> Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows
I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.
SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.
I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.
> giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
Prior to SharePoint 2013, Microsoft used sparse columns. It made for massive tables and was poor design.
Moving to XML blobs for user-defined schemas was the correct choice. The table schema became significantly smaller and user-defined schemas (for Lists/Libraries) could become much more complex.
> A launcher for a climbing rope or grappling hook. Have you ever tried getting a rope up over a branch on a very tall tree?
You might look into arborist's throw line launchers and line guns. They come in slingshot and pneumatic varieties. With a little (mostly fun) practice, they can be pretty accurate and reach limbs over 100' up.
> Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales
I have a thermal imager. They can't see through walls in the sense you're imagining. If there's an electric heating element inside a wall or a ceiling, you could get an image of that. If there's a camera or other active electronics hidden in a wall or object, you can see the heat from that.
You wouldn't be able to see a person in an adjacent room through the wall between the two rooms, unless the wall was made specifically of thermally-transparent material.
I've heard rumours of "see through walls" equipment in the US military before. If they really have something like that, it would have to be using technology other than thermal imaging.
> At least in America, high-tech scans are treated as a cash cow. And cheap & reasonable tests, if done, are merely an afterthought - after the patient has been milked for all the scan-bucks that their insurance will pay out.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but that hasn't been my experience. I've had one MRI and one CT scan in the 25+ years that I've been a full-time employed adult with insurance.
I'd have been happy to sign up for more so I could have proactive health information and the raw data to use for hobby projects.
If I ever have a house built to my own specs, I want to get the best of both worlds by using drywall, but with most/all of the interior walls being maintenance corridors accessible via concealed doorways. A modern version of the way the dormitory in Real Genius was constructed.
Just make the house itself ~10% larger than it would be otherwise, so the usable floorspace is the same.
Adding/repairing wiring and plumbing would be easy. Every wall could have two layers of thermal/sound insulation. And who doesn't love secret passages?
Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon.
Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.
I would be amused if the actual reason for upscaling is that a 256x192 display is hard to source and that the firmware is partially shared between models with a display and models without one.
It connects to a cell phone for display so the image is scaled either way. The issue is how the chosen algorithm may be adding non-existent detail or not. If you disable the enhancement you get nearest-neighbor. The true sensor size is all that really matters. Flir has nothing in this segment that comes close to that.
They weren't that high frequency. I could hear computer monitors into my twenties at least. I'd guess somewhere around 20 - 22 kHz. CRTs were largely replaced by LCDs by my late 20s/early 30s, so I don't have a good sense of when I stopped being able to hear frequencies that high.
I find it very useful for wildlife photos. Autofocus never seems to work well for me on e.g. birds in flight.
It's also possible to generate a depth map from a single shot, to use as a starting point for a 3D model.
They're pretty neat cameras. The relatively low output resolution is the main downside. They would also have greatly benefited from consulting with more photographers on the UI of the hardware and software. There's way too much dependency on using the touchscreen instead of dedicated physical controls.
I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.
SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.
I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.
reply