The problem is, when people know you have a cell phone they always say "why didn't you answer the phone?
Why is that a problem? Just tell them you didn't feel like answering the phone. Explain that the phone is a convienance for you not them. Its the truth, and if they have a problem with it, its their problem, not yours.
In fact if there is someone physically in your presense it is IMPOLITE to answer the phone
Some people might consider it rude, but I'm not going to trouble myself by trying to predict which people consider various things rude (hmm, elbows on the table or not...). I don't have a problem with people answering the phone while I'm there, as long as its fairly transient, same as if someone they knew happened to walk up to say hello or to ask a quick question.
I wish they'd spend more time focusing on interoperability than on gee-wiz features. I want my phone to be able to easily talk to my computer and my palm pilot. I want it to know when I'm in the office and switch to its 'quite enviroment' settings (ie, with a battery powered do-hicky I leave by my monitor that tells my phone via bluetooth or whatever, 'hey, keep it quite'.
I want to check my bank balance with as few keypresses as is secure. I want to beam any phone number to any other phone with a keypress. I want to be able to send RC5 codes so I can control my TV and my Tivo with my phone (why? because I always have my phone clipped to my belt, who knows where that damn remote is?).
I want a completely configurable menu system. I'm convinced that the Sanyo SCP-4700 was designed specificly to force one to waste time online while using the incredibly bad UI.
I want my phone to have a fast wireless connection to my computer and flash memory so I can carry around important files. I want to put my credit card info into it so I can use it to authorize payments at stores without dragging out a silly plastic card. I want it to use SecurID or something to generate dynamic numbers so I don't have to worry about the clerk, his manager or some hacker stealing my credit info. I want it to unlock and start my car.
I want it to speak X10, I want it to let me provide location info to systems in buildings that support it, so I don't have to turn on lights. I want the PC's I use to automaticly know my prefered desktop settings and my favorite web sites. I want it to hold my MP3 collection so I can listen to music on whatever playback equipment is nearby.
I want it to have more *#$%*#*$ buttons so I don't have to use T9!
This is a piece of technology that I carry with me or have within reach ALL THE TIME. Its rugged, its small (the electronics are so small now that the UI is the limiting factor), it has so much potential that phone makers just don't seem to get. Many of these features are really hard. Many are really, really easy, and would help to get people to see how useful it is to have one device that can do these things.
Re:Ethical Problems? They already do it.
on
Human-Mouse Hybrids?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Ethical problems don't exist... It's a made up thing
So likewise, 'laws do not exist... They are a made up thing'?
Ethical problems do exist, but they are personal in nature. Societies choose which ethical concerns they collectively believe ought be enforced across the society. Generally such things are called laws.
we will have a problem as the line between human and animal blurs
There is no such line. Humans are and have always been animals. Its just that most humans believe that they are somehow 'more' than other animals (and most also believe that they are more than other humans too). The truth is that we are simply different.
Should we raise all animals to the level of humans wrt the rights they have?
That is precisely what many people assert. Such a move would obviously require that the entire population either go vegan or engineer and accept meat animals without even basic intelligence (I suspect this would be a great thing for food producers; all the meat and none of the behavour problems of 'real' animals).
Many people consider that beings that suffer (and that we can reasonably identify as suffering) ought not be caused, through our actions, to suffer.
From this point of view, early term abortion is pefectly ok, because the aborted material has not yet evolved to the point at which it is able to suffer.
I tend to agree with this viewpoint, to an extent. I don't think that the suffering of the mice outweighs the value of the research done with them. I'd prefer that they not be harmed, but at the moment it seems necessary. I would not take this position with animals with significantly more cognative power, such as apes.
I thought that the whole point of evolution was to move forward.
Certainly not. The point of evolution is to ensure the propagation of the system. If the only route to that end is to reduce complexity, thats what will happen.
Another way to look at it is to consider that evolution is simply the mutations that happened to survive. Life is what happens to self replicating systems that don't terminate.
There are so many extremely difficult problems to be solved in molecular biology.
Precisely the reason patents on such things can be a good thing. There is a lot of very hard work that needs to be done, and one really good way to get them done is to let people make money off of the work they do.
However, I'd like to consider the option of requiring any entity which uses patent protection for inventions to release all details of the production of patent protected products when the patent expires.
I don't like the idea of discoveries being locked away as secrets for much longer than it takes for a company to turn a good profit on them. I'd just hate to see useful technology lost because the few people who know how to do it got hit by a low flying airliner.
Its not that they need access to bank and hospital systems really, its that the current licensing seems to force one to give them (and their authorized agents) access to the systems.
Wouldn't it be fun to compromize the autoupdate database and install some software to wire a few bucks from every account to some secret location. And all patient records with well known names (those can just be posted directly to usenet). Then have all the systems download and auto install the Linux 'upgrade'.:)
From the perspective a conscious entity, what is a discontinuity of conciousness?
I fall asleep every night and exist in a semi-discontinious state. I may or may not have a sense of the passage of time while I was asleep.
If I go in for surgery and am put under general anestesia, I will have no sense of the passage of time. The only reason I have to believe that I am the same person that I was before surgery is that I seem to remember things that happened before I woke up. If humanity had the technology to implant memories, I would have less reason to believe that any of my memories were accurate, or indeed, that I had even existed at all before I woke up (as explored in bladerunner/do androids dream of electric sheep, and other works).
It seems that 'continuity of consciousness' is difficult to define. There are different levels or kinds of consciousness, and we currently don't seem to have any way to evaluate someone elses consciousness (in sense meaningful to the dicussion). If consciousness ceases entirely, then returns, such as in the case of GA, is it the same 'person'? What defines sameness? If the brain is modified while unconscious, at what point is what wakes up considered something different? Given that all consciousness changes over time at varying rates, does it even make sense to try to define sameness?
Its hard to talk about details of consciousness when it seems so ill-defined.
My grandfather is in the same boat (sorry, couldn't resist), but he only has one eye (WWII injuries). He says that the pressure on the bottom of his feet is also important to his sense of balance.
Re:Interesting OT: Segway is not IT
on
Lego Segway
·
· Score: 2
Hmm, kind of makes one wonder about the name. Segway. Perhaps its a leader for something truely revolutionary?
My 3, 5 and 7 year olds all love both Photoshop and The Gimp. They are getting pretty good with the tablet interface too, I'm thinking of getting them their own Fark.com accounts...
Thats not really a new idea at all, and judging by the pictures, they don't have it working anyway. I'll bet you can find superior technology in many wind tunnels around the world.
There is a company out there that makes fountains using laminar flow emitters. One in particularly that was very cool consisted of 4 streams of water 1.5 inches in diameter shooting from the corners of a large room into a central catch area. The 'beams' of water made perfect, stable parabolic arches about 15-20 feet tall, and landed without a splash or noise. Additionally, the emitters had light bulbs in them, and the streams acted as (lossy) optical fiber, glowing along their entire length. Very cool display.
The emitters consisted essentially of an 8 inch cylinder stuffed full of parallel soda straws and some fine mesh screens. It seems like it wouldn't be to much harder to do the same thing with an air stream. Certainly this would be something the typical geek could tinker with at home. Perhaps a very thick screen (12 inches) with the fog portion taking a narrow channel down the center. Turbulance would tend to form most at the edges of the flow, so the central portion would be kept stable.
Its not likely that you are a typical desktop user either. I'd venture a guess that you don't often delete things you didn't mean to either.
As is often the case with 'power users' the settings we prefer are not the same as what typical users perfer.
Personification aside, a system which maintains user deleted files (not necessarily all deleted files) does not have to take a large performance hit. Several obvious optimizations could be performed to minimize the impact deleted files would have, such as moving them to the slowest areas of the drive.
The system would obviously not perform as well as if it did not maintain deleted files (near capacity or not), if speed is your only measurement of performance. If thats all you are concerned with, simply adjust the settings to increase speed, or turn off the feature.
we're talking about a piece of glass (or plastic, depending on the camera) thats probably less than half a centimeter across. I doubt theres anything in a miniture CCD camera that would break under its own weight even at hundreds of G's.
I'm not sure how shock and vibration ratings translate to continious G ratings, or if theres any relation at all. It seems that a shock pulse would be more damaging than gentle acceleration, as it is transmitted through the material, causing intense local deformation (relative to slowly rising acceleration).
If you take the approach of maintaning files as long as possible, performance not withstanding, yes, you end up operating at 100% capacity. To make it practical you'd want to give the filesystems some space to work effectively.
I've never written a defrag, but it seems that given a journaling file system and plenty of time to calculate optimal block movements it shouldn't be particularly difficult or dangerous.
Naturally any scheme like this would become less effective (ie, shorter history) the closer the drive was to filled.
Re:I don't think this is the right solution...
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 2
The obvious answer is to do what Microsoft did. Provide from the file system two ways to delete files. One sends files to the trash, one really deletes them. Files deleted by the user go to the trash, unless the user really deletes them (ie, hold down shift and delete in Exploder), files deleted by the system are really deleted.
As long as recycle bins/trash cans have been around this seems like it should be a solved problem.
What we're doing here is adding additional work for the hard disk, thereby slowing down the computer further
As a user I don't push the drives hard enough to notice a difference. I'm not running a high traffic web server, I'm editing documents.
by continuing to avoid overwriting data and allowing the drive to fill, you further decrease disk performance. Hard drives generally begin to work more slowly when they become more than half filled, with a more severe and noticeable performance hit at around 80%
The drive doesn't give a damn what those bits are, it has no concept of full or empty, it just reads and writes where its told. Your filesystem may have issues when you hit 50-80% capacity, but that doesn't have anything to do with the drive.
One would want to be sure that the filesystem operated at acceptable speed with a large percentage of its capacity in use. Given the low number of file accesses (relative to a server system) of a typical desktop system, it shouldn't be a problem. The filesystem could even do low-priority background defrags, making sure it had its files arranged in the optimal order for the patters of use typical of desktop users.
The proposed solution, at least without serious modification, would massively fragment the hard drive
Not true. The files marked as deleted are still real files and available for the file system to move around to minimize fragmentation. They just aren't displayed to users, and can potentially be overwritten when more space is required.
I had a feeling this would happen sooner or later.
Naturally. As development tools advance the need for code jockies will be reduced too. Eventually the systems will be powerful enough that managment types will just tell the computer what they what to do and it'll do it. Its always been a matter of 'telling the computer what you want it to do', but we've been progressed from directly entering machine code to modeling business objects in UML (and the like). Eventually there will be layers on top of that too.
I'm not an engineer, but I'm curious why it took them a year to develop the camera. Seems like the most they'd have to do is pot the thing in epoxy and plug it in. Maybe they built the thing one evening then spent the rest of the year putting off writing the documentation?
Have all black hole detections been done with this method? If so, could it be possible that gravity doesn't work on the large scale the way we think it works?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, when people know you have a cell phone they always say "why didn't you answer the phone?
Why is that a problem? Just tell them you didn't feel like answering the phone. Explain that the phone is a convienance for you not them. Its the truth, and if they have a problem with it, its their problem, not yours.
In fact if there is someone physically in your presense it is IMPOLITE to answer the phone
Some people might consider it rude, but I'm not going to trouble myself by trying to predict which people consider various things rude (hmm, elbows on the table or not...). I don't have a problem with people answering the phone while I'm there, as long as its fairly transient, same as if someone they knew happened to walk up to say hello or to ask a quick question.
I wish they'd spend more time focusing on interoperability than on gee-wiz features. I want my phone to be able to easily talk to my computer and my palm pilot. I want it to know when I'm in the office and switch to its 'quite enviroment' settings (ie, with a battery powered do-hicky I leave by my monitor that tells my phone via bluetooth or whatever, 'hey, keep it quite'.
I want to check my bank balance with as few keypresses as is secure. I want to beam any phone number to any other phone with a keypress. I want to be able to send RC5 codes so I can control my TV and my Tivo with my phone (why? because I always have my phone clipped to my belt, who knows where that damn remote is?).
I want a completely configurable menu system. I'm convinced that the Sanyo SCP-4700 was designed specificly to force one to waste time online while using the incredibly bad UI.
I want my phone to have a fast wireless connection to my computer and flash memory so I can carry around important files. I want to put my credit card info into it so I can use it to authorize payments at stores without dragging out a silly plastic card. I want it to use SecurID or something to generate dynamic numbers so I don't have to worry about the clerk, his manager or some hacker stealing my credit info. I want it to unlock and start my car.
I want it to speak X10, I want it to let me provide location info to systems in buildings that support it, so I don't have to turn on lights. I want the PC's I use to automaticly know my prefered desktop settings and my favorite web sites. I want it to hold my MP3 collection so I can listen to music on whatever playback equipment is nearby.
I want it to have more *#$%*#*$ buttons so I don't have to use T9!
This is a piece of technology that I carry with me or have within reach ALL THE TIME. Its rugged, its small (the electronics are so small now that the UI is the limiting factor), it has so much potential that phone makers just don't seem to get. Many of these features are really hard. Many are really, really easy, and would help to get people to see how useful it is to have one device that can do these things.
Ethical problems don't exist... It's a made up thing
So likewise, 'laws do not exist... They are a made up thing'?
Ethical problems do exist, but they are personal in nature. Societies choose which ethical concerns they collectively believe ought be enforced across the society. Generally such things are called laws.
we will have a problem as the line between human and animal blurs
There is no such line. Humans are and have always been animals. Its just that most humans believe that they are somehow 'more' than other animals (and most also believe that they are more than other humans too). The truth is that we are simply different.
Should we raise all animals to the level of humans wrt the rights they have?
That is precisely what many people assert. Such a move would obviously require that the entire population either go vegan or engineer and accept meat animals without even basic intelligence (I suspect this would be a great thing for food producers; all the meat and none of the behavour problems of 'real' animals).
Many people consider that beings that suffer (and that we can reasonably identify as suffering) ought not be caused, through our actions, to suffer.
From this point of view, early term abortion is pefectly ok, because the aborted material has not yet evolved to the point at which it is able to suffer.
I tend to agree with this viewpoint, to an extent. I don't think that the suffering of the mice outweighs the value of the research done with them. I'd prefer that they not be harmed, but at the moment it seems necessary. I would not take this position with animals with significantly more cognative power, such as apes.
I thought that the whole point of evolution was to move forward.
Certainly not. The point of evolution is to ensure the propagation of the system. If the only route to that end is to reduce complexity, thats what will happen.
Another way to look at it is to consider that evolution is simply the mutations that happened to survive. Life is what happens to self replicating systems that don't terminate.
Precisely the reason patents on such things can be a good thing. There is a lot of very hard work that needs to be done, and one really good way to get them done is to let people make money off of the work they do.
However, I'd like to consider the option of requiring any entity which uses patent protection for inventions to release all details of the production of patent protected products when the patent expires.
I don't like the idea of discoveries being locked away as secrets for much longer than it takes for a company to turn a good profit on them. I'd just hate to see useful technology lost because the few people who know how to do it got hit by a low flying airliner.
Its not that they need access to bank and hospital systems really, its that the current licensing seems to force one to give them (and their authorized agents) access to the systems.
:)
Wouldn't it be fun to compromize the autoupdate database and install some software to wire a few bucks from every account to some secret location. And all patient records with well known names (those can just be posted directly to usenet). Then have all the systems download and auto install the Linux 'upgrade'.
From the perspective a conscious entity, what is a discontinuity of conciousness?
I fall asleep every night and exist in a semi-discontinious state. I may or may not have a sense of the passage of time while I was asleep.
If I go in for surgery and am put under general anestesia, I will have no sense of the passage of time. The only reason I have to believe that I am the same person that I was before surgery is that I seem to remember things that happened before I woke up. If humanity had the technology to implant memories, I would have less reason to believe that any of my memories were accurate, or indeed, that I had even existed at all before I woke up (as explored in bladerunner/do androids dream of electric sheep, and other works).
It seems that 'continuity of consciousness' is difficult to define. There are different levels or kinds of consciousness, and we currently don't seem to have any way to evaluate someone elses consciousness (in sense meaningful to the dicussion). If consciousness ceases entirely, then returns, such as in the case of GA, is it the same 'person'? What defines sameness? If the brain is modified while unconscious, at what point is what wakes up considered something different? Given that all consciousness changes over time at varying rates, does it even make sense to try to define sameness?
Its hard to talk about details of consciousness when it seems so ill-defined.
Babies, who are learning at an astounding rate, actually seem to experience periodic whole brain "crashes" and "reboots" during sleep
That is interesting, do you have a link or reference for more info on this research?
My grandfather is in the same boat (sorry, couldn't resist), but he only has one eye (WWII injuries). He says that the pressure on the bottom of his feet is also important to his sense of balance.
Hmm, kind of makes one wonder about the name. Segway. Perhaps its a leader for something truely revolutionary?
How about clothing with wireless networking so you can be a walking billboard in exchange for cheaper admission to themeparks?
And you could have the chance of hacking someone elses pants.
Imagine if everybody at a sporting event had network addressable clothing, the stands would be one huge scrolling marquee.
What happens if you simply rotate the camera 90 degrees?
My 3, 5 and 7 year olds all love both Photoshop and The Gimp. They are getting pretty good with the tablet interface too, I'm thinking of getting them their own Fark.com accounts...
Thats not really a new idea at all, and judging by the pictures, they don't have it working anyway. I'll bet you can find superior technology in many wind tunnels around the world.
There is a company out there that makes fountains using laminar flow emitters. One in particularly that was very cool consisted of 4 streams of water 1.5 inches in diameter shooting from the corners of a large room into a central catch area. The 'beams' of water made perfect, stable parabolic arches about 15-20 feet tall, and landed without a splash or noise. Additionally, the emitters had light bulbs in them, and the streams acted as (lossy) optical fiber, glowing along their entire length. Very cool display.
The emitters consisted essentially of an 8 inch cylinder stuffed full of parallel soda straws and some fine mesh screens. It seems like it wouldn't be to much harder to do the same thing with an air stream. Certainly this would be something the typical geek could tinker with at home. Perhaps a very thick screen (12 inches) with the fog portion taking a narrow channel down the center. Turbulance would tend to form most at the edges of the flow, so the central portion would be kept stable.
Kan it do the 'network neighborhood' (My network places, whatever) thing? So I don't have to know the names of machines that have shares available?
I do happen to use my hard drives
Its not likely that you are a typical desktop user either. I'd venture a guess that you don't often delete things you didn't mean to either.
As is often the case with 'power users' the settings we prefer are not the same as what typical users perfer.
Personification aside, a system which maintains user deleted files (not necessarily all deleted files) does not have to take a large performance hit. Several obvious optimizations could be performed to minimize the impact deleted files would have, such as moving them to the slowest areas of the drive.
The system would obviously not perform as well as if it did not maintain deleted files (near capacity or not), if speed is your only measurement of performance. If thats all you are concerned with, simply adjust the settings to increase speed, or turn off the feature.
we're talking about a piece of glass (or plastic, depending on the camera) thats probably less than half a centimeter across. I doubt theres anything in a miniture CCD camera that would break under its own weight even at hundreds of G's.
I'm not sure how shock and vibration ratings translate to continious G ratings, or if theres any relation at all. It seems that a shock pulse would be more damaging than gentle acceleration, as it is transmitted through the material, causing intense local deformation (relative to slowly rising acceleration).
If you take the approach of maintaning files as long as possible, performance not withstanding, yes, you end up operating at 100% capacity. To make it practical you'd want to give the filesystems some space to work effectively.
I've never written a defrag, but it seems that given a journaling file system and plenty of time to calculate optimal block movements it shouldn't be particularly difficult or dangerous.
Naturally any scheme like this would become less effective (ie, shorter history) the closer the drive was to filled.
The obvious answer is to do what Microsoft did. Provide from the file system two ways to delete files. One sends files to the trash, one really deletes them. Files deleted by the user go to the trash, unless the user really deletes them (ie, hold down shift and delete in Exploder), files deleted by the system are really deleted.
As long as recycle bins/trash cans have been around this seems like it should be a solved problem.
What we're doing here is adding additional work for the hard disk, thereby slowing down the computer further
As a user I don't push the drives hard enough to notice a difference. I'm not running a high traffic web server, I'm editing documents.
by continuing to avoid overwriting data and allowing the drive to fill, you further decrease disk performance. Hard drives generally begin to work more slowly when they become more than half filled, with a more severe and noticeable performance hit at around 80%
The drive doesn't give a damn what those bits are, it has no concept of full or empty, it just reads and writes where its told. Your filesystem may have issues when you hit 50-80% capacity, but that doesn't have anything to do with the drive.
One would want to be sure that the filesystem operated at acceptable speed with a large percentage of its capacity in use. Given the low number of file accesses (relative to a server system) of a typical desktop system, it shouldn't be a problem. The filesystem could even do low-priority background defrags, making sure it had its files arranged in the optimal order for the patters of use typical of desktop users.
The proposed solution, at least without serious modification, would massively fragment the hard drive
Not true. The files marked as deleted are still real files and available for the file system to move around to minimize fragmentation. They just aren't displayed to users, and can potentially be overwritten when more space is required.
I had a feeling this would happen sooner or later.
Naturally. As development tools advance the need for code jockies will be reduced too. Eventually the systems will be powerful enough that managment types will just tell the computer what they what to do and it'll do it. Its always been a matter of 'telling the computer what you want it to do', but we've been progressed from directly entering machine code to modeling business objects in UML (and the like). Eventually there will be layers on top of that too.
I'm not an engineer, but I'm curious why it took them a year to develop the camera. Seems like the most they'd have to do is pot the thing in epoxy and plug it in. Maybe they built the thing one evening then spent the rest of the year putting off writing the documentation?
Have all black hole detections been done with this method? If so, could it be possible that gravity doesn't work on the large scale the way we think it works?