White House offers 'Virtual' holiday tours
Posted by me101 on 07 December 2001 - 17:13 · no comments & 184 views
About the Author
Full name: Unknown
Forum name:
me101
Contact: via forum PM
Submissions: Normal · Headline
Full name: Unknown
Forum name:
me101Contact: via forum PM
Submissions: Normal · Headline
Slashdot It!
Submit to reddit
Submit to blinklist
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Add to furl
Share on Facebook
Add to Windows Live
Add to Google
Visitors to the official White House Web site are greeted with a view of the gleaming foyer with flocked trees and sparkling white lights, and invited to take a "360 degree virtual holiday tour of the White House."
The White House has been stung by criticism for canceling the popular holiday season tours, which Washington, D.C. officials have said conflicted with President Bush's calls to revive tourism and hurt their own efforts to bring visitors to the capital.
"It's hard to have normalcy when you know the White House is a target," Bush said. "We urged the Secret Service to be more open-minded, but they convinced us that the security risk is such that we cannot jeopardize the lives of others," he added.
The technology used in this "Virtual Tour" is from IPIX, a java plugin will be required to view.
(I just hope that the Whitehouse's web server can withstand the onslaught of the traffic! Ed.)
Sun has completed about 75 percent of the layoffs it announced in early October and plans to have about 40,000 employees by the end of the quarter, down from 43,000. As a result of the job cuts and facility reductions, Sun expects to take a $500 million charge, Lehman said.
To help spur sales, Sun has been working to push its 900MHz UltraSparc III processors across its entire hardware line and announced that the Sun Fire 280R entry-level server will now have the speedier chips. Sun's newest high-end and midrange servers already have the 900MHz chips.
The Sun Fire 280R is shipping immediately with two 900MHz chips, at a starting price of $22,995 with 2GB of memory and two 36GB internal disks. A similar product with 750MHz UltraSparc IIIs starts at $17,995, according to information on Sun's Web site.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun also said it plans to introduce some new storage technology in January that will come out of tools it acquired through its purchase of HighGround Systems.in April. Sun has previously said the new offerings would involve virtual storage management and next-generation file system technology.