The obvious thing that comes to mind for most people who see this, is how the heck can it stop. The fanciest gryo's and computer control isn't going to stop you as quickly as something two points in it's wheel base, versus one.
Note that this unit has "landing gear" that deploy to help give stability and braking ability. Which all seems to make the elgance of it a lot more clunkier.
I'm wondering if any of the motorcycle manufacturers are considering adding segway-like smarts (gyros, computer control, and such), to somewhat more traditional motorcycle design, giving more stability, control, manoueverability, and such. In the end, the driver is going to be what determins the safety, for sure, but it would seem that some of the segway-like technology sure could hurt to avoid major mistakes.
What one usually calls "cold" is not something of low temperature, but something with a lower temperature and a good heat conductance. Hence, a piece of metal of room temperature is cold.
This is an excellent point, and is also the explanation of something I always wondered about when I was younger: why a swimming pool that's at 20'C (70'F-ish) seems noticably cooler than room temperature. Both room temperature and the water are much colder than our bodies, but water contacting your skin conducts away your heat much more effectively than the air.
This trusted computing BIOS approach really concerns me. It strikes me as the best strategy Microsoft has come up with for hurting Linux.
My 1.5 year old Toshiba laptop still can't suspend due to lack of support for ACPI support, even in RedHat 9.0 (maybe there's some experimental kernel that would help me, but then everything else that's supported in a stable kernel version, would end up breaking). I can just imagine the grief with the sweeping changes of the trusted computing architectures.
Wow, it looks like the human carrying robot has an awfully high center of gravity to me. I'd feel uncomfortable sitting up there even when it's at rest.
I understand that for climbing stairs and such, some extension would be required, but surely using a different kind of base (multi-sectioned telescoping sections?) would make it a little lower in general?
Slightly off topic, but that reminds me of the time I was using my Toshiba Libretto on a plane, and the flight attendant comes by, points to my lap, and says in a voice that was far too loud, "Wow, that's the smallest one of those I've ever seen!"
She turned quite red when she realized how that sounded.
This is pure speculation on my part (which I know is highly irregular on/.), but maybe it's some private key or keys on the unit that are the concern, and not necessarily some non-standard encryption algorithm.
I think the biggest advance in debugging would be teaching people to use them.
I know a lot of programmers, but I think I'm the only one I know that actually uses a debugger to find problems. I haven't personally seen any University courses on debugging techniques or tools.
I think it's an essential skill (like typing) that makes programmers *so* much more productive.
I have quite a clear memory of crawling out of my crib, and onto the floor as a child. I'm assuming I was 1-ish more or less. Also have a few memories of being changed in diapers, so I think it can happen under 2 years quite easily. Under one year, is probably less usual.
Anyhow, just one more reference point for the survey.
Sorry, this might be an unpopular view because Linus works there, and all, but no company needs my support if they've got a product I find useful for a price that is competitive with other companies, and I won't waste my money supporting someone else's unsucessful ideas, just because they've got cool technology or cool employees. Well, as I understand it, TransMeta has products that are lower powered and run cooler than Intel's, which isn't just fluff, and $995 for a development board is pretty reasonable. (Not for a production model, but development kids are usually pricey). Seems intruiging to me.
SoftIce is (or at least was, and I presume still is) truly amazing. The version I used, awhile back, loaded *before* windows, allowing it to breakpoint on anything, about as low-level as you can get.
Too bad VMWare doesn't support debugging in it's PC emulation, it would even be better than the Wine approach (a real copy of windows running). Still there are some good tools out there to trace programs. Very cool stuff.
Up here in Canada, where proposed legislation will give CD's a 59c tax and regular blank DVD's a $2.27 tax per unit, I can just imagine what they'll want to tax something that can store 19x the data. Ulp! A $43 tax per blank media would really suck.
(The proposal also has a $21 per gigabyte tax on devices with build in hard drives. Insane; a 10G device would have a $210 tax. Even though our dollars are smaller, that's still $135US additional for a 10G unit.)
I sure hope the Canadian public is vocal enough to stomp this legislation, although we're not exactly known for creating a stir:-)
In the dispute with the hotel, couldn't (shouldn't?) the government simply take photos of the boulders on the beach themselves for evidence? I could see if the photos were taken over time, and showed the differences, but this sounds like just one current point in time the photos were taken. Sounds like it's just slightly more convenient to use his photo taken from the water. Hardly as sensational as it sounds.
Secondly, this guy owns four electric cars, but also flies a helicopter? I would guess that the amount of helicopter fuel burned, and air and sound pollution produced in a short outing would *far* outweigh most people's gas usage for a month. Just seems a little out of kilter. (Of course, I'm assuming it's not an *electric* helicopter:-)
When they played Heidi over the end of the greatest come-back in football history. Oh wait, you didn't mean that kind of programming, did you?
What is even more interesting about this, is that it turned out to be related to a phone overload (sort of an unintentional DOS).
The exec's gave an initial order to air Heidi at 7:00pm, but when they decided to override it and air the final minutes of the game and delay Heidi, they couldn't get through to the folks controlling the programming, as worried fans were calling in before 7:00pm to make sure they wouldn't switch to Heidi! D'oh!
Seriously, though, one thing I wished more people did, was at least do the converse as well, and write a letter letting a company know when you think they've done something *right*. It's almost unheard of; people often intend to, but never get around to it, unlike letters of complaint.
Man, it almost makes me physically sick when I see a cut-throat and ruthless corporate monopoly like Microsoft, dumping money into stunts like this to try and appear "fun" and "hip."
It's like Mr. Burns trying to improve his image. Gates should just hire a stunt monkey like Homer, tossing money at him to rob him of his dignity, instead. Baby make boom boom.
Since the BSD-style license is "more free" than the GPL (it just doesn't force freedom for modifications or commercial use), I don't see what the problem is.
Anyone who wants to use BSD-style licensed code is free to do so. I'm cool with that.
I see the Web as consistent with other media. It's not a requirement of the publishers of books to make braille versions, but third parties can use the appropriate technology to bring that medium to those with limited or alternative "I/O channels".
I don't know the particular legalities, but it seems to me from the credits given, that it is also third party sponsorship and organizations that put the effort into bringing closed captioning or descriptive audio to television broadcasts. Again, taking the existing medium, and making it more accessible to others.
The web is somewhat more gnarly and less structured, to say the least, but the same principles can largely apply. Screen readers, smart HTML parsing, and so forth, can make the Web accessible to those who can not read it.
The biggest threat to this is poor standardization (i.e. IE extensions and such crud, versus proper standard), and silliness like ShockWave which seldom add anything to the true *content*, and just add to meaningless splash.
I've read several eBooks, mostly ones for Microsoft Reader running on my iPaq. (Mostly old titles, classic novels; I think MS releases them because the copyright has expired. They're nobody's bitch.)
Anyhow, reading on the iPaq is very pleasant in many ways; nice screen contrast, high quality ClearType fonts, ability to look up works in the dictionary easily, and so forth. However, it can be physically fatiquing on the hands, because of the need to push the button to change pages. The requires a relatively large amount of force, in a fairly awkward manner, as compared to reaching over your other hand, and flipping a thin piece of paper. And because each virtual page holds less, you do it more.
I think that once some of the more subtle ergonmic issues are taken care of, the selection of titles is greater, and Pocket PC-style devices are much cheaper (Palm devices still aren't up to the quality of MS Reader), you'll see it become a far more common and preferred way to read.
Nothing beats carrying a dozen virtual books around with you, in addition to your calendar, todo list, some games, and so on. Makes waiting in long lines, waiting at the doctor, far less annoying.
For fun like arbitrary rotation, try Squeak at http://www.squeak.org
It's a smalltalk based system. Cute to play around with, and good for education, protyping, etc.. A bit slow for production work.
Anyhow, rotation is built in from the graphics system from the ground up, so you can have your terminals or any window rotated at an arbitrary angle. Slow, but cool nonetheless. I don't know of any other system which allows that (nor why any one should:-)
Not quite. SunRay's are closer to VNC than to X Windows. Everyone's X Server runs on the central machine, with it's display being mirrored in a thin-client kind of way to the SunRay display.
They are just a thin keyboard/mouse/display relay, in effect.
Unfortunately, it's a completely closed and proprietary protocol; I guess that helps sell more Sun Servers to support them. Would be nice for some Linux support, though.
As an alternative, VNC from http://www.realvnc.com, is a great re-connectable X (and Win and Mac) desktop system.
There have been some evidence that gluten inteolerance (i.e. wheat allergy) can be related to autism.
Some people have found gluten-free diets successful in helping autistic children.
The whole gluten-intolerance area is *way* behind other areas of research; hopefully someday there will be more discoveries that can help both conditions (especially autism).
Rather than slashdotting a specific site, I'll just mention that a google search for "gluten intolerance" and autism has a lot of related sites and articles.
With the modern leading edge technology that is Windows XP Pro, a fresh install, applying all service packs, it notifies me that it has found new hardware (the S3 Savage IX chip on my Toshiba); I go through the wizard that pops up, only to end in a failure error message "The data is invalid."
Yeah, that's a helpful one. *Anything* would have been more useful than that.
A key question someone needs to ask themselves when storing data in a relational database, is "is this data really relational"?
In a surprising amount of cases, it really isn't. For example, storing user preferences for visiting a given web page; there is never a case where you need to relate the different users to each other. The power aggregation abilities of relational databases are irrelevant, so why incur the overhead (performance-wise, cost-wise, etc.)
Even when aggregating such information is useful, I've often found off-line duplication of the information to databases (which you can then query the hell out of, without affecting the production system) a better way to go.
If a flat file will do the job, use that instead of a database.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew that name sounded familiar.
Ray is also the man behind Kurzweil Music Products who make a lot of high end and mid range gear, including very nice keyboards.
The obvious thing that comes to mind for most people who see this, is how the heck can it stop. The fanciest gryo's and computer control isn't going to stop you as quickly as something two points in it's wheel base, versus one.
Note that this unit has "landing gear" that deploy to help give stability and braking ability. Which all seems to make the elgance of it a lot more clunkier.
I'm wondering if any of the motorcycle manufacturers are considering adding segway-like smarts (gyros, computer control, and such), to somewhat more traditional motorcycle design, giving more stability, control, manoueverability, and such. In the end, the driver is going to be what determins the safety, for sure, but it would seem that some of the segway-like technology sure could hurt to avoid major mistakes.
This is an excellent point, and is also the explanation of something I always wondered about when I was younger: why a swimming pool that's at 20'C (70'F-ish) seems noticably cooler than room temperature. Both room temperature and the water are much colder than our bodies, but water contacting your skin conducts away your heat much more effectively than the air.
This trusted computing BIOS approach really concerns me. It strikes me as the best strategy Microsoft has come up with for hurting Linux.
My 1.5 year old Toshiba laptop still can't suspend due to lack of support for ACPI support, even in RedHat 9.0 (maybe there's some experimental kernel that would help me, but then everything else that's supported in a stable kernel version, would end up breaking). I can just imagine the grief with the sweeping changes of the trusted computing architectures.
-d
Wow, it looks like the human carrying robot has an awfully high center of gravity to me. I'd feel uncomfortable sitting up there even when it's at rest.
I understand that for climbing stairs and such, some extension would be required, but surely using a different kind of base (multi-sectioned telescoping sections?) would make it a little lower in general?
Slightly off topic, but that reminds me of the time I was using my Toshiba Libretto on a plane, and the flight attendant comes by, points to my lap, and says in a voice that was far too loud, "Wow, that's the smallest one of those I've ever seen!"
She turned quite red when she realized how that sounded.
Ah, the joys of portable technology.
This is pure speculation on my part (which I know is highly irregular on /.), but maybe it's some private key or keys on the unit that are the concern, and not necessarily some non-standard encryption algorithm.
-me
I think the biggest advance in debugging would be teaching people to use them.
I know a lot of programmers, but I think I'm the only one I know that actually uses a debugger to find problems. I haven't personally seen any University courses on debugging techniques or tools.
I think it's an essential skill (like typing) that makes programmers *so* much more productive.
-me
I have quite a clear memory of crawling out of my crib, and onto the floor as a child. I'm assuming I was 1-ish more or less. Also have a few memories of being changed in diapers, so I think it can happen under 2 years quite easily. Under one year, is probably less usual.
Anyhow, just one more reference point for the survey.
-me
Sorry, this might be an unpopular view because Linus works there, and all, but no company needs my support if they've got a product I find useful for a price that is competitive with other companies, and I won't waste my money supporting someone else's unsucessful ideas, just because they've got cool technology or cool employees.
Well, as I understand it, TransMeta has products that are lower powered and run cooler than Intel's, which isn't just fluff, and $995 for a development board is pretty reasonable. (Not for a production model, but development kids are usually pricey). Seems intruiging to me.
SoftIce is (or at least was, and I presume still is) truly amazing. The version I used, awhile back, loaded *before* windows, allowing it to breakpoint on anything, about as low-level as you can get.
Too bad VMWare doesn't support debugging in it's PC emulation, it would even be better than the Wine approach (a real copy of windows running). Still there are some good tools out there to trace programs. Very cool stuff.
Up here in Canada, where proposed legislation will give CD's a 59c tax and regular blank DVD's a $2.27 tax per unit, I can just imagine what they'll want to tax something that can store 19x the data. Ulp! A $43 tax per blank media would really suck.
:-)
(The proposal also has a $21 per gigabyte tax on devices with build in hard drives. Insane; a 10G device would have a $210 tax. Even though our dollars are smaller, that's still $135US additional for a 10G unit.)
I sure hope the Canadian public is vocal enough to stomp this legislation, although we're not exactly known for creating a stir
In the dispute with the hotel, couldn't (shouldn't?) the government simply take photos of the boulders on the beach themselves for evidence? I could see if the photos were taken over time, and showed the differences, but this sounds like just one current point in time the photos were taken. Sounds like it's just slightly more convenient to use his photo taken from the water. Hardly as sensational as it sounds.
Secondly, this guy owns four electric cars, but also flies a helicopter? I would guess that the amount of helicopter fuel burned, and air and sound pollution produced in a short outing would *far* outweigh most people's gas usage for a month. Just seems a little out of kilter. (Of course, I'm assuming it's not an *electric* helicopter :-)
What is even more interesting about this, is that it turned out to be related to a phone overload (sort of an unintentional DOS).
The exec's gave an initial order to air Heidi at 7:00pm, but when they decided to override it and air the final minutes of the game and delay Heidi, they couldn't get through to the folks controlling the programming, as worried fans were calling in before 7:00pm to make sure they wouldn't switch to Heidi! D'oh!
You must be fun at a parties.
The world needs more people like you :-)
Seriously, though, one thing I wished more people did, was at least do the converse as well, and write a letter letting a company know when you think they've done something *right*. It's almost unheard of; people often intend to, but never get around to it, unlike letters of complaint.
Man, it almost makes me physically sick when I see a cut-throat and ruthless corporate monopoly like Microsoft, dumping money into stunts like this to try and appear "fun" and "hip."
It's like Mr. Burns trying to improve his image. Gates should just hire a stunt monkey like Homer, tossing money at him to rob him of his dignity, instead. Baby make boom boom.
Since the BSD-style license is "more free" than the GPL (it just doesn't force freedom for modifications or commercial use), I don't see what the problem is.
Anyone who wants to use BSD-style licensed code is free to do so. I'm cool with that.
I don't know the particular legalities, but it seems to me from the credits given, that it is also third party sponsorship and organizations that put the effort into bringing closed captioning or descriptive audio to television broadcasts. Again, taking the existing medium, and making it more accessible to others.
The web is somewhat more gnarly and less structured, to say the least, but the same principles can largely apply. Screen readers, smart HTML parsing, and so forth, can make the Web accessible to those who can not read it.
The biggest threat to this is poor standardization (i.e. IE extensions and such crud, versus proper standard), and silliness like ShockWave which seldom add anything to the true *content*, and just add to meaningless splash.
Anyhow, reading on the iPaq is very pleasant in many ways; nice screen contrast, high quality ClearType fonts, ability to look up works in the dictionary easily, and so forth. However, it can be physically fatiquing on the hands, because of the need to push the button to change pages. The requires a relatively large amount of force, in a fairly awkward manner, as compared to reaching over your other hand, and flipping a thin piece of paper. And because each virtual page holds less, you do it more.
I think that once some of the more subtle ergonmic issues are taken care of, the selection of titles is greater, and Pocket PC-style devices are much cheaper (Palm devices still aren't up to the quality of MS Reader), you'll see it become a far more common and preferred way to read.
Nothing beats carrying a dozen virtual books around with you, in addition to your calendar, todo list, some games, and so on. Makes waiting in long lines, waiting at the doctor, far less annoying.
I believe things like QNX, the dearly departed BeOS, and OS/X have a layer that allows X applications to run on their alternative window system.
A fully functional, efficient compatability system would greatly facilitate evolving to a better underlying system until all the apps migrate.
It's a smalltalk based system. Cute to play around with, and good for education, protyping, etc.. A bit slow for production work.
Anyhow, rotation is built in from the graphics system from the ground up, so you can have your terminals or any window rotated at an arbitrary angle. Slow, but cool nonetheless. I don't know of any other system which allows that (nor why any one should :-)
They are just a thin keyboard/mouse/display relay, in effect.
Unfortunately, it's a completely closed and proprietary protocol; I guess that helps sell more Sun Servers to support them. Would be nice for some Linux support, though.
As an alternative, VNC from http://www.realvnc.com, is a great re-connectable X (and Win and Mac) desktop system.
Some people have found gluten-free diets successful in helping autistic children.
The whole gluten-intolerance area is *way* behind other areas of research; hopefully someday there will be more discoveries that can help both conditions (especially autism).
Rather than slashdotting a specific site, I'll just mention that a google search for "gluten intolerance" and autism has a lot of related sites and articles.
Yeah, that's a helpful one. *Anything* would have been more useful than that.
In a surprising amount of cases, it really isn't. For example, storing user preferences for visiting a given web page; there is never a case where you need to relate the different users to each other. The power aggregation abilities of relational databases are irrelevant, so why incur the overhead (performance-wise, cost-wise, etc.)
Even when aggregating such information is useful, I've often found off-line duplication of the information to databases (which you can then query the hell out of, without affecting the production system) a better way to go.
If a flat file will do the job, use that instead of a database.