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An IBot has four modes: "Normal" (basically a conventional wheelchair), 4-wheel (all wheels powered) stair-climbing (really!) and Balance. Take an IBot, remove all the modes except Balance, remove the ability to reposition the chair vertically, replace the chair with a foot-level platform, and replace the joystick with a fancy system for guiding the vehicle with instinctive body movements. Result: a Segway.

Eventually, you're going to see physically disabled people cruising around town in IBots. Balance seems to be the most popular and useful mode, so a lot of people are going to mistake them for Segways. Undoubtedly, some asshole will come up and say, "You stupid Yuppie! Why don't you use the legs God gave you!?"

This prejudice has turned American cities into congested, smoggy messes, where thousands of people are unemployed simply because they can't find a job that will cover the cost of buying a car. Perhaps Dean Kamen thought he could get people of their cars if he could provide them with an alternative to public transit. I mean, we're talking about people who own $50,000 SUVs! What's a $5,000 scooter?

Actually, there's only one reason the Segway exists. It's just a variation of Kamen's revolutionary IBot Wheel Chair, which has been stuck in the FDA approval process for years. The IBot certainly has a future (imagine a wheel chair that climbs stairs and allows the user to talk without any neck craning!), but the Segway is probably just an idea looking for an application.

Yeah you can point out what's wrong with what he's saying? no?. Of course not because economists can get a fs*king idea straight-

You economists are morons buying low and selling high.This flash can completely substitue you all morons.

[Borg] Definitely one of the most original sci-fi enemies ever.

the humanoid population of that planet perfected the science of cybernetics. They replaced their bodies with mechanical counterparts, and even altered the thought processes of their brains. Thus, the Cybermen were born. Ruthless and emotionless, the Cybermen began a campaign of conquest to rule the galaxy.

The Cybermen were originally humans, and the scientists of their home planet Mondas perfected cybernetics. They initially replaced only their limbs with metal and plastic, but they gradually progressed to the nervous system and finally the brain. The end product was the Cyberman, who were huge metal giants, devoid of emotion, only acted on logic, immensely strong and intent on conquest.

"Some were produced, sure, but they were not workable in that they were expensive. In the real world price is an integral component of usability."

"You're right, DEC wasn't any of those things."

"People used to buy Alphas because they were bloody fast. But they lost that advantage by not keeping up with their otherwise inferior competitors."

"Took a whole quarter in at school. I hated it then"

"particularly when you had to pay for the CPU by the second"

"beginning programmers can grok procedural programming faster than functional programming."

• Patently Absurd
• Wacky Patents
• Patent of the Week
• Weird and Wonderful Patents
• Totally Absurd Inventions
• Patently Weird

For the complete lyrics and MIDI files

Now that brings back some memories. It was the only spectrum game my parents played. They'd stay up late muttering darkly about it while I lurked in the background suggesting Knightlore was infinitely superior, 3d and all.

Were there any earlier variants?

Mined Out (link for my parents :-)

> Am I the only one to remember Fantavision as a kind of animation creation software?

No, but most have forgotten ;(

> I used to play with it on my Tandy 1000 TL and created vertice (vertex?) animations with it.

I had it on the Apple ][+. Never knew it came out on other platforms.

Yes, it was vertex animation, with tweening (lerping)

> I remember that Luxo lamp animation. I was so amazed back then...

The 2nd disc (back side of the floppy) had some cool animations. I brought the cell reproduction into science class one day. The teacher loved it, since it showed the principles better then any verbose description could.

--
I am not a number -- I am a free man!

Here's an even better mirror.

Here is a mirror.

Here is a mirror.

I asked a (native) British collegue about it, and this was his reply:

Ahh the wonders of pancacke day or as the French call it Mardi Gras Fat tuesday. This is the day before the start of Lent (crazy Christian starvation festival, preparing mind and body for the Easter celebrations etc). Typically people used to use up all their fatty things on this day such as butter, eggs and lard etc, coz it was not the done thing to be eating lard cakes when everybody else was eating celery.

Thus the pancake tradition started. Of course, all the religous nonsense has largely disappeared but the pancakes remain in British Culture.

As far as the tossing equation goes, thats just the work of a whacked out English ale swilling academics, and is an essential part of British inventiveness and ingenuity. (You can't make great discoveries all of the time)

Hope that helps and thank you for your interest in Britain.

:-)

The new WOOD5000 router!

A guy who works in my building has one that he rides around occasionally (his wife works for Segway), and he let me try it out.
It's pretty fun to ride around, actually, very simple to use. I got the hang of it in about 5 minutes with coaching, and was doing loops around the third floor atrium of the building (Morse Hall at the University of New Hampshire) shortly thereafter.

If I had $5,000 to spend on a toy, I'd do it in a second.
That being said, I'd like to repeat the sentiments of previous posters: In the final equation, it has few advantages over a bike, and several disadvantages, and If I needed a way to get around without a car, I'd buy a bike first. Bikes go faster, even a mild lardass like myself can outride the segway's ~15 mile charge, and you can attach all kinds of trailers and racks to a bike if you want to haul stuff. Plus, there's the health benefits to providing the motive energy to moving your butt around.

Bikes are much larger, but much lighter. It's a bit easier to keep your clothes clean & pressed while riding a segway, so it could be a bicycle substitute for the suit type- as long as they don't mind looking like dorks.

This thing could be fairly useful for door to door postal service and similar applications.

Most people here probably know that the Segway is based on the technology developed for the Ibot 3000 , a balancing, standing wheelchair- truly an innovation for the disabled, and I'm sure it will sell very well.

The Segway, then, might be a good thing for the elderly, those still healthy enough to stand at any rate, to help them get around. But if they're fit enough to ride on this, maybe they should be riding a bike too...

Anyway, my conclusion: Fun, but a waste of money for anything outside of a few specific demographics and jobs.
Get a bike. You'll live longer.

Symbolics keyboard, the commercialized space cadet.

Definitely my favourite .

Nah, its boring WITH the chat, because in that case, the game gets in the WAY of social interaction.

Try to have a conversation with someone in the game... Assuming they DO talk back (and most won't), you can guarantee that about 5 minutes into the conversation, someone will say "Oh, wait, gotta go green." and then go off and do a series of silly repititive tasks and then come back to the conversation and say "So where were we?"

Or skill building... It takes forever, and is boring as heck, and the mere fact that everybody is staring at the screen while doing it tends to shape the conversation. During, the "free trial" I don't know how many "So, wow, we suck at guitar." or "Everybody working out here sounds like they need more fiber" conversations I was party to. The conversations probably would have been better if there was a blank screen ala IRC, since people wouldn't feel compelled to comment on it.

There is no "promotion" system in the game. The current subset of functionality in the game versus the offline Sims is very small.

And in the end, the game really is just IRC with avatars, ala Habitat or what have you. And I don't even really like IRC.

Indeed, it brought to mind this.

Nothing too secret about that, though, I suppose.

4) A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Err, wasn't that actually the Zeroth Law?

Countries such as Mexico and Peru also took this stance. Realizing the threat posed by this, Microsoft flew out to these countries for talks with their governments and ended up handing out large amounts of cash, providing their education and software development sectors with free software worth millions of dollars. Although Microsoft would lose money short-term they would make money in the long run, a similar strategy to that of the Xbox. Software upgrades would ensure that Microsoft maintained their cash flow, and the threat of Linux would be significantly removed by the widespread use of Microsoft's proprietary protocols and file formats (locking users into Windows due to compatibility issues).

NewsForge.com reprinted an article from Pikeus. More information can be found here

Admittedly, I am unable to find anything which indicates closure to the Peruvian Congressional bill 1609, which proposes the use of Open Source Software. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that the issue is still open for debate. However, with the acceptance of $550,000 of donated goods from Microsoft, it looks as though Peru may have taken a softer view on Microsoft and their proprietary software

Surely anyone here over the age of thirty-five remembers the theme song:

One banana, two banana, three banana, four
Four bananas make a bunch and so do many more
Over hill and highway the banana buggies go
Comin' to bring you the Banana Split show

• A mercury delay line driver and receiver from LEO 2
• A PSU from LEO 3
• Acorns, all working:
  • Atom with econet
  • BBC model A serial no 509, with documentation and software
  • BBC model B with econet
  • 6502 second processor for BBC
  • Electron
  • R140
  • R260, with documentation and software (power supply unit dead)
• Sinclairs, all working
  • 6 assorted early Sinclair calculators
  • ZX80
  • ZX81
  • QL, with documentation and software
  • ICL OPD - original designer's prototype, with documentation and software
  • Z88, with documentation and software
• Two Jupiter Aces, including one which was unfinished when the company went bankrupt (ir works, but has no case)
• Memotech keyboard for Jupiter Ace (manufacturer's prototype, nicely badged but doesn't and probably never did work, never went into production)
• Memotech MTX 512, working
• Newbrain AD, with documentation still in shrink-wrap, working
• Enterprise 64, working
• Oric 1, working
• Psion Organiser II
• Microwriter, working, with documentation
• Apricot PC, (charcoal, with 10MB hard disk!), working, with software and some documentation
• Dragon 32, working
• IBM badged Tadpole RS6000 laptop, hard disk is dodgy.

I've also got a late model 32k Commodore PET with dual disk drives, but as it isn't British made I don't think of it as part of my collection and will happily swap it for an interesting early British machine.

Yes, I know this is all pretty ggeky. But this is part of our history - in my opinion an important part of our history - and these machines are being thrown into dustbins all the time. Somebody needs to preserve them. So if anyon'e got a Nascom, or an Acorn Model 1 or Acorn Cambridge Workstation that they don't want, let me know.

I have a working Jupiter Ace with a big honking 16K RamPack expansion. The world's only ever released FORTH-based micro. This machine rules! It's the machine that the designers of the Spectrum (Timex-Sinclair 2000) went on to designfor an encore, and was hardware compatible. You can think of it in terms of Jay Miner's Atari->Amiga progression. Of course, if you really want to see what it's all about why bother with emulators? You can build your own Jupiter Ace.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to applying chaos theory to weather. And in some situations it probably fits. However most of us who did physics studied lots of systems that stabilized or didn't behave chaotically. Even some chaotic "systems" had a range where they weren't chaotic. (Using the term system and range or starting point loosely)

I don't have the article handy, but New Scientist had an article a few months ago that compared the predictions of nonlinear behavior with measurement of how the weather corresponded to models. The article strongly argued that the problem was poor models and not chaos. The following is a similar paper.

It's very nice to say that some problems are in principle "unknowable." However, as I said, that is sometimes a crutch of late in science. Hard isn't undoable.

We can probably safely judge the Chia Pet's, contribution to society today.

Here are some other "patently useless" inventions. These ones from Japan will certainly improve our lifestyle at some point!

TTFN

Here is a prediction of a real change, with serious money making opportunities for businesses that get the timing right.

Try a company like Freeserve. You can register online (i.e. before you get here) and use that to connect. You'll get charged for the price of a local call (1p/minute at weekends) to dial up, but otherwise it's free. You get a website/email account, but you'll probably want to use a webmail account or something for the short time you'll be here.

Please, if you're going to quote spam songs, why didn't you find this one

Lovely Spaaam! Wonderful Spaaam!
Lovely Spaaam! Wonderful Spam.

Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am.
Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am.
Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am.
Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am.

Lovely Spaaam! (Lovely Spam!)
Lovely Spaaam! (Lovely Spam!)
Lovely Spaaam!

Spaaam, Spaaam, Spaaam, Spaaaaaam!

I know that there is a wheelchair called the ibot which is made by John Williamson. Part of the attraction is that when the chair is in "standing" mode, the wheelchair bound person is on the same eye level as able bodied people. (is abled bodied people the correct term for people with working legs?) anyway, what would happen if a paralysed person braced their legs straight and then balanced on the platform of a segeway and got that same six foot tall feeling of looking a six foot tall person in the eye for 1/20th the cost of an i-bot wheelchair?

We should be buying new music from small labels and encouraging them to experiment with Open Media/Open Source releases. That way we'll have it both ways, good new music, and we can copy and re-use it however we want without worrying about cracking and hacking some god-awful crappy protection scheme.

We do we have to buy such safe multinational anodyne music??? Come on slashotters EXPERIMENT! There are so many interesting labels out there.

static

LOCA

Bearos

Tigerbeat

Anticon

To name just a few....

WinZip would be killed eventually by free clones, such as EnZip.

the likes of WinZip

Don't use WinZip, use EnZip.

It's one of those "Why pay for something you can get for free?" situations.

Check out the following for a start:

• Books in Progress and Requested
• Steve Harris' PG To-do List
• David Price's In-Progress Page (some have been "in-progress" for quite awhile now, so they are probably free to grab)

But what if only proprietary software vendors have access to A.tgz?

In that case, is A.tgz really in the PD?

Or maybe I misinterpreted what you said - it depends on what the definition of the term "is" is, or what "in the PD" is. To me, PD guarantees reusability but doesn't guarantee availability. GPL guarantees both.

This looks like a good introduction to the history of the British Police Box...

"The TARDIS style boxes were the most expensive and the cost for building a box in 1931 was 55pounds 16 shillings and 7pence, with another 3 pounds for number plate, coat hook, lino , stool, a fire extinguisher and bracket, as well as a brush and duster to keep the mini police station tidy!"

Happy reading. Me, I'm 36 and grew up in England. Never saw a 'real' police box til I was a teenager. Vaguely knew that Dr. Who was travelling round in something that old-fashioned policemen used to use when my dad was a boy (or the Age of the Dinosaurs or similar) but never saw one until I was wandering round London as a teenager and found a few grubby disused and flyposted ones. Luckily these days councils have cottoned on to the fact that they are actually design classics, charming and tourists love them (as well as us who grew up as kids watching the Doctor take on tin foil and vacuum cleaner-part aliens), and they've been restoring a few rather than flattening them all.

How is this any different from Camouflage, which is used by some "Warez" sites to hide files within images?

I've seen this used to keep zip files on free-webservers which do not allow them.

Quote from their website: "you could create a picture file that looks and behaves exactly like any other picture file but contains hidden encrypted files"

http://www.dctsystems.freeserve.co.uk/rmanBasics.h tml

It was later commercially expanded into a faster program called 'entropy'. Exluna was a company that Larry Gritz and some coworkers from Pixar (Gritz joined and then left Pixar) founded. Apparently entropy was fast enough for commercial use (eg. LOTR-scale projects that required photorealistic scenes). Pixar did not like this. At all. The sequelae were as documented here:

http://www.renderman.org/RMR/OtherLinks/blackSIGGR APH.html

Now this is probably not relevant to you if you're working at wetafx or ILM or other big shops, but it's still kind of a shame that, when a product came along that WAS able to compete with PRMan, Pixar chose to squash it with lawyers rather than innovation. I'm not claiming that the case was clear-cut, but the original lawsuit apparently lacked legal merit, and Pixar then went after the individual founders of the company in an effort to drain their resources, which is rather unimpressive.

So the point is that, for a time, there WAS an alternative to PRman for big (cinematic) projects, and Pixar used lawsuits to bury it.

D'oh.

Most people who have replied to this post have done so on the premise that processors of the future will use current computing techniques.
Take a look at this article on quantum computing. In the future quantum computers will probably be able to calculate all possibilities simultaneously.
OK, I'm sure this will annoy the hell out of people trying to make uncrackable encryption, but it will be great news for chess buffs. The aim of the game will be for a chamption to draw with a quantum computer, proof positive you have played the perfect game.

I'm sorry, but I just can't imagine what a "Microsoft Lager" might be like.

I can't resist to give you this link:
If Beer was like Operating Systems...

>I am running a Gateway surplus motherboard in a ATX case, and it just does the typical feep that all x86 computers since the IBM5150

Since a couple of years ago, PC users (who cared) have been able to customize the sound their BIOS makes.

Beats me why you'd want to, though. That beep just seems so... perfect to describe "The computer is booting".

Awwww crap! Looks like the link in that story no longer works!

Here's Google's cache of the page, and here's a mirror of all the images that were on it.

http://www.satcom.freeserve.co.uk/docking.htm/a.

It was a cheap £30 ($45) webcam - his site says a "ToUcam" webcam from phillips (Possibly This one

What? The only "Digital Televisions" available in the UK were ones with the OnDigital receiver built in. OnDigital was a digital-over-UHF provider that went bust 6 months ago. You'd be hard-pressed to find one anywhere, seeing as they don't offer any additional channels over terestrial TV (the free channels are still broadcast, but no premium content is available).

In the UK, digital TV is not the same as the US DTV. All it is is a transport medium for the signal to reach your set. It's still a PAL format and it plays on a regular TV. There are no plans for HDTV, which isn't all that neccessary as PAL is still pretty good technology, especially if you hook it up over S-Video or component-RGB which most TVs have had for many (8+) years here. God bless SCART, which also carries data lines to allow for auto-channel changing when you press play on your DVD etc.

Digital cable/satalite is pretty big however. It offers interactive content as well as lot's of channels. There is no incompatibility with existing sets, any TV can be hooked up to it. For the technologically chalenged it also offers RF output for it to work with just about anything. Most content is in anamorphic 16/9, with auto-switching for your TV. It's a great system.

TVs with digital signal processing are another kettle of fish altogether. I really don't understand the point of these. The picture never looks better than traditional sets, you get artifacts of a analog->digital->analog conversion that just isn't neccessary. At the most basic level a TV is analog. The signal going into it is analog. Why would you want to convert this to digital and back again within the TV?

Hell, most people don't even see the advantage in DVDs

Again, I don't understand where you are getting this from. DVD is huge here. The only person I know that does not have a DVD player is a friend who doesn't even have a mobile phone and never watches much TV anyway. Anyone can instantly see the advantage in DVD, especially when you factor in on-line ordering from abroad, where you can get cheaper prices. My parents have one and they don't even have a PC or internet!

That's even more fun than SCANNING BARCODES! I hope it COMES with a STICK OF GUM!

9/11 - coverage, part 1
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9/11 - coverage, part 4

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9/11 - coverage, part 3
9/11 - coverage, part 4

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9/11 - coverage, part 3
9/11 - coverage, part 4