This isn't a joke! I spent most of my life playing strategy and RPG games on a PC or mac. Then one weekend I was helping a friend by playing a small part in a film for him... that's neither here nor there, but the producer brought a Playstation, which I'd never seen. And a copy of Driver. I played about 14 hours of driver that day, and then drove home from the shoot.
I hit 110 without knowing it at one point, dodging in and out of traffic on LA freeways like it was child's play. I snapped out of it after the second near accident that would have been been fatal at that speed.
A distant second is X-Com: UFO defense, which sucked me in emotionally like no other game. I spent an entire spring break week playing it one year in college. So much that at one point I stopped caring and had my team blaster-bomb themselves for fun. When I got up from my chair, I was instantly hit with a wave of nausea and headache like I'd never felt before or since - the effect of some 60+ hours staring at the screen almost nonstop, plus on-off play for another 2.5 days before. I tottered off to the loo, violently blew my lunch, and crept back to bed, where I lay sobbing for hours because the intense pain of the migraine plus huge caffeine load prevented me from falling asleep. I've never felt so sick.
But to this day, I think X-Com: UFO defense is the greatest game ever created. Can't wait for the opensource remake to bear fruit...
I sent a similar email to friends. Here's my housemate's reply.
Don't you see?
Apple has always had a vision of a better world, but Steve was always too 'out there' to lead it. Now they have a leader, and they can start a new government of the world. In this new country (which as yet only has territory in the hearts of the faithful) everything works the way it ought to, peace and communication are the order of the day, republicanism is outlawed, and the new G5 clocks up to 28.6 GHz. California (with the exception of Orange County) will immediately secede from the Union and join the new government of the world. Others will follow. The most brilliant part of the plan is this, and it's clear that Apple has been setting this up for two decades now: In 6 months to three years, Microsoft will offer a markedly similar (although slightly inferior) government and the rest of the world will adopt it.
But seriously folks, I'm all for alternet engery sources. Just not at the expense of reason.
How is this at the expense of reason? There is a HUGE amount of potential energy available in manure. As bacteria break it down, they will release the same methane anyway. Methane is a nastier greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so you really might as well capture it and burn it to make use of the energy.
Throwing it into a pile to rot is wasting a huge resource, and making use of it doesn't particularly harm the environment if you burn it smartly.
Not using is is the unreasonable activity. It's wasteful! Why use more Uranium than you have to? The "lifetime cycle management system" you suggest is NOT an easy thing to create. Many smart people have been working on it for fifty years with no completely satisfactory solution in sight.
Anybody with a backhoe and a few sacks of cement can make a methane reclamation system.
So just pull your hard drives and cram *them* in the station wagon. The data's already on them, presumably, and can just be plugged into the computer(s) at the other end.
Quick estimate of 5000 hard drives, 200GB each, in a station wagon. Hell, make it 10000 drives in a fullsize van so the math is nicer. 1000TB goes 3000 miles (coast to coast, US) in about 45 hours driving time at the speed limit. IMMIR (If My Math Is Right), it comes out to about 6.2GB/s or 50Gb/s. Faster over shorter distances or at "unsanctioned" velocities.
Halleluja, brother. Maybe they need some photoshop help; a few cute Aqua-style icons to inspire the masses.
Otherwise, I can bring a mop to complement your broom. Or maybe re-learn some of the crap I forgot since I got that engineering degree.
BUT - only if it's actually going to happen. Not if they're going to pull some half-assed X-33 or SSC bullcrap on us. If you pick a project that dares to dream, then just fucking finish it, okay?
The problem is that Focused Spending (tm) has become too Focused. Focussed spending helps you generate next year's version of today's product. It doesn't help you develop the next complete revolution.
Focussed Spending (tm) didn't invent the transistor at Bell Labs. Bell spent on fundamental research and crazy ideas, and ended up inventing a huge fraction of the world we live in today.
But now, it's become Lucent Technologies, with a publicly stated goal of "incremental" rather than "fundamental" research. No more Transistor-level revolutions from them - Lucent just makes sure next year's cell phone is a little smaller, cuter, and cheaper.
The space program "wasted" truckloads of money on, admittedly, a glopbal-scale pissing contest with the USSR. In the process, it invented more technologies than you can name. These improvements in materials, power, communications, etc. are the bread and butter of hundreds of profitable corporations in the US. The cost of the space race was returned to the us economy 100-fold the last thirty years.
Fundamental research is being carefully scoured from US companies. Mostly because it doesn't pay off fast enough... in the new, faster, lower-margin economic reality that has grown in the past 15 years in the US, spending money on something that will pay off in 10 years will get your company KILLED DEAD in the market.
Cutting the competitive edge closer in business is a cultural shift the US has seen in the last 10 years. It results in employees working 80-hour weeks, wrecking their marriages, kids raised without parents around.... and it leaves no room for long-term research for the future.
So it's up to the universities and national labs. But, inspired by the improvements in efficiency in business in the 1990's, our research institiutions are starting to think the same way. Schools are run more like businesses now, and are forming more and more partnerships with businesses to fund and help direct research.
Fundamental research is not dead in the US, but it IS dying slowly. And true fundamental discoveries in the US are what have pulled most countries ahead. An assortment of technologies, social insights, and/or mathematics alternately made China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome powers in their day. The renaissance pulled the standard of living up in Europe and made western civilization dominant. The industrial revolution made England the #1 world power for quite a while. Electronics, nuclear power, and all the spinoffs of space technology were discovered in the US, making it the dominant world power for the last 60 years.
Fundamental R&D in the 21st century is expensive. We'll see fewer discoveries in the garage (like the laser). Now, it takes the will and money of an entire nation to really make it happen. And the US, while certainly ahead in research for the moment, is systematically pulling back from it. Europe is slowly headed into the lead in high-energy physics research, China in some areas of biotech. India and China are systematically increasing their mindshare resources by sending students to US academic institutions and wooing them back home with large salaries and shiny new labs.
If the United States as a nation does not recover from it's increasingly myopic focus on Captialism-as-a-priori-virtue and short term profit returns as a primary goal, IMHO it is unlikely to still be the dominant world power in 2060. It's time to start "wasting" piles of money on research, high-energy physics, and the space program again. Make sure environmental research, medical/biotech, neuroscience, and materials science are well-funded, too.
I'm not under any illusion that science research in the US is gone. I'm a science grad student in California, I see the cool shit that happens here every day. But I don't think the trends bode well for the long term. Other countries could pull ahead, 20+ years from now. 20 years after that, the US has a big problem.
Lots of Focus (tm) is great for next week. But it'll murder the next generation.
But the improved R&D money thing is fine. Sure. But what has gotten the HPs and IBMs? Answer: undercut by Dell.
Just because Dell sells more desktops does not make them a more successful company than HP or IBM.
IBM got out of a low-margin business where it couldn't compete with edge-cutters like Dell. HP's desktop unit became eclipsed because it couldn't compete with the likes of Dell.
BUT, both companies have HUGE other endeavours that a specialist like Dell doesn't. It will be a while before Dell's attempts at diversification push them to HP's level, and they will probably never be able to touch IBM without a core change in corporate strategy.
Last year, IBM was the 9th-highest earning company in the US, with $86 billion in income. All the higher-earners were Energy, Oil, or Automobile companies, except for one bank and Wal-Mart.
IBM's status as the highest-earning tech company in the world is, even today, untouched and probably will be for a while. In huge part, this is IMHO because IBM has better R&D labs, and more R&D expenditure, than any other tech corporation in the world. They discover or invent and patent a huge fraction of the technologies everyone else ends up using a few years down the line.
UK is also conservative. China, on the other hand, is spending billions setting up shiny new stem-cell, cloning, and other biotech labs. They're offering enough money to bring back many of the chinese scientists who came to the US for grad school... giving them funding and their own labs.
China is set to kick the US's butt in some areas of biotech research over the next 15 years.
While Apple's filling up our landfills with garbage bits, Microsoft recycles them so they can be used again.
No, Micro$oft really is the evil empire. What happens when you recycle garbage? It is sent to a central facility where it gets carefully sorted through and the useful things get picked out to get turned into new products. The facility makes a tidy profit on this.
So, when you dump your homework / old code / other data in M$ recycle bin, it gets sent...
The best thing is, because they call it the recycle bin, they're not even lying about scouring your data for useful stuff!
Use your existing keyboard, and make the switch in software. English Dvorak layout should be built into windows, and can be easily found for linux or mac.
No, you won't have letters on the keycaps. But, the whole point of dvorak is touchtyping anyway; you really don't want the habit of looking down. Print out a dvorak layout and tape it to your monitor. This is how I learned when I switched to dvorak about 10 years ago. After a couple of weeks, you'll be able to take the printout down and you'll be typing faster than you did before.
If you really must have a physical keyboard, pop the keycaps off by hand and put them back on in a dvorak layout. Then switch the keyboard in software as above.
Hope this helps.
P.S. I use a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard which can be switched qwerty/dvorak in hardware. But they're fairly expensive, and you were asking for cheap...
But essentially, it uses the hall effect to tell where your fingers are -- and it reads not only letters, but gestures.
Do something like this, and every keyboard is completely reprogrammable. Why not have a different key combination for every programming word, for example?
Wicked. As soon as they make one contoured to ward off my RSI, sign me up. Maybe kinesis corp is listening....? I'd probably pay close to a kilobuck for something like that.
On the other hand, I began developing severe repetitive strain typing injuries in college eight years ago. I tried every major ergonomic keyboard or variant key entry system on the market (including maltron, datahand, and a bunch of others) and settled on the kinesis.
I haven't had problems with my hands since then.
I'm a computer professional; I spend upwards of $2500 on a new top of the line workstation every year. It makes sense to me, anyway, to spend $350 every five years or so on the one part of the system I interact with most, and the one which could potentially give me permanent injuries.
When you're talking about your body and your health, aren't a few extra bucks worth it?
Have any of you programmers actually used Dvorak or Maltron keyboards
Yeah, every day. I switched to dvorak six years ago. True, the pure dvorak layout is not well designed for programming. But it's advantages in English are astounding.
Cool thing is, the 'board is hardware macro programmable. A footswitch puts the keyboard into "second layer", which normally maps the right hand keys to a keypad. Instead, I have the second layer activate macros. On my left hand, keys with the footswitch down activate HTML macros, like followed by eight left arrows and a carraige return. On my right, single keys activate macros, like "t" (where K is on a qwerty) gives me a pair of curly braces on two lines, and arrows back up to put me on a line in between them, like this:
{
<cursor left here> }
one key in the middle of the board saves me about eight awkward keystrokes.
footswitch-"f" gives me:
for (<cursor left here>;;)
saving me about a dozen keystrokes.
I've got dozens of such macros. I never ever type "" or "{" or "(" (except I just did:). Every common syntax, keyword, or markup tag is a one-key macro. I rip off HTML/XML and C/perl/java like nobodys' business.
No carpal-tunnel strain from reaching for weirdly placed "{" and "" keys all the time, because they're all in my macros.
The 'board is USB and mac/pc switchable and the macros are in hardware, so I can take it with me to group meeting / LAN party / whatever and work with any machine, anywhere, with all my layout customizations and macros.
And I won't even get started on the kinesis' contour shape, which addresses 8+ major ergonomic concerns where things like the MS Natural and such only address 1.
I can switch between qwerty/dvorak with a keystroke, without losing my macros, so that friends can try out the keyboard.
I've been using this setup for half a decade. Kicks ass, I'm telling you.
Yet another poster who says that "they dont care". Obviously you DO care; do you think that by saying this you
I'm not saying at all that I don't care about this thread. Obviously, as you point out, I do, or I wouldn't have done that simulation. What I meant (at the bottom of the website I posted and which you quote) is that I don't care to spend more time on the simulation, because I didn't believe it necessary.
Proving that something can be faked doesnt make the original a lie; what it proves is that you are skilled at forgery,
I was not attempting to prove that it was a forgery, and I do not in fact believe it was a forgery. I suspect it is, most likely, an actual telescopic photograph taken by the satellite in question.
What I was attempting to demonstrate was that there wasn't enough information in their original image to form a conclusion about the nature of the object.
That the original was a very low-resolution image. In specific, that the bright white object seen is only 3 pixels wide and in reality is just a 4-pixel upside down "T" shape. In only looks like the classic UFO shape because of the "enhancement" they applied. The shape it was before ehnancement could have been a picture of anything: a star, a planet, a comet, a spacecraft, or a speck of dust on the lens.
My argument is that, based on only a few pixels of color and no other information, one cannot generally make a conclusion as to the nature of the object.
havent got either the brains or skills to do the REAL WORK that is needed to comb through this evidence to find out whats really going on.
While normally I wouldn't even respond to such an obvious troll, in this case I'll make an exception. I would be the first one to cheer in the case of confirmed evidence of extraterrestrials. My real work is, in fact, in astrobiology - the search for life on other worlds. It involves a great deal of "combing through the evidence" -- many years worth, and a whole lot of hard work. I work now at the California Institute of Techonology in collaboration with researchers at JPL and USC.
I just can't abide people who don't understand the scientific method and critical thought, and who believe a tiny amount of nonspecific, unconfirmed data like a three-pixel-wide image can prove anything.
Give me *real* evidence, say a few 300-pixel-wide image showing spacecraft structures, or parallax and spectrographic shift data demonstrating that this object is in our solar system but moving contrary to gravity (i.e. under thrust or other sort of propulsion), and get that data confirmed by a couple of independent laboratories, and you'll make a believer out of me. I want it to be true as much as you do.
In the meantime, I'll remain wary of charlatans who would capitalize on your naievete and fanatical desire for UFOs to be real in order to sell you CDs of "enhanced" pictures of what are probably random space rocks.
Okay, that's hilarious. The instant I saw their image, I tried to reproduce it, starting from a 15x11 pixel image in photoshop. THEN I saw this posting.
Water is generally accepted as a very good reaction mass due to these factors. The usability of water will most likely far outweigh any benefits you would get from using hydrogen.
I couldn't agree more. Not a chance NASA will use it, though. NASA engineers historically know too much theory and too little practice... Most american rockets use hydrogen fuel because it has a higher specific thrust than anything else. They figure the extra thrust efficiency outweighs the humongous development cost to deal with the volatile stuff, and the weight and expense of building refrigerated tanks. The Russians use kerosene. They have to build their rockets a bit bigger, but they're much cheaper and less complex.
It's like the pen story... NASA spent over a million dollars developing a pen with a pressurized ink cartridge so it would write upside down or in zero-g. The Russians just used pencils.
I don't mean to disparage NASA too much; I've worked at JPL, and I know exactly how brilliant the people are. But I do think they sometimes design too much with an eye for achieving peak theoretical efficiency.
"Many have tried, and failed, at getting a robot to sustain it's own balance
Many have tried and succeeded, as well. Balancing a two-wheeled robot (or balancing a pole from the bottom, or a four wheeled robot on top of a randomly rolling cylinder, etc.) is a fairly common design project for undergraduate engineering students in control theory. I'm not surprised someone did it in legos; they're a perfectly good platform for such an experiment.
Kamen was not the first to come up with a balancing machine -- he's just the first I know of to market a useful (?) consumer product using such a system for human control of a vehicle. One of those head-smackers... "why didn't I think of that?".
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a joke! I spent most of my life playing strategy and RPG games on a PC or mac. Then one weekend I was helping a friend by playing a small part in a film for him... that's neither here nor there, but the producer brought a Playstation, which I'd never seen. And a copy of Driver. I played about 14 hours of driver that day, and then drove home from the shoot.
I hit 110 without knowing it at one point, dodging in and out of traffic on LA freeways like it was child's play. I snapped out of it after the second near accident that would have been been fatal at that speed.
A distant second is X-Com: UFO defense, which sucked me in emotionally like no other game. I spent an entire spring break week playing it one year in college. So much that at one point I stopped caring and had my team blaster-bomb themselves for fun. When I got up from my chair, I was instantly hit with a wave of nausea and headache like I'd never felt before or since - the effect of some 60+ hours staring at the screen almost nonstop, plus on-off play for another 2.5 days before. I tottered off to the loo, violently blew my lunch, and crept back to bed, where I lay sobbing for hours because the intense pain of the migraine plus huge caffeine load prevented me from falling asleep. I've never felt so sick.
But to this day, I think X-Com: UFO defense is the greatest game ever created. Can't wait for the opensource remake to bear fruit...
Dammit! It's always my luck that the good, scientific hardware reviews never include the options I'm considering.
I'm trying to choose between a Canon Powershot G3 and an iPod. This article could have been so USEFUL...
I sent a similar email to friends. Here's my housemate's reply.
Don't you see?
Apple has always had a vision of a better world, but Steve was always too 'out there' to lead it. Now they have a leader, and they can start a new government of the world. In this new country (which as yet only has territory in the hearts of the faithful) everything works the way it ought to, peace and communication are the order of the day, republicanism is outlawed, and the new G5 clocks up to 28.6 GHz. California (with the exception of Orange County) will immediately secede from the Union and join the new government of the world. Others will follow. The most brilliant part of the plan is this, and it's clear that Apple has been setting this up for two decades now: In 6 months to three years, Microsoft will offer a markedly similar (although slightly inferior) government and the rest of the world will adopt it.
Peace and harmony reign!!!
Finally, it all makes sense.
Scott
That Apple is inducting Al Gore on the very day the Bush is starting a war in Iraq?
Isn't this just a little weird to you guys?
I'm not insinuating any particular meaning --- I have no clue as to the meaning. It's just kind of creepy...
But seriously folks, I'm all for alternet engery sources. Just not at the expense of reason.
How is this at the expense of reason? There is a HUGE amount of potential energy available in manure. As bacteria break it down, they will release the same methane anyway. Methane is a nastier greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so you really might as well capture it and burn it to make use of the energy.
Throwing it into a pile to rot is wasting a huge resource, and making use of it doesn't particularly harm the environment if you burn it smartly.
Not using is is the unreasonable activity. It's wasteful! Why use more Uranium than you have to? The "lifetime cycle management system" you suggest is NOT an easy thing to create. Many smart people have been working on it for fifty years with no completely satisfactory solution in sight.
Anybody with a backhoe and a few sacks of cement can make a methane reclamation system.
hell, my math isn't right. I did 5000 drives after all. Well, room left over in the van for a keg to be used at the other end.
So just pull your hard drives and cram *them* in the station wagon. The data's already on them, presumably, and can just be plugged into the computer(s) at the other end.
Quick estimate of 5000 hard drives, 200GB each, in a station wagon. Hell, make it 10000 drives in a fullsize van so the math is nicer. 1000TB goes 3000 miles (coast to coast, US) in about 45 hours driving time at the speed limit. IMMIR (If My Math Is Right), it comes out to about 6.2GB/s or 50Gb/s. Faster over shorter distances or at "unsanctioned" velocities.
For those wondering what the hell SLAC is, it stands for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
So you can speed up transfer of bits through a network by using a linear accelerator?
Cool! Who knew?
Halleluja, brother. Maybe they need some photoshop help; a few cute Aqua-style icons to inspire the masses.
Otherwise, I can bring a mop to complement your broom. Or maybe re-learn some of the crap I forgot since I got that engineering degree.
BUT - only if it's actually going to happen. Not if they're going to pull some half-assed X-33 or SSC bullcrap on us. If you pick a project that dares to dream, then just fucking finish it, okay?
The problem is that Focused Spending (tm) has become too Focused. Focussed spending helps you generate next year's version of today's product. It doesn't help you develop the next complete revolution.
.... and it leaves no room for long-term research for the future.
Focussed Spending (tm) didn't invent the transistor at Bell Labs. Bell spent on fundamental research and crazy ideas, and ended up inventing a huge fraction of the world we live in today.
But now, it's become Lucent Technologies, with a publicly stated goal of "incremental" rather than "fundamental" research. No more Transistor-level revolutions from them - Lucent just makes sure next year's cell phone is a little smaller, cuter, and cheaper.
The space program "wasted" truckloads of money on, admittedly, a glopbal-scale pissing contest with the USSR.
In the process, it invented more technologies than you can name. These improvements in materials, power, communications, etc. are the bread and butter of hundreds of profitable corporations in the US. The cost of the space race was returned to the us economy 100-fold the last thirty years.
Fundamental research is being carefully scoured from US companies. Mostly because it doesn't pay off fast enough... in the new, faster, lower-margin economic reality that has grown in the past 15 years in the US, spending money on something that will pay off in 10 years will get your company KILLED DEAD in the market.
Cutting the competitive edge closer in business is a cultural shift the US has seen in the last 10 years. It results in employees working 80-hour weeks, wrecking their marriages, kids raised without parents around
So it's up to the universities and national labs. But, inspired by the improvements in efficiency in business in the 1990's, our research institiutions are starting to think the same way. Schools are run more like businesses now, and are forming more and more partnerships with businesses to fund and help direct research.
Fundamental research is not dead in the US, but it IS dying slowly. And true fundamental discoveries in the US are what have pulled most countries ahead. An assortment of technologies, social insights, and/or mathematics alternately made China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome powers in their day. The renaissance pulled the standard of living up in Europe and made western civilization dominant. The industrial revolution made England the #1 world power for quite a while. Electronics, nuclear power, and all the spinoffs of space technology were discovered in the US, making it the dominant world power for the last 60 years.
Fundamental R&D in the 21st century is expensive. We'll see fewer discoveries in the garage (like the laser). Now, it takes the will and money of an entire nation to really make it happen. And the US, while certainly ahead in research for the moment, is systematically pulling back from it. Europe is slowly headed into the lead in high-energy physics research, China in some areas of biotech. India and China
are systematically increasing their mindshare resources by sending students to US academic institutions and wooing them back home with large salaries and shiny new labs.
If the United States as a nation does not recover from it's increasingly myopic focus on Captialism-as-a-priori-virtue and short term profit returns as a primary goal, IMHO it is unlikely to still be the dominant world power in 2060. It's time to start "wasting" piles of money on research, high-energy physics, and the space program again. Make sure environmental research, medical/biotech, neuroscience, and materials science are well-funded, too.
I'm not under any illusion that science research in the US is gone. I'm a science grad student in California, I see the cool shit that happens here every day. But I don't think the trends bode well for the long term. Other countries could pull ahead, 20+ years from now. 20 years after that, the US has a big problem.
Lots of Focus (tm) is great for next week. But it'll murder the next generation.
But the improved R&D money thing is fine. Sure. But what has gotten the HPs and IBMs? Answer: undercut by Dell.
Just because Dell sells more desktops does not make them a more successful company than HP or IBM.
IBM got out of a low-margin business where it couldn't compete with edge-cutters like Dell. HP's desktop unit became eclipsed because it couldn't compete with the likes of Dell.
BUT, both companies have HUGE other endeavours that a specialist like Dell doesn't. It will be a while before Dell's attempts at diversification push them to HP's level, and they will probably never be able to touch IBM without a core change in corporate strategy.
Last year, IBM was the 9th-highest earning company in the US, with $86 billion in income. All the higher-earners were Energy, Oil, or Automobile companies, except for one bank and Wal-Mart.
HP was 28th, with $45 billion.
Dell was 53rd, with $31 billion.
Here, see for yourself.
IBM's status as the highest-earning tech company in the world is, even today, untouched and probably will be for a while. In huge part, this is IMHO because IBM has better R&D labs, and more R&D expenditure, than any other tech corporation in the world. They discover or invent and patent a huge fraction of the technologies everyone else ends up using a few years down the line.
UK is also conservative. China, on the other hand, is spending billions setting up shiny new stem-cell, cloning, and other biotech labs. They're offering enough money to bring back many of the chinese scientists who came to the US for grad school... giving them funding and their own labs.
China is set to kick the US's butt in some areas of biotech research over the next 15 years.
While Apple's filling up our landfills with garbage bits, Microsoft recycles them so they can be used again.
No, Micro$oft really is the evil empire. What happens when you recycle garbage? It is sent to a central facility where it gets carefully sorted through and the useful things get picked out to get turned into new products. The facility makes a tidy profit on this.
So, when you dump your homework / old code / other data in M$ recycle bin, it gets sent...
The best thing is, because they call it the recycle bin, they're not even lying about scouring your data for useful stuff!
Sleep well.
That was a Dell...and he "didn't notice the warm feeling until it was too late"
... ..um ...damn, I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere.
Dude, you're gettin a
Use your existing keyboard, and make the switch in software. English Dvorak layout should be built into windows, and can be easily found for linux or mac.
No, you won't have letters on the keycaps. But, the whole point of dvorak is touchtyping anyway; you really don't want the habit of looking down. Print out a dvorak layout and tape it to your monitor. This is how I learned when I switched to dvorak about 10 years ago. After a couple of weeks, you'll be able to take the printout down and you'll be typing faster than you did before.
If you really must have a physical keyboard, pop the keycaps off by hand and put them back on in a dvorak layout. Then switch the keyboard in software as above.
Hope this helps.
P.S. I use a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard which can be switched qwerty/dvorak in hardware. But they're fairly expensive, and you were asking for cheap...
But essentially, it uses the hall effect to tell where your fingers are -- and it reads not only letters, but gestures.
Do something like this, and every keyboard is completely reprogrammable. Why not have a different key combination for every programming word, for example?
Wicked. As soon as they make one contoured to ward off my RSI, sign me up. Maybe kinesis corp is listening....? I'd probably pay close to a kilobuck for something like that.
I previewed twice and missed the fact that slashcode removed the half-dozen HTML tags that I put in there as examples. (DUH).
For example, there was a spot where I meant to say "...HTML macros, like <TABLE></TABLE> followed by eight left arrows", etc.
I must have gone too many nights without caffeine lately. So sorry.
Well, yes, your keyboard is cheaper.
On the other hand, I began developing severe repetitive strain typing injuries in college eight years ago. I tried every major ergonomic keyboard or variant key entry system on the market (including maltron, datahand, and a bunch of others) and settled on the kinesis.
I haven't had problems with my hands since then.
I'm a computer professional; I spend upwards of $2500 on a new top of the line workstation every year. It makes sense to me, anyway, to spend $350 every five years or so on the one part of the system I interact with most, and the one which could potentially give me permanent injuries.
When you're talking about your body and your health, aren't a few extra bucks worth it?
Yeah, every day. I switched to dvorak six years ago. True, the pure dvorak layout is not well designed for programming. But it's advantages in English are astounding.
I use dvorak layout on a Kinesis contoured keyboard.
Cool thing is, the 'board is hardware macro programmable. A footswitch puts the keyboard into "second layer", which normally maps the right hand keys to a keypad. Instead, I have the second layer activate macros. On my left hand, keys with the footswitch down activate HTML macros, like followed by eight left arrows and a carraige return. On my right, single keys activate macros, like "t" (where K is on a qwerty) gives me a pair of curly braces on two lines, and arrows back up to put me on a line in between them, like this:one key in the middle of the board saves me about eight awkward keystrokes.
footswitch-"f" gives me:saving me about a dozen keystrokes.
I've got dozens of such macros. I never ever type "" or "{" or "(" (except I just did
No carpal-tunnel strain from reaching for weirdly placed "{" and "" keys all the time, because they're all in my macros.
The 'board is USB and mac/pc switchable and the macros are in hardware, so I can take it with me to group meeting / LAN party / whatever and work with any machine, anywhere, with all my layout customizations and macros.
And I won't even get started on the kinesis' contour shape, which addresses 8+ major ergonomic concerns where things like the MS Natural and such only address 1.
I can switch between qwerty/dvorak with a keystroke, without losing my macros, so that friends can try out the keyboard.
I've been using this setup for half a decade. Kicks ass, I'm telling you.
Wow, NASA's demonstration linked from the story looks an awful lot like the one I did the last time this topic was discussed on slashdot a week ago.
He'll run the country without having any idea of how it actually works, fire anyone who doesn't follow his vision
And this would be a change, you think?
Yet another poster who says that "they dont care". Obviously you DO care; do you think that by saying this you
I'm not saying at all that I don't care about this thread. Obviously, as you point out, I do, or I wouldn't have done that simulation. What I meant (at the bottom of the website I posted and which you quote) is that I don't care to spend more time on the simulation, because I didn't believe it necessary.
Proving that something can be faked doesnt make the original a lie; what it proves is that you are skilled at forgery,
I was not attempting to prove that it was a forgery, and I do not in fact believe it was a forgery. I suspect it is, most likely, an actual telescopic photograph taken by the satellite in question.
What I was attempting to demonstrate was that there wasn't enough information in their original image to form a conclusion about the nature of the object.
That the original was a very low-resolution image. In specific, that the bright white object seen is only 3 pixels wide and in reality is just a 4-pixel upside down "T" shape. In only looks like the classic UFO shape because of the "enhancement" they applied. The shape it was before ehnancement could have been a picture of anything: a star, a planet, a comet, a spacecraft, or a speck of dust on the lens.
My argument is that, based on only a few pixels of color and no other information, one cannot generally make a conclusion as to the nature of the object.
havent got either the brains or skills to do the REAL WORK that is needed to comb through this evidence to find out whats really going on.
While normally I wouldn't even respond to such an obvious troll, in this case I'll make an exception. I would be the first one to cheer in the case of confirmed evidence of extraterrestrials. My real work is, in fact, in astrobiology - the search for life on other worlds. It involves a great deal of "combing through the evidence" -- many years worth, and a whole lot of hard work. I work now at the California Institute of Techonology in collaboration with researchers at JPL and USC.
I just can't abide people who don't understand the scientific method and critical thought, and who believe a tiny amount of nonspecific, unconfirmed data like a three-pixel-wide image can prove anything.
Give me *real* evidence, say a few 300-pixel-wide image showing spacecraft structures, or parallax and spectrographic shift data demonstrating that this object is in our solar system but moving contrary to gravity (i.e. under thrust or other sort of propulsion), and get that data confirmed by a couple of independent laboratories, and you'll make a believer out of me. I want it to be true as much as you do.
In the meantime, I'll remain wary of charlatans who would capitalize on your naievete and fanatical desire for UFOs to be real in order to sell you CDs of "enhanced" pictures of what are probably random space rocks.
Okay, that's hilarious. The instant I saw their image, I tried to reproduce it, starting from a 15x11 pixel image in photoshop. THEN I saw this posting.
Well, here for your viewing enjoyment, are the results of my simulation.
Cheers,
Ev
Water is generally accepted as a very good reaction mass due to these factors. The usability of water will most likely far outweigh any benefits you would get from using hydrogen.
I couldn't agree more. Not a chance NASA will use it, though. NASA engineers historically know too much theory and too little practice... Most american rockets use hydrogen fuel because it has a higher specific thrust than anything else. They figure the extra thrust efficiency outweighs the humongous development cost to deal with the volatile stuff, and the weight and expense of building refrigerated tanks. The Russians use kerosene. They have to build their rockets a bit bigger, but they're much cheaper and less complex.
It's like the pen story... NASA spent over a million dollars developing a pen with a pressurized ink cartridge so it would write upside down or in zero-g. The Russians just used pencils.
I don't mean to disparage NASA too much; I've worked at JPL, and I know exactly how brilliant the people are. But I do think they sometimes design too much with an eye for achieving peak theoretical efficiency.
"Many have tried, and failed, at getting a robot to sustain it's own balance
... "why didn't I think of that?".
Many have tried and succeeded, as well. Balancing a two-wheeled robot (or balancing a pole from the bottom, or a four wheeled robot on top of a randomly rolling cylinder, etc.) is a fairly common design project for undergraduate engineering students in control theory. I'm not surprised someone did it in legos; they're a perfectly good platform for such an experiment.
Kamen was not the first to come up with a balancing machine -- he's just the first I know of to market a useful (?) consumer product using such a system for human control of a vehicle. One of those head-smackers