Slashdot Mirror

can be found here

Is it too late to patent the origami phone? Little cube you keep on your keychain folds out to a 24in screen when you hit the button. And I'm sure I can sell it for at least 10k!

We have such sights to show you.

Isn't this one of the signs of the coming Armageddon?

This is Queensland, they're already two sandwiches and a Maroon loss away from a situation called "Mad Max".

Seriously though, I don't think this is going to be part of your actual number plate number, just an extra graphic. We've been able to have certain graphics for years already, things like this ancient plate with a map of Queensland on it. This is just adding new options.

You want a minimalist phone? You can't handle minimalist phone! The truth is if you are going for a smartphone then it's not minimalist at all. Something like this is what you should be looking for: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g...

So your "neutral face" is a 400 pound Beaker?

Recycled dinosaurs

I don't understand the concept of "renting" movies. Information wants to be free.

It's pretty straightforward. You hook your VCR up to your buddy's VCR and copy the VHS tape you've rented from Blockbuster onto a blank tape. Free information.

Note that you may also need an RX2 Video Stabilizer.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i...

But then you have to 1. upgrade from a flip phone to one that plays music, and 2. be careful to buy one with a microSD slot or risk having to cram all your music into the same 8 GB that already holds the OS, apps, and apps' data.

1) I haven't had a dumbphone since 2005. (Never had a flip phone...all the way back to 1996, they were variations of the form factor of the phone on the left in this picture...oh, wait, one employer provided a Nextel flip phone, but that was it. The phones I paid for weren't flip phones.)

2) Even that first smartphone had an SD-card slot (not MicroSD, which didn't yet exist IIRC, but full-size SD).

(That first smartphone was a Palm Treo 650. My current phone's a Moto Z Play. I bought a 128GB MicroSDXC card for it to hold my music collection. As FLAC, the collection needs about 300 GB, but recompressed to Opus, it only needs 40 GB. That leaves tons of space to bring along movies and TV shows, or for other purposes.)

You mean that miniature screen far away from the driver? Yeah, totally the same thing.

And I'm sure you're typing this message from your special web browser keyboard and using your special web browser mouse, which is different from the one you use for word processing, which is different from the ones you use for each different video game... because of course it makes total sense to have different controls for each task rather than multifunction.

If you can't hit a button this big on a 15" touchscreen that's right in front of you, there's something wrong with you. No "three levels of menus", it's one level, and accessible by steering wheel controls.

apparently the designers expect everyone to have a long pre-planned playlist ready for every trip or something.

What exactly is your use case? Want to listen to a specific artist or song? Press the voice command button and say to play their name. Try doing that in your specialized-control-for-each-device interface.

With Snapchat lenses?

I can see how this could really go wrong.

So now both parties do it, and it becomes an auction for each vote.

What of it? Votes of the indifferent are worthless anyway. Votes of the convinced will be too expensive. Who cares...

I still don't see a problem. People vote for all sorts of bogus reasons — Obama was attractive to some women, for example, and got some share of votes based on that. Trump may have the same advantage this time. May as well allow the otherwise indifferent folks to simply sell their votes.

http://i.ebayimg.com/00/$(KGrH...

Oh, that's an excellent idea. Make the whole thing open source and open hardware, 3D-printable casing, etc.

Use 12×12mm buttons and round button caps. Just pick another colour than white for the button cap so Amazon won't complain about the "design trademark" and make the whole thing send something like an email so it's platform-agnostic.

Well, at least they didn't make the astronauts wear ties...

Not until they got back on Earth.

http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/OTY1...

The point being that you didn't see anyone from the space program that sent guys to the moon and brought them back alive trying to draw attention to themselves with flashy shirts with scantily clad ladies on them. But back then, the people who were part of the space program didn't think of themselves as special snowflakes.

'Special snowflakes' is it?

Funny that, over the years I've never confused the container with the contents..

Well, at least they didn't make the astronauts wear ties...

Not until they got back on Earth.

http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/OTY1...

The point being that you didn't see anyone from the space program that sent guys to the moon and brought them back alive trying to draw attention to themselves with flashy shirts with scantily clad ladies on them. But back then, the people who were part of the space program didn't think of themselves as special snowflakes.

SO THIS.

I HATE thin tablets. Why the hell do I want a thin tablet?
Hell no, I want a big fat tablet with FEATURES.

Likewise with crap like Apples Air laptops. Awful useless piece of crap.
Why would you want to gimp yourself with a featureless piece of crap like that?
Get a real laptop, even if it is one of Apples other laptops. But don't buy thin-crap, it is a serious waste of money.

Thing is, all of these crappy tablets COULD have features and such if they just added a common hardware port that let you connect to a hub, similar to this one from days of old M (holy crap why are ebays image links so terrible? Also funny story, 2 weeks ago I found a saved ebay image hidden on my Windows machine because it had a bloody $ symbol at the start of the name. )
Something like this that let you connect to monitors, keyboard and anything under the sun, maybe then tablets might actually steal some more marketshare from PCs, but until then, they are simply casual computer users market tier.

Features > looks.
People that disagree are the reason we have shitty shiny screens instead of matte.

I can't keep dollar coins in my wallet

Get a new wallet.
1 2 3

You forget that most modern cars these days have literally dozens of microcontrollers and hang everything off the CAN-BUS (including the radio!). There are a lot of points of interconnection to worry about shielding/filtering.

But most are IN the engine compartment and the Dash. So a couple layers of wire mesh in these areas will shield most of them in one swell foop.
You still have the harnesses that go through doors, frame, and trunk space to deal with, but you can wrap that in 3M Scotch 24 electrical Shielding tape

You have to assume that as soon as this device becomes commonly available (even if only to law enforcement) it will be used by criminals. Armored Car companies, and Presidential Limos will all be rushing to install counter measures.

Oh, what's this?

Yes, it's a poster advertising a Bill Hicks tour. Hypocrite that he was.

Oh cool! :D

No, I intend to have no buttons on the dashboard. My DB looks like this: http://c767170.r70.cf2.rackcdn.com/R20924.jpg

There is a nice rectangular hole in the middle, where the centre speaker would go (optional extra). In my case that is an empty cavity, and would make an excellent place for a LCD screen.

At the moment I'm debating whether to make it a touch screen or not, but if I do make it touch sensitive, it would be rarely used (only instead of a keyboard, e.g. if I want to type in an address), due to my original post w.r.t distractions, and because I don't like fingerprints on the screen :)

The place I was thinking of putting the buttons is on the centre console, between the gear stick and the armest. That is currently being used by the ashtray (which I never use, as I don't smoke), seen here on the left: Centre console.

I built an in-car PC for a friend ages ago, and found that a simple usb numpad (12 buttons in 4x4 arrangement) was more that enough to fulfill all the functions we needed, including having some dedicated buttons for music/movie control, so you could switch tracks e.g. even when you were on the GPS map. As it was just in front of the armrest, when you rested your arm your fingers were right on the keys, for easy access while cruising, seemed to work pretty well for years.

However I don't have the space for a 4x4 grid there, so need to trim down the button count, or find a better interface. I tried the BMW iDrive system when it first came out, but I didn't really like it, doing simple tasks required you to remember patterns (e.g. Shift left, rotate twice, shift right, then up, then rotate left, etc...).
Once again I found myself having to look at the screen in order to make sure what I was doing was correct. Ideally I'd want an interface that is limited enough so that the basics, such as track/app switching and volume control, can be done without me needing to look at the buttons or the screen.

Not an easy goal, eh? ;) Also, even if I found an in-car system that I was happy with, how could I interface it with my own hardware and software? Most of these parts aren't exactly easy to come by for the hobbyist :)

Have you considered consolidating your accounts? I travel a lot for business, as well, and I basically have a slim alligator wallet (something like this) with just a couple of cards: my personal debit card, my corporate credit card, insurance card, and driver's license. I do carry a business card case with my badges and business cards in my suit jackets/bag. A few things that used to be in my wallet are now in my bag, including my frequent flyer and other loyalty/priority access cards, a wiping cloth for my glasses etc. It's amazing just carrying the barest minimum -- plus, it doesn't bulge against your pants, and makes your pants look more sleek.

I agree. I use a cheapo ($15 or so) serial port Chinese-made programmer for DIP8 I2C and SPI EEPROMs, has been working like a charm for over 2 years. Looks like this: http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Serial-Eeprom-programmer-24Cxx-93Cxx-and-25xxx-/22/!C!P6,0QBWk~$(KGrHqV,!jME0DV!UBpyBNCNme3PvQ~~_12.JPG

I believe you can find USB versions for not much more money.

I think disallowing non-flat mirrors on the drivers side is ridiculous. In the UK they are allowed - they usually are an optional extra on cheaper cars like mine. My current car has a non-flat mirror fitted by the factory and works great. My old car didn't have it, but I sourced an OEM mirror in a scrapyard and changed it over.

For example - http://i.ebayimg.com/06/!BzWmwGw!mk~$(KGrHqEOKj8E)T9GsOscBMVsWT3G7!~~_12.JPG - same as what I have on my car - you can see a black line signifying the area where the non-flat part is. In fact, the passenger side mirror is flat. If most cars in Europe have this, and people don't crash due to this, why can't the US have this without having to have expensive fallible electronics?

here you go. I can haz monies nao plz? kthxbye.

Here in Texas we don't need any fancy license-plate-scanning computers to notice our judges.
We just put "State Judge" on their license plates!

It especially helps them find their ride after a few drinks.

Heck, they're even kind enough to return the favor :)

I guess this is a real item, though it seems a bit strange OLPC Postage Stamp

http://i6.ebayimg.com/08/i/000/c5/bc/b5f4_1_sbol.JPG

Sadly I cant find a better image.

How is this indian car a marked improvement on this?
I'm betting the key to it is the light weight.

My favorite was the Defender handheld by Entex.

http://i4.ebayimg.com/03/i/000/9b/fb/8196_1_b.JPG

Defender had a full 2D grid of sprites which allowed up/down movement, left/right scrolling and placement of enemies anywhere on the screen. It also had eight buttons and a speed control knob!

In terms of gameplay, Entex's Defender was (amazingly) pretty close to the Atari version. You had to catch falling civilians all over the place. I never got a Tiger because, judging from the commercials, they sacrificed scrolling for a smaller number of large, photo-realistic sprites. Defender was back-lit too :)

Not disagreeing with that, but I am talking about convenience.

For instance, I needed a webcam quite urgently - so I went to eBay and found a good, cheap one. It was small, good, had white LEDs and cost me $9.99 plus shipping. It came with a driver CD and works like a charm on Windows but does not on Linux.

Now, the same goes for the $2.50 bluetooth dongle that I purchased off eBay. Or for a slew of other USB devices that I use.

Most hardware is designed to work with Windows, for whatever reason. The moment I have to worry about whether or not my hardware works, you are taking away my options. That was my point.

-- Punch magazine, in 1935, on the ineffectual response of Britain and France to the Abyssinian crisis The cartoon, found on an ebay auction

It sounds strangely derivative of a game called Isolation.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/1875
http://i7.ebayimg.com/01/i/000/7d/d9/edec_1.JPG

Not many neck ties at the Green Day concert.

Indeed. I have a solar powered Fossil Sundial wrist watch that never needs winding and has no moving parts, LOL!

If you don't have a simple 4 x 3 array of actual press buttons with numbers in the usual order, with perfect right angles (none of the snaking, swoopy rows), you've failed in making a decent phone. Do whatever you want with the rest of the UI, but don't mess with the basic phone function. I've seen and have had to use some pretty bad phone button designs (where you have to look for each button in order to press it), and to put it bluntly, "I've had it with $#$##@@# bad button design on this $#$##@#@##@@# ". It's not rocket science. Here is a badly designed phone and a well-designed phone. At least as far as being able to dial numbers goes.

What a beauty!

What the hell?!

Anybody worth their Turrican and Speedball highscores knows the the only Joysticks you'd ever need were the Competition and Competition Pro (red).

Power stick..bwhaha.. looks like it was made for the physiognomy of dr.zoidberg!

but if you've ever seen boys play with dolls, they're more likely to play with the Ken doll and race around in the sports car than play with Barbie.

I've seen the compactflash hard disk drive, and they are impressive in the way that a hard disk drive can be squished into the size of a flashcard.
But I was wondering if it would be possible to have a connector in the shape of a flashcard at one end, with a cable that could run to an external USB 2.0 2.5"hard disk drive This would give access to 40-80 Gigabytes of storage for the cost of a laptop hard drive.

I'm a merchant in this venue. I sell clocks! Take a look! I make about USD 50 each week. It's good spending money for any kid, just for having fun for about 3 hours a day.

I found that someone with OCR already posted the text in an eBay forum.
Here it is for free.

It was called Super Mario World, actually.

http://i17.ebayimg.com/03/i/04/0c/86/7f_1_b.JPG

You to mount this on the outside of the case and that should solve all of your cooling problems.

I've always wondered why the classified and confidential stuff is always in black and white - never in any other color.

The department that declassifies material is probably still using their first gerataion PaperPort and Mac Plus.

"open-apple" and "solid-apple" function keys

As if the all-in-one iMac form factor computer was something that Apple invented. I distinctly remember Compaq Prolinea (sp?) 486 all-in-one computers, which crammed a CD-Rom, Floppy(!), and all the other needed parts into an oversized 14"-15" monitor. Picture here.

Likewise, a computer the size of a Mac Mini is hardly original - people have imagined stuff like that for years. Apple is just the first company to pull it off on such a large scale.

Although as this is The Sun, I wouldnt put it past them to make articles up...

The local school system here runs Blackboard

Our local school system here is blackboard too. It's proven technology and it really works well. The licensing fee is really low too!

Even for a homicidal cycloptic spaceship computer, I can't imagine any conceivable advantage to having red light shining out of your eye. Was the purpose of that ever explained in the film?

I *read* Playboy. No, really...it's for the articles!!

Then you should subscribe to the Braille edition.