According to the NLRB, less than 10% (it's about 8% now) of the TOTAL US workforce, including 63% of government employees, are members of labor unions. Among white collar workers, the number is much lower, around 1%. Unite, my ass. Ain't gonna happen.
It would seem if I understand what dumbass is declaring this time, that IE is nothing but a blood-sucking product for M$. I'm generally a M$ critic, but this statement seems pretty weird. There are things that IE has historically done better than other browsers. The main problem that M$ has with IE is that 6 was lame and it has taken foever to get to 7. In the meantime there haven't been any real innovations in the beta to differentiate it from Opera, FF or Safari. However, saying that it's doing nothing but costing M$ money is pretty stupid. If nothing else it gives M$ a reliable platform upon which to build ASP and Atlas apps, thus making the entire web-development suite for M$ capable of producing results that are predictable since they control the display engine. What the heck is wrong with that? What happens if one of the others accidentally or intentionally breaks something or another internally? What is M$ to do - say "oh crap, none of our.net.asp etc. apps don't work any longer, fix the problem!"? No. Then they're in the same boat that everyone else is in when dealing with M$, except they are no longer the party in control. As usual, dude needs to stop doing the chronic and get a real job.
The REAL bad news from all of this is that I could have sold the one I won on everytenminutes.com for $6000 or $7000 instead of the crappy $5000 they were going for from other winners.
Now that http://www.morfik.com/ is in public beta, and Atlas is about to do the same, we are finally starting to get some IDE/RAD tools to build WebOS apps. It's pretty exciting to see where AJAX has gone in 14 months. I can't wait for things to get a bit further so I can start seriously selling clients on going this route.
Next stop: IBM reintroduces the javastation (only now it will be a javascript station).
We'll see how long it takes to make this kind of interface really WORK on cell phones and other ultraportable devices.
They no longer give discounts because ABS is so common.
Well, then when I just got the wife's van covered I was lied to by agents from different companies, who told me that ABS is a wash - it is a mitigating factor and a contributing factor almost equally in wrecks...and that at least in OUR winters, it doesn't work well. There is no optimal solution for braking while going downhill on ice, with or without ABS. Ice is very slippery. Once you exceed the maximum traction between ice & rubber, the car will slide. There is almost no grip between ice & rubber, which is why you shouldn't drive in those conditions (or use snow tires/chains/studs and drive very very slowly)....ABS is not the holy grail, neither is 4-wheel drive. I'm a little worried about your comments about all of these. First, you are absolutely right that there isn't one optimal solution for all circumstances, which is exactly my point. ABS applies ONE solution, which is frequently NOT optimal, and it precludes me from applying another solution, which my experience and judgement suggests IS optimal. Second, as I'm sure you know, chains, studs, snowtires and 4WD help you GO, not STOP. I'm not going to bore the audience with a lecture, but I have never seen a study indicate that any of these tools reduce stopping distance, especially 4WD, snowtires, or studs.
Where I live we get crap conditions from October to April (that's mid October to mid April), so if we follow your advice, that's a lot of "not driving" time. I'm not sure where you live, but since you didn't mention having a bumper sticker that says "My other car is an Arctic Cat", it doesn't sound like you see hundreds of inches of snow a year (where I live we AVERAGE around 280 inches, and I'm barely in the snow belt. Higher elevations see snowfall totals that add another 30-50% on top of that, depending on conditions).
You've got a lot of dumb friends. Send them back to driving school.
It seems pointless to continue to argue about this, so I'll just extend to you and anyone else who is interested a simple offer. I'm a firefighter. I've been a firefighter for ten years. My friends are all firefighters. We have all been to a lot of wrecks, and we have all had to drive our personal vehicles faster than we would like in road conditions that were a lot less than ideal because somebody's ass was in a sling and we were the only ones that could help - you know - MVA with entrapment and fire - that sort of thing. Next January when things REALLY get rocking up here send me an email. We'll find a place for you to stay for a week. You can try driving in REAL winter conditions under REAL time constraints and see what you think then. This is no driving school. This is the shit. No roll bars, no tip wheels, no nice controlled circumstances. Maybe you'll still like your ABS. Maybe I'll make you put a plastic cover on your seat or make you wear Depends before you get in. Maybe you too will pull the fuse when it's all over, if your car survives it.
There is a reson why insurance companies don't give out ABS discounts any longer in places where it snows regularly. They don't work well because conditions are variable from one second to the next, and the algorithms that are programmed into the controllers can't measure intent. In fact, among people that I know that HAVE ABS on their vehicles, the first thing they do is pull the fuse to disable it in winter. I wish I had done the same. My vehicle was involved in one moderate crash over a thirteen year span (I bought it new) and two minor ones due to the fact that the ABS controller was not programed with an optimal solution for downhill on ice, i.e. acceleration despite intervention by the controller. As a result not only was my stopping distance increased, but I was unable to actively steer the vehicle into the curb to gain additional traction from the median snow and from the collision with the curb.
Don't give me the "but the systems have improved since you first bought yours". No, they haven't. Try this on a northern winter day when conditions are icy - go out for a test drive in a new vehicle with ABS. Go to the nearest mall/shopping center, whatever. Get the car going, try to stop, measure the stopping distance. Now find the ABS fuse and remove it. Repeat test. Result: ABS makes car stop straighter, but increases stopping distance. In addition, ABS makes car stop dead-straight, (no you can't steer with ABS in near-zero-traction conditions - total myth - try it), so any chance you have of using a skid to maneuver yourself out of the way is completely out the window.
...The update, which is the first change to the list of backwards compatible titles in several months...
It might be the first change to THE LIST in several months, but the 360 patch that was released last month added support for Tom Clancey's Ghost Recon II, among others, for the first time, enabling me to stop using my original XBox except for DDR (the dance mats aren't compatible with the 360, so I haven't even bothered to see if the game is). So while the list might have not been updated in a while, the periodic patches have added more backwards compatibility.
I started with Vonage about two years ago. After one year I switched to SunRocket because it is a lot cheaper. I would say that my service is fine for the price I pay. Is it as good as POTS? No. Do I pay about $70.00 per month less than I used to for POTS, including long-distance? Hell yes. Do I value the difference in clarity and always-on-ness of POTS enough to go back to it? Hell no.
In terms of overall quality, I would rank Vonage as above SunRocket. In terms of features, Vonage over SunRocket. In terms of value SunRocket is the clear winner. SunRocket came with the phones, which are great, a second phone number in any area code I choose, which is great for my wife since her family isn't around here, and about 30 international minutes each month, which is great since she has friends out of the country that she spends a small amount of time on the phone with each month.
For business I'm using Skype (including SkypeIn, SkypeOut and SkypeVoicemail) for more of my IT related calls. We aren't going to junk the PBX anytime soon, but pretty soon someone is going to build a lighter version of Asterisk (like a peer version) and we may very well start sawing off lines.
Calendar is the calendar extension for Mozilla products such as Mozilla Firefox,Mozilla Thunderbird, Seamonkey and the Mozilla Application Suite.
Sunbird is the standalone form of the calendar extension, which means that it doesn't need one of the above mentioned applications to run. Sunbird and Calendar use the same base code so their functionality is virtually the same and they share the same bugs and bug fixes. Some features currently depend on the underlying product:
and, further down the same page: Tuesday, March 14th, 2006:
The Calendar team is proud to announce the first official release of the new Lightning extension: Lightning 0.1 for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This is a major milestone on the road to an integrated calendar for users of the award-winning mail-client Mozilla Thunderbird. Thanks go to all developers, testers and other supporters of the project.
Actually, I believe you're both wrong. Sunbird can run standalone, within Firefox, within Thunderbird, or within the Mozz desktop suite. The only reason I know this is because I was trying to make it work with a certain Yahoo Day Planner widget (the 0.2 version of Sunbird does work, the 0.3 version does not). I am asking the same question - why do we care about Lightning?
Huh. I followed the link. I must have missed the RAD part. I'll take a look again in a little while. I know that Eclipse was a Java-based AJAX framework, but I didn't see the integration tools. Thanks for the reply. I'll try again later.
Frameworks aren't the same thing as IDE/RAD tools. http://www.axaxian.com/ discusses lots of frameworks every day. Ruby on Rails does AJAX. However, this isn't the same thing as having a complete integrated tool that does it all for you. Any geek can spank out httpRequests, but this next generation of tool should make rich web apps a lot eaiser to build, which means that a lot more creative people will be building them.
Well, the AJAX wars have started, and M$ maybe just got off the first shot. We'll see. With http://www.morfik.com/'s public beta just around the corner the RAD IDE AJAX tools are finally coming on scene. We'll see what people can do with these tools, and whether AJAX is REALLY as overrated as some are claiming. Personally I'll bet that once people can get their hands on tools that let them build web apps as easily as they can desktop apps (and unplug them, i.e. run them locally or over the 'net, as you can with Morfik) you'll see a huge increase in web applications.
OK, first, of course this is the case. That's why many of you recommend that nobody adopt any.0 release, but instead wait until AT LEAST six months until after a.2 release is out. You also experience the same thing with TV shows if you watch every new series from the first episode instead of catching the first season on DVD and coming in at season 2 - you tend to only watch shows that are hits then, but you are a bit behind for a season.
However, as we all know, early adopters get a huge head start on everybody else in terms of being able to use a new technology months or years in advance. As an example, I'm an alpha tester on a new development tool that I'm convinced is going to be a smash hit. It won't even be available for a public BETA for another month, and by that time I'll have been using it for six months, banging my head against the wall on some things, but learning a lot in the process.
The other thing that EARLY adopters get out of the deal is...input, and access to the designers. The customers who adopted the new Phillips units will have much more say in future product innovation than people who come later, because the cutsomer base is smaller at the beginning, and the team is more willing to listen to the people who give them the first feedback.
RAZR and SLVR users have the coolest phones (if a bit wide), and will be the ones who experience the early product problems. SO? They're still the coolest phones.
This doesn't confirm anything. They have found evidence that may or may not be consistent with a particular hypothesis. Could someone please do a better job of editing the titles?
Uh, no. If I give you the keys to area 51, you still aren't allowed in there, and your widow won't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning a suit where she claims wrongful death because you got your mellon squished when you tried to enter.
The good news is...Bungie will have more time to get Halo 3 ready. I was very disappointed with the single user mission in Halo 2, and it's too damn easy for cheaters in the Live maps. So thank goodness it won't be as rushed as 2 was...or at least it seemed to be based on the weekly updates at Bungie's web site.
Uh, thanks, but my Coleco predated Colecovision. It had four pong-like games, and two games that you used a light-capture gun for. I'm pretty sure it's still in my parents' basement, along with all the other old consoles...
I'm...not young. I remember when Pong was brand new and way cool. First game console: Coleco. The wife isn't young either. We have...several kids. The oldest is eight. She loves to play Halo 2 on Live with Ma or Pa or both. It is yet another way for her to interact with us, and on a more engaging, exciting level. It's constant action, so it's more interesting for them than, say, throwing the ball in the yard or riding a bike. It's also lots of fun for us to play with her because it's a relatively level playing field. It's something we can all do, and nobody sucks any worse at than anybody else does.
Of course, we also found that we were suffering from "video game tummy", until we stumbled upon DDR (Dance Dance Revolution). All of a sudden there was another game, one that involved some exercise, that also keeps all of us interested, but also draws in the other kids. They all want to play. It's one of the few activities (short of watching "Finding Nemo"...again...) that everyone gets into. Everyone wants in, and everyone has a blast doing it. The game is easy enough yet challenging enough so nobody gets bored or feels like they can't do well.
I love gaming with my kids. My kids love gaming with me. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than taking them to a game, too!
Ugh. I literally JUST got back in the door from a structure fire (sorry, no links to pictures yet, but they'll be up in the morning at www.kuhlhosefire.org). My bunker gear was sopping wet when I finished my second bottle, and we were just doing RIT/overhaul! (Uh, sorry, overhaul is what you do when the main fire is out and you find all the hot spots and burning debris and put it out so that you don't get called back three hours later once everyone is home in bed).
There are a couple of major issues that this technology might address that would be helpful. 1) At hazmat incidents, turnout gear is frequently inappropriate. The people doing the hot zone work are in "level 1" suits, which are fully encapsulated. However, level 1 suits are HOT, and level 1 techs are hard to come by. This might make it easier for level 1 techs to stay in the hot zone for longer periods of time or perform more evolutions. 2) For my brother firefighter who pointed out that structural firefighting gear including nomex hoods provide inadequate protection for flashover (or getting steamed by the idiot outside who started squirting when we're inside), imagine having a level-1 type of setup for fighting fire. Your hands and head are no longer the most vulnerable because with this new technology your whole body is being cooled actively. I realize that level 1 is bulky and wouldn't be appropriate NOW, but if the technology is available someone will figure out a way... 3) Barn fires in August just KILL crews. If you're standing outside in the sun for any length of time in turnout gear, you get completely baked. This might make it easier for us to endure fires in summer. 4) Brush fires suck. SOG for departments that don't have nomex jumpers for fighting brush fires are to wear FF boots, turnout pants, and gloves. So you're slogging around through chest-high red brush getting cut to hell, a mile off the road, getting your ass kicked in your heavy gear, taking a shovel, axe, or if you're a rookie an Indian Can strapped to your back. Again, it doesn't take long to get overheated. Maybe not any longer.
Isn't this problem only relevant to the Enterprise version? The Personal version doesn't have this "feature", so it's not an issue for that version. I understand that there isn't anything that's keeping google from putting this in the personal version, but they haven't. Personally I find google desktop (at least the deskbar - the rest of it is just annoyingly large, even with multiple monitors) to be an excellent addition to my machine. It is SO much faster and easier to use than the Windows search function.
I strongly disagree with two of the controllers: The Intellivion controller was just brilliant. The atari joystick had 8 contacts. The Intellivision had 16. That made the feel of many of the games more realistic. In Football (or Super Pro Football), for example (oh crap am I dating myself here), "rolling out" the QB was just that - as you rolled your thumb around the wheel, the QB rolled, in something that resembled a circle. In addition, there was much less of a need to do combination "wiggles" like you had to do on the Atari to get into a particular position, since the motion was smooth, and the extra contacts made the motion finer. The overlays were great. You could call pass routes for receivers, and literally draw them on the keypad. In games like Sea Battle, Space Battle, B-52 Bomber, etc., the keypad (and side buttons) allowed the games to be more complicated than they could be on Atari with its single button. The overlays simply gave you a visual representation on the keypad of the functions of the various buttons. Not all games required them, but the ones that did were much more interesting.
I've said it before on/., I REALLY like the Duke controller for the original XBox. It is much, much more comfortable in my hands (and my wife's tiny hands) for hours upon hours of gameplay. The day I opened my XBox I played Halo for eight hours straight - I never got up. I didn't take a potty break, I didn't get food, I just sat and played. At the end of that time, my hands were not the least bit tired or crampy. The fact that your hand is mostly open when holding the Duke is part of the reason why. Your fingers are in the near-ideal resting position when holding it. In addition, the Duke featured buttons that were arranged so that their orientation was relative to the motion of the thumb, not relative to the bottom of the controller. When you grab a controller, your thumb isn't pointing straight up. It's pointing at about a 50 degree angle. The ABXY diamond was lined up in-line and perpendicular to the extended-line of the thumb - so if my thumb is on the "A", if I extend my thumb I will be on the "Y", and if I move my thumb to the left I'm on the "X", and to the right the "Y". On every other controller I'm aware of, the buttons are not arranged relative to the motion of the thumb, they are arranged relative to the bottom of the controller, so moving between buttons is a more complicated maneuver, which means more strain on your hand.
While I can say that I have never experienced severe strain with a current-generation controller, the comfort level of the Duke is definitely much better than any of the others. I would only put the 360 wireless controller somewhere in the same ballpark (I haven't played with any 3rd party wireless controllers for PS2 or GC) because the weight and lack of cord (which means I can get the rest of me in a more comfortable position) are noticible improvements...but I'd still take the Duke if it was available for other consoles.
After RTFA, especially the analysis of the FedEx ad, I am left with the following alternative hypothesis to the author - maybe it actually IS funny, and maybe the study doesn't really reveal what the author thinks it reveals. Of course, as usual, when someone wants to get up on their soapbox and look all clever and such they get complete lockbrain and ignore evidence that contradicts the hypothesis they are trying to support. Does this remind anyone of any other frequent topics on/.?
Slashdot Mirror
According to the NLRB, less than 10% (it's about 8% now) of the TOTAL US workforce, including 63% of government employees, are members of labor unions. Among white collar workers, the number is much lower, around 1%. Unite, my ass. Ain't gonna happen.
It would seem if I understand what dumbass is declaring this time, that IE is nothing but a blood-sucking product for M$. I'm generally a M$ critic, but this statement seems pretty weird. There are things that IE has historically done better than other browsers. The main problem that M$ has with IE is that 6 was lame and it has taken foever to get to 7. In the meantime there haven't been any real innovations in the beta to differentiate it from Opera, FF or Safari. However, saying that it's doing nothing but costing M$ money is pretty stupid. If nothing else it gives M$ a reliable platform upon which to build ASP and Atlas apps, thus making the entire web-development suite for M$ capable of producing results that are predictable since they control the display engine. What the heck is wrong with that? What happens if one of the others accidentally or intentionally breaks something or another internally? What is M$ to do - say "oh crap, none of our .net .asp etc. apps don't work any longer, fix the problem!"? No. Then they're in the same boat that everyone else is in when dealing with M$, except they are no longer the party in control. As usual, dude needs to stop doing the chronic and get a real job.
The REAL bad news from all of this is that I could have sold the one I won on everytenminutes.com for $6000 or $7000 instead of the crappy $5000 they were going for from other winners.
Now that http://www.morfik.com/ is in public beta, and Atlas is about to do the same, we are finally starting to get some IDE/RAD tools to build WebOS apps. It's pretty exciting to see where AJAX has gone in 14 months. I can't wait for things to get a bit further so I can start seriously selling clients on going this route.
Next stop: IBM reintroduces the javastation (only now it will be a javascript station).
We'll see how long it takes to make this kind of interface really WORK on cell phones and other ultraportable devices.
They no longer give discounts because ABS is so common.
Well, then when I just got the wife's van covered I was lied to by agents from different companies, who told me that ABS is a wash - it is a mitigating factor and a contributing factor almost equally in wrecks...and that at least in OUR winters, it doesn't work well.
There is no optimal solution for braking while going downhill on ice, with or without ABS. Ice is very slippery. Once you exceed the maximum traction between ice & rubber, the car will slide. There is almost no grip between ice & rubber, which is why you shouldn't drive in those conditions (or use snow tires/chains/studs and drive very very slowly)....ABS is not the holy grail, neither is 4-wheel drive.
I'm a little worried about your comments about all of these. First, you are absolutely right that there isn't one optimal solution for all circumstances, which is exactly my point. ABS applies ONE solution, which is frequently NOT optimal, and it precludes me from applying another solution, which my experience and judgement suggests IS optimal. Second, as I'm sure you know, chains, studs, snowtires and 4WD help you GO, not STOP. I'm not going to bore the audience with a lecture, but I have never seen a study indicate that any of these tools reduce stopping distance, especially 4WD, snowtires, or studs.
Where I live we get crap conditions from October to April (that's mid October to mid April), so if we follow your advice, that's a lot of "not driving" time. I'm not sure where you live, but since you didn't mention having a bumper sticker that says "My other car is an Arctic Cat", it doesn't sound like you see hundreds of inches of snow a year (where I live we AVERAGE around 280 inches, and I'm barely in the snow belt. Higher elevations see snowfall totals that add another 30-50% on top of that, depending on conditions).
You've got a lot of dumb friends. Send them back to driving school.
It seems pointless to continue to argue about this, so I'll just extend to you and anyone else who is interested a simple offer. I'm a firefighter. I've been a firefighter for ten years. My friends are all firefighters. We have all been to a lot of wrecks, and we have all had to drive our personal vehicles faster than we would like in road conditions that were a lot less than ideal because somebody's ass was in a sling and we were the only ones that could help - you know - MVA with entrapment and fire - that sort of thing. Next January when things REALLY get rocking up here send me an email. We'll find a place for you to stay for a week. You can try driving in REAL winter conditions under REAL time constraints and see what you think then. This is no driving school. This is the shit. No roll bars, no tip wheels, no nice controlled circumstances. Maybe you'll still like your ABS. Maybe I'll make you put a plastic cover on your seat or make you wear Depends before you get in. Maybe you too will pull the fuse when it's all over, if your car survives it.
There is a reson why insurance companies don't give out ABS discounts any longer in places where it snows regularly. They don't work well because conditions are variable from one second to the next, and the algorithms that are programmed into the controllers can't measure intent. In fact, among people that I know that HAVE ABS on their vehicles, the first thing they do is pull the fuse to disable it in winter.
I wish I had done the same. My vehicle was involved in one moderate crash over a thirteen year span (I bought it new) and two minor ones due to the fact that the ABS controller was not programed with an optimal solution for downhill on ice, i.e. acceleration despite intervention by the controller. As a result not only was my stopping distance increased, but I was unable to actively steer the vehicle into the curb to gain additional traction from the median snow and from the collision with the curb.
Don't give me the "but the systems have improved since you first bought yours". No, they haven't. Try this on a northern winter day when conditions are icy - go out for a test drive in a new vehicle with ABS. Go to the nearest mall/shopping center, whatever. Get the car going, try to stop, measure the stopping distance. Now find the ABS fuse and remove it. Repeat test. Result: ABS makes car stop straighter, but increases stopping distance. In addition, ABS makes car stop dead-straight, (no you can't steer with ABS in near-zero-traction conditions - total myth - try it), so any chance you have of using a skid to maneuver yourself out of the way is completely out the window.
...The update, which is the first change to the list of backwards compatible titles in several months...
It might be the first change to THE LIST in several months, but the 360 patch that was released last month added support for Tom Clancey's Ghost Recon II, among others, for the first time, enabling me to stop using my original XBox except for DDR (the dance mats aren't compatible with the 360, so I haven't even bothered to see if the game is). So while the list might have not been updated in a while, the periodic patches have added more backwards compatibility.
I'm so surprised that nobody suggested that the REAL desktop eyecandy can be found at http://www.nudeunion.com/
I started with Vonage about two years ago. After one year I switched to SunRocket because it is a lot cheaper. I would say that my service is fine for the price I pay. Is it as good as POTS? No. Do I pay about $70.00 per month less than I used to for POTS, including long-distance? Hell yes. Do I value the difference in clarity and always-on-ness of POTS enough to go back to it? Hell no.
In terms of overall quality, I would rank Vonage as above SunRocket. In terms of features, Vonage over SunRocket. In terms of value SunRocket is the clear winner. SunRocket came with the phones, which are great, a second phone number in any area code I choose, which is great for my wife since her family isn't around here, and about 30 international minutes each month, which is great since she has friends out of the country that she spends a small amount of time on the phone with each month.
For business I'm using Skype (including SkypeIn, SkypeOut and SkypeVoicemail) for more of my IT related calls. We aren't going to junk the PBX anytime soon, but pretty soon someone is going to build a lighter version of Asterisk (like a peer version) and we may very well start sawing off lines.
Whoops. I clearly misread the Sunbird and Calendar pages http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/. Apologies, all. In the second section, I quote:
Calendar vs. Sunbird
Calendar is the calendar extension for Mozilla products such as Mozilla Firefox,Mozilla Thunderbird, Seamonkey and the Mozilla Application Suite.
Sunbird is the standalone form of the calendar extension, which means that it doesn't need one of the above mentioned applications to run. Sunbird and Calendar use the same base code so their functionality is virtually the same and they share the same bugs and bug fixes. Some features currently depend on the underlying product:
and, further down the same page:
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006:
The Calendar team is proud to announce the first official release of the new Lightning extension: Lightning 0.1 for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This is a major milestone on the road to an integrated calendar for users of the award-winning mail-client Mozilla Thunderbird. Thanks go to all developers, testers and other supporters of the project.
Actually, I believe you're both wrong. Sunbird can run standalone, within Firefox, within Thunderbird, or within the Mozz desktop suite. The only reason I know this is because I was trying to make it work with a certain Yahoo Day Planner widget (the 0.2 version of Sunbird does work, the 0.3 version does not). I am asking the same question - why do we care about Lightning?
Huh. I followed the link. I must have missed the RAD part. I'll take a look again in a little while. I know that Eclipse was a Java-based AJAX framework, but I didn't see the integration tools. Thanks for the reply. I'll try again later.
Frameworks aren't the same thing as IDE/RAD tools. http://www.axaxian.com/ discusses lots of frameworks every day. Ruby on Rails does AJAX. However, this isn't the same thing as having a complete integrated tool that does it all for you. Any geek can spank out httpRequests, but this next generation of tool should make rich web apps a lot eaiser to build, which means that a lot more creative people will be building them.
Well, the AJAX wars have started, and M$ maybe just got off the first shot. We'll see. With http://www.morfik.com/'s public beta just around the corner the RAD IDE AJAX tools are finally coming on scene. We'll see what people can do with these tools, and whether AJAX is REALLY as overrated as some are claiming. Personally I'll bet that once people can get their hands on tools that let them build web apps as easily as they can desktop apps (and unplug them, i.e. run them locally or over the 'net, as you can with Morfik) you'll see a huge increase in web applications.
The number of AJAX tools that are on their way is staggering. http://www.tersus.com/ is one designed for the absolute noob, and http://www.backbase.com/ is also a potential option.
OK, first, of course this is the case. That's why many of you recommend that nobody adopt any .0 release, but instead wait until AT LEAST six months until after a .2 release is out. You also experience the same thing with TV shows if you watch every new series from the first episode instead of catching the first season on DVD and coming in at season 2 - you tend to only watch shows that are hits then, but you are a bit behind for a season.
However, as we all know, early adopters get a huge head start on everybody else in terms of being able to use a new technology months or years in advance. As an example, I'm an alpha tester on a new development tool that I'm convinced is going to be a smash hit. It won't even be available for a public BETA for another month, and by that time I'll have been using it for six months, banging my head against the wall on some things, but learning a lot in the process.
The other thing that EARLY adopters get out of the deal is...input, and access to the designers. The customers who adopted the new Phillips units will have much more say in future product innovation than people who come later, because the cutsomer base is smaller at the beginning, and the team is more willing to listen to the people who give them the first feedback.
RAZR and SLVR users have the coolest phones (if a bit wide), and will be the ones who experience the early product problems. SO? They're still the coolest phones.
This doesn't confirm anything. They have found evidence that may or may not be consistent with a particular hypothesis. Could someone please do a better job of editing the titles?
Uh, no. If I give you the keys to area 51, you still aren't allowed in there, and your widow won't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning a suit where she claims wrongful death because you got your mellon squished when you tried to enter.
The good news is...Bungie will have more time to get Halo 3 ready. I was very disappointed with the single user mission in Halo 2, and it's too damn easy for cheaters in the Live maps. So thank goodness it won't be as rushed as 2 was...or at least it seemed to be based on the weekly updates at Bungie's web site.
Uh, thanks, but my Coleco predated Colecovision. It had four pong-like games, and two games that you used a light-capture gun for. I'm pretty sure it's still in my parents' basement, along with all the other old consoles...
I'm...not young. I remember when Pong was brand new and way cool. First game console: Coleco. The wife isn't young either. We have...several kids. The oldest is eight. She loves to play Halo 2 on Live with Ma or Pa or both. It is yet another way for her to interact with us, and on a more engaging, exciting level. It's constant action, so it's more interesting for them than, say, throwing the ball in the yard or riding a bike. It's also lots of fun for us to play with her because it's a relatively level playing field. It's something we can all do, and nobody sucks any worse at than anybody else does.
Of course, we also found that we were suffering from "video game tummy", until we stumbled upon DDR (Dance Dance Revolution). All of a sudden there was another game, one that involved some exercise, that also keeps all of us interested, but also draws in the other kids. They all want to play. It's one of the few activities (short of watching "Finding Nemo"...again...) that everyone gets into. Everyone wants in, and everyone has a blast doing it. The game is easy enough yet challenging enough so nobody gets bored or feels like they can't do well.
I love gaming with my kids. My kids love gaming with me. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than taking them to a game, too!
Ugh. I literally JUST got back in the door from a structure fire (sorry, no links to pictures yet, but they'll be up in the morning at www.kuhlhosefire.org). My bunker gear was sopping wet when I finished my second bottle, and we were just doing RIT/overhaul! (Uh, sorry, overhaul is what you do when the main fire is out and you find all the hot spots and burning debris and put it out so that you don't get called back three hours later once everyone is home in bed).
There are a couple of major issues that this technology might address that would be helpful.
1) At hazmat incidents, turnout gear is frequently inappropriate. The people doing the hot zone work are in "level 1" suits, which are fully encapsulated. However, level 1 suits are HOT, and level 1 techs are hard to come by. This might make it easier for level 1 techs to stay in the hot zone for longer periods of time or perform more evolutions.
2) For my brother firefighter who pointed out that structural firefighting gear including nomex hoods provide inadequate protection for flashover (or getting steamed by the idiot outside who started squirting when we're inside), imagine having a level-1 type of setup for fighting fire. Your hands and head are no longer the most vulnerable because with this new technology your whole body is being cooled actively. I realize that level 1 is bulky and wouldn't be appropriate NOW, but if the technology is available someone will figure out a way...
3) Barn fires in August just KILL crews. If you're standing outside in the sun for any length of time in turnout gear, you get completely baked. This might make it easier for us to endure fires in summer.
4) Brush fires suck. SOG for departments that don't have nomex jumpers for fighting brush fires are to wear FF boots, turnout pants, and gloves. So you're slogging around through chest-high red brush getting cut to hell, a mile off the road, getting your ass kicked in your heavy gear, taking a shovel, axe, or if you're a rookie an Indian Can strapped to your back. Again, it doesn't take long to get overheated. Maybe not any longer.
I hope that the technology performs. I'm whipped.
Isn't this problem only relevant to the Enterprise version? The Personal version doesn't have this "feature", so it's not an issue for that version. I understand that there isn't anything that's keeping google from putting this in the personal version, but they haven't. Personally I find google desktop (at least the deskbar - the rest of it is just annoyingly large, even with multiple monitors) to be an excellent addition to my machine. It is SO much faster and easier to use than the Windows search function.
Yes, and it's called Morfik. You should join the Explorer's program and give it a try.
I strongly disagree with two of the controllers: The Intellivion controller was just brilliant. The atari joystick had 8 contacts. The Intellivision had 16. That made the feel of many of the games more realistic. In Football (or Super Pro Football), for example (oh crap am I dating myself here), "rolling out" the QB was just that - as you rolled your thumb around the wheel, the QB rolled, in something that resembled a circle. In addition, there was much less of a need to do combination "wiggles" like you had to do on the Atari to get into a particular position, since the motion was smooth, and the extra contacts made the motion finer. The overlays were great. You could call pass routes for receivers, and literally draw them on the keypad. In games like Sea Battle, Space Battle, B-52 Bomber, etc., the keypad (and side buttons) allowed the games to be more complicated than they could be on Atari with its single button. The overlays simply gave you a visual representation on the keypad of the functions of the various buttons. Not all games required them, but the ones that did were much more interesting.
/., I REALLY like the Duke controller for the original XBox. It is much, much more comfortable in my hands (and my wife's tiny hands) for hours upon hours of gameplay. The day I opened my XBox I played Halo for eight hours straight - I never got up. I didn't take a potty break, I didn't get food, I just sat and played. At the end of that time, my hands were not the least bit tired or crampy. The fact that your hand is mostly open when holding the Duke is part of the reason why. Your fingers are in the near-ideal resting position when holding it. In addition, the Duke featured buttons that were arranged so that their orientation was relative to the motion of the thumb, not relative to the bottom of the controller. When you grab a controller, your thumb isn't pointing straight up. It's pointing at about a 50 degree angle. The ABXY diamond was lined up in-line and perpendicular to the extended-line of the thumb - so if my thumb is on the "A", if I extend my thumb I will be on the "Y", and if I move my thumb to the left I'm on the "X", and to the right the "Y". On every other controller I'm aware of, the buttons are not arranged relative to the motion of the thumb, they are arranged relative to the bottom of the controller, so moving between buttons is a more complicated maneuver, which means more strain on your hand.
I've said it before on
While I can say that I have never experienced severe strain with a current-generation controller, the comfort level of the Duke is definitely much better than any of the others. I would only put the 360 wireless controller somewhere in the same ballpark (I haven't played with any 3rd party wireless controllers for PS2 or GC) because the weight and lack of cord (which means I can get the rest of me in a more comfortable position) are noticible improvements...but I'd still take the Duke if it was available for other consoles.
After RTFA, especially the analysis of the FedEx ad, I am left with the following alternative hypothesis to the author - maybe it actually IS funny, and maybe the study doesn't really reveal what the author thinks it reveals. Of course, as usual, when someone wants to get up on their soapbox and look all clever and such they get complete lockbrain and ignore evidence that contradicts the hypothesis they are trying to support. Does this remind anyone of any other frequent topics on /.?