xyance - Slashdot User

What If There Was a Microsoft Appreciation Day? 362

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday August 04, 2012 @06:35PM from the good-luck-finding-one-around-here dept.

theodp writes "In 2005, Microsoft came under fire after withdrawing support for an anti-gay-discrimination bill. 'I don't want the company to be in the position of appearing to dismiss the deeply-held beliefs of any employee, by picking sides on social policy issues,' explained CEO Steve Ballmer. That was then. Microsoft — like Google and Amazon — has since very publicly declared its support for gay-marriage legislation, which means it — unlike Chick-fil-A — needn't worry about the 'deeply-held beliefs of any employee' causing it to be blocked from doing business by the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. I guess we'll never know what Microsoft versions of 'Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day' or 'National Same-Sex Kiss Day' would have looked like."

Giant Mech Robots From Japan 104

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @10:57AM from the i-for-one-welcome-our-new-robot-overlords dept.

New submitter Hanike writes "According to The Verge, Japanese hi-tech company Suidobashi Heavy Industry is developing a 13-foot, diesel-powered, real Mecha robot called Kuratas! 'The two-man team — artist Kogoro Kurata and robotics researcher Wataru Yoshizaki — isn't stopping there, either. Suidobashi wants to mass produce, starting at the low price of $1.35 million. So, what do you get for the money? Kuratas has over 30 hydraulic joints that allow it to freely move its arms, legs, and torso. It can fire water bottle rockets and fireworks, and its 6,000 round-per-minute BB Gatling guns are controlled with the pilot's smile; part of Yoshizaki's V-Shido (read like bushido, as in "way of the samurai") control system. In order to get around, the four-legged mech uses ordinary wheels, but the Suidobashi team wants to get it walking in order to navigate uneven terrain.'"

Comment Re:Pro graphics apps (Score 1) 566

by xyance on Thursday August 03, 2006 @09:45AM (#15839150) Attached to: The Future of Closed Source Software and Linux

...there are plenty of higher end 3d animating and modelling apps availible

Isn't this partially due to the fact that many of these apps were already available on a Unix platform, i.e. IRIX on SGI hardware? A port from an arbitrary flavor of Unix is not necessarily trivial, but a heck easier than an outright dissimilar platform. It seems to me that it's not that these software companies are specifically focusing more on Linux but instead continuing to evolve their apps to match the way the *nix space has evolved because it's what's good for business.

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