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Interesting fact: "Telephone sanitizer" is actually a euphemism for toilet cleaner. The term came about when indoor plumbing was popularized. Women who couldn't afford servants but still had money would hire out people to come in and clean their toilets. Nobody wanted a truck parked outside of their house that had "WC cleaner" written on it, so one enterprising businessman put "Telephone Sanitizing" on the side of his truck, which implied that these middle class housewives had adopted another new technology: the telephone. Thus, a euphemism was born.

Source: http://tlb.org/telsan.html

Trevor Blackwell built both a couple of two-wheeled versions, but also built a unicycle about half a decade ago. He just figured "If Dean builds it with two wheels, and I can build one with two wheels, I'm gonna build one with one wheel":
Two wheeled original version
Unicycle version

Check out the video link on the Unicycle page, it's pretty amusing to watch him try and stop.

Trevor Blackwell built both a couple of two-wheeled versions, but also built a unicycle about half a decade ago. He just figured "If Dean builds it with two wheels, and I can build one with two wheels, I'm gonna build one with one wheel":
Two wheeled original version
Unicycle version

Check out the video link on the Unicycle page, it's pretty amusing to watch him try and stop.

...only the stupidly arrogant think of "ordinary" people as "barely functioning, non-contributing member[s] of society."

News flash...the overwhelming majority of the highly-functionaly contributing members of society are just ordinary (non-brilliant) people.

Those telephones aren't going to sanitize themselves!

I present Trevor Blackwell's theory on how printing and then putting the paper in landfills may actually stop global warming:

http://www.tlb.org/faq.html (scroll to the bottom)

Amazing that Honda with its vast R&D and engineering resources is now able to produce something that one guy as a hobby built designed and built for himself years ago. Gosh, I'm really impressed. I'll have my broker buy me some Honda stock immediately.

But can you fit an e-bike in a shoulder bag, and easily carry it to your office? Even the folding e-bikes are bigger than this, and generally weigh more. It also reminds me of the Eunicycle, although like the 3 wheel Segway clones, this bike is more practical. (The Eunicycle guy also has made real 2-wheel style Segway clones.)

Obligatory telephone sanitizer link.

For less than half the price!

http://tlb.org/scooter.html

Actually, according to this site, the telephone sanitizers didn't clean telephones at all. I guess "telephone sanitizer" sounds better than "crapper cleaner."

We've successfully cured cancer lots of times. The problem is that there's millions of versions of cancer; heck, you could say everybody who gets cancer gets their own, personalized version. A person can get cancer, completely separate, unrelated cancers, multiple times.

You are the most renowned general of an undefeated army. The Emperor calls you to court and tells you: "We have received intelligence that a mighty army, intent on invasion, is gathering at the frontier. Go forth, engage and defeat them."

You return from the frontier 6 months later to tell the Emperor: "Indeed there is a mighty army. There are Teutons, Magyars, Turks, Armenians, Slavs, Mongols, Franks, Sarmatians, Goths (whom are composed of Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Western Goths) and Huns, to name a few. I have devised a taxonomy of the barbarian invaders..."

The Emperor interrupts "Have you defeated the enemy?"

Moral: Current medicine is B Ship material.

1) next to impossible != impossible
2) if the feds require multi-pass wipes for non-classified data and media destruction for classified data, why should I settle for anything less?

OK, maybe this guy is right and maybe the feds are behind the times, but I'd like to see multiple independent studies come out and say this before I'm getting rid of my drive sanitizers. I mean, we all know what happens to societies when they get rid of their equipment sanitizers, don't we?

It doesnt exactly take much to kill something that was barely alive anyways (mostly just have to pull out the plug from the resperator). There's also geeks out there who have put together their own segways for far less than what the actual company wants. IMHO, if I didnt think it looked so douchey to ride one, I'd think it would be pretty awesome to build something like that at home for fun.

From wiki:

When it was launched in December 2001 the annual sales target was 40,000 units, [38] and the company expected to sell 50,000 to 100,000 units in the first 13 months[39]. Segway Inc's investors were optimistic. Inventor Dean Kamen predicted that the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy"[40] and John Doerr, a venture capitalist who invested in the company,[41] predicted that Segway Inc would be the fastest company to reach $1 billion in sales.[40] In fact only about 30,000 Segways were sold from 2001 to 2007.[41]

Critics point to Segway Inc's silence over its financial performance as an indication that the company is still not profitable, as about $100 million was spent developing the Segway.[40]

That's because they hired an award-winning design firm to design it for them.

All they did was supply the logo and the money. And if you're not typing in numbers all day, you can improve your keyboard by removing the former.

PC/104 (4" square) http://tlb.org/ttds-pc104.html
Pico-ITX (3.9" x 2.8") http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2154184680.html
Embedded Ethernet Boards http://www.ethernut.de/en/hardware/index.html
Chumby http://www.chumby.com/

Make magazine (lots of fun stuff) http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/11/the_o pen_source_1.html

I call your fake vehicle and raise you two real ones.

Ask Mr. Blackwell to do cheap version for you.. he was able to create a segway clone with way cheaper parts.
see http://www.tlb.org/scooter.html

You could always just chop off the num pad... http://www.tlb.org/keyboardchop.html

This page shows what appears to be a man in prison jumpsuit colors firmly perched on a 1 wheel motorized device (complete with a parts list and source code!).

Three cheers for prison reform! 'Cause...dang....our state just has stone breaking, weight lifting, bike repair and woodshop!

Well, then there's that new sport those two cowboy fellers are doing to each other while goat herding in that there new movie. Bare back? Broke back? Cum back for more? Anyway, one of those things.

I am amused that you were modded "offtopic" when you commented directly on the newsitem and even included a reference.

But to clear up any confusion, the "IT" referred to in the OP is of course the famous Segway motorized scooter. See how the whole thing makes sense now?

AHH!

"I have a strong bias towards building products that people buy for their own use." -Trevor

I too support people killing themselves. But, really - couldn't we find a more effective method?

When you get right down to it, the Segway is quite simple. It is a closed loop feedback control system that corrects error in the device angle. Not too difficult for any electrical or computer engineering student. However, a one wheeled segway is a very different story. I'd like to see polo played on that thing.

Now, a powered, unicycle segway. Woot.

Someone already made one. Its called the Eunicycle. Apparently operation is rather intuitive as well since all you have to do to turn is lean.

I wonder if a Segway could get by on one wheel...

It has been done. (This from the same guy who built a regular two-wheel scooter, too)

As someone who cycles to work (almost) every day, I'd not be too pleased to find the cycle lanes (such as they are) blocked by yuppies on wheels. To cycle long(ish) distances effectively you need to keep a constant speed - it's bad enough dodging potholes and motorists who think that because you have no engine you can stop instantaneously to avoid them.
Having said that, Segways are cool technology, and for those with the brass balls to do so can travel fast enough to cause minimal problems to cyclists, it's just on the rare occasions I've seen them in use here (in the UK) people have been beetling along at snails-pace. It's a shame that they're so expensive. Of course, you could always build your own. That is, until Segway's lawyers get to you and take your house...

Basically what you're saying is that America is going to be a "B" ship country.

There's a serious point though. It's possible that you can't run a modern economy based largely on tertiary industry (services).

April on Despair's 2004 calendar is 'Potential'

I've only been back to work for 3 months, after spending 7 months unemployed, but I'm not of the holier than thou belief that someone owed me a job. [yes, I was fired because of someone's napoleon complex, but I didn't think that meant I should just get an instant job out of it...more that he should lose his for having done it].

There will always be a need for a wide variety of professions, and we can't just go shooting telephone sanitizers out into space, and we're not all going to get jobs playing video games.

I think it's a problem with both society, in thinking that people are 'owed' a job, and in education, for teaching fixed subjects, without focusing on how to improve an individual person in a way that will make them a more productive person in society. [oooh....he can add...and can write papers.... sure, that's useful, but if they don't care, they're not going to apply themselves well... find a way to center the curriculum around them...maybe 'math for people who enjoy fixing cars' or such]

I'd like to see programs in training people fix those important, but overlooked jobs in society. Sure, there are classes for learning computer programming, or even system administration -- but what about manning a helpdesk? [and I don't mean, get them off the phone anyway possible], or even computer operations [handling computer backups, monitoring systems for oddities, aka. playing computer games while babysitting computers]

Here is a monumental safety imporvement to any low speed scooter, like a balancing scooter, a segway, or something else:

Problem: In a low speed (under 15 mph) failure of the equipment, the passenger will continue to move forward after the vehicle has stopped. The safest and most reasonable thing for the passener to do when the vehicle halts is to step off the front. However the front handlebar of these scooters eliminate that option, and as noted by the first reference, and more publicly by Mr. Bush, you will be thrown down on your face.

Solution: Remove the front handlebar. You could implement the controls on a rear handlebar that wraps arround the sides of the rider. It would make the vehicle less natural to mount (you step into it backwards) but much safer to bail off of at speed. If this is unacceptable, (or if passangers need to be able to bail off of an out of control scooter without being run over by it), provide the controls above one or two handlebars on the sides of the vehicle.

Better Idea Forget the whole self balancing nonsense as proposed by the third reference. Tricycles, however, are very unstable when turning. Make a quadricycle with no stearing column or handlebars. Put a pressure sensing pad on the top - transfer of pressure in any direction indicates a desire to exprerience acceleration in the opposite direction. The rider only fails to communicate with the platform if she has lost her balance and her center of mass is no longer "over" the platform (with respect to gravity and any pseudo forces she is experiencing), i.e. when she has already comitted herself to falling off. The vehicle automatically stops when the platform is vacated.

or just build your own

Building a Balancing Scooter...

link

This guy built one himself.

I don't think it's as groundbreaking as the hype would lead you to believe. That, and I think it predates 2003 by a bit.

No, In fact, once the planet got rid of their telephone sanitizers the people on the planet "were suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone."

Also, here is a link to the history of the term "telephone sanitizer".

LFS (originally by Ousterhout, ported to 4.4BSD by Seltzer) writes everything in a log. Just write as much as possible in one long stripe to the disk (up to a meg in the initial designs.) This means blocks of data move each time they are updated, which means you always write new inodes with each data write which point to the old unchanged blocks, and the new changed blocks.

Obviously once you hit the end of the disk, you have to wrap back around, and write some more, but where?

LFS had a seperate backgroup process that went around and finds all the, now unneeded, old data blocks that have been rewritten somewhere else and cleans them up. This is called the cleaner. Once the cleaner has found more space you get to write there.

The main positive point of the LFS design was very good write performance due to the lack of seeking needed to put little bits of data all over the disk.

The main downside to LFS was the cleaner itself, which was costly to run.

Margo Seltzer and Trevor Blackwell did some more work with the cleaner in this paper that shows that with the right timing you can get the cleaner to run efficiently.

I'm not aware of this work having been implemented (at least not as of 2000 which I stopped working on it on BSDI where Margo had been keeping LFS)

A good description can be found in the original papers, and the Pink 4.4 BSD book by McKusick, Bostic, Karels, and Quaterman.

Britt