Now, thanks to this new technology, Clippy can appear and say "It looks like I'm pissing you off! What can I do to help?"
Then your reaction might cause Clippy to dial 9-1-1 (or the local equivalent for non-US versions) for you so an ambulance can be on the way already to deal with the aneurysm you are about to have in 3... 2...
But when you pass out and your nose lands on the "F" key, he'll turn off autorepeat for you so if you survive the experience your document will be waiting for you when you get back from the hospital. Maybe not so much in the American version, here he'll just check your insurance status and put your car and house up on eBay so you can afford the downpayment on your medical bills.
Someone needs to contact Google, they'll provide a shitload of funding for something like this, as long as they can get some of the images to run through some sort of facial expression analysis.
Not only will they know the sites you are visiting, but they'll get an idea of how interested you are in each individual product you see, and whether you glance at their ads.
No, you bring some properly-powered lights to illuminate the area around you so you can film it, like you do any dark place. Very much like, y'know, filming at night.
Seven miles of depth doesn't impart some magical light-blocking properties to water. It's just dark. So you bring lights. Cameron's a filmmaker, I think he's got the whole "proper illumination" thing figured out.
PS: We've already got photos and video from Challenger Deep, the X-Prize is to send a MANNED mission there.
Don't worry. The descent is a risky venture. There's a very good chance the submarine will fail at depth, costing Cameron his life and the world the opportunity to see a sequel.
Not that I personally wish Cameron any harm, of course.
Ideally, the submarine will fail at a very survivable depth on the way down (or on the way back up, but in such a way that the footage is destroyed), he'll resurface unharmed, and he'll take that as a sign from [insert_deity_or_external_force_here] that Avatar, like Terminator and Alien and The Matrix, is a movie that should never, ever, ever have a sequel.
I'm sure NoScript will (if it isn't already) add detection of content types, and anything it considers "executable" in any form will need to get the whitelist treatment. There's already protection for a lot of things other than JavaScript.
Eventually, NoScript will probably have to have a whitelist for tags. <b> and <img> are OK by default, <video> might need whitelisting for a specific site, or you whitelist the whole site, or you whitelist the tag across all sites.
Our company uses RSA SecureID units on our VPN, and I've used them in the past for other companies.
In our case, you don't actually enter a PIN into the unit - it displays a 6-digit number that changes every 60 seconds, and that number is part of your password (but not all of it - you have an 8-character code you have to choose yourself that forms the other part of your password). The main computer at work uses the same algorithm as the SecureID card to rotate numbers, so the password is always changing but always in sync.
I've never heard of an RSA unit that actually has you key in a PIN to access the rotating code. Generally the PIN is presented as part of the password along with the rotating code. Seems to me that putting a keyboard on those things would make them less portable, less durable, and more subject to hackery (if you enter the wrong PIN, does the system simply show a random number, or is it possible to "hack" the card by entering PINs until you see a number display, for example?). But that may either be a very different or much older RSA system.
In 2009, Texas has passed a new law (SB129) allowing them to drive 35 mph on 45 mph roads;
So now we have a new class of car that is limited to a speed limit 10MPH lower than everyone else using the same road?
Speeders are dangerous enough, but differential speed with no safe passing provision is almost a guarantee of accidents. Cars have a very high differential speed compared to, say, bicycles, but bicycles rarely take up enough of the road that you can't pass safely within a minute or so, so the vast majority will wait until they can pass safely (they can see a little distance and generally don't pass with oncoming traffic, and slide over and use part of the opposite lane to pass safely).
Put a car doing 10MPH under the normal speed limit and who takes up an entire lane on a 2-lane road with few passing lanes, and you'll get a much different result. Put a bunch of them out there and you'll probably have a problem.
It may be safer, but it can't be sold in the US as a production automobile because it would be considered a "car", and all production cars in the US have to have at least dual second-generation airbags (among other things that motorcycles do not require).
Motorcycles may be "less safe", but they don't require the same safety equipment as a car because they are a different class of vehicle.
They may be able to sell them as a "kit" or something, if they intend selling them without an airbag. I don't know if you could ever get it certified for road use, though.
Yes, it would result in the creation of two Ford Fiestas.
Re:Halo is About Multi-Player
on
Review: Halo: Reach
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you want a game you can enjoy 25 years from now, the single player mode is important.
Yes, but also if you want a game you can enjoy 25 years from now, you'd better buy 10 of whatever runs it and hope to hell that one of them lasts 25 years. Most video games released in 1985 years ago were arcade games. Sure, you could have bought "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?" for DOS on an 80286 that year, but only on 5 1/4" floppy, and I'm not sure if you could successfully emulate DOS 3.1 on an 80286 using modern hardware very well. I don't know about you, but my last 80286 didn't make it to 1990. Neither did my TI 99/4A or my Apple IIe.
I have books that I've owned for more than 25 years and still enjoy. I don't even have the hardware to run the games I bought 25 years ago.
Could still be useful for loading maps. Who says the two network connections need to be mutually exclusive? Isn't that why you have a QoS flag system in TCP/IP in the first place?
Map loads: High bandwidth desired, high latency acceptable. "Differentiated/Best Effort" chosen. Routing engine chooses pigeon. Gaming: Low bandwidth desired, low latency acceptable. "Guaranteed" chosen. Routing engine chooses standard broadband. Email in the background: Low bandwidth desired, high latency acceptable. "Differentiated/Priority" chosen. Routing engine uses connection with the most free capacity at the time.
Please explain in more detail how a 747 full of DVDs would cause pants to be removed by the application of vegetables. Does it require a specific species of beet? Can this technology be more widely applied to removing pants from things other than fibre?
As a father, should I be concerned if my daughter's date shows up driving a 747 full of DVDs?
Personally, for FREE software, I'd be happy just to get the damned bug acknowledged and fixed in a jiffy, and maybe have my name in lights for doing the legwork. Any payment should be considered a rather nice bonus.
No matter how small or insulting it is, it's still 100% more than Microsoft pays for bug reports, and Microsoft's release schedule on the fixes is downright glacial compared to Google or Firefox. Assuming they don't outright ignore you or threaten to sue you for violating the EULA.
I'm a rightie, and I find myself doing the same thing most of the time. I find that using my left hand to mouse also frees my right hand up for the keyboard (enter, backspace, etc) when necessary and I can mouse and use the numeric keypad on my computer at the same time which is occasionally handy.
At home, my wife is just used to the mouse on the right, so I go with that.
The nice part is that it evens out the wear on my wrists.
You know, I'm no Apple apologist or even a fan, but you'd think if they wanted to do this they'd have done it in the last few versions of the iPhone. Instead, they've improved the hardware and added more features to get their cash cows mooing happily and buying the very latest version of overpriced (IMHO!) Apple sexiness.
To be fair to Apple, my Blackberry hasn't had an OS update in well over a year now - the highest my Blackberry will support is 4.5, and there are no plans whatsoever to allow my 2-year-old 8310 to run OS5 or 6. It's a dead end as far as Blackberry is concerned.
Meanwhile, my iPod Touch Generation 2 (contest prize) is happily running iOS 4.1, which was released this month. Yes, I paid the iOS 3 $10 tithe, but iOS 4 was free. At least Apple gave me the opportunity to upgrade the OS.
Apple and Blackberry have obviously added new features and gewgaws and whatnot to their product lines (personally, I'm drooling over the Torch, and I'm SO ready to drop my EDGE-only unit for something with 3G, tethering on EDGE is excruciatingly slow when trying to solve a work problem).
But despite my obvious Blackberry fanboi-ism, I will give Apple credit where credit is due - if you're willing to put up with "last generation" hardware, they are at least putting some effort into keeping it running fairly well, and by and large either not charging for it or charging very reasonable prices when they do charge. An iPhone-totin' friend of mine bought an iPhone 4 for himself and his old 3GS shifted to his wife and her 3G shifted to their kid. All three phones run iOS 4 and (other than obvious hardware limitations) can perform the same functions.
Blackberry? Not so much. You might get one or two "point release" OS upgrades in the first year or so, then you're expected to buy new hardware if you want new features, even software features.
I'm not disputing your 2% number, because I don't have any other numbers to dispute it with. But not all computers are new computers.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but I personally know of a handful computers that are running Linux. They probably did come out of Big Box Retailer, but almost a decade ago. They won't run Windows any more (at least not a flavor that will work in today's world), but they are all perfectly happy with a lightweight window manager running under Linux, and can run the latest Firefox quite happily. Their owners, who can't afford a new computer, were grateful to get the results of my dumpster-diving, reformatting, and refurbishing. It costs me (and them) nothing.
"New Computers Sold" obviously would show a massively overwhelming preponderance toward Windows, obviously. But Linux is incredibly useful for slightly older hardware for people on a tight budget. There's a good bit of hardware that would have once had a one-way trip to dumpsterville that is now making a long stop at Linux Station along the way and getting a few more useful years of life.
I agree that 10% seems rather, well, "overly optimistic". My gut tells me it's higher than 2%, though.
To be fair, my gut tells me the two cheeseburgers I had for lunch were just what I needed, so it lies to me sometimes.
I was looking at it and thinking the same thing. The hinge on the T91 is bigger and beefier.
On the other hand, the T91 has a lot more complex a hinge system, and it does a relatively poor job of containing the forces necessary to switch from one mode to another. They combined a single spindle and a hinge into one unit that can't be terribly effective at either, then overdesigned the crap out of it to compensate. Imagine being halfway through the conversion and having something bump into the top of the screen - you'd almost certainly snap it off.
Dell's design is pretty clever. By putting dual spindles on either side of the screen and keeping that mechanism contained in a frame and separate from the hinge, they've significantly reduced the complexity of the motion and made it less likely a user will twist it off or break components by mistake. The actual open/close hinge system looks like it has the standard two attachment points and is a simple netbook-style hinge that should be able to take some use , and the screen itself is held in place at two opposing points by simple spindles.
So instead of one single pivot about which two axes of motion and force are applied, Dell has designed a system that handles each axis separately, using two attachment points for each motion. So the motions are more controlled, and it's harder to apply force in the "wrong direction" and break something. The Dell doesn't need to be overdesigned to hold together, so you can probably build 'em cheaper and keep 'em lighter, and still have a pretty solid machine.
All in all, it's an impressive improvement in the mechanical design of a convertible tablet.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, Moss.
Not necessarily. Pedants are frequently incorrect.
Of course, since I'm being pedantic at this very moment, there's probably a good chance I'm wrong.
And then your facial expression at the moment of orgasm will be for sale a few seconds later.
Kinda like those roller coaster cameras.
Except in this case it's $1 for a copy, $10,000 for a copy that includes not posting it with the picture that "inspired" it to your Facebook wall.
They'll announce it a few years from now, codename "Terrifying Tantalus"
glares at MS Word
Now, thanks to this new technology, Clippy can appear and say "It looks like I'm pissing you off! What can I do to help?"
Then your reaction might cause Clippy to dial 9-1-1 (or the local equivalent for non-US versions) for you so an ambulance can be on the way already to deal with the aneurysm you are about to have in 3... 2...
But when you pass out and your nose lands on the "F" key, he'll turn off autorepeat for you so if you survive the experience your document will be waiting for you when you get back from the hospital. Maybe not so much in the American version, here he'll just check your insurance status and put your car and house up on eBay so you can afford the downpayment on your medical bills.
I always feel like... Ubuntu's watching me!
Someone needs to contact Google, they'll provide a shitload of funding for something like this, as long as they can get some of the images to run through some sort of facial expression analysis.
Not only will they know the sites you are visiting, but they'll get an idea of how interested you are in each individual product you see, and whether you glance at their ads.
No, you bring some properly-powered lights to illuminate the area around you so you can film it, like you do any dark place. Very much like, y'know, filming at night.
Seven miles of depth doesn't impart some magical light-blocking properties to water. It's just dark. So you bring lights. Cameron's a filmmaker, I think he's got the whole "proper illumination" thing figured out.
PS: We've already got photos and video from Challenger Deep, the X-Prize is to send a MANNED mission there.
Don't worry. The descent is a risky venture. There's a very good chance the submarine will fail at depth, costing Cameron his life and the world the opportunity to see a sequel.
Not that I personally wish Cameron any harm, of course.
Ideally, the submarine will fail at a very survivable depth on the way down (or on the way back up, but in such a way that the footage is destroyed), he'll resurface unharmed, and he'll take that as a sign from [insert_deity_or_external_force_here] that Avatar, like Terminator and Alien and The Matrix, is a movie that should never, ever, ever have a sequel.
Interesting. I never knew ones with keypads even existed, but Wikipedia to the rescue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_token
You learn something new every day. :)
I'm sure NoScript will (if it isn't already) add detection of content types, and anything it considers "executable" in any form will need to get the whitelist treatment. There's already protection for a lot of things other than JavaScript.
Eventually, NoScript will probably have to have a whitelist for tags. <b> and <img> are OK by default, <video> might need whitelisting for a specific site, or you whitelist the whole site, or you whitelist the tag across all sites.
Our company uses RSA SecureID units on our VPN, and I've used them in the past for other companies.
In our case, you don't actually enter a PIN into the unit - it displays a 6-digit number that changes every 60 seconds, and that number is part of your password (but not all of it - you have an 8-character code you have to choose yourself that forms the other part of your password). The main computer at work uses the same algorithm as the SecureID card to rotate numbers, so the password is always changing but always in sync.
I've never heard of an RSA unit that actually has you key in a PIN to access the rotating code. Generally the PIN is presented as part of the password along with the rotating code. Seems to me that putting a keyboard on those things would make them less portable, less durable, and more subject to hackery (if you enter the wrong PIN, does the system simply show a random number, or is it possible to "hack" the card by entering PINs until you see a number display, for example?). But that may either be a very different or much older RSA system.
Yes, the tin foil hat wearers are part of a conspiracy.
In 2009, Texas has passed a new law (SB129) allowing them to drive 35 mph on 45 mph roads;
So now we have a new class of car that is limited to a speed limit 10MPH lower than everyone else using the same road?
Speeders are dangerous enough, but differential speed with no safe passing provision is almost a guarantee of accidents. Cars have a very high differential speed compared to, say, bicycles, but bicycles rarely take up enough of the road that you can't pass safely within a minute or so, so the vast majority will wait until they can pass safely (they can see a little distance and generally don't pass with oncoming traffic, and slide over and use part of the opposite lane to pass safely).
Put a car doing 10MPH under the normal speed limit and who takes up an entire lane on a 2-lane road with few passing lanes, and you'll get a much different result. Put a bunch of them out there and you'll probably have a problem.
It may be safer, but it can't be sold in the US as a production automobile because it would be considered a "car", and all production cars in the US have to have at least dual second-generation airbags (among other things that motorcycles do not require).
Motorcycles may be "less safe", but they don't require the same safety equipment as a car because they are a different class of vehicle.
They may be able to sell them as a "kit" or something, if they intend selling them without an airbag. I don't know if you could ever get it certified for road use, though.
Yes, it would result in the creation of two Ford Fiestas.
If you want a game you can enjoy 25 years from now, the single player mode is important.
Yes, but also if you want a game you can enjoy 25 years from now, you'd better buy 10 of whatever runs it and hope to hell that one of them lasts 25 years. Most video games released in 1985 years ago were arcade games. Sure, you could have bought "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?" for DOS on an 80286 that year, but only on 5 1/4" floppy, and I'm not sure if you could successfully emulate DOS 3.1 on an 80286 using modern hardware very well. I don't know about you, but my last 80286 didn't make it to 1990. Neither did my TI 99/4A or my Apple IIe.
I have books that I've owned for more than 25 years and still enjoy. I don't even have the hardware to run the games I bought 25 years ago.
Could still be useful for loading maps. Who says the two network connections need to be mutually exclusive? Isn't that why you have a QoS flag system in TCP/IP in the first place?
Map loads: High bandwidth desired, high latency acceptable. "Differentiated/Best Effort" chosen. Routing engine chooses pigeon.
Gaming: Low bandwidth desired, low latency acceptable. "Guaranteed" chosen. Routing engine chooses standard broadband.
Email in the background: Low bandwidth desired, high latency acceptable. "Differentiated/Priority" chosen. Routing engine uses connection with the most free capacity at the time.
(checks) Yup, still to low-capacity and slow to back up my pr0n collection. Next idea?
beets the pants off
Please explain in more detail how a 747 full of DVDs would cause pants to be removed by the application of vegetables. Does it require a specific species of beet? Can this technology be more widely applied to removing pants from things other than fibre?
As a father, should I be concerned if my daughter's date shows up driving a 747 full of DVDs?
Personally, for FREE software, I'd be happy just to get the damned bug acknowledged and fixed in a jiffy, and maybe have my name in lights for doing the legwork. Any payment should be considered a rather nice bonus.
No matter how small or insulting it is, it's still 100% more than Microsoft pays for bug reports, and Microsoft's release schedule on the fixes is downright glacial compared to Google or Firefox. Assuming they don't outright ignore you or threaten to sue you for violating the EULA.
Which model is the most insulting again?
I'm a rightie, and I find myself doing the same thing most of the time. I find that using my left hand to mouse also frees my right hand up for the keyboard (enter, backspace, etc) when necessary and I can mouse and use the numeric keypad on my computer at the same time which is occasionally handy.
At home, my wife is just used to the mouse on the right, so I go with that.
The nice part is that it evens out the wear on my wrists.
You know, I'm no Apple apologist or even a fan, but you'd think if they wanted to do this they'd have done it in the last few versions of the iPhone. Instead, they've improved the hardware and added more features to get their cash cows mooing happily and buying the very latest version of overpriced (IMHO!) Apple sexiness.
To be fair to Apple, my Blackberry hasn't had an OS update in well over a year now - the highest my Blackberry will support is 4.5, and there are no plans whatsoever to allow my 2-year-old 8310 to run OS5 or 6. It's a dead end as far as Blackberry is concerned.
Meanwhile, my iPod Touch Generation 2 (contest prize) is happily running iOS 4.1, which was released this month. Yes, I paid the iOS 3 $10 tithe, but iOS 4 was free. At least Apple gave me the opportunity to upgrade the OS.
Apple and Blackberry have obviously added new features and gewgaws and whatnot to their product lines (personally, I'm drooling over the Torch, and I'm SO ready to drop my EDGE-only unit for something with 3G, tethering on EDGE is excruciatingly slow when trying to solve a work problem).
But despite my obvious Blackberry fanboi-ism, I will give Apple credit where credit is due - if you're willing to put up with "last generation" hardware, they are at least putting some effort into keeping it running fairly well, and by and large either not charging for it or charging very reasonable prices when they do charge. An iPhone-totin' friend of mine bought an iPhone 4 for himself and his old 3GS shifted to his wife and her 3G shifted to their kid. All three phones run iOS 4 and (other than obvious hardware limitations) can perform the same functions.
Blackberry? Not so much. You might get one or two "point release" OS upgrades in the first year or so, then you're expected to buy new hardware if you want new features, even software features.
Isn't that what the little "+" and "-" are for?
Clicked "-", selected "binspam", hopefully a few hundred others will do the same and the spam will go away.
I'm not disputing your 2% number, because I don't have any other numbers to dispute it with. But not all computers are new computers.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but I personally know of a handful computers that are running Linux. They probably did come out of Big Box Retailer, but almost a decade ago. They won't run Windows any more (at least not a flavor that will work in today's world), but they are all perfectly happy with a lightweight window manager running under Linux, and can run the latest Firefox quite happily. Their owners, who can't afford a new computer, were grateful to get the results of my dumpster-diving, reformatting, and refurbishing. It costs me (and them) nothing.
"New Computers Sold" obviously would show a massively overwhelming preponderance toward Windows, obviously. But Linux is incredibly useful for slightly older hardware for people on a tight budget. There's a good bit of hardware that would have once had a one-way trip to dumpsterville that is now making a long stop at Linux Station along the way and getting a few more useful years of life.
I agree that 10% seems rather, well, "overly optimistic". My gut tells me it's higher than 2%, though.
To be fair, my gut tells me the two cheeseburgers I had for lunch were just what I needed, so it lies to me sometimes.
I was looking at it and thinking the same thing. The hinge on the T91 is bigger and beefier.
On the other hand, the T91 has a lot more complex a hinge system, and it does a relatively poor job of containing the forces necessary to switch from one mode to another. They combined a single spindle and a hinge into one unit that can't be terribly effective at either, then overdesigned the crap out of it to compensate. Imagine being halfway through the conversion and having something bump into the top of the screen - you'd almost certainly snap it off.
Dell's design is pretty clever. By putting dual spindles on either side of the screen and keeping that mechanism contained in a frame and separate from the hinge, they've significantly reduced the complexity of the motion and made it less likely a user will twist it off or break components by mistake. The actual open/close hinge system looks like it has the standard two attachment points and is a simple netbook-style hinge that should be able to take some use , and the screen itself is held in place at two opposing points by simple spindles.
So instead of one single pivot about which two axes of motion and force are applied, Dell has designed a system that handles each axis separately, using two attachment points for each motion. So the motions are more controlled, and it's harder to apply force in the "wrong direction" and break something. The Dell doesn't need to be overdesigned to hold together, so you can probably build 'em cheaper and keep 'em lighter, and still have a pretty solid machine.
All in all, it's an impressive improvement in the mechanical design of a convertible tablet.