Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Toyota is barely in the race... (Score 1) 216

There's not much of a moment of suspension, but there is some. There's a little more than with Research ASIMO.

Perhaps a poor pun, but you forget that ASIMO has been running now for at least 5 years. Back in 2005, my girlfriend and i watched the run demonstration on one of Honda's world trips. The literature at the event pointed out that the robot had been running (both feet off the ground) for at least a year prior to that event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtiCHtHxc48

One should also not forget that the ASIMO project is growing in multiple areas of robotics, including but not limited to face recognition and learning to interact with the 3D world. Fragments of this can be seen in the show "James May's Big Ideas" (BBC).

Good effort from Toyota and i hope their robotics project continues to get funding.
Cheers.

Comment Re:The last thing we need ... (Score 1) 803

Sounds like a design flaw in the operating system. Attempts to "install" to a protected location by a privileged user should trigger a password window. Or provide API hooks to escalate privileges to achieve software upgrades.

(Haven't used windows since 2002-03 and am starting to forget if power users can install software).

Comment Re:UAE - no surprise (Score 1) 116

we know where all the traffic radars are and so we slow down just in time

Do not try this in your Pajero: Over 250kmph, the cameras usually don't register a passing vehicle.

It's just the standard "bell" that comes out from the car when you go above 120km/h . I really don't think it's due to a government regulation, but it's probably dependant on the car itself.

It is not from the car manufacturer.

Comment Re:meh FUNNY, but serious... (Score 2, Insightful) 544

FRACK! At the very LEAST your programmers should have been told (or, if they asked, been allowed) to put QA bounding-box fields on the statements. If a monthly charge font size to be printed is longer than the width of the statement imaginary box, eject the statement from the enveloping system, then punt it to a manager.

That isn't even close to how the financial organizations function. There is simply zero drive to pre-empt problems as there is no major authority breathing down their necks and auditing every single iteration of their customer-facing software processes in great detail.

Moreover, the customers are individuals or small businesses, meaning there is practically nothing to fear in the form of loss of business due to dissatisfied customerbase or defamation. It's not like they have too many other choices.

Comment Re:How? (Score 1) 477

They're not.

http://gcn.com/Articles/2009/07/13/Update2-USPS-open-source-Product-Tracking-System.aspx?p=1

The service is moving 1,300 Sun Solaris midrange servers to a Hewlett-Packard Linux environment. USPS is using Novellâ(TM)s SUSE Linux on the mainframe and distributed computing platforms to forge greater interoperability between the two environments, Byrne said.

Comment Suse (Score 1) 477

http://gcn.com/Articles/2009/07/13/Update2-USPS-open-source-Product-Tracking-System.aspx?p=1

The service is moving 1,300 Sun Solaris midrange servers to a Hewlett-Packard Linux environment. USPS is using Novellâ(TM)s SUSE Linux on the mainframe and distributed computing platforms to forge greater interoperability between the two environments, Byrne said.

Comment Re:Agreed - Too Much of a Paradigm Shift (Score 1) 394

Google wants me to rethink how I work in order to use their tools. I don't have cute little folders, I have to deal with "labels". I want filters to put mail into folders, not labels, because I don't want to deal with seeing the new mail in my Inbox that I know is irrelevant; I want the Facebook mail in a Facebook folder I can ignore all week long. Searching isn't necessarily as nice as sorting because sometimes my brain might remember someone's initials, but not their full last name. When I want to see all the "K's", I want to see all the K's. All in all, I find it too foreign of a way to work to be truly comfortable.

Labels can work exactly like folders, and it is trivial to set this up in Gmail. Sorting requires pre-determined rules. Searching uses throw-away rules. Combine the two and you have a very powerful usage paradigm. As Gmail can do both, i see very little merit in this section of your post.

My previous two employers used GoogleApps. There was some resistance from the masses, but when they were enlightened to the learning curve from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and Outlook versions, they came around very quickly.

Comment Re:England == UK (Score 1) 429

John Stripe, in The Memorials of Thomas Cranmer, writes:

  "It is a small error, but being so oft repeated deserveth to be observed into corrected. The name of that archbishop was Thomas Becket; nor can it otherwise have found to be written in any authentic history, record, calendar, or other book."

  "If the vulgar did formerly, as it doth now, call him 'Thomas à Becket' their mistake is not to be followed by learned men."

Source: [http://www.freewebs.com/qitranscripts/301.htm]

Slashdot Top Deals

"But what we need to know is, do people want nasally-insertable computers?"

Working...