A couple of weeks ago, I saw a documentary showing this technology being used by surgeons, and was very impressed. The main advantage of the system is being able to display a *live* 3D model of the operated organ (or any other data), allowing the surgeon to remain concentrated on his 'target' rather than having to look at some monitor, hence reducing the risk of a bad manipulation.
When performing microsurgery, surgeons wear magnifying glasses, so don't worry about your tiny blood vessels or nerves. Anyway, I don't think any serious surgeon would use this technology if it weren't adapted to their needs, and these people are demanding when it comes to new hardware. The top surgeons who were testing the equipment seemed to be very happy about it!
"I think I could do a bang-up job of helping a *lot* of people if I had a lot of money."
If you need any help for spending a few billions on *good* things, send me a mail!
/max
if Bob *is* England this week...
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 2
Then I'd like to ask him, now that he *is* England, what it feels like being afflicted by foot-and-mouth, him coming from the Silicon Valley which is well known for its foot-in-mouth epidemic.
Linux afficionados are also known for their highly contagious tongue-in-cheek comments style, I'm starting to wonder if there wouldn't be a corelation between the time spent on computers and the risk of catching a dreadful three-words diseases. Shall we start digging trenches around tech centers?
I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, but I saw this monitor for sale here in Geneva, Switzerland... about 3 months ago. Big flat plama screens (for TV) have been around for a few years, but the prices will make you wish they didn't exist.
While the size and luminosity of the Samsung were nice, it wasn't nearly as sharp as Apple's Cinema Display. And for the Samsung's price you can buy a G4 Cube with the 24" panel!
If only flat panels were cheap enough, I could save lots of room in my tiny apartment and my electricity bill would nicely drop...
"I'd be curious to see what people think about the possibility of securing a network that sends data through the air."
For one, you could try a lead-coated bunker so that even Superman and the MPAA won't be able to tap into your precious air waves.
After that, if you're scared about air contamination (all that data has to run through it, no?) you can try accomplishing a complete vacuum ; the NASA has some big pumps for lease.
Having to wear a spacesuit for kernel hacking on an iBook while sitting on the pot will bring you to total geekness!
You can't stop it. I mean, cloning *sterile* people? How are those clones going to reproduce if their "parents", or should I say "originals", are sterile, hence themselves as well? Unless they start modifying their genes, I don't see an end to it.
Well, they could clone some fully functional person too I guess, but it raises many serious ethical factors for which I don't see any chances of positive consensus in the forseeable future.
Fuck, those unfortunate parents could adopt one (ore more) of the millions of orphans the World unfortunately bears, it would do much more good to humanity than starting to play a game for which we don't know all the rules yet.
You're confusing Betamax and BETACAM, the former being a dead consumer standard and the latter being a high-end pro standard. The only hting they share is the tape size (the small ones only, Betacam VCRs take 2 sizes).
Betacam also exists in digital and is the most used standard in all TVs around the world. Forget about having one at home, it's hugely expensive.
This is pathetic. Reminds me of situations in which some doctors keep adding equipment and experiments to keep somebody alive, although the brain's fried.
Pleeeeaaaase leave the Amiga its dignity. It was great, but 10 years ago. Let us remember it for the wonderful machine it was. Those deperate attemps at keeping it alive revolt me as a former Amiga user and lover.
When it's over, it's over. Let's unplug the thing.
And I don't understand well why being conscious of why and how we must protect our environment makes one the target of various insults.
After all, if terrestrial life ceases to be possible, the morons who built their lives on destroying the Earth's biosphere for a profit will be the first to run out of business and, hopefully, die.
It's not the fact they put these technologies on flying wings that's interesting. The conbination of solar panels + clean fuel cells is a perfect source of clean energy for everyone. Such equipment could be put on every roof, or even be used on large areas and be used as a local powerstation.
It's clean energy, with only water as a byproduct. Once the systems get into mass production, their prices will drop sharply. The cost of environmental damage isn't quantifiable and we can't keep on relying on fuel and nuclear power forever.
The applications for such concepts are huge ; from depolluting industrialized countries to the equipment of developing countries by diminishing the power grid infrastrucure.
If you combine this system to fast-spinning flywheels (read this excellent artice from Wired Magazine), you get permanent, clean energy with little or no maintenance as long as the components can last. Heavy industry could rely on fewer heavy-duty (polluting) powerplants, thus greatly reducing pollution (I don't think we can eradicate all of it, unfortunately).
To me, it looks like the ideal power source for durable development.
May I turn your attention to the fact some areas of our planet are becomming unfit to life because of complete ozone layer depletion? It's actually the case in Terra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. By getting outside unprotected you get third-degree burn in less than seven minutes. Organic life isn't possible without the ozone layer.
If we don't want that to happen to the rest of the planet, it's urgent some serious investments are made in such technologies.
If the Windows and Office source code starts circulating around, coder may just start coding stable apps and improve it since they'll have access to *everything*.
Bah, some dude in Scandinavia or Russia will release an open-source distro of Windows and we'll all end using and praising it... Imagine that, the Ultimate Revenge(tm)! MS forced to embrace OSS or else they die! Haha! Some are already creaming their pants, I know that for sure.
If your Palm 3 eats up its batteries, there's a few things that you may want to check:
- Leaving the Palm (only for units running on alkaline batteries) in its cradle drains the batteries. There's a *very* easy fix for that (a wire to cut in the cradle). You can find detailed instructions here
- Perform a warm reset, it often solves lots of problems. There's plenty of info on usenet, and I strongly recommend comp.sys.palmtops.pilot, there's heaps of guys who probably have all the answers to any question...
On average, my Palm IIIx runs about 18 hours on 2 AAA el-cheapo alkaline batteries, about 45 days of use. I once managed to run the beast a whoping 34 hours on a pair of the same batteries. Uptime hack is pretty handy, and once you get to know your batteries' discharge curve you can really guess how long they'll last (I have found many variations, even between batteries from the same pack).
Nevertheless, I really wouldn't mind a Palm Vx. The lithium-Ion battery is a dream to use, and if you know how to use them properly (recharge them as often as possible, never empty it totally and never, ever, leave the device usused with an empty battery).
With 24 million non-voting shares, M$ can still tell Corel to "drop Linux and go.NET or else we shall *sell* the shares at a *very* low price", thus causing Corel to totally crash.
Considering Corel hasn't been doing too well, financially speaking, for quite a while I wouldn't be too surprised is M$ was using this kind of tactics to crush a potential competitor in the OS+office apps market.
Call me paranoid, but it sounds "logical" to me. M$ can't do anything else because they have their tentacles tied with a nice antitrust procecution, but they have plenty of money to lose for such games.
I mean, Corel is the only software company that offers a full package without anything from M$, and still have a pretty good reputation when it comes to office apps (much better than StarOffice). And people (the administrative kind) who only use their PCs for word processing, speadsheet and net stuff basically don't give a rat's ass regarding the OS it's running on, since most of them don't know what it is.
Man, I got no idea of what the hell this means. I mean... What do "pay" and "Windows" mean? This is S-L-A-S-H-D-O-T here.
This story is evidently a troll coming straight from the Evil Empire itself. Don't read or listen to them! They're trying to pervert us with incohenrent yet subversive words!
Mmmhhh, BeOS has native mp3 support, last time I checked. You can even drag'n'drop mp3 files into the CD-Burner app and they're automagically (and on the fly) converted into regular audio-CD tracks. Bah, one more cool app won't hurt!
BeOS is really, really cool with media files. Being able to play as many mp3 files as you want *simultaneously* isn't bad, albeit not very useful. But it proves BeOS's multitasking excellence, since you can have several video feeds running along with 25 mp3's, with no apparent slowing down.
With OpenGL, Java and BONE (BeOS Network Environment) coming, I *really* wish more software vendors would port their apps to BeOS. IMHO, BeOS is near perfect for a desktop OS. Boots in 10 seconds, is fast, doesn't crash, has friendly and polite advocates... but isn't Open-Source.
Heck, half of/. is drooling over OS X, which isn't really GPL compliant either. Get some community support for BeOS, please! Port your apps!
I would suggest you to get in touch with NGOs involved in Africa (then again, Africa is *huge*). There's also some UN-related agencies working very hard to bring education and tools to developing countries, even in remote/agitated/devastated places (which Africa isn't as a whole, far from it). Most of them are based in Geneva, Switzerland, just in case. Contact them, I'm sure they'd be very happy to get some help. You can probably gather some info at http://www.oneworld.org/ and on the United Nation Development Programme on http://www.undp.org/
If education was more widespread in Africa, you can be sure there'd be much less wars, epidemics and other catastrophies.
Some moronic posters here on/. seem to forget the African continent is several orders of magnitude larger than the USofA and carry almost a billion people. If the "Western" world stops using Africa as a dumpster and testing ground for chemicals and actually starts redistributing its [financial and educational] resources, many African countries could start experiencing strong growth in the tech domains, just like South-East Asian countries did.
Now, tell big companies to give away their old computers so they can be shipped to developing countries... But most of them don't give a shit and most of all don't want to spend a penny for getting rid of their 3 year-old PC junk...
I can not believe it would take until November 2000 before we could have a GSM enabled PDA
Ever heard of Nokia's Communicator (the 9110i), or of Kyocera's PDQ (not GSM, but almost)?. Cool stuff, but you have to lug a real brick of a cellphone even if you don't want (or need) to use the PDA stuff.
That's why I stick to having a Palm IIIx and a Nokia 8210.
Now, I'm not sure I'd go for the "all-in-one". I mean, what happens if you lose or break your GSM/PDA/Kitch-sink-mega-gizmo? Never keep all your eggs in the same basket, huh.
Btw (and slghtly OT), the 9110 has a pretty powerful speaker, so you can use a wav file as a ringtone. Just for fun, a friend had put an old phone (ring-ring) sound, you should have seen the faces in the bus when the thing would ring... LOL!
Slashdot Mirror
Make it a HUGE pink elephant and you got a hell of a setting for a Pink Floyd gig!
Or maybe a Disaster Area happening...
/max
Any real 'dotter knows the answer is CowboyNeal
'nuff said.
.max
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a documentary showing this technology being used by surgeons, and was very impressed. The main advantage of the system is being able to display a *live* 3D model of the operated organ (or any other data), allowing the surgeon to remain concentrated on his 'target' rather than having to look at some monitor, hence reducing the risk of a bad manipulation.
When performing microsurgery, surgeons wear magnifying glasses, so don't worry about your tiny blood vessels or nerves. Anyway, I don't think any serious surgeon would use this technology if it weren't adapted to their needs, and these people are demanding when it comes to new hardware. The top surgeons who were testing the equipment seemed to be very happy about it!
.max
If you need any help for spending a few billions on *good* things, send me a mail!
/max
Then I'd like to ask him, now that he *is* England, what it feels like being afflicted by foot-and-mouth, him coming from the Silicon Valley which is well known for its foot-in-mouth epidemic.
Linux afficionados are also known for their highly contagious tongue-in-cheek comments style, I'm starting to wonder if there wouldn't be a corelation between the time spent on computers and the risk of catching a dreadful three-words diseases. Shall we start digging trenches around tech centers?
/max
Isn't the actual American president a living proof that cloning also induces mental deficencies?
.max
Yep, after only 5 posts, wow. Almost record breaking!
Anybody nice enough to give us an unauthorized copy of the news release?
I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, but I saw this monitor for sale here in Geneva, Switzerland... about 3 months ago. Big flat plama screens (for TV) have been around for a few years, but the prices will make you wish they didn't exist.
While the size and luminosity of the Samsung were nice, it wasn't nearly as sharp as Apple's Cinema Display. And for the Samsung's price you can buy a G4 Cube with the 24" panel!
If only flat panels were cheap enough, I could save lots of room in my tiny apartment and my electricity bill would nicely drop...
.m
"I'd be curious to see what people think about the possibility of securing a network that sends data through the air."
For one, you could try a lead-coated bunker so that even Superman and the MPAA won't be able to tap into your precious air waves.
After that, if you're scared about air contamination (all that data has to run through it, no?) you can try accomplishing a complete vacuum ; the NASA has some big pumps for lease.
Having to wear a spacesuit for kernel hacking on an iBook while sitting on the pot will bring you to total geekness!
/max
You can't stop it. I mean, cloning *sterile* people? How are those clones going to reproduce if their "parents", or should I say "originals", are sterile, hence themselves as well? Unless they start modifying their genes, I don't see an end to it.
Well, they could clone some fully functional person too I guess, but it raises many serious ethical factors for which I don't see any chances of positive consensus in the forseeable future.
Fuck, those unfortunate parents could adopt one (ore more) of the millions of orphans the World unfortunately bears, it would do much more good to humanity than starting to play a game for which we don't know all the rules yet.
/RANT
max
Just in case, there's a Palm port of DopeWars. Oh, Linux is also on the list on this page [http://www.emergeworld.com/dope.htm].
/max
You're confusing Betamax and BETACAM, the former being a dead consumer standard and the latter being a high-end pro standard. The only hting they share is the tape size (the small ones only, Betacam VCRs take 2 sizes).
Betacam also exists in digital and is the most used standard in all TVs around the world. Forget about having one at home, it's hugely expensive.
/max
This is pathetic. Reminds me of situations in which some doctors keep adding equipment and experiments to keep somebody alive, although the brain's fried.
Pleeeeaaaase leave the Amiga its dignity. It was great, but 10 years ago. Let us remember it for the wonderful machine it was. Those deperate attemps at keeping it alive revolt me as a former Amiga user and lover.
When it's over, it's over. Let's unplug the thing.
/max
There's a BBC report about it.
And I don't understand well why being conscious of why and how we must protect our environment makes one the target of various insults.
After all, if terrestrial life ceases to be possible, the morons who built their lives on destroying the Earth's biosphere for a profit will be the first to run out of business and, hopefully, die.
/max
It's not the fact they put these technologies on flying wings that's interesting. The conbination of solar panels + clean fuel cells is a perfect source of clean energy for everyone. Such equipment could be put on every roof, or even be used on large areas and be used as a local powerstation.
It's clean energy, with only water as a byproduct. Once the systems get into mass production, their prices will drop sharply. The cost of environmental damage isn't quantifiable and we can't keep on relying on fuel and nuclear power forever.
The applications for such concepts are huge ; from depolluting industrialized countries to the equipment of developing countries by diminishing the power grid infrastrucure.
If you combine this system to fast-spinning flywheels (read this excellent artice from Wired Magazine), you get permanent, clean energy with little or no maintenance as long as the components can last. Heavy industry could rely on fewer heavy-duty (polluting) powerplants, thus greatly reducing pollution (I don't think we can eradicate all of it, unfortunately).
To me, it looks like the ideal power source for durable development.
May I turn your attention to the fact some areas of our planet are becomming unfit to life because of complete ozone layer depletion? It's actually the case in Terra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. By getting outside unprotected you get third-degree burn in less than seven minutes. Organic life isn't possible without the ozone layer.
If we don't want that to happen to the rest of the planet, it's urgent some serious investments are made in such technologies.
Think about it.
/max
If the Windows and Office source code starts circulating around, coder may just start coding stable apps and improve it since they'll have access to *everything*.
Bah, some dude in Scandinavia or Russia will release an open-source distro of Windows and we'll all end using and praising it... Imagine that, the Ultimate Revenge(tm)! MS forced to embrace OSS or else they die! Haha! Some are already creaming their pants, I know that for sure.
Linux is in danger!
/max
If your Palm 3 eats up its batteries, there's a few things that you may want to check:
- Leaving the Palm (only for units running on alkaline batteries) in its cradle drains the batteries. There's a *very* easy fix for that (a wire to cut in the cradle). You can find detailed instructions here
- Perform a warm reset, it often solves lots of problems. There's plenty of info on usenet, and I strongly recommend comp.sys.palmtops.pilot, there's heaps of guys who probably have all the answers to any question...
On average, my Palm IIIx runs about 18 hours on 2 AAA el-cheapo alkaline batteries, about 45 days of use. I once managed to run the beast a whoping 34 hours on a pair of the same batteries. Uptime hack is pretty handy, and once you get to know your batteries' discharge curve you can really guess how long they'll last (I have found many variations, even between batteries from the same pack).
Nevertheless, I really wouldn't mind a Palm Vx. The lithium-Ion battery is a dream to use, and if you know how to use them properly (recharge them as often as possible, never empty it totally and never, ever, leave the device usused with an empty battery).
Cheers,
/max
Think about flywheels. There's a good Wired article here and another interessting page (artemis project) here.
Added to solar panels, they would provide a pretty good alternative to batteries for energy storage.
/max
With 24 million non-voting shares, M$ can still tell Corel to "drop Linux and go .NET or else we shall *sell* the shares at a *very* low price", thus causing Corel to totally crash.
Considering Corel hasn't been doing too well, financially speaking, for quite a while I wouldn't be too surprised is M$ was using this kind of tactics to crush a potential competitor in the OS+office apps market.
Call me paranoid, but it sounds "logical" to me. M$ can't do anything else because they have their tentacles tied with a nice antitrust procecution, but they have plenty of money to lose for such games.
I mean, Corel is the only software company that offers a full package without anything from M$, and still have a pretty good reputation when it comes to office apps (much better than StarOffice). And people (the administrative kind) who only use their PCs for word processing, speadsheet and net stuff basically don't give a rat's ass regarding the OS it's running on, since most of them don't know what it is.
What do you guys think?
/max
Man, I got no idea of what the hell this means. I mean... What do "pay" and "Windows" mean? This is S-L-A-S-H-D-O-T here.
This story is evidently a troll coming straight from the Evil Empire itself. Don't read or listen to them! They're trying to pervert us with incohenrent yet subversive words!
/max
Packets should be free to chose which route they prefer.
And what about GPL'd data packets? What happens is they take the toll route? RMS, we need help!
/max
That's plain stupid. I mean, one should be allowed to at least *read* his/her data between two BSODs!
/max
Mmmhhh, BeOS has native mp3 support, last time I checked. You can even drag'n'drop mp3 files into the CD-Burner app and they're automagically (and on the fly) converted into regular audio-CD tracks. Bah, one more cool app won't hurt!
/. is drooling over OS X, which isn't really GPL compliant either. Get some community support for BeOS, please! Port your apps!
BeOS is really, really cool with media files. Being able to play as many mp3 files as you want *simultaneously* isn't bad, albeit not very useful. But it proves BeOS's multitasking excellence, since you can have several video feeds running along with 25 mp3's, with no apparent slowing down.
With OpenGL, Java and BONE (BeOS Network Environment) coming, I *really* wish more software vendors would port their apps to BeOS. IMHO, BeOS is near perfect for a desktop OS. Boots in 10 seconds, is fast, doesn't crash, has friendly and polite advocates... but isn't Open-Source.
Heck, half of
/max
I would suggest you to get in touch with NGOs involved in Africa (then again, Africa is *huge*). There's also some UN-related agencies working very hard to bring education and tools to developing countries, even in remote/agitated/devastated places (which Africa isn't as a whole, far from it). Most of them are based in Geneva, Switzerland, just in case. Contact them, I'm sure they'd be very happy to get some help. You can probably gather some info at http://www.oneworld.org/ and on the United Nation Development Programme on http://www.undp.org/
/. seem to forget the African continent is several orders of magnitude larger than the USofA and carry almost a billion people. If the "Western" world stops using Africa as a dumpster and testing ground for chemicals and actually starts redistributing its [financial and educational] resources, many African countries could start experiencing strong growth in the tech domains, just like South-East Asian countries did.
If education was more widespread in Africa, you can be sure there'd be much less wars, epidemics and other catastrophies.
Some moronic posters here on
Now, tell big companies to give away their old computers so they can be shipped to developing countries... But most of them don't give a shit and most of all don't want to spend a penny for getting rid of their 3 year-old PC junk...
Good luck,
/max
I can not believe it would take until November 2000 before we could have a GSM enabled PDA
Ever heard of Nokia's Communicator (the 9110i), or of Kyocera's PDQ (not GSM, but almost)?. Cool stuff, but you have to lug a real brick of a cellphone even if you don't want (or need) to use the PDA stuff.
That's why I stick to having a Palm IIIx and a Nokia 8210.
Now, I'm not sure I'd go for the "all-in-one". I mean, what happens if you lose or break your GSM/PDA/Kitch-sink-mega-gizmo? Never keep all your eggs in the same basket, huh.
Btw (and slghtly OT), the 9110 has a pretty powerful speaker, so you can use a wav file as a ringtone. Just for fun, a friend had put an old phone (ring-ring) sound, you should have seen the faces in the bus when the thing would ring... LOL!
/max