I wrote a blog entry about the concept of multi-touch mice vs. multi-touch trackpads.
"I can envision an ecosystem where multi-touch mice being accepted as a low-cost enabling technology that introduces people to Natural User Interfaces without a large investment. Those would be used in addition to or to complement multi-touch displays and larger Surface devices. It would benefit NUI adoption by allowing existing computers to use NUI software. While it would add to the complexity of planning interfaces across a larger variety of hardware capabilities, the potential for mass adoption may be more important."
The brain-computer program analogy doesn't quite work that way with invalid pointers. The poster above did mention that he can avoid bad things from happening by avoiding certain situations and states, so there is a slight relation. Basically there are certain paths in his brain that lead to overloads or abnormal, possibly synethetic experiences. The fear of small heights seems like a link between the "small things" area and the "fear" area. So it is more like there are some pointers that trigger weird combinations.
For myself, I have epilepsy as well and have fortunately only had 3-4 major events. Other than those, I sometimes have auras, which are the precursor to a seizure, and I can sometimes remove myself from the current situation and make it go away, or other times just concentrate and "will" it to go away. There are different types of seizures, but for those auras it feels like there is too much activity or electricity in my brain. Many different areas are being stimulated at once, much more than normal. My conscious thoughts retreat to a very small area in order to stay in control. The computer analogy might be overclocking a computer and/or turning up the voltage.
Yes, I know, but that was the only article I could find that referenced the aerodynamic stabilization issue (in the solutions section, as you mention.)
3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher
Actually most if not all manned and unmanned commercial rockets are aerodynamically unstable. They require active guidance systems to stay flying straight. (You couldn't manually pilot them without computer control, similar to modern fighter jets from F-16 onward.)
Model rockets have fins in order to be stable without this active guidance.
Also check this article on Little Joe II, the apollo abort test platform. It has fins to be stable, regardless of what else happens. Most modern launchers don't. (Some Saturn V versions had tiny fins, but those were not sufficient for inherent stability.)
As the American Freedom Campaign put it in an email to members this morning:
"The founders of our country feared more than anything else the prospect of an executive who put his own power and desires above the Constitution. Congress was given the power of impeachment so that it could remove any president who committed the high crime of violating the Constitution during his (or her) term in office.
A strong case can be made that no president in the history of this country is more deserving of impeachment than George W. Bush. If he is not impeached, the bar for impeachment will have been raised so high that it might as well no longer exist. Future presidents will know that they can violate the Constitution at will, confident in the fact that Congress does not have the courage as an institution to do anything about it.
We cannot allow this to happen."
That's about as simple as it gets. Even if Bush only have seven months left, Congress has to set an example and exert its authority.
It's not $63 million spent on only 170 students. $63 million was spent as a capital investment into building the school, infrastructure, and other things which can be amortize over the usable lifetime of the school. I know of high schools that have been around for at least 50 years, although of course there are occasional renovations. Assuming the school lasts for 50 years, you have to divide by the total number of students that attend the school. You would have to calculate the capital investment into the school by $63 million / (170 new students per year * 50 years) = $7,411.76 per student cost to build the school. If the school lasts longer or increases the number of new students per year, the per student cost decreases.
There is also the yearly cost of teaching and maintaining the grounds, but that is a separate statistic.
It's not Mono vs.NET Framework. Mono is an implementation of the.NET Framework and C# compiler on the linux platform. If you're asking about IDEs, then look at the ones the review talked about, and sharpDevelop and such.
The mono c# compiler allows you to create CIL (common intermediate language) code, which is analygous to java byte-code, except for just-in-time compilation. The mono implementation of the.NET Framework allows you to compile CIL to native linux binary JIT and run it on Linux.
The whole point about the.NET Framework and CIL is that you could write and compile a program using Mono, then copy it to windows and run it, and vice versa for VS.NET to linux. Right now this probably only works with console programs, and web services and ASP.NET and such. (Of course, with both windows and linux if you include system specific APIs, they won't run on the opposing system. )
When Mono's Windows.Forms implementation is complete, you should be able to do this same thing with complete GUI applications, however in the mean time that's what GTK# and other linux-based APIs are for.
You can bet diamonds to dollars that Microsoft will never open source their version though.
Not so. Check out Shared Source CLI, as known as Rotor. Basically a free, open-source version of the.Net framework and C# compiler distributed by Microsoft. It is supported on Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.
The enormity of possible applications heralds this discovery as not only a new technology - but a new industry. Think of it... the ability exists with 3D HoloProjectionTM to telepresence a visually real or imagined environment around a person, or group or conversely to telepresence a person or group into a visually real or imagined environment. The applications are unlimited.
I'm running W2K (sp3) and currently have an uptime of 36 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute.
I do believe that my computer and I has fallen into an alternate dimension.
I generally run at about 100% RAM usage (384 megs RAM) and leave Opera, Outlook, AIM, and explorer open at all times. Occasionally I have to restart Opera when it leaks memory and starts taking up >100megs RAM, like it is right now.
It's amazing that it is still stable after 36 days of constant daily workstation-type use. I just bought a new printer and cd-rw, but they're still in the box because I don't want to upset the constant uptime. It may never happen again.
Yeah, and those REALLY lazy ones that sit in a chair all day everywhere they go...you know the ones, I think they're called paralyzed?
Really...it pays once in a while to think of how technology like this can be used to benefit others rather than how it could let you be lazier. A hands-free mouse interface would definately let certain handicapped people use the computer where they couldn't before. I know there are probably other 'accessibility devices' out there, but most of them are pretty expensive. A mass marketed hands-free device would let bring the cost down and let people who don't have the benefit of use of their arms anymore really use a computer a lot easier.
There is an interesting problem though...do we have the ability (assuming we can hook up however many storage devices we want to one system) to space huge files across them? (DNA, DNA+metadata references, etc...) I wonder when the first terrabyte file will be made. I'd speculate it'd be a [.wad|.mpq|.u|*] file for Uber-QuakenHalflifeTournament XP.;)
I guess the simple truth is that now that 100 gig drives are a couple hundred bucks, we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need (unless you define "Reasonable" as "I need to store DNA Sequences"). - slashdot
Nobody should ever have need for more than 640 kB of RAM - Bill Gates
Simularities anyone?
Yes, they're both talking about memory needs, but there is a key difference...
"we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need [right now]"
vs.
"Nobody should ever [in the future] have need for more than 640 kB of RAM"
It's implied. Of course we understand that with larger available disk space people will make programs or rip DVDs or what have you that will fill it all up, but this terrabyte array isn't exactly going to be an everyday/everyuser product.
I'd like to personally thank whoever was responsible for that. There *is* life within microsoft! The corporate behemouth hasn't squashed all personality yet... Too bad what looks like a kill clippy game isn't done yet.
We have this great display in our computer system lab... We won a ETA-10 Supercomputer in SuperQuest in 1989, but alas it doesn't work anymore, due to a leaky roof and a badly timed storm. Anyway, we have one of the disk drives sitting there, about 5 feet tall, 6 feet wide and 4 feet deep, labeled 'ETA-10 HD: 1.2 MB, $300,000, 1989' then on top a standard hard drive (albiet dead) labeled 'Maxtor HD: 9.8 GB, $230, 1999'.
I'm not sure about the exact numbers, but it was about there. So in ten years we increased memory storage by 7 orders of magnitude (given the same amount of money), give or take a few megabytes.
Now a friend tells me the ballpark estimate for the number of molecules of CHO (in general the components of life) in a human 15 feet^3 and 150lbs is 2.15x10^27.
Conservatively, if each molecule takes up 1mb (including said error checking), then we'd need 2.15x10^27 mb of space. Starting with about 1mb in 1989 and our already estimated 7 times magnitude increase in 10 years, it'd take roughly (27/7)*10 = 38 years to reach this level, and it would cost only $300,000! I can easily imagine us being able to store the information needed to construct a human within my lifetime. The real problem would be how to get around the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle...measuring each of those zillions of molecules...you'd likely have to freeze the body to close to absolute zero to be able to measure it, but then you wouldn't be alive anymore so what's the point? The technology to measure this type of stuff would probably take longer to develop than the memory.
Flamers, note this won't be a hard drive or tape drive or anything we know of today probably...38 years ago we didn't dream of the hard drive, we were still using core memory. Imagine what's possible. Also, I'm not trolling that AC, just doing an exercise in imagination.
Well in my experience my mail is delivered fairly quickly, particularly if I use the 5+4 zip code. (I live in Northern Virginia.) There was one exception, however... On December 9th of last year, a friend of mine sent me a draft of a program for a banquet I was arranging. He made a trip to the post office to send it, so it did indeed have correct postage (77 cents). I recieved it January 18th...long after the banquet was over. I can only assume it got lost or dropped in a corner somewhere until someone found it, but I'd imagine that it is hard to lose something for a month in a large envelope, specially mailed, and only about 10 miles between sender and recipient. What if it was really important? Oh well.
Why does this old tech last so long, while later gee whizz probes plummet into Mars? Lots of the early probes failed, IIRC, it's just that nobody remembers the early failures. Incidentally, the Russians probably had a lot more, including manned ones.
There's a big difference between sticking a box of scientific instruments in orbit of the sun and landing them on another planet. Yeah, there were plenty of failures, but that was in the beginning. Then they learned all the intricacies of getting rockets and payloads into orbit and navigating the solar system, and those projects afterwards (Voyager, Galileo, Pioneer) were very successful.
Now, we're only at the beginning of the sending stuff to other planets phase. NASA is still learning how to make good reliable landings, but once they do, it'll make way for further exploration, manned missions, etc... As far as I know, the only way NASA has gotten stuff from space back to earth was from 1) smacking it into the ocean in an oblong capsule or 2) landing the space shuttle on a controlled surface (runway) with a crew guiding it. You can't do that on Mars. (And the X-* vehicles, but those were all suborbital, and aren't ready yet.) If you imagine if they landed a gemini capsule in some random uncontrolled enviroment on earth, vertically, using a controlled descent. This stuff is MASSIVELY hard! Or, as NASA would say, non-trivial. We've done some stuff right, but there's still some experience to be gained until it's at the level of, say, the Pioneer 6 engineering quality.
We switched to 10 digit phone numbers about a year ago as well. Didn't seem to be much of a problem for anyone, except for people who had to track phone numbers in databases for various organizations. It gets important to know the actual area code and have it implicitly stated rather than implied when you start getting more than one area code in an area.
Personally, I don't know what this fuss is all about. Can't people handle punching 3 extra numbers? Most of all the numbers you call for the time being will have the same first 3 numbers.
The IPv6 idea was interesting...think of the things you could do: ping someone's phone to see if it's alive (or busy or whatnot), telnet (ssh?) to a high tech answering machine... Now we just need to get the telephony devices to handle such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a blog entry about the concept of multi-touch mice vs. multi-touch trackpads.
"I can envision an ecosystem where multi-touch mice being accepted as a low-cost enabling technology that introduces people to Natural User Interfaces without a large investment. Those would be used in addition to or to complement multi-touch displays and larger Surface devices. It would benefit NUI adoption by allowing existing computers to use NUI software. While it would add to the complexity of planning interfaces across a larger variety of hardware capabilities, the potential for mass adoption may be more important."
Is it just me, or does the summary border on non-fair use? I clicked through and TFA was exactly the same as the summary, except for paragraph breaks.
The brain-computer program analogy doesn't quite work that way with invalid pointers. The poster above did mention that he can avoid bad things from happening by avoiding certain situations and states, so there is a slight relation. Basically there are certain paths in his brain that lead to overloads or abnormal, possibly synethetic experiences. The fear of small heights seems like a link between the "small things" area and the "fear" area. So it is more like there are some pointers that trigger weird combinations.
For myself, I have epilepsy as well and have fortunately only had 3-4 major events. Other than those, I sometimes have auras, which are the precursor to a seizure, and I can sometimes remove myself from the current situation and make it go away, or other times just concentrate and "will" it to go away. There are different types of seizures, but for those auras it feels like there is too much activity or electricity in my brain. Many different areas are being stimulated at once, much more than normal. My conscious thoughts retreat to a very small area in order to stay in control. The computer analogy might be overclocking a computer and/or turning up the voltage.
Yes, I know, but that was the only article I could find that referenced the aerodynamic stabilization issue (in the solutions section, as you mention.)
3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher
Actually most if not all manned and unmanned commercial rockets are aerodynamically unstable. They require active guidance systems to stay flying straight. (You couldn't manually pilot them without computer control, similar to modern fighter jets from F-16 onward.)
Model rockets have fins in order to be stable without this active guidance.
Pendulum Rocket Fallacy
Also check this article on Little Joe II, the apollo abort test platform. It has fins to be stable, regardless of what else happens. Most modern launchers don't. (Some Saturn V versions had tiny fins, but those were not sufficient for inherent stability.)
...and go sledding!
In your analogy, does the drag queen represent Obama or McCain?
Maybe I would understand it if this were a car analogy... you know what they say about slashdoters experience with women.
What's the point?
As the American Freedom Campaign put it in an email to members this morning:
"The founders of our country feared more than anything else the prospect of an executive who put his own power and desires above the Constitution. Congress was given the power of impeachment so that it could remove any president who committed the high crime of violating the Constitution during his (or her) term in office.
A strong case can be made that no president in the history of this country is more deserving of impeachment than George W. Bush. If he is not impeached, the bar for impeachment will have been raised so high that it might as well no longer exist. Future presidents will know that they can violate the Constitution at will, confident in the fact that Congress does not have the courage as an institution to do anything about it.
We cannot allow this to happen."
That's about as simple as it gets. Even if Bush only have seven months left, Congress has to set an example and exert its authority.
Me too!
...due to AIDS.
It's not $63 million spent on only 170 students. $63 million was spent as a capital investment into building the school, infrastructure, and other things which can be amortize over the usable lifetime of the school. I know of high schools that have been around for at least 50 years, although of course there are occasional renovations. Assuming the school lasts for 50 years, you have to divide by the total number of students that attend the school. You would have to calculate the capital investment into the school by $63 million / (170 new students per year * 50 years) = $7,411.76 per student cost to build the school. If the school lasts longer or increases the number of new students per year, the per student cost decreases.
There is also the yearly cost of teaching and maintaining the grounds, but that is a separate statistic.
It's not Mono vs .NET Framework. Mono is an implementation of the .NET Framework and C# compiler on the linux platform. If you're asking about IDEs, then look at the ones the review talked about, and sharpDevelop and such.
.NET Framework allows you to compile CIL to native linux binary JIT and run it on Linux.
.NET Framework and CIL is that you could write and compile a program using Mono, then copy it to windows and run it, and vice versa for VS.NET to linux. Right now this probably only works with console programs, and web services and ASP.NET and such. (Of course, with both windows and linux if you include system specific APIs, they won't run on the opposing system. )
The mono c# compiler allows you to create CIL (common intermediate language) code, which is analygous to java byte-code, except for just-in-time compilation. The mono implementation of the
The whole point about the
When Mono's Windows.Forms implementation is complete, you should be able to do this same thing with complete GUI applications, however in the mean time that's what GTK# and other linux-based APIs are for.
You can bet diamonds to dollars that Microsoft will never open source their version though.
.Net framework and C# compiler distributed by Microsoft. It is supported on Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.
.Net framework are each ECMA standards? ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 respectively.
.Net Framework, look at the Mono Project. It is not connected to Microsoft.)
Not so. Check out Shared Source CLI, as known as Rotor. Basically a free, open-source version of the
Also check http://www.sscli.net for some SSCLI/Rotor Projects.
And did you know that C# and the
(If you want a linux version of the
Well then check out this company! http://www.3dh.net/ Choice quote:
This company is "something else!"
I'm running W2K (sp3) and currently have an uptime of 36 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute.
I do believe that my computer and I has fallen into an alternate dimension.
I generally run at about 100% RAM usage (384 megs RAM) and leave Opera, Outlook, AIM, and explorer open at all times. Occasionally I have to restart Opera when it leaks memory and starts taking up >100megs RAM, like it is right now.
It's amazing that it is still stable after 36 days of constant daily workstation-type use. I just bought a new printer and cd-rw, but they're still in the box because I don't want to upset the constant uptime. It may never happen again.
BTW, I use UpTime 2000 from http://opus80.com/discnode.
Shouldn't it be Cracking Bill?
Aren't we trying to get rid of the image of hackers being bad? We should use the correct terminology ourselves then.
Yeah, and those REALLY lazy ones that sit in a chair all day everywhere they go...you know the ones, I think they're called paralyzed?
Really...it pays once in a while to think of how technology like this can be used to benefit others rather than how it could let you be lazier. A hands-free mouse interface would definately let certain handicapped people use the computer where they couldn't before. I know there are probably other 'accessibility devices' out there, but most of them are pretty expensive. A mass marketed hands-free device would let bring the cost down and let people who don't have the benefit of use of their arms anymore really use a computer a lot easier.
It's already happening!
http://www.robotbase.org
There is an interesting problem though...do we have the ability (assuming we can hook up however many storage devices we want to one system) to space huge files across them? (DNA, DNA+metadata references, etc...) I wonder when the first terrabyte file will be made. I'd speculate it'd be a [.wad|.mpq|.u|*] file for Uber-QuakenHalflifeTournament XP. ;)
I guess the simple truth is that now that 100 gig drives are a couple hundred bucks, we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need (unless you define "Reasonable" as "I need to store DNA Sequences"). - slashdot
Nobody should ever have need for more than 640 kB of RAM - Bill Gates
Simularities anyone?
Yes, they're both talking about memory needs, but there is a key difference...
"we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need [right now]"
vs.
"Nobody should ever [in the future] have need for more than 640 kB of RAM"
It's implied. Of course we understand that with larger available disk space people will make programs or rip DVDs or what have you that will fill it all up, but this terrabyte array isn't exactly going to be an everyday/everyuser product.
At the 'clippy' website, the onmouseover for the menus reveal different humorous things that the paperclip says...one of them being, "All Your Base Are Belong To Us"...this can also be found directly at http://www.officeclippy.com/images/rollover_4.gif
I'd like to personally thank whoever was responsible for that. There *is* life within microsoft! The corporate behemouth hasn't squashed all personality yet... Too bad what looks like a kill clippy game isn't done yet.
We can't store that much information
We have this great display in our computer system lab... We won a ETA-10 Supercomputer in SuperQuest in 1989, but alas it doesn't work anymore, due to a leaky roof and a badly timed storm. Anyway, we have one of the disk drives sitting there, about 5 feet tall, 6 feet wide and 4 feet deep, labeled 'ETA-10 HD: 1.2 MB, $300,000, 1989' then on top a standard hard drive (albiet dead) labeled 'Maxtor HD: 9.8 GB, $230, 1999'.
I'm not sure about the exact numbers, but it was about there. So in ten years we increased memory storage by 7 orders of magnitude (given the same amount of money), give or take a few megabytes.
((300000/1.2)/(230/9800))= 10652174
log10(10652174) = 7
Now a friend tells me the ballpark estimate for the number of molecules of CHO (in general the components of life) in a human 15 feet^3 and 150lbs is 2.15x10^27. Conservatively, if each molecule takes up 1mb (including said error checking), then we'd need 2.15x10^27 mb of space. Starting with about 1mb in 1989 and our already estimated 7 times magnitude increase in 10 years, it'd take roughly (27/7)*10 = 38 years to reach this level, and it would cost only $300,000! I can easily imagine us being able to store the information needed to construct a human within my lifetime. The real problem would be how to get around the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle...measuring each of those zillions of molecules...you'd likely have to freeze the body to close to absolute zero to be able to measure it, but then you wouldn't be alive anymore so what's the point? The technology to measure this type of stuff would probably take longer to develop than the memory.
Flamers, note this won't be a hard drive or tape drive or anything we know of today probably...38 years ago we didn't dream of the hard drive, we were still using core memory. Imagine what's possible. Also, I'm not trolling that AC, just doing an exercise in imagination.
Well in my experience my mail is delivered fairly quickly, particularly if I use the 5+4 zip code. (I live in Northern Virginia.) There was one exception, however... On December 9th of last year, a friend of mine sent me a draft of a program for a banquet I was arranging. He made a trip to the post office to send it, so it did indeed have correct postage (77 cents). I recieved it January 18th...long after the banquet was over. I can only assume it got lost or dropped in a corner somewhere until someone found it, but I'd imagine that it is hard to lose something for a month in a large envelope, specially mailed, and only about 10 miles between sender and recipient. What if it was really important? Oh well.
Why does this old tech last so long, while later gee whizz probes plummet into Mars? Lots of the early probes failed, IIRC, it's just that nobody remembers the early failures. Incidentally, the Russians probably had a lot more, including manned ones.
There's a big difference between sticking a box of scientific instruments in orbit of the sun and landing them on another planet. Yeah, there were plenty of failures, but that was in the beginning. Then they learned all the intricacies of getting rockets and payloads into orbit and navigating the solar system, and those projects afterwards (Voyager, Galileo, Pioneer) were very successful.
Now, we're only at the beginning of the sending stuff to other planets phase. NASA is still learning how to make good reliable landings, but once they do, it'll make way for further exploration, manned missions, etc... As far as I know, the only way NASA has gotten stuff from space back to earth was from 1) smacking it into the ocean in an oblong capsule or 2) landing the space shuttle on a controlled surface (runway) with a crew guiding it. You can't do that on Mars. (And the X-* vehicles, but those were all suborbital, and aren't ready yet.) If you imagine if they landed a gemini capsule in some random uncontrolled enviroment on earth, vertically, using a controlled descent. This stuff is MASSIVELY hard! Or, as NASA would say, non-trivial. We've done some stuff right, but there's still some experience to be gained until it's at the level of, say, the Pioneer 6 engineering quality.
Just my opinion, Josh
We switched to 10 digit phone numbers about a year ago as well. Didn't seem to be much of a problem for anyone, except for people who had to track phone numbers in databases for various organizations. It gets important to know the actual area code and have it implicitly stated rather than implied when you start getting more than one area code in an area.
Personally, I don't know what this fuss is all about. Can't people handle punching 3 extra numbers? Most of all the numbers you call for the time being will have the same first 3 numbers.
The IPv6 idea was interesting...think of the things you could do: ping someone's phone to see if it's alive (or busy or whatnot), telnet (ssh?) to a high tech answering machine... Now we just need to get the telephony devices to handle such a thing.