My motto is: "If you strive for perfection, then the end result will always be better than settling for mediocrity."
That's pretty much what I was thinking - that this company's results are not especially due to their methods, but due to hiring highly-skilled developers who know what they're doing and care about doing it right.
Half of the "enterprise" applications I've worked with were built on a foundation of absolute shit - too many elements of their core design were based on flawed thinking. No amount of money and time would have let their developers make them work properly.
My current opinion is that that kind of software is made by people who capitalize on the bureaucracy of corporations. I don't control what product is purchased here, so the salespeople for OverhypedFlashInThePanSoft only have to make a businessperson - rather than an engineer - think that their software is what they need to buy.
Afaik, electronics wouldn't - they'd just run faster in the cold.
My cellphone and the remote control for my car would like to have a word with you about that, but they haven't really been themselves since they spent the night with me in a tiny emergency snow cave.
Wonder if there are any open source projects working on a version of the blackberry server?
I would think a better open source-type option would be to either use a handheld that has some kind of X Window client for mail on a remote server (if you want it in realtime), or a regular mail client that syncs up its local copy of the inbox every once in awhile.
Honestly, there's no legitimate reason I can think of for the Blackberries to work the way they do, with mail passing through RIM between your mail server and the handhelds, other than RIM wanting to ensure that its customers keep paying for support.
GP is undoubtedly referring to the unreleased sequel, IOU. Apparently the tagline "Remember the past!" didn't fly too well with test audiences, and the idea of a man clinically obsessed with finding a way to show people that funny thing he did at that one party that one time was less compelling on film than paper.
That would have actually been really cool - sort of like Sacrifice, where as you play through whichever path you've chosen, the world becomes more and more ravaged until finally you're fighting the ultimate evil in a charred wasteland.
I consider myself agnostic because (to me at least) atheism is the "no" checkbox on the part of the questionaire that asks if you believe in anything beyond the physical world. I'm not comfortable answering "yes" or "no," because there's no way for me to know either way, or even form a reasonable theory.
I don't believe in anything per se, but I don't disbelieve either. It's like asking if Schroedinger's cat is dead before you open the box. Sooner or later I'll die and either find out for myself or I won't exist to care.
I had no idea the server backend was so...crummy. Why do geeks running FreeBSD at home have their passwords encrypted within MySQL, but big companies with million dollar products don't?
The entire server backend is like that. Some of the more amusing examples:
- When it starts, it has a fixed number of threads it can use to talk to the Exchange server. Let's say it's 1000. If a thread is killed off, e.g. because it timed out, it is not returned to the pool. So over the course of a week or so, you run out of threads and the app will no longer do anything. Consequently, we now reboot the server every night.
- If you have Outlook installed on the Blackberry server, it breaks the Blackberry server software, because it will only work with a very specific nonstandard version of the MAPI DLL.
- 50% of the time when you call their support line, the answer to your question mysteriously turns out to be that your server is under too heavy of a load and you need to buy another server license. Even if the server is working fine for all but one user, or if it was working fine for everyone until you switched license keys.
Basically the entire thing is a giant Rube Goldberg contraption. The handhelds are decent for what they do, but not spectacular.
Thats about the range of those early rocket belts, I think they had enough fuel for 20-30 seconds flight.
They're still limited to roughly 30 seconds, because they're so fuel-inefficient.
My understanding is that by using jet turbines, this type of propulsion should be able to be scaled up MUCH better to longer flight times. I mean, a "rocket belt" has an entire backpack full of fuel to do the 30 second flight, whereas this guy just had a couple of hot water bottles full of fuel in his flight suit.
This is really, really awesome. Even if it can't let the guy launch on his own power from the ground, it would be amazingly fun to zoom around in before popping a parachute.
Probably the only design question is how to armour the body of the flying person so that a catastrophic jet engine failure doesn't riddle them with shrapnel. One advantage of the "rocket belts" is that they don't (AFAIK) have sharp metal bits spinning at incredible speed inside.
It's a neat idea, but this particular model will never catch on as the EyeBud has the unfortunate effect of making the wearer looking like a Borg from Star Trek
Not even that cool. The Borg look evil and ominous, whereas wearing this device makes you looks like you're got on some sort of orthodontic or post-cranial-surgery headgear.
If they could make one that was VERY lightweight, and wrapped around the back of your head (but not the front) like those "behind the head" headphones, and had a transparent screen with no visible frame, MAYBE it wouldn't look absolutely stupid.
The giant bit across the forehead is the worst part. No one other than Klingon cosplayers like to highlight their foreheads.
Basically, from an artistic perspective, Seven of Nine has well-designed headgear. It highlights her eye, but doesn't obscure it, and it doesn't overwhelm the rest of her face. It also looks nicely-crafted, like a piece of jewelry, instead of some cheap white plastic (which again contributes to the "I wear this for medical reasons" appearance).
It might catch on with the kind of people who like Segways, however.
It is perfectly possible to make artfully-designed products that are also durable. Anyone who thinks otherwise should take a lesson from the music equipment industry.
Given the general "repent and be redeemed" theme of the New Testament, I think it's more likely that those 144,000 are supposed to be given some special honour. My Christian mythology is a little rusty though.
Hah, wow. I have one of those in my current machine, because my Geforce4 burned itself up. Maybe I should find another and enable ultimate Glide power. I could play Jet Moto and Myth at resolutions and framerates too high for mortals to bear.
Bose engineers went at the interiors of some cars to determine the accoustics, which are nothing short of ultra-complex. They designed some very impressive car audio systems.
I've only heard one Bose car stereo (factory-installed in an Audi TT), but I thought it was really underwhelming. The homebrew subwoofer and not-particularly-expensive CD deck/speaker setup my friend put together for his car was much nicer-sounding.
Even the most nasty power supplies I've seen are UL listed. The sheer amount of liability one would assume selling non-UL equipment ensures this.
Back in the mid 90s, most of the ones I saw were UL listed. Now almost none are.
I have a brand-new Coolermaster PSU sitting on my floor. It came with the replacement case I bought. It is not UL listed, and I thought "oh ho! I will use my old, expensive Enermax PSU, which *surely* is!" but actually it turns out that that one isn't either.
UL listing merely means that it's gone through testing to pretty much insure that if it fails it doesn't cause a serious safety hazard by doing things like electrifying it's case, blowing up, spewing glass shards everywhere, catching fire, etc.
That's pretty much the most important feature in an electrical device for me.
Re:how about a good power supply instead?
on
A Kilowatt of Power
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In my experience, PC Power & Cooling tend to make high-quality products.
This review, however, is crap. If someone is writing about a PSU and can't bother to include whether it's UL listed or not in SIX PAGES of text, their site is a joke.
UL listing is one of the most important things to look for in a PSU, yet almost none of them have it, and few if any review websites seem to care. If there's one thing in my computer that I want to be over-engineered for safety, it's the part that plugs into the wall socket.
This one *is*, but I had to go to the manufacturer's website to find that out.
Are you serious? Something like $10 out of every $50 game goes straight to MS' wallets. Game licenses are where nearly all of their income from the console market is from.
Datel, MadCatz, Recoton, etc., have referred to the Playstation 2, Gamecube, and Xbox by name on the packaging and in the documentation and software for their unlicensed console accessories for years. Sony, Nintendo, and MS hate them for it, but there's nothing they can do.
Anything can be used as a weapon if you are desperate. You are chasing a rainbow. Ban one thing, and the tiny number of actual terrorists in the world will find something else to use.
From what I have read, the Google Maps images of the White House, etc have been deliberately obscured because, amongst other things, they divulged the positions of the Secret Service on the roofs of those buildings.
If an aerial photo is that dangerous, the Secret Service needs to redesign their coverage.
Pretty soon, it's going to be highly impractical to prevent amateur aerial photography. It's not that expensive to build a radio-controlled plane with a camera. As soon as someone releases a general purpose GPS waypoint-following system for them, anyone who is willing to sacrifice $2k or less in parts will be able to get pictures of anything. If the plane is self-piloted and broadcasts its imagery, the people gathering it with a passive antenna will be long gone before anyone can do anything.
I've often wondered what will happen with places like Area 51 in that kind of environment. A lot of things can be put underground, but if you've got an aircraft it has to go outside sometime.
Those terrorists have millions of dollars in funding, access to all sorts of cold war technology, have managed to orchastrate an intricate plot involving the simultanious hijacking of several American airliners, have managed to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon, but they absolutely depend on Google *fricking* Earth for their maps!
The liberal media cabal is covering up the *Alpha* release of Google Maps/Earth, which was tested from 2000-2002 by Osama Bin Laden himself. Google sat on it for three years to avoid casting suspicion on themselves.
But seriously, it almost makes me want to laugh how just about every government seems to want cameras everywhere except pointing at their buildings.
I was under the impression that healthcare costs are sky-high because of people who sue when ANYTHING goes wrong, or could even be construed as having gone wrong, whether or not you could have done anything. This then forces everyone in the hospital to carry an unbelievable amount of insurance. Think of the cost of an NMR scanner's coolant for a year VS the operator's insurance.
I think that the insurance issue is less important than the greed of many people in the health care industry. Health insurance companies are by far the worst. The ones here in Washington are allegedly nonprofits, but they keep increasing fees and decreasing coverage even though they have hundreds of millions in surplus profit every year. Hospitals charge outrages sums for medication (morphine costs pennies for hospitals, but I was billed something like $100 for it when I had surgery), disposable equipment, and PER MINUTE in the recovery room. One psychiatrist I went to for my ADHD medication charged $90 for a five minute visit once a month, and I've heard that's fairly common in that field.
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My motto is: "If you strive for perfection, then the end result will always be better than settling for mediocrity."
That's pretty much what I was thinking - that this company's results are not especially due to their methods, but due to hiring highly-skilled developers who know what they're doing and care about doing it right.
Half of the "enterprise" applications I've worked with were built on a foundation of absolute shit - too many elements of their core design were based on flawed thinking. No amount of money and time would have let their developers make them work properly.
My current opinion is that that kind of software is made by people who capitalize on the bureaucracy of corporations. I don't control what product is purchased here, so the salespeople for OverhypedFlashInThePanSoft only have to make a businessperson - rather than an engineer - think that their software is what they need to buy.
What devices would need to stay heated?
Afaik, electronics wouldn't - they'd just run faster in the cold.
My cellphone and the remote control for my car would like to have a word with you about that, but they haven't really been themselves since they spent the night with me in a tiny emergency snow cave.
Wonder if there are any open source projects working on a version of the blackberry server?
I would think a better open source-type option would be to either use a handheld that has some kind of X Window client for mail on a remote server (if you want it in realtime), or a regular mail client that syncs up its local copy of the inbox every once in awhile.
Honestly, there's no legitimate reason I can think of for the Blackberries to work the way they do, with mail passing through RIM between your mail server and the handhelds, other than RIM wanting to ensure that its customers keep paying for support.
GP is undoubtedly referring to the unreleased sequel, IOU. Apparently the tagline "Remember the past!" didn't fly too well with test audiences, and the idea of a man clinically obsessed with finding a way to show people that funny thing he did at that one party that one time was less compelling on film than paper.
That would have actually been really cool - sort of like Sacrifice, where as you play through whichever path you've chosen, the world becomes more and more ravaged until finally you're fighting the ultimate evil in a charred wasteland.
I consider myself agnostic because (to me at least) atheism is the "no" checkbox on the part of the questionaire that asks if you believe in anything beyond the physical world. I'm not comfortable answering "yes" or "no," because there's no way for me to know either way, or even form a reasonable theory.
I don't believe in anything per se, but I don't disbelieve either. It's like asking if Schroedinger's cat is dead before you open the box. Sooner or later I'll die and either find out for myself or I won't exist to care.
I had no idea the server backend was so...crummy. Why do geeks running FreeBSD at home have their passwords encrypted within MySQL, but big companies with million dollar products don't?
The entire server backend is like that. Some of the more amusing examples:
- When it starts, it has a fixed number of threads it can use to talk to the Exchange server. Let's say it's 1000. If a thread is killed off, e.g. because it timed out, it is not returned to the pool. So over the course of a week or so, you run out of threads and the app will no longer do anything. Consequently, we now reboot the server every night.
- If you have Outlook installed on the Blackberry server, it breaks the Blackberry server software, because it will only work with a very specific nonstandard version of the MAPI DLL.
- 50% of the time when you call their support line, the answer to your question mysteriously turns out to be that your server is under too heavy of a load and you need to buy another server license. Even if the server is working fine for all but one user, or if it was working fine for everyone until you switched license keys.
Basically the entire thing is a giant Rube Goldberg contraption. The handhelds are decent for what they do, but not spectacular.
Thats about the range of those early rocket belts, I think they had enough fuel for 20-30 seconds flight.
They're still limited to roughly 30 seconds, because they're so fuel-inefficient.
My understanding is that by using jet turbines, this type of propulsion should be able to be scaled up MUCH better to longer flight times. I mean, a "rocket belt" has an entire backpack full of fuel to do the 30 second flight, whereas this guy just had a couple of hot water bottles full of fuel in his flight suit.
This is really, really awesome. Even if it can't let the guy launch on his own power from the ground, it would be amazingly fun to zoom around in before popping a parachute.
Probably the only design question is how to armour the body of the flying person so that a catastrophic jet engine failure doesn't riddle them with shrapnel. One advantage of the "rocket belts" is that they don't (AFAIK) have sharp metal bits spinning at incredible speed inside.
It's a neat idea, but this particular model will never catch on as the EyeBud has the unfortunate effect of making the wearer looking like a Borg from Star Trek
Not even that cool. The Borg look evil and ominous, whereas wearing this device makes you looks like you're got on some sort of orthodontic or post-cranial-surgery headgear.
If they could make one that was VERY lightweight, and wrapped around the back of your head (but not the front) like those "behind the head" headphones, and had a transparent screen with no visible frame, MAYBE it wouldn't look absolutely stupid.
The giant bit across the forehead is the worst part. No one other than Klingon cosplayers like to highlight their foreheads.
Basically, from an artistic perspective, Seven of Nine has well-designed headgear. It highlights her eye, but doesn't obscure it, and it doesn't overwhelm the rest of her face. It also looks nicely-crafted, like a piece of jewelry, instead of some cheap white plastic (which again contributes to the "I wear this for medical reasons" appearance).
It might catch on with the kind of people who like Segways, however.
I think it's because the PSP is truly outrageous.
You don't mistreat beautiful things.
It is perfectly possible to make artfully-designed products that are also durable. Anyone who thinks otherwise should take a lesson from the music equipment industry.
Its a Hitachi VHS model.
My 13+ year-old Hitachi VCR is still running just fine as well.
Hmm.
Given the general "repent and be redeemed" theme of the New Testament, I think it's more likely that those 144,000 are supposed to be given some special honour. My Christian mythology is a little rusty though.
Hah, wow. I have one of those in my current machine, because my Geforce4 burned itself up. Maybe I should find another and enable ultimate Glide power. I could play Jet Moto and Myth at resolutions and framerates too high for mortals to bear.
yeah, didn't s3 do something like that way way back. or was it matrox?
3dfx. The Voodoo2 I think was the only model that supported it.
Bose engineers went at the interiors of some cars to determine the accoustics, which are nothing short of ultra-complex. They designed some very impressive car audio systems.
I've only heard one Bose car stereo (factory-installed in an Audi TT), but I thought it was really underwhelming. The homebrew subwoofer and not-particularly-expensive CD deck/speaker setup my friend put together for his car was much nicer-sounding.
Even the most nasty power supplies I've seen are UL listed. The sheer amount of liability one would assume selling non-UL equipment ensures this.
Back in the mid 90s, most of the ones I saw were UL listed. Now almost none are.
I have a brand-new Coolermaster PSU sitting on my floor. It came with the replacement case I bought. It is not UL listed, and I thought "oh ho! I will use my old, expensive Enermax PSU, which *surely* is!" but actually it turns out that that one isn't either.
UL listing merely means that it's gone through testing to pretty much insure that if it fails it doesn't cause a serious safety hazard by doing things like electrifying it's case, blowing up, spewing glass shards everywhere, catching fire, etc.
That's pretty much the most important feature in an electrical device for me.
In my experience, PC Power & Cooling tend to make high-quality products.
This review, however, is crap. If someone is writing about a PSU and can't bother to include whether it's UL listed or not in SIX PAGES of text, their site is a joke.
UL listing is one of the most important things to look for in a PSU, yet almost none of them have it, and few if any review websites seem to care. If there's one thing in my computer that I want to be over-engineered for safety, it's the part that plugs into the wall socket.
This one *is*, but I had to go to the manufacturer's website to find that out.
Are you serious? Something like $10 out of every $50 game goes straight to MS' wallets. Game licenses are where nearly all of their income from the console market is from.
Insects have antennae. Spiders have chelicerae. I don't see what the problem is.
Exactly.
Datel, MadCatz, Recoton, etc., have referred to the Playstation 2, Gamecube, and Xbox by name on the packaging and in the documentation and software for their unlicensed console accessories for years. Sony, Nintendo, and MS hate them for it, but there's nothing they can do.
Anything can be used as a weapon if you are desperate. You are chasing a rainbow. Ban one thing, and the tiny number of actual terrorists in the world will find something else to use.
From what I have read, the Google Maps images of the White House, etc have been deliberately obscured because, amongst other things, they divulged the positions of the Secret Service on the roofs of those buildings.
If an aerial photo is that dangerous, the Secret Service needs to redesign their coverage.
Pretty soon, it's going to be highly impractical to prevent amateur aerial photography. It's not that expensive to build a radio-controlled plane with a camera. As soon as someone releases a general purpose GPS waypoint-following system for them, anyone who is willing to sacrifice $2k or less in parts will be able to get pictures of anything. If the plane is self-piloted and broadcasts its imagery, the people gathering it with a passive antenna will be long gone before anyone can do anything.
I've often wondered what will happen with places like Area 51 in that kind of environment. A lot of things can be put underground, but if you've got an aircraft it has to go outside sometime.
Those terrorists have millions of dollars in funding, access to all sorts of cold war technology, have managed to orchastrate an intricate plot involving the simultanious hijacking of several American airliners, have managed to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon, but they absolutely depend on Google *fricking* Earth for their maps!
The liberal media cabal is covering up the *Alpha* release of Google Maps/Earth, which was tested from 2000-2002 by Osama Bin Laden himself. Google sat on it for three years to avoid casting suspicion on themselves.
But seriously, it almost makes me want to laugh how just about every government seems to want cameras everywhere except pointing at their buildings.
I was under the impression that healthcare costs are sky-high because of people who sue when ANYTHING goes wrong, or could even be construed as having gone wrong, whether or not you could have done anything. This then forces everyone in the hospital to carry an unbelievable amount of insurance. Think of the cost of an NMR scanner's coolant for a year VS the operator's insurance.
I think that the insurance issue is less important than the greed of many people in the health care industry. Health insurance companies are by far the worst. The ones here in Washington are allegedly nonprofits, but they keep increasing fees and decreasing coverage even though they have hundreds of millions in surplus profit every year. Hospitals charge outrages sums for medication (morphine costs pennies for hospitals, but I was billed something like $100 for it when I had surgery), disposable equipment, and PER MINUTE in the recovery room. One psychiatrist I went to for my ADHD medication charged $90 for a five minute visit once a month, and I've heard that's fairly common in that field.