You said "HUDs in cars could become standard offering by sticking an OLED screen on the windscreen..."
I would think retinal projection on a single eye would work much better for this - because having to focus on the windscreen to see the display is going to be distracting to the driver, while a retinal projection would require no refocusing and would allow you to see the information all the time, while driving, without distracting refocusing.
You must come from a different planet from me if students who leave university with 20k + debts ($100k I read in the US) have lots of spare money to splash out on overpriced CDs.
There are plenty of countries on THIS planet that aren't dumb enough to put people that want an education into a huge pile of debt.
To take it even further, it might be like suggesting that an advanced primate like a Gorilla would have a chance of converting a human to its belief system (presumably based around sitting in a jungle doing nothing).
SIGN ME UP!
They do have wireless connections and LAN parties in the jungle, don't they?
"How is any small to middle sized company ever going to break into the..."
() auto industry? () pharmaceutical industry? () nuclear reactor industry?
The auto industry: most of these companies are bleeding money. The question here is closer to "WHY would any company want to break into this industry."
The pharmaceutical industry: the most profitable industry, mostly because of (unnecessarily lengthy, different can of worms too) patents etc. If you happen to find a new, unpatented, cheap to manufacture and effective drug, you could break into this industry, no problem.
Nuclear reactor industry: this one is very heavily regulated, for very good reasons! I don't want normal competition in this industry allegedly for a "better" reactor, leading to some companies producing inferior and highly unsafe ones in the hopes of gaining some market share. However, if you have the money (expensive materials and construction), and the know-how to build a reactor, I don't think anything is stopping you.
All this is very different from the Microsoft situation. If any company gets a little too close to succes, one of two things happens: - Microsoft buys them. - Microsoft bundles a (usually inferior) similar product with Windows for free, and Average Joe User will never take a second look at the alternative because "hey, I've already got one of those, and all my friends have one of those same ones, how convenient".
The patent seems to indicate that Microsoft is focusing on improving the reliability of its software through analysis of failures in the wild.
Now, I don't know about you, but I find that a pretty bad way to go about improving your software. "Yeah it's buggy now, but allow us to analyse the gazillion crashes and we'll be able to reduce them to just a few hundred thousand."
Microsoft patents this, and thereby makes sure that no-one else gets to use this way of working (because we all know how happy Microsoft is about granting licenses to competitors). That's a GOOD THING. Competitors will be forced to use methods like improving the quality of the software through design, not PRODUCING buggy software in the first place, instead of pissing your users off by not only crashing software, but sending a bunch of data across your network, potentially complaining about not having an active connection, and opening up all kinds of exploits by triggering faults deliberately etc. etc.
Using the data from a news article (http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2001/0 1/08/daily2.html), this is how many acres of macademia nuts you need to have to keep this power plant active:
50 million lbs is about 20 million kilos. For about 20.000 acres, that means you produce about 1000 kilos of nuts per acre per year. Assume that the shell is about the same weight as the nut (probably grossly overestimating, but can't find data on it), so you'd produce 1000 kilos of shell per acre, per year.
The article states they burn through 1680 kilos per hour. That's 1680*24*365 = 15 million kilos a year. That's 15.000 acres of trees to keep this powerplant running, or about the entire production of Hawaii in a bad year, for 1.5 megawatts.
"Any user who does not patch daily and harms another due to not being patched should be punished"
95% of the people I have to go visit to solve serious computer-related problems wouldn't even know what the word "patch" means.
To me, requiring the average joe user to be on top of his patches is like asking average joe driver to stay on top of the advancements in electronic motormanagement technology. I just want to drive the damn car, fill up the water reservoir every now and then, and take the car in for regular checkups. If there is something seriously wrong with the car I'm using that causes it to be unsafe for either me, or other people, I expect the manufacturer or garage holder to notify me of this fact. If it's big enough, it'll be on the news (and it has been several times, relating to the recent worms).
Now, we don't really have "garage holders" for white-box PC systems, and even people like Dell aren't going to be particularly bothered. I think this is part of the problem. That's why half my neighbourhood comes to ME when they have issues, I'm the only guy that knows anything about computers that will actually put the time in to help them.
What we need is PC service centers. The kind where you walk in carrying your box under your arm, and your problems are fixed for a small fee. Not just "nothing works anymore" problems, but also setups, regular patchings, checkups for viruses (when are virus/worm scanners and firewalls going to become mandatory for any system that wants to connect to the internet anyway??)
I'm just a backseat environmental scientist, but what is the effect of losing the temperature-buffer that is the ice-cap? I mean, while it's melting, it will retain a temperature of 0 degrees, at least if I recall my physics/chemistry correctly. That means the icecaps provide a nice energy buffer for rises and falls in temperature. If they MELT, they obviously no longer do that. So, will global temperatures rise faster when the icecaps are gone?
Thinking that birth control, homosexuality and ecumenalism are all okay, instead of being the one way tickets to eternan Damnation
Damn right I'm going to hell! With all those prissy, stuck-up, non-fornicating, pregnant people in heaven, it would be no fun at all. It's MoodSwing Central dude!
10-finger traditional typing was invented to keep movement BIG, so as to avoid the hammers for various letters crashing together when typing very fast.
Um, or trick us into thinking it was real-time but simulating us at a far slower pace? In a cortex simulation, it would be easy to slow our perception down as much as necessary for the simulator to keep up.
I'm guessing there's some creative making-up-of-numbers going on. If 'they' (the anti-internet people) had their way, the breakdown would be as follows:
My favourite songs are over 20 minutes long, and I'm part of the MTV generation, but generalizing to the common denominator is sometimes a useful tool for showing why a particular line of thought is probably not the correct one.
>Support your favorite bands by seeing them live. >You'll probably even discover a lot of new music that way too.
Let's see:
A concert: - the drive to a concert: 1 hour to the concert, one hour back. - 2.5 hours of listening to music, usually at vastly inferior sound quality, unintelligible to those who do not already know the songs. - 4 crap bands and one passable one.
Downloading MP3: - 1 minute for the search of the most popular songs of the five bands. - 5 minutes for the MP3s to get to your HDD. - 10 seconds listening to each, deciding they are all crap, saving 5* $20 on the bands' CDs that you now don't need to buy, another $20 on the t-shirt, $10 in concert admission, and $5 in gas.
This is the MTV generation downloading. Their attention span is approximately equal to the length of one radio-play song, that is to say 2 minutes 30 seconds. Think you can get them to sit through a concert of music they do not yet know?
Imagine the damage you could do by distributing a worm that causes millions of "send me my password" e-mails at any business site? You might even bring a business to its knees that way.
Except that brute-forcing such a massive key would lead to results that _seem_ valid. Say those infinite monkeys produce the works of John Keats by accident, how would you know it wasn't Shakespeare?
Slashdot Mirror
So, it kindof worked for him, in that he didn't have to write the next chapters because the book wasn't good enough for people to want to buy it.
But the grandparent turned it around - "give me enough money and I'll make something new, give me nothing and I'll continue with my day job"
Quite a refreshing idea I think. If the person doing it is talented/well known enough, it could work.
You said
"HUDs in cars could become standard offering by sticking an OLED screen on the windscreen..."
I would think retinal projection on a single eye would work much better for this - because having to focus on the windscreen to see the display is going to be distracting to the driver, while a retinal projection would require no refocusing and would allow you to see the information all the time, while driving, without distracting refocusing.
The current article even mentions it.... but, yeah, RTFA, etc. etc. etc.
Our Guild of Sanitation Engineers makes a living out of the by-products of Food Service Technicians, so we think they are a valuable ASSet.
You must come from a different planet from me if students who leave university with 20k + debts ($100k I read in the US) have lots of spare money to splash out on overpriced CDs.
There are plenty of countries on THIS planet that aren't dumb enough to put people that want an education into a huge pile of debt.
To take it even further, it might be like suggesting that an advanced primate like a Gorilla would have a chance of converting a human to its belief system (presumably based around sitting in a jungle doing nothing).
SIGN ME UP!
They do have wireless connections and LAN parties in the jungle, don't they?
Eisbaern mussen nir weinen ;)
"How is any small to middle sized company ever going to break into the..."
() auto industry?
() pharmaceutical industry?
() nuclear reactor industry?
The auto industry: most of these companies are bleeding money. The question here is closer to "WHY would any company want to break into this industry."
The pharmaceutical industry: the most profitable industry, mostly because of (unnecessarily lengthy, different can of worms too) patents etc. If you happen to find a new, unpatented, cheap to manufacture and effective drug, you could break into this industry, no problem.
Nuclear reactor industry: this one is very heavily regulated, for very good reasons! I don't want normal competition in this industry allegedly for a "better" reactor, leading to some companies producing inferior and highly unsafe ones in the hopes of gaining some market share. However, if you have the money (expensive materials and construction), and the know-how to build a reactor, I don't think anything is stopping you.
All this is very different from the Microsoft situation. If any company gets a little too close to succes, one of two things happens:
- Microsoft buys them.
- Microsoft bundles a (usually inferior) similar product with Windows for free, and Average Joe User will never take a second look at the alternative because "hey, I've already got one of those, and all my friends have one of those same ones, how convenient".
The patent seems to indicate that Microsoft is focusing on improving the reliability of its software through analysis of failures in the wild.
Now, I don't know about you, but I find that a pretty bad way to go about improving your software. "Yeah it's buggy now, but allow us to analyse the gazillion crashes and we'll be able to reduce them to just a few hundred thousand."
Microsoft patents this, and thereby makes sure that no-one else gets to use this way of working (because we all know how happy Microsoft is about granting licenses to competitors). That's a GOOD THING. Competitors will be forced to use methods like improving the quality of the software through design, not PRODUCING buggy software in the first place, instead of pissing your users off by not only crashing software, but sending a bunch of data across your network, potentially complaining about not having an active connection, and opening up all kinds of exploits by triggering faults deliberately etc. etc.
Using the data from a news article (http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2001/0 1/08/daily2.html), this is how many acres of macademia nuts you need to have to keep this power plant active:
50 million lbs is about 20 million kilos. For about 20.000 acres, that means you produce about 1000 kilos of nuts per acre per year. Assume that the shell is about the same weight as the nut (probably grossly overestimating, but can't find data on it), so you'd produce 1000 kilos of shell per acre, per year.
The article states they burn through 1680 kilos per hour. That's 1680*24*365 = 15 million kilos a year. That's 15.000 acres of trees to keep this powerplant running, or about the entire production of Hawaii in a bad year, for 1.5 megawatts.
Thumbs up? Methinks not.
"unbiased defamination"
:)
Is that the act of becoming un-hungry without ever becoming subjective about the whole matter?
"Any user who does not patch daily and harms another due to not being patched should be punished"
95% of the people I have to go visit to solve serious computer-related problems wouldn't even know what the word "patch" means.
To me, requiring the average joe user to be on top of his patches is like asking average joe driver to stay on top of the advancements in electronic motormanagement technology. I just want to drive the damn car, fill up the water reservoir every now and then, and take the car in for regular checkups. If there is something seriously wrong with the car I'm using that causes it to be unsafe for either me, or other people, I expect the manufacturer or garage holder to notify me of this fact. If it's big enough, it'll be on the news (and it has been several times, relating to the recent worms).
Now, we don't really have "garage holders" for white-box PC systems, and even people like Dell aren't going to be particularly bothered. I think this is part of the problem. That's why half my neighbourhood comes to ME when they have issues, I'm the only guy that knows anything about computers that will actually put the time in to help them.
What we need is PC service centers. The kind where you walk in carrying your box under your arm, and your problems are fixed for a small fee. Not just "nothing works anymore" problems, but also setups, regular patchings, checkups for viruses (when are virus/worm scanners and firewalls going to become mandatory for any system that wants to connect to the internet anyway??)
Anyway, [/rant], [asbestos]
True. At least we'd finally get rid of this damned heatwave! Bring out the igloos!
I'm growing a beard, and I'll be ready for Vikings 2005 - Rape, Pillage, Surf and Hack.
I'm just a backseat environmental scientist, but what is the effect of losing the temperature-buffer that is the ice-cap? I mean, while it's melting, it will retain a temperature of 0 degrees, at least if I recall my physics/chemistry correctly. That means the icecaps provide a nice energy buffer for rises and falls in temperature. If they MELT, they obviously no longer do that. So, will global temperatures rise faster when the icecaps are gone?
No, the ice displaces an amount of water equal to it's on weight, and that's why some of it sticks out above the water.
Thinking that birth control, homosexuality and ecumenalism are all okay, instead of being the one way tickets to eternan Damnation
Damn right I'm going to hell! With all those prissy, stuck-up, non-fornicating, pregnant people in heaven, it would be no fun at all. It's MoodSwing Central dude!
10-finger traditional typing was invented to keep movement BIG, so as to avoid the hammers for various letters crashing together when typing very fast.
It would have to be nearly infinately fast
Um, or trick us into thinking it was real-time but simulating us at a far slower pace? In a cortex simulation, it would be easy to slow our perception down as much as necessary for the simulator to keep up.
I'm guessing there's some creative making-up-of-numbers going on. If 'they' (the anti-internet people) had their way, the breakdown would be as follows:
60%: p2p traffic
30%: Spam
20%: Kiddie porn
_________________
110% evil.
My favourite songs are over 20 minutes long, and I'm part of the MTV generation, but generalizing to the common denominator is sometimes a useful tool for showing why a particular line of thought is probably not the correct one.
Devil's Advocate, etc.
PS: I play in three bands too.
>Support your favorite bands by seeing them live.
>You'll probably even discover a lot of new music that way too.
Let's see:
A concert:
- the drive to a concert: 1 hour to the concert, one hour back.
- 2.5 hours of listening to music, usually at vastly inferior sound quality, unintelligible to those who do not already know the songs.
- 4 crap bands and one passable one.
Downloading MP3:
- 1 minute for the search of the most popular songs of the five bands.
- 5 minutes for the MP3s to get to your HDD.
- 10 seconds listening to each, deciding they are all crap, saving 5* $20 on the bands' CDs that you now don't need to buy, another $20 on the t-shirt, $10 in concert admission, and $5 in gas.
This is the MTV generation downloading. Their attention span is approximately equal to the length of one radio-play song, that is to say 2 minutes 30 seconds. Think you can get them to sit through a concert of music they do not yet know?
Indeed!
Imagine the damage you could do by distributing a worm that causes millions of "send me my password" e-mails at any business site? You might even bring a business to its knees that way.
E-Stamps is Teh Stupid.
Quote: "Just my $0.02US"
Is that in peppercoins, or real payment?
Except that brute-forcing such a massive key would lead to results that _seem_ valid. Say those infinite monkeys produce the works of John Keats by accident, how would you know it wasn't Shakespeare?