I'd rather ask: what the fuck would I need Google Glass for, except maybe as a "cool" video recorder with a little display showing how much storage/battery is left. Perhaps also a showing realtime image histogram just to make sure there's enough light, but not too much. So, well, there's some use for it after all, fuck or not:)
Well, there are radioisotope generators. They can put out as much power as you design them for, there are no inherent limitations except for the fact that you need to have somewhere to dump all the waste heat to.
The pacemaker stuff were Betacels that worked by directly coupling a beta emitter with a semiconductor junction. Those as well can be scaled up to be as big as you wish them, but they only last a couple of years (10). Lithium batteries have better power density, so there's really no reason to use Betacels if all you want is a disposable power source.
All of those utilize nuclear power. Nuclear != atomic. I don't know what idiot first called nuclear power "atomic" power. Let this mistake die, please.
When it comes to the outlets and paint and such, I've found that having a pair of screwdrivers with you works really well. I usually poke things, take them apart (and put together), etc., and generally do things even home inspectors don't do. Having a moisture meter also helps -- paint won't cover that up, no matter how hard you try.
I don't know what banks you deal with, but U.S. banks certainly don't require the home to be inspected. They require an appraisal that includes an external viewing of the property just to make sure it's still there, that's all.
Bullshit. I've seen it done for a 2nd gen iPad, and it'd work continuously for two hours while tracking 8 fiducials. In normal use it'd last an 8hr shift easily, since you don't need to keep the camera on continuously -- once you've identified where you are on the device, the camera can be turned off and you can slide the diagrams with your finger.
Yes, they do, with software to support it. It doesn't come as a platform-provided API, but is certainly something you can implement. Having dabbled with it myself, about the only complaint I have is that you really need to do the math on the GPU or at least you need a decently statically compiled environment like you get on the iPhone or Symbian -- Dalvik doesn't cut it, not even with JIT. I have participated in a project where the devices that are being assembled have low resolution 2D fiducial codes on them. Then an iPad application uses the built-in camera to detect the fiducials, calculate the relative 3D position and orientation of the iPad in relation to the work-in-progress, and overlays the video with wiring diagrams, assembly diagrams, QC notes, etc.
I don't know what kind of an idiot you are, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that our visual system does not support texting and driving. As in, you know, the central vision is the only thing with decent resolution -- the only thing that in fact support conscious processing of imagery that has meanings that have to be decoded. That's why you constantly relocate your central vision while you read. If it has meaning that has to be picked up, the central vision must get to it. So, in order to look at a cell phone you're moving the central vision smack onto the cellphone's display. The cellphone's display is likely to be in a location where the peripheral vision -- the realtime, absent-of-meaning parallel-processing vision of ours -- will not be targeted at the windows and windshield. Thus you make yourself effectively blind for the purposes of driving. That's why texting and driving is so bad -- when you text, you're a blind person driving the car. It's that easy. Things are perhaps a bit more acceptable if you have a tactile keyboard on your phone and know how to use it without looking at the phone *at all*, but you're still redirecting your conscious attention to processing of the text you're writing, and that's bad in and of itself as I'll explain in the last two paragraphs.
As for talking on the cellphone while driving: well, most people, in the U.S. at least, have to hold their cell in their head, or support it with the shoulder, etc. Again it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you're altering your posture sufficiently so that your external field of view becomes crippled, and you're unable to execute head saccades. Saccades are the fast motions of the eye that redirect the gaze to a new point of interest. When a saccade is large enough, it gets executed in tandem by your neck muscles and your eye muscles. If it's even larger, your entire body participates in the motion -- and it's pretty damn cool that all those stacked motion stages can still execute a saccade that ends up at most a couple of visual degrees away from the intended target. All this goes to hell when you have a cellphone to deal with -- either between your head and your shoulder, or between your head and your hand. Again -- you're making yourself partially blind in the areas of peripheral vision that would normally elicit a shift of visual attention.
Oh, so what about the hands-free sets? Again, it doesn't take a rocket scientist. You've got an extra thing on your head to worry about if you wear a headset. Any sort of an out-of-normal situation (slipping headset, change of settings, etc) will for a moment monopolize your conscious attention. If you're using the car hands-free set, those are the worst. The audio quality is worse, so more of your conscious attention needs to be redirected to what was an automated task: decoding the meaning of words. The worse the audio quality, the more conscious processing is required to deal with a task that in normal conditions is purely automatic once you're around age 5. I don't think I need to convince you that depriving yourself of serial conscious processing is good while driving. The conscious attention is a serial resource -- it can only do one thing at a time. Yes, arguably driving depends a lot on sub-conscious processing -- since this is the only kind of processing we have available that's fast and real time -- that's why you can't drive a bicycle just knowing the physics of it, your conscious processing is way too slow.
But, in spite of most driving being done by the hugely parallel sub-conscious processing, you do need to do some ahead-planning to cope with changing weather and road conditions. If you completely redirect your conscious attention at the phone conversation, you may end up rear-ending someone -- for a simple reason. The conscious processing is used to keep the driving model up-to-date so that your learned sub-conscious "reflexes" keep you driving at a correct speed, in the correct lane, at a correct distance from the car(s) ahead of you. Once there
Well, all batteries we know of are ultimately made of atoms, so that's not a big deal. A nuclear battery -- one utilizing nuclear power, well, that's something I've never heard of. They are usually called nuclear reactors, and come with piles of paperwork and hordes of qualified operators and inspectors.
Augmented reality is only power-expensive because you need to be doing lots of matrix algebra and other heavy lifting to determine your head's orientation and position in 3D space based on what the camera is seeing *and* on some reference imagery (Street View comes to mind). If they figure out how to let the GPU do most of it, they'll probably be OK.
If it has a camera, it'd be quite doable to "compare" the image it sees to Google Street View imagery from the vicinity, and use that to determine not only your heading, but pretty much solve the full 6 degree of freedom head position/orientation combo.
Not an accelerometer -- that doesn't have anything to do with heading. For wearable heading you have two options: a full 6 degree-of-freedom inertial platform, or a magnetometer. Well, there's a third option - phase-differential GPS, but that only works outdoors, with no tall buildings around, and it would be the most expensive to develop as they'd need it done custom as none of the off-the-shelf "tiny" modules support anything like it. You really need to feed input from two antennas, separated by a known distance, to the receiver, and compare the phase of the incoming signals to determine which way the baseline is pointing. For wearable heading, a magnetometer is pretty much "it". Oh, and it tends to have problems when you're on the boundary to large steel structures. In a high rise building, you'd be OK when inside, but would face lower accuracy near the walls and when going in/out of the building. And so on.
Well, to say the truth, if you have a good team you should be able at least to do the first construction stage drafted out, contracted out and permitted quickly - a couple months if local political figures don't interfere. Stuff like grading, getting the utilities in, etc., can happen in parallel with detailed design of the actual fab that fills in the space you've allocated to it. Of course two months was a joke, I was hoping to catch some Apple fanboys to "agree" with me.
:) I'm in the middle of a fucking residential remodel that I'm doing myself (I'm my own contractor). One room. $600+ for three permits, and I've had enough schedule slips of my own doing that it's not even funny. I've allocated a week to do a complete gut, re-finish and re-wire. LOL. Oh, and I have figured for the $200 permit I might as well replumb the whole house's water supply in CPVC. I'm now two weeks behind schedule and if I really push it this weekend I'll be staring at finished walls and new hardwood floor, but that's not the end of it. I'm pretty damn sure getting anything done in two months, especially when you have local politics to deal with, is nigh impossible. You'd need to know a lot of people face-to-face just to get a productive team assembled in that timeframe. I was trying to be funny and I'm thankful to the insightful moderator who caught onto that.
A friend of mine had to wait a year for the city politics to play out just to get an office building approved in the historic part of the city. The permit was cheap, the wait wasn't.
If you're on linux and are "illiterate", you should stick to the packages provided by your distribution, and whatever repositories that are designed to interface with your distribution. I'm partial to RedHat, so I use CentOS and various add-on repositories (epel, atrpms, etc.). Once you add those repositories, you don't need to worry, simply use the graphical package manager and that's it. No need to manually download anything, no need to worry about dependencies. It's all handled automagically. Either it's there, or it isn't. The DAG repository has RPMs for the Flash plugin:)
you *will* be looking through the fingerprints, and you *will* like it
That's perhaps the thing I just don't get about tablets. How the heck can you work with all that body oil on your screen? It looks crappy. You're not paying top dollar for high resolution displays just to have it all smeared out by a layer of grime. Desktop touchscreens are a similarly stupid idea -- OK for stuff where you don't need to see any detail, so large font POS or medical applications are fine, but forget it if you actually want to put more than 30 lines of text on the screen.
I don't think anyone really buys Microsoft OSes to upgrade existing machines. That's what Apple has figured out but Microsoft hasn't -- people do buy OS X upgrades. Upgrade OS sales are probably noise for MS in terms of sales numbers, except maybe for corporate market. I'd love to see some numbers to prove me wrong.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but power users were always screaming that keyboard is faster, and just look at how fast can experienced people be with green screen keyboard-only interfaces. Search box on the menu is basically a command line with lookahead. Exactly what everyone who knows their usability knew all along since long ago.
Search, mmm -- the command line, built right into the core UI shell. What an innovation:) That's like DOS with fancy-named batchfiles for redirection and on-the-fly completion. Yes, what progress. Right fucking about time, I'd say. Apple's spotlight was giving them a run for the money, in a way.
There is a real and obvious performance difference between i7 and P4. Try a libreoffice upgrade on either with an antivirus turned on and you'll immediately see it. That's also about the only step-up that I'd recommend: if you've got an office full of P4 machines running XP, do yourself a bit of good and replace them with i7 boxes running Windows 7 64 bit. I'd think pre-Core 2 CPUs can be treated like P4s. If you've got Core 2 or newer stuff, just keep it, add RAM, upgrade hard drives either to fast 10k SATA models or go straight to SSD, put Win7 on it, and be happy. That's my 2 cents.
The Win8 app-ified shell is like going to DOS days where you had one full-screen application at a time. If you ran Desqview, you could switch between them. That's the "progress" we get with Win8. It's like a big WTF with a cherry on top.
Unless you regularly commute over the stretch of the Autobahn where there are no speed limits -- it's only on some stretches, definitely not everywhere.
Reading fail. Go to just before the first iPhone debuted and look at what you had with regards to app development and platform compatibility for phones. LOL. Everything was proprietary, we'll-let-you-sign-an-NDA-if-you-buy-our-reps-a-couple-nights-on-the-town, and so on. Even the fucking power connectors and power specs for the phones weren't standard. At least Apple was making stuff with the same connector for almost a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
But the atomic pacemaker allusion was really to Betacels where you have a P-N junction "driven" by beta decay electrons. ;)
Should there be packet filtering at that level?
Hell yes. It's not that hard.
I'd rather ask: what the fuck would I need Google Glass for, except maybe as a "cool" video recorder with a little display showing how much storage/battery is left. Perhaps also a showing realtime image histogram just to make sure there's enough light, but not too much. So, well, there's some use for it after all, fuck or not :)
Well, there are radioisotope generators. They can put out as much power as you design them for, there are no inherent limitations except for the fact that you need to have somewhere to dump all the waste heat to.
The pacemaker stuff were Betacels that worked by directly coupling a beta emitter with a semiconductor junction. Those as well can be scaled up to be as big as you wish them, but they only last a couple of years (10). Lithium batteries have better power density, so there's really no reason to use Betacels if all you want is a disposable power source.
All of those utilize nuclear power. Nuclear != atomic. I don't know what idiot first called nuclear power "atomic" power. Let this mistake die, please.
When it comes to the outlets and paint and such, I've found that having a pair of screwdrivers with you works really well. I usually poke things, take them apart (and put together), etc., and generally do things even home inspectors don't do. Having a moisture meter also helps -- paint won't cover that up, no matter how hard you try.
I don't know what banks you deal with, but U.S. banks certainly don't require the home to be inspected. They require an appraisal that includes an external viewing of the property just to make sure it's still there, that's all.
Bullshit. I've seen it done for a 2nd gen iPad, and it'd work continuously for two hours while tracking 8 fiducials. In normal use it'd last an 8hr shift easily, since you don't need to keep the camera on continuously -- once you've identified where you are on the device, the camera can be turned off and you can slide the diagrams with your finger.
Yes, they do, with software to support it. It doesn't come as a platform-provided API, but is certainly something you can implement. Having dabbled with it myself, about the only complaint I have is that you really need to do the math on the GPU or at least you need a decently statically compiled environment like you get on the iPhone or Symbian -- Dalvik doesn't cut it, not even with JIT. I have participated in a project where the devices that are being assembled have low resolution 2D fiducial codes on them. Then an iPad application uses the built-in camera to detect the fiducials, calculate the relative 3D position and orientation of the iPad in relation to the work-in-progress, and overlays the video with wiring diagrams, assembly diagrams, QC notes, etc.
I don't know what kind of an idiot you are, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that our visual system does not support texting and driving. As in, you know, the central vision is the only thing with decent resolution -- the only thing that in fact support conscious processing of imagery that has meanings that have to be decoded. That's why you constantly relocate your central vision while you read. If it has meaning that has to be picked up, the central vision must get to it. So, in order to look at a cell phone you're moving the central vision smack onto the cellphone's display. The cellphone's display is likely to be in a location where the peripheral vision -- the realtime, absent-of-meaning parallel-processing vision of ours -- will not be targeted at the windows and windshield. Thus you make yourself effectively blind for the purposes of driving. That's why texting and driving is so bad -- when you text, you're a blind person driving the car. It's that easy. Things are perhaps a bit more acceptable if you have a tactile keyboard on your phone and know how to use it without looking at the phone *at all*, but you're still redirecting your conscious attention to processing of the text you're writing, and that's bad in and of itself as I'll explain in the last two paragraphs.
As for talking on the cellphone while driving: well, most people, in the U.S. at least, have to hold their cell in their head, or support it with the shoulder, etc. Again it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you're altering your posture sufficiently so that your external field of view becomes crippled, and you're unable to execute head saccades. Saccades are the fast motions of the eye that redirect the gaze to a new point of interest. When a saccade is large enough, it gets executed in tandem by your neck muscles and your eye muscles. If it's even larger, your entire body participates in the motion -- and it's pretty damn cool that all those stacked motion stages can still execute a saccade that ends up at most a couple of visual degrees away from the intended target. All this goes to hell when you have a cellphone to deal with -- either between your head and your shoulder, or between your head and your hand. Again -- you're making yourself partially blind in the areas of peripheral vision that would normally elicit a shift of visual attention.
Oh, so what about the hands-free sets? Again, it doesn't take a rocket scientist. You've got an extra thing on your head to worry about if you wear a headset. Any sort of an out-of-normal situation (slipping headset, change of settings, etc) will for a moment monopolize your conscious attention. If you're using the car hands-free set, those are the worst. The audio quality is worse, so more of your conscious attention needs to be redirected to what was an automated task: decoding the meaning of words. The worse the audio quality, the more conscious processing is required to deal with a task that in normal conditions is purely automatic once you're around age 5. I don't think I need to convince you that depriving yourself of serial conscious processing is good while driving. The conscious attention is a serial resource -- it can only do one thing at a time. Yes, arguably driving depends a lot on sub-conscious processing -- since this is the only kind of processing we have available that's fast and real time -- that's why you can't drive a bicycle just knowing the physics of it, your conscious processing is way too slow.
But, in spite of most driving being done by the hugely parallel sub-conscious processing, you do need to do some ahead-planning to cope with changing weather and road conditions. If you completely redirect your conscious attention at the phone conversation, you may end up rear-ending someone -- for a simple reason. The conscious processing is used to keep the driving model up-to-date so that your learned sub-conscious "reflexes" keep you driving at a correct speed, in the correct lane, at a correct distance from the car(s) ahead of you. Once there
Well, all batteries we know of are ultimately made of atoms, so that's not a big deal. A nuclear battery -- one utilizing nuclear power, well, that's something I've never heard of. They are usually called nuclear reactors, and come with piles of paperwork and hordes of qualified operators and inspectors.
Augmented reality is only power-expensive because you need to be doing lots of matrix algebra and other heavy lifting to determine your head's orientation and position in 3D space based on what the camera is seeing *and* on some reference imagery (Street View comes to mind). If they figure out how to let the GPU do most of it, they'll probably be OK.
If it has a camera, it'd be quite doable to "compare" the image it sees to Google Street View imagery from the vicinity, and use that to determine not only your heading, but pretty much solve the full 6 degree of freedom head position/orientation combo.
Not an accelerometer -- that doesn't have anything to do with heading. For wearable heading you have two options: a full 6 degree-of-freedom inertial platform, or a magnetometer. Well, there's a third option - phase-differential GPS, but that only works outdoors, with no tall buildings around, and it would be the most expensive to develop as they'd need it done custom as none of the off-the-shelf "tiny" modules support anything like it. You really need to feed input from two antennas, separated by a known distance, to the receiver, and compare the phase of the incoming signals to determine which way the baseline is pointing. For wearable heading, a magnetometer is pretty much "it". Oh, and it tends to have problems when you're on the boundary to large steel structures. In a high rise building, you'd be OK when inside, but would face lower accuracy near the walls and when going in/out of the building. And so on.
Well, to say the truth, if you have a good team you should be able at least to do the first construction stage drafted out, contracted out and permitted quickly - a couple months if local political figures don't interfere. Stuff like grading, getting the utilities in, etc., can happen in parallel with detailed design of the actual fab that fills in the space you've allocated to it. Of course two months was a joke, I was hoping to catch some Apple fanboys to "agree" with me.
:) I'm in the middle of a fucking residential remodel that I'm doing myself (I'm my own contractor). One room. $600+ for three permits, and I've had enough schedule slips of my own doing that it's not even funny. I've allocated a week to do a complete gut, re-finish and re-wire. LOL. Oh, and I have figured for the $200 permit I might as well replumb the whole house's water supply in CPVC. I'm now two weeks behind schedule and if I really push it this weekend I'll be staring at finished walls and new hardwood floor, but that's not the end of it. I'm pretty damn sure getting anything done in two months, especially when you have local politics to deal with, is nigh impossible. You'd need to know a lot of people face-to-face just to get a productive team assembled in that timeframe. I was trying to be funny and I'm thankful to the insightful moderator who caught onto that.
A friend of mine had to wait a year for the city politics to play out just to get an office building approved in the historic part of the city. The permit was cheap, the wait wasn't.
If you're on linux and are "illiterate", you should stick to the packages provided by your distribution, and whatever repositories that are designed to interface with your distribution. I'm partial to RedHat, so I use CentOS and various add-on repositories (epel, atrpms, etc.). Once you add those repositories, you don't need to worry, simply use the graphical package manager and that's it. No need to manually download anything, no need to worry about dependencies. It's all handled automagically. Either it's there, or it isn't. The DAG repository has RPMs for the Flash plugin :)
you *will* be looking through the fingerprints, and you *will* like it
That's perhaps the thing I just don't get about tablets. How the heck can you work with all that body oil on your screen? It looks crappy. You're not paying top dollar for high resolution displays just to have it all smeared out by a layer of grime. Desktop touchscreens are a similarly stupid idea -- OK for stuff where you don't need to see any detail, so large font POS or medical applications are fine, but forget it if you actually want to put more than 30 lines of text on the screen.
I don't think anyone really buys Microsoft OSes to upgrade existing machines. That's what Apple has figured out but Microsoft hasn't -- people do buy OS X upgrades. Upgrade OS sales are probably noise for MS in terms of sales numbers, except maybe for corporate market. I'd love to see some numbers to prove me wrong.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but power users were always screaming that keyboard is faster, and just look at how fast can experienced people be with green screen keyboard-only interfaces. Search box on the menu is basically a command line with lookahead. Exactly what everyone who knows their usability knew all along since long ago.
Search, mmm -- the command line, built right into the core UI shell. What an innovation :) That's like DOS with fancy-named batchfiles for redirection and on-the-fly completion. Yes, what progress. Right fucking about time, I'd say. Apple's spotlight was giving them a run for the money, in a way.
There is a real and obvious performance difference between i7 and P4. Try a libreoffice upgrade on either with an antivirus turned on and you'll immediately see it. That's also about the only step-up that I'd recommend: if you've got an office full of P4 machines running XP, do yourself a bit of good and replace them with i7 boxes running Windows 7 64 bit. I'd think pre-Core 2 CPUs can be treated like P4s. If you've got Core 2 or newer stuff, just keep it, add RAM, upgrade hard drives either to fast 10k SATA models or go straight to SSD, put Win7 on it, and be happy. That's my 2 cents.
The Win8 app-ified shell is like going to DOS days where you had one full-screen application at a time. If you ran Desqview, you could switch between them. That's the "progress" we get with Win8. It's like a big WTF with a cherry on top.
Unless you regularly commute over the stretch of the Autobahn where there are no speed limits -- it's only on some stretches, definitely not everywhere.
Apple can afford to pay people with the knowhow. If they wanted and needed a fab, they could get one.
Reading fail. Go to just before the first iPhone debuted and look at what you had with regards to app development and platform compatibility for phones. LOL. Everything was proprietary, we'll-let-you-sign-an-NDA-if-you-buy-our-reps-a-couple-nights-on-the-town, and so on. Even the fucking power connectors and power specs for the phones weren't standard. At least Apple was making stuff with the same connector for almost a decade.