I'm sorry, if you can't grip it in one hand easily and write on it, then it ends up being a three-hand affair, two to hold the tablet steady and one to draw/write/type. Personally, I think the Apple Newton was the perfect "Super-PDA/Tablet" form factor. Not something you want to carry in your shirt pocket, but something you carry around at work or as a PC replacement on the go. The Newton's screen was just under 6" (480x320), but one could conceivably fit a wide/tall screen of 8" diagonal, perhaps (768x512) in the same form factor. If I'm giving up the power of a laptop, I want to lose the bulk of the laptop also.
My dream PDA is described in my journal entry. where I mention the SuperPDA concept.
Actually I did, I just carried away listing innovations. The PB 17, PowerCube, and especially G4 iMac are pretty amazing innovations in form and function. Equal to the iPod in terms of innovation my opinion.
Less innovative over time? From what institute did you get released? Lets see the stuff Apple has come up with in the last 4 years that was considered ground breaking and whether other companies followed their lead:
2G iMac (not yet)
17" PB (first derided, then copied all over the place)
PowerCube (not a huge success, but sort of copied)
G5 PowerMac (not yet widely copied)
iPod (yes)
Expose (soon to be copied)
Rendevous (sort of copied)
iTunes Store (copied)
iDVD (copied)
iSync (copied)
iPhoto w/ integrated book/picture printing service (copied)
GarageBand (soon to be copied)
I'll keep my PB, iLife, iSync, Expose all make my life easier.
In my previous job I worked on such a system as you describe: An event driven graphical system with a large group of interrelated structures and objects being manipulated. One of the primary identifiers used to maintain the large soup of objects was called GObjectID. Each of them stored a 128bit id plus some assorted slop. By flyweighting the GObjectID's (using 32bits) we shrunk the memory footprint of a typical program run by >20%! This also had a corresponding improvement in performance of ~10%.
The lead architects solution to performance problems was to add MORE data and MORE abstraction to cache data access and linkage, improving the performance somewhat, but also increasing the code size and the memory footprint of the application.
PHB summary: to change battery type setting on some Palms you can do "shortcut dot seven". This should echo the new battery setting. Repeating will cycle through the options (alk, NiCd, NiMH I think).
Efficiency can take on many meanings depending on what your objective function looks like. Undoubtedly you can get more FLOP for the $. But that isn't why you'd use a setup like this. I could also see a use for this if you were trying to optimize for FLOPs / Watt. Or FLOPs / dB. Or FLOPs / ft^3. This kind of a computing setup seems to be optimized for low-power, low noise, low-maintenance and small space uses. I can definitely envision scenarios where you could optimally arrive at such a setup.
A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott. Except for the simplification of the times at which the ghosts of christmas past and present appear (in the book they both arrive at 2 o'clock in what turns out to be the same night, in the movie they arrive one hour apart I think), even the dialogue was kept mostly intact.
Add me to the list. Here's one programmer who swears by his HHKb. It's almost exactly the size of a letter sheet of paper folded in half lengthwise. It has all of the keys I need and all of them are right where I can get at them. That and an iGesture Pad keep me productive and my wrists pain free. Both come in hacker black also.
Sorry, I have to disagree with your assessment of "they're doing alright". If anything, the two accidents have exposed a culture of poor to nonexistent engineering analysis and management cowardice, which makes me doubtful of NASA's ability to manage any complex projects with the engineering integrity and clarity necessary to run them effectively and safely. With the exceptionally high costs of operating the SS, even a 2x increase in reliability will not make the program cost effective, especially when compared to the available alternatives. If anything, the accidents have exposed the SS and NASA's organization as incapable of meeting our countries space development needs for the near and far future.
The thing that went wrong with Columbia wasn't just a failure of the SS itself, but a failure of the organization to identify, analyze and respond the challenges to its preconceived, unsupported, myopic view of the world, in the face of engineering reality.
I'll have hope for the future of our space program, when the managers of NASA have the integrity to speak the truth about the SS and the courage to start looking for a real solution to our nations space exploration needs.
[Having had a good night's rest] Boy, was I a grumpy poo or what? I guess our samples depend on our industries. Most of my friends work in the dot-com area (the ones that have managed to make money and stay in business) so I guess it's no wonder that they prefer to use Apache+Linux|BSD.
Deep breath. Relaxed. Settled. Going with the flow.
Uhmm, how many companies have you worked for? How many hits does your site get in a day? How much of your company's business is critically dependent on your web presence? Your assertions don't mean diddly if you're using your single corporation as the definitive example of "Corporate America" and extrapolating from there. I'd like to point out that most of your reasoning "If a MAJOR vendor will not support etc etc." and "...barely getting their feet wet...etc." is pure conjecture and guesswork. How many CTO's did you survey to come up with those homilies? How many Linux/Windows vendors have you surveyed? I'm guessing ZERO. Most of Corporate America is interested in one thing: MONEY. If dumping IIS for Linux will make them more MONEY, they'd all do it in a second. And many have.
I work for a large company (very large) and believe me, IIS doesn't get within two router hops of our production environment. I have also dealt with many large pharma companies and they love Linux for their research clusters. It's cheap, it's fast and it works. Many of my techy friends work at various companies, and from what I've heard, the less technically savvy the company is, the more likely it is that they run IIS. The more crucial internet presense is to their bottom line, the more likely that they run Apache+Linux|BSD. My samples are also pretty limited but at least their based on real knowledge and samples (10+), not conjecture and extrapolation from a single data point. So go spread your bull fewmets elsewhere, like "Microsoft Weekly" or "IIS Developers Quarterly". We ain't interested.
Yeah, but after capturing the 3D world, you're still displaying it 2D. For some things, people are still a heck of a lot better at straight drawing in 2D than manipulating virtual objects on a virtual 3D stage to render into a 2D image. That's one of the reasons the movement of the characters in Final Fantasy was so stilted and also one of the reasons Pixar hasn't done any "human only" features yet. Their next feature, "The Incredibles" will have humans, but that's after they've built up the experience of what, 5 feature films. Take a look at the movement of the humans in, say, Beauty and the Beast, vs. the movements of the humans in "Toy Story" or Toy Story 2. the humans in BatB move much more naturally and normally, where as the humans in TS1 and TS2 look like mediocrely animated G.I.Joe dolls. Another good example is Tarzan, where the background was 3D CG for many scenes but all of the characters were traditional hand-drawn cell animations.
As long as the final product is 2D, I think it is still a toss-up between doing things 2D in a computer vs doing things in 3D on a computer. Advantages and disadvantages to both. I think there's still lots of opportunity for doing kick-ass 2D animation using a computer as the primary medium (eliminating the cell-drawing/painting/'tweening tedium and expense). It blows my mind that "Treasure Planet" cost $140 mega bucks to make. I'll bet if we gave 14 aspiring animators $10 mega bucks each, they could make some seriously great films, both in 2D and in 3D.
Good example. Doing 2D in the computer makes lots of sense in terms of color matching/'tweening and overall effects. Metropolis was a very pretty looking movie. Too bad the pacing and directing were so poorly done.
Why are they insisting on 3D? It seems to me that there's plenty of opportunity and market for well drawn, intersting 2D animation with good stories. The problem with Disney's latest offerings (aside from the mentioned Lilo and Stitch) has been an appalling lack of creativity in story and plot. If you look at the anime coming out of Japan, the large majority of it is still 2D and a lot of it is completely awesome. A couple of the more recent ones which got limited theatrical releases here in the U.S. were Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and Cowboy Bebop: the Movie. Both were 2D animation with great visual and story quality. Of course, Spirited Away was also mostly 2D (with some 3D affects and scenes added) also. There's still plenty of life left in 2D, why try to teach people who have been great at it for so many years to switch? Why abandon all of the expertise and skills you've built up?
Of course, that doesn't mean that they should abandon the 3D animation arena to Dreamworks and Pixar. Developing talent and capabilities in the 3D arena are clearly needed (and could be melded into existing 2D techniques ala the ballroom scene in "Beauty and the Beast"). Still concluding that 2D is dead seems a bit premature to me.
How about if a huge guy broke into your house and was rummaging through your kitchen shouting "I'm gonna stick you and your kids like pigs!". Call the police and wait 5 minutes? Lock your door and hope he can't break them? If I ordered someone like that to leave and shot him when he didn't would you consider me a criminal?
Good point. It should be noted that the newest Palm, the T3, has a 320x480 (2:3 wider format) screen that's 3.75" diagonal. Translate that to a 10" 3:2 format and you get an 1280x853 LCD. Hmm, maybe PALM should come out with a uberPDA/miniTablet, with a 8" high rez 1152x768 uber rez screen (nominally 6" wide including thin bezel) and show MSFT how tablet's were meant to be...
I have a journal rant^H^H^H^Hentry covering my dream PDA. You might like some of my ideas. I like your idea for a high-rez largePDA/small tablet. I should just write a new entry for all these cool new ideas.
Back when the alpha's were so far ahead they were about the lap the competition in terms of performance, you had two choices for supported operating systems: VMS or OSF (aka Tru64). VMS was in a coma by then (although its innate greatness has kept it alive even until now) and Tru64 was the 4th or 5th unix platform that vendors would port to (after Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, and AIX). It was also somewhat trickier to port to since you had to clean your code to be 64bit safe. So there weren't that many programs, there weren't that many developers etc. etc. etc., network affects accumulated and alpha never got itself over the hump and into the mainstream. Alpha remained a fringe player 'til today; yelling from outside the marketplace, "Hey, look at me! I'm super fast! I'm 64 bit! I'm way faster than those other guys! Look at me!"
Linux wasn't a real factor back then and DEC never really got behind the Linux on Alpha anyway.
Back in the days of 3.5" diskettes being big enough to hold multiple documents, a secretary came to me, practically in tears, holding a very grungy and sticky 3.5" disk. She said it had all of her important documents and (of course) it was her only copy. She kept it in her purse and her hair gel had leaked all over it. Needless to say, it had completely gummed up the disk, even seeping into the disk itself. I couldn't even open the gate.
I said I'd try to see what I could do. I carefully cracked the case open and wiped off the sticky gunk with warm water. I then opened another good floppy, replaced the disk with the cleaned and dried formerly gunky disk. I said a brief prayer to the Woz and put it in the computer. Hey presto! We immediately read all of the information and made three copies for her to have. One for her purse, one for her desk and one for her home. I kept the original disk on my office wall labelled "Lazarus" until the day I quit. Ah, the days of multiple grain sized magnetic domains...
It should be remembered that most of the computation to develop the many of our nuclear weapons was done on the computational equivalent of a Palm Pilot (the Dragonball version). As with most things, it's not the tools that are the deciding factor, it's the programmer/scientist/mathematician using the tools that makes the difference.
A favorite story of mine concerning the difference between having a calculator and knowing how to use one: As the scientists in the Manhattan project were waiting in the trenches/bunkers for the first trinity test, one of them started ripping little pieces of paper and just before the bomb went off, tossed them in the air. After the bomb went off, he paced off the distance they had been blown, did a bunch of calculations and gave the first estimate of the yield of the bomb. Accurate to within 20-40% I recall.
Sure, send me the links or post them. I've exposed my SPAM protected email address.
Protenomics ain't all that yet. Like I said, just because you get the playbook, it doesn't mean you can predict how the game gets played. Still, the amount of information is very impressive. I'm just not convinced that all that information will necessarily lead to knowledge, especially information at such a lower level than the control processes that work inside and outside a cell.
If you're interested in this stuff, check out Entelos. They do some interesting simulation work in the biological modelling/simulation area.
Naw, I'm not that kind of a person when it comes to science. I'm just trying to point out that alot of the assumptions are based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the complexity of life. The "Genetic Code" has underlying implications which are quite misleading.
Just because you can hack the code of Doom to make a 'bot, doesn't mean that you now have the ability to write Doom. And the simple fact is that a cell doesn't work because of its genes, it works because of its DNA and its enzymatic contents and structure. The problem is not a problem of interpreting DNA, it's a problem of untangling the web of triggers and signals which exist simultaneously in the DNA and the enzymatic concentrations and the receptors. All effect the other and all are operating simultaneously. Cells are not Von-Neumann architectures, cells are massively parallel dynamic systems with DNA-protein synthesis occurring at the same time as chemical reaction at the same time of receptor activation + blocking. Sequencing is like getting the playbooks for two football teams. You still don't know how the plays will get run, or what the outcomes will be when the two teams actually run the plays. It's in the collisions, the penalties and all of the other non-DNA stuff existing as the "state" of the cell and activation of genes. Combine that problem with all of the other cells interacting with the cells and you can see why all this talk about "sequencing == great biological advances" doesn't really fly with me.
I like to think of the advance of biological knowledge as being like mapping terrain. Sequencing gives us a good set of binoculars and GPS recorder, but it doesn't give us wings. We still need to cover the ground on land, crossing the rough terrain on foot which means experimentation and knowledge twisted from the grains of truth a drop at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Available:
- Lion
- Cougar
- Leopard
- Cheetah
- Sabretooth (it's extinct, but everybody knows it)
And the smaller + more obscure:- Lynx
- Bobcat
- Manx
- Ocelot
- Caracal
- Serval
- Margay
- Jaguarundi
I believe that Apple has trademarked the following names: Lynx, Cougar, Leopard, and TigerI'm sorry, if you can't grip it in one hand easily and write on it, then it ends up being a three-hand affair, two to hold the tablet steady and one to draw/write/type. Personally, I think the Apple Newton was the perfect "Super-PDA/Tablet" form factor. Not something you want to carry in your shirt pocket, but something you carry around at work or as a PC replacement on the go. The Newton's screen was just under 6" (480x320), but one could conceivably fit a wide/tall screen of 8" diagonal, perhaps (768x512) in the same form factor. If I'm giving up the power of a laptop, I want to lose the bulk of the laptop also. My dream PDA is described in my journal entry. where I mention the SuperPDA concept.
Actually I did, I just carried away listing innovations. The PB 17, PowerCube, and especially G4 iMac are pretty amazing innovations in form and function. Equal to the iPod in terms of innovation my opinion.
- 2G iMac (not yet)
- 17" PB (first derided, then copied all over the place)
- PowerCube (not a huge success, but sort of copied)
- G5 PowerMac (not yet widely copied)
- iPod (yes)
- Expose (soon to be copied)
- Rendevous (sort of copied)
- iTunes Store (copied)
- iDVD (copied)
- iSync (copied)
- iPhoto w/ integrated book/picture printing service (copied)
- GarageBand (soon to be copied)
I'll keep my PB, iLife, iSync, Expose all make my life easier.In my previous job I worked on such a system as you describe: An event driven graphical system with a large group of interrelated structures and objects being manipulated. One of the primary identifiers used to maintain the large soup of objects was called GObjectID. Each of them stored a 128bit id plus some assorted slop. By flyweighting the GObjectID's (using 32bits) we shrunk the memory footprint of a typical program run by >20%! This also had a corresponding improvement in performance of ~10%.
The lead architects solution to performance problems was to add MORE data and MORE abstraction to cache data access and linkage, improving the performance somewhat, but also increasing the code size and the memory footprint of the application.
PHB summary: to change battery type setting on some Palms you can do "shortcut dot seven". This should echo the new battery setting. Repeating will cycle through the options (alk, NiCd, NiMH I think).
Efficiency can take on many meanings depending on what your objective function looks like. Undoubtedly you can get more FLOP for the $. But that isn't why you'd use a setup like this. I could also see a use for this if you were trying to optimize for FLOPs / Watt. Or FLOPs / dB. Or FLOPs / ft^3. This kind of a computing setup seems to be optimized for low-power, low noise, low-maintenance and small space uses. I can definitely envision scenarios where you could optimally arrive at such a setup.
- Backup to multiple locations so you aren't screwed if you lose your PDA. How often do you photocopy your day planner?
- Encrypt passwords/PIN# private information.
- Search for all occurances of a string
- Store/index reference books
- Actively remind you of deadlines
- Cache content from your computer/web
Check out my journal entry on what I want in a PDA. Palm OS Cobalt seems like a sideways step at best.- The effects of debris strikes are never formally investigated with real world experimentation and become "acceptable" over time.
- The top managers don't understand that foam in a Mach 5 slipstream deccelearates VERY FAST and that a 1 pound peice of anything is deadly at 500mph.
- Engineers who present analysis don't put their assumptions and uncertainties first and foremost
- No fault tree exists which have the RCC panels with huge red flashing lights around them.
Apologize all you want for the mealy-mouthed, platitude spewing, engineering ignorant incompetents at NASA, I will not.A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott. Except for the simplification of the times at which the ghosts of christmas past and present appear (in the book they both arrive at 2 o'clock in what turns out to be the same night, in the movie they arrive one hour apart I think), even the dialogue was kept mostly intact.
Add me to the list. Here's one programmer who swears by his HHKb. It's almost exactly the size of a letter sheet of paper folded in half lengthwise. It has all of the keys I need and all of them are right where I can get at them. That and an iGesture Pad keep me productive and my wrists pain free. Both come in hacker black also.
The thing that went wrong with Columbia wasn't just a failure of the SS itself, but a failure of the organization to identify, analyze and respond the challenges to its preconceived, unsupported, myopic view of the world, in the face of engineering reality.
I'll have hope for the future of our space program, when the managers of NASA have the integrity to speak the truth about the SS and the courage to start looking for a real solution to our nations space exploration needs.
Deep breath. Relaxed. Settled. Going with the flow.
I work for a large company (very large) and believe me, IIS doesn't get within two router hops of our production environment. I have also dealt with many large pharma companies and they love Linux for their research clusters. It's cheap, it's fast and it works. Many of my techy friends work at various companies, and from what I've heard, the less technically savvy the company is, the more likely it is that they run IIS. The more crucial internet presense is to their bottom line, the more likely that they run Apache+Linux|BSD. My samples are also pretty limited but at least their based on real knowledge and samples (10+), not conjecture and extrapolation from a single data point. So go spread your bull fewmets elsewhere, like "Microsoft Weekly" or "IIS Developers Quarterly". We ain't interested.
As long as the final product is 2D, I think it is still a toss-up between doing things 2D in a computer vs doing things in 3D on a computer. Advantages and disadvantages to both. I think there's still lots of opportunity for doing kick-ass 2D animation using a computer as the primary medium (eliminating the cell-drawing/painting/'tweening tedium and expense). It blows my mind that "Treasure Planet" cost $140 mega bucks to make. I'll bet if we gave 14 aspiring animators $10 mega bucks each, they could make some seriously great films, both in 2D and in 3D.
Good example. Doing 2D in the computer makes lots of sense in terms of color matching/'tweening and overall effects. Metropolis was a very pretty looking movie. Too bad the pacing and directing were so poorly done.
Of course, that doesn't mean that they should abandon the 3D animation arena to Dreamworks and Pixar. Developing talent and capabilities in the 3D arena are clearly needed (and could be melded into existing 2D techniques ala the ballroom scene in "Beauty and the Beast"). Still concluding that 2D is dead seems a bit premature to me.
How about if a huge guy broke into your house and was rummaging through your kitchen shouting "I'm gonna stick you and your kids like pigs!". Call the police and wait 5 minutes? Lock your door and hope he can't break them? If I ordered someone like that to leave and shot him when he didn't would you consider me a criminal?
I have a journal rant^H^H^H^Hentry covering my dream PDA. You might like some of my ideas. I like your idea for a high-rez largePDA/small tablet. I should just write a new entry for all these cool new ideas.
Linux wasn't a real factor back then and DEC never really got behind the Linux on Alpha anyway.
I said I'd try to see what I could do. I carefully cracked the case open and wiped off the sticky gunk with warm water. I then opened another good floppy, replaced the disk with the cleaned and dried formerly gunky disk. I said a brief prayer to the Woz and put it in the computer. Hey presto! We immediately read all of the information and made three copies for her to have. One for her purse, one for her desk and one for her home. I kept the original disk on my office wall labelled "Lazarus" until the day I quit. Ah, the days of multiple grain sized magnetic domains...
A favorite story of mine concerning the difference between having a calculator and knowing how to use one: As the scientists in the Manhattan project were waiting in the trenches/bunkers for the first trinity test, one of them started ripping little pieces of paper and just before the bomb went off, tossed them in the air. After the bomb went off, he paced off the distance they had been blown, did a bunch of calculations and gave the first estimate of the yield of the bomb. Accurate to within 20-40% I recall.
Protenomics ain't all that yet. Like I said, just because you get the playbook, it doesn't mean you can predict how the game gets played. Still, the amount of information is very impressive. I'm just not convinced that all that information will necessarily lead to knowledge, especially information at such a lower level than the control processes that work inside and outside a cell.
If you're interested in this stuff, check out Entelos. They do some interesting simulation work in the biological modelling/simulation area.
Just because you can hack the code of Doom to make a 'bot, doesn't mean that you now have the ability to write Doom. And the simple fact is that a cell doesn't work because of its genes, it works because of its DNA and its enzymatic contents and structure. The problem is not a problem of interpreting DNA, it's a problem of untangling the web of triggers and signals which exist simultaneously in the DNA and the enzymatic concentrations and the receptors. All effect the other and all are operating simultaneously. Cells are not Von-Neumann architectures, cells are massively parallel dynamic systems with DNA-protein synthesis occurring at the same time as chemical reaction at the same time of receptor activation + blocking. Sequencing is like getting the playbooks for two football teams. You still don't know how the plays will get run, or what the outcomes will be when the two teams actually run the plays. It's in the collisions, the penalties and all of the other non-DNA stuff existing as the "state" of the cell and activation of genes. Combine that problem with all of the other cells interacting with the cells and you can see why all this talk about "sequencing == great biological advances" doesn't really fly with me.
I like to think of the advance of biological knowledge as being like mapping terrain. Sequencing gives us a good set of binoculars and GPS recorder, but it doesn't give us wings. We still need to cover the ground on land, crossing the rough terrain on foot which means experimentation and knowledge twisted from the grains of truth a drop at a time.