubs. Everything opening up here is bohemian in nature, they all are blogged and Myspaced to death, and their music videos go up on YouTube, not on MTV.
It's been going this way for the last 4 years, perhaps longer. Philadelphia lost the landmark flagship Tower Records store, which REALLY put a damper on people going out to buy CDs (it has been replaced by FYE, which is more known for its DVD selection XBOX/PS2 games).
The Tower Records location on South Street, which was the analog to the Virgin Records megastore in Chelsea (Manhattan)--the epicenter of what is "hip and cool" closed. Now it's iPods and live bands. Philly has more college kids living in it than Boston--we tend to stay way ahead of the music than most cities with plastic wrap CD stores and recycled Clear Channel/XM radio. It's one of the perks about living in the murder capital of the United States.:-)
I happen to love it.
Sony is capturing some of this vibe with Acidplanet
The only way I could make sense of my inbox was to look at all the people who routinely send me stuff.
Then, I created a folder for each person and setup an inbox rule (easy in KMail or Outlook) to move the message to a tingle-table folder based on each person.
At work this keeps my inbox clear almost all-day long, and I can quickly get to the people I need to reply to quickly, and let all the personal/jokes/riffraff and autoresponders gather dust until I login late at night from home and read it.
When I am REALLY busy and don't want distraction, I just close my email reader completely and forward my extension to my (turned off) cell phone.
Walk-ups to my desk get a very grumpy face and a "I am really busy, it will have to wait" response.
Turning a room into your house into the StarTrek bridge.
OK, so where does he keep the jackoff lube? I'm only asking because that's the only thing he'll be doing in that room--no way he'll get to bed down a female in there for sure.
What... rip up the planet earth again to run a bunch of lines that barely will bring in enough cash to ex-suburbanites when they already have access to decent-speed broadband in most cases (or can get DirectWay).
e.g. my area:
If you really want FIOS real bad and want it now--you can move to Philadelphia and get it. It's going in the urban core and the inner suburbs... the outer McMansions in the country probably will never get it.
That's the rub. Nobody has ever seen the highest-skilled job classes in society erode before to foreign countries.
There is even talk of "health-outsourcing" being tried (TIME mag article) that some health insurers are looking at. Patients with treatable diseases and necessary surgeries that are not immediately dire emergencies (can be done within a month timeframe) can be performed in Thailand and Seoul for pennies on the dollar--saving HMOs tremendous amounts of cash.
Of course, local hospitals, physicians groups and think tanks are ENTIRELY against this--saying that foreign medicine is substandard, the overseas doctors are not properly educated, and you'll run into risks (like you don't run a risk in the US already).
Tell me, if these so-called people in the upper echelons of academia can get away with telling you that an Auditor or Actuary Scientist is something that can be offshored without suffering any quality in work... WHY should we believe the other hype that we should NOT allow U.S. medical tourism and allow foreign medicine to compete with local medicine?
Maybe it's because some people fear the avg. pay for a neurosurgeon (a tad below $300,000), would drop down to the upper $70K, like it is outside the US.
I've won about 2/3rds of the achievements in the game so far.
But... even though the difficulty is set at the CAPTAIN level, it's rather disappointingly easy, once you figure out where certain "snatch" points are in the game. There are parts of the game that do offer more difficulty, such as the mission where you must keep the Borg "busy" while a rescue operation commences to move transport ships off planets being taken over by the Borg.
However, the No. annoying thing in the game is the difficulty in torpedo targeting! It almost seems random when you can get a torpedo lock on anything, even when you try to orient the ship so the portals are clearly pointing at the enemy, you are close enough, and there's been enough time for ship's crewmen to load the torpedoes. It seems even more bizarre to get them to fire even all the way up to the USS Defiant which is supposed to have homing devices so you don't even have to orient the whole ship to fire them.
Now is a good time to figure out how to do things programmatically without using Office's VBA scripting (which you can half-assed do it if you reference libraries with.NET or use OLE).
Any spreadsheet macros that make use of sending click messages will break.
I have been using Office 2007 for a couple months now, and I must say---they are right about the learning curve.
It look be forever just to figure out what happened to the "undo" button on the tool bar.
Also, replacing the upper-left standard window menu and icon with this "Office Globe" is rather annoying. Word and Excel almost feel like they are their own presentation managers.
Most Windows fat client developers (sorry, smart client) look at Office towards innovative UI techniques. The Ribbon is sure to be copied in a lot of other apps that have a rich UI (I've already seen components being offered for.NET, old school OLE ones are sure to come soon).
Anyone who started on Office2000 or 2003 is sure to be frustrated for a few months after this release. More so if you are a heavy spreadsheet user.
Crime and poverty are related, so guess who also has the highest murder per capita rate of a large city?
No, not D.C. anymore... it's Philadelphia.
I live in Center City Philadelphia, and this area is virtually "landlocked" by 4 different notorious regions of the city which are so fierce with crime that two aren't even safe to drive through in the daytime! We do have gentrification occurring here, but that isn't enough to drop the crime rate down.
Also, our city school system was annexed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and taken out of City control, and the improvement in things like the truancy rate have still yet to be seen... one of the larger contributors to shootings other than drug turf disputes.
The crime cameras are located on major city intersections, and in very high crime areas where the number of "SHOTS FIRED" incidents occur more than 100x a year [citywide, we have about 1,900 shootings reported annually, with 2006's murder total at 406 people, NYC only has 100 more murders, but it has 8 times the population we do].
City residents were jumping for joy, rich and poor, when this plan was announced. Life is different in Philly than in your little suburb and corporate office park. CCTV in public areas has been challenged in court numerous times, by the ACLU and others, and each time the litigants lost up front or lost in the appellate circuits.
Center City is safe only because there are hundreds of thousands of eyes on the streets, it looks like Manhattan, and a lot of the nation's most historic objects are located here. The other parts of Philadelphia which are spread out... very few eyeballs are on the street.
The program is working for us. We want to keep it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I was saying that in jest. I come from Texas (I now live in Philadelphia).
:-)
If you have ever been in East Texas before, you'll quickly understand the humor in that comment.
Let me get this straight.
Litigants... CA company defendant, Mass entities the plaintiffs.
Lawsuit filed in East Texas.
They are making sure they get a judge who has never heard of a computer before.
I live in Philadelphia, PA... home of Comcast, and their new crystal palace they are building with your hard-wasted dollars (the Comcast Center, look it up on emporis.com).
What is so funny about my internet connection is that my apartment tower is on Verizon DSL. Some areas can get Verizon FIOS, but getting Verizon permission to cut up the street and the access tubes to the subway is a major ordeal... the City of Philadelphia is stuck between Verizon wanting to expand their network, Earthlink using city light poles to setup low-cost WiFi, and Comcast not wanting ANY of this to happen.
And here I am... not even able to get BASIC cable! My building manager signed a deal with the Verizon infidels and Comcast is not even allowed near my skyscraper. So even between a choice between two monopolies, I only have one legal choice: the Verizon infidels [or, suck off someone's unprotected wifi like a Thai whore].
I'm tired of paying $70 a month for a crappy always-goes-down, DNS-server-sucks ADSL!
Death to the Verizon infidels! DEATH TO THE VERIZON INFIDE....
+++ATH
NO CARRIER
was never on life-support, either.
.NET code on the mainframe (SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 plus MONO installed), including ASP.NET 2.0 code.
New customers of the z/Series machines might not even use ISPF/RACF/TSO and all the other subsystems they get with z/OS and instead run their machine as a pure Linux environment with many little Linux VMs running on the same hardware.
This is identical to buying a huge 16-way x86 Xeon server with hyperthreading, installing VMware ESX server, and running a bunch of Linux VMs on the machine. You can do this on IBM hardware cheaper than on Intel hardware [yes, believe it... it's true].
For big database customers of DB2, no other platform runs DB2 better for you than a big z/Series box when you look at the high-speed I/O channels IBM has on the machine. To setup pure-fiber SANS between an HP SAN and a big HP or Dell server cluster costs the same money and has more points of failure than a single z/Series box running 3 or for VMs with participating DB2 instances.
There's still customers running CICS/IMS, etc... but nobody is out there writing new apps on these platforms. WinTel people aren't aware of this because they don't ever interact with mainframe people except to integrate old software.
You can even run
The mainframe is nothing but a bigger, powerful more fail-safe server. Think of it that way.
I don't think I would panic over a satellite named after SCAT.
Slackware is still the one and only distro were setting XGL working is a MAJOR bitch.
I hope this has been fixed.
Even as far back as 2000, Albertsons grocery stores had cheap inkjet printers (at several locations in San Antonio, TX), for as low as $65 setup in those display piles you pass as you enter and leave the store.
Seems like a steal, right?
Even Wal-Mart was hocking them in bulk outside their electronics department. Seemed like we couldn't get enough inkjet printers.
Now that you actually use an inkjet after a year, you realize how painful the cartridge price stings and how often you have to replace it. Many new printers (like the later EPSONSs and HPs) refuse to print ANYTHING until the printer stops reporting that the cartridge is low. Sometimes this is enforced in the print driver on Windows (so if you print on Linux you are able to get around it), but in many cases, that is on the printer's firmware so you can't easily get around it.
I learned my lesson. I bought an HP 3050 LaserJet (top-fed ADF scanner, fax built-in). There are two stores already here in Philadelphia (Center City/Downtown) which do NOTHING but toner cartridge recharge and recycling.
And I also love STAPLES pickup/dropoff toner service, as well as their green box toner cartridges.
For the love of having cheap color, which first attracted me to inkjet, I have since discovered that I print color so infrequently, it is easier to just take a USB stick to a Kinkos and get the color output done professionally when I need it done for non-business printouts.
Remember Microsoft telling us OS/2 would be a better DOS than DOS?
Then Microsoft turns around and screws their own deal with IBM by releasing Windows 3.0 as a separate product with a hacked together back end and the original Presentation Manager front end, then divorcing themselves from IBM after it actually became marketable and successful.
Come on... like Manuel Labor needs to use a PC all day. There's tons of people working all sorts of jobs that require no interaction with a computer what--so--ever!
Consuela doesn't need to get on the internet to turn the bedsheets at the Holiday Inn.
IBM has a program going evidenced at activities underway in its Boulder, Colorado location for its (botched) implementation of LEAN. (similar to LEAN manufacturing, reference wikipedia)
However, IBM is using staff cutting and IBM India augmentation to achieve the efficiencies that are documented in LEAN-M, whereas IBM's implementation of LEAN is really just a pony show that is masquerading as an internal offshoring program.
The number of decimated IGS units in total will probably be something closer to 30K-40K employees.
For the record, IBM has also made a settlement in a class-action in respect to its Cash Balance pension changes which were instituted after Y2K. Many people at Alliance@IBM (the organization which is trying to unionize existing IBM employees) fear that IBM is trying to put the pension fund itself into default so that those obligations can be wiped off the balance sheet, which would also be an instant win on IBM's stock EPS.
IBM is not only ditching employees, it is also ditching customers. IGS was known for signing a lot of non-profitable contracts in anticipation that future work would be coming from those same clients (in addition to ancillary project-related purchases by clients for things such as networking and hardware and all the labor that goes with that).
That apparently didn't come to fruition. IBM will be giving some sad news in the next few years to come of its accounts as it lets those go, and those resources who were working on them.
and you call the control center that is monitoring the satellite's orbital decay, you get a Bangalore employee named "Bob" who asks you to reboot your PC.
As a Philadelphia Verizon customer (cell/DSL) with Vonage for home phone [Vonage doesn't publish their phone registration records to telemarketers plus the long distance benefits are amazing]....
I am really caught between two nasty options. Ditch Verizon and hope I can get by with radio wifi (Philadelphia has Earthlink wireless), or allow Vonage to die and make other arrangements.
I like both companies, but I can't believe Verizon "invented" anything concerning VoIP... and was just granted a rubber stamp patent... which it is wielding to shut down a thorn in their side competitor from New Jersey.
Considering I live in a high rise tower and I see at least 10 unsecured WAPs... I could switch to AT&T wireless, drop Verizon, and use free Internet and pay a lot less money to the Verizon monopoly that controls most of the Northeast.
If you are counting the number of patches... and you are saying Windows has the fewest number in the last 6 months than MacOS or RedHat... does that mean Windows is more secure?
What is this, 3rd grade?
I could stop patching Windows forever and it will be the bestest Operating System EV-ER! Like OMGWTFBBQ!
Seriously, Microsoft releases in cycles, has to perform a buttload of testing (because of the DNS patch which screwed over a lot of customers), and is slow to react to 0day problems that are brought up with theories and proofs. [They do a lot better when there is an active attack going on, I'll give you that].
I get SuSE patches for hundreds of installed packages just about every other day and install most of them automatically. The kernel I'll patch up once every 6 months or so.
Does that make me less secure than Windows? I don't know. I sure feel more secure about putting a fresh openSuSE 10.2 box on the internet unfirewalled than putting a Vista box on the Internet unfirewalled [I wonder if MSFT has actually performed this test with Vista... to see how long it takes before a basic Vista install gets compromised with the software firewall turned off].
Aside from the Top 40 which I rarely even bother to listen to anymore [and I haven't listened to XM/Sirius or FM radio in years... now I'm stuck on an iPod or listening to AM talk radio], the dance music/club craze that was big in the 90s, died down--is now coming back up again, at least on the East Coast.
I buy and scour Shoutcast for a DJ here in Philadelphia, and I must say... DanceRecords.com and several other Philly stores (Sound of Market, Funk-O-Mart, plus 100 other local shops) are pushing more and more fresh vynil lately (you used to have to request a press from a label or get a press made from a CD so that way you could spin it).
Now just about any title you see in a shop already has an album press available including a buttload of new singles which are available on LP-only and are only meant to go to clubs and get zero radio play.
It's nice to see local DJs finally taking back some of the music industry market from what Clear Channel had stolen in the last 13 years.
I live in Philly, and the indie band craze has really taken storm here. The days of going to a bar and listening to recorded music is now left to just the gay dance clubs. Everything opening up here is bohemian in nature, they all are blogged and Myspaced to death, and their music videos go up on YouTube, not on MTV.
:-)
It's been going this way for the last 4 years, perhaps longer. Philadelphia lost the landmark flagship Tower Records store, which REALLY put a damper on people going out to buy CDs (it has been replaced by FYE, which is more known for its DVD selection XBOX/PS2 games).
The Tower Records location on South Street, which was the analog to the Virgin Records megastore in Chelsea (Manhattan)--the epicenter of what is "hip and cool" closed. Now it's iPods and live bands. Philly has more college kids living in it than Boston--we tend to stay way ahead of the music than most cities with plastic wrap CD stores and recycled Clear Channel/XM radio. It's one of the perks about living in the murder capital of the United States.
I happen to love it.
Sony is capturing some of this vibe with Acidplanet
The only way I could make sense of my inbox was to look at all the people who routinely send me stuff.
Then, I created a folder for each person and setup an inbox rule (easy in KMail or Outlook) to move the message to a tingle-table folder based on each person.
At work this keeps my inbox clear almost all-day long, and I can quickly get to the people I need to reply to quickly, and let all the personal/jokes/riffraff and autoresponders gather dust until I login late at night from home and read it.
When I am REALLY busy and don't want distraction, I just close my email reader completely and forward my extension to my (turned off) cell phone.
Walk-ups to my desk get a very grumpy face and a "I am really busy, it will have to wait" response.
This story is making me moist as a snackcake down there.
Turning a room into your house into the StarTrek bridge.
OK, so where does he keep the jackoff lube? I'm only asking because that's the only thing he'll be doing in that room--no way he'll get to bed down a female in there for sure.
What... rip up the planet earth again to run a bunch of lines that barely will bring in enough cash to ex-suburbanites when they already have access to decent-speed broadband in most cases (or can get DirectWay).
e.g. my area:
If you really want FIOS real bad and want it now--you can move to Philadelphia and get it. It's going in the urban core and the inner suburbs... the outer McMansions in the country probably will never get it.
QNX can run on ARM processors, and it's trivial to recompile C/C++ software on Darwin over to it.
Just a thought.
That's the rub. Nobody has ever seen the highest-skilled job classes in society erode before to foreign countries.
There is even talk of "health-outsourcing" being tried (TIME mag article) that some health insurers are looking at. Patients with treatable diseases and necessary surgeries that are not immediately dire emergencies (can be done within a month timeframe) can be performed in Thailand and Seoul for pennies on the dollar--saving HMOs tremendous amounts of cash.
Of course, local hospitals, physicians groups and think tanks are ENTIRELY against this--saying that foreign medicine is substandard, the overseas doctors are not properly educated, and you'll run into risks (like you don't run a risk in the US already).
Tell me, if these so-called people in the upper echelons of academia can get away with telling you that an Auditor or Actuary Scientist is something that can be offshored without suffering any quality in work... WHY should we believe the other hype that we should NOT allow U.S. medical tourism and allow foreign medicine to compete with local medicine?
Maybe it's because some people fear the avg. pay for a neurosurgeon (a tad below $300,000), would drop down to the upper $70K, like it is outside the US.
Jobs has been tagged as the PHB he truly is! Either that or he just had a PHB moment there and forgot to put a doubleshot in his latte.
I've won about 2/3rds of the achievements in the game so far.
But... even though the difficulty is set at the CAPTAIN level, it's rather disappointingly easy, once you figure out where certain "snatch" points are in the game. There are parts of the game that do offer more difficulty, such as the mission where you must keep the Borg "busy" while a rescue operation commences to move transport ships off planets being taken over by the Borg.
However, the No. annoying thing in the game is the difficulty in torpedo targeting! It almost seems random when you can get a torpedo lock on anything, even when you try to orient the ship so the portals are clearly pointing at the enemy, you are close enough, and there's been enough time for ship's crewmen to load the torpedoes. It seems even more bizarre to get them to fire even all the way up to the USS Defiant which is supposed to have homing devices so you don't even have to orient the whole ship to fire them.
Now is a good time to figure out how to do things programmatically without using Office's VBA scripting (which you can half-assed do it if you reference libraries with .NET or use OLE).
.NET, old school OLE ones are sure to come soon).
Any spreadsheet macros that make use of sending click messages will break.
I have been using Office 2007 for a couple months now, and I must say---they are right about the learning curve.
It look be forever just to figure out what happened to the "undo" button on the tool bar.
Also, replacing the upper-left standard window menu and icon with this "Office Globe" is rather annoying. Word and Excel almost feel like they are their own presentation managers.
Most Windows fat client developers (sorry, smart client) look at Office towards innovative UI techniques. The Ribbon is sure to be copied in a lot of other apps that have a rich UI (I've already seen components being offered for
Anyone who started on Office2000 or 2003 is sure to be frustrated for a few months after this release. More so if you are a heavy spreadsheet user.
Guess where the American government was founded?
Yes, Philadelphia.
Which is the poorest city in the United States?
Philadelphia.
Crime and poverty are related, so guess who also has the highest murder per capita rate of a large city?
No, not D.C. anymore... it's Philadelphia.
I live in Center City Philadelphia, and this area is virtually "landlocked" by 4 different notorious regions of the city which are so fierce with crime that two aren't even safe to drive through in the daytime! We do have gentrification occurring here, but that isn't enough to drop the crime rate down.
Also, our city school system was annexed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and taken out of City control, and the improvement in things like the truancy rate have still yet to be seen... one of the larger contributors to shootings other than drug turf disputes.
The crime cameras are located on major city intersections, and in very high crime areas where the number of "SHOTS FIRED" incidents occur more than 100x a year [citywide, we have about 1,900 shootings reported annually, with 2006's murder total at 406 people, NYC only has 100 more murders, but it has 8 times the population we do].
City residents were jumping for joy, rich and poor, when this plan was announced. Life is different in Philly than in your little suburb and corporate office park. CCTV in public areas has been challenged in court numerous times, by the ACLU and others, and each time the litigants lost up front or lost in the appellate circuits.
Center City is safe only because there are hundreds of thousands of eyes on the streets, it looks like Manhattan, and a lot of the nation's most historic objects are located here. The other parts of Philadelphia which are spread out... very few eyeballs are on the street.
The program is working for us. We want to keep it.