There was a theory that the Fiji Islands are the remains of Atlantis, mostly due to the history of volcanic activity, climatic conditions, and the types of animals which Plato described on the islands. They even went so far as to connect the islands into rings to show how Atlantis was described, and commented that Plato could have stopped there on his travels to Egypt. But it's in the wrong direction...
Europe has a much improved public transportation infrastructure over North America, and a slightly higher level of self respect than to be seen on one of those abominations. To top it all off, the cost of living is considerably higher, especially in the urban areas, which is where the product is marketed for.
Re:Age old technology gets a facelift....
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
If anything has been slapped together out of old technology, it's Microsoft Office, but hey, that's just fact, you don't have to believe it.
Hey Visio is a good product, let's buy it, slap a MS logo on it, and sell it for double the price. I have Visio 4.0 kicking around the office which is the last version before the Redmond Giant bought out the company, and it has most of the functionality of the MS Version (with all the office menus stripped out) and doesn't crash nearly as often!
Re:The most important...
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
That's about the only positive point I see in this whole thing too. Just like the Aibo-Icybie thing, Someone will build a cheaper model, pushing the component costs down to a reasonable and tolerable level, where they can be used for much more inventive/exciting things like the personal flying vehicles we were promised by 2000 in the 60's or the robotic maids a-la Jetsons. Maybe I can use this technology to give inebriated college students the ability to walk the straight line and amass a fortune... Now that's worth $3000.00 a pop!
The Great RW
And if you don't believe that I'm great, go ahead and ask me.
Age old technology gets a facelift....
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Is anyone else sick and tired of 20 year old technology getting slapped together into some cheezy consumer product and being heralded as the cure for cancer? Is a gyrosco-ped supposed to make me go out and spend a ton of money on something that is functionally useless?
Maybe we haven't been telling people what we want loud enough, because they're getting worse at guessing. Come on market researchers, earn your money!
Re:Volunteer work would be great if you got paid..
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
·
· Score: 1
Point taken, but I don't think that taking a job for a non-profit organization is necessarily "Volunteer Work".
On the flip side of the coin, I do not not make the six figure salary which I was promised in University, but I still do the computer gig because I love the job. If I had the chance to go to another country and do what I love, and get paid for it (before I got tied down with family) I would have jumped at the chance. Locally, I donate my time and skills to schools and other organizations, because many of the teachers in the industry do not have the hands on experience or background in areas which commonly get overlooked in high school computer science. This is easier to fit in my schedule, allows me to hold a paying job, and still makes a difference.
There are many ways to do volunteer work for overseas nations without leaving home, like lobbying politicians for changes in export laws, or increasing foreign aid. I am merely saying Don't be sucked into the romantic vision of venturing off to the third world and changing the way people live. More often than not there is a definitive reason why people that live in third world countries are poor , and it's not due to a lack of technology or wealth(listing them here will thread way off topic), and helping out people by bringing farming knowledge, mechanical skills, or even internet access won't make a lick of difference until the underlying causes are changed. Choose battles which you can win. Teaching a village to farm better means that they will end up having to produce more cash crops for their government, and will have little impact on their quality of life.
Volunteer work would be great if you got paid...
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
First of all, props to the guys who can just pick up and leave for six monts at a time, but for the majority of working shmoes such as myself, it is an impossibility. Good intentions don't put food on the table, and I don't know of one employer who would let a person leave for a year, then graciously welcome him back.
If I had a company and somebody came to me with a resume showing he took off for a year to do goodwill work in some other country, all I'd see is a guy who needs retraining on a years worth of technology changes. You want to help out, donate money. Let the out of work hippies donate months of their lives.
It isn't very hard to social engineer your way your way onto a system, it's just a matter of getting preliminary information. You wouldn't believe how many companies I worked for that just threw out lists of user accounts, old phone bills, network maps, and other sensitive computer information. With that information anyone could con the helpdesk into opening the doors for them.
Re:Why only Windows...
on
Tiny Apps
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The more and more end-user applications are developed for the linux desktop, the more and more bloated the software will be. People don't have the time to tailor source to make small, powerful apps, and end users want complete functionality, glitz, and polish.
How many people use all of the functions in an office package? Open Office is as much to blame as Microsoft Office for unnecessary tools, as are many other software packages. Why should I give up 200+ megs of disk space so I can type a couple of letters, an e-mail, and make a simple bar graph, and have it look like someone over the age of four did it?
A small, clean word processor that has the capability to snap in additional functions, like dictionary, thesaurus, forms, and html editing, or several grades of the program, tailored to different classes of users would save a lot of disk space, and remove confusion. It would also go a long way to creating and enforcing standards among the different OS'es and programs which are available.
Hmm, Firewire on the PS2. As long as it follows 1394 standards, then you can run External HDD's. I believe that you can even turn an old IDE drive into a hot-swappable drive.
They would certainly make a nice low-volume server farm. But that's what they said when they ported linux to the PS1.
I agree with the VNC, however I still keep a KVM in the server room. If you have a lot of servers, and are doing mission critical work, a KVM is better than nothing, and you don't lose so much rackspace if you only have a couple of monitors
The big, mission critical servers are all fit with VNC, as well as have their own monitors, everything else (voicemail,modem and fax sharing, IDS, DNS, etc) are fitted with a kvm. If the OS won't work, neither will vnc, and I'd much rather spend my time fixing the problem than pulling junk out of the storeroom.
Re:Oh, so that's what it's calld....
on
IgNobel Awards
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· Score: 1
What good is 170k if you can't do anything with it? More MP3s for my phone? Download new ring styles in the blink of an eye? It's a waste until they make a GPRS modem for my visor.
Once KDE and Konqueror offer complete active X controls in a sane environment, that will be enough for me to switch from Gnome. I am constantly stuck having to either walk to a new machine or reboot just to administer my NT boxes, and it really is a pain in the ass.
As for the look and feel of KDE, I really don't care for it. I prefer Gnome, I prefer the apps which are specific to gnome, and will continue to use gnome, especially if Helix ever gets it to install on Slackware any time soon.
However, if I was to replace all the windows boxes in the company, I would most certainly choose KDE, as I feel it is a more business centric desktop, and the windows users wouldn't feel completely alienated.
1) Hackable == Customizable, Hackable != Secure
2) Robot cannot control plane, USB cord not long enough
3) You don't have to buy it
4) Webservers don't crash planes, Control Towers are extremely difficult to hack (I don't think it's ever been reported, not sure how much the systems are tied together, and pilot still has final say over where he's going to put the plane)
5) The thing's just over a foot tall!
Firstly, a improperly secured webserver can do a lot of damage. It is up to the individual to see that it is secure. Secondly hackable means that they're going to let you get into the guts of it, the programming, the hardware. This is a good thing for a number of reasons: cutting training costs, improvement, and flexibility to name a few.
Thirdly, in its present form, it is merely an expensive toy. It is not going to be used in production in General Motors, and is really too small to do any damage. It will probably end up in some university lab hooked to a Java front end that you can control through your browser.
Lastly, in order to have it cause any real damage, you would have to break into the controlling computer, and send it your own commands. This could take a while, and the first time the robot appears to be moving on its own, you just unplug it. If it were my machine and my robot, I wouldn't have it hooked to the web. It would be too expensive for someone to walk it off my desk or down the stairs.
Open source and hackable is merely a term used to say "We're not going to tell you how to play with it". It means they want you to pull it apart, change it, make it do things that they never even thought of, and most importantly, learn from it! You are not going to see an army of these things patrolling the street, killing everything in its path. And even if the absurd does happen, get out your golf clubs and have a blast.
The pope, the president, and Mayor Daley are stuck in a liferaft after their cruise ship sunk. Water's coming in fast, and therey decide that there's only room for one person in this tiny craft.
The President says, "Well, I'm the leader of the free world, I should stay in the boat."
The pope says, "I am a religious icon for 1 billion people, I should stay in the boat!"
"Guys, guys" Daley pipes up, "Let's do this democratically! We'll all write a name of who should stay, and put it in my hat. Whoever gets the most votes, gets to stay in the boat."
The votes were cast, the results tallies, and Mayor Daley won by 97 votes.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's what apple needs. Apple hasn't had any kind of serious marketing blitz since the Apple ][ and the Chaplainesque (non)spokesperson.
Or how about "nothing there"?
There was a theory that the Fiji Islands are the remains of Atlantis, mostly due to the history of volcanic activity, climatic conditions, and the types of animals which Plato described on the islands. They even went so far as to connect the islands into rings to show how Atlantis was described, and commented that Plato could have stopped there on his travels to Egypt. But it's in the wrong direction...
Europe has a much improved public transportation infrastructure over North America, and a slightly higher level of self respect than to be seen on one of those abominations. To top it all off, the cost of living is considerably higher, especially in the urban areas, which is where the product is marketed for.
If anything has been slapped together out of old technology, it's Microsoft Office, but hey, that's just fact, you don't have to believe it.
Hey Visio is a good product, let's buy it, slap a MS logo on it, and sell it for double the price.
I have Visio 4.0 kicking around the office which is the last version before the Redmond Giant bought out the company, and it has most of the functionality of the MS Version (with all the office menus stripped out) and doesn't crash nearly as often!
That's about the only positive point I see in this whole thing too. Just like the Aibo-Icybie thing, Someone will build a cheaper model, pushing the component costs down to a reasonable and tolerable level, where they can be used for much more inventive/exciting things like the personal flying vehicles we were promised by 2000 in the 60's or the robotic maids a-la Jetsons.
Maybe I can use this technology to give inebriated college students the ability to walk the straight line and amass a fortune... Now that's worth $3000.00 a pop!
The Great RW
And if you don't believe that I'm great, go ahead and ask me.
Is anyone else sick and tired of 20 year old technology getting slapped together into some cheezy consumer product and being heralded as the cure for cancer? Is a gyrosco-ped supposed to make me go out and spend a ton of money on something that is functionally useless?
Maybe we haven't been telling people what we want loud enough, because they're getting worse at guessing. Come on market researchers, earn your money!
Point taken, but I don't think that taking a job for a non-profit organization is necessarily "Volunteer Work".
On the flip side of the coin, I do not not make the six figure salary which I was promised in University, but I still do the computer gig because I love the job. If I had the chance to go to another country and do what I love, and get paid for it (before I got tied down with family) I would have jumped at the chance. Locally, I donate my time and skills to schools and other organizations, because many of the teachers in the industry do not have the hands on experience or background in areas which commonly get overlooked in high school computer science. This is easier to fit in my schedule, allows me to hold a paying job, and still makes a difference.
There are many ways to do volunteer work for overseas nations without leaving home, like lobbying politicians for changes in export laws, or increasing foreign aid. I am merely saying Don't be sucked into the romantic vision of venturing off to the third world and changing the way people live. More often than not there is a definitive reason why people that live in third world countries are poor , and it's not due to a lack of technology or wealth(listing them here will thread way off topic), and helping out people by bringing farming knowledge, mechanical skills, or even internet access won't make a lick of difference until the underlying causes are changed. Choose battles which you can win. Teaching a village to farm better means that they will end up having to produce more cash crops for their government, and will have little impact on their quality of life.
First of all, props to the guys who can just pick up and leave for six monts at a time, but for the majority of working shmoes such as myself, it is an impossibility. Good intentions don't put food on the table, and I don't know of one employer who would let a person leave for a year, then graciously welcome him back.
If I had a company and somebody came to me with a resume showing he took off for a year to do goodwill work in some other country, all I'd see is a guy who needs retraining on a years worth of technology changes. You want to help out, donate money. Let the out of work hippies donate months of their lives.
AWG
The new Metal Gear looks like it can keep up with the X-box, and you don't have the pie plate controller to mess around with.
That could be said about any software developer. I imagined it worked fine in the lab.
...although drive wiping is a pretty embarassing oversight.
It isn't very hard to social engineer your way your way onto a system, it's just a matter of getting preliminary information. You wouldn't believe how many companies I worked for that just threw out lists of user accounts, old phone bills, network maps, and other sensitive computer information. With that information anyone could con the helpdesk into opening the doors for them.
The more and more end-user applications are developed for the linux desktop, the more and more bloated the software will be. People don't have the time to tailor source to make small, powerful apps, and end users want complete functionality, glitz, and polish.
How many people use all of the functions in an office package? Open Office is as much to blame as Microsoft Office for unnecessary tools, as are many other software packages. Why should I give up 200+ megs of disk space so I can type a couple of letters, an e-mail, and make a simple bar graph, and have it look like someone over the age of four did it?
A small, clean word processor that has the capability to snap in additional functions, like dictionary, thesaurus, forms, and html editing, or several grades of the program, tailored to different classes of users would save a lot of disk space, and remove confusion. It would also go a long way to creating and enforcing standards among the different OS'es and programs which are available.
Hmm, Firewire on the PS2. As long as it follows 1394 standards, then you can run External HDD's. I believe that you can even turn an old IDE drive into a hot-swappable drive.
They would certainly make a nice low-volume server farm. But that's what they said when they ported linux to the PS1.
I agree with the VNC, however I still keep a KVM in the server room. If you have a lot of servers, and are doing mission critical work, a KVM is better than nothing, and you don't lose so much rackspace if you only have a couple of monitors
The big, mission critical servers are all fit with VNC, as well as have their own monitors, everything else (voicemail,modem and fax sharing, IDS, DNS, etc) are fitted with a kvm. If the OS won't work, neither will vnc, and I'd much rather spend my time fixing the problem than pulling junk out of the storeroom.
And where can we get tickets to Stalin World?
Welcome to the unfunnest place on earth!
The easiest way to get shot is to shoot yourself. If you leave it up to an intern, he'll just shoot your boss and you'll get blamed.
What good is 170k if you can't do anything with it? More MP3s for my phone? Download new ring styles in the blink of an eye? It's a waste until they make a GPRS modem for my visor.
Once KDE and Konqueror offer complete active X controls in a sane environment, that will be enough for me to switch from Gnome. I am constantly stuck having to either walk to a new machine or reboot just to administer my NT boxes, and it really is a pain in the ass.
As for the look and feel of KDE, I really don't care for it. I prefer Gnome, I prefer the apps which are specific to gnome, and will continue to use gnome, especially if Helix ever gets it to install on Slackware any time soon.
However, if I was to replace all the windows boxes in the company, I would most certainly choose KDE, as I feel it is a more business centric desktop, and the windows users wouldn't feel completely alienated.
Maybe we should combine the two projects to have it catalog the news articles it brings down.
I can see the -1 hovering, go ahead...
Sorry, on point 1:
1) Hackable == Customizable, Hackable != INsecure
Let's try this again, with the magic of reality:
1) Hackable == Customizable, Hackable != Secure
2) Robot cannot control plane, USB cord not long enough
3) You don't have to buy it
4) Webservers don't crash planes, Control Towers are extremely difficult to hack (I don't think it's ever been reported, not sure how much the systems are tied together, and pilot still has final say over where he's going to put the plane)
5) The thing's just over a foot tall!
Firstly, a improperly secured webserver can do a lot of damage. It is up to the individual to see that it is secure.
Secondly hackable means that they're going to let you get into the guts of it, the programming, the hardware. This is a good thing for a number of reasons: cutting training costs, improvement, and flexibility to name a few.
Thirdly, in its present form, it is merely an expensive toy. It is not going to be used in production in General Motors, and is really too small to do any damage. It will probably end up in some university lab hooked to a Java front end that you can control through your browser.
Lastly, in order to have it cause any real damage, you would have to break into the controlling computer, and send it your own commands. This could take a while, and the first time the robot appears to be moving on its own, you just unplug it. If it were my machine and my robot, I wouldn't have it hooked to the web. It would be too expensive for someone to walk it off my desk or down the stairs.
Open source and hackable is merely a term used to say "We're not going to tell you how to play with it". It means they want you to pull it apart, change it, make it do things that they never even thought of, and most importantly, learn from it! You are not going to see an army of these things patrolling the street, killing everything in its path. And even if the absurd does happen, get out your golf clubs and have a blast.
Isn't that Windows on the laptop in that pic?
Not that it matters anyway, but you think that they'd show an actual setup, and not a cute marketing picture.
The pope, the president, and Mayor Daley are stuck in a liferaft after their cruise ship sunk. Water's coming in fast, and therey decide that there's only room for one person in this tiny craft.
The President says, "Well, I'm the leader of the free world, I should stay in the boat."
The pope says, "I am a religious icon for 1 billion people, I should stay in the boat!"
"Guys, guys" Daley pipes up, "Let's do this democratically! We'll all write a name of who should stay, and put it in my hat. Whoever gets the most votes, gets to stay in the boat."
The votes were cast, the results tallies, and Mayor Daley won by 97 votes.