American Power Conversion.. the market leader for UPS's (no that is not a transport company).
I'm well aware, considering that I've spec'd out 16kVA room-wide UPS's and the like. My original comment was a slightly sarcastic comment aimed at the original poster who was "pulling a Xerox" (aka confusing the company name with the type of equipment).
And the best thing is, I don't have to pay for APC's, as they all come with batteries!
They do, but my experience with laptops (particularly old laptops) has been that their battery capacity gauges don't like being left on A/C power for a couple of months; either the battery gets discharged, or the chip thinks the battery has no capacity left, and instead of going on battery power when the A/C shuts off.
PS: they're Uninterruptable Power Supplies. Not "APCs". Those are Armored Personnel Carriers.
Does anyone know how much ASIMO is estimated to have cost Honda? I know there have been several revisions and whatnot, so "just for the current one" is fair in my book.
I have a feeling it probably pales in comparison to the billion or so spent on their F1 racing efforts (yeah, billion with a b; F1 is insane these days).
anti-terrorism search engine that will hunt for 'hidden' information -- like how to take down an airliner
To be honest, that sort of thing has never struck me as the kind of problem terrorists have had- usually when they've tried it, they've been pretty successful. They haven't tried many times, and we've seen how close even complete and total idiots like Richard Reid(sp?) can come, despite all our "security measures".
Nevermind that far more planes crash because of pilot error or mechanical problems than terrorist hijackings- maybe we should rethink priorities here a little?
What's next? The Department of Transportation determining driver ed manuals need to be pulled because they tell people how to drive a truck, and trucks might be used to carry bombs? Next thing you know, budgets will be hidden because, gasp, we wouldn't want terrorists to know where we spend the most money, they might try to blow it up! Then CSPAN won't be allowed to broadcast senate sessions- wouldn't want terrorists to know when senators are in session. The list goes on and on and on.
This paranoia is getting REALLY annoying. Folks- come to grips with the fact that freedom might, on occasion, require personal sacrifice. This country is getting really fucking annoying to live in, which is pretty much exactly what terrorists set out to do.
In the words of Ben Franklin, "they that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
That's the funniest thing I've heard about the government doing since they shut down the "psychic spies" unit ten years ago.
Well, management knew it was time to close shop when, during their talks about whether to do layoffs, employees were asking for raises and coming in late.
400 bucks buys a used car...I won't really consider these affordable until they're down to 200 or less.
I love how this got moderated "troll". Folks- digital TV is supposedly "mandated" for switchover. Except nobody's making cheap digital TVs- so people aren't buying.
People also aren't buying because current plasma and LCD units just DO NOT LAST! We have a TV in our house that is at least 15 years old, and works just fine (yes, it's got an IR remote, yes, it tunes basic cable, etc). While Motorola's press release hasn't said much about exactly how long the lifetime will be on these, if the TV industry wants consumers to buy 'em in numbers large enough to make the "mandate" possible- they'd better make them a tad more durable.
a)PhysOrg is just a slightly more subtle version of PR Newswire. Note there's no author. Slashdot, please stop linking to crap like this. Manufacturers- if you're going to put out a press release, just call it a #@$!ing press release- and stop insulting our intelligence.
b)Manufactured cost is NOT market cost. Not even close. If a NE display lasts longer than plasma and looks equally nice- you can be damn sure it will cost MORE to the consumer.
c)They claim longer lifetime, but no range/estimate is given, even though they surely know what it is. If it's a year or two more than plasma (which is lucky to last 3-4 years), pardon me while I let out a big 'ol yawn.
d)A five-inch unit was produced because, most likely, they haven't been able to get high enough yield rates to do a 42" display. Call us when you've got something that actually resembles your target application in terms of scale.
Question- why are we funding an industry that is rolling in record amounts of dough? Biotech research and development is almost 100% government-funded already, and we're giving them even more?
What do we get for all these tax dollars? Why, scandals like Vioxx...and drugs like Nexium, which don't work much better than the pill they replaced, but have some little bit patented so it can't be cloned by generic drug companies...and a new catchy name or color for the public to run to their doctors, demand these premium drugs, and rip off our health insurance companies.
As others have pointed out- wiretaps, "give us the key or you go to jail just as long", as well as simply not unplugging the box...all make this project pretty pointless.
I also got a kick out of the author bragging, under a screenshot showing links to numerous illegal torrent sites, "that's a legal torrent I'm downloading!" Do these people think they're clever or something?
Any particular reason "kitplane01" came within a sentence or two of posting the entire story in his/her submission?
It's completely uncredited, and presented as material he/she wrote; that's called plagiarism, folks. Though things have gotten better over the years (I remember when more than half of the stories on the front page were like this), this still happens too often.
It's also pretty pointless. The story summary is supposed to accurately describe the story, to help us determine if we want to follow the link, or read commentary.
How does caching your cookies to the internet help speed up your local browsing?
Who said it was a cookie that was cached, and not the page content? Much of the discussion thusfar seemed based off what an anonymous quote in a ZDnet article. Far as I can tell, the guy saw "Welcome back, Bob!" and freaked, when he wasn't -actually- logged in as Bob. Furthermore, who says it isn't Futuremark (or their forum software- because we all know how security-conscious PHP/MySQL forum software is) tagging their pages as cacheable when they shouldn't be? If Google is ignoring "don't cache this page", now yes, we have a problem- but the ZDnet story is of a technical level I'd expect of a community newspaper, so it's kind of hard to tell. It's like a story in your city newspaper that read "somebody killed by a cop!" and going off on a rant about police brutality...only to find out later the guy was a bank robber with an Uzi.
Before you get all excited about bank sites etc- keep in mind those often use very unique URLs for each page and other tricks.
Considering most of the reviews marked "plusses" say things like "it was an insult to Adams, but it's saved by decent graphics and acting"- yeah. A lot of critics tried really hard to have something nice to say about it.
Is that similar to how 51% is an overwhelming election victory?
That is a "mandate", citizen! Prepare for re-education!
I, along with most of/. probably can't count the number of times that we've seen the original 3 Episodes of SWs
You're right- I can't, because each time was less memorable than the first. Ever since I purposely watched it- probably over 10 years ago- the only times I've seen it have been when absolutely nothing else was on TV, and it was being re-run for the fiftieth time on the SciFi channel.
This'll get me marked as a troll by all the rabid SW fanboys (or the Space Fetishists) with mod points, but hell if I care. Believe it or not, not everyone thought Star Wars was more than just "a nice scifi film from the 70's".
The first reviews of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith have started to trickle onto the Net. [snip] The reviews have all been positive so far
Isn't that what they said about the Hitchhiker movie? Brillaint? True to Adam's vision? Except critics are pretty much split about it...and many Hitchhiker fans all have the same thing to say, which is that it really wasn't that funny, because it didn't have that mix of absurdity and sophistication his books had- ie, it wasn't true to Adams at all. Example- we don't learn that beer is a muscle relaxant that'll help with teleporting- we're just left to assume they're getting drunk because that's the right thing to do when the end of the world is coming. We all knew that was probably the REAL reason when we read the book...but we were robbed of this by the movie.
Remember, folks- the first people to get previews of products- movies included- are those who are guaranteed to say nice things about it. Either because they always have something nice to say, they're getting compensated to have something nice to say, or they're desperate for the attention that comes with being first in line to "review" a product.
Consumer says fix it, company says we've reduced the complexity, customer still sitting waiting for fix.
The customer is sitting there wondering why their "antivirus" (or worse, "internet security"...I love that one) software isn't protecting them from a self-installing, replicating program they didn't want installed, which crashes their system and/or slows it down. I've seen spyware/adware/malware act like viruses (modifying/inserting itself into DLLs and whatnot) and worms (searching for other systems to infect) and trojans (how some of them "hide" from the user in plain sight). Snooty computer scientists get all huffy when you call a spyware program a "virus", but let's be completely upfront here- spyware/adware is just a trojan/worm/virus with commercial purpose.
Every uneducated computer user whose system I've fixed for spyware has asked the same two questions: "why doesn't my antivirus software protect me from this?" (and indeed, the software is installed, definitions are current) and "isn't this spyware stuff a virus?"
Fact remains that for all the crap hype- in at least a decade, "antivirus" technology hasn't improved. Much/all of it is based off the good old standby- definition files. Those worked when viruses took weeks to spread. Now they spread in hours- or less.
My favorite story about how useless antivirus software can be comes from 2000, when one of the worms going around got right past our antivirus software on our mail server. We looked at the one that got quarantined, and the one that didn't- and for an hour or two, we couldn't find any differences. Only when I loaded both onto my powerbook and opened them in BBedit, turning on "show all hidden characters", did I see that one had carriage returns and line feeds- the other only had one (CR's, I think). Because of this very simple change, the worm got right past our antivirus software. How idiotic is that?
"Don't worry. Their motto is 'do no evil', so we can trust them!", say the geek masses.
Dow Chemical's motto is "Living. Improved Daily". Unless you're one of 15,000-30,000 people in Bhopal, India, of course.
Ford's motto is "Ford: Quality is #1". Well, except for the Ford Pinto (or its modern equivalent, the Ford Crown Victoria, which is burning police to death left+right). Or Ford Explorers, where management ignored engineering reports saying the roof pillars were substantially weaker. Or ignition switches in millions of Ford vehicles which would catch fire- even if you weren't using the car? Then there's the Ford Focus, which I think is close to setting the world record on factory recalls...
Then there's GE- "we bring good things to life". Well, I don't think the people who have been harmed by dioxin poisoning would agree with you there. But hey, GE will sell you a nice water filtration system (seriously- go into Home Depot, GE is the featured brand. Note how it brags about removing industrial toxins?)
Microsoft says "enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential", something I think we can all give a good chortle about, considering how grossly unreliable virtually every Windows release has been, how incompatible their software is one year to the next, piss-poor interoperability, anticompetitive practices, licensing costs, spyware, viruses, etc.
Need I go on to prove that corporate PR lines are just that- nothing more than PR lines? Or should I mention that Google AdSense terms prohibited AdSense customers from discussing, in public or private, their experience/satisfaction with AdSense? Hmm. Now, why would a "do no evil" corporation do something like that?
"It will give information about heights that will be very useful in applications such as planning power lines."
Um...right. Like decades if not centuries of maps can't help there. Besides, I would think that in a country as large as India, they'd be focusing on localized power generation.
Sorry, but this sounds like a really lame excuse for lobbing a satellite up there to spy on Pakistan, with a happy-go-lucky PR spin so the average citizen thinks "oh, another satellite that will be useful!" Yessir, routing power lines.
Not like the US hasn't done the same thing- the majority of shuttle missions were for either admitted, or "disguised-as-scientific-experimentation" military satellites.
The bigger question for me is if the open source software is used and fails then where does the accountability lie
With NASA, for not validating/testing a solution enough, just as it would be my responsibility if I implemented a half-assed piece of software into a corporate environment without adequate testing. If NASA went down to the hardware store and bought a garden hose valve for a rocket fuel tank, slapped it on the night of a launch and it failed and sent a rocket into the drink- would you blame the garden hose valve maker? Course not. We like to point fingers all the time at things other than our decision-making process.
I help volunteer for a car club which teaches high performance driving at various racetracks. A lot of stuff becomes Really Important when you're driving close to the limits of your talent and the vehicle's equipment. Stuff does go wrong, although it's statistically very rare for there to be an incident caused by mechanical failure. Much of the time, it's driver error.
For example, a wheel falls off. The driver says "I crashed because my wheel fell off." No. The driver crashed because the driver forgot to check lug bolt torque, and the wheel came off because the torque on the lug bolts wasn't correct. A more complex example: "I crashed because my brakes failed". No. The driver crashed because the lap before he crashed, the driver didn't realize his brake pedal was getting really spongy- or worse, he did realize it, and didn't do anything about it (ie, he didn't pit in and bleed the brakes because he wanted to stay out on track).
commercial use of government software
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why aren't more government software development projects open source?
I seem to recall that the reason they didn't release government-developed projects as open-source was because of prohibitions on commercial use of government software.
Basicallly, they didn't want a government agency to be making software (using your tax bucks) for the profit of someone else.
Before you say "corporations pay taxes too", let me remind you that corporate tax share has gone from about 50% in the 1950's, to about 2% today. Yep- the individual foots 98% of the government budget, but corporations get all the laws.
The problem is that it's more about accountability that actually doing things right.
I worked for a company that had to follow Sarbanes-Oxley.
We were required to force password changes every month or two.
Except Mac users (at least half the company) didn't get a warning their password was about to be disabled, nor could they actually change their password, because Outlook and Microsoft's appletalk server don't allow you to change an active directory password.
So every month or two, for two days, the phone would ring off the fucking hook with people whose email accounts didn't work. And, out of curiosity, since the phone system didn't have caller ID for external lines, guess what? Anyone could call up and request a password change, since there was no policy requiring us to a)look up the employee's # and call them back, or b)deny the request if we couldn't verify it. They could, of course, just claim to be traveling on business, in a hotel or with a client. If we DID do too much due dilligence, someone would scream about how much time we were taking to get their password to them.
Way to go.
Oh, and then there were the audits of the trouble-ticket database, where some pencil-pusher who knows nothing about the department goes through and critiques those.
And then a few weeks later, you get to do it all over again, and then ONCE MORE, because you had two firms that did audits, and then a THIRD that came along and compared the first two. What a clusterfuck.
To disclaim social involvement is shameless lying when they are involved in everything from tax structure to allocation of funds
Actually, corporate tax share is around 2% these days. Used to be 50% back in the 1950's. Your taxes have gone up because corporate taxes have gone down or been evaded through thousands of tax loopholes, like foreign-head-office corporations.
Sounds like "representation without taxation" to me- and nothing infuriates me more than to see those "this truck pays $10,000 in taxes a year" stickers- when each load out of hundreds is worth at least that.
What planet do you live on? EVERY working pro I know has paid for his equipment. You may get a demo of a new camera, but after the demo period is over the camera goes back and you buy your own.
Actually, you're completely fucking wrong. Nikon GIVES AWAY some gear to high profile professionals- it's well known, and they've admitted to it as much on their websites. Where do you think computer companies learned it from?
I suspect Canon does the same, but I haven't heard anything to back it up. At the very least, Canon Professional Services members get equipment discounted a healthy bit off retail.
Part of the allure of the ISOTOPE, to some at least, is having it pre-modified to accommodate a series of lighting gadgets, ranging from a couple of cathodes through to neon string and, would you believe, a strobe light.
Um...I thought the whole 'allure' of stupi...er, I mean, custom looking cases was that they're unique and YOU built it. You know, instead of having that dull grey case that everyone else has, you have a case with neon and cutouts and 50 fans. Just like everyone else, but at least YOU botched the installation and didn't get it quite square and so on, so it's still...uh...unique.
So how is this supposed to be alluring? Next year, everyone's going to have one of these things.
Sorry, I forgot to put in [click to read more] after every sentence...
I suppose that's why the D30 had atrocious autofocus, the D60 was marginally better but suffered horrible front/back focus problems, the 10D (which I own) does the same only not quite as badly, and the 20D finally fixed it for the most part?
I suppose that's why my camera can't talk to the new 580EX flash to communicate smaller frame size and focus distance, but the 20D can? All as a cheap ploy to get me to upgrade from my 10D because it has atrocious flash metering, so much so that wedding photo pros hate it? There's a reason 580EX marketing material specifically mentions the wedding photography industry.
Still, at least Canon will service imported grey-market gear, and their CMOS sensors have lower noise than just about anything except the Fuji SuperCCD(which is amazing in almost all regards, just hindered by a body that isn't as well designed).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm well aware, considering that I've spec'd out 16kVA room-wide UPS's and the like. My original comment was a slightly sarcastic comment aimed at the original poster who was "pulling a Xerox" (aka confusing the company name with the type of equipment).
They do, but my experience with laptops (particularly old laptops) has been that their battery capacity gauges don't like being left on A/C power for a couple of months; either the battery gets discharged, or the chip thinks the battery has no capacity left, and instead of going on battery power when the A/C shuts off.
PS: they're Uninterruptable Power Supplies. Not "APCs". Those are Armored Personnel Carriers.
"Interview?" More like, "opportunity to mention APC's UPS efficiency and then yack about how important that is."
Somewhere, APC's PR firm is quite pleased.
Does anyone know how much ASIMO is estimated to have cost Honda? I know there have been several revisions and whatnot, so "just for the current one" is fair in my book.
I have a feeling it probably pales in comparison to the billion or so spent on their F1 racing efforts (yeah, billion with a b; F1 is insane these days).
To be honest, that sort of thing has never struck me as the kind of problem terrorists have had- usually when they've tried it, they've been pretty successful. They haven't tried many times, and we've seen how close even complete and total idiots like Richard Reid(sp?) can come, despite all our "security measures".
Nevermind that far more planes crash because of pilot error or mechanical problems than terrorist hijackings- maybe we should rethink priorities here a little?
What's next? The Department of Transportation determining driver ed manuals need to be pulled because they tell people how to drive a truck, and trucks might be used to carry bombs? Next thing you know, budgets will be hidden because, gasp, we wouldn't want terrorists to know where we spend the most money, they might try to blow it up! Then CSPAN won't be allowed to broadcast senate sessions- wouldn't want terrorists to know when senators are in session. The list goes on and on and on.
This paranoia is getting REALLY annoying. Folks- come to grips with the fact that freedom might, on occasion, require personal sacrifice. This country is getting really fucking annoying to live in, which is pretty much exactly what terrorists set out to do.
In the words of Ben Franklin, "they that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Well, management knew it was time to close shop when, during their talks about whether to do layoffs, employees were asking for raises and coming in late.
I love how this got moderated "troll". Folks- digital TV is supposedly "mandated" for switchover. Except nobody's making cheap digital TVs- so people aren't buying.
People also aren't buying because current plasma and LCD units just DO NOT LAST! We have a TV in our house that is at least 15 years old, and works just fine (yes, it's got an IR remote, yes, it tunes basic cable, etc). While Motorola's press release hasn't said much about exactly how long the lifetime will be on these, if the TV industry wants consumers to buy 'em in numbers large enough to make the "mandate" possible- they'd better make them a tad more durable.
a)PhysOrg is just a slightly more subtle version of PR Newswire. Note there's no author. Slashdot, please stop linking to crap like this. Manufacturers- if you're going to put out a press release, just call it a #@$!ing press release- and stop insulting our intelligence.
b)Manufactured cost is NOT market cost. Not even close. If a NE display lasts longer than plasma and looks equally nice- you can be damn sure it will cost MORE to the consumer.
c)They claim longer lifetime, but no range/estimate is given, even though they surely know what it is. If it's a year or two more than plasma (which is lucky to last 3-4 years), pardon me while I let out a big 'ol yawn.
d)A five-inch unit was produced because, most likely, they haven't been able to get high enough yield rates to do a 42" display. Call us when you've got something that actually resembles your target application in terms of scale.
What do we get for all these tax dollars? Why, scandals like Vioxx...and drugs like Nexium, which don't work much better than the pill they replaced, but have some little bit patented so it can't be cloned by generic drug companies...and a new catchy name or color for the public to run to their doctors, demand these premium drugs, and rip off our health insurance companies.
From the site:
"Use? Actually, I'm not sure"
As others have pointed out- wiretaps, "give us the key or you go to jail just as long", as well as simply not unplugging the box...all make this project pretty pointless.
I also got a kick out of the author bragging, under a screenshot showing links to numerous illegal torrent sites, "that's a legal torrent I'm downloading!" Do these people think they're clever or something?
Any particular reason "kitplane01" came within a sentence or two of posting the entire story in his/her submission?
It's completely uncredited, and presented as material he/she wrote; that's called plagiarism, folks. Though things have gotten better over the years (I remember when more than half of the stories on the front page were like this), this still happens too often.
It's also pretty pointless. The story summary is supposed to accurately describe the story, to help us determine if we want to follow the link, or read commentary.
Who said it was a cookie that was cached, and not the page content? Much of the discussion thusfar seemed based off what an anonymous quote in a ZDnet article. Far as I can tell, the guy saw "Welcome back, Bob!" and freaked, when he wasn't -actually- logged in as Bob. Furthermore, who says it isn't Futuremark (or their forum software- because we all know how security-conscious PHP/MySQL forum software is) tagging their pages as cacheable when they shouldn't be? If Google is ignoring "don't cache this page", now yes, we have a problem- but the ZDnet story is of a technical level I'd expect of a community newspaper, so it's kind of hard to tell. It's like a story in your city newspaper that read "somebody killed by a cop!" and going off on a rant about police brutality...only to find out later the guy was a bank robber with an Uzi.
Before you get all excited about bank sites etc- keep in mind those often use very unique URLs for each page and other tricks.
Considering most of the reviews marked "plusses" say things like "it was an insult to Adams, but it's saved by decent graphics and acting"- yeah. A lot of critics tried really hard to have something nice to say about it.
Is that similar to how 51% is an overwhelming election victory?
That is a "mandate", citizen! Prepare for re-education!
You're right- I can't, because each time was less memorable than the first. Ever since I purposely watched it- probably over 10 years ago- the only times I've seen it have been when absolutely nothing else was on TV, and it was being re-run for the fiftieth time on the SciFi channel.
This'll get me marked as a troll by all the rabid SW fanboys (or the Space Fetishists) with mod points, but hell if I care. Believe it or not, not everyone thought Star Wars was more than just "a nice scifi film from the 70's".
Isn't that what they said about the Hitchhiker movie? Brillaint? True to Adam's vision? Except critics are pretty much split about it...and many Hitchhiker fans all have the same thing to say, which is that it really wasn't that funny, because it didn't have that mix of absurdity and sophistication his books had- ie, it wasn't true to Adams at all. Example- we don't learn that beer is a muscle relaxant that'll help with teleporting- we're just left to assume they're getting drunk because that's the right thing to do when the end of the world is coming. We all knew that was probably the REAL reason when we read the book...but we were robbed of this by the movie.
Remember, folks- the first people to get previews of products- movies included- are those who are guaranteed to say nice things about it. Either because they always have something nice to say, they're getting compensated to have something nice to say, or they're desperate for the attention that comes with being first in line to "review" a product.
The customer is sitting there wondering why their "antivirus" (or worse, "internet security"...I love that one) software isn't protecting them from a self-installing, replicating program they didn't want installed, which crashes their system and/or slows it down. I've seen spyware/adware/malware act like viruses (modifying/inserting itself into DLLs and whatnot) and worms (searching for other systems to infect) and trojans (how some of them "hide" from the user in plain sight). Snooty computer scientists get all huffy when you call a spyware program a "virus", but let's be completely upfront here- spyware/adware is just a trojan/worm/virus with commercial purpose.
Every uneducated computer user whose system I've fixed for spyware has asked the same two questions: "why doesn't my antivirus software protect me from this?" (and indeed, the software is installed, definitions are current) and "isn't this spyware stuff a virus?"
Fact remains that for all the crap hype- in at least a decade, "antivirus" technology hasn't improved. Much/all of it is based off the good old standby- definition files. Those worked when viruses took weeks to spread. Now they spread in hours- or less.
My favorite story about how useless antivirus software can be comes from 2000, when one of the worms going around got right past our antivirus software on our mail server. We looked at the one that got quarantined, and the one that didn't- and for an hour or two, we couldn't find any differences. Only when I loaded both onto my powerbook and opened them in BBedit, turning on "show all hidden characters", did I see that one had carriage returns and line feeds- the other only had one (CR's, I think). Because of this very simple change, the worm got right past our antivirus software. How idiotic is that?
"Don't worry. Their motto is 'do no evil', so we can trust them!", say the geek masses.
Dow Chemical's motto is "Living. Improved Daily". Unless you're one of 15,000-30,000 people in Bhopal, India, of course.
Ford's motto is "Ford: Quality is #1". Well, except for the Ford Pinto (or its modern equivalent, the Ford Crown Victoria, which is burning police to death left+right). Or Ford Explorers, where management ignored engineering reports saying the roof pillars were substantially weaker. Or ignition switches in millions of Ford vehicles which would catch fire- even if you weren't using the car? Then there's the Ford Focus, which I think is close to setting the world record on factory recalls...
Then there's GE- "we bring good things to life". Well, I don't think the people who have been harmed by dioxin poisoning would agree with you there. But hey, GE will sell you a nice water filtration system (seriously- go into Home Depot, GE is the featured brand. Note how it brags about removing industrial toxins?)
Microsoft says "enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential", something I think we can all give a good chortle about, considering how grossly unreliable virtually every Windows release has been, how incompatible their software is one year to the next, piss-poor interoperability, anticompetitive practices, licensing costs, spyware, viruses, etc.
Need I go on to prove that corporate PR lines are just that- nothing more than PR lines? Or should I mention that Google AdSense terms prohibited AdSense customers from discussing, in public or private, their experience/satisfaction with AdSense? Hmm. Now, why would a "do no evil" corporation do something like that?
Um...right. Like decades if not centuries of maps can't help there. Besides, I would think that in a country as large as India, they'd be focusing on localized power generation.
Sorry, but this sounds like a really lame excuse for lobbing a satellite up there to spy on Pakistan, with a happy-go-lucky PR spin so the average citizen thinks "oh, another satellite that will be useful!" Yessir, routing power lines.
Not like the US hasn't done the same thing- the majority of shuttle missions were for either admitted, or "disguised-as-scientific-experimentation" military satellites.
With NASA, for not validating/testing a solution enough, just as it would be my responsibility if I implemented a half-assed piece of software into a corporate environment without adequate testing. If NASA went down to the hardware store and bought a garden hose valve for a rocket fuel tank, slapped it on the night of a launch and it failed and sent a rocket into the drink- would you blame the garden hose valve maker? Course not. We like to point fingers all the time at things other than our decision-making process.
I help volunteer for a car club which teaches high performance driving at various racetracks. A lot of stuff becomes Really Important when you're driving close to the limits of your talent and the vehicle's equipment. Stuff does go wrong, although it's statistically very rare for there to be an incident caused by mechanical failure. Much of the time, it's driver error.
For example, a wheel falls off. The driver says "I crashed because my wheel fell off." No. The driver crashed because the driver forgot to check lug bolt torque, and the wheel came off because the torque on the lug bolts wasn't correct. A more complex example: "I crashed because my brakes failed". No. The driver crashed because the lap before he crashed, the driver didn't realize his brake pedal was getting really spongy- or worse, he did realize it, and didn't do anything about it (ie, he didn't pit in and bleed the brakes because he wanted to stay out on track).
I seem to recall that the reason they didn't release government-developed projects as open-source was because of prohibitions on commercial use of government software.
Basicallly, they didn't want a government agency to be making software (using your tax bucks) for the profit of someone else.
Before you say "corporations pay taxes too", let me remind you that corporate tax share has gone from about 50% in the 1950's, to about 2% today. Yep- the individual foots 98% of the government budget, but corporations get all the laws.
I worked for a company that had to follow Sarbanes-Oxley.
We were required to force password changes every month or two.
Except Mac users (at least half the company) didn't get a warning their password was about to be disabled, nor could they actually change their password, because Outlook and Microsoft's appletalk server don't allow you to change an active directory password.
So every month or two, for two days, the phone would ring off the fucking hook with people whose email accounts didn't work. And, out of curiosity, since the phone system didn't have caller ID for external lines, guess what? Anyone could call up and request a password change, since there was no policy requiring us to a)look up the employee's # and call them back, or b)deny the request if we couldn't verify it. They could, of course, just claim to be traveling on business, in a hotel or with a client. If we DID do too much due dilligence, someone would scream about how much time we were taking to get their password to them.
Way to go.
Oh, and then there were the audits of the trouble-ticket database, where some pencil-pusher who knows nothing about the department goes through and critiques those.
And then a few weeks later, you get to do it all over again, and then ONCE MORE, because you had two firms that did audits, and then a THIRD that came along and compared the first two. What a clusterfuck.
Actually, corporate tax share is around 2% these days. Used to be 50% back in the 1950's. Your taxes have gone up because corporate taxes have gone down or been evaded through thousands of tax loopholes, like foreign-head-office corporations.
Sounds like "representation without taxation" to me- and nothing infuriates me more than to see those "this truck pays $10,000 in taxes a year" stickers- when each load out of hundreds is worth at least that.
Actually, you're completely fucking wrong. Nikon GIVES AWAY some gear to high profile professionals- it's well known, and they've admitted to it as much on their websites. Where do you think computer companies learned it from?
I suspect Canon does the same, but I haven't heard anything to back it up. At the very least, Canon Professional Services members get equipment discounted a healthy bit off retail.
Um...I thought the whole 'allure' of stupi...er, I mean, custom looking cases was that they're unique and YOU built it. You know, instead of having that dull grey case that everyone else has, you have a case with neon and cutouts and 50 fans. Just like everyone else, but at least YOU botched the installation and didn't get it quite square and so on, so it's still...uh...unique.
So how is this supposed to be alluring? Next year, everyone's going to have one of these things.
Sorry, I forgot to put in [click to read more] after every sentence...
I suppose that's why the D30 had atrocious autofocus, the D60 was marginally better but suffered horrible front/back focus problems, the 10D (which I own) does the same only not quite as badly, and the 20D finally fixed it for the most part?
I suppose that's why my camera can't talk to the new 580EX flash to communicate smaller frame size and focus distance, but the 20D can? All as a cheap ploy to get me to upgrade from my 10D because it has atrocious flash metering, so much so that wedding photo pros hate it? There's a reason 580EX marketing material specifically mentions the wedding photography industry.
Still, at least Canon will service imported grey-market gear, and their CMOS sensors have lower noise than just about anything except the Fuji SuperCCD(which is amazing in almost all regards, just hindered by a body that isn't as well designed).