Heh. When the plane crashed in Sioux City, Iowa because all hydrolics got cut they sure had to been wishing for fly-by-wire-like system. The airplane tech had gone in sixty years from cables(which stretched and snapped) to triple redundant tubes of drippy hydrolic oil(that needs people to fix and check) and it still had an instance of catastrophic failure caused by breakage. A one-in-a-million day where something went wrong. And like the current crash, the pilots brought round the situation.
Just like always, the newest tech is shown to not be "perfect" or "foolproof" guarantee of safety. Or, a replacement for people who know how to fly the plane.
Heck, even the ISS can't get that no moisture around electronics thing right. IIRC, the Soviet computer failures the past summer was moisture-related. It had their firm and NASA going in circles.
I believe the CNN video said 'ice' at some point rather than 'water.' From my time flying with my dad in small planes water in fuel was something you checked every time you started up. In enclosed spaces humidity does odd stuff when temperatures change. Just like on the ISS, cold metal would form up some frost somewhere without needing an opening to let water in. But I would have thought the big aircraft had more ways to deal with fuel water that didn't mean the pilots took a little vial to the tanks as they did their inspection.
A lot of the time in winter season I see bare trees and think of the movie Pitch Black where they find the bones. The art director must be a fan of the book or the math.
These programmers ever heard of Bryce 6? I've been able to model okay trees since 1999 for a modest price. And rocks, mountains and a little bit of weather, too. Just doing a tree isn't going to provide a solution to someone that needs a whole world.
Did they use Bryce as a base for the improvements? It would be cool if the collaboration could link back into a 3D suite.
It's so cutting edge I never heard of it before. So easy to use I never noticed it in my browser. It *can't* be a MS product then. They must have bought it.
I think they had to take a Luddite step back to accommodate the grannies and granddads out there. It has to have QWERTY keyboard to make sense to my mom, for instance. It's sort of magical that Sprint cell frequency is going to get the content. That sort of "I refuse to get Internet" type of person will still be able to enjoy. As long as they have some internet connected relative to buy the books for them...
What I wonder is how this sudden upswing in Sprint bandwidth will affect my Ambient Orb.;p
My mom was tickled by news that handicapped users of Segway were trying to take Disney to court for not allowing them access to the park with their devices.
I've been doing this reading of content with first a Palm III, a Palm Zire and now a Dell Axim. No one ever heard of Avant Go before?! About the only thing that improved was a bookseller offering current books. And streamlined how they get to the device. Of course this only happened when big money got involved in the process. I just don't know about paying $10 for a title. A little hyped up IMHO. Amazing how stuff like the iPhone (like, no camera in it?!) and Kindle get a mad rush to sellout. (reviewer says it's got a poor web browser? Get the Dell Axim on ebay and have both) Kindle is less than cutting edge stuff and if only people knew it they'd save some cash. Cripes! Re-purpose your tired PDA into a reader and save!
Vista continues to act in the annoying way I loathe XP for. Launching programs keep jumping to the "front" even when I switch back to another item to wait for the new item to load. It's a 'trick' that must have worked in some OS but not anymore. The code needs to say 'I'm on top' to believe it's open and a requested application. I haven't liked the new menus in IE (new interface which was a XP preview of Vista-ness), haven't liked Adobe Pro 8's new interface. Maybe all the icons made translation into other languages easier but it just made my coworkers ask how to print a web page in IE for the first two weeks it rolled out into our work computers. It's a good thing FireFox is around to bring some sanity back to web browsing.
If it's the gadgets that wow'd the young woman from the article, her tech mom must have locked down all the free-er ware sidebars and things that do the same thing in the XP OS. No reason to move to Vista to have a weather bug and a clock on your desktop. There's a Kubuntu app that IMHO is a little flaky but brings (brought before vista even beta released?) a desktop gadget environment. Clock, weather, TV schedules. I guess the 13-year-old is the new-age techie child: able to work the computer/smartphone but not especially interested in experimenting with them in a software way. It is all about how much social content you can text to your BBFE in a day. Pre-made MS stuff is 'good enough' and the more like a simulation of the existing world, the better?
Way to go down on the people that make the daily world work! All I say to this "have to have a college degree" is that when economic times turned and I had to take a "real world" service job at a food store, that degree was held as the reason I wouldn't remain a week there. And it was only a four year arts degree with a minor in business administration. Some people's situations mean they're going direct to just that kind of job after high school and some people rise to greatness from it. And more go on to lead ordinary lives. I just don't know if great things are going to happen to kids from now forward if they don't get solid education in stuff they might not want to sit through, might not understand now(or ever), and that they only get stuff that makes them feel good about themselves. I reflect on stuff in school where I was wrong, felt like an idiot, and had to survive the day with that held over my head by the other students. I think they used to call that character building. Additionally, I've read kids now can't remember something as simple as a home phone number and can't add without a calculator. This worries me. I don't know a whole lot of productive things that demand more Xbox hand-eye coordination over looking at some business numbers/reams of paper/widgets on a shelf and knowing what they'd total without resorting to a calculator.
If someone is going to give a non-degreed person a chance in a job, they're going to be most annoyed at a lack of basic knowledge. So consider if all the colleges packed up and went away tomorrow, everyone was a GED-level, wouldn't you'd appreciate people well-rounded in basics?
In high school we got to speak with career adviser teachers who volunteered their off-class time speaking with people about their studied fields. They were not *extraordinary* helpful, there was lots of pressure to choose even then, but it made students dwell on it for longer than a minute at a time. I believe we only got to choose classes to fill in schedules the third and fourth years only-- usually with an eye to what we were applying to college for. Those SAT tests scores meant everything in terms of college applications, you know! But at the high school age "what you want to do when you're grownup" still might be the childish wish "to be a doctor/astronaut/fireman" or inspired or thought out in later years of youth. Depends on the child. And knowing the child enough to tell if he or she is serious or flighty. And we're back to how much the schools should be doing to bring up kids in the absence of parents... Kids have been expected to grow up just that much faster these years I'm unsure exactly how committed they are to a plan and how much they'd understand about jobs and work by age thirteen. I never had any job I could say to my parents I see myself doing until closer to age eighteen. I'm unsure if having set something on paper at age thirteen would have helped me remain interested in school or not. I guess I'm part of the old school:) Sit the kids down and teach them stuff they "don't need to know" for their supposed career. And teach real-life stuff like checking accounts, stocks, home buying, drivers ed. They're going to need it someday to survive in a changing world.
regular driving and you can charge the battery pack to full power in about the same time you need to fill up a 11-gallon fuel tank at a standard gas station fuel pump!:-) Really could break people out of stopping for gas(a chore) and more for stopping to meet up with your friends for coffee at a Starbucks Perk and Charge. Any brick and mortar storefront could install the ability.
I think it's unfortunate that the documentary makers for "Who Killed The Electric Car" didn't get GM/Saturn people to lay out it was the parts liability that they couldn't stomach. I think it played up the bias that GM/Saturn people didn't give two shakes about what their drivers wanted. Even with people offering to never, ever bother them when the batteries went out they would not sell. Even with people standing outside a GM office for weeks. We just didn't get the side of GM/Saturn. And possibly because they didn't want to tip their hand of how that technology was going to advance and make them money in the future.
It just floored me that GM/Saturn didn't go for the money shot on those hundred of cars. There were people who wished to experiment on those cars and bring them the newer parts and batteries. It floored me that a car maker gave a damn about what happened to a car post-sale. It just does not happen to ICE cars. You have to mod the car with your preferred mechanic to keep it running past it's envisioned life. Why was the EV1 any different simply because it was built from the ground up electric?
Oh thank you. I finally get how the capacitor technology would replace batteries. The same way flash card memory replaced the 3 1/4" floppy disk. More data(energy), smaller form, less moving parts.
I read the "first time in the industry" test on public roads in the article brief and zoinks! has the author missed the whole story about a bunch of California celebrities that fell in love with the first GM electric car? And missed that the state of California spent money to build charging stations? This isn't ancient history. At least, I don't think 1999 was all that long ago. For so many people 8-15 mile range was perfect for urban workers, as long as a recharge was possible during 9am-5pm for the commute home. The celebrities that drove those cars almost would have lain on the road in front of the wreckers that took the cars at the end of the leases. (but then we'd have a few less of our celebrities) No one could buy such devotion to a car. It bordered on the love people had for the old Apple Computer products. Those drivers almost needed a 12 step program to part with their electric cars. And GM refused to sell them, scooped those cars up and shredded them for scrap. GM made a marketing blunder.
This is one technology that can be done. Don't let the gasoline engine monopoly tell you otherwise while pointing the batteries flaws and pushing you to the end of the lot with the hybrid gasoline cars. Look how many years it took to shame car makers into improving the gasoline engine. If there was unhindered R&D there would be equal improvement in batteries in a shorter time. I'm more in doubt of there not being solid numbers that electric cars wouldn't create a demand in electricity which would pollute with coal-fired generators. We still need the jump of technology to get the recharge from solar energy. And we should also have a plan for what to do with spent battery materials. We don't need some floating trash barge of spent electric car batteries out in the ocean.
Maybe for every green car Toyota promotes they can hide the other gas-guzzlers in their line-up behind them, but at least they bring it to the market. They can surely learn from the GM/Saturn program what not to do.
I've one of the very old USB Half-keyboards. http://www.matias.ca/halfkeyboard/index.php They're a bit pricey for the size but all the alternate keyboard seem to be more than a $22 QWERTY you can get at the office store. I found it easy to pick up having two letters per key. The tapping a modifier key to get number and the function keys takes more concentration and the keyboard manual. It's been something I use when irc chatting while laying on the couch.
I've got a similar theory about Adam and Eve. I have always wondered how many pairs of Adams and Eves god had to go through before he managed to make a set that would think for themselves (and thus be released into the world). I still think He has not got the right set running the place.
So the 'next-gen' batteries/fuel cell/ju-ju will be some combo of CZ and diamond arranged to take advantage of the properties of each.:) And still super expensive for the 'average joe' to own.
Profit for someone!!
Got so wrapped up there I forgot about the awful Hole In The Ozone that was going to kill all life on Earth. The big, bad thing made out of the one man-caused goof of our chemical science and love of air conditioning and spray paint.
Since we no longer have the Cold War and the specter of being blown up by a Russian nuke (Although the whole nuclear thing comes back with Iran announcing they put up stuff to orbit on a rocket. Things are cyclical that way. We'll be back to having duck and cover bomb drills in no time.) And while we were distracted by the bomb thing, we generated a lot of trash and synthetic diapers and then had to tell our kids to conserve the Earth's resources or we'll all be sorry in the next generation. So then recycling and minimal cardboard packaging is doing a tiny bit to stop landfills from becoming the only thing we'll see... Then it's the battle to keep Nuclear Waste out of your state. All the cheap power was going to kill us by irradiating us by cans of goop from the reactors. Our grandkids would be *so* mad at us if we ever buried that in their future home on the prairie. We'll all be sorry in the next generation. So we kinda get past all that (send it to the West somewhere under the desert where, you know, nothing lives) and let kids entertain themselves playing with them new fangled computers. For some reason or another America had to reinvent another ending of doom to teach to the next generation. Our grandkids will be so mad at us for not being able to dive coral reefs and will have to enjoy the coastal cities we grew up in by mini-sub. (of course, they probably won't do those sorts of things because they never played outside much) But if our power generation and driving habits are to blame, is alternative fuels getting any backing that would bring it to the market in the next five years? No? We'll all be sorry in the next generation.
No matter that it's perfectly normal for the atmosphere to do it's carbon thing and the oceans to rise and fall. No matter that it's the local star driving the bus, the politicians and scientists at the back will still figure a way to make us scared of living. If it's not global warming, it's tidal wave from a collapsing African volcano, or the Earth's magnetic field switching, or Yellowstone's caldera blowing up. Isn't it dangerous outside the cave? Yeah! Deal.
Same reaction I had. Hopefully, they aren't cruising somewhere down-current from a volcanic area when they brightly announce this. First time they got a thingi that can go really deep without breaking down, it can explore and poke around for a long time that deep, and the data all points to the evil global warming gremlin. I'm sincerely hoping the truth about the deep ocean will be stranger than we can imagine.
an E note 15 octaves below middle C (C5). Do animals like dogs and cats pick up sounds that low? It could lead to explaining why they freak out before earthquakes if the hum is disturbed by the building stresses of the impending earthquake. Like, they got to be grooving to that earth vibe and *squak!* Rocks grinding sure could be disturbing to their senses.
It's probably in a few books. I remember this shown as the cellphone of the near future on TV in Earth:Final Conflict(mm. 1996 or so). Second was Red Planet(2000) where this roll-out was a PDA and mapping device. I'm supposing it was easy to make the effect work in film and TV CGI but producing a tough, flexible screen is another matter.
So really, we just need a large object to bounce the objects into the atmosphere. At the times I watched "Dead Like Me" the idea of a toilet seat from MIR killing someone was silly, but maybe not...
Slashdot Mirror
Just like always, the newest tech is shown to not be "perfect" or "foolproof" guarantee of safety. Or, a replacement for people who know how to fly the plane.
I believe the CNN video said 'ice' at some point rather than 'water.' From my time flying with my dad in small planes water in fuel was something you checked every time you started up. In enclosed spaces humidity does odd stuff when temperatures change. Just like on the ISS, cold metal would form up some frost somewhere without needing an opening to let water in. But I would have thought the big aircraft had more ways to deal with fuel water that didn't mean the pilots took a little vial to the tanks as they did their inspection.
A lot of the time in winter season I see bare trees and think of the movie Pitch Black where they find the bones. The art director must be a fan of the book or the math.
Did they use Bryce as a base for the improvements? It would be cool if the collaboration could link back into a 3D suite.
It's so cutting edge I never heard of it before. So easy to use I never noticed it in my browser. It *can't* be a MS product then. They must have bought it.
I think they had to take a Luddite step back to accommodate the grannies and granddads out there. It has to have QWERTY keyboard to make sense to my mom, for instance. It's sort of magical that Sprint cell frequency is going to get the content. That sort of "I refuse to get Internet" type of person will still be able to enjoy. As long as they have some internet connected relative to buy the books for them...
What I wonder is how this sudden upswing in Sprint bandwidth will affect my Ambient Orb. ;p
My mom was tickled by news that handicapped users of Segway were trying to take Disney to court for not allowing them access to the park with their devices.
I've been doing this reading of content with first a Palm III, a Palm Zire and now a Dell Axim. No one ever heard of Avant Go before?! About the only thing that improved was a bookseller offering current books. And streamlined how they get to the device. Of course this only happened when big money got involved in the process. I just don't know about paying $10 for a title. A little hyped up IMHO. Amazing how stuff like the iPhone (like, no camera in it?!) and Kindle get a mad rush to sellout. (reviewer says it's got a poor web browser? Get the Dell Axim on ebay and have both) Kindle is less than cutting edge stuff and if only people knew it they'd save some cash. Cripes! Re-purpose your tired PDA into a reader and save!
Vista continues to act in the annoying way I loathe XP for. Launching programs keep jumping to the "front" even when I switch back to another item to wait for the new item to load. It's a 'trick' that must have worked in some OS but not anymore. The code needs to say 'I'm on top' to believe it's open and a requested application. I haven't liked the new menus in IE (new interface which was a XP preview of Vista-ness), haven't liked Adobe Pro 8's new interface. Maybe all the icons made translation into other languages easier but it just made my coworkers ask how to print a web page in IE for the first two weeks it rolled out into our work computers. It's a good thing FireFox is around to bring some sanity back to web browsing. If it's the gadgets that wow'd the young woman from the article, her tech mom must have locked down all the free-er ware sidebars and things that do the same thing in the XP OS. No reason to move to Vista to have a weather bug and a clock on your desktop. There's a Kubuntu app that IMHO is a little flaky but brings (brought before vista even beta released?) a desktop gadget environment. Clock, weather, TV schedules. I guess the 13-year-old is the new-age techie child: able to work the computer/smartphone but not especially interested in experimenting with them in a software way. It is all about how much social content you can text to your BBFE in a day. Pre-made MS stuff is 'good enough' and the more like a simulation of the existing world, the better?
Sooo. Let's paint some "Visit California" advertising on the back and call it even. Surely promoting California tourism would recoup their money.
Way to go down on the people that make the daily world work! All I say to this "have to have a college degree" is that when economic times turned and I had to take a "real world" service job at a food store, that degree was held as the reason I wouldn't remain a week there. And it was only a four year arts degree with a minor in business administration. Some people's situations mean they're going direct to just that kind of job after high school and some people rise to greatness from it. And more go on to lead ordinary lives. I just don't know if great things are going to happen to kids from now forward if they don't get solid education in stuff they might not want to sit through, might not understand now(or ever), and that they only get stuff that makes them feel good about themselves. I reflect on stuff in school where I was wrong, felt like an idiot, and had to survive the day with that held over my head by the other students. I think they used to call that character building. Additionally, I've read kids now can't remember something as simple as a home phone number and can't add without a calculator. This worries me. I don't know a whole lot of productive things that demand more Xbox hand-eye coordination over looking at some business numbers/reams of paper/widgets on a shelf and knowing what they'd total without resorting to a calculator.
If someone is going to give a non-degreed person a chance in a job, they're going to be most annoyed at a lack of basic knowledge. So consider if all the colleges packed up and went away tomorrow, everyone was a GED-level, wouldn't you'd appreciate people well-rounded in basics?
In high school we got to speak with career adviser teachers who volunteered their off-class time speaking with people about their studied fields. They were not *extraordinary* helpful, there was lots of pressure to choose even then, but it made students dwell on it for longer than a minute at a time. I believe we only got to choose classes to fill in schedules the third and fourth years only-- usually with an eye to what we were applying to college for. Those SAT tests scores meant everything in terms of college applications, you know! But at the high school age "what you want to do when you're grownup" still might be the childish wish "to be a doctor/astronaut/fireman" or inspired or thought out in later years of youth. Depends on the child. And knowing the child enough to tell if he or she is serious or flighty. And we're back to how much the schools should be doing to bring up kids in the absence of parents... Kids have been expected to grow up just that much faster these years I'm unsure exactly how committed they are to a plan and how much they'd understand about jobs and work by age thirteen. I never had any job I could say to my parents I see myself doing until closer to age eighteen. I'm unsure if having set something on paper at age thirteen would have helped me remain interested in school or not. I guess I'm part of the old school :) Sit the kids down and teach them stuff they "don't need to know" for their supposed career. And teach real-life stuff like checking accounts, stocks, home buying, drivers ed. They're going to need it someday to survive in a changing world.
I think it's unfortunate that the documentary makers for "Who Killed The Electric Car" didn't get GM/Saturn people to lay out it was the parts liability that they couldn't stomach. I think it played up the bias that GM/Saturn people didn't give two shakes about what their drivers wanted. Even with people offering to never, ever bother them when the batteries went out they would not sell. Even with people standing outside a GM office for weeks. We just didn't get the side of GM/Saturn. And possibly because they didn't want to tip their hand of how that technology was going to advance and make them money in the future.
It just floored me that GM/Saturn didn't go for the money shot on those hundred of cars. There were people who wished to experiment on those cars and bring them the newer parts and batteries. It floored me that a car maker gave a damn about what happened to a car post-sale. It just does not happen to ICE cars. You have to mod the car with your preferred mechanic to keep it running past it's envisioned life. Why was the EV1 any different simply because it was built from the ground up electric?
Oh thank you. I finally get how the capacitor technology would replace batteries. The same way flash card memory replaced the 3 1/4" floppy disk. More data(energy), smaller form, less moving parts.
I read the "first time in the industry" test on public roads in the article brief and zoinks! has the author missed the whole story about a bunch of California celebrities that fell in love with the first GM electric car? And missed that the state of California spent money to build charging stations? This isn't ancient history. At least, I don't think 1999 was all that long ago. For so many people 8-15 mile range was perfect for urban workers, as long as a recharge was possible during 9am-5pm for the commute home. The celebrities that drove those cars almost would have lain on the road in front of the wreckers that took the cars at the end of the leases. (but then we'd have a few less of our celebrities) No one could buy such devotion to a car. It bordered on the love people had for the old Apple Computer products. Those drivers almost needed a 12 step program to part with their electric cars. And GM refused to sell them, scooped those cars up and shredded them for scrap. GM made a marketing blunder.
This is one technology that can be done. Don't let the gasoline engine monopoly tell you otherwise while pointing the batteries flaws and pushing you to the end of the lot with the hybrid gasoline cars. Look how many years it took to shame car makers into improving the gasoline engine. If there was unhindered R&D there would be equal improvement in batteries in a shorter time. I'm more in doubt of there not being solid numbers that electric cars wouldn't create a demand in electricity which would pollute with coal-fired generators. We still need the jump of technology to get the recharge from solar energy. And we should also have a plan for what to do with spent battery materials. We don't need some floating trash barge of spent electric car batteries out in the ocean.
Maybe for every green car Toyota promotes they can hide the other gas-guzzlers in their line-up behind them, but at least they bring it to the market. They can surely learn from the GM/Saturn program what not to do.
I've one of the very old USB Half-keyboards. http://www.matias.ca/halfkeyboard/index.php They're a bit pricey for the size but all the alternate keyboard seem to be more than a $22 QWERTY you can get at the office store. I found it easy to pick up having two letters per key. The tapping a modifier key to get number and the function keys takes more concentration and the keyboard manual. It's been something I use when irc chatting while laying on the couch.
So the 'next-gen' batteries/fuel cell/ju-ju will be some combo of CZ and diamond arranged to take advantage of the properties of each. :) And still super expensive for the 'average joe' to own.
Profit for someone!!
Got so wrapped up there I forgot about the awful Hole In The Ozone that was going to kill all life on Earth. The big, bad thing made out of the one man-caused goof of our chemical science and love of air conditioning and spray paint.
No matter that it's perfectly normal for the atmosphere to do it's carbon thing and the oceans to rise and fall. No matter that it's the local star driving the bus, the politicians and scientists at the back will still figure a way to make us scared of living. If it's not global warming, it's tidal wave from a collapsing African volcano, or the Earth's magnetic field switching, or Yellowstone's caldera blowing up. Isn't it dangerous outside the cave? Yeah! Deal.
Same reaction I had. Hopefully, they aren't cruising somewhere down-current from a volcanic area when they brightly announce this. First time they got a thingi that can go really deep without breaking down, it can explore and poke around for a long time that deep, and the data all points to the evil global warming gremlin. I'm sincerely hoping the truth about the deep ocean will be stranger than we can imagine.
1. airline bomb scare involving small bottles of gel-like items
2. massive amounts of carry on toiletries thrown away across nations
3. buy Palmolive stock
4. profit!
It's probably in a few books. I remember this shown as the cellphone of the near future on TV in Earth:Final Conflict(mm. 1996 or so). Second was Red Planet(2000) where this roll-out was a PDA and mapping device. I'm supposing it was easy to make the effect work in film and TV CGI but producing a tough, flexible screen is another matter.