by the way, the first phones was invented and made by Italians, not Graham Bell (he copied the mechanism of his phone from an article in a paper)
Bell demonstrated his phone at the Centennial Expo in Philadelphia in 1876. The first Bell telephone exhange opened in New Haven, Connecticut in January 1878.
In 1871 Meucci filed a caveat at the US Patent Office. His caveat describes his invention, but does not mention a diaphragm, electromagnet, conversion of sound into electrical waves, conversion of electrical waves into sound, or other essential features of an electromagnetic telephone.
Meucci's 1871 caveat did not mention any of the telephone features later credited to him by his lawyer, and which were published in [a] Scientific American Supplement [in 1885] , a major reason for the loss of the 'Bell v. Globe and Meucci' patent infringement court case.
Without IBM and Microsoft, other architectures like the Atari ST or Amiga lines may have had a shot, and we might have a more diversified industry.
MS-DOS began as a serviceable 16 bit clone of CP/M.
It sold for $40 --- 1/6 of the price of CP/M 86.
$95 vs $568, adjusted for inflation.
Microsoft had a full suite of programming languages for the new micro.
MBASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN and Assembler.
The port of your business-oriented CP/M program to PC-DOS/MS-DOS was straight-forward --- and within a year or two most of the territory has been staked out.
This is about as close as I've seen to a "System for accomplishing a well known task with a computer".
Everything the computer does could be done by simpler machines or with pen and paper --- assuming you have unlimited time, money and manpower.
The tractor with a PTO and three-point hitch replaced the plow horse.
The tasks are the same (preparing the ground, harvesting the grain, and so on.) But there are vast improvements in efficiency and safety, if you do it right.
On top of that as indie game studios now often support linux, I am not sure you are correct.
Less than a quarter of the payments for the Humble Indie 3 bundle were for the Linux versions - even though the average Linux gamer was paying $12 each and the Windows gamer $5. The Humble Indie Bundle 3
Something less than a ringing endorsement fof the port to Linux.
Keep the old xp's lying around and install Ubuntu dualboot.
Two operating systems. Two software libraries. Two skill sets needed to maintain them. That is for the enthusiast and the IT pro. Not the senior volunteers at the public library.
Most charities that accept computers...will wipe the hard drive and install their own anyway... they need to make sure they aren't being presented with pirated software or viruses, and that's the easiest way to do it. The licenses that MS offers to charities are dirt cheap (in some cases free), so it just makes sense for them to install their own.
For the basics of hardware and software donations for the Windows OS: TechSoup
The biggest mistake the geek can make is to make decisions for others:
You are not on the board.
You are not the charity's parent organization or its affliates.
[which often implies centralized purchasing, customized software bundles and so on]
You are not on staff.
You are not recruiting or managing volunteer workers.
You are not one of the charity's clients or their representatives.
If first-teir software for their needs is Mac or Windows only, you will have seriously mucked things up.
You are not raising money by teaching after-hours courses in MS Office.
Honestly, all the "censorship" talk about copyright makes me imagine a spamlord complaining that he's being censored because he can't get his mass mailings out to everybody.
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
--- George Orwell (1984)
Become very rich, bribe enough politicians with more money than the RIAA/MPAA offers, get them to change the laws.
The Pixar feature is a $200 million dollar production that will gross $1 billion dollars in its first run theatrical release. Tell me how you persuade the voter in California that pumping that much money into the state economy is a bad thing.
For some reason I get an error message when I try to post this as a direct response.
Last thing we need is a flux of new subscribers that are low-income (read: jobless or underemployed) who have all the time in the world to suck up my precious bandwidth.
This had me thinking of Sterling Hayden, General Jack D. Ripper, the commies and his precious bodily fluids.
Nothing could make it plainer that the geek still sees the Internet as his private playground - his walled garden and gated suburb - and not a public resource.
The poor have the Red Box.
The geek Pirate Bay and his 250 GB monthly allotment.
(read: jobless or underemployed)
Read "elderly and the disabled" as well.
The geek might usefully remember that only death is forever. Not his youth. Not his health --- and most certainly not his paycheck. His only measure of success in this world.
Mozilla's only significant source of funding is the add-click.
According to the statement, a whopping 97% of Mozilla's income comes from the search deals. Unfortunately, [the] company did not disclose the percentage of searches it sends to each search provider.
The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider which expires November 2011. Aproximately 86% and 91% of royalty revenue for 2009 and 2008, respectively was derived from this contract.
When your only source of funding is the "add-supported" browser, the Windows OS is the air you breathe and the water you drink. You cannot survive without it.
Windows is a commercial, proprietary and closed source OS. That is in many ways extraordinarly open to the user, the recreational programmer and the professional developer.
I have over 200 programs on this Win 7 system. I am not bound to any single repository or app store. I am not hectored by RMS. Steve Jobs or Bill Gates when I install a program which they would not approve.
Microsoft began with the stand-alone PC for the school, the home and small business. It began with the user. It began with a market.
The producer Samuel Goldwyn is usually credited for the line "If you've got a message, send a telegram."
Good advice for anyone whose Grand Design is about to collide head-on with a world that is skeptical, pragmatic and more than a little weary of those Who Think They Know What Is Best For Me.
What has theoretical freedom of ideas have to do with a full-scale commercial piracy operation?
Nothing whatever.
Which shows how impoverished and fraudulent these cries for "Freedom!" have become.
P2P is the geek's middle class entitlement. Nothing more. The investment in tech and services required makes that plain. The AAA game demands AAA hardware.
Playing the pirated HD video on the 60" screen doesn't make you a hero.
It's a shame that a lot of old games (including DOS games, circa 1995) have been consigned to the graveyard of dead software, where they can't be ported/maintained because they have no sources and need emulation, they can't be bought except for second/third/20th-hand, they can't be copied/preserved because of copyright.
Gog.com lists about 400 MSDOS and Windows games, almost all of which will run without a hassle under 64 bit Windows 7. But you have to be realistic.
Gog sells desktop games to the hard-core PC gamer willing to invest a substantial amount of time in a classic adventure, RPG, simulation or strategy game.
The problem is that even the enthusiast finds it hard to warm up to a game with five to twenty-five year old graphics, gameplay and sound --- and that is not an easy problem to fix.
The Black Mesa total conversion threatens to become the next Duke Nukem Forever.
It needs writers, production designers, level designers, background artists, model makers, character animators, effects animators, Foley artists, composers, musicians, vocal performers, etc., etc., etc.
Is it wrong of me to be hoping to see the new Carmageddon released on Wii?
No.
But this looks like an Indie start-up with no money to speak of.
What I would like to see is [the M-rated] Carmageddon 2 on Gog.com, with the soundtrack, PDF cars, etc, as extras. Its the perfect way to test the waters and raise some cash,
"Reincarnation" is a piss-poor title --- uncomfortably remeniscent of the late and unlamented "Duke Nukem Forever." I hope they can come up with something better.
Fair enough. COBOL has never been my area of expertise.
COBOL is written in the language of the accountant. That will drive the hot-shot, trend-forward, programmer nuts. But if you are MetLife with 66,000 employees and 90 million policy holders the audit trail is a must.
I have dreamt of carmageddon being released. I want to port it to Linux and update the graphics, everything,
Then these are the people you need to talk to:
The Carmageddon brand has been reacquired by the team that developed the original PC titles Carmageddon and Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now. Stainless Games today announced that a new title is in early development, called 'Carmageddon: Reincarnation'
These fantastic 3D paper cars have been created by long-time Carmageddon fan and modder extraordinaire Harm (Harmalarm). They were created using a neat bit of software called Pepakura. This program is able to unfold digital 3D models, turning them into foldable models.
I imagine that nobody is writing new applications in COBOL.
You could be wrong, you know
Fujitsu announced late Friday that it is shipping four middleware products designed to work with Microsoft's Windows Azure public cloud development platform
"The new line of products delivers runtime environments for Java and Cobol, two application programming languages that are commonly employed in building mission-critical systems, in addition to providing functionality enabling central monitoring between on-premise systems and the Windows Azure Platform."
Even Java, a much lauded language when it arrived 20 years ago, is already deemed to be old and "legacy". Yet, according to analyst Gartner, more than 70% of the world's business is run by a technology that was christened over 50 years ago - COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language.
At JD Williams Ltd, UK's leading direct home shopping company, for example, COBOL is one of the strategic languages used due to its key strengths in its English-like syntax, and the fact that is it very quick to develop in and easy to debug.
Recent research revealed that an average person would interact with a COBOL application at least ten times a day. With Gartner estimates putting the number of lines of COBOL code in excess of 200 billion, the global investment in COBOL applications exceeds several trillion dollars.
Some are at least two years old and frequently discounted.
The competition for the casual gamer and the budget gamer in the Windows market is fierce and the backlist of available titles in all genres that sell online for under $10 is enormous.
The third Humble Bundle has been beefed up at least twice - with the addition of Steel Storm (bew to Linux) and the bundling in of the second Humble Indie Bundle for those paying more than $5.01.
The average donation at 8:25 PM ET Wednesday is $5.02 and for that you get the Flash-based game "Machinarium," quite arguably the best of the lot.
There have been about a quarter of a million sales of the Humble 3 bundle. It's been a grand opportinity for the Linux gamer in particular to bulk-up cheap on commercially produced casual games.
But he can't deliever even a quarter of the sales.
I wont say this will kill anything, but it sounds fun. I'm betting this works with kinect soon.
Good call.
Kinect Services for RDS provides sample services that use the Kinect for Windows SDK to allow access to the Depth and RGB data from a Kinect sensor. In addition to a service for a real Kinect, there is also a service for a simulated Kinect that works with the RDS simulator. A sample application is included that shows how to use a Kinect on a simulated robot to wander around and avoid obstacles.
Up until recently Google has been deliberately naive about the problem, shrugging it off and allowing others to take the hit. Google need to get hit, and they need to see software patents as a real threat to their plan of world domination.
Google is a licensee of three MPEG LA patent pools:
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVC/H.264
I haven't the least doubt that it licensees other technoogies on the same scale.
Google is a business. Its core competence is search. All that licensing the patent portfolio really means iin business s that you can't afford to be the first or the best in everything.
For Microsoft, it's the difference between the Presbyterian Home For The Aged and The First Presbyterian Church. The food bank sponsored by Catholic Charities and The Holy Trinity R.C. Church on Tenth Street.
Microsoft has a steeply discounted "open licensing" program for charities through its VAR sales partners. TechSoup can still be of help to you for other software.
Of course, that doesn't hold true for Office, as there's no way I'd subject our staff to the latest version given the unanimous horrible things I've heard about it. OpenOffice FTW...
I think you should give "The Ribbon" a try. It has been an insanely successful product at retail and the chances are damn good your people will have no fear of it.
MS Office skills are taught everywhere --- and to all ages. The Senior Center. The High School. This is a godsend when you are trying to staff an office on an impossibly tight budget and mostly with volunteers.
Microsoft's charitable VAR licensing supports the MS Office Home User program.
We have new hardware to install in my church's office. The old computers run XP, purchased as charity licenses. The new hardware came with Vista and I was hoping we could install Windows 7 instead. As a result, we're going to be shoe-horning XP back onto the *new* machines, and I'll be installing an Ubuntu dual-boot on them to see if there's any way to get the staff to consider moving to it. Go-go-gadget greed, Microsoft!
Tech for non-profits:
TechSoup Global, founded in 1987 as The CompuMentor Project, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides technology assistance to other nonprofit organizations in the United States and in 35 countries.
TechSoup.Org Product Donations, originally known as DiscounTech and later as TechSoup Stock, is a technology product philanthropy service for nonprofits which was launched in January 2002. It is the exclusive U.S. distributor of Microsoft product donations, and helps to connect nonprofits and libraries to over 430 different product donations from 45 donating partners (including Cisco, Symantec, Sun and Adobe).
Microsoft software donations are still mainstays of the TechSoup program. And it's a good thing! Since they started the program in 1998, Microsoft has donated more than $3.9 billion worth of software to nonprofit organizations in more than 100 countries worldwide, now reaching over 40,000 nonprofits each year.
Organizations can now request Microsoft products as needed, not just once per year. Also, there is no longer a five-seat minimum requirement, so an organization can request just one license if that is all it needs.
Now you can request from up to 10 different Microsoft title groups in each two-year cycle
Take our Check Program Eligibility Quiz --- see if you're eligible for Microsoft and our 44 other donation programs.
To learn more about the updates to the Microsoft Software Donation Program and how they affect your organization, visit our Overview of the Microsoft Software Donation Program. Then, join us on August 4, 2011, for a free webinar Microsoft Donation Program: How Does It Work?
>>After the split, he began directing several thousand public Twitter messages toward Zeoli, some of which were threatening, according to prosecutors.
Several thousand abusive messages.
In the American system, the roots of free speech lie in the desire for open and public political debate without fear of government interference.
But there has always been the contrarian impulse to keep that debate civilized --- and not to carry it over into a man's private life.
Malice is out of bounds. Harassment is out of bounds.
"The intentional inflection of emotional distress" is not free speech.
This case is not a slam-dunk for the EFF.
Also note that "simple plastic objects with no moving parts" represents probably 50% by weight or volume of the stuff at walmart and target. Entire aisles of laundry baskets, storage baskets, kitchen gadgets, housewares gadgets, all obsolete.
You won't be paying OEM prices for your chemical feedstocks.
Think mile-long unit trains. Fleets of container ships. Transcontinental pipelines.
Does it make sense for the high wage geek to spend hours or days at home fabricating plastic forks and spoons that sell for $1.39 a box at the dollar store?
Scavaging aluminum at 5 cents a can?
Do we ignore the problem of air, ground and water pollution when you bring an industrial process into the home?
Slashdot Mirror
by the way, the first phones was invented and made by Italians, not Graham Bell (he copied the mechanism of his phone from an article in a paper)
Bell demonstrated his phone at the Centennial Expo in Philadelphia in 1876. The first Bell telephone exhange opened in New Haven, Connecticut in January 1878.
In 1871 Meucci filed a caveat at the US Patent Office. His caveat describes his invention, but does not mention a diaphragm, electromagnet, conversion of sound into electrical waves, conversion of electrical waves into sound, or other essential features of an electromagnetic telephone.
Meucci's 1871 caveat did not mention any of the telephone features later credited to him by his lawyer, and which were published in [a] Scientific American Supplement [in 1885] , a major reason for the loss of the 'Bell v. Globe and Meucci' patent infringement court case.
Invention of the telephone
In 1885 there were 50 telephones per 1,000 population in Atlanta, 30 in Honolulu, 22 in Buffalo.
Without IBM and Microsoft, other architectures like the Atari ST or Amiga lines may have had a shot, and we might have a more diversified industry.
MS-DOS began as a serviceable 16 bit clone of CP/M.
It sold for $40 --- 1/6 of the price of CP/M 86.
$95 vs $568, adjusted for inflation.
Microsoft had a full suite of programming languages for the new micro.
MBASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN and Assembler.
The port of your business-oriented CP/M program to PC-DOS/MS-DOS was straight-forward --- and within a year or two most of the territory has been staked out.
This is about as close as I've seen to a "System for accomplishing a well known task with a computer".
Everything the computer does could be done by simpler machines or with pen and paper --- assuming you have unlimited time, money and manpower.
The tractor with a PTO and three-point hitch replaced the plow horse.
The tasks are the same (preparing the ground, harvesting the grain, and so on.) But there are vast improvements in efficiency and safety, if you do it right.
On top of that as indie game studios now often support linux, I am not sure you are correct.
Less than a quarter of the payments for the Humble Indie 3 bundle were for the Linux versions - even though the average Linux gamer was paying $12 each and the Windows gamer $5. The Humble Indie Bundle 3
Something less than a ringing endorsement fof the port to Linux.
Keep the old xp's lying around and install Ubuntu dualboot.
Two operating systems. Two software libraries. Two skill sets needed to maintain them. That is for the enthusiast and the IT pro. Not the senior volunteers at the public library.
Most charities that accept computers...will wipe the hard drive and install their own anyway... they need to make sure they aren't being presented with pirated software or viruses, and that's the easiest way to do it. The licenses that MS offers to charities are dirt cheap (in some cases free), so it just makes sense for them to install their own.
For the basics of hardware and software donations for the Windows OS: TechSoup
The biggest mistake the geek can make is to make decisions for others:
You are not on the board.
You are not the charity's parent organization or its affliates.
[which often implies centralized purchasing, customized software bundles and so on]
You are not on staff.
You are not recruiting or managing volunteer workers.
You are not one of the charity's clients or their representatives.
If first-teir software for their needs is Mac or Windows only, you will have seriously mucked things up.
You are not raising money by teaching after-hours courses in MS Office.
Honestly, all the "censorship" talk about copyright makes me imagine a spamlord complaining that he's being censored because he can't get his mass mailings out to everybody.
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
--- George Orwell (1984)
Become very rich, bribe enough politicians with more money than the RIAA/MPAA offers, get them to change the laws.
The Pixar feature is a $200 million dollar production that will gross $1 billion dollars in its first run theatrical release. Tell me how you persuade the voter in California that pumping that much money into the state economy is a bad thing.
Last thing we need is a flux of new subscribers that are low-income (read: jobless or underemployed) who have all the time in the world to suck up my precious bandwidth.
This had me thinking of Sterling Hayden, General Jack D. Ripper, the commies and his precious bodily fluids.
Nothing could make it plainer that the geek still sees the Internet as his private playground - his walled garden and gated suburb - and not a public resource.
The poor have the Red Box.
The geek Pirate Bay and his 250 GB monthly allotment.
(read: jobless or underemployed)
Read "elderly and the disabled" as well.
The geek might usefully remember that only death is forever. Not his youth. Not his health --- and most certainly not his paycheck. His only measure of success in this world.
According to the statement, a whopping 97% of Mozilla's income comes from the search deals. Unfortunately, [the] company did not disclose the percentage of searches it sends to each search provider.
Mozilla's 2009 Financial Statement [Nov 19, 2010]
The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider which expires November 2011. Aproximately 86% and 91% of royalty revenue for 2009 and 2008, respectively was derived from this contract.
Mozilla Foundation and Susidiaries: Consolidated Financial Statements : Notes: Note 9: Concentration of Risk [August 23, 2010]
When your only source of funding is the "add-supported" browser, the Windows OS is the air you breathe and the water you drink.
You cannot survive without it.
Windows 88%
OSX 6%
iOS 3%
Linux 1%
Android 1%
Operating System Market Share [August 5, 2011] [Rounded] [Global]
Desktop: 95%
Mobile vs Desktop [July 10 to July 11] [Rounded] [Global]
Windows XP 50%
Win 7 28%
Vista 15%
OSX 6%
Linux 1%
Other 1%
Top 5 Operating Systems [July 10 to July 11] [Rounded] [Global]
Windows is a commercial, proprietary and closed source OS. That is in many ways extraordinarly open to the user, the recreational programmer and the professional developer.
I have over 200 programs on this Win 7 system. I am not bound to any single repository or app store. I am not hectored by RMS. Steve Jobs or Bill Gates when I install a program which they would not approve.
Microsoft began with the stand-alone PC for the school, the home and small business. It began with the user. It began with a market.
The producer Samuel Goldwyn is usually credited for the line "If you've got a message, send a telegram."
Good advice for anyone whose Grand Design is about to collide head-on with a world that is skeptical, pragmatic and more than a little weary of those Who Think They Know What Is Best For Me.
What has theoretical freedom of ideas have to do with a full-scale commercial piracy operation?
Nothing whatever.
Which shows how impoverished and fraudulent these cries for "Freedom!" have become.
P2P is the geek's middle class entitlement. Nothing more. The investment in tech and services required makes that plain. The AAA game demands AAA hardware.
Playing the pirated HD video on the 60" screen doesn't make you a hero.
It makes you a thief.
Ah, such an over sensationalist title and summary again.
It happens whenever a geek is arrested for a white-collar crime. Apparently, the police are supposed to look the other way.
It's a shame that a lot of old games (including DOS games, circa 1995) have been consigned to the graveyard of dead software, where they can't be ported/maintained because they have no sources and need emulation, they can't be bought except for second/third/20th-hand, they can't be copied/preserved because of copyright.
Gog.com lists about 400 MSDOS and Windows games, almost all of which will run without a hassle under 64 bit Windows 7. But you have to be realistic.
Gog sells desktop games to the hard-core PC gamer willing to invest a substantial amount of time in a classic adventure, RPG, simulation or strategy game.
The problem is that even the enthusiast finds it hard to warm up to a game with five to twenty-five year old graphics, gameplay and sound --- and that is not an easy problem to fix.
The Black Mesa total conversion threatens to become the next Duke Nukem Forever.
It needs writers, production designers, level designers, background artists, model makers, character animators, effects animators, Foley artists, composers, musicians, vocal performers, etc., etc., etc.
Is it wrong of me to be hoping to see the new Carmageddon released on Wii?
No.
But this looks like an Indie start-up with no money to speak of.
What I would like to see is [the M-rated] Carmageddon 2 on Gog.com, with the soundtrack, PDF cars, etc, as extras. Its the perfect way to test the waters and raise some cash,
"Reincarnation" is a piss-poor title --- uncomfortably remeniscent of the late and unlamented "Duke Nukem Forever." I hope they can come up with something better.
Fair enough. COBOL has never been my area of expertise.
COBOL is written in the language of the accountant. That will drive the hot-shot, trend-forward, programmer nuts. But if you are MetLife with 66,000 employees and 90 million policy holders the audit trail is a must.
I have dreamt of carmageddon being released. I want to port it to Linux and update the graphics, everything,
Then these are the people you need to talk to:
The Carmageddon brand has been reacquired by the team that developed the original PC titles Carmageddon and Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now. Stainless Games today announced that a new title is in early development, called 'Carmageddon: Reincarnation'
Carmageddon
Carmageddon Paper Crafts
These fantastic 3D paper cars have been created by long-time Carmageddon fan and modder extraordinaire Harm (Harmalarm). They were created using a neat bit of software called Pepakura. This program is able to unfold digital 3D models, turning them into foldable models.
Paper Cars Pepakura
I imagine that nobody is writing new applications in COBOL.
You could be wrong, you know
Fujitsu announced late Friday that it is shipping four middleware products designed to work with Microsoft's Windows Azure public cloud development platform
"The new line of products delivers runtime environments for Java and Cobol, two application programming languages that are commonly employed in building mission-critical systems, in addition to providing functionality enabling central monitoring between on-premise systems and the Windows Azure Platform."
Fujitsu Teams with Microsoft on Azure Middleware
Even Java, a much lauded language when it arrived 20 years ago, is already deemed to be old and "legacy". Yet, according to analyst Gartner, more than 70% of the world's business is run by a technology that was christened over 50 years ago - COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language.
At JD Williams Ltd, UK's leading direct home shopping company, for example, COBOL is one of the strategic languages used due to its key strengths in its English-like syntax, and the fact that is it very quick to develop in and easy to debug.
Recent research revealed that an average person would interact with a COBOL application at least ten times a day. With Gartner estimates putting the number of lines of COBOL code in excess of 200 billion, the global investment in COBOL applications exceeds several trillion dollars.
The case for COBOL
It proves that the original statement that Humble Bundle makes more money from Linux & Mac combined than from Windows
The pie chart reads "Total Payments by Platform."
Windows payments about 60% of the total. Mac and Linux payments each about 20%.
This even though individual sales average about $12 for Linux, $7 for the Mac and $4 for Windows.
Really? I guess you can't read pie charts http://www.humblebundle.com/
I can read the chart.
But what does it prove?
These ganes are not new to the Windows platform.
Some are at least two years old and frequently discounted.
The competition for the casual gamer and the budget gamer in the Windows market is fierce and the backlist of available titles in all genres that sell online for under $10 is enormous.
The third Humble Bundle has been beefed up at least twice - with the addition of Steel Storm (bew to Linux) and the bundling in of the second Humble Indie Bundle for those paying more than $5.01.
The average donation at 8:25 PM ET Wednesday is $5.02 and for that you get the Flash-based game "Machinarium," quite arguably the best of the lot.
There have been about a quarter of a million sales of the Humble 3 bundle. It's been a grand opportinity for the Linux gamer in particular to bulk-up cheap on commercially produced casual games.
But he can't deliever even a quarter of the sales.
I wont say this will kill anything, but it sounds fun. I'm betting this works with kinect soon.
Good call.
Kinect Services for RDS provides sample services that use the Kinect for Windows SDK to allow access to the Depth and RGB data from a Kinect sensor. In addition to a service for a real Kinect, there is also a service for a simulated Kinect that works with the RDS simulator. A sample application is included that shows how to use a Kinect on a simulated robot to wander around and avoid obstacles.
Kinect Services for RDS 2008 R3
Up until recently Google has been deliberately naive about the problem, shrugging it off and allowing others to take the hit. Google need to get hit, and they need to see software patents as a real threat to their plan of world domination.
Google is a licensee of three MPEG LA patent pools:
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVC/H.264
I haven't the least doubt that it licensees other technoogies on the same scale.
Google is a business. Its core competence is search. All that licensing the patent portfolio really means iin business s that you can't afford to be the first or the best in everything.
Wow, thanks for linking that!!!
The picture is a little more complicated.
For Microsoft, it's the difference between the Presbyterian Home For The Aged and The First Presbyterian Church. The food bank sponsored by Catholic Charities and The Holy Trinity R.C. Church on Tenth Street.
Microsoft has a steeply discounted "open licensing" program for charities through its VAR sales partners. TechSoup can still be of help to you for other software.
Of course, that doesn't hold true for Office, as there's no way I'd subject our staff to the latest version given the unanimous horrible things I've heard about it. OpenOffice FTW...
I think you should give "The Ribbon" a try. It has been an insanely successful product at retail and the chances are damn good your people will have no fear of it.
MS Office skills are taught everywhere --- and to all ages. The Senior Center. The High School. This is a godsend when you are trying to staff an office on an impossibly tight budget and mostly with volunteers.
Microsoft's charitable VAR licensing supports the MS Office Home User program.
The $10 download for your staff.
We have new hardware to install in my church's office. The old computers run XP, purchased as charity licenses. The new hardware came with Vista and I was hoping we could install Windows 7 instead. As a result, we're going to be shoe-horning XP back onto the *new* machines, and I'll be installing an Ubuntu dual-boot on them to see if there's any way to get the staff to consider moving to it. Go-go-gadget greed, Microsoft!
Tech for non-profits:
TechSoup Global, founded in 1987 as The CompuMentor Project, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides technology assistance to other nonprofit organizations in the United States and in 35 countries.
TechSoup.Org Product Donations, originally known as DiscounTech and later as TechSoup Stock, is a technology product philanthropy service for nonprofits which was launched in January 2002. It is the exclusive U.S. distributor of Microsoft product donations, and helps to connect nonprofits and libraries to over 430 different product donations from 45 donating partners (including Cisco, Symantec, Sun and Adobe).
TechSoup TechSoup
Microsoft software donations are still mainstays of the TechSoup program. And it's a good thing! Since they started the program in 1998, Microsoft has donated more than $3.9 billion worth of software to nonprofit organizations in more than 100 countries worldwide, now reaching over 40,000 nonprofits each year.
Organizations can now request Microsoft products as needed, not just once per year. Also, there is no longer a five-seat minimum requirement, so an organization can request just one license if that is all it needs.
Now you can request from up to 10 different Microsoft title groups in each two-year cycle
Take our Check Program Eligibility Quiz --- see if you're eligible for Microsoft and our 44 other donation programs.
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Good News! Updates to the Microsoft Software Donation Program [July 27]
>>After the split, he began directing several thousand public Twitter messages toward Zeoli, some of which were threatening, according to prosecutors. Several thousand abusive messages. In the American system, the roots of free speech lie in the desire for open and public political debate without fear of government interference. But there has always been the contrarian impulse to keep that debate civilized --- and not to carry it over into a man's private life. Malice is out of bounds. Harassment is out of bounds. "The intentional inflection of emotional distress" is not free speech. This case is not a slam-dunk for the EFF.
Also note that "simple plastic objects with no moving parts" represents probably 50% by weight or volume of the stuff at walmart and target. Entire aisles of laundry baskets, storage baskets, kitchen gadgets, housewares gadgets, all obsolete.
You won't be paying OEM prices for your chemical feedstocks.
Think mile-long unit trains. Fleets of container ships. Transcontinental pipelines.
Does it make sense for the high wage geek to spend hours or days at home fabricating plastic forks and spoons that sell for $1.39 a box at the dollar store?
Scavaging aluminum at 5 cents a can?
Do we ignore the problem of air, ground and water pollution when you bring an industrial process into the home?