I look for pics of hot girls. I find it funny that most desktop screenshots have some semi-nude girl as the wallpaper. Obviously good software should come pre-installed with nudie pics.
That still means that 26% of the average consumer either has done this themselves or has someone that did it for them. Either way it still looks like 40% of my customers are using non-IE, standards complaint, browsers.
A good point. More and more services will be local I think. It's just more effecient than piping everything from a long distance. Take something like bit torrent. If it can pick out other nodes to share with that are within the faster local network then downloads could be considerably faster.
Of course I'm still wanting gigabit speeds to my home and businesses and a backbone that can equal it.:)
Don't bother, they aren't truely random. Silly geeks don't realize that nature is orderly and reverse engineerable. The aliens can still read your messages!
On my non-tech website IE is down to under 60% browser market share. Firefox has 26%. That's pretty good for a site used mostly by non-techical older people.
I totally agree. Watching what kids like is the best way to see where the market is going. I like to hang out at libraries and college computer labs to get an idea what websites kids are using and try to figure out what they like about them. If you lose touch with your market then you're doomed.
Lasers are dangerous in an uninhabited area? I can see possibly impractical as they might require a lot of energy to work but I'd think you'd have to compare it to the energy required to tunnel and build the cement walls as needed. Also there is no need to be to urgent so they could recharge, work a little, recharge, work a little, etc. Other than those energy needs I don't see why it'd be impractical to use a laser to heat the rock walls until they fused into a solid surface. Any explanation for those of us who don't study moon rocks?
I'd think in the cold of space heat would be something to conserve. If you did need to get rid of extra heat I wonder if you couldn't use it as a power source by channeling the heat into one area and playing off the difference in tempertures.
Would there be nothing on the moon that'd provide us with the materials needed to make the resin? The only thing that I'd expect to not be there if making some form of cement or concrete would be a water source. I wonder if nobody has a method of producing something like that from native moon rock that wouldn't require water to bond.
Seems like a death cry to me. When a sofware company can't get it's own software working properly and turns to filing more and more patents just so it can sue other companies that is a sure sign that something is terribly wrong. Is Microsoft going to become a huge version of SCO? Rather than making products they'll just try to cash in on anyone else that tries to make a product. To bad they're big enough to cause a lot of damage on their way to the bottom.
Interesting. Have they actually taken soil samples under the top layer? I find it surprising that underneath the regolith it isn't just solid rock. It'd seem to be expected that with nothing to constantly erode the substance that it would be a solid mass under a thin dust layer.
Even so, would it not be workable to tunnel through this substance and have it create the cement inner walls inside the tunnels? Or would lasering, or otherwise heating, the walls to seal them not be workable?
It seems a bit silly that we haven't sent more exploration robots to the moon as it'd seem to be much quicker and less expensive to send such robots there, be more likely to be useful to us in the near term, and that sending data back and forth would be less problematic given the shorter distance involved.
I never read that one. Is it about tunneling? It's weird how few sci fi books seem to be written these days about living or traveling to the moon whereas in the past it was a popular topic. It's like it became boring to just travel to the moon even though we haven't made it available to the common person yet. I'm still waiting though.:)
The definition of alpha, beta, etc is project by project but there are certain standands that exist as to the naming scheme. I agree that Microsoft isn't likely to follow such a standard, or any standard, but it's still the standard. I don't remember if IE7 was even called a beta though. They could have called it something else and I wouldn't remember. I wish they'd let you keep IE7 and IE6 installed on the same system without jumping through hoops. IMO all testing software should do that.
True, they could suddenly do something that makes IE7 rock. I hope they do. But history and their own claims about IE7 says that it isn't going to do that good. Maybe user feedback will convince them it's worth the effort though. Maybe the programmers will get so pissed at upper management, given the article about Vista and Office causing an uprising, that somehow they'll push through an IE7 with awesome CSS, DOM, and JS support. That'd be awesome. I'll keep my fingers crossed.
I've always thought that tunneling is the obvious way to build a moon base. It's a lot of dense rock so we could send up a mining robot to dig through the rock and collect the scrap for use in producing glass and possibly collecting useful resources from. Maybe use a laser to seal any places where the rock isn't airtight. If it's an airtight tunnel then just slap on a an airlock and all that and you have a survivable place to start building a city.
It'd seem something that would be within reasonably ability to build a semi-automated robot that could pick proper locations and make the tunnels needed for human habitation.
Beta means mostly feature complete. Or is supposed to. If IE7 is to have anywhere near the quality of CSS, DOM, and JS support as Firefox, Safari, and Opera then it really isn't beta quality software yet. If it improves that much by release I'll be happy. IE7, as of now, sucks though as compared to the testing version of Opera 9 which is very good.
I just need to be able to rent a machine shop for an evening now and then. In school I had free access to the machines needed but now I certainly can't afford to buy them so it means putting a lot of things together by hand with small tools.
It doesn't cost millions to design a laptop casing but it can cost a couple thousand. If you're spending millions you're doing something very wrong. Other than that you can use mostly existing electronics to build the laptop so it's not that big of an investment. A mini-itx or possibly nano-itx (now that they're finally coming out), standard screen, normal laptop parts, etc. The only real difference from building a normal small form factor computer and building a laptop is the casing and the need to include a battery/recharging system. Don't make things to hard.;) Of course it adds up quicker if you pay other people to do all the work. I'll agree that the lack of proper tools is a drag but the same things can be done without the fancy tools - it's just more work.
Sadly, I wish that was possible. To bad Gecko can't be compiled as a downloadable Java applet or something. IE7 still sucks although maybe not as bad as IE6 but with the extra benefit of being incompatible with IE6, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. At least Firefox, Opera, and Safari are mostly compatible amongst themselves.
Yeah, someone that could do affordable one offs would be pretty awesome. For example I have a custom laptop design I've been working on. If I could crank out prototypes of the casing for around $100 each that'd be awesome. Part of the design calls for the keyboard and mouse to be usable either in normal fashion or able to be pulled away from the rest of the laptop and used (bluetooth w/ own batteries). Little things like that need to be worked out to get the details right and prototypes get expensive for something I'm not planning on resale for.
Man, these places need some marketing. I'd be making a lot more shit if I'd known about this Machine Shop website. I suggest advertising on Slashdot and in Make magazine.:)
I have one of the upper end GeForce 6800 (512MB) cards that I picked up for about $100 recently from NewEgg. I thought about a beefier card (I'm a little disappointed as I was expecting to get a 7800 card in trade for some work but it never came through.) but really the 6800 handles every one of the major games I've tried, with all features turned on and cranked up all the way, without any problem. These are leading top-of-the-line games out right now and I'm seeing good frame rates and the games look great. Following my past trends I expect to still be using this card in a couple years without it totally sucking. Exactly as you say the computers I have that have budget cards have always sucked - they say 3D capable but it's hard to find anything they actually work with that isn't five years old. If I was a bigger gamer I'd pick a little bit better video card but for me my $100 card has about the right price to performance ratio.
1 person - me. The curse of the small business. I did just recently outsource some graphic work that was beyond my ability though and in the future would like to outsource all of the work if I could find people that'd do the work to the standards I want. Data entry alone would be something I could outsource to several full time workers.
You obviously use the web. Eventually using virtual reality will be a lot like that. Instead of clicking links to move from one world to another you might have to trigger some special type of object but it'll still be mostly the same. It all might start out as a game system but eventually it'll be a powerful tool for getting work done and sharing information. Spatial representation can be useful in many types of problems.
It's all waiting for the client and server programs of significant power and ease of use to be made available for free and as an open standard. When that happens it'll be similar to when the web was introduced. The differences between gopher and the web were minor but enough to be the difference between something that was merely out there to something that changed the world.
Something like Second Life would seem prime for this to happen if they'd just see that they could profit more by becoming a standard than by sticking to being a game world. Imagine if eBay had a VR interface where people could buy and sell real, or virtual, items for Linden dollars. A built-in cash system is something the web has been missing since inception so the new system could already be a leap ahead. It'd be a chance for a whole new market to pop-up to make taking 3D images of objects as easy as taking a digital photo and uploading it. Lots of money to be made.
Maybe you could say, all unused footage that doesn't invade privacy. I'm not saying the film of someone taking a piss between scenes. As to the uncorrected, unorganized, horrible rest I suggest that you remember that one mans trash is another mans treasure. You may not see anything useful there but to some people it'd be a wealth of data to build wonderful things from.
The classic consumer wouldn't download most of it. Those that only viewed a compilation would only need to download the parts they were viewing. Only the editing crazy people would download all the extras in full. Maybe not even that if you made an online editor that would only download bits as needed.
If they really wanted to succeed they'd supply the option of having all the original uncut footage available to the consumers to make their own edits and pass around. Let customers pass around an edit control file - which buys the source materials as needed and edits them together as desired. Certain types of customers would love that sort of thing and if they compiled together custom shows using elements of more than one existing show then every customer that wanted to see the new movie would need to buy a license to each of the films involved. It could be huge especially with things popular among young people.
Slashdot Mirror
I look for pics of hot girls. I find it funny that most desktop screenshots have some semi-nude girl as the wallpaper. Obviously good software should come pre-installed with nudie pics.
I was a bit annoyed because I wanted to buy those wireless extension cords. Damn them!
That still means that 26% of the average consumer either has done this themselves or has someone that did it for them. Either way it still looks like 40% of my customers are using non-IE, standards complaint, browsers.
A good point. More and more services will be local I think. It's just more effecient than piping everything from a long distance. Take something like bit torrent. If it can pick out other nodes to share with that are within the faster local network then downloads could be considerably faster.
:)
Of course I'm still wanting gigabit speeds to my home and businesses and a backbone that can equal it.
Don't bother, they aren't truely random. Silly geeks don't realize that nature is orderly and reverse engineerable. The aliens can still read your messages!
On my non-tech website IE is down to under 60% browser market share. Firefox has 26%. That's pretty good for a site used mostly by non-techical older people.
I totally agree. Watching what kids like is the best way to see where the market is going. I like to hang out at libraries and college computer labs to get an idea what websites kids are using and try to figure out what they like about them. If you lose touch with your market then you're doomed.
Lasers are dangerous in an uninhabited area? I can see possibly impractical as they might require a lot of energy to work but I'd think you'd have to compare it to the energy required to tunnel and build the cement walls as needed. Also there is no need to be to urgent so they could recharge, work a little, recharge, work a little, etc. Other than those energy needs I don't see why it'd be impractical to use a laser to heat the rock walls until they fused into a solid surface. Any explanation for those of us who don't study moon rocks?
I'd think in the cold of space heat would be something to conserve. If you did need to get rid of extra heat I wonder if you couldn't use it as a power source by channeling the heat into one area and playing off the difference in tempertures.
Would there be nothing on the moon that'd provide us with the materials needed to make the resin? The only thing that I'd expect to not be there if making some form of cement or concrete would be a water source. I wonder if nobody has a method of producing something like that from native moon rock that wouldn't require water to bond.
Seems like a death cry to me. When a sofware company can't get it's own software working properly and turns to filing more and more patents just so it can sue other companies that is a sure sign that something is terribly wrong. Is Microsoft going to become a huge version of SCO? Rather than making products they'll just try to cash in on anyone else that tries to make a product. To bad they're big enough to cause a lot of damage on their way to the bottom.
Interesting. Have they actually taken soil samples under the top layer? I find it surprising that underneath the regolith it isn't just solid rock. It'd seem to be expected that with nothing to constantly erode the substance that it would be a solid mass under a thin dust layer.
Even so, would it not be workable to tunnel through this substance and have it create the cement inner walls inside the tunnels? Or would lasering, or otherwise heating, the walls to seal them not be workable?
It seems a bit silly that we haven't sent more exploration robots to the moon as it'd seem to be much quicker and less expensive to send such robots there, be more likely to be useful to us in the near term, and that sending data back and forth would be less problematic given the shorter distance involved.
I never read that one. Is it about tunneling? It's weird how few sci fi books seem to be written these days about living or traveling to the moon whereas in the past it was a popular topic. It's like it became boring to just travel to the moon even though we haven't made it available to the common person yet. I'm still waiting though. :)
The definition of alpha, beta, etc is project by project but there are certain standands that exist as to the naming scheme. I agree that Microsoft isn't likely to follow such a standard, or any standard, but it's still the standard. I don't remember if IE7 was even called a beta though. They could have called it something else and I wouldn't remember. I wish they'd let you keep IE7 and IE6 installed on the same system without jumping through hoops. IMO all testing software should do that.
True, they could suddenly do something that makes IE7 rock. I hope they do. But history and their own claims about IE7 says that it isn't going to do that good. Maybe user feedback will convince them it's worth the effort though. Maybe the programmers will get so pissed at upper management, given the article about Vista and Office causing an uprising, that somehow they'll push through an IE7 with awesome CSS, DOM, and JS support. That'd be awesome. I'll keep my fingers crossed.
I've always thought that tunneling is the obvious way to build a moon base. It's a lot of dense rock so we could send up a mining robot to dig through the rock and collect the scrap for use in producing glass and possibly collecting useful resources from. Maybe use a laser to seal any places where the rock isn't airtight. If it's an airtight tunnel then just slap on a an airlock and all that and you have a survivable place to start building a city.
It'd seem something that would be within reasonably ability to build a semi-automated robot that could pick proper locations and make the tunnels needed for human habitation.
Beta means mostly feature complete. Or is supposed to. If IE7 is to have anywhere near the quality of CSS, DOM, and JS support as Firefox, Safari, and Opera then it really isn't beta quality software yet. If it improves that much by release I'll be happy. IE7, as of now, sucks though as compared to the testing version of Opera 9 which is very good.
I just need to be able to rent a machine shop for an evening now and then. In school I had free access to the machines needed but now I certainly can't afford to buy them so it means putting a lot of things together by hand with small tools.
;) Of course it adds up quicker if you pay other people to do all the work. I'll agree that the lack of proper tools is a drag but the same things can be done without the fancy tools - it's just more work.
It doesn't cost millions to design a laptop casing but it can cost a couple thousand. If you're spending millions you're doing something very wrong. Other than that you can use mostly existing electronics to build the laptop so it's not that big of an investment. A mini-itx or possibly nano-itx (now that they're finally coming out), standard screen, normal laptop parts, etc. The only real difference from building a normal small form factor computer and building a laptop is the casing and the need to include a battery/recharging system. Don't make things to hard.
Sadly, I wish that was possible. To bad Gecko can't be compiled as a downloadable Java applet or something. IE7 still sucks although maybe not as bad as IE6 but with the extra benefit of being incompatible with IE6, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. At least Firefox, Opera, and Safari are mostly compatible amongst themselves.
Yeah, someone that could do affordable one offs would be pretty awesome. For example I have a custom laptop design I've been working on. If I could crank out prototypes of the casing for around $100 each that'd be awesome. Part of the design calls for the keyboard and mouse to be usable either in normal fashion or able to be pulled away from the rest of the laptop and used (bluetooth w/ own batteries). Little things like that need to be worked out to get the details right and prototypes get expensive for something I'm not planning on resale for.
Man, these places need some marketing. I'd be making a lot more shit if I'd known about this Machine Shop website. I suggest advertising on Slashdot and in Make magazine. :)
I have one of the upper end GeForce 6800 (512MB) cards that I picked up for about $100 recently from NewEgg. I thought about a beefier card (I'm a little disappointed as I was expecting to get a 7800 card in trade for some work but it never came through.) but really the 6800 handles every one of the major games I've tried, with all features turned on and cranked up all the way, without any problem. These are leading top-of-the-line games out right now and I'm seeing good frame rates and the games look great. Following my past trends I expect to still be using this card in a couple years without it totally sucking. Exactly as you say the computers I have that have budget cards have always sucked - they say 3D capable but it's hard to find anything they actually work with that isn't five years old. If I was a bigger gamer I'd pick a little bit better video card but for me my $100 card has about the right price to performance ratio.
1 person - me. The curse of the small business. I did just recently outsource some graphic work that was beyond my ability though and in the future would like to outsource all of the work if I could find people that'd do the work to the standards I want. Data entry alone would be something I could outsource to several full time workers.
You obviously use the web. Eventually using virtual reality will be a lot like that. Instead of clicking links to move from one world to another you might have to trigger some special type of object but it'll still be mostly the same. It all might start out as a game system but eventually it'll be a powerful tool for getting work done and sharing information. Spatial representation can be useful in many types of problems.
It's all waiting for the client and server programs of significant power and ease of use to be made available for free and as an open standard. When that happens it'll be similar to when the web was introduced. The differences between gopher and the web were minor but enough to be the difference between something that was merely out there to something that changed the world.
Something like Second Life would seem prime for this to happen if they'd just see that they could profit more by becoming a standard than by sticking to being a game world. Imagine if eBay had a VR interface where people could buy and sell real, or virtual, items for Linden dollars. A built-in cash system is something the web has been missing since inception so the new system could already be a leap ahead. It'd be a chance for a whole new market to pop-up to make taking 3D images of objects as easy as taking a digital photo and uploading it. Lots of money to be made.
Maybe you could say, all unused footage that doesn't invade privacy. I'm not saying the film of someone taking a piss between scenes. As to the uncorrected, unorganized, horrible rest I suggest that you remember that one mans trash is another mans treasure. You may not see anything useful there but to some people it'd be a wealth of data to build wonderful things from.
The classic consumer wouldn't download most of it. Those that only viewed a compilation would only need to download the parts they were viewing. Only the editing crazy people would download all the extras in full. Maybe not even that if you made an online editor that would only download bits as needed.
It's still slow. I've ran Fedora since the beginning and have yet to be impressed with yum. It's still painfully slow.
If they really wanted to succeed they'd supply the option of having all the original uncut footage available to the consumers to make their own edits and pass around. Let customers pass around an edit control file - which buys the source materials as needed and edits them together as desired. Certain types of customers would love that sort of thing and if they compiled together custom shows using elements of more than one existing show then every customer that wanted to see the new movie would need to buy a license to each of the films involved. It could be huge especially with things popular among young people.