The feature you're looking for is called rollover. If you google for "rollover keyboard" you'll find plenty of keyboards that advertise multi-key rollover.
FWIW, I just checked my Microsoft ergo keyboard and it'll accept up to 5 key presses before I have to release a key.
Yes, I know, Berkeley really is an old school but still... using a local auctioneer?
Had they used Ebay, the entire world could have bid which would have maximized the price Cal fetched for the equipment. And just perhaps, by posting pictures on Ebay, some of the equipment might have been identified that even their "ace in the hole, Shugart" couldn't identify.
Strange call on Cal's part. Then again, this is Berkeley we're talking about.
All of your arguments are valid. However, seems to me that we really ought to colonize the moon before we get all hot and bothered about Mars. Lots of the lessons we'd learn from a Mars mission could probably be gleaned from a Moon colony.
Besides, we really ought to have a giant radio telescope on the far side of the moon - where else can you get radio silence these days?
Darn near useless. I typed in the japanese url, pressed the Go button and Wowie! I get a Japanese web page with a little popup window that gives me an English translation of the word under the cursor.
I suppose if I was willing to move my cursor over each and every word to try to figure out what each and every word was, it might be useful but I think I'll stick with Babelfish.
OTOH, Babelfish yielded this Gem...However, as for this besides the fact that you cannot use in the CD-RW media, light and shade expression to differ, cannot use with the product " of the CRW-F1 " time before even with CD-R/RW drive of the same company with the media.
If you want to make a fair comparison, you have to keep in mind that many of these net-cafes were underground, illegal operations.
One can reasonably ask why the cafes were all illegal. Surely not all 2200 of them were death traps.
70 years ago, the United States tried clamping down on booze and speakeasys were the market's response to an absurd prohibition. Looks like China is going to have to learn the same lesson - clamp down on something people want and they'll find another way to get it, sometimes with disastrous results.
Speaking of 70 years ago, that's about the same time as the Reichstag Fire. Seems the Nazis wanted something to hang a cause on and so they set fire to the German Reichstag and blamed the Communists. I mention the Reichstag connection because of this odd quote from The Guardian
``It was around 3 a.m. when I smelled gasoline and saw thick smoke coming up from the bottom of the stairs,'' said Li, who went to the cafe with about 10 other students from Beijing Technology University.
Odd thing that - smelling gasoline in an Internet Cafe.
1) You're right - I should have qualified Powell and Danby's invention as "superconducting maglev."
2) Putting a battery into the loop doesn't mitigate the fact that power loss is catastrophic. The battery is an attempt to stave off the effects of a power loss.
It may be, as you say, no problem to maintain the correct vehicle-track distance when the track doesn't move but in areas like California, the ground is shifting daily. The 10 mm gap Transrapid's approach calls for is less than 3 months worth of shifting out here.
The maglev was conceived in 1962 by James Powell who got stuck in a Long Island traffic jam. He started daydreaming about how to float past the traffic. As it happened, Powell was a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and started discussing the idea with Gordon Danby. Danby was a particle accelerator designer and so the idea of using superconducting magnets came naturally to the two men. They patented the idea in the United States and Europe but not Japan, which at the time, wasn't considered a likely competitor. The Japanese jumped on the idea and have built several pilot tracks since, the Yamanashi track being the latest incarnation.
The Japanese made a couple of mistakes however. First their track switching technology is cumbersome. They literally move concrete barriers around to shove the train onto another track. Secondly, they didn't design their magnets correctly and so have had problems maintaining them. Those problems aside, the Japanese have done a first rate implementation job.
The Germans, in an attempt to circumvent the Powell and Danby patents and cut costs, chose a conventional electromagnet approach for their maglev solution. Powell and Danby had considered eletromagnets and rejected them due to inherent limitations. First, electromagnets aren't anywhere as strong as superconducting magnets so the gap between vehicle and track is much smaller. Secondly, a power loss would be catastrophic. Thirdly, the way the Germans have approached maglev using magnets to attract each other, requires active controls. The intra-magnet gap has to be maintained to very close tolerances otherwise the train gets pulled into the track or falls away from the track if it veers too far. The tolerance problem will be especially acute in seismically active locations like China and California where tracks will drift slightly on a daily basis.
Powell and Danby have kept working at maglev despite paltry American support. Their website describes several design changes to their original idea. They've designed all electronic switching equipment that makes dynamic track switching feasible. That's advantagous on a heavily traveled track that's being shared by express and local trains. They've also re-arranged their track to a monorail cum flatbed design to support dynamic switching.
Their website describes a variety of uses for maglev. Among them is a trans-continental vacuum tube that enables coast to coast travel in under an hour. The vacuum is necessary because as the train speed increases, the majority of power that's required to move the train is spent moving air out of the way. An evacuated tube makes it possible to move a train across the continent using the equivalent of 20 gallons of gas.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Lincoln authorized the construction of a transcontinental railroad. At the time, it was considered technologically impossible given the chasms and mountains that had to be crossed. Lincoln initiated the transcontinental railroad in the middle of the civil war. Part of his motivation was to demonstrate that though engaged in war, the United States was great enough to concurrently tackle a monumental engineering task.
Fifty years later, we built the Panama Canal, another technological impossibility. Finally 50 years ago, Eisenhower authorized the interstate highway system and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Fifty years have passed since this country last undertook a major infrastructure challenge. Whether our generation steps up to the plate and makes a significant contribution to the infrastructure as our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have done remains to be seen.
Because the EULA says they can turn the damn thing off if THEY decide to. Moreover, the EULA says if they decide to, they don't owe you anything.
In the pre-EULA days, when you bought something, you owned it. Now both Sonic and TIVO are saying that despite you giving them money, they still own the device and can do whatever they want with it, including disabling it.
An example of where this will get unpleasant is if they start using the machine in some way that you hadn't anticipated. TIVO just force fed their UK subscribers a show the subscribers didn't ask for. What if the machine starts forcing you to wacth an ad before they'll let you see what you bought the machine for? What can you do? Not a thing according to the EULA.
What if a competing service that doesn't monkey around with the basic service springs up and offers their wares at a lower price? Can you switch to them? Nope - the EULA forbids modifying the software. If Sonic or Tivo figure out that you switched, they can legally turn off your machine.
The really ridiculous thing about all of this is there isn't enough worthwhile stuff on TV to warrant watching TV in the first place. How many times have you gotten up after watching TV and thought "That was a waste?" Maybe deleting the ads would have improved the signal to noise ratio but now the machine you bought to skip the ads is beginning to force ads down your throat.
Expecting RH to be a moral, upright corporate citizen because otherwise they'll piss off a lot of smart geeks doesn't seem to carry much weight. Witness Blizzard squashing bnetd -/. carried a fawning WC-III review a few weeks after Blizzard filed suit. How many people didn't buy a PIV because of Intel's idiotic suit against "Yogi Inside?"
If at some point, RH thinks they can use their patents to kill other distros I don't doubt they'll try - pissed off geeks or no. Moral suasion doesn't appear to work these days.
He was using Microsoft as an example of companies that change their mind. There are plenty more. Think Yahoo ( we won't sell your id), Hewlett Packard (The HP3000 has a long life ahead of it), Yahoo again (we know you opted out but you'll have to do it again because we didn't like it), AT&T ( yes, we sold you megabit cable access but we didn't expect you to use it so you can't), Tivo (that machine you thought you bought from us is really ours to use as we wish).
The original parent post was right on - if Redhat sees a need to change their mind, they will - their post notwithstanding. Or go even deeper and read their post with a modicum of scepticsm and you'll see plenty of wiggle adjectives that give them leeway to do as they wish.
Like a lot of folks who said they were fine until some marathon gig at their computer, I hadn't experienced rsi until I spent two weeks solid typing day in and day out. Ordinarily, when I code, I'll type some code, compile, debug, type some more so most of my time is spent thinking not typing. The marathon typing session was something else.
About a week into the session, my wrists started flaring up. I could tell by looking and trying different wrist postures that the problem was that I wasn't using piano-teacher-perfect-wrist-posture. My wrists were bent at about 30 degrees instead of being ruler-flat. Knowing what's wrong and changing aren't necessarily synonymous so eventually I rigged up a sharp pencil and some velcro. The pencil was strapped across the back of my wrist so that if I bent my wrist at all, I'd get a poke to remind me to straighten my wrists. The poke was enough to correct my wrist posture and the correct posture made the pain go away.
Now, instead of sharp pencils, I use two keyboard wrist rests stacked one on the other so my wrists can't even think about bending. It looks a little odd but not as odd as pencils strapped to the back of my wrists.
If you're one who types all day and thinks rsi is imaginary because you haven't experienced it, think of yourself as more evolutionarily fit to join the typing pool. Either you have naturally perfect posture or your wrists are shaped in such a way that your tendons aren't chafed by typing.
...winchester drives came out, folks were talking about how small the read gaps were and the damage a human hair or a smoke particle could cause if it got between the read head and the platter. Since hard drives were the size of a washing machine, it was pretty amazing to think that a smoke particle could ruin it. Disk drives "fly" the heads as close as they can to the platters to minimize the area being affected by the read/write signaling.
So at what point does the surface of "perfectly clean" material get so inherently bumpy that it's impossible to go any further without crashing into the random atom that sticks above its neighbors? Given the bumpiness induced by thermal agitation, are hard drives of the future going to have to be cooled just to get the heads in close enough?
There's an angle Cringely missed on adding intelligence to vehicles. There's work going on at UC Berkeley that involves cars talking to each other and sensing where the road is. The idea is if the driver's reaction time is eliminated from driving decisions, you can pack more cars on over-burdened freeways and speed them up as well.
The way it works is there are magnets embedded in the freeway that tell a car where the road is. The cars have transmitters that communicate with the cars in the immediate vicinity so when a car speeds up or slow down, the other cars know it immediately and can react accordingly. You drive onto a freeway and pull in behind a convoy of PATH-enabled cars. The car takes over from there and drives itself until you tell it you want out of the convoy.
Instead of discouraging tailgating, the technology can use tailgating to improve overall fuel efficiency by having the trailing cars draft the leader - much like race car drivers do now except you're not relying on human reactions to make it viable. Human factors come into play as people who have ridden in a car doing 60 mph that's 4 inches behind the car in front find the experience uncomfortable.
The technology has been tested on a section of I-5 near San Diego and actually works. There are of course, reasons why it isn't going to show up in next year's models. Some are technical such as magnetizing enough freeways and dealing with magnets that go bad but a key obstacle is the need to revise liablitiy laws and draft legislation that specifies maintenance schedules and such. Without tort revision, the first accident that involved PATH-enabled cars would kill the technology. People will ignore the fact that we've had non-PATH pileups in the past and focus on "the computer did it..."
A while back, there was an excellent article on Lord Macaulay's speech to the British Parliament. Macaulay lays out both a solid case for copyright and against unreasonable extensions to copyrights.
The speech was made over 160 years ago.
Re:Software Patents have a repressive effect
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
Respectfully, NO IT ISN'T!! Copyright and patent laws protect VERY different concepts.
I'm fully aware of the difference between the two protections. I'm simply saying that I don't need, or want, protection from someone implementing the idea.
The fact is the software industry evolved very rapidly in the absence of patents - we were slugging it out by seeing who could build the best piece of code that was usable. Having an idea was nowhere near enough. You had to be able to implement it and implement it well.
I made a fortune and so did others without having to worry about someone who thought they were so brilliant that they paid an attorney to patent an idea. We competed on implementation details and marketing. As long as some pirate couldn't just take our code (copyright protection) we didn't need a patent.
Patents benefit companies that can sue you into the ground with them. Think that patent you just got will make you rich? Just wait until Microsoft countersues you with 2000 patents to your one. Patents create such a barrier to innovation that large companies routinely sign cross-licensing deals to clear the field. Software patents exist to make Bill Gates richer than he already is and to keep you out of the game.
Software Patents have a repressive effect
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
My career spans the period when what I do was and wasn't patentable. We wrote software in a frenzy back in the 80's because we'd come up with a neat idea and we wanted to market it before it became a common idea. We didn't need patent protection - copyright was sufficient protection. By the time someone realized what we had done, we'd be working on the next great idea. It's the nature of the business - to create.
Along came Bruce Lehman, et. al. with his uspto dog and pony act. Programmer after programmer testified "Don't do this! We do not need patents." At one point, a programmer testified "The only people in this room who have testified in favor of software patents have been corporate attorneys." Lehman acknowledged the truth of that testimony and ignored us. So now we have software patents - to benefit those attorneys.
The upshot is my software productivity has declined because now I have to worry about writing some piece of code that someone else owns - even though I've never even seen the other coder's implementation. That very obstacle strikes at the core of what we do - to create. We didn't need patents before they became available and we need them even less now that their intrinsic worthlessnes has become apparent. The USPTO will never be able to field examiners who understand what is obvious in the field because to be a patent examiner means they're not coders. What is obvious to a comptent coder is magic to others.
Implement reasonable copyright protection and that's enough.
Color me suspicious but I'm not about to give out personal id and banking information to a group in Russia whom I've never heard of. The last time I saw a similar request it was to help out a Nigerian clerk who knew where there was a stash of cash and he wanted to park it in my bank account.
Furthermore, and more importantly, all of the control systems on Buran were designed and built solely by the Soviets. This allowed Burtan to do something the US Shuttle can't - fly to space and back unmanned.
That's not clear - the decision not to completely automate the shuttle flight was political, not technical.
Feynman noted in his appendix to the Challenger investigation that the avionic software did everything except lower the landing gear and touchdown. Ostensibly, that one step was left to the astronauts for safety reasons but it probably had a lot to do with the astronauts not wanting to be, as Chuck Yeager put it, "spam in a can."
The original Mercury test flight involved shooting a chimpanzee into sub orbit to make sure the capsule didn't kill the astronaut on re-entry. That meant ground control ran the whole show from liftoff to touchdown. The Mercury 7 astronauts made it clear that they wouldn't fly if they didn't control at least some part of the flight.
As it stands now, the astronauts don't gain control until the last few seconds of a shuttle flight.
I'm looking at CAD and milling software right now. I've looked at a variety of software and have settled on what CAD software I want but I'm still uncertain about the milling software. The reason has everything to do with the nature of what I've downloaded so far.
Rhino's CAD software comes fully functional for 25 saves. That is, it does absolutely everything the purchased software does but you're limited to 25 saves. You can check out how every function works, find the bugs and see if there's a reasonable work around and in general, have an excellent idea of whether or not the software does what you need it to do. Rhino's a definite buy for me.
Contrast that to the milling software. Now I have my sample Rhino file and I want to feed it to the milling software. How easy is it to do that, how good is the cnc code coming out the other end? I don't know. Every single piece of milling demo software I've found so far either turns out to be a quicktime movie showing me how they intend it to be used or the software is limited to using some demo files they've provided. That's worth squat as a demo. It doesn't tell me if the software will work the way I want it to work or if there are show stopper bugs in the feature sets I'm likely to use. I don't for a second doubt that the demo's will be gee-whiz, whiz-bang, ain't-it-cool. But what I really want to know is will it really work?
I'm not too eager to lay out $500-1000 for software that the developer isn't comfortable letting me test-drive at 90 mph on 45 mph curves.
Slashdot Mirror
The feature you're looking for is called rollover. If you google for "rollover keyboard" you'll find plenty of keyboards that advertise multi-key rollover.
FWIW, I just checked my Microsoft ergo keyboard and it'll accept up to 5 key presses before I have to release a key.
Yes, I know, Berkeley really is an old school but still... using a local auctioneer?
Had they used Ebay, the entire world could have bid which would have maximized the price Cal fetched for the equipment. And just perhaps, by posting pictures on Ebay, some of the equipment might have been identified that even their "ace in the hole, Shugart" couldn't identify.
Strange call on Cal's part. Then again, this is Berkeley we're talking about.
'L' is right above 'S' on a dvorak keyboard.
All of your arguments are valid. However, seems to me that we really ought to colonize the moon before we get all hot and bothered about Mars. Lots of the lessons we'd learn from a Mars mission could probably be gleaned from a Moon colony.
Besides, we really ought to have a giant radio telescope on the far side of the moon - where else can you get radio silence these days?
Darn near useless. I typed in the japanese url, pressed the Go button and Wowie! I get a Japanese web page with a little popup window that gives me an English translation of the word under the cursor.
I suppose if I was willing to move my cursor over each and every word to try to figure out what each and every word was, it might be useful but I think I'll stick with Babelfish.
OTOH, Babelfish yielded this Gem...However, as for this besides the fact that you cannot use in the CD-RW media, light and shade expression to differ, cannot use with the product " of the CRW-F1 " time before even with CD-R/RW drive of the same company with the media.
One can reasonably ask why the cafes were all illegal. Surely not all 2200 of them were death traps.
70 years ago, the United States tried clamping down on booze and speakeasys were the market's response to an absurd prohibition. Looks like China is going to have to learn the same lesson - clamp down on something people want and they'll find another way to get it, sometimes with disastrous results.
Speaking of 70 years ago, that's about the same time as the Reichstag Fire. Seems the Nazis wanted something to hang a cause on and so they set fire to the German Reichstag and blamed the Communists. I mention the Reichstag connection because of this odd quote from The Guardian
Odd thing that - smelling gasoline in an Internet Cafe.
1) You're right - I should have qualified Powell and Danby's invention as "superconducting maglev."
2) Putting a battery into the loop doesn't mitigate the fact that power loss is catastrophic. The battery is an attempt to stave off the effects of a power loss.
It may be, as you say, no problem to maintain the correct vehicle-track distance when the track doesn't move but in areas like California, the ground is shifting daily. The 10 mm gap Transrapid's approach calls for is less than 3 months worth of shifting out here.
The Japanese made a couple of mistakes however. First their track switching technology is cumbersome. They literally move concrete barriers around to shove the train onto another track. Secondly, they didn't design their magnets correctly and so have had problems maintaining them. Those problems aside, the Japanese have done a first rate implementation job.
The Germans, in an attempt to circumvent the Powell and Danby patents and cut costs, chose a conventional electromagnet approach for their maglev solution. Powell and Danby had considered eletromagnets and rejected them due to inherent limitations. First, electromagnets aren't anywhere as strong as superconducting magnets so the gap between vehicle and track is much smaller. Secondly, a power loss would be catastrophic. Thirdly, the way the Germans have approached maglev using magnets to attract each other, requires active controls. The intra-magnet gap has to be maintained to very close tolerances otherwise the train gets pulled into the track or falls away from the track if it veers too far. The tolerance problem will be especially acute in seismically active locations like China and California where tracks will drift slightly on a daily basis.
Powell and Danby have kept working at maglev despite paltry American support. Their website describes several design changes to their original idea. They've designed all electronic switching equipment that makes dynamic track switching feasible. That's advantagous on a heavily traveled track that's being shared by express and local trains. They've also re-arranged their track to a monorail cum flatbed design to support dynamic switching.
Their website describes a variety of uses for maglev. Among them is a trans-continental vacuum tube that enables coast to coast travel in under an hour. The vacuum is necessary because as the train speed increases, the majority of power that's required to move the train is spent moving air out of the way. An evacuated tube makes it possible to move a train across the continent using the equivalent of 20 gallons of gas.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Lincoln authorized the construction of a transcontinental railroad. At the time, it was considered technologically impossible given the chasms and mountains that had to be crossed. Lincoln initiated the transcontinental railroad in the middle of the civil war. Part of his motivation was to demonstrate that though engaged in war, the United States was great enough to concurrently tackle a monumental engineering task.
Fifty years later, we built the Panama Canal, another technological impossibility. Finally 50 years ago, Eisenhower authorized the interstate highway system and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Fifty years have passed since this country last undertook a major infrastructure challenge. Whether our generation steps up to the plate and makes a significant contribution to the infrastructure as our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have done remains to be seen.
... you can write your PhD thesis, the Great American Novel, 2 slashdot comments and still have time to burn.
Because the EULA says they can turn the damn thing off if THEY decide to. Moreover, the EULA says if they decide to, they don't owe you anything.
In the pre-EULA days, when you bought something, you owned it. Now both Sonic and TIVO are saying that despite you giving them money, they still own the device and can do whatever they want with it, including disabling it.
An example of where this will get unpleasant is if they start using the machine in some way that you hadn't anticipated. TIVO just force fed their UK subscribers a show the subscribers didn't ask for. What if the machine starts forcing you to wacth an ad before they'll let you see what you bought the machine for? What can you do? Not a thing according to the EULA.
What if a competing service that doesn't monkey around with the basic service springs up and offers their wares at a lower price? Can you switch to them? Nope - the EULA forbids modifying the software. If Sonic or Tivo figure out that you switched, they can legally turn off your machine.
The really ridiculous thing about all of this is there isn't enough worthwhile stuff on TV to warrant watching TV in the first place. How many times have you gotten up after watching TV and thought "That was a waste?" Maybe deleting the ads would have improved the signal to noise ratio but now the machine you bought to skip the ads is beginning to force ads down your throat.
Not a worthwhile purchase in my book.
Expecting RH to be a moral, upright corporate citizen because otherwise they'll piss off a lot of smart geeks doesn't seem to carry much weight. Witness Blizzard squashing bnetd - /. carried a fawning WC-III review a few weeks after Blizzard filed suit. How many people didn't buy a PIV because of Intel's idiotic suit against "Yogi Inside?"
If at some point, RH thinks they can use their patents to kill other distros I don't doubt they'll try - pissed off geeks or no. Moral suasion doesn't appear to work these days.
He was using Microsoft as an example of companies that change their mind. There are plenty more. Think Yahoo ( we won't sell your id), Hewlett Packard (The HP3000 has a long life ahead of it), Yahoo again (we know you opted out but you'll have to do it again because we didn't like it), AT&T ( yes, we sold you megabit cable access but we didn't expect you to use it so you can't), Tivo (that machine you thought you bought from us is really ours to use as we wish).
The original parent post was right on - if Redhat sees a need to change their mind, they will - their post notwithstanding. Or go even deeper and read their post with a modicum of scepticsm and you'll see plenty of wiggle adjectives that give them leeway to do as they wish.
Do you know what the oscillation magnitude is of an atom at 300 K vs 100 K? Does it vary with the solid or is it a constant?
Like a lot of folks who said they were fine until some marathon gig at their computer, I hadn't experienced rsi until I spent two weeks solid typing day in and day out. Ordinarily, when I code, I'll type some code, compile, debug, type some more so most of my time is spent thinking not typing. The marathon typing session was something else.
About a week into the session, my wrists started flaring up. I could tell by looking and trying different wrist postures that the problem was that I wasn't using piano-teacher-perfect-wrist-posture. My wrists were bent at about 30 degrees instead of being ruler-flat. Knowing what's wrong and changing aren't necessarily synonymous so eventually I rigged up a sharp pencil and some velcro. The pencil was strapped across the back of my wrist so that if I bent my wrist at all, I'd get a poke to remind me to straighten my wrists. The poke was enough to correct my wrist posture and the correct posture made the pain go away.
Now, instead of sharp pencils, I use two keyboard wrist rests stacked one on the other so my wrists can't even think about bending. It looks a little odd but not as odd as pencils strapped to the back of my wrists.
If you're one who types all day and thinks rsi is imaginary because you haven't experienced it, think of yourself as more evolutionarily fit to join the typing pool. Either you have naturally perfect posture or your wrists are shaped in such a way that your tendons aren't chafed by typing.
...winchester drives came out, folks were talking about how small the read gaps were and the damage a human hair or a smoke particle could cause if it got between the read head and the platter. Since hard drives were the size of a washing machine, it was pretty amazing to think that a smoke particle could ruin it. Disk drives "fly" the heads as close as they can to the platters to minimize the area being affected by the read/write signaling.
So at what point does the surface of "perfectly clean" material get so inherently bumpy that it's impossible to go any further without crashing into the random atom that sticks above its neighbors? Given the bumpiness induced by thermal agitation, are hard drives of the future going to have to be cooled just to get the heads in close enough?
There's an angle Cringely missed on adding intelligence to vehicles. There's work going on at UC Berkeley that involves cars talking to each other and sensing where the road is. The idea is if the driver's reaction time is eliminated from driving decisions, you can pack more cars on over-burdened freeways and speed them up as well.
The way it works is there are magnets embedded in the freeway that tell a car where the road is. The cars have transmitters that communicate with the cars in the immediate vicinity so when a car speeds up or slow down, the other cars know it immediately and can react accordingly. You drive onto a freeway and pull in behind a convoy of PATH-enabled cars. The car takes over from there and drives itself until you tell it you want out of the convoy.
Instead of discouraging tailgating, the technology can use tailgating to improve overall fuel efficiency by having the trailing cars draft the leader - much like race car drivers do now except you're not relying on human reactions to make it viable. Human factors come into play as people who have ridden in a car doing 60 mph that's 4 inches behind the car in front find the experience uncomfortable.
The technology has been tested on a section of I-5 near San Diego and actually works. There are of course, reasons why it isn't going to show up in next year's models. Some are technical such as magnetizing enough freeways and dealing with magnets that go bad but a key obstacle is the need to revise liablitiy laws and draft legislation that specifies maintenance schedules and such. Without tort revision, the first accident that involved PATH-enabled cars would kill the technology. People will ignore the fact that we've had non-PATH pileups in the past and focus on "the computer did it..."
Well you'll have to wait to ask the tyke at the bottom of this page to see if he thinks Segway is a killer app....then again, maybe you won't.
A while back, there was an excellent article on Lord Macaulay's speech to the British Parliament. Macaulay lays out both a solid case for copyright and against unreasonable extensions to copyrights.
The speech was made over 160 years ago.
Respectfully, NO IT ISN'T!! Copyright and patent laws protect VERY different concepts.
I'm fully aware of the difference between the two protections. I'm simply saying that I don't need, or want, protection from someone implementing the idea.
The fact is the software industry evolved very rapidly in the absence of patents - we were slugging it out by seeing who could build the best piece of code that was usable. Having an idea was nowhere near enough. You had to be able to implement it and implement it well.
I made a fortune and so did others without having to worry about someone who thought they were so brilliant that they paid an attorney to patent an idea. We competed on implementation details and marketing. As long as some pirate couldn't just take our code (copyright protection) we didn't need a patent.
Patents benefit companies that can sue you into the ground with them. Think that patent you just got will make you rich? Just wait until Microsoft countersues you with 2000 patents to your one. Patents create such a barrier to innovation that large companies routinely sign cross-licensing deals to clear the field. Software patents exist to make Bill Gates richer than he already is and to keep you out of the game.
My career spans the period when what I do was and wasn't patentable. We wrote software in a frenzy back in the 80's because we'd come up with a neat idea and we wanted to market it before it became a common idea. We didn't need patent protection - copyright was sufficient protection. By the time someone realized what we had done, we'd be working on the next great idea. It's the nature of the business - to create.
Along came Bruce Lehman, et. al. with his uspto dog and pony act. Programmer after programmer testified "Don't do this! We do not need patents." At one point, a programmer testified "The only people in this room who have testified in favor of software patents have been corporate attorneys." Lehman acknowledged the truth of that testimony and ignored us. So now we have software patents - to benefit those attorneys.
The upshot is my software productivity has declined because now I have to worry about writing some piece of code that someone else owns - even though I've never even seen the other coder's implementation. That very obstacle strikes at the core of what we do - to create. We didn't need patents before they became available and we need them even less now that their intrinsic worthlessnes has become apparent. The USPTO will never be able to field examiners who understand what is obvious in the field because to be a patent examiner means they're not coders. What is obvious to a comptent coder is magic to others.
Implement reasonable copyright protection and that's enough.
Color me suspicious but I'm not about to give out personal id and banking information to a group in Russia whom I've never heard of. The last time I saw a similar request it was to help out a Nigerian clerk who knew where there was a stash of cash and he wanted to park it in my bank account.
That's not clear - the decision not to completely automate the shuttle flight was political, not technical.
Feynman noted in his appendix to the Challenger investigation that the avionic software did everything except lower the landing gear and touchdown. Ostensibly, that one step was left to the astronauts for safety reasons but it probably had a lot to do with the astronauts not wanting to be, as Chuck Yeager put it, "spam in a can."
The original Mercury test flight involved shooting a chimpanzee into sub orbit to make sure the capsule didn't kill the astronaut on re-entry. That meant ground control ran the whole show from liftoff to touchdown. The Mercury 7 astronauts made it clear that they wouldn't fly if they didn't control at least some part of the flight.
As it stands now, the astronauts don't gain control until the last few seconds of a shuttle flight.
Though you'll save $400 per box, the noise that all those AMD-powered boxes will generate may not be worth the savings.
I'm not sure how they do it but Dell boxes are extremely quiet.
I'm looking at CAD and milling software right now. I've looked at a variety of software and have settled on what CAD software I want but I'm still uncertain about the milling software. The reason has everything to do with the nature of what I've downloaded so far.
Rhino's CAD software comes fully functional for 25 saves. That is, it does absolutely everything the purchased software does but you're limited to 25 saves. You can check out how every function works, find the bugs and see if there's a reasonable work around and in general, have an excellent idea of whether or not the software does what you need it to do. Rhino's a definite buy for me.
Contrast that to the milling software. Now I have my sample Rhino file and I want to feed it to the milling software. How easy is it to do that, how good is the cnc code coming out the other end? I don't know. Every single piece of milling demo software I've found so far either turns out to be a quicktime movie showing me how they intend it to be used or the software is limited to using some demo files they've provided. That's worth squat as a demo. It doesn't tell me if the software will work the way I want it to work or if there are show stopper bugs in the feature sets I'm likely to use. I don't for a second doubt that the demo's will be gee-whiz, whiz-bang, ain't-it-cool. But what I really want to know is will it really work?
I'm not too eager to lay out $500-1000 for software that the developer isn't comfortable letting me test-drive at 90 mph on 45 mph curves.
So want a successful demo program? Copy Rhino's.
You're too late to be a founding member....