I tried TiVo once, and had to return the equipment for a refund. The firmware was crappy, and the user experience was abysmal. This was their 2nd generation system, no less.
As much as I'd like to see competition out there, I think the only company with the understanding of how to satisfy a customer is Apple and their iTunes service. I seriously think that they are the only ones who understand how to offer smooth experience for users of their technology, in spite of whatever snafus they have committed in their history. All of the DVRs that my friends have are irritating in their UI response lag. Seriously, it's 2011 and you can't make a fucking GUI that takes less than 150ms to react to a keypress on the remote? Fucking seriously? I shudder to think what sort of lame engineers guide the teams that make DVR software. It's like they never heard of a state machine and pushing events between state machines. It's not hard. Don't block the UI when waiting for network or mass storage. Sheesh.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that being out in miserable weather will make you sick -- not if you're maintaining proper body temperature, at least. That's some wives' tale that has lived way past its expiry date. I know not everyone can live in a place where there's a walkable neighborhood, but perhaps you have a public park somewhere?
At least in Ohio, doing anything against the rules of a theatre owner can get you charged with criminal trespass, an M4 (misdemeanor in fourth degree) -- that's up to a $250 fine and up to 30 days in jail. Do you seriously think that's not sufficient? Federal punishment for copyright violations is IMHO entirely unconstitutional. The punishment should be in line with the crime, the way it's right now you can sell a couple bootleg DVDs and end up paying that off for the rest of your life. That's almost like a life-long prison sentence, but the feds get off easy on paying the prison costs.
iPad is "overpriced" in the sense that one wishes it was cheaper, it's all there's to it. I know that it costs about 50% of the sale price to make it, and that's cutting it pretty close given all the overheads involved (and profit!). So while the reality is that it can't be made any cheaper right now, I think there will be ways of making it much cheaper as the technology matures.
Apple's desktop products are exceptionally well designed, and that figures in the price, but hardware-spec-wise there are better deals out there if you're OK with getting rid of things that aren't truly necessary. I have an iMac with firewire ports that I have never used, and have no reason to ever use. Same with the Macbook. I believe they are a very good deal for the money, but I think they should cost less given that Apple has had ample time to optimize the manufacturing process. I'm OK with Apple making good profit, but their mfg costs have a way to go down. A couple weeks ago I got three Dell Vostros that come with i7, 4GB of RAM and a 23" monitor for about $800 each. They are very fast and quiet things -- sure they take some room under the desk, but I'd have hard time spending money for three iMacs that I would be running Windows 7 on anyway...
I really have no clue how my post's obviously critical position towards Apple can be read as fanboyism ("Apple was being killed by having too many products and no clear sense of direction."). Quoting the article you refer to:
We were still very dependent on the profits of Apple II. I felt we had to push profits of Apple II and Steve wanted to lower the price of the Mac to get sales up. We went to the board to decide.
The period Sculley is talking about is centered around 1985. That's what your "at the time" refers to. Their prices were pretty much at the top end of what would be "acceptable" given their relatively low volumes, all the while the PC market was churning out mass-made PCs that kept going down in price. That's what I mean by the price of Mac not changing much: it only changed relative to the price of a PC.
Heck, Apple's products are still considered to be overpriced, and Apple's stock took several "beatings" supposedly as a reaction to the "excessive" pricing (say in Oct 2008).
I still stand by my position that Apple's products showed lack of focus and attention to detail under SSA (Sculley, Spindler and Amelio), and that this was really their undoing. Exceptional products can be sold at a premium, during the SSA period Apple's products kept losing the exceptional status -- status that was faltering even when Jobs was in charge of the Mac. What happened to Apple was IMHO all for the better: it allowed Jobs to learn from his own failures (NeXT), and to get the insight needed to recover the company.
I do of course consider the first Mac to be a revolutionary product, but it was coming short in performance, and there wasn't much improvement in that area, and for quite a while. It really took to change over to Intel CPU for Macs to start having competitive performance.
This is much needed, because there are crazies out there who sell slightly "modified" water (read: extra shit added) that does not have 0 calories, yet they still have the word Water displayed prominently on the package.
I should add that an isotonic solution makes sense when the individual is mostly healthy and just dehydrated from something common like perspiration or a bout of diarrhea/vomiting. If you're dehydrated due to anything more serious, there are no magic bullets and you need to be under medical care -- I agree with that.
That "common sense" way of thinking would be OK perhaps 300 years ago. Now, the truth is that pure water does not prevent dehydration at all, at least not in isolation. If you went on a hunger strike and only had pure water to drink, you'd kill yourself prematurely. Dehydration is prevented by adequate intake of water and water-soluble electrolyte salts. Typically that's taken care of by a decent diet. If you want a drink that prevents dehydration, you're looking for something that's isotonic
There's no way to market water as preventing dehydration, because it doesn't work alone. It's like trying to market bread as a remedy for malnourishment -- sure, it could be a part of a restorative diet, but you won't recover much from malnourishment if all you'd eat is bread and water.
where while it is technically true, the stuff is not medical, and shouldn't be sold as if it were a medical drug/device
Whoa. Drugs and medical devices require the manufacturer to keep insane amounts of paperwork and do a fair amount of due diligence in production. I think that any cranberry juice manufacturer that wanted to go through this process would pretty much go bankrupt. It'd be economically infeasible to sell common, mass produced foodstuffs and supplements as drugs, even if it was legal to do so.
Subtitlers or dubbers, ha ha. Yes, you want to coordinate all of them from the USA, because otherwise they will suck big time. If they don't live here, they completely lack the cultural context needed for translation. That's what I take from watching subtitles Hollywood movies in Poland. There are few notable exceptions -- I think that Polish translation of Shrek I was brilliantly done and funnier than the original, but that only drives the point in. If it were up to me, I would stipulate that all movie translation be done by first generation translators living permanently in the U.S., and then be vetted by their local counterparts for correct use of the language, and perhaps for further exploitation of local humor that sometimes is lost on emigrants. If you have translators who don't live 50% of the time each in the two countries whose language they translate between, they're bound to be deficient, so you have to have two people doing the translation, each based in the respective country.
only *1* person would need to buy the $11 movie ticket, then he could record the movie with a HD video camera (Not sneaking it in, because it's now legal), and then upload it
This is a myth that I see repeated over and over. When you go to see a movie, it's up to the theater's owners to limit what you can do while being in the theatre. There's plenty of legal stuff that would get you kicked out of a theatre. So what you claim isn't a problem at all, you don't need copyright law to prevent people from recording movies in theaters. Same applies to DRM used on media files for digital projection: their effectiveness doesn't depend on copyright law either, they are technological measures that don't give a rats ass about law, they just work for their intended purpose (mostly, hah).
Heck, I'd say that the content producers' marriage to advertisers is what will eventually bring them down. Somehow, the producers must realize that their products have worth and that the consumers will gladly pay for it, as long as it's offered in a convenient form. I'd much rather pay for 20 episodes of various shows, at $1 each, that I'd like to watch every month, than for all the useless shit I used to get on cable.
Sorry, the "raised the prices of Macintoshes until they were at the brink of extinction" is something you made up. Apple was being killed by having too many products and no clear sense of direction. When Jobs came to bring them around, he cut all of that cruft and in a matter of a couple of quarters they were profitable again. And guess what: the price of the Mac hasn't changed much at all in that period of time! The products themselves became better, because the company got its focus back.
Your assumption is that the beancounters and corporate drones are making right decisions. I think there's enough evidence around that working for a big media company makes you do dumb shit. Seriously. Required resources, my ass. Those already exist. I'm sure Netflix would love to provide the service, run the infrastructure (they have most of it anyway!), etc.
That's just silly. Those "normally toxic" chemicals are not antibiotics! Not only that, toxicity is not some deity-given thing. There are things that we eat that will kill many small mammals, and vice versa: stuff that squirrels or birds eat that would be toxic to us. There are various ways a given substance can be toxic, and usually the more complex organic substances are not necessarily generally toxic. Heck, even some pathogens won't necessarily infect all mammals!
You seem to repeat false claims from genetic roulette and elsewhere. First, there are some very old bacteria that actually do make antibiotics that act on plants root systems, and those do help the farmed plants thrive. There are of course other examples (molds helping themselves not to get infected FTW!). So the nature itself does use antibiotics, and we're not all dead with MRSA, contrary to what nutters would like you to think. Secondly, GM does not involve inserting such synthesis genes as you claim. That's some made up BS, unless you provide me with clear citations that somehow imply that technique is used. What does happen is that antibiotic resistance genes are used in creating GMOs. That's very different from antibiotic synthesis. The concern is that those antibiotic resistance genes would get transferred to bacteria and create some vile antibiotic-resistant superstrain. That's just someone's wild imagination that has no backing in what really happens in nature.
Says acedemicsreview.org:
Some transgenic crops contain antibiotic resistance genes as selection markers that were used during the process of transgene construction. The proliferation in gut bacteria of these markers would require first the uptake of the functional resistance gene by a gut bacterium, and then a selective advantage for that bacterium to survive and multiply. The improbability of the gene transfer has already been mentioned in earlier sections. The consequences of the very improbable transfer should be judged against the background of antibiotic resistance already present in intestinal bacteria. Our gut already contains billions of bacteria carrying resistances to kanamycin and ampicillin, the two most commonly used antibiotic marker genes in GM crops. There is a huge reservoir of ampicillin resistance genes in soil and these can be readily transmitted to gut bacteria. Current medical opinion is that the antibiotic markers used in commercialised crops do not pose any infectious disease risk.
Say Gay and Gillespie:
Cotransformation with an antibiotic-resistance marker is often necessary in the process of creating a genetically modified (GM) plant. Concern has been expressed that the release of these markers in GM plants may result in an increase in the rate of antibiotic resistance in human pathogens. For such an event to occur, DNA must not be totally degraded in field conditions, and the antibiotic-resistance marker must encounter potential recipient bacteria and be taken up by them, before being integrated into the bacterial genome, and the genes then expressed. In addition, the new recombinant must overcome the physiological disadvantage of acquisition of a piece of foreign DNA, probably in conditions where the new gene does not provide a selective advantage. We review each of these stages, summarising the investigations that have followed each of these steps. We contrast the potential increase in the antibiotic resistance reservoir created by antibiotic-resistance markers in GM plants with the current situation created by medical antibiotic prescribing. We conclude that, although fragments of DNA large enough to contain an antibiotic-resistance gene may survive in the environment, the barriers to transfer, incorporation, and transmission are so substantial that any contribution to antibiotic resistance made by GM plants must be overwhelmed by the contribution made by antibiotic prescription in clinical practice.
From Thomashow et al.
Broadly defined, antibiotics include a chemically heterogeneous group of small organic molecules of microbial origin that, at low concentrations, are deleterious to the growth or metabolic activities of other microorganisms (48). That soil is rich in microorganisms capable of antibiotic synthesis is well accepted, but the frequency with which synthesis occurs at ecologically significant levels in nature has been much less clear. Over the past decade, however, genetic and molecular t
and genetically mutilated crops is an other example of the same problem of making bacteria drug resistant
I agree with most of the post, but this is just silly. Kinda takes away from credibility of the rest of it. WTF has GM food got with drug resistant bacteria, for crying out loud?
You can't expect anyone to know everything, but there's something called research and exploration. There needs to be a phase where you play with it on paper (or in your head). Of course he did it for the heck of it, and I'm sure he had fun, but that's good for him, not for the potential user of it:) I claim that the details he invested his time into were simply not enough, at least not if you're thinking of a device that would purport to be anything besides an experiment (usable for others vs. usable to yourself only).
The deal is that he missed a vital factor in designing a device that purports to be useful: user-friendliness and usability. That's what turns you from just another engineer into an engineer that will do stuff that's enjoyable, not a yet another kludge. I still don't see why it had to cost so much, perhaps he included the cost of "lab supplies" such as the solderless breadboard?
I don't think that the age is much of a factor, I've seen more complex projects done by younger kids. Location (central america) doesn't tell us much by default either. Well, other than he probably had to pay higher taxes on everything, compared to U.S.
Do note that a medically rated power supply is not sufficient by itself, you still need another layer of galvanic isolation between that and the body of your subject. Batteries and optical (either wired or wireless) or radio connection are a best bet if you're not sure.
EOG doesn't really need more than a kilohertz or two for sampling rate, I don't know if that's "high speed" in your book or not.
I pretty much don't think it's worthy of Slashdot homepage, there is plenty of similarly cool projects done by kids all around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried TiVo once, and had to return the equipment for a refund. The firmware was crappy, and the user experience was abysmal. This was their 2nd generation system, no less.
As much as I'd like to see competition out there, I think the only company with the understanding of how to satisfy a customer is Apple and their iTunes service. I seriously think that they are the only ones who understand how to offer smooth experience for users of their technology, in spite of whatever snafus they have committed in their history. All of the DVRs that my friends have are irritating in their UI response lag. Seriously, it's 2011 and you can't make a fucking GUI that takes less than 150ms to react to a keypress on the remote? Fucking seriously? I shudder to think what sort of lame engineers guide the teams that make DVR software. It's like they never heard of a state machine and pushing events between state machines. It's not hard. Don't block the UI when waiting for network or mass storage. Sheesh.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that being out in miserable weather will make you sick -- not if you're maintaining proper body temperature, at least. That's some wives' tale that has lived way past its expiry date. I know not everyone can live in a place where there's a walkable neighborhood, but perhaps you have a public park somewhere?
At least in Ohio, doing anything against the rules of a theatre owner can get you charged with criminal trespass, an M4 (misdemeanor in fourth degree) -- that's up to a $250 fine and up to 30 days in jail. Do you seriously think that's not sufficient? Federal punishment for copyright violations is IMHO entirely unconstitutional. The punishment should be in line with the crime, the way it's right now you can sell a couple bootleg DVDs and end up paying that off for the rest of your life. That's almost like a life-long prison sentence, but the feds get off easy on paying the prison costs.
iPad is "overpriced" in the sense that one wishes it was cheaper, it's all there's to it. I know that it costs about 50% of the sale price to make it, and that's cutting it pretty close given all the overheads involved (and profit!). So while the reality is that it can't be made any cheaper right now, I think there will be ways of making it much cheaper as the technology matures.
Apple's desktop products are exceptionally well designed, and that figures in the price, but hardware-spec-wise there are better deals out there if you're OK with getting rid of things that aren't truly necessary. I have an iMac with firewire ports that I have never used, and have no reason to ever use. Same with the Macbook. I believe they are a very good deal for the money, but I think they should cost less given that Apple has had ample time to optimize the manufacturing process. I'm OK with Apple making good profit, but their mfg costs have a way to go down. A couple weeks ago I got three Dell Vostros that come with i7, 4GB of RAM and a 23" monitor for about $800 each. They are very fast and quiet things -- sure they take some room under the desk, but I'd have hard time spending money for three iMacs that I would be running Windows 7 on anyway...
I really have no clue how my post's obviously critical position towards Apple can be read as fanboyism ("Apple was being killed by having too many products and no clear sense of direction."). Quoting the article you refer to:
We were still very dependent on the profits of Apple II. I felt we had to push profits of Apple II and Steve wanted to lower the price of the Mac to get sales up. We went to the board to decide.
The period Sculley is talking about is centered around 1985. That's what your "at the time" refers to. Their prices were pretty much at the top end of what would be "acceptable" given their relatively low volumes, all the while the PC market was churning out mass-made PCs that kept going down in price. That's what I mean by the price of Mac not changing much: it only changed relative to the price of a PC.
Heck, Apple's products are still considered to be overpriced, and Apple's stock took several "beatings" supposedly as a reaction to the "excessive" pricing (say in Oct 2008).
I still stand by my position that Apple's products showed lack of focus and attention to detail under SSA (Sculley, Spindler and Amelio), and that this was really their undoing. Exceptional products can be sold at a premium, during the SSA period Apple's products kept losing the exceptional status -- status that was faltering even when Jobs was in charge of the Mac. What happened to Apple was IMHO all for the better: it allowed Jobs to learn from his own failures (NeXT), and to get the insight needed to recover the company.
I do of course consider the first Mac to be a revolutionary product, but it was coming short in performance, and there wasn't much improvement in that area, and for quite a while. It really took to change over to Intel CPU for Macs to start having competitive performance.
Let me happily announce that the answer to your question is a definite and resounding YES.
This is much needed, because there are crazies out there who sell slightly "modified" water (read: extra shit added) that does not have 0 calories, yet they still have the word Water displayed prominently on the package.
Heck, in Switzerland I would occasionally drink from streams that were above the pastures. Best water taste ever, as far as I'm concerned.
Heck yes! +1 insightful
It's an effect, not a cause. You can get dehydrated while drinking enough water! I think you should look in a medical encyclopedia next time.
I should add that an isotonic solution makes sense when the individual is mostly healthy and just dehydrated from something common like perspiration or a bout of diarrhea/vomiting. If you're dehydrated due to anything more serious, there are no magic bullets and you need to be under medical care -- I agree with that.
That "common sense" way of thinking would be OK perhaps 300 years ago. Now, the truth is that pure water does not prevent dehydration at all, at least not in isolation. If you went on a hunger strike and only had pure water to drink, you'd kill yourself prematurely. Dehydration is prevented by adequate intake of water and water-soluble electrolyte salts. Typically that's taken care of by a decent diet. If you want a drink that prevents dehydration, you're looking for something that's isotonic
There's no way to market water as preventing dehydration, because it doesn't work alone. It's like trying to market bread as a remedy for malnourishment -- sure, it could be a part of a restorative diet, but you won't recover much from malnourishment if all you'd eat is bread and water.
where while it is technically true, the stuff is not medical, and shouldn't be sold as if it were a medical drug/device
Whoa. Drugs and medical devices require the manufacturer to keep insane amounts of paperwork and do a fair amount of due diligence in production. I think that any cranberry juice manufacturer that wanted to go through this process would pretty much go bankrupt. It'd be economically infeasible to sell common, mass produced foodstuffs and supplements as drugs, even if it was legal to do so.
Subtitlers or dubbers, ha ha. Yes, you want to coordinate all of them from the USA, because otherwise they will suck big time. If they don't live here, they completely lack the cultural context needed for translation. That's what I take from watching subtitles Hollywood movies in Poland. There are few notable exceptions -- I think that Polish translation of Shrek I was brilliantly done and funnier than the original, but that only drives the point in. If it were up to me, I would stipulate that all movie translation be done by first generation translators living permanently in the U.S., and then be vetted by their local counterparts for correct use of the language, and perhaps for further exploitation of local humor that sometimes is lost on emigrants. If you have translators who don't live 50% of the time each in the two countries whose language they translate between, they're bound to be deficient, so you have to have two people doing the translation, each based in the respective country.
only *1* person would need to buy the $11 movie ticket, then he could record the movie with a HD video camera (Not sneaking it in, because it's now legal), and then upload it
This is a myth that I see repeated over and over. When you go to see a movie, it's up to the theater's owners to limit what you can do while being in the theatre. There's plenty of legal stuff that would get you kicked out of a theatre. So what you claim isn't a problem at all, you don't need copyright law to prevent people from recording movies in theaters. Same applies to DRM used on media files for digital projection: their effectiveness doesn't depend on copyright law either, they are technological measures that don't give a rats ass about law, they just work for their intended purpose (mostly, hah).
That's precisely the argument Steve Jobs had when meeting with various media companies. "they just don't get it", he'd say.
Heck, I'd say that the content producers' marriage to advertisers is what will eventually bring them down. Somehow, the producers must realize that their products have worth and that the consumers will gladly pay for it, as long as it's offered in a convenient form. I'd much rather pay for 20 episodes of various shows, at $1 each, that I'd like to watch every month, than for all the useless shit I used to get on cable.
Sorry, the "raised the prices of Macintoshes until they were at the brink of extinction" is something you made up. Apple was being killed by having too many products and no clear sense of direction. When Jobs came to bring them around, he cut all of that cruft and in a matter of a couple of quarters they were profitable again. And guess what: the price of the Mac hasn't changed much at all in that period of time! The products themselves became better, because the company got its focus back.
Your assumption is that the beancounters and corporate drones are making right decisions. I think there's enough evidence around that working for a big media company makes you do dumb shit. Seriously. Required resources, my ass. Those already exist. I'm sure Netflix would love to provide the service, run the infrastructure (they have most of it anyway!), etc.
Ketchup on pizza is yummy. I think it's a matter of taste. Also, remember that not all ketchup is created equal.
That's just silly. Those "normally toxic" chemicals are not antibiotics! Not only that, toxicity is not some deity-given thing. There are things that we eat that will kill many small mammals, and vice versa: stuff that squirrels or birds eat that would be toxic to us. There are various ways a given substance can be toxic, and usually the more complex organic substances are not necessarily generally toxic. Heck, even some pathogens won't necessarily infect all mammals!
You seem to repeat false claims from genetic roulette and elsewhere. First, there are some very old bacteria that actually do make antibiotics that act on plants root systems, and those do help the farmed plants thrive. There are of course other examples (molds helping themselves not to get infected FTW!). So the nature itself does use antibiotics, and we're not all dead with MRSA, contrary to what nutters would like you to think. Secondly, GM does not involve inserting such synthesis genes as you claim. That's some made up BS, unless you provide me with clear citations that somehow imply that technique is used. What does happen is that antibiotic resistance genes are used in creating GMOs. That's very different from antibiotic synthesis. The concern is that those antibiotic resistance genes would get transferred to bacteria and create some vile antibiotic-resistant superstrain. That's just someone's wild imagination that has no backing in what really happens in nature.
Says acedemicsreview.org:
Some transgenic crops contain antibiotic resistance genes as selection markers that were used during the process of transgene construction. The proliferation in gut bacteria of these markers would require first the uptake of the functional resistance gene by a gut bacterium, and then a selective advantage for that bacterium to survive and multiply. The improbability of the gene transfer has already been mentioned in earlier sections. The consequences of the very improbable transfer should be judged against the background of antibiotic resistance already present in intestinal bacteria. Our gut already contains billions of bacteria carrying resistances to kanamycin and ampicillin, the two most commonly used antibiotic marker genes in GM crops. There is a huge reservoir of ampicillin resistance genes in soil and these can be readily transmitted to gut bacteria. Current medical opinion is that the antibiotic markers used in commercialised crops do not pose any infectious disease risk.
Say Gay and Gillespie:
Cotransformation with an antibiotic-resistance marker is often necessary in the process of creating a genetically modified (GM) plant. Concern has been expressed that the release of these markers in GM plants may result in an increase in the rate of antibiotic resistance in human pathogens. For such an event to occur, DNA must not be totally degraded in field conditions, and the antibiotic-resistance marker must encounter potential recipient bacteria and be taken up by them, before being integrated into the bacterial genome, and the genes then expressed. In addition, the new recombinant must overcome the physiological disadvantage of acquisition of a piece of foreign DNA, probably in conditions where the new gene does not provide a selective advantage. We review each of these stages, summarising the investigations that have followed each of these steps. We contrast the potential increase in the antibiotic resistance reservoir created by antibiotic-resistance markers in GM plants with the current situation created by medical antibiotic prescribing. We conclude that, although fragments of DNA large enough to contain an antibiotic-resistance gene may survive in the environment, the barriers to transfer, incorporation, and transmission are so substantial that any contribution to antibiotic resistance made by GM plants must be overwhelmed by the contribution made by antibiotic prescription in clinical practice.
From Thomashow et al.
Broadly defined, antibiotics include a chemically heterogeneous group of small organic molecules of microbial origin that, at low concentrations, are deleterious to the growth or metabolic activities of other microorganisms (48). That soil is rich in microorganisms capable of antibiotic synthesis is well accepted, but the frequency with which synthesis occurs at ecologically significant levels in nature has been much less clear. Over the past decade, however, genetic and molecular t
and genetically mutilated crops is an other example of the same problem of making bacteria drug resistant
I agree with most of the post, but this is just silly. Kinda takes away from credibility of the rest of it. WTF has GM food got with drug resistant bacteria, for crying out loud?
You can't expect anyone to know everything, but there's something called research and exploration. There needs to be a phase where you play with it on paper (or in your head). Of course he did it for the heck of it, and I'm sure he had fun, but that's good for him, not for the potential user of it :) I claim that the details he invested his time into were simply not enough, at least not if you're thinking of a device that would purport to be anything besides an experiment (usable for others vs. usable to yourself only).
The deal is that he missed a vital factor in designing a device that purports to be useful: user-friendliness and usability. That's what turns you from just another engineer into an engineer that will do stuff that's enjoyable, not a yet another kludge. I still don't see why it had to cost so much, perhaps he included the cost of "lab supplies" such as the solderless breadboard?
I don't think that the age is much of a factor, I've seen more complex projects done by younger kids. Location (central america) doesn't tell us much by default either. Well, other than he probably had to pay higher taxes on everything, compared to U.S.
Do note that a medically rated power supply is not sufficient by itself, you still need another layer of galvanic isolation between that and the body of your subject. Batteries and optical (either wired or wireless) or radio connection are a best bet if you're not sure.
EOG doesn't really need more than a kilohertz or two for sampling rate, I don't know if that's "high speed" in your book or not.
I pretty much don't think it's worthy of Slashdot homepage, there is plenty of similarly cool projects done by kids all around the world.