Although there has been a lot of talk about how open source is safer and better in many ways than m$, pehaps m$ does have one thing *nix doesn't... As closed source there is no need for developers to learn english to create packages that work in their languages or for their needs. Now don't get me wrong, I think M$ is evil... but, even though a non-native english speaker can run *nix in their own language, any programming they want to do is predominantly restricted to English. I work in Japan and we do a fair amount of programming in C as well as other languages, and funny enough, although the english abilities of my co-workers are nominal at best, a few verbs and the odd noun, if I speak to them in code they understand me compleatly... It is truely weird... The other day I was trying to tell one of the programmers that the coffee machine was out of sugar, the standard english phrase "The coffee machine is out of sugar' had no effect, as soon as I said 'if led = 1 then sato(sugar) = 0' I was understood... So back to my origional statement, although I think open source is much better for the computer industry, the lack of having to learn english in order to get something to work for your business is a definate plus to the managers who decide to implement something purely on the basis of cost.
I was, unclearly, speaking only from my experience here in Japan and In Canada... Thanks though for the input on 3 years as if memory serves me correct in Canada, they trash the value of your card if you don't use it for 12 consecutive months, and charge you somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2 per month that it is unused up to the amount on the card or 12 months which ever comes first. I am still deciphering the notations on the back of my Japanese card, but I suspect it is the same. I would not doubt if companies set their own standards outside of the United States citing international trade and home country laws to push for whatever is best for them.
they could get rid of that pesky, so much per month charge for unused card, thing like they have on the starbucks card... Starbucks makes it out like it is costing them a fortune to keep a database file of how much you have on their card. I will explain, too long, I will sum up, You get a card at $B, put money on it, if you don't use it for a certain period, they wipe it clean and you are done, or if you neglect to use it for a period they charge you for not using it... sound fair to you, or should I say, sound fare? Don't know about you but it leaves me with a bad taste of burnt coffee in my mouth, of course this just might be the $B coffee I had this morning.
totaly unaware that the rest of the world is laughing at them and not with them... When will it end, this patent fiasco? Has the worlds super power gone totaly mad? I thought it was just the technology side of things that came up with crazy patent ideas, but come on, enviornments... I can understand some of Frank Gehry's work , but a bank that serves popcorn and has a childrens play area... Great, what if I open a Mc Corporate Death Burgers inside an AMC theatre and put in an instant teller... Am I likely to be sued?
I for one can't wait until the day that I am playing GTA and decide to pull over for a slice of pizza and instantly my door bell rings with a delivery. The best part is it should only cost me 4 hub caps from the game car I just jacked... Now if only I could redeem coffee and dough nuts from the game to clear my parking tickets...
Damn if I can see one of these things tipping over. it has a 4' x 8' foot print and a 57" height on 3 wheels... one good corner and whammo your toast. Get nailed by an SUV... Organ doner... Sure it looked really cool with a whale tail in the Austin Powers Gold Member, but you wanna pick up your date in one of these things? Damn, forgot, single seater just like their other unit the Merlin. At least the Merlin looked like it would stand up to a stiff side wind. You want balls out excitement, check out T-Rex Granted it isn't electric but it is a two seater, motorcycle engine and heart pounding fun. I got the chance to see on up close at Sturgis last year. I hope the sparrow does do well though as it will innevitably translate into all around better transportation options in other areas.
Play some speed metal or punk. Nothing says "We are here to help you" like Crass or Slipknot. You may find your work load lighten a bit with all the hang ups.
Hit the art colleges during open houses or design shows... take a look around and talk to the students... Don't count on anyone calling you from any adds you take out. Artists and designers want to know what is in it for them... The best thing to do as far as the contract is concerned is to offer to pay them, you retain rights to use and distribute anything they 'sell' to you, but they retain rights to use the 'work' they produce in their portfolio... you can also pro-offer to supply them with a free finished product, as well as liner or some form of hard copy with their name on it. Things like that go a long way to getting designers or artists to hand over work. As long as their 'signature' ends up somewhere in the finished product hard coded (read printed in a booklet somewhere), they are usually happy. As for artistic freedom, that is a whole different kettle of fish... Try to let them do what they do best and stay out of their way only offering direction. Try to arrange work previews during the buildup and don't hit them with 'buts' use 'ands' to direct their work. You will find that you get much better end results that way Best of luck.
I too am currently designing the 'perfect' office. I was given the task of designing the new design studio for our company. It also had to include a showroom for our products as well as a meeting room for customers and sales. I found the most important thing was consideration of the use of space. One can not design an enviornment without getting input directly from the people who will use it. What one person likes or finds friendly, another may find annoying or unfriendly. Simple things like are corridors or pathways wide enough for two people to walk side by side or pass eachother without one having to give way to the other. Or, are ammenities that are used on a regular basis easy to reach yet inobtrusive, such as the printer. Will there be regular informal meetings that require a central table or private rooms? Aside from all the suggestions of windows and no cubicles, walk through patterns, work flow patterns and usage patterns should be researched first and once those are as correct as they can be, making it bright, or pretty or anything else is easy, at least the space will be useable. Oscar Wilde said "Uglyness is the result of someone trying to make something beautiful, while beauty is acchieved by those who aim at making something useful". I fortunately have a background in design and thinking about the little things has become second nature to me through years of experience. My best suggestions would be to hit the printing room and grab a package of A4 paper and print out a floor plan of just walls and things you can not move, then draw in bulk areas of work space slowly refining them over a number of drawings. These don't have to be pretty drawings or even useful to anyone other than yourself. Just try to see what goes where, who does what and how your paths make life easier for the majority. If you need to get final approval from someone, please for your own sake, only give them 3 - 5 semi final top view drawings showing no more than boxes for desks and outlines for everything. Then let them choose the one they like the best before going gung ho choosing floor covering and paint colours. The worst thing you can do to yourself is give them too much detail and too many choices as they will ineveitably pootch screw the whole thing by taking bits and pieces from each and move them around causing you to think ' if they were going to be this nit picky, why the hell didn't they just do it all themselves?' Take your time and back up your stages with written explanations or notes as to why you did something the way you did and how it makes for a good work enviornment. Best of luck I have been on this for the better part of a year and we are still about 3 months from choosing a final design. As I work for a Japanese company, once the final design is chosen, I doubt that it will take more than 1 month to complete the build. But there is the nature of Japanese firms, total consensus before any action, then swift action. What a nightmare up to action but damn inside a week everything gets done and it is a sight to behold. Hope this helps.
Man... I run at 1600 x 1200 on a 17" sony trinitron monitor and can't wait to pick up a nice 21" viewsonic and run higher rez... Granted it is a pain when I visit web sites that insist on using tiny fonts, although I did see a really cool flash site that scaled everything to fit into whatever window you had opened, and I could read it great even when I had it scaled down small... I do a tonne of 3D work and I love my real estate. At work I am on three 21" viewsonics maxed out at 1900 x 1600 and always use all three for one application. Granted I have a system that can handle it and I am not losing my eye sight just yet... On the other hand, my mother has difficulty seeing, due to cataracs, and she browses and does banking on a 800 X 600 laptop. So for private use hi res is something you set for web space the lowest common denominator is your best bet. I am sure within a few years we will have higer res as standard, but again as more boomers lose their sight, sites with easier to read text will do better. I can see a standard of higher res but then we will all have to use H1 for paragraph text.
I can't live without my 3D Max... I have tried Maya and it is just too much to get up to speed as I have been using Max for 10 yrs or so and I have to be productive... I have not yet seen another Linux based 3D program to compete with Max, so if you know any let me know... other than that, I have switched off all other M$ products using Moz and open office... Anyone else have the same issues? Games you say... Thats what my PSX is for... I think that it is important for office and businesses to be given the ability to open windows only programs yet not be dependant on the high costs of licences for M$ boxes... Yet, reading the article, I can't help but think the reason most people use M$ is because it works out of the box and installing programs and getting them to work is as easy as clicking a mouse... I went through the article and thought to myself... Who the hell can be bothered to do all this just to get a program to work when i can install it and run it instantly on a M$ box? I have read a number of comments here on/. saying the same thing, that Linux programs really need to be made easier to get up and running, Installers need to be made simpler, Interface needs to be streamlined and redefined... and I agree... as developers we have to remember people who chose linux over M$ tend to be able to deal with the tech behind getting their computer to work, but regular joe users are for the most part total Muppets.
Being an English (only) speaker living in Japan, I have had no problems with contacting my cell provider (NTT DoCoMo) and getting the answers I need. I won't go into all the bells and whistles of how great the phones are &c. save to say the only limiting factor I could find was that I had to get a certain brand of phone that had dual language capabilities. Once I chose my phone, everything I got with it was in English, and not the broken English manuals and instructions I expected. Any time I have had to talk with an operator or contact NTT directly, all I have to do is say Eigo and the person immediately switches to English. Apparently NTT won't even hire you for customer service unless you speak English as well as Japanese. I had a setup problem with my e-mail service on my phone, I was getting spam and wanted to know waht to do about it. I called them expecting to be shuffled around or misunderstood, but instead, the woman helping me gave me the answers I needed right off the top of her head without a stutter even though I was not doing the best job of explaining what I was trying to accomplish. In the end, she sat with me on the line and helped me to create an accept list for e-mail messages. Anything not coming from the 20 odd addresses I punched in would not be accepted by my phone. I think this is much better than any block list you can hand me, and much easier on the system side of things too. At the same time I had a question about my home internet connection, also with NTT, and instead of transfering me to another division, she again answered my questions as if she had them written on the back of her hand. After having had to deal with Rogers and Bell in Canada , and having a nightmare of a time even getting someone who spoke English, dealing with my issues become secondary to being able to communicate, I have found the service and quality of personel here amazing.
As to TV operators, we here have to pay a tax even if we don't have a television or cable, somthing along the lines of the U.K. the only experience I have with the TV guy is when someone comes to the door looking to sign me up so they can collect the monthly tax automatically. Here, not speaking Japanese pays off. I feign ignorance and confusion repeating over and over again TV nai and they go away for a year. So far this has been my only contact with them. Now whether they have tried to contact me by phone or not, I will never know because as soon as some one on the line realises I don't speak Japanese, they usually give up, and so far no one has contacted me in English about the TV tax. I can't wait till they do, in English, so I can practice my French...
Sure there is...
1. grab homeless guy off street.
2. ship him out with newspaper and whisky in a brown paper bag.
3. let nature take its course.
4.?
5. Profit.
but seriously, I am sure some form of wiper will be incorporated into the next version.
This is all fine and dandy as a recording medium goes, but I would like to see the technology put to some other uses, like recording my incomming e-mail messages direct to memory stick while skipping the spam.
For my mom, who works a couple days a week, the ability to record her soap programs, sans interuptions, while she is at work is great. I just find that if you record a 1 hr show without commercials, you get about 40 min of video on average. You spend 40 min watching this and recording another 30 min program, aprox. 22 min of real show. You record another show shile watching your 22 min show and so on... It is like constantly halving a distance... you seem to get somewhere in the beginning but you never reach the end.
Thats the way it has been done till now...
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
The question of should the key be removed or moved as well as is it still useful can't be easily answered. As with any system there are always a number of people who love it or hate it, use it or abuse it. From an engenering point of view if it ain't broke don't fix it comes to mind. From a vernacular point of view, people have always had it there above the shift key, ever since the time of manual type writers, and messing with something that has become standard for most people is a no no unless you are redefining the vernacular. For example, changing a phone pad to a calculator layout would be a no no, and would just confuse the majority of non-iwannahaveittobedifferent types, but creating a whole new juggle scroll a la iPod, ok. I have to admit it causes me no end of hassle as I use TAB all the time and am constantly hitting Caps Lock by accident. I just wish it had a click on click off feel to it like the old type writers rather than just a silly light. At least that way it would take a little effort to get it to engage and/or would provide some tactile feedback that the key is being pressed or is depressed. Well I should shut up now as I am not likely to build a new keyboard.
The article leaves the possibilitys open for unmanned launch and repair/upgrade systems to be developed. I can see some of the teams from the autonomous challange, as covered to death here on/. in recent months, being quite interested in developing this technology. I am all for sending people into space as being there is part of the point, but I am very interested in the technology that will come out of these proposals over the next 20 years. If we look at some of the things that have made their way into our homes thanks to r+d from NASA, I can see a time when not only is may car built a la Minority report Lexus, but it can be repaired just as easily in the same fashion. Here, in Japan, we have these great car washes that you park your car under and they move from the front to the back cleaning and then drying. I don't know if they are around the US, I have not seen any in Canada, but it would be nice , when my car breaks down, or that crazy useless check engine light comes on, if I can just pull into one of these things, pop in my warranty card, and have the machine fix whatever is wrong with it. granted lots of hard working people, as we see the workforce right now, would lose their jobs if it were to all of a sudden come into being, but given time and reclasification of jobs, I think that in the same way typesetters became typests become data entry clerks, assembly line workers will become robotic assembly line technitions. On another note... I started to fully understand 'whither' about three quarters of the way through his speech...
I used to work for an industrial door manufacturer and we on occasion built soundproof doors...
You say your work space is 10' x 10'
Start with a wooden frame 2"X6" and 10' square. Cover one side in 10 guage steel plate, sandwich sound proof insulation into it and lay on a layer of lead sheet. Over the lead sheet place 5/8" drywall and seal the units final side with 10 guage steel plate. Repete 4 more times, 5 if you want a floor. Make sure you put a door into one of the walls. Assemble the units into a big ass cube and cover the inside surfaces with sound proofing conical foam sheet. At this point you should have a comfotable 6'X6' work enviornment inside which you can hold a Metalica concert without disturbing your co workers, aside from the vibrations, which can be taken care of by relocating to the basement and bolting your cube to two concrete walls and the floor. Best of luck with your hearing.
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Although there has been a lot of talk about how open source is safer and better in many ways than m$, pehaps m$ does have one thing *nix doesn't... As closed source there is no need for developers to learn english to create packages that work in their languages or for their needs.
Now don't get me wrong, I think M$ is evil... but, even though a non-native english speaker can run *nix in their own language, any programming they want to do is predominantly restricted to English.
I work in Japan and we do a fair amount of programming in C as well as other languages, and funny enough, although the english abilities of my co-workers are nominal at best, a few verbs and the odd noun, if I speak to them in code they understand me compleatly... It is truely weird... The other day I was trying to tell one of the programmers that the coffee machine was out of sugar, the standard english phrase "The coffee machine is out of sugar' had no effect, as soon as I said 'if led = 1 then sato(sugar) = 0' I was understood...
So back to my origional statement, although I think open source is much better for the computer industry, the lack of having to learn english in order to get something to work for your business is a definate plus to the managers who decide to implement something purely on the basis of cost.
I was, unclearly, speaking only from my experience here in Japan and In Canada... Thanks though for the input on 3 years as if memory serves me correct in Canada, they trash the value of your card if you don't use it for 12 consecutive months, and charge you somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2 per month that it is unused up to the amount on the card or 12 months which ever comes first.
I am still deciphering the notations on the back of my Japanese card, but I suspect it is the same.
I would not doubt if companies set their own standards outside of the United States citing international trade and home country laws to push for whatever is best for them.
they could get rid of that pesky, so much per month charge for unused card, thing like they have on the starbucks card...
Starbucks makes it out like it is costing them a fortune to keep a database file of how much you have on their card.
I will explain, too long, I will sum up, You get a card at $B, put money on it, if you don't use it for a certain period, they wipe it clean and you are done, or if you neglect to use it for a period they charge you for not using it...
sound fair to you, or should I say, sound fare?
Don't know about you but it leaves me with a bad taste of burnt coffee in my mouth, of course this just might be the $B coffee I had this morning.
totaly unaware that the rest of the world is laughing at them and not with them... When will it end, this patent fiasco? Has the worlds super power gone totaly mad? I thought it was just the technology side of things that came up with crazy patent ideas, but come on, enviornments... I can understand some of Frank Gehry's work , but a bank that serves popcorn and has a childrens play area... Great, what if I open a Mc Corporate Death Burgers inside an AMC theatre and put in an instant teller... Am I likely to be sued?
and do it all in l33t...
I for one can't wait until the day that I am playing GTA and decide to pull over for a slice of pizza and instantly my door bell rings with a delivery. The best part is it should only cost me 4 hub caps from the game car I just jacked... Now if only I could redeem coffee and dough nuts from the game to clear my parking tickets...
It has just been brought to our attention at the root of the problem this site
Damn if I can see one of these things tipping over. it has a 4' x 8' foot print and a 57" height on 3 wheels... one good corner and whammo your toast. Get nailed by an SUV... Organ doner... Sure it looked really cool with a whale tail in the Austin Powers Gold Member, but you wanna pick up your date in one of these things? Damn, forgot, single seater just like their other unit the Merlin. At least the Merlin looked like it would stand up to a stiff side wind.
You want balls out excitement, check out T-Rex
Granted it isn't electric but it is a two seater, motorcycle engine and heart pounding fun. I got the chance to see on up close at Sturgis last year.
I hope the sparrow does do well though as it will innevitably translate into all around better transportation options in other areas.
Play some speed metal or punk. Nothing says "We are here to help you" like Crass or Slipknot.
You may find your work load lighten a bit with all the hang ups.
Hit the art colleges during open houses or design shows... take a look around and talk to the students... Don't count on anyone calling you from any adds you take out. Artists and designers want to know what is in it for them... The best thing to do as far as the contract is concerned is to offer to pay them, you retain rights to use and distribute anything they 'sell' to you, but they retain rights to use the 'work' they produce in their portfolio... you can also pro-offer to supply them with a free finished product, as well as liner or some form of hard copy with their name on it. Things like that go a long way to getting designers or artists to hand over work. As long as their 'signature' ends up somewhere in the finished product hard coded (read printed in a booklet somewhere), they are usually happy.
As for artistic freedom, that is a whole different kettle of fish... Try to let them do what they do best and stay out of their way only offering direction. Try to arrange work previews during the buildup and don't hit them with 'buts' use 'ands' to direct their work. You will find that you get much better end results that way
Best of luck.
I too am currently designing the 'perfect' office. I was given the task of designing the new design studio for our company. It also had to include a showroom for our products as well as a meeting room for customers and sales.
I found the most important thing was consideration of the use of space. One can not design an enviornment without getting input directly from the people who will use it.
What one person likes or finds friendly, another may find annoying or unfriendly. Simple things like are corridors or pathways wide enough for two people to walk side by side or pass eachother without one having to give way to the other. Or, are ammenities that are used on a regular basis easy to reach yet inobtrusive, such as the printer. Will there be regular informal meetings that require a central table or private rooms?
Aside from all the suggestions of windows and no cubicles, walk through patterns, work flow patterns and usage patterns should be researched first and once those are as correct as they can be, making it bright, or pretty or anything else is easy, at least the space will be useable. Oscar Wilde said "Uglyness is the result of someone trying to make something beautiful, while beauty is acchieved by those who aim at making something useful".
I fortunately have a background in design and thinking about the little things has become second nature to me through years of experience. My best suggestions would be to hit the printing room and grab a package of A4 paper and print out a floor plan of just walls and things you can not move, then draw in bulk areas of work space slowly refining them over a number of drawings. These don't have to be pretty drawings or even useful to anyone other than yourself. Just try to see what goes where, who does what and how your paths make life easier for the majority.
If you need to get final approval from someone, please for your own sake, only give them 3 - 5 semi final top view drawings showing no more than boxes for desks and outlines for everything. Then let them choose the one they like the best before going gung ho choosing floor covering and paint colours.
The worst thing you can do to yourself is give them too much detail and too many choices as they will ineveitably pootch screw the whole thing by taking bits and pieces from each and move them around causing you to think ' if they were going to be this nit picky, why the hell didn't they just do it all themselves?'
Take your time and back up your stages with written explanations or notes as to why you did something the way you did and how it makes for a good work enviornment.
Best of luck I have been on this for the better part of a year and we are still about 3 months from choosing a final design. As I work for a Japanese company, once the final design is chosen, I doubt that it will take more than 1 month to complete the build. But there is the nature of Japanese firms, total consensus before any action, then swift action. What a nightmare up to action but damn inside a week everything gets done and it is a sight to behold.
Hope this helps.
This is one of the rare examples where 1 and 2 are actualy #3...
Whodathunk?
Surfboard... Check Sun block... Check
beach towel... Check
Sex Wax... Check
500' extension cord... Check
life insurance... hmmmmmmm...
Man... I run at 1600 x 1200 on a 17" sony trinitron monitor and can't wait to pick up a nice 21" viewsonic and run higher rez... Granted it is a pain when I visit web sites that insist on using tiny fonts, although I did see a really cool flash site that scaled everything to fit into whatever window you had opened, and I could read it great even when I had it scaled down small... I do a tonne of 3D work and I love my real estate. At work I am on three 21" viewsonics maxed out at 1900 x 1600 and always use all three for one application. Granted I have a system that can handle it and I am not losing my eye sight just yet...
On the other hand, my mother has difficulty seeing, due to cataracs, and she browses and does banking on a 800 X 600 laptop. So for private use hi res is something you set for web space the lowest common denominator is your best bet.
I am sure within a few years we will have higer res as standard, but again as more boomers lose their sight, sites with easier to read text will do better. I can see a standard of higher res but then we will all have to use H1 for paragraph text.
Someone ship a tonne of these thing to AOL and not tell them they are ghost disks.
I can't live without my 3D Max... I have tried Maya and it is just too much to get up to speed as I have been using Max for 10 yrs or so and I have to be productive... I have not yet seen another Linux based 3D program to compete with Max, so if you know any let me know... other than that, I have switched off all other M$ products using Moz and open office... Anyone else have the same issues? /. saying the same thing, that Linux programs really need to be made easier to get up and running, Installers need to be made simpler, Interface needs to be streamlined and redefined... and I agree... as developers we have to remember people who chose linux over M$ tend to be able to deal with the tech behind getting their computer to work, but regular joe users are for the most part total Muppets.
Games you say... Thats what my PSX is for...
I think that it is important for office and businesses to be given the ability to open windows only programs yet not be dependant on the high costs of licences for M$ boxes... Yet, reading the article, I can't help but think the reason most people use M$ is because it works out of the box and installing programs and getting them to work is as easy as clicking a mouse... I went through the article and thought to myself... Who the hell can be bothered to do all this just to get a program to work when i can install it and run it instantly on a M$ box?
I have read a number of comments here on
Can't wait to see the bubble burst on this one...
Being an English (only) speaker living in Japan, I have had no problems with contacting my cell provider (NTT DoCoMo) and getting the answers I need.
I won't go into all the bells and whistles of how great the phones are &c. save to say the only limiting factor I could find was that I had to get a certain brand of phone that had dual language capabilities. Once I chose my phone, everything I got with it was in English, and not the broken English manuals and instructions I expected.
Any time I have had to talk with an operator or contact NTT directly, all I have to do is say Eigo and the person immediately switches to English.
Apparently NTT won't even hire you for customer service unless you speak English as well as Japanese.
I had a setup problem with my e-mail service on my phone, I was getting spam and wanted to know waht to do about it. I called them expecting to be shuffled around or misunderstood, but instead, the woman helping me gave me the answers I needed right off the top of her head without a stutter even though I was not doing the best job of explaining what I was trying to accomplish. In the end, she sat with me on the line and helped me to create an accept list for e-mail messages. Anything not coming from the 20 odd addresses I punched in would not be accepted by my phone. I think this is much better than any block list you can hand me, and much easier on the system side of things too. At the same time I had a question about my home internet connection, also with NTT, and instead of transfering me to another division, she again answered my questions as if she had them written on the back of her hand.
After having had to deal with Rogers and Bell in Canada , and having a nightmare of a time even getting someone who spoke English, dealing with my issues become secondary to being able to communicate, I have found the service and quality of personel here amazing.
As to TV operators, we here have to pay a tax even if we don't have a television or cable, somthing along the lines of the U.K. the only experience I have with the TV guy is when someone comes to the door looking to sign me up so they can collect the monthly tax automatically. Here, not speaking Japanese pays off. I feign ignorance and confusion repeating over and over again TV nai and they go away for a year. So far this has been my only contact with them. Now whether they have tried to contact me by phone or not, I will never know because as soon as some one on the line realises I don't speak Japanese, they usually give up, and so far no one has contacted me in English about the TV tax. I can't wait till they do, in English, so I can practice my French...
Sure there is...
1. grab homeless guy off street.
2. ship him out with newspaper and whisky in a brown paper bag.
3. let nature take its course.
4.?
5. Profit.
but seriously, I am sure some form of wiper will be incorporated into the next version.
This is all fine and dandy as a recording medium goes, but I would like to see the technology put to some other uses, like recording my incomming e-mail messages direct to memory stick while skipping the spam.
For my mom, who works a couple days a week, the ability to record her soap programs, sans interuptions, while she is at work is great. I just find that if you record a 1 hr show without commercials, you get about 40 min of video on average. You spend 40 min watching this and recording another 30 min program, aprox. 22 min of real show. You record another show shile watching your 22 min show and so on... It is like constantly halving a distance... you seem to get somewhere in the beginning but you never reach the end.
The question of should the key be removed or moved as well as is it still useful can't be easily answered. As with any system there are always a number of people who love it or hate it, use it or abuse it. From an engenering point of view if it ain't broke don't fix it comes to mind. From a vernacular point of view, people have always had it there above the shift key, ever since the time of manual type writers, and messing with something that has become standard for most people is a no no unless you are redefining the vernacular. For example, changing a phone pad to a calculator layout would be a no no, and would just confuse the majority of non-iwannahaveittobedifferent types, but creating a whole new juggle scroll a la iPod, ok. /or would provide some tactile feedback that the key is being pressed or is depressed.
I have to admit it causes me no end of hassle as I use TAB all the time and am constantly hitting Caps Lock by accident.
I just wish it had a click on click off feel to it like the old type writers rather than just a silly light. At least that way it would take a little effort to get it to engage and
Well I should shut up now as I am not likely to build a new keyboard.
The article leaves the possibilitys open for unmanned launch and repair/upgrade systems to be developed. I can see some of the teams from the autonomous challange, as covered to death here on /. in recent months, being quite interested in developing this technology.
I am all for sending people into space as being there is part of the point, but I am very interested in the technology that will come out of these proposals over the next 20 years.
If we look at some of the things that have made their way into our homes thanks to r+d from NASA, I can see a time when not only is may car built a la Minority report Lexus, but it can be repaired just as easily in the same fashion.
Here, in Japan, we have these great car washes that you park your car under and they move from the front to the back cleaning and then drying. I don't know if they are around the US, I have not seen any in Canada, but it would be nice , when my car breaks down, or that crazy useless check engine light comes on, if I can just pull into one of these things, pop in my warranty card, and have the machine fix whatever is wrong with it.
granted lots of hard working people, as we see the workforce right now, would lose their jobs if it were to all of a sudden come into being, but given time and reclasification of jobs, I think that in the same way typesetters became typests become data entry clerks, assembly line workers will become robotic assembly line technitions.
On another note... I started to fully understand 'whither' about three quarters of the way through his speech...
that the technical beta release does not have the stability of released Microsoft software...
Released Microsoft software doesn't have stability either so what is the big deal?
I used to work for an industrial door manufacturer and we on occasion built soundproof doors...
You say your work space is 10' x 10'
Start with a wooden frame 2"X6" and 10' square. Cover one side in 10 guage steel plate, sandwich sound proof insulation into it and lay on a layer of lead sheet. Over the lead sheet place 5/8" drywall and seal the units final side with 10 guage steel plate. Repete 4 more times, 5 if you want a floor. Make sure you put a door into one of the walls. Assemble the units into a big ass cube and cover the inside surfaces with sound proofing conical foam sheet. At this point you should have a comfotable 6'X6' work enviornment inside which you can hold a Metalica concert without disturbing your co workers, aside from the vibrations, which can be taken care of by relocating to the basement and bolting your cube to two concrete walls and the floor. Best of luck with your hearing.
1. overclock the air compressor
2. press start
3. watch the robot inflate like the incredible hulk
4. duck flying buttons
5. rinse and repete