Define "...adequate/superior manpower...". History is littered with smaller forces that devastated numerically superior foes, sometimes through technology (e.g. the early Gatling gun) and other times through being more mobile and concentrating their force where the enemy was weak for long enough to wreak havoc on men and materiel, and then vanish before the larger force could respond.
Kind of OT, but someone has done a lot of nice work on the LCARS specification at http://www.starbasemccoy.com/lcars/, including an LCARS font, all open source and free download.
Besides on the touchscreen, I mean.
I'm wondering what it would take to put a nice X10 interface or DVD controls on there along with the audio mixing for the ultimate in customised portable home theater control panels. Just stick an ethernet jack (or WAP) near your favorite seat and you'd be all set.
Quoth yon article:
In terms of operating system choices, Motorola definitely chose the road less traveled for the A768i. The obvious choices in the market are the Symbian OS and, of course, Microsoft.
While I'll grant you that Linux is certainly "...the road less traveled..." for smartphones they didn't even mention PalmOS? I know (and am very disappointed) that there are few enough of them out there, but PalmOS is such a strong player in the PDA market that I can't figure out why there aren't more Palm based phones out there.
Most corporations no longer see us a customers, they see us as consumers. The difference being that a customer is a partner, someone you listen to. A consumer is no more than a blob to cough up cash, in carny terms it would be called a mark.
This is just an extension of us being viewed as consumers. We're no more than sheep to be fleeced as often as possible. And this is done by bombarding us with advertising as often as possible in whatever environments possible. What ever happened to the vendor supplying "value added" and counting that (the inprovement in there reputation) as advertising? I guess some clown in a corporate boardroom can't pocket that or claim it on the quarterly statement to get the mutual funds to buy more of their stock.
Ok, some one moderated the parent as a troll. I didn't think I had to say this but, IT'S A JOKE PEOPLE. It's even been modded Funny just incase the clue bus doesn't stop at your terminal. Sheesh!
Yes, the above counts as "humor" too.:) Have a nice day.
I'm all for electronic voting, but there needs to be accountability built into the system. My vision is something like this:
Go into voting booth, key in votes, voting machine spits out two (or three, depending how redundant you want to be) identical bar coded pieces of cardstock or material of similar thickness, maybe plastic.
Leave the voting booth and go to the next station, insert one bar coded piece of card stock. This machine counts your vote and files your paper vote.
Go home or to public library.
VoteCreator(tm) is made by one company, it's hardware and software specs are available to the public down to the source or bit and component level.
VoteTabulator(tm) is made by another, completely unrelated, company, specs available as above. The bar code printed by the VoteCreator and read is an open specification for each election.
All computers at the public library will have a bar code reader and VoteTabulator (or open source equivelant) so you can check that your vote was recorded properly. Recounts must be performed by a "VoteTabulator" from a different company than the original.
I don't think the above system is flawless, but it introduces accountability and redundancy, something current electronic voting systems lack.
Minor linguistic niggle: I never said the battle was with IE, I said it was over IE. And if you want say that replacing Java functions with ActiveX functions that are subtly different is "...attempting to extend the language with platform specific features." I suppose that you are technically correct.
And while HTML may not technically be a standard (and browsers are not required to adhere to this non-standard), it serves the same purpose as one. To provide a standardised markup language so that Web browsers created by different authors will provide similar output when provided similar input.
Wearable computer are not new, and have multiple proven uses in the workplace already.
One example is when building/QCing an aircraft (mil or civ) you can either lug a cart with several 5,000 page notebooks for current specifications in addition to the cart with all your tools/instruments, or wear an 802.11 system with small display where you can search out the specs for the exact section you are working on at the moment.
Sorry what standard was IE based on exactly? Oh wait, there was no standard for browsers. MS were free to innovate or assimilate as they saw fit with IE.
So you don't consider HTML to be a standard? I thought I saw some Web site once.... where was that again? Oh yeah, I remember now! It was http://w3c.org/! (I might also add that Netscape (pre-AOL) violated those same standards.)
Then there was something called Java... Wasn't there some legal battle over that and IE? Hmm..... As I recall Microsoft lost that one, too. And that was a proprietary standard at that.
I hate being put in the position of bashing Microsoft (partly because it's so easy, and partly because it's so trendy here on/.) but when they mess up recognize it, and when they do something good recognize that too!
Ok, cool. I meant to add a disclaimer to my previous comment so I wouldn't come off like a rabid "I hate microsoft" zombie, but I was at work and work keeps interfereing with Slashdot for some sick reason....
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Microsoft. But I'll confine my dislike to the facts, not elevate it to a Crusade.
Yes, you can. And most OS's at least attempt to protect themselves from malicious code. But ActiveX (MS's failed attempt to kill Java as a viable cross platform language) has more than it's share of "user friendly" features that allow unscrupulous coders to compromise a system with an unwary or uneducated user. And it's not bad enough that all users are members of the Administrator group by default (on XP Home or Pro running a peer2peer network), but any app can tell Windows it needs to run with System level rights, regardless of the user's permissions, and have it's merry way with your system.
Back in the days when people actually knew their neighbors and community was at least partially defined by geographical vicinity, raising the kids was a community effort. And it was a good thing and it worked more often than not. Now that modern industrialized society has fragmented and we don't know our neighbors as well and everyone is more mobile, this legislation is a good thing. It is ultimately the parent's responsibility to determine what values they want to raise their child with. If the parent things that GTA is ok for a 9 year old, then let them come to the store and buy it for the 9 year old.
...I'd love to take a Segway, 1 or 2 deep cycle marine batteries, a mini-ITX system and Voila! instant robot*, just add appendages.
*(with 2 years of software development time, not for use around the frail or infirm, your electric bill may show unexpected increases, void where prohibited, your milage may vary, not responsible for reactions of household pets, not responsible if you install optional Death Ray appendage)
We tend to forget, with our Western viewpoint, that not all research is scientific. But putting that thought aside for the moment let's do some pure blue sky thinking. What if we develop telepathy as a discipline and can tell when concious thought begins, or can detect the soul? What if our life sciences become so advanced that we acutally understand the nature of life and can detect and measure it?
What about a biological virus, scientists still don't agree on whether they're alive or not.
I disagree with the idea Life is subjective and personal. It sounds like a cop out to me, and one designed to try and avoid an argument. (Not that I'm looking for an argument here.) And because the question "when does a zygote become a person" is of an ethical nature don't you think it should be dealt with before we charge helter-skelter into this research? But it's not even being given a wink or a nod by these Harvard profs. The fact that they may be committing murder doesn't bother them in the slightest.
And that is what bothers me. These people are (theoretically) supposed to be at the pinacle of scientific thought, leading by example as we explore the world around us, yet they haven't even slowed down (let alone stopped!) to consider some very basic questions.
Slashdot Mirror
You saw it here first!
Define "...adequate/superior manpower...". History is littered with smaller forces that devastated numerically superior foes, sometimes through technology (e.g. the early Gatling gun) and other times through being more mobile and concentrating their force where the enemy was weak for long enough to wreak havoc on men and materiel, and then vanish before the larger force could respond.
All that work for nothing....
Buy a goat?
Ahah! So they have indeed musterd the genes elsewhere!
Display - Size : 12 inches diagonal - 800x600 pixels - Resolution : 800x600 pixels - Type : LCD - Contrast : Ajustable
Sensor - Sensor resolution : 100x128 - Number of fingers at once : 20 (two hands + two feets)
Central Processor Unit (CPU) - CPU : Nios 100Mhz 32bit float precision
Graphic Processor Unit (GPU) - Fill Rate : 360M Pixels/s - 2 pixels/cycle - Color format : RGB (5.6.5) : 65,536 colors - 16bit RGB/ARGB and 8 bits Alpha Textures - Texture Mapping : UV Coordinates, Rotation, Scaling, Transformation
Bilinear Filtering at 4 cycles/pixel
Cache Memory : 256 pixels (16 Lines) Texture cache, 128 Primitives List cache
Pixel Engine Function : Transparency, Additive Blending, Texture Lighting & Shadows
System Logic
Build-in functions : 100
Internal precision : 32bit float
Memory
User Memory : 16Mo
Internal Memory : 32Mo
Connectivity
Ethernet : RJ45 - 10/100Mb
Communication : OSC via TCP/UDP
Power
External power : 12-V power supply
Electrical Consommation : 14 Watts
Sorry about the formatting. Between /. griping about the number of characters per line and my lowly HTML skills this is what you get. :)
Where'd they off-shore the genes to?
Kind of OT, but someone has done a lot of nice work on the LCARS specification at http://www.starbasemccoy.com/lcars/, including an LCARS font, all open source and free download.
Besides on the touchscreen, I mean. I'm wondering what it would take to put a nice X10 interface or DVD controls on there along with the audio mixing for the ultimate in customised portable home theater control panels. Just stick an ethernet jack (or WAP) near your favorite seat and you'd be all set.
Ok, I see the article does mention PalmOS later in that same paragraph, please pardon the knee jerk posting.
While I'll grant you that Linux is certainly "...the road less traveled..." for smartphones they didn't even mention PalmOS? I know (and am very disappointed) that there are few enough of them out there, but PalmOS is such a strong player in the PDA market that I can't figure out why there aren't more Palm based phones out there.
In Soviet Russia comments insert you into the code.
This is just an extension of us being viewed as consumers. We're no more than sheep to be fleeced as often as possible. And this is done by bombarding us with advertising as often as possible in whatever environments possible. What ever happened to the vendor supplying "value added" and counting that (the inprovement in there reputation) as advertising? I guess some clown in a corporate boardroom can't pocket that or claim it on the quarterly statement to get the mutual funds to buy more of their stock.
Series 60 (the OS on his phone) is a Symbian based OS, designed strictly for PDAs and phones. So what's Windows got to do with this?
Yes, the above counts as "humor" too. :) Have a nice day.
...any better than CSPAN?
Go into voting booth, key in votes, voting machine spits out two (or three, depending how redundant you want to be) identical bar coded pieces of cardstock or material of similar thickness, maybe plastic.
Leave the voting booth and go to the next station, insert one bar coded piece of card stock. This machine counts your vote and files your paper vote.
Go home or to public library.
VoteCreator(tm) is made by one company, it's hardware and software specs are available to the public down to the source or bit and component level.
VoteTabulator(tm) is made by another, completely unrelated, company, specs available as above. The bar code printed by the VoteCreator and read is an open specification for each election.
All computers at the public library will have a bar code reader and VoteTabulator (or open source equivelant) so you can check that your vote was recorded properly. Recounts must be performed by a "VoteTabulator" from a different company than the original.
I don't think the above system is flawless, but it introduces accountability and redundancy, something current electronic voting systems lack.
And while HTML may not technically be a standard (and browsers are not required to adhere to this non-standard), it serves the same purpose as one. To provide a standardised markup language so that Web browsers created by different authors will provide similar output when provided similar input.
One example is when building/QCing an aircraft (mil or civ) you can either lug a cart with several 5,000 page notebooks for current specifications in addition to the cart with all your tools/instruments, or wear an 802.11 system with small display where you can search out the specs for the exact section you are working on at the moment.
So you don't consider HTML to be a standard? I thought I saw some Web site once.... where was that again? Oh yeah, I remember now! It was http://w3c.org/! (I might also add that Netscape (pre-AOL) violated those same standards.)
Then there was something called Java... Wasn't there some legal battle over that and IE? Hmm..... As I recall Microsoft lost that one, too. And that was a proprietary standard at that.
I hate being put in the position of bashing Microsoft (partly because it's so easy, and partly because it's so trendy here on /.) but when they mess up recognize it, and when they do something good recognize that too!
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Microsoft. But I'll confine my dislike to the facts, not elevate it to a Crusade.
Yes, you can. And most OS's at least attempt to protect themselves from malicious code. But ActiveX (MS's failed attempt to kill Java as a viable cross platform language) has more than it's share of "user friendly" features that allow unscrupulous coders to compromise a system with an unwary or uneducated user. And it's not bad enough that all users are members of the Administrator group by default (on XP Home or Pro running a peer2peer network), but any app can tell Windows it needs to run with System level rights, regardless of the user's permissions, and have it's merry way with your system.
Back in the days when people actually knew their neighbors and community was at least partially defined by geographical vicinity, raising the kids was a community effort. And it was a good thing and it worked more often than not. Now that modern industrialized society has fragmented and we don't know our neighbors as well and everyone is more mobile, this legislation is a good thing. It is ultimately the parent's responsibility to determine what values they want to raise their child with. If the parent things that GTA is ok for a 9 year old, then let them come to the store and buy it for the 9 year old.
*(with 2 years of software development time, not for use around the frail or infirm, your electric bill may show unexpected increases, void where prohibited, your milage may vary, not responsible for reactions of household pets, not responsible if you install optional Death Ray appendage)
What about a biological virus, scientists still don't agree on whether they're alive or not.
I disagree with the idea Life is subjective and personal. It sounds like a cop out to me, and one designed to try and avoid an argument. (Not that I'm looking for an argument here.) And because the question "when does a zygote become a person" is of an ethical nature don't you think it should be dealt with before we charge helter-skelter into this research? But it's not even being given a wink or a nod by these Harvard profs. The fact that they may be committing murder doesn't bother them in the slightest.
And that is what bothers me. These people are (theoretically) supposed to be at the pinacle of scientific thought, leading by example as we explore the world around us, yet they haven't even slowed down (let alone stopped!) to consider some very basic questions.