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Comment Re:Dogfood (Score 1) 1003

by rubies (#32414506) Attached to: Google Reportedly Ditching Windows

I can't remember - it was back in the nineties when Sun was asking everybody to switch to 100% solaris and ditch their MVS mainframes.

Sun was running those (or as/400s or some combination I can't remember) for at least one accounting package, maybe payroll, and announced they were ditching it to "eat their own dog food". Now Sun are the dog food :-)

It's kinda like the last act of every technology company that just realised they exceeded the bounds of their possible markets.

Comment Dogfood (Score 1) 1003

by rubies (#32414222) Attached to: Google Reportedly Ditching Windows

It never ends well. Sun tried weaning themselves off IBM accounting hardware at one stage - I never read a press release saying they'd accomplished it.

A million personal assistants at Google will all turn frosty pretty quickly if you try to tear MS Word out of their white knuckled little fists.

Comment Re:Hate to say it... how about vbs? (Score 2, Informative) 426

by rubies (#32355038) Attached to: For Automated Testing, Better Alternatives To DOS Batch Files?

I second VBS - asking a customer to install Perl is just asking for trouble unless you're in Unix land. The reason Bourne shell is popular isn't because it's particularly good, but because you know it (or a close variant) will always be available on any *nix.

VBS isn't particularly nice to program in, but if you know what you're doing you can call most windows functions and even do database queries if that floats your boat. Networking stuff is a breeze and you can do a dialog based GUI if necessary.
Microsoft

Microsoft's New Attempt To Dominate Robotics 225

Posted by timothy from the more-robots-in-more-places dept.
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Microsoft's Robotics Group is announcing new world domination plans — at least for the robotics world. The company is making its Robotics Developer Studio (RDS), which includes Microsoft's CCR and DSS runtime toolkit, available to anyone for free. Why make it a freebie? Because the company wants to expand its RDS base and get a grip on the robotics development space, hoping big things will come out of it."

Submission + - Intel TM claim: Please, judge, my I have another? (jdsupra.com)

Submitted by Ron Coleman
Ron Coleman writes: "Chip giant Intel has a bit of a reputation for being a trademark bully at times, threatening or suing many companies just for having 'intel' in their name somewhere — including a travel agency and a jeans company.... Intel's lawyers seem to go out of their way to find potential infringement where there obviously is none at all.
"Paul Alan Levy alerts us to the latest such case, where Intel has sued the operators of the Mexico Watch newsletter, because its domain is LatinIntel.com. Of course, the reason for that is that it is using the commonly accepted abbreviation of "intel" as short for "intelligence." It's common shorthand, especially within government circles, to refer to gathered intelligence as simply "intel." The owners of the site explained this to Intel, and in return were given a boilerplate explanation about trademark law, insisting that since Intel's trademark is so valuable, it still has to stop others from using it — even if they're in a totally different business, which is an interesting interpretation of trademark law, and one not supported by the courts in most cases.
"More importantly, no one is going to look at LatinIntel.com and confuse it for the world's largest computer chip maker. No one is going to look at that site and wonder how come they can't order a Centrino processor. There's simply no confusion at all... [A]fter more than two years of this back and forth, Intel sued Mexico Watch, even though it's not even close to competitive and any "moron in a hurry" (as the popular trademark test notes) would clearly know the difference between a site about Mexican politics and a company selling microprocessors."
www.techdirt.com/articles/20091117/1151596970.shtml
Mexico Watch's first motion to dismiss the complaint was granted. Intel went ahead and filed an amended complaint, only slightly different from the first. Intel has now filed the slightly different motion to dismiss this one, too. There's not much reason to think Intel will "get it" this time, either, however.
Businesses

Submission + - YouTube and the New Creative Class

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Kevin Yen, the director of strategic partnerships for YouTube, writes for Cnet that five years after YouTube's birth, the site exceeds 2 billion views a day and a new creative class of budding, do-it-yourself media moguls is emerging who have transformed their fledgling businesses into successful and profitable online brands. For example with only a small band of regular employees — just 40 staffers — Mekanism has built a reputation as "marketing's twisted troubadours, with a particular talent for attracting the wandering eye of the fickle youth market." YouTube personality Phil DeFranco, a frequent Mekanism collaborator, has the seventh most popular channel on YouTube and beats 'Larry King Live' and 'The O'Reilly Factor' in daily audience. "We give companies a fun way to engage new viewers with excellent click-throughs and exposure," says DeFranco adding that "some YouTubers in 2010 will make seven-figure incomes." Yen writes that content creators and distributors determine the cost and availability around their content charging $5.99 the first week, $2.99 a month later, and then migrate to an ad-supported model to sustain demand and broaden their audience. The model is still in its earliest stages with some content owners able to use a "self service" tool on YouTube to charge for access to their videos but consumer habits are changing and "the money is already starting to come. The question really is, who is positioned to capitalize on it? ""
Google

Submission + - Domo Arigato, Sergey Roboto

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With parts made in Japan, Sergey's the modren man. Unable to attend Saturday night's X PRIZE Foundation Benefit in-person due to a family vacation, Google co-founder Sergey Brin did the next best thing: He attended as a robot he could control remotely. Thanks to a Willow Garage Texai robot, which sports a two-way computer monitor for a head, Brin was still able to put in some face time at the fundraiser. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.

Submission + - Machine learning and game theory

Submitted by Bill_s16
Bill_s16 writes: Space War reports in "Game Theoretic Machine Learning Methods Can Help Explain Long Periods Of Conflict" on a study in PLOS Computational Biology that tends to deemphasize individual influence on instigating fights and asserts that history carrying forward from past conflicts may be more influential. In other words...grudges. And perhaps a step along the path toward something akin to an approximation of Asimov's Psychohistory.
Medicine

Submission + - fMRI Shows Some Vegetative Patients Are Conscious (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: In a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the University of Cambridge and the Coma Science Group at the University Hospital of Leige describe their use of fMRI technology to scan the brains of patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Surprisingly, they found that a small proportion of the patients could understand and respond to a series of questions even though they showed no outward signs of consciousness. This finding is sure to rewrite the textbook on defining and diagnosing disorders of consciousness.

Comment Re:Get your vaccinations you mangy mongrels (Score 1) 368

by rubies (#32248072) Attached to: Doctors Seeing a Rise In "Google-itis"

That might be so, but here in Australia we were having something of a minor epidemic of pertussis and there were prominent health warnings about it especially with respect to infants. Sure, adults don't generally get it anymore thanks to the previous rounds of vaccination but the incidence is rising with the rise in ASS (that's Adult Stupidity Syndrome).

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