How many times can you put up a tent, let a bunch of desperate people use it for six months to a year, and take it down again and use it somewhere else?
It's not really a problem specific to gunite/shotcrete, it's mostly because there's two layers of concrete both bonded to the insulation. It looks like the 3D-panels have a slightly different construction.
I think the church I watched them build may have using a different vendor, but I don't recall the name now.
Audioscrobbler is the first thing I thought of. [...] but there's not that much opportunity to interact unless you're willing to go straight to messaging them,
There's a few people I've kinda got to know through moderations, and I've had a few "Wow, you really like Yasunori Mitsuda!" type messages.
I've tried out Friendster and Orkut, but couldn't find any compelling reason to keep using them. The only social networking tools I find at all useful are ones based primarily on a specific interest, like Audioscrobbler, or ones that groups have built or, sometimes, that seem to have built themselves out of the raw network using ordinary communication tools like Usenet and bulletin boards.
Trying to artificially develop a network of people whose only interest is that they're members of the same network... I don't know, it just seems silly.
They built a church nearby out of this shotcrete/gunite over foam panel mechanism. It was really amazing to watch it go up. The only problem I'd see would be cracking over time... since the inside and outside layers of concrete are going to have quite different temperateure environments you may have the same kinds of differential cracking problems the Monolithic Dome people reported with the 2-layer concrete domes.
but it isn't going to be good as a regular structure.
Depending on the part of the world you're in it is a regular structure.
It seems to be pretty similar to an uninsulated gunite dome, without a foundation, or adobe construction. If you surround the base with packed earth after it sets it should be every bit as good as matchstick construction.
1. Delete all songs. 2. Select playlist (either a Smart Playlist, or Party Shuffle). 3. Drag, drop.
What you wanted is for Apple to release a Magic Star iPod (256MB for, at best, $50 less than a 4GB mini
Um, the 4GB mini was $250 in January 2004, not $200, so that'd be $100 less than the Mini.
You still haven't stated exactly what you think Apple should have released at MWSF '04
You're not paying attention. I've suggested the 256M iPod Shuffle could have been sold for $150 in January 2004. Leaving out the LCD and extra controls really does save about 25% on the price, which is why Apple left them out of the Shuffle.
You're also making up the "I didn't want them to have Autofill" bit. That's just software, the marginal cost of that is $0.00.
You know, I think the real problem here is that you have a crappy collection of songs in your iTunes playlist. If you have to hit "Next" more than a couple of times an hour you're having WAY too much trouble filling your playlist with good stuff.
Made me think of light wells, myself. Solar lighting for buildings is new the way bellbottoms and tie died shirts are new... eventually everything old is new again.
1. Autofill is a manual process as well... plugging in the iPod, hitting Autofill, and waiting. It's a couple fewer steps, but because of the way iTunes and the iPod are tightly integrated it's at least as intrusive... if you let Finder do the actual copying it goes on in the background and doesn't make iTunes hang while mounting and unmounting the iPod.
2. You keep saying that 128M isn't sufficient storage, based on your experience with a 64M device. That's like the people who were pooh-poohing the shuffle based on their experience with 256M devices.
3. You're still putting words in my mouth.
You keep saying, "Magic Star made this player in '02, surely Apple could have made one too!"
I said that Apple could have made a slightly smaller shuffle in 2004, and it would have been a killer device in 2004.
That's why I said you had to have iTunes shuffle play for the shuffle to be usable.
Yes, you need the iTunes shuffle capability, or something equivalent. But you don't need the iPod shuffle to get that, you can use the iTunes shuffle feature with any MP3 player that provides a "flash drive" interface. I'm sorry that you never thought of doing that with the "3 flash players" you owned prior to the iPod, because it makes a tremendous difference.
By the way, you keep saying Apple would have been stupid to release an iPod shuffle without "their implementation of 'shuffle' syncing". I don't understand what your point is, there. You don't need Autofill to get shuffle syncing... the Autofill button is just a gimmick. It's the random selection that they put in for Party Shuffle and Smart Playlists that's the important part. Soon as the shuffle started shipping, you had people posting schemes to use them to build better automated playlists for their shuffles than the Autofill gave them.
Like I said before, none of this is hard to figure out. Assuming you're willing to think about it.
The problems with your Magic Star player weren't apparent until the advent of the iPod.
Um, the iPod was already out when I bought it. For five times the price.
Raytracing is heavily parallelizable and is an obvious operation to build into a graphics card. It's about time someone managed to do a good job of putting the two together and doing realtime raytracing for games.
Apple can't bring a $70 iPod to the market today, but you think they could have in Jan '04.
You're making things up again. I have not at any point in this discussion suggested Apple could have produced a $70 iPod in January '04. I've suggested that since Magic Star could produce a $70 flash device iin 2002, Apple could have produced a $150 flash device in 2004.
Apple has to pay for R&D, support, advertising, etc, and so on. Magic Star has miniscule overhead. Apple also has to make a quality player. Magic Star doesn't.
That's why I didn't suggest that Apple should produce a $70 device. You keep coming up with this stuff, arguing against something you imagined I said. Why?
Because the iPod is about bringing your music with you.
The iPod Mini already fails that test, for me. Once your iPod is smaller than your iTunes music library (by a factor of 4, in my case) you have to pick and choose or come up with some scheme to automate that. And once you've automated it, the only limit is how much music you're going to listen to before you reload.
That's not enough choice for an iPod.
The Shuffle isn't about choice, it's about chance. Once you've abandoned "bringing your music with you", you're in a whole new world... and in that world, the only limit you need to worry about is how often you get back to base to refuel...
I've got 512M of music in my Shuffle. That's 147 songs. I doubt if I've listened to more than half of them yet, between repeats and resets... and the last time I hit Autofill was last week.
What you propose isn't an iPod, it's just a crap mp3 player
Yeh, that's EXACTLY what people were saying about the shuffle right after MWSF '05. I knew it was more... that it was a great little MP3 player... because of my experience with a merely good one. It wouldn't matter if the base unit was 256M, 512M, or 1G, people would say the same thing... until they had a chance to try it. Since you haven't had a chance to try the Magic Star player (in any of its versions, 128M, 256M, or 512M), you're in no better a position to call it names than the people who came out of MWSF pooh-poohing the Shuffle.
As other people have noted, you still have to say "yes, bone me". But people don't expect a Java applet (since it's normally firewalled) to be dangerous, so they're more likely to say "yes".
If allowing an unrestricted Java applet to run is just as dangerous as installing and running an application, then the dialog box should reflect that. If Firefox is going to make you manually approve sites that you're going to allow XPI installs from, and *then* run a countdown in the warning dialog, they need to be at least as thorough about any other operation that takes you outside the sandbox.
How many people were all, "WTF? No screen? Random mix?" They didn't get the point.
Uh, yeh, that's the same reaction a lot of people had to the MP3 player I bought in 2003.
Again, if Apple had all the pieces in 2003, why didn't they release it then and take the whole mp3 market?
Who the hell knows why Apple does anything? Anyone who's followed Apple for more than a couple of years has whiplash trying to follow the twists and turns. look at the Mac mini, for years they say "No ugly monitors on nice Macs" (that's a Steve Jobs line, by the way), then they turn around and throw out "BYODKM". They're by turns brilliant, infuriating, obtuse, and illuminated. Sometimes they hit the market dead on, sometimes they come in late, sometimes they produce stupendous flops and sometimes they engineer miracles. Apple follows their own rules.
Possibly they held off on the Shuffle purely for market timing. maybe they were right to do so. That doesn't change the fact that Steve Jobs' talk in 2004 was a blatant misrepresentation of the flash player market. You didn't have to pay $200 for a 256M iPod-sized monster, you could spend $70 on something the size of a thumb drive and get a better designed device.
Less than $70, by then. $70 was the January 2003 price.
Hrm. So much for the Apple $150 player in Q1 '04.
What are you getting at here? Are you saying Apple doesn't have advertising dollars to spend? That they're not a big name?
A flash iPod, 256MB, Jan '04, for how much, $150? Is that what you are 'livid' at Apple for not creating?
Um, no, I was livid at Steve Jobs for claiming that the flash market was represented by the huge behemoths that he was comparing the iPod Mini to, rather than the streamlined minimal design that the majority of flash players used. It was an obvious straw man.
But, yeh, $150 for a 256M iPod Shuffle in January 2004. that would have worked. $50 less than the 256M flash players Steve was mocking, smaller, lighter, he could have blown them away.
512 is the minimum usable capacity
You keep saying that. Do you think repetition makes it true?
You know, I'll bet if he'd come out with (say) a $120 1G model and a $180 2G model, you'd be writing "1G is the minimum usable capacity". Fact is, the minimum usable capacity of a flash-drive MP3 player like the shuffle is based on one thing and one thing only: how long you spend listening to it before you reload it. If you listen 8 hours a day, then you need 8 hours worth of music... maybe a little less, because of the shuffle function, but that's a reasonable first cut.
I listen for less than 2 hours a day... that's how long I spend driving to work, home again, and at lunch. My daughter's ride to school was shorter than that, and she wasn't allowed to listen in class, so that worked out well for her. So, my 512M shuffle is much bigger than I really need. Now maybe you really need more than that, but don't assume that your needs are some kind of physical constant that Apple has to hew to lest people laugh at them.
I mean, hell, I think the 256M RAM in the Mac Mini is silly, and Apple should be ashamed of themselves for shipping less than 512M in a Mac. But it doesn't seem to be hurting their sales... because, you see, that's my opinion. Not a law of physics.
You have to remember to add the above "it's expensive to launch" issue into account.
Um, no, that's a fixed cost, no matter whether he launched in 2004 or 2005 the marketing costs would have been comparable. Maybe a little cheaper in 2004, what with inflation, but not enough to matter.
One of the odd things about debates over the Patriot Act is that even its harshest informed critics actually only oppose a very small part of the Act;
Why is that odd?
No, really, I don't get it. It would be utterly astonishing if that wasn't true. Treating that as news is like treating it as news that only a small number of incidents of speeding or drunk driving actually lead to accidents, or that the majority of suicide attempts don't lead to death.
Do you have a point, or are you just trying to muddy the waters?
and the right was later reinstated at the end of the war
Haven't you been paying attention to Bush? There isn't going to be an end to this war. No, I'm not being flip here, he's said that multiple times and he really means it no matter what the spin doctors say.
Did you think I'd forget what you said in this post?
I'm sorry, you're obviously trying to pick a fight, because I'm not trying to "pretend" anything, and I didn't "google" anything. I plugged my shuffle in and observed what iTunes did as it updated the playlist. That's what I based the comment you're pointing to on.
That's research.
Reading Apple's webpage and believing their system requirements isn't research.
If I depended on what Apple said I probably wouldn't have a Mac right now, because until the Mini came out I sure couldn't afford their prices. I certainly wouldn't have tried installing OS X on a Powermac 7500, or put more than 192M RAM in a 1st generation iMac G3.
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How many times can you put up a tent, let a bunch of desperate people use it for six months to a year, and take it down again and use it somewhere else?
It's not really a problem specific to gunite/shotcrete, it's mostly because there's two layers of concrete both bonded to the insulation. It looks like the 3D-panels have a slightly different construction.
I think the church I watched them build may have using a different vendor, but I don't recall the name now.
Audioscrobbler is the first thing I thought of. [...] but there's not that much opportunity to interact unless you're willing to go straight to messaging them,
There's a few people I've kinda got to know through moderations, and I've had a few "Wow, you really like Yasunori Mitsuda!" type messages.
I've tried out Friendster and Orkut, but couldn't find any compelling reason to keep using them. The only social networking tools I find at all useful are ones based primarily on a specific interest, like Audioscrobbler, or ones that groups have built or, sometimes, that seem to have built themselves out of the raw network using ordinary communication tools like Usenet and bulletin boards.
Trying to artificially develop a network of people whose only interest is that they're members of the same network... I don't know, it just seems silly.
It's made of amorphous silicon dioxide!
Structural fiberglass is held together by epoxy - a plastic resin. It doesn't burn strongly, but it does burn.
PS: Thanks so much for pointing me to the "3-D Panel" website. I've been looking for this for months now.
They built a church nearby out of this shotcrete/gunite over foam panel mechanism. It was really amazing to watch it go up. The only problem I'd see would be cracking over time... since the inside and outside layers of concrete are going to have quite different temperateure environments you may have the same kinds of differential cracking problems the Monolithic Dome people reported with the 2-layer concrete domes.
I KNOW that somewhere I've seen someone else constructing buildings with this inflation method
Not quite the same, but it's similar to gunite or shotcrete domes. Check out the Monolithic Dome website.
but it isn't going to be good as a regular structure.
Depending on the part of the world you're in it is a regular structure.
It seems to be pretty similar to an uninsulated gunite dome, without a foundation, or adobe construction. If you surround the base with packed earth after it sets it should be every bit as good as matchstick construction.
I've suggested the 256M iPod Shuffle could have been sold for $150 in January 2004.
No, you never stated this.
*plonk*
Sorry, it goes like this:
1. Delete all songs.
2. Select playlist (either a Smart Playlist, or Party Shuffle).
3. Drag, drop.
What you wanted is for Apple to release a Magic Star iPod (256MB for, at best, $50 less than a 4GB mini
Um, the 4GB mini was $250 in January 2004, not $200, so that'd be $100 less than the Mini.
You still haven't stated exactly what you think Apple should have released at MWSF '04
You're not paying attention. I've suggested the 256M iPod Shuffle could have been sold for $150 in January 2004. Leaving out the LCD and extra controls really does save about 25% on the price, which is why Apple left them out of the Shuffle.
You're also making up the "I didn't want them to have Autofill" bit. That's just software, the marginal cost of that is $0.00.
You know, I think the real problem here is that you have a crappy collection of songs in your iTunes playlist. If you have to hit "Next" more than a couple of times an hour you're having WAY too much trouble filling your playlist with good stuff.
Made me think of light wells, myself. Solar lighting for buildings is new the way bellbottoms and tie died shirts are new... eventually everything old is new again.
1. Autofill is a manual process as well... plugging in the iPod, hitting Autofill, and waiting. It's a couple fewer steps, but because of the way iTunes and the iPod are tightly integrated it's at least as intrusive... if you let Finder do the actual copying it goes on in the background and doesn't make iTunes hang while mounting and unmounting the iPod.
2. You keep saying that 128M isn't sufficient storage, based on your experience with a 64M device. That's like the people who were pooh-poohing the shuffle based on their experience with 256M devices.
3. You're still putting words in my mouth.
You keep saying, "Magic Star made this player in '02, surely Apple could have made one too!"
I said that Apple could have made a slightly smaller shuffle in 2004, and it would have been a killer device in 2004.
That's why I said you had to have iTunes shuffle play for the shuffle to be usable.
Yes, you need the iTunes shuffle capability, or something equivalent. But you don't need the iPod shuffle to get that, you can use the iTunes shuffle feature with any MP3 player that provides a "flash drive" interface. I'm sorry that you never thought of doing that with the "3 flash players" you owned prior to the iPod, because it makes a tremendous difference.
By the way, you keep saying Apple would have been stupid to release an iPod shuffle without "their implementation of 'shuffle' syncing". I don't understand what your point is, there. You don't need Autofill to get shuffle syncing... the Autofill button is just a gimmick. It's the random selection that they put in for Party Shuffle and Smart Playlists that's the important part. Soon as the shuffle started shipping, you had people posting schemes to use them to build better automated playlists for their shuffles than the Autofill gave them.
Like I said before, none of this is hard to figure out. Assuming you're willing to think about it.
The problems with your Magic Star player weren't apparent until the advent of the iPod.
Um, the iPod was already out when I bought it. For five times the price.
Raytracing is heavily parallelizable and is an obvious operation to build into a graphics card. It's about time someone managed to do a good job of putting the two together and doing realtime raytracing for games.
Patent the idea of websites using hideous color schemes?
You'll make a mint!
Apple can't bring a $70 iPod to the market today, but you think they could have in Jan '04.
You're making things up again. I have not at any point in this discussion suggested Apple could have produced a $70 iPod in January '04. I've suggested that since Magic Star could produce a $70 flash device iin 2002, Apple could have produced a $150 flash device in 2004.
Apple has to pay for R&D, support, advertising, etc, and so on. Magic Star has miniscule overhead. Apple also has to make a quality player. Magic Star doesn't.
That's why I didn't suggest that Apple should produce a $70 device. You keep coming up with this stuff, arguing against something you imagined I said. Why?
Because the iPod is about bringing your music with you.
The iPod Mini already fails that test, for me. Once your iPod is smaller than your iTunes music library (by a factor of 4, in my case) you have to pick and choose or come up with some scheme to automate that. And once you've automated it, the only limit is how much music you're going to listen to before you reload.
That's not enough choice for an iPod.
The Shuffle isn't about choice, it's about chance. Once you've abandoned "bringing your music with you", you're in a whole new world... and in that world, the only limit you need to worry about is how often you get back to base to refuel...
I've got 512M of music in my Shuffle. That's 147 songs. I doubt if I've listened to more than half of them yet, between repeats and resets... and the last time I hit Autofill was last week.
What you propose isn't an iPod, it's just a crap mp3 player
Yeh, that's EXACTLY what people were saying about the shuffle right after MWSF '05. I knew it was more... that it was a great little MP3 player... because of my experience with a merely good one. It wouldn't matter if the base unit was 256M, 512M, or 1G, people would say the same thing... until they had a chance to try it. Since you haven't had a chance to try the Magic Star player (in any of its versions, 128M, 256M, or 512M), you're in no better a position to call it names than the people who came out of MWSF pooh-poohing the Shuffle.
Regardless of where it appears though, it would be great to see an open source tool with this feature.
What's the license on the MATLAB code?
As other people have noted, you still have to say "yes, bone me". But people don't expect a Java applet (since it's normally firewalled) to be dangerous, so they're more likely to say "yes".
If allowing an unrestricted Java applet to run is just as dangerous as installing and running an application, then the dialog box should reflect that. If Firefox is going to make you manually approve sites that you're going to allow XPI installs from, and *then* run a countdown in the warning dialog, they need to be at least as thorough about any other operation that takes you outside the sandbox.
Stop filling with that color when you hit something that marks a definitive boundary.
That's the "and then a miracle occurs" step.
My first thought was "Gimp Plugin!", but a Photoshop plugin would be good too.
How many people were all, "WTF? No screen? Random mix?" They didn't get the point.
Uh, yeh, that's the same reaction a lot of people had to the MP3 player I bought in 2003.
Again, if Apple had all the pieces in 2003, why didn't they release it then and take the whole mp3 market?
Who the hell knows why Apple does anything? Anyone who's followed Apple for more than a couple of years has whiplash trying to follow the twists and turns. look at the Mac mini, for years they say "No ugly monitors on nice Macs" (that's a Steve Jobs line, by the way), then they turn around and throw out "BYODKM". They're by turns brilliant, infuriating, obtuse, and illuminated. Sometimes they hit the market dead on, sometimes they come in late, sometimes they produce stupendous flops and sometimes they engineer miracles. Apple follows their own rules.
Possibly they held off on the Shuffle purely for market timing. maybe they were right to do so. That doesn't change the fact that Steve Jobs' talk in 2004 was a blatant misrepresentation of the flash player market. You didn't have to pay $200 for a 256M iPod-sized monster, you could spend $70 on something the size of a thumb drive and get a better designed device.
Less than $70, by then. $70 was the January 2003 price.
Hrm. So much for the Apple $150 player in Q1 '04.
What are you getting at here? Are you saying Apple doesn't have advertising dollars to spend? That they're not a big name?
A flash iPod, 256MB, Jan '04, for how much, $150? Is that what you are 'livid' at Apple for not creating?
Um, no, I was livid at Steve Jobs for claiming that the flash market was represented by the huge behemoths that he was comparing the iPod Mini to, rather than the streamlined minimal design that the majority of flash players used. It was an obvious straw man.
But, yeh, $150 for a 256M iPod Shuffle in January 2004. that would have worked. $50 less than the 256M flash players Steve was mocking, smaller, lighter, he could have blown them away.
512 is the minimum usable capacity
You keep saying that. Do you think repetition makes it true?
You know, I'll bet if he'd come out with (say) a $120 1G model and a $180 2G model, you'd be writing "1G is the minimum usable capacity". Fact is, the minimum usable capacity of a flash-drive MP3 player like the shuffle is based on one thing and one thing only: how long you spend listening to it before you reload it. If you listen 8 hours a day, then you need 8 hours worth of music... maybe a little less, because of the shuffle function, but that's a reasonable first cut.
I listen for less than 2 hours a day... that's how long I spend driving to work, home again, and at lunch. My daughter's ride to school was shorter than that, and she wasn't allowed to listen in class, so that worked out well for her. So, my 512M shuffle is much bigger than I really need. Now maybe you really need more than that, but don't assume that your needs are some kind of physical constant that Apple has to hew to lest people laugh at them.
I mean, hell, I think the 256M RAM in the Mac Mini is silly, and Apple should be ashamed of themselves for shipping less than 512M in a Mac. But it doesn't seem to be hurting their sales... because, you see, that's my opinion. Not a law of physics.
You have to remember to add the above "it's expensive to launch" issue into account.
Um, no, that's a fixed cost, no matter whether he launched in 2004 or 2005 the marketing costs would have been comparable. Maybe a little cheaper in 2004, what with inflation, but not enough to matter.
One of the odd things about debates over the Patriot Act is that even its harshest informed critics actually only oppose a very small part of the Act;
Why is that odd?
No, really, I don't get it. It would be utterly astonishing if that wasn't true. Treating that as news is like treating it as news that only a small number of incidents of speeding or drunk driving actually lead to accidents, or that the majority of suicide attempts don't lead to death.
Do you have a point, or are you just trying to muddy the waters?
and the right was later reinstated at the end of the war
Haven't you been paying attention to Bush? There isn't going to be an end to this war. No, I'm not being flip here, he's said that multiple times and he really means it no matter what the spin doctors say.
Did you think I'd forget what you said in this post?
I'm sorry, you're obviously trying to pick a fight, because I'm not trying to "pretend" anything, and I didn't "google" anything. I plugged my shuffle in and observed what iTunes did as it updated the playlist. That's what I based the comment you're pointing to on.
That's research.
Reading Apple's webpage and believing their system requirements isn't research.
If I depended on what Apple said I probably wouldn't have a Mac right now, because until the Mini came out I sure couldn't afford their prices. I certainly wouldn't have tried installing OS X on a Powermac 7500, or put more than 192M RAM in a 1st generation iMac G3.