You obviously don't require anything graphically intense. For imagery related work, a CRT will out perform the flat panel. For general use though, I'd love to have some flat panel, but I doubt I've seen the last of them at work.
Now a couple years back when I had to haul around a pair of 24" Sun monitor, I'd have killed for a pair of large LCDs.
"LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Two of the key unions representing actors have asked their members to authorize a strike against the video game industry after talks on a new master agreement between the two sides broke down."
I can see in some games where the voice is important (Lord of the Rings for example) but in many other games, I really don't care who is doing the voices. The game play is generally what matters most to me.
Also from the article...
"The games industry said the biggest sticking point was residuals, or ongoing payments to actors and actresses for each copy of a game sold to which they contributed, including their voices and likenesses.
The unions wanted residual payments on games that sell more than 400,000 units, while the game publishers wanted only to make single up-front payments to talent.
Results of the strike vote are expected on June 7."
If an actor wants to push for higher residuals, that's fine too, but they should be prepared for someone else to step in and do this at a cheaper price. How long until voice overs are out sourced?
Rather than starting a whole "union: good or bad" debate, I'll just state (my opinion) that I feel unions, while in the past they may have done some good, are actually a driving force in outsourcing jobs. They are by no means the only factor, but the overhead has to be passed on to a consumer at some point and consumers will choose products with a lower price if the quality is acceptable.
Well it depends on which movie the "doctor" was watching when they came to this conclusion. I have seen several listings for Freejack on Comcast lately.
I had to do this once for an employee that was being let go. The managers first called myself and one of the other administrators into the office and explained that we were to change all the root, admininistrator, and shared login (administrative but not OS related) passwords and disable the employee's accounts. When we got up to leave the office, we passed the guy coming down the hall to meet with the manager. When we were just about done with the lockdown, the guy was escorted to his desk and allowed to gather his possesions and then escorted out of the building.
Can you open multiple URLs from a single bookmark in IE? I can bookmark a set of tabs that I always use and reopen them quickly without having to launch multiple browsers and in each of them launch a bookmark. One can always find a flaw in the design and likely your employer isn't going to remove your ability to use IE. Maybe Microsoft could provide a customized version of Mozilla like Sun provides in Solaris 10. I'm sure Microsoft could easily impliment the tabs in the taskbar like you want (of course I doubt they would do this but with enough pressure from you, they might).
I don't normally have more than a handful of URLs open at a time but if I do, I can certainly group them into particular windows rather than placing all in a single instance. Maybe you could put all your documentation tabs in one browser, test applications in another, research in another, etc... Searching through 20 tabs through alt-tab certainly wouldn't be a joy do look through. The description you see is limited in character length (granted that it's a generally enough to figure out what is what) but you could easily hover the mouse over a tab to get a the title too.
As others have pointed out, you can certainly choose not to use tabs for any documents you need to find through alt-tab. I just personally find having a huge number of applications to sift through in my task bar (especially if you start grouping tabs) very annoying.
While your point is valid, I would argue that you can run OOo on more platforms that MS Office.
This really is the problem. It ties OOo to only the platforms that Sun wants to support.
This link (java.sun.com) has the interesting line "Other vendors provide ports of J2SE to various operating systems and CPUs not listed here.". Does Sun really restrict which platforms Java can run on? My guess is that the platform developer may have to port and test their Java software, but why would you figure Sun to only want to support a limited set of platforms?
I think the more obvious slogan is Quality is Job One. Both Ford and Microsoft (certainly not limited to these two companies, but they are the topic of the article) seem to apply the same level of dedication to this philosophy.
Yes, hard not to be redundant for this thread.
I seem to recall a tech show some years back where Volkswagen had experimented with their vans and computers to allow "caravaning". The driver of the trailing vans actually crawled into the back seat after catching onto the caravan and the system took over. If I remember correctly, the system turned the following vehicles into "lemmings" essentially. I wonder if they carried the research forward over the years.
Running your query without quotes returns:
(You do mean this link(San Andreas Radio), right?)
MSN - 3rd
Google - 3rd
With quotes around it:
MSN - 2nd
Google - 1rst
With a + (plus sign):
MSN - 2nd
Google - 1rst
I'm not sure where #7 came from (unless others have done repeated searches on this too). Do we know what Rock Star Games is using for their web server then to know if the IIS preference comes into play in this case?
Sort of makes sense that only new systems will include this option. A vendor who delivers the 64 bit MS Windows systems will surely make every attempt to resolve the driver issues before actually selling it. Home users are more likely to just "try it" on their existing hardware without doing all the homework on verifying driver compatibility and all that will do is generate negative feedback for the company. Microsoft realizes they don't need to provide their critics with any ammo.
Sun has been very good to me for stability and performance (mostly running Oracle, WebLogic, Tomcat, Apache, and Java). XP Pro has also been pretty good, but between the two, XP Pro has had rare lockups that I haven't encountered on Sun systems. My in-laws actually have XP Home Edition and they seem to have a few problems with it but they disregard most safe computer practices (when I visit, I have to regularly clean up their system from spyware and the occasional virus - they do at least leave the AntiVirus running but often install anything they can download). I'd imagine XP Home to be pretty similar in performance to XP Pro.
I haven't looked, but Dome used to make high end medical use graphics cards that were Sun compatible. I don't know that I've ever seen them mentioned for MS Win32 use. That might be an example of a non-Sun part that may not have MS Win32 drivers first.
I have to admit, XP doesn't crash very often compared to previous MS releases. I have had it crash/lockup though due to applications and the only thing to do is power it down. I can't recall seeing a BSOD with it yet. On the other hand, my Solaris systems for the last 7 years and the DEC Ultrix systems for 3 years prior to that have had better reliability with zero OS freezes/crashes. I have had applications hang, but they haven't hung the OS in the least.
Microsoft has to overcome years poor stability reputation among IT professionals. Linux will likely face the same issue. The major difference I see though between the MS and Linux systems is that when I pay for the OS, I'd expect better quality, just because I'm paying for it. I'm probably a bit more forgiving to the Linux system crashing than a Microsoft OS.
As for the hardware comments, vendor support for the dominant desktop OS makes sense. Unless the hardware vendor sees a particular reason to release drivers simultaneously for multiple operating systems, I would expect MS to be the first driver released.
If you're looking for hardware to install into your PC, then how about showing me where I can get MS Win32 drivers for Sun GigaSwift PCI Ethernet Card. Likely this piece of hardware will only provide Solaris drivers. Note: I'm only showing this as an example to disprove your statement. Generally speaking though, you are correct about the hardware.
You know I'm sure glad Microsoft has created the concept of maintaining a data object of related emergency data for use in an emergency system. I really wonder now how the 911 system I supported 6 years ago did this. Really amazing that Tiburon Inc. figured a way to do this for Prince George's County Maryland without creating prior art. Emergency records must have magically made it from the call centers to the terminals in the police or EMS vehicles.
Maybe the patent stands because they are using.NET?
I can't see how the USPTO can let this one pass without seeing prior art.
Using your example though, not all dealerships will choose to carry multiple brands while others will. If the market supports having multiple brands, then you will see various cars brands at the dealership. The real point is that a company can choose to carry a single brand if they find that business model profitable. I'm sure Dell has done their research and found that carrying both AMD and Intel isn't as profitable for the company at this time.
Adjustments to tech support website to make sure the average home PC user can easily find the right updates
All these issues, and likely many more, must be addressed when expanding your product offering. You also need to look at where Dell makes their money. Do companies buy AMD based systems? I haven't switched jobs in a while but my current and previous employers were exclusively Intel for the MS Win32 systems.
He also explained that because of things like fog and clouds, specific regional satellite images can be a composite of several stitched-together pictures.
To illustrate the point of stitching the images together, this link presents an interesting example of that:
DC Buildings (Google.com). Notice at that the four buildings show a different side and shadow as though the vantage point were different for each of them.
Interesting enough, if you pan to the East and slightly to the South, you'll see a portion of the image is intentionally distorted. For those who would prefer to go directly to the area, click here.
The first mapping company I worked for flew aerial photos flights for counties. For the type of mapping we did (cadastral, planimetric, and topographic), we generally took the photos in late Fall (after the leaves were pretty much off the trees and before the snow fell) or early Spring (after the snow and before the leaves appeared). For a particular job, we unfortunately caught a major civil war re-enactment where they were shooting off a lot of cannons. Needless to say, the counties requirements for ground visibility required us to refly a portion of the county to retake the photos.
True that the RAID configuration of two disk isn't very efficient. In some cases, this is necessary, but it doesn't sound like your a candidate for a RAID really. Where you do see a better balance (cost vs reliability) is when you start looking at RAID 5 and typically lose a single parity disk out of a larger number of disk (5x160GB disk where you lose 1x160GB for parity and have roughly 4x160GB for data). Given the size of your data, making a RAID probably isn't the best solution in your case. I'd still recommend some form of version control but even that depends on the complexity of your project.
In that situation RAID is better than once-a-day backups onto the same devices.
I don't believe the poster was backing up to the same physical device (at least I hope they know better than that for hardware protection). I got the impression he had two physical disk to protect only against hardware failure.
As to the versioning issue, I'd hope the poster was using something like CVS (which is what we use internally for our development group) or any other version control application. If the poster uses a version control application, then making the backup or using RAID makes a bit more sense but does leave the "disaster at a sight" problem still. Of course the off-site backup may be overkill for what they are working on so I wouldn't hold that against them.
I can't speak for the hardware in the 911 center prior to my working with the county as they were in the process of switching over already. I know they had two sections in the building where one was for the older equipment and the other for the "new" system, which was where I spent most of my time when I was at the building. My involvement was primarily from the counties GIS department where we prepared a centerline vector file for loading into the system. I know the previous system used tables where the records weren't geo-referenced in any way but they worked primarily due to the efforts of the fire fighters verify printouts with their extensive knowledge of the areas they covered. My task was to prepare the setup a system for attributing and maintaining the counties centerline file and writing a conversion routine to the Tiburon data format (which oddly enough was still flat files).
I'm not entirely familiar with the systems you've listed beyond knowing the names. When I started my career, I was at the DEC Ultrix time frame with a VMS system, but that was for a company that converted paper maps to GIS datasets. The VMS was primarily used to extract county CAMA (tax files) and the Ultrix systems were used to run workstation ArcInfo (ESRI).
I think I'll have to find out how to tour my current counties 911 system. Should be interesting to see the operations.
You must be checking a newer 911 call center than the one I supported. Granted that my support was roughly four years ago, I guess it's possible that Prince George's County Maryland has made some enhancements to include video over time. Given county politics though, I wouldn't be surprised if they went with the wrong consultant (Tiburon - System wasn't able to handle the number or records for the county, common place files had performance issues, hazardous sites files had to be kept to a minimum for performance issues too, unable to recommend addressing scheme for road interchanges/ramps, etc...) again.
Baltimore's 911 center did have a bit more tech enhancements than PG County, but I don't recall any video feeds. Maybe I need to take another tour.
While Microsoft does improve their product, I think the point they were making is that this improvement, like many others, is long overdue. One would think the dominant commercial operating system would have the revenue to produce subsequent versions that far exceed the security and capabilities of it's competitors, either free or commercial. By cheering for small improvements, we essentially approve of Microsofts unimpressive improvement process. With the profits from previous versions, shouldn't we expect "great things"?
I think the misunderstanding is probably due to the haste with which I wrote the original posting of mine. The real point is that my company is stepping up it's internal education of licensing in general with particular focus on Free Open Source Software (termed FOSS on various information postings around company bulletin boards). They've always had a policy to address licensing but with more accepted use of FOSS, they decided to address it specifically.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously don't require anything graphically intense. For imagery related work, a CRT will out perform the flat panel. For general use though, I'd love to have some flat panel, but I doubt I've seen the last of them at work.
Now a couple years back when I had to haul around a pair of 24" Sun monitor, I'd have killed for a pair of large LCDs.
I'm guessing you are making reference to this..
"LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Two of the key unions representing actors have asked their members to authorize a strike against the video game industry after talks on a new master agreement between the two sides broke down."
I can see in some games where the voice is important (Lord of the Rings for example) but in many other games, I really don't care who is doing the voices. The game play is generally what matters most to me.
Also from the article...
"The games industry said the biggest sticking point was residuals, or ongoing payments to actors and actresses for each copy of a game sold to which they contributed, including their voices and likenesses.
The unions wanted residual payments on games that sell more than 400,000 units, while the game publishers wanted only to make single up-front payments to talent.
Results of the strike vote are expected on June 7."
If an actor wants to push for higher residuals, that's fine too, but they should be prepared for someone else to step in and do this at a cheaper price. How long until voice overs are out sourced?
Rather than starting a whole "union: good or bad" debate, I'll just state (my opinion) that I feel unions, while in the past they may have done some good, are actually a driving force in outsourcing jobs. They are by no means the only factor, but the overhead has to be passed on to a consumer at some point and consumers will choose products with a lower price if the quality is acceptable.
Well it depends on which movie the "doctor" was watching when they came to this conclusion. I have seen several listings for Freejack on Comcast lately.
I had to do this once for an employee that was being let go. The managers first called myself and one of the other administrators into the office and explained that we were to change all the root, admininistrator, and shared login (administrative but not OS related) passwords and disable the employee's accounts. When we got up to leave the office, we passed the guy coming down the hall to meet with the manager. When we were just about done with the lockdown, the guy was escorted to his desk and allowed to gather his possesions and then escorted out of the building.
Can you open multiple URLs from a single bookmark in IE? I can bookmark a set of tabs that I always use and reopen them quickly without having to launch multiple browsers and in each of them launch a bookmark. One can always find a flaw in the design and likely your employer isn't going to remove your ability to use IE. Maybe Microsoft could provide a customized version of Mozilla like Sun provides in Solaris 10. I'm sure Microsoft could easily impliment the tabs in the taskbar like you want (of course I doubt they would do this but with enough pressure from you, they might).
I don't normally have more than a handful of URLs open at a time but if I do, I can certainly group them into particular windows rather than placing all in a single instance. Maybe you could put all your documentation tabs in one browser, test applications in another, research in another, etc... Searching through 20 tabs through alt-tab certainly wouldn't be a joy do look through. The description you see is limited in character length (granted that it's a generally enough to figure out what is what) but you could easily hover the mouse over a tab to get a the title too.
As others have pointed out, you can certainly choose not to use tabs for any documents you need to find through alt-tab. I just personally find having a huge number of applications to sift through in my task bar (especially if you start grouping tabs) very annoying.
While your point is valid, I would argue that you can run OOo on more platforms that MS Office.
This really is the problem. It ties OOo to only the platforms that Sun wants to support.
This link (java.sun.com) has the interesting line "Other vendors provide ports of J2SE to various operating systems and CPUs not listed here.". Does Sun really restrict which platforms Java can run on? My guess is that the platform developer may have to port and test their Java software, but why would you figure Sun to only want to support a limited set of platforms?
I think the more obvious slogan is Quality is Job One. Both Ford and Microsoft (certainly not limited to these two companies, but they are the topic of the article) seem to apply the same level of dedication to this philosophy.
Yes, hard not to be redundant for this thread.
I seem to recall a tech show some years back where Volkswagen had experimented with their vans and computers to allow "caravaning". The driver of the trailing vans actually crawled into the back seat after catching onto the caravan and the system took over. If I remember correctly, the system turned the following vehicles into "lemmings" essentially. I wonder if they carried the research forward over the years.
(You do mean this link(San Andreas Radio), right?)
MSN - 3rd
Google - 3rd
With quotes around it:
MSN - 2nd
Google - 1rst
With a + (plus sign):
MSN - 2nd
Google - 1rst
I'm not sure where #7 came from (unless others have done repeated searches on this too). Do we know what Rock Star Games is using for their web server then to know if the IIS preference comes into play in this case?
Sort of makes sense that only new systems will include this option. A vendor who delivers the 64 bit MS Windows systems will surely make every attempt to resolve the driver issues before actually selling it. Home users are more likely to just "try it" on their existing hardware without doing all the homework on verifying driver compatibility and all that will do is generate negative feedback for the company. Microsoft realizes they don't need to provide their critics with any ammo.
Sun has been very good to me for stability and performance (mostly running Oracle, WebLogic, Tomcat, Apache, and Java). XP Pro has also been pretty good, but between the two, XP Pro has had rare lockups that I haven't encountered on Sun systems. My in-laws actually have XP Home Edition and they seem to have a few problems with it but they disregard most safe computer practices (when I visit, I have to regularly clean up their system from spyware and the occasional virus - they do at least leave the AntiVirus running but often install anything they can download). I'd imagine XP Home to be pretty similar in performance to XP Pro.
I haven't looked, but Dome used to make high end medical use graphics cards that were Sun compatible. I don't know that I've ever seen them mentioned for MS Win32 use. That might be an example of a non-Sun part that may not have MS Win32 drivers first.
I have to admit, XP doesn't crash very often compared to previous MS releases. I have had it crash/lockup though due to applications and the only thing to do is power it down. I can't recall seeing a BSOD with it yet. On the other hand, my Solaris systems for the last 7 years and the DEC Ultrix systems for 3 years prior to that have had better reliability with zero OS freezes/crashes. I have had applications hang, but they haven't hung the OS in the least.
Microsoft has to overcome years poor stability reputation among IT professionals. Linux will likely face the same issue. The major difference I see though between the MS and Linux systems is that when I pay for the OS, I'd expect better quality, just because I'm paying for it. I'm probably a bit more forgiving to the Linux system crashing than a Microsoft OS.
As for the hardware comments, vendor support for the dominant desktop OS makes sense. Unless the hardware vendor sees a particular reason to release drivers simultaneously for multiple operating systems, I would expect MS to be the first driver released.
If you're looking for hardware to install into your PC, then how about showing me where I can get MS Win32 drivers for Sun GigaSwift PCI Ethernet Card. Likely this piece of hardware will only provide Solaris drivers. Note: I'm only showing this as an example to disprove your statement. Generally speaking though, you are correct about the hardware.
You know I'm sure glad Microsoft has created the concept of maintaining a data object of related emergency data for use in an emergency system. I really wonder now how the 911 system I supported 6 years ago did this. Really amazing that Tiburon Inc. figured a way to do this for Prince George's County Maryland without creating prior art. Emergency records must have magically made it from the call centers to the terminals in the police or EMS vehicles.
.NET?
Maybe the patent stands because they are using
I can't see how the USPTO can let this one pass without seeing prior art.
Using your example though, not all dealerships will choose to carry multiple brands while others will. If the market supports having multiple brands, then you will see various cars brands at the dealership. The real point is that a company can choose to carry a single brand if they find that business model profitable. I'm sure Dell has done their research and found that carrying both AMD and Intel isn't as profitable for the company at this time.
Training production and support staff
Additional inventory storage: motherboards, CPUs, fans
Multiple BIOS
Adjustments to tech support website to make sure the average home PC user can easily find the right updates All these issues, and likely many more, must be addressed when expanding your product offering. You also need to look at where Dell makes their money. Do companies buy AMD based systems? I haven't switched jobs in a while but my current and previous employers were exclusively Intel for the MS Win32 systems.
How about applying MIL-STD-2525B, Common Warfighting Symbology in this case?
He also explained that because of things like fog and clouds, specific regional satellite images can be a composite of several stitched-together pictures.
To illustrate the point of stitching the images together, this link presents an interesting example of that: DC Buildings (Google.com). Notice at that the four buildings show a different side and shadow as though the vantage point were different for each of them.
Interesting enough, if you pan to the East and slightly to the South, you'll see a portion of the image is intentionally distorted. For those who would prefer to go directly to the area, click here.
Not exactly satellite photos...
The first mapping company I worked for flew aerial photos flights for counties. For the type of mapping we did (cadastral, planimetric, and topographic), we generally took the photos in late Fall (after the leaves were pretty much off the trees and before the snow fell) or early Spring (after the snow and before the leaves appeared). For a particular job, we unfortunately caught a major civil war re-enactment where they were shooting off a lot of cannons. Needless to say, the counties requirements for ground visibility required us to refly a portion of the county to retake the photos.
True that the RAID configuration of two disk isn't very efficient. In some cases, this is necessary, but it doesn't sound like your a candidate for a RAID really. Where you do see a better balance (cost vs reliability) is when you start looking at RAID 5 and typically lose a single parity disk out of a larger number of disk (5x160GB disk where you lose 1x160GB for parity and have roughly 4x160GB for data). Given the size of your data, making a RAID probably isn't the best solution in your case. I'd still recommend some form of version control but even that depends on the complexity of your project.
In that situation RAID is better than once-a-day backups onto the same devices.
I don't believe the poster was backing up to the same physical device (at least I hope they know better than that for hardware protection). I got the impression he had two physical disk to protect only against hardware failure.
As to the versioning issue, I'd hope the poster was using something like CVS (which is what we use internally for our development group) or any other version control application. If the poster uses a version control application, then making the backup or using RAID makes a bit more sense but does leave the "disaster at a sight" problem still. Of course the off-site backup may be overkill for what they are working on so I wouldn't hold that against them.
I can't speak for the hardware in the 911 center prior to my working with the county as they were in the process of switching over already. I know they had two sections in the building where one was for the older equipment and the other for the "new" system, which was where I spent most of my time when I was at the building. My involvement was primarily from the counties GIS department where we prepared a centerline vector file for loading into the system. I know the previous system used tables where the records weren't geo-referenced in any way but they worked primarily due to the efforts of the fire fighters verify printouts with their extensive knowledge of the areas they covered. My task was to prepare the setup a system for attributing and maintaining the counties centerline file and writing a conversion routine to the Tiburon data format (which oddly enough was still flat files).
I'm not entirely familiar with the systems you've listed beyond knowing the names. When I started my career, I was at the DEC Ultrix time frame with a VMS system, but that was for a company that converted paper maps to GIS datasets. The VMS was primarily used to extract county CAMA (tax files) and the Ultrix systems were used to run workstation ArcInfo (ESRI).
I think I'll have to find out how to tour my current counties 911 system. Should be interesting to see the operations.
You must be checking a newer 911 call center than the one I supported. Granted that my support was roughly four years ago, I guess it's possible that Prince George's County Maryland has made some enhancements to include video over time. Given county politics though, I wouldn't be surprised if they went with the wrong consultant (Tiburon - System wasn't able to handle the number or records for the county, common place files had performance issues, hazardous sites files had to be kept to a minimum for performance issues too, unable to recommend addressing scheme for road interchanges/ramps, etc...) again.
Baltimore's 911 center did have a bit more tech enhancements than PG County, but I don't recall any video feeds. Maybe I need to take another tour.
Humans must be in space before the Pigs In Space take it over.
While Microsoft does improve their product, I think the point they were making is that this improvement, like many others, is long overdue. One would think the dominant commercial operating system would have the revenue to produce subsequent versions that far exceed the security and capabilities of it's competitors, either free or commercial. By cheering for small improvements, we essentially approve of Microsofts unimpressive improvement process. With the profits from previous versions, shouldn't we expect "great things"?
I think the misunderstanding is probably due to the haste with which I wrote the original posting of mine. The real point is that my company is stepping up it's internal education of licensing in general with particular focus on Free Open Source Software (termed FOSS on various information postings around company bulletin boards). They've always had a policy to address licensing but with more accepted use of FOSS, they decided to address it specifically.
I realize the implications apply to any license type but I was singling out GPL as that is the license mentioned in the article.