From the comments, I suspect that most Slashdot readers don't spend much time in gyms.
Heart rate monitors are very useful. They tell you what resistance level you should be using on the cardio machines. Some of the fancier cardio machines read your heart rate and automatically adjust the resistance level to keep your heart rate in the training zone.
Great for obese kids. And adults. It fine-tunes their workout to a level they can handle while preventing goofing off.
If the school is really doing that, good for them. They're doing it right.
Science has gotten harder. Subatomic physics once seemed reasonably comprehensible. Disney produced shows for kids explaining chain reactions. The mess we have now even puzzles physicists.
We don't even know if superstrings are a meaningful concept. And the "it's a ceullular automaton
at the bottom" is gathering support. There used to be hope that at some low level, the fundamentals were simple. We're a long way from that now.
The chemical basis of life is beginning to be understood, but the complexity there is awesome, and it's not ever going to be simple.
A Western Electric model 600 desk phone or an AM radio was easily comprehensible by a smart kid. Even an tube-era analog TV isn't that complicated. Think about what it takes to actually understand a modern mobile phone.
So we have a story about a press release about a report by some unknown company. Big deal.
This is an important subject, though. The big issues are 1) will "netbooks" wipe out the notebook industry, 2) will "netbooks" become slaves to mobile phone companies, like handsets, 3) will Microsoft succeed in enforcing their ceiling on how powerful a netbook can get. The story addresses none of those issues.
The fascinating thing, and one that cries out for some good journalism, is how effectively Microsoft squashed the Linux netbook industry. The first netbooks all ran Linux. Eighteen months later, it's very hard to buy a Linux netbook. How did Microsoft get Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers to pay for a OS when they had successful products with a free one?
If you want a sense of how far Shockwave can be pushed, try Maid Marion. They have a halfway decent 3D multiuser RPG that runs in a browser. Looks about as good as Everquest of a few years ago. There are guilds, monsters, dungeons, items, PvP combat - all the usual stuff. The game mechanics, like collisions, ground contact, and camera control, are all reasonably decent, if well behind modern console games.
If Adobe could just solve the loading time problem, as they did for Flash, this would be the solution to 3D on the Web.
This is about Try #4 for 3D on the Web. Web3D was an XML representation of VRML. Unfortunately, the effect of the Web3D consortium was to kill VRML in favor of a vaporware concept.
3D in the browser is done well in Macromedia Shockwave. Try this 3D driving game. The Shockwave player is supposedly available on 58% of PCs. Some versions of Shockwave even had the Havok physics engine, but Macromedia stopped paying Havok for the license and took that out.
The main problem with Shockwave is that it doesn't start as fast as Flash does. Flash has a nice scheme for interleaving the timeline and the asset data, so that playing starts very quickly. At least if the content is authored properly. Also, Shockwave authoring tools are expensive.
About Java 3D, the less said, the better.
The problem with offering OpenGL access to Javascript is that Javascript isn't a good language for fast matrix math. Also, authoring tools will have to be developed. You can't effectively author 3D content in a text editor.
I used the Eaton VORAD automotive radar on a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. It's a useful little device. You get, for up to 20 targets, range, range rate, and azimuth. Targets smaller than a motorcycle usually do not show up.
It will not see pedestrians at any useful range.
Azimuth info accuracy isn't very good, but range and range rate are quite good. That's ten year old technology; the newer units are better. Those units have been on some big trucks for fifteen years. But the technology was too expensive for most cars. It's been appearing as "intelligent cruise control" on some cars for years.
The Eaton units, with the display and controller used for vehicles, supports accident reconstruction. The last 15 seconds are retained, and you can see what other vehicles in front were doing. Trucking companies find this useful, because they often can show that it was the other driver's fault.
For those who missed the dot-com boom, read this: "In the outer lobby and decadent smoking lounge, the top sales guys from VA Linux flashed their nametags in an effort to secure some immediate female profit taking from one of the most impressive IPOs of recent weeks. Elsewhere the women of Snowball danced with wild abandon and Dexter from Scent.com tried to sell me a unit that would include smell in my daily internet experience. As I quietly exited the scene, I caught view of a woman in a long dress being pulled off of the dancing cage for the second time..."
(SF Girl wasn't making that stuff up. It was real. I went to some of those parties.)
A free trip to the latest Harry Potter movie (which isn't even very good compared to its predecessors) is lame in comparison.
A basic problem with open source applications is poor usability, combined with general amateurishness. There's a tendency to get to "90% working", after which the developers lose interest. The fundamental problem is that nobody is in a position to insist that the hard-to-fix problems get fixed.
Firefox I recently "upgraded" from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3.5.2. There's some bug that, about once a day per password site, causes some internal JavaScript associated with saved passwords to take about two minutes, producing dialogs warning that JavaScript is taking too long. I installed a JavaScript debugger, but it's not working correctly. It's futile to report this as a bug unless I can actually find the problem. That's open source.
Also, each new version of Firefox seems to be more of a memory hog than the last. There is no excuse for a web browser requiring half a gigabyte of RAM.
Blender After five years, it's gone from having the interface from hell to only having the interface from heck. There are stupid bugs, like smooth shading sometimes working in the renderer but not the interactive windows, and vice versa. It's a good program, with crappy Q/A and usability.
Open Office I've used OpenOffice since 1.0; I still have a paid-up copy of Word 97 for emergencies, but that's it. At version 3, OpenOffice at least mostly works now. But the usability still sucks. The word completion assumes you don't touch-type fast, for example. Microsoft does much better at the subtle handling of spelling correction. External.doc documents sometimes don't render properly.
SumatraPDF At last, a safe PDF viewer. But I report about two documents a month that won't render at all. The SumatraPDF people run the PDF documents through some PDF checker and report that the document is at fault. This is a problem when the document comes from a legal proceeding. Plus, you can't even select text in SumatraPDF.
In the visual effects field and graphics world plugins are part of daily life.
Someone at Autodesk once described the 3DS Max plug-in market to me as "400 people chasing $4 million in business". You don't want to be one of those 400 people.
OK. So they build this really big projection touchscreen. And then they divide it into sections because they don't have an application that can use it effectively.
That indicates a failure of imagination. But it's really just a PR device for the Hard Rock location in Vegas. It's not something anyone uses regularly. So its interface has to be trivial.
What could you usefully do with a touchscreen that big usable simultaneously by multiple people? Intelligence analysis? Maybe. But there's an inherent bias in something like that towards short-attention span behavior, which may not be a good thing in analysis. Trading platform? Might work; those guys already have too many screens. But they don't move their windows around much; they have many screens because they need their data to be in expected places. Architecture? Look at, yes; show to clients, yes, actually design, no. That's more likely to be one guy with a modest size touchscreen driving a wall-sized display.
I could see this as a management tool for a MMORPG, where the staff is trying to run a world, but the consequences of errors are low.
From a business perspective, never write a "plug-in". You're too vulnerable to the whims of the vendor into which your plug-in plugs. If you want to write one for fun, fine, but it's not a sound basis for a business venture.
The front entrance is very impressive. But it's security theater. Google StreetView shows the entrance to the loading dock, where the gate has been left open.
About 10-15 years ago, there was talk in the space community of a "big dumb booster", with costs reduced and a lower level of reliability. The problem is that, after half a century, rockets still aren't very reliable. Launch success rates for satellites are still in the 80% - 90% range.
The Shuttles have had 114 flights and two crashes.
The killer on costs is weight reduction. If boosters could be built with the weight budget of an airliner, space travel could work as well as air travel does. Weight reduction pushes the use of exotic but fragile materials; nobody would put foam insulation on the outside of an airliner.
This is why space travel just barely works.
Is that a price worth paying?
If we had big nuclear rockets (which were built and tested in the 1950s), we'd have enough power to build spacecraft with reasonable weight budgets. No more exposed insulating foam, as with the shuttle; the outer skin would be titanium or stainless steel, and thick enough to handle ice and rain impacts.
When Orion, the nuclear-bomb powered launcher, was being designed, someone calculated that for each launch, statistically 0.5 people would die from cancer, in terms of shortened life from fallout. There are countries that would consider that a good trade.
The US once did. The estimated casualties for the invasion of Japan in WWII were a million Allied soldiers. (The necessary number of Purple Heart medals was manufactured, and the military is still using up that supply.) In the 1950s and 1960s, US military fighter pilots had a 20% casualty rate, without any help from an enemy.
The trouble with phishing blacklists is that if you take a hard enough line to make them work, there's collateral damage. Blacklisting by URL is useless; most attackers with a clue use a different URL in each email. Even blacklisting by full domain is no longer enough; many attackers use a bogus subdomain for each phishing e-mail.
If you take a hard line and blacklist at the second-level domain, blacklists are more effective.
We measure the collateral damage of doing that. We (as SiteTruth) maintain an updated list of major domains being exploited by phishing scams. This is a list of domains that are both in PhishTank with a hostile URL, and OpenDirectory, as "major". Today, there are only 37 domains on the list, which is about as low as it's ever been. The high was around 175, back in 2008. This matters because the big-name sites are likely to be whitelisted, and phishers look for exploits that will let them use a big-name domain to evade filters.
We nag sites into fixing security holes which allowed some phishing site to exploit them. Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay have cleaned up their act. Only a few major sites are still on the list.
Google is on the list because someone figured out a way to use a Google Docs spreadsheet to host a phishing site. Piczo.com, a free hosting service now hosting 103 phishing URLs, just doesn't seem to care. The other sites with more than one entry tend to be dying hosting services: Geocities, FortuneCity, RoadRunner.
The problem of big-name sites being exploited by phishers is coming under control. It's probably safe to blacklist by second-level domain now. (If only Google gets their act together and deals with that spreadsheet exploit.)
If you visit that site, it spends about thirty seconds running a "preloader". Yet the actual quiz comes from another site and is trivial. What's going on in there?
AT&T has "distributed generation", and not just in central offices. Some in-ground network nodes have a small engine fueled from a gas line. This provides backup power if commercial power goes out.
In some areas, there's been grumbling about this; somebody in the subdivision gets stuck with the big green box in their yard.
It's mostly a problem in high-density suburban areas. In urban areas, there are underground vaults and commercial basements in which infrastructure equipment can be placed. In low-density suburban areas and rural areas, big metal boxes that make small amounts of noise aren't that bothersome. But in areas where everybody has their little patch of lawn and little else, there are complaints.
I have one of these nodes at the end of my driveway. I get landline phone and DSL through it. It's about 1m x 2m, projecting about 30cm above ground, with a big exhaust vent. I've seen the box open; it looks like a server rack. Normally, it just produces fan noise; the engine is only run for tests and power outages.
OK, the FM radio is "pausable", which means the data goes into storage. And there's automatic song identification for stations sending that info on a subcarrier.
Now, what is Apple forbidding you from doing? Can you load songs from the FM radio into your song library? Automatically? Can you fast forward through commercials? If not, will Apple complain when third party applications add those features? Apple wouldn't like "Turn it on, and watch it fill up with the latest music. For free.".
That's legal, by the way, under the Audio Home Recording Act, as long as you don't redistribute the files.
As the article mentions, shot length in film has been declining for decades. The average
is now around five seconds. In 3D, more adaptation time is required at shot changes. The
article says 10-15 seconds is required. If you do too many fast focal length changes, viewers
get eyestrain.
There's a database of film shot lengths. "Batman Begins" clocks at 2.8 seconds for the entire film. (Don't take the values in that database as definitive. Click on an entry to check it. Some entries are from clips or trailers, not the entire film.) The Bourne films are even shorter. This is going to be a real problem for action films.
Troubled Teen?
Get info- specialty boarding school Stuggling teens www.HorizonAcademy.net
The place seems to be a private prison camp for "troubled teens": Our remote rural location (36 29'44"N 116 25'23"W) on the Nevada/California border gives our students the opportunity to enjoy a life of simplicity and to develop an appreciation of nature and physical activity.
It's bigger than a Barrett sniper rifle.
What it actually looks like is an "anti-tank rifle", a bad idea from WWI which hung around until anti-tank rockets were invented. The classic was the Boys rifle out of the UK. Note the similarity.
Further development in that direction led to a real BFG. It's even bigger than Halo's weapon. There were about a dozen variants on that theme, none successful.
Anti-tank rifles were a desperation measure to give infantry something to use against tanks. Tanks quickly acquired more armor than anything like that could penetrate, so they were ineffective. They were too big to lug around for any other target, so they fell out of use.
I don't see this as a big problem. It's more of an opportunity.
We need phones that can help prioritize text messages. Some few you need to read immediately, and in some cases you're involved in an active dialog. On the other hand, anything from Twitter probably doesn't require immediate attention. So your phone should have both distinctive ring and some way to set (preferably without looking) your current level of availability - (for example "available", "important stuff only", "emergencies only".) It would also be nice if places like theaters could send out a local signal that phones recognized as "set to emergencies only".
To give "emergency" some teeth, charge a few dollars to send at "emergency" priority.
Telcos would love this.
Little programs connected by pipes, right. Back in 1978, that was kind of cool. Anyone remember
when you got multiple columns from ls by writing ls | mc ? "ls" originally just produced a one entry per line list; if you wanted multiple columns, you used the "mc" filter to create them. Now, the feature list of "ls" is huge.
Actually, UNIX and Linux are way behind in inter-program communication. Using pipes for message passing is like hammering a screw. Windows at least has a standard way for programs to talk to each other in a coherent way. UNIX has about five such ways, none of them very good. OpenOffice and GNOME both have reasonable message passing systems, but they're different and don't talk to each other.
Attempts to get out of this mess have produced things like AJAX and JSON, which are widely used and ugly, and more elegant schemes like Google's message marshaling system, used by few outside Google.
Slashdot Mirror
From the comments, I suspect that most Slashdot readers don't spend much time in gyms.
Heart rate monitors are very useful. They tell you what resistance level you should be using on the cardio machines. Some of the fancier cardio machines read your heart rate and automatically adjust the resistance level to keep your heart rate in the training zone.
Great for obese kids. And adults. It fine-tunes their workout to a level they can handle while preventing goofing off.
If the school is really doing that, good for them. They're doing it right.
Science has gotten harder. Subatomic physics once seemed reasonably comprehensible. Disney produced shows for kids explaining chain reactions. The mess we have now even puzzles physicists. We don't even know if superstrings are a meaningful concept. And the "it's a ceullular automaton at the bottom" is gathering support. There used to be hope that at some low level, the fundamentals were simple. We're a long way from that now.
The chemical basis of life is beginning to be understood, but the complexity there is awesome, and it's not ever going to be simple.
A Western Electric model 600 desk phone or an AM radio was easily comprehensible by a smart kid. Even an tube-era analog TV isn't that complicated. Think about what it takes to actually understand a modern mobile phone.
So we have a story about a press release about a report by some unknown company. Big deal.
This is an important subject, though. The big issues are 1) will "netbooks" wipe out the notebook industry, 2) will "netbooks" become slaves to mobile phone companies, like handsets, 3) will Microsoft succeed in enforcing their ceiling on how powerful a netbook can get. The story addresses none of those issues.
The fascinating thing, and one that cries out for some good journalism, is how effectively Microsoft squashed the Linux netbook industry. The first netbooks all ran Linux. Eighteen months later, it's very hard to buy a Linux netbook. How did Microsoft get Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers to pay for a OS when they had successful products with a free one?
If you want a sense of how far Shockwave can be pushed, try Maid Marion. They have a halfway decent 3D multiuser RPG that runs in a browser. Looks about as good as Everquest of a few years ago. There are guilds, monsters, dungeons, items, PvP combat - all the usual stuff. The game mechanics, like collisions, ground contact, and camera control, are all reasonably decent, if well behind modern console games.
If Adobe could just solve the loading time problem, as they did for Flash, this would be the solution to 3D on the Web.
This is about Try #4 for 3D on the Web. Web3D was an XML representation of VRML. Unfortunately, the effect of the Web3D consortium was to kill VRML in favor of a vaporware concept.
3D in the browser is done well in Macromedia Shockwave. Try this 3D driving game. The Shockwave player is supposedly available on 58% of PCs. Some versions of Shockwave even had the Havok physics engine, but Macromedia stopped paying Havok for the license and took that out.
The main problem with Shockwave is that it doesn't start as fast as Flash does. Flash has a nice scheme for interleaving the timeline and the asset data, so that playing starts very quickly. At least if the content is authored properly. Also, Shockwave authoring tools are expensive.
About Java 3D, the less said, the better.
The problem with offering OpenGL access to Javascript is that Javascript isn't a good language for fast matrix math. Also, authoring tools will have to be developed. You can't effectively author 3D content in a text editor.
I used the Eaton VORAD automotive radar on a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. It's a useful little device. You get, for up to 20 targets, range, range rate, and azimuth. Targets smaller than a motorcycle usually do not show up. It will not see pedestrians at any useful range. Azimuth info accuracy isn't very good, but range and range rate are quite good. That's ten year old technology; the newer units are better. Those units have been on some big trucks for fifteen years. But the technology was too expensive for most cars. It's been appearing as "intelligent cruise control" on some cars for years.
The Eaton units, with the display and controller used for vehicles, supports accident reconstruction. The last 15 seconds are retained, and you can see what other vehicles in front were doing. Trucking companies find this useful, because they often can show that it was the other driver's fault.
For those who missed the dot-com boom, read this: "In the outer lobby and decadent smoking lounge, the top sales guys from VA Linux flashed their nametags in an effort to secure some immediate female profit taking from one of the most impressive IPOs of recent weeks. Elsewhere the women of Snowball danced with wild abandon and Dexter from Scent.com tried to sell me a unit that would include smell in my daily internet experience. As I quietly exited the scene, I caught view of a woman in a long dress being pulled off of the dancing cage for the second time..."
(SF Girl wasn't making that stuff up. It was real. I went to some of those parties.)
A free trip to the latest Harry Potter movie (which isn't even very good compared to its predecessors) is lame in comparison.
Then again, Microsoft is profitable.
A basic problem with open source applications is poor usability, combined with general amateurishness. There's a tendency to get to "90% working", after which the developers lose interest. The fundamental problem is that nobody is in a position to insist that the hard-to-fix problems get fixed.
Also, each new version of Firefox seems to be more of a memory hog than the last. There is no excuse for a web browser requiring half a gigabyte of RAM.
In the visual effects field and graphics world plugins are part of daily life.
Someone at Autodesk once described the 3DS Max plug-in market to me as "400 people chasing $4 million in business". You don't want to be one of those 400 people.
OK. So they build this really big projection touchscreen. And then they divide it into sections because they don't have an application that can use it effectively.
That indicates a failure of imagination. But it's really just a PR device for the Hard Rock location in Vegas. It's not something anyone uses regularly. So its interface has to be trivial.
What could you usefully do with a touchscreen that big usable simultaneously by multiple people? Intelligence analysis? Maybe. But there's an inherent bias in something like that towards short-attention span behavior, which may not be a good thing in analysis. Trading platform? Might work; those guys already have too many screens. But they don't move their windows around much; they have many screens because they need their data to be in expected places. Architecture? Look at, yes; show to clients, yes, actually design, no. That's more likely to be one guy with a modest size touchscreen driving a wall-sized display.
I could see this as a management tool for a MMORPG, where the staff is trying to run a world, but the consequences of errors are low.
From a business perspective, never write a "plug-in". You're too vulnerable to the whims of the vendor into which your plug-in plugs. If you want to write one for fun, fine, but it's not a sound basis for a business venture.
The front entrance is very impressive. But it's security theater. Google StreetView shows the entrance to the loading dock, where the gate has been left open.
About 10-15 years ago, there was talk in the space community of a "big dumb booster", with costs reduced and a lower level of reliability. The problem is that, after half a century, rockets still aren't very reliable. Launch success rates for satellites are still in the 80% - 90% range. The Shuttles have had 114 flights and two crashes.
The killer on costs is weight reduction. If boosters could be built with the weight budget of an airliner, space travel could work as well as air travel does. Weight reduction pushes the use of exotic but fragile materials; nobody would put foam insulation on the outside of an airliner. This is why space travel just barely works.
Is that a price worth paying?
If we had big nuclear rockets (which were built and tested in the 1950s), we'd have enough power to build spacecraft with reasonable weight budgets. No more exposed insulating foam, as with the shuttle; the outer skin would be titanium or stainless steel, and thick enough to handle ice and rain impacts.
When Orion, the nuclear-bomb powered launcher, was being designed, someone calculated that for each launch, statistically 0.5 people would die from cancer, in terms of shortened life from fallout. There are countries that would consider that a good trade.
The US once did. The estimated casualties for the invasion of Japan in WWII were a million Allied soldiers. (The necessary number of Purple Heart medals was manufactured, and the military is still using up that supply.) In the 1950s and 1960s, US military fighter pilots had a 20% casualty rate, without any help from an enemy.
The trouble with phishing blacklists is that if you take a hard enough line to make them work, there's collateral damage. Blacklisting by URL is useless; most attackers with a clue use a different URL in each email. Even blacklisting by full domain is no longer enough; many attackers use a bogus subdomain for each phishing e-mail.
If you take a hard line and blacklist at the second-level domain, blacklists are more effective. We measure the collateral damage of doing that. We (as SiteTruth) maintain an updated list of major domains being exploited by phishing scams. This is a list of domains that are both in PhishTank with a hostile URL, and OpenDirectory, as "major". Today, there are only 37 domains on the list, which is about as low as it's ever been. The high was around 175, back in 2008. This matters because the big-name sites are likely to be whitelisted, and phishers look for exploits that will let them use a big-name domain to evade filters.
We nag sites into fixing security holes which allowed some phishing site to exploit them. Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay have cleaned up their act. Only a few major sites are still on the list. Google is on the list because someone figured out a way to use a Google Docs spreadsheet to host a phishing site. Piczo.com, a free hosting service now hosting 103 phishing URLs, just doesn't seem to care. The other sites with more than one entry tend to be dying hosting services: Geocities, FortuneCity, RoadRunner.
The problem of big-name sites being exploited by phishers is coming under control. It's probably safe to blacklist by second-level domain now. (If only Google gets their act together and deals with that spreadsheet exploit.)
If you visit that site, it spends about thirty seconds running a "preloader". Yet the actual quiz comes from another site and is trivial. What's going on in there?
AT&T has "distributed generation", and not just in central offices. Some in-ground network nodes have a small engine fueled from a gas line. This provides backup power if commercial power goes out. In some areas, there's been grumbling about this; somebody in the subdivision gets stuck with the big green box in their yard.
It's mostly a problem in high-density suburban areas. In urban areas, there are underground vaults and commercial basements in which infrastructure equipment can be placed. In low-density suburban areas and rural areas, big metal boxes that make small amounts of noise aren't that bothersome. But in areas where everybody has their little patch of lawn and little else, there are complaints.
I have one of these nodes at the end of my driveway. I get landline phone and DSL through it. It's about 1m x 2m, projecting about 30cm above ground, with a big exhaust vent. I've seen the box open; it looks like a server rack. Normally, it just produces fan noise; the engine is only run for tests and power outages.
OK, the FM radio is "pausable", which means the data goes into storage. And there's automatic song identification for stations sending that info on a subcarrier.
Now, what is Apple forbidding you from doing? Can you load songs from the FM radio into your song library? Automatically? Can you fast forward through commercials? If not, will Apple complain when third party applications add those features? Apple wouldn't like "Turn it on, and watch it fill up with the latest music. For free.".
That's legal, by the way, under the Audio Home Recording Act, as long as you don't redistribute the files.
Now that the servers have been separated from Microsoft's engineers, outsourcing of development can easily be accelerated.
NASA hires, or contracts to some of the most intelligent people on the planet.
Have you been to a NASA facility lately? It's been a long, long time since the best and the brightest went to NASA.
As the article mentions, shot length in film has been declining for decades. The average is now around five seconds. In 3D, more adaptation time is required at shot changes. The article says 10-15 seconds is required. If you do too many fast focal length changes, viewers get eyestrain.
There's a database of film shot lengths. "Batman Begins" clocks at 2.8 seconds for the entire film. (Don't take the values in that database as definitive. Click on an entry to check it. Some entries are from clips or trailers, not the entire film.) The Bourne films are even shorter. This is going to be a real problem for action films.
Here's what happens when I tried to read the article:
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Google's ad engine attached this ad:
Troubled Teen?
Get info- specialty boarding school Stuggling teens
www.HorizonAcademy.net
The place seems to be a private prison camp for "troubled teens": Our remote rural location (36 29'44"N 116 25'23"W) on the Nevada/California border gives our students the opportunity to enjoy a life of simplicity and to develop an appreciation of nature and physical activity.
That's one way to stop excessive texting.
It's bigger than a Barrett sniper rifle. What it actually looks like is an "anti-tank rifle", a bad idea from WWI which hung around until anti-tank rockets were invented. The classic was the Boys rifle out of the UK. Note the similarity. Further development in that direction led to a real BFG. It's even bigger than Halo's weapon. There were about a dozen variants on that theme, none successful.
Anti-tank rifles were a desperation measure to give infantry something to use against tanks. Tanks quickly acquired more armor than anything like that could penetrate, so they were ineffective. They were too big to lug around for any other target, so they fell out of use.
I don't see this as a big problem. It's more of an opportunity.
We need phones that can help prioritize text messages. Some few you need to read immediately, and in some cases you're involved in an active dialog. On the other hand, anything from Twitter probably doesn't require immediate attention. So your phone should have both distinctive ring and some way to set (preferably without looking) your current level of availability - (for example "available", "important stuff only", "emergencies only".) It would also be nice if places like theaters could send out a local signal that phones recognized as "set to emergencies only".
To give "emergency" some teeth, charge a few dollars to send at "emergency" priority. Telcos would love this.
So get busy, mobile app people.
Little programs connected by pipes, right. Back in 1978, that was kind of cool. Anyone remember when you got multiple columns from ls by writing ls | mc ? "ls" originally just produced a one entry per line list; if you wanted multiple columns, you used the "mc" filter to create them. Now, the feature list of "ls" is huge.
Actually, UNIX and Linux are way behind in inter-program communication. Using pipes for message passing is like hammering a screw. Windows at least has a standard way for programs to talk to each other in a coherent way. UNIX has about five such ways, none of them very good. OpenOffice and GNOME both have reasonable message passing systems, but they're different and don't talk to each other. Attempts to get out of this mess have produced things like AJAX and JSON, which are widely used and ugly, and more elegant schemes like Google's message marshaling system, used by few outside Google.