The BOSPDAUG (Boston PDA User's Group) has been putting accelermeters in palms for a while now. There was a brief project to put two of them in to get full motion... and then invent a new form of entering text with hand motions.
Replying to my own post in effort to reply to all those who replied to it as well.
First: I am VERY impressed with the decorum exersized in the replies so far! There are some VERY good arguments made.
There seems to be a common thread of "What if they could find out you were gay," and I'd like to suggest that maybe if it were easy to tell if someone was gay (not so much a matter of public record, but just easy to tell) then we'd realize how totally NORMAL this is and the biggotry might be greatly dimished.
I think this kind of idea was planted in my head when I read the book by Halperin called The Truth Machine in which he makes some predictions on what would happen if we had a perfect lie detector. People couldn't lie, and would have no reason to lie or protect someone else's ability to lie.
I apologize if I've made too big a jump from privacy and the "Ability to Lie." Sometimes I think that's what people consider privacy though.
Am I the only one sick of "privacy" being used as an argument? It reminds me of "won't someone think of the children." The Constitution/Declaration of Independance do not stipulate privacy.
I'm beginning to think that privacy is costing us too much. If we had access to a plethora of medical information, perhaps we could do some data mining and identify some patterns that would benifit us more than we can imagine.
I'm trying to remember WHY I want all this privacy, why it's so impoartant my purchases be private, who is it I'm afraid of them knowing that I bought a copy of "swank" magazine. I guess if I was a politcian I wouldn't want people to know some things, but I'm just a pretty average citizen, I don't need someone else protecting my privacy.
Maybe an employer would do a backround check and find something - but if they won't hire me becuase of some obscure piece of information, maybe I don't want to work there. Perhaps I'm the kind of person who doesn't really have something like that to hide... it seems the only people concerned about privacy are trying to hide something. Now I'm beginning to ramble...
I'm not sure if this is good or bad. On the one hand, I applaud netflix for protecting a buisness model they invented, or at least they were the first to implement and sink a lot of capital into.
But this gives them a monopoly. If they have the patent on a business, they have the monopoly and can stop everyone else from competeing.
A lot of the eTailers are trying to patent things that in effect would give them a similar monopolistic control over entire ways of doing business (oneClick etc...), these are definatly bad.
So I guess after reasoning this out, it's bad. It gives NetFlix an unfair control over a business model. There will be no competition, and they can raise the price to any level they see fit. So instead of you and me getting a service like this for $5 a month, becuase that's just a little bit more than it costs to make it happen, we will be forced to pay $25 or more becuase no-one is allowed to compete with NetFlix.
BTW: I'm a netflix user and love it. I think the system is great. I'd love some competition to drive the price way down.
This was the problem I had, the whole "in my major" thing. I was acing the tech stuff (CompSci, Chem, Math) but couldn't keep my eyes open for anything remotely liberal-arts-ish. My advice is realize you HAVE TO PASS THIS STUFF to keep your ride and get your sheep-skin, so just hunker down and do it. Easy to say.
I've found that latley I've starte to appriciate the crap they wanted to jam down my throat. I never read a single word of Mark Twain when I was 18yr old, but now I have his complete works on my Palm and read it whenever I have a spare moment, and really really enjoy it! _Conneticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court_ is just amazing. I was %100 sci-fi pre work-force, but now I really love the classic-lit stuff. Maybe we need to try to recognize this in our students and nurture it more appropriatly.
Who needs ritalin when we have slashdot. When I have a couple seconds between compiles (damn faster clock speeds) I am here, or at countless other websites that fill those spare cycles.
The only reason you are alive is becuase your ancestors were competitive and won.
I am referring to the single celled organisms that COMPETED with the other single celled organisms and won. Then they formed multi-celled organisms and kicked the other multi-celled organisms butts (well, what was going to become a butt eventually)
So you say: "I'd love to live in a world where competition wasn't the driving reason to succeed," and to be blunt, there is no life if we don't compete. At least not as we know it.
My opinion on this: The persuit of space is worth the loss of life. There are people willing to risk their life for these goals. I wish we could get the kind of zeal for the space program that religon has, i.e. have people willing to climb aboard a rocket that MIGHT kill them, instead of strapping a bomb to their chest that WILL kill them.
If we do not achieve a colony on mars or the moon soon, we will get hit by a rock, and the only known setient life form in the universe will be destroyed. And we will be to blame. Me, you, everybody.
I believe if we could redirect the energy given to religon to the persuit of colonizing mars or the moon, we could have it DONE (or at least have ships on the way) within a decade, easy.
My opinion is that the younger you started the less likely you are to have problems. I've been at a keyboard since before 10yrs old, and now, over 30, I don't have any problems at all, either eye sight or wrist/hand related. No special keyboards, no left/right hand mouse switching.
Do you understand the model here? You signup for hundreds of movies, and you always have three. You return one, they send you another. So you always have a movie you want to see. You don't have to watch it the second you get it, it costs you no more to watch it 3 months after you get it, but you only get 3 out at a time.
We've been netflix customers for about a year, and I still goto blockbuster. I don't always rent a movie at blockbuster, but I make a list of the movies I MIGHT have rented and the update my netflix list with these movies.
Kids don't know how to use roatary phones, or plows, or ride horses today either. This doesn't mean we should get rid of touch-pads, modern farming equipment and cars.
Maybe it's interesting to note this decline in the use of an obsolete technology, but I do not believe action is needed.
Kids are still learning to write NON CURSIVE letters, and I think that's just fine. The reason for cursive is rapid writing, the reason for a keyboard is even MORE rapid writing.
The same arguments that can be used for "A kid doesn't need to use a computer" can be made for the "A kid doesn'r need to write" arguments.
You'll need luck to get a job if you can't wirte! You'll need a luck getting a job if you can't type too. Unless your writing skills don't need to go beyond filling out the application, you're going to need the keyboard skills. Most writing has been or is being moved to computers.
When all the redundant power in an airplane fails, the hydralics and compass will still work. The pilots don't use the compass much whent he much more advanced electirc systems are working. So when the plane is hit but lightning (or something else which takes the power out) the pilot really needs the compass to know which way to go, and just then, every joey on the plane fires up his cell phone and the compass goes haywire.
I'm a private pilot, and I always thought the reason cell phone usage was restricted wasn't interferance (on a clear day, you don't need any electronics in the plane, just spark to the plugs) I thought it was becuase the massivly increased range of the phone screws up the cell to cell protocol.
There's only one major caveat on the AirPort: You'll need a Mac to configure it. Since you'll only need to do this once, though, it's not a big problem. Only a small percentage of us own an Apple computer, but we all know someone who does and never stops reminding us. Not only will your Mac Buddy come over and set up your AirPorts, he'll be hurt if you don't let him. Go ahead, ask him and see.
If I can't do it myself, with my own hardware, I ain't gonna do it. When I need something tweaked on the airport at 3am, my MAC buddy is asleep, beucase he has to get up at 5am and flip burgers.
Of course it may be a nice excuse to add a MAC laptop to the shopping cart... the wife has inquired about "What kind of laptop is that? The screen is so thin..."
Don't believe that suggestion BTW: It's stopid. It was engineered by DeBeers just like the "Suprise Engagement Ring" crap, which they payed to have put into movies. Any intillegent couple, if they sit down and talk about it, will come up with something much better to spend that much money on, like a HOUSE.
I don't know about most college students, but my life savings went to ZERO and kept dropping the second I enrolled at college.
If I had fallen for the DeBeers crap of "Two Months Salary" being spent on a wedding ring, and proposed to my wife in college, I'd end up asking her for money to buy the ring.
Nobody has too much time on their hands. I used to think I knew what that comment meant, but now I tend to classify it in the same bin as the comment "Whatever." A sort of brush off or dismisal from a person who does not understand what is being presented.
I know I'm kind of babeling here, but telling a person who hacks up something like this that "They have too much time on their hands" is a very destructive comment. If I had heard that more when I was younger I would probably be flipping burgers now instead of programming computers. A *LOT* of what computer programmers do early on can be classifed into "too much time on your hands" and if they get that comment too much they might start to resemble it and do something the ignorant person who said it thinks they should do, which usually falls into one of two channels, sports or fashion.
Original post was referring to wallet-size notepad. I'm not condoning the use of a palm for class note taking for excatly many of the reasons you mention.
I'm arguing the palm kicks a wallet-size pad for everything you you would use a wallet-size pad for.
I think taking notes on the palm, or a notebook, still pretty much sucks.
Palm turn on time is pretty much INSTANT. It causes a weekness in that you can only run one app at a time (opening Calander closes the notebook) but it is INSTANT. You cannot see the transition. You don't BOOT a palm. I cannot talk about a WinCE machine.
Personally, I find my 59c wallet-sized notepad more useful than my friend's Palm
I am a)sick of hearing this and b)not sure what you mean. How is a notepad more useful? Sure it's more durable, but if you loose it, it's gone as well as any data in it. How much memory can it hold? How many times can you erase it and rewrite it? How long does it take you to find things? Or verify you only have something in there once?
Or are you implying that YOUR pad of paper is more useful to YOU than your FRIENDS pilot? I guess you don't have your friend around alot?
Seriously though, saying a pad of paper is as useful as a palm is getting very old.
Slashdot Mirror
Name any field (Computers, Engineering, Finance, Medicine, Skateboarding) and if you are not involved, you will get blown away by terminology.
M@
The BOSPDAUG (Boston PDA User's Group) has been putting accelermeters in palms for a while now. There was a brief project to put two of them in to get full motion... and then invent a new form of entering text with hand motions.
The best part was the name: "Physical Graffiti"
M@
Replying to my own post in effort to reply to all those who replied to it as well.
First: I am VERY impressed with the decorum exersized in the replies so far! There are some VERY good arguments made.
There seems to be a common thread of "What if they could find out you were gay," and I'd like to suggest that maybe if it were easy to tell if someone was gay (not so much a matter of public record, but just easy to tell) then we'd realize how totally NORMAL this is and the biggotry might be greatly dimished.
I think this kind of idea was planted in my head when I read the book by Halperin called The Truth Machine in which he makes some predictions on what would happen if we had a perfect lie detector. People couldn't lie, and would have no reason to lie or protect someone else's ability to lie.
I apologize if I've made too big a jump from privacy and the "Ability to Lie." Sometimes I think that's what people consider privacy though.
Again, thanks for so many great rebuttles!
M@
heres a picture of the woman in the picture without the xrays.
M@
Am I the only one sick of "privacy" being used as an argument? It reminds me of "won't someone think of the children." The Constitution/Declaration of Independance do not stipulate privacy.
I'm beginning to think that privacy is costing us too much. If we had access to a plethora of medical information, perhaps we could do some data mining and identify some patterns that would benifit us more than we can imagine.
I'm trying to remember WHY I want all this privacy, why it's so impoartant my purchases be private, who is it I'm afraid of them knowing that I bought a copy of "swank" magazine. I guess if I was a politcian I wouldn't want people to know some things, but I'm just a pretty average citizen, I don't need someone else protecting my privacy.
Maybe an employer would do a backround check and find something - but if they won't hire me becuase of some obscure piece of information, maybe I don't want to work there. Perhaps I'm the kind of person who doesn't really have something like that to hide... it seems the only people concerned about privacy are trying to hide something. Now I'm beginning to ramble...
M@
These kinds of tricks fool tons of people. It's the minority that look carefully. Welcome to the wonderful world of marketing.
M@
In case you don't know what's going on: This link might help you understand the situation.
M@
I'm not sure if this is good or bad. On the one hand, I applaud netflix for protecting a buisness model they invented, or at least they were the first to implement and sink a lot of capital into.
But this gives them a monopoly. If they have the patent on a business, they have the monopoly and can stop everyone else from competeing.
A lot of the eTailers are trying to patent things that in effect would give them a similar monopolistic control over entire ways of doing business (oneClick etc...), these are definatly bad.
So I guess after reasoning this out, it's bad. It gives NetFlix an unfair control over a business model. There will be no competition, and they can raise the price to any level they see fit. So instead of you and me getting a service like this for $5 a month, becuase that's just a little bit more than it costs to make it happen, we will be forced to pay $25 or more becuase no-one is allowed to compete with NetFlix.
BTW: I'm a netflix user and love it. I think the system is great. I'd love some competition to drive the price way down.
M@
This was the problem I had, the whole "in my major" thing. I was acing the tech stuff (CompSci, Chem, Math) but couldn't keep my eyes open for anything remotely liberal-arts-ish. My advice is realize you HAVE TO PASS THIS STUFF to keep your ride and get your sheep-skin, so just hunker down and do it. Easy to say.
I've found that latley I've starte to appriciate the crap they wanted to jam down my throat. I never read a single word of Mark Twain when I was 18yr old, but now I have his complete works on my Palm and read it whenever I have a spare moment, and really really enjoy it! _Conneticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court_ is just amazing. I was %100 sci-fi pre work-force, but now I really love the classic-lit stuff. Maybe we need to try to recognize this in our students and nurture it more appropriatly.
Oh! A butterfly!
M@
Who needs ritalin when we have slashdot. When I have a couple seconds between compiles (damn faster clock speeds) I am here, or at countless other websites that fill those spare cycles.
M@
Cancer: Good point. I was trying to make the jump single-cell compitition to multi cell coperation, but still competing.
M@
The only reason you are alive is becuase your ancestors were competitive and won.
I am referring to the single celled organisms that COMPETED with the other single celled organisms and won. Then they formed multi-celled organisms and kicked the other multi-celled organisms butts (well, what was going to become a butt eventually)
So you say: "I'd love to live in a world where competition wasn't the driving reason to succeed," and to be blunt, there is no life if we don't compete. At least not as we know it.
M@
My opinion on this: The persuit of space is worth the loss of life. There are people willing to risk their life for these goals. I wish we could get the kind of zeal for the space program that religon has, i.e. have people willing to climb aboard a rocket that MIGHT kill them, instead of strapping a bomb to their chest that WILL kill them.
If we do not achieve a colony on mars or the moon soon, we will get hit by a rock, and the only known setient life form in the universe will be destroyed. And we will be to blame. Me, you, everybody.
I believe if we could redirect the energy given to religon to the persuit of colonizing mars or the moon, we could have it DONE (or at least have ships on the way) within a decade, easy.
M@
My opinion is that the younger you started the less likely you are to have problems. I've been at a keyboard since before 10yrs old, and now, over 30, I don't have any problems at all, either eye sight or wrist/hand related. No special keyboards, no left/right hand mouse switching.
M@
Speaking of Wireless being the next step... I have been waiting for a wireless twiddler for almost 5 years now. If the made one, I'd buy it.
M@
Do you understand the model here? You signup for hundreds of movies, and you always have three. You return one, they send you another. So you always have a movie you want to see. You don't have to watch it the second you get it, it costs you no more to watch it 3 months after you get it, but you only get 3 out at a time.
We've been netflix customers for about a year, and I still goto blockbuster. I don't always rent a movie at blockbuster, but I make a list of the movies I MIGHT have rented and the update my netflix list with these movies.
M@
NasaTv covered the launch live too. They had the rocket-cam view as well, which was excellent this time.
M@
Kids don't know how to use roatary phones, or plows, or ride horses today either. This doesn't mean we should get rid of touch-pads, modern farming equipment and cars.
Maybe it's interesting to note this decline in the use of an obsolete technology, but I do not believe action is needed.
Kids are still learning to write NON CURSIVE letters, and I think that's just fine. The reason for cursive is rapid writing, the reason for a keyboard is even MORE rapid writing.
The same arguments that can be used for "A kid doesn't need to use a computer" can be made for the "A kid doesn'r need to write" arguments.
You'll need luck to get a job if you can't wirte! You'll need a luck getting a job if you can't type too. Unless your writing skills don't need to go beyond filling out the application, you're going to need the keyboard skills. Most writing has been or is being moved to computers.
M@
When all the redundant power in an airplane fails, the hydralics and compass will still work. The pilots don't use the compass much whent he much more advanced electirc systems are working. So when the plane is hit but lightning (or something else which takes the power out) the pilot really needs the compass to know which way to go, and just then, every joey on the plane fires up his cell phone and the compass goes haywire.
I'm a private pilot, and I always thought the reason cell phone usage was restricted wasn't interferance (on a clear day, you don't need any electronics in the plane, just spark to the plugs) I thought it was becuase the massivly increased range of the phone screws up the cell to cell protocol.
M@
If I can't do it myself, with my own hardware, I ain't gonna do it. When I need something tweaked on the airport at 3am, my MAC buddy is asleep, beucase he has to get up at 5am and flip burgers.
Of course it may be a nice excuse to add a MAC laptop to the shopping cart... the wife has inquired about "What kind of laptop is that? The screen is so thin..."
M@
Don't believe that suggestion BTW: It's stopid. It was engineered by DeBeers just like the "Suprise Engagement Ring" crap, which they payed to have put into movies. Any intillegent couple, if they sit down and talk about it, will come up with something much better to spend that much money on, like a HOUSE.
M@
I don't know about most college students, but my life savings went to ZERO and kept dropping the second I enrolled at college.
If I had fallen for the DeBeers crap of "Two Months Salary" being spent on a wedding ring, and proposed to my wife in college, I'd end up asking her for money to buy the ring.
M@
Nobody has too much time on their hands. I used to think I knew what that comment meant, but now I tend to classify it in the same bin as the comment "Whatever." A sort of brush off or dismisal from a person who does not understand what is being presented.
I know I'm kind of babeling here, but telling a person who hacks up something like this that "They have too much time on their hands" is a very destructive comment. If I had heard that more when I was younger I would probably be flipping burgers now instead of programming computers. A *LOT* of what computer programmers do early on can be classifed into "too much time on your hands" and if they get that comment too much they might start to resemble it and do something the ignorant person who said it thinks they should do, which usually falls into one of two channels, sports or fashion.
M@
Original post was referring to wallet-size notepad. I'm not condoning the use of a palm for class note taking for excatly many of the reasons you mention.
I'm arguing the palm kicks a wallet-size pad for everything you you would use a wallet-size pad for.
I think taking notes on the palm, or a notebook, still pretty much sucks.
Palm turn on time is pretty much INSTANT. It causes a weekness in that you can only run one app at a time (opening Calander closes the notebook) but it is INSTANT. You cannot see the transition. You don't BOOT a palm. I cannot talk about a WinCE machine.
M@
I am a)sick of hearing this and b)not sure what you mean. How is a notepad more useful? Sure it's more durable, but if you loose it, it's gone as well as any data in it. How much memory can it hold? How many times can you erase it and rewrite it? How long does it take you to find things? Or verify you only have something in there once?
Or are you implying that YOUR pad of paper is more useful to YOU than your FRIENDS pilot? I guess you don't have your friend around alot?
Seriously though, saying a pad of paper is as useful as a palm is getting very old.
M@