Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be leading edge.

First, I like Comcast’s Internet service. It was fast, and stayed up pretty well. I also like AT&T’s DSL service, which I use now. It’s nowhere near as fast as Comcast, and it’s also reasonably reliable. But Comcast hated me and shut me down, and AT&T doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, which is pretty much how I like my vendors. I pay the bills, they provide the service, that’s about it.

Comcast on the other hand, felt I was using too much of their service. Instead of limiting the amount I could use, or telling me what the limit was (and allowing me to monitor it) they just said “Too much and if you do it again, goodbye Dave.” And they told me this by shutting off my service to get me to call them. I almost fired them as a vendor for doing that, but as I said, I liked the service.

Predictably, I crossed the line again, they shut me off. They wanted to keep me as a TV customer but I fired them, replaced them with DirecTV and every night before I go to bed I say a prayer asking God to punish them in new and innovative ways, so deep is my hatred of all-things-Comcast.

Then I read a bunch of articles saying they’ve come around to my way of thinking. Amazing!

WSJ: Comcast starts acting like a company that cares just a bit about their customers.

Like I said, sometimes it’s better not to be so leading edge.

Galveston, TX, September 25, 2008 — Cots lined up in a men’s bunkhouse and waiting for occupants at the Galveston Airport Base Camp. FEMA can provide safe and secure temporary housing that can be built and ready for use in a matter of hours. Mike Moore/FEMA

Washington - For the first time, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recruiters will look to Georgia and South Carolina with four simultaneous Border Patrol agent recruiting events. On Saturday, September 20, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., CBP’s Southern Blitz will launch recruiting events in four population centers including the Georgia cities of Atlanta and Columbus, along with Columbia and North Charleston in South Carolina. (more)

(Wisconsin State Journal, The Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sep. 27–The QTI Group is a privately held staffing, recruiting, consulting and human resources outsourcing company based in Madison. Founded in 1957 as a franchise of the Manpower employment

WASHINGTON?A growing number of American manufacturers seem to be profiting from an anti-outsourcing backlash. MORE Did you enjoy this article? Click here to subscribe to the magazine. Most Emailed Articles Top Searches Most Popular Articles Mind the

© 2008 AlphaMed Press This Article All Versions of this Article: 13/9/1001 most recent eLetters: Submit a response to this article Google Scholar Symptom Management and Supportive Care Evolving Strategies for the Management of Hand?Foot Skin Reaction

We’ve known for some time that Dell was working on a Netbook-style laptop–the same kind of small, low-power, inexpensive system made popular by Asus and the Eee PC line. And even though there are not many surprises in the just-announced Inspiron Mini 9 (previous leaks revealed the system’s design and features), it’s still exciting to see a major player back the Netbook concept in a big way.

Component-wise, the Mini 9 is similar to other recent Netbooks, such as the Eee PC 901 and the Acer Aspire One, and includes Intel’s Atom CPU. But in typical Dell fashion, there are more customization options than we’ve seen in a Netbook before.

Our test unit arrived with 1GB of RAM, a 16GB solid-state hard drive, and Windows XP. That config costs $514 and comes very close to hitting the benchmarks we set out in our “Building the Perfect Netbook” feature, which asked for similar components, but maybe a slightly bigger SSD hard drive and an impulse-purchase $499 price tag.

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‘Spore,’ the new evolution game from Electronic Arts and ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ creator Will Wright, started with a series of small prototyping systems.

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

Electronic Arts’ much anticipated evolution game, Spore hits store shelves Sunday in North America, and for those that have been on the project since the beginning, it has been a long road from concept to completion.

The game’s creator, Will Wright, who is famous for previous games like SimCity and The Sims said recently that the game has been seven years in the making, meaning the project was getting under way not long after The Sims launched and became the best-selling PC game of all time.

Wright has talked at length about how Spore’s origins lie in the SETI project and other flights of his fancy.

“The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore,” Wright told me last month. “As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy.”

In the highly anticipated lead-up to the Spore’s release from EA studio Maxis, in Emeryville, Calif., almost all the attention has been on the game itself or on its Creature Creator, which gives users an easy and sophisticated way to create complex beasts and which was made available in June as a free download.

But for many people, an equally exciting element has been the series of prototypes available for free download on the Spore Web site, each of which provides a look at the origins of a small piece of the larger game.

In fact, the prototypes were a crucial part of making Spore a reality. For example, since the procedural animation of the creatures in the game is one of its most-heralded elements, it’s notable that before the system was ever built into the game, it started as a prototype.

“The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior,” Wright said. “We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn’t doable, where we have to scale it back.”

The first programmer on the Spore team was a Maxis veteran named Jason Shankel. Prior to joining Wright on his evolution project, he’d been working on a project known as SimMars, which was essentially a Mars terraforming game that was supported financially by NASA before the plug was finally pulled.

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The Zephyr aircraft flies purely by solar power.

(Credit: QinetiQ)

After 16 days, the Olympics concluded with 43 world records being broken. However, there’s now another record that’s no less exciting.

QinetiQ claimed Sunday that its propeller-driven aircraft called Zephyr flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes nonstop, …