No, the point of this article is that no one has done anything useful yet with nanotech on virtually any scale. This may be the first Real World(TM) application of nanotech on a large scale.
The sci-fi books have little bloodwork nanobots, star-trek-like replicators, and other, well, sci-fi uses. The only Real World application I've heard of before this was arrays of nanomirrors on microscopic rotors, and I don't know if that made it past the prototype stage.
This is real work. The army likes to throw money at a technology problem until it is solved. That probably means a real solution will come of this. And that's why this is News for Nerds, etc, and not just another sci-fi proposal.
Army researchers eye nanomachine-based 'smart' paints for combat vehicles
by John Keller
PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. -- U.S. Army experts are trying to embed microscopic electromechanical machines in paint that could detect and heal cracks and corrosion in the bodies of combat vehicles, as well as give vehicles the chameleon-like quality of rapidly altering camouflage to blend in with changing operating environments.
Officials of the Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (TACOM-ARDEC) at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., are working with scientists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, N.J., to develop nanotechnology-based "smart" coatings for Army vehicles and other materiel.
Unlike today's paint coatings on battlefield vehicles, Army experts seek to develop paints with the ability to self-correct because of changing circumstances and tell the user of potential anomalies such as corrosion or adhesion problems.
Today's conventional paints are labor intensive to apply, and potentially hazardous to the people working with them, Army officials say. In addition, most of these coatings need to be touched-up by hand, which can hide damage to the metal or other substrate material.
As a result, Army leaders estimate the total cost for U.S. Department of Defense corrosion-related problems at $10 billion per year -- $2 billion of which is related to painting and paint-scraping operations.
To rectify these problems experts from Picatinny and the New Jersey Institute of Technology plan to develop a prototype paint with nanomachine powders consisting of tiny machines that act as gears, motors, and electronic switches at the atomic level.
These "smart" paints should be able to alert maintenance technicians of potential problems with the coating, in addition to modifying their physical characteristics on command.
These future "smart" coatings will involve far more, however, than simply brushing on paint from a can, points out Joe Agento, program integration manager at the TACOM-ARDEC Industrial Ecology Center at Picatinny Arsenal.
"Rather than paints, we are talking about coatings, which could be electroplated, or put on with physical vapor deposition qualities. We are talking about more things than paints. They could be metallic or have other qualities," Agento says.
"We're trying to prototype a coating to replace the primers and top coats we use today, and develop a one-system coating that incorporates nanomachines within the coating itself," says Laura Battista, environmental engineer at the Industrial Ecology Center.
"Now we are looking at the first stage -- a coating with nanomachines," Battista says. "We want to determine what the nanomachines are that we need; we still have to determine what that nanomachine would be -- switches, motors, or gears -- to allow the coating to change on command."
Vehicle operators might quickly change the camouflage paint scheme on vehicles with "smart" coatings with an electrical impulse, Battista explains. "What we hope this coating can do is amazing. We're also looking at making it seem invisible."
Researchers will begin by determining what the properties of a "smart" coating would be. Later, researchers would develop a prototype, before applying the coating to a tank or other Army vehicle, Battista says.
A prototype "smart" coating may be developed as early as 2005, she says. "Once you already have the properties of the coating, such as the camouflage properties, we hope that changing the camouflage is as simple as changing pixels in the coating; it shouldn't be that difficult," she says.
Assuming that researchers receive the necessary funding, Battista speculates that "smart" coatings might be deployed with active combat forces sometime between 2005 and 2009. Military & Aerospace Electronics October, 2002 Author(s) : John Keller
This points out the absolute absurdity of click-through EULAs. Hopefully, a case against them could be used as a legal defense against other badly-licensed software.
[ First, remember that pesky First Amendment thing that lets us print what we want. Law enforcement couldn't stop the magazine "The Progressive" from printing plans for an atomic bomb in 1979. An exploratory theory of a computer worm is not even in the same league. ]
Next, this is not new news, and not by a long shot. "The Adolescense of P1", a 1977 novel by Thomas Ryan, discusses a worm almost exactly like Curious Yellow. In it, the worm evolves along three lines: a hunger for new nodes, a paranoid fear of detection, and random mutation.
It takes over virtually every IBM computer in the world, which in 1977 was many thousands, and the author even deemed non-IBM computers as statistically irrelevant. Just as Nimda takes over unsuspecting Microsoft IIS Win2K machines, and deems others irrelevant.
The parallels are striking.
(In the novel, the random mutations cause it to develop sentience, at which point it starts reading news articles and tracks down its creator. But that's just where the "fiction" part of science fiction kicked in.)
It was a great read when I was back in high school. It may be dated, but it is prophetic.
I have to go home tonight and dig this out of my bookshelf. I think it now deserves a reread.
That's mostly true, and in general not a bad idea. Typically, consistency is good. Your example of Photoshop isn't a great one, though. Photoshop has one of the worst user interfaces I've ever had the nonpleasure of using. It's so bad I ran to the store to buy Paint Shop Pro. Photoshop may be powerful, the screens may be pretty and/or unique, the filters do what you want, etc., etc., etc., but it's so interface-challenged that it's operationally impossible FOR ME to pick up and run without practice and/or training. It may be fine for the devoted Photoshoppers, but it was not fine for me, and I suspect not for the average casual user. (And I'm not interested in a flamewar or Photoshop usage tips. I switched to the Gimp first but it's missing quite a few features I need. So I bought Paint Shop Pro and I now use it instead.)
But again, the original question was not "how should my UI look" but "how should I architect my complex GUI application?" A previous poster mentioned Observers and Adapters, which I think is the best way to go with a multiple viewpoint app like his. I'd work to make this division occur at the highest level possible. I'd have Observers "register" with the viewed object requesting updates only when it changes. And I'd want this separation be so wide that it would even be possible to have the Observers running in a different process, or even connected via sockets from a different machine.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
The main picture logos or favicons are terrific. They look like either a raptor claw or Klingon Empire logo. I'm not sure if their intent was to have a hand "offering" you a dot or if it was to have a hand "grabbing" a dot (as in "I got Dot"?) Either way, the net result is that they both look like a hand that is going to crush the dot.
Better, if you picture the "dot" as a "globe" instead, it looks like the logo a Bond villain might use. Perhaps this is their prerelease logo slated for the planet Mars?
(At least you'll be able to get these images out without waiting for the slashdotted IIS servers to completely recover. And how do we know they're slashdotted, anyway? Perhaps there's a run of VB.Net coders out there hammering away at it?)
The basic principle of the geographic profiling is that a human predator hunts in an area where they have a comfort level (they know the neighbourhood) but not so close as to implicate their lair.
I wonder if that means the bad guy is shooting victims in some of his old haunts? It's not like the D.C. police (or even the FBI) knows everyone's past lives, but if there's a person watching the news who says to himself, "Joe and I went to that school when we were growing up! And hey, that lady was shot at the gas station where Joe used to work..."
I would suspect that's what they're hoping for with publicising geoprofiling. If this can get a friend or neighbor to tip them, it worked.
I think BWJones profile looks very insightful. The guy just "feels" more Columbine than military. Making mistakes like leaving a shell casing are day-one kind of errors, and if the guy is ex-military, I'd think he'd be trying to take pride in his work and training. That'd mean a clean scene, and definite-kill shots, not abdomen shots.
And why would you assume "no scope"? This whole thing sounds like a guy with a hunting rifle, and scopes there are as common as mosquitos. If he's shooting from a vehicular blind (as I guessed above) then he's also got the advantage of a pre-set-up steady rest. Of course, having the police find a shell casing doesn't fit the vehicular blind theory now, does it? Damn.
I think the only advantage the police have here is that they know what kind of gun the guy is shooting; and if it's a bolt-action.223 then he'll be easier to take alive. And they want him alive. They'll need a trial and a conviction to make the community feel safe again.
Everybody within 100 miles of Washington D.C. is so paranoid right now that if anyone heard a balloon pop you'd have phone calls pouring into 911 so fast it'd make a Slashdotting seem like a walk in the park.
The guy has to be silencing it somehow. My guess is he's shooting from inside a vehicle, out a small port cut out for the purpose. I think he's using his vehicle as a silencer.
And my vote for punishment (as if anyone had asked?) Life in a solitary cell, bright white light 24 hours/day, white noise pumped in, food and toilet paper served via conveyor belt, no human contact, no human voices. For the next 80 years.
I never thought I'd give up carrying a Swiss Army Knife, but I bought a Leatherman Wave a few years ago and it's just the greatest. I wear it on my belt everywhere, and use it all the time.
(Helpful hint: if you have trouble opening the side with the three tools that include the phillips screwdriver, try keeping it in the case with the lanyard eye sticking out. There's enough friction that you can just slide the eye back and it'll pull out the inner tools.)
I don't recommend the older leatherman tools or any of the clones. The handles on the Wave are designed to let you really grip the pliers comfortably. The new blade lock mechanisms are very positive, I've never accidentally opened one or accidentally not-locked one, but they're easy to unlock when you need to. The only tool I miss from my Swiss Army knives of the past is the pair of tweezers.
Other miscellaneous tools I have in my desk that have proven handy:
Four or five little kits of jeweller's screwdrivers. They tend to get lost and/or tips get twisted, and the little kits are cheap enough to just have a few laying around to loan out to people. Sometimes they don't come back.
A pair of tweezers. Were you paying attention?
A spool of wirewrap wire, a wirewrapping tool, and a handful of miniature DPDT switches. They're great for making switch-operated "broken hardware" testing setups that you can "fix" again with the flip of a switch.
Screwdriver handle with a set of interchangable bits, including Torx bits.
1/4" and 3/16" nut drivers
A hand-operated drill (kind of like a manual egg beater, and has four drill bits stored on the shaft.) Makes for nicer looking cube mods, and nobody can hear it.
A bunch of paper clips are nice, but invest in a quality set of lockpicks.
A flashlight. The backs of PCs under desks is too dark to see the difference between "line in / mic in / line out / speaker out" on the back of a sound card; or between the "phone" and "jack" on the back of a modem card.
A soldering iron and heat shrink tubing make for nice looking cable repairs. And a voltmeter helps pin them out.
Several Altoids tins of random tiny screws, recovered from disk drives and PC cases over the years.
Hmm... a lot of the cable repair stuff is from a time long ago when I did a lot more RS-232 work with peripherals. If you don't deal with peripherals, that gear may end up going unused.
Good advice. That's how spies have done it since the advent of the portable camera.
The old "spy" instructions I've seen for taking surrepetitious photos of documents suggests stacking two columns of books up to the focal distance of the camera was set to, and then suspending the camera between the columns by taping it to a pair of wooden rulers. Arrange a pair of desk lamps between the stacks to dump as much light as possible on the document. Snap, turn page, snap, turn page, repeat until done or caught.
Rather than the book columns (which were easy for a spy to come by without having to carry anything more than a tiny Minox) you could bring an ordinary camera tripod. This is a library, after all. I have a tripod that has a removable center column that works perfectly for copying documents. I pull the center column out the top and reinsert it into the bottom of the tripod's head, hanging the camera down below the tripod head and between the legs. It's a great copy stand, as there are no leg shadows. You still need to provide the light, as a photoflash will not go over well in a typical library.
Re:Of course they're an environmental hazard.
on
Discarded Cell Phones
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Would you like to hazard a guess as to which cell phone "stuff" is NOT used by a computer? Here's the complete list:
antenna
For those unfamiliar with "antennae", they consist of a length of hazardous stuff called "wire". Quite possibly the most hazardous part of a cell phone, especially when shoved forcefully into the ear.
I see that those of you who don't have all your kids yet might be concerned.... Perhaps some pseudoscience will allay your fears.
The problem with the antenna by the head is that 1/2 the wavelength of 928MHz is 161cm, or 6.3 inches, fairly close to the diameter of the interior of the skull, making the brain case a resonance cavity.
Now, if we moved the phone to the... uhm... belt, then a full wavelength antenna would be 12.6 inches. Perhaps the best advice I can give you is you may not want to make a phone call if your antenna is fully extended.
Oh, absolutely, convergent devices are the right answer for the right user. I guess I wasn't clear in explaining that it's my personal usage and my personal judgement that finds single devices are too awkward.
Anyway, the Treo's screen is still substantially smaller than my Visor's. If I'm using a handheld, I want as much screen as I can get for no more than about 5.5 oz. I like the Unix idea of one thing doing one job well: a phone for communicating and a PDA for PDAing, and if one needs the other then they establish a pipe between them. With Bluetooth (or at least the promise of Bluetooth) the handheld will be able to use the phone in my pocket without my having to touch that other device. And with the Bluetooth headset, I may never have to handle the phone ever. It'll just be a communications base-camp hanging from my belt, which I think would be the ideal peripheral. It'd even get those nasty 926MHz waves away from my cranium:-)
For years, first as a Palm owner then as a Visor owner, I wanted a combination device so I wouldn't have to carry two different things on me.
Then I got to trying some of the available combo devices, such as the QualComm PDQ, the VisorPhone and the Kyocera. None were good enough at both tasks for me to ever want to use one again.
The screens are way too small on the dedicated phones. The PDQ was a great innovator, and a damn fine doorstop. The bolt-on radio made the Visor too big and heavy to fit comfortably in a pocket, and the speaking position is surprisingly clumsy. The Kyocera is just a very large phone with a very tiny PDA.
I've finally come to recognize that they are two different devices used for different purposes that have an occasional need for convergence. Any hardware combination is going to be a compromise that makes the usability of both suffer. I think the best answer now is going to be bluetooth communications between two separate devices. Bluetooth will also come in handy with future consumer controls (think TV remotes that don't rely on an under powered IR or a cordless phone base that talks to your cell phone's earpiece, etc.,) so it has the potential to be used much more widely than just pocket to earpiece communicatons.
Let's just say that the news of this device is two years late and mostly underwhelming.
Once upon a time, way back in high school, I used to think that someday I'd be working for General Instruments coming up with the next revolutionary chip. (Yes, that's a clue to my age.)
But I grew up. My field is now software. If they build it, I will come; but I can't build it myself anymore. I can barely hold up one end of a conversation regarding the damage static electricity might do to a chip.
Don't get me wrong: I can read the article and appreciate the difficulties the engineers will go through in trying to solve their problems. But I can't solve this problem. I already have a day job, and coming up with crack ideas for chip fabricating isn't it. I know that.
And I'm not alone. You don't think Gordon Moore is still in the lab saying, "well, if you developed a laser that operated in the X-ray spectrum, you could touch-up etch some smaller pathways to optimize the register pipeline", do you? News flash: his job is in the board room, promising shareholders that Intel's gonna make money this year, really, because they have great scientists who are on the verge of making a.08 micron breakthrough in three years.
So get off your high keyboard. Either go work for a chip fabricator and do it yourself, or understand your own limitations. But don't tell me that my reading an article and rubbing a couple dusty old neurons together is going to come up with Intel's next big breakthrough. I just trust that by my offering them enough money for faster chips that they'll be pressured into developing something better than they have today.
C'mon, people. It's like the corollary to Moore's Law: Every eighteen months, someone has to publish an article why Moore's law will halt the progress of processor development in the next eighteen months.
I remember reading once why they'd never be able to break the 25MHz barrier. And another bemoaning the fact that we'd never be able to produce submicron traces.
While I know it won't be me, there will be some clever person somewhere who will wave their magic wand (figuratively) and dissipate static electricity problems. I refuse to believe that the market will let manufacturers STOP hunting for solutions.
Agreed that it might be problematic to sync so many devices, but what are the other options? I will not keep my personal data on a public server.
I suppose if I ran a personal server then the initial training of these mobile devices would consist of just passing out the URL to my server. That would assume the receiving device could find some IP path home to pull the full sync. I don't relish the thought of having to run and maintain a full, secure copy of Apache or IIS just to host a sync server. Again, I don't know what else will work easily and safely.
Cell phones and other wireless devices will have other costs, namely money and time. Let's say that it costs somewhere around $.04/kb to send data over GPRS. My address book in Palm format is near 250KB, or about $5.00 of charges and around two minutes of time at 19.2. And that's without expanding it to vcard format for the transmission. Deltas, of course, are small but still will take time and money, although I'd be more likely to do that in a pinch.
I'd definitely want the option to sync it via IR to my Palm, with a USB/Firewire cable or cradle, inserting a GSM smart card or via Bluetooth. Only one or two of those is likely to be directly to my desktop. The others will have to flow through an intermediary. And when I'm out in the field, I don't want to be punching data into my phone via the numeric keypad when I could be syncing to my iPod.
So I see a need for the ubiquitous exchange of data, where every machine understands syncing and can do it unobtrusively and cheaply. (Of course AT&T, Sprint and Verizon have no desire to promote unpaid transfer of data, but it's Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola that count.)
In order to achieve the service you're looking for, you're saying all programs and devices will need to implement some common "standard universal interface" to this kind of data, be it XML or whatever. Your proposal is for a Central Repository Server, which is the stated goal of Microsoft's Passport or.NET services.
A better solution than storing it on someone else's server would be to make the interface synchronizable between platforms.
I'd keep a copy on my work desktop. I'd sync my home PC and my work PC over the internet (using VPN or SSL, of course.) I'd HotSync it to my PalmOS device. My Palm could Bluetooth it to my phone. My phone could GPRS it to my car's phone. My wife could sync the "Family" category on her Palm to the "Family" category on my Visor.
PalmOS does this sort of thing now with the HotSync program, but only in the limited "Handheld -- Palm Desktop -- Outlook" chain. With a robust protocol (almost certainly XML) and a strong standards committee this should not be an insurmountable task.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever hear of DARPA? Ever use any of their inventions? (Hint: think Al Gore.)
The sci-fi books have little bloodwork nanobots, star-trek-like replicators, and other, well, sci-fi uses. The only Real World application I've heard of before this was arrays of nanomirrors on microscopic rotors, and I don't know if that made it past the prototype stage.
This is real work. The army likes to throw money at a technology problem until it is solved. That probably means a real solution will come of this. And that's why this is News for Nerds, etc, and not just another sci-fi proposal.
Army researchers eye nanomachine-based 'smart' paints for combat vehicles
by John Keller
PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. -- U.S. Army experts are trying to embed microscopic electromechanical machines in paint that could detect and heal cracks and corrosion in the bodies of combat vehicles, as well as give vehicles the chameleon-like quality of rapidly altering camouflage to blend in with changing operating environments.
Officials of the Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (TACOM-ARDEC) at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., are working with scientists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, N.J., to develop nanotechnology-based "smart" coatings for Army vehicles and other materiel.
Unlike today's paint coatings on battlefield vehicles, Army experts seek to develop paints with the ability to self-correct because of changing circumstances and tell the user of potential anomalies such as corrosion or adhesion problems.
Today's conventional paints are labor intensive to apply, and potentially hazardous to the people working with them, Army officials say. In addition, most of these coatings need to be touched-up by hand, which can hide damage to the metal or other substrate material.
As a result, Army leaders estimate the total cost for U.S. Department of Defense corrosion-related problems at $10 billion per year -- $2 billion of which is related to painting and paint-scraping operations.
To rectify these problems experts from Picatinny and the New Jersey Institute of Technology plan to develop a prototype paint with nanomachine powders consisting of tiny machines that act as gears, motors, and electronic switches at the atomic level.
These "smart" paints should be able to alert maintenance technicians of potential problems with the coating, in addition to modifying their physical characteristics on command.
These future "smart" coatings will involve far more, however, than simply brushing on paint from a can, points out Joe Agento, program integration manager at the TACOM-ARDEC Industrial Ecology Center at Picatinny Arsenal.
"Rather than paints, we are talking about coatings, which could be electroplated, or put on with physical vapor deposition qualities. We are talking about more things than paints. They could be metallic or have other qualities," Agento says.
"We're trying to prototype a coating to replace the primers and top coats we use today, and develop a one-system coating that incorporates nanomachines within the coating itself," says Laura Battista, environmental engineer at the Industrial Ecology Center.
"Now we are looking at the first stage -- a coating with nanomachines," Battista says. "We want to determine what the nanomachines are that we need; we still have to determine what that nanomachine would be -- switches, motors, or gears -- to allow the coating to change on command."
Vehicle operators might quickly change the camouflage paint scheme on vehicles with "smart" coatings with an electrical impulse, Battista explains. "What we hope this coating can do is amazing. We're also looking at making it seem invisible."
Researchers will begin by determining what the properties of a "smart" coating would be. Later, researchers would develop a prototype, before applying the coating to a tank or other Army vehicle, Battista says.
A prototype "smart" coating may be developed as early as 2005, she says. "Once you already have the properties of the coating, such as the camouflage properties, we hope that changing the camouflage is as simple as changing pixels in the coating; it shouldn't be that difficult," she says.
Assuming that researchers receive the necessary funding, Battista speculates that "smart" coatings might be deployed with active combat forces sometime between 2005 and 2009.
Military & Aerospace Electronics October, 2002
Author(s) : John Keller
This points out the absolute absurdity of click-through EULAs. Hopefully, a case against them could be used as a legal defense against other badly-licensed software.
Next, this is not new news, and not by a long shot. "The Adolescense of P1", a 1977 novel by Thomas Ryan, discusses a worm almost exactly like Curious Yellow. In it, the worm evolves along three lines: a hunger for new nodes, a paranoid fear of detection, and random mutation.
It takes over virtually every IBM computer in the world, which in 1977 was many thousands, and the author even deemed non-IBM computers as statistically irrelevant. Just as Nimda takes over unsuspecting Microsoft IIS Win2K machines, and deems others irrelevant.
The parallels are striking.
(In the novel, the random mutations cause it to develop sentience, at which point it starts reading news articles and tracks down its creator. But that's just where the "fiction" part of science fiction kicked in.)
It was a great read when I was back in high school. It may be dated, but it is prophetic.
I have to go home tonight and dig this out of my bookshelf. I think it now deserves a reread.
But again, the original question was not "how should my UI look" but "how should I architect my complex GUI application?" A previous poster mentioned Observers and Adapters, which I think is the best way to go with a multiple viewpoint app like his. I'd work to make this division occur at the highest level possible. I'd have Observers "register" with the viewed object requesting updates only when it changes. And I'd want this separation be so wide that it would even be possible to have the Observers running in a different process, or even connected via sockets from a different machine.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Better, if you picture the "dot" as a "globe" instead, it looks like the logo a Bond villain might use. Perhaps this is their prerelease logo slated for the planet Mars?
(At least you'll be able to get these images out without waiting for the slashdotted IIS servers to completely recover. And how do we know they're slashdotted, anyway? Perhaps there's a run of VB.Net coders out there hammering away at it?)
youlove PostScript eq {honk} if
And yes, I wrote it in PostScript.
I wonder if that means the bad guy is shooting victims in some of his old haunts? It's not like the D.C. police (or even the FBI) knows everyone's past lives, but if there's a person watching the news who says to himself, "Joe and I went to that school when we were growing up! And hey, that lady was shot at the gas station where Joe used to work..."
I would suspect that's what they're hoping for with publicising geoprofiling. If this can get a friend or neighbor to tip them, it worked.
And why would you assume "no scope"? This whole thing sounds like a guy with a hunting rifle, and scopes there are as common as mosquitos. If he's shooting from a vehicular blind (as I guessed above) then he's also got the advantage of a pre-set-up steady rest. Of course, having the police find a shell casing doesn't fit the vehicular blind theory now, does it? Damn.
I think the only advantage the police have here is that they know what kind of gun the guy is shooting; and if it's a bolt-action .223 then he'll be easier to take alive. And they want him alive. They'll need a trial and a conviction to make the community feel safe again.
The guy has to be silencing it somehow. My guess is he's shooting from inside a vehicle, out a small port cut out for the purpose. I think he's using his vehicle as a silencer.
And my vote for punishment (as if anyone had asked?) Life in a solitary cell, bright white light 24 hours/day, white noise pumped in, food and toilet paper served via conveyor belt, no human contact, no human voices. For the next 80 years.
(Helpful hint: if you have trouble opening the side with the three tools that include the phillips screwdriver, try keeping it in the case with the lanyard eye sticking out. There's enough friction that you can just slide the eye back and it'll pull out the inner tools.)
I don't recommend the older leatherman tools or any of the clones. The handles on the Wave are designed to let you really grip the pliers comfortably. The new blade lock mechanisms are very positive, I've never accidentally opened one or accidentally not-locked one, but they're easy to unlock when you need to. The only tool I miss from my Swiss Army knives of the past is the pair of tweezers.
Other miscellaneous tools I have in my desk that have proven handy:
-
Four or five little kits of jeweller's screwdrivers. They tend to get lost and/or tips get twisted, and the little kits are cheap enough to just have a few laying around to loan out to people. Sometimes they don't come back.
-
A pair of tweezers. Were you paying attention?
-
A spool of wirewrap wire, a wirewrapping tool, and a handful of miniature DPDT switches. They're great for making switch-operated "broken hardware" testing setups that you can "fix" again with the flip of a switch.
-
Screwdriver handle with a set of interchangable bits, including Torx bits.
-
1/4" and 3/16" nut drivers
-
A hand-operated drill (kind of like a manual egg beater, and has four drill bits stored on the shaft.) Makes for nicer looking cube mods, and nobody can hear it.
-
A bunch of paper clips are nice, but invest in a quality set of lockpicks.
-
A flashlight. The backs of PCs under desks is too dark to see the difference between "line in / mic in / line out / speaker out" on the back of a sound card; or between the "phone" and "jack" on the back of a modem card.
-
A soldering iron and heat shrink tubing make for nice looking cable repairs. And a voltmeter helps pin them out.
-
Several Altoids tins of random tiny screws, recovered from disk drives and PC cases over the years.
Hmm... a lot of the cable repair stuff is from a time long ago when I did a lot more RS-232 work with peripherals. If you don't deal with peripherals, that gear may end up going unused.The old "spy" instructions I've seen for taking surrepetitious photos of documents suggests stacking two columns of books up to the focal distance of the camera was set to, and then suspending the camera between the columns by taping it to a pair of wooden rulers. Arrange a pair of desk lamps between the stacks to dump as much light as possible on the document. Snap, turn page, snap, turn page, repeat until done or caught.
Rather than the book columns (which were easy for a spy to come by without having to carry anything more than a tiny Minox) you could bring an ordinary camera tripod. This is a library, after all. I have a tripod that has a removable center column that works perfectly for copying documents. I pull the center column out the top and reinsert it into the bottom of the tripod's head, hanging the camera down below the tripod head and between the legs. It's a great copy stand, as there are no leg shadows. You still need to provide the light, as a photoflash will not go over well in a typical library.
For those unfamiliar with "antennae", they consist of a length of hazardous stuff called "wire". Quite possibly the most hazardous part of a cell phone, especially when shoved forcefully into the ear.
The problem with the antenna by the head is that 1/2 the wavelength of 928MHz is 161cm, or 6.3 inches, fairly close to the diameter of the interior of the skull, making the brain case a resonance cavity.
Now, if we moved the phone to the ... uhm ... belt, then a full wavelength antenna would be 12.6 inches. Perhaps the best advice I can give you is you may not want to make a phone call if your antenna is fully extended.
Anyway, the Treo's screen is still substantially smaller than my Visor's. If I'm using a handheld, I want as much screen as I can get for no more than about 5.5 oz. I like the Unix idea of one thing doing one job well: a phone for communicating and a PDA for PDAing, and if one needs the other then they establish a pipe between them. With Bluetooth (or at least the promise of Bluetooth) the handheld will be able to use the phone in my pocket without my having to touch that other device. And with the Bluetooth headset, I may never have to handle the phone ever. It'll just be a communications base-camp hanging from my belt, which I think would be the ideal peripheral. It'd even get those nasty 926MHz waves away from my cranium :-)
Then I got to trying some of the available combo devices, such as the QualComm PDQ, the VisorPhone and the Kyocera. None were good enough at both tasks for me to ever want to use one again.
The screens are way too small on the dedicated phones. The PDQ was a great innovator, and a damn fine doorstop. The bolt-on radio made the Visor too big and heavy to fit comfortably in a pocket, and the speaking position is surprisingly clumsy. The Kyocera is just a very large phone with a very tiny PDA.
I've finally come to recognize that they are two different devices used for different purposes that have an occasional need for convergence. Any hardware combination is going to be a compromise that makes the usability of both suffer. I think the best answer now is going to be bluetooth communications between two separate devices. Bluetooth will also come in handy with future consumer controls (think TV remotes that don't rely on an under powered IR or a cordless phone base that talks to your cell phone's earpiece, etc.,) so it has the potential to be used much more widely than just pocket to earpiece communicatons.
Let's just say that the news of this device is two years late and mostly underwhelming.
Once upon a time, way back in high school, I used to think that someday I'd be working for General Instruments coming up with the next revolutionary chip. (Yes, that's a clue to my age.)
But I grew up. My field is now software. If they build it, I will come; but I can't build it myself anymore. I can barely hold up one end of a conversation regarding the damage static electricity might do to a chip.
Don't get me wrong: I can read the article and appreciate the difficulties the engineers will go through in trying to solve their problems. But I can't solve this problem. I already have a day job, and coming up with crack ideas for chip fabricating isn't it. I know that.
And I'm not alone. You don't think Gordon Moore is still in the lab saying, "well, if you developed a laser that operated in the X-ray spectrum, you could touch-up etch some smaller pathways to optimize the register pipeline", do you? News flash: his job is in the board room, promising shareholders that Intel's gonna make money this year, really, because they have great scientists who are on the verge of making a .08 micron breakthrough in three years.
So get off your high keyboard. Either go work for a chip fabricator and do it yourself, or understand your own limitations. But don't tell me that my reading an article and rubbing a couple dusty old neurons together is going to come up with Intel's next big breakthrough. I just trust that by my offering them enough money for faster chips that they'll be pressured into developing something better than they have today.
I remember reading once why they'd never be able to break the 25MHz barrier. And another bemoaning the fact that we'd never be able to produce submicron traces.
While I know it won't be me, there will be some clever person somewhere who will wave their magic wand (figuratively) and dissipate static electricity problems. I refuse to believe that the market will let manufacturers STOP hunting for solutions.
#2 By sodatwit (6 Posts) at 9/25/2002 5:29:18 AM
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When their editors mod you down, they mod you all the way down.
Yeah, he'll sell you a pair, but he has to include the pattern he used to make them.
The resolution was syncml.org, a protocol and spec for universal syncing of data. I bet bookmarks are in there if you look hard enough.
Cell phones and other wireless devices will have other costs, namely money and time. Let's say that it costs somewhere around $.04/kb to send data over GPRS. My address book in Palm format is near 250KB, or about $5.00 of charges and around two minutes of time at 19.2. And that's without expanding it to vcard format for the transmission. Deltas, of course, are small but still will take time and money, although I'd be more likely to do that in a pinch.
I'd definitely want the option to sync it via IR to my Palm, with a USB/Firewire cable or cradle, inserting a GSM smart card or via Bluetooth. Only one or two of those is likely to be directly to my desktop. The others will have to flow through an intermediary. And when I'm out in the field, I don't want to be punching data into my phone via the numeric keypad when I could be syncing to my iPod.
So I see a need for the ubiquitous exchange of data, where every machine understands syncing and can do it unobtrusively and cheaply. (Of course AT&T, Sprint and Verizon have no desire to promote unpaid transfer of data, but it's Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola that count.)
And now that you mention it, that must be how my phone SMSs "calendar" events around.
Thanks for the link!
A better solution than storing it on someone else's server would be to make the interface synchronizable between platforms.
I'd keep a copy on my work desktop. I'd sync my home PC and my work PC over the internet (using VPN or SSL, of course.) I'd HotSync it to my PalmOS device. My Palm could Bluetooth it to my phone. My phone could GPRS it to my car's phone. My wife could sync the "Family" category on her Palm to the "Family" category on my Visor.
PalmOS does this sort of thing now with the HotSync program, but only in the limited "Handheld -- Palm Desktop -- Outlook" chain. With a robust protocol (almost certainly XML) and a strong standards committee this should not be an insurmountable task.