My impression was that this was already a solved problem. Back when I took my AI class, all the robotics guys said the hard thing to do was to walk, and climb stairs, and that running was comparitively easy. This is why the robot that could climb stairs 3-4 years ago was a big thing (Honda I think?).
Back when they started trying to make walking things, they realized it was actually easier to run, since balance was not required - it is essentially just a controlled fall, whereas walking requires a robot to stop and rebalance itself. The first 'running' robot I saw was a robot with one leg that ran around in a circle (It looked like a pogo stick). Someone else on here pointed out that running bipedal robots have been around for quite sometime at MIT. Now I could believe that stopping after running might be a big deal.
So, basically.. I can make anything sound like a breakthrough by adding enough qualifiers to it. Notice the qualification of 'humanoid'. Kind of like the Wright brother's flight. Lots of people don't realize that people were flying before, but you add qualifiers like powered, controlled, sustained, heavier-than-air, and suddenly they're the first:)
An old friend of mine was a big mac person and had to buy a windows box to do her work for the UT business school. Not to mention all the stories about 'UT affected by Blaser worm' or some nonsense always ends up being about the business school, because their mail servers and everything I believe are MS based. As CS majors, we were always amused when the sign on the door to the business school would say something to the effect of 'Labs closed due to X worm', when the rest of us didn't even realize it was a problem.
In general, UT used to be pretty mac savvy. One of my freshman CS classes was in 68k assembler - so we got to crash the macs a lot:) Though with all the donations by Dell and such, along with the proliferation of Linux, that's diminished somewhat.
I would guess that Dell is probably the largest private employer in Austin. Granted, they're technically in Round Rock. IBM has a relatively small campus in Austin, even after acquiring Tivoli. And as far as AMD goes, Intel also has an office there as well.
My guess is another reason, if not more likely, is The University of Texas. The UT CS department is a pretty open source heavy department. The rest of the university, other than the business school, is pretty apathetic to Microsoft. I would guess that people making these decisions in Austin are either influenced by, educated by, or former employees of the university.
Overall though, Austin is a pretty tech centric city. So, at least to me, who lived there for a number of years, this isn't really that much of a surprise.
"A pigeon can fly at a cruising speed of 65km/h, 100km/h when pushed," said Mr Andreef. "But native falcons fly at up to 250km/h."
Looks like a perfect opportunity for an upgrade. They just have to train the falcons, and then they'll get a network that's 2.5 times faster, and less likely to be devoured.
no seriously, FAT was convenient and fairly standard.. all microsoft is going to do is drive manufacturers to other (hopefully free software) schemes.... That's when we all win! THANKS MICROSOFT!
That would require these businesses to recode all their software, redesign all their chips, and re-test everything, when all they have to do is cough up $250,000 or less. Not to mention the fact that incompatibilities between old and new products are almost a certainty if they don't. This results in more tech support calls and they lose even more money.
To a real business, paying it is just the cost of doing business. It might put the little guy out of work, but I'm sure the Microsoft guys have considered what this will do to their marketshare. Probably not much. So basically, it just results in the price of everything going up a buck or two. How do we all win again?
I thought I tried Huminity out once and I didn't find it particularly useful or accurate. Maybe I just used something similar. Anyone have any experience with this thing as it is now?
I had written my own guestbook and one week I started to get a couple of spam-like entries.. I deleted them and then added a little note on the 'add entry' page that said:
This is for people, not businesses. Do not use this for advertising your products or services. If I'm going to have ads on my site, you're going to pay me for them. Frankly, I pay for hosting so visitors to my site don't have to deal with ads. Exceptions must be approved by me:)
Suprisingly enough, since then, I've only gotten one post I didn't want.. Who'da thunk.
But is an expensive digital camera really worth it yet?
When I graduated, I decided to sink a bunch of money into a Minolta Dimage and I was somewhat worried that it might not be worth it. Two weeks later, I took a long camping trip out west and ended up taking about 100 pictures a day. At the end of the trip, I calculated what my film costs would have been.. and it came out to be pretty close to what the camera cost me.
The other plus was that in addition to the instant feedback of the mini-display, I could also take a look at the shots every night on my laptop when I got back to the tent. This allowed me to do a lot of playing with the camera settings and still have a reasonable idea of what they were when I saw the photos.
In the end it all depends on what you're going to do with your photos. I don't need to print any of mine since I put them on a website and just send family members the address so they can look at them. Though there are some companies that are getting into good digital printing that should bring the costs of that down as well.
So recently on Slashdot, we've seen predictions of the end of Bluetooth, the end of PDAs, and now the end of oil. I'm beginning to think people don't quite understand the concept. Sure, someday the sun will go out and it will likely be the end of Earth (though who knows what we'll have by then). Anyway, it's a little premature to proclaim something dead just because there's some competition.
According to this case study (ppt), MapQuest was founded in the 60's.. hit the electronic front in 91, and launched on the web in '96. So if we're talking the web based MapQuest, 7 tops.. 40's if they used the paper maps:) But heck, I was a young computer user, so who knows - though I can't recall using maps at that age.
External CD burners, external 802.11b wireless adapters, bluetooth adapters, ethernet adapters... all exist with USB and lose a lot of value if they don't perform at the advertised speeds. Some of these products even come with USB PCI cards to make sure..
I registered my domain about a year and a half ago, and used different addresses for each thing I used and then set the catch all account to go to an address called junkmail. The nice part about this is I could see where the spam was coming from.
I get no spam to my primary address, which only my friends and family have for the most part. Websites I've registered with send me an e-mail a month related to their sites, but I haven't gotten any spam on those addresses from anyone else. The e-mail on my resume gets about half a dozen per month and they're related to job-finding services.
So where's the actual spam coming to? Almost entirely to the address posted on the main page of my website. I occasionally get an e-mail to just some random address.. and I get a very tiny amount to an address I used in a campus newsgroup which usually isn't visible off campus. So basically, it's all spiders snagging addresses.
So assuming that SCO loses this court battle.. do they all get arrested for fraud if they don't return the money raised for license fees. I mean, they are essentially telling people to pay for something they don't own. I can claim that you have to pay me money to drink liquid, and I'm sure there are enough morons out there that would do it to give me a nice little income, but I thought that would put you behind bars.
Re:And the major thing all VoIP was missing
on
New VOIP App. Profiled
·
· Score: 2, Informative
They also make the proclamation themselves that it doesn't. I get the feeling they could be in trouble if they announce it doesn't, but have it in there anyway.
Who said anything about telling people what to use at home? This is about what the universities are using on their own computers, as you so elegantly pointed out, what does it matter what they use at home?
They were talking about resident networks. That would be a student's machine in the dorm on the university network. Not the university's machine.
We're talking about installing linux on a student's system here. The support issues with getting their hardware working alone can be a nightmare. I still haven't gotten my Linksys wireless card to play nicely on my laptop. In win2k/xp it was just a matter of plugging it in.
I'm in a pool of a bunch of grad students at the moment who are being forced to use linux systems for which only windowMaker or some crap like that is supported. Granted, we all quickly flipped to KDE anyway, but a lot of things just don't work the way they're supposed to under KDE.
This is the problem with having multiple window managers - none of which fully satisfy me yet. Gnome's close, but has a tendancy to have the side panels crash on boot in an endless loop until I can sneak in a click to remove the panel from my desktop - not exactly my ideal behavior. And definitely not something you want to throw at some poor business student. I also had one install that failed to bring up X - another thing you don't want to throw at a business student.
As for computer science students - should they be made to use Linux? Yes!
No. Frankly, any CS student should be able to program on whatever platform they see fit.. and they should be able to easily port it to whichever platform you request them to turn it in on. In fact, I would say that a CS student shouldn't program on the target platform so that he/she is aware of the compatibility issues. For those not going to academia, currently, the reality is that their job will likely be to write code for windows. And even in academia, in a field like graphics, windows is the platform of choice, simply because the drivers are typically behind the times. Every decent CS dept I've seen has supported at least Win2k, Linux, and Solaris, if not others.
Worms? What are they? I wouldn't know, I use Linux, never had any problems with worms, trojans, viruses, etc.
First off, neither would I, because I update my systems. I think the last virus I got was when I was running DOS back in the 80's. I don't recall our CS dept ever having trouble either; it's always the business school that gets shut down. Plus, the writers of these things target the most popular platform because it's more likely to spread successfully. Every system has its vulnerabilities, and I would be very surprised if there isn't someone out there that could find a few in linux.
Lastly - to tell people they have to install a certain OS on their home computer is silly. Everything is moving to device independence.. not to 'you have to use linux'. That's no better than 'you have to use windows'.
IBM doesn't do nearly as much manufacturing these days anyway. Most sites I've been to have those large manufacturing buildings, but none have had any manufacturing. Some have been occupied by other companies, and in the case of Austin, one was taken over by a culinary institute. Granted, IBM does make some things themselves, but most of the manufacturing they used to do back in the day has been outsourced for quite some time now. At least that's my understanding.
My original point was more that Congress is too stupid to recognize the difference between digital and actual cloning. I'm all for using real examples to debate the issue of cloning, but our government draws some pretty stupid conclusions because they use the wrong data.
Every once in awhile a real gem will pop up, and you won't really think of it as a great game for several years. In some instances, it's just little modifications that make it fun - like Action Quake 2.. I dug that out a few months ago and had some fun with it again.
Lately I've been playing 'Enemy Territory', which has the bonus of being a freebie. I think this one's done quite well, with the objectives and multiple classes/capabilities.. and for some reason seems more fun with me than regular ol' Wolfenstein. A little more strategy involved than in most shooter-up games these days.
Well, I didn't use a stopwatch.. My experience was with both systems doing auto-logon, so I don't notice a difference between time to logon and time to desktop. When I had 2000 on here, I used to get up in the morning, power on the machine, go do a few things and come back and it would still be loading up stuff at the desktop. Now, I power it on, and it's usually ready to go even if I just walk to the bathroom and back. Not to mention it shuts down faster. I was quite skeptical myself, but seeing the same machine with both OS's fixed that.
After I get moved and settled in, I'll be putting Redhat on a partition I no longer need, so I'm interested to see how that compares. So far, Linux has only made it to my older laptop.
According to Information Week the lawsuit against IBM will start in April of 2005!? Do we really have to put up with SCO claiming they can charge these rediculous rates for more than a year and a half? How much did Microsoft pay these guys?
I had a similar experience with the telco in New York, when I spent a summer up there. It took about a month (maybe more) to get a phone because they had to run new lines. And then once it was up, if I didn't pick up before the third ring, the line died, so my answering machine never picked up. Sprint's been pretty good to me for signal in Austin and on the road, but they're starting to get on my nerves between the lack of info about the T608 and also their reinterpretations of 'unlimited data'.
Slashdot Mirror
My impression was that this was already a solved problem. Back when I took my AI class, all the robotics guys said the hard thing to do was to walk, and climb stairs, and that running was comparitively easy. This is why the robot that could climb stairs 3-4 years ago was a big thing (Honda I think?).
Back when they started trying to make walking things, they realized it was actually easier to run, since balance was not required - it is essentially just a controlled fall, whereas walking requires a robot to stop and rebalance itself. The first 'running' robot I saw was a robot with one leg that ran around in a circle (It looked like a pogo stick). Someone else on here pointed out that running bipedal robots have been around for quite sometime at MIT. Now I could believe that stopping after running might be a big deal.
So, basically.. I can make anything sound like a breakthrough by adding enough qualifiers to it. Notice the qualification of 'humanoid'. Kind of like the Wright brother's flight. Lots of people don't realize that people were flying before, but you add qualifiers like powered, controlled, sustained, heavier-than-air, and suddenly they're the first :)
An old friend of mine was a big mac person and had to buy a windows box to do her work for the UT business school. Not to mention all the stories about 'UT affected by Blaser worm' or some nonsense always ends up being about the business school, because their mail servers and everything I believe are MS based. As CS majors, we were always amused when the sign on the door to the business school would say something to the effect of 'Labs closed due to X worm', when the rest of us didn't even realize it was a problem.
In general, UT used to be pretty mac savvy. One of my freshman CS classes was in 68k assembler - so we got to crash the macs a lot :) Though with all the donations by Dell and such, along with the proliferation of Linux, that's diminished somewhat.
I would guess that Dell is probably the largest private employer in Austin. Granted, they're technically in Round Rock. IBM has a relatively small campus in Austin, even after acquiring Tivoli. And as far as AMD goes, Intel also has an office there as well.
My guess is another reason, if not more likely, is The University of Texas. The UT CS department is a pretty open source heavy department. The rest of the university, other than the business school, is pretty apathetic to Microsoft. I would guess that people making these decisions in Austin are either influenced by, educated by, or former employees of the university.
Overall though, Austin is a pretty tech centric city. So, at least to me, who lived there for a number of years, this isn't really that much of a surprise.
"A pigeon can fly at a cruising speed of 65km/h, 100km/h when pushed," said Mr Andreef. "But native falcons fly at up to 250km/h."
Looks like a perfect opportunity for an upgrade. They just have to train the falcons, and then they'll get a network that's 2.5 times faster, and less likely to be devoured.
no seriously, FAT was convenient and fairly standard.. all microsoft is going to do is drive manufacturers to other (hopefully free software) schemes.... That's when we all win! THANKS MICROSOFT!
That would require these businesses to recode all their software, redesign all their chips, and re-test everything, when all they have to do is cough up $250,000 or less. Not to mention the fact that incompatibilities between old and new products are almost a certainty if they don't. This results in more tech support calls and they lose even more money.
To a real business, paying it is just the cost of doing business. It might put the little guy out of work, but I'm sure the Microsoft guys have considered what this will do to their marketshare. Probably not much. So basically, it just results in the price of everything going up a buck or two. How do we all win again?
I thought I tried Huminity out once and I didn't find it particularly useful or accurate. Maybe I just used something similar. Anyone have any experience with this thing as it is now?
I had written my own guestbook and one week I started to get a couple of spam-like entries.. I deleted them and then added a little note on the 'add entry' page that said:
This is for people, not businesses. Do not use this for advertising your products or services. If I'm going to have ads on my site, you're going to pay me for them. Frankly, I pay for hosting so visitors to my site don't have to deal with ads. Exceptions must be approved by me :)
Suprisingly enough, since then, I've only gotten one post I didn't want.. Who'da thunk.
But is an expensive digital camera really worth it yet?
When I graduated, I decided to sink a bunch of money into a Minolta Dimage and I was somewhat worried that it might not be worth it. Two weeks later, I took a long camping trip out west and ended up taking about 100 pictures a day. At the end of the trip, I calculated what my film costs would have been.. and it came out to be pretty close to what the camera cost me.
The other plus was that in addition to the instant feedback of the mini-display, I could also take a look at the shots every night on my laptop when I got back to the tent. This allowed me to do a lot of playing with the camera settings and still have a reasonable idea of what they were when I saw the photos.
In the end it all depends on what you're going to do with your photos. I don't need to print any of mine since I put them on a website and just send family members the address so they can look at them. Though there are some companies that are getting into good digital printing that should bring the costs of that down as well.
So recently on Slashdot, we've seen predictions of the end of Bluetooth, the end of PDAs, and now the end of oil. I'm beginning to think people don't quite understand the concept. Sure, someday the sun will go out and it will likely be the end of Earth (though who knows what we'll have by then). Anyway, it's a little premature to proclaim something dead just because there's some competition.
According to this case study (ppt), MapQuest was founded in the 60's.. hit the electronic front in 91, and launched on the web in '96. So if we're talking the web based MapQuest, 7 tops.. 40's if they used the paper maps :) But heck, I was a young computer user, so who knows - though I can't recall using maps at that age.
External CD burners, external 802.11b wireless adapters, bluetooth adapters, ethernet adapters ... all exist with USB and lose a lot of value if they don't perform at the advertised speeds. Some of these products even come with USB PCI cards to make sure..
I registered my domain about a year and a half ago, and used different addresses for each thing I used and then set the catch all account to go to an address called junkmail. The nice part about this is I could see where the spam was coming from.
I get no spam to my primary address, which only my friends and family have for the most part. Websites I've registered with send me an e-mail a month related to their sites, but I haven't gotten any spam on those addresses from anyone else. The e-mail on my resume gets about half a dozen per month and they're related to job-finding services.
So where's the actual spam coming to? Almost entirely to the address posted on the main page of my website. I occasionally get an e-mail to just some random address.. and I get a very tiny amount to an address I used in a campus newsgroup which usually isn't visible off campus. So basically, it's all spiders snagging addresses.
So assuming that SCO loses this court battle.. do they all get arrested for fraud if they don't return the money raised for license fees. I mean, they are essentially telling people to pay for something they don't own. I can claim that you have to pay me money to drink liquid, and I'm sure there are enough morons out there that would do it to give me a nice little income, but I thought that would put you behind bars.
They also make the proclamation themselves that it doesn't. I get the feeling they could be in trouble if they announce it doesn't, but have it in there anyway.
Who said anything about telling people what to use at home? This is about what the universities are using on their own computers, as you so elegantly pointed out, what does it matter what they use at home?
They were talking about resident networks. That would be a student's machine in the dorm on the university network. Not the university's machine.
There's nothing difficult about it at all
We're talking about installing linux on a student's system here. The support issues with getting their hardware working alone can be a nightmare. I still haven't gotten my Linksys wireless card to play nicely on my laptop. In win2k/xp it was just a matter of plugging it in.
I'm in a pool of a bunch of grad students at the moment who are being forced to use linux systems for which only windowMaker or some crap like that is supported. Granted, we all quickly flipped to KDE anyway, but a lot of things just don't work the way they're supposed to under KDE.
This is the problem with having multiple window managers - none of which fully satisfy me yet. Gnome's close, but has a tendancy to have the side panels crash on boot in an endless loop until I can sneak in a click to remove the panel from my desktop - not exactly my ideal behavior. And definitely not something you want to throw at some poor business student. I also had one install that failed to bring up X - another thing you don't want to throw at a business student.
As for computer science students - should they be made to use Linux? Yes!
No. Frankly, any CS student should be able to program on whatever platform they see fit.. and they should be able to easily port it to whichever platform you request them to turn it in on. In fact, I would say that a CS student shouldn't program on the target platform so that he/she is aware of the compatibility issues. For those not going to academia, currently, the reality is that their job will likely be to write code for windows. And even in academia, in a field like graphics, windows is the platform of choice, simply because the drivers are typically behind the times. Every decent CS dept I've seen has supported at least Win2k, Linux, and Solaris, if not others.
Worms? What are they? I wouldn't know, I use Linux, never had any problems with worms, trojans, viruses, etc.
First off, neither would I, because I update my systems. I think the last virus I got was when I was running DOS back in the 80's. I don't recall our CS dept ever having trouble either; it's always the business school that gets shut down. Plus, the writers of these things target the most popular platform because it's more likely to spread successfully. Every system has its vulnerabilities, and I would be very surprised if there isn't someone out there that could find a few in linux.
Lastly - to tell people they have to install a certain OS on their home computer is silly. Everything is moving to device independence.. not to 'you have to use linux'. That's no better than 'you have to use windows'.
IBM doesn't do nearly as much manufacturing these days anyway. Most sites I've been to have those large manufacturing buildings, but none have had any manufacturing. Some have been occupied by other companies, and in the case of Austin, one was taken over by a culinary institute. Granted, IBM does make some things themselves, but most of the manufacturing they used to do back in the day has been outsourced for quite some time now. At least that's my understanding.
My original point was more that Congress is too stupid to recognize the difference between digital and actual cloning. I'm all for using real examples to debate the issue of cloning, but our government draws some pretty stupid conclusions because they use the wrong data.
Don't let the legislature get wind of this story.. They'll try to use it as justification to ban cloning.
Not much technology runs without power of some sort.
Every once in awhile a real gem will pop up, and you won't really think of it as a great game for several years. In some instances, it's just little modifications that make it fun - like Action Quake 2.. I dug that out a few months ago and had some fun with it again.
Lately I've been playing 'Enemy Territory', which has the bonus of being a freebie. I think this one's done quite well, with the objectives and multiple classes/capabilities.. and for some reason seems more fun with me than regular ol' Wolfenstein. A little more strategy involved than in most shooter-up games these days.
Well, I didn't use a stopwatch.. My experience was with both systems doing auto-logon, so I don't notice a difference between time to logon and time to desktop. When I had 2000 on here, I used to get up in the morning, power on the machine, go do a few things and come back and it would still be loading up stuff at the desktop. Now, I power it on, and it's usually ready to go even if I just walk to the bathroom and back. Not to mention it shuts down faster. I was quite skeptical myself, but seeing the same machine with both OS's fixed that.
After I get moved and settled in, I'll be putting Redhat on a partition I no longer need, so I'm interested to see how that compares. So far, Linux has only made it to my older laptop.
The study in question was XP, which loads massively faster than NT or Win2k. I doubted it too, but I installed it on a system and saw for myself.
According to Information Week the lawsuit against IBM will start in April of 2005!? Do we really have to put up with SCO claiming they can charge these rediculous rates for more than a year and a half? How much did Microsoft pay these guys?
I had a similar experience with the telco in New York, when I spent a summer up there. It took about a month (maybe more) to get a phone because they had to run new lines. And then once it was up, if I didn't pick up before the third ring, the line died, so my answering machine never picked up. Sprint's been pretty good to me for signal in Austin and on the road, but they're starting to get on my nerves between the lack of info about the T608 and also their reinterpretations of 'unlimited data'.