If such weapons make their way onto the battlefield, you're going to end up with a lot of blinded soldiers. Any beam powerful enough to be useful will be capable of blinding everyone near the target with the reflected light. In fact, if you put some kind of corner cube reflective coating on the target, there might be enough light sent back to the source to blind the people firing the beam.
They're not actually making the weapons themselves. The Whitehouse says they are being made in Iran and smuggled in. There's no firm evidence, but it's true.
I've often wondered why data sent through the mobile networks (voice, internet etc) is so much more expensive than land based traffic. I mean you wouldn't sit around browsing the web over a mobile phone, even if it did have a huge screen, since you'd go bankrupt. Surely it costs more to dig up a whole city and lay cable than it does to erect some mobile masts, so why is data transferred by cable so much cheaper? Also aside from the initial expense of digging up a city, surely maintenance is more expensive for cable companies since it also involves digging and disrupting traffic etc. It seems to me that we are being massively ripped off.
Just out of curiosity, what is the harm in Microsoft "discontinuing" VB? Granted, no new versions of the language will be released, nor patches for compilers, etc., but that doesn't suddenly make current tools stop working.
No, they won't suddenly stop working but customers who use your VB6 applications expect to keep moving forward technologically. So when they install Vista, or SQL Server 2005 or whatever, and suddenly your VB6 application doesn't work as expected, you could be in real troublem since Microsoft may not fix it. Also companies may not even buy your product any more, knowing that Microsoft will not be supporting or enhancing the language you have used.
Why is their discontinuation of VB so terrible for companies that use the language?
Well aside from the possible failure of VB6 libraries etc, to work properly on future operating systems, companies who's products use VB are also not really able to enhance them. What happens when everyone is releasing 64 bit versions of their applications? VB6 is 32 bit. And what happens when people start selling competing products that can use multiple cores? Since Microsoft no longer supports VB6, it certainly won't be improving the multi-threading features. An what happens if Visual Studio 6 has problems running on future operating systems?
Basically once a proprietary language like that is dumped, you are in real trouble. It's not like you can just shift over to a new vendor. If Microsoft dumped their C++ product, at least you have the possibility of moving your code over to Borland products, or even some open source efforts.
The only option is really to do a total rewrite, and that is something that many companies do not have the time or finances to do.
Tell me about it. The company I used to work for had a lot more the 70k lines. They spent hundreds of thousands developing their products over many years. Then Microsoft dumped VB and screwed them and so many other companies. I think the only reason small software houses have not made a big fuss is because they are worried their customers will realise their products are written in a dead language.
I still find it hard to believe that Microsoft ended a language that was so popular and had tens of millions of important lines of code written in it, representing countless millions of dollars of effort. The thing is, companies are making the same mistake in trusting Microsoft again. If they dumped VB6, what is to stop them dumping.NET and trashing your huge investment all over again? Don't think you can rely on Mono, unless you strictly use Mono to develop your products in the first place.
P.S. Automatic translation of VB6 into VB.NET is a joke, even in principle.
If one of your 1:00AMs is missing you've got bigger problems than just a clock change!
No, it was perfectly ok for data points to be missing. e.g. There might be a temperature reading available for 3am but not 4am etc. But when it happened for one of the 1:00 AMs, then there was real confusion:)
Of course if you store the times in UNIX format as the number of seconds from Jan 1, 1970 then it's not really a problem.
Well as long as you use GMT or some other continuous time scheme then everything is fine. The problem was that so many customers were using clock time in their data systems.
it's not a trivial problem and should never be treated as such.
Agreed. We were handling time is such a way that we couldn't just rely on built in functions (which were often dodgy anyway). The user could log into databases for different countries and the program would then have to use the time scheme for that country (without screwing up the windows regional settings). Everything was ok for the UK and Europe, but lots of countries handle things is quite odd ways. I made sure we had automated unit tests for our time classes, testing all the awkward cases I could think of.
One of the other issues was the question of what time format a file was using (e.g. UTC, Local Time, Clock Time etc). We had it so that the user had to tick in the interface the time format the file was using. This was a mistake as people often forgot or misunderstood what time format was being used. So a file would be sent from some database people in some outsourced company and the user would make false assumptions when reading it in. We should have demanded that the files were self-identifying with some kind of Header Record stating the time format.
Daylight Savings is truly a software development nightmare. I used to work on a product that had to read in data in clock time (i.e. like on your wristwatch) and convert into local time (always continuous with no clock changes). The system read in data in hourly chunks and had to work in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. It doesn't matter how clever people are, clock changes are always confusing. We'd be testing the system and always having disagreements over whether it was working correctly. Customers would also get confused and complain, then we'd have a big discussion with the customer with them usually realising that they didn't understand the clock changes properly themselves.
One of the big problems was that in clock time, one of the times occurs twice. e.g. you end up with two occurrences of 1.00 am when the clocks go back. You then have the issue of determining which one is which. You can treat them in order, but what happens if one of them is missing? Arghhhh!. You can start making demands of the customer like all BST (British Summer Time) times have "BST" after them, but usually you have to bend to the will of the customer rather than the other way round.
People made all that fuss over the millennium bug, but it's clock changes that really cause financial losses.
I think they've made a mistake by breaking it too early. They should have waited until it was much more widespread. Then again, I would imagine it is psychologically virtually impossible to sit on a "breakthrough" like that.
Sort of off topic I know, but how does Michael Crichton manage to get away with witting the same story again and again? i.e. We develop some cool piece of technology, then it all goes horribly wrong because we don't really know what we're doing.
Westworld - Our theme-park androids go haywire and kill us.
Jurassic Park - Our Genetically engineered Dinosaurs go out of control and kill us.
Runaway - Tom Selleck battles crazy Robot things. Again, our own inventions go bad.
Prey - Our Nanotechnology goes haywire
Efficiency is not always the best thing for the consumer though, which is something governments never talk about when they want to privatize things. For example, since privatisation, the trains where I live have been getting shorter and shorter, so people really have to cram in now. It's more efficient for the train company since they don't need to purchase as many carriages, but their improved efficiency has been at the expense of customer comfort.
Small screens are a problem, but I think some other technologies might be more promising. There are a number of miniature projective systems on they way, either designed to project images onto surfaces or into the eye.
http://www.mvis.com/
Then again, the Virtual Retinal Display has been "on the way" for more than 10 years. Hopefully lightblueoptics will move to market more quickly.
If they can ignore 1 Million people marching in London against the Iraq war, they can certainly ignore 600,000 on some website. What you really need is something like the Swiss system where the public can instigate a referendum. All they have to do is get a certain number of signatures together to kick off the process.
1. You're paying not to see commercials
2. You're paying for the convenience of seeing whenever you want
3. You're paying for the infrastructure needed 1. With Subscription TV you're already paying for the content, yet they show the commercials anyway.
2. Your convenience is not really something that cost money to the Studio.
3. This is a real cost, but looking at other online file services, it should be pretty cheap.
If they were screwing big greedy stars it might not be so outrageous, but they are screwing people like J. Michael Straczynski who worked so hard on Babylon 5, even writing entire seasons himself (almost going mad in the process).
I'm not sure what better alternatives exist to this weapon. What is the best way to disperse a crowd of nonviolent people who don't want to disperse?
The more convenient it is to disperse protesters, the worse it is for democracy. Imagine if the police could just click their fingers and make all the protesters instantly reappear back in their homes. If that were possible you would never actually see any protests anywhere. The UK government has already pre-emptively dispersed protesters by banning any "unauthorised" protests within half a mile of Parliament, and that's bad enough. We can do without very visible "pain-ray" vehicles situated at protests, intimidating people and frightening them away from their democratic right to protest.
If there was an effective and official way for the public to express its views, we wouldn't need the ability to protest so much. In Switzerland the public can actually instigate a referendum all by themselves, a power which most populations can only dream of.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. They complain about people damaging their livelihoods by ripping DVDs when at the same time they are in fact actively ripping off people who have directly worked very hard for them. The next time a Journalist interviews someone from the MPAA about piracy who says "You are depriving all the writers and technicians etc of their livelihoods", I would like to see them turn around and say "If that is your viewpoint, why are your members so frequently stealing money from their workers?"
Please stop using strawman agruments. The article said nothing about peaceful protestors.
The purpose they state for the use of the weapon in the article is to "make enemies drop their weapons". I feel that is quite a specious argument. That kind of huge clunky device is not really practical for use against highly mobile insurgents who take cover behind walls and buildings etc. We know it will be used against crowds of protesters. This is a crowd control device through and through.
The situation I am thinking of is a group of peaceful protesters. Inflicting pain on that group of people to gain their compliance is torture. Torture does not have to be thumbscrews.
Slashdot Mirror
If such weapons make their way onto the battlefield, you're going to end up with a lot of blinded soldiers. Any beam powerful enough to be useful will be capable of blinding everyone near the target with the reflected light. In fact, if you put some kind of corner cube reflective coating on the target, there might be enough light sent back to the source to blind the people firing the beam.
Whenever I read about piracy, I always remember this scene from Amazon Women on the Moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I5dVBezF9k
Great, so now we will have to buy both ridiculously expensive ink and ridiculously expensive paper.
They're not actually making the weapons themselves. The Whitehouse says they are being made in Iran and smuggled in. There's no firm evidence, but it's true.
I've often wondered why data sent through the mobile networks (voice, internet etc) is so much more expensive than land based traffic. I mean you wouldn't sit around browsing the web over a mobile phone, even if it did have a huge screen, since you'd go bankrupt. Surely it costs more to dig up a whole city and lay cable than it does to erect some mobile masts, so why is data transferred by cable so much cheaper? Also aside from the initial expense of digging up a city, surely maintenance is more expensive for cable companies since it also involves digging and disrupting traffic etc. It seems to me that we are being massively ripped off.
Which format looks best once converted to Xvid? :)
No, they won't suddenly stop working but customers who use your VB6 applications expect to keep moving forward technologically. So when they install Vista, or SQL Server 2005 or whatever, and suddenly your VB6 application doesn't work as expected, you could be in real troublem since Microsoft may not fix it. Also companies may not even buy your product any more, knowing that Microsoft will not be supporting or enhancing the language you have used.
Why is their discontinuation of VB so terrible for companies that use the language?
Well aside from the possible failure of VB6 libraries etc, to work properly on future operating systems, companies who's products use VB are also not really able to enhance them. What happens when everyone is releasing 64 bit versions of their applications? VB6 is 32 bit. And what happens when people start selling competing products that can use multiple cores? Since Microsoft no longer supports VB6, it certainly won't be improving the multi-threading features. An what happens if Visual Studio 6 has problems running on future operating systems?
Basically once a proprietary language like that is dumped, you are in real trouble. It's not like you can just shift over to a new vendor. If Microsoft dumped their C++ product, at least you have the possibility of moving your code over to Borland products, or even some open source efforts.
The only option is really to do a total rewrite, and that is something that many companies do not have the time or finances to do.
Tell me about it. The company I used to work for had a lot more the 70k lines. They spent hundreds of thousands developing their products over many years. Then Microsoft dumped VB and screwed them and so many other companies. I think the only reason small software houses have not made a big fuss is because they are worried their customers will realise their products are written in a dead language.
.NET and trashing your huge investment all over again? Don't think you can rely on Mono, unless you strictly use Mono to develop your products in the first place.
I still find it hard to believe that Microsoft ended a language that was so popular and had tens of millions of important lines of code written in it, representing countless millions of dollars of effort. The thing is, companies are making the same mistake in trusting Microsoft again. If they dumped VB6, what is to stop them dumping
P.S. Automatic translation of VB6 into VB.NET is a joke, even in principle.
No, it was perfectly ok for data points to be missing. e.g. There might be a temperature reading available for 3am but not 4am etc. But when it happened for one of the 1:00 AMs, then there was real confusion
Of course if you store the times in UNIX format as the number of seconds from Jan 1, 1970 then it's not really a problem.
Well as long as you use GMT or some other continuous time scheme then everything is fine. The problem was that so many customers were using clock time in their data systems.
it's not a trivial problem and should never be treated as such.
Agreed. We were handling time is such a way that we couldn't just rely on built in functions (which were often dodgy anyway). The user could log into databases for different countries and the program would then have to use the time scheme for that country (without screwing up the windows regional settings). Everything was ok for the UK and Europe, but lots of countries handle things is quite odd ways. I made sure we had automated unit tests for our time classes, testing all the awkward cases I could think of.
One of the other issues was the question of what time format a file was using (e.g. UTC, Local Time, Clock Time etc). We had it so that the user had to tick in the interface the time format the file was using. This was a mistake as people often forgot or misunderstood what time format was being used. So a file would be sent from some database people in some outsourced company and the user would make false assumptions when reading it in. We should have demanded that the files were self-identifying with some kind of Header Record stating the time format.
Daylight Savings is truly a software development nightmare. I used to work on a product that had to read in data in clock time (i.e. like on your wristwatch) and convert into local time (always continuous with no clock changes). The system read in data in hourly chunks and had to work in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. It doesn't matter how clever people are, clock changes are always confusing. We'd be testing the system and always having disagreements over whether it was working correctly. Customers would also get confused and complain, then we'd have a big discussion with the customer with them usually realising that they didn't understand the clock changes properly themselves.
One of the big problems was that in clock time, one of the times occurs twice. e.g. you end up with two occurrences of 1.00 am when the clocks go back. You then have the issue of determining which one is which. You can treat them in order, but what happens if one of them is missing? Arghhhh!. You can start making demands of the customer like all BST (British Summer Time) times have "BST" after them, but usually you have to bend to the will of the customer rather than the other way round.
People made all that fuss over the millennium bug, but it's clock changes that really cause financial losses.
I think they've made a mistake by breaking it too early. They should have waited until it was much more widespread. Then again, I would imagine it is psychologically virtually impossible to sit on a "breakthrough" like that.
Sort of off topic I know, but how does Michael Crichton manage to get away with witting the same story again and again? i.e. We develop some cool piece of technology, then it all goes horribly wrong because we don't really know what we're doing.
Westworld - Our theme-park androids go haywire and kill us.
Jurassic Park - Our Genetically engineered Dinosaurs go out of control and kill us.
Runaway - Tom Selleck battles crazy Robot things. Again, our own inventions go bad.
Prey - Our Nanotechnology goes haywire
Feel free to add to the list.
Efficiency is not always the best thing for the consumer though, which is something governments never talk about when they want to privatize things. For example, since privatisation, the trains where I live have been getting shorter and shorter, so people really have to cram in now. It's more efficient for the train company since they don't need to purchase as many carriages, but their improved efficiency has been at the expense of customer comfort.
Porn or not, I find it quite worrying that Sony is able to dictate who is allowed to print films onto Blu-ray. If indeed that is the situation.
Small screens are a problem, but I think some other technologies might be more promising. There are a number of miniature projective systems on they way, either designed to project images onto surfaces or into the eye.
e.g.
http://www.lightblueoptics.com/technology.htm
http://www.mvis.com/
Then again, the Virtual Retinal Display has been "on the way" for more than 10 years. Hopefully lightblueoptics will move to market more quickly.
If they can ignore 1 Million people marching in London against the Iraq war, they can certainly ignore 600,000 on some website. What you really need is something like the Swiss system where the public can instigate a referendum. All they have to do is get a certain number of signatures together to kick off the process.
We've had them in the UK for a while
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampsh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Accounting
Ok, I made the percentage up.
If they were screwing big greedy stars it might not be so outrageous, but they are screwing people like J. Michael Straczynski who worked so hard on Babylon 5, even writing entire seasons himself (almost going mad in the process).
Damn, they're right. Googling "Liar" no longer brings back Tony Blair as the top link.
The more convenient it is to disperse protesters, the worse it is for democracy. Imagine if the police could just click their fingers and make all the protesters instantly reappear back in their homes. If that were possible you would never actually see any protests anywhere. The UK government has already pre-emptively dispersed protesters by banning any "unauthorised" protests within half a mile of Parliament, and that's bad enough. We can do without very visible "pain-ray" vehicles situated at protests, intimidating people and frightening them away from their democratic right to protest.
If there was an effective and official way for the public to express its views, we wouldn't need the ability to protest so much. In Switzerland the public can actually instigate a referendum all by themselves, a power which most populations can only dream of.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. They complain about people damaging their livelihoods by ripping DVDs when at the same time they are in fact actively ripping off people who have directly worked very hard for them. The next time a Journalist interviews someone from the MPAA about piracy who says "You are depriving all the writers and technicians etc of their livelihoods", I would like to see them turn around and say "If that is your viewpoint, why are your members so frequently stealing money from their workers?"
The purpose they state for the use of the weapon in the article is to "make enemies drop their weapons". I feel that is quite a specious argument. That kind of huge clunky device is not really practical for use against highly mobile insurgents who take cover behind walls and buildings etc. We know it will be used against crowds of protesters. This is a crowd control device through and through.
The situation I am thinking of is a group of peaceful protesters. Inflicting pain on that group of people to gain their compliance is torture. Torture does not have to be thumbscrews.