OK, here's what I've been wanting, but haven't been able to figure out how to code:
An "information manager" type application that works with the web AND has data-analysis intelligence built in. The features I'm personally after would look something like these:
integrated into browsing (Mozilla?). Sort of like Pyra's Blogger -- if I find something nifty, I can just click & add the URL into my info-base, without going to another page, without bringing up a dialog box, and without having to choose what "category" it fits into.
data-mining and text-analysis. The info manager should be continuously trolling through my collected links, retrieving & saving remote URLs, analysing their contents and making suggested links based on the analysis (connected to Google?).
The analysis engine should be able to refine itself over time, observing which recommendations I agree with, and which I ignore (like a super-powerful epinions.com).
The analysis engine should also be able to pay attention to my personal classification schemes, and start organizing things accordingly.
as an option the analysis engine should be able to check my current surf patterns, and notify me of related URLs that it has found on it's own.
all of the data it uses should be encrypted.
it should be extensible, so that I can add filters to other (non-HTML) data formats, enabling the analysis engine to read PDFs, etc.
it would be nice if the system was able to store it's raw data on a remote server (encrypted) and use the server for the heavy-duty stuff, passing down the results to my client.
it would also be nice if the "remote server option" I just mentioned was an option -- I should be able to have everything run on my desktop if I want.
I could keep ranting, but I guess I'll stop here. I want this sort of app, and I'll pay for it. Anyone got any recommendations? I can see these functions in many disparate apps, but haven't found anything that sews it all together.
"the energy cost of sending humans and their life-support supplies into space is still too high"
Yes, but only because we're not pouring sufficient funding into space travel. If spaceflight were still a Grand Dream, we'd be dumping money into R&D, and perhaps the energy equation wouldn't be such a problem by now.
As you correctly point out, Grand Dreams don't just fall out of the sky into your lap -- they have to be built. If we want spaceflight, we have to lay the groundwork and THEN we can go about the grand adventure.
The fact that most of the western world has become so focused on instant gratification really bugs me. What ever happened to taking the long view?
First, I agree with your remark about documenting Linux & educating users.
But I disagree with your point about usability features. After all, if someone can't figure out how to turn off their GUI, they shouldn't be TRYING to turn off their GUI.
I dunno; to use the omnipresent "car metaphor": Q: how do I rebuild my transmission? A: if you have to ask, you shouldn't be rebuilding your transmission.
Well, that wasn't very elegant, but I guess it makes my point well enough. The nice thing about Linux is that it can always be customized. A slick UI is just that -- a slick UI. You'll always be able to get into the guts if you need to . . .
As far as speed goes, well, I agree with you there.
. . . they make more money than God, by charging libraries $10K for a subscription simply because they KNOW THEY CAN. (No, really, there's at least one journal that costs ten thousand a year, I used to work in libraries in college).
Sure, journals cost a lot of money to produce (in the hardcopy world). But a whole lot of academic journals are simply an exercise in price-gouging. They charge $10K because they know damn well that the faculty of a university will DEMAND that the library carry a specific high-prestige journal. There isn't any fundamental reason to charge what they do -- witness their profit margins. I'm sure Elsevier would make noise about how their high-margin journals finance the low-margin ones, but that's simply a lie -- Elsevier makes too much raw profit for that to be the case.
This, to my mind, is why online academic publishing is so important -- information won't be locked up in these expensive ghettoes any more, and more researchers (and students) will be able to access it.
This is also, not coincidentally, why you won't see any major companies like Elsevier getting involved in low-cost online journals (for them it would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg).
The only way Elsevier will go online with their stuff is if they can charge multiple hundreds or thousands of dollars for access.
Perhaps you haven't actually spent any time reading the Maryland UCITA, or listening to legal analysis of it, but things aren't as rosy as you seem to think.
For one, the Maryland UCITA only has protections for consumers. Which means that I, as a business user, am screwed. Now, I'm sure that lots of you folks don't care about business users (what with us being the spawn of Satan and all that), but we do pay your salaries. If we get screwed, we're taking you down with us.
Second, a goodly portion of the Maryland UCITA protections hinge on the flaky definition of "mass-market". Now, what the heck is that? Some legal folks have said that, possibly, no transaction conducted over the Internet would qualify as "mass-market" for the purposes of UCITA.
Certainly it's not the end of the world. But just because you saw protections in the Maryland UCITA, that doesn't mean that those protections will actually protect you in any way.
Uhh, you're not safe either
on
Fighting UCITA
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· Score: 1
The fact that UCITA is strictly a US law doesn't protect residents of other countries.
Why?
Simple: UCITA enables all sorts of nasty remote-disable provisions in software. The idea is that a vendor should be able to remotely turn off your software if they want to. As you'd probably expect, many US software vendors are excited about this sort of thing. And if they install those features in their products for the US market, they'll probably leave them in for all versions of their product.
That affects foreign software users, because those same "backdoors" will probably be in YOUR copy of the software as well.
. . . which doesn't mean that a US software company will remotely turn off the software used by a French customer.
IBM also manufactures similar products, one of which will automatically encrypt the data on a laptop if it's removed from a building without prior authorization: http://www.ibm.com/security/news/pr_notebook.html
The regexpt argument isn't terribly compelling for me, given that a truly adequate voice recognition system would handle natural-language queries as well (so you wouldn't use a regex).
For me, the more important reason to avoid voice recognition interfaces is simply this:
I do NOT want to hear all of my coworkers yammering away to their computers!!
I mean, geez, cube-land is already loud enough -- I don't need to have everybody talking to their PCs. Maybe if we all had private offices or something, but in a world where the majority of workers occupy cubes (or, hell, just big tables) there's no damn way voice recognition will take off.
It would just be too damn irritating.
. . . and hey, that's saying a lot, seeing as how I've recently started developing an RSI in my right hand (argh!).
. . . actually, one of the things that mainframes are BEST at is monster IO.
They're really not super-powerful in terms of CPU, but their I/O is just ridiculously powerful -- that's why they dominate in high-transaction environments (like banking).
Yes, it would be incredibly easy. In fact, you could probably set it up for automatic failover.
My take on this, however, is that this technical feat is really best for web-hosting and "box on a rack" type stuff.
This way, the hosting provider simply runs one gigantic box, rather than hundreds and hundreds of smaller boxes, each of which has their own MTBF ticking away . . .
Well, if we're talking about "force of nature" failures, then a mainframe becomes even MORE attractive.
Here's why: IBM actually manufactures (and sells) a mainframe system that comes with it's OWN satellite uplink and guaranteed bandwidth. They're designed for use on oil platforms.
These systems also come with some insanely fancy remote-mirroring and update functions (because, after all, oil platforms are hostile environments for most computers).
So, if you're worried about natural disasters, you could theoretically buy two of these systems. Then you won't need to worry about anything less than a nuclear war -- even if the land-lines get killed, you've still got your friendly satellite.
Besides which, distributing a couple o' mainframes is a hell of a lot easier than effectively distributing 82,000 PC-based systems! I mean, heck, just think of the POWER requirements for the PC equivalents . . . Good lord, you'd probably have components failing on at least one machine every five minutes or so (MTBF would kill ya on that many machines).
Of course, I could be wrong.
Incorrect statement by Davies
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
. . . even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd . ..
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!
I do not accept this at all. I have NEVER accepted "as an act of faith" that the universe is not absurd, and I used to be a research scientist (note: yes, I held these beliefs at that time as well).
I really, really really hate it when people like Davies go around spouting off about what I "must accept" or "must believe" as a scientist.
The very fact that he is able to make statements like this proves, to me, that Davies isn't a very good scientist . . .
Whether or not it is absurd to be an atheist depends on how you formulate the concepts of "atheism" and "god".
If the very fact of our existence automatically implies the existence of something called God, then it is absurd to be an atheist IF you also allow that "God" can be a synonym for "random process occurring over billions of years".
For example, I hold that humanity is the result of unthinking processes that tend toward randomness. I am also an atheist, under the terms that I use to define God (eg: I require that "god" have a purposeful intellect). If we say that "god" does not require a purposeful intellect, then a random process could be god, and I am automatically not an atheist under those definitions.
Everything hinges on definitions.
And I'm not even going to get into the whole question of an "immanent purpose" in the universe.
So I guess all I'm trying to say is that's it's not absurd to be an atheist, even under the definitions you appear to be using . . .
The German (and RIAA) approach is, effectively, an attempt to "defend" an industry against the future itself.
That cannot be done.
Instead of wasting their time putzing around trying to roll back the clock, why don't they spend some of that effort trying to reinvent themselves? The concept of a music industry is NOT doomed! The current concept of the music industry, on the other hand, might be in serious trouble.
But there I go again, thinking that the RIAA (and their German equiv.) might have intelligent people on staff! How foolish of me . . . I've seen cabbages with a better grip on handling change.
The fact that there isn't any single-user version sucks, and effectively locks me out of your product forever.
Why? Because I'm an independent contractor. This, frankly, tends to imply that the software is manager-friendly, not user-friendly. That might easily be bias on my part -- my past experience indicates that software with no public pricing mechanism ("call us for a quote!") is typically overpriced, niche-marketed, and ultimately not worth the effort. But, as I say, I might be biased in this regard.
And that's a pity, because your Flash demo looks interesting, and it seems like a single-user version would be quite successful.
"Just like there's nothing wrong with owning a crack pipe . .."
Actually, that's not necessarily true. In many jurisdictions, for example, owning a crack pipe with intent to sell the crack pipe is a felony.
Believe it or not.
Similarly, in some jurisdictions you can be arrested for carrying a screwdriver -- if the police have "sufficient cause" to believe that you're going to do something illegal with them. In the case of a friend of mine, "sufficient cause" was being black, and walking down the street after 8pm. They nailed him with a misdemeanor.
Um, if you get the chance, take a look at Framemaker for your more complex publications.
Personally, I wouldn't use Framemaker for magazine-type stuff, but if you don't want to start in with LaTeX, Framemaker might be right for you -- and it has Linux support!
. . . which is more than can be said for Quark . . .
OK, I'm embarrassed to have used the term "abso-freakin-lutely", but I simply had to jump in and agree with Midnight Ryder on this one . . .
Maintenance is key! I am, at various times, a tech writer/tech editor, and I've been called in to clean up the mess left by sub-par contractors and other "professionals" who simply used whatever tool they liked, without regard to the project history and maintenance cycle.
Document maintenance is a flaming nightmare unless you're very very careful about it. You absolutely MUST pick a standard file format, and stick with it. For the LDP folks, the only choice they had was SGML. It's practically everywhere, it's well-documented, and many of the tools that work with it are free.
If the LDP just accepted any ol' file format you felt like sending, they'd be spending 98% of their time cleaning up after your mess; trying to convert binary formats, trying to rig together transform engines with weirdo hacks to work around inconsistencies in formats . . . these are all things that I've had to do, and it ALWAYS sucks.
Besides which, you know darn well that fully a quarter of all LDP submissions would probably be in some bizarro self-made markup language that the author felt was somehow "better" than SGML, simply because it looked kewl when transformed by his/her own home-built scripting system.
Think of it this way: CPAN only accepts Perl stuff. LDP only accepts SGML stuff. It's the nature of the beast, so to speak.
I'm willing to agree that powerful psychedelics can "break" some people. However, I'm also willing to agree that going to the grocery store HAS "broken" some people. It happened to the mother of a friend of mine. She just freaked out one nice summer day, and has never been sane since. Does that mean that we should ban grocery stores?
In the absence of serious statistical analysis, anecdotal evidence of risk is not just meaningless, but actually danerous. It just encourages speculation and pointless screaming.
For example, I myself have done LSD several hundred times. I've even managed to do some DMT, which makes LSD look like distilled water . . .
I am (surprise!) completely stable, well-paid, chock full of assets, and generally an upstanding member of society. However, this is ALSO just an anecdote, and therefore suspect.
I guess my only point is this:
We ought to trust adults to make their own judgements, and accept their own risks. Thus far, drug use hasn't done anything negative to me. I may, however, be over-confident, and perhaps the next occasion will shatter my psyche. Maybe, maybe not. I'm willing to accept the risk, and more importantly I'm willing to accept the consequences. So, why not let me? The State lets people jump out of perfectly good airplanes, why won't it let me use drugs on occasion if I want?
In the absence of serious scientific analysis (the kind of analysis that the government simply REFUSES to sponsor), I think that this is the only sensible approach.
Whilst in college, an EE/ME friend and I tried to develop a project we called the "BeerMaster" -- a range-finding, direction-finding tabletop device, with a gravity-fed magazine of beer cans, and a compressed air launching mechanism.
The basic idea was that if you'd shout "Beer Me!", the device would recognize your call, turn to face you, estimate distance, and launch a beer at you (which you'd naturally grab out of the air).
We had a couple problems that made us give up development:
our targetting was poor. The device was able to direction-find pretty accurately, but the rangefinding wasn't very good -- it would frequently target the wall six feet behind you, or the like.
the launching mechanism required a fair bit of power, that made the device relatively unfeasible for normal home use. For example, we had to attach two cylinders of compressed air, and that didn't last long.
in order to get a clean launch, each can had to be placed in a "non-discarding sabot" -- a jacket that fit over each beer and provided a better fit against the launch mechanism. We only had one such jacket, 'cause it was a pain to make. Cans aren't terribly ballistic, as-is.
since we used compressed air, and we weren't really good at metering it, our launches were of irregular force. It was nearly impossible to get the can flying at exactly the right speed.
In retrospect, we perhaps shouldn't have given up so easily, but when you've had a few too many cans shot at your head, you start to get spooked easily. Plus the cans were able to dent sheetrock, and therefore messed up our walls pretty badly.
Anyone want to take up the effort? It'd be a cool party trick, but don't blame me if you kill someone.
Slashdot Mirror
An "information manager" type application that works with the web AND has data-analysis intelligence built in. The features I'm personally after would look something like these:
- integrated into browsing (Mozilla?). Sort of like Pyra's Blogger -- if I find something nifty, I can just click & add the URL into my info-base, without going to another page, without bringing up a dialog box, and without having to choose what "category" it fits into.
- data-mining and text-analysis. The info manager should be continuously trolling through my collected links, retrieving & saving remote URLs, analysing their contents and making suggested links based on the analysis (connected to Google?).
- The analysis engine should be able to refine itself over time, observing which recommendations I agree with, and which I ignore (like a super-powerful epinions.com).
- The analysis engine should also be able to pay attention to my personal classification schemes, and start organizing things accordingly.
- as an option the analysis engine should be able to check my current surf patterns, and notify me of related URLs that it has found on it's own.
- all of the data it uses should be encrypted.
- it should be extensible, so that I can add filters to other (non-HTML) data formats, enabling the analysis engine to read PDFs, etc.
- it would be nice if the system was able to store it's raw data on a remote server (encrypted) and use the server for the heavy-duty stuff, passing down the results to my client.
- it would also be nice if the "remote server option" I just mentioned was an option -- I should be able to have everything run on my desktop if I want.
I could keep ranting, but I guess I'll stop here. I want this sort of app, and I'll pay for it. Anyone got any recommendations? I can see these functions in many disparate apps, but haven't found anything that sews it all together.Yes, but only because we're not pouring sufficient funding into space travel. If spaceflight were still a Grand Dream, we'd be dumping money into R&D, and perhaps the energy equation wouldn't be such a problem by now.
As you correctly point out, Grand Dreams don't just fall out of the sky into your lap -- they have to be built. If we want spaceflight, we have to lay the groundwork and THEN we can go about the grand adventure.
The fact that most of the western world has become so focused on instant gratification really bugs me. What ever happened to taking the long view?
But I disagree with your point about usability features. After all, if someone can't figure out how to turn off their GUI, they shouldn't be TRYING to turn off their GUI.
I dunno; to use the omnipresent "car metaphor":
Q: how do I rebuild my transmission?
A: if you have to ask, you shouldn't be rebuilding your transmission.
Well, that wasn't very elegant, but I guess it makes my point well enough. The nice thing about Linux is that it can always be customized. A slick UI is just that -- a slick UI. You'll always be able to get into the guts if you need to . . .
As far as speed goes, well, I agree with you there.
Not that it matters; I'm just curious.
The "lawyers and extortion" post makes a really good argument! . . . where are my moderator points when I need 'em?
Sure, journals cost a lot of money to produce (in the hardcopy world). But a whole lot of academic journals are simply an exercise in price-gouging. They charge $10K because they know damn well that the faculty of a university will DEMAND that the library carry a specific high-prestige journal. There isn't any fundamental reason to charge what they do -- witness their profit margins. I'm sure Elsevier would make noise about how their high-margin journals finance the low-margin ones, but that's simply a lie -- Elsevier makes too much raw profit for that to be the case.
This, to my mind, is why online academic publishing is so important -- information won't be locked up in these expensive ghettoes any more, and more researchers (and students) will be able to access it.
This is also, not coincidentally, why you won't see any major companies like Elsevier getting involved in low-cost online journals (for them it would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg).
The only way Elsevier will go online with their stuff is if they can charge multiple hundreds or thousands of dollars for access.
For one, the Maryland UCITA only has protections for consumers. Which means that I, as a business user, am screwed. Now, I'm sure that lots of you folks don't care about business users (what with us being the spawn of Satan and all that), but we do pay your salaries. If we get screwed, we're taking you down with us.
Second, a goodly portion of the Maryland UCITA protections hinge on the flaky definition of "mass-market". Now, what the heck is that? Some legal folks have said that, possibly, no transaction conducted over the Internet would qualify as "mass-market" for the purposes of UCITA.
Certainly it's not the end of the world. But just because you saw protections in the Maryland UCITA, that doesn't mean that those protections will actually protect you in any way.
Why?
Simple: UCITA enables all sorts of nasty remote-disable provisions in software. The idea is that a vendor should be able to remotely turn off your software if they want to. As you'd probably expect, many US software vendors are excited about this sort of thing. And if they install those features in their products for the US market, they'll probably leave them in for all versions of their product.
That affects foreign software users, because those same "backdoors" will probably be in YOUR copy of the software as well.
. . . which doesn't mean that a US software company will remotely turn off the software used by a French customer.
. . . but a French cracker might.
IBM also manufactures similar products, one of which will automatically encrypt the data on a laptop if it's removed from a building without prior authorization:
http://www.ibm.com/security/news/pr_notebook.html
For me, the more important reason to avoid voice recognition interfaces is simply this:
I do NOT want to hear all of my coworkers yammering away to their computers!!
I mean, geez, cube-land is already loud enough -- I don't need to have everybody talking to their PCs. Maybe if we all had private offices or something, but in a world where the majority of workers occupy cubes (or, hell, just big tables) there's no damn way voice recognition will take off.
It would just be too damn irritating.
. . . and hey, that's saying a lot, seeing as how I've recently started developing an RSI in my right hand (argh!).
They're really not super-powerful in terms of CPU, but their I/O is just ridiculously powerful -- that's why they dominate in high-transaction environments (like banking).
My take on this, however, is that this technical feat is really best for web-hosting and "box on a rack" type stuff.
This way, the hosting provider simply runs one gigantic box, rather than hundreds and hundreds of smaller boxes, each of which has their own MTBF ticking away . . .
Here's why:
IBM actually manufactures (and sells) a mainframe system that comes with it's OWN satellite uplink and guaranteed bandwidth. They're designed for use on oil platforms.
These systems also come with some insanely fancy remote-mirroring and update functions (because, after all, oil platforms are hostile environments for most computers).
So, if you're worried about natural disasters, you could theoretically buy two of these systems. Then you won't need to worry about anything less than a nuclear war -- even if the land-lines get killed, you've still got your friendly satellite.
Besides which, distributing a couple o' mainframes is a hell of a lot easier than effectively distributing 82,000 PC-based systems! I mean, heck, just think of the POWER requirements for the PC equivalents . . . Good lord, you'd probably have components failing on at least one machine every five minutes or so (MTBF would kill ya on that many machines).
Of course, I could be wrong.
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!
I do not accept this at all. I have NEVER accepted "as an act of faith" that the universe is not absurd, and I used to be a research scientist (note: yes, I held these beliefs at that time as well).
I really, really really hate it when people like Davies go around spouting off about what I "must accept" or "must believe" as a scientist.
The very fact that he is able to make statements like this proves, to me, that Davies isn't a very good scientist . . .
How do you know they don't make that recognition? Maybe the consciousness of playing cards transcends the realm of humanly-knowable facts . . .
If the very fact of our existence automatically implies the existence of something called God, then it is absurd to be an atheist IF you also allow that "God" can be a synonym for "random process occurring over billions of years".
For example, I hold that humanity is the result of unthinking processes that tend toward randomness. I am also an atheist, under the terms that I use to define God (eg: I require that "god" have a purposeful intellect). If we say that "god" does not require a purposeful intellect, then a random process could be god, and I am automatically not an atheist under those definitions.
Everything hinges on definitions.
And I'm not even going to get into the whole question of an "immanent purpose" in the universe.
So I guess all I'm trying to say is that's it's not absurd to be an atheist, even under the definitions you appear to be using . . .
But hey, I could be wrong.
Personally, I think it's humor -- if for no other reason than it's too long to be a mere troll. Trolls get bored too quickly . . .
That cannot be done.
Instead of wasting their time putzing around trying to roll back the clock, why don't they spend some of that effort trying to reinvent themselves? The concept of a music industry is NOT doomed! The current concept of the music industry, on the other hand, might be in serious trouble.
But there I go again, thinking that the RIAA (and their German equiv.) might have intelligent people on staff! How foolish of me . . . I've seen cabbages with a better grip on handling change.
Why? Because I'm an independent contractor. This, frankly, tends to imply that the software is manager-friendly, not user-friendly. That might easily be bias on my part -- my past experience indicates that software with no public pricing mechanism ("call us for a quote!") is typically overpriced, niche-marketed, and ultimately not worth the effort. But, as I say, I might be biased in this regard.
And that's a pity, because your Flash demo looks interesting, and it seems like a single-user version would be quite successful.
Actually, that's not necessarily true. In many jurisdictions, for example, owning a crack pipe with intent to sell the crack pipe is a felony.
Believe it or not.
Similarly, in some jurisdictions you can be arrested for carrying a screwdriver -- if the police have "sufficient cause" to believe that you're going to do something illegal with them. In the case of a friend of mine, "sufficient cause" was being black, and walking down the street after 8pm. They nailed him with a misdemeanor.
What kind of lunacy is that?
Personally, I wouldn't use Framemaker for magazine-type stuff, but if you don't want to start in with LaTeX, Framemaker might be right for you -- and it has Linux support!
. . . which is more than can be said for Quark . . .
Maintenance is key! I am, at various times, a tech writer/tech editor, and I've been called in to clean up the mess left by sub-par contractors and other "professionals" who simply used whatever tool they liked, without regard to the project history and maintenance cycle.
Document maintenance is a flaming nightmare unless you're very very careful about it. You absolutely MUST pick a standard file format, and stick with it. For the LDP folks, the only choice they had was SGML. It's practically everywhere, it's well-documented, and many of the tools that work with it are free.
If the LDP just accepted any ol' file format you felt like sending, they'd be spending 98% of their time cleaning up after your mess; trying to convert binary formats, trying to rig together transform engines with weirdo hacks to work around inconsistencies in formats . . . these are all things that I've had to do, and it ALWAYS sucks.
Besides which, you know darn well that fully a quarter of all LDP submissions would probably be in some bizarro self-made markup language that the author felt was somehow "better" than SGML, simply because it looked kewl when transformed by his/her own home-built scripting system.
Think of it this way: CPAN only accepts Perl stuff. LDP only accepts SGML stuff. It's the nature of the beast, so to speak.
I'm willing to agree that powerful psychedelics can "break" some people. However, I'm also willing to agree that going to the grocery store HAS "broken" some people. It happened to the mother of a friend of mine. She just freaked out one nice summer day, and has never been sane since. Does that mean that we should ban grocery stores?
In the absence of serious statistical analysis, anecdotal evidence of risk is not just meaningless, but actually danerous. It just encourages speculation and pointless screaming.
For example, I myself have done LSD several hundred times. I've even managed to do some DMT, which makes LSD look like distilled water . . .
I am (surprise!) completely stable, well-paid, chock full of assets, and generally an upstanding member of society. However, this is ALSO just an anecdote, and therefore suspect.
I guess my only point is this:
In the absence of serious scientific analysis (the kind of analysis that the government simply REFUSES to sponsor), I think that this is the only sensible approach.Some people will freak out. Oh well; that's life.
The basic idea was that if you'd shout "Beer Me!", the device would recognize your call, turn to face you, estimate distance, and launch a beer at you (which you'd naturally grab out of the air).
We had a couple problems that made us give up development:
- our targetting was poor. The device was able to direction-find pretty accurately, but the rangefinding wasn't very good -- it would frequently target the wall six feet behind you, or the like.
- the launching mechanism required a fair bit of power, that made the device relatively unfeasible for normal home use. For example, we had to attach two cylinders of compressed air, and that didn't last long.
- in order to get a clean launch, each can had to be placed in a "non-discarding sabot" -- a jacket that fit over each beer and provided a better fit against the launch mechanism. We only had one such jacket, 'cause it was a pain to make. Cans aren't terribly ballistic, as-is.
- since we used compressed air, and we weren't really good at metering it, our launches were of irregular force. It was nearly impossible to get the can flying at exactly the right speed.
In retrospect, we perhaps shouldn't have given up so easily, but when you've had a few too many cans shot at your head, you start to get spooked easily. Plus the cans were able to dent sheetrock, and therefore messed up our walls pretty badly.Anyone want to take up the effort? It'd be a cool party trick, but don't blame me if you kill someone.