Im going to completely ignore the typical grammar nazi posts I could throw in...
We havent been innocent for a very long time. The Veitnam war was probrably the end of it, and even before that fear played a hell of a big role in our lives ( you know... the whole Cold War thing ). The only thing that has changed since post World War 2 innocence is a greater lack of conformity, the fear mongering was always there.
Movies are a classic example, horror movies and thrillers specifically. The themes change from generation to generation, but there was always an underlying current. Godzilla representing the fallout of the nucleur era, countless war movies following vietnam, slasher flicks of the 70s and 80s teaching us our normal fellow man may infact be a psychotic killer. But here is an example much closer to home for me( at my age ). Did you every go trick or treating? Was *the fear* ever put into you that you had to inspect all of your candy, because psychos were putting razorblades and poison in them? Ever hear of a single case of that actually happenning? I mean... an actual case of someone you know? No, it was simply media generated hype.
Yeah, there are sickos in the world, always have been. Thing is, in our 24/7 media coverage generation we get overloaded with stories of pure evil. I have to imagine an immegrant from a war oppressed region of Africa has to look at America's modern day fears and laugh. When our biggest fears are whatever media/goverment generated terror scheme which never actually seem to happen. After that, our fears seem to revolve around meaningless shit like Grand Theft Auto and its murder simulations. To someone who came from a soceity where death was a daily occurance, our fears much seem pretty damned trivial.
Notice though, the government isnt doing much to curb those fears? Thats simple, a scared population is an easy to control population. Something the current regime seems to have learned exceedingly well.
Most people will look at this and see a corrupt police force and yet another sign of our times. Yes, I see the irony that a citizen is getting charged under a wiretapping law in this day and age.
Problem is, most people don't see these stories for what they truly generally are. Stupidity. You know, there are stupid cops and even stupid judges. Most of the time, when cases like this make it out into the world people think that the system is to blame. Normally thats not the case, the stupidity of the officers involved are to blame. Well, either that or some queer powertrip, which is far too common with law enforcement aswell.
In the end, this will all get thrown out in court. Thing is, nobody knows at what cost it will be to the guy involved. Thats truly the greatest flaw of all in the system. IMHO, there should almost be a pre-court judge that can take a look at cases in advance as a checksum against stupidity, and throw them out right away if they are as dumb as this one. I suppose that would be rife for abusing too though.
Paypal isnt so much the most popular service because it's "easy"
Many other services are just as easy to use as Paypal. No the biggest reasons are:
- Its "the brand" so far as online payments go. Most people use paypal, so other people get brought in my default.
- Its trusted. For online payments, this is a HUGE deal.
- Its cheap. Really, look at what people have to pay for online banking. If you want to setup an e-commerce website, alot of payment gateways charge a monthly fee, then take a huge percentage of your revinue. Plus, payout rates ( how fast you get your cash )are much higher with Paypal then most gateways.
- It acts as a credit card proxy, so if you have a MC or Visa, you can pay with Paypal without the fear of giving out your credit card number.
- Its in bed with eBay. Alot of peoples first need for a payment service is because they bought something on eBay. Once they have an eBay account, if they buy something else online, why sign up for a different service when the one you use already works?
So, there are many reasons beyond "it's easy" that Paypal is popular.
Thats my biggest beef with the way this kit works. The JSNI interface seems like a pure hack to start with doing things like embedding javascript code in a java file using code like the following:
// Trigger named Scriptaculous effect $wnd.Effect[effectName](element); }-*/;
I find these kinds of toolkits get you up and going quickly, especially if you are new. However, the first time you run into something the toolkit can't handle, the black box nature means your SOL.
Do you insist on saying M$ because:
a) Your pandering to the Linux Zealot crowd, where as you think any Microsoft bash will result in more Karma coming your way?
or...
b) You are just trying to inform time consumed folks how biased your opinions are, so as to save them from wasting more time reading whatever else it is you have to say?
If its B, I thank you for the courtesy and time savings you have given me!
The UI in question isn't actually from Microsoft. They licensed it from a company called Fortune Fountain ( yeah... lame name ), its called DialKeys(www.dialkeys.com). Its actually a very neat piece of technology.
As to the Origami's, I am actually fairly interested. There is a model coming soon that is 800$, includes a GPS built in. I have been interested in a good car based GPS device for a long time and this might just fill the need ( plus satisfy my geek fetish side nicely ).
LOL... you think the lack of focus is particular to Microsoft? Think again.
Hell, look at google. They became massively successful because they were great at what they did ( search and advertising ). Now what are they doing? Lets see... getting into the email space ( gmail ), buying up calendaring software, mapping software ( Google earth ), Flikr like graphics companies ( Picasso ). On top of that, buying up dark fibre for dog knows why, as of yet. Plus they seem to be trying to push their way into the office suite with their new spreadsheet.
Its the nature of the beast. I could have just as easily picked Yahoo, or Ebay as examples, as they have both made high profile but non specialized moves as of late. Its just what happens, when you tap out your market share, you need to move into new markets. "Breaking even" just aint good enough. Hell, investors would rather see a company lose money trying new shit out then they would seeing the same company break even time and time again. They really have no choice in the matter.
Then why is it that the first 3 HD-DVDs released were all from Warner Home Video? ( Last Samurai, Million Dollar Baby and Phantom of the Opera )?
Content producer support is anything but decided at this point.
The fact this was modded insightful proves that Slashdot is still driven by pack mentality. Sadly I actually thought things were improving around here recently, but I may have set my hopes a bit too high. Oh well, nobody to blame but myself.
The reason? It has trained at least one, and probably two, generations of computer users to expect the computer to be fragile. It has made those people afraid to simply experiment with the computer because they might do something to "break" it.
Havent used too many other operating systems, have you? Im sorry, but compared to the DOS days, even Windows 95 was a godsend. I will say Windows 3 and 3.1 were nothing special, but frankly it was still easier to nuke a DOS install in those days. Plus, they actually moved away from having to have a stack of floppies lying around to boot in order to make your system actually run your software. Worse still, my first computer ( An Atari 800 XL ) had a button that was pretty much the equivalent of format my machine down the left hand side. If anything 95 improved "fragility" and every version since ( minus ME, ME was trash ) has improved this greatly. Hell, ive accidently blown away more Linux installs then Windows over the years... you know, doing shit like recompiling the kernal to get my friggin hardware to work!
This is a big reason there are so many people who don't want to learn how the computer works. By training at least one generation of people that computers are fragile, Microsoft has in a single stroke managed to limit people's willingness to learn about the computer they use every day, and thus limited their effectiveness with it.
Yeah, im sure thats the reason. Not because most people look at a computer as a tool. I mean, everyone that drives a car knows how to fix their transmission... right? Right? You know what, with a manual transmission, its extremely easy to blow a clutch, but strangely many people are still happy to drive them without knowing how to make that fix.
That Microsoft also tends to (or has tended to) write their software in such a way as to hide the details of errors that occur only exacerbates the problem. And the constant stream of critical security flaws only serves to hammer in the final nail in the coffin.
Yes... because every user wants to see stack dumps and memory traces when something goes wrong. I mean like when linux crashes and I get the error message - Seg Fault. I mean, thanks to that unhidden error, phew... I know exactly whats going on! As to "constant stream of security flaws"... do you remember any in the pre-Internet days of Windows? Oddly I cant. The holes come from security having not been a huge focus when the core OS was designed, and frankly at the time for a consumer OS, that made alot of sense. 12 years ago could you have imagined spyware, malware, trojans and internet worms?
Sharepoint is actually a pretty damned impressive product now that it hit 2003. 2001 and the origonal werent near as impressive. Sharepoint is pretty damned close to a disruptive technology if your company uses it correctly. It pretty much blows away the concept of organizing via shared network file system aswell as sharing documents internally with attachments. If you can train yourself off both those practices, the productivity gain is pretty damned impressive.
That said, Workflow is the biggest weakness of 2003. My understanding is 2007 will have workflow built in which will make a huge difference. Otherwise, you will probrably end up buying a BPM ( Business Process Management ) package from a company like K2, Ultima or Captaris. Once you start organizing documents in a portal, your quickly going to want workflow on top like approvals and routing, or tiered publishing. Out of the box, Sharepoint supports all of those things pretty poorly.
I can say as a company we are moving away from Novell to a sharepoint solution. ( By the way, Groupwise is closer to Exchange, so far as products go ). Right now we make fairly extensive use of iFolder for our Extranet and hands down Sharepoint has it beat. First of, the stability of Novell is something horrid compared to Windows 2003 ( never though id say that... ). Yet, since about Netware 6, its brutal the number of critical crashes that occur.
On top of that, Novell just can't compete feature wise. Versioning? Nope. Easy self service? Nope. Office Integration? Nope. On top of that the Sharepoint searching and meta data aspects just trounce Novell hands down. Frankly I would figure within 3 years we will be Novell free ( its File & Print now, used to be much more ). Im not going to lose any sleep over that either.
The biggest flaw to date with Sharepoint 2003, is that lack of workflow. You end up buying something like Captaris Teamplate, or K2 Workflow within months of a purchase. There is basic document approval built into Sharepoint, but its almost useless.
Frankly, I would always rather see a machine killed over a human. Sadly, in military thinking im the exception to the norm. It really does boil down to total cost of ownership ( TOC ) like in any other business. That depresses me greatly, but point blank the military assigns a value to each "asset" and acts accordingly. To use a horrible example, if the military had to chose between sacraficing an empty billion dollar aircraft carrier or a dozen troops, we both know how they will choose.
But I am both happy with any technology that saves or prevents the loss of human life ( on either side of the conflict to be honest ) and to know that some people out there know that first off, we have a military in Canada and secondly, they understand the contributions we do infact make. I would say 99% of Americans dont realize Canada sent troops to both Veitnam and Korea, let alone the fact that we do infact have special forces ( yes... Canada actually has special forces... ) in Iraq as we speak.
Bravo to you, and I hope your experiences along side the Canadian army were good ones.
Mod points for being off topic be damned, Im just delighted to see that you know Canadians are picking up the slack in Afghanistan. Im not kidding in any way here, its heartening to see that people notice our small but meaningful contribution. Many people based on Canada for not supporting Iraq, but seemed to forget that we have our people dying in Afghanistan as part of the war on terror too.
Thing is though, the military already has drones that can basically hover silently for hours and are the extremely small. I dont really see what the advantage of a wall hugger version would be unless 1) the ability to stick to the wall doesnt require any energy to maintain or 2) they are sufficently cheaper.
Since its only a blurb, here is basically the article in full
A GECKO-like robot with sticky feet could soon be scampering up a wall near you. See a video of the robot in action here (24MB mov file).
Geckos can climb up walls and across ceilings thanks to the millions of tiny hairs, or setae, on the surface of their feet. Each of these hairs is attracted to the wall by an intermolecular force called the van der Waals force, and this allows the gecko's feet to adhere.
Stickybot, developed by Mark Cutkosky and his team at Stanford University in California, has feet with synthetic setae made of an elastomer. These tiny polymer pads ensure a large area of contact between the feet and the wall, maximising the van der Waals stickiness.
The Pentagon is interested in developing gecko-inspired climbing gloves and shoes. Cutkosky says a Stickybot-type robot would also make an adept planetary rover or rescue bot.
Frankly, I cant believe this tech couldnt have been done already, even twenty or thirty years ago. I have to imagine we've had the tech to do adhesiveness on demand based on an external stimuli ( such as electricity ) for many years. We have had the ability when the opposite material is metal since atleast the beginning of the space race, but even sticking to any surface on demand shouldnt be too difficult.
My question is, does the armies interest stem from creating an army of spidermen?
Yeah, the worst part is, if you tear down that savants Access DB or Excel spreadsheet, you had better replace it with something functionally superior. Im not saying technically superior, end users dont care about that. Im say it has to be feature complete with less bugs then the earlier system. Bug wise its normally not a problem, but feature wise it can be a nightmare. On of the biggest strengths and weaknesses of adhoc Excel solutions is the ease of customizations without involving IT. That is very hard to replecate in code, atleast in a time efficent manor. In the end, your solution may be more robust, scale better and be more tolerant to failure. Yet, if the end user finds his/her job harder, they are going to resist like you couldnt believe.
As to audits, yeah, that becomes a bitch. Then again, half the audits out there are easy to pass with a bit of sleight of hand. Many audits have conditions like "have or are implementing a solution that does blah blah blah". The are implementing part makes it really easy to get by without any real actual work.
Thats the worst put, some of these Excel people can be dumb as dirt, but when it comes to Excel, my god they can perform wizardry. As an actual example ive seen at work, there are spreadsheets that hit the 65K limit but they are so key to peoples job functions they find "work arounds", like creating "archive" spreadsheets once they hit the fixed limit and starting a new copy of the sheet that cross references all the archives.
Hell, ive seen people in excel basically create relational databases WITHIN excel. Dont under estimate what these people can come up with, some of its pretty damned scary.
Plus, atleast where I am, we have HUNDREDS of Excel workbooks and pidly ass Access databases that really should be in Oracle or SQL, but at the same time, they work. Our IT department is nowhere big enough to port and maintain each of these solutions to a more robust system. Plus, people creating these systems are pretty damned good at taking ownership of them. However, if they dont create the sheet/DB that last thing they want to do is maintain it. A double edge sword really.
For the most part both Excel and Access are necisarry evils, unless you have a huge IT budget.
Seriously - 1GB ram (512MB for low end installs) seems like an awful lot to me....
For whatever reason Microsoft is high-balling these figures. I ran Vista on my rather standard laptop ( Amd 64 3ghz, 1gig, craptastic nvidia card and a 5400rpm hard drive ) and to be honest, it was snappier on that machine then it was on the XP install it replaced. This was a few months back, so I have to (hope) the performace has improved since.
Seriously, you turn off all the new eye candy(which you can do) and I believe Vista outperforms XP in most cases. The TinFoil hat wearing part of me almost wonders if part of this is simply a deal Microsoft has struck with OEMs like Dell. The higher the system requirements appear to be, the more likely a user is to buy a new PC. If the user buys a new PC Microsoft makes another OEM Vista license sale. Win - Win... well except the consumer that is.
It is true that the 100,000 or so extra Xbox 360's sold probably do mean another 150,000 or so games added to the tally for the month too. But from MS's point of view, that's really got to be a pretty disappointing number.
Not really sure where you learned math, but wasntit 295,000 units sold. On top of that, even if it was only 100,000 units, the attach rate with the 360 is close to 4 games per unit. That adds up closer to 400,000 extra games sold using the 100,000 number and 1.18 million games sold using the 295K number. Neither should cause Microsoft to lose sleep. Plus, these numbers were from April, before Sony shot themselves multiple times in the foot. I imagine Microsoft staff are sleeping pretty soundly these days.
Kinda kills earlier analyst comments that "The 360 is bad for the industry" as an 15.5% rise in sales sounds like a pretty damned good thing for the industry. Although Kingdom Hearts2 really does need to get the credit it deserves.
So basically they are setting up a method for vendors to submit driver updates through them, then distributing them with YaST if the versions dont match.
More so than that... what is it? Frankly, all I get out of reading that article is that Novell is going to accept drivers directly from vendors, and then have some form of distribution method for customers to get up to date drivers from within SUSE.
Im still boycotting subway... once that former fat fuck Jarred admits it was actually liposuction, ill eat there again, until then "Let them eat caviar!!!!"
Yeah, the big winners win, but thats rare these days, REALLY rare. Instead of dealing with EA and UBISOFT, your now dealing with MSN games and RealArcade, etc... that are charging upwards to 50%+ royalites just to distribute your games. The Indy market isnt what it was when bejewelled made millions.
Dont bother coming back with the whole self publish line, as frankly without traffic driving your site, you arent going to get the sales. There are exceptions, but in the end they are exactly that, exceptions.
Check out the postmortem on www.bookofhook about the indy game development Brian Hook ( of iD fame) started and see how it turned out. Look into MonkeyStone, the indy dev house Romero started and bombed at. Even a big name isnt a huge help anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Im going to completely ignore the typical grammar nazi posts I could throw in...
We havent been innocent for a very long time. The Veitnam war was probrably the end of it, and even before that fear played a hell of a big role in our lives ( you know... the whole Cold War thing ). The only thing that has changed since post World War 2 innocence is a greater lack of conformity, the fear mongering was always there.
Movies are a classic example, horror movies and thrillers specifically. The themes change from generation to generation, but there was always an underlying current. Godzilla representing the fallout of the nucleur era, countless war movies following vietnam, slasher flicks of the 70s and 80s teaching us our normal fellow man may infact be a psychotic killer. But here is an example much closer to home for me( at my age ). Did you every go trick or treating? Was *the fear* ever put into you that you had to inspect all of your candy, because psychos were putting razorblades and poison in them? Ever hear of a single case of that actually happenning? I mean... an actual case of someone you know? No, it was simply media generated hype.
Yeah, there are sickos in the world, always have been. Thing is, in our 24/7 media coverage generation we get overloaded with stories of pure evil. I have to imagine an immegrant from a war oppressed region of Africa has to look at America's modern day fears and laugh. When our biggest fears are whatever media/goverment generated terror scheme which never actually seem to happen. After that, our fears seem to revolve around meaningless shit like Grand Theft Auto and its murder simulations. To someone who came from a soceity where death was a daily occurance, our fears much seem pretty damned trivial.
Notice though, the government isnt doing much to curb those fears? Thats simple, a scared population is an easy to control population. Something the current regime seems to have learned exceedingly well.
Most people will look at this and see a corrupt police force and yet another sign of our times. Yes, I see the irony that a citizen is getting charged under a wiretapping law in this day and age.
Problem is, most people don't see these stories for what they truly generally are. Stupidity. You know, there are stupid cops and even stupid judges. Most of the time, when cases like this make it out into the world people think that the system is to blame. Normally thats not the case, the stupidity of the officers involved are to blame. Well, either that or some queer powertrip, which is far too common with law enforcement aswell.
In the end, this will all get thrown out in court. Thing is, nobody knows at what cost it will be to the guy involved. Thats truly the greatest flaw of all in the system. IMHO, there should almost be a pre-court judge that can take a look at cases in advance as a checksum against stupidity, and throw them out right away if they are as dumb as this one. I suppose that would be rife for abusing too though.
Paypal isnt so much the most popular service because it's "easy"
Many other services are just as easy to use as Paypal. No the biggest reasons are:
- Its "the brand" so far as online payments go. Most people use paypal, so other people get brought in my default.
- Its trusted. For online payments, this is a HUGE deal.
- Its cheap. Really, look at what people have to pay for online banking. If you want to setup an e-commerce website, alot of payment gateways charge a monthly fee, then take a huge percentage of your revinue. Plus, payout rates ( how fast you get your cash )are much higher with Paypal then most gateways.
- It acts as a credit card proxy, so if you have a MC or Visa, you can pay with Paypal without the fear of giving out your credit card number.
- Its in bed with eBay. Alot of peoples first need for a payment service is because they bought something on eBay. Once they have an eBay account, if they buy something else online, why sign up for a different service when the one you use already works?
So, there are many reasons beyond "it's easy" that Paypal is popular.
Thats my biggest beef with the way this kit works. The JSNI interface seems like a pure hack to start with doing things like embedding javascript code in a java file using code like the following:
I find these kinds of toolkits get you up and going quickly, especially if you are new. However, the first time you run into something the toolkit can't handle, the black box nature means your SOL.
Question for you...
Do you insist on saying M$ because:
a) Your pandering to the Linux Zealot crowd, where as you think any Microsoft bash will result in more Karma coming your way?
or...
b) You are just trying to inform time consumed folks how biased your opinions are, so as to save them from wasting more time reading whatever else it is you have to say?
If its B, I thank you for the courtesy and time savings you have given me!
I am with you on most of your comment, but whats so altruistic about Costco?
The UI in question isn't actually from Microsoft. They licensed it from a company called Fortune Fountain ( yeah... lame name ), its called DialKeys(www.dialkeys.com). Its actually a very neat piece of technology.
As to the Origami's, I am actually fairly interested. There is a model coming soon that is 800$, includes a GPS built in. I have been interested in a good car based GPS device for a long time and this might just fill the need ( plus satisfy my geek fetish side nicely ).
LOL... you think the lack of focus is particular to Microsoft? Think again.
Hell, look at google. They became massively successful because they were great at what they did ( search and advertising ). Now what are they doing? Lets see... getting into the email space ( gmail ), buying up calendaring software, mapping software ( Google earth ), Flikr like graphics companies ( Picasso ). On top of that, buying up dark fibre for dog knows why, as of yet. Plus they seem to be trying to push their way into the office suite with their new spreadsheet.
Its the nature of the beast. I could have just as easily picked Yahoo, or Ebay as examples, as they have both made high profile but non specialized moves as of late. Its just what happens, when you tap out your market share, you need to move into new markets. "Breaking even" just aint good enough. Hell, investors would rather see a company lose money trying new shit out then they would seeing the same company break even time and time again. They really have no choice in the matter.
Then why is it that the first 3 HD-DVDs released were all from Warner Home Video? ( Last Samurai, Million Dollar Baby and Phantom of the Opera )? Content producer support is anything but decided at this point.
The fact this was modded insightful proves that Slashdot is still driven by pack mentality. Sadly I actually thought things were improving around here recently, but I may have set my hopes a bit too high. Oh well, nobody to blame but myself.
The reason? It has trained at least one, and probably two, generations of computer users to expect the computer to be fragile. It has made those people afraid to simply experiment with the computer because they might do something to "break" it.
Havent used too many other operating systems, have you? Im sorry, but compared to the DOS days, even Windows 95 was a godsend. I will say Windows 3 and 3.1 were nothing special, but frankly it was still easier to nuke a DOS install in those days. Plus, they actually moved away from having to have a stack of floppies lying around to boot in order to make your system actually run your software. Worse still, my first computer ( An Atari 800 XL ) had a button that was pretty much the equivalent of format my machine down the left hand side. If anything 95 improved "fragility" and every version since ( minus ME, ME was trash ) has improved this greatly. Hell, ive accidently blown away more Linux installs then Windows over the years... you know, doing shit like recompiling the kernal to get my friggin hardware to work!
This is a big reason there are so many people who don't want to learn how the computer works. By training at least one generation of people that computers are fragile, Microsoft has in a single stroke managed to limit people's willingness to learn about the computer they use every day, and thus limited their effectiveness with it.
Yeah, im sure thats the reason. Not because most people look at a computer as a tool. I mean, everyone that drives a car knows how to fix their transmission... right? Right? You know what, with a manual transmission, its extremely easy to blow a clutch, but strangely many people are still happy to drive them without knowing how to make that fix.
That Microsoft also tends to (or has tended to) write their software in such a way as to hide the details of errors that occur only exacerbates the problem. And the constant stream of critical security flaws only serves to hammer in the final nail in the coffin.
Yes... because every user wants to see stack dumps and memory traces when something goes wrong. I mean like when linux crashes and I get the error message - Seg Fault. I mean, thanks to that unhidden error, phew... I know exactly whats going on! As to "constant stream of security flaws"... do you remember any in the pre-Internet days of Windows? Oddly I cant. The holes come from security having not been a huge focus when the core OS was designed, and frankly at the time for a consumer OS, that made alot of sense. 12 years ago could you have imagined spyware, malware, trojans and internet worms?
Sharepoint is actually a pretty damned impressive product now that it hit 2003. 2001 and the origonal werent near as impressive. Sharepoint is pretty damned close to a disruptive technology if your company uses it correctly. It pretty much blows away the concept of organizing via shared network file system aswell as sharing documents internally with attachments. If you can train yourself off both those practices, the productivity gain is pretty damned impressive.
That said, Workflow is the biggest weakness of 2003. My understanding is 2007 will have workflow built in which will make a huge difference. Otherwise, you will probrably end up buying a BPM ( Business Process Management ) package from a company like K2, Ultima or Captaris. Once you start organizing documents in a portal, your quickly going to want workflow on top like approvals and routing, or tiered publishing. Out of the box, Sharepoint supports all of those things pretty poorly.
I can say as a company we are moving away from Novell to a sharepoint solution. ( By the way, Groupwise is closer to Exchange, so far as products go ). Right now we make fairly extensive use of iFolder for our Extranet and hands down Sharepoint has it beat. First of, the stability of Novell is something horrid compared to Windows 2003 ( never though id say that... ). Yet, since about Netware 6, its brutal the number of critical crashes that occur.
On top of that, Novell just can't compete feature wise. Versioning? Nope. Easy self service? Nope. Office Integration? Nope. On top of that the Sharepoint searching and meta data aspects just trounce Novell hands down. Frankly I would figure within 3 years we will be Novell free ( its File & Print now, used to be much more ). Im not going to lose any sleep over that either.
The biggest flaw to date with Sharepoint 2003, is that lack of workflow. You end up buying something like Captaris Teamplate, or K2 Workflow within months of a purchase. There is basic document approval built into Sharepoint, but its almost useless.
Frankly, I would always rather see a machine killed over a human. Sadly, in military thinking im the exception to the norm. It really does boil down to total cost of ownership ( TOC ) like in any other business. That depresses me greatly, but point blank the military assigns a value to each "asset" and acts accordingly. To use a horrible example, if the military had to chose between sacraficing an empty billion dollar aircraft carrier or a dozen troops, we both know how they will choose.
But I am both happy with any technology that saves or prevents the loss of human life ( on either side of the conflict to be honest ) and to know that some people out there know that first off, we have a military in Canada and secondly, they understand the contributions we do infact make. I would say 99% of Americans dont realize Canada sent troops to both Veitnam and Korea, let alone the fact that we do infact have special forces ( yes... Canada actually has special forces... ) in Iraq as we speak.
Bravo to you, and I hope your experiences along side the Canadian army were good ones.
Mod points for being off topic be damned, Im just delighted to see that you know Canadians are picking up the slack in Afghanistan. Im not kidding in any way here, its heartening to see that people notice our small but meaningful contribution. Many people based on Canada for not supporting Iraq, but seemed to forget that we have our people dying in Afghanistan as part of the war on terror too.
Thing is though, the military already has drones that can basically hover silently for hours and are the extremely small. I dont really see what the advantage of a wall hugger version would be unless 1) the ability to stick to the wall doesnt require any energy to maintain or 2) they are sufficently cheaper.
Ahhh... here comes the next generation of internet voyeur pr0n! Aint technology a wonderful thing.
Since its only a blurb, here is basically the article in full
A GECKO-like robot with sticky feet could soon be scampering up a wall near you. See a video of the robot in action here (24MB mov file). Geckos can climb up walls and across ceilings thanks to the millions of tiny hairs, or setae, on the surface of their feet. Each of these hairs is attracted to the wall by an intermolecular force called the van der Waals force, and this allows the gecko's feet to adhere. Stickybot, developed by Mark Cutkosky and his team at Stanford University in California, has feet with synthetic setae made of an elastomer. These tiny polymer pads ensure a large area of contact between the feet and the wall, maximising the van der Waals stickiness. The Pentagon is interested in developing gecko-inspired climbing gloves and shoes. Cutkosky says a Stickybot-type robot would also make an adept planetary rover or rescue bot. Frankly, I cant believe this tech couldnt have been done already, even twenty or thirty years ago. I have to imagine we've had the tech to do adhesiveness on demand based on an external stimuli ( such as electricity ) for many years. We have had the ability when the opposite material is metal since atleast the beginning of the space race, but even sticking to any surface on demand shouldnt be too difficult.
My question is, does the armies interest stem from creating an army of spidermen?
Yeah, the worst part is, if you tear down that savants Access DB or Excel spreadsheet, you had better replace it with something functionally superior. Im not saying technically superior, end users dont care about that. Im say it has to be feature complete with less bugs then the earlier system. Bug wise its normally not a problem, but feature wise it can be a nightmare. On of the biggest strengths and weaknesses of adhoc Excel solutions is the ease of customizations without involving IT. That is very hard to replecate in code, atleast in a time efficent manor. In the end, your solution may be more robust, scale better and be more tolerant to failure. Yet, if the end user finds his/her job harder, they are going to resist like you couldnt believe.
As to audits, yeah, that becomes a bitch. Then again, half the audits out there are easy to pass with a bit of sleight of hand. Many audits have conditions like "have or are implementing a solution that does blah blah blah". The are implementing part makes it really easy to get by without any real actual work.
Thats the worst put, some of these Excel people can be dumb as dirt, but when it comes to Excel, my god they can perform wizardry. As an actual example ive seen at work, there are spreadsheets that hit the 65K limit but they are so key to peoples job functions they find "work arounds", like creating "archive" spreadsheets once they hit the fixed limit and starting a new copy of the sheet that cross references all the archives.
Hell, ive seen people in excel basically create relational databases WITHIN excel. Dont under estimate what these people can come up with, some of its pretty damned scary.
Plus, atleast where I am, we have HUNDREDS of Excel workbooks and pidly ass Access databases that really should be in Oracle or SQL, but at the same time, they work. Our IT department is nowhere big enough to port and maintain each of these solutions to a more robust system. Plus, people creating these systems are pretty damned good at taking ownership of them. However, if they dont create the sheet/DB that last thing they want to do is maintain it. A double edge sword really.
For the most part both Excel and Access are necisarry evils, unless you have a huge IT budget.
Seriously - 1GB ram (512MB for low end installs) seems like an awful lot to me.... For whatever reason Microsoft is high-balling these figures. I ran Vista on my rather standard laptop ( Amd 64 3ghz, 1gig, craptastic nvidia card and a 5400rpm hard drive ) and to be honest, it was snappier on that machine then it was on the XP install it replaced. This was a few months back, so I have to (hope) the performace has improved since.
Seriously, you turn off all the new eye candy(which you can do) and I believe Vista outperforms XP in most cases. The TinFoil hat wearing part of me almost wonders if part of this is simply a deal Microsoft has struck with OEMs like Dell. The higher the system requirements appear to be, the more likely a user is to buy a new PC. If the user buys a new PC Microsoft makes another OEM Vista license sale. Win - Win... well except the consumer that is.
It is true that the 100,000 or so extra Xbox 360's sold probably do mean another 150,000 or so games added to the tally for the month too. But from MS's point of view, that's really got to be a pretty disappointing number.
Not really sure where you learned math, but wasntit 295,000 units sold. On top of that, even if it was only 100,000 units, the attach rate with the 360 is close to 4 games per unit. That adds up closer to 400,000 extra games sold using the 100,000 number and 1.18 million games sold using the 295K number. Neither should cause Microsoft to lose sleep. Plus, these numbers were from April, before Sony shot themselves multiple times in the foot. I imagine Microsoft staff are sleeping pretty soundly these days.
Kinda kills earlier analyst comments that "The 360 is bad for the industry" as an 15.5% rise in sales sounds like a pretty damned good thing for the industry. Although Kingdom Hearts2 really does need to get the credit it deserves.
Ahhh... the click through link gives alot more details. http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Categor y:Partner_Linux_Driver_Process
So basically they are setting up a method for vendors to submit driver updates through them, then distributing them with YaST if the versions dont match.
Again, not seeing the breakthrough...
More so than that... what is it? Frankly, all I get out of reading that article is that Novell is going to accept drivers directly from vendors, and then have some form of distribution method for customers to get up to date drivers from within SUSE.
Not exactly what I would call a break through.
Im still boycotting subway... once that former fat fuck Jarred admits it was actually liposuction, ill eat there again, until then "Let them eat caviar!!!!"
Yeah, the big winners win, but thats rare these days, REALLY rare. Instead of dealing with EA and UBISOFT, your now dealing with MSN games and RealArcade, etc... that are charging upwards to 50%+ royalites just to distribute your games. The Indy market isnt what it was when bejewelled made millions.
Dont bother coming back with the whole self publish line, as frankly without traffic driving your site, you arent going to get the sales. There are exceptions, but in the end they are exactly that, exceptions.
Check out the postmortem on www.bookofhook about the indy game development Brian Hook ( of iD fame) started and see how it turned out. Look into MonkeyStone, the indy dev house Romero started and bombed at. Even a big name isnt a huge help anymore.