I'm actually amazed that the company acted so responsibly. It would have been easy to just backtrack and forgive and forget, but they forged ahead, making an enemy and losing a customer, to try to maintain the "rules of the land". Good for them.
You have a funny definition of "responsible". If you read TFA, he went through great lengths to attempt to resolve the issue with Blizzard, keeping his emails polite at all times. He pointed out that both Logitech and Blizzard had advertised the keyboard as being good for WoW, and even offered to accept a temporary ban to make up for any accidental infractions.
Blizzard ignored all his correspondance, and went for a permanent ban, apparently in direct violation of their own terms of service.
Blizzard was WRONG, and paid no attention to a reasonable customer. I find it perfectly acceptable if he was currently considering either legal or grass roots responses to their gross negligence in the matter. If that is the best they can do for loyal customers who attempted civil resolutions, then they deserve to end up in a media circus of bad press and class action suits.
Don't bother with the Inquirer story. It's practically a verbatim copy of the source story here. The only difference is that the source story adds the following comments:
As I pointed out in the article (and the comments), these devices are not autonomous. For some, this would disqualify them from being true robots. However, the military and the manufacturer both refer to the SWORDS device as a robot, and it certainly fits common usage. The word "robot" comes from the Czech robota (from Capek's play R.U.R.) meaning "forced labor" or "drudgery." This device surely does an unpleasant task usually done by a person. Also, consider that, strictly speaking, an autonomous cruise missile is a self-guided machine, and is therefore a "robot" although most people wouldn't think of it that way.
These are actually robots, but they're not the fully-autonomous solutions that Asimov was suggesting that mankind needed protection from. Thus the "laws" of robotics don't apply here, because it's still a human who's doing the thinking for the machine.
In effect, this is a safe way for ground troops to line up a kill zone, then cause lots 'o bad guys to get torn to shreds. Prior to this, troops needed to use a vehicle-mounted machine gun to get this sort of rate of fire. This was extremely limited in close quarters, where a Humvee or Tank might not fit. While it was theoretically possible to carry a machine gun to the combat zone, such weapons are difficult to transport, setup, and use in close quarters.
1. You will not see all of the searches that go through the network.
2. You will only see a tiny, tiny fraction of the hits resulting from the searches that you do see.
Neither one of these is relevant. We're talking about aquiring a statistical sample of what the populace is looking for. Having a set of nodes on different factions of the network can get you plenty to do a statistical analysis. Especially if you setup a few SuperNodes.
If all of the above happen, you may see a PUSH packet when someone tries to download a file.
That's more or less what I was thinking about when I claimed you can detect downloads. Granted, it's not terribly reliable, but it can be of interest when compared to other push requests. All in all, though, the searches would be far more interesting.
I think you're missing the point. One of the most valuable statistics to the entertainment industry is what is popular in the "underground" at the moment. That popularity is often a good indicator of what can be successfully marketed to the general public. Or as a friend of mine used to say, "By the time a music track goes mainstream, it's popularity at the clubs I go to has already come and gone."
The purpose of this tool is to harness internet downloads to find out what might be highly marketable, and what isn't. And if they can get geographic data on its popularity, they'll even be able to target their marketing in the appropriate areas.
As an aside, I think we're almost reaching a point where single-player games are getting under-served.
Amen! What the world today really needs is more Guybrush Threepwood! Which is to say, more adventure games chock full of puzzles, humor, and living environments to explore. The recent fan game Stargate Adventure really reminded me of how much fun those old games were. Sure, they didn't have "Three-Dee", but that was okay. They had distinctively attractive artwork that gave a much more organic feel to the game than today's 3D-based games. They also provided the perfect viewpoint for playing out a television or movie in a game.
In fact, many of the more serious adventure games were spinoffs of movies or television. Star Trek 25th anniversay is an example that comes to mind, as is Star Trek: A Final Unity. Another good example is Indiana Jones. The Dig even had a book version of the story!
Today, all that creativity has been shunned in favor of more action and 3D graphics. (Not to mention "adult" themes.) Can we have back a few games that are actually games rather than "entertainment products?" Please?
1. GNUTella networks send the data through many clients before it reaches its destination. By monitoring this traffic with a modified client, one can get a reasonably good sampling of what users are searching for and/or downloading.
2. Unless the torrent is private, anyone can connect to the server and all kinds of stats on the number of seeds and leechers.
I'm not up on how Kazaa or eDonkey work, so I won't comment on those. But the very nature of these networks do make it possible to obtain useful stats.
Falun Gong is a rung away from Scientology on the crazy ladder to spiritual enlightenment.
It was also both officially and unofficially endorsed by the Chinese government. Then at some point they changed their minds (likely because it was becomes too powerful of a religion), and started a disinformation campaign against them.
I'm not a supporter of Falun Gong, but I have known a few practitioners who have escaped China. They are certainly no Church of Scientology, and they definitely don't represent such a significant threat that the Chinese government ignores its own constitution to persecute them.
I've had quite a few Chinese coworkers and friends. I also have a high respect for the Chinese people and much of their culture. But I spit on the farce they call a "government of the people." It's a government of selfish power that attempts to subvert the thinking of the common person into believing that such subjigation is what they want.
According to the article, the reporter did try to contact Mr. Wang. OTOH, Wang claims that he was never contacted. Given that Mr. Wang is the perpetrator of a hoax, I'm inclined to believe that the blogger intentionally made himself hard to reach to insure his goals.
Within hours, English-language bloggers and Western news media spread the word that the Chinese government had closed the sites.
This makes it sound like all the major news outlets were up in arms about it. In fact, a quick check of Google news for "Massage Milk", sorted by date, shows that there was the BBC story on the 8th, then numerous reports about it being a hoax the next day.
The BBC article states:
Now, Mr Wang's high profile seems to have attracted the disapproval of the Chinese government, which administers the most sophisticated system of internet censorship and control anywhere in the world.
A note on his site reads simply but pointedly: "Because of unavoidable reasons, this blog is now temporarily closed."
(Emphasis mine.)
The WSJ article claims that the BBC updated its article, but it doesn't make clear what was updated. The few blogs that picked up the story seem to support the text I quoted above. Meaning, that the BBC was not unreasonable in its report, even if it did assume the worst.
As far as I can tell, the only irresponsible party here is the blogger himself. He created a situation that directly insinutated government shutdown, then tried to play the matter up as "irresponsible western journalism." He's proved nothing except to do damage to the free speech movement in China.
Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?
Yes, actually. As soon as Caldera took over the SCO Unix business, they pretty much dropped any real support for the platform and focused their efforts on sueing Linux. If the reports are to be believed, their distributors were about ready to hang them during the various regional meetings. The SCO corporate reps came across as somewhat anxious about all the bad will towards them, but definitely not apologetic.
The fallout of these meetings was expected to be that SCO would lose a lot of their local distributors. The results of which would be catastrophic if SCO were actually trying to do business. Now that they realize that their lawsuit has failed, they've found that they've screwed themselves on being able to do business. In addition, they've burned their OSS bridge (guess we won't be seeing an opensco.org, eh?), leaving them with no real edge in the market. So now they're trying to convince businesses that they can provide OSS support without being an OSS supporter.
My prediction? You're going to be seeing quite a few new Solaris 10/OpenSolaris installations very soon now.
I think it is good to rant about this because he has a good point: those web reviews sites don't wanna lose their jobs. So they play along with the devs, not the people.
*sigh* PC Gamer, PC Gamer, wherefore art thou PC Gamer? Thoust were taken over by PC Accelerator, forever to be changed into a mediocre magazine. The PC Gamer thy once were is forever dead. Dead, and floating upon the winds of time. Farewell pointy stick and coconut monkey, I knewest thou well.
The best counter examples are during the launch, particularly with the timing of SRB ignition and SSME shutdown. Get those wrong and its all over very quickly.
True enough. Though there's little that could be done by a human anyway, so you just have to trust that the computer will get it right.
BTW, scratch the part about the explosive bolts. I'm doing some checking, and it looks like NASA abandoned the bolts at some point. As far as I can tell, they're hydrolic now, but I don't know if they're still locked in a down position. (I assume so, as there's no good way to reseal the gear doors for reentry.)
I don't see that in the ALSJ. They got a quantity light but Armstrong had the vehicle on the ground within the required 60 seconds.
Double-checking that, it looks like you're right. I'm probably thinking of the fact that there were several situations which called for a possible abort (including the 1201 program code which resulting in an abort during the last simulator run).
As a result if they have to abandon a shuttle in orbit there is absolutely no way to recover the vehicle.
More or less. I can't say I disagree with their decision, though. The Shuttle was the most complex spacecraft built to date. Anything that could be done to improve safety was a good option consider. I'd imagine that a new vehicle like the Shuttle would probably carry an arming switch that, once activated, would allow computer control over the gear.
there must be hundreds of things which the computers could break during the flight which would cause loss of the mission.
Yes and no. Most everything else the computer might do is recoverable. If it begins applying the wrong control surfaces, manual control can be applied. If it miscalculates a burn, mission control or the crew can override with new parameters for a correction burn. If it begins opening the bay doors, they can be reclosed. Only the landing gear is completely unrecoverable, as it is deployed with explosive bolts. (!) Thus, even under the best conditions (deployment in orbit), there would be nothing the crew could do to fix the situation.
All the apollo lunar landings were flown manually for the last minute or so.
Actually, Armstrong took manual control from the computer during the Apollo 11 landing. This was due to several program errors (the radar switch was in the wrong position) as well as mistakes in automatic guidance. Armstrong was advised to abort at one point, but chose to land the Eagle anyway.
My recollection is that shuttle landings are generally flown manually.
Pretty much everything up until the landing gear is released is automatic. The Shuttle could be landed on automatic, but the engineers made an intentional decision to make the landing gear deployment a 100% manual process. The reason for this is that the landing gear cannot be stowed in flight once it is deployed. Should a computer error occur, premature deployment of the gear could cause a failed reentry or undershoot of the intended landing zone.
The Russians, OTOH, had no qualms about automating the landing. The Buran Space Shuttle flew once with no crew aboard, and safely landed on full automatic.
Haven't orbital burns been computer controlled since the beginning human spaceflight.
Pretty much. On most manned craft (going all the way back to Apollo), all the crew needs to do is punch in the preloaded program number, and the vehicle will attempt to do the rest. (That's why in the movies you always see the crew pull a booklet out before attempting a manuver. It's a list of program codes.) On the Space Shuttle, new telemetry can be uploaded by the ground crews. In theory, ground control is in a better position to compute an orbital burn.
The situation in this case isn't so much that it isn't automatic, as there's very little that can be done if things go wrong. By the time you know that something is wrong, the craft may have already burnt up. Even if it hasn't, by the time your response gets there, the craft could be in a completely unpredictable sitation.
With all the problems NASA and the ESA have had with losing craft, they always get a bit tense during orbital insertions and landing operations.
I kind of screwed up the formatting on that one. The first link points to Bill Gates' dream home, the second link points to the Xanadu tourist attractions that were in Wisconsin Dells and Florida, and the third link is a joke about watching Xanadu the movie inside of Xanadu, the ancient "house of the future".:-)
I have seen many posts wher Ipod users rave about how Itunes remembers what tracks they listen to and rank or suggest playlist based on your listening habits.
Well, you can rank your music. This affects the algorithm that iTunes uses for the shuffling. The online store also has a feature where it suggests music you might like based on what you've purchased and/or are listening to at the moment. (The latter part is togglable.) This is pretty similar to what Amazon does with books.
Personally, I've never used either feature. There are a few long dissertations I ripped from CD that I tell iTunes never to send to the iPod, but that's about the extent of how I let it interfere.
I said I didn't buy an Ipod, you're assuming I haven't even seen one?
Seeing one and using one are two separate things. <morpheus>iPods are like the Matrix. You cannot see what it is. You must experience it for yourself.>/morpheus< Err... I mean that iPods are very much about ease of use. If you're looking to "see" lots of features, you're going to be disappointed. But in actual use, they hold up extremely well.
I have experienced plugging in a few Nanos in to PCs. It does not show up as a hard drive.
I don't know about Nanos, but I know it works on Shuffles and regular iPods.
Can you plug your Ipod in and use windows media player/winamp(without hacked plugin)/music match to sync tunes?
Music Match has had an iPod plugin for as long as I can remember. (Obviously, it can't play Windows DRMed music, but that's a different problem.) I don't know enought about WMP to answer your question, but dragging MP3s to your iPod does work.
Now that is really great news! You should probably see if you can get that as a front page Slashdot story. It's certainly worth shouting from the rooftops!
I know what tunes I like, I don't need software to recommend a playlist.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
During a long drive your friend/gf asks you: "What do you want to listen to?" Do you say: "I really like band ______?" or "Itunes says I like band _______?"
What in the world are you talking about? You say, "I really like band _____", then use the search area in iTunes to find it quickly. If you are using your iPod at the moment, thumb through the categories and find what you want to hear.
All I want is something that can play and shuffle music with easily accessible volume buttons.
iPod shuffle? iTunes randomly downloads you new music when you plug it in, then it plays through those tracks. The controls are: Volume Up, Volume Down, Play/Pause, Skip Forward, Skip Back. They're arranged in a circle, so they look like this:
--^-- <<P>> --V--
Where "P" is play, and '-' is filler so my chart looks good.:D
You can clearly see the controls here. A regular iPod can be told to do the same thing, except that it can hold your entire music library at once.
Why is Apple pretending that your Ipod isnt just a hard drive/flash memory, a PCB and a battery? Why doesn't it work as a normal drive without Itunes?
They don't, and it does. When you plug in your iPod to a PC, you can see it as a new drive. (It used to show up on Macs too, but I haven't paid enough attention lately to note if this is still the case.) Many people use their iPods as portable hard drives in addition to music players. A practice, I might add, that Apple actively encourages. (I learned about it when I overheard one of the seminars they were giving at the local Apple Store.)
But I don't own a Ipod though
Well, that explains why your post is so confusing. I think you have the wrong impression about the iPod. You might want to take another look.:-)
I'd like to ask what keeps you personally from reading e-books?
Lack of content and overreaching DRM. The selection of devices doesn't help either.
I'm a big fan of Baen's online books. They're quick to purchase, and simple to download to a Palm Pilot. And should you need to file again, you can easily redownload it from your "personal library" feature on Baen's site. Not to mention that they give away free books to get you hooked on new series.
Downloading to my Sony Clie was the perfect way to read eBooks, too. The backlight was pure white, the fonts were crisp, and the scroll-wheel on the side meant that I could hold the device in a pistol-grip in my palm rather than balancing it between my thumb and finger-tips so that I can thumb the up/down buttons on the front. (Sony screwed this up in later models, BTW. They replace the up/down buttons with a wheel, and eliminate the wheel on the side.)
The Clie wasn't so good for technical books (the layout is screwed), but for fiction it was great! I could stand on the bus and read without the difficulties of trying to turn the page on a paperback with one hand. Plus, the Clie fit in my pocket much easier than a paperback, and wouldn't lose its place when I needed to stash it away quick so that I don't miss my stop.
The only real problem I had was that I ran out of content. Baen has some great books, but they're no Simon & Schuster. I looked into other sites, but it was just too much pain and anguish for me to want to bother with. Most sites had a poor selection (though I have noted that selection has been improving lately), limited you to DRM formats (most of which don't work on a Palm Pilot), overcharged for their titles, and just generally hassled the consumer as if he was a theif who should feel honored to have limited access to stuff he paid for.
Thanks, but no thanks.
More publishers should pay attention to Jim Baen. Not only does he release titles you buy in open formats; not only does he give away free books; but he bundles CDs with many hardcover books that are chock-full of eBooks (such as the entire Honor Harrington series). In addition, the license on the CDs state that you can make copies and give them away to friends and family. No restrictions, as long as you're not making a profit.
Now THAT, is how you grow a business. Not by treating the customers like criminals, but by treating them like valued friends. =)
The ipod (like this device) was an incremental improvement over other mp3 players from the time, not revolutionary.
To a certain degree, yes. It actually had fewer features than many of its direct competitors. However, the iPod "won" on the total package as opposed to feature bloat. Its total package was smooth, easy to use, pleasant, rich in features that mattered to consumers, and decidedly unconfusing. Everything the average joe with a blinking VCR wanted in a device.
Even then, however, the iPod was only a leader in the market rather than the uncontested champion. It was the introduction of iTunes that took the total package experience of the iPod to the levels it's at today.
This is a feature that other players have trouble replicating. If they take Microsoft's DRM route (not that they have much choice), they must take the path of interfacing with third party software rather than attaining the vertical integration that Apple has. This convinces consumers that the device should work across many different music packages, thus causing frustration when the device is incompatible. (As the author of the story related about his experience with Rhapsody.)
The best positioned company to beat the iPod at the moment is Sony. They have a music store, a hardware business, and a record label. If they vertically integrate these, they might pose a challenge. Unfortunately, Sony seems to have been having difficulties in getting their act together.
This device (whilst it will almost certainly be no ipod killer in the ipod's major markets) looks & sounds pretty nice.
Agreed. My only point is that the only way to beat the iPod is to be better than the iPod rather than a psuedo-iPod.:-)
In fact, if iPod didn't loom over every conversation as the screamingly obvious point of comparison, the Z5 could be the next little thing.
Of course, that would have required that Samsung independently invent the Z5 rather than hiring away the people that produced the iPod. Thus, without the iPod, there would be no Z5.
If Samsung wants to beat Apple at their own game, they're going to have to do better than hang on their coattails. Unfortunately, every new revision of the iPod and iTunes from Apple raises the barrier to entry that much higher.
Well, it's not entirely Swedish at this point. It blew my mind when Ford ran a commercial that stated that they were "using their Volvo brand to innovate in exciting new ways." I looked it up, and sure enough. Ford bought out Volvo in 1999.
I know Mozilla does the heavy lifting here, and it's not strictly speaking a cross-platform webapp, but I still think it's potentially very useful.
Mozilla is extremely useful as a cross-OS development platform. The relatively small size of the engine means that it can easily be bundled with a large application. It's also really good for thin client development, as the browser code is designed for interacting with the network. So it does have a lot of uses, just not in the webapp arena.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually amazed that the company acted so responsibly. It would have been easy to just backtrack and forgive and forget, but they forged ahead, making an enemy and losing a customer, to try to maintain the "rules of the land". Good for them.
You have a funny definition of "responsible". If you read TFA, he went through great lengths to attempt to resolve the issue with Blizzard, keeping his emails polite at all times. He pointed out that both Logitech and Blizzard had advertised the keyboard as being good for WoW, and even offered to accept a temporary ban to make up for any accidental infractions.
Blizzard ignored all his correspondance, and went for a permanent ban, apparently in direct violation of their own terms of service.
Blizzard was WRONG, and paid no attention to a reasonable customer. I find it perfectly acceptable if he was currently considering either legal or grass roots responses to their gross negligence in the matter. If that is the best they can do for loyal customers who attempted civil resolutions, then they deserve to end up in a media circus of bad press and class action suits.
These are actually robots, but they're not the fully-autonomous solutions that Asimov was suggesting that mankind needed protection from. Thus the "laws" of robotics don't apply here, because it's still a human who's doing the thinking for the machine.
In effect, this is a safe way for ground troops to line up a kill zone, then cause lots 'o bad guys to get torn to shreds. Prior to this, troops needed to use a vehicle-mounted machine gun to get this sort of rate of fire. This was extremely limited in close quarters, where a Humvee or Tank might not fit. While it was theoretically possible to carry a machine gun to the combat zone, such weapons are difficult to transport, setup, and use in close quarters.
1. You will not see all of the searches that go through the network.
2. You will only see a tiny, tiny fraction of the hits resulting from the searches that you do see.
Neither one of these is relevant. We're talking about aquiring a statistical sample of what the populace is looking for. Having a set of nodes on different factions of the network can get you plenty to do a statistical analysis. Especially if you setup a few SuperNodes.
If all of the above happen, you may see a PUSH packet when someone tries to download a file.
That's more or less what I was thinking about when I claimed you can detect downloads. Granted, it's not terribly reliable, but it can be of interest when compared to other push requests. All in all, though, the searches would be far more interesting.
I think you're missing the point. One of the most valuable statistics to the entertainment industry is what is popular in the "underground" at the moment. That popularity is often a good indicator of what can be successfully marketed to the general public. Or as a friend of mine used to say, "By the time a music track goes mainstream, it's popularity at the clubs I go to has already come and gone."
The purpose of this tool is to harness internet downloads to find out what might be highly marketable, and what isn't. And if they can get geographic data on its popularity, they'll even be able to target their marketing in the appropriate areas.
As an aside, I think we're almost reaching a point where single-player games are getting under-served.
Amen! What the world today really needs is more Guybrush Threepwood! Which is to say, more adventure games chock full of puzzles, humor, and living environments to explore. The recent fan game Stargate Adventure really reminded me of how much fun those old games were. Sure, they didn't have "Three-Dee", but that was okay. They had distinctively attractive artwork that gave a much more organic feel to the game than today's 3D-based games. They also provided the perfect viewpoint for playing out a television or movie in a game.
In fact, many of the more serious adventure games were spinoffs of movies or television. Star Trek 25th anniversay is an example that comes to mind, as is Star Trek: A Final Unity. Another good example is Indiana Jones. The Dig even had a book version of the story!
Today, all that creativity has been shunned in favor of more action and 3D graphics. (Not to mention "adult" themes.) Can we have back a few games that are actually games rather than "entertainment products?" Please?
And how pray tell will you acheive this?
1. GNUTella networks send the data through many clients before it reaches its destination. By monitoring this traffic with a modified client, one can get a reasonably good sampling of what users are searching for and/or downloading.
2. Unless the torrent is private, anyone can connect to the server and all kinds of stats on the number of seeds and leechers.
I'm not up on how Kazaa or eDonkey work, so I won't comment on those. But the very nature of these networks do make it possible to obtain useful stats.
Falun Gong is a rung away from Scientology on the crazy ladder to spiritual enlightenment.
It was also both officially and unofficially endorsed by the Chinese government. Then at some point they changed their minds (likely because it was becomes too powerful of a religion), and started a disinformation campaign against them.
I'm not a supporter of Falun Gong, but I have known a few practitioners who have escaped China. They are certainly no Church of Scientology, and they definitely don't represent such a significant threat that the Chinese government ignores its own constitution to persecute them.
I've had quite a few Chinese coworkers and friends. I also have a high respect for the Chinese people and much of their culture. But I spit on the farce they call a "government of the people." It's a government of selfish power that attempts to subvert the thinking of the common person into believing that such subjigation is what they want.
According to the article, the reporter did try to contact Mr. Wang. OTOH, Wang claims that he was never contacted. Given that Mr. Wang is the perpetrator of a hoax, I'm inclined to believe that the blogger intentionally made himself hard to reach to insure his goals.
This makes it sound like all the major news outlets were up in arms about it. In fact, a quick check of Google news for "Massage Milk", sorted by date, shows that there was the BBC story on the 8th, then numerous reports about it being a hoax the next day.
The BBC article states:
(Emphasis mine.)
The WSJ article claims that the BBC updated its article, but it doesn't make clear what was updated. The few blogs that picked up the story seem to support the text I quoted above. Meaning, that the BBC was not unreasonable in its report, even if it did assume the worst.
As far as I can tell, the only irresponsible party here is the blogger himself. He created a situation that directly insinutated government shutdown, then tried to play the matter up as "irresponsible western journalism." He's proved nothing except to do damage to the free speech movement in China.
Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?
Yes, actually. As soon as Caldera took over the SCO Unix business, they pretty much dropped any real support for the platform and focused their efforts on sueing Linux. If the reports are to be believed, their distributors were about ready to hang them during the various regional meetings. The SCO corporate reps came across as somewhat anxious about all the bad will towards them, but definitely not apologetic.
The fallout of these meetings was expected to be that SCO would lose a lot of their local distributors. The results of which would be catastrophic if SCO were actually trying to do business. Now that they realize that their lawsuit has failed, they've found that they've screwed themselves on being able to do business. In addition, they've burned their OSS bridge (guess we won't be seeing an opensco.org, eh?), leaving them with no real edge in the market. So now they're trying to convince businesses that they can provide OSS support without being an OSS supporter.
My prediction? You're going to be seeing quite a few new Solaris 10/OpenSolaris installations very soon now.
I think it is good to rant about this because he has a good point: those web reviews sites don't wanna lose their jobs. So they play along with the devs, not the people.
*sigh* PC Gamer, PC Gamer, wherefore art thou PC Gamer? Thoust were taken over by PC Accelerator, forever to be changed into a mediocre magazine. The PC Gamer thy once were is forever dead. Dead, and floating upon the winds of time. Farewell pointy stick and coconut monkey, I knewest thou well.
The best counter examples are during the launch, particularly with the timing of SRB ignition and SSME shutdown. Get those wrong and its all over very quickly.
True enough. Though there's little that could be done by a human anyway, so you just have to trust that the computer will get it right.
BTW, scratch the part about the explosive bolts. I'm doing some checking, and it looks like NASA abandoned the bolts at some point. As far as I can tell, they're hydrolic now, but I don't know if they're still locked in a down position. (I assume so, as there's no good way to reseal the gear doors for reentry.)
I don't see that in the ALSJ. They got a quantity light but Armstrong had the vehicle on the ground within the required 60 seconds.
Double-checking that, it looks like you're right. I'm probably thinking of the fact that there were several situations which called for a possible abort (including the 1201 program code which resulting in an abort during the last simulator run).
As a result if they have to abandon a shuttle in orbit there is absolutely no way to recover the vehicle.
More or less. I can't say I disagree with their decision, though. The Shuttle was the most complex spacecraft built to date. Anything that could be done to improve safety was a good option consider. I'd imagine that a new vehicle like the Shuttle would probably carry an arming switch that, once activated, would allow computer control over the gear.
there must be hundreds of things which the computers could break during the flight which would cause loss of the mission.
Yes and no. Most everything else the computer might do is recoverable. If it begins applying the wrong control surfaces, manual control can be applied. If it miscalculates a burn, mission control or the crew can override with new parameters for a correction burn. If it begins opening the bay doors, they can be reclosed. Only the landing gear is completely unrecoverable, as it is deployed with explosive bolts. (!) Thus, even under the best conditions (deployment in orbit), there would be nothing the crew could do to fix the situation.
All the apollo lunar landings were flown manually for the last minute or so.
Actually, Armstrong took manual control from the computer during the Apollo 11 landing. This was due to several program errors (the radar switch was in the wrong position) as well as mistakes in automatic guidance. Armstrong was advised to abort at one point, but chose to land the Eagle anyway.
My recollection is that shuttle landings are generally flown manually.
Pretty much everything up until the landing gear is released is automatic. The Shuttle could be landed on automatic, but the engineers made an intentional decision to make the landing gear deployment a 100% manual process. The reason for this is that the landing gear cannot be stowed in flight once it is deployed. Should a computer error occur, premature deployment of the gear could cause a failed reentry or undershoot of the intended landing zone.
The Russians, OTOH, had no qualms about automating the landing. The Buran Space Shuttle flew once with no crew aboard, and safely landed on full automatic.
Haven't orbital burns been computer controlled since the beginning human spaceflight.
Pretty much. On most manned craft (going all the way back to Apollo), all the crew needs to do is punch in the preloaded program number, and the vehicle will attempt to do the rest. (That's why in the movies you always see the crew pull a booklet out before attempting a manuver. It's a list of program codes.) On the Space Shuttle, new telemetry can be uploaded by the ground crews. In theory, ground control is in a better position to compute an orbital burn.
The situation in this case isn't so much that it isn't automatic, as there's very little that can be done if things go wrong. By the time you know that something is wrong, the craft may have already burnt up. Even if it hasn't, by the time your response gets there, the craft could be in a completely unpredictable sitation.
With all the problems NASA and the ESA have had with losing craft, they always get a bit tense during orbital insertions and landing operations.
I kind of screwed up the formatting on that one. The first link points to Bill Gates' dream home, the second link points to the Xanadu tourist attractions that were in Wisconsin Dells and Florida, and the third link is a joke about watching Xanadu the movie inside of Xanadu, the ancient "house of the future". :-)
Xanadu of course. No, not that Xanadu. THIS Xanadu.
Just imagine! A home with a built in Apple II computer, where you can watch Xanadu in your kitchen on a 10" built-in screen! What could be better?
Xanadu, your neon lights will shine...
I have seen many posts wher Ipod users rave about how Itunes remembers what tracks they listen to and rank or suggest playlist based on your listening habits.
Well, you can rank your music. This affects the algorithm that iTunes uses for the shuffling. The online store also has a feature where it suggests music you might like based on what you've purchased and/or are listening to at the moment. (The latter part is togglable.) This is pretty similar to what Amazon does with books.
Personally, I've never used either feature. There are a few long dissertations I ripped from CD that I tell iTunes never to send to the iPod, but that's about the extent of how I let it interfere.
I said I didn't buy an Ipod, you're assuming I haven't even seen one?
Seeing one and using one are two separate things. <morpheus>iPods are like the Matrix. You cannot see what it is. You must experience it for yourself.>/morpheus< Err... I mean that iPods are very much about ease of use. If you're looking to "see" lots of features, you're going to be disappointed. But in actual use, they hold up extremely well.
I have experienced plugging in a few Nanos in to PCs. It does not show up as a hard drive.
I don't know about Nanos, but I know it works on Shuffles and regular iPods.
Can you plug your Ipod in and use windows media player/winamp(without hacked plugin)/music match to sync tunes?
Music Match has had an iPod plugin for as long as I can remember. (Obviously, it can't play Windows DRMed music, but that's a different problem.) I don't know enought about WMP to answer your question, but dragging MP3s to your iPod does work.
Now that is really great news! You should probably see if you can get that as a front page Slashdot story. It's certainly worth shouting from the rooftops!
I have no idea what you're talking about.
During a long drive your friend/gf asks you: "What do you want to listen to?"
Do you say:
"I really like band ______?"
or
"Itunes says I like band _______?"
What in the world are you talking about? You say, "I really like band _____", then use the search area in iTunes to find it quickly. If you are using your iPod at the moment, thumb through the categories and find what you want to hear.
All I want is something that can play and shuffle music with easily accessible volume buttons.
iPod shuffle? iTunes randomly downloads you new music when you plug it in, then it plays through those tracks. The controls are: Volume Up, Volume Down, Play/Pause, Skip Forward, Skip Back. They're arranged in a circle, so they look like this:Where "P" is play, and '-' is filler so my chart looks good.
You can clearly see the controls here. A regular iPod can be told to do the same thing, except that it can hold your entire music library at once.
Why is Apple pretending that your Ipod isnt just a hard drive/flash memory, a PCB and a battery? Why doesn't it work as a normal drive without Itunes?
They don't, and it does. When you plug in your iPod to a PC, you can see it as a new drive. (It used to show up on Macs too, but I haven't paid enough attention lately to note if this is still the case.) Many people use their iPods as portable hard drives in addition to music players. A practice, I might add, that Apple actively encourages. (I learned about it when I overheard one of the seminars they were giving at the local Apple Store.)
But I don't own a Ipod though
Well, that explains why your post is so confusing. I think you have the wrong impression about the iPod. You might want to take another look.
I'd like to ask what keeps you personally from reading e-books?
Lack of content and overreaching DRM. The selection of devices doesn't help either.
I'm a big fan of Baen's online books. They're quick to purchase, and simple to download to a Palm Pilot. And should you need to file again, you can easily redownload it from your "personal library" feature on Baen's site. Not to mention that they give away free books to get you hooked on new series.
Downloading to my Sony Clie was the perfect way to read eBooks, too. The backlight was pure white, the fonts were crisp, and the scroll-wheel on the side meant that I could hold the device in a pistol-grip in my palm rather than balancing it between my thumb and finger-tips so that I can thumb the up/down buttons on the front. (Sony screwed this up in later models, BTW. They replace the up/down buttons with a wheel, and eliminate the wheel on the side.)
The Clie wasn't so good for technical books (the layout is screwed), but for fiction it was great! I could stand on the bus and read without the difficulties of trying to turn the page on a paperback with one hand. Plus, the Clie fit in my pocket much easier than a paperback, and wouldn't lose its place when I needed to stash it away quick so that I don't miss my stop.
The only real problem I had was that I ran out of content. Baen has some great books, but they're no Simon & Schuster. I looked into other sites, but it was just too much pain and anguish for me to want to bother with. Most sites had a poor selection (though I have noted that selection has been improving lately), limited you to DRM formats (most of which don't work on a Palm Pilot), overcharged for their titles, and just generally hassled the consumer as if he was a theif who should feel honored to have limited access to stuff he paid for.
Thanks, but no thanks.
More publishers should pay attention to Jim Baen. Not only does he release titles you buy in open formats; not only does he give away free books; but he bundles CDs with many hardcover books that are chock-full of eBooks (such as the entire Honor Harrington series). In addition, the license on the CDs state that you can make copies and give them away to friends and family. No restrictions, as long as you're not making a profit.
Now THAT, is how you grow a business. Not by treating the customers like criminals, but by treating them like valued friends. =)
The ipod (like this device) was an incremental improvement over other mp3 players from the time, not revolutionary.
:-)
To a certain degree, yes. It actually had fewer features than many of its direct competitors. However, the iPod "won" on the total package as opposed to feature bloat. Its total package was smooth, easy to use, pleasant, rich in features that mattered to consumers, and decidedly unconfusing. Everything the average joe with a blinking VCR wanted in a device.
Even then, however, the iPod was only a leader in the market rather than the uncontested champion. It was the introduction of iTunes that took the total package experience of the iPod to the levels it's at today.
This is a feature that other players have trouble replicating. If they take Microsoft's DRM route (not that they have much choice), they must take the path of interfacing with third party software rather than attaining the vertical integration that Apple has. This convinces consumers that the device should work across many different music packages, thus causing frustration when the device is incompatible. (As the author of the story related about his experience with Rhapsody.)
The best positioned company to beat the iPod at the moment is Sony. They have a music store, a hardware business, and a record label. If they vertically integrate these, they might pose a challenge. Unfortunately, Sony seems to have been having difficulties in getting their act together.
This device (whilst it will almost certainly be no ipod killer in the ipod's major markets) looks & sounds pretty nice.
Agreed. My only point is that the only way to beat the iPod is to be better than the iPod rather than a psuedo-iPod.
In fact, if iPod didn't loom over every conversation as the screamingly obvious point of comparison, the Z5 could be the next little thing.
Of course, that would have required that Samsung independently invent the Z5 rather than hiring away the people that produced the iPod. Thus, without the iPod, there would be no Z5.
If Samsung wants to beat Apple at their own game, they're going to have to do better than hang on their coattails. Unfortunately, every new revision of the iPod and iTunes from Apple raises the barrier to entry that much higher.
Well, it's not entirely Swedish at this point. It blew my mind when Ford ran a commercial that stated that they were "using their Volvo brand to innovate in exciting new ways." I looked it up, and sure enough. Ford bought out Volvo in 1999.
I know Mozilla does the heavy lifting here, and it's not strictly speaking a cross-platform webapp, but I still think it's potentially very useful.
:-)
Mozilla is extremely useful as a cross-OS development platform. The relatively small size of the engine means that it can easily be bundled with a large application. It's also really good for thin client development, as the browser code is designed for interacting with the network. So it does have a lot of uses, just not in the webapp arena.