The US Millitary currently uses an advance tactical simulation modual that attaches the the stock of a standard M-16 rifle of other equipment (aka missles, rocket launchers, M1A1 tanks, you name it) They then don laser vests that sense laser radiation emmited toward them.
The system is called MILES. It works quite well, but it also has some problems - hiding behind light foliage, for instance, will deflect the laser but would not stop a bullet.
Actually no they dont use ANY paintballs.
They do use paintballs, esp. for close quarters training (FIBUA - Fighting in Built-Up Areas etc...) where you don't need to worry about the slow speed or short effective range of the rounds. You can even get paintballs in NATO-standard 5.56mm rounds that will work in unmodified rifles. One version is called Shortstop, which is made by a company called Simunition.
Ok, someone please explain to me why anyone would want to have a cloned music store? What value is added? What are the licensees bringing to the table?
Customer segmentation. If your website is devoted to, say, West Coast Christian hiphop-jazz fusion and you already attract fan traffic to your site, you can gain an addition revenue stream by offering a wide selection of West Coast Christian hiphop-jazz fusion music. Since you can offer this without any investment in infrastructure, it's money in the bank. The provider is happy becuase they don't need to spend much to get you up and running, so they can increase sales through an aggregator model of boutique stores.
This concept has just been rolled out in downtown Toronto with a system called Dexit.
The Dexit chip comes either as a key fob or a sticker for your cell phone. Most of the merchants in the PATH (downtown underground network) have a Dexit reader at their till, which reads the Dexit RFID tag. The cost is $1.50 for every $100 you load on the card, with no transactional fees. It claims to be "easier than cash, faster than credit", but the big value proposition seems to be food - most food merchants won't take debit cards due to time constraints, but they will take Dexit.
If you are unwilling to venture into the unknown, take a look at VueScan by Hamrick Software.
VueScan is a very impressive scanning application that runs on OSX/Lin/Win. It works with just about every scanner out there (including my POS Acer), and is very useful for managing scanning projects such as multiple photos etc... It's $60 shareware, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. It's easily one of the best OS X apps on the market.
In fact, I've seen items in Best Buy, asked if the discount was at the register, or via rebate, and if it was the latter, I'd simply not buy it. I wondered for a while, why companies do this- why don't they just give a price break instead?
Here's two reasons:
1. This lets the retailer receive the full amount in cash. If the discount price is less than the wholesale price, retailers will lose money on every sale. This way they still have incentive to sell. You could give the rebate to the retailer instead of the consumer, but that leads to....
2. What percentage of people actually bother to submit the paperwork - 10%? 20%? Once that coupon expires its money in the bank.
Claiming higher revenues doesn't really matter, since any serious financial analysis would back out the the value of the rebates.
Cardiff recorded Spem in Alium nunquam habui, written by Thomas Tallis in 1575. The piece is unique in that was designed for eight choirs of five people each. Cardiff made her recording by capturing each voice separately and on its own track. The piece is then played back over a circle of forty speakers in the installation space (here's how it looked at the Tate). I saw it when it was at the National Gallery, where it was set up in the Gallery's Rideau Chapel.
The effect is breathtaking - from outside the room it sounds like a normal choral piece, but once inside your perspective changes. By standing in the middle of the circle you can feel the voices blend and wash over you. You can then walk up to each of the speaker sets and hear that group's harmony. Step closer and you can hear each individual voice. By moving around the room you can experience different parts of the sound sculpture.
When the piece ends there is complete silence. After about a minute you can hear rustling and whispering from speakers as the choir gets ready, and then the piece begins again. You have to hear it to understand.
The end result is a complete immersive 3-dimensional aural experience that, like the organ, would be completely impossible to replicate with one, two, or even a handful of speakers.
There is the Half Life 2 source code floating around the net right now. It looks to be about a month old. There's no official word from Valve on the source code leak yet.
Did they also manage to leak the schematics for a P4 5.6ghz and a GeForce 7MX so we'll be able to play it?
The worst placement for the reset button was on the PowerMac 601 (pizza box "G1" if you wish), where the front-mounted reset (and power) switch was at the same height of the (then much) thick keyboard. Pushing the keyboard against the machine could switch it off. Outright stupid it was.
Not only that, but they put it right beside the floppy drive. You could tell if someone was a PC user because they restarted the computer every time they tried to eject a disk...
Bell Internet sucks anyway. They have very strict download and bandwidth limits with huge fees if you go over. And they introduced these limits without even a letter(email doens't count, not everyone uses ISP email) or phone call to thier customers. Waking up to a 150$ dsl bill without warning isn't very good customer service. I'm sticking with the friendly local DSL providers thank you.
Bell Sympatico just doubled their upload and download speeds and got rid of bandwidth caps. It's been that way for about a month now.
Cater to the locals instead of the visitors. Since this is a tourist town, I'd suggest courses in computers for small business. This would include classes in email/www/word/excel/database/simply accounting/cash register apps (or freeware variants etc...). You could tie it together in a series and work them up to bookkeeping/inventory control packages. You could even partner with an accounting firm to teach bookkeeping on a different night. Customers could run the apps on a dirt-cheap used computer & improve their businesses - you would be helping to support local industry.
If OS X was truly open source, we'd probably be patching our machines right now, instead of impotently discussing this on slashdot.
True, except you wouldn't be able to run Fink to download the screensaver patch until you figure out why your computer crashes every time you type with your hardware-hacked keyboard. You suspect that it's because your version of OpenAqua is creating conflicts with GND (GND's Not Darwin), but you can't go online to check because the web forum doesn't support OnSafari 0.1.2.33a.
Limiting shuttles to flights to the International Space Station or the Hubble Space Telescope. So they can see any stuff that has fallen off better and so they have a place to stay when bad stuff happens.
Dunno about this one. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), but I suspect that even a damaged shuttle would be safer for re-entry than riding back in the Hubble.
I just finished an MBA where laptops were required, so I was able to observe about 300 different machines on a daily basis over the course of two years. The school was fully wireless and we used them for pretty much everything.
My thoughts are that any laptop will be lucky to survive 4 years of college. Most of our laptops limped through the end of the 2-year program - and it didn't matter whether they were cheap or expensive. Battery life will be zip after a year, and you will likely run into optical drive and screen problems. Of the bunch, I would say that the Dell Inspiron line was complete, utter, garbage. They were flimsy, fell apart easily and everyone's battery totally died within a few weeks of each other. I had an HP, which was comfortable but required repeated major surgery. Toshibas and IBMs (especially) seemed to fare the best. We weren't allowed to use Macs, but my little sister uses an iBook that developed screen problems after a few months.
If you are going to go with a laptop, get the cheapest one with a decent screen and spring for the extended warranty. It won't survive, so don't blow tons of cash on it.
I'm really torn on the desktop-vs-laptop issue. I really liked being able to surf anywhere in the building and take notes/run simulations etc... in class (but keep in mind that you need to plug in power which most lecture halls lack). A desktop is a lot cheaper, much more powerful, much less likely to break (chance of laptop failure comes close to 100%) and much less likely to get stolen. If you are a gamer, it's just not economical to go with a laptop.
So in the end it boils down to whether you need the portability - if not, go with a sturdy, stable desktop for the four years.
That's because you probably saw an OMNIMAX (aka ""IMAX DOME") as opposed to an IMAX. The OMNIMAX has a round screen & more immersive experience, but there aren't as many screens or movies out there. Most OMNIMAXes usually just show IMAX movies w/o taking advantage of the larger screen. Same company though, and essentially the same technology.
Lev13than writes "In a pretty routine blunder, slashdot.org has inexplicably posted an article about Amazon making a typo. The article is for sale for just over $0 (plus postage and packing). It's not very hard to get through to their site right now, but if you're bored you can have a look at their blunder here." Don't bother clicking through, Slashdot will post a dupe in 20 minutes.
Re:Also Above All at Bloor and Bathurst
on
Great Surplus Stores?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The guys at Active Surplus are also pretty friendly.
A big reason to like them is that they are one of the only places that stocks Mac parts. The suppply is a bit variable, but every now and then they'll have shelves full of Mac Pluses for $10 or bins full of Mac parts.
Slashdot Mirror
The US Millitary currently uses an advance tactical simulation modual that attaches the the stock of a standard M-16 rifle of other equipment (aka missles, rocket launchers, M1A1 tanks, you name it) They then don laser vests that sense laser radiation emmited toward them.
The system is called MILES. It works quite well, but it also has some problems - hiding behind light foliage, for instance, will deflect the laser but would not stop a bullet.
Actually no they dont use ANY paintballs.
They do use paintballs, esp. for close quarters training (FIBUA - Fighting in Built-Up Areas etc...) where you don't need to worry about the slow speed or short effective range of the rounds. You can even get paintballs in NATO-standard 5.56mm rounds that will work in unmodified rifles. One version is called Shortstop, which is made by a company called Simunition.
Ok, just got home and installed it - runs fine with 256mb, but >256 you get the same problem as before. Damn.
Has anyone tried this on a Sawtooth with GeForce? Has it solved the memory problem?
Ok, someone please explain to me why anyone would want to have a cloned music store? What value is added? What are the licensees bringing to the table?
Customer segmentation. If your website is devoted to, say, West Coast Christian hiphop-jazz fusion and you already attract fan traffic to your site, you can gain an addition revenue stream by offering a wide selection of West Coast Christian hiphop-jazz fusion music. Since you can offer this without any investment in infrastructure, it's money in the bank. The provider is happy becuase they don't need to spend much to get you up and running, so they can increase sales through an aggregator model of boutique stores.
This concept has just been rolled out in downtown Toronto with a system called Dexit.
The Dexit chip comes either as a key fob or a sticker for your cell phone. Most of the merchants in the PATH (downtown underground network) have a Dexit reader at their till, which reads the Dexit RFID tag.
The cost is $1.50 for every $100 you load on the card, with no transactional fees. It claims to be "easier than cash, faster than credit", but the big value proposition seems to be food - most food merchants won't take debit cards due to time constraints, but they will take Dexit.
Uhuh? Anyone else confused? They seem like numbers just for the sake of numbers to me...
"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that."
Give the Gift of Slashdot(ting)
Funny, when I first read the headline I thought it meant you could buy a service to crash someone else's server....
If you are unwilling to venture into the unknown, take a look at VueScan by Hamrick Software.
VueScan is a very impressive scanning application that runs on OSX/Lin/Win. It works with just about every scanner out there (including my POS Acer), and is very useful for managing scanning projects such as multiple photos etc... It's $60 shareware, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. It's easily one of the best OS X apps on the market.
In fact, I've seen items in Best Buy, asked if the discount was at the register, or via rebate, and if it was the latter, I'd simply not buy it. I wondered for a while, why companies do this- why don't they just give a price break instead?
Here's two reasons:
1. This lets the retailer receive the full amount in cash. If the discount price is less than the wholesale price, retailers will lose money on every sale. This way they still have incentive to sell. You could give the rebate to the retailer instead of the consumer, but that leads to....
2. What percentage of people actually bother to submit the paperwork - 10%? 20%? Once that coupon expires its money in the bank.
Claiming higher revenues doesn't really matter, since any serious financial analysis would back out the the value of the rebates.
This reminds of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff's remarkable art installation 40 Part Motet, which represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale and won the Millennium Prize at the National Gallery of Canada.
Cardiff recorded Spem in Alium nunquam habui, written by Thomas Tallis in 1575. The piece is unique in that was designed for eight choirs of five people each. Cardiff made her recording by capturing each voice separately and on its own track. The piece is then played back over a circle of forty speakers in the installation space (here's how it looked at the Tate). I saw it when it was at the National Gallery, where it was set up in the Gallery's Rideau Chapel.
The effect is breathtaking - from outside the room it sounds like a normal choral piece, but once inside your perspective changes. By standing in the middle of the circle you can feel the voices blend and wash over you. You can then walk up to each of the speaker sets and hear that group's harmony. Step closer and you can hear each individual voice. By moving around the room you can experience different parts of the sound sculpture.
When the piece ends there is complete silence. After about a minute you can hear rustling and whispering from speakers as the choir gets ready, and then the piece begins again. You have to hear it to understand.
The end result is a complete immersive 3-dimensional aural experience that, like the organ, would be completely impossible to replicate with one, two, or even a handful of speakers.
Can you say....
Planet of the Apes?
Err... the movie or the planet?
There is the Half Life 2 source code floating around the net right now. It looks to be about a month old. There's no official word from Valve on the source code leak yet.
Did they also manage to leak the schematics for a P4 5.6ghz and a GeForce 7MX so we'll be able to play it?
The worst placement for the reset button was on the PowerMac 601 (pizza box "G1" if you wish), where the front-mounted reset (and power) switch was at the same height of the (then much) thick keyboard. Pushing the keyboard against the machine could switch it off. Outright stupid it was.
Not only that, but they put it right beside the floppy drive. You could tell if someone was a PC user because they restarted the computer every time they tried to eject a disk...
DVORAK isn't an acronym, it's a proper name. I don't think August Dvorak spelled his last name in capital letters.
I think it stands for Dumb Version Of Retardedly Arranged Keys.
Bell Internet sucks anyway. They have very strict download and bandwidth limits with huge fees if you go over. And they introduced these limits without even a letter(email doens't count, not everyone uses ISP email) or phone call to thier customers. Waking up to a 150$ dsl bill without warning isn't very good customer service. I'm sticking with the friendly local DSL providers thank you.
Bell Sympatico just doubled their upload and download speeds and got rid of bandwidth caps. It's been that way for about a month now.
Try doing a search for "Confidential" + "Internal Use Only". That brings up a few doozies...
Cater to the locals instead of the visitors. Since this is a tourist town, I'd suggest courses in computers for small business. This would include classes in email/www/word/excel/database/simply accounting/cash register apps (or freeware variants etc...).
You could tie it together in a series and work them up to bookkeeping/inventory control packages. You could even partner with an accounting firm to teach bookkeeping on a different night. Customers could run the apps on a dirt-cheap used computer & improve their businesses - you would be helping to support local industry.
If OS X was truly open source, we'd probably be patching our machines right now, instead of impotently discussing this on slashdot.
True, except you wouldn't be able to run Fink to download the screensaver patch until you figure out why your computer crashes every time you type with your hardware-hacked keyboard. You suspect that it's because your version of OpenAqua is creating conflicts with GND (GND's Not Darwin), but you can't go online to check because the web forum doesn't support OnSafari 0.1.2.33a.
Limiting shuttles to flights to the International Space Station or the Hubble Space Telescope.
So they can see any stuff that has fallen off better and so they have a place to stay when bad stuff happens.
Dunno about this one. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), but I suspect that even a damaged shuttle would be safer for re-entry than riding back in the Hubble.
I just finished an MBA where laptops were required, so I was able to observe about 300 different machines on a daily basis over the course of two years. The school was fully wireless and we used them for pretty much everything.
My thoughts are that any laptop will be lucky to survive 4 years of college. Most of our laptops limped through the end of the 2-year program - and it didn't matter whether they were cheap or expensive. Battery life will be zip after a year, and you will likely run into optical drive and screen problems. Of the bunch, I would say that the Dell Inspiron line was complete, utter, garbage. They were flimsy, fell apart easily and everyone's battery totally died within a few weeks of each other. I had an HP, which was comfortable but required repeated major surgery. Toshibas and IBMs (especially) seemed to fare the best. We weren't allowed to use Macs, but my little sister uses an iBook that developed screen problems after a few months.
If you are going to go with a laptop, get the cheapest one with a decent screen and spring for the extended warranty. It won't survive, so don't blow tons of cash on it.
I'm really torn on the desktop-vs-laptop issue. I really liked being able to surf anywhere in the building and take notes/run simulations etc... in class (but keep in mind that you need to plug in power which most lecture halls lack). A desktop is a lot cheaper, much more powerful, much less likely to break (chance of laptop failure comes close to 100%) and much less likely to get stolen. If you are a gamer, it's just not economical to go with a laptop.
So in the end it boils down to whether you need the portability - if not, go with a sturdy, stable desktop for the four years.
That's because you probably saw an OMNIMAX (aka ""IMAX DOME") as opposed to an IMAX. The OMNIMAX has a round screen & more immersive experience, but there aren't as many screens or movies out there. Most OMNIMAXes usually just show IMAX movies w/o taking advantage of the larger screen. Same company though, and essentially the same technology.
If you don't care about piddly little things like context, you can go straight to her images folder here:
http://kare.com/images/
What isnt a toaster good for?
(I regretfully ask)
A: Making Bread
Lev13than writes "In a pretty routine blunder, slashdot.org has inexplicably posted an article about Amazon making a typo. The article is for sale for just over $0 (plus postage and packing). It's not very hard to get through to their site right now, but if you're bored you can have a look at their blunder here." Don't bother clicking through, Slashdot will post a dupe in 20 minutes.
The guys at Active Surplus are also pretty friendly.
A big reason to like them is that they are one of the only places that stocks Mac parts. The suppply is a bit variable, but every now and then they'll have shelves full of Mac Pluses for $10 or bins full of Mac parts.