This won't beat the Android with the lowest sales, let alone the iPad.
Well, yes. I agree with you. But I was attempting to refute the GPP's assertion that the iPad is the 'looser' tablet.
I own an iPad, which I bought before Android tablets were really a thing. If I were to go out and buy a new tablet, it would likely be an Android (probably Galaxy, but I haven't researched them in a while). I prefer the openness and don't feel the need for the Apple walled garden. The point is, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I'm just using the data that were given to refute a claim that I don't believe they justify.
Do you not keep up with current events. the iPad is the looser tablet. Its market share has plummeted from 60% of sales last year to 32%
According to your link, iPad's sales of 32.4% of tablets last quarter represents sales of 1.8 times as many tablets as Samsung, which is the only other company that has double-digit sales. So Apple is outselling the next-best-selling tablet by almost 2 to 1, and the next one after that by more than 7 to 1. The tablet market is fragmenting, and I expect that we will continue to see strong competition from Android tablets, particularly from Samsung, but from these numbers, for now, iPad is still the tablet to beat.
Well, I guess one of the problems is that in a lot of states, schools are getting a decreasing share of tax dollars. The legislature of the State of Idaho is almost comically opposed to education, K-12 and higher, despite our constitution having included specific language requiring the state to fund public education. The school districts actually had to sue the state, in a case that went all the way to the state supreme court, to force the state to continue to pay for critical maintenance of school buildings (things like making sure the roof doesn't collapse).
I guess what I'm getting at is that if we don't want corporate funding of schools (and the corporate influence on curricula that inevitably comes with), then we should be adequately funding schools with tax dollars. Perhaps by diverting some money from prisons (which is where a lot of the education money has gone in Idaho).
I think you have a point. With all of the standardized testing and other requirements, we often hear teachers complaining that there isn't enough time in the school year to cover everything they're supposed to cover. Why would we pile on these propaganda "lessons" that seem to offer negative educational benefit, when we don't have enough time to teach the important lessons?
I guess my response would be to talk to my kids' teachers, find out if they intend on using this curriculum, keeping my kids out of school on those days when it is covered, and drafting a letter to the teacher, the principal, and the school board. I don't believe that blatant corporate propaganda has any place in education. My kids and I can stay home "sick" on the days when this happens.
Yeah, the poor guy. He dedicates considerable text to repeatedly pointing out his "Buddhism" and how enlightened he is. But over the course of the whole year-long experience, he never gives any indication of actually learning anything about either himself or the world around him. He tells an anecdote about getting into a physical fight with some road-rager, and he seems to completely miss the fact that the altercation was utterly pointless, and that his enlightened self should have been able to eventually figure that out.
He seems to spend all of this time trying to come up with justifications for attacking a guy for making a stupid comic featuring his "mom", without it ever occurring to him that this fight is completely pointless--that if he just ignores the thing, it will all go away, and nobody will care about it anymore.
He also bloviates profoundly about Sun Tzu and how his whole revenge-litigation personality is actually based on wise and ancient strategies of war, and how the lyrics to some songs are just like his life, man.
There's nothing wrong with being a lawyer, but if you're going to be an aggressively nasty, sleazy one, just own up to it. This ugly episode was not a poetic trial sent by ancient gods. It was just him being a jerk.
One thing I've never understood: how do the phaser beam know when to stop vaporizing? I mean, if I'm sitting in a desk chair and get vaporized by a phaser, then the chair usually remains there, completely unharmed and pristine. How does that work? Is it just super-sensitive to boundaries of conductivity? Shouldn't my clothes be left behind, too?
Could you just skip the 'likely what happened here' conjecture and take a look at TFA? If you read the article or the audit report, you'll learn that the contractors did not start this fiasco (the DOC CIRT group did), did not provide the temporary infrastructure (the census bureau did), did not recommend the destruction of the hardware (they advised the EDA to reimage the handful of computers that were infected), and ultimately advised the CIO of EDA that they could not provide the guarantee that no malware could possibly exist anywhere on the EDA network.
The contractor made a lot of money for this work, but the real problem seems to be naive management at EDA who panicked and brought the contractors in in the first place and then persisted in paying the contractors to search for malware infections that the contractors had already told them weren't there. I'm no great fan of indiscriminately replacing government workers with contractors, but I don't think the contractors are the villains in this particular story.
Really? Did they ruin Postman by missing the point? What would you say the point of The Postman was? I've always kind of thought it was about the guy putting on the outfit to stay warm, and then growing in to the role on account of how people treated him. Plus a whole lot of stuff about government-created supersoldiers.
The book was good, the movie was bad, but how do you think they could have fixed it?
Okay, so that's a nice, broad, political view of the situation. I appreciate that. Maybe this crackdown is related. It's also true that sometimes, other countries take a harder line on laws they haven't before, in order to exert diplomatic pressure. Maybe it's bullshit to you that China is now enforcing their laws.
In the meantime, take your GPS into Tunisia and let me know how that goes. I won't visit you in Tunisian prison.
US companies expect retaliation for trade disagreements. The mechanics of those consequences will vary. Those multinationals have planned for the consequences, and we shouldn't cry for them. The loss that Coke realizes in all of this is more than you or I will make in years, but less than they make in a day. To them, it's just the cost of doing business.
If you do a lot of travelling, you will find that GPS laws are different everywhere. Many countries won't even allow you to bring one across the border. Defense against enemies obtaining high quality maps is usually the reasoning. Sometimes, you can bribe a customs guy to let you bring it in. But you shouldn't be flaunting GPS when you're visiting a place like that. I think China should be more free, but I can't get too upset when they enforce their existing laws against visitors who break them, even when the laws are out of date or seem silly.
Nonsense. Survival of the fittest is still occurring, it's just that the fitness criteria have changed. As you say, "babies that would have died lived on" -- but mostly that happens for those parents who have either the money or the health insurance (and the medical facilities) to deal with what would previously have been an "unfit" baby. Natural selection continues through societal means: the costs of birthing and raising viable children are inversely proportional to the health of the baby; children with difficulties are more expensive to raise.
There is still selection pressure, but in developed countries it's coming more from societal sources than from environmental sources. And the societal pressure isn't so worried about things like good eyesight or height, or those sort of physiological characteristics; it's about access to health care (whether that comes from parents with money or states with social safety nets).
And I would argue that even though humans are in charge of the programs and policies that affect these new fitness criteria, they are still fitness criteria because they are being applied to populations, rather than to individuals (except in very special and statistically insignificant cases). So, survival of the fittest is still alive and well, and being implemented inadvertently by human policy.
For one thing, even with a sit-down desk, you shouldn't be sitting in front of it for nine hours. What I do is I set a countdown timer for an hour or so. When it rings, I get up and walk around the floor, hit the bathroom, fill up my water bottle, maybe step outside for a few minutes and experience sunlight. But you really have to train yourself to do it, and stick to getting up when it goes off. I find that it improves my work, because it forces me to step away from immediate problems and think about things in a larger context while I'm taking my little walk. I get back to my desk eager (usually) to continue work, and energized from getting my blood flowing. If your employer is so concerned about OSHA, then they should know that OSHA recommends frequent rest breaks for employees who sit at computer desks all day.
To me, one of the most important things about a standing desk is that you need to pay attention to the ergonomics of the floor and your footwear. My building has concrete floors with low-pile carpet. If I stood all day at a desk on this surface, my feet would kill by the end of the day. You potentially need a floor mat that provides more support than a solid floor. Think of the kinds of surfaces that workers on manufacturing lines stand on all day. You also want some kind of low platform or stool (preferably two of different heights, or one that you can flip onto a different side to change its height) that you can use to put one foot up on for periods, adjust your stance and weight distribution. Finally, you'll want to pay attention to the shoes that you wear, to make sure that you're getting the support that your feet need for you to be standing on them all day. There's a reason they call beat cops 'flat-foor'.
So. Sorry for the text wall. But those are some considerations.
There is this idea that "computers", as an abstract concept, are a way to improve education. We see this all the time; most recently, states are pouring huge amounts of money into putting laptop computers into the hands of every student. It seems that people seldom ask why we're doing this. Why are we doing this? Well, it's self-evident that computers make education better, right? At least, that's the way we've been treating the issue. We don't have enough people asking in what ways, specifically, computers will improve education.
So this article is about the result of that way of thinking. Today, even the poorer kids have access to technology in their homes. And, obviously, they play video games with the technology instead of sitting in front of the computer and thinking great thoughts and composing essays and multimedia presentations in their spare time. But the article is full of people who express surprise at this. They are mystified that putting computers into kids' hands didn't magically make them into better students and deeper thinkers.
As has been said in this forum many times before, a computer is merely a tool. There is absolutely no reason why you should expect a student to suddenly become a great learner simply because you handed him a computer, any more than you would expect him to complete his education on his own if you handed him a pile of K-12 textbooks. Someone in charge has to stop and ask the right questions, if we want computers to really help in education. Someone has to stop and ask why and how we expect computers to help, and then implement a plan that actually makes that happen. Because right now, we're just funneling a lot of money into facebook machines for students.
You know, your whole post would have been a lot better without the first paragraph, which was mostly just pointless name-calling. Why did you do that? Did you think it would make your point more persuasively if you prefaced it by calling the rest of us "fat little smug antisocial nerds" and concluded your post with "fat asshole nerds?" I understand that you feel strongly, but get a grip.
Anyhow. I don't think most of us are unhappy because your eye surgeon friend gets a phone call telling her that she needs to go in to work. We're unhappy because some guy who believes that his time is more valuable than anyone else's refuses to stop talking on his cell phone while the entire rest of the airplane waits on him so we can push back from the gate. We're unhappy because people sitting in cinemas apparently believe that they should be entitled to take phone calls for the duration of the film (I don't care what your profession is, if you get a phone call that's so important that you need to take it at the cinema, or the theatre, or the symphony, or wherever, then you get up and leave the room to take your call). We're unhappy because people feel the need to SHOUT on the phone, and they like to sit next to us on the train and discuss the family's latest medical situation or other drama.
You accuse us of believing that the world revolves around us, but such are exactly the people who aggravate us the most. Nobody begrudges the use of cell phones during emergencies. But even during emergencies, it is polite to attempt to remove yourself from the midst of a group of people who don't want to listen to your phone conversation. Those who advocate for jammers are responding to a persistent frustration with inconsiderate people. Jamming is clearly not the best solution. But repeatedly calling people names doesn't really do much for the situation, either.
So the data are free for anyone to look at. But I'm not aware that there's any way to download georeferenced imagery from Google Maps? I mean, they're making the imagery available, but it doesn't seem all that useful to me from a photogrammetry standpoint. You don't have nearly enough information to do a lot of kinds of analysis using just a color-balanced RGB image (that may have been through some lossy compression process?). It seems like your Ikonos data are still of superior quality and use to what can now be seen on Google Maps. So what's the problem?
It used to be artificially limited (they called it 'selected availability'). Today, US GPS has selected availability turned off, so civilian GPS users have access to the same data as the military. I don't believe there's any technical reason why they couldn't turn it back on, but GPS has proved to be so useful for civilians that it'd probably have to be a pretty serious situation that would prompt them to do it.
Stationary GPS is a little bit different. The receiver is planted in a location whose coordinates can be very carefully determined via more traditional survey methods. Combine this with some other technologies, and you can get very precise and accurate results. For example, one of the factors that degrades the accuracy of GPS is atmospheric effects. With a network of carefully surveyed stationary GPS units, we can correct for atmospheric effects by seeing how 'off' the various units are compared to normal, and to each other. There are other sources of error, but the point is that GPS error can be greatly reduced when you already know where you are.
Now, in this case, the 'stationary' GPS units are actually moving at a very slow rate. With the error corrections described above, once all the other errors are accounted for, what remains is error due to actual movement of the GPS. I can't see the full text of the paper, but probably what they have is a statistical model that says the GPS units are moving by a certain amount each year, and a confidence level, and all of that.
So, to your last point: if you want to improve the GPS accuracy of your lawn bot, you need only to install a stationary GPS receiver on your house, survey its location very carefully, and attach a transmitter to turn it into a 'GPS base station' that your robot's GPS will use as a local reference to improve its GPS fix. (You can buy a GPS base station from someone like Trimble; they're often used for construction and the like.)
404 pages that don't return code 404 make me crazy. I worked on some software that did periodic harvesting of remote data, and there was one site that was always moving its files around, and they had a custom 404 page that returned 200 OK. So the software was never able to tell that the file it was looking for wasn't actually there, and our database for that site was always screwed up. They would contact us and complain about our links being wrong every now and then, but I could never get them to fix their 404 page. To be honest, I'm not sure I ever got them to understand what the problem was.
The point of the whole project was to automate the process. If we have to go and visually inspect every URL to make sure that the remote web server isn't lying to us about the validity of the link, then it kind of invalidates the whole thing.
Okay, that explains it. The submitter was only willing to put in the smallest possible amount of time and effort to make his blog post not so transparently an interstitial page with no beneficial contribution to the topic.
I don't mind if people link to their own blog in the summary, but if they're going to, at least they should make their blog post *useful*.
Probably, not every single computer in the OP's work needs to work with a Kinect. For some applications, it would be enough to have one machine dedicated to that kind of application, and its use would be shared among the office.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes. I agree with you. But I was attempting to refute the GPP's assertion that the iPad is the 'looser' tablet.
I own an iPad, which I bought before Android tablets were really a thing. If I were to go out and buy a new tablet, it would likely be an Android (probably Galaxy, but I haven't researched them in a while). I prefer the openness and don't feel the need for the Apple walled garden. The point is, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I'm just using the data that were given to refute a claim that I don't believe they justify.
According to your link, iPad's sales of 32.4% of tablets last quarter represents sales of 1.8 times as many tablets as Samsung, which is the only other company that has double-digit sales. So Apple is outselling the next-best-selling tablet by almost 2 to 1, and the next one after that by more than 7 to 1. The tablet market is fragmenting, and I expect that we will continue to see strong competition from Android tablets, particularly from Samsung, but from these numbers, for now, iPad is still the tablet to beat.
Well, I guess one of the problems is that in a lot of states, schools are getting a decreasing share of tax dollars. The legislature of the State of Idaho is almost comically opposed to education, K-12 and higher, despite our constitution having included specific language requiring the state to fund public education. The school districts actually had to sue the state, in a case that went all the way to the state supreme court, to force the state to continue to pay for critical maintenance of school buildings (things like making sure the roof doesn't collapse).
I guess what I'm getting at is that if we don't want corporate funding of schools (and the corporate influence on curricula that inevitably comes with), then we should be adequately funding schools with tax dollars. Perhaps by diverting some money from prisons (which is where a lot of the education money has gone in Idaho).
I think you have a point. With all of the standardized testing and other requirements, we often hear teachers complaining that there isn't enough time in the school year to cover everything they're supposed to cover. Why would we pile on these propaganda "lessons" that seem to offer negative educational benefit, when we don't have enough time to teach the important lessons?
I guess my response would be to talk to my kids' teachers, find out if they intend on using this curriculum, keeping my kids out of school on those days when it is covered, and drafting a letter to the teacher, the principal, and the school board. I don't believe that blatant corporate propaganda has any place in education. My kids and I can stay home "sick" on the days when this happens.
Yeah, the poor guy. He dedicates considerable text to repeatedly pointing out his "Buddhism" and how enlightened he is. But over the course of the whole year-long experience, he never gives any indication of actually learning anything about either himself or the world around him. He tells an anecdote about getting into a physical fight with some road-rager, and he seems to completely miss the fact that the altercation was utterly pointless, and that his enlightened self should have been able to eventually figure that out.
He seems to spend all of this time trying to come up with justifications for attacking a guy for making a stupid comic featuring his "mom", without it ever occurring to him that this fight is completely pointless--that if he just ignores the thing, it will all go away, and nobody will care about it anymore.
He also bloviates profoundly about Sun Tzu and how his whole revenge-litigation personality is actually based on wise and ancient strategies of war, and how the lyrics to some songs are just like his life, man.
There's nothing wrong with being a lawyer, but if you're going to be an aggressively nasty, sleazy one, just own up to it. This ugly episode was not a poetic trial sent by ancient gods. It was just him being a jerk.
One thing I've never understood: how do the phaser beam know when to stop vaporizing? I mean, if I'm sitting in a desk chair and get vaporized by a phaser, then the chair usually remains there, completely unharmed and pristine. How does that work? Is it just super-sensitive to boundaries of conductivity? Shouldn't my clothes be left behind, too?
Could you just skip the 'likely what happened here' conjecture and take a look at TFA? If you read the article or the audit report, you'll learn that the contractors did not start this fiasco (the DOC CIRT group did), did not provide the temporary infrastructure (the census bureau did), did not recommend the destruction of the hardware (they advised the EDA to reimage the handful of computers that were infected), and ultimately advised the CIO of EDA that they could not provide the guarantee that no malware could possibly exist anywhere on the EDA network.
The contractor made a lot of money for this work, but the real problem seems to be naive management at EDA who panicked and brought the contractors in in the first place and then persisted in paying the contractors to search for malware infections that the contractors had already told them weren't there. I'm no great fan of indiscriminately replacing government workers with contractors, but I don't think the contractors are the villains in this particular story.
Really? Did they ruin Postman by missing the point? What would you say the point of The Postman was? I've always kind of thought it was about the guy putting on the outfit to stay warm, and then growing in to the role on account of how people treated him. Plus a whole lot of stuff about government-created supersoldiers.
The book was good, the movie was bad, but how do you think they could have fixed it?
Okay, so that's a nice, broad, political view of the situation. I appreciate that. Maybe this crackdown is related. It's also true that sometimes, other countries take a harder line on laws they haven't before, in order to exert diplomatic pressure. Maybe it's bullshit to you that China is now enforcing their laws.
In the meantime, take your GPS into Tunisia and let me know how that goes. I won't visit you in Tunisian prison.
US companies expect retaliation for trade disagreements. The mechanics of those consequences will vary. Those multinationals have planned for the consequences, and we shouldn't cry for them. The loss that Coke realizes in all of this is more than you or I will make in years, but less than they make in a day. To them, it's just the cost of doing business.
If you do a lot of travelling, you will find that GPS laws are different everywhere. Many countries won't even allow you to bring one across the border. Defense against enemies obtaining high quality maps is usually the reasoning. Sometimes, you can bribe a customs guy to let you bring it in. But you shouldn't be flaunting GPS when you're visiting a place like that. I think China should be more free, but I can't get too upset when they enforce their existing laws against visitors who break them, even when the laws are out of date or seem silly.
Nonsense. Survival of the fittest is still occurring, it's just that the fitness criteria have changed. As you say, "babies that would have died lived on" -- but mostly that happens for those parents who have either the money or the health insurance (and the medical facilities) to deal with what would previously have been an "unfit" baby. Natural selection continues through societal means: the costs of birthing and raising viable children are inversely proportional to the health of the baby; children with difficulties are more expensive to raise.
There is still selection pressure, but in developed countries it's coming more from societal sources than from environmental sources. And the societal pressure isn't so worried about things like good eyesight or height, or those sort of physiological characteristics; it's about access to health care (whether that comes from parents with money or states with social safety nets).
And I would argue that even though humans are in charge of the programs and policies that affect these new fitness criteria, they are still fitness criteria because they are being applied to populations, rather than to individuals (except in very special and statistically insignificant cases). So, survival of the fittest is still alive and well, and being implemented inadvertently by human policy.
For one thing, even with a sit-down desk, you shouldn't be sitting in front of it for nine hours. What I do is I set a countdown timer for an hour or so. When it rings, I get up and walk around the floor, hit the bathroom, fill up my water bottle, maybe step outside for a few minutes and experience sunlight. But you really have to train yourself to do it, and stick to getting up when it goes off. I find that it improves my work, because it forces me to step away from immediate problems and think about things in a larger context while I'm taking my little walk. I get back to my desk eager (usually) to continue work, and energized from getting my blood flowing. If your employer is so concerned about OSHA, then they should know that OSHA recommends frequent rest breaks for employees who sit at computer desks all day.
To me, one of the most important things about a standing desk is that you need to pay attention to the ergonomics of the floor and your footwear. My building has concrete floors with low-pile carpet. If I stood all day at a desk on this surface, my feet would kill by the end of the day. You potentially need a floor mat that provides more support than a solid floor. Think of the kinds of surfaces that workers on manufacturing lines stand on all day. You also want some kind of low platform or stool (preferably two of different heights, or one that you can flip onto a different side to change its height) that you can use to put one foot up on for periods, adjust your stance and weight distribution. Finally, you'll want to pay attention to the shoes that you wear, to make sure that you're getting the support that your feet need for you to be standing on them all day. There's a reason they call beat cops 'flat-foor'.
So. Sorry for the text wall. But those are some considerations.
There is this idea that "computers", as an abstract concept, are a way to improve education. We see this all the time; most recently, states are pouring huge amounts of money into putting laptop computers into the hands of every student. It seems that people seldom ask why we're doing this. Why are we doing this? Well, it's self-evident that computers make education better, right? At least, that's the way we've been treating the issue. We don't have enough people asking in what ways, specifically, computers will improve education.
So this article is about the result of that way of thinking. Today, even the poorer kids have access to technology in their homes. And, obviously, they play video games with the technology instead of sitting in front of the computer and thinking great thoughts and composing essays and multimedia presentations in their spare time. But the article is full of people who express surprise at this. They are mystified that putting computers into kids' hands didn't magically make them into better students and deeper thinkers.
As has been said in this forum many times before, a computer is merely a tool. There is absolutely no reason why you should expect a student to suddenly become a great learner simply because you handed him a computer, any more than you would expect him to complete his education on his own if you handed him a pile of K-12 textbooks. Someone in charge has to stop and ask the right questions, if we want computers to really help in education. Someone has to stop and ask why and how we expect computers to help, and then implement a plan that actually makes that happen. Because right now, we're just funneling a lot of money into facebook machines for students.
You know, your whole post would have been a lot better without the first paragraph, which was mostly just pointless name-calling. Why did you do that? Did you think it would make your point more persuasively if you prefaced it by calling the rest of us "fat little smug antisocial nerds" and concluded your post with "fat asshole nerds?" I understand that you feel strongly, but get a grip.
Anyhow. I don't think most of us are unhappy because your eye surgeon friend gets a phone call telling her that she needs to go in to work. We're unhappy because some guy who believes that his time is more valuable than anyone else's refuses to stop talking on his cell phone while the entire rest of the airplane waits on him so we can push back from the gate. We're unhappy because people sitting in cinemas apparently believe that they should be entitled to take phone calls for the duration of the film (I don't care what your profession is, if you get a phone call that's so important that you need to take it at the cinema, or the theatre, or the symphony, or wherever, then you get up and leave the room to take your call). We're unhappy because people feel the need to SHOUT on the phone, and they like to sit next to us on the train and discuss the family's latest medical situation or other drama.
You accuse us of believing that the world revolves around us, but such are exactly the people who aggravate us the most. Nobody begrudges the use of cell phones during emergencies. But even during emergencies, it is polite to attempt to remove yourself from the midst of a group of people who don't want to listen to your phone conversation. Those who advocate for jammers are responding to a persistent frustration with inconsiderate people. Jamming is clearly not the best solution. But repeatedly calling people names doesn't really do much for the situation, either.
So the data are free for anyone to look at. But I'm not aware that there's any way to download georeferenced imagery from Google Maps? I mean, they're making the imagery available, but it doesn't seem all that useful to me from a photogrammetry standpoint. You don't have nearly enough information to do a lot of kinds of analysis using just a color-balanced RGB image (that may have been through some lossy compression process?). It seems like your Ikonos data are still of superior quality and use to what can now be seen on Google Maps. So what's the problem?
It used to be artificially limited (they called it 'selected availability'). Today, US GPS has selected availability turned off, so civilian GPS users have access to the same data as the military. I don't believe there's any technical reason why they couldn't turn it back on, but GPS has proved to be so useful for civilians that it'd probably have to be a pretty serious situation that would prompt them to do it.
Stationary GPS is a little bit different. The receiver is planted in a location whose coordinates can be very carefully determined via more traditional survey methods. Combine this with some other technologies, and you can get very precise and accurate results. For example, one of the factors that degrades the accuracy of GPS is atmospheric effects. With a network of carefully surveyed stationary GPS units, we can correct for atmospheric effects by seeing how 'off' the various units are compared to normal, and to each other. There are other sources of error, but the point is that GPS error can be greatly reduced when you already know where you are.
Now, in this case, the 'stationary' GPS units are actually moving at a very slow rate. With the error corrections described above, once all the other errors are accounted for, what remains is error due to actual movement of the GPS. I can't see the full text of the paper, but probably what they have is a statistical model that says the GPS units are moving by a certain amount each year, and a confidence level, and all of that.
So, to your last point: if you want to improve the GPS accuracy of your lawn bot, you need only to install a stationary GPS receiver on your house, survey its location very carefully, and attach a transmitter to turn it into a 'GPS base station' that your robot's GPS will use as a local reference to improve its GPS fix. (You can buy a GPS base station from someone like Trimble; they're often used for construction and the like.)
In most cases, including this one, the prisoner is interested in using his own money to buy an Xbox, not tax dollars.
Er... actually, President Bush toured the country in a bus from the same company.
404 pages that don't return code 404 make me crazy. I worked on some software that did periodic harvesting of remote data, and there was one site that was always moving its files around, and they had a custom 404 page that returned 200 OK. So the software was never able to tell that the file it was looking for wasn't actually there, and our database for that site was always screwed up. They would contact us and complain about our links being wrong every now and then, but I could never get them to fix their 404 page. To be honest, I'm not sure I ever got them to understand what the problem was.
The point of the whole project was to automate the process. If we have to go and visually inspect every URL to make sure that the remote web server isn't lying to us about the validity of the link, then it kind of invalidates the whole thing.
Probably not from Microsoft, but the OpenKinect community has developed an API that works under many platforms:
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page
Okay, that explains it. The submitter was only willing to put in the smallest possible amount of time and effort to make his blog post not so transparently an interstitial page with no beneficial contribution to the topic.
I don't mind if people link to their own blog in the summary, but if they're going to, at least they should make their blog post *useful*.
Thanks.
Probably, not every single computer in the OP's work needs to work with a Kinect. For some applications, it would be enough to have one machine dedicated to that kind of application, and its use would be shared among the office.
The blog post must have been written in a hurry by someone whose native language is not English.
Here is the link to the actual Microsoft SDK:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/