But I prefer to use make and a Makefile to compile my Java stuff because make is available on every Unix by default.
This is such a ridiculous assertion. Lets take this apart for a moment.
First of all, Makei s not available on every Unix by default. You have to install it from whatever distribution methodolog you happen to use.
Once it's installed, you STILL have to install the JDK for ANY application you're building, no matter what. You're a java developer, ergo, you need the JDK. With me so far?
If you have the JDK installed, you have a Java VM. Ant uses the Java VM (it's distributed in binary form as a.JAR file. You have to have Java to run it.
So, by your own definition here, every platform you'd be developing or running apps on will run Ant. So much for that excuse.
Moving along. Installation of Ant is TRIVIAL. Unpack the distribution into/usr/ant (or wherever). Do 'export ANT_HOME=/usr/ant; export PATH=$PATH:$ANT_HOME/bin' - or make symlinks as appropriate, and voila, it's installed.
Remember, Ant will run on every system that Java runs on, which is every platform YOU'D be working on.
If you want to use Make because you're used to it, more power to ya, but don't use false statements to justify your own preferences.
Very few people can dispute that Apple has made some of the sexiest, most interesting systems that have come down the pike. The Mac was a masterful bit of design at introduction, and even though it was looking a bit long in the tooth as MacOS 8 and MacOS 9 were coming along, you couldn't argue that the environment set the tone for making GUI's useable as a primary interface.
OSX is a FANTASTIC piece of software, jumping the Mac platform squarely into Unix land (where we all knew desktop systems should have been all along, right?) while also providing a wonderful desktop experience.
On the other hand, Apple the corporation has made truly painful decisions that have alienated a lot of the 'apple fans'. The one that comes to mind was the decision to cancel the Newton, just when it was showing promise. Apple has a history of driving new technologies through to maturity, and with the Newton 2100, the platform had just gotten to the point of usefulness when it was cancelled. Did this make me less of a Mac fan? No. Did it make me less of an Apple fan? Absolutely.
I have on my desk a Mac Mini (for my mom), an old iMac (to test Safari pages), a Shuttle box running Windows XP, and my primary platform, an IBM T40 running Debian Linux. Of the 4, the most pleasant to work on is the Mac Mini. The most productive is the Linux Laptop. The best for game playing is the XP machine. The iMac is just there to look cool (as cool as purple gumdrops get).
I'm still a fan of Macs. I'm an okay fan of Apple. The OSX decision was masterful. Will I use it as my primary platform? Probably not, the price point on their proprietary hardware is still too high (Thinkpad T40 used: $800. Powerbook of similar power used: $1800, plus OSX licenses).
... how often Slashdot is a good 12-24 hours behind Boingboing? They posted this yesterday at 3pm, adn Slashdot is just getting around to it now.
I wonder how many of the editors of Slashdot are reading the better blogs now, and just duping articles into it. THe percentage of "Boingboing... then Slashdot" articles is alarmingly high.
My main reason for going with Hibernate is... it's java. It's iwthin the J2EE appserver environment, deployment to it is identical to deploying any other J2EE component. Package it up, drop it in the deployment dir, and you're off and running.
Shifting persistent objects into anything other than a standard SQL engine means you have to undersgtand and work with 2 different technologies when manipulating your persistence engine.
Frankly, I'd like to stay with one language, one deployment method, one set of known plusses and minuses.
Oh, and Hibernate works fine with a zillion SQL servers. Stored procedures only work with the one they're designed for.
The issue isn't really how many people are using it. That certainly does figure into it, but the very basic design philosophy of IE allows spyware to propogate easily.
Firefox has far better controls on what programs can be installed and can't be. Also, the very multi-platform nature of the code makes it harder to write an app that will work well.
I'm not worried. On the IE side, the only people who can fix the code are microsoft drones, and they won't do it. On the firefox side, the people who fix the code are the people who use it, namely us.
I'm one of those myself. I'm a one person software company trying to make it with my own product and services. I can't say that hte current environment is better, worse, or the same for the 'little guy' trying to get a leg up in the world. Starting a business anytime where you don't have a financial cushion is difficult.
Mnay of the tech folks were spoiled with the dotcom boom, where anyone with even half an idea would have VC's falling all over themselves to contribute money. No more - now you have to spent the time and money to have a solid basis.
I've managed to get some things starting doing the work full time / and code at night approach. After that it was consulting part time while finishing up the code, and now it's about 80% my business, and 20% consulting. But this has taken almost 3 years of pretty solid workl, not to mention some serious loss of social life, money, and income.
Putting out your own shingle is not for the faint of heart no matter what your business. But stick with it, work hard, and you can succeed.
(of course, i have to plug my business in a post like this:)
I used to be apathetic about government and politics. Uniniterested in 'what those wanks in Washington were doing'. The first inkling of a problem was the CDA (Communications Decency Act), which was scary, but okay, some bad legistlation is bound to happen.
Then Bush and his cronies moved in, and anything even approaching preservation of civil liberties, the Constitution, or... okay, lets be honest, our dignity... went totally out the window in pursuit of idealism and Empire building.
I'm ashamed that the coutnry I live in could put a man like George Bush in power, could support a congress that would ratify such onerous legislation as the Patriot Act, and, what's worse, even consider re-electing this man. (As I type this, the US elections are still undecided).
More commentary on my blog, I'm done ranting here.:)
So, you mean that I could get something to and from Mars in under 90 days? That's better time than the US takes to process my tax return. I wonder when Mailboxes Etc will set up a PO Box service on mars? Could be a whole growth opportunity.
Or maybe I shouldn't post to slashdot before morning coffee.
Single worst spam day by number of messages: August 22, 2002. 67 pieces of spam. The vertical blue line.
This guy needs to get out more. I set up monitoring of all my spam and total message traffic for the last couple years. My current average is around 350-450 spams per day. Check out the spam report I run every night.
Virii? That's a different report. I seperate my virii out of the entire mail feed for the 3-4 domains I run (yay amavisd and postfix). The virii report is a lot more variable, with as many as 1600 viruses a day, and as few as 10, though that's pretty rare.
Spam filtering here is done via amavisd + postfix + spamassassin + some custom rules.
I don't quite get where they're going with this. I'll have to assume it's a simple pre-release, run from there.
I use Evolution for all things that folks would associate with Outlook. Contact management, calendaring, and email. It does all of these pretty well, and I'm a pretty heavy-duty email user - going from a curses based mail client to Evolution was a lot easier than I thought, and I haven't lost any functionality (and sure as nuts gained some).
Evolution's integrated calendar + contact management is functional, complete, and works -great- with WebDAV based calendar servers. 1.4.x does not have automatic publishing, but since Evolution uses ical format calendars by default, a simple 'scp foo.ics' up to the webdav server instantly publishes your calendar. (we use phpiCalendar for calendar sharing).
I applaud Mozilla's project, more ical based applications means wider acceptance of the standard, but for now I'll stick with Evolution.
I had to laugh out loud listening to this stuffed shirt 'answer' the questions. I give you this particular gem regarding why an opensource developer should choose Ingres over MySQL or PostgreSQL:
Greenblatt: This question is like comparing the three divergent products in asking which one should one use. We understand that there are different reasons for selecting each product. It is incumbent upon you the end user or developer to look for the one that best meets the needs of their application. There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.
At first, Greenblatt says "Well, it depends on what you want you can't just compare them and say one is best". Then , in the next breath, "there will be no doubt... making Ingres the best choice" - but at no point does he actually answer the question. Why is Ingres better than PostgresSQL or MySQL, two well proven, widely accepted, and powerful database solutions? I still see absolutely no reason to support Ingres, nor do anything to support CA's policy of embrace and devour.
This is just a bone thrown to the opensource community. I predict, knowing the wisdom and capreciousnes of the opensource world, that Ingres will simply vanish, as MySQL and PostgresSQL continue their growth into enterprise-level applications
I have no idea what you're talking about, the site renders -perfectly- for me. Check out the screenshot (this is Debian Linux w/ some extensions + FF 0.9.1)
This is unfortunately not what they're looking for. There are any number of 'SQL front ends' - that let you do basically all the functions that a MySQL user can do from the command line. What this doesn't give you is a customziable front end with linked forms, back end processing, and data verification. YOu want to present the user base with a native, comfortable look and feel.
Others have recommended web-based solutions wth PHP, which are okay, but are difficult to maintain for the non-PHP literate.
Perhaps something like Rekall from theKompany would do it? It's not free, but it's a lot less expensive than most of the commercial front ends out there. It supports MySQL, is multi-platform, and has forms and front end scripting (using Python I believe).
The man simply has no social graces. And I really don't understand why he is deified in the community. He has the social skills of a 14yr old, and is simply a leftover 60's idealistic whacko.
Don't believe me? Try carrying on a conversation with him. If you happen to be female, guaranteed his eyes won't ever get above your breasts. This comes from experience folks (no, not mine:)
FileGate was a tool by the republican party to throw crap on the face of the Clinton administration. Before using this as a basis for an argument of "That's okay, the democrats did it too", learn the facts:
As usual, the facts of what happened, who got what files, and the 'numbers' involved were lost in the media frenzy, perpetuated by the Washington Post, et al.
REad. Learn. Understand. If you still feel that there was this huge scandal, then feel free to continue, but don't continue spouting O'Reilly's rhetoric without knowing the facts.
What a fool! Always late for meetings, never gives any supportive commentary, the pay sucks, the hours are long, and _HE_ gets all the glory for the crap I have to do all day long! What a bozo!
With the level of complexity in current hardware, I can't imagine anyone will come up with a benchmark that -can't- be labelled as skewed, inaccurate, or 'not giving justice'.
If I spend a million dollars developing a cool board that does zillions of sprigmorphs a second (a made up metric), and someone does a benchmark that doesn't test sprigmorph rendering, does that mean my board sucks? No, it just means the benchmark doesn't check it.
However, if Competitor B makes a board that doens't have sprigmorph rendering, but scores higher on this benchmark, which is the 'better card'?
The days of simple benchmarks, alas, are past. It used to be "how many clock cycles a second". Nowadays, whether one piece of hardware is better than another simply comes down to "Can it do what I'm doig right now any faster or cheaper than another unit?"
The first real incarnation of this was a weird little thing called a MacCharlie. It took what was then the only form factor of the Mac (what I believe folks today call a 128KE) and added a pair of 5 1/4" floppy drives, a system board, and the keyboard extension needed for the F1-F10 keys and the numeric keypad.
Here's a decent webpage about it. It was manufactured by Dayna, and actually was sort of cute.
I believe it was limited to 80x24 text applications (since in that day, the Monochrome Graphics Adapter was actually an expansion, and if you were -really- inventive, you could get (gasp) a CGA card! Woo!:)
Its wonderful seeing well thought out postings on this topic - my respect for this guy has just gone up a LOT, and I'm going to take a look at his books.
Talking about "what should be Java" and "what should not be Java" is a volatile topic no matter how you slice it. One thing I think the Java community has going for it is that they're not nearly as fragmented or hyper-screaming knee-jerk as a lot of the C or C++ community is.
I could see Sun and/or the JCP taking these proposals and starting the J3 development cycle. The trick is that much of what he's talking about is more than just a couple weeks hacking by a few dozen coders. Theres some serious internal redesigns here. However, he has worked them all through, with well-thought out arguments for and against each of his points.
I don't profess to be a Java guru. I've only been working in the language for about a year, but I've found it strong, the community intelligent and professional, and the environment a pleasure to work with.
Java ain't just applets and painfully slow JVM's anymore.
The best set of augmented vision stuff is done by Don Papp (http://www.aeinnovations.com). He's pretty well known in the wearable computing circles.
He's the only one I've seen that has put a HUD optical device behind a pair of sunglasses WITHOUT making you look like some sort of mutant. The problem is the display is small, (landscape piece of paper at a range of 4'), and is not quite VGA resolution (400x300 or therabouts, monochrome only).
What folks have to think about is what they really want to display on their glasses. A true design should allow -some- information to the user, but not totally engross them visually. A one line text display can relay an ENORMOUS amount of data - considering the baseline is zero (some data is a vast improvement over no data).
Couple a display with audio cues and a prompting system, you won't exactly be chattering on a high volume IRC channel, but you could get GPS location information, notifications of events (*bing*! - Ah, an event in the network. Let me see what happened...), etc etc.
Augmented reality is -the- application for this stuff. Being able to drive your car, and have your display mark out other cars, or show you where a turn coming up is, or point out hazards at night - or even show you there's a car in your blindspot. Mmm. How about showing you how far your tires are from the curb while you're parking? Ta heck with VR. Enhance whatcha got!
Articulating the carriage will in fact increase throwing range, in the same way a FAT mechanism works.
Unfortunatley, for such a low weight unit, it gets unstable with that much weight flying around so fast, as is evidenced by the second video (where the machine actually throws itself off my hottub lid:)
The next version of this machine, whenever I build it, will probalby have a wheeled carriage, and have a much stronger throwing arm.
Slashdot Mirror
But I prefer to use make and a Makefile to compile my Java stuff because make is available on every Unix by default.
.JAR file. You have to have Java to run it.
/usr/ant (or wherever). Do 'export ANT_HOME=/usr/ant; export PATH=$PATH:$ANT_HOME/bin' - or make symlinks as appropriate, and voila, it's installed.
This is such a ridiculous assertion. Lets take this apart for a moment.
First of all, Makei s not available on every Unix by default. You have to install it from whatever distribution methodolog you happen to use.
Once it's installed, you STILL have to install the JDK for ANY application you're building, no matter what. You're a java developer, ergo, you need the JDK. With me so far?
If you have the JDK installed, you have a Java VM. Ant uses the Java VM (it's distributed in binary form as a
So, by your own definition here, every platform you'd be developing or running apps on will run Ant. So much for that excuse.
Moving along. Installation of Ant is TRIVIAL. Unpack the distribution into
Remember, Ant will run on every system that Java runs on, which is every platform YOU'D be working on.
If you want to use Make because you're used to it, more power to ya, but don't use false statements to justify your own preferences.
Very few people can dispute that Apple has made some of the sexiest, most interesting systems that have come down the pike. The Mac was a masterful bit of design at introduction, and even though it was looking a bit long in the tooth as MacOS 8 and MacOS 9 were coming along, you couldn't argue that the environment set the tone for making GUI's useable as a primary interface.
OSX is a FANTASTIC piece of software, jumping the Mac platform squarely into Unix land (where we all knew desktop systems should have been all along, right?) while also providing a wonderful desktop experience.
On the other hand, Apple the corporation has made truly painful decisions that have alienated a lot of the 'apple fans'. The one that comes to mind was the decision to cancel the Newton, just when it was showing promise. Apple has a history of driving new technologies through to maturity, and with the Newton 2100, the platform had just gotten to the point of usefulness when it was cancelled. Did this make me less of a Mac fan? No. Did it make me less of an Apple fan? Absolutely.
I have on my desk a Mac Mini (for my mom), an old iMac (to test Safari pages), a Shuttle box running Windows XP, and my primary platform, an IBM T40 running Debian Linux. Of the 4, the most pleasant to work on is the Mac Mini. The most productive is the Linux Laptop. The best for game playing is the XP machine. The iMac is just there to look cool (as cool as purple gumdrops get).
I'm still a fan of Macs. I'm an okay fan of Apple. The OSX decision was masterful. Will I use it as my primary platform? Probably not, the price point on their proprietary hardware is still too high (Thinkpad T40 used: $800. Powerbook of similar power used: $1800, plus OSX licenses).
... how often Slashdot is a good 12-24 hours behind Boingboing? They posted this yesterday at 3pm, adn Slashdot is just getting around to it now.
I wonder how many of the editors of Slashdot are reading the better blogs now, and just duping articles into it. THe percentage of "Boingboing... then Slashdot" articles is alarmingly high.
My main reason for going with Hibernate is... it's java. It's iwthin the J2EE appserver environment, deployment to it is identical to deploying any other J2EE component. Package it up, drop it in the deployment dir, and you're off and running.
Shifting persistent objects into anything other than a standard SQL engine means you have to undersgtand and work with 2 different technologies when manipulating your persistence engine.
Frankly, I'd like to stay with one language, one deployment method, one set of known plusses and minuses.
Oh, and Hibernate works fine with a zillion SQL servers. Stored procedures only work with the one they're designed for.
Sounds very Star-trek'y... the whole pneumatic against the neck thingy. *FSSHT!*
Cool though - I wonder if this can work for any type of injection? Things like insulin shots, etc.
The issue isn't really how many people are using it. That certainly does figure into it, but the very basic design philosophy of IE allows spyware to propogate easily.
Firefox has far better controls on what programs can be installed and can't be. Also, the very multi-platform nature of the code makes it harder to write an app that will work well.
I'm not worried. On the IE side, the only people who can fix the code are microsoft drones, and they won't do it. On the firefox side, the people who fix the code are the people who use it, namely us.
Planet-GeekI'm one of those myself. I'm a one person software company trying to make it with my own product and services. I can't say that hte current environment is better, worse, or the same for the 'little guy' trying to get a leg up in the world. Starting a business anytime where you don't have a financial cushion is difficult.
:)
Mnay of the tech folks were spoiled with the dotcom boom, where anyone with even half an idea would have VC's falling all over themselves to contribute money. No more - now you have to spent the time and money to have a solid basis.
I've managed to get some things starting doing the work full time / and code at night approach. After that it was consulting part time while finishing up the code, and now it's about 80% my business, and 20% consulting. But this has taken almost 3 years of pretty solid workl, not to mention some serious loss of social life, money, and income.
Putting out your own shingle is not for the faint of heart no matter what your business. But stick with it, work hard, and you can succeed.
(of course, i have to plug my business in a post like this
I used to be apathetic about government and politics. Uniniterested in 'what those wanks in Washington were doing'. The first inkling of a problem was the CDA (Communications Decency Act), which was scary, but okay, some bad legistlation is bound to happen.
:)
Then Bush and his cronies moved in, and anything even approaching preservation of civil liberties, the Constitution, or... okay, lets be honest, our dignity... went totally out the window in pursuit of idealism and Empire building.
I'm ashamed that the coutnry I live in could put a man like George Bush in power, could support a congress that would ratify such onerous legislation as the Patriot Act, and, what's worse, even consider re-electing this man. (As I type this, the US elections are still undecided).
More commentary on my blog, I'm done ranting here.
So, you mean that I could get something to and from Mars in under 90 days? That's better time than the US takes to process my tax return. I wonder when Mailboxes Etc will set up a PO Box service on mars? Could be a whole growth opportunity.
Or maybe I shouldn't post to slashdot before morning coffee.
Single worst spam day by number of messages: August 22, 2002. 67 pieces of spam. The vertical blue line.
This guy needs to get out more. I set up monitoring of all my spam and total message traffic for the last couple years. My current average is around 350-450 spams per day. Check out the spam report I run every night.
Virii? That's a different report. I seperate my virii out of the entire mail feed for the 3-4 domains I run (yay amavisd and postfix). The virii report is a lot more variable, with as many as 1600 viruses a day, and as few as 10, though that's pretty rare.
Spam filtering here is done via amavisd + postfix + spamassassin + some custom rules.
I don't quite get where they're going with this. I'll have to assume it's a simple pre-release, run from there.
I use Evolution for all things that folks would associate with Outlook. Contact management, calendaring, and email. It does all of these pretty well, and I'm a pretty heavy-duty email user - going from a curses based mail client to Evolution was a lot easier than I thought, and I haven't lost any functionality (and sure as nuts gained some).
Evolution's integrated calendar + contact management is functional, complete, and works -great- with WebDAV based calendar servers. 1.4.x does not have automatic publishing, but since Evolution uses ical format calendars by default, a simple 'scp foo.ics' up to the webdav server instantly publishes your calendar. (we use phpiCalendar for calendar sharing).
I applaud Mozilla's project, more ical based applications means wider acceptance of the standard, but for now I'll stick with Evolution.
I had to laugh out loud listening to this stuffed shirt 'answer' the questions. I give you this particular gem regarding why an opensource developer should choose Ingres over MySQL or PostgreSQL:
... making Ingres the best choice" - but at no point does he actually answer the question. Why is Ingres better than PostgresSQL or MySQL, two well proven, widely accepted, and powerful database solutions? I still see absolutely no reason to support Ingres, nor do anything to support CA's policy of embrace and devour.
Greenblatt:
This question is like comparing the three divergent products in asking which one should one use. We understand that there are different reasons for selecting each product. It is incumbent upon you the end user or developer to look for the one that best meets the needs of their application. There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.
At first, Greenblatt says "Well, it depends on what you want you can't just compare them and say one is best". Then , in the next breath, "there will be no doubt
This is just a bone thrown to the opensource community. I predict, knowing the wisdom and capreciousnes of the opensource world, that Ingres will simply vanish, as MySQL and PostgresSQL continue their growth into enterprise-level applications
I have no idea what you're talking about, the site renders -perfectly- for me. Check out the screenshot (this is Debian Linux w/ some extensions + FF 0.9.1)
screenshot
This is unfortunately not what they're looking for. There are any number of 'SQL front ends' - that let you do basically all the functions that a MySQL user can do from the command line. What this doesn't give you is a customziable front end with linked forms, back end processing, and data verification. YOu want to present the user base with a native, comfortable look and feel.
Others have recommended web-based solutions wth PHP, which are okay, but are difficult to maintain for the non-PHP literate.
Perhaps something like Rekall from theKompany would do it? It's not free, but it's a lot less expensive than most of the commercial front ends out there. It supports MySQL, is multi-platform, and has forms and front end scripting (using Python I believe).
The man simply has no social graces. And I really don't understand why he is deified in the community. He has the social skills of a 14yr old, and is simply a leftover 60's idealistic whacko.
:)
Don't believe me? Try carrying on a conversation with him. If you happen to be female, guaranteed his eyes won't ever get above your breasts. This comes from experience folks (no, not mine
FileGate was a tool by the republican party to throw crap on the face of the Clinton administration. Before using this as a basis for an argument of "That's okay, the democrats did it too", learn the facts:
A well detailed, fact filled summary of what -actually- happened
As usual, the facts of what happened, who got what files, and the 'numbers' involved were lost in the media frenzy, perpetuated by the Washington Post, et al.
REad. Learn. Understand. If you still feel that there was this huge scandal, then feel free to continue, but don't continue spouting O'Reilly's rhetoric without knowing the facts.
What a fool! Always late for meetings, never gives any supportive commentary, the pay sucks, the hours are long, and _HE_ gets all the glory for the crap I have to do all day long! What a bozo!
Waiddasec. I work for myself.
Is there a doctor in the house?
With the level of complexity in current hardware, I can't imagine anyone will come up with a benchmark that -can't- be labelled as skewed, inaccurate, or 'not giving justice'.
If I spend a million dollars developing a cool board that does zillions of sprigmorphs a second (a made up metric), and someone does a benchmark that doesn't test sprigmorph rendering, does that mean my board sucks? No, it just means the benchmark doesn't check it.
However, if Competitor B makes a board that doens't have sprigmorph rendering, but scores higher on this benchmark, which is the 'better card'?
The days of simple benchmarks, alas, are past. It used to be "how many clock cycles a second". Nowadays, whether one piece of hardware is better than another simply comes down to "Can it do what I'm doig right now any faster or cheaper than another unit?"
The first real incarnation of this was a weird little thing called a MacCharlie. It took what was then the only form factor of the Mac (what I believe folks today call a 128KE) and added a pair of 5 1/4" floppy drives, a system board, and the keyboard extension needed for the F1-F10 keys and the numeric keypad.
:)
Here's a decent webpage about it. It was manufactured by Dayna, and actually was sort of cute.
I believe it was limited to 80x24 text applications (since in that day, the Monochrome Graphics Adapter was actually an expansion, and if you were -really- inventive, you could get (gasp) a CGA card! Woo!
Its wonderful seeing well thought out postings on this topic - my respect for this guy has just gone up a LOT, and I'm going to take a look at his books.
Talking about "what should be Java" and "what should not be Java" is a volatile topic no matter how you slice it. One thing I think the Java community has going for it is that they're not nearly as fragmented or hyper-screaming knee-jerk as a lot of the C or C++ community is.
I could see Sun and/or the JCP taking these proposals and starting the J3 development cycle. The trick is that much of what he's talking about is more than just a couple weeks hacking by a few dozen coders. Theres some serious internal redesigns here. However, he has worked them all through, with well-thought out arguments for and against each of his points.
I don't profess to be a Java guru. I've only been working in the language for about a year, but I've found it strong, the community intelligent and professional, and the environment a pleasure to work with.
Java ain't just applets and painfully slow JVM's anymore.
The best set of augmented vision stuff is done by Don Papp (http://www.aeinnovations.com). He's pretty well known in the wearable computing circles.
He's the only one I've seen that has put a HUD optical device behind a pair of sunglasses WITHOUT making you look like some sort of mutant. The problem is the display is small, (landscape piece of paper at a range of 4'), and is not quite VGA resolution (400x300 or therabouts, monochrome only).
What folks have to think about is what they really want to display on their glasses. A true design should allow -some- information to the user, but not totally engross them visually. A one line text display can relay an ENORMOUS amount of data - considering the baseline is zero (some data is a vast improvement over no data).
Couple a display with audio cues and a prompting system, you won't exactly be chattering on a high volume IRC channel, but you could get GPS location information, notifications of events (*bing*! - Ah, an event in the network. Let me see what happened...), etc etc.
Augmented reality is -the- application for this stuff. Being able to drive your car, and have your display mark out other cars, or show you where a turn coming up is, or point out hazards at night - or even show you there's a car in your blindspot. Mmm. How about showing you how far your tires are from the curb while you're parking? Ta heck with VR. Enhance whatcha got!
Colo'ed at RCN. Thank them :)
Articulating the carriage will in fact increase throwing range, in the same way a FAT mechanism works.
:)
:)
Unfortunatley, for such a low weight unit, it gets unstable with that much weight flying around so fast, as is evidenced by the second video (where the machine actually throws itself off my hottub lid
The next version of this machine, whenever I build it, will probalby have a wheeled carriage, and have a much stronger throwing arm.
60 to 1 would be awfully nice
Feh, that's nothin! Too many parts, too easy to fail. What you -really- want to do is make a trebuchet out of -tinkertoys-.
Like I did!
http://www.stonekeep.com/trebuchet/
Microsoft is only interested in making money.
Opensource projects are only interested is in getting the job done.
Which do you want to go with?