Thank you for putting into words why I still use Windows. I've done Linux. I've spent hours getting something or other to work in Linux. I've even been successful at it. In the end, I've determined it isn't worth the inevitible headache when I can do it so much easier with Windows. Granted, I may lose 50% of the configurability, but in return I get to spend more time with my fiance.
(/me puts on flame-retardant suit)
Simple. The MPAA and RIAA have done their best to tie quality to fair use. They look past analog copies because each one is worse than the previous. Digital mediums scare the bejesus out of them because there is no difference between buying the original and getting a copy elsewhere.
The copyright law doesn't apply unless the copyright holder prosecutes. The MPAA and RIAA have decided analog, poor copies aren't worth the time and money to prosecute. They're hoppin' mad about digital copies though.
I saw AotC two days ago. I came out utterly confused. Now, previously Star Wars was so incredibly simple that a 6 year old could fully understand the plot. AotC has taken a completely different way. There were far too many story lines to follow, and WAY too much was left unexplained. The biggest problem, however was the lack of clear-cut good vs. evil. We all know Anakin is evil. Or turns evil. But he's not evil yet. And the head of the senate - he's pretty evil, but the Jedi are still protecting him. And the Jedi are fighting a war with the Sith, but the Jedi are using an army that they happened to stumble upon, provided by someone evil?
I think Lucas probably intended it this way, as at some point in the Star Wars universe, everything needs to get turned upside down so Anakin can turn to the Dark Site. But the entire time during AotC, everything seemed grey. While it might fit into the overall plot, it doesn't stand alone as an entertaining movie.
AotC spent too much time showing off effects and fight scenes, and too little time developing what was actually going on in the universe. Lucas seems to be OK breezing over plots by letting the committees fill in the audience (Jedi or Naboo's) and getting to the next fight scene as quick as possible.
For these reasons, Spider-Man, hands down, is a MUCH better movie than AotC. Spider-Man spent time on plot and character development, scattered with just enough fight scenes to make it all interesting. Anakin goes through the movie frustrated, but other than him going ape-nuts on those that killed his mother, we see very little character development. In leiu of character development, we are "treated" to an extra-long fight scene at the end that starts with an attempted execution, and ending in a full scale war. I came out of AotC exhausted of watching fight scenes and tired of trying to follow Lucas' convoluted plot lines. I came out of Spider-Man with the a good warm feeling, knowing that in Comics, the guy never gets the girl, but looking forward to what Spider-Man II will offer.
"There are some hacks to get focus-follows-mouse, but a lot of apps don't work well with it."
Start->Settings->Control Panel->Tweak UI->Mouse Tab->Check "Activation Follows Mouse (X-Mouse)". Semi-supported by microsoft, should work with 99.9% of all windows and apps. Hardly a "hack".
Don't have TweakUI? Go here
"The task bar."
Click and drag the top of the taskbar down to the bottom. It disappears. Or turn on auto-hide.
"when the IDE/Word/whatever opens a bunch of subwindows "
Since Office2000, office applications have created new windows for the window manager to handle for each document open. In Excel for example, Tools Menu->Options->View Tab->check Windows in Taskbar. The fact that older applications do this stems from the GUI design of Windows 3.1, where window management sucked, and people only ran 1 application at a time anyway.
"Clippy"
He's dead. Why kick a dead horse?
Windows window management has come of age. Looks like you dumped it back in '95 and never looked back.
I worked as a network administrator for a small software firm that brought in a few people from offshore to do contract programming. Our lead programmer (also Indian) was very concerned about these people taking the code and running. With a lack of jurisdiction, if a small Indian firm picks up all your code and decides to run off and make their OWN product, you're kind've up shit creek.
The sad part about schools is that the buracracy is thick and goes on forever. Just do what my boss always told me: "Act now and ask for forgiveness later."
Seriously though, just block or limit it. If someone somewhere complains with a *valid* complaint, such as a teacher needing to download Bach for their music class, let them through. Policies eventually come back to bite you in the ass, don't bother trying make new ones unless you have to.
When I setup my first webserver at my High School, we didn't look around asking for permission and policies. We just did it. 2 years later when the rest of the staff discovered the Internet, the administration allocated resources (a teacher) to maintain it and take it off our hands. No harm done.
Sunland Group of Companies is introducing a totally new transport vessel called Flightship to the Maldives at the end of this year. Flightship, as the name denotes, is a combination of a flight and a ship! Flightship is a Singapore/Australian shipbuilder specialising in the design and manufacture of ultra-high speed marine craft.
There are two sizes of these vessels, one with a capacity of six passengers and the other with a capacity of 40 passengers. The Flightship FS8 is a craft that carries 6 passengers and luggage (plus 2 crew) in total safety and quiet comfort, at speeds up to 85 knots. After only a short taxi on the water to build up air pressure under the manta-ray-shaped craft, the FS8 gently lifts itself up to 3.5 metres above the tops of waves and flies away.
At a press briefing organised by Sunland, the members of the media were told that the FS8 is technically known as a Wing in Ground Effect craft (WIG). It is the same principle as hovercraft but the height of a Flightship above waves is much greater and less engine power is needed. The FS8 vessels are very much cheaper and safer to operate than an aircraft and certainly faster and quieter than a hovercraft. Ocean conditions of up to 2-metre waves would not affect the perfectly flat ride of these craft, said Sunland.
Sunland Group's Managing Director, Shabeer Ahmed, said that the Flightships that Sunland is introducing to the Maldives towards the end of this year would have only a six-passenger capacity and therefore would not be viable for wider use. He said that the FS8 model aircraft would be first used to transfer tourists to Sunland's resort islands during the peak season of the year. Shabeer said that only when the company gets the FS40 aircraft, which has a 40-passenger capacity within two to three years, would it be able to use the crafts on a wider scale.
"Since the FS8 model aircraft is something altogether new to Maldives, we are bringing them on a trial basis," Shabeer said. Sunland is getting four of these Flightships, which travel three meters above water. The company will be spending US$ 3.2 million on the acquisition of these four aircraft. Each Flightship costs about US$ 800,000. A Flightship with a capacity of 40-passengers would cost US$ 5 million.
After the trail period, where Sunland would sue the first four Flightships (each with a capacity of only six passengers, to carry tourists to and from Sunland's resorts; the company hopes to invest a further five million dollars to get bigger Flightships with a capacity of 40 passengers. This would enable Sunland to open the Flightships for passengers and tourists from other resorts and even for locals. The potential for Flightships to expand to various corners of the country is immense, both as a mode of transport for tourists and that for locals. In a country with a population fragmented by the seas, Maldives stands to gain a lot if the trials of Sunland's Flightships turn out to be successful. In such a scenario, one would not be surprised if the Flightships of Sunland were to successfully compete with seaplane carriers such as Maldivian Air Taxi and Trans Maldivian Airways. @
This is completely flawed logic. Just because something is open source does not mean that it works perfectly, or doesn't have interoperability problems.
Ever seen an open source FTP client have interoperability problems with an FTP server? How about an open source web browser having problems with an open source web server? It can and does happen.
I have no problems with finding and using alternatives to Microsoft software. But PLEASE don't assume that because it is open source that it doesn't and won't ever have interoperability problems with another implementation.
I used to work for a shop of about 50 computers. We considered all options when we needed upgrades and new computers. In the end, we determined that a $600 Celeron Toshiba desktop machine was better than trying to roll our own and have compatibility and quality problems.
However, we determined that rolling our own servers was VASTLY cheaper than trying to buy them. We went with straight Intel, right down to the motherboard, which was the most stable at the time. Built 3 new servers in just a few days. Most of the components had already been through a burn-in test, but I put them through my own anyway. Last I heard the fileserver had been up for > 365 days, and it was Win2k machine.
If you do decide to roll your own, make sure you've got some extra equipment to replace dead stuff. Memory, motherboards, processors, etc. Then you can stand to wait that extra 2 weeks to get the replacement parts, because you are just waiting for replacements for you spares. In our 50 person shop, we always had a machine or two lying aside that could be swapped in for a problem child at a moment's notice. That allowed the users to maximze productivity while I diagnosed the problem on my own time and/or waited for a replacement.
Roaming profiles and a good backend setup allowed a virtually seamless swap of machines.
Want a PeeCee in a Mac case? How about the best of both worlds (no emulation involved)? Apple producted a 486 expansion card for the original PowerMacs. Sweet little Cyrix chip on a NuBus card that allowed you to run DOS and Windows natively. Had some compatibility issues, but it was pretty neat at the time.
They also later built a card for PCI macs based off the Pentium line of Intel processors.
http://www.bme.unc.edu/~hope/linx/mac/dosmac.html
For $100, it is probably hardware (assisted) MPEG-2 recording engine. Just like ATI's products - mostly software encoding, but somehow the hardware helps out to make it feasible in realtime even for my puny 450Mhz Celeron doing MPEG-2 @2Mbit CBR at 640x480, i frames only, 29.97fps.
The latest MMC, 7.6, has a skip forward and skip back buttons when you are in time delay mode. You can configure them (right-click) to be different lengths. I think I have mine set for 30 seconds skip for the forwards, and 10 seconds for backward - similar to my TiVo which as 30 sec skip forward and 7 sec skip back.
The latest release is also quite stable on my Win2k box - ATI has put a lot of work into this area. It probably isn't perfect, but making sure you don't mix.dll's from different versions goes a long way towards making it very stable.
Anyone remember, back in the day, when Microsoft released DOS 5.0, and packaged "EDIT" (and qbasic) with it? Edit was a godsend, compared to the edlin it eventually replaced. DOS 6.0 was packaged with a defragmenter - wow, now you didn't need to buy Norton Utilities. MS has been packing more and more features into their products forever. Win98SE was just Win98+(a small company that made a NAT product, which MS bought, integrated, and packaged as ICS).
MS's business practices? Just the same as everyone else. I once read a quote by the CEO of Compaq that essentially said everyone in the computer industry plays hardball. MS just got "caught".
The problem now, apparently, is that MS did TOO good of a job. They are now considered a monopoly, and what was accceptable business practice in 1980 is no longer acceptable for them, because they have too much of the market, and now it is considered anti-competitive.
This, I believe, is a fundamental problem with capitalism. If a company does things TOO well, eventually they are considered a threat to capitalism and bashed down by the government.
It isn't as if MS has had the industry by the neck forever. They got to where they are by making the right decisions, and a little of being in the right place at the right time. Remeber Lotus 1-2-3? Wordperfect? MS took those markets away because they did it right. They had the better product/price/support/features/whatever. At a certain point, the world decided Word>Wordperfect and Excel>Lotus 1-2-3.
Capitalism, unfortunatly, has no inherent checks and balances built in once the scale is tipped too far. As a matter of fact, capitalism, by its very nature, is prone to the big guy pushing out the little guy. It is the same reason we have 2 Home Depots in my area, and no more Tru-Value affiliates. The problem, of course, is when 1 big guy pushes out EVERYBODY else.
The only check and balance built into capitalism is the overseeing government. So, Uncle Sam, it is time to go in and do what only you can do.
ASCI White currently operates at 12 teraflops, but by early next year, Los Alamos expects to operate at 30 teraflops.
I can see all the overclockers salivating already. That is better than the Celeron 300A's running stable at 450Mhz.
I checked out sprintpcs.com and the $75.00 rebate is actually a $50 service rebate, shown as a $25 discount on the first two bills. The other rebate is a $50 mail-in rebate on the Kyocera 6035 phone.
I considered getting one of these when they first came out, but they were a whopping $500. Now it looks like you can get them for a mere $100...certainly not bad, but I'd much prefer a color PDA, though it would do nasty things to the battery life.
"This site has exceeded its limit of 3 Gigabytes of transfer for the month. You may buy extra Gigabytes of transfer by logging in to the user menu and choosing "upgrade". "
I got one of the CueCats from ScrapShack. Took it home, cut the neccessary traces inside. Now it reads barcodes, plain and ordinary. Great, free barcode scanner. But it is still useless.
The content industries (Movies, Music, and TV) are being turned upside down right now by technology. Instead of changing their business models to correspond and innovate with Value-added products and services, they have chosen to try to keep their old business models by suing the pants off anything that has the potential to hurt their current standings. That's how hollywood works - it is a Big Boys club turning into the Big Babies club as they go whining to the courts about copyright infringement and how such-and-such device is going to hurt their bottom line. They need to start innovating - think, TV stations could setup large storage devices of their of their own so consumers could download programs not otherwise available via cable directly to their PVR for a small fee (pay for what you watch, not for everything on every channel). Eventually, DirectTV and cable companies won't even be in the picture - just a big fat pipe to the Internet in every home.
I don't know exactly how it is going to turn out, but I know that the content companies business models are going to have to change, eventually. You can't just make everything illegal.
Start dealing with the future and stop whining about the present.
...and I was horrified by this comment:
"As far as the games, things look good as well. As of now, the choice is enormous and there is no lack of good titles."
25 games is enormous? Give me a break. I thought Tom's was generally not-biased, but they tiptoed over the edge on this one. Every other review of the XBox I've seen said the games are standard, and boring, with the exception of Halo.
100 games is good selection. 2000 games is enormous. MS will be lucky if their game selection reaches "good" by next X-mas.
How about some sort of Javascript, that as soon as you start typing in a credit card number, it shoots you onto the next page saying "You're an idiot." People are generally serious about buying something once they pull out the old plastic.
This could be advertised just as a requirement to fufill some non-US-citizen law. I know at my previous company, they had to post a job description for our head software developer since the person actually in the position was here on a visa or some such thing. I guess the idea is, if the company would find an equally or better qualified person that doesn't need a visa, they should fire the visa holder and hire the person applying.
So I'm going to guess they already have a "System Engineering Manager", but have to post the job description (and take applications for it) for legal reasons.
I'm sure someone more familiar with the system can provide more details than I.
I would also like to see old, unsupported hardware drivers released to the public. I have an old SCSI scanner that I really like (it is quiet, fast, and the interface is pretty good, and not cutesy). But I had a helluva time getting it to work on Win2k, due to complete lack of driver support. Upon contacting the manufacturer, however, it appears the source code has been lost. (Luckily for me, a new SCSI card and an OLD Win95 driver came to the rescue.)
It would also help those who write drivers for Linux support some of the stranger, old hardware out there.
A theory explaining why some nerves don't grow back is touched on in the article: it can cause more damage than good. They even noted that connections may have been a bit scrambled.
Think about waking up after such a surgery and seeing only (the biological equivalent of) TV snow. Splendid. You may be able to tell when there is light in front of you (as you can tell when a TV that only displays snow is on), but I don't think the human brain is capable of forming a pattern out of gibberish.
The same thing would happen in the case of a spinal cord injury - the density of nerves there is far too dense to guarantee they reconnect themselves properly. Think of waking up after spinal-cord reconstruction surgery to feel a large, shooting pain in your left leg. But in actuality, someone is tickling your right toe.
For you computer people, think of severing a large bundle of wires or fiber optics with a backhoe. Instead of splicing each wire or fiber back together by hand, you decide it would work just as well if you just pushed it back together and hope each one connected to the one it was connected to before. Heh. Not likely.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for putting into words why I still use Windows. I've done Linux. I've spent hours getting something or other to work in Linux. I've even been successful at it. In the end, I've determined it isn't worth the inevitible headache when I can do it so much easier with Windows. Granted, I may lose 50% of the configurability, but in return I get to spend more time with my fiance. (/me puts on flame-retardant suit)
Simple. The MPAA and RIAA have done their best to tie quality to fair use. They look past analog copies because each one is worse than the previous. Digital mediums scare the bejesus out of them because there is no difference between buying the original and getting a copy elsewhere.
The copyright law doesn't apply unless the copyright holder prosecutes. The MPAA and RIAA have decided analog, poor copies aren't worth the time and money to prosecute. They're hoppin' mad about digital copies though.
I saw AotC two days ago. I came out utterly confused. Now, previously Star Wars was so incredibly simple that a 6 year old could fully understand the plot. AotC has taken a completely different way. There were far too many story lines to follow, and WAY too much was left unexplained. The biggest problem, however was the lack of clear-cut good vs. evil. We all know Anakin is evil. Or turns evil. But he's not evil yet. And the head of the senate - he's pretty evil, but the Jedi are still protecting him. And the Jedi are fighting a war with the Sith, but the Jedi are using an army that they happened to stumble upon, provided by someone evil? I think Lucas probably intended it this way, as at some point in the Star Wars universe, everything needs to get turned upside down so Anakin can turn to the Dark Site. But the entire time during AotC, everything seemed grey. While it might fit into the overall plot, it doesn't stand alone as an entertaining movie. AotC spent too much time showing off effects and fight scenes, and too little time developing what was actually going on in the universe. Lucas seems to be OK breezing over plots by letting the committees fill in the audience (Jedi or Naboo's) and getting to the next fight scene as quick as possible. For these reasons, Spider-Man, hands down, is a MUCH better movie than AotC. Spider-Man spent time on plot and character development, scattered with just enough fight scenes to make it all interesting. Anakin goes through the movie frustrated, but other than him going ape-nuts on those that killed his mother, we see very little character development. In leiu of character development, we are "treated" to an extra-long fight scene at the end that starts with an attempted execution, and ending in a full scale war. I came out of AotC exhausted of watching fight scenes and tired of trying to follow Lucas' convoluted plot lines. I came out of Spider-Man with the a good warm feeling, knowing that in Comics, the guy never gets the girl, but looking forward to what Spider-Man II will offer.
"There are some hacks to get focus-follows-mouse, but a lot of apps don't work well with it."
Start->Settings->Control Panel->Tweak UI->Mouse Tab->Check "Activation Follows Mouse (X-Mouse)". Semi-supported by microsoft, should work with 99.9% of all windows and apps. Hardly a "hack".
Don't have TweakUI? Go here
"The task bar."
Click and drag the top of the taskbar down to the bottom. It disappears. Or turn on auto-hide.
"when the IDE/Word/whatever opens a bunch of subwindows "
Since Office2000, office applications have created new windows for the window manager to handle for each document open. In Excel for example, Tools Menu->Options->View Tab->check Windows in Taskbar. The fact that older applications do this stems from the GUI design of Windows 3.1, where window management sucked, and people only ran 1 application at a time anyway.
"Clippy"
He's dead. Why kick a dead horse?
Windows window management has come of age. Looks like you dumped it back in '95 and never looked back.
I worked as a network administrator for a small software firm that brought in a few people from offshore to do contract programming. Our lead programmer (also Indian) was very concerned about these people taking the code and running. With a lack of jurisdiction, if a small Indian firm picks up all your code and decides to run off and make their OWN product, you're kind've up shit creek.
The sad part about schools is that the buracracy is thick and goes on forever. Just do what my boss always told me: "Act now and ask for forgiveness later."
Seriously though, just block or limit it. If someone somewhere complains with a *valid* complaint, such as a teacher needing to download Bach for their music class, let them through. Policies eventually come back to bite you in the ass, don't bother trying make new ones unless you have to.
When I setup my first webserver at my High School, we didn't look around asking for permission and policies. We just did it. 2 years later when the rest of the staff discovered the Internet, the administration allocated resources (a teacher) to maintain it and take it off our hands. No harm done.
Here's a good site on how the ground effect works: Ground Effect
Sunland ventures in to sea/air transport.
By Mohamed Ali
Sunland Group of Companies is introducing a totally new transport vessel called Flightship to the Maldives at the end of this year. Flightship, as the name denotes, is a combination of a flight and a ship! Flightship is a Singapore/Australian shipbuilder specialising in the design and manufacture of ultra-high speed marine craft.
There are two sizes of these vessels, one with a capacity of six passengers and the other with a capacity of 40 passengers. The Flightship FS8 is a craft that carries 6 passengers and luggage (plus 2 crew) in total safety and quiet comfort, at speeds up to 85 knots. After only a short taxi on the water to build up air pressure under the manta-ray-shaped craft, the FS8 gently lifts itself up to 3.5 metres above the tops of waves and flies away.
At a press briefing organised by Sunland, the members of the media were told that the FS8 is technically known as a Wing in Ground Effect craft (WIG). It is the same principle as hovercraft but the height of a Flightship above waves is much greater and less engine power is needed. The FS8 vessels are very much cheaper and safer to operate than an aircraft and certainly faster and quieter than a hovercraft. Ocean conditions of up to 2-metre waves would not affect the perfectly flat ride of these craft, said Sunland.
Sunland Group's Managing Director, Shabeer Ahmed, said that the Flightships that Sunland is introducing to the Maldives towards the end of this year would have only a six-passenger capacity and therefore would not be viable for wider use. He said that the FS8 model aircraft would be first used to transfer tourists to Sunland's resort islands during the peak season of the year. Shabeer said that only when the company gets the FS40 aircraft, which has a 40-passenger capacity within two to three years, would it be able to use the crafts on a wider scale.
"Since the FS8 model aircraft is something altogether new to Maldives, we are bringing them on a trial basis," Shabeer said. Sunland is getting four of these Flightships, which travel three meters above water. The company will be spending US$ 3.2 million on the acquisition of these four aircraft. Each Flightship costs about US$ 800,000. A Flightship with a capacity of 40-passengers would cost US$ 5 million.
After the trail period, where Sunland would sue the first four Flightships (each with a capacity of only six passengers, to carry tourists to and from Sunland's resorts; the company hopes to invest a further five million dollars to get bigger Flightships with a capacity of 40 passengers. This would enable Sunland to open the Flightships for passengers and tourists from other resorts and even for locals. The potential for Flightships to expand to various corners of the country is immense, both as a mode of transport for tourists and that for locals. In a country with a population fragmented by the seas, Maldives stands to gain a lot if the trials of Sunland's Flightships turn out to be successful. In such a scenario, one would not be surprised if the Flightships of Sunland were to successfully compete with seaplane carriers such as Maldivian Air Taxi and Trans Maldivian Airways. @
This is completely flawed logic. Just because something is open source does not mean that it works perfectly, or doesn't have interoperability problems.
Ever seen an open source FTP client have interoperability problems with an FTP server? How about an open source web browser having problems with an open source web server? It can and does happen.
I have no problems with finding and using alternatives to Microsoft software. But PLEASE don't assume that because it is open source that it doesn't and won't ever have interoperability problems with another implementation.
I used to work for a shop of about 50 computers. We considered all options when we needed upgrades and new computers. In the end, we determined that a $600 Celeron Toshiba desktop machine was better than trying to roll our own and have compatibility and quality problems. However, we determined that rolling our own servers was VASTLY cheaper than trying to buy them. We went with straight Intel, right down to the motherboard, which was the most stable at the time. Built 3 new servers in just a few days. Most of the components had already been through a burn-in test, but I put them through my own anyway. Last I heard the fileserver had been up for > 365 days, and it was Win2k machine. If you do decide to roll your own, make sure you've got some extra equipment to replace dead stuff. Memory, motherboards, processors, etc. Then you can stand to wait that extra 2 weeks to get the replacement parts, because you are just waiting for replacements for you spares. In our 50 person shop, we always had a machine or two lying aside that could be swapped in for a problem child at a moment's notice. That allowed the users to maximze productivity while I diagnosed the problem on my own time and/or waited for a replacement. Roaming profiles and a good backend setup allowed a virtually seamless swap of machines.
Want a PeeCee in a Mac case? How about the best of both worlds (no emulation involved)? Apple producted a 486 expansion card for the original PowerMacs. Sweet little Cyrix chip on a NuBus card that allowed you to run DOS and Windows natively. Had some compatibility issues, but it was pretty neat at the time. They also later built a card for PCI macs based off the Pentium line of Intel processors. http://www.bme.unc.edu/~hope/linx/mac/dosmac.html
For $100, it is probably hardware (assisted) MPEG-2 recording engine. Just like ATI's products - mostly software encoding, but somehow the hardware helps out to make it feasible in realtime even for my puny 450Mhz Celeron doing MPEG-2 @2Mbit CBR at 640x480, i frames only, 29.97fps.
The latest MMC, 7.6, has a skip forward and skip back buttons when you are in time delay mode. You can configure them (right-click) to be different lengths. I think I have mine set for 30 seconds skip for the forwards, and 10 seconds for backward - similar to my TiVo which as 30 sec skip forward and 7 sec skip back. The latest release is also quite stable on my Win2k box - ATI has put a lot of work into this area. It probably isn't perfect, but making sure you don't mix .dll's from different versions goes a long way towards making it very stable.
Anyone remember, back in the day, when Microsoft released DOS 5.0, and packaged "EDIT" (and qbasic) with it? Edit was a godsend, compared to the edlin it eventually replaced. DOS 6.0 was packaged with a defragmenter - wow, now you didn't need to buy Norton Utilities. MS has been packing more and more features into their products forever. Win98SE was just Win98+(a small company that made a NAT product, which MS bought, integrated, and packaged as ICS).
MS's business practices? Just the same as everyone else. I once read a quote by the CEO of Compaq that essentially said everyone in the computer industry plays hardball. MS just got "caught".
The problem now, apparently, is that MS did TOO good of a job. They are now considered a monopoly, and what was accceptable business practice in 1980 is no longer acceptable for them, because they have too much of the market, and now it is considered anti-competitive.
This, I believe, is a fundamental problem with capitalism. If a company does things TOO well, eventually they are considered a threat to capitalism and bashed down by the government.
It isn't as if MS has had the industry by the neck forever. They got to where they are by making the right decisions, and a little of being in the right place at the right time. Remeber Lotus 1-2-3? Wordperfect? MS took those markets away because they did it right. They had the better product/price/support/features/whatever. At a certain point, the world decided Word>Wordperfect and Excel>Lotus 1-2-3.
Capitalism, unfortunatly, has no inherent checks and balances built in once the scale is tipped too far. As a matter of fact, capitalism, by its very nature, is prone to the big guy pushing out the little guy. It is the same reason we have 2 Home Depots in my area, and no more Tru-Value affiliates. The problem, of course, is when 1 big guy pushes out EVERYBODY else.
The only check and balance built into capitalism is the overseeing government. So, Uncle Sam, it is time to go in and do what only you can do.
ASCI White currently operates at 12 teraflops, but by early next year, Los Alamos expects to operate at 30 teraflops.
I can see all the overclockers salivating already. That is better than the Celeron 300A's running stable at 450Mhz.
I checked out sprintpcs.com and the $75.00 rebate is actually a $50 service rebate, shown as a $25 discount on the first two bills. The other rebate is a $50 mail-in rebate on the Kyocera 6035 phone. I considered getting one of these when they first came out, but they were a whopping $500. Now it looks like you can get them for a mere $100...certainly not bad, but I'd much prefer a color PDA, though it would do nasty things to the battery life.
"This site has exceeded its limit of 3 Gigabytes of transfer for the month. You may buy extra Gigabytes of transfer by logging in to the user menu and choosing "upgrade". "
Changing two lines of code is news?
I got one of the CueCats from ScrapShack. Took it home, cut the neccessary traces inside. Now it reads barcodes, plain and ordinary. Great, free barcode scanner. But it is still useless.
The content industries (Movies, Music, and TV) are being turned upside down right now by technology. Instead of changing their business models to correspond and innovate with Value-added products and services, they have chosen to try to keep their old business models by suing the pants off anything that has the potential to hurt their current standings. That's how hollywood works - it is a Big Boys club turning into the Big Babies club as they go whining to the courts about copyright infringement and how such-and-such device is going to hurt their bottom line. They need to start innovating - think, TV stations could setup large storage devices of their of their own so consumers could download programs not otherwise available via cable directly to their PVR for a small fee (pay for what you watch, not for everything on every channel). Eventually, DirectTV and cable companies won't even be in the picture - just a big fat pipe to the Internet in every home. I don't know exactly how it is going to turn out, but I know that the content companies business models are going to have to change, eventually. You can't just make everything illegal. Start dealing with the future and stop whining about the present.
...and I was horrified by this comment:
"As far as the games, things look good as well. As of now, the choice is enormous and there is no lack of good titles."
25 games is enormous? Give me a break. I thought Tom's was generally not-biased, but they tiptoed over the edge on this one. Every other review of the XBox I've seen said the games are standard, and boring, with the exception of Halo. 100 games is good selection. 2000 games is enormous. MS will be lucky if their game selection reaches "good" by next X-mas.
How about some sort of Javascript, that as soon as you start typing in a credit card number, it shoots you onto the next page saying "You're an idiot." People are generally serious about buying something once they pull out the old plastic.
This could be advertised just as a requirement to fufill some non-US-citizen law. I know at my previous company, they had to post a job description for our head software developer since the person actually in the position was here on a visa or some such thing. I guess the idea is, if the company would find an equally or better qualified person that doesn't need a visa, they should fire the visa holder and hire the person applying.
So I'm going to guess they already have a "System Engineering Manager", but have to post the job description (and take applications for it) for legal reasons.
I'm sure someone more familiar with the system can provide more details than I.
I would also like to see old, unsupported hardware drivers released to the public. I have an old SCSI scanner that I really like (it is quiet, fast, and the interface is pretty good, and not cutesy). But I had a helluva time getting it to work on Win2k, due to complete lack of driver support. Upon contacting the manufacturer, however, it appears the source code has been lost. (Luckily for me, a new SCSI card and an OLD Win95 driver came to the rescue.) It would also help those who write drivers for Linux support some of the stranger, old hardware out there.
A theory explaining why some nerves don't grow back is touched on in the article: it can cause more damage than good. They even noted that connections may have been a bit scrambled.
Think about waking up after such a surgery and seeing only (the biological equivalent of) TV snow. Splendid. You may be able to tell when there is light in front of you (as you can tell when a TV that only displays snow is on), but I don't think the human brain is capable of forming a pattern out of gibberish.
The same thing would happen in the case of a spinal cord injury - the density of nerves there is far too dense to guarantee they reconnect themselves properly. Think of waking up after spinal-cord reconstruction surgery to feel a large, shooting pain in your left leg. But in actuality, someone is tickling your right toe.
For you computer people, think of severing a large bundle of wires or fiber optics with a backhoe. Instead of splicing each wire or fiber back together by hand, you decide it would work just as well if you just pushed it back together and hope each one connected to the one it was connected to before. Heh. Not likely.