Anyway, what was that about evolution not being able to cause a turbine to be created?
Actually, biology did invent the turbine, but market conditions were not ripe for its mass-adoption, since the piston/cylinder was in such wide use at the time.
Any automotive engineer taking a "fresh look" at the state of today's transportaion systems wonders why the 4-cycle engine is still top dog. Well, the answer is: momentum and ease of manufacture, regardless of the availability of today's alternatives.
Consider that perhaps a biological turbine might have not been the most straightfoward machine to implement with the cheapest parts on a large scale AT THE TIME the market was ripe for a "disruptive" technology change.
Therefore, we're stuck with valves and a wonky heart, QWERTY keyboards, NTSC television, 4-stroke internal combustion automobiles, and idiotic small text-box entry forms using web browsers to do all kinds of various work (and non-work) tasks.
Sony's scheme would reduce the effectiveness of the 4-color DLP projectors to some extent. Although this will work in general, there are some projectors that will not be fully compatible with this screen, specifically because it does not reflect much broad-spectrum white light.
Be aware of this if considering a DLP for home use.
Nobody wants to read 5-paragraph themes all day long, even if they do get the point across. They are just a means to an end.
One of the best English teachers I've ever had would point to the use of alliteration, clever turns of phrase, humor, novel word choice (not just synonym-madness), and other completely subjective facets of writing as some of what makes the written word worth reading.
In most states where absentee ballots are used, they aren't even OPENED unless the number of ballots would possibly affect the election by the "normal" means (whatever that is).
So, unless you can get a significant portion of the voting public to go absentee, you still must have faith that the normal voting mechanism is unbiased in order for your paper trail to matter at all.
a guy in South Florida who used to sell (back in the day) PC clone computers where it was trendy to have a "turbo" button and an LED on the front panel showing the CPU clock speed.
Some of the cases simply had three 7-segment LEDs with jumpers to select what was "displayed" when the "turbo" button was pressed.
This guy was selling "100 MHz" 80486 computers back when the top speed available was still 33 MHz, and it took awhile before anybody called bullshit... the amazing thing is that people were willing to believe that their computers really were that much faster, just to stroke their own ego.
This sounds very much like PARC wants to teach machines how to interact more on "human" terms than on strict "computer" terms.
The most useful systems of tomorrow can't simply assume that peripherals/devices conform to their world view in order to work together. Instead, they must spend some time up front talking, listening, communicating, then eventually, cooperating.
Heading in this direction will prevent a technological monoculture from appearing, which wedges itself into a hole dug from its own presuppositions. Instead, I think this would foster a hardware equivalent of Open Source, where anyone who knew how to talk the fundamental protocol could build something interesting and introduce it into a system.
Of course, that's a pretty far-off idea, but I think it is worth pursuing.
Ted Turner originated this idea back when TBS started broadcasting the starts of every show at 5 minutes past the hour. The thinking was that during most network content's first commercial break, people flipped around. TBS was the only network which showed the beginning of a new show during that window of opportunity.
And, it also made it difficult to get back away from TBS since at the end of a show, you have just missed the beginnings of all other network's programs because you wanted to watch the end of the TBS program.
...and have been playing "Software Development Supervisor" for the last two weeks! Best MMORPG yet! I still can't kill enough bugs to get to SEI level 3, though. Must be a process issue...
Why doesn't any device which serves up AUDIO use an AUDIO-based navigation system... it could be as dumb as a simple voice synthesizer telling you what you are scrolling through, instead of an expensive LCD.
Jerry Pournelle was perhaps more of a trendsetter in pimping out his blog than he realized. I could just imaging this text taken from his articles:
Jerry Pournelle Chaos Manor Byte Magazine...After spending two hours on the phone with Raging Cow tech support, we figured out how to suppress the projectile vomiting. It works much better than YooHoo.
Concentrate on eliminating all sources of indoctrination, remove the tools for brainwashing and intolerance
- remember that the freedom of choice ends when the actions are criminal, fundamentalists behind this
attack have abrogated their rights. Root out the organisations responsible. There is no quick solution, only a
path that needs to be travelled. Once everyone on the planet has the freedom to choose their destiny can the
barricades these terrorists have created be broken down.
This is easy to say on paper, but the Taliban punishes the dissemination of information about other religions with a death sentence. Until the people of Islam are free to learn about religious choices, or at least get unbiased information about other religions from neutral sources without fear of death, they will always have the capacity for brainwashing and will be an intolerant people.
Shame on those of you who only donate blood after a catastrophe, when it is needed all of the time. We wouldn't need long lines at blood banks in emergencies if all of our blood banks were fully stocked by regular donations.
Both my wife and I are O-, universal donors, and we feel it is our civic RESPONSIBILITY to regularly donate blood for those less fortunate than we are.
To be sure, the next time we become eligible to donate again, we'll be there. As usual.
Since record companies don't SELL music videos, and since they're not suing TiVo and ReplayTV and the likes for the ability to time-shift (fair-use) an MTV broadcast, what is preventing us from using something like a TiVo to capture all of our favorite videos and share the MP4's?
Don't think it won't eventually happen, especially when digital broadcast TV begins. The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR and ATI All-In-Wonder boards make it painfully simple to capture broadcast videos now.
With a little post-processing, we have a library of small, hi-fi MP4 videos that can be shared.
And since they don't sell videos, what losses can they claim THEN? It's a fair-use time-shifting of a television broadcast in my book.
Face it, your individual viewing data is WORTHLESS. You're just not that important of a person. Viewing data is only worthwhile as an aggregate, despite what everyone seems to think.
I beg to differ. If TiVo could show that you, who earn between $75,000-$80,000 and are a White, 32-35 year-old Male who drives a Saturn and shops at the local Mega-Lo-Mart every week, and everyone exactly like you also watch ER, then they've got something worth selling to advertisers.
There's more degrees of freedom to aggregate upon besides the longitude/latitude of your TiVo box.
Hmmm... wouldn't it be possible to implement some sort of geography masquerading protocol, to get around this? We already have IP masquerading, why not geography masquerading?
Like the Netpliance i-opener, this is basically a box which runs an OS with a big hard drive. We know the i-opener runs QNX, and the TiVo runs a variant of Linux (seen the patches). Why can't these be hacked to PREVENT any data gathering from happening without explicit opt-in from the owner?
Better yet, can they be hacked NOT to require the monthly service fees? I'd love just to have a self-contained tapeless recorder, and would happily buy one, but I want to use it JUST LIKE A VCR, thankyouverymuch.
I recall watching The Wave in school, and it had a profound effect on me.
However, I have these comments:
"Students have a one-in-two-million chance of being killed in school..."
My chances of winning my state lotto seem to be a lot worse than being killed in school, according to these numbers.
"...the anonymous reporting culture is a growing business... to report date rape, sexual harassment, abuse, and other forms of brutality and insensitivity."
Most hotlines are set up to report crimes which have already happened, which is markedly different than letting unqualified armchair psychologists guess who may or may not be capable of commiting a crime. I have been told that 911 is the appropriate hotline to use to report an immediate threat to life or property.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, biology did invent the turbine, but market conditions were not ripe for its mass-adoption, since the piston/cylinder was in such wide use at the time.
Any automotive engineer taking a "fresh look" at the state of today's transportaion systems wonders why the 4-cycle engine is still top dog. Well, the answer is: momentum and ease of manufacture, regardless of the availability of today's alternatives.
Consider that perhaps a biological turbine might have not been the most straightfoward machine to implement with the cheapest parts on a large scale AT THE TIME the market was ripe for a "disruptive" technology change.
Therefore, we're stuck with valves and a wonky heart, QWERTY keyboards, NTSC television, 4-stroke internal combustion automobiles, and idiotic small text-box entry forms using web browsers to do all kinds of various work (and non-work) tasks.
Cest la vie.
Mod parent up.
Sony's scheme would reduce the effectiveness of the 4-color DLP projectors to some extent. Although this will work in general, there are some projectors that will not be fully compatible with this screen, specifically because it does not reflect much broad-spectrum white light.
Be aware of this if considering a DLP for home use.
This was the point I was going to make, too.
Nobody wants to read 5-paragraph themes all day long, even if they do get the point across. They are just a means to an end.
One of the best English teachers I've ever had would point to the use of alliteration, clever turns of phrase, humor, novel word choice (not just synonym-madness), and other completely subjective facets of writing as some of what makes the written word worth reading.
Am I the only one who thinks the Wallop logo looks like the Cingular guy getting ripped apart by the tidal forces of a black hole?
In most states where absentee ballots are used, they aren't even OPENED unless the number of ballots would possibly affect the election by the "normal" means (whatever that is).
So, unless you can get a significant portion of the voting public to go absentee, you still must have faith that the normal voting mechanism is unbiased in order for your paper trail to matter at all.
a guy in South Florida who used to sell (back in the day) PC clone computers where it was trendy to have a "turbo" button and an LED on the front panel showing the CPU clock speed.
Some of the cases simply had three 7-segment LEDs with jumpers to select what was "displayed" when the "turbo" button was pressed.
This guy was selling "100 MHz" 80486 computers back when the top speed available was still 33 MHz, and it took awhile before anybody called bullshit... the amazing thing is that people were willing to believe that their computers really were that much faster, just to stroke their own ego.
...to India!
It's true! I read it on BBspot earlier today!
I'd like to revise this law and phrase it as:
So, the next real "killer" internet application is clearly a mail client which can play MP3 files.
This sounds very much like PARC wants to teach machines how to interact more on "human" terms than on strict "computer" terms.
The most useful systems of tomorrow can't simply assume that peripherals/devices conform to their world view in order to work together. Instead, they must spend some time up front talking, listening, communicating, then eventually, cooperating.
Heading in this direction will prevent a technological monoculture from appearing, which wedges itself into a hole dug from its own presuppositions. Instead, I think this would foster a hardware equivalent of Open Source, where anyone who knew how to talk the fundamental protocol could build something interesting and introduce it into a system.
Of course, that's a pretty far-off idea, but I think it is worth pursuing.
AOL is not the internet.
Neither is that "IE" icon on your windows desktop.
The internet is also not just for pornography anymore.
Ted Turner originated this idea back when TBS started broadcasting the starts of every show at 5 minutes past the hour. The thinking was that during most network content's first commercial break, people flipped around. TBS was the only network which showed the beginning of a new show during that window of opportunity.
And, it also made it difficult to get back away from TBS since at the end of a show, you have just missed the beginnings of all other network's programs because you wanted to watch the end of the TBS program.
...and have been playing "Software Development Supervisor" for the last two weeks! Best MMORPG yet! I still can't kill enough bugs to get to SEI level 3, though. Must be a process issue...
Ahem. I believe you are mistaking secrecy for privacy.
Why doesn't any device which serves up AUDIO use an AUDIO-based navigation system... it could be as dumb as a simple voice synthesizer telling you what you are scrolling through, instead of an expensive LCD.
Jerry Pournelle was perhaps more of a trendsetter in pimping out his blog than he realized. I could just imaging this text taken from his articles:
...After spending two hours on the phone with Raging Cow tech support, we figured out how to suppress the projectile vomiting. It works much better than YooHoo.
Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor
Byte Magazine
Recommended.
Nobody ever takes into consideration the fact that the SECOND TIME you do something with the keyboard, it is MUCH faster than using the GUI again:
No complex gesture. Two keypresses. Done.
Show me the WIMP equivalent of that for "tail myfile" and then we'll talk.
Shame, they should have named them "Neo" and "Geo", then built in some cool multi-player games.
/bin/laden
% unlink
This is easy to say on paper, but the Taliban punishes the dissemination of information about other religions with a death sentence. Until the people of Islam are free to learn about religious choices, or at least get unbiased information about other religions from neutral sources without fear of death, they will always have the capacity for brainwashing and will be an intolerant people.
...because I donated two weeks ago.
Shame on those of you who only donate blood after a catastrophe, when it is needed all of the time. We wouldn't need long lines at blood banks in emergencies if all of our blood banks were fully stocked by regular donations.
Both my wife and I are O-, universal donors, and we feel it is our civic RESPONSIBILITY to regularly donate blood for those less fortunate than we are.
To be sure, the next time we become eligible to donate again, we'll be there. As usual.
Don't think it won't eventually happen, especially when digital broadcast TV begins. The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR and ATI All-In-Wonder boards make it painfully simple to capture broadcast videos now. With a little post-processing, we have a library of small, hi-fi MP4 videos that can be shared.
And since they don't sell videos, what losses can they claim THEN? It's a fair-use time-shifting of a television broadcast in my book.
I beg to differ. If TiVo could show that you, who earn between $75,000-$80,000 and are a White, 32-35 year-old Male who drives a Saturn and shops at the local Mega-Lo-Mart every week, and everyone exactly like you also watch ER, then they've got something worth selling to advertisers.
There's more degrees of freedom to aggregate upon besides the longitude/latitude of your TiVo box.
Reminds me of Terry Gilliam's movie, "Brazil," wherein a major plot complication revolves around the "unauthorized" repair of a home air-conditioner.
Coneheads: "We are from France!"
Better yet, can they be hacked NOT to require the monthly service fees? I'd love just to have a self-contained tapeless recorder, and would happily buy one, but I want to use it JUST LIKE A VCR, thankyouverymuch.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
However, I have these comments:
My chances of winning my state lotto seem to be a lot worse than being killed in school, according to these numbers.
Most hotlines are set up to report crimes which have already happened, which is markedly different than letting unqualified armchair psychologists guess who may or may not be capable of commiting a crime. I have been told that 911 is the appropriate hotline to use to report an immediate threat to life or property.