given that they seem to have stumbled on a useful version of steganography, that's the part that's troubling - they can largely forego the typical encrypted email routes... yes they should be gone-after. no the gummint should not have all our keys.
Cuz right out of the Newton box, I could type or scrawl 'lunch with bob tues" and it would schedule an event called 'lunch' the next tuesday, with the most frequently accessed bob in my address book, create links to each of those things, show it to me one last time in case it was another tuesday or another bob or there was a conflict, and voila. Palm can't do that - I've yet to see a 3rd party app than can. Hiw you can leave hyperlinking out of a 90's OS is beyond me. The genius of the Newton was the OS. The form was simply to big. For that matter my General Magic pad was a better UI and OS from the user standpoint *lest we forget that's the view that matters* but again, way too bulky. I use a Palm daily, I show my Newton when I want people to see a whole solution, and the Magic Pad when I want them to continue to use it past 5 minutes. One reality check is if you can't make the screen big enough to know they're Susan Kare's icons, go back to the drawing board. That last comment is merely food for thought.
(pun intended) - if Ben and Jerry in their infancy could bring Pillsbury / Haggen Dazs to their knees, this should be a steamroller for the engineers. This is what happens when lawyers don't learn to play Nintendo - they end up with waaaaay too much time on their hands. Anyone want to start a charity - "GCs for JDs"?
Those generalizations are not the norm among the teams - sounds like you were victims of pretty lousy leadership, cooperation and team attitude there... opportunities are what you make them. Remember, - the winners in 98 were a small mom-and-pop engineering firm with a local high school. They beat JPL and all the other NASA teams and big corp teams. The corporate support makes sure teams get financed, and these are the companies that will someday benefit from these proto-engineers. (What - are kids going to come out at the end of an EE as itinerant street engineers?) The best teams DO involve the kids at all levels. The best teams have enough drivers and coaches so that they can spell each other and the kids can still enjoy the tournament and its setting. Yes, it's expensive, but it's a drop in the bucket from what schools spends on sports. Not that it's a guns-or-butter argument - but think of it this way: there's a 1 in 40,000 chance that some HS kid will make $100K playing pro sports. On the other hand, there's a million $100K math/sci/engineeering jobs (that's 50 FIRST/Disney tournaments) in the US available to these same kids. Which way do you want to bet?
blind? hardly. they all get the game rules and kits on the same day, they all have to pack up a finished robot the same day 6 weeks later. many schools scrimmage before they ship. this year the level of cooperation is such that many teams will probably publicise their robot's abilities - something that was unheard of in FIRST three years ago.
If you are an engineer of any sort, get with one of these teams. I'm a veteran FIRST team leader and coach. It is far and away the best program for getting kids psyched about being geeks (that word is used in FIRST by the participants with ringing reverence)
It promotes the design of robust solutions to a unique problem, and in the past few years has stressed cooperation between teams - distancing itself even further from Battlebots etc - which also have their place.
I've seen more kids head towards sci/tech from this program than any other single program in 21 years of sci/tech education. The professional engineers, to a person, say this program is the thing that reminds them why they got into engineering in the first place. A fresh challenge and 6 weeks to go is the antidote for too many engineering jobs - twiddling the last 1% performance per year out of whatever thing you're working on.
Plus, someone asked me what the regional competition was like after we returned. I told them that it was the first time in 17 years of teaching that I had to sit down and put my head between my knees because I was about to pass out watching my students do something academic. And I'm the most laid-back guy on the staff.
(FIRST veteran) You have to power this thing with *only* the wiring given you in the Kit of Parts - this makes for some interesting power budgets - you can't just plug-n-play what they give you. Also, the box and controls ARE configurable - the plastic box is made for them by Raytheon, and it IS programmable. Course, it doesn't run *NIX, so some in this millieu will find it beneath them, but you can't just wire switches to the radio net and make it go.
>7.1.1 restrict or inhibit any other user from
>using the Internet;
Well, slap my ass - doesn't going on the internet increase the traffic (especially locally) and therefore by definition inhibit the others from using the internet? (or is that just me and my cable modem...?)
Crouching Tiger is brilliant - hardly inspired by Matrix, though.
Oh Brother proves that the Coen Brothers can still be as funny as they were in Raising Arizona & Fargo and as good storytellers as they were in Blood Simple & Miller's Crossing.
However, Proof of Life was the most stilted, poorly-directed film in a long time. A lousy film which is only attractive in its trailer. The testy of a well-made film? Try this - put anyone else besides the two leads in it and it would have closed in a week.
seems the server is gagging - can get topic names but no poop, straight or otherwise.
beer... in... spaaaace...
on
Beer In Space
·
· Score: 1
Dag-nab it! Ban the word 'weightless'! In their free-fall, orbiting craft do have this nasty habit of negating most of the effects of gravity. As far as carbonated beverage are concerned, they are all a very VERY bad idea. The gas in the consumed beverage acts just like the water bubbles you see in those on-orbit videos. It all comes together in a minimal-surface-area ball smack dab in the middle of your gut. Won't go down, won't go up. So you don't burp or fart it gradually - but when you de-orbit something very nasty will happen when it all emerges at once. And yes, people do yakk in space - many astronauts keep a waste bag velcro'd to their suit - on their shoulder if handy - for the first day or three. Missing sucks, but they get plenty of practice on the parabolic test flights.
Somebody could make a lot of friends by starting with the PalmOS emulator(s) and porting THAT to run on top of the WinCE the same way I run the PalmOS emulator on Mac or Win... Since this is way above my technical threshold, I'll leave the implementation as an exercise to the reader...
um, maybe i'm fuzzy on ebay, but...
on
Crack for Sale
·
· Score: 2
the $15K shouldn't matter, as it's not yet up to the reserve, and who knows what that is... *BUT* then there's this detail on the site: "The name will be sold before the reserve is met, so don't wait until the last minute to bid." Huh? If you set a reserve price, why sell it before it's met - you know folks are going to test the reserve, and a bid below the reserve price is non-binding. Either there's some confusion here, or else these guys don't need the money, or else this is the equivalent of a pawn-shop deal on eBay... You mean this isn't the part-time-plumbing repair union site (with apologies to Bill Murray's old SNL bit...)
how DO these people decide...
on
Longitude
·
· Score: 1
this review of a five year old book is front page news, but handheld phasers in two years isn't? who do you have to sleep with to get a post around here?
Got 'em both - the palm/targus branded stowaway is the runaway winner. With the neoprene case I can acttually use it as a case for my IIIe or m100 just by slipping it in before completely zipping the case. Plus it;s a dead ringer for my Powerbook keyboard. The gotype is gathering dust.
... for what it did this past time. No, the triplecast was not the answer (or maybe they've dropped the first shoe of figuring out how to pay-per-view the olympics...) But neither was this. The night of the cycling road race, they were live on the air AS IT WAS HAPPENING talking to Harry Smith (huh?) about the race we would finally see over a day later. Harry's Big Insight was that Lance Armstrong once had cancer. He's apparently the last person to find this out. SHOW THE FREAKING RACE!!! So you may lose some ad revenue? You think more people watch "Cursed" and "Titans" than the triple jump or the luge? What they are really showing by this is that people would rather see things as they happen rather than wait according to their gordian time-delay schedule. So offer me the pay-per-view of the cycling and sculling, speed skating and curling events (they sound purposefully obscure to make a point - but there's something sublime about curling I really like watching...) and I'll pay - but GIVE SOME RHYME OR REASON TO IT. Heck, I'll even watch Bob Costas for the whole thing if you'll serve up things as they happen.
Should be easy enough to email this guy and find out if it's legit, pix and all. Though its's hard to imagine a few carts haven't gone flaky in all that time. Geez, that $600 the local cumby's wanted for an arcade Centipede 10 years ago seems pretty tame now. Apeiron just ain't the same *sniff* *sob* even with my old trackball...
Look around the site - look at the hands and feet.
Look at the legs/hips. You can't fit a body thru there. Especially since the thighs are essentially empty in the middle.
Read the technical papers on how the solved the balance of the foot.
Occam's Razor does not push you to the conclusion that they faked it - that is arguably just as complex a solution as doing it for real. The intermediary forms are all over the place - waldo devices in the entertainment industry, MIT's robots, CMU, Dean Kamen's balancing wheelchair, there are plenty of proof-of-concept pieces of this - they claim to have put it all together. And it ain't exactly doing chase scenes from James Bond - some simple movements, stairs, etc.
yes, but carnegie mellon has one that can unload a tractor trailer - but it looks like a fork lift and ain't nearly as humanoid...
http://www.honda.co.jp/english/technology/robot/
or
http://world.honda.com/robot/
penguin behavior - and its underwhelming impact - was covered in a very old issue of develop at apple - can't find it online - i'll try and get the paper version in the office tomorrow... the gist was how to catch a penguin - two methods were preferred (1) place three boom boxes and an open cage on each of four sides of the birds. play walrus sounds thru the boomboxes. wait not very long for the ensuing instinctual response. close cage. or (2) chase them - when they run, their feet heat up (you can't sweat thru feathers), stop chasing, and they stop, their warm feet temporarily melt the ice then refreeze, and poof. they're stuck. get a thermos of warm water and just go pick'em up.
Sooooo everyone gets the same page because (1) most aolers are too bleak to specify their own home URL and/or (2) AOL is still crate full of massive control freaks we've come to know and loathe. True story: I was a charter AppleLink Personal Edition subscriber. Apple in it's inimitable wisdom decided no one would ever make money with online services, and sold it to a little outfit in Vienna VA. We all got beta tester status (and half price time - at that time full price was $9 to 11 per hour) for 6 months. Then we all got regular user disks of the newly-re-branded America Online. Six months later I get a call from Steve Case himself. "We screwed up on the disks and we've been charging you beta rates for too long, and basically you need to send us whatever you've spent in the last half year AGAIN." I don't think so. How many of us does this affect? Dozens? "Yes." Hundreds? "Yes." Thousands? "Look, that's really not the point. You have to send us the money." Feh. Offered them a installment plan and they never called again. How does a company this clueless make so much scratch?
I don't have a better answer, but I took enough research design to offer an opinion. In stats you can make two sorts of errors: (1) miss something that's really there, and (2) discover something that really isn't. In some rare complicated cases, you can do both. I think we have a winner. Go look at the evidence offered in their own site - under statistical evaluation - chart two - no study even follows these kids to the point where they can legally purchase alcohol. There's no real proof that they've found the secret to stopping abuse, and the odds are that something would work, and they're not doing it. What proof will I accept? Tell me how you're stopping people who become lifelong addicts and abusers and all that that entails. Look, everyone's going to try alcohol, DARE or no DARE. If you have the disease that is alcoholism, you're going to be in trouble long before you know you are, DARE or no DARE. So what can they really tell us? The rest of their evidence seems to be that lots of people want the program - so what? Lots of people want money, that doesn't make it necessarily healthy. And I certainly hope there is something beside the simple authority of the police departments to deter kids - anyone who knows a significant number of officers knows they're no saints. In my experience, which includes attending a college with a criminal justice school, the CS students were among the biggest party animals, one fraternity was suspended from operation after numerous alcohol incidents including the death of one student (the car he was in went over a logging road so fast that he was killed when his head hit the inside of the car roof... an hour later the frats met in the campus pub to console themselves!)
If you can offer me a program where none of the officers and teachers use alcohol or drugs, then I might buy it - but I know too many of each (I'm an educator) that can't claim innocence. Preaching to kids about this stuff is a band-aid at best.
and a network manager / mac geek/ lab god / I have had the lovely experience of sitting at home on my rock-solid powerbook, and watching every network service go dead as a doornail, see the sync light go dead on the cable modem, and then have @home (after hours on hold) tell me that i must've changed something on my computer and they'll have to send a tech out during working hours at least a week hence. now i know it's not just the problem solving skills of the voice on the phone, but in fact corporate policy. who was it that thought that the two worst customer service companies - the cable company and the phone company - would be BETTER if merged into one?!
Tell BESS and they'll look at letting a site thru.
on
Mandated Mediocrity
·
· Score: 1
As I understand it (and have successfully done in the past) N2H2 will accept teacher suggestions to let thru pages that really aren't bad enough to warrant filtering. No filter is perfect, and they seem to be good at letting this escape valve work... Am I missing something you found otherwise?
Slashdot Mirror
given that they seem to have stumbled on a useful version of steganography, that's the part that's troubling - they can largely forego the typical encrypted email routes... yes they should be gone-after. no the gummint should not have all our keys.
Cuz right out of the Newton box, I could type or scrawl 'lunch with bob tues" and it would schedule an event called 'lunch' the next tuesday, with the most frequently accessed bob in my address book, create links to each of those things, show it to me one last time in case it was another tuesday or another bob or there was a conflict, and voila. Palm can't do that - I've yet to see a 3rd party app than can. Hiw you can leave hyperlinking out of a 90's OS is beyond me. The genius of the Newton was the OS. The form was simply to big. For that matter my General Magic pad was a better UI and OS from the user standpoint *lest we forget that's the view that matters* but again, way too bulky. I use a Palm daily, I show my Newton when I want people to see a whole solution, and the Magic Pad when I want them to continue to use it past 5 minutes. One reality check is if you can't make the screen big enough to know they're Susan Kare's icons, go back to the drawing board. That last comment is merely food for thought.
(pun intended) - if Ben and Jerry in their infancy could bring Pillsbury / Haggen Dazs to their knees, this should be a steamroller for the engineers. This is what happens when lawyers don't learn to play Nintendo - they end up with waaaaay too much time on their hands. Anyone want to start a charity - "GCs for JDs"?
Those generalizations are not the norm among the teams - sounds like you were victims of pretty lousy leadership, cooperation and team attitude there... opportunities are what you make them. Remember, - the winners in 98 were a small mom-and-pop engineering firm with a local high school. They beat JPL and all the other NASA teams and big corp teams. The corporate support makes sure teams get financed, and these are the companies that will someday benefit from these proto-engineers. (What - are kids going to come out at the end of an EE as itinerant street engineers?) The best teams DO involve the kids at all levels. The best teams have enough drivers and coaches so that they can spell each other and the kids can still enjoy the tournament and its setting. Yes, it's expensive, but it's a drop in the bucket from what schools spends on sports. Not that it's a guns-or-butter argument - but think of it this way: there's a 1 in 40,000 chance that some HS kid will make $100K playing pro sports. On the other hand, there's a million $100K math/sci/engineeering jobs (that's 50 FIRST/Disney tournaments) in the US available to these same kids. Which way do you want to bet?
blind? hardly. they all get the game rules and kits on the same day, they all have to pack up a finished robot the same day 6 weeks later. many schools scrimmage before they ship. this year the level of cooperation is such that many teams will probably publicise their robot's abilities - something that was unheard of in FIRST three years ago.
It promotes the design of robust solutions to a unique problem, and in the past few years has stressed cooperation between teams - distancing itself even further from Battlebots etc - which also have their place.
I've seen more kids head towards sci/tech from this program than any other single program in 21 years of sci/tech education. The professional engineers, to a person, say this program is the thing that reminds them why they got into engineering in the first place. A fresh challenge and 6 weeks to go is the antidote for too many engineering jobs - twiddling the last 1% performance per year out of whatever thing you're working on.
Plus, someone asked me what the regional competition was like after we returned. I told them that it was the first time in 17 years of teaching that I had to sit down and put my head between my knees because I was about to pass out watching my students do something academic. And I'm the most laid-back guy on the staff.
(FIRST veteran) You have to power this thing with *only* the wiring given you in the Kit of Parts - this makes for some interesting power budgets - you can't just plug-n-play what they give you. Also, the box and controls ARE configurable - the plastic box is made for them by Raytheon, and it IS programmable. Course, it doesn't run *NIX, so some in this millieu will find it beneath them, but you can't just wire switches to the radio net and make it go.
>7. ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY.
>7.1 When using the Service, you may not:
>7.1.1 restrict or inhibit any other user from
>using the Internet;
Well, slap my ass - doesn't going on the internet increase the traffic (especially locally) and therefore by definition inhibit the others from using the internet? (or is that just me and my cable modem...?)
Crouching Tiger is brilliant - hardly inspired by Matrix, though. Oh Brother proves that the Coen Brothers can still be as funny as they were in Raising Arizona & Fargo and as good storytellers as they were in Blood Simple & Miller's Crossing. However, Proof of Life was the most stilted, poorly-directed film in a long time. A lousy film which is only attractive in its trailer. The testy of a well-made film? Try this - put anyone else besides the two leads in it and it would have closed in a week.
seems the server is gagging - can get topic names but no poop, straight or otherwise.
Dag-nab it! Ban the word 'weightless'! In their free-fall, orbiting craft do have this nasty habit of negating most of the effects of gravity. As far as carbonated beverage are concerned, they are all a very VERY bad idea. The gas in the consumed beverage acts just like the water bubbles you see in those on-orbit videos. It all comes together in a minimal-surface-area ball smack dab in the middle of your gut. Won't go down, won't go up. So you don't burp or fart it gradually - but when you de-orbit something very nasty will happen when it all emerges at once. And yes, people do yakk in space - many astronauts keep a waste bag velcro'd to their suit - on their shoulder if handy - for the first day or three. Missing sucks, but they get plenty of practice on the parabolic test flights.
Somebody could make a lot of friends by starting with the PalmOS emulator(s) and porting THAT to run on top of the WinCE the same way I run the PalmOS emulator on Mac or Win... Since this is way above my technical threshold, I'll leave the implementation as an exercise to the reader...
the $15K shouldn't matter, as it's not yet up to the reserve, and who knows what that is... *BUT* then there's this detail on the site: "The name will be sold before the reserve is met, so don't wait until the last minute to bid." Huh? If you set a reserve price, why sell it before it's met - you know folks are going to test the reserve, and a bid below the reserve price is non-binding. Either there's some confusion here, or else these guys don't need the money, or else this is the equivalent of a pawn-shop deal on eBay... You mean this isn't the part-time-plumbing repair union site (with apologies to Bill Murray's old SNL bit...)
this review of a five year old book is front page news, but handheld phasers in two years isn't? who do you have to sleep with to get a post around here?
Got 'em both - the palm/targus branded stowaway is the runaway winner. With the neoprene case I can acttually use it as a case for my IIIe or m100 just by slipping it in before completely zipping the case. Plus it;s a dead ringer for my Powerbook keyboard. The gotype is gathering dust.
... for what it did this past time. No, the triplecast was not the answer (or maybe they've dropped the first shoe of figuring out how to pay-per-view the olympics...) But neither was this. The night of the cycling road race, they were live on the air AS IT WAS HAPPENING talking to Harry Smith (huh?) about the race we would finally see over a day later. Harry's Big Insight was that Lance Armstrong once had cancer. He's apparently the last person to find this out. SHOW THE FREAKING RACE!!! So you may lose some ad revenue? You think more people watch "Cursed" and "Titans" than the triple jump or the luge? What they are really showing by this is that people would rather see things as they happen rather than wait according to their gordian time-delay schedule. So offer me the pay-per-view of the cycling and sculling, speed skating and curling events (they sound purposefully obscure to make a point - but there's something sublime about curling I really like watching...) and I'll pay - but GIVE SOME RHYME OR REASON TO IT. Heck, I'll even watch Bob Costas for the whole thing if you'll serve up things as they happen.
Should be easy enough to email this guy and find out if it's legit, pix and all. Though its's hard to imagine a few carts haven't gone flaky in all that time. Geez, that $600 the local cumby's wanted for an arcade Centipede 10 years ago seems pretty tame now. Apeiron just ain't the same *sniff* *sob* even with my old trackball...
Look around the site - look at the hands and feet. Look at the legs/hips. You can't fit a body thru there. Especially since the thighs are essentially empty in the middle. Read the technical papers on how the solved the balance of the foot. Occam's Razor does not push you to the conclusion that they faked it - that is arguably just as complex a solution as doing it for real. The intermediary forms are all over the place - waldo devices in the entertainment industry, MIT's robots, CMU, Dean Kamen's balancing wheelchair, there are plenty of proof-of-concept pieces of this - they claim to have put it all together. And it ain't exactly doing chase scenes from James Bond - some simple movements, stairs, etc.
yes, but carnegie mellon has one that can unload a tractor trailer - but it looks like a fork lift and ain't nearly as humanoid... http://www.honda.co.jp/english/technology/robot/ or http://world.honda.com/robot/
getting a 404 today!=-_... anyone know of a mirror? domo
penguin behavior - and its underwhelming impact - was covered in a very old issue of develop at apple - can't find it online - i'll try and get the paper version in the office tomorrow... the gist was how to catch a penguin - two methods were preferred (1) place three boom boxes and an open cage on each of four sides of the birds. play walrus sounds thru the boomboxes. wait not very long for the ensuing instinctual response. close cage. or (2) chase them - when they run, their feet heat up (you can't sweat thru feathers), stop chasing, and they stop, their warm feet temporarily melt the ice then refreeze, and poof. they're stuck. get a thermos of warm water and just go pick'em up.
Sooooo everyone gets the same page because (1) most aolers are too bleak to specify their own home URL and/or (2) AOL is still crate full of massive control freaks we've come to know and loathe. True story: I was a charter AppleLink Personal Edition subscriber. Apple in it's inimitable wisdom decided no one would ever make money with online services, and sold it to a little outfit in Vienna VA. We all got beta tester status (and half price time - at that time full price was $9 to 11 per hour) for 6 months. Then we all got regular user disks of the newly-re-branded America Online. Six months later I get a call from Steve Case himself. "We screwed up on the disks and we've been charging you beta rates for too long, and basically you need to send us whatever you've spent in the last half year AGAIN." I don't think so. How many of us does this affect? Dozens? "Yes." Hundreds? "Yes." Thousands? "Look, that's really not the point. You have to send us the money." Feh. Offered them a installment plan and they never called again. How does a company this clueless make so much scratch?
I don't have a better answer, but I took enough research design to offer an opinion. In stats you can make two sorts of errors: (1) miss something that's really there, and (2) discover something that really isn't. In some rare complicated cases, you can do both. I think we have a winner. Go look at the evidence offered in their own site - under statistical evaluation - chart two - no study even follows these kids to the point where they can legally purchase alcohol. There's no real proof that they've found the secret to stopping abuse, and the odds are that something would work, and they're not doing it. What proof will I accept? Tell me how you're stopping people who become lifelong addicts and abusers and all that that entails. Look, everyone's going to try alcohol, DARE or no DARE. If you have the disease that is alcoholism, you're going to be in trouble long before you know you are, DARE or no DARE. So what can they really tell us? The rest of their evidence seems to be that lots of people want the program - so what? Lots of people want money, that doesn't make it necessarily healthy. And I certainly hope there is something beside the simple authority of the police departments to deter kids - anyone who knows a significant number of officers knows they're no saints. In my experience, which includes attending a college with a criminal justice school, the CS students were among the biggest party animals, one fraternity was suspended from operation after numerous alcohol incidents including the death of one student (the car he was in went over a logging road so fast that he was killed when his head hit the inside of the car roof... an hour later the frats met in the campus pub to console themselves!) If you can offer me a program where none of the officers and teachers use alcohol or drugs, then I might buy it - but I know too many of each (I'm an educator) that can't claim innocence. Preaching to kids about this stuff is a band-aid at best.
and a network manager / mac geek/ lab god / I have had the lovely experience of sitting at home on my rock-solid powerbook, and watching every network service go dead as a doornail, see the sync light go dead on the cable modem, and then have @home (after hours on hold) tell me that i must've changed something on my computer and they'll have to send a tech out during working hours at least a week hence. now i know it's not just the problem solving skills of the voice on the phone, but in fact corporate policy. who was it that thought that the two worst customer service companies - the cable company and the phone company - would be BETTER if merged into one?!
As I understand it (and have successfully done in the past) N2H2 will accept teacher suggestions to let thru pages that really aren't bad enough to warrant filtering. No filter is perfect, and they seem to be good at letting this escape valve work... Am I missing something you found otherwise?