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Comment Re:Finally (Score 2) 361

I have to agree with the overall sentiment here....and I am sure that anyone with experience can tell their own war stories of dealing with a professional "manager" that thinks they only have to manage people and don't need to know anything about the job those people do... I can't stand those as I don't find it to be true. I used to be the first person to bring up the past examples of someone being "promoted out of their sphere of incompetence"... but I was lucky enough that whenever I came across those people, they had always managed to actually end up as good managers... they had the mindset for management much more than they were technically capable of delivery. For myself I have recently changed jobs and moved from a management role, back in to consulting... and as much as I complained about dealing with the HR stuff "because I'm a techie"... I now find myself the first person raising his hand and volunteering to help set up a brand new graduate program with personal mentoring and career guidance for the first time for my current company.... I now see the things I can offer beyond just the technical and find that I want to challenge myself in those areas... (and for a while longer keeping myself current on the tech and walking the walk as a consultant)... I'm sure at some point in the future I'll get sick of dealing with clients face-to-face and I'll end up back doing an internal management role... but for now.. I have my nerd propeller... so let me code and test in peace :-)
Games

Haptic Gaming Vest Simulates Punches, Shots, Stabbing 110

Posted by Soulskill from the thumpity-thump-thump dept.
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a Tactile Gaming Vest that smacks and vibrates as players get shot in a game based on Half-Life 2. Four solenoid actuators in the chest and shoulders in front and two solenoids in the back give you the feeling of a simulated gunshot. In addition, vibrating eccentric-mass motors clustered against the shoulder blades make you feel a slashing effect as you get stabbed from behind. If this kind of vest could be linked to a movie while you watch it, the experience would be that much more exciting. Or as one of the creators put it, 'every time Bruce Willis gets shot, you feel it.'"
X

After 2 Years of Development, LTSP 5.2 Is Out 79

Posted by timothy from the terminal-velocity dept.
The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is, as always, available on Launchpad."
Input Devices

Sony Develops a Universal Game Console Controller 62

Posted by Soulskill from the floats-like-a-dreamcast-stings-like-a-wii dept.
Go Rumors has discovered that Sony recently applied for a patent on a "universal game console controller." According to the patent filing, the controller "includes a hand-holdable housing and a touch sensitive liquid crystal display (LCD) on the housing. The LCD is caused to present, depending on what type of game console a user has selected, a controller key layout for a first type of game console or a controller key layout for a second type of game console. A key layout includes plural keys selectable by a user to input commands to a game console."

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.
Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."
Space

Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242

Posted by Soulskill from the i-for-one dept.
likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

Comment Pay now or pay later... you still pay the MS piper (Score 2, Insightful) 234

by Reapl (#26098167) Attached to: Windows Cheap Enough For $2B Aussie Laptop Deal

OK, so Micro$haft have come up with a cost model that in the short term "may" allow the laptops to be purchased for the same money, but ffs can't people look long term with this stuff and not just the initial up front cost.

So you aren't paying the MS tax for office now, but instead you are just amoritising that cost over years of needing larger internet bandwidth to the "cloud". With some of the crap being bandied about down here lets go out on the edge and look at issues with this...
    - The new $8Billion national broadband network of which one core issue is to provide school networks if it doesn't come off then stuffed internet for schools means no cloud that will be useful
    - The great aussie internet fence (like the rabbit proof fence not the great wall)... if you are using the cloud lets hope no cloud server accidently gets put on the black list...
    - I have not seen anything from MS that show the ongoing cost analysis of this
    - how much to upgrade the version of office in the 'cloud'?
    - how and at what cost to get non-MS products into this mysterios 'cloud'?
    - when are MS going to force me to upgrade ALL my netbooks because the latest cloud products don't work on the old core netbook OS? (and it will be forced look at their track record)

Basically, I don't like ther risks or the costings of this cloud computing model for schools like this...

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