Obviously, AC Clarke has foretold that we should wait for the 3rd one. Just in case, let's make sure we don't kill all the humpbacks for a few decades.
Attention Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, etc. - fire sale on well placed existing communication towers will soon be available for your ramp up to compete with Big 2 networks. The law of unintended consequences shows no mercy.
Once again/. falls victim to a reference to a technical article written by a clueless tech writer. The MS announcement clearly states deep integration with Visual Studio, which any developer or even casual technical person would know makes much more sense. However, as another poster pointed out, those of us that care about this kind of stuff already know about it about 3-7 days before it shows up here.
Agree. Sent them feedback immediately on the first ambush by this new horror. Far fewer customizations, insistence on presenting pictures which are sometimes relevant to the headlines. I mainly use my customized feedly account, but now I'll give reddit a try. The only worse news layouts would be Bing / MSN. If I truly wanted odd and irrelevant stuff shoved at my eyes, I'd be hanging out on StumbleUpon - which could happen if I'm truly bored. That hasn't happened since last November.
I have no interest in yet another device that requires an overpriced, locked-in, data plan from a US carrier that could learn better customer service from a fast food cashier. Unless these devices are paired with the fabled Microsoft data network and reasonably priced, they are a waste of the promise of the ARM/Qualcomm port of Windows to the chip. I want a great WiFi tablet based on this technology. All other parties need not call.
All states and jurisdictions also support trespassing laws. How do they play into this discussion? Is contact with the ground required? I don't think so. The FAA is asking too much in requiring my faith that any drone over my property is there for some legal and beneficial reason. Citizens must be given some recourse to challenge the legitimacy of any drone. Legal experts care to comment?
Dell started selling an all-in-one XPS convertible 18" tablet in 2013. Compatible with Windows 8/8.1/10 - still available on their site. But, I guess if it's not Samsung, or Apple, or Google, then it's not news? Innovation has been taking place in the Windows world for over a decade. Miniature systems, hardened industrial laptops, and more that simply doesn't get the consumer publicity, but find very robust deployments in a variety of industries. Someday soon Apple will try to invent a new form factor called "server"?
Oil companies, and mining companies, get a special tax write off in the US called the "oil depletion allowance". It's often used along with "questionable" estimates of a site's reserve capacity to result in depreciation allowances greater than the income in a fiscal period. That is a very generous description of the tactics employed by many in these highly specific industries. Tax laws are far too illogical and capricious to debate in these forums, whether you're discussing personal or business tax codes. Most (many?) of us here are prone by occupation to think logically which can put us at a disadvantage when thinking about "the law".
Back in the 70's when I was still a junior electrical design engineer working for a distribution transformer company, we used algorithms loaded into TI calculators to compute the electrical, heat, and mechanical stresses. I later got the task of modernizing those codes and merging them with a FORTRAN code that another engineer had written and abandoned because it was too expensive to run. Things went well at first, we saved a lot of time and used that as any good engineer would to optimize our designs using different parameters to reduce cost and improve efficiency, both very important to my company and its customers. Then one day we got a limiting case which we didn't recognize at the time. As usual, one of our engineering assistants used the computer generated design and the old methods to validate the design. The engineer always takes responsibility for the design. After the build, the unit, a 3 phase unit that had 76,000 volt inputs, was tested in our "hi pot" chamber - a voltage pulse of the rated voltage but with reduced current and only for a short pulse. The center core winding turned into shards of copper spaghetti in the 8 foot tall tank. It cost $25,000 to repair, and delayed delivery for 3 weeks. My heart rate hit about 200 when the engineering manager called me and my supervisor into his office. Then he explained that he had run the calculations also, and discovered that our methods had a flaw in the prediction of the axial forces on the center coil. It was a very subtle mistake, and he said it could have been much worse. We were able to revise the code within a few hours, and that incident led to further improvements in methods and automation. It also taught me my most important lesson about computers - human error is the greatest risk. Real tests of your code sometimes do "blow up".
First, in general, no we don't need to teach people to "code". As others have said or implied, we need to teach the more basic skill that underlies coding and science = logic. It's all too obvious that far too many people make decisions based on emotion alone. It's not enough to have challenging attitude without the skills to analyze and that basic skill is logic.
Second, this topic shows the deep bias in too many computing discussions based on "apps", and almost always mobile device apps. This is a very consumer focused and short sighted view of what computing offers to society.
There are already plugs all around you - probably within less than 15 feet from where you're reading this post. The issue is making the existing ubiquitous electrical grid accessible for this new need. Special purpose electrical transformers, aka charging stations, should be fairly easy to mass produce. Tap into the wireless Internet access points for self-service payment options, and you'll have a growth industry in every pod mall in the US. It's just a new type of vending machine with far fewer issues than the tanks for gasoline and diesel fuels. The things can even phone home for service. The tipping point is very close. There's serious private sector investment in battery technology with monthly advances being announced. Every hybrid purchased, puts a little more money into a battery producer that can be used for more R&D.
I installed Safari on Windows just to see what the buzz was about. It installed quickly and cleanly, or so I thought. Some browsing around my favorite sites to put some stress on it and found it to be much faster than IE 7, or Firefox 2.x. However, within an hour I discovered that the installation of Safari had broken my DivX 6.5 player. The DivX Pro converter continued to function, but the player aborted on launch with an error saying it was improperly installed and that a reinstall was require. Well, after a couple of reinstalls, an upgrade to 6.6, and a few reboots, I did some research into what was installed by Safari. When I hit the integrated support for the DivX format I knew I had found the smoking gun. An immediate uninstall of Safari restored full functionality of the DivX player immediately!
While Microsoft may not make a distinction based on the number of cores, they have assured themselves a healthy revenue stream based on virtualization - another key technology for the near future. Microsoft requires a license for every virtual machine running under any virtual technology, regardless the number of CPUs in the system. Even if you are running Windows XP in a virtual machine on a physical machine running Windows XP, you must have at least 2 licenses for Windows XP. I would not be surprised to find a lot of VMware and Virtual PC / Server customers that are in violation of this requirement. I could understand requiring a license for Windows Server 2003 running in a virtual machine on that XP box - but only one license for any number of virtual machines. Looks like Microsoft is protecting its revenue stream against any extreemly powerful single processors also. Too bad, machine virtualization is a very good protection against the various memory leaks and lockups caused by Windows applications, and is an effective strategy to consolidate servers for small remote offices.
I find a lot of people rewriting the ATT breakup history. Having the Baby Bells stripped away by the FEDS was the best thing to happen to both ATT and the consumer. This led to a communications revolution that would have taken much longer. Long distance prices, cellular (analog and digital) services, and the consumer rush to the Internet would all have been severly retarded by the communications industry prior to the breakup. Another good example of anti-trust actually working to the company's benefit AND the consumer is IBM. They lost a large part of their services business, and had to open up their OS and mainframes. Who gave you the personal computer? Who continues to push the envelop in basic science and constantly set the mark for storage technologies? IBM now provides more variety in their product lines than the next two largest hardware vendors combined. The other nice thing about both ATT and IBM is that they have REAL capital not just market capital, which tells you they know what to do with earnings. I don't see breaking up Microsoft as a bad thing because I see the same signs in their operations that plagued other large US companines in the past. They have outgrown their (founder's) vision, and the emperor-in-charge management style. There have been several fiascos in the past 5 years with different Microsoft divisions distributing incompatible DLL's within two or three months of each other. As far as I'm concerned MS Office has been the greatest single product contributing to "DLL Hell". They were top of the heap in "patching the OS" during the installation of the app, before IE came along.
Personally I want them to be required to port all their software to Linux and Mac OS before they can release a new version of anything under Windows, and be required to release this at the same price point as the Windows versions with the same level (or better?) of support. It's a winner for everyone - MS finds the bugs that are lurking due to over familiarity with Windows, the other OS's get apps to spark real competition, and Windows users will get apps with fewer bugs. They might even find a few problems with the OS they'd be willing to fix just to make their apps run. This is where MS really lives. Windows was the vision but Office is the cash flow.
As others have pointed out, this is _not_ a high end box for _this_ Chrismas - forget 2001. No, the real secret here is the _waiting_ - it allows this technology to age down the price curve, allows the anticipation to build, allows the FUD to force bad moves by the competition, and allows Microsoft to _float_ another mediocre idea that is then highly _polished_ by free design _criticism_. Look at the price of generic systems with these specs _today_ and you'll see that this box could be _shipping_ this Christmas for under $500 - can you say $199 with a three year commitment to MSN? The _wait_ is the thing - it's deliberate because it will also _benefit_ PC gaming by implication that by developing for the PC you - game developer - get an _advantage_ when it _finally ships_. I'll bet I can find an Office 2000 or Windows 2000 pre-press release from 1998 that you could use to build 80% of this by word substitution. If I were seriously targeting the end of next year then the specs would be at least _double_ everything listed except the hard drive would be in the 30 - 50 MB range - the irony is that a closed box really needs more cached storage space. This response has already consumed more cycles than all of us should give to this announcement. Wait for Release candidate 1 this time next year.
I subscribe to our local newspaper and have for years, but I prefer to read the local paper on their web site. They just don't put it all online - which tells me they "get it" but they're cautious. I disagree with what Mr. Katz is trying to say about what and how newspapers cover contemporary culture. It's not that they can't or don't - they do when they are forced to by competition. And in areas like mine where a there's only a single local paper, that competition comes from other and diverse media. My main complaint with newspapers is the "ink and paper" mentality. They define themselves by the physical product - wrong answer. In the larger papers we saw the transition years ago from "newspaper publisher" to "news organization". The open forum style works on/. to inform and add value, but this is because it's "balanced" by the moderated "edited" publications. Think for a moment about the sources of these "this just in" nuggets on/. and you'll see what I mean. The discussions here derive a large measure of their value from our "informed" opinions regarding "established" items of news initially reported elsewhere - usually by card carrying "news organizations". Ask yourself how many times have you read, or written, "Read the damn reference before you post you idiot!" To all those local and regional news_papers_ I send this wakeup call: "It's the news stupid!" not the paper!
Why was this moderated as Funny? It's insightful - the whole subject is funny, but this post is dead on - Total is great - but it's not 100% of _my_ Daily Requirements. I like the concept though, and Scott Adams will eventually get it right, or he'll get _eaten alive_ by that new CmdrTaco brand.
Didn't you think the "correction" sounded more like someone caught in the act? He "agreed" with the statement, but he didn't "say" it. Crap. Bill's starting to act more like a politician every day this trial goes on.
Now Micro$oft is trying to spin the thing. Over at ABCNews they have an article from Reuters saying that "Bill did not make any of the comments attributed to him about the settlement,..." Bloomberg has issued a "correction" saying that the release should have read, "Bill Gates agreed with the statement" that Microsoft would be willing... Huh? He didn't "say" it he just "agreed" with it? Sounds like someone got caught "floating one". Read about it he re.
Re:Phone is a great analogy
on
LonelyNet
·
· Score: 2
What a revelation! It just hit me - all the things I do to avoid "human interaction":
1 - Sleep 6 hours 2 - Run 2 to 3 miles a day 3 - Work 8 to 10 hours a day 4 - Bathe 5 - Brush Teeth 6 - Toilet Breaks 7 - Think about how to make the world better 8 - Read a book, newspaper, online article 9 - Worry about finances 10 - Feed the cat 11 - Take out the trash 12 - Talk to out of town family on the phone
Is it just me or have you noticed that about half of all surveys are below average lately?
This just in: Half of all divorcing people are men.
It doesn't though, does it? The contract can still be inside the box, so I have to buy the product to read the license, and I can return it as long as I don't also open the shrink wrapped CDROM. I suspect a change in "Return Policy" will be forthcoming that requires me to ship it back to the producer at my expense to get the refund if I have a problem with the license. Of course, I'll have to buy it and open it to read about that new policy also - just a hunch.;-)
One of the main reasons we got the customization toolkit for Netscape at work was so I could remove AIM from the distribution, along with setting the automatic proxy string. Now they've integrated it into the browser. Sounds too much like "IE is part of the OS" to me. I don't need AIM, or other chat tools - I have enough distractions: phone, pager, email, quick questions, management, meetings,... My opinion is that "buddies" buy you a beer after work.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, AC Clarke has foretold that we should wait for the 3rd one.
Just in case, let's make sure we don't kill all the humpbacks for a few decades.
Attention Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, etc. - fire sale on well placed existing communication towers will soon be available for your ramp up to compete with Big 2 networks. The law of unintended consequences shows no mercy.
Once again /. falls victim to a reference to a technical article written by a clueless tech writer. The MS announcement clearly states deep integration with Visual Studio, which any developer or even casual technical person would know makes much more sense. However, as another poster pointed out, those of us that care about this kind of stuff already know about it about 3-7 days before it shows up here.
Agree. Sent them feedback immediately on the first ambush by this new horror. Far fewer customizations, insistence on presenting pictures which are sometimes relevant to the headlines. I mainly use my customized feedly account, but now I'll give reddit a try. The only worse news layouts would be Bing / MSN. If I truly wanted odd and irrelevant stuff shoved at my eyes, I'd be hanging out on StumbleUpon - which could happen if I'm truly bored. That hasn't happened since last November.
Yes, my standard tag line applies!
I have no interest in yet another device that requires an overpriced, locked-in, data plan from a US carrier that could learn better customer service from a fast food cashier. Unless these devices are paired with the fabled Microsoft data network and reasonably priced, they are a waste of the promise of the ARM/Qualcomm port of Windows to the chip. I want a great WiFi tablet based on this technology. All other parties need not call.
All states and jurisdictions also support trespassing laws. How do they play into this discussion? Is contact with the ground required? I don't think so. The FAA is asking too much in requiring my faith that any drone over my property is there for some legal and beneficial reason. Citizens must be given some recourse to challenge the legitimacy of any drone. Legal experts care to comment?
Confirmation of a X deviant among us!
Ignore this warning at your peril!
Dell started selling an all-in-one XPS convertible 18" tablet in 2013. Compatible with Windows 8/8.1/10 - still available on their site. But, I guess if it's not Samsung, or Apple, or Google, then it's not news? Innovation has been taking place in the Windows world for over a decade. Miniature systems, hardened industrial laptops, and more that simply doesn't get the consumer publicity, but find very robust deployments in a variety of industries. Someday soon Apple will try to invent a new form factor called "server"?
Oil companies, and mining companies, get a special tax write off in the US called the "oil depletion allowance". It's often used along with "questionable" estimates of a site's reserve capacity to result in depreciation allowances greater than the income in a fiscal period. That is a very generous description of the tactics employed by many in these highly specific industries. Tax laws are far too illogical and capricious to debate in these forums, whether you're discussing personal or business tax codes. Most (many?) of us here are prone by occupation to think logically which can put us at a disadvantage when thinking about "the law".
Back in the 70's when I was still a junior electrical design engineer working for a distribution transformer company, we used algorithms loaded into TI calculators to compute the electrical, heat, and mechanical stresses. I later got the task of modernizing those codes and merging them with a FORTRAN code that another engineer had written and abandoned because it was too expensive to run. Things went well at first, we saved a lot of time and used that as any good engineer would to optimize our designs using different parameters to reduce cost and improve efficiency, both very important to my company and its customers. Then one day we got a limiting case which we didn't recognize at the time. As usual, one of our engineering assistants used the computer generated design and the old methods to validate the design. The engineer always takes responsibility for the design. After the build, the unit, a 3 phase unit that had 76,000 volt inputs, was tested in our "hi pot" chamber - a voltage pulse of the rated voltage but with reduced current and only for a short pulse. The center core winding turned into shards of copper spaghetti in the 8 foot tall tank. It cost $25,000 to repair, and delayed delivery for 3 weeks. My heart rate hit about 200 when the engineering manager called me and my supervisor into his office. Then he explained that he had run the calculations also, and discovered that our methods had a flaw in the prediction of the axial forces on the center coil. It was a very subtle mistake, and he said it could have been much worse. We were able to revise the code within a few hours, and that incident led to further improvements in methods and automation. It also taught me my most important lesson about computers - human error is the greatest risk. Real tests of your code sometimes do "blow up".
First, in general, no we don't need to teach people to "code". As others have said or implied, we need to teach the more basic skill that underlies coding and science = logic. It's all too obvious that far too many people make decisions based on emotion alone. It's not enough to have challenging attitude without the skills to analyze and that basic skill is logic.
Second, this topic shows the deep bias in too many computing discussions based on "apps", and almost always mobile device apps. This is a very consumer focused and short sighted view of what computing offers to society.
There are already plugs all around you - probably within less than 15 feet from where you're reading this post. The issue is making the existing ubiquitous electrical grid accessible for this new need. Special purpose electrical transformers, aka charging stations, should be fairly easy to mass produce. Tap into the wireless Internet access points for self-service payment options, and you'll have a growth industry in every pod mall in the US. It's just a new type of vending machine with far fewer issues than the tanks for gasoline and diesel fuels. The things can even phone home for service. The tipping point is very close. There's serious private sector investment in battery technology with monthly advances being announced. Every hybrid purchased, puts a little more money into a battery producer that can be used for more R&D.
Forest moon of Endor, watch out for any strange "unfinished" artifacts...
Yes, yes, yes! I'm sure that must be it!
Oh wait...
I installed Safari on Windows just to see what the buzz was about. It installed quickly and cleanly, or so I thought. Some browsing around my favorite sites to put some stress on it and found it to be much faster than IE 7, or Firefox 2.x. However, within an hour I discovered that the installation of Safari had broken my DivX 6.5 player. The DivX Pro converter continued to function, but the player aborted on launch with an error saying it was improperly installed and that a reinstall was require. Well, after a couple of reinstalls, an upgrade to 6.6, and a few reboots, I did some research into what was installed by Safari. When I hit the integrated support for the DivX format I knew I had found the smoking gun. An immediate uninstall of Safari restored full functionality of the DivX player immediately!
***** You have been warned. *****
While Microsoft may not make a distinction based on the number of cores, they have assured themselves a healthy revenue stream based on virtualization - another key technology for the near future. Microsoft requires a license for every virtual machine running under any virtual technology, regardless the number of CPUs in the system. Even if you are running Windows XP in a virtual machine on a physical machine running Windows XP, you must have at least 2 licenses for Windows XP. I would not be surprised to find a lot of VMware and Virtual PC / Server customers that are in violation of this requirement. I could understand requiring a license for Windows Server 2003 running in a virtual machine on that XP box - but only one license for any number of virtual machines. Looks like Microsoft is protecting its revenue stream against any extreemly powerful single processors also. Too bad, machine virtualization is a very good protection against the various memory leaks and lockups caused by Windows applications, and is an effective strategy to consolidate servers for small remote offices.
I find a lot of people rewriting the ATT breakup history. Having the Baby Bells stripped away by the FEDS was the best thing to happen to both ATT and the consumer. This led to a communications revolution that would have taken much longer. Long distance prices, cellular (analog and digital) services, and the consumer rush to the Internet would all have been severly retarded by the communications industry prior to the breakup. Another good example of anti-trust actually working to the company's benefit AND the consumer is IBM. They lost a large part of their services business, and had to open up their OS and mainframes. Who gave you the personal computer? Who continues to push the envelop in basic science and constantly set the mark for storage technologies? IBM now provides more variety in their product lines than the next two largest hardware vendors combined. The other nice thing about both ATT and IBM is that they have REAL capital not just market capital, which tells you they know what to do with earnings. I don't see breaking up Microsoft as a bad thing because I see the same signs in their operations that plagued other large US companines in the past. They have outgrown their (founder's) vision, and the emperor-in-charge management style. There have been several fiascos in the past 5 years with different Microsoft divisions distributing incompatible DLL's within two or three months of each other. As far as I'm concerned MS Office has been the greatest single product contributing to "DLL Hell". They were top of the heap in "patching the OS" during the installation of the app, before IE came along.
Personally I want them to be required to port all their software to Linux and Mac OS before they can release a new version of anything under Windows, and be required to release this at the same price point as the Windows versions with the same level (or better?) of support. It's a winner for everyone - MS finds the bugs that are lurking due to over familiarity with Windows, the other OS's get apps to spark real competition, and Windows users will get apps with fewer bugs. They might even find a few problems with the OS they'd be willing to fix just to make their apps run. This is where MS really lives. Windows was the vision but Office is the cash flow.
As others have pointed out, this is _not_ a high end box for _this_ Chrismas - forget 2001. No, the real secret here is the _waiting_ - it allows this technology to age down the price curve, allows the anticipation to build, allows the FUD to force bad moves by the competition, and allows Microsoft to _float_ another mediocre idea that is then highly _polished_ by free design _criticism_. Look at the price of generic systems with these specs _today_ and you'll see that this box could be _shipping_ this Christmas for under $500 - can you say $199 with a three year commitment to MSN? The _wait_ is the thing - it's deliberate because it will also _benefit_ PC gaming by implication that by developing for the PC you - game developer - get an _advantage_ when it _finally ships_. I'll bet I can find an Office 2000 or Windows 2000 pre-press release from 1998 that you could use to build 80% of this by word substitution. If I were seriously targeting the end of next year then the specs would be at least _double_ everything listed except the hard drive would be in the 30 - 50 MB range - the irony is that a closed box really needs more cached storage space. This response has already consumed more cycles than all of us should give to this announcement. Wait for Release candidate 1 this time next year.
I subscribe to our local newspaper and have for years, but I prefer to read the local paper on their web site. They just don't put it all online - which tells me they "get it" but they're cautious. I disagree with what Mr. Katz is trying to say about what and how newspapers cover contemporary culture. It's not that they can't or don't - they do when they are forced to by competition. And in areas like mine where a there's only a single local paper, that competition comes from other and diverse media. My main complaint with newspapers is the "ink and paper" mentality. They define themselves by the physical product - wrong answer. In the larger papers we saw the transition years ago from "newspaper publisher" to "news organization". The open forum style works on /. to inform and add value, but this is because it's "balanced" by the moderated "edited" publications. Think for a moment about the sources of these "this just in" nuggets on /. and you'll see what I mean. The discussions here derive a large measure of their value from our "informed" opinions regarding "established" items of news initially reported elsewhere - usually by card carrying "news organizations". Ask yourself how many times have you read, or written, "Read the damn reference before you post you idiot!" To all those local and regional news_papers_ I send this wakeup call: "It's the news stupid!" not the paper!
Why was this moderated as Funny? It's insightful - the whole subject is funny, but this post is dead on - Total is great - but it's not 100% of _my_ Daily Requirements. I like the concept though, and Scott Adams will eventually get it right, or he'll get _eaten alive_ by that new CmdrTaco brand.
Didn't you think the "correction" sounded more like someone caught in the act? He "agreed" with the statement, but he didn't "say" it. Crap. Bill's starting to act more like a politician every day this trial goes on.
Now Micro$oft is trying to spin the thing. Over at ABCNews they have an article from Reuters saying that "Bill did not make any of the comments attributed to him about the settlement, ..." Bloomberg has issued a "correction" saying that the release should have read, "Bill Gates agreed with the statement" that Microsoft would be willing... Huh? He didn't "say" it he just "agreed" with it? Sounds like someone got caught "floating one". Read about it he re.
What a revelation! It just hit me - all the things I do to avoid "human interaction":
1 - Sleep 6 hours
2 - Run 2 to 3 miles a day
3 - Work 8 to 10 hours a day
4 - Bathe
5 - Brush Teeth
6 - Toilet Breaks
7 - Think about how to make the world better
8 - Read a book, newspaper, online article
9 - Worry about finances
10 - Feed the cat
11 - Take out the trash
12 - Talk to out of town family on the phone
Is it just me or have you noticed that about half of all surveys are below average lately?
This just in: Half of all divorcing people are men.
It doesn't though, does it? The contract can still be inside the box, so I have to buy the product to read the license, and I can return it as long as I don't also open the shrink wrapped CDROM. I suspect a change in "Return Policy" will be forthcoming that requires me to ship it back to the producer at my expense to get the refund if I have a problem with the license. Of course, I'll have to buy it and open it to read about that new policy also - just a hunch. ;-)
One of the main reasons we got the customization toolkit for Netscape at work was so I could remove AIM from the distribution, along with setting the automatic proxy string. Now they've integrated it into the browser. Sounds too much like "IE is part of the OS" to me. I don't need AIM, or other chat tools - I have enough distractions: phone, pager, email, quick questions, management, meetings, ... My opinion is that "buddies" buy you a beer after work.
Warning! The "Microsoft" tag has been deprecated.