While in the Chicago airport recently I thought of something similar, though admitted much simpler.
The tunnel that connects the two United terminals (B&C?) has a bunch of neon lights arranged in rainbow patterns that cycle through various blinking patterns. The sound system is playing the "United Airlines Music" while you look at the flashing lights.
I suggested to my brother as we calmly rode the people mover (we weren't in a hurry) that it would be interesting to have a system that could monitor the number of people in the tunnel. It could then make the music and the lights change according to the number of people. Lots of people could cause louder, faster music and wildly blinking neon lights while just a few people could cause the system to make the lights and music a much more calming experience. Then you could watch people's reactions to see if the hectic music made a frantic situation even worse. You could also switch the system around and see if you could slow large crowds of people by playing softer, slower music.
My brother thought it was an interesting idea but said that you'd probably be sued when some 55 year-old business man came through and had a heart attack due to the extra stress of going through such a tunnel.
He said "Linux/OSS community". Rather than chiding him for his laziness maybe you could have mentioned that the OSS community is Open Source SOFTWARE. Making devices strikes me as hardware. I am not aware of many consumer devices developed by the OSS community. Does Tivo count? Usually devices are developed by large companies like Apple or even IBM. Yet when the Linux Watch comes out would you say that the DEVICE was developed by the OSS community?
Ok, so maybe I am ranting too. If he had just said Linux community then I would have to shut up.
You can fly on an HP calc because you know when you've pressed a key. You hear it and FEEL it. Give me a TI and I have to push harder and keep looking to see if the key shows up. I get accidental double presses on TI's too which NEVER happens with an HP. Basically an HP has a feel of quality to it and a TI feels like a cheap toy.
How about the My Linux Personal Linux Workstation?
on
The Dream Handheld
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· Score: 3, Informative
Ours had no triangles and now way to turn the front wheel. I managed to steer by popping wheelies and jerking the wheel to one side repeatedly. We used 2x4s for the frame and plywood wheels with 1 inch dowels for axles. The seat was mounted to a 2x4 that came up just in front of the rear wheel. The handle bar was mounted to 2x4s that were attached at the same point as the front axel. We cheated and used a modern bike chain and chainrings for the drivetrain. Now I wish we had used a rope with wooden beads on it or something a bit more creative. There are pictures of our project, but none on the net.:(
Overall it was pretty sturdy, but I only rode it for a few days. I didn't dare give it heavy use prior to having the project graded. Then I had to leave campus a few days after it was turned in. It was heavy and not very comfortable to ride but really the lack of steering was the only real deficiency. We couldn't see from the drawing how it would have been steerable. Perhaps with an axle in the frame mounted behind the front wheel. Maybe someday I'll build it right.
Most meteor shower items show up a day or two before the show. Michael already posted an article mentioning this one. Are we going to have one article a day on this for the next two weeks?
For the final project of my freshman year Civ class we built a da Vinci bicycle out of wood. Acutally we built it twice since the janitors from the dorm thought the first one which had only to be assembled to be complete was junk so they threw it out. The second one was ridable and could be pedaled but was hard to turn.
I even rode it to class a few times. Nothing attracts attention like riding your extremely loud wooden bicycle to class.
We ended up not having a place to store for the summer it so we simply locked it to a bike rack and left it as art. It lasted as art for several months before being removed.
Here's what I use for very little change
on
New Cube controller
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· Score: 2
For my games I re-assign the keys so that I can simply put my hands on the keyboard as if I were typing.
Now this is when the reader says, "But you still have to take your hands off to use the mouse!"
And I respond, "Nope, I am using a Thinkpad and the Trackpoint is very natural to use with just a slight tilt of your right hand."
Of course playing Diablo on a Thinkpad will give you a serious case of RSI.
One or two times a day I receive calls with nobody on the other end. I usually say "Hello..... Hello??? Anybody there?" for a while and then hang up.
I have been told that this is a telemarketing system seeing if my number is "good". Is there any truth to this?
Finally, I want to allow telemarketers to call me, but I want a $0.50 credit on my phone bill for each minute (partial minutes should count too, just like when the phone company charge me) that I spend listening to them. Let them pay to bother me. In fact, there should be a message that plays when a telemarketer calls:
"For a chage of 50 cents a minute this line will accept you telemarketing call. Press '1' to accept, otherwise please disconnect and remove this number from your list."
I understand your point and I have certainly learned a great deal using distance learning methods. My regrets stem from my perception that the best aspects of the university experience are student to student interactions and student to teacher interactions.
The interactions I had with other students were the most valuable part of my university education. Not only will I enjoy those friendships for the rest of my life, but the contacts that I made will be of use to me professionally as well. Just having a degree from such-and-such university is less than half of what makes my education worth the amount of money I paid for it. Yes my degree says that I have some level of CS proficiency, but the people that I know now are even more valuable to me.
For me as much of my learning came in the dorm as in the classroom. I was able to ask people for help and also able to give help nearly any hour of the day. I am not saying that this cannot happen in a distance learning enviroment, but for me it seems much more difficult.
If you read the article you will find that the MIT professors that came up with this disagree with you.
MIT is careful to point out that the OpenCourseWare project is not a distance-learning initiative. Indeed, according to Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering who served on the committee that developed the idea, OpenCourseWare represents a repudiation of distance learning. "It's a large effort at MIT that says, 'We're not going to do distance education,'" says Abelson. "It really is making a statement about what the university is about and what it's not about."
Also, the government isn't paying for this, since MIT is private.
I am amazed that you think that professions that don't need lab environments don't need campus based training. Would you want to pursue a history/English/law/religion degree without spending actual classroom time with your teacher and fellow students?
I took advantage of the fact that for many of the university courses I took were on-line. Not only were all the course materials on-line, but the lectures were too. So I would often sleep in and then catch class on my Mac Performa while eating lunch. Guess what? I really regret doing that. I wish I could go back and kick myself in the head and make myself go to class. I did fine in my classes but I missed out on lots of interaction, and the ability to ask a question in lecture.
Besides, Prof. Nick Parlante would always wear plaid to screw with the video compression.:)
I noticed on NBC last night that when they showed footage taken with a video phone they only used the left 1/3 of the screen for the video phone image and then showed maps or other footage in the rest of the screen.
This made the lack of resolution less apparent. Scaling the image up to fill the screen produces a very pixelated image. Also it seemed that the low framerate was less noticable this way. It wasn't nearly as annoying as the video phone footage that I've seen in the past.
Perhaps if they don't want to transmit in real-time and can afford a minute or two of delay they could record some footage at a higher resolution and/or framerate and then send it to the network and have them assemble it at the network. It might take 3 minutes to transmit 1 minute of footage this way. You lose the realtime aspect of the current setup but you could get better quality.
I recently rode the BikeE that my brother owns and it felt natural within a few minutes of riding. Not only was it comfortable, but it was great fun. You can buy the least expensive model for about US$575 though his was a bit more than that. Maybe my comfort was due to the fact that the handlebars are in a more normal position and you are sitting more upright than on more agressive recumbents.
Now, in true hacker tradition, he has outfitted it with a homemade fairing (his wife calls it a windshield)in front and a wind box in back. All for about $6 worth of plastic. This recent inventiveness of his has spurred but the comment of another biker told him that riding behing him was almost as good as dragging off a small car. Hopefully that is no longer the case.
I agree with your assesment about the Matrix and Tron. My point though was to look at whether Star Wars left more room for a sequel than The Matrix. Interestingly, when and if Tron 2.0 comes out it will owe its existence to The Matrix as much as to the original Tron. The Matrix has made Tron 2.0 commercially viable.
After Star Wars Luke had gained "superpowers" and destroyed the Death Star, freeing the galaxy from evil, right? So why bother with two sequels? (The prequel, btw, struck me as a money-grab.)
The Matrix left more questions unanwered than Star Wars and really presented a much smaller victory if you think about it. So Neo can fly around in the Matrix now, big deal. Can he free humanity? Can he defeat the machines in the real world?
I think the movie left plenty of interesting questions unanswered and there is still room for the sequels to ask more. Even if the new movies aren't as interesting as the first they will still have lots of sfx and kung-fu magic which will be more than enough to attract a large percentage of the/. crowd.
They messed with your story pretty good, huh? Did you mean to link to both monitors? Do they have anything in common? Why mention both of them? Where did you get the price from? Could you clear up some of this confusion?
You might also want to look at P/E ratios. IBM is 20.70 while Sun is still up at 31.03. Also while you are right that you can't directly compare stock prices, you might want to take a look at the charts for the last year for each company. Sun has been dropping, shedding over 80% of its value. IBM has remained relatively steady, bouncing around between $80-120.
I am trying to figure out who you mean. GE? VA Linux? Apple? Nintendo? Ok, so GE is the only serious one.
What I hear is that IBM would be happy to get control of Java. I can't think of another company that would have as much to gain from gaining control of Java as IBM. Except for MS and they would just kill it.
Note: I happen to work for IBM. This post is pure speculation on my part and is not the opinion of IBM.
If you weighed that much more you would be your own weight room.
ps. Do you mean solid ti bones or hollow ones?:)
Get a clue Jon! It was about female models.
on
Review: Zoolander
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Female supermodels have long been the target of satirists, but this is the most head-on assault yet on the men.
Jon, this film WAS a send-up of female models. It is simply more politically correct to use male models. Otherwise the movie would have seemed vicious rather than funny. You can get away with much more by being indirect.
I took the movie as being set in an alternate universe in which male models are popular in that same way that female models are in ours.
As long as I'm posting, let me say that the trailers contained every funny moment from the film with the exception of the gas station scene. In fact some scenes were funnier in the trailer. The David Duchovny scene was hilarious in the trailers, but fell flat in the movie itself due to less frantic timing.
If you want to go to a funny movie, go see Rat Race. It really exceeded my expectations. Zoolander had a great concept (you're right on that point Jon, congrats) but the execution wasn't there.
Would you appreciate it if once you have graduated a large number of the non-technical people you work with have taken some sort of CS course?
At the school that I went to about 10% of each class majored in CS. However, over 50% of all undergraduates took CS 106 which at the time was a pretty fast-paced introductory C course. Later in life, which would you want to work with:
A) The English major who has written a fractal generation program, and has spent hours debugging code.
B) The English major who only used a computer to write papers.
If you picked B then I can't help you. Maybe your university is expecting too much from you.
If you picked A then use some of that logic that you've learned and apply it to yourself.
As for the comment about learning what you'll need for the next 10 years, what industry do you think you'll be working in? Should the people who graduated in 1993 not have learned Java since then? I graduated in 1998 and have spent much of the time since then working with smart cards. Should I have learned that in school? The technical aspects of your education prepare you enough that your first employer won't laugh at your resume. The theoretical aspects give you the tools you need to teach yourself new skills and that is what the computer industry is all about.
Disclaimer: I majored in CS and minored in Portuguese. I thought the different specialties were each a nice break from each other. I certainly never thought that either one hurt me.
This is the sort of nitpick that proves that I am a geek. However, I'm not that big of a geek since I don't know the answer.
Didn't the "Enterprise of the Future" commanded by Riker in "All Good Things" go Warp factor 13?
In any event, it seems like capping it at 10 leads to making advances from 9.6 to 9.7 cause for excitement. In any case, I doubt that an increase of that sort is as impressive to viewers as Warp 13!
Slashdot Mirror
While in the Chicago airport recently I thought of something similar, though admitted much simpler. The tunnel that connects the two United terminals (B&C?) has a bunch of neon lights arranged in rainbow patterns that cycle through various blinking patterns. The sound system is playing the "United Airlines Music" while you look at the flashing lights. I suggested to my brother as we calmly rode the people mover (we weren't in a hurry) that it would be interesting to have a system that could monitor the number of people in the tunnel. It could then make the music and the lights change according to the number of people. Lots of people could cause louder, faster music and wildly blinking neon lights while just a few people could cause the system to make the lights and music a much more calming experience. Then you could watch people's reactions to see if the hectic music made a frantic situation even worse. You could also switch the system around and see if you could slow large crowds of people by playing softer, slower music. My brother thought it was an interesting idea but said that you'd probably be sued when some 55 year-old business man came through and had a heart attack due to the extra stress of going through such a tunnel.
They hair system they used on the gigantic blue-with-purple-spots monster is simply stunning.
He said "Linux/OSS community". Rather than chiding him for his laziness maybe you could have mentioned that the OSS community is Open Source SOFTWARE. Making devices strikes me as hardware. I am not aware of many consumer devices developed by the OSS community. Does Tivo count? Usually devices are developed by large companies like Apple or even IBM. Yet when the Linux Watch comes out would you say that the DEVICE was developed by the OSS community?
Ok, so maybe I am ranting too. If he had just said Linux community then I would have to shut up.
You can fly on an HP calc because you know when you've pressed a key. You hear it and FEEL it. Give me a TI and I have to push harder and keep looking to see if the key shows up. I get accidental double presses on TI's too which NEVER happens with an HP. Basically an HP has a feel of quality to it and a TI feels like a cheap toy.
http://mylinux.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/
Overall it was pretty sturdy, but I only rode it for a few days. I didn't dare give it heavy use prior to having the project graded. Then I had to leave campus a few days after it was turned in. It was heavy and not very comfortable to ride but really the lack of steering was the only real deficiency. We couldn't see from the drawing how it would have been steerable. Perhaps with an axle in the frame mounted behind the front wheel. Maybe someday I'll build it right.
Most meteor shower items show up a day or two before the show. Michael already posted an article mentioning this one. Are we going to have one article a day on this for the next two weeks?
I even rode it to class a few times. Nothing attracts attention like riding your extremely loud wooden bicycle to class.
We ended up not having a place to store for the summer it so we simply locked it to a bike rack and left it as art. It lasted as art for several months before being removed.
Now this is when the reader says, "But you still have to take your hands off to use the mouse!"
And I respond, "Nope, I am using a Thinkpad and the Trackpoint is very natural to use with just a slight tilt of your right hand."
Of course playing Diablo on a Thinkpad will give you a serious case of RSI.
I have been told that this is a telemarketing system seeing if my number is "good". Is there any truth to this?
Finally, I want to allow telemarketers to call me, but I want a $0.50 credit on my phone bill for each minute (partial minutes should count too, just like when the phone company charge me) that I spend listening to them. Let them pay to bother me. In fact, there should be a message that plays when a telemarketer calls:
"For a chage of 50 cents a minute this line will accept you telemarketing call. Press '1' to accept, otherwise please disconnect and remove this number from your list."
Too bad for you! Microsoft seems to have dropped Windows for Smart Card in May 2000. One of the worst product names ever. Should have been VB for SC.
Now you are stuck with Java Card. Maybe they can fill up on coffee instead of FUD.
Hey, do you know Chacko Sonny?
I understand your point and I have certainly learned a great deal using distance learning methods. My regrets stem from my perception that the best aspects of the university experience are student to student interactions and student to teacher interactions.
The interactions I had with other students were the most valuable part of my university education. Not only will I enjoy those friendships for the rest of my life, but the contacts that I made will be of use to me professionally as well. Just having a degree from such-and-such university is less than half of what makes my education worth the amount of money I paid for it. Yes my degree says that I have some level of CS proficiency, but the people that I know now are even more valuable to me.
For me as much of my learning came in the dorm as in the classroom. I was able to ask people for help and also able to give help nearly any hour of the day. I am not saying that this cannot happen in a distance learning enviroment, but for me it seems much more difficult.
MIT is careful to point out that the OpenCourseWare project is not a distance-learning initiative. Indeed, according to Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering who served on the committee that developed the idea, OpenCourseWare represents a repudiation of distance learning. "It's a large effort at MIT that says, 'We're not going to do distance education,'" says Abelson. "It really is making a statement about what the university is about and what it's not about."
Also, the government isn't paying for this, since MIT is private.
I am amazed that you think that professions that don't need lab environments don't need campus based training. Would you want to pursue a history/English/law/religion degree without spending actual classroom time with your teacher and fellow students?
I took advantage of the fact that for many of the university courses I took were on-line. Not only were all the course materials on-line, but the lectures were too. So I would often sleep in and then catch class on my Mac Performa while eating lunch. Guess what? I really regret doing that. I wish I could go back and kick myself in the head and make myself go to class. I did fine in my classes but I missed out on lots of interaction, and the ability to ask a question in lecture.
Besides, Prof. Nick Parlante would always wear plaid to screw with the video compression. :)
This made the lack of resolution less apparent. Scaling the image up to fill the screen produces a very pixelated image. Also it seemed that the low framerate was less noticable this way. It wasn't nearly as annoying as the video phone footage that I've seen in the past.
Perhaps if they don't want to transmit in real-time and can afford a minute or two of delay they could record some footage at a higher resolution and/or framerate and then send it to the network and have them assemble it at the network. It might take 3 minutes to transmit 1 minute of footage this way. You lose the realtime aspect of the current setup but you could get better quality.
Now, in true hacker tradition, he has outfitted it with a homemade fairing (his wife calls it a windshield)in front and a wind box in back. All for about $6 worth of plastic. This recent inventiveness of his has spurred but the comment of another biker told him that riding behing him was almost as good as dragging off a small car. Hopefully that is no longer the case.
You go Redbeard!
I agree with your assesment about the Matrix and Tron. My point though was to look at whether Star Wars left more room for a sequel than The Matrix. Interestingly, when and if Tron 2.0 comes out it will owe its existence to The Matrix as much as to the original Tron. The Matrix has made Tron 2.0 commercially viable.
The Matrix left more questions unanwered than Star Wars and really presented a much smaller victory if you think about it. So Neo can fly around in the Matrix now, big deal. Can he free humanity? Can he defeat the machines in the real world?
I think the movie left plenty of interesting questions unanswered and there is still room for the sequels to ask more. Even if the new movies aren't as interesting as the first they will still have lots of sfx and kung-fu magic which will be more than enough to attract a large percentage of the /. crowd.
They messed with your story pretty good, huh? Did you mean to link to both monitors? Do they have anything in common? Why mention both of them? Where did you get the price from? Could you clear up some of this confusion?
You might also want to look at P/E ratios. IBM is 20.70 while Sun is still up at 31.03. Also while you are right that you can't directly compare stock prices, you might want to take a look at the charts for the last year for each company. Sun has been dropping, shedding over 80% of its value. IBM has remained relatively steady, bouncing around between $80-120.
What I hear is that IBM would be happy to get control of Java. I can't think of another company that would have as much to gain from gaining control of Java as IBM. Except for MS and they would just kill it.
Note: I happen to work for IBM. This post is pure speculation on my part and is not the opinion of IBM.
ps. Do you mean solid ti bones or hollow ones? :)
Jon, this film WAS a send-up of female models. It is simply more politically correct to use male models. Otherwise the movie would have seemed vicious rather than funny. You can get away with much more by being indirect.
I took the movie as being set in an alternate universe in which male models are popular in that same way that female models are in ours.
As long as I'm posting, let me say that the trailers contained every funny moment from the film with the exception of the gas station scene. In fact some scenes were funnier in the trailer. The David Duchovny scene was hilarious in the trailers, but fell flat in the movie itself due to less frantic timing.
If you want to go to a funny movie, go see Rat Race. It really exceeded my expectations. Zoolander had a great concept (you're right on that point Jon, congrats) but the execution wasn't there.
At the school that I went to about 10% of each class majored in CS. However, over 50% of all undergraduates took CS 106 which at the time was a pretty fast-paced introductory C course. Later in life, which would you want to work with:
A) The English major who has written a fractal generation program, and has spent hours debugging code.
B) The English major who only used a computer to write papers.
If you picked B then I can't help you. Maybe your university is expecting too much from you.
If you picked A then use some of that logic that you've learned and apply it to yourself.
As for the comment about learning what you'll need for the next 10 years, what industry do you think you'll be working in? Should the people who graduated in 1993 not have learned Java since then? I graduated in 1998 and have spent much of the time since then working with smart cards. Should I have learned that in school? The technical aspects of your education prepare you enough that your first employer won't laugh at your resume. The theoretical aspects give you the tools you need to teach yourself new skills and that is what the computer industry is all about.
Disclaimer: I majored in CS and minored in Portuguese. I thought the different specialties were each a nice break from each other. I certainly never thought that either one hurt me.
Didn't the "Enterprise of the Future" commanded by Riker in "All Good Things" go Warp factor 13?
In any event, it seems like capping it at 10 leads to making advances from 9.6 to 9.7 cause for excitement. In any case, I doubt that an increase of that sort is as impressive to viewers as Warp 13!