Having browsed at 0 and seeing many items far more influential noted - I'd note that most of the items proposed hardly qualify as a gadget.
Aside from prototype nuclear weapons, I can't see a circumstance where I'd accept 'gadget' as a descriptive of an item which couldn't be held in the hand... "Hand me that gadget over there", pointing in the direction of a hair dryer / cell phone / power drill / etc, sounds reasonable to me, while "Haul that gadget over here", pointing at a chain engine hoist / deep freezer / electron microscope / etc, sounds bloody odd / incorrect.
None of this is to say that I agree with the iphone as a choice... I don't. I just don't think an airplane or printing press qualifies as a 'gadget'... A gun, however, might.
Not to be too picky, but initially (I was an early adopter, with the original iphone, within a very short time of its release) there wasn't the app support you describe. It had the apps it came with, and could access 'webapps' - javascript on webpages via bookmarks, more or less. There wasn't an app store, public sdk, etc. That all came later - at least several months, might've even been a hair over a year.
I've already replied with a list of phones which didn't suffer these problems... After looking at your links, both refer to the 5x. I wish you'd phrased your observation so it didn't appear as a blanket attack on google-made or google-engined phones; while it's precisely correct, it's deceptive.
List of phones I've owned which had no lag or locking up when trying to take pictures:
iphone (original) iphone3g (when the i3g died in a hurricane and itunes was still antiquated enough that new phone == paying for all apps / tunes over again, I made the switch...) nexus 1 htc g2 htc evo3d htc evo3gle (or whatever it was called... commonly called 'eagle') sony psx phone (whatever that was called) htc shift nexus 4 nexus 5 nexus 6 blackberry priv
The sad part is, I know I've missed at least two phones in there. And those two, didn't have lag or lock up when using the camera either. I've never met anyone who complained of lag, or this lock-up-camera thing.
Bought mine at EBG, asked prior to purchase what the returns policy was, recv'd reply:
14 days cash back if unopened
if opened, store credit
And further, that the opened-for-store-credit was for any reason; IE, if I had bad pixels, I return the unit for store credit, get another; rinse, repeat.
Moot point though, as mine had no dead or stuck pixels.
Actually, yes, I did just that. When I go to sleep for the night, I rclick a button called time (lclick gives me flite speaking the time), which sets the bios alarm to 3:30am, creates a trigger file, and hibernates the machine.
Come 3:30, machine wakes up, after coming out of hibernate, a script which runs constantly notices that a hibernation action has completed (via logs), notices the trigger file, checks the time, and starts announcing (via flite) the date, day of week, time, time when I -have- to get up. Then it starts up xmms and gradually raises the volume, while popping up a small tk window w/ a snooze button on it. Click that kills the music & announcements for a time, after which the cycle repeats, with the cycle shortening with each iteration, defined initially by the difference between the back-from-hibernation time and the -have-to-wake-up-time, against a min/max qty of iterations specified. You get the idea...
Well, it works for me... the description to co-workers garners a few laughs and queries about whether I need a simple alarm clock.
If it's like the next cube, the casing is magnesium. Magnesium's flammable, and difficult to extinguish - something to think about before trying to cut it.
In re: speech recog: I went through the paces on system releases for macs, from 4.3 up through 7.3 - checking what was new each time. Never saw speech recog... Are you sure that quadra didn't have speech recog as part of some optional software package, IE, that it was definitley part of the OS? And yes, OS/2 w3 (or 4? still can't recall) predates the release of sys 7.3 - I recall, because I installed OS/2 and played w/ the speech recog while waiting for 7.3 to be released.
Re: powerbook - keyboard placement, ok. First useable on lap, no. Grid must predate the first powerbooks, at a minimum. Quicktime, like which exactly? AVI. Was making avi files on macs before quicktime had even been thought of. I'll give you that last one as long as it's qualified w/ mouse-driven & widely available. GUI's predate the mac if you eliminate the mouse-driven portion.
A lot of what you mentioned wasn't innovation by apple... some was, but much isn't:
trackpads - apple stuck w/ rollerballs when other laptops were using trackpads. apple was a late adopter.
speech recog - ibm os/2 (w3 or w4? can't recall) had this as an OS built-in while mac was still at system 7.2, which had no speech recog
"the powerbook" - it's a laptop; there were laptops before the powerbook was launched - what about the powerbook did you think was innovative?
quicktime - it's a media wrapper; other media wrappers existed prior to quicktime
"the mac" - it had innovative features for a pc, but it was still, essentially, just another sequential release for a pc company.
Now, the newton was definitley innovative; at the time there was nothing comparable. The duo -may- have been the first docking laptop - can't say, don't recall, but i'll give it to you anyway. p2pfs out of the box - didn't know they did that. Seems unusual.
I know parent was mod funny, but just to clear this up: mortar isn't intended to stick bricks together. Rather, it acts as a compressible platform to provide a stable base for subsequent layers, as well as a gap filler.
Surely you've seen buildings / walls w/ mortarless brick construction - those always require "decorative" brick, essentially cut brick, so the flats are... erm.. flat enough to not require a gap filler to still be stable.
I'll second recommending crumpler bags - I actually have two, a "formal lounge" and a "brian's hottub" - got the hottub when I moved on to a laptop larger than the formal lounge could handle.
They're both of the "camera bag" variety, and deceptively roomy inside. I have, on occasion, carried three laptops plus associated cables, bricks, & sundry drives at once in the hottub - though admittedly only one laptop got the full padded-pocket protection. The entire interior is fuzzy velcro, so velcro straps can be used to secure items on the inside; has a wealth of pockets & straps; is amazingly comfortable to wear and sturdily built.
The downside is cost - these bags aren't even close to the 50$ price point. More like $150+.
Oh, and if you move to a 17" widescreen or 16" 4:3 laptop, you'll have to get the hottub model.
When I was, IIRC, ~14 years old, the movie Re-Animator came out - as a not-rated flick (I believe one of, if not the, first modern(ish; 1984?5?) wide-release movies to be released unrated). It was released NR because it would've received an X if it'd taken a rating. At any rate, it was no sweat for me to get a ticket & see it - not rated, apparently, meant no restrictions on ticket buyers.
A year or two goes buy; the movie gets re-edited, and re-released with an R rating. I wasn't able to see it on the re-release due to my age. Go figure.
It's just something which weirded me out at the time.
"Well, as long it isn't Polish, I'm fine with it:)."
Funny you'd say that - one of Oshii's latest (and I think best) films is a live action movie titled "Avalon", filmed in Poland, with Polish actors, speaking... wait for it... Polish.
There's also a Japanese dub track, but eh, why? Polish is a beautiful language, to me - I don't know Polish, but it's very close to Czech in sound, and some phrases are intelligible ("dobri hra, ashe" = "good game, ashe" in either czech or polish).
Dear god, only 90 & half full? (OK, maybe it's a small MS...)
The best method for books on a palm device (yay clies, 480x320 = more text per screen) is via html'izing all books and running 'em through a parser conversant in plucker format. Uses zlib for compression, retains most simple html formatting, the cvs snaps do anti-aliased fonts (unf twice), can do true full screen, etc, etc - OSS, as well, has parsers for the OS of your choice - and extra bonus, saves space (media wise & app wise) over doc, txt, pdf, and their respective palm os viewers. Can't praise it enough.
I've been trying to fill a 512mb CF card (w/ a single pdb plucker file - pdb size isn't an issue to the app), so far I'm over 400 full length novels and still have room to spare...
C'mon - plenty of readers here might want to use a *nix based vector tool - ie, sodipodi. It outputs.svg - and it's mature enough that I've never looked back wistfully at Illustrator.
(Yes, it's missing -tons- of features that Illus. has - but it's decidedly useable.
many variants to play with, all take a good long while to complete. Think of 'em as nethack extended.
Personal favortites are pernband & cthangband, psiband isn't bad either.
Well - seems like most of the watercooling systems I've seen involved fairly large (1cm+) diameter tubing - I can see a fishy getting sucked into the intake, and taking a (fun, terminal, voyage through hell) wild ride through your cooling system...
Wonder if the cooling block over the cpu would become a haven for high-heat loving algae?
On another side note, I've toyed with the theory of ultra-large bore tubing - IE, basically sticking a tank of water right on top of the cpu, with fans blowing across the top, open to the air - let heat convection do its work, no pump - Though I'm probably missing some of the physics as to why such an obvious approach wouldn't work. If it did, and the fish were smart enough to avoid high heat areas, I suppose you could have fish right in the waterblock itself, with such a setup...
I think the big question should be, why shouldn't we think this is already out, probably in every version of windows2000, xp, me.
Would it make sense for the FBI to announce their intetions to do something like this before the fact?
I'm guessing they've already done it, and are relying on the (relative) ubiquitousness of the windows OS on the desktop to ensure its use by (hacker/terrorist/criminal/grandmother].
A lot of people must be in the same boat as me - large mp3 collection, constantly adding to it, not keeping track of what I already have - end result being multiple copies of the same song, albeit with different track names, filenames, encoding rates, etc... something like this would be a godsend to identify duplicates (not easily doable, since filesizes differ on the same tune often, w/ leading / tailing times differed & tracknames differing, along w/ encoding...)
spot on, more or less.
VoE = 26 eps + 1 movie
SELain = 13 eps (actually OVA's)
NGEvangelion = 26 eps + 2 (3, 2 combines into 1) movies
EH = dunno. There are OVA's & possibly a movie as well, at least.
Kenshin = 95 eps, 1 movie, a 4 part OVA which is possibly the best piece of media I've ever seen...
Cowboy Bebop = 26 eps, finished, ain't no more, although I've heard rumors of OVA's eventually coming into existance.
Trigun = 26 eps, done.
I have 2 real dogs, & 2 real cats. When they die, I'll look into robotics for replacements.
Why? Vet bills & food for the past 5 years have totaled ~20k$, & I expect them to live for ~5 years more (some were adopted, so are older than 5).
"But where's the actual 'love' a -real- pet can give you?" Bah. Simple behaviours which should be fairly easy to reproduce - & I'd imagine in 5 years the AI's will be fairly sophisticated. Dog rubs his head against my leg when I come home, cat walks up to have his head scratched & be petted - how hard would this be to reproduce? Not very, I'd think.
I'm attached to this machine - why not to one which can walk & bark? W/ luck & upgrades, I could potentially play some video games against it, something you can't do w/ a real dog - imagine trying to teach Rover chess.
That being said, current AIBO's are seriously lacking:
a) They're puppies. Puppies are, by their nature, limited; poor balance & coordination, not very smart. In a big-dog world, they can't compete. If you want a watchdog, forget a perma-puppy: burglar deterrence factor zero.
b) They're cheaply constructed. A quick look through AIBO message boards & mailing lists shows breakdowns aplenty; lotsa AIBO's out there w/ limps or worse.
c) Batteries & power; not strictly SONY's fault, but battery technology (fuel cells?) needs to get better for these to be effective. & at the minimum, they need to be able to find their charger & plug themselves in w/o intervention when needed.
My idea of an ideal AIBO: size & shape of a doberman, full-grown; stainless steel, aluminum, & titanium construction (maybe a carbon fiber shell over aluminum would work, I'd imagine keeping weight down would help the servos a bit). Servos capable of the same output as a real dog's muscles (more, of course, would be fine). The ability to run & jump. Face recognition, voice recognition. 12 hour battery life (roughly what a real dog can do before needing sleep under rough conditions). A 10 year warranty on parts.
If this were made, I'd pay 50k$ for it happily - this would be a 'dog' without any of the current heartache of vet visits, peeing on carpets, mood swings, & eventual death.
Slashdot Mirror
Having browsed at 0 and seeing many items far more influential noted - I'd note that most of the items proposed hardly qualify as a gadget.
Aside from prototype nuclear weapons, I can't see a circumstance where I'd accept 'gadget' as a descriptive of an item which couldn't be held in the hand... "Hand me that gadget over there", pointing in the direction of a hair dryer / cell phone / power drill / etc, sounds reasonable to me, while "Haul that gadget over here", pointing at a chain engine hoist / deep freezer / electron microscope / etc, sounds bloody odd / incorrect.
None of this is to say that I agree with the iphone as a choice... I don't. I just don't think an airplane or printing press qualifies as a 'gadget'... A gun, however, might.
Not to be too picky, but initially (I was an early adopter, with the original iphone, within a very short time of its release) there wasn't the app support you describe. It had the apps it came with, and could access 'webapps' - javascript on webpages via bookmarks, more or less. There wasn't an app store, public sdk, etc. That all came later - at least several months, might've even been a hair over a year.
I've already replied with a list of phones which didn't suffer these problems... After looking at your links, both refer to the 5x. I wish you'd phrased your observation so it didn't appear as a blanket attack on google-made or google-engined phones; while it's precisely correct, it's deceptive.
List of phones I've owned which had no lag or locking up when trying to take pictures:
iphone (original)
iphone3g
(when the i3g died in a hurricane and itunes was still antiquated enough that new phone == paying for all apps / tunes over again, I made the switch...)
nexus 1
htc g2
htc evo3d
htc evo3gle (or whatever it was called... commonly called 'eagle')
sony psx phone (whatever that was called)
htc shift
nexus 4
nexus 5
nexus 6
blackberry priv
The sad part is, I know I've missed at least two phones in there. And those two, didn't have lag or lock up when using the camera either. I've never met anyone who complained of lag, or this lock-up-camera thing.
And further, that the opened-for-store-credit was for any reason; IE, if I had bad pixels, I return the unit for store credit, get another; rinse, repeat.
Moot point though, as mine had no dead or stuck pixels.
Actually, yes, I did just that. When I go to sleep for the night, I rclick a button called time (lclick gives me flite speaking the time), which sets the bios alarm to 3:30am, creates a trigger file, and hibernates the machine.
Come 3:30, machine wakes up, after coming out of hibernate, a script which runs constantly notices that a hibernation action has completed (via logs), notices the trigger file, checks the time, and starts announcing (via flite) the date, day of week, time, time when I -have- to get up. Then it starts up xmms and gradually raises the volume, while popping up a small tk window w/ a snooze button on it. Click that kills the music & announcements for a time, after which the cycle repeats, with the cycle shortening with each iteration, defined initially by the difference between the back-from-hibernation time and the -have-to-wake-up-time, against a min/max qty of iterations specified. You get the idea...
Well, it works for me... the description to co-workers garners a few laughs and queries about whether I need a simple alarm clock.
That is rubish. Most likely they are screenshoots of the window manager.
Screenshots 1-5 are of the bootloader and subsequent setup - no WM to be found. Admittedley, from that point forward it's all X+WM.
If it's like the next cube, the casing is magnesium. Magnesium's flammable, and difficult to extinguish - something to think about before trying to cut it.
In re: speech recog: I went through the paces on system releases for macs, from 4.3 up through 7.3 - checking what was new each time. Never saw speech recog... Are you sure that quadra didn't have speech recog as part of some optional software package, IE, that it was definitley part of the OS?
And yes, OS/2 w3 (or 4? still can't recall) predates the release of sys 7.3 - I recall, because I installed OS/2 and played w/ the speech recog while waiting for 7.3 to be released.
Re: powerbook - keyboard placement, ok. First useable on lap, no. Grid must predate the first powerbooks, at a minimum.
Quicktime, like which exactly? AVI. Was making avi files on macs before quicktime had even been thought of.
I'll give you that last one as long as it's qualified w/ mouse-driven & widely available. GUI's predate the mac if you eliminate the mouse-driven portion.
trackpads - apple stuck w/ rollerballs when other laptops were using trackpads. apple was a late adopter.
speech recog - ibm os/2 (w3 or w4? can't recall) had this as an OS built-in while mac was still at system 7.2, which had no speech recog
"the powerbook" - it's a laptop; there were laptops before the powerbook was launched - what about the powerbook did you think was innovative?
quicktime - it's a media wrapper; other media wrappers existed prior to quicktime
"the mac" - it had innovative features for a pc, but it was still, essentially, just another sequential release for a pc company.
Now, the newton was definitley innovative; at the time there was nothing comparable. The duo -may- have been the first docking laptop - can't say, don't recall, but i'll give it to you anyway. p2pfs out of the box - didn't know they did that. Seems unusual.
Surely you've seen buildings / walls w/ mortarless brick construction - those always require "decorative" brick, essentially cut brick, so the flats are... erm.. flat enough to not require a gap filler to still be stable.
They're both of the "camera bag" variety, and deceptively roomy inside. I have, on occasion, carried three laptops plus associated cables, bricks, & sundry drives at once in the hottub - though admittedly only one laptop got the full padded-pocket protection. The entire interior is fuzzy velcro, so velcro straps can be used to secure items on the inside; has a wealth of pockets & straps; is amazingly comfortable to wear and sturdily built.
The downside is cost - these bags aren't even close to the 50$ price point. More like $150+.
Oh, and if you move to a 17" widescreen or 16" 4:3 laptop, you'll have to get the hottub model.
A year or two goes buy; the movie gets re-edited, and re-released with an R rating. I wasn't able to see it on the re-release due to my age. Go figure.
It's just something which weirded me out at the time.
in sodipodi or inkscape (works same in both):
rclick->view->add new docked toolbar
close your original toolbar. Voila, clutter gone.
f11 makes it full-screen - no desktop peeping through. f12 makes floating windows pop up when in full screen.
HTH.
"Well, as long it isn't Polish, I'm fine with it :)."
Funny you'd say that - one of Oshii's latest (and I think best) films is a live action movie titled "Avalon", filmed in Poland, with Polish actors, speaking... wait for it... Polish.
There's also a Japanese dub track, but eh, why? Polish is a beautiful language, to me - I don't know Polish, but it's very close to Czech in sound, and some phrases are intelligible ("dobri hra, ashe" = "good game, ashe" in either czech or polish).
More polish films, please =)
The best method for books on a palm device (yay clies, 480x320 = more text per screen) is via html'izing all books and running 'em through a parser conversant in plucker format. Uses zlib for compression, retains most simple html formatting, the cvs snaps do anti-aliased fonts (unf twice), can do true full screen, etc, etc - OSS, as well, has parsers for the OS of your choice - and extra bonus, saves space (media wise & app wise) over doc, txt, pdf, and their respective palm os viewers. Can't praise it enough.
I've been trying to fill a 512mb CF card (w/ a single pdb plucker file - pdb size isn't an issue to the app), so far I'm over 400 full length novels and still have room to spare...
C'mon - plenty of readers here might want to use a *nix based vector tool - ie, sodipodi. It outputs .svg - and it's mature enough that I've never looked back wistfully at Illustrator.
(Yes, it's missing -tons- of features that Illus. has - but it's decidedly useable.
sodipodi homepage
Nerds have a tough time taking vacations, apparently, hence the need for vacation simulators?
If I order new-and-nifty phone from Japane, will I be able to use it?
I'd hope this would be possible, but I'm guessing the answer's no... sigh.
http://www.angband.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
many variants to play with, all take a good long while to complete. Think of 'em as nethack extended.
Personal favortites are pernband & cthangband, psiband isn't bad either.
Wonder if the cooling block over the cpu would become a haven for high-heat loving algae?
On another side note, I've toyed with the theory of ultra-large bore tubing - IE, basically sticking a tank of water right on top of the cpu, with fans blowing across the top, open to the air - let heat convection do its work, no pump - Though I'm probably missing some of the physics as to why such an obvious approach wouldn't work. If it did, and the fish were smart enough to avoid high heat areas, I suppose you could have fish right in the waterblock itself, with such a setup...
Would it make sense for the FBI to announce their intetions to do something like this before the fact?
I'm guessing they've already done it, and are relying on the (relative) ubiquitousness of the windows OS on the desktop to ensure its use by (hacker/terrorist/criminal/grandmother].
A lot of people must be in the same boat as me - large mp3 collection, constantly adding to it, not keeping track of what I already have - end result being multiple copies of the same song, albeit with different track names, filenames, encoding rates, etc... something like this would be a godsend to identify duplicates (not easily doable, since filesizes differ on the same tune often, w/ leading / tailing times differed & tracknames differing, along w/ encoding...)
spot on, more or less.
VoE = 26 eps + 1 movie
SELain = 13 eps (actually OVA's)
NGEvangelion = 26 eps + 2 (3, 2 combines into 1) movies
EH = dunno. There are OVA's & possibly a movie as well, at least.
Kenshin = 95 eps, 1 movie, a 4 part OVA which is possibly the best piece of media I've ever seen...
Cowboy Bebop = 26 eps, finished, ain't no more, although I've heard rumors of OVA's eventually coming into existance.
Trigun = 26 eps, done.
The rest I can't speak on.
I have 2 real dogs, & 2 real cats. When they die, I'll look into robotics for replacements.
Why? Vet bills & food for the past 5 years have totaled ~20k$, & I expect them to live for ~5 years more (some were adopted, so are older than 5).
"But where's the actual 'love' a -real- pet can give you?" Bah. Simple behaviours which should be fairly easy to reproduce - & I'd imagine in 5 years the AI's will be fairly sophisticated. Dog rubs his head against my leg when I come home, cat walks up to have his head scratched & be petted - how hard would this be to reproduce? Not very, I'd think.
I'm attached to this machine - why not to one which can walk & bark? W/ luck & upgrades, I could potentially play some video games against it, something you can't do w/ a real dog - imagine trying to teach Rover chess.
That being said, current AIBO's are seriously lacking:
a) They're puppies. Puppies are, by their nature, limited; poor balance & coordination, not very smart. In a big-dog world, they can't compete. If you want a watchdog, forget a perma-puppy: burglar deterrence factor zero.
b) They're cheaply constructed. A quick look through AIBO message boards & mailing lists shows breakdowns aplenty; lotsa AIBO's out there w/ limps or worse.
c) Batteries & power; not strictly SONY's fault, but battery technology (fuel cells?) needs to get better for these to be effective. & at the minimum, they need to be able to find their charger & plug themselves in w/o intervention when needed.
My idea of an ideal AIBO: size & shape of a doberman, full-grown; stainless steel, aluminum, & titanium construction (maybe a carbon fiber shell over aluminum would work, I'd imagine keeping weight down would help the servos a bit). Servos capable of the same output as a real dog's muscles (more, of course, would be fine). The ability to run & jump. Face recognition, voice recognition. 12 hour battery life (roughly what a real dog can do before needing sleep under rough conditions). A 10 year warranty on parts.
If this were made, I'd pay 50k$ for it happily - this would be a 'dog' without any of the current heartache of vet visits, peeing on carpets, mood swings, & eventual death.
Someone make it; I will come.