Funny - I have TWC in Queens (Astoria), and the service is excellent. I regularly get 1000kbytes/sec download speeds, and upload speeds of up to 64kbytes/sec. My service has never been interrupted. The contractor who installed the line was friendly, clean, efficient, and good at what he did (I've never crimped cables so neatly or quickly; I've also never mounted cables along the baseboards as neatly as he did). Sorry you're not happy with them...
"This whole thing is just a political football; Spitzer is dragging it out in order to make himself seem more appealing to conservatives, because he has an election coming up in 2010 and he needs to have some resume lines for it."
This isn't a conservative or liberal standpoint; it's a fascist one and one both 'sides' adhere to. A true conservative would rail on anything like this, because it infringes personal freedom and grows the government. The Neocons that label themselves conservative and run the GOP now are fascists in elephant suits, just like the democrats are fascists in donkey suits. Their differences are only skin deep (and typically on pointless 'flashpoint' type decisions).
Too bad the R rating on movies is a guideline, not a law.
It is theater policy that prohibits those under 17 from being admitted to an R rated film without an adult present (and many theaters restrict this further for evening shows, not allowing anyone under 17 in even with an adult - younger individuals in the audience tend to increase the ambient noise factor, be it giggling at the boob scene or laughing at an explosion).
The only law restricting film sales is for NC17 rated films, which are your ultraviolence and porn. I don't think we've seen games that reach the level of realistic violence in many R rated films (Schindler's List, anyone?), though I haven't played Manhunt.
Until we start seeing videogames with the level of realism and wanton violence as, say, Faces of Death, well...
This kind of legislation is stupid, silly, and - what's this with these fascists legislating what parents should be doing in the first place?
For those of you who live in New York City, there's a rally on May 5 to protest video game legislation and mourn for the lives snuffed out at VT. It starts at 1PM in Bryant Park.
Public schools should be transformed from the monolithic installments they are today, and turned to something more community oriented.
I'm still trying to reconcile having an extensive curriculum available (many foreign languages, high quality arts and sciences, etc) in a small school building without having many redundancies (inefficiencies) across the school system. Here's my current proposal:
Small classrooms (student size) in small high tech schools. More schools, less students per school. They typically walk or ride a bike to school, because they're within a half mile. Much, much closer if in an urban environment. Once at school, their core curriculum is taught in the morning. There are no 'elementary,' 'middle,' and 'high' schools: the levels of instruction available in each school are determined by demand. Cafeterias sell subsidized locally grown foodstuffs, all fresh. Most school cafeterias follow the mantra: open the box, put the box in the microwave, set the box out for the kids to eat. It's disgusting, and terribly unhealthy. One school in the midwest for problem children switched from the typical foodstuffs to healthy locally grown stuffs, and the mood and attitude of the children improved. Imagine that.
At the beginning of each school semester, the parent comes in with the child (depending on age; older children likely don't need a parent there but will need one to sign off on things) and discusses with a counselor possible "extracurricular activities:" art, music, computer science, specialized interests, performing arts, etc. Depending on their competency (based on a personal assessment, not a standardized test, from a teacher of the subject the student has not been involved with before: similar to a job interview), they are grouped into classes based on skill level and age.
The core classes make up what everyone should know: math, history, english, science, foreign language. Later on, personal finance is a required core course.
One of the reasons for treating the extracurriculars like job interviews is to invoke a sense of competition with other students. You would never "not get the job," but you might be delegated to a beginner class. This gives everyone the chance to try everything without discouraging them, but still helps drive them to be competitive. It's also more indicative of how the student will do in the real world: if they can make it through their interviews, show that they have the knowledge, and get the knowledge to move up a class next year... they are shown what they can do, and they shoot for the sky. The key is to get the kids excited about learning these extracurriculars; help them find what they're most interested in; encourage them to try new things if they aren't happy / are bored with their current extracurriculars. Build in methodologies for students to change extracurriculars if they are unhappy, so they aren't stuck in a bullshit class that they hate for an entire semester.
These arts and sciences campuses could be made out of current school establishments after some refurbishing and upgrading.
Allow 16-18 year olds still in the system to opt out of extracurriculars - if they show that they are employed part time. Bonus points if they're employed in a sector they're interested in, instead of fast food. Set up mentoring programs between local business and schools.
Get kids ready for success, not ready for standardized tests.
"Take out of the 'achievement' aspect that comes with killing 10,000 kobolds and people would not suffer the horrible and repetitive gamplay of an MMORPG. The gameplay of MMORPGs does not stand on its own for very long. Hence, we have piles of MMORPGs with atrocious game play that retain players by keeping them addicted to the 'achievement' aspect of their repetitive gameplay."
The solution to this, of course, is the most difficult of all. The solution is to replace the artificial level and stat gains with real, tangible rewards. LOTROL tried to achieve this with their silly achievements - but even those were just another grind. These developers are still thinking inside the box. What about having your character actually survive to an old age, only to be able to retire him - and in doing so, introduce a new, unique artifact into the world? Maybe if you had artificial death, but reduced the playtime required to get equipped and 'up to speed' to do 90% of the content a matter of hours, instead of weeks. Maybe if you made the process of dying (or, the syntax of your character's dying) a requirement for an achievement that can benefit later characters? What if there was actually a storyline that players could build towards, instead of reading and occasionally dealing with huge spawns (or, in WoW's case, BRAND NEW DUNGEONS WOO)... Maybe if you could actually control an economy through trade, or protect an economy through battle.. these games would be more endearing.
There was a recent episode of Numb3rs for which this was a topic, as well. It involved scandal and cheating an election by using a collection of voting machines in a 'swing' area of the area which was voting, and for a relatively unimportant role - all in a test to see if it would work for a larger scale fraud.
Yeah, but what sane gamer wants to actually play a Pavlovian - er, I mean, Brad McQuaidian - 'game'? Much less pay to beta test it so it 'might' get better? The guy has about the same game design skills as what they shovel out of the elephant pen at the local zoo.
Really, this says it all. It's a terribly derivative product with little or no thought behind what might actually propel the industry forward. Then again, who was expecting anything more from Brad?
"Gee, have to actually explore the game to improve your character!"
Granted, the ruins traits were kind of interesting. But stats are fairly useless.
The traits that actually increase your abilities take a focused effort on your part to use the ability the trait is based on. Over and over again. Then bam, all of a sudden, you get a new one. Woo!
I think I got up to level 15 in the stress test and only got the exploration traits, and a couple of the mob-slaying traits (woo, okay, I'm a wolfslayer. awesome.)
The game had some potentially interesting mechanics (in traits), but other weaknesses (quest grind, typical level-based play, static world that EVERYONE knows what the story will end up like...) make it a pretty weak game overall.
What can they do with the story, anyway? The elves were already in the process of leaving at the beginning of the fellowship, and complete it at the end, ushering in the age of Man. unfortunately, if this goes as planned, a quarter of the game population is going to disappear in about three years. If the game lasts that long, and if they follow cannon. OH WAIT, EXPANSION PACK. WAII ^_^v
There are other ways to keep a player engaged than dangle a never-achievable carrot in front of their noses.
Make a game world that's dynamic and actually changes based on socio-economic-political structures (ie..guilds) over time, without falling into the shadowbane trap... and you could have an amazing MMO that needs no 'grind' (or very minimal grind to play 90% of the game) to keep players engaged. Don't know if the server technology is there for it yet.. but I'll keep my fingers crossed.
"don't remember XP's rollout being this much trouble. I remember being elated at how it just seemed to have drivers for everything I was running and and there was a significant improvement over Win98 and NT"
That's because the Windows 2000 drivers only needed to be slightly tweaked for XP when it was first released, and it had a 2 year head start in that department. That's why most driver packages are "Windows 2000 / XP" - for many pieces of hardware, there are little to no differences in drivers between the two OSes.
Vista, on the other hand, includes all this proprietary DRM later shiat between the hardware and the OS... It's going to take vendors a year or so to really get the hang of writing drivers for it. Just like drivers were kinda hard to find and somewhat flakey when Windows 2000 came out.
Note, I'm not saying this is a good thing.. it's just something that's pretty predictable from how MS has built shit in the past.
Not just anime conventions - Dir en Grey is doing a HUGE tour of the US right now. Pizzicato 5 opened for George Clinton.
If Japanese bands were smart, they wouldn't tour to anime conventions... most of the people who go to the concerts there are more interested in screaming over pretty japanese men than buying a cd or a tshirt.
Because we're not being invaded, we're extending imperial control over a foreign sovereign nation and installing a puppet government in order to keep the region destabilized; if the region stabilized, OPEC would be much more powerful and the effect of their quasi-monopoly would be much more obvious. Once a scalable oil alternative is found, the region will descend into anarchy: they'll either kill themselves off or form a union of sorts and figure out some other export than crude. After 50-100 years of bloody battle. The only reason the region is so unstable (and has been for centuries) is because of the west (europe and america)'s constant meddling to keep it in a state of fracture.
It's the same technique prison guards use to keep prisoners under control (covertly promoting rival gang factions within the prison); the same technique slave-owners in the not-so-distant US past used; the same technique deBeers uses in Africa.
It's all for one focus: This (presumably not as advanced) group of people in this region have sole control over a high-demand resource. Another group of people sees it and gets dollar signs in their eyes. Instead of invading and subjugating, they sow dissent and encourage factional disputes. The factions sell them the raw material at low cost (compared to world market) in return for weapons to fight their artificial enemies. The US and Soviet Union took turns doing this in the middle east. DeBeers does this in Africa. This war has nothing to do with terrorism, and everything to do with keeping the region destabilized.
Hell, I'm still on Windows 2000 at home. I've seen no reason to upgrade. At all.
I'm running a little bit older hardware (putting money away for a macbook pro), sure - but not THAT old. Pentium 4 3ghz (ht turned off), pc3200 ram, etc etc. It was a fairly high end machine when I first put it together. It still does fine for: Photoshop, notepad++, web browsing, limited (modern) gaming (M:TW 2 runs like crap), and just about everything else I need out of it. I just wish I had a nice brainstorming/writing application for it, like there are for OSX (I'm not shelling out the money for Office - I don't do reports, presentations, etc... I write poetry, fiction and nonfiction along with conceptual exercises in game design documents).
I don't see any more reason to update to Vista than I do to update to XP. A prettier interface? If I wanted that, I'd be running xgl on linux (unfortunately, gimp doesn't support layer blending modes or the upcoming filter layers, so I pretty much need CS2 for my freelance work as a web designer unless I want my graphics to take about 30 times longer to create). Security? Okay, well, I run a pretty robust hardware firewall on my home network, only download trusted files (and scan those). The only "added" feature to Vista that could improve my day-to-day usage is MAYBE the search, but I use google desktop just fine. And I'd rather not take the DRM tunnels for every single piece of media I view that's flagged.
In fact, I'd rather move over to OSX. Linux isn't quite there for me yet, though I do futz around with it occasionally (My firewall box is debian). We'll see what it's like when microsoft releases Windows Precipice (the direct successor to a broad Vista), followed succinctly by the Windows Defenestrator.
It's still an amusement park game. They've added a few more rides, and some neat things to look at. But you're still hopping on a roller coaster - and no matter how much you like roller coasters, after you ride the same 15 roller coasters 800 times each, they get a bit bland.
I long for the day when an MMO comes out that has a truly dynamic world.
Low sodium chloride causes cells to reverse osmosis and swell, sometimes 'popping.'
Low magnesium salts can cause heart failure - which is why cardiac patients are given magnesium salts in their IV drips along with the typical saline solution and whatever other medication they need in preparation for their treatment.
One such company, Envyr Corporation (makers of iCobol), builds a solid windows-based IDE for COBOL. Their compiler supports many different architectures - AIX on RS/6000, DG/UX on AViiON (though, newer versions aren't supported on this platform), HP-UX on HP Series PA-RISC 1.1, Intel RedHat (above kernel 2.2 for newer releases), SCO (yeah, yeah, I know). They also support the full line of Windows OSes, though older versions like 98, NT and ME only have basic testing performed on them.
They provide tools for transitioning from older Data General COBOL to newer OSes (Windows, RedHat).
Interesting thing also, is they provide a cgi platform for COBOL.
They also provide various APIs for C to interact with the COBOL program you have, services for code migration, etc etc.
The company is run by several ex-Data General employees, and they really know their stuff.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Envyr Corp, but I have family that does.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because they designed it in 2004, built the prototype in 2005, and some blogspam idiot is publicizing it in 2007.
You forget stardock - makes are Galactic Civ II.
Funny - I have TWC in Queens (Astoria), and the service is excellent. I regularly get 1000kbytes/sec download speeds, and upload speeds of up to 64kbytes/sec. My service has never been interrupted. The contractor who installed the line was friendly, clean, efficient, and good at what he did (I've never crimped cables so neatly or quickly; I've also never mounted cables along the baseboards as neatly as he did). Sorry you're not happy with them...
"This whole thing is just a political football; Spitzer is dragging it out in order to make himself seem more appealing to conservatives, because he has an election coming up in 2010 and he needs to have some resume lines for it."
This isn't a conservative or liberal standpoint; it's a fascist one and one both 'sides' adhere to. A true conservative would rail on anything like this, because it infringes personal freedom and grows the government. The Neocons that label themselves conservative and run the GOP now are fascists in elephant suits, just like the democrats are fascists in donkey suits. Their differences are only skin deep (and typically on pointless 'flashpoint' type decisions).
Too bad the R rating on movies is a guideline, not a law. It is theater policy that prohibits those under 17 from being admitted to an R rated film without an adult present (and many theaters restrict this further for evening shows, not allowing anyone under 17 in even with an adult - younger individuals in the audience tend to increase the ambient noise factor, be it giggling at the boob scene or laughing at an explosion). The only law restricting film sales is for NC17 rated films, which are your ultraviolence and porn. I don't think we've seen games that reach the level of realistic violence in many R rated films (Schindler's List, anyone?), though I haven't played Manhunt. Until we start seeing videogames with the level of realism and wanton violence as, say, Faces of Death, well... This kind of legislation is stupid, silly, and - what's this with these fascists legislating what parents should be doing in the first place? For those of you who live in New York City, there's a rally on May 5 to protest video game legislation and mourn for the lives snuffed out at VT. It starts at 1PM in Bryant Park.
Public schools should be transformed from the monolithic installments they are today, and turned to something more community oriented.
I'm still trying to reconcile having an extensive curriculum available (many foreign languages, high quality arts and sciences, etc) in a small school building without having many redundancies (inefficiencies) across the school system. Here's my current proposal:
Small classrooms (student size) in small high tech schools. More schools, less students per school. They typically walk or ride a bike to school, because they're within a half mile. Much, much closer if in an urban environment. Once at school, their core curriculum is taught in the morning. There are no 'elementary,' 'middle,' and 'high' schools: the levels of instruction available in each school are determined by demand. Cafeterias sell subsidized locally grown foodstuffs, all fresh. Most school cafeterias follow the mantra: open the box, put the box in the microwave, set the box out for the kids to eat. It's disgusting, and terribly unhealthy. One school in the midwest for problem children switched from the typical foodstuffs to healthy locally grown stuffs, and the mood and attitude of the children improved. Imagine that.
At the beginning of each school semester, the parent comes in with the child (depending on age; older children likely don't need a parent there but will need one to sign off on things) and discusses with a counselor possible "extracurricular activities:" art, music, computer science, specialized interests, performing arts, etc. Depending on their competency (based on a personal assessment, not a standardized test, from a teacher of the subject the student has not been involved with before: similar to a job interview), they are grouped into classes based on skill level and age.
The core classes make up what everyone should know: math, history, english, science, foreign language. Later on, personal finance is a required core course.
One of the reasons for treating the extracurriculars like job interviews is to invoke a sense of competition with other students. You would never "not get the job," but you might be delegated to a beginner class. This gives everyone the chance to try everything without discouraging them, but still helps drive them to be competitive. It's also more indicative of how the student will do in the real world: if they can make it through their interviews, show that they have the knowledge, and get the knowledge to move up a class next year... they are shown what they can do, and they shoot for the sky. The key is to get the kids excited about learning these extracurriculars; help them find what they're most interested in; encourage them to try new things if they aren't happy / are bored with their current extracurriculars. Build in methodologies for students to change extracurriculars if they are unhappy, so they aren't stuck in a bullshit class that they hate for an entire semester.
These arts and sciences campuses could be made out of current school establishments after some refurbishing and upgrading.
Allow 16-18 year olds still in the system to opt out of extracurriculars - if they show that they are employed part time. Bonus points if they're employed in a sector they're interested in, instead of fast food. Set up mentoring programs between local business and schools.
Get kids ready for success, not ready for standardized tests.
"Take out of the 'achievement' aspect that comes with killing 10,000 kobolds and people would not suffer the horrible and repetitive gamplay of an MMORPG. The gameplay of MMORPGs does not stand on its own for very long. Hence, we have piles of MMORPGs with atrocious game play that retain players by keeping them addicted to the 'achievement' aspect of their repetitive gameplay." The solution to this, of course, is the most difficult of all. The solution is to replace the artificial level and stat gains with real, tangible rewards. LOTROL tried to achieve this with their silly achievements - but even those were just another grind. These developers are still thinking inside the box. What about having your character actually survive to an old age, only to be able to retire him - and in doing so, introduce a new, unique artifact into the world? Maybe if you had artificial death, but reduced the playtime required to get equipped and 'up to speed' to do 90% of the content a matter of hours, instead of weeks. Maybe if you made the process of dying (or, the syntax of your character's dying) a requirement for an achievement that can benefit later characters? What if there was actually a storyline that players could build towards, instead of reading and occasionally dealing with huge spawns (or, in WoW's case, BRAND NEW DUNGEONS WOO) ... Maybe if you could actually control an economy through trade, or protect an economy through battle.. these games would be more endearing.
There was a recent episode of Numb3rs for which this was a topic, as well. It involved scandal and cheating an election by using a collection of voting machines in a 'swing' area of the area which was voting, and for a relatively unimportant role - all in a test to see if it would work for a larger scale fraud.
Yeah, but what sane gamer wants to actually play a Pavlovian - er, I mean, Brad McQuaidian - 'game'? Much less pay to beta test it so it 'might' get better? The guy has about the same game design skills as what they shovel out of the elephant pen at the local zoo.
And four:
"Combines the best [worst?] of EQ1 and WoW"
Really, this says it all. It's a terribly derivative product with little or no thought behind what might actually propel the industry forward. Then again, who was expecting anything more from Brad?
"Gee, have to actually explore the game to improve your character!"
...) make it a pretty weak game overall.
Granted, the ruins traits were kind of interesting. But stats are fairly useless.
The traits that actually increase your abilities take a focused effort on your part to use the ability the trait is based on. Over and over again. Then bam, all of a sudden, you get a new one. Woo!
I think I got up to level 15 in the stress test and only got the exploration traits, and a couple of the mob-slaying traits (woo, okay, I'm a wolfslayer. awesome.)
The game had some potentially interesting mechanics (in traits), but other weaknesses (quest grind, typical level-based play, static world that EVERYONE knows what the story will end up like
What can they do with the story, anyway? The elves were already in the process of leaving at the beginning of the fellowship, and complete it at the end, ushering in the age of Man. unfortunately, if this goes as planned, a quarter of the game population is going to disappear in about three years. If the game lasts that long, and if they follow cannon. OH WAIT, EXPANSION PACK. WAII ^_^v
lame.
There are other ways to keep a player engaged than dangle a never-achievable carrot in front of their noses.
Make a game world that's dynamic and actually changes based on socio-economic-political structures (ie..guilds) over time, without falling into the shadowbane trap... and you could have an amazing MMO that needs no 'grind' (or very minimal grind to play 90% of the game) to keep players engaged. Don't know if the server technology is there for it yet.. but I'll keep my fingers crossed.
"don't remember XP's rollout being this much trouble. I remember being elated at how it just seemed to have drivers for everything I was running and and there was a significant improvement over Win98 and NT"
That's because the Windows 2000 drivers only needed to be slightly tweaked for XP when it was first released, and it had a 2 year head start in that department. That's why most driver packages are "Windows 2000 / XP" - for many pieces of hardware, there are little to no differences in drivers between the two OSes.
Vista, on the other hand, includes all this proprietary DRM later shiat between the hardware and the OS... It's going to take vendors a year or so to really get the hang of writing drivers for it. Just like drivers were kinda hard to find and somewhat flakey when Windows 2000 came out.
Note, I'm not saying this is a good thing.. it's just something that's pretty predictable from how MS has built shit in the past.
Bonus: the captcha is 'hilarity.'
You might take your own advice: Try using hd-dvd instead of hddvd and you get a drastically different result:
t ab=0&geo=all&date=all
http://www.google.com/trends?q=bluray%2C+hd-dvd&c
neither is the harris power plant near New Hill, NC (about 20 mi southwest of raleigh)
Not just anime conventions - Dir en Grey is doing a HUGE tour of the US right now. Pizzicato 5 opened for George Clinton.
If Japanese bands were smart, they wouldn't tour to anime conventions... most of the people who go to the concerts there are more interested in screaming over pretty japanese men than buying a cd or a tshirt.
Because we're not being invaded, we're extending imperial control over a foreign sovereign nation and installing a puppet government in order to keep the region destabilized; if the region stabilized, OPEC would be much more powerful and the effect of their quasi-monopoly would be much more obvious. Once a scalable oil alternative is found, the region will descend into anarchy: they'll either kill themselves off or form a union of sorts and figure out some other export than crude. After 50-100 years of bloody battle. The only reason the region is so unstable (and has been for centuries) is because of the west (europe and america)'s constant meddling to keep it in a state of fracture.
It's the same technique prison guards use to keep prisoners under control (covertly promoting rival gang factions within the prison); the same technique slave-owners in the not-so-distant US past used; the same technique deBeers uses in Africa.
It's all for one focus: This (presumably not as advanced) group of people in this region have sole control over a high-demand resource. Another group of people sees it and gets dollar signs in their eyes. Instead of invading and subjugating, they sow dissent and encourage factional disputes. The factions sell them the raw material at low cost (compared to world market) in return for weapons to fight their artificial enemies. The US and Soviet Union took turns doing this in the middle east. DeBeers does this in Africa. This war has nothing to do with terrorism, and everything to do with keeping the region destabilized.
Hell, I'm still on Windows 2000 at home. I've seen no reason to upgrade. At all.
... I write poetry, fiction and nonfiction along with conceptual exercises in game design documents).
I'm running a little bit older hardware (putting money away for a macbook pro), sure - but not THAT old. Pentium 4 3ghz (ht turned off), pc3200 ram, etc etc. It was a fairly high end machine when I first put it together. It still does fine for: Photoshop, notepad++, web browsing, limited (modern) gaming (M:TW 2 runs like crap), and just about everything else I need out of it. I just wish I had a nice brainstorming/writing application for it, like there are for OSX (I'm not shelling out the money for Office - I don't do reports, presentations, etc
I don't see any more reason to update to Vista than I do to update to XP. A prettier interface? If I wanted that, I'd be running xgl on linux (unfortunately, gimp doesn't support layer blending modes or the upcoming filter layers, so I pretty much need CS2 for my freelance work as a web designer unless I want my graphics to take about 30 times longer to create). Security? Okay, well, I run a pretty robust hardware firewall on my home network, only download trusted files (and scan those). The only "added" feature to Vista that could improve my day-to-day usage is MAYBE the search, but I use google desktop just fine. And I'd rather not take the DRM tunnels for every single piece of media I view that's flagged.
In fact, I'd rather move over to OSX. Linux isn't quite there for me yet, though I do futz around with it occasionally (My firewall box is debian). We'll see what it's like when microsoft releases Windows Precipice (the direct successor to a broad Vista), followed succinctly by the Windows Defenestrator.
Until the music files have digital watermark signals that the microphone picks up and refuses to record. Or records just a screeching whine.
All hail the return to reel-to-reel tapes!
It's still an amusement park game. They've added a few more rides, and some neat things to look at. But you're still hopping on a roller coaster - and no matter how much you like roller coasters, after you ride the same 15 roller coasters 800 times each, they get a bit bland.
I long for the day when an MMO comes out that has a truly dynamic world.
If a trojan can capture a password, what keeps it from accessing the dongle and capturing its hash?
Low sodium chloride causes cells to reverse osmosis and swell, sometimes 'popping.'
Low magnesium salts can cause heart failure - which is why cardiac patients are given magnesium salts in their IV drips along with the typical saline solution and whatever other medication they need in preparation for their treatment.
Envyr Corporation has a cgi-based web services platform for COBOL applications.
One such company, Envyr Corporation (makers of iCobol), builds a solid windows-based IDE for COBOL. Their compiler supports many different architectures - AIX on RS/6000, DG/UX on AViiON (though, newer versions aren't supported on this platform), HP-UX on HP Series PA-RISC 1.1, Intel RedHat (above kernel 2.2 for newer releases), SCO (yeah, yeah, I know). They also support the full line of Windows OSes, though older versions like 98, NT and ME only have basic testing performed on them.
They provide tools for transitioning from older Data General COBOL to newer OSes (Windows, RedHat).
Interesting thing also, is they provide a cgi platform for COBOL.
They also provide various APIs for C to interact with the COBOL program you have, services for code migration, etc etc.
The company is run by several ex-Data General employees, and they really know their stuff.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Envyr Corp, but I have family that does.
You should do it again, but use this infrared webcam hack so you don't have to have all that damn light! :D
e d-webcam/
http://www.hackaday.com/2005/03/14/make-an-infrar