Comment Re:Panic Averted - Resume Doing Nothing (Score 1) 264
Hopefully a good marketing person can think up a decent name for such a thing.
"QuickProtect"
Comment Hello Slashdot..? (Score 5, Insightful) 234
I know we're all supposed to hate Microsoft, but come on.
Here's a story: On the day Microsoft releases IE 8 -- the most popular web browser in the world -- Slashdot doesn't mention it, but posts a trivial article about Google Chrome benchmarks.
Here's a story: On the day Microsoft releases IE 8 -- the most popular web browser in the world -- Slashdot doesn't mention it, but posts a trivial article about Google Chrome benchmarks.
Comment Airlines (Score 4, Insightful) 360
Speed: There is a very narrow range of trip lengths for which high-speed rail makes sense.
Suppose this train actually achieves the stated 236 miles per hour. Without making any stops at all, you're still looking at about 13 hours to get from New York to San Francisco. With five or six stops (that's not even one per state), it would approach 20 hours. This is a 6-hour flight. Anywhere farther than 600 miles is going to be faster by air.
For trips less than 250 miles, it's just not worth the hassle of getting to a major rail hub, parking your car (or taking transit and transfering), waiting to board the train, arriving at your destination with no ground transport and having to rent a car, etc.. It's easier to just jump in your car and drive there. Cheaper, too.
Those are best-case scenarios. In reality, the Acela takes 8 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC -- a flight I've made in about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Cost: Anyone with $50 or $100 million can start their own airline, leasing a few planes and plying low-volume routes to make money for expansion.
Good luck getting a high-speed rail built for less than $50 billion. With that kind of money, you could outright buy 40 or 50 brand-new airliners and hire people to fly them. That lets you provide service to a lot more than just two cities.
Capacity: It would take over a decade and untold billions of dollars to build a track. That's ignoring all the right-of-way and environmental headaches. Once built, the track can't exactly be picked up and moved if peoples' travel habits change. Air routes change all the time, based on passenger demand.
Airspace is already there, and it's free. The only real limit on capacity is landing slots, and big airports like LAX can land over a thousand flights a day.
Security: In flight, the only external threat to an airliner would be from ground-to-air missiles. Those aren't exactly easy to come by. You can't make one in your tool shed. Airliners are very delicate, but they're also very hard to reach, six miles above ground and moving along at mach 0.8..
High-speed rails travel a fixed route at predictable times. You could destroy one pretty easily using an IED. Even a small fuel-fertilizer bomb would be sufficient -- moving at hundreds of miles per hour, anything which gets the train slightly off-kilter is going to cause massive casualties. Patrolling thousands and thousands of miles of rail, 24 hours a day, is impractical and expensive.
Suppose this train actually achieves the stated 236 miles per hour. Without making any stops at all, you're still looking at about 13 hours to get from New York to San Francisco. With five or six stops (that's not even one per state), it would approach 20 hours. This is a 6-hour flight. Anywhere farther than 600 miles is going to be faster by air.
For trips less than 250 miles, it's just not worth the hassle of getting to a major rail hub, parking your car (or taking transit and transfering), waiting to board the train, arriving at your destination with no ground transport and having to rent a car, etc.. It's easier to just jump in your car and drive there. Cheaper, too.
Those are best-case scenarios. In reality, the Acela takes 8 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC -- a flight I've made in about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Cost: Anyone with $50 or $100 million can start their own airline, leasing a few planes and plying low-volume routes to make money for expansion.
Good luck getting a high-speed rail built for less than $50 billion. With that kind of money, you could outright buy 40 or 50 brand-new airliners and hire people to fly them. That lets you provide service to a lot more than just two cities.
Capacity: It would take over a decade and untold billions of dollars to build a track. That's ignoring all the right-of-way and environmental headaches. Once built, the track can't exactly be picked up and moved if peoples' travel habits change. Air routes change all the time, based on passenger demand.
Airspace is already there, and it's free. The only real limit on capacity is landing slots, and big airports like LAX can land over a thousand flights a day.
Security: In flight, the only external threat to an airliner would be from ground-to-air missiles. Those aren't exactly easy to come by. You can't make one in your tool shed. Airliners are very delicate, but they're also very hard to reach, six miles above ground and moving along at mach 0.8..
High-speed rails travel a fixed route at predictable times. You could destroy one pretty easily using an IED. Even a small fuel-fertilizer bomb would be sufficient -- moving at hundreds of miles per hour, anything which gets the train slightly off-kilter is going to cause massive casualties. Patrolling thousands and thousands of miles of rail, 24 hours a day, is impractical and expensive.
Customer Loses Xbox 360 Artwork During Repair 330
An anonymous reader writes "The Consumerist is reporting that one unlucky individual had to send his Xbox 360 in for repairs. The catch is he had spent a great deal of time getting signatures and artwork on the outside of the console from notable members of the gaming industry. He specifically asked and even sent a letter along with his console requesting that the outside of the case be returned intact. When he got it back it was once again, plain white. Assuming that this is a genuine claim, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the missing/cleaned case Microsoft should at least apologize to the guy."
Dinosaur Fossil Found With Preserved Soft Tissue 248
damn_registrars writes "A fossilized hadrosaur has been uncovered in South Dakota that has preserved soft tissue. This is described as a "mummified" dinosaur, and allows for a look at the skin and musculature of some parts of this animal. The find was reported by a 24 year old Yale graduate student of paleontology."
First Thing IT Managers Do In the Morning? 584
An anonymous reader writes "When I was a wee-little IT Manager, I interviewed for a position at an online CRM provider in San Francisco, a job I certainly was qualified for, at least on paper. One of the interviewer's questions was 'What is the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?' I thought saying 'Read Slashdot' wouldn't be what he was looking for — so I made up something, I'm sure, equally lame. I didn't get the job. But the question has stuck with me over the years. What do real IT and MIS managers do when they walk in to the office in the morning? What Web sites or tools do they look at or use the first thing? Remember, this is for posterity, so please be honest."
Star Trek XI - What We Know 341
Jean Lucy writes "TwitchGuru has an article outlining in detail what is known about Star Trek XI. The film is in the early stages of production, led by J.J. Abrams (creator of Lost), and the movie will most likely be a prequel featuring Kirk and Spock in their younger years. No word of Matt Damon to play Kirk, though..." From the article: "As reported in early September, even former Star Trek actors are saying that CBS has kicked Rick Berman off the Trek bandwagon. This helps to allay the fears of those who say that 'they' will screw up this movie as 'they' have been doing for the past several years. As Anthony Pascale put it to me, however, 'There is no they any more. Everyone who has worked on Star Trek previously, from the top executives at the studio to the guy who sweeps the floor on-set, is gone. There's now a totally different production team running Star Trek. This is what people have been asking for now for years.'"
Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August 519
Max Fomitchev writes "Looks like Apple is going to reveal its new cool and fast Mac OS code-named 'Leopard' in the upcoming World Developer's Conference in August. Good news for Apple! And terrible news for Microsoft. If 'Leopard' is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
Web 2.0, Meet .Net 3.0 177
An anonymous reader writes to mention an eWeek article about Microsoft's move to rename WinFX to .Net Framework 3.0. Microsoft has also announced the availability of the beta version of the MSDN Wiki, the company's first step toward allowing customers to contribute to Microsoft's developer documentation. From the article: "It is purely a branding change, company officials said. The gist of the issue is that Microsoft has two successful developer brands in WinFX and .Net, and the company has seen 320,000 downloads of WinFX -- and 700 signed GoLive licenses -- since the December Community Technology Preview, and more than 35 million downloads of the .Net Framework since the November launch. "
