Yes, certain key things are 'planted'. For instance, on the aircraft one the crashed plane was planted. But remember that in the end, someone has to drive/fly/pilot/stand near these things, and deaths caused by duff materials wouldn't be good. And of course, the teams have to find the stuff, and they don't necessarily know that what the experts requested has been provided. I agree the Mylar sounds a bit fishy though!
I'm sure there's still plenty of scope for thinking up new things to do - I can think of a half-dozen off the top of my head, no problems at all.
Re the Robot Wars point, no. In a word. The idea of Robot Wars is that anyone can do it - all you need is a remote control, a couple of hundred quid, a local scrapyard and an idea, and you can build your own robot in 6 months easily. The moment you introduce intelligence and autonomous robots, you're limiting who can enter, simply by virtue of the fact that heavy-duty electronics for that is expensive, complex and requires serious software skills. No schools, for starters - too complex and too expensive. No individuals like Rex Garrod - it'll take you 6 man-months to build the thing, and another 12 man-months to get the software sorted, which is too long for most folk. Few amateurs - it's expensive to buy DSPs, and even more expensive to buy a programmer for them!
And of course, there's the "interest" factor. Most autonomous robots are crap at what they do, and two robots wandering aimlessly around the arena is not good TV. It might be interesting if you've made the robot, or if you're into AI, but it certainly isn't entertainment. To get two well-programmed, well-constructed robots, which can put up a decent fight, ready to go in 6 months is a task only a university engineering department or a company can meet. I'm personally a bit disappointed that it's already getting quite commercial (some teams have spent a couple of grand on their robots), so adding this is just going to screw it up.
By all means, try a feature for them. They had a feature not so long ago for walker robots, which basically failed. But competing for the top prize - I doubt it. Plus, I doubt an autonomous robot could compete against a human, so it's unlikely.
I grant you, until he says _which_ 30 games, it's still vapour. But if only 1 new game is written specifically for the Indrema and is a success, they'll get a hit. For instance, Sonic was a killer app in the console world, not for advertising but bcos it was good and original - get something like that and you're away. In the early 90's, Doom was a killer app for PCs - there wasn't anything like it around, consoles were all ancient and looked shite, and as a bonus you could do work on PCs too, so kiddies could persuade their parents that they wanted them for that.:-)
Consoles aren't just about marketing, they're about quality too. If there's better games available on another console, all the marketing in the world won't save you. Their approach may actually work in that they're going out and saying, "OK, we're not going to waste our money telling you how good we are, we're going to _show_ you", which has a certain element of originality after the media max-out of Sony, etc. Of course, they're only as good as their games, so they'd better be pretty damn hot! Consoles are largely aimed at kids, and kids have just about THE best network around cos they're all into the "who's got the best" thing.
I don't actually remember Indrema saying that their games were going to be open-source - all they say is that the specs of their machine are open so anyone can develop for it, as opposed to Sony, Nintendo, etc who charge $$$ for licensing. And it makes the field open to hardware hackers and add-on merchants, who can add all sorts of custome goodies to it.
Spot on, Kris. The sooner losers like the guy writing this article (and some of the bleeding hearts who replied on the other site's forum) learn to take some personal responsibility instead of throwing a tantrum and screaming for daddy every time they do things wrong, the better.
Let's see. They can't be bothered to check how long what they've bought is going to be reasonably up-to-date. They can't be bothered to check whether it's at a reasonable price. They can't be bothered to read the contract. And even worse, they can't be bothered to work out IF THEY ACTUALLY NEED IT! And somehow, this is supposed to be the fault of the person selling it to them? Grow up, for god's sake!
If I went to a shop and said, "I want a stuffed llama", then when they give me a stuffed llama I have no rights to say "What's that? I didn't really want a stuffed llama after all, I actually wanted a cheeseburger."
I'd buy a clock radio if it adequately did the job of both a clock and a radio - most clock radios do, so no problems there.
But what are WAP and iMode aiming at? Let's see...
1) Ease of use. Uh-oh. 10-digit keypad with 3 presses to get the "C" key? No thanks, I'm not typing in URLs with that! Shitty little screen? No thanks - I like to be able to see things, and I wouldn't demean my website by trying to display it on that. Why design a cool website when all you can really display on a WAP phone is text?
2) Mobile Internet access. Well, everything on the Web is HTML, so that's screwed for starters - you can only get access to a select few sites. Most places have tried it, decided it sucks and abandoned the idea. Email? Well that may be OK, but you can send SMS messages from a normal phone if you really need to, and if you need full-on email you're better with a laptop and a modem. Oh, and you can't read any attachments to your email - so sorry.
3) Desirability. This worked in Japan bcos the Japanese (children in particular) are culturally prone to fads. Here today, gone tomorrow. Anyone own a Tamagotchi, and still plays with it? Thought not.
4) Price. It's much more expensive than a normal phone, and you're tied in for a contract length. Keep that up for a couple of years, and you could have bought a PDA, or a second-hand laptop.
So let's see what we've got, and the implications for the WAP phone:-
1) It's small like a PDA. Good.
2) It hasn't got the functions of a PDA. Bad.
3) Regardless of the hype, there's almost no sites you can visit with it. Bad.
4) Its user interface is appalling - worse even than PDAs. Bad.
5) You can attach a normal mobile to a laptop, and get full Internet access. Bad.
6) There's SMS messages on normal phones which act like email, and some (eg. Nokia) even have proper keyboards. Bad.
So in other words, there's nothing a WAP phone will do that other things can't, and it does everything significantly worse than other appliances already available. And it's much more expensive.
Would you buy a clock radio that didn't display the hours, could only do AM radio, and cost $100? Cos that's what WAP phones are trying to sell you. You want to buy one, go ahead. There's always plenty of suckers in the world who'll fall for marketing hype - sheep are made to be sheared. But being on/. I would like to hope that folks can think for themselves.
Has everyone missed an essential element here? Why does anyone want one of these gadgets anyway?
If I want a mobile phone, I'll buy a mobile phone. If I want to do mobile computing, I'll buy a laptop. If I want a pocket-sized computer, I'll buy a PDA. Maybe a PDA or a laptop with an integrated cellphone-modem would be neat. But who cares about WAP phones? They're crap and pointless. The screens are shite, you can't type easily on them (come on, you can't pretend you're going to send long messages off a 10-button keypad! 3 clicks for letter "C", etc.) and generally it's all a complete abortion.
I have to say, there's only one group of ppl who'd buy this rubbish, and that's SUCKERS! Or gear-heads, which amounts to the same thing. Anyone with an IQ better than a goldfish should be able to see through the marketing hype and spot that they're lousy products with no purpose at all.
If you still want your WAP or iMode phone, I've got some lovely hi-tech pieces of polystyrene for sale. They're sprayed silver so they look cool, they're _so_ light, and when you hook them up to a battery, it lasts forever!
Sorry to sound so Luddite, but it's all so pointless - creating stuff without bothering to find out whether it's useful, and then sending out the advertising flacks to drum up a market for it. If you/. readers, of all ppl, can't see through this then there's no hope for you.
Grab.
Re:Social aspects of work
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Disconnected
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You not heard of contracts? Don't know about yours over in America, but over in Britain when we take a job we sign to say that we'll stick to the rules of the job. And on that list of rules is the hours you have to work.
If you don't want to work more than that, then don't. It's called "work to rule", and over here in little old Britain, you can't be sacked for doing what you were hired to do. If they do fire you for that (ie. if there isn't another excuse they can use to ditch you), any halfway awake lawyer can kick ass.
And if you don't like how they treat you, then DOH! Find another job and hoist the finger at your boss. If you either (a) can't be bothered to do that, or (b) don't have the skills and are too hidebound to acquire new skills for another job, then don't bitch to us.
IIRC, Catwoman's still got 1 life left (yay, get MP back in that catsuit!), and Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy are still alive, albeit in prison.
But that was a point for X-Men. Some of the reviews said stuff like "Oh, they've killed off some of the characters" and folks were getting all upset about their favourite comic-book chars dying in the first movie. Well - Toad gets lightninged, but may just be scorched (even in RL, you need a connection to the ground to be electrocuted, and he was in mid-air when he got hit) and Sabretooth has his fall broken by a boat (don't tell me that someone who can throw tree-trunks around can't take a fall). Definite potential, and maybe we'll get some more character development, esp from the bad guys! Admittedly it'd be difficult to reinstate Senator Kelly.
Incidentally, the X-Men website has "mutant reports" on Wolvie and Sabretooth, saying that there's some previous history between them. That does rather suggest that Sabretooth is coming back, since they didn't develop it at all in the film.
This is exactly why we don't use RAM-disks on modern machines.
The stock A500 had 1/2Meg of RAM, so most stuff was designed to run in that memory space. Most word-pros and spreadsheets would run in this, but didn't have much room spare for file data, so more serious users got a 1/2Meg RAM upgrade for this (and even now, you can store a lot of text in a 1/2Meg file). If you had the money for a 2Meg (or more) expansion card, the world was your oyster. You could then run 2 or more heavy-duty programs simultaneously, and use any space left over to cache your frequently-used commands in a RAM-disk. Well cool at the time.
Now back to today. It's no longer strange to run several heavy-duty applications together - at any one time in Windows (sorry, but that's what I use at work), I may have Word, Excel, Access, DevStudio, Outlook, Matlab, Acrobat and IE all running together. At this point, the Amiga would have reached the "heavy heavy heavy, man" stage and died with a Guru Meditation error. We have vast stacks of RAM now, but our expectations have risen too, and so have the program sizes. You could still sit down and code a graphics app in Intel assembler if you really wanted to (as one Amiga developer did to get fastest performance and minimum code size), but I wouldn't recommend it.
Also, the purpose of a RAM-disk has pretty much vanished. When we used floppies, the disk access time was enormous and slowed things down considerably, but modern hard drives are so fast that disk access time isn't as big a deal as it was then. Even then, if you had a HDD (20Megs was state-of-the-art then!) then you didn't really need to use a RAM-disk.
Can we have a "stating the bleedin' obvious" department here, too? This isn't worth a long answer. Yes, it's right. Yes, MIT may have just produced a report saying it's so. No, it's not news - this has been the case for the last decade. If MIT released a study showing that the sky was blue, anyone think Jon would be posting links to that too, saying it's hot, happening news?
Grab.
"Insightful"??? Derivative and typecast, more like
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Now known as the Technocracy, these mages wielded increasing control over mass media, education, technology and business; they even defined what was real and what wasn't.
It's amazing to encounter so insightful a worldview in a paper-and-pencil role-playing game.
Insightful? Come on, this is just a basic us-against-the-big-evil-force scenario. Think every fantasy novel, film, RPG ever made, and you're there. Or is it insightful just cos it explicitly mentions education, the media, etc? Plenty of paranoia novels around about how "the system" controls us.
I'm vaguely amused that Katz posts stuff like this, deifying completely derivative RPGs (and every RPG is derivative of fantasy/SF novels), whilst in the meantime there are mass/. postings about patents on prior art.
Hey, never mind Germany, think of Britain. Small pissant little island, manages to basically whip all the rest of the world in battle and rule for 2 centuries (OK, American Revolution aside:-) And Rome dominated the world for maybe 800 years.
There's 2 key elements to this.
First off, most of your men are fighting, so they can't farm, produce food, work in industry, etc. So you need to get the folks you've just conquered to work for you, either by bringing them back home as slaves as the Romans did, or by shipping the stuff back home (as the British did).
Second off, you make it clear that your way of life is what's got you to where you are. Simply by being in power, ppl will respect you and try to imitate your way of life (think of America today). And once that's happened, you've essentially _transformed_ the country you've conquered into a copy of your own. OK, the local customs will still survive, but there will be an aspiration to be like the ppl in power.
That in itself is interesting. Jesse Owen(?)'s Black Power salute was radical politics at the time - would this be an issue too? And how would it be that only officially-recognised flags are allowed in the stadium?
What it needs for this is an athlete who's prepared to stick their neck out a bit. Win your event (and preferably a high-profile event such as track events), and then do your stuff on the podium. If the IOC and/or the country committe try screwing them over, the public indignation will be incredible.
I'd volunteer, but I don't think I stand much chance out there. Only event I'd make is the 100m printout...
Off-topic, but the trouble with Crichton is that he's one of the best ppl around at thinking up great ideas for books, but he sucks big-time when it comes to the actual writing. He'd be much better teaming up with someone who knows about characters and plot development. Oh, and someone to read it and point out the huge gaping holes in the plot which you could drive a tank division through, as well...
You've obviously not been watching it then! Cassius and Chaos2 both had wicked air rams which would flip another robot over - it's now quite a popular design. They also had the neat trick of being able to back-flip to right themselves if they got flipped.
There's no trick to sending motors and speed controllers flying - all you need for that is to be competing against a shoddily-built robot!
It does seem to be rather "me too". Robot Wars started as a niche show in the UK, and spread by word of mouth rather than by any publicity. Now it's popular, suddenly the networks are saying "oh, we can make some money off this". Maybe it's like Gladiators, it needs the Brits to get involved b4 you get anything decent out of it!
I fly hang-gliders. There's power units available for hang-gliders and paragliders now, so there's personal air transportation for you. I don't know why more ppl don't fly hang-gliders - it's an amazing feeling flying in complete silence.
At a recent free-flight show (in Telford, UK), there was a stand featuring a self-build helicopter. It looked pretty agricultural, just being a basic girder frameword around the single seat and the engine, but it was perfectly airworthy.
Most fun personal air transport was at the last Telford show, which was a personal hot-air balloon! Think of the Darwin award honorable mention for the guy who tied helium balloons to his armchair, and you're in about the right sort of area!
"Hey Joe, where's your robot going with a gun in its hand?
Hey Joe, where's your robot going with a gun in its hand?"
"I haven't a f***ing clue, it's been cracked, I'm running as fast as I can."
"Hey Joe, your robot's just blown my pussycat away.
Hey Joe, your robot's just blown my pussycat away."
"Never mind the cat, how's about us!? Just keep your head down and pray."
"Hey Joe, what's that robot doing following you?
Hey Joe, what's that robot doing following you?"
...
DAKADAKADAKADAKA!
Static RAM requires 2 gates to construct each bit of memory. As long as power is supplied to the gates, the value is held (but when power is taken away, the value is lost).
Dynamic RAM requires 1 gate to construct each bit of memory. With DRAM, the value stored 'erodes' over time, so a 1 would become a 0 after a certain time period. This isn't what we want, so we have a separate controller chip which keeps rewriting the DRAM cells continuously to keep them in the same state.
So given that DRAM is a pain and requires a separate controller to work it, why do we use it? Firstly, there's die size - it takes half as many gates to make DRAM, so you can get more on a wafer, which makes them cheaper. Secondly. there's performance - for SRAM to change state, one gate has to change and the other gate follows it, so it takes twice as long for a state change. This is all approximate, of course.
Neither of these RAM technologies preserve memory after power-off. For that, you need either battery-backed RAM, Flash or EPROM (eraseable programmable ROM), or the new MRAM, which all hold their contents on power-off.
Battery-backed RAM is fine, except eventually the battery runs down and then you lose your data.
EPROM is crap - it has to be erased by UV light and it's slow to reprogram. EEPROM (electrically-erasable PROM) is better - it can be erased with a voltage, but it's still slow to reprogram, and it has a limited number of rewrite cycles. Both hold their contents permanently though.
Flash is similar to EEPROM but has more rewrite cycles and is easier to rewrite. Flash is usually organised into "pages" or "blocks" though, so you can't erase an individual bit/byte, only a whole block of data. The rewrite cycles are still limited on Flash though, so you couldn't use a Flash cell to store a variable - 100,000 rewrite cycles would be up in a few seconds! Plus it does take time to program it - it's still nowhere near as fast as writing to RAM.
MRAM is a kind of "holy grail" of memory - one that can be changed on-the-fly like RAM, but which holds its value like EPROM/Flash.
In what way does this make you 'automated', any more than, say, a pacemaker? But of course, you'd refuse a pacemaker, or an artificial limb, or kidney dialysis, or blood transfusion... Where have you been the last few decades years with modern medicine?
Philosophy decided a LONG time ago that the brain/soul denotes who we are, not our physical bodies. If brain transplants existed, you could move your brain into another body, but you'd still be the same person mentally. Similarly, if we could keep a brain in a robot host, that would still be your brain in there with all your knowledge, emotions, etc, albeit in a metal body. Automation has nothing to do with it. Do you have a dictionary? Automation means mindlessly following your programming, not thinking for yourself. And your posting shows precisely that - follow what the Christian Fundamentalists say, not any form of common sense or scientific enquiry.
Religion is fine as far as providing a set of morals goes, but follow it too far and you end up with the Taliban saying TV is the Devil's tool and similar tripe. BTW, on the "mark of the beast" theme, John was a delusional schizophrenic. A fine example to us all, no doubt, and I'm sure his hallucinations deserve millions of people following them.
As other folk have said, your customers aren't going to be doing serious surfing, but they may want to access links to places (eg. if you've read an article about a graphics card, you may want to follow a link to the manufacturer).
So, a solution emerges. Have a master-list of "node" sites (eg. Yahoo, BBC news, etc.) which folks can start from. Allow accesses to these nodes, and allow click-through to ONE SITE only beyond there. Once they've visited one of these sites, it'll be in the history, so allow them to go to other pages on that site as well. This may need adapting for ISPs who give 2nd-level domain names, but that shouldn't be too hard to do - just get a list of as many ISPs as you can, and on these sites, only allow access to the same 2nd-level domain as in the history.
But don't allow the user to follow links off that site, or only allow one stage further from that site to prevent any possible "daisy-chain" to unwanted sites.
This can be combined with blocking of "illegal" words (sex-related, hate-related, etc.) to screen out obvious offences, but leave in references to "breast, etc., which may show up in legitimate sites.
That means that folk can read news and stuff, and can follow links to investigate the stories, but can't go any further. That'll be a medium kind of project to code, I reckon - not as easy as just a blocking-list of words, but perfectly feasible. Obviously you need to compile your list of "nodes" (and/. is unlikely to be one, given what gets posted...), but that's not too hard, just watch what everyone in the office looks at over the course of a couple of weeks.
This is where CNET's analogy of taking a car from a carpark is totally wrong. The point of abandonware is that it's like retrieving a car from a river or a beach where it's been dumped and ignored for years, restoring it and using it again. AFAIK, there isn't anywhere has a law against picking up junk (or discarded articles) and re-using them.
If piracy is the equivalent of house-breaking, abandonware is the equivalent of beachcombing.
Just started reading it here at work, then realised that it might trip off the pr0n sensors in the IT dept! Some ppl have no sense of humour:-( Ah well, I'll have to check it out at home instead...
It's the new meal from Cannibal Burgers - "vegan, lettuce and tomato". You don't get much meat on a vegan (they're skinny buggers), but it's all top-quality stuff. Sliced thinly, marinated briefly in herb butter, then flash-fried. Served in a sesame-seed bun with a side-salad or fries.
Incidentally, I've just found "www.cannibal.org" is registered to NetworkSolutions. Ironic or what?! However, "www.cannibal.com" is still available, for any carnivores wanting a web-presence...
This just gives you a cheap little server you can stick in a corner, maybe give it an old 14" monitor in case you ever need to look at it, and forget about it. If you're just going to use it as a server, you're hardly ever going to look at it, so what do you need a 1600x1200 true-colour display for?
Back in the 50s, how many folk would have thought that being able to dope silicon with phosphorus was useful? Just another chem. eng. project, no? Fast-forward 50 years, and look at the effects! Pure scientists work with pure science, and don't bother with the consequences. Maybe you could criticise them for living in their 'ivory towers', but we do need ultra-genius guys working on this stuff otherwise we'll never get any new tech. Lesser mortals can work on applications for it.
Anyway, these releases are designed for other scientists and engineers to read, who know how this stuff works. If you can't figure what it means and the implications, chances are you're not the target audience, and they don't give a crap about you. Think of a software company who just puts out a release saying "We've written a new utility which guarantees low ping times to Q3 servers". Show that to Joe Bloggs in the street, and he'll say, "What the **** does that mean?" But post it on/. and the site will be jammed with gamers within seconds!
Oh, and if you can't figure out applications for frictionless bearings, you need to work on your RL engineering a bit!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, certain key things are 'planted'. For instance, on the aircraft one the crashed plane was planted. But remember that in the end, someone has to drive/fly/pilot/stand near these things, and deaths caused by duff materials wouldn't be good. And of course, the teams have to find the stuff, and they don't necessarily know that what the experts requested has been provided. I agree the Mylar sounds a bit fishy though!
I'm sure there's still plenty of scope for thinking up new things to do - I can think of a half-dozen off the top of my head, no problems at all.
Re the Robot Wars point, no. In a word. The idea of Robot Wars is that anyone can do it - all you need is a remote control, a couple of hundred quid, a local scrapyard and an idea, and you can build your own robot in 6 months easily. The moment you introduce intelligence and autonomous robots, you're limiting who can enter, simply by virtue of the fact that heavy-duty electronics for that is expensive, complex and requires serious software skills. No schools, for starters - too complex and too expensive. No individuals like Rex Garrod - it'll take you 6 man-months to build the thing, and another 12 man-months to get the software sorted, which is too long for most folk. Few amateurs - it's expensive to buy DSPs, and even more expensive to buy a programmer for them!
And of course, there's the "interest" factor. Most autonomous robots are crap at what they do, and two robots wandering aimlessly around the arena is not good TV. It might be interesting if you've made the robot, or if you're into AI, but it certainly isn't entertainment. To get two well-programmed, well-constructed robots, which can put up a decent fight, ready to go in 6 months is a task only a university engineering department or a company can meet. I'm personally a bit disappointed that it's already getting quite commercial (some teams have spent a couple of grand on their robots), so adding this is just going to screw it up.
By all means, try a feature for them. They had a feature not so long ago for walker robots, which basically failed. But competing for the top prize - I doubt it. Plus, I doubt an autonomous robot could compete against a human, so it's unlikely.
Grab.
I grant you, until he says _which_ 30 games, it's still vapour. But if only 1 new game is written specifically for the Indrema and is a success, they'll get a hit. For instance, Sonic was a killer app in the console world, not for advertising but bcos it was good and original - get something like that and you're away. In the early 90's, Doom was a killer app for PCs - there wasn't anything like it around, consoles were all ancient and looked shite, and as a bonus you could do work on PCs too, so kiddies could persuade their parents that they wanted them for that. :-)
Consoles aren't just about marketing, they're about quality too. If there's better games available on another console, all the marketing in the world won't save you. Their approach may actually work in that they're going out and saying, "OK, we're not going to waste our money telling you how good we are, we're going to _show_ you", which has a certain element of originality after the media max-out of Sony, etc. Of course, they're only as good as their games, so they'd better be pretty damn hot! Consoles are largely aimed at kids, and kids have just about THE best network around cos they're all into the "who's got the best" thing.
I don't actually remember Indrema saying that their games were going to be open-source - all they say is that the specs of their machine are open so anyone can develop for it, as opposed to Sony, Nintendo, etc who charge $$$ for licensing. And it makes the field open to hardware hackers and add-on merchants, who can add all sorts of custome goodies to it.
Grab.
Spot on, Kris. The sooner losers like the guy writing this article (and some of the bleeding hearts who replied on the other site's forum) learn to take some personal responsibility instead of throwing a tantrum and screaming for daddy every time they do things wrong, the better.
Let's see. They can't be bothered to check how long what they've bought is going to be reasonably up-to-date. They can't be bothered to check whether it's at a reasonable price. They can't be bothered to read the contract. And even worse, they can't be bothered to work out IF THEY ACTUALLY NEED IT! And somehow, this is supposed to be the fault of the person selling it to them? Grow up, for god's sake!
If I went to a shop and said, "I want a stuffed llama", then when they give me a stuffed llama I have no rights to say "What's that? I didn't really want a stuffed llama after all, I actually wanted a cheeseburger."
Grab.
I'd buy a clock radio if it adequately did the job of both a clock and a radio - most clock radios do, so no problems there.
/. I would like to hope that folks can think for themselves.
But what are WAP and iMode aiming at? Let's see...
1) Ease of use. Uh-oh. 10-digit keypad with 3 presses to get the "C" key? No thanks, I'm not typing in URLs with that! Shitty little screen? No thanks - I like to be able to see things, and I wouldn't demean my website by trying to display it on that. Why design a cool website when all you can really display on a WAP phone is text?
2) Mobile Internet access. Well, everything on the Web is HTML, so that's screwed for starters - you can only get access to a select few sites. Most places have tried it, decided it sucks and abandoned the idea. Email? Well that may be OK, but you can send SMS messages from a normal phone if you really need to, and if you need full-on email you're better with a laptop and a modem. Oh, and you can't read any attachments to your email - so sorry.
3) Desirability. This worked in Japan bcos the Japanese (children in particular) are culturally prone to fads. Here today, gone tomorrow. Anyone own a Tamagotchi, and still plays with it? Thought not.
4) Price. It's much more expensive than a normal phone, and you're tied in for a contract length. Keep that up for a couple of years, and you could have bought a PDA, or a second-hand laptop.
So let's see what we've got, and the implications for the WAP phone:-
1) It's small like a PDA. Good.
2) It hasn't got the functions of a PDA. Bad.
3) Regardless of the hype, there's almost no sites you can visit with it. Bad.
4) Its user interface is appalling - worse even than PDAs. Bad.
5) You can attach a normal mobile to a laptop, and get full Internet access. Bad.
6) There's SMS messages on normal phones which act like email, and some (eg. Nokia) even have proper keyboards. Bad.
So in other words, there's nothing a WAP phone will do that other things can't, and it does everything significantly worse than other appliances already available. And it's much more expensive.
Would you buy a clock radio that didn't display the hours, could only do AM radio, and cost $100? Cos that's what WAP phones are trying to sell you. You want to buy one, go ahead. There's always plenty of suckers in the world who'll fall for marketing hype - sheep are made to be sheared. But being on
Grab.
Has everyone missed an essential element here? Why does anyone want one of these gadgets anyway?
/. readers, of all ppl, can't see through this then there's no hope for you.
If I want a mobile phone, I'll buy a mobile phone. If I want to do mobile computing, I'll buy a laptop. If I want a pocket-sized computer, I'll buy a PDA. Maybe a PDA or a laptop with an integrated cellphone-modem would be neat. But who cares about WAP phones? They're crap and pointless. The screens are shite, you can't type easily on them (come on, you can't pretend you're going to send long messages off a 10-button keypad! 3 clicks for letter "C", etc.) and generally it's all a complete abortion.
I have to say, there's only one group of ppl who'd buy this rubbish, and that's SUCKERS! Or gear-heads, which amounts to the same thing. Anyone with an IQ better than a goldfish should be able to see through the marketing hype and spot that they're lousy products with no purpose at all.
If you still want your WAP or iMode phone, I've got some lovely hi-tech pieces of polystyrene for sale. They're sprayed silver so they look cool, they're _so_ light, and when you hook them up to a battery, it lasts forever!
Sorry to sound so Luddite, but it's all so pointless - creating stuff without bothering to find out whether it's useful, and then sending out the advertising flacks to drum up a market for it. If you
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You not heard of contracts? Don't know about yours over in America, but over in Britain when we take a job we sign to say that we'll stick to the rules of the job. And on that list of rules is the hours you have to work.
If you don't want to work more than that, then don't. It's called "work to rule", and over here in little old Britain, you can't be sacked for doing what you were hired to do. If they do fire you for that (ie. if there isn't another excuse they can use to ditch you), any halfway awake lawyer can kick ass.
And if you don't like how they treat you, then DOH! Find another job and hoist the finger at your boss. If you either (a) can't be bothered to do that, or (b) don't have the skills and are too hidebound to acquire new skills for another job, then don't bitch to us.
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IIRC, Catwoman's still got 1 life left (yay, get MP back in that catsuit!), and Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy are still alive, albeit in prison.
But that was a point for X-Men. Some of the reviews said stuff like "Oh, they've killed off some of the characters" and folks were getting all upset about their favourite comic-book chars dying in the first movie. Well - Toad gets lightninged, but may just be scorched (even in RL, you need a connection to the ground to be electrocuted, and he was in mid-air when he got hit) and Sabretooth has his fall broken by a boat (don't tell me that someone who can throw tree-trunks around can't take a fall). Definite potential, and maybe we'll get some more character development, esp from the bad guys! Admittedly it'd be difficult to reinstate Senator Kelly.
Incidentally, the X-Men website has "mutant reports" on Wolvie and Sabretooth, saying that there's some previous history between them. That does rather suggest that Sabretooth is coming back, since they didn't develop it at all in the film.
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This is exactly why we don't use RAM-disks on modern machines.
The stock A500 had 1/2Meg of RAM, so most stuff was designed to run in that memory space. Most word-pros and spreadsheets would run in this, but didn't have much room spare for file data, so more serious users got a 1/2Meg RAM upgrade for this (and even now, you can store a lot of text in a 1/2Meg file). If you had the money for a 2Meg (or more) expansion card, the world was your oyster. You could then run 2 or more heavy-duty programs simultaneously, and use any space left over to cache your frequently-used commands in a RAM-disk. Well cool at the time.
Now back to today. It's no longer strange to run several heavy-duty applications together - at any one time in Windows (sorry, but that's what I use at work), I may have Word, Excel, Access, DevStudio, Outlook, Matlab, Acrobat and IE all running together. At this point, the Amiga would have reached the "heavy heavy heavy, man" stage and died with a Guru Meditation error. We have vast stacks of RAM now, but our expectations have risen too, and so have the program sizes. You could still sit down and code a graphics app in Intel assembler if you really wanted to (as one Amiga developer did to get fastest performance and minimum code size), but I wouldn't recommend it.
Also, the purpose of a RAM-disk has pretty much vanished. When we used floppies, the disk access time was enormous and slowed things down considerably, but modern hard drives are so fast that disk access time isn't as big a deal as it was then. Even then, if you had a HDD (20Megs was state-of-the-art then!) then you didn't really need to use a RAM-disk.
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Spot on - shame I've got no mod points and I already posted to this thread. Mod this up, someone!
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Can we have a "stating the bleedin' obvious" department here, too? This isn't worth a long answer. Yes, it's right. Yes, MIT may have just produced a report saying it's so. No, it's not news - this has been the case for the last decade. If MIT released a study showing that the sky was blue, anyone think Jon would be posting links to that too, saying it's hot, happening news?
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Now known as the Technocracy, these mages wielded increasing control over mass media, education, technology and business; they even defined what was real and what wasn't.
/. postings about patents on prior art.
It's amazing to encounter so insightful a worldview in a paper-and-pencil role-playing game.
Insightful? Come on, this is just a basic us-against-the-big-evil-force scenario. Think every fantasy novel, film, RPG ever made, and you're there. Or is it insightful just cos it explicitly mentions education, the media, etc? Plenty of paranoia novels around about how "the system" controls us.
I'm vaguely amused that Katz posts stuff like this, deifying completely derivative RPGs (and every RPG is derivative of fantasy/SF novels), whilst in the meantime there are mass
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Hey, never mind Germany, think of Britain. Small pissant little island, manages to basically whip all the rest of the world in battle and rule for 2 centuries (OK, American Revolution aside :-) And Rome dominated the world for maybe 800 years.
There's 2 key elements to this.
First off, most of your men are fighting, so they can't farm, produce food, work in industry, etc. So you need to get the folks you've just conquered to work for you, either by bringing them back home as slaves as the Romans did, or by shipping the stuff back home (as the British did).
Second off, you make it clear that your way of life is what's got you to where you are. Simply by being in power, ppl will respect you and try to imitate your way of life (think of America today). And once that's happened, you've essentially _transformed_ the country you've conquered into a copy of your own. OK, the local customs will still survive, but there will be an aspiration to be like the ppl in power.
Anyway, this is way off-topic, so I'll stop now.
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That in itself is interesting. Jesse Owen(?)'s Black Power salute was radical politics at the time - would this be an issue too? And how would it be that only officially-recognised flags are allowed in the stadium?
What it needs for this is an athlete who's prepared to stick their neck out a bit. Win your event (and preferably a high-profile event such as track events), and then do your stuff on the podium. If the IOC and/or the country committe try screwing them over, the public indignation will be incredible.
I'd volunteer, but I don't think I stand much chance out there. Only event I'd make is the 100m printout...
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Off-topic, but the trouble with Crichton is that he's one of the best ppl around at thinking up great ideas for books, but he sucks big-time when it comes to the actual writing. He'd be much better teaming up with someone who knows about characters and plot development. Oh, and someone to read it and point out the huge gaping holes in the plot which you could drive a tank division through, as well...
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You've obviously not been watching it then! Cassius and Chaos2 both had wicked air rams which would flip another robot over - it's now quite a popular design. They also had the neat trick of being able to back-flip to right themselves if they got flipped.
There's no trick to sending motors and speed controllers flying - all you need for that is to be competing against a shoddily-built robot!
It does seem to be rather "me too". Robot Wars started as a niche show in the UK, and spread by word of mouth rather than by any publicity. Now it's popular, suddenly the networks are saying "oh, we can make some money off this". Maybe it's like Gladiators, it needs the Brits to get involved b4 you get anything decent out of it!
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I fly hang-gliders. There's power units available for hang-gliders and paragliders now, so there's personal air transportation for you. I don't know why more ppl don't fly hang-gliders - it's an amazing feeling flying in complete silence.
At a recent free-flight show (in Telford, UK), there was a stand featuring a self-build helicopter. It looked pretty agricultural, just being a basic girder frameword around the single seat and the engine, but it was perfectly airworthy.
Most fun personal air transport was at the last Telford show, which was a personal hot-air balloon! Think of the Darwin award honorable mention for the guy who tied helium balloons to his armchair, and you're in about the right sort of area!
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Anyone for some Hendrix....?
"Hey Joe, where's your robot going with a gun in its hand?
Hey Joe, where's your robot going with a gun in its hand?"
"I haven't a f***ing clue, it's been cracked, I'm running as fast as I can."
"Hey Joe, your robot's just blown my pussycat away.
Hey Joe, your robot's just blown my pussycat away."
"Never mind the cat, how's about us!? Just keep your head down and pray."
"Hey Joe, what's that robot doing following you?
Hey Joe, what's that robot doing following you?"
...
DAKADAKADAKADAKA!
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This is a standard confusion about RAM.
Static RAM requires 2 gates to construct each bit of memory. As long as power is supplied to the gates, the value is held (but when power is taken away, the value is lost).
Dynamic RAM requires 1 gate to construct each bit of memory. With DRAM, the value stored 'erodes' over time, so a 1 would become a 0 after a certain time period. This isn't what we want, so we have a separate controller chip which keeps rewriting the DRAM cells continuously to keep them in the same state.
So given that DRAM is a pain and requires a separate controller to work it, why do we use it? Firstly, there's die size - it takes half as many gates to make DRAM, so you can get more on a wafer, which makes them cheaper. Secondly. there's performance - for SRAM to change state, one gate has to change and the other gate follows it, so it takes twice as long for a state change. This is all approximate, of course.
Neither of these RAM technologies preserve memory after power-off. For that, you need either battery-backed RAM, Flash or EPROM (eraseable programmable ROM), or the new MRAM, which all hold their contents on power-off.
Battery-backed RAM is fine, except eventually the battery runs down and then you lose your data.
EPROM is crap - it has to be erased by UV light and it's slow to reprogram. EEPROM (electrically-erasable PROM) is better - it can be erased with a voltage, but it's still slow to reprogram, and it has a limited number of rewrite cycles. Both hold their contents permanently though.
Flash is similar to EEPROM but has more rewrite cycles and is easier to rewrite. Flash is usually organised into "pages" or "blocks" though, so you can't erase an individual bit/byte, only a whole block of data. The rewrite cycles are still limited on Flash though, so you couldn't use a Flash cell to store a variable - 100,000 rewrite cycles would be up in a few seconds! Plus it does take time to program it - it's still nowhere near as fast as writing to RAM.
MRAM is a kind of "holy grail" of memory - one that can be changed on-the-fly like RAM, but which holds its value like EPROM/Flash.
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Wah! Cyborgs, irrational FUD, ignorant unscientific people!
In what way does this make you 'automated', any more than, say, a pacemaker? But of course, you'd refuse a pacemaker, or an artificial limb, or kidney dialysis, or blood transfusion... Where have you been the last few decades years with modern medicine?
Philosophy decided a LONG time ago that the brain/soul denotes who we are, not our physical bodies. If brain transplants existed, you could move your brain into another body, but you'd still be the same person mentally. Similarly, if we could keep a brain in a robot host, that would still be your brain in there with all your knowledge, emotions, etc, albeit in a metal body. Automation has nothing to do with it. Do you have a dictionary? Automation means mindlessly following your programming, not thinking for yourself. And your posting shows precisely that - follow what the Christian Fundamentalists say, not any form of common sense or scientific enquiry.
Religion is fine as far as providing a set of morals goes, but follow it too far and you end up with the Taliban saying TV is the Devil's tool and similar tripe. BTW, on the "mark of the beast" theme, John was a delusional schizophrenic. A fine example to us all, no doubt, and I'm sure his hallucinations deserve millions of people following them.
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As other folk have said, your customers aren't going to be doing serious surfing, but they may want to access links to places (eg. if you've read an article about a graphics card, you may want to follow a link to the manufacturer).
/. is unlikely to be one, given what gets posted...), but that's not too hard, just watch what everyone in the office looks at over the course of a couple of weeks.
So, a solution emerges. Have a master-list of "node" sites (eg. Yahoo, BBC news, etc.) which folks can start from. Allow accesses to these nodes, and allow click-through to ONE SITE only beyond there. Once they've visited one of these sites, it'll be in the history, so allow them to go to other pages on that site as well. This may need adapting for ISPs who give 2nd-level domain names, but that shouldn't be too hard to do - just get a list of as many ISPs as you can, and on these sites, only allow access to the same 2nd-level domain as in the history.
But don't allow the user to follow links off that site, or only allow one stage further from that site to prevent any possible "daisy-chain" to unwanted sites.
This can be combined with blocking of "illegal" words (sex-related, hate-related, etc.) to screen out obvious offences, but leave in references to "breast, etc., which may show up in legitimate sites.
That means that folk can read news and stuff, and can follow links to investigate the stories, but can't go any further. That'll be a medium kind of project to code, I reckon - not as easy as just a blocking-list of words, but perfectly feasible. Obviously you need to compile your list of "nodes" (and
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This is where CNET's analogy of taking a car from a carpark is totally wrong. The point of abandonware is that it's like retrieving a car from a river or a beach where it's been dumped and ignored for years, restoring it and using it again. AFAIK, there isn't anywhere has a law against picking up junk (or discarded articles) and re-using them.
If piracy is the equivalent of house-breaking, abandonware is the equivalent of beachcombing.
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Just started reading it here at work, then realised that it might trip off the pr0n sensors in the IT dept! Some ppl have no sense of humour :-( Ah well, I'll have to check it out at home instead...
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It's the new meal from Cannibal Burgers - "vegan, lettuce and tomato". You don't get much meat on a vegan (they're skinny buggers), but it's all top-quality stuff. Sliced thinly, marinated briefly in herb butter, then flash-fried. Served in a sesame-seed bun with a side-salad or fries.
Incidentally, I've just found "www.cannibal.org" is registered to NetworkSolutions. Ironic or what?! However, "www.cannibal.com" is still available, for any carnivores wanting a web-presence...
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This just gives you a cheap little server you can stick in a corner, maybe give it an old 14" monitor in case you ever need to look at it, and forget about it. If you're just going to use it as a server, you're hardly ever going to look at it, so what do you need a 1600x1200 true-colour display for?
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Back in the 50s, how many folk would have thought that being able to dope silicon with phosphorus was useful? Just another chem. eng. project, no? Fast-forward 50 years, and look at the effects! Pure scientists work with pure science, and don't bother with the consequences. Maybe you could criticise them for living in their 'ivory towers', but we do need ultra-genius guys working on this stuff otherwise we'll never get any new tech. Lesser mortals can work on applications for it.
/. and the site will be jammed with gamers within seconds!
;-)
Anyway, these releases are designed for other scientists and engineers to read, who know how this stuff works. If you can't figure what it means and the implications, chances are you're not the target audience, and they don't give a crap about you. Think of a software company who just puts out a release saying "We've written a new utility which guarantees low ping times to Q3 servers". Show that to Joe Bloggs in the street, and he'll say, "What the **** does that mean?" But post it on
Oh, and if you can't figure out applications for frictionless bearings, you need to work on your RL engineering a bit!
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