I can come up with at least one example of the old user interface providing something ribbons were not making as easy to find. Under older versions of MS Word you double-click on the Header or Footer and you would be shown a toolbar that gave you options to insert Page Numbers, Total pages and so forth.
So if I wanted to, I could quickly do: Page/Total to get a 1/2 to show up at the bottom of the document.
Now under 2007, that toolbar dissapears and now I can insert Page numbers, none of which matched that exact format and none of which were simply a macro fill in. Hence, I had to dig through in order to find what I wanted. Go to Insert, and look about its not necessarily obvious. But eventually you can click on Quick Parts and Field and then select from a large list of macros.
Now that you do it once, you can create a template and never repeat the procedure. However, how was that any easier or more obvious then the old method?
MySQL caused a bit of a stir where I worked for the same reasons mentioned in the article. It is not always about doing the legwork, as anyone can pretty much take a few hours of research to find out licenses, variants in code and so forth.
What IS the problem however, is the fact that the GPL is a complex legal document and some companies don't want to pay the fees necessary for a small battalion of lawyers to confirm its use on a server platform or within a product. Its polar opposite the BSD license however is far easier for anyone to interpret and has a lot of legal precedence behind it.
The MySQL dual licensing issue reminds me of another project I encountered. iText PDF (http://www.itextpdf.com) is a Java open-source license that was traditionally released under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
Oddly enough, just as their tutorials disappeared when the author of the library published a book. To which is used exclusively when asking for help in the forums, they also changed the license to the AGPL.
This seemed to be a way to force companies into buying their dual license. Apparently a lot of people used their product on a back-end servers to generate PDF invoices and so forth. By forcing the license change it meant that their changes to the code would have to be released and the viral nature of the AGPL forced the hands of many formerly legal products.
Fortunately, their MPL licensed version is only a few months older then their new code and oddly works with their Tutorial files they have hidden away in an old archive on Source forge.
Not that myself or my organization was opposed to licensing legally. However when you have a small, no fee, in house product being distributed within your organization and they are looking for 100$ US or more per instance for licensing fees, it rather makes it a hard pill to swallow.
MySQL had the same problem some of their fees seemed to range in the 300$ US per instance depending on the type of licensing involved and overhead of the company you used to get them. Some individuals at our organization recalls getting Oracle licenses for that price!
In a way, are these open source products or are they simply using the moniker as a way to attract people and force them into costly solutions?
What about OpenBSD? The core distro has apparently gone through the rigours of auditing and I am sure that is dealing with a fair amount of lines of code.
Sure OpenBSD does not offer every bell and whistle in their distribution. It certainly shows that it can be done if you have the will and resources to do it.
Not necessarily. Who does security of the perimeter around the air base? Who would defend the air base in war time conditions when the marines and army are out there holding the line?
Knowing how to defend your colleagues, the installation and yourself is not a waste of money. It's not like they are in a low risk job and will never be deployed overseas.
Of course if their training is almost meaningless and treated as a joke by those doing said training. Then I agree with you.
A lot of corporate Exchange accounts have limits on their size. So you have a PST to bypass that limitation, since an overflow prevents you from getting mail in at least our case!
When mounting a filesystem under OpenBSD you can specify that any file within that mount cannot be executed. I find that this is very much a valuable flag (noexec) when you are mounting/tmp and/home as it pretty much prevents execution of files outside of expected areas.
Your forgetting the effect that drinking diet can have on someone. They feel that they can consume more of something else because they are being 'good' about what they drink.
I recall an article on MacDonald's being lower calorie per meal then Subway because of the same thinking. First of all people would load up on condiments at Subway then get cookies and a real non-diet soda.
When tallied together, it was better calorie wise to have a Big Mac combo with a diet coke. Reasoning being that since they knew what they were eating was bad, they would adjust accordingly. The reverse however does not seem to apply.
Not entirely unheard of if you are male, under 25, single and drive a car that is expensive to repair with a higher probability of causing accidents and damage. Insurance companies run profiles on everything and charge accordingly.
My insurance for a 6 year old Chrysler Neon was more expensive then a brand new Chevrolet Cavalier Z24 for example. Until recently, my wife paid less for insurance then I did. She has had three accidents in the last seven years and one of which was deemed at fault, while my record was clean.
That one always bothered me, since good behaviour was worth less then gender to the auto insurance industry.
SSBN's are not necessarily the trump card everyone makes them up to be. They are effective against other nuclear submarines such as the Alpha which is renowned for generating large amounts of self-noise.
They are not however overly effective against diesel-electric submarines that can move through the water with a lot less noise generation. I would assume that the Chinese has a fleet of Kilo-like class of diesel-electrics that would prevent or threaten naval operation close to their shores.
In the end, deterrence is one of the biggest factors. If stories from the Royal Australian Navy and their ilk is true and that they have been able to stalk and shadow carriers in their 'outdated' submarine technology, then the Americans would think twice before getting too close.
There is no stable government in Somalia either. The lack of social system, education and so forth has in fact failed not only the pirates by their society as a whole. This is not the reason for the rampant piracy, especially when dealing with ships that are brining in food supplies.
This is good old fashioned greed, until recently it has been pretty much a win-win for the pirates. They were seldom if ever confronted and the return on investment was massive. With those conditions in place it created an environment similar to what we had with Privateering.
They claim to care about the over-fishing, the illegal dumping and so forth, but it boils down to greed. Especially when you see that it is not fishing vessels that are hit, but supply tankers with big fat cargos worth millions.
If they were there as social activists, they would be boarding vessels that actually created their problems and keeping them on their shores as a political statement. Not claiming million dollar bounties and going after the next ripe and defenceless target.
That's why they are so vocal about recent warship involvement. Their goose is cooked if world navies crack down.
As long as the environment is substainable throughout time. Certainly cases like New Orleans and Katrina, point out that all of these 'fit' individuals are seriously at risk of natural selection when their medication runs out.
Be it due to a shortage of supply due to roads being washed out and heavy winds providing reliable air transportation; electrical shortages making refrigeration innefective and not being able to afford the drugs at a local drug store (due to inflation for example). All of these factors make the environment hostile and put the 'fit' as risk. Even more so then an able bodied person.
There are reasons why the Military does not allow certain allergies to exist in their members. Warzones are not the best of environments for special medical requirements.
I see it as being slightly more damaging down the road than that. Currently in the United-States and Canada, there are more women graduating with post secondary education then men.
There exists no social or political push to correct this process as it is not seen as a issue. However, more female graduates are increasing slightly every year in positions that used to be male dominated.
Again not necessarily a problem, until you force women to take up more seats at the universities in all fields of studies. Now you take a greater population level and push out the men in order to keep up with the perceived fairness and end up with a job market being flooded with white collared women.
Meanwhile men would be pushed down to what's left for jobs. Construction, manufacturing, oil fields, mining, sanitation and so forth.
Essentially, society would end up with a reversal of gender roles. Men would occupy the lower runs of society doing the jobs that require little education and become the expected practise.
Meanwhile women would become doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers, scientists and teachers. Perfectly acceptable in the end, because from today's views it would be righting a wrong and men (white/straight/young) are not protected by any laws.
Only if you plan to use multiple schemas at the same time. Otherwise you can use the defaults (public and the users name) or set the schema search path to whatever is desired. From that point forward using a table name will result in a search or the implied schema name if you only include the one.
I use this all the time in Perl to do a sort of virtual hosting capability. Multiple copies of the same database under a different schema to keep information contained.
If you are going to burn the coal in order to produce the large quantities of energy required to warm and light homes. Then you can alleviate its impact to the environment and reuse some of that waste to make the system more efficient overall.
Solar power as of yet, is not effective enough to produce the energy of a major coal plant (with the same density of land area used). Coal plants however, pollute en-masse and this addition makes them more efficient and less hazardous to the environment as a whole.
Now if solar was as efficient, then there would be no point to it.
Iran comes to mind as a nation with a small fleet of submarines that may not have any particular love for the US. Submarine capable nations are pretty much everywhere around the globe and while they do not necessarily have high technology nuclear subs and instead make use of ageing Russian hand-me-down subs, they certainly can still prevent carrier fleets from entering certain waters.
Subs in the Falklands war could have been deadly if their maintenance routines did not lead to interface cards being damaged. Chile is hardly an international powerhouse, still they managed.
Prisoners, military, federal employees and I'd assume political personalities. Mind you these days they do seem to qualify military health care as employee benefits.
When I started getting more active in online communities, I recall getting involved with a site named WBS. This system was massive, featuring hundreds of rooms and thousands of players at any given time. Of course, like most things during that day if it showed an inkling of success it was purchased by a large corporations and subsequently change in a way to sour the proverbial milk.
Eventually, WBS was shut down as a web-based chat system and people were scattered to the wind. Some smaller sites opened up, some of which are still active today, but none of them ever captured the greatness that was prior to their inception and none worked well with one another. It was during I decided to kill a bit of time and code my own site, being throughoughly disgruntled by the administration of certain of those sites.
The code I built grew in scope, adding features that had been lost when WBS fell, adding my own, expanding into galleries, forums and adding new features including a social network/dating profile addition. Naturally people started to notice and flocked to my site which generated a modest amount of traffic day in and day out.
There was one difference however from my site and others who offered similiar services and that was code released under the GPL and made freely available. While the code to this day is still a bit difficult to install (tons of modules it depends on) other sites managed to get it going and it caused an unexpected side effect. Essentially it allowed other people to create a multitude of splinter sites, without having to know programming, database administration or even administration of a Unix based server.
As a result of the GPL, these sites featured the same options, functionality, features as the main site with a possible lag in development/release time. However even when I closed my site and people moved on, I noticed that the splinter sites kept popping up with (specific niche needs) here and there using the code and the features that had been put into the code for years.
Perhaps social networking is in for such a step. Essentially, a commodity-based approach to the product and through standards/common code allow people to find communities that match their needs. Sure it may not be a Lavalife, Facebook, MySpace in which everyone and their dog is there, but people do seem to find comfort in a little corner to the world being their own, a community of like-minded people a net centered neighbourhood.
On a side note, I also found that once the code allowed for things such as import/export of handles and such, people tended to flow freely from one site to another. I wonder if implementing OpenID on the system would increase that movement?
That would probably be popular for a certain segment of the population. However, I would imagine that there are still several people out there who want a handheld gaming system to be able to play short quick games in between intermissions in their lives. Something as demanding as a MMORPG game is not something you can turn on, play for five minutes while the kid takes a nap and close up when (s)he cries.
There is an entire market of novelty toys that play games like poker, sodoku and so forth. This shows that people want something small, portable and quick to put down in a matter of seconds. Again a game that requires online play, cannot be really saved in a current position (put down, change diaper and take up again) is not really suited for this type of gameplay.
Besides, to play online you need STABLE hotspots and LOTS of battery power since WiFi will generaly kill your batteries faster (so the PSP may not be a great candidate for this). Hardly what I would call portable with the current connectivity available in a city now.
It worked out pretty well for Frodo in Lord of the Rings. It does seem to be a re-occuring theme in books and popular culture of late. People perhaps feel comfort that no matter how little they try to change, work to better themselves or learn something new... That great things are still in store for them?
I've actually encountered some oddities when coding a site to use HTML and CSS. Essentially, it would validate 100% without any problems listed at all, however if I added in the Doctype it would completely screw up the rendering in Internet Explorer and Netscape/Firefox.
Never really made sense to me, how something could validate fine and then screw up royally when actually made to render to that validated standard. The site while it can validate has no Doctype so the browsers render in Quirks mode which works fine.
I actually had a sample files that I could pass along to a person with 100% identical code. The only difference was the Doctype line. One would show up fine the other would fail miserably... Like I said, never made any sense to me!
They seem to be including all models of the same letter code and ignoring the digits. If you count them like that, there are 8 models. That is at least from a cursory overview of the list.
One of the courses I am taking through the military covers lectures from a professor of the University of Toronto. Ursula Franklin has a lot of say about how technology has changed society, removed authority from the common individual, stripped communication of reciprocity and led us to viewing the world through virtual realities.
Personally, I see it as a matter of choice on the matter, but the 'The Real World of Technology' likes to paint these technologies as existing to enslave us. Really has a tin foil hat type of view of the world, saying that new technologies such as the Signer sewing machine were created to force women to work in sweat shops and all that.
Nonetheless, the concept of a virtual reality for those bound by technology is nothing new at all.
They covered this on the Discovery Channel up in Canada a few months back. The problem was not the technology, it was related to how the procedures differed between airlines and countries. In one instance the pilots of the cargo plane followed the computers directions, while the Russian pilots listened to the air control tower.
Had both listened to the air control tower or the onboard warning systems everything would have worked. This was not the case and a midair collision ensued.
Slashdot Mirror
Source: http://www.synonyms.net/synonym/surrender
surrender, yielding, capitulation, giving up, resignation, fall, forsaking, concession, surrender, resignation, conceding
Depending on your point of view these can apply as well: Withdraw, fall back, retreat.
So what does that say about English speaking countries?
I can come up with at least one example of the old user interface providing something ribbons were not making as easy to find. Under older versions of MS Word you double-click on the Header or Footer and you would be shown a toolbar that gave you options to insert Page Numbers, Total pages and so forth.
So if I wanted to, I could quickly do: Page/Total to get a 1/2 to show up at the bottom of the document.
Now under 2007, that toolbar dissapears and now I can insert Page numbers, none of which matched that exact format and none of which were simply a macro fill in. Hence, I had to dig through in order to find what I wanted. Go to Insert, and look about its not necessarily obvious. But eventually you can click on Quick Parts and Field and then select from a large list of macros.
Now that you do it once, you can create a template and never repeat the procedure. However, how was that any easier or more obvious then the old method?
MySQL caused a bit of a stir where I worked for the same reasons mentioned in the article. It is not always about doing the legwork, as anyone can pretty much take a few hours of research to find out licenses, variants in code and so forth.
What IS the problem however, is the fact that the GPL is a complex legal document and some companies don't want to pay the fees necessary for a small battalion of lawyers to confirm its use on a server platform or within a product. Its polar opposite the BSD license however is far easier for anyone to interpret and has a lot of legal precedence behind it.
The MySQL dual licensing issue reminds me of another project I encountered. iText PDF (http://www.itextpdf.com) is a Java open-source license that was traditionally released under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
Oddly enough, just as their tutorials disappeared when the author of the library published a book. To which is used exclusively when asking for help in the forums, they also changed the license to the AGPL.
This seemed to be a way to force companies into buying their dual license. Apparently a lot of people used their product on a back-end servers to generate PDF invoices and so forth. By forcing the license change it meant that their changes to the code would have to be released and the viral nature of the AGPL forced the hands of many formerly legal products.
Fortunately, their MPL licensed version is only a few months older then their new code and oddly works with their Tutorial files they have hidden away in an old archive on Source forge.
Not that myself or my organization was opposed to licensing legally. However when you have a small, no fee, in house product being distributed within your organization and they are looking for 100$ US or more per instance for licensing fees, it rather makes it a hard pill to swallow.
MySQL had the same problem some of their fees seemed to range in the 300$ US per instance depending on the type of licensing involved and overhead of the company you used to get them. Some individuals at our organization recalls getting Oracle licenses for that price!
In a way, are these open source products or are they simply using the moniker as a way to attract people and force them into costly solutions?
What about OpenBSD? The core distro has apparently gone through the rigours of auditing and I am sure that is dealing with a fair amount of lines of code.
Sure OpenBSD does not offer every bell and whistle in their distribution. It certainly shows that it can be done if you have the will and resources to do it.
Not necessarily. Who does security of the perimeter around the air base? Who would defend the air base in war time conditions when the marines and army are out there holding the line?
Knowing how to defend your colleagues, the installation and yourself is not a waste of money. It's not like they are in a low risk job and will never be deployed overseas.
Of course if their training is almost meaningless and treated as a joke by those doing said training. Then I agree with you.
A lot of corporate Exchange accounts have limits on their size. So you have a PST to bypass that limitation, since an overflow prevents you from getting mail in at least our case!
When mounting a filesystem under OpenBSD you can specify that any file within that mount cannot be executed. I find that this is very much a valuable flag (noexec) when you are mounting /tmp and /home as it pretty much prevents execution of files outside of expected areas.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=mount&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html
Of course if it is a script, nothing stops the person from calling the interpreter first. e.g. perl script.pl
Your forgetting the effect that drinking diet can have on someone. They feel that they can consume more of something else because they are being 'good' about what they drink.
I recall an article on MacDonald's being lower calorie per meal then Subway because of the same thinking. First of all people would load up on condiments at Subway then get cookies and a real non-diet soda.
When tallied together, it was better calorie wise to have a Big Mac combo with a diet coke. Reasoning being that since they knew what they were eating was bad, they would adjust accordingly. The reverse however does not seem to apply.
Got this link from a quick Google search: http://www.diet-blog.com/archives/2007/09/04/subway_diners_eat_more_calories.php
Not entirely unheard of if you are male, under 25, single and drive a car that is expensive to repair with a higher probability of causing accidents and damage. Insurance companies run profiles on everything and charge accordingly.
My insurance for a 6 year old Chrysler Neon was more expensive then a brand new Chevrolet Cavalier Z24 for example. Until recently, my wife paid less for insurance then I did. She has had three accidents in the last seven years and one of which was deemed at fault, while my record was clean.
That one always bothered me, since good behaviour was worth less then gender to the auto insurance industry.
SSBN's are not necessarily the trump card everyone makes them up to be. They are effective against other nuclear submarines such as the Alpha which is renowned for generating large amounts of self-noise.
They are not however overly effective against diesel-electric submarines that can move through the water with a lot less noise generation. I would assume that the Chinese has a fleet of Kilo-like class of diesel-electrics that would prevent or threaten naval operation close to their shores.
In the end, deterrence is one of the biggest factors. If stories from the Royal Australian Navy and their ilk is true and that they have been able to stalk and shadow carriers in their 'outdated' submarine technology, then the Americans would think twice before getting too close.
There is no stable government in Somalia either. The lack of social system, education and so forth has in fact failed not only the pirates by their society as a whole. This is not the reason for the rampant piracy, especially when dealing with ships that are brining in food supplies.
This is good old fashioned greed, until recently it has been pretty much a win-win for the pirates. They were seldom if ever confronted and the return on investment was massive. With those conditions in place it created an environment similar to what we had with Privateering.
They claim to care about the over-fishing, the illegal dumping and so forth, but it boils down to greed. Especially when you see that it is not fishing vessels that are hit, but supply tankers with big fat cargos worth millions.
If they were there as social activists, they would be boarding vessels that actually created their problems and keeping them on their shores as a political statement. Not claiming million dollar bounties and going after the next ripe and defenceless target.
That's why they are so vocal about recent warship involvement. Their goose is cooked if world navies crack down.
As long as the environment is substainable throughout time. Certainly cases like New Orleans and Katrina, point out that all of these 'fit' individuals are seriously at risk of natural selection when their medication runs out.
Be it due to a shortage of supply due to roads being washed out and heavy winds providing reliable air transportation; electrical shortages making refrigeration innefective and not being able to afford the drugs at a local drug store (due to inflation for example). All of these factors make the environment hostile and put the 'fit' as risk. Even more so then an able bodied person.
There are reasons why the Military does not allow certain allergies to exist in their members. Warzones are not the best of environments for special medical requirements.
I see it as being slightly more damaging down the road than that. Currently in the United-States and Canada, there are more women graduating with post secondary education then men.
There exists no social or political push to correct this process as it is not seen as a issue. However, more female graduates are increasing slightly every year in positions that used to be male dominated.
Again not necessarily a problem, until you force women to take up more seats at the universities in all fields of studies. Now you take a greater population level and push out the men in order to keep up with the perceived fairness and end up with a job market being flooded with white collared women.
Meanwhile men would be pushed down to what's left for jobs. Construction, manufacturing, oil fields, mining, sanitation and so forth.
Essentially, society would end up with a reversal of gender roles. Men would occupy the lower runs of society doing the jobs that require little education and become the expected practise.
Meanwhile women would become doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers, scientists and teachers. Perfectly acceptable in the end, because from today's views it would be righting a wrong and men (white/straight/young) are not protected by any laws.
Only if you plan to use multiple schemas at the same time. Otherwise you can use the defaults (public and the users name) or set the schema search path to whatever is desired. From that point forward using a table name will result in a search or the implied schema name if you only include the one.
I use this all the time in Perl to do a sort of virtual hosting capability. Multiple copies of the same database under a different schema to keep information contained.
If you are going to burn the coal in order to produce the large quantities of energy required to warm and light homes. Then you can alleviate its impact to the environment and reuse some of that waste to make the system more efficient overall.
Solar power as of yet, is not effective enough to produce the energy of a major coal plant (with the same density of land area used). Coal plants however, pollute en-masse and this addition makes them more efficient and less hazardous to the environment as a whole.
Now if solar was as efficient, then there would be no point to it.
Thanks. It came to me the day before! Thanks for the clarification however!
Iran comes to mind as a nation with a small fleet of submarines that may not have any particular love for the US. Submarine capable nations are pretty much everywhere around the globe and while they do not necessarily have high technology nuclear subs and instead make use of ageing Russian hand-me-down subs, they certainly can still prevent carrier fleets from entering certain waters.
Subs in the Falklands war could have been deadly if their maintenance routines did not lead to interface cards being damaged. Chile is hardly an international powerhouse, still they managed.
Prisoners, military, federal employees and I'd assume political personalities. Mind you these days they do seem to qualify military health care as employee benefits.
When I started getting more active in online communities, I recall getting involved with a site named WBS. This system was massive, featuring hundreds of rooms and thousands of players at any given time. Of course, like most things during that day if it showed an inkling of success it was purchased by a large corporations and subsequently change in a way to sour the proverbial milk.
Eventually, WBS was shut down as a web-based chat system and people were scattered to the wind. Some smaller sites opened up, some of which are still active today, but none of them ever captured the greatness that was prior to their inception and none worked well with one another. It was during I decided to kill a bit of time and code my own site, being throughoughly disgruntled by the administration of certain of those sites.
The code I built grew in scope, adding features that had been lost when WBS fell, adding my own, expanding into galleries, forums and adding new features including a social network/dating profile addition. Naturally people started to notice and flocked to my site which generated a modest amount of traffic day in and day out.
There was one difference however from my site and others who offered similiar services and that was code released under the GPL and made freely available. While the code to this day is still a bit difficult to install (tons of modules it depends on) other sites managed to get it going and it caused an unexpected side effect. Essentially it allowed other people to create a multitude of splinter sites, without having to know programming, database administration or even administration of a Unix based server.
As a result of the GPL, these sites featured the same options, functionality, features as the main site with a possible lag in development/release time. However even when I closed my site and people moved on, I noticed that the splinter sites kept popping up with (specific niche needs) here and there using the code and the features that had been put into the code for years.
Perhaps social networking is in for such a step. Essentially, a commodity-based approach to the product and through standards/common code allow people to find communities that match their needs. Sure it may not be a Lavalife, Facebook, MySpace in which everyone and their dog is there, but people do seem to find comfort in a little corner to the world being their own, a community of like-minded people a net centered neighbourhood.
On a side note, I also found that once the code allowed for things such as import/export of handles and such, people tended to flow freely from one site to another. I wonder if implementing OpenID on the system would increase that movement?
That would probably be popular for a certain segment of the population. However, I would imagine that there are still several people out there who want a handheld gaming system to be able to play short quick games in between intermissions in their lives. Something as demanding as a MMORPG game is not something you can turn on, play for five minutes while the kid takes a nap and close up when (s)he cries.
There is an entire market of novelty toys that play games like poker, sodoku and so forth. This shows that people want something small, portable and quick to put down in a matter of seconds. Again a game that requires online play, cannot be really saved in a current position (put down, change diaper and take up again) is not really suited for this type of gameplay.
Besides, to play online you need STABLE hotspots and LOTS of battery power since WiFi will generaly kill your batteries faster (so the PSP may not be a great candidate for this). Hardly what I would call portable with the current connectivity available in a city now.
It worked out pretty well for Frodo in Lord of the Rings. It does seem to be a re-occuring theme in books and popular culture of late. People perhaps feel comfort that no matter how little they try to change, work to better themselves or learn something new... That great things are still in store for them?
I've actually encountered some oddities when coding a site to use HTML and CSS. Essentially, it would validate 100% without any problems listed at all, however if I added in the Doctype it would completely screw up the rendering in Internet Explorer and Netscape/Firefox.
Never really made sense to me, how something could validate fine and then screw up royally when actually made to render to that validated standard. The site while it can validate has no Doctype so the browsers render in Quirks mode which works fine.
I actually had a sample files that I could pass along to a person with 100% identical code. The only difference was the Doctype line. One would show up fine the other would fail miserably... Like I said, never made any sense to me!
They seem to be including all models of the same letter code and ignoring the digits. If you count them like that, there are 8 models. That is at least from a cursory overview of the list.
One of the courses I am taking through the military covers lectures from a professor of the University of Toronto. Ursula Franklin has a lot of say about how technology has changed society, removed authority from the common individual, stripped communication of reciprocity and led us to viewing the world through virtual realities.
Personally, I see it as a matter of choice on the matter, but the 'The Real World of Technology' likes to paint these technologies as existing to enslave us. Really has a tin foil hat type of view of the world, saying that new technologies such as the Signer sewing machine were created to force women to work in sweat shops and all that.
Nonetheless, the concept of a virtual reality for those bound by technology is nothing new at all.
They covered this on the Discovery Channel up in Canada a few months back. The problem was not the technology, it was related to how the procedures differed between airlines and countries. In one instance the pilots of the cargo plane followed the computers directions, while the Russian pilots listened to the air control tower.
Had both listened to the air control tower or the onboard warning systems everything would have worked. This was not the case and a midair collision ensued.