Alternatively, you could follow the path I did (and several others I know, some of whom encouraged me to follow the path) - completed my 4 year in Computer Engineering with a minor in EE. Worked for a few years but really disliked the work I was doing (IT infrastructure), took a little time off, and signed up and went to a 2 year community college trades program in Industrial Electrician... What that did was introduce me to many people working for various companies and hugely expanded my "network" of industry contacts. I had 0 problem landing a 6 figure job as an EE specializing in industrial control systems before I even finished the trade program. My employer thought my background of both "practical electrician" training on top of my CmpEn/EE background made me an unmatchable asset - I know the theory and the practical applications.
For the OP - perhaps going to a traditional Comp Sci program would be the best place to start - and then follow it up with a technical program afterwards where they have exposure to people in industry, and can "shine" as a well educated, brilliant programmer with sharp CS skills. They could even end up like I did getting several offers to teach courses at the community college level after I graduated. I am doing that now part time in the evenings in addition to my full time job.
Not sure how "industrial" OP wants to go but we use these in all of our control panels - the prices are size dependent, but the smaller ones are well under $100, the larger ones can run upwards of $400. There are several other lines they offer if this one doesn't do what you need: http://www.kinco.cn/category.aspx?NodeID=108
This is the laptop they got me for work - it's got great processing power, video, battery life, they keyboard is comfortable, etc -- the touch pad sucks something awful however. The "mouse buttons" are part of the touch pad, and touching them to click inevitably moves the mouse. Not great for me considering I'm using it for Zuken E3 - always dropping my nodes in the wrong place.
Yes and no. With today's population all having handheld devices that can twitter, facebook, etc. it's often the case that the local population to an event gets the message out often substantially before the official channels do. Take for example tornadoes - while the NWS may have radar that shows where a tornado might be occurring, and people calling 911 might set off official responses to a tornado, someone who's sitting in their house tweeting that the house next door just flew away in a twister is more immediate and more eyewitness - which is what DHS is looking for - they want to know if something is going on before the official channels can process it. After RTFA and the document related, it appears they have a "trust order relationship" - first off - major news media (CNN, etc.) - second is "local media" - third is things like well known websites and news aggregate sites, fourth is blogs and social media, etc... things that are 3rd and 4th level need "confirmation" from a first level source before it becomes official. This just sets off the warning bells that something might be happening and everyone needs to pay more attention that something could be up.... makes sense if you ask me.
Correlation is NOT causation. If you are already a child molester, chances are you'll probably view some CP during your down time. So - does viewing that CP make them a child molester? No - it's just a correlation. Do you see hundreds of FBI agents running out becoming Chester the Molester? Nope... but they are plainly viewing hundreds or thousands of hours of CP. There are millions of porn viewers out there watch things they know they can't, or won't EVER get to do with a significant other as well (bondage, anal, rape fantasy, s&m, DP, menage, etc.) - You don't see them all running off to pay for an S&M prostitute - it's a chance to explore something they find curious or interesting. There are probably millions of actual CP viewers out there who have checked it out due to curiousity, perversion, or a side interest -- but they check it out there because they know it's wrong to act on it in reality. Child molestation existed LONG before CP - and will exist long after all these efforts to ban CP - just the way it is.
Actually you can - quite easily. All you have to do is go to a carrier and buy the cheapest dumbphone with SIM that you can (AT&T is good for this) and get it on a "no contract length" plan (so.. a dumbphone will probably be about $100 - you'll have to pay that) - get the voice service you want on it with no data plan. Take the SIM out and put it in your android or blackberry phone. Your data services will not work, your voice services will.
I live in Canada and have an unlocked Blackberry Bold 9700 on Rogers with a normal blackberry data/voice/etc. plan for around $60/mo. I travel to the US regularly - many weeks a year. I went to an AT&T store and bought a $129 dumbphone with a $24/mo voice plan, no data, etc. I have that service automatically charged to my credit card each month so I just ignore its existence for the most part. When I travel to the US I pop my Rogers SIM out, pop my AT&T SIM in, and I'm good to go - I'm on a US phone number for making and receiving calls, and I have no data or blackberry service, but whenever I'm around WIFI I can use that for any data apps / web browsing.
Previously I had been paying around $600/yr in roaming costs when in the US. (typically ~$50 per week I was there). I now pay $300/yr for my US phone service and I get more minutes than I'll ever use while there and I use the Blackberry just fine with no data plan. My wife does the same with her Android phone using my SIM when she has to go to the US as well.
To be more accurate, it depends on the environment you work in, but there are software engineers who *are* engineers and differ from programmers and developers.
In the last company I worked for (a large well known much hated (but not as much as MS) software firm) - there were software engineers who never wrote a line of code -- that wasn't what they did. To use the old automotive analogy, they were to software what the guy in a studio with modelling clay is to the car design and building industry (the guy who never touches a part of the finished car in his job). They simply worked on design and architecture - how should the UI feel, how should this software work with other software, how should this software work with the OS and file system, how should this software accept incoming data, how should this software present its completed data, etc. These engineers took the fields of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and information systems and tried to design frameworks for the software that the developers and programmers could then implement.
Luckily I worked as a network admin so I got to avoid all of them as long as I kept my stuff running.
Not to mention "texting heavy" teens (2500 and up texts per month - sometimes 25000 per month) LOVE the physical keyboard. Most of my nieces, nephews, and cousin's kids all have BB's - they use Blackberry Messenger heavily amongst themselves and their friends with BB's, and standard SMS with their non "BB" companions. My nephew (age 17) just got a BB Bold 9780 for $99 on a 2 year contract, and in the first day he had it he said he sent around 500 BBM messages and another 150 or so SMS messages.
There's just no replacement for a good physical keyboard when you are texting 500 - 1000 times a day from what I've heard from these kids. And most of them say that they can use Opera or the BB Browser fine on pretty much any website, the phones do videos and mp3s just fine, there's facebook and twitter apps, and that's really all they need in their phones. Several of them have iPod touch on the side for gaming - but won't go for an iPhone because of the expense of all the plans (especially here in Canada - you can't get an iPhone serviced for under $100 a month really... but these kids get BB plans for $50/mo that takes care of all their needs). Have only seen one Android phone so far - my niece has the Galaxy S - she likes the phone, but says it took her a long time to get quick at typing using Swype, and she still can't keep up with the BB kids.
We briefly cared about baseball for a period around 17-18 years ago - when the Jays won the '92 and '93 world series... once we were done showing those south of the border that if we set our mind to it we could kick their collective backsides, we got bored and moved on...
As sad, convoluted, and unusual as the IT field has become, my manager (the director of IT) at my previous employer told everyone in the IT department to put all their critical passwords and important passwords and any other passwords that we regularly use onto an Excel spreadsheet including what the password was for, when it was implemented, and when it would expire if it would expire. Then print that spreadsheet, delete and BCwipe the file off the computer, and lock the printed spreadsheet in one of our desk drawers. The passwords were utterly complex and hard (our policy was 12-16 digit passwords, at least 2 digits, 2 capital letters, 2 lower case letters, and 2 symbols) but none of them ever had to be memorized - take the spreadsheet out, look up the password, re-file the spreadsheet.
Now this won't work for people who have to travel around - but a highly encrypted file (or Truecrypt file system) on a USB key with the same basic premise and only one long password memorized to access the key would make it relatively possible and secure. Lose the key - who cares - its content is useless - by the time someone could break the encryption on the key you would have had time to go back to your office (or safe at your home office), get out the hard copy, log in and change your password on every system involved, and build yourself a new USB key.
Not that complex... relatively friendly to newb's and other people who aren't super technically adept... and does a nice job. If you need more security, it's time to switch to SecurID and give everyone a token.
Where are you shopping that you can build a decent HTPC that can play 1080p video files over HDMI output in a nice small form factor for under $250? Just the motherboard, processor, RAM, case, hard drive, power supply, and video card (I'm assuming a stand alone video card, but if you go for a motherboard with integrated video add the appropriate cost to the board) for pretty much anything you can build will be $300 - and I didn't include any optical drive there. And as for TVs that can do it - the price premium is generally several hundred dollars as well - and would require most everyone to trade their recently purchased $700-$2000 LCD or Plasma TV for one with the capability. At this point the PS3 at the $249 sale price point that is now regularly being seen is a steal in what its capabilities are - web browser, web video and audio player, DLNA player, blu-ray player, not to mention you can actually play a game or two on it if you feel like it sometime (many free demos on PS3 store, etc. so you don't even have to spend a cent to get dozens or hundreds of hours of casual games).
You've met one now - I've got the antenna on a small pole on the back of my house extending it about 10 feet above the roof line. I have a spare battery I charge with it in the base as well and always carry the phone and spare battery with me -- it works from my house all the way to my office - as well as all over my neighbourhood. I have it connected to an analog digium card in my asterisk pbx. It's nice having access to my home phone and free voice over IP calls from anywhere within 3-4 km of home, and the phone isn't much bigger than the old "candybar" style cell phones of the late 90s/early 2000 vintage.
Remember that 240 wind turbines spread across 36,000 acres does not *use* 36,000 acres - not anywhere near it. Every wind energy corporation I've worked with allows farmers to farm right up to within 10 meters of the turbine tower base. The wires are almost universally all run underground with these new wind farms. The actual footprint of the turbine tower base with the 10 meters of safety space, is less than 1/2 of 1 acres. 240 towers will use an area around 120 acres. The remaining 35,880 acres will still be prime viable agricultural space. In the meantime, the typical turbine lease involves payments to the landowner of approx. $10,000 per year per turbine on their property. That means if you have a farm that is 1000 acres and have suitable space for 10 turbines, you'll lose about 5 acres of your growing space, but be paid around $100,000 a year. The loss of 5 acres of crop space may see something in the order of $5000 in lost revenue from the growing space.
The farmer comes out $95,000 a year ahead - that just might keep their farm operating when otherwise economics might say they couldn't. Also, note that for every MWh of power generated by a wind turbine, that's typically 1220 pounds of CO2 emissions avoided from traditional power generating plants (coal, gas, oil, etc.) - a 600Mw farm running at 25% capacity for a 20 year life span generates 26,280 GWh of power - potentially keeping 16 million tons of CO2 out of the environment.
I think the only thing that makes non-tech people cringe more is "bright orange on a dull orange background" - something reminiscent of the amber screen w/ hercules graphics cards
Now if only the article was correct - this didn't take place in New Jersey, but Pennsylvania. FYI I went to this high school in the 90s. The girls were nothing to write home about. I still don't think they are - not much changes in farm country.
I know the families of several of the involved in this case -- it just was yet another case of a DA trying to make a big name for himself with a "prize case" that would make nation attention and move him up the ladder in his career. He's a real ass clown.
No kidding - there are so many hundreds if not thousands of applications for this that I wish I'd had the technological know-how to make one of these.
Imagine if you will: - Flexible advertising that would allow you to interact with it (e.g. the hood of a car in a showroom - you could explore all the specs and details) - Portable point of sale - maybe you sell things at concerts or trade shows - unroll the screen, plug it into a micro-format computer with wifi/3G and have e-commerce available on a 50 inch screen. - So many other cool things that I could just go on listing all day - but I've made my point.
Anyone dismissing this technology is either jealous or clueless.
In these cases isn't it reasonable to run a virtual machine on the computer with an instance of DOS X.XX installed on it? I had a small company I was helping out a while ago that wanted their staff to be able to have email and web browsing at their workstations, but their point of sale and contact management software were "Uber-Old" DOS apps that acted like your example. I installed the free version of VMWare Server on all their PC's and installed DOS in the virtual environment. Their "over-powered" computers that had just been running DOS and nothing else, now had full Win XP environments with Email, Web, etc. - as well as their proprietary DOS apps in the virtual machine.
I don't know about you but I still buy almost everything with cash - I don't carry it for long - I head to the bank or ATM and get my money for the day's purchases - and make them quite happily. I've yet to run into a store that wasn't happy to take my $20's in return for whatever I was buying - that has included a $2500 56" LCD TV, my PS3 (from Best Buy - they can't find me hehe!), many movies and games, an HP Laptop, a Lenovo desktop, the majority of the furniture in my house, and my wife's car ($21,000 in cash).
I prefer the new 3D LCD monitors that don't require glasses at all - one of my customers bought one earlier this year (or had it sent to them for research?) in any case - I got to play on it a while - the 3D was viewable from a pretty good wide angle, and it was almost bizarre seeing it with no glasses on... the image really popped out of the screen and looked like it had true depth. http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Gaming/Accessories/J6U3R4T3 For more information on the tech.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to not become one of those people. I did. But I personally can affirm the story in my personal case.
I lived in San Francisco for 7 years after university, and became accustomed to urban life - having things open 24 hours, having china town a few steps away, having everything so close and easy to get to. On the other hand I always felt distracted, stressed, and like I was unable to do half the things I wanted because of crowds, traffic, too long of lines, waiting lists for restaurant reservations, you name it. I was not being very productive as I was always thinking about the logistical ramifications.
I left. I went to the opposite corner of North America - I bought a cabin on a remote lake in north central Ontario Canada - no phone line - electricity was solar and a generator - heat was a wood stove and a fireplace - internet was via 2-way Satellite - I can get in my car and drive an hour in any given direction and see no more than 5 cars. No more lines. No more traffic. No more logistical nightmares. When your biggest concern for a week is if you should drive in for provisions on Wednesday or Thursday depending on the weather, and if there's enough firewood split to last the month out. However I did catch myself saying "When I was in SF, I could get Chinese delivery in 20 minutes, and if I wanted a part for something I was working on there were so many stores to choose from!".
I lived there for 5 years - the most productive and happy 5 years of my life - but in the end it did get a little lonely and I've now moved to the fringes of a small city (100,000 ppl) - I'm still surrounded by trees and not people - but now I'm only a 10 minute drive to stores and supplies - rather than close to 2 hours. I still feel able to think here - there's nowhere near the horrible stress of urban life.
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Alternatively, you could follow the path I did (and several others I know, some of whom encouraged me to follow the path) - completed my 4 year in Computer Engineering with a minor in EE. Worked for a few years but really disliked the work I was doing (IT infrastructure), took a little time off, and signed up and went to a 2 year community college trades program in Industrial Electrician... What that did was introduce me to many people working for various companies and hugely expanded my "network" of industry contacts. I had 0 problem landing a 6 figure job as an EE specializing in industrial control systems before I even finished the trade program. My employer thought my background of both "practical electrician" training on top of my CmpEn/EE background made me an unmatchable asset - I know the theory and the practical applications.
For the OP - perhaps going to a traditional Comp Sci program would be the best place to start - and then follow it up with a technical program afterwards where they have exposure to people in industry, and can "shine" as a well educated, brilliant programmer with sharp CS skills. They could even end up like I did getting several offers to teach courses at the community college level after I graduated. I am doing that now part time in the evenings in addition to my full time job.
Not sure how "industrial" OP wants to go but we use these in all of our control panels - the prices are size dependent, but the smaller ones are well under $100, the larger ones can run upwards of $400. There are several other lines they offer if this one doesn't do what you need:
http://www.kinco.cn/category.aspx?NodeID=108
This is the laptop they got me for work - it's got great processing power, video, battery life, they keyboard is comfortable, etc -- the touch pad sucks something awful however. The "mouse buttons" are part of the touch pad, and touching them to click inevitably moves the mouse. Not great for me considering I'm using it for Zuken E3 - always dropping my nodes in the wrong place.
Yes and no. With today's population all having handheld devices that can twitter, facebook, etc. it's often the case that the local population to an event gets the message out often substantially before the official channels do. Take for example tornadoes - while the NWS may have radar that shows where a tornado might be occurring, and people calling 911 might set off official responses to a tornado, someone who's sitting in their house tweeting that the house next door just flew away in a twister is more immediate and more eyewitness - which is what DHS is looking for - they want to know if something is going on before the official channels can process it. After RTFA and the document related, it appears they have a "trust order relationship" - first off - major news media (CNN, etc.) - second is "local media" - third is things like well known websites and news aggregate sites, fourth is blogs and social media, etc... things that are 3rd and 4th level need "confirmation" from a first level source before it becomes official. This just sets off the warning bells that something might be happening and everyone needs to pay more attention that something could be up.... makes sense if you ask me.
Hah... same here - CS201? Intro programming for engineers? My CS friends all had CS101 in Pascal at the same time.
Correlation is NOT causation. If you are already a child molester, chances are you'll probably view some CP during your down time. So - does viewing that CP make them a child molester? No - it's just a correlation. Do you see hundreds of FBI agents running out becoming Chester the Molester? Nope... but they are plainly viewing hundreds or thousands of hours of CP. There are millions of porn viewers out there watch things they know they can't, or won't EVER get to do with a significant other as well (bondage, anal, rape fantasy, s&m, DP, menage, etc.) - You don't see them all running off to pay for an S&M prostitute - it's a chance to explore something they find curious or interesting. There are probably millions of actual CP viewers out there who have checked it out due to curiousity, perversion, or a side interest -- but they check it out there because they know it's wrong to act on it in reality. Child molestation existed LONG before CP - and will exist long after all these efforts to ban CP - just the way it is.
Has anyone considered that maybe these notes ARE the one time pad for decrypting another message that hasn't been discovered yet?
Actually you can - quite easily. All you have to do is go to a carrier and buy the cheapest dumbphone with SIM that you can (AT&T is good for this) and get it on a "no contract length" plan (so.. a dumbphone will probably be about $100 - you'll have to pay that) - get the voice service you want on it with no data plan. Take the SIM out and put it in your android or blackberry phone. Your data services will not work, your voice services will.
I live in Canada and have an unlocked Blackberry Bold 9700 on Rogers with a normal blackberry data/voice/etc. plan for around $60/mo. I travel to the US regularly - many weeks a year. I went to an AT&T store and bought a $129 dumbphone with a $24/mo voice plan, no data, etc. I have that service automatically charged to my credit card each month so I just ignore its existence for the most part. When I travel to the US I pop my Rogers SIM out, pop my AT&T SIM in, and I'm good to go - I'm on a US phone number for making and receiving calls, and I have no data or blackberry service, but whenever I'm around WIFI I can use that for any data apps / web browsing.
Previously I had been paying around $600/yr in roaming costs when in the US. (typically ~$50 per week I was there). I now pay $300/yr for my US phone service and I get more minutes than I'll ever use while there and I use the Blackberry just fine with no data plan. My wife does the same with her Android phone using my SIM when she has to go to the US as well.
To be more accurate, it depends on the environment you work in, but there are software engineers who *are* engineers and differ from programmers and developers.
In the last company I worked for (a large well known much hated (but not as much as MS) software firm) - there were software engineers who never wrote a line of code -- that wasn't what they did. To use the old automotive analogy, they were to software what the guy in a studio with modelling clay is to the car design and building industry (the guy who never touches a part of the finished car in his job). They simply worked on design and architecture - how should the UI feel, how should this software work with other software, how should this software work with the OS and file system, how should this software accept incoming data, how should this software present its completed data, etc. These engineers took the fields of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and information systems and tried to design frameworks for the software that the developers and programmers could then implement.
Luckily I worked as a network admin so I got to avoid all of them as long as I kept my stuff running.
Not to mention "texting heavy" teens (2500 and up texts per month - sometimes 25000 per month) LOVE the physical keyboard. Most of my nieces, nephews, and cousin's kids all have BB's - they use Blackberry Messenger heavily amongst themselves and their friends with BB's, and standard SMS with their non "BB" companions. My nephew (age 17) just got a BB Bold 9780 for $99 on a 2 year contract, and in the first day he had it he said he sent around 500 BBM messages and another 150 or so SMS messages.
There's just no replacement for a good physical keyboard when you are texting 500 - 1000 times a day from what I've heard from these kids. And most of them say that they can use Opera or the BB Browser fine on pretty much any website, the phones do videos and mp3s just fine, there's facebook and twitter apps, and that's really all they need in their phones. Several of them have iPod touch on the side for gaming - but won't go for an iPhone because of the expense of all the plans (especially here in Canada - you can't get an iPhone serviced for under $100 a month really... but these kids get BB plans for $50/mo that takes care of all their needs). Have only seen one Android phone so far - my niece has the Galaxy S - she likes the phone, but says it took her a long time to get quick at typing using Swype, and she still can't keep up with the BB kids.
10 times that much or more... building a computer with 500 TFLOPS for under $1mil is a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it.
Is that you Steve Ballmer?
We briefly cared about baseball for a period around 17-18 years ago - when the Jays won the '92 and '93 world series... once we were done showing those south of the border that if we set our mind to it we could kick their collective backsides, we got bored and moved on...
As sad, convoluted, and unusual as the IT field has become, my manager (the director of IT) at my previous employer told everyone in the IT department to put all their critical passwords and important passwords and any other passwords that we regularly use onto an Excel spreadsheet including what the password was for, when it was implemented, and when it would expire if it would expire. Then print that spreadsheet, delete and BCwipe the file off the computer, and lock the printed spreadsheet in one of our desk drawers. The passwords were utterly complex and hard (our policy was 12-16 digit passwords, at least 2 digits, 2 capital letters, 2 lower case letters, and 2 symbols) but none of them ever had to be memorized - take the spreadsheet out, look up the password, re-file the spreadsheet.
Now this won't work for people who have to travel around - but a highly encrypted file (or Truecrypt file system) on a USB key with the same basic premise and only one long password memorized to access the key would make it relatively possible and secure. Lose the key - who cares - its content is useless - by the time someone could break the encryption on the key you would have had time to go back to your office (or safe at your home office), get out the hard copy, log in and change your password on every system involved, and build yourself a new USB key.
Not that complex... relatively friendly to newb's and other people who aren't super technically adept... and does a nice job. If you need more security, it's time to switch to SecurID and give everyone a token.
Where are you shopping that you can build a decent HTPC that can play 1080p video files over HDMI output in a nice small form factor for under $250? Just the motherboard, processor, RAM, case, hard drive, power supply, and video card (I'm assuming a stand alone video card, but if you go for a motherboard with integrated video add the appropriate cost to the board) for pretty much anything you can build will be $300 - and I didn't include any optical drive there. And as for TVs that can do it - the price premium is generally several hundred dollars as well - and would require most everyone to trade their recently purchased $700-$2000 LCD or Plasma TV for one with the capability. At this point the PS3 at the $249 sale price point that is now regularly being seen is a steal in what its capabilities are - web browser, web video and audio player, DLNA player, blu-ray player, not to mention you can actually play a game or two on it if you feel like it sometime (many free demos on PS3 store, etc. so you don't even have to spend a cent to get dozens or hundreds of hours of casual games).
Two providers - les.net and AtlasVoice - one for incoming, one for outgoing respectively.
You've met one now - I've got the antenna on a small pole on the back of my house extending it about 10 feet above the roof line. I have a spare battery I charge with it in the base as well and always carry the phone and spare battery with me -- it works from my house all the way to my office - as well as all over my neighbourhood. I have it connected to an analog digium card in my asterisk pbx. It's nice having access to my home phone and free voice over IP calls from anywhere within 3-4 km of home, and the phone isn't much bigger than the old "candybar" style cell phones of the late 90s/early 2000 vintage.
Remember that 240 wind turbines spread across 36,000 acres does not *use* 36,000 acres - not anywhere near it. Every wind energy corporation I've worked with allows farmers to farm right up to within 10 meters of the turbine tower base. The wires are almost universally all run underground with these new wind farms. The actual footprint of the turbine tower base with the 10 meters of safety space, is less than 1/2 of 1 acres. 240 towers will use an area around 120 acres. The remaining 35,880 acres will still be prime viable agricultural space. In the meantime, the typical turbine lease involves payments to the landowner of approx. $10,000 per year per turbine on their property. That means if you have a farm that is 1000 acres and have suitable space for 10 turbines, you'll lose about 5 acres of your growing space, but be paid around $100,000 a year. The loss of 5 acres of crop space may see something in the order of $5000 in lost revenue from the growing space.
The farmer comes out $95,000 a year ahead - that just might keep their farm operating when otherwise economics might say they couldn't. Also, note that for every MWh of power generated by a wind turbine, that's typically 1220 pounds of CO2 emissions avoided from traditional power generating plants (coal, gas, oil, etc.) - a 600Mw farm running at 25% capacity for a 20 year life span generates 26,280 GWh of power - potentially keeping 16 million tons of CO2 out of the environment.
Mmmm vt-100.
I think the only thing that makes non-tech people cringe more is "bright orange on a dull orange background" - something reminiscent of the amber screen w/ hercules graphics cards
Now if only the article was correct - this didn't take place in New Jersey, but Pennsylvania. FYI I went to this high school in the 90s. The girls were nothing to write home about. I still don't think they are - not much changes in farm country.
I know the families of several of the involved in this case -- it just was yet another case of a DA trying to make a big name for himself with a "prize case" that would make nation attention and move him up the ladder in his career. He's a real ass clown.
No kidding - there are so many hundreds if not thousands of applications for this that I wish I'd had the technological know-how to make one of these.
Imagine if you will:
- Flexible advertising that would allow you to interact with it (e.g. the hood of a car in a showroom - you could explore all the specs and details)
- Portable point of sale - maybe you sell things at concerts or trade shows - unroll the screen, plug it into a micro-format computer with wifi/3G and have e-commerce available on a 50 inch screen.
- So many other cool things that I could just go on listing all day - but I've made my point.
Anyone dismissing this technology is either jealous or clueless.
In these cases isn't it reasonable to run a virtual machine on the computer with an instance of DOS X.XX installed on it? I had a small company I was helping out a while ago that wanted their staff to be able to have email and web browsing at their workstations, but their point of sale and contact management software were "Uber-Old" DOS apps that acted like your example. I installed the free version of VMWare Server on all their PC's and installed DOS in the virtual environment. Their "over-powered" computers that had just been running DOS and nothing else, now had full Win XP environments with Email, Web, etc. - as well as their proprietary DOS apps in the virtual machine.
I don't know about you but I still buy almost everything with cash - I don't carry it for long - I head to the bank or ATM and get my money for the day's purchases - and make them quite happily. I've yet to run into a store that wasn't happy to take my $20's in return for whatever I was buying - that has included a $2500 56" LCD TV, my PS3 (from Best Buy - they can't find me hehe!), many movies and games, an HP Laptop, a Lenovo desktop, the majority of the furniture in my house, and my wife's car ($21,000 in cash).
I prefer the new 3D LCD monitors that don't require glasses at all - one of my customers bought one earlier this year (or had it sent to them for research?) in any case - I got to play on it a while - the 3D was viewable from a pretty good wide angle, and it was almost bizarre seeing it with no glasses on... the image really popped out of the screen and looked like it had true depth.
http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Gaming/Accessories/J6U3R4T3
For more information on the tech.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to not become one of those people. I did. But I personally can affirm the story in my personal case.
I lived in San Francisco for 7 years after university, and became accustomed to urban life - having things open 24 hours, having china town a few steps away, having everything so close and easy to get to. On the other hand I always felt distracted, stressed, and like I was unable to do half the things I wanted because of crowds, traffic, too long of lines, waiting lists for restaurant reservations, you name it. I was not being very productive as I was always thinking about the logistical ramifications.
I left. I went to the opposite corner of North America - I bought a cabin on a remote lake in north central Ontario Canada - no phone line - electricity was solar and a generator - heat was a wood stove and a fireplace - internet was via 2-way Satellite - I can get in my car and drive an hour in any given direction and see no more than 5 cars. No more lines. No more traffic. No more logistical nightmares. When your biggest concern for a week is if you should drive in for provisions on Wednesday or Thursday depending on the weather, and if there's enough firewood split to last the month out. However I did catch myself saying "When I was in SF, I could get Chinese delivery in 20 minutes, and if I wanted a part for something I was working on there were so many stores to choose from!".
I lived there for 5 years - the most productive and happy 5 years of my life - but in the end it did get a little lonely and I've now moved to the fringes of a small city (100,000 ppl) - I'm still surrounded by trees and not people - but now I'm only a 10 minute drive to stores and supplies - rather than close to 2 hours. I still feel able to think here - there's nowhere near the horrible stress of urban life.