Well, just old technology. I gigged with a client in 2004 and their dispatch software would do this. I would expect that UPS would have even better and more capabilities, from knowing one-way streets to turn-by-turn routing, and left v right turns would be critical.
And drivers with relatively fixed routes would soon become better than the system at optimizing their routes. Save for the priority packages that have to be delivered out of sequence.
Still, this is not really too new, and the newsworthy part to me would be the fuel savings, delivery goals met, and driver turnover avoided.
I, for one would NOT drive for UPS or any other delivery service. Too damned hard. Unless my doctor told me to lose 45 pounds asap. At least I'd get paid for it.
This is where the argument that all opinions are equally valid leads us, especially in science. You move from 'Newton's theory' to 'Newton's opinion',and then 'that in no way says that Aristotle's opinion was not or is not valid'.
If my opinion is that gravity not applicable to me, jumping off the top of a five-story building will result in my falling, despite my opinion. I will be falling just as fast and as far as if I beleived, and held the opinion, that gravity did in fact apply to me.
My opinions mean nothing if they are contrary to fact. At best they mislead me to my peril. At worst, they mislead others to their peril as well.
My theory is that there is such a thing as certain truth. I hold it to be immutably true. You may, if you wish, hold the opinion that there is no such thing as certain truth, but if you would apply a logical test to your opinion, you would first disprove it by testing, and second find your opinon wanting and invalid in a real world.
And I mean a 'real' world, where there are things that just are, despite our opinons about them.
Amazing. Reality is the kind of thing that causes people to have an interest in Science. Denying reality is pointless.
I'm not sure I can agree with your premise that you (us) tie your security to the well-being of others. In a global economy, your friends easily find new friends that are worth more to them than you were, the emphasis on 'were'.
China, for instance, is a pretty attractive partner to OPEC, certainly at least as attractive as the US is. Japan is less attractive to OPEC in many ways. Suddenly, we are not the best friend of Japan, unless we can help them with their petroleum needs, if OPEC decides to favor China over Japan. This plays out mostly when Venuzuela, for instance, decides to ship to China more, and Japan less. Does Japan pay more for oil as it is shipped from the Middle East, costing more possibly?
China is everyone's favorite trading partner, it seems. Cost is a big part of that, and the relative lack of environmental controls there. But we may be neglecting the reality that China has an enormous doemstic market. In time, and perhaps soon, they will reach the tipping point where their domestic demand is sufficient, and their domestic income adequate, to fuel their own consumer production. Then they need us a lot less than now, perhaps hardly at all. If China can choose its partners, do we get chosen? And do we want to be 'chosen'? Perhaps they choose based on which partner they can extract the most from, leaving that partner as empty a wallet as possible...
When we are not worth as much to China as a market as we are a threat to them, them expect trouble. And I think that day is a lot closer than we hope. Right now, today, what whould happen to China's economy if we reduced imports by half? Probably pretty damaging. What about 5 years from now? 10?
The Chinese seem to take a long view of the inevitable conflict between us. We must also. Keeping onshore manufacturing for critical needs will be an issue for us soon, if not immediately. If you think it's fun to fend off the worms, trojans, viruses, and other disguised but overt attacks on our information systems, imagine the joy of having to mistrust your BIOS, hard drive firmware, even RAM. Imagine a concerted effort by a non-US manufacturer to insert 'spyware' in systems at the hardware level. I don't think I'm describing anything new here, either, just in scale. For example, http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/lsc311/textbook/information&society.pdf describes the persistent rumor of such a tactic used on a very limited scale in Operation Desert Storm. Didn't get much press back then, did it...
We're on the cusp of proving something well known and fairly true. Technology will be exploited to its fullest in warfare.
And we will not always be able to choose our friends, nor keep them, when well-being is the test. Our friends must look further than their dinner plates, sometimes, to choose the right path. Even we will have to do that soon.
Estonia got hammered, probably by Russia. That Russia contracted a stormbot net merely qualifies it as a mercenary attack. Think Bay of Pigs, with a lot more deniability.
China-based machines have been spotted trying all sorts of hijinks against targets worldwide. Not that China-based machines are alone in this, but they seem to be pretty aggressive.
When I was younger, I dreamt up interesting warfare. Why use Anthrax when a decent influenza mutant gave you deniability and a very debilitating attack. Use something like Salmonella, and give the population diarreah. A cleanup of fairly massive proportions. As part of the strategy, hit Atlanta with the Salmonella, and Phoenix, and watch the water problems escalate. Influenza would be best used in metropolitan areas, since it would be indistiguishable from a genuine pandemic.
Cyberwar offers states deniability, subterfuge, and targeted attacks at economic and industrial resources. Wonderful way to cripple your opponent on their own soil, and then run circles around them snarfing up territory, influence, or just plain good press while the losers suffer in every other way.
Once upon a time, you knew who your enemy was - they were slashing, shooting, or bombing you. then it got harder to figure out where they were. Then it got harder to figure out WHO they were.
From now on, it will be harder to figure out if you're really under attack, until it's too late.
I suspect our military will be taking more and more systems off-Net, to completely prevent attacks. Then our adversaries will go after the softest parts of the military systems: Communications - satellites for instance. Logistics - civilian systems the military depends on. Political Systems - including the media, elections.
We are close to fighting an invisble enemy, with uncertain targets, in a neverending low-grade conflict that saps our resources and diverts our attention from greater threats and opportunities.
Time to start giving tax breaks to onshore manufacturers again. We cannot continue to import most of our critical technology from our avowed and hostile enemies.
Talented artists could often fill an album with songs that *all* were worth listening to. But such talent was rare. In fact, after Pink Floyd, I'm having a hard time coming up with a list. Prince? Sting?
But the music industry has been plodding along trying to sell the album to the current young market, and it ain't selling for two reasons. First, there is iTunes, and you can buy just the tracks ya want. Second, there are very, very, VERY few artists that play to the young market that can string together 6-7 tracks worth buying on an album. At that point, Buying the album (ok, CD, I know what year it is...) is almost a wash - $6.93 on iTunes v whatever Best Buy has them on the rack for. And a third point, if there are more than, say 3 good tracks on a disc, then many will download the whole disc for 'free', rather than pay the $2.97 for the three tracks...
And this also spells the end of the album/disc contract. I suspect the real change will come when the Big Music Industry Companies start changing their artist contracts to be based either on duration or number of tracks. Since albums/discs are no longer the preferred unit of purchase, why not make artist contracts based on single tracks? Let the lamers spew out as many tracks as they can, hoping some will stick to the wall and sell a few units on iTunes. The loser tracks just disappear into the void. BMICompanies pay only for what sells. Artists with little talent get little pay. Nope, it's not very fair, but fame isn't fair.
Of course, when your contract is by the track, why bother? Why not change the paradigm completely and, as an artist, sign on with true distributors (iTunes, Amazon, Starbucks?) for at least the first few, then use the capital to pay for better mastering, selling more the next track, and climb the ladder that way? Well, many artists are clueless about how a song gets fixed up into something worth listening to. And from what little I know, the best masterers are pretty much such a hot commodity that they don't contract with a label - they pretty much choose their work. So struggling artists will mostly be looking for a masterer to fix up their track, which is usually a pay up front proposition. Good opportunity for some eager mastering outfits to start working for royalties, maybe.
In the end, my point is that if the BMICompanies are basically operating in a package-album-and-sell-it-to-the-world mode, those days are already done. Sooner they give up, the better. But they need to break the news to their artists that the album paradigm is dead. And change the payment schedule. And that breaks everything, as artists start looking around for a better deal, having just been told that the old deal doesn't sell any more.
If I were so motivated, I'd be pimping my website to artists, to have the music ready to taste. Give the first one away at 128kb, and sell it for $1 as wmv or 320kb. Send your buyers a note when the next track is ready, let them opt out without any games, give returning buyers a discount, make the 5th track free, lock them onto your space and get/keep their attention. Always reach out for the next gang. Invest wisely. Be prepared to go into the management business when you can't make a hit any more.
And the real loser in this? Billboard. Top 40 becomes top 2,000. pfft. Ratings suck.
Since it's Beta, I won't whine about the shortcuts that don't work, key mappings that don't work, nor the interesting quirks in the map display. Overall, it's usable.
But I was in an area where there is often only one tower in range, and My Location was off by as much as 5 miles. It was mostly off in a quadrant that was WSW to WNW. Today, in an area with two good towers and one weak one (and the weak one is my carrier, so it grabs me at all costs - I watch my bars go from 5 to 1 when I actually make a call...) and I'm located within an unmeasurable 100m. Not bad.
My wife installed it too. She thinks it will be cool. She's a complete Luddite. We'll see.
- How did the Senate come to the point it was at in Ep1? Sith lord and the droid army? Plenty of material for an Ep-1 in exploring the Sith and the conspiracy to rais an army and make an Empire. ps- this sets the stage for figuring out how the driod army was just bait, an excuse to use the clone army.
- How did the Sith come to be? EP-2 can explore this, the rise of the Dark Side, the backstory to the convergence of both sides of the Force, and the split in the first place.
- And what about the Force? Ep-3 can certainly develop this, with the rise of the Jedi, the inevitable rise of a Dark Side, infiltration of the Federation by evil forces which probably pre-date the federation and certainly become Jedi if only by by the accident of birth.
Plenty of material to work with. Let's just hope Lucas doesn't hire any of the Tolkein family to work on this... Since The Silmarillion, that franchise has been as dry a husk as a corncob pipe. ewww.
Jumping the Shark would be to come up with the other 3 prequels. New cast, more hot babes, 'retro' effects for a Federation not so much into chrome and stupid engine noises. Though something like a '69 Bug sound would make sense. Right.
Gee, sounds like Access. A shared Access table corrupts about as easy as a prom dress. Or something like that.
You'll be looking at something like mySQL,etc, to replace that.
But the functionality you're thinking of isn't in the db engine, it's in the GUI and interface. that is, most likely, completely replaceable, though not cheap to re-create.
You can probably provide the same pretty face in anything from Notes to ASP, PHP, even the dreaded SQL Server variants.
I used FMPro for a long time, with a fairly large contact DB in use by 7-8 people. You may want to look over your networking, especially if it's Windows. Disconnections will cause corruption, and they can be hard to diagnose. Among other things, if your LAN is addressed in the 10. network, watch that any external connection also doesn't go through another 10. net. This is a shortcoming of Windows Networking, if only by design. And awfully hard to diagnose or test. Rotsa Ruck. Rewrite it in PHP!:-)
He seemed to feel that stress, whether emotional/workplace induced/whatever, or physical/exercise induced/dietetically induced, was pretty much the same. For me, the workplace/emotional stuff was actually reduced by those hours on the treadmilll, and free weights. Leg nights... squats, Yates Rows, Olympic-style movements, I really took a lot of stress out on those weights. Bench presses too. Running sometimes let me leave so much behind.
But, of course, if you don't fuel the furnace adequately, all this is for naught. Then your body rebels.
I watch 'The Biggest Loser', and the equation is deceptively simple- less in, more out. Jillian is a B=*#%{, but she knows how to kick butt. Pretty basic. It's the will to change that's important.
1. Muscle must be fed. Fat doesn't. Strength training builds muscle, which if nothing else consumes calories all the time, just much less at rest.
2. What goes in must either be used or go out. If I eat 6 pounds of food a week, and manage to consume 3 pounds of that as energy, eliminating 3 pounds as indegestible waste (you know what I mean), I neither gain or lose. If I work harder, or replace fat with muscle, I need more energy. It comes from somewhere.
3. If I eat less, I will eventually lose weight. The key word is 'eventually'.
4. If I work more, and don't change my diet, I will eventually lose weight.
5. The equation is, eat less, work more, and be patient. My body may well try to hoard resources in response to the apparent famine or starvation of not so much food.
6. Keep a balanced diet. Not feeding your body nutrients, especially calcium and trace elements, is very bad.
Currently, we do not have to install the Jet engine for our app to be installed. Yes, we use AC97 tables.
Is SQL 2005 Express so free that you don't even have to install it?
How about MSDE?.NET framework?
We are riding on the coattails of Windows 2000/XP/Vista, to be sure, but the alternatives require our users to also install some DB engine,and our users are unsophisticated to the extreme. Leaving Access opens us up to the entire world of DB engines.
We also need to encrypt data now. This limits things a bit more.
But Access is surely as much trouble as it is good. We'll be changing soon, though it won't be SQL 2005 Lite, as the developer teams we have auditioned for that are clueless. Not about SQL, but about users - they spend much of their time telling us how our users use our app. Trying to substitute your nonexistent experience in a field for that of 14 years worth of experience is not always successful. Sometimes, you overlook why the product exists in thne first place. Our current pretenders to the throne are well on their way to proving they don't understand anything of our business. Why won't they just code? Please?
AT&T could send Apple whatever they wanted to know about usage and location.
What else is there to know about your iPhone? Oh yeah, software version, but that's trivial to find out.
Just when I'm looking to replace T-Mobile as my GSM provider, I'm pretty well stuck with the competition that is eager to drop their shorts and give whatever is asked for to whoever asks for it. Except me, of course.
Well, time to go 'negotiate' with T-Mobile. Bleagh.
...if this means they will be sending substantially more data. You know, we wouldn't want to hurt Comcast's poor, fragile, overworked network, would we, Snookums?
Fascinating. Your ISP complaing necause you are USING the bandwidth they SOLD to you.
Sorry, it's easy to rant about this, even if it is pointless. And I'm not even a Comcast customer. Guess I want my ISP (Cox) to avoid this in the future...
Then I apologize. Unwarranted, though it's hard to find a columnist that just gives it as they see it. I wonder how many others are bought and paid for. It happens, I hear.
I still disagree. But I didn't really comment expecting a response to the substantive points. And certainly not any reponse to the unfortunately smeary stuff. Mibad.
And I still think you dissed most everything my old BlackBerry is. Did you ever look at a 7105t? Whatcha think of it? Crap, I should just Google it.
And I wouldn't begrudge you tickets to the Open. Loge seats? Send me some? Please? I'll be nice. (Oh dear, now I see how wrong swag is...)
Our app is a VB frontend using an Access database. Yeah, I know, I know...
But I found a noticeable bug, causing about 10% of our users (well, maybe 150-200 users) significant problems, not data loss but very poor performance.
We got a patch in 4 hours, and rolled into into the next service pack with little effort. I suspect our app is tiny, with at the time 2 full-time developers, 1 QA position, and around 8,000 users. It's highly specialized, and crucial for our clients, the product of 3 years' serious development and another 8 years before that of previous systems all the way back to DOS.
48 hours to patch a serious bug? Sounds like a big, all-hands-on-deck event. You present it in a way that implies, to me, that you don't like to send out 'good enough' patches.
It's all about priorities. We've been watching development of a web-based app to replace our Windows- base solution. F-I-A-S-C-O. A case study in how NOT to do project management, web developent, app design, everything is wrong about this. I pray that it will silently go away, but there is no practical hope of that. Someone has it on their list of things they did last year, and why they are deserving of their bonus. And they will get their bonus. We get the support calls.
Hold out for time to deliver excellence. When the business demands it, solve the problem, even if it's dirty, and then go and perform perfection. If you find that the dirty patch is considered good enough, and you;r enot allowed to go back and 'do it right', then you will have more reason to push back and resist the quick fix.
It's all a compromise. Fast, Good, Cheap. Choose any two of the three, right?
.. for no other reason than they lost so much more by surfacing than we could have lost by 'not knowing' they were there.
If I were Naval Intelligence, I'd be happy with the story:
- Chinese 'appear' in middle exercise. Or maybe, we drove over them to give them a wedgie.
- Chinese surface in middle of a naval group to 'consternation'. Or maybe, we ping them so hard they can't even think. Along with torpedo sound and a striking cover of "Whiter Shade of Pale" that deafens their launch crew.
- Chinese have capabilities we are 'astonished' at. Yeah, astonished they would let us know, in fact more astonished that they would let the rest of the world know.
I see this as much victory for the US as anything. We learned much more about them than they learned about us, I bet, and the other navies of the world shared in that wakeup call.
But make no mistake, China is our enemy, if only by their own choosing. And we have a capable enemy in them. It's just a matter of time.
The thought of a 29" long CCFL worries me. How do I get one of those shipped to me off of eBay? I see many shards of glass, and unspeakable rare earths in my lungs.
I'm beginning to think a rear-pro set is the way to go. The electronics and optics are smaller and pretty reliable, just the lamp with a finite amount of hours.
Not to convince my wife that those few inches matter. Sheesh. First she wants it big, then she wants it small, then she wants it just right. No rest.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, just old technology. I gigged with a client in 2004 and their dispatch software would do this. I would expect that UPS would have even better and more capabilities, from knowing one-way streets to turn-by-turn routing, and left v right turns would be critical.
And drivers with relatively fixed routes would soon become better than the system at optimizing their routes. Save for the priority packages that have to be delivered out of sequence.
Still, this is not really too new, and the newsworthy part to me would be the fuel savings, delivery goals met, and driver turnover avoided.
I, for one would NOT drive for UPS or any other delivery service. Too damned hard. Unless my doctor told me to lose 45 pounds asap. At least I'd get paid for it.
Got me there...
You can have just as much fun with a banana peel, or a case of beer and a bug zapper.
This is where the argument that all opinions are equally valid leads us, especially in science. You move from 'Newton's theory' to 'Newton's opinion',and then 'that in no way says that Aristotle's opinion was not or is not valid'.
If my opinion is that gravity not applicable to me, jumping off the top of a five-story building will result in my falling, despite my opinion. I will be falling just as fast and as far as if I beleived, and held the opinion, that gravity did in fact apply to me.
My opinions mean nothing if they are contrary to fact. At best they mislead me to my peril. At worst, they mislead others to their peril as well.
My theory is that there is such a thing as certain truth. I hold it to be immutably true. You may, if you wish, hold the opinion that there is no such thing as certain truth, but if you would apply a logical test to your opinion, you would first disprove it by testing, and second find your opinon wanting and invalid in a real world.
And I mean a 'real' world, where there are things that just are, despite our opinons about them.
Amazing. Reality is the kind of thing that causes people to have an interest in Science. Denying reality is pointless.
Precisely.
I'm not sure I can agree with your premise that you (us) tie your security to the well-being of others. In a global economy, your friends easily find new friends that are worth more to them than you were, the emphasis on 'were'.
China, for instance, is a pretty attractive partner to OPEC, certainly at least as attractive as the US is. Japan is less attractive to OPEC in many ways. Suddenly, we are not the best friend of Japan, unless we can help them with their petroleum needs, if OPEC decides to favor China over Japan. This plays out mostly when Venuzuela, for instance, decides to ship to China more, and Japan less. Does Japan pay more for oil as it is shipped from the Middle East, costing more possibly?
China is everyone's favorite trading partner, it seems. Cost is a big part of that, and the relative lack of environmental controls there. But we may be neglecting the reality that China has an enormous doemstic market. In time, and perhaps soon, they will reach the tipping point where their domestic demand is sufficient, and their domestic income adequate, to fuel their own consumer production. Then they need us a lot less than now, perhaps hardly at all. If China can choose its partners, do we get chosen? And do we want to be 'chosen'? Perhaps they choose based on which partner they can extract the most from, leaving that partner as empty a wallet as possible...
When we are not worth as much to China as a market as we are a threat to them, them expect trouble. And I think that day is a lot closer than we hope. Right now, today, what whould happen to China's economy if we reduced imports by half? Probably pretty damaging. What about 5 years from now? 10?
The Chinese seem to take a long view of the inevitable conflict between us. We must also. Keeping onshore manufacturing for critical needs will be an issue for us soon, if not immediately. If you think it's fun to fend off the worms, trojans, viruses, and other disguised but overt attacks on our information systems, imagine the joy of having to mistrust your BIOS, hard drive firmware, even RAM. Imagine a concerted effort by a non-US manufacturer to insert 'spyware' in systems at the hardware level. I don't think I'm describing anything new here, either, just in scale. For example, http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/lsc311/textbook/information&society.pdf describes the persistent rumor of such a tactic used on a very limited scale in Operation Desert Storm. Didn't get much press back then, did it...
We're on the cusp of proving something well known and fairly true. Technology will be exploited to its fullest in warfare.
And we will not always be able to choose our friends, nor keep them, when well-being is the test. Our friends must look further than their dinner plates, sometimes, to choose the right path. Even we will have to do that soon.
And it's not even very much a secret now.
Estonia got hammered, probably by Russia. That Russia contracted a stormbot net merely qualifies it as a mercenary attack. Think Bay of Pigs, with a lot more deniability.
China-based machines have been spotted trying all sorts of hijinks against targets worldwide. Not that China-based machines are alone in this, but they seem to be pretty aggressive.
When I was younger, I dreamt up interesting warfare. Why use Anthrax when a decent influenza mutant gave you deniability and a very debilitating attack. Use something like Salmonella, and give the population diarreah. A cleanup of fairly massive proportions. As part of the strategy, hit Atlanta with the Salmonella, and Phoenix, and watch the water problems escalate. Influenza would be best used in metropolitan areas, since it would be indistiguishable from a genuine pandemic.
Cyberwar offers states deniability, subterfuge, and targeted attacks at economic and industrial resources. Wonderful way to cripple your opponent on their own soil, and then run circles around them snarfing up territory, influence, or just plain good press while the losers suffer in every other way.
Once upon a time, you knew who your enemy was - they were slashing, shooting, or bombing you. then it got harder to figure out where they were. Then it got harder to figure out WHO they were.
From now on, it will be harder to figure out if you're really under attack, until it's too late.
I suspect our military will be taking more and more systems off-Net, to completely prevent attacks. Then our adversaries will go after the softest parts of the military systems: Communications - satellites for instance. Logistics - civilian systems the military depends on. Political Systems - including the media, elections.
We are close to fighting an invisble enemy, with uncertain targets, in a neverending low-grade conflict that saps our resources and diverts our attention from greater threats and opportunities.
Time to start giving tax breaks to onshore manufacturers again. We cannot continue to import most of our critical technology from our avowed and hostile enemies.
Absolutely, and that's the real point of TFA.
Talented artists could often fill an album with songs that *all* were worth listening to. But such talent was rare. In fact, after Pink Floyd, I'm having a hard time coming up with a list. Prince? Sting?
But the music industry has been plodding along trying to sell the album to the current young market, and it ain't selling for two reasons. First, there is iTunes, and you can buy just the tracks ya want. Second, there are very, very, VERY few artists that play to the young market that can string together 6-7 tracks worth buying on an album. At that point, Buying the album (ok, CD, I know what year it is...) is almost a wash - $6.93 on iTunes v whatever Best Buy has them on the rack for. And a third point, if there are more than, say 3 good tracks on a disc, then many will download the whole disc for 'free', rather than pay the $2.97 for the three tracks...
And this also spells the end of the album/disc contract. I suspect the real change will come when the Big Music Industry Companies start changing their artist contracts to be based either on duration or number of tracks. Since albums/discs are no longer the preferred unit of purchase, why not make artist contracts based on single tracks? Let the lamers spew out as many tracks as they can, hoping some will stick to the wall and sell a few units on iTunes. The loser tracks just disappear into the void. BMICompanies pay only for what sells. Artists with little talent get little pay. Nope, it's not very fair, but fame isn't fair.
Of course, when your contract is by the track, why bother? Why not change the paradigm completely and, as an artist, sign on with true distributors (iTunes, Amazon, Starbucks?) for at least the first few, then use the capital to pay for better mastering, selling more the next track, and climb the ladder that way? Well, many artists are clueless about how a song gets fixed up into something worth listening to. And from what little I know, the best masterers are pretty much such a hot commodity that they don't contract with a label - they pretty much choose their work. So struggling artists will mostly be looking for a masterer to fix up their track, which is usually a pay up front proposition. Good opportunity for some eager mastering outfits to start working for royalties, maybe.
In the end, my point is that if the BMICompanies are basically operating in a package-album-and-sell-it-to-the-world mode, those days are already done. Sooner they give up, the better. But they need to break the news to their artists that the album paradigm is dead. And change the payment schedule. And that breaks everything, as artists start looking around for a better deal, having just been told that the old deal doesn't sell any more.
If I were so motivated, I'd be pimping my website to artists, to have the music ready to taste. Give the first one away at 128kb, and sell it for $1 as wmv or 320kb. Send your buyers a note when the next track is ready, let them opt out without any games, give returning buyers a discount, make the 5th track free, lock them onto your space and get/keep their attention. Always reach out for the next gang. Invest wisely. Be prepared to go into the management business when you can't make a hit any more.
And the real loser in this? Billboard. Top 40 becomes top 2,000. pfft. Ratings suck.
Installed it on my 7105t, slick.
Since it's Beta, I won't whine about the shortcuts that don't work, key mappings that don't work, nor the interesting quirks in the map display. Overall, it's usable.
But I was in an area where there is often only one tower in range, and My Location was off by as much as 5 miles. It was mostly off in a quadrant that was WSW to WNW. Today, in an area with two good towers and one weak one (and the weak one is my carrier, so it grabs me at all costs - I watch my bars go from 5 to 1 when I actually make a call...) and I'm located within an unmeasurable 100m. Not bad.
My wife installed it too. She thinks it will be cool. She's a complete Luddite. We'll see.
For now, one snap with a twist.
Any of the next three to comne out...
- How did the Senate come to the point it was at in Ep1? Sith lord and the droid army? Plenty of material for an Ep-1 in exploring the Sith and the conspiracy to rais an army and make an Empire. ps- this sets the stage for figuring out how the driod army was just bait, an excuse to use the clone army.
- How did the Sith come to be? EP-2 can explore this, the rise of the Dark Side, the backstory to the convergence of both sides of the Force, and the split in the first place.
- And what about the Force? Ep-3 can certainly develop this, with the rise of the Jedi, the inevitable rise of a Dark Side, infiltration of the Federation by evil forces which probably pre-date the federation and certainly become Jedi if only by by the accident of birth.
Plenty of material to work with. Let's just hope Lucas doesn't hire any of the Tolkein family to work on this... Since The Silmarillion, that franchise has been as dry a husk as a corncob pipe. ewww.
Jumping the Shark would be to come up with the other 3 prequels. New cast, more hot babes, 'retro' effects for a Federation not so much into chrome and stupid engine noises. Though something like a '69 Bug sound would make sense. Right.
Gee, sounds like Access. A shared Access table corrupts about as easy as a prom dress. Or something like that.
:-)
You'll be looking at something like mySQL,etc, to replace that.
But the functionality you're thinking of isn't in the db engine, it's in the GUI and interface. that is, most likely, completely replaceable, though not cheap to re-create.
You can probably provide the same pretty face in anything from Notes to ASP, PHP, even the dreaded SQL Server variants.
I used FMPro for a long time, with a fairly large contact DB in use by 7-8 people. You may want to look over your networking, especially if it's Windows. Disconnections will cause corruption, and they can be hard to diagnose. Among other things, if your LAN is addressed in the 10. network, watch that any external connection also doesn't go through another 10. net. This is a shortcoming of Windows Networking, if only by design. And awfully hard to diagnose or test. Rotsa Ruck. Rewrite it in PHP!
Yeah, he touched on that, not as a top 10 item.
He seemed to feel that stress, whether emotional/workplace induced/whatever, or physical/exercise induced/dietetically induced, was pretty much the same. For me, the workplace/emotional stuff was actually reduced by those hours on the treadmilll, and free weights. Leg nights... squats, Yates Rows, Olympic-style movements, I really took a lot of stress out on those weights. Bench presses too. Running sometimes let me leave so much behind.
But, of course, if you don't fuel the furnace adequately, all this is for naught. Then your body rebels.
I watch 'The Biggest Loser', and the equation is deceptively simple- less in, more out. Jillian is a B=*#%{, but she knows how to kick butt. Pretty basic. It's the will to change that's important.
1. Muscle must be fed. Fat doesn't. Strength training builds muscle, which if nothing else consumes calories all the time, just much less at rest.
2. What goes in must either be used or go out. If I eat 6 pounds of food a week, and manage to consume 3 pounds of that as energy, eliminating 3 pounds as indegestible waste (you know what I mean), I neither gain or lose. If I work harder, or replace fat with muscle, I need more energy. It comes from somewhere.
3. If I eat less, I will eventually lose weight. The key word is 'eventually'.
4. If I work more, and don't change my diet, I will eventually lose weight.
5. The equation is, eat less, work more, and be patient. My body may well try to hoard resources in response to the apparent famine or starvation of not so much food.
6. Keep a balanced diet. Not feeding your body nutrients, especially calcium and trace elements, is very bad.
7. Portion control. Just do it.
8. Keep at it. Patience.
9. Drink plenty of water.
10. Read items 1-9 regularly and heed.
Currently, we do not have to install the Jet engine for our app to be installed. Yes, we use AC97 tables.
.NET framework?
Is SQL 2005 Express so free that you don't even have to install it?
How about MSDE?
We are riding on the coattails of Windows 2000/XP/Vista, to be sure, but the alternatives require our users to also install some DB engine,and our users are unsophisticated to the extreme. Leaving Access opens us up to the entire world of DB engines.
We also need to encrypt data now. This limits things a bit more.
But Access is surely as much trouble as it is good. We'll be changing soon, though it won't be SQL 2005 Lite, as the developer teams we have auditioned for that are clueless. Not about SQL, but about users - they spend much of their time telling us how our users use our app. Trying to substitute your nonexistent experience in a field for that of 14 years worth of experience is not always successful. Sometimes, you overlook why the product exists in thne first place. Our current pretenders to the throne are well on their way to proving they don't understand anything of our business. Why won't they just code? Please?
but i digress...
... that Microsoft doesn't want to fix Jet.
.NET in it.
They'd rather you re-wrote your app and used MSDE, or something with
Not a lot of money in supporting the db engine they give away.
And this is not the first time. Does no one remember they tried to Kill Jet in XP -and- Vista?
A pox on them all. I hope we re-write our app in mySQL.
Ah, my mistake. Assuming Apple would necessarily ask for or receive info from only one source.
Guess they would have to use the IMEI after all. No conspiracy required.
I suppose most any device could do this, if it ran apps and bothered.
You know, when you put it that way, it made AT&T look good. That's interesting.
AT&T could send Apple whatever they wanted to know about usage and location.
What else is there to know about your iPhone? Oh yeah, software version, but that's trivial to find out.
Just when I'm looking to replace T-Mobile as my GSM provider, I'm pretty well stuck with the competition that is eager to drop their shorts and give whatever is asked for to whoever asks for it. Except me, of course.
Well, time to go 'negotiate' with T-Mobile. Bleagh.
Well, a half-speed BitTorrent feed is better than none at all. Sort of.
Guess this means I shouldn't buy that VonageLinksys router gizmo on clearance at Wal-Mart?
Or maybe I can flash it into something useful when Vonage dies?
...if this means they will be sending substantially more data. You know, we wouldn't want to hurt Comcast's poor, fragile, overworked network, would we, Snookums?
Fascinating. Your ISP complaing necause you are USING the bandwidth they SOLD to you.
Sorry, it's easy to rant about this, even if it is pointless. And I'm not even a Comcast customer. Guess I want my ISP (Cox) to avoid this in the future...
And me with no mod points... darn.
I love my Herman Miller Scooter. It may be overkill for you.
Buy the biggest table size you can find.
http://office.pricegrabber.com/tables/m/10389209/
Then I apologize. Unwarranted, though it's hard to find a columnist that just gives it as they see it. I wonder how many others are bought and paid for. It happens, I hear.
I still disagree. But I didn't really comment expecting a response to the substantive points. And certainly not any reponse to the unfortunately smeary stuff. Mibad.
And I still think you dissed most everything my old BlackBerry is. Did you ever look at a 7105t? Whatcha think of it? Crap, I should just Google it.
And I wouldn't begrudge you tickets to the Open. Loge seats? Send me some? Please? I'll be nice. (Oh dear, now I see how wrong swag is...)
oh, my captcha word... 'frigid'. Yeah.
Our app is a VB frontend using an Access database. Yeah, I know, I know...
But I found a noticeable bug, causing about 10% of our users (well, maybe 150-200 users) significant problems, not data loss but very poor performance.
We got a patch in 4 hours, and rolled into into the next service pack with little effort. I suspect our app is tiny, with at the time 2 full-time developers, 1 QA position, and around 8,000 users. It's highly specialized, and crucial for our clients, the product of 3 years' serious development and another 8 years before that of previous systems all the way back to DOS.
48 hours to patch a serious bug? Sounds like a big, all-hands-on-deck event. You present it in a way that implies, to me, that you don't like to send out 'good enough' patches.
It's all about priorities. We've been watching development of a web-based app to replace our Windows- base solution. F-I-A-S-C-O. A case study in how NOT to do project management, web developent, app design, everything is wrong about this. I pray that it will silently go away, but there is no practical hope of that. Someone has it on their list of things they did last year, and why they are deserving of their bonus. And they will get their bonus. We get the support calls.
Hold out for time to deliver excellence. When the business demands it, solve the problem, even if it's dirty, and then go and perform perfection. If you find that the dirty patch is considered good enough, and you;r enot allowed to go back and 'do it right', then you will have more reason to push back and resist the quick fix.
It's all a compromise. Fast, Good, Cheap. Choose any two of the three, right?
.. for no other reason than they lost so much more by surfacing than we could have lost by 'not knowing' they were there.
If I were Naval Intelligence, I'd be happy with the story:
- Chinese 'appear' in middle exercise. Or maybe, we drove over them to give them a wedgie.
- Chinese surface in middle of a naval group to 'consternation'. Or maybe, we ping them so hard they can't even think. Along with torpedo sound and a striking cover of "Whiter Shade of Pale" that deafens their launch crew.
- Chinese have capabilities we are 'astonished' at. Yeah, astonished they would let us know, in fact more astonished that they would let the rest of the world know.
I see this as much victory for the US as anything. We learned much more about them than they learned about us, I bet, and the other navies of the world shared in that wakeup call.
But make no mistake, China is our enemy, if only by their own choosing. And we have a capable enemy in them. It's just a matter of time.
The thought of a 29" long CCFL worries me. How do I get one of those shipped to me off of eBay? I see many shards of glass, and unspeakable rare earths in my lungs.
I'm beginning to think a rear-pro set is the way to go. The electronics and optics are smaller and pretty reliable, just the lamp with a finite amount of hours.
Not to convince my wife that those few inches matter. Sheesh. First she wants it big, then she wants it small, then she wants it just right. No rest.