Birmingham, England, had the first in the 1980s, though the promise of airliner-like speeds on land is still unrealized.
The first maglev prototype was built in Sutton Gault, Cambridgeshire, adjacent to the flood plains of the Ouse Washes. These days there is no sign of the maglev tracks, the area is now a microlight airstrip.
This is a google maps image of the area. That large blue strip moving through the picture is the Ouse Washes - the largest wildfowl water area in Europe, currently flooded (as it should be at this time of year). The whole area is very flat, for miles in many directions and most of it would be underwater if not for the work of some Dutch Engineers a few hundred years ago. The flood plain stretches to the North Sea, joining it at The Wash, in Norfolk.
When people are prepared to pay the true engineering cost of secure software you'll get it.
Until then you'll get what you are prepared to pay for.
I really don't understand why people want to have Audi or Mercedes quality but only pay the engineering cost of a Ford.
Superficially they both look the same and behave the same (four wheels, engine, economy, airbags, NCAP safety rating, etc) but when you've driven one you won't be going back to the other (unless you can't afford it).
First Video Game? Pong, In a hotel in Wales. I must have been 7 or 8 years old.
Then nothing more until we moved house several years later and I discovered Space Invaders and Asteroids at the local inland holiday resort:-) of Stourport on Severn.
From that point on I wanted a home computer. I got a VIC-20 and learned 6502 and wrote a joystick controller (whoopee doo!).
After the a C64 and wrote many games, plus games for a prototype Commodore C-16 (provided by Commodore via a game company with no manuals, nothing - we had to find the joystick, video and sound hardware by disassembling the BASIC ROM and a lot of guessing what bits did what in which register), Atari 400s, Acorn Electron, BBC Model B, Atari ST, IBM PC-AT, all in assembler.
Best game ever? Defender (Williams, Arcade), closely followed by Robotron (Williams, Arcade) and Sheep in Space (Llamasoft, Commodore C64).
Things to avoid: Wireless.
Humans have not evolved to deal with radiation at these frequencies.
Just say no. You don't need it.
Sure, I'll modded down or labeled as a flake. I don't care. Neither should you. Go wired and stay that way.
Stephen
Use a mobile phone a lot? Suffering from short term memory loss? Wonder why?
Give it four or five years and there will be a lot of lawsuits because of Repetitive Strain Injury.
Laptops are bad for ergonomics and RSI, as are "comfy" chairs etc.
These companies are just setting themselves up for a whole heap of trouble. I'm glad I don't work there.
Since when did Defective By Design apply only to DRM?
As a series of words forming a phrase in the English language, its pretty clear what it means.
A firewall that doesn't work properly is defective by design.
The tendency for technology to provide support for basic producers (music, videos, EFF, etc) is wonderful. It is also very threatening for large organizations based on the scarcity principles of "old" economics.
Seems like its time to re-read my dog-eared copy of Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (Heinlein).
Quite amazing when people quote an acronym, especially such a famous one and don't understand the meaning of it.
When it comes to video games the best ones were, amazingly on 8 bit platforms.
Defender and Robotron by Williams (Z80 plus nice graphics board), circa 1980/81.
Sheep in Space, 6510 (Commodore C64) by Jeff Minter.
Mr Do's Castle, unsure about processor, probably Z80
Dingo (Ashby Computers and Graphics), most likely Z80 as this software house later
transformed itself into Ultimate Play The Game, a Z80 specialist for the Sinclair Spectrum.
All simple to understand and highly playable. Playable being the key
word, something which seems to have left games behind with the advent of 3D graphics.
Now its all show and flash graphics, but no gameplay. What is the point?
Maybe I'm an old fogey at the grand age of 42. Many of our customers are game developers and
sometimes we talk to them about this subject. Unsurprisingly most of their older developers, at
a similar age to me, have similar opinions about this (that is 2D good, 3D less so).
I think when you get to decent 3D immersive gaming then 3D may take off (in terms of being as
good as say Defender, or Robotron). We'll have to wait and see on that one.
3G for me to be interested. I was really disappointed. We've waited for some time in the UK to get the iPhone.
I had assumed that being Apple it would be a premium product. The pricing is. But the product doesn't have 3G, even
years after 3G has been available in the UK. I've never had or wanted a mobile phone. Recently been thinking getting one,
so held out for the iPhone, but no 3G, no sale.
If the iPhone gets 3G I will get an iPhone. Don't talk to me about Wifi, its not the same and
for the needs I have it won't cut it.
3G (or better) or nothing.
A proper SDK is also required. There are apps in my head that would be perfect for the iPhone but which I don't envisage
being possible without an SDK.
A GPS (or location based on GSM tower transmitter sector triangulation) option would be very useful too.
300 metres - thats 12 lengths of a 25m pool. If 2 knots is 1m/S then you have 5 minutes to swim the 300 metres.
300 metres isn't a long way - triathlon guys swim a mile in open water (6400m) and I swim 1000m whenever I swim as part of
my physiotherapy program for the injuries in my arms.
I'm 42, I have injuries in my arms that prevent me using too much power, but even so I can do 12 lengths of breast stroke in 6 minutes and if I did front crawl (freestyle) I'd be under the 5 minutes easily. I'm not a club or competition swimmer so although I'm faster than the average guy I'm not the fastest by a long way.
So I can beat that device without having it and I'm past my prime - is that device really solving a problem?
The type of people that I imagine would be interested in this would be already fit, competent swimmers -
but the stats are that this device isn't that fast.
Just can't see the point, unless they are claiming it will help poor swimmers swim that fast - but poor swimmers won't have the technique for the legs (that leg action is very un-natural to use when swimming).
#1
The Berne convention says you can use small snippets of larger works without penalty. Its called "fair use".
A 20 second clip out of a 90 minute move (5400 seconds)is definitely fair use (its 1/3rd of 1 percent of the movie).
The intent was also fair use - to show it to her little brother as an example of what they had seen.
#2
Did you know that makers of TV programmes, documentaries, films, movies etc, if they use a snippet of your music that
you recorded (and possibly have for sale with EMI, Sony, whoever), they can use an snippet they want, with no fee, as
background music in their film/documentary/etc so long as the snippet is less than 30 seconds in length?
How do I know this? A friend recorded a CD of music. He played Uilleann pipes. One night down the pub we'd been playing tunes
and he asked if I'd seen such and such a TV programme the night before. I had. Did I like the music for the bit where they
flew over the mountains in Scotland? Yes. I wrote that. Cool. Er, not really they didn't pay me and then he told me why. This
was for the UK and its the way the PRS or MCPS (the latter I think) work. They'd cut his music on the 29 second mark to avoid
paying him. No idea if the same concept applies in the USA.
So its OK to use copyrighted music snippets in other people's copyrighted TV works without fee, but not OK to video tape a poor quality scene in a movie theater for 20 seconds when there is no profit or theft motive? Hmmm, I might think somebody was having their cake and eating it.
Nevermind the clueless programme producer using the bagpipes of Ireland for a flyover scene for Scotland. Doh! Happens all the time - Oh its celtic just shove some Irish music in there, no one will know...
http://www.m-spatial.com/ provide services like this (location based info).
The founding team used to work at Laser Scan (a GIS company).
I worked with them at Laser Scan, good people.
I first saw a Smart car in 2000 I think, at Bilbao airport. A hire car firm was using them to great effect, getting a lot of attention.
I think if you lived in a city and did short commutes at urban speeds it would be nice, but the thought of long distance driving in one, and the dire thought of having to survive an accident in one doesn't fill me with much joy. Someone in my street has one and it doesn't look like it would stand up to the same impact as my VW Passat would. I'm amazed that something so lightweight as a Smart car gets worse mileage than my heavier, larger Vauxhall Astra from 20 years ago.
Really sad comments. I am not an anti-American, although you do appear to be anti-European. I do however think American automobile design is abysmal. America makes excellent fighter planes and aircraft carriers. The UK makes the best tanks. When it comes to cars, it is European design coupled with Japanese manufacturing techniques.
Your comments regarding how expensive life is in the US are grossly ignorant. The US is cheaper, much cheaper, than Europe. Time to stop whining. People drive just as far to get to work in the UK, often driving for two hours each way, which is insane combined with an eight hour workday - time for your kids?
The emotional event you describe is coming. Check out Cluster Fuck Nation. if you want to know more.
I'm sorry to have to burst your bubble, but 40mpg is nothing. Most cars in the UK can do this.
My 1987 Vauxhall Astra (1.3L engine, petrol) regularly gave me 43mpg (and lasted 13 years before it
was written off by thieves. My girlfriends Skoda Octavia 1.9L diesel can get about 60mpg on a good
run and averages 54mpg including urban commuting. If you don't know what a Skoda Octavia is it is an
Audi A4 with a different skin styling - made by VW/Audi group - they own Skoda and Seat.
It is a true indictment of how wasteful car designs and usage are in the US that you think 40mpg
is newsworthy. BTW, your $3.50/gallon petrol is cheap. We pay £0.97 per litre - thats $1.94 per litre to you,
or about $9 per gallon. So when you complain about your "high" US petrol, sorry, gas, prices, you are
complaining about something that is not high at all.
Provides a lot more statistics than Purify or BoundsChecker.
Works with Visual Studio (C++ and VB), Metrowerks, Delphi, Fortran and third party allocators such
as CherryStone (or even an allocator you wrote yourself).
Very customizable.
Some people run sessions with billions of allocations tracked by Memory Validator
http://www.softwareverify.com/testimonials.html
Slashdot Mirror
Birmingham, England, had the first in the 1980s, though the promise of airliner-like speeds on land is still unrealized.
The first maglev prototype was built in Sutton Gault, Cambridgeshire, adjacent to the flood plains of the Ouse Washes. These days there is no sign of the maglev tracks, the area is now a microlight airstrip.
This is a google maps image of the area. That large blue strip moving through the picture is the Ouse Washes - the largest wildfowl water area in Europe, currently flooded (as it should be at this time of year). The whole area is very flat, for miles in many directions and most of it would be underwater if not for the work of some Dutch Engineers a few hundred years ago. The flood plain stretches to the North Sea, joining it at The Wash, in Norfolk.
When people are prepared to pay the true engineering cost of secure software you'll get it.
Until then you'll get what you are prepared to pay for.
I really don't understand why people want to have Audi or Mercedes quality but only pay the engineering cost of a Ford.
Superficially they both look the same and behave the same (four wheels, engine, economy, airbags, NCAP safety rating, etc) but when you've driven one you won't be going back to the other (unless you can't afford it).
Result!
First Video Game? Pong, In a hotel in Wales. I must have been 7 or 8 years old.
Then nothing more until we moved house several years later and I discovered Space Invaders and Asteroids at the local inland holiday resort :-) of Stourport on Severn.
From that point on I wanted a home computer. I got a VIC-20 and learned 6502 and wrote a joystick controller (whoopee doo!). After the a C64 and wrote many games, plus games for a prototype Commodore C-16 (provided by Commodore via a game company with no manuals, nothing - we had to find the joystick, video and sound hardware by disassembling the BASIC ROM and a lot of guessing what bits did what in which register), Atari 400s, Acorn Electron, BBC Model B, Atari ST, IBM PC-AT, all in assembler.
Best game ever? Defender (Williams, Arcade), closely followed by Robotron (Williams, Arcade) and Sheep in Space (Llamasoft, Commodore C64).
Things to avoid: Wireless. Humans have not evolved to deal with radiation at these frequencies. Just say no. You don't need it. Sure, I'll modded down or labeled as a flake. I don't care. Neither should you. Go wired and stay that way. Stephen Use a mobile phone a lot? Suffering from short term memory loss? Wonder why?
Give it four or five years and there will be a lot of lawsuits because of Repetitive Strain Injury. Laptops are bad for ergonomics and RSI, as are "comfy" chairs etc.
These companies are just setting themselves up for a whole heap of trouble. I'm glad I don't work there.
RSI Info
Since when did Defective By Design apply only to DRM? As a series of words forming a phrase in the English language, its pretty clear what it means. A firewall that doesn't work properly is defective by design.
Why isn't this story also tagged as "haha"?
If this was a story about a Windows Firewall, as well as defectivebydesign you'd also have the "haha" tag. Do I detect bias?
The tendency for technology to provide support for basic producers (music, videos, EFF, etc) is wonderful. It is also very threatening for large organizations based on the scarcity principles of "old" economics. Seems like its time to re-read my dog-eared copy of Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (Heinlein). Quite amazing when people quote an acronym, especially such a famous one and don't understand the meaning of it.
When it comes to video games the best ones were, amazingly on 8 bit platforms.
All simple to understand and highly playable . Playable being the key word, something which seems to have left games behind with the advent of 3D graphics. Now its all show and flash graphics, but no gameplay. What is the point?
Maybe I'm an old fogey at the grand age of 42. Many of our customers are game developers and sometimes we talk to them about this subject. Unsurprisingly most of their older developers, at a similar age to me, have similar opinions about this (that is 2D good, 3D less so).
I think when you get to decent 3D immersive gaming then 3D may take off (in terms of being as good as say Defender, or Robotron). We'll have to wait and see on that one.
3G for me to be interested. I was really disappointed. We've waited for some time in the UK to get the iPhone. I had assumed that being Apple it would be a premium product. The pricing is. But the product doesn't have 3G, even years after 3G has been available in the UK. I've never had or wanted a mobile phone. Recently been thinking getting one, so held out for the iPhone, but no 3G, no sale.
If the iPhone gets 3G I will get an iPhone. Don't talk to me about Wifi, its not the same and for the needs I have it won't cut it.
3G (or better) or nothing.
A proper SDK is also required. There are apps in my head that would be perfect for the iPhone but which I don't envisage being possible without an SDK.
A GPS (or location based on GSM tower transmitter sector triangulation) option would be very useful too.
Er, whats the point?
300 metres - thats 12 lengths of a 25m pool. If 2 knots is 1m/S then you have 5 minutes to swim the 300 metres. 300 metres isn't a long way - triathlon guys swim a mile in open water (6400m) and I swim 1000m whenever I swim as part of my physiotherapy program for the injuries in my arms.
I'm 42, I have injuries in my arms that prevent me using too much power, but even so I can do 12 lengths of breast stroke in 6 minutes and if I did front crawl (freestyle) I'd be under the 5 minutes easily. I'm not a club or competition swimmer so although I'm faster than the average guy I'm not the fastest by a long way.
So I can beat that device without having it and I'm past my prime - is that device really solving a problem?
The type of people that I imagine would be interested in this would be already fit, competent swimmers - but the stats are that this device isn't that fast.
Just can't see the point, unless they are claiming it will help poor swimmers swim that fast - but poor swimmers won't have the technique for the legs (that leg action is very un-natural to use when swimming).
#1
The Berne convention says you can use small snippets of larger works without penalty. Its called "fair use".
A 20 second clip out of a 90 minute move (5400 seconds)is definitely fair use (its 1/3rd of 1 percent of the movie). The intent was also fair use - to show it to her little brother as an example of what they had seen.
#2
Did you know that makers of TV programmes, documentaries, films, movies etc, if they use a snippet of your music that you recorded (and possibly have for sale with EMI, Sony, whoever), they can use an snippet they want, with no fee, as background music in their film/documentary/etc so long as the snippet is less than 30 seconds in length?
How do I know this? A friend recorded a CD of music. He played Uilleann pipes. One night down the pub we'd been playing tunes and he asked if I'd seen such and such a TV programme the night before. I had. Did I like the music for the bit where they flew over the mountains in Scotland? Yes. I wrote that. Cool. Er, not really they didn't pay me and then he told me why. This was for the UK and its the way the PRS or MCPS (the latter I think) work. They'd cut his music on the 29 second mark to avoid paying him. No idea if the same concept applies in the USA.
So its OK to use copyrighted music snippets in other people's copyrighted TV works without fee, but not OK to video tape a poor quality scene in a movie theater for 20 seconds when there is no profit or theft motive? Hmmm, I might think somebody was having their cake and eating it.
Nevermind the clueless programme producer using the bagpipes of Ireland for a flyover scene for Scotland. Doh! Happens all the time - Oh its celtic just shove some Irish music in there, no one will know...
You earn $1600 a year?
If you've copied them from a rental CD that is not a legitimate copy. You won't destroy that copy when you return the rental will you?
Why is it an important question? Legitimate backup copies have nothing to do with pirated software.
Does the transputer invalidate this patent as prior art?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
http://www.m-spatial.com/ provide services like this (location based info).
The founding team used to work at Laser Scan (a GIS company).
I worked with them at Laser Scan, good people.
I first saw a Smart car in 2000 I think, at Bilbao airport. A hire car firm was using them to great effect, getting a lot of attention.
I think if you lived in a city and did short commutes at urban speeds it would be nice, but the thought of long distance driving in one, and the dire thought of having to survive an accident in one doesn't fill me with much joy. Someone in my street has one and it doesn't look like it would stand up to the same impact as my VW Passat would. I'm amazed that something so lightweight as a Smart car gets worse mileage than my heavier, larger Vauxhall Astra from 20 years ago.
Really sad comments. I am not an anti-American, although you do appear to be anti-European. I do however think American automobile design is abysmal. America makes excellent fighter planes and aircraft carriers. The UK makes the best tanks. When it comes to cars, it is European design coupled with Japanese manufacturing techniques.
Your comments regarding how expensive life is in the US are grossly ignorant. The US is cheaper, much cheaper, than Europe. Time to stop whining. People drive just as far to get to work in the UK, often driving for two hours each way, which is insane combined with an eight hour workday - time for your kids?
The emotional event you describe is coming. Check out Cluster Fuck Nation. if you want to know more.
I'm sorry to have to burst your bubble, but 40mpg is nothing. Most cars in the UK can do this. My 1987 Vauxhall Astra (1.3L engine, petrol) regularly gave me 43mpg (and lasted 13 years before it was written off by thieves. My girlfriends Skoda Octavia 1.9L diesel can get about 60mpg on a good run and averages 54mpg including urban commuting. If you don't know what a Skoda Octavia is it is an Audi A4 with a different skin styling - made by VW/Audi group - they own Skoda and Seat.
It is a true indictment of how wasteful car designs and usage are in the US that you think 40mpg is newsworthy. BTW, your $3.50/gallon petrol is cheap. We pay £0.97 per litre - thats $1.94 per litre to you, or about $9 per gallon. So when you complain about your "high" US petrol, sorry, gas, prices, you are complaining about something that is not high at all.
Provides a lot more statistics than Purify or BoundsChecker.
Works with Visual Studio (C++ and VB), Metrowerks, Delphi, Fortran and third party allocators such as CherryStone (or even an allocator you wrote yourself).
Very customizable.
Some people run sessions with billions of allocations tracked by Memory Validator
http://www.softwareverify.com/testimonials.html
Stephen
(Disclaimer: I work for SVL)