Both Microsoft and Sony missed a huge opportunity: two player shared / overlayed console games on a single TV. Each player sees their own 2D screen on the same shared 3D-capable TV set. Take 2 pairs of passive 3D glasses and swap the lenses so one pair has 2 right lenses and the other has 2 left lenses. Each player then sees only one of the two stereoscopic images. The console can then show different content to each of the two players (or two "teams" if playing with more people). For example, in a setting up your football offensive call, player 1 can make their selection, while player 2 sees their defensive screen. Then each player sees the play from their own side's perspective. It works very well for driving games, where each player sees their own cockpit and HUD, but some content like the map are the same. The best demo was a single screen game (like Towerfall), but each had their own privately visible power-ups, and when a character became "cloaked" player 1 could still see their character but the opponent player couldn't. Cool stuff. I did some preliminary work on this a long while back, but it became clear neither Microsoft nor Sony was interested. We did some demos on the now defunct OUYA.
Did you watch the video? IT'S AN INTERVIEW. Most of it is state-of-the-industry type questions. He is asked about what to buy, he gives an answer.
In the end he recommends a 47", passive glasses technology, and smart TV features are nice but not a deal breaker. Doesn't sound like a shill to me, that happens to be exactly what I would recommend to a friend.
He is brand agnostic. Listen to the part where he talks about smart TV features - he praises Roku, Apple TV and WD. He discusses how a modern Blu-ray player makes the embedded Smart TV features irrelevant and warns against manufactures "double dipping".
Sure you can be pissed at/. for giving us a piece that is too consumer oriented, but it clearly is not endorsing any brand or sales outlet.
A new name implies a new focus, new processes, or at least a new mission attitude.
To rename it now is to embrace the department's need for PR image update, but without a clear new mandate it is just enabling 10 years of the same outdated behavior.
I appreciate the humor of the OP but this is the kind of idea I could see being promoted in the halls of DHS.
If you watch any of the numerous interviews with Chandra in the past few weeks you can see this comment in context. He is bashing all other Android tablets in an effort to differentiate his new product. He readily admits he has learned many lessons from the joojoo, but "poor carbon copy" and "rip-off" are digs at what came after the iPad release.
Remember this is a consumption device that can be used for the occasional tweet or post, not a programmer's device.
They made a good start by zapping the PrintScreen/ScrollLock/Pause/NumLock/Insert/CapsLock buttons. But there is so much more to be done in creating the perfect consumption netbook keyboard.
They made the up/down buttons too small and took away many of the nav keys (PgUp, PgDn, Home, End). This is a big deal. I'm actually not suggesting they return these keys but perhaps re-invent the keyboard navigation. I'd love to see a variable rocker switch embedded in the keyboard with scroll wheel functionality where a single tap is a one-line move and a strong press is equivalent to a PgUp/PgDn keystroke. I'm not an HCI expert but a new human-centric keyboard navigation paradigm is needed.
Also: Take away the programmer's keyboard keys - back-quote, square braces, and backslash keys - and move them to Alt- keystrokes (back quote on the quotes key, backslash on the/? key, pipe on the;: key, square braces on the,lt.gt keys, curly braces on the 9(0) keys, tilda on the 6^ key) This way they are still there but not taking up valuable real estate.
The one mistake in my mind is zapping the Delete key. I can't write a post without both backspace and delete keys.
The last big change they should have made is putting in "B"old and "i"talic keys, putting them in place of the CapsLock key. It would be fairly easy to support them in all Google's sites (just put support into their various frameworks) and the rest of the world would follow soon enough. Although this is my preference I can see why they chose a "Search" button, after all this is a search company.
As for focusing on CapsLock, this is an non-issue as the double tap Shift functionality is already well established in the Google ecosystem, but I do appreciate the way it has gotten everyone thinking about how to evolve the old keyboard again.
I changed my key caps and switch to the Dvorak layout for a couple of months. After 2 weeks I was up to speed, and found it seamless to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak.
The killer was the shortcut keys. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V were chosen more for their proximity on the QWERTY keyboard than for the letters they represent. I know the shortcut keys from muscle memory of their locations, not from the underlying letter keys. Even simple cutting and pasting is painful on Dvorak, and more advanced shortcut keys are a nightmare.
We may all lament the lack of foresight when the first IBM PC designers chose to use the stock QWERTY keyboard, but there was another opportunity at the dawn of the GUI. Had the assignment of shortcut keys been made location specific and layout independent, the switch to Dvorak or any other layout would have been a simple personal choice; but that day has come and gone.
I've no doubt your raw WPM will go up after a couple weeks of Dvorak use, but I'll bet your overall productivity goes down. You will either struggle with shortcut keys of find yourself resorting to using the mouse for menu selections.
I reluctantly quit Dvorak and went back to QWERTY.
Fairly soon I'm sure I'll want to get blu-ray quality movies digitally. At $.25/GB that will be $5.00 just for the digital transportation costs of the disc, let alone the price for the movie. Um, no thanks. I think I can do better with UPS.
The weak point is the screen - kids poke and bang it all the time. Try to get one with a hard touch sensitive surface, mostly for the screen protection. I added one to my Asus 701 eee and it works well. Unfortunately Asus still isn't selling a model with the touch screen built in. Otherwise the Asus eee line is durable and great.
If you're considering a laptop too, choose the smaller device. Kids tend to close laptops violently and large screens may get damaged, or at least the housing can be cracked.
Kids tend to do horrible things to CD/DVD drives. The fewer ports the better. Especially try to avoid large slots like double height PC Card slots. This isn't a problem with most netbooks, but worth mentioning anyway.
If you go for a netbook make sure you're getting the 1024x600 instead of the 800x480 screen. Lots of the kid's sites assume 1024 pixels width. I got the Asus 701 and wish I'd waited a few months for the 901.
Another option is an old desktop with a CRT. Its very hard to damage the screen, and if something gets in the keyboard you're out $5. If you go with an old desktop make sure the kid can't easily get to any of the external drive bays.
Also, get an undersized mouse. Either a mobile mouse or one made for a kid's hands. Logitech used to make a cute half-sized race car mouse, which is great. Kids have a rough time with trackpads. Also, mark the USB port he/she should use for the mouse with something like a drop of nail polish, and mark the mouse USB so they know which side is up. If you don't the kid will assume they're just not pushing hard enough and you'll end up with a mangled USB port.
On another note: My 2.5-year-old loves to play on the computer. He goes to PBS kids and helps Cailou build a train track, he helps Big Bird find his letters, and helps Mr. Snuffleupagus grow his garden. I show him the ropes with him sitting on my lap and guiding his hand and clicking. After only a few minutes he moves my hand away and is off and running, exploring and having fun. Don't listen to those trying to tell you otherwise, a general purpose computer can be a great learning instrument.
Dear Slashdot editors, Its a milestone not a barrier. The 640k memory limit on PCs was a barrier. Going faster than the speed of sound was a barrier. A barrier requires technical challenges to be met to move beyond a specific maximum point. A milestone is significant only in artificial numeric terms, such as reaching a percentage of a goal, or achieving a number of ops per sec that happens to be divisible by 2^10.
Its still quite newsworthy and very cool, but it isn't a broken barrier.
There is prior art out there and this shouldn't be granted. The original idea from the late 80's wasn't web based, but otherwise all the details are the same.
A participating rating organization would download the program listing into a fat client program. The ratings could then be assigned and uploaded back to the central server. The ratings would then be distributed to cable operators, who would broadcast the rating organization's ID and their disposition using one of the unused closed captioning areas. The user would put in a set-top box and program it (VCR-style) to include the boolean logic to determine which content rating organizations to use and define rating thresholds. then the set-top box would black out any show that didn't meet the selected requirements.
As far as I know the idea never got fully implemented, but prior art must be out there.
The piece Microsoft seems to have left out is the ability to define your own scales, and the ability to have your own values within those scales. So a rating organization could define a scale "immoral" with levels of "ok", "on-the-edge", and "over-the-line", but then the organization had to publish their standards for their scale. Microsoft seems to have a binary yes/no scale only. Too bad, this was a cool key feature. There were a few other features not in the MS claims such as a series default rating that could be overridden on an episode basis.
The only major difference is the web allows the participating rating organization to be a collection of individuals, where as the original concept was just bigger organizations, such as Roger and Ebert, the MPAA, the 700 club, etc. Even so, the original idea was to have multiple hands from the rating organization in the decision process, so truly nothing here is new.
All the connectors (power, USB, etc) are on the side. This works for traditional motherboards where the size of the connector is relatively insignificant, but in this case it seriously restricts the form factor. It looks small in the picture next to the phone, but imagine the wires attached. 3"x1.8" fits into a standard wall box, but not with the wires on the side. I think they need to stack the connectors on the surface of the MB to make this size viable as a standard.
I've been using Microsoft products since the late 70's. I started out loving them, then I had mixed feelings during their ruthless and illegal business practices period, and have since settled into an ambivalent frame of mind. If this goes forward, I will aggressively work to switch all my resources away from MS solutions, relegating all Microsoft products to compatibility testing in the lab. I hope they're not so stupid to push people like me over the edge.
I've been using VisiBone products for years and I love them. So when Bob sent me an oh-so-friendly email about his new MySql Cards, I forked over my credit card info right away. I've been using my new cards for 30 days now. Here's my alternate review:
The cards come as 2 laminated 8.5x11 duplex sheets. Visibone's JavaScript and HTML cards are also 2 sheets, but they are connected at the spine to make a mini book, and in the case of the JavaScript cards each page has a unique border color. These small details makes a huge difference. I'm constantly flipping these MySql cards around to find the right page.
Each page has a title, such as "Statements H-Z". Unfortunately these titles aren't at the top! One is close to the top, one is in the middle of the page, and the other two are close to the bottom, making it more difficult to orient yourself.
The colors are very nice, but aren't taken far enough. There are lots of boxes all round such as "Legend", "Terminology", and "Regular Expressions" placed wherever there is room on the page, but they don't stand out. Again, see his prior work.
I have no quibbles with the content he chose to put on these cards. Kudos.
The biggest problem I have is the alphabetical approach. Often I'm coming back to MySql after a day coding Oracle statements, and I can't remember what MySql calls a particular function. I don't know the name, so printed alpha isn't much help. To correct this Bob should pull out all the date/time functions into a group, all mathematical functions in another group, etc. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is what he did on his JavaScript card (but not his HTML card).
I would still rate the product highly, but this version isn't a "10".
How about this for an evil business plan of the day. (This one isn't so evil, unless you are RIAA.)
Create a company to license music for internet radio, where the royalty rates are reasonable (equal to radio rates). The license is offered as an alternative to the compulsory license (see Spazmania's comment above). It requires that any broadcaster who intends to take advantage of this alternate license to sign up, and provide monthly reporting and payment. Failure to sign up or provide reporting and payment signifies non-acceptance of the alternate license, and the agreement reverts to the compulsory license.
The business is very light-weight, where artists and broadcasters interact online only. Payment is received from broadcasters and distributed to artists online (PayPal or EFT). There is no legal department per se; there is an online form to report abuse which is reviewed, and if the issues can't be resolved it is forwarded to RIAA's attack dogs.
This removes the independent artist from the income stream yet maintains the enforcement arm of the RIAA. This leaves the burdon of enforcement where congress placed it - in the hands of SoundExchange and the RIAA, but independent artists only pay into the system when there is a problem.
Its a win-win for the broadcasters and the artists. The broadcasters get a relatively cheap license, and the artists see money that would otherwise go into a black hole. Even more important, the artist maintains the stick of the RIAA lawyers while wielding a tastier carrot.
For this service the company takes a modest percentage of the collected royalties.
The RIAA has gotten too greedy and has created this economic opportunity themselves. Please, someone run with it. My fee is a mere 2%.
OK, so it looks like a black hole, but it is just a wormhole; so I go for it. I jump in along with all the other matter swirling around, and I get sucked in. To an observer in my universe, it looks like I got torn apart, but actually I'm just passing through. I'm ok with it up to here (well, not really, but go with it).
So then I pop out the other side. Then what? I'm there with all the other matter that got spit out into the alternate universe. Perhaps there's just a friendly gas cloud there, but more likely everything is spit out into the same point location. In other words, I'm spit out into an alternate universe's black hole.
Firefox users (at least in Windows) can use Greasemonkey with this script http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8346 along with McAfee's SiteAdvisor to see a red/yellow/green icon next to all Google ad links. Its not the best Greasemonkey script, but it gets the job done.
What we need is a consortium of a few software heavyweights like Adobe and Microsoft to change their licensing for Flash, PDF, and WMA to deny the right to transmit their formats unless there is a level playing field. The software industry could undermine the whole QOS discussion today if they wanted.
For minesweeper on the PSP, Mac, or anything non-MS that supports javascript, use the version at http://home.comcast.net/~sheppoor/minesweeper/mine sweeper.html. It is being inclueded in a few off-line PSP packages. Too bad the PSP browser doesn't have a right click:(
You make some good points about churches themselves, but I am concerned about other properties owned by churches. Religious organizations have extremely long time horizons. Frequently a wide range of properties are bought with the expectation that a few of them will be quite valuable at some future time. There is little incentive for a non-taxed investment to be improved, given the expectation that some of the properties will realize only moderate or negative gains. The incentive is to sit on the property until the land becomes a substantial asset and then sell. Meanwhile the community is stuck with unproductive land and structures, both in terms of tax roles and economic growth, and it tends to depress the value of the surrounding properties. Seizing these kinds of properties is what this decision is all about. I agree there needs to be an exception for churches, and probably graveyards as well. However all other church owned lands need to be subject to the same rules as privately owned properties.
Microsoft doesn't see any future value in Access. But, just as MSIE was caught napping by Moz/FF, there is an opportunity... for the Mac.
There is no Access on the Mac, and that is holding back many Windows/Office people back. Make this tool work on the Mac, interoperable with Excel on the Mac, and preferably get Apple to endorse or co-brand the tool. Then you've got yourself a viable transition for millions of users.
You are on the right track - Office is the front end for SQL Server, but Excel will be the front end tool, not Access. If you need reports, they want you to buy MS Reporting Services. If you want apps, use Visual Studio. Access is no longer part of the plan.
Access was Microsoft's gateway drug. Now that most of the world is hooked, it has served its purpose. Microsoft will keep Access around for the die hard fans and the newbies, but it will never see any real updates.
According to the NOAA 2004 budget, 3.326 billion. And from what I can tell, they are making that 3B go pretty far. Assuming there are 300 million in the US, and all are paying takes (big assumption), that comes to $11 and change.
Slashdot Mirror
Both Microsoft and Sony missed a huge opportunity: two player shared / overlayed console games on a single TV. Each player sees their own 2D screen on the same shared 3D-capable TV set.
Take 2 pairs of passive 3D glasses and swap the lenses so one pair has 2 right lenses and the other has 2 left lenses. Each player then sees only one of the two stereoscopic images. The console can then show different content to each of the two players (or two "teams" if playing with more people).
For example, in a setting up your football offensive call, player 1 can make their selection, while player 2 sees their defensive screen. Then each player sees the play from their own side's perspective. It works very well for driving games, where each player sees their own cockpit and HUD, but some content like the map are the same. The best demo was a single screen game (like Towerfall), but each had their own privately visible power-ups, and when a character became "cloaked" player 1 could still see their character but the opponent player couldn't. Cool stuff.
I did some preliminary work on this a long while back, but it became clear neither Microsoft nor Sony was interested. We did some demos on the now defunct OUYA.
Did you watch the video? IT'S AN INTERVIEW. Most of it is state-of-the-industry type questions. He is asked about what to buy, he gives an answer.
In the end he recommends a 47", passive glasses technology, and smart TV features are nice but not a deal breaker. Doesn't sound like a shill to me, that happens to be exactly what I would recommend to a friend.
He is brand agnostic. Listen to the part where he talks about smart TV features - he praises Roku, Apple TV and WD. He discusses how a modern Blu-ray player makes the embedded Smart TV features irrelevant and warns against manufactures "double dipping".
Sure you can be pissed at /. for giving us a piece that is too consumer oriented, but it clearly is not endorsing any brand or sales outlet.
Watch the video. (is WTFV the new RTFM?)
No, now is not the time.
A new name implies a new focus, new processes, or at least a new mission attitude.
To rename it now is to embrace the department's need for PR image update, but without a clear new mandate it is just enabling 10 years of the same outdated behavior.
I appreciate the humor of the OP but this is the kind of idea I could see being promoted in the halls of DHS.
If you watch any of the numerous interviews with Chandra in the past few weeks you can see this comment in context. He is bashing all other Android tablets in an effort to differentiate his new product. He readily admits he has learned many lessons from the joojoo, but "poor carbon copy" and "rip-off" are digs at what came after the iPad release.
Remember this is a consumption device that can be used for the occasional tweet or post, not a programmer's device.
They made a good start by zapping the PrintScreen/ScrollLock/Pause/NumLock/Insert/CapsLock buttons. But there is so much more to be done in creating the perfect consumption netbook keyboard.
They made the up/down buttons too small and took away many of the nav keys (PgUp, PgDn, Home, End). This is a big deal. I'm actually not suggesting they return these keys but perhaps re-invent the keyboard navigation. I'd love to see a variable rocker switch embedded in the keyboard with scroll wheel functionality where a single tap is a one-line move and a strong press is equivalent to a PgUp/PgDn keystroke. I'm not an HCI expert but a new human-centric keyboard navigation paradigm is needed.
Also: Take away the programmer's keyboard keys - back-quote, square braces, and backslash keys - and move them to Alt- keystrokes (back quote on the quotes key, backslash on the /? key, pipe on the ;: key, square braces on the ,lt.gt keys, curly braces on the 9(0) keys, tilda on the 6^ key) This way they are still there but not taking up valuable real estate.
The one mistake in my mind is zapping the Delete key. I can't write a post without both backspace and delete keys.
The last big change they should have made is putting in "B"old and "i"talic keys, putting them in place of the CapsLock key. It would be fairly easy to support them in all Google's sites (just put support into their various frameworks) and the rest of the world would follow soon enough. Although this is my preference I can see why they chose a "Search" button, after all this is a search company.
As for focusing on CapsLock, this is an non-issue as the double tap Shift functionality is already well established in the Google ecosystem, but I do appreciate the way it has gotten everyone thinking about how to evolve the old keyboard again.
I changed my key caps and switch to the Dvorak layout for a couple of months. After 2 weeks I was up to speed, and found it seamless to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak.
The killer was the shortcut keys. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V were chosen more for their proximity on the QWERTY keyboard than for the letters they represent. I know the shortcut keys from muscle memory of their locations, not from the underlying letter keys. Even simple cutting and pasting is painful on Dvorak, and more advanced shortcut keys are a nightmare.
We may all lament the lack of foresight when the first IBM PC designers chose to use the stock QWERTY keyboard, but there was another opportunity at the dawn of the GUI. Had the assignment of shortcut keys been made location specific and layout independent, the switch to Dvorak or any other layout would have been a simple personal choice; but that day has come and gone.
I've no doubt your raw WPM will go up after a couple weeks of Dvorak use, but I'll bet your overall productivity goes down. You will either struggle with shortcut keys of find yourself resorting to using the mouse for menu selections.
I reluctantly quit Dvorak and went back to QWERTY.
Fairly soon I'm sure I'll want to get blu-ray quality movies digitally. At $.25/GB that will be $5.00 just for the digital transportation costs of the disc, let alone the price for the movie. Um, no thanks. I think I can do better with UPS.
The weak point is the screen - kids poke and bang it all the time. Try to get one with a hard touch sensitive surface, mostly for the screen protection. I added one to my Asus 701 eee and it works well. Unfortunately Asus still isn't selling a model with the touch screen built in. Otherwise the Asus eee line is durable and great.
If you're considering a laptop too, choose the smaller device. Kids tend to close laptops violently and large screens may get damaged, or at least the housing can be cracked.
Kids tend to do horrible things to CD/DVD drives. The fewer ports the better. Especially try to avoid large slots like double height PC Card slots. This isn't a problem with most netbooks, but worth mentioning anyway.
If you go for a netbook make sure you're getting the 1024x600 instead of the 800x480 screen. Lots of the kid's sites assume 1024 pixels width. I got the Asus 701 and wish I'd waited a few months for the 901.
Another option is an old desktop with a CRT. Its very hard to damage the screen, and if something gets in the keyboard you're out $5. If you go with an old desktop make sure the kid can't easily get to any of the external drive bays.
Also, get an undersized mouse. Either a mobile mouse or one made for a kid's hands. Logitech used to make a cute half-sized race car mouse, which is great. Kids have a rough time with trackpads. Also, mark the USB port he/she should use for the mouse with something like a drop of nail polish, and mark the mouse USB so they know which side is up. If you don't the kid will assume they're just not pushing hard enough and you'll end up with a mangled USB port.
On another note: My 2.5-year-old loves to play on the computer. He goes to PBS kids and helps Cailou build a train track, he helps Big Bird find his letters, and helps Mr. Snuffleupagus grow his garden. I show him the ropes with him sitting on my lap and guiding his hand and clicking. After only a few minutes he moves my hand away and is off and running, exploring and having fun. Don't listen to those trying to tell you otherwise, a general purpose computer can be a great learning instrument.
The Google cache of the comparison doesn't include McCain's responses yet, but here is the link anyway:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:yzwwifpqCyAJ:sharp.sefora.org/innovation2008/compare/race/president/2008/+http://sharp.sefora.org/innovation2008/compare/race/president/2008/
Dear Slashdot editors,
Its a milestone not a barrier. The 640k memory limit on PCs was a barrier. Going faster than the speed of sound was a barrier. A barrier requires technical challenges to be met to move beyond a specific maximum point. A milestone is significant only in artificial numeric terms, such as reaching a percentage of a goal, or achieving a number of ops per sec that happens to be divisible by 2^10.
Its still quite newsworthy and very cool, but it isn't a broken barrier.
There is prior art out there and this shouldn't be granted. The original idea from the late 80's wasn't web based, but otherwise all the details are the same.
A participating rating organization would download the program listing into a fat client program. The ratings could then be assigned and uploaded back to the central server. The ratings would then be distributed to cable operators, who would broadcast the rating organization's ID and their disposition using one of the unused closed captioning areas. The user would put in a set-top box and program it (VCR-style) to include the boolean logic to determine which content rating organizations to use and define rating thresholds. then the set-top box would black out any show that didn't meet the selected requirements.
As far as I know the idea never got fully implemented, but prior art must be out there.
The piece Microsoft seems to have left out is the ability to define your own scales, and the ability to have your own values within those scales. So a rating organization could define a scale "immoral" with levels of "ok", "on-the-edge", and "over-the-line", but then the organization had to publish their standards for their scale. Microsoft seems to have a binary yes/no scale only. Too bad, this was a cool key feature. There were a few other features not in the MS claims such as a series default rating that could be overridden on an episode basis.
The only major difference is the web allows the participating rating organization to be a collection of individuals, where as the original concept was just bigger organizations, such as Roger and Ebert, the MPAA, the 700 club, etc. Even so, the original idea was to have multiple hands from the rating organization in the decision process, so truly nothing here is new.
All the connectors (power, USB, etc) are on the side. This works for traditional motherboards where the size of the connector is relatively insignificant, but in this case it seriously restricts the form factor. It looks small in the picture next to the phone, but imagine the wires attached. 3"x1.8" fits into a standard wall box, but not with the wires on the side. I think they need to stack the connectors on the surface of the MB to make this size viable as a standard.
I've been using Microsoft products since the late 70's. I started out loving them, then I had mixed feelings during their ruthless and illegal business practices period, and have since settled into an ambivalent frame of mind. If this goes forward, I will aggressively work to switch all my resources away from MS solutions, relegating all Microsoft products to compatibility testing in the lab. I hope they're not so stupid to push people like me over the edge.
I've been using VisiBone products for years and I love them. So when Bob sent me an oh-so-friendly email about his new MySql Cards, I forked over my credit card info right away. I've been using my new cards for 30 days now. Here's my alternate review:
The cards come as 2 laminated 8.5x11 duplex sheets. Visibone's JavaScript and HTML cards are also 2 sheets, but they are connected at the spine to make a mini book, and in the case of the JavaScript cards each page has a unique border color. These small details makes a huge difference. I'm constantly flipping these MySql cards around to find the right page.
Each page has a title, such as "Statements H-Z". Unfortunately these titles aren't at the top! One is close to the top, one is in the middle of the page, and the other two are close to the bottom, making it more difficult to orient yourself.
The colors are very nice, but aren't taken far enough. There are lots of boxes all round such as "Legend", "Terminology", and "Regular Expressions" placed wherever there is room on the page, but they don't stand out. Again, see his prior work.
I have no quibbles with the content he chose to put on these cards. Kudos.
The biggest problem I have is the alphabetical approach. Often I'm coming back to MySql after a day coding Oracle statements, and I can't remember what MySql calls a particular function. I don't know the name, so printed alpha isn't much help. To correct this Bob should pull out all the date/time functions into a group, all mathematical functions in another group, etc. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is what he did on his JavaScript card (but not his HTML card).
I would still rate the product highly, but this version isn't a "10".
How about this for an evil business plan of the day. (This one isn't so evil, unless you are RIAA.)
Create a company to license music for internet radio, where the royalty rates are reasonable (equal to radio rates). The license is offered as an alternative to the compulsory license (see Spazmania's comment above). It requires that any broadcaster who intends to take advantage of this alternate license to sign up, and provide monthly reporting and payment. Failure to sign up or provide reporting and payment signifies non-acceptance of the alternate license, and the agreement reverts to the compulsory license.
The business is very light-weight, where artists and broadcasters interact online only. Payment is received from broadcasters and distributed to artists online (PayPal or EFT). There is no legal department per se; there is an online form to report abuse which is reviewed, and if the issues can't be resolved it is forwarded to RIAA's attack dogs.
This removes the independent artist from the income stream yet maintains the enforcement arm of the RIAA. This leaves the burdon of enforcement where congress placed it - in the hands of SoundExchange and the RIAA, but independent artists only pay into the system when there is a problem.
Its a win-win for the broadcasters and the artists. The broadcasters get a relatively cheap license, and the artists see money that would otherwise go into a black hole. Even more important, the artist maintains the stick of the RIAA lawyers while wielding a tastier carrot.
For this service the company takes a modest percentage of the collected royalties.
The RIAA has gotten too greedy and has created this economic opportunity themselves. Please, someone run with it. My fee is a mere 2%.
OK, so it looks like a black hole, but it is just a wormhole; so I go for it. I jump in along with all the other matter swirling around, and I get sucked in. To an observer in my universe, it looks like I got torn apart, but actually I'm just passing through. I'm ok with it up to here (well, not really, but go with it).
So then I pop out the other side. Then what? I'm there with all the other matter that got spit out into the alternate universe. Perhaps there's just a friendly gas cloud there, but more likely everything is spit out into the same point location. In other words, I'm spit out into an alternate universe's black hole.
I don't see the difference.
Firefox users (at least in Windows) can use Greasemonkey with this script
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8346
along with McAfee's SiteAdvisor to see a red/yellow/green icon next to all Google ad links.
Its not the best Greasemonkey script, but it gets the job done.
What we need is a consortium of a few software heavyweights like Adobe and Microsoft to change their licensing for Flash, PDF, and WMA to deny the right to transmit their formats unless there is a level playing field. The software industry could undermine the whole QOS discussion today if they wanted.
from the "already solved" dept.
Didn't slashdot figure this out years ago?
For minesweeper on the PSP, Mac, or anything non-MS that supports javascript, use the version at http://home.comcast.net/~sheppoor/minesweeper/mine sweeper.html. It is being inclueded in a few off-line PSP packages. Too bad the PSP browser doesn't have a right click :(
I can see it now: TCP/IP/[insert new acronym here]
You make some good points about churches themselves, but I am concerned about other properties owned by churches. Religious organizations have extremely long time horizons. Frequently a wide range of properties are bought with the expectation that a few of them will be quite valuable at some future time. There is little incentive for a non-taxed investment to be improved, given the expectation that some of the properties will realize only moderate or negative gains. The incentive is to sit on the property until the land becomes a substantial asset and then sell. Meanwhile the community is stuck with unproductive land and structures, both in terms of tax roles and economic growth, and it tends to depress the value of the surrounding properties. Seizing these kinds of properties is what this decision is all about.
I agree there needs to be an exception for churches, and probably graveyards as well. However all other church owned lands need to be subject to the same rules as privately owned properties.
Microsoft doesn't see any future value in Access. But, just as MSIE was caught napping by Moz/FF, there is an opportunity... for the Mac.
There is no Access on the Mac, and that is holding back many Windows/Office people back. Make this tool work on the Mac, interoperable with Excel on the Mac, and preferably get Apple to endorse or co-brand the tool. Then you've got yourself a viable transition for millions of users.
You are on the right track - Office is the front end for SQL Server, but Excel will be the front end tool, not Access. If you need reports, they want you to buy MS Reporting Services. If you want apps, use Visual Studio. Access is no longer part of the plan.
Access was Microsoft's gateway drug. Now that most of the world is hooked, it has served its purpose. Microsoft will keep Access around for the die hard fans and the newbies, but it will never see any real updates.
I've already paid for (with my taxes) ...
So how much are we paying?
According to the NOAA 2004 budget, 3.326 billion. And from what I can tell, they are making that 3B go pretty far. Assuming there are 300 million in the US, and all are paying takes (big assumption), that comes to $11 and change.
NOAA 2004 budget (9MB pdf)