I blogged this idea last year (and, yes, I know it wasn't a wholly original idea then, either--some guys had driven around with laptops already)
My idea then was for having cars talk to each other about traffic: "As a car approaches a pack of other cars, it connects to their network. The pack of cars can tell the new car the average speed and size of the network (and if there's GPS information, maybe even the beginning and end of the pack), which the driver--maybe with the help of some mapping software--can use to determine whether to stay in the pack or get off at the next available opportunity."
iTunes and all other stuff we already do with networks are implicit, but I thought it would be interesting to see what new ideas could come from this kind of network
It's not trying to do the same thing as newsmap. That's a snapshot of the magnitude of the current news, whereas this is a visualization of the CHANGE in a news story's popularity over the last week. I think the two work together well and newsmap could easily incorporate this code into their service.
1. Don't reinvent the wheel. Just because you're smart, it doesn't mean you're unique or have unique problems. Your issues are those of many people, many smart and not-so-smart people, and their solutions to them can be yours, too. Many of my smart friends get bogged down reinventing the wheel (whether when it's writing software or solving relationship problems), when perfectly good solutions that work for "most people" work well enough for them, too.
2. DO use your talents. Don't be a snob, share the wealth of your intelligence and knowledge. Don't be too good to do something just because it's for "normal" people. If you catch yourself thinking that, that's fear talking. The fear that maybe you're "normal," too. When you find yourself in that position, do whatever it is you're afraid of. You'll find that many times you DO succeed more than others, and other times you don't, which is also useful information to have, since it shows your your limitations. Don't be too proud to have limitations, just know where they are.
And don't let the things you're not so good at (like, say, focusing on something that bores you) get you down. It's OK to have faults, and it's OK to have people see those faults. Being comfortable with your whole self is what's most useful.
So it looks like it would be OK to walk around it, but it's missing some basic things, such as directional lighting for reading. LED's provide narrow directional light, which is fine for washes of light (when diffused with lenses or diffusers) or small pin-spots, but the designers don't appear to have tried to create light at the scale needed for common things like sitting on the couch and reading or cooking.
Btw, I've had my apartment stairway lit with white LED replacement bulbs from LEDTronics for 5 years (continuously! Never turned off because it's too dark to find the switches, which is why I installed the bulbs in the first place.). It's worked great, except that they've now faded to the point they no longer provide enough light to walk up the stairs with, but it's taught me that the technology isn't ready to replace all the bulbs in the house. Here's their full line of replacement bulbs:
Earlie this week I posted some ideas related to this on my blog, having not heard about this initiative.
The basic idea is as follows: "A tight pack of cars is the perfect situation for an ad-hoc network. As a car approaches a pack of other cars, it connects to their network. The pack of cars can tell the new car the average speed and size of the network (and if there's GPS information, maybe even the beginning and end of the pack), which the driver--maybe with the help of some mapping software--can use to determine whether to stay in the pack or get off at the next available opportunity"
There's all this talk about slashdotting their mailroom and taking them to small claims court. Hello? This situation is exactly what class action lawsuits are for. Someone needs to hire a lawyer and set up a class action lawsuit about breach of license. RMS seems like the logical person, since he's the one who started the whole thing and has been the strongest defender of the strong interpretation of the License. Then everyone who contributed--everyone who ever checked in (or even checked out)--code into something that SCO is overly restricting can join it.
I think that the interviewer is asking (or Rheingold in interpreting the question to mean) why he calls them "mobs" because mobs have a negative connotation. He's responding by saying that the 9/11 terrorists were a mob in the negative sense of the word and a smart mob in that that the coordination of the attack wouldn't have been possible without the datacomm infrastructure provided by cell phones and the Net.
But, frankly, I think he's just back-defining a term that sounds provacative.
Ludicorp showed an application called Confab at the O'Reilly Etech conference that was specifically designed for this. It mapped the layout of the conference rooms to a shared discussion space so that as people moved from room to room they could chat about what they saw. More fun was that you could listen in on the discussions happening in the other parallel tracks. Not much on their site about it, but here's the Google search for it.
How do you make it worse?
on
X11 in ASCII
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· Score: 1
Run it through a text-to-speech interface and listen to your X session.;-)
I agree with this. I wrote a 500+ page book in StarOffice/OpenOffice (plug: "Observing the User Experience", ISBN 1558609237;-) and the worst problems were with the compatability with Word. Change tracking, always a bit buggy, produced a number of pretty mangled files where various deleted parts would suddenly reappear and new text would disappear. That was a big pain in the butt, but--as a writing tool--the program was fine provided I saved often enough to deal with the 1-2 crashes per day, which was about par for Word until a couple versions back.
True, but maybe the point isn't to COMPLETELY replace petroleum, but to replace part of it. I'm sure that even replacing 10% of the petroleum used for gas would create a huge change in the environmental, automotive and agricultural landscape in the US. These things don't have to be absolute, just as not all paper used has to be recycled to make a big difference in the number of trees felled every year.
The Velleman K8000 isn't the prettiest or most flexible solution, but it'll work well if you have a limited knowledge of electronics and $150. You can even get Linux libraries for it, and it'll do a lot more than just make lights blink.
However, if all you want is watch lights blink, there's always Color Kinetics LightOrb.
British Pathe has digitized and made public a huge quantity of their newsreels online, starting with the 1890s and going to 1970. Watch nearly a century of riots, wars and cheezy human interest stories on pretty much every topic. Type in "computer" and see the history of computers, as told in short chunks with dramatic voiceover.
The summary: "Two fungal diseases, Panama disease and black Sigatoka, are cutting a swath through banana plantations, just as blight once devastated potato crops. But unlike the potato, and other crops where disease-resistant strains can be bred by conventional means, making a fungus-free variety of the banana is extraordinarily difficult."
And, in fact, the sensitive photo of the unnamed freelance writer is a stock photo. Specifically, it's photo number 120084 from the Getty Images collection.
Some other thoughts on the topic (mine)
on
GUIs for Everyone
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Last week Lane Becker and I presented some ideas about this at a tutorial we taught at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. We tried to address what makes Open Source user interface development problematic and to present some techniques that allow software developers to research what interaction methods work for their users. You can find all of the materials on our site and we welcome feedback from the Open Source community.
(and yes, we realize that most of our materials are in MS Office formats or in PDF, but--with the exception of Visio--we tried to make documents that can be opened by Open Office or Ghostscript)
The purpose of any tool, whether it's a hammer, a TiVo or Perl, is to enable its user to do something. The goal is to get something done, not to use the tool. The less that the tool gets in the way, the easier it is for the person using it to do what they're trying to do. Learning about the tool creates a hurdle on the way to doing something. As in running, the fewer hurdles, the better.
Sulfur lighting has been around for a long time. The technology was first demonstrated almost 10 years ago after almost a decade of development. It got written up in Popular Science in 1995, but still never managed to get off the ground commercially.
The same goes for induction fluourescent lamp technology. The GE Genura is the only consumer-grade bulb available and it's expensive and GE probably loses money on every single bulb sold.
Now what I'm waiting for is ethernet-over-railroad-track. I mean, sheeit, that stuff already covers whole continents, no backhoe is going to go through it and it's durned hard to steal. And, at least in the US, there's lots of it that's going underutilized. This could be the recycling innovation of the year.
Big Media has always been quick to shoot itself in the foot. They also said that the VCR would be the end of the film industry. Today's statistics don't quite agree with that viewpoint.
When I was in college in the late 80s, I was in a nonprofit student film cooperative. VCRs may not have affected the big Hollywood film industry, but it definitely affected the independent film distribution world. Whereas in 1986 we could show a different film every night and make money, by 1990 we were down to one film per week. That was completely because VCRs had gotten cheap enough that college students could afford them. And we weren't the only ones. The independent "art" film theaters in town suffered, too. One of the three closed (it's reopened since, but only because Urban Outfitters rents the space where the two large street-level screens used to be) and another switched formats several times before closing a couple of years ago. My film coop closed in 1996 after struggling and loosing money for most of the 90s.
I'm not saying that VCRs are evil or that the film industry was right in fearing them--I agree that technological change should not be resisted, but adjusted to--just that the transition to VCRs was not completely smooth or "victimless."
(And, tangentially, it wasn't just the coops and movie theaters that suffered. Many of the movies we showed were not--and are not--available on tape. We often rented prints directly from the filmmakers, so when we went under, so did a source of independent film income.)
Slashdot Mirror
I blogged this idea last year (and, yes, I know it wasn't a wholly original idea then, either--some guys had driven around with laptops already)
My idea then was for having cars talk to each other about traffic: "As a car approaches a pack of other cars, it connects to their network. The pack of cars can tell the new car the average speed and size of the network (and if there's GPS information, maybe even the beginning and end of the pack), which the driver--maybe with the help of some mapping software--can use to determine whether to stay in the pack or get off at the next available opportunity."
iTunes and all other stuff we already do with networks are implicit, but I thought it would be interesting to see what new ideas could come from this kind of network
It's not trying to do the same thing as newsmap. That's a snapshot of the magnitude of the current news, whereas this is a visualization of the CHANGE in a news story's popularity over the last week. I think the two work together well and newsmap could easily incorporate this code into their service.
My two points of advice:
1. Don't reinvent the wheel. Just because you're smart, it doesn't mean you're unique or have unique problems. Your issues are those of many people, many smart and not-so-smart people, and their solutions to them can be yours, too. Many of my smart friends get bogged down reinventing the wheel (whether when it's writing software or solving relationship problems), when perfectly good solutions that work for "most people" work well enough for them, too.
2. DO use your talents. Don't be a snob, share the wealth of your intelligence and knowledge. Don't be too good to do something just because it's for "normal" people. If you catch yourself thinking that, that's fear talking. The fear that maybe you're "normal," too. When you find yourself in that position, do whatever it is you're afraid of. You'll find that many times you DO succeed more than others, and other times you don't, which is also useful information to have, since it shows your your limitations. Don't be too proud to have limitations, just know where they are.
And don't let the things you're not so good at (like, say, focusing on something that bores you) get you down. It's OK to have faults, and it's OK to have people see those faults. Being comfortable with your whole self is what's most useful.
So it looks like it would be OK to walk around it, but it's missing some basic things, such as directional lighting for reading. LED's provide narrow directional light, which is fine for washes of light (when diffused with lenses or diffusers) or small pin-spots, but the designers don't appear to have tried to create light at the scale needed for common things like sitting on the couch and reading or cooking.
x /2 5mm_med_index.htm
Btw, I've had my apartment stairway lit with white LED replacement bulbs from LEDTronics for 5 years (continuously! Never turned off because it's too dark to find the switches, which is why I installed the bulbs in the first place.). It's worked great, except that they've now faded to the point they no longer provide enough light to walk up the stairs with, but it's taught me that the technology isn't ready to replace all the bulbs in the house. Here's their full line of replacement bulbs:
http://www.led.net/datasheets/25mm_medbase_inde
Earlie this week I posted some ideas related to this on my blog, having not heard about this initiative.
The basic idea is as follows: "A tight pack of cars is the perfect situation for an ad-hoc network.
As a car approaches a pack of other cars, it connects to their network. The pack of cars can tell the new car the average speed and size of the network (and if there's GPS information, maybe even the beginning and end of the pack), which the driver--maybe with the help of some mapping software--can use to determine whether to stay in the pack or get off at the next available opportunity"
There's all this talk about slashdotting their mailroom and taking them to small claims court. Hello? This situation is exactly what class action lawsuits are for. Someone needs to hire a lawyer and set up a class action lawsuit about breach of license. RMS seems like the logical person, since he's the one who started the whole thing and has been the strongest defender of the strong interpretation of the License. Then everyone who contributed--everyone who ever checked in (or even checked out)--code into something that SCO is overly restricting can join it.
I think that the interviewer is asking (or Rheingold in interpreting the question to mean) why he calls them "mobs" because mobs have a negative connotation. He's responding by saying that the 9/11 terrorists were a mob in the negative sense of the word and a smart mob in that that the coordination of the attack wouldn't have been possible without the datacomm infrastructure provided by cell phones and the Net.
But, frankly, I think he's just back-defining a term that sounds provacative.
Ludicorp showed an application called Confab at the O'Reilly Etech conference that was specifically designed for this. It mapped the layout of the conference rooms to a shared discussion space so that as people moved from room to room they could chat about what they saw. More fun was that you could listen in on the discussions happening in the other parallel tracks. Not much on their site about it, but here's the Google search for it.
Run it through a text-to-speech interface and listen to your X session. ;-)
I agree with this. I wrote a 500+ page book in StarOffice/OpenOffice (plug: "Observing the User Experience", ISBN 1558609237 ;-) and the worst problems were with the compatability with Word. Change tracking, always a bit buggy, produced a number of pretty mangled files where various deleted parts would suddenly reappear and new text would disappear. That was a big pain in the butt, but--as a writing tool--the program was fine provided I saved often enough to deal with the 1-2 crashes per day, which was about par for Word until a couple versions back.
Is, of course, cardboard: http://amawin.com/commercial/quart_de_poil/L5_engl ish/Quart_de_poil_carton_uk.htm
And weren't there cardboard geodesic domes at Burning Man last year?
Just don't smoke in bed.
True, but maybe the point isn't to COMPLETELY replace petroleum, but to replace part of it. I'm sure that even replacing 10% of the petroleum used for gas would create a huge change in the environmental, automotive and agricultural landscape in the US. These things don't have to be absolute, just as not all paper used has to be recycled to make a big difference in the number of trees felled every year.
The Velleman K8000 isn't the prettiest or most flexible solution, but it'll work well if you have a limited knowledge of electronics and $150. You can even get Linux libraries for it, and it'll do a lot more than just make lights blink.
However, if all you want is watch lights blink, there's always Color Kinetics LightOrb.
British Pathe has digitized and made public a huge quantity of their newsreels online, starting with the 1890s and going to 1970. Watch nearly a century of riots, wars and cheezy human interest stories on pretty much every topic. Type in "computer" and see the history of computers, as told in short chunks with dramatic voiceover.
The summary: "Two fungal diseases, Panama disease and black Sigatoka, are cutting a swath through banana plantations, just as blight once devastated potato crops. But unlike the potato, and other crops where disease-resistant strains can be bred by conventional means, making a fungus-free variety of the banana is extraordinarily difficult."
And, in fact, the sensitive photo of the unnamed freelance writer is a stock photo. Specifically, it's photo number 120084 from the Getty Images collection.
(and yes, we realize that most of our materials are in MS Office formats or in PDF, but--with the exception of Visio--we tried to make documents that can be opened by Open Office or Ghostscript)
--Mike Kuniavsky
The purpose of any tool, whether it's a hammer, a TiVo or Perl, is to enable its user to do something. The goal is to get something done, not to use the tool. The less that the tool gets in the way, the easier it is for the person using it to do what they're trying to do. Learning about the tool creates a hurdle on the way to doing something. As in running, the fewer hurdles, the better.
The same goes for induction fluourescent lamp technology. The GE Genura is the only consumer-grade bulb available and it's expensive and GE probably loses money on every single bulb sold.
Now what I'm waiting for is ethernet-over-railroad-track. I mean, sheeit, that stuff already covers whole continents, no backhoe is going to go through it and it's durned hard to steal. And, at least in the US, there's lots of it that's going underutilized. This could be the recycling innovation of the year.
;-)
Here's the project that most closely resembles this one, Gridcosm:
http://www.sito.org/synergy/gridcosm/
When I was in college in the late 80s, I was in a nonprofit student film cooperative. VCRs may not have affected the big Hollywood film industry, but it definitely affected the independent film distribution world. Whereas in 1986 we could show a different film every night and make money, by 1990 we were down to one film per week. That was completely because VCRs had gotten cheap enough that college students could afford them. And we weren't the only ones. The independent "art" film theaters in town suffered, too. One of the three closed (it's reopened since, but only because Urban Outfitters rents the space where the two large street-level screens used to be) and another switched formats several times before closing a couple of years ago. My film coop closed in 1996 after struggling and loosing money for most of the 90s.
I'm not saying that VCRs are evil or that the film industry was right in fearing them--I agree that technological change should not be resisted, but adjusted to--just that the transition to VCRs was not completely smooth or "victimless."
(And, tangentially, it wasn't just the coops and movie theaters that suffered. Many of the movies we showed were not--and are not--available on tape. We often rented prints directly from the filmmakers, so when we went under, so did a source of independent film income.)