The only thing these really need added is an LED to aid head tracking with a web cam.

Yeah, I got a couple of those during my time in. I did a few things to improve productivity and spent a lot of time teaching people how to use PCs (The amazing, Tempest-certified Z-248! Running Enable!). I think I had performed over 200 one-on-one classes in the ~3 years I was at that particular unit.

Tweaked the EDL-based print spooler we ran to get print from Camp Lejeune so we could store more than 65,535 lines of print (hmmmm maybe it was 255 lines)... that made it possible for the "night shift" person to come in @ 5am and still get all the print off and ready by 7am... before, we had to start at 10pm to get the same amount of work done. It seems that both communications and printing were faster if they weren't performed at the same time, by at least an order of magnitude.

I wrote a nice database system to track inventory cards and print out cards that were pretty much identical to the forms our S-4 used back in the late 80s in the Marine Corps. It was much better than the system they had used - which relied on removing old cards, and filling out, by hand, all new cards every time a piece of equipment was checked out or checked in. It helped alot with leakage... and worse, with equipment that was supposedly checked out, but had actually been checked in (and the Marine would then have to incur replacement cost).

There were other things I worked on, but this one had a significant impact on our effectiveness as a logistics unit.

Seriously... who the frack thought this would EVER be practical? It's like that nonsense "beer delivery" drone - except there was no way that drone could deliver a 6-pack, let alone a case of bottled beer to anybody. Range, payload, maintenance, control, and fuel all mean a big "NO" to delivering packages by "drone" for at least the next few decades.

It's a JOKE. Apparently, a brilliant one, because slashdotters still believe that something useful could be delivered in a practical manner this way.

They should have tried a new Beta format. Surely that would have saved them.

No, your analogies suck. We have never bought an SSD expecting it to randomly meet the specs. If you buy anything expecting i to randomly meet the expectations advertised, you are a stupid consumer.

We buy parts like SSD drives based on the specs. We expect them to meet the specs... every single item of that model should meet or exceed the specs. Exceeding the specs is a nice bonus, but not required.

A better analogy is buying an intel quad-core i7 CPU, rated at 4ghz, but getting a dual-core i3 part (no hyperthreading) that runs at 2.8ghz, but stamped with the exact same i7 part number, the only change being a revision number.

If I was a reviewer, I'd continue to review Kingston and PNY parts, with a huge caveat notice that this manufacturer is known to degrade performance by more than 50% in regular production models by substituting inferior parts. I'd also offer projected benchmarks of those crappier production parts based on previous incidents. Eventually, the manufacturers would get the message.

I see the Kingston VP of their SSD division is posting as AC on Slashdot today. Maybe they would be more wise to spend the time deleting their e-mails directing them to save costs and use cheaper, under-performing parts.

Thanks for elaborating. It's all clear now... PNY only created a single SSD in production with a completely different controller and firmware. It's like a practical joke played on the customer, and he should laugh instead, since PNY spent all that money to send him the only SSD of that model ever to be made with a Sandforce controller.

Damn witch hunts!

They must be... because I can't think of a faster way to poison the well and scare customers off than cheating them. The Kingston move is downright shocking... whoever is making the calls for their SSD parts needs to be fired ASAP, and some serious damage control needs to be put into play if they ever want to continue selling SSDs.

Like EVERYBODY else, I'm not sure why this was posted in Slashdot... but maybe you'll give my three-person unicycle Kickstarter a mention? At the moment it is simply a concept drawing... I'm hoping to raise $5 million and would probably deliver a working production bike after I've exhausted the funds at my design facility in the Caribbean.

Well, mentally, I was kind of lumping in a lot more, like server-side languages and the many scripting languages used to create binaries for mobile apps and such.

My point was, why not continue the improvements to something like Javascript?

As for VBScript, that is an abomination that should have been banned from the web a decade ago. When it comes to "BASIC" Microsoft seems to have an unhealthy, co-dependant relationship with it.

There are far too many choices now. Most of them only differ in minor semantics, but it is enough that it makes porting already well-designed code a pain. It also muddles education and opens opportunities for countless security holes through exploits.

What we need is a "golden ideal" language - which may not be possible, but if we could whittle it down to three or four special purpose languages, optimized for specific uses, and a solid general-purpose language, we'd have an ecosystem worth contributing to and using.

Time to get the dev version. They've already had the annoying habit of nagging me everytime I started the browser to "Disable developer mode extensions" and now they pull this crap.

OK, so I now have three WQHD displays and the 1440 vertical pixels are nice... while I cannot stand the 21:9 1080p monitors, because they are only useful for watching movies, I can see 3440x1440 being somewhat useful, but realistically, nothing beats multiple monitors for development. There are times when you need to go full-screen with your application while debugging. Having a 7680x1440 (and 3440x1440 still means at least 2 monitors to match what I currently have) display won't help me at all there (which is why I don't use nvidia's "Surround"). The problem with the 2560x1080 monitors is the lack of vertical real estate for "everything else" outside of games and movies. We took a minor step backward with 1080p to synch up with our home theater TVs, and as a developer, it was truly miserable to develop in. Even if I went with two of these monitors, it means I don't have a center monitor - I either have a primary and a secondary off to the side, or I'm staring at a bezel in the center. Maybe a developer on a budget could get one of these, and a WQHD monitor as a secondary... all I know is that I'm no longer miserable debugging full screen and mobile apps with my current setup.

While I'm ranting...

For home theater, ultra-wide is fine. Curved, on the other hand, is a crappy gimmick unless you are the sole viewer in your lazyboy at the focal point. In this usage, I can also see curved ultra-wides as a possible ideal gaming monitor.

Anybody who uses the phrase "these gadgets" when referring to desktop computers is a bit out of touch, and probably shouldn't be trusted to provide an unbiased, open-minded opinion about them.

Secondary reasons to not take this opinion seriously is that it comes from "the teacher's union" which prioritizes member employment over education. It's akin to the UAW saying "these robot gadgets make poor quality products because they don't have the flexibility of a human assembly line worker" - just because they make some idiotic statement without a connection to reality, doesn't make it true. Unions are, by definition, very self-serving of its members, often to the detriment of the employers (the theory being, push them until the start to bleed, to make sure we get the most we can).