You have a point, but there are two issues here, the first; if the light is truely wall sized the luminosity per square inch will be so low you'll be able to look straight at it and not see anything "glowing." It'll just look like a white wall.
The other issue is that it practical reasons will make full wall coverage an unusual application, mostly applied to public buildings which have no furnishings. In the home you'll just put a 6 inch wide strip of the stuff around the top of the room. Even with that small amount the luminosity per square inch will be so low that you can stare right at it, but you'll get a nice, diffuse "glow" throughout the room, much like natural light out of doors.
Put a rheostat on it, crank it down a bit, and light a candle, and you can also look as sexy as you want. Well, at least as sexy as you can.:)
KFG
Re:Patriot missile -- really a "failure"
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 1
I've always considered it rather ironic that, statistically speaking, the safest place to be during Desert Storm was in a plane over Bagdhad, and the most dangerous place to be was behind the lines having dinner.
With regards to the story it serves to illustrate that there is no such thing as "safe," only safer, statistically speaking.
Are you safe when you put your life in the hands of software? No, the people who went before you proved to be safe by virtue of their survival. You might well become the statistic on the obverse side of the equation.
It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
Ironic that you should choose an overtly UNIX standard as your example of compatible software providing a free and lively internet. Should there have been no Microsoft there would still be tcp/ip, and indeed Microsoft was classically opposed to internet technology, since it had no control or direct way to provide profit from it, the technologies being free and open.
As per your other case, yes, I would suggest that $45 is the price point above which the customer should refuse to buy Windows XP Pro, and $20 for Office. I admit to no other means of compulsion.
It makes one wonder, doesn't it, since Slashdot itself has posted many, many stories on OLED displays? Are the powers that be paying any attention at all to what they themeselves have written these days?
Using an OLED panel to backlight a conventional LED display is, well, kinda doofey, and smacks of Brazil type misapplication of technologies.
No market? No clamor? Good Lord man, people have been dreaming of inexpensive, high efficiency, nealy infinite lifetime, luminous panels for many, many decades.
In the book that I oft make reference to, Your Engineered House, published in 1964, a book which in many respects advocates older "technologies" as being the most suitable to to the task of supplying housing, he looks forward to a day when luminous panels might be available, as they provide the ultimate engineering solution to indoor lighting ( the light fixture in the center of the room/ceiling being the least desirable means, and yet the most prevelant).
Not to mention the possible application of such, buy using RGB OLEDs, to visual displays. Your laptop, your TV, etc, all cheap, efficient, and nearly indestructable.
And, or course, the advent of the "visual wall display" so often used in Science Fiction stories.
No discernable market or clamor for such a technology? Man, you seriously havn't been paying attention.
Well, that's no ordinary rabbit. That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!
Not that rabbits are actually rodents, mind you, but we can make allowences for medieval knowledge of taxonomy.
My guess is that the furry little fellow belongs to Marvin and is an active member of the Martian Defense League, and they're pretty pissed about letting a couple of invaders get through the shield and took it out on the poor, defenseless little Beagle.
If he doesn't have coordination, I wouldn't do Karate as it will only frustrate him.
Yes, if his Karate teacher sucks. Unfortunately there are many of these. As with all things one must be an intelligent and discerning shopper.
In any case, a child such as this is quite likely to do better with one of the "soft" martial arts, such as Tai Chi and Aikido, where developing coordination is the principle focus of the art. They also require a good deal of intelligent thoughtfulness to do well. A good teacher will take him from wherever he is and train him from there, not from some hypothetical starting point where he's "supposed to be." Then when he develops skill, coordination and selfconfidence he can adopt a "hard" school if he wishes.
Exactly, if MS really wanted to compete, rather than bludgeon its way into dominance, it could really put the screws to companies such as Red Hat, Madrake, etc, by offering the "premium" product at the same, or perhaps even slightly lower, retail price.
But if you go back and read those earliest interviews with BG it's pretty easy to discern that even while a small upstart with no visible future MS has never been about competeing, or even making a profit. It has always been about dominance and control, a "how dare they" attitude to the rest of the world in general, while holding itself aloof and inviolable from any outside influence. This is why MS is hated, and has always been hated, since long before they were even big enough to be an annoying pimple on the ass of the computer industry.
Now that they are an abscess on the industry it's time they learned to play by the rules, or get lanced.
Indeed, and I have long publicly held that $45 is right about the fair price for the retail version of the "greatest" version of Windows. Rather less for the "lower orders" and OEM versions.
Particularly over the past few years when the legal street price for a functional OS has been $0. All Microsoft is really selling these days is value added above that which is available for free, and that added value shrinks daily.
The same goes for pirated versions as well, were XP Pro $45 retail and XP Home $25 I dare say you'd see 90% of the pirate market dry up over night and Microsoft revenues either hardly dip at all, or perhaps even rise slighttly.
Those who would still pirate it at those prices are those that will pirate it anyway, notwithstanding price.
Any company that can, at those prices, cry that they're only making about 90% clear profit on their wares had best not cry to me. I shall likely be entirely deaf to their entreaties, knowing, as I do from personal experience, that squeezing 20% overall profit from commercial trade is doing rather well, both by one's self and by reference to the profit margins of others.
Take GM, for instance, who must deliver to you a car for the same profit margin that MS makes on Windows+Office, and who must invest billions of dollars in research, regulation compliance, manufacturing facilities, distribution channels, liablility etc, in order to deliver that car to you.
Microsoft's vauted "R&D" costs are peanuts compared to what it takes to make a simple change to an existing auto design, let alone the cost of designing and certifying a wholely new model. Their manufacturing costs are virtually nil, as are their distribution costs.
This is why they have been able to gather their unparalleled vast fortune in only a couple of handfuls of years, and why they must now resort to extraordinary actions to maintain their sales, even though their vast fortune would allow the company to live quite securely ad infinitum without conducting any overt commercial trade whatsoever.
Yes, for Windows XP Pro $45 seems fair, to a bit less than fair, as a retail price.
In the words of Susan McDougal, "God help you if you're innocent."
The guilty have bargaining chips. Some so many that they can trade their way out of jail.
The innocent have nothing, and if convicted garner harsh, retributional sentences for failing to "repent" that which they did not do.
But hey, at least nearly anybody can swear out a criminal complaint against anybody, so what are the odds that you will ever face a criminal charge, eh? To hell with relying on the police, how about your wife/girlfriend. . . while you're breaking up, can you rely on her not "get even"?
Not to mention (as I did in the last story about these wheels, and am again now) what it does to the sprung/unsprung weight ratio, resulting in a degradation in suspension function. There's a reason why designers have gone to more trouble and expense reducing the weight of the wheels than any other part of a vehicle.
A compromise would be four small conventional motors driving the wheels through stub axles.
The benefits to eliminating the coventional drive train and using computer controls to provide traction control in both accelerating and braking are too great to give up if you can avoid it.
You won't need a conventional clutch in any case, since an electric motor produces maximum torque at 0 rpm and can be simply stopped and started at will. No powerband issues to speak of and no need to maintain a minimum rpm at all times, thus no need for a conventional gear reduction box to control torque output and the motor itself, having no mechanical connection between the moving parts, acts as its own "shock absorber."
Wheelchair design is very conservative. I looked into the idea of doing some myself and gave it up. The hurdles you have to jump to get anything into production, and the potential liability risks involved, simply put it far out of my reach.
I was thinking of something in carbon fiber/titanium, custom molded seats, with electric wheel drive. Not cheap, but lighter, stronger, more comfortable and more effiecient than what's out there right now.
Maybe Dean Kamen could afford to do this, but I can't I'm afraid.
A mistake that many electric car designers have made over the years is to fail to recognize that the electric car is not simply an internal combustion engined car with the engine replaced by an electric motor.
It is a different idiom, with a different design grammar and syntax.
This is one of the reasons that gas to electric conversions, while they may work, generally suck as electric cars.
There's another reason that electric cars usually look bad though. They are almost always designed as small commuter vehicles, since that is where the strength of electric vehicles now lies until the whole battery thingy is dealt with, and small commuter cars tend to be ugly. It's a function of the short wheelbase but high greenhouse.
One of my favorite cars in terms of styling right now is the Chrysler Concorde (the one with the full oval grill). It's the perfect "retro" car, evoking the feel of the Pininfarina Ferraris of the 60s, but still quite modern, without any of the clunkiness many of the retro/modern hybrids exhibit (witness the new Mustang) trying to weld classic design elements to futuristic.
But this is a Biiiiiig car, which allows it to look low and long.
The commuter box is always going to be just that to some extent. A box. With wheels on. Goes with the territory.
Assuming, of course, that we have almost unlimited amounts of nuclear fuel. With fussion that may one day be possible, but forgive me if I decline to buy stock in the company until a working model is demonstrated.
Don't get me wrong, I adore electric cars and as I have posted many times even worked for a time as the design engineer for one of the many failed startup electric car companies that the fuel crisis of the 70s spawned (too many hippies smoking dope while reading Mother Earth News I think), but even given plentiful and cheap electricity production the electric car will remain loved only be a few wingnuts such as myself until such time as batteries don't suck or fuel cells really work and are also cheap and plentiful.
As for the information society, as far as I can tell it doesn't require cars at all and I currently live quite happily without one, even the clime of upstate NY, at least in part due to advances in the information society.
The information travels down the wires obviating the need for me to travel much at all.
Believe it or not, that is a minature of the 1921 Rumpler, a name that anyone familiar with the aircraft of WWI will recognize. After the war Dr. Rumpler applied aircraft knowledge to automobiles, but was usually too far ahead of his time and so largely ignored. Witness the Benz Tropfenwagen GP car of the early 20s. Fully streamlined, independently sprung, with mid-mounted motor and radiators, the very model for the modern GP car. The FIAT of the same year became the model for the next 10 years of GP car though, for although it was revolutionary, it was also evolutionary, and thus in an idiom other designers could understand, copy and develop.
Yeah, my mom was just outside of Chernobyl at the time, as a guest journalist of the Russian government who were trying to foster a better image in the west. Nobody told the journalists what was going on or get them out of the area as that would have made for some serious bad publicity.
So there she was, an American journalist who just happened to be right there at the scene, and didn't find out about it until she left Russia and entered Finland just as the radioactive fallout was hitting.
We use her for a nightlight now. Or to scare kids on Halloween.
I'll have to refer her to this site after it recovers.
Re:Perfect Security is infinite...
on
Security Warrior
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
However, physical security and network security are somewhat different issues. If you unplug from the net you are entirely secure from attacks over the net. Yeah, somebody can still drop a bomb on you, just as someone can drop a bomb on your house. Motivation to do so is often lacking though, since that denies them the ability to walk off with your TV set.
The issue with net security is that you're inviting people into your foyer, and perhaps even your living room and bathroom, but wish to keep them from snooping in your bedroom or medicine cabinet, or slipping into the heating ducts.
Maintaining limited security is a thougher nut than just throwing a wall around your place with big "Keep Out" signs.
In any case, just as with home security, the real goal isn't so much to become ultimately secure, as you point out that's impossible, but to make it easier to break into your neighbor's house than your own.
Suck's for your neighbor I suppose, but that's what it boils down to.
If you use your car as collateral on a loan it cannot be summarily reposessed for failure to pay said loan. You must get a court order. Car ownership, and the rights therein, are determined by state granted title.
If you offer a lien on your car to guaruntee a loan, and such lien is registered with the state on the title itself, then yes, it may be repossessed because a lien is the wilfull granting of such a right.
Slashdot Mirror
It supports Elvish.
Klingon, however, has already been determined to be "silly."
KFG
Point taken.
KFG
You have a point, but there are two issues here, the first; if the light is truely wall sized the luminosity per square inch will be so low you'll be able to look straight at it and not see anything "glowing." It'll just look like a white wall.
:)
The other issue is that it practical reasons will make full wall coverage an unusual application, mostly applied to public buildings which have no furnishings. In the home you'll just put a 6 inch wide strip of the stuff around the top of the room. Even with that small amount the luminosity per square inch will be so low that you can stare right at it, but you'll get a nice, diffuse "glow" throughout the room, much like natural light out of doors.
Put a rheostat on it, crank it down a bit, and light a candle, and you can also look as sexy as you want. Well, at least as sexy as you can.
KFG
I've always considered it rather ironic that, statistically speaking, the safest place to be during Desert Storm was in a plane over Bagdhad, and the most dangerous place to be was behind the lines having dinner.
With regards to the story it serves to illustrate that there is no such thing as "safe," only safer, statistically speaking.
Are you safe when you put your life in the hands of software? No, the people who went before you proved to be safe by virtue of their survival. You might well become the statistic on the obverse side of the equation.
It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
KFG
Ironic that you should choose an overtly UNIX standard as your example of compatible software providing a free and lively internet. Should there have been no Microsoft there would still be tcp/ip, and indeed Microsoft was classically opposed to internet technology, since it had no control or direct way to provide profit from it, the technologies being free and open.
As per your other case, yes, I would suggest that $45 is the price point above which the customer should refuse to buy Windows XP Pro, and $20 for Office. I admit to no other means of compulsion.
KFG
Et tu, adde touche, Brute? :)
KFG
It makes one wonder, doesn't it, since Slashdot itself has posted many, many stories on OLED displays? Are the powers that be paying any attention at all to what they themeselves have written these days?
Using an OLED panel to backlight a conventional LED display is, well, kinda doofey, and smacks of Brazil type misapplication of technologies.
KFG
No market? No clamor? Good Lord man, people have been dreaming of inexpensive, high efficiency, nealy infinite lifetime, luminous panels for many, many decades.
In the book that I oft make reference to, Your Engineered House, published in 1964, a book which in many respects advocates older "technologies" as being the most suitable to to the task of supplying housing, he looks forward to a day when luminous panels might be available, as they provide the ultimate engineering solution to indoor lighting ( the light fixture in the center of the room/ceiling being the least desirable means, and yet the most prevelant).
Not to mention the possible application of such, buy using RGB OLEDs, to visual displays. Your laptop, your TV, etc, all cheap, efficient, and nearly indestructable.
And, or course, the advent of the "visual wall display" so often used in Science Fiction stories.
No discernable market or clamor for such a technology? Man, you seriously havn't been paying attention.
KFG
Well, that's no ordinary rabbit. That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!
Not that rabbits are actually rodents, mind you, but we can make allowences for medieval knowledge of taxonomy.
My guess is that the furry little fellow belongs to Marvin and is an active member of the Martian Defense League, and they're pretty pissed about letting a couple of invaders get through the shield and took it out on the poor, defenseless little Beagle.
KFG
If he doesn't have coordination, I wouldn't do Karate as it will only frustrate him.
Yes, if his Karate teacher sucks. Unfortunately there are many of these. As with all things one must be an intelligent and discerning shopper.
In any case, a child such as this is quite likely to do better with one of the "soft" martial arts, such as Tai Chi and Aikido, where developing coordination is the principle focus of the art. They also require a good deal of intelligent thoughtfulness to do well. A good teacher will take him from wherever he is and train him from there, not from some hypothetical starting point where he's "supposed to be." Then when he develops skill, coordination and selfconfidence he can adopt a "hard" school if he wishes.
KFG
Exactly, if MS really wanted to compete, rather than bludgeon its way into dominance, it could really put the screws to companies such as Red Hat, Madrake, etc, by offering the "premium" product at the same, or perhaps even slightly lower, retail price.
But if you go back and read those earliest interviews with BG it's pretty easy to discern that even while a small upstart with no visible future MS has never been about competeing, or even making a profit. It has always been about dominance and control, a "how dare they" attitude to the rest of the world in general, while holding itself aloof and inviolable from any outside influence. This is why MS is hated, and has always been hated, since long before they were even big enough to be an annoying pimple on the ass of the computer industry.
Now that they are an abscess on the industry it's time they learned to play by the rules, or get lanced.
KFG
Indeed, and I have long publicly held that $45 is right about the fair price for the retail version of the "greatest" version of Windows. Rather less for the "lower orders" and OEM versions.
Particularly over the past few years when the legal street price for a functional OS has been $0. All Microsoft is really selling these days is value added above that which is available for free, and that added value shrinks daily.
The same goes for pirated versions as well, were XP Pro $45 retail and XP Home $25 I dare say you'd see 90% of the pirate market dry up over night and Microsoft revenues either hardly dip at all, or perhaps even rise slighttly.
Those who would still pirate it at those prices are those that will pirate it anyway, notwithstanding price.
Any company that can, at those prices, cry that they're only making about 90% clear profit on their wares had best not cry to me. I shall likely be entirely deaf to their entreaties, knowing, as I do from personal experience, that squeezing 20% overall profit from commercial trade is doing rather well, both by one's self and by reference to the profit margins of others.
Take GM, for instance, who must deliver to you a car for the same profit margin that MS makes on Windows+Office, and who must invest billions of dollars in research, regulation compliance, manufacturing facilities, distribution channels, liablility etc, in order to deliver that car to you.
Microsoft's vauted "R&D" costs are peanuts compared to what it takes to make a simple change to an existing auto design, let alone the cost of designing and certifying a wholely new model. Their manufacturing costs are virtually nil, as are their distribution costs.
This is why they have been able to gather their unparalleled vast fortune in only a couple of handfuls of years, and why they must now resort to extraordinary actions to maintain their sales, even though their vast fortune would allow the company to live quite securely ad infinitum without conducting any overt commercial trade whatsoever.
Yes, for Windows XP Pro $45 seems fair, to a bit less than fair, as a retail price.
Let's say $19.95 for Office.
KFG
In the words of Susan McDougal, "God help you if you're innocent."
The guilty have bargaining chips. Some so many that they can trade their way out of jail.
The innocent have nothing, and if convicted garner harsh, retributional sentences for failing to "repent" that which they did not do.
But hey, at least nearly anybody can swear out a criminal complaint against anybody, so what are the odds that you will ever face a criminal charge, eh? To hell with relying on the police, how about your wife/girlfriend. . . while you're breaking up, can you rely on her not "get even"?
KFG
Yeah, isn't the aibo great?
No, I meant dogs.
Clifford Simak's "City"
KFG
Don't worry, there will always be the dogs.
KFG
With the caveat that that central place is surrounded by company lawyers and lobbyists.
It's always easier to control 100 million powerless people than 100 powerful ones.
KFG
Not to mention (as I did in the last story about these wheels, and am again now) what it does to the sprung/unsprung weight ratio, resulting in a degradation in suspension function. There's a reason why designers have gone to more trouble and expense reducing the weight of the wheels than any other part of a vehicle.
A compromise would be four small conventional motors driving the wheels through stub axles.
The benefits to eliminating the coventional drive train and using computer controls to provide traction control in both accelerating and braking are too great to give up if you can avoid it.
You won't need a conventional clutch in any case, since an electric motor produces maximum torque at 0 rpm and can be simply stopped and started at will. No powerband issues to speak of and no need to maintain a minimum rpm at all times, thus no need for a conventional gear reduction box to control torque output and the motor itself, having no mechanical connection between the moving parts, acts as its own "shock absorber."
KFG
Wheelchair design is very conservative. I looked into the idea of doing some myself and gave it up. The hurdles you have to jump to get anything into production, and the potential liability risks involved, simply put it far out of my reach.
I was thinking of something in carbon fiber/titanium, custom molded seats, with electric wheel drive. Not cheap, but lighter, stronger, more comfortable and more effiecient than what's out there right now.
Maybe Dean Kamen could afford to do this, but I can't I'm afraid.
KFG
A mistake that many electric car designers have made over the years is to fail to recognize that the electric car is not simply an internal combustion engined car with the engine replaced by an electric motor.
It is a different idiom, with a different design grammar and syntax.
This is one of the reasons that gas to electric conversions, while they may work, generally suck as electric cars.
There's another reason that electric cars usually look bad though. They are almost always designed as small commuter vehicles, since that is where the strength of electric vehicles now lies until the whole battery thingy is dealt with, and small commuter cars tend to be ugly. It's a function of the short wheelbase but high greenhouse.
One of my favorite cars in terms of styling right now is the Chrysler Concorde (the one with the full oval grill). It's the perfect "retro" car, evoking the feel of the Pininfarina Ferraris of the 60s, but still quite modern, without any of the clunkiness many of the retro/modern hybrids exhibit (witness the new Mustang) trying to weld classic design elements to futuristic.
But this is a Biiiiiig car, which allows it to look low and long.
The commuter box is always going to be just that to some extent. A box. With wheels on. Goes with the territory.
KFG
Assuming, of course, that we have almost unlimited amounts of nuclear fuel. With fussion that may one day be possible, but forgive me if I decline to buy stock in the company until a working model is demonstrated.
Don't get me wrong, I adore electric cars and as I have posted many times even worked for a time as the design engineer for one of the many failed startup electric car companies that the fuel crisis of the 70s spawned (too many hippies smoking dope while reading Mother Earth News I think), but even given plentiful and cheap electricity production the electric car will remain loved only be a few wingnuts such as myself until such time as batteries don't suck or fuel cells really work and are also cheap and plentiful.
As for the information society, as far as I can tell it doesn't require cars at all and I currently live quite happily without one, even the clime of upstate NY, at least in part due to advances in the information society.
The information travels down the wires obviating the need for me to travel much at all.
KFG
Believe it or not, that is a minature of the 1921 Rumpler, a name that anyone familiar with the aircraft of WWI will recognize. After the war Dr. Rumpler applied aircraft knowledge to automobiles, but was usually too far ahead of his time and so largely ignored. Witness the Benz Tropfenwagen GP car of the early 20s. Fully streamlined, independently sprung, with mid-mounted motor and radiators, the very model for the modern GP car. The FIAT of the same year became the model for the next 10 years of GP car though, for although it was revolutionary, it was also evolutionary, and thus in an idiom other designers could understand, copy and develop.
1921 Rumpler
1923 Benz Tropfenwagen
KFG
Yeah, my mom was just outside of Chernobyl at the time, as a guest journalist of the Russian government who were trying to foster a better image in the west. Nobody told the journalists what was going on or get them out of the area as that would have made for some serious bad publicity.
So there she was, an American journalist who just happened to be right there at the scene, and didn't find out about it until she left Russia and entered Finland just as the radioactive fallout was hitting.
We use her for a nightlight now. Or to scare kids on Halloween.
I'll have to refer her to this site after it recovers.
KFG
That's a DoS.
Not if you're using it as a doorstop.
KFG
However, physical security and network security are somewhat different issues. If you unplug from the net you are entirely secure from attacks over the net. Yeah, somebody can still drop a bomb on you, just as someone can drop a bomb on your house. Motivation to do so is often lacking though, since that denies them the ability to walk off with your TV set.
The issue with net security is that you're inviting people into your foyer, and perhaps even your living room and bathroom, but wish to keep them from snooping in your bedroom or medicine cabinet, or slipping into the heating ducts.
Maintaining limited security is a thougher nut than just throwing a wall around your place with big "Keep Out" signs.
In any case, just as with home security, the real goal isn't so much to become ultimately secure, as you point out that's impossible, but to make it easier to break into your neighbor's house than your own.
Suck's for your neighbor I suppose, but that's what it boils down to.
KFG
If you use your car as collateral on a loan it cannot be summarily reposessed for failure to pay said loan. You must get a court order. Car ownership, and the rights therein, are determined by state granted title.
If you offer a lien on your car to guaruntee a loan, and such lien is registered with the state on the title itself, then yes, it may be repossessed because a lien is the wilfull granting of such a right.
Lien
KFG