the samsunk sph-i300, which is the balls by the way a color palm-based phone that also recently came out handles this well -
1. you can be on the phone and switch to any palm app, and the phone will automatically switch to speakerphone mode - and yes, it does a pretty decent job as a speakerphone
2. or, if you have your headset plugged in, that works great as well.
i have been using the I300 for a couple of months now. The thing is great. I have very few complaints. Sure, it could be smaller, but its way smaller than my Vx + phone was, and it still will fit in my front pocket if necessary.
Great screen - its so bright, i made the mistake of opening it in a dark jazz club the other night and got the attention of the whole room.
its the best phone i have used on the sprint network as far as reception and voice quality.
by various benchmarks it is currently the fastest palm machine out there.
Evolution has as its central tenant that variations in individuals of a particular population (owing to, perhaps, mutation) cause some to be better adapted for a particular environment than others. Those better adapted will on the average have more offspring, and the beneficial genes will be present in these offspring at a higher rate than in the average population. Thus the general tendency of the population, to become better adapted to an environment.
What happens, though, when the population gets smart enough to alter their environment? Air conditioning and heating systems remove the need for individuals to worry about temperature extremes. Antibiotics mean that individuals with weaker immune systems are not at a disadvantage when competing with more hardy individuals. People born with degenerative diseases can go on to have productive lives and offspring.
We have a long way to go before we are complete masters of our environment and selves, but the trend is there. Evolution is a natural process. Tweaking our genes to eliminate genetic disease, or increase longevity or have blue-eyed children or whatever is NOT evolution - it is directed and deliberate change, the opposite of evolution. Maybe not necessarily wise change,, but natural selection plays no part in it. People are animals, still, but I think of it being sort of a graduation day when we learn how to remove ourselves completely from the evolutionary fray.
there werethree of us in our office that ripped our rather large cd collections.
we are up to approximately 140gb.
when you have so many mp3s, new problems arise.
every jukebox i have ever tried gets rather unhappy when you feed it that many files.
we built our own web-based system for playing, built around a relational db and it was pretty neat, though a total hack job.
now we are building in our spare time a system that is jini based and has distributed services for playback, indexing / importing, and perhaps ripping and re-encoding as well as a few other things.
its all controllable by a web browser. players are independant of the remote control, as well. everything is distributed. this gives you the ability to control players running on other machines, such as set the playlist for the machine running down the hall, and control its volume. what use this has i dont know, but its kinda fun.
Salon is an awesome site. People are going to have to get used to the idea that they can't get everything for free anymore.
Salon has been on the hairy edge of going under for a while. If you enjoy reading their articles, now is the time to sign up for salon premium. Then, two problems will be solved:
As an owner of a hacked ReplayTV (i stuck in an 80gb drive) i can tell you that, imho for most people going beyond 80 or 100 hours is not all that helpful. The ReplayTV is a time-shifting device, not an archiving device.
As the space you have for storage goes up, the problem you immediately run into is the inability to record two things at the same time. This happens more often than you might think, principally because networks compete for the same audience by sheduling shows that have similar appeal opposite each other (the bastards) like for example, X-Files and Dark Angel.
So, personally, i think that ReplayTV would be better served by sticking in an extra tuner in there in preference to a bigger harddrive.
Tivo has announced a unit with two tuners, but i believe it only works with directtv. similarly, the microsoft ultimatetv can record two things at the same time, but only off directtv.
Of course, once there are two tuners in there, it will be easier to use up the space. Harddrives are upgradeable, however.
Another approach, since these new units are going to be networkable, would be to be able to network two or more units together. Have them negotiate between them who is going to record what when, and then present one user interface to control all of them. that would be nifty, though an expensive way to be able to record two things at once...
also, as i understand it, there is nothing preventing someone other than microsoft from implementing java as a crl for.net. all that microsoft has implied is that it won't be them.
I would agree with the above post. If I had it to do over again, I would probably go the physics / cs double major.
As it was, I got an EE (with a concentration in computer engineering) undergrad degree, which more than adequately prepared me for a CS masters degree.
My experience is that either you have the sort of mind for programming or you dont. If you do, then any math / physics / cs / ce undergraduate degree will serve you adequately. If you dont' then whatever program you choose will likely be unpleasant.
This idea has always really appealed to me, because its so simple in concept, and so elegant.
However, the reason for even considering building one, is that it will greatly reduce the cost of getting things to orbit. However, to build this thing will require an unbelievable number of spaceflights, using old, expensive technologies...
So, can you justify bankrupting yourself to build something that might recoup your investment far in the future, or do you put it off until spaceflight becomes cheap enough to justify building it? And, once spaceflight becomes that cheap, is there a need to build it anymore?
I think it should be done, and that it probably will, eventually, I just dont think it really will be a bootstrapping sort of technology that will catapult us into space - we cant build the thing until we are already able to get their easily.
yah, but strictly speaking people (at least people in the better-off parts of the world for now) aren't evolving anymore.
With natural selection, an individual's likelyhood of passing on their genes is dependant on their fitness for their particular environment. More "fit" individuals have a better chance of passing on their genes than less "fit" ones. Successive generations get more and more "fit".
However, people now change their environment to suit them. Cant reach the food? - buy a ladder. Sun too bright? Put on some coppertone. Too ugly to land a mate? Start a rock band. Have some debilitating inherited genetic disorder? Go to the clinic and get some gene therapy.
I dont think that the companies that are providing these free PCs and internet access are doing it out of the kindness of their corporate hearts.
What is not really mentioned in Jon's article, is that sticking a pc in each employees home, complete with net connection, also gives the corporation a pipe directly to the employee that is available 24/7. It gives the employer another means of trying to coax more work out of the employee.
I haven't listened to them in years. i must be getting old. Their site, though is nauseating. Apparently they recently changed access to their chat and forums to be "members-only" - probably were sick of getting shit for their position on the whole digital music thing, would be my guess.
they even have advertisements on there for wine and chocolate! How lame can you get...
Uhhhh.. Its been a while, but it was my understanding that you can't "shield" magnetic fields like this. You can't wrap metal foil around something and consider it shielded like you can do with electrical fields.
For an example at the other end of the scale, First and second generation MRI machines used large iron domes erected around the magnets. These domes would perturb and draw in the fieldlines emanating from the mri's main magnet, because iron is much more ferromagnetic than the surrounding air. It didnt shield stuff outside the dome, though it did reduce how far the field emanated from the mri magnet by essentially reshaping its fieldlines.
The amount of iron or similar material was of course proportional to both the strenght of the field emnanated by the mri, and to the amount and rapidity with which you wanted the fieldstrength to decrease past the dome (typically, the goal was 5 gauss field strength at any point where patients or the general public might be able to access, as this is the federal safety limit for pacemakers and other metallic implants).
Putting this much iron near the mri has the unfortunate side-effect of screwing up the mri magnet's magnetic field, so small bits of iron would be strategically spaced to offset this distortion (shimming).
New MRI machines usually are actively shielded. The current-carrying superconductive coils that make up the MRI Magnet (3 sets, one for each axis) essentially have a complimentary set that generate fields act in unison but opposite to the main coils, thus "cancelling out" the fields generated outside the bore of the magnet. same issues apply with one field screwing up the other, and lots of calculations and adjustments have to be made to fix things. Active shielding greatly increases the rate at which the field weakens outside the magnet, to the point where now it is easy to cram even a 1.5 tesla magnet in a truck or even motorhome-sized vehicle and drive it down the highway while the field is up.
The point of this long-winded post is that even though we are talking about much smaller field strengths, I suspect that the shielding issues will be more than trivial.
Also, I wonder how sensitive these things will be to EMPs? (Just saw "Until the End Of the World" again the other night.)
I have been thinking... Really, right now the only use for a pda is to bring some useful subset of the data and capabilities found on your pc with you. Some compromises have to be made to account for the smaller cpus, memory, storage, and imput limitations of the pda. blah blah blah.
You could argue that some experiences on a well-designed pda are BETTER than a pc (i sure can find someones phone number quicker on a pda sitting in my pocket than in MS outlook, for example). Perhaps the designers of the palmos when faced with many more limitations in possible user interfaces had to pay greater attention to how people actually use things.
It seems like the trends towards ubiquitous computing are accellerating. There's the "wireless bandwidth everywhere" trend. There's the alternate display / input devices trend, the most exciting of which to me are the eInk efforts and the similar research that is happening at Xerox with regards to electronic paper. CPU and storage go up and up and up in speed / size.
A future that I envision will have computer displays and connectivity everywhere. Your news might be delivered to your wallpaper in your bathroom. The tag in your shirt might let you order a replacement by pressing on it. Your shoes might always know where you are, and inform the rest of your clothing your exact location.
All of your data might be stored on the equivalent of a "home server" or it might be distrubuted around the internet such that you cant say exactly where it is. If there is connectivity everywhere you are, and your necessary information is reachable from wherever you are, why carry a pda or anything with you at all?
the longer we wait the cheaper / easier it will be
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
I used to be the biggest proponent of the manned exploration of space. I really wanted to be able to go there before I died. Now, though, with the exception of the nuke ourselves / asteroid impact total destruction of our species argument, it seems to me that we would be better off funnelling any spending into basic science.
I know from a political standpoint that is unlikely (noone seems to want to fund basic science), but its kind of like moore's law all over again.
As that recent slashdot posting that argued that any computationally intensive project that takes more than 2.5 years to complete should be put off for 2.5 years, because it will actually be finished sooner if started with the much higher performance computers available then (for equivalent $$), the same goes for space exploration.
Why risk people and tremendous capital on missions of questionable utility other than for PR and warm fuzzy feelings, when funnelling that money into research on fancy new interplanetary drives, automated probes, infrastructure (like that solar system internet thingie), etc. etc. might get us there as quickly, but much more safely and efficiently?
we need to do better than what we did with the moon. Sure, we muscled our way there, using crude technology and brute force. And, we haven't been back in decades. And, going back now would be extremely difficult. We need technology and infrastructure and a plan that will get us out into space permanently.
This is a great topic, one I've been meaning to post myself.
What I have been looking for specifically is a wrap-around sort of desk, like in Zero Effect or the Matrix, that would comfortably and spaciously hold 3 21" monitors and a large laptop. It looks like its possible to construct something pretty neat from anthro, but they dont seem to want to return my emails...
Does anyone out there have any experience or suggestions?
I was about ready to do it myself, and had been planning for this winter (there are many activities that you can't do within 3 or 6 months of the surgery, incl scubadiving or general watersports (i like to kayak), so i wanted to time it so that it wouldnt impact fun things).
However, i started to read some alarming things about it. While the percentages of people who have markedly improved vision is high, and quite a high percentage of those end up with 20/20 vision, what isnt often quoted is that a large percentage of people have significantly worsened night vision, permanently. Many people are no longer able to drive at night at all.
My night vision is already not so hot. Also, if your vision isnt stable, it will of course continue to not be stable after your surgery. This is also a problem i have been having, though at least my vision has been improving.
There are several alternative surgery technologies that show great promise and less risk that have not been approved yet. Things are changing so fast that it just seems prudent to not take such a risk until the techniques are more mature...
Sorry i dont have pointers to where I read this stuff or actual facts and figures. That time magazine cover from a few weeks ago was worth reading. If I were you, though, I would hesitate to make such a huge decision based on anecdotal evidence and on an immature technology, when things are changing so rapidly...
It seems to me that reports of Java's death are greatly exaggerated...
Wasn't there a post on slashdot just last week that showed Java's continuing rise in popularity, at the expense of C++ and C, forcasting a landscape totally dominated by java and perl a few years out?
Every programmer that I know prefers java (where appropriate) to anything else. Java may not have lived up to its hype, but what has??
Man, stories like this really are really annoying. Especially after having been online for about 16 hours straight, trying to finish up a project...
Aside from chemical addiction / dependency involving substances like heroin and nicotine, its an issue with the PERSON, not the thing that they are addicted to. (Unless microsoft has figured out how to put subliminal messages in their dialog boxes, or to tune monitor emissions to control our brains.)
I'm sure there are people out there addicted to picking their nose, or farting showtunes...
An interesting thing about the internet is it really can serve as just a conduit to information. Maybe for example, a large portion of these people are really addicted to nose-picking, and the internet is just serving as a convenient way for them to read everything they can about new nose-picking techniques. I guess we will never know.
Its just more of the same shit, more news to print that casts a negative light on technological change and those who embrace it, instead of trying to understand what might make some people want to escape their lives into their computers...
Posting to this thread is probably like beating a dead horse, but what the hell... It's cathartic.
First of all, I must say that the two Katz articles were definitely the most moving things that I have read in some time. Like most everyone that responded to this thread, I was something of a freak in grammar school and beyond. I was way too smart for my own good. I didn't have many experiences as horrible as some of those that you have posted here, and I was liked; there was just so little common ground between me and my peers (or my parents for that matter), that I turned inward. Being quiet and shy, no one noticed, except for the occasional teacher that took advantage of me, I'm assuming because they felt threatened, and a few wonderful ones that encouraged me any way they could.
I still have bad feelings about those days, but for the last several years I have been congratulating myself (as many of you seem to be doing) on my accomplishments. Many of the people I went to high school with probably look back on those years as the best ones of their life, and here I am, an obscenely well paid software developer and owner of my own consulting company, with so many options available its daunting...
After reading Katz's articles, though, something became clear. In a very real sense, I still am that boy. I still harbor a lot of bad feelings from those days. Healing is not the same thing as learning to cope via avoidance and denial, and ego self-inflation. In fact, such things prevent healing. I am still upset. When I read the stories about kids expressing their understanding of some of the possible catalysts for this tragedy being punished for it, I get so angry. And, when I hear that the Congress is going to look into the effects of Doom on our Nation's youth, I come closer to understanding how years of torture can drive someone over the edge towards violence and hate than I really want to be.
Slashdot Mirror
the samsunk sph-i300, which is the balls by the way a color palm-based phone that also recently came out handles this well -
1. you can be on the phone and switch to any palm app, and the phone will automatically switch to speakerphone mode - and yes, it does a pretty decent job as a speakerphone
2. or, if you have your headset plugged in, that works great as well.
i would imagine the treo would work similarly
i have been using the I300 for a couple of months now. The thing is great. I have very few complaints. Sure, it could be smaller, but its way smaller than my Vx + phone was, and it still will fit in my front pocket if necessary.
Great screen - its so bright, i made the mistake of opening it in a dark jazz club the other night and got the attention of the whole room.
its the best phone i have used on the sprint network as far as reception and voice quality.
by various benchmarks it is currently the fastest palm machine out there.
for more info see samsung's page or a great message board about the phone, including some nacent hacking projects
Evolution has as its central tenant that variations in individuals of a particular population (owing to, perhaps, mutation) cause some to be better adapted for a particular environment than others. Those better adapted will on the average have more offspring, and the beneficial genes will be present in these offspring at a higher rate than in the average population. Thus the general tendency of the population, to become better adapted to an environment.
What happens, though, when the population gets smart enough to alter their environment? Air conditioning and heating systems remove the need for individuals to worry about temperature extremes. Antibiotics mean that individuals with weaker immune systems are not at a disadvantage when competing with more hardy individuals. People born with degenerative diseases can go on to have productive lives and offspring.
We have a long way to go before we are complete masters of our environment and selves, but the trend is there. Evolution is a natural process. Tweaking our genes to eliminate genetic disease, or increase longevity or have blue-eyed children or whatever is NOT evolution - it is directed and deliberate change, the opposite of evolution. Maybe not necessarily wise change,, but natural selection plays no part in it. People are animals, still, but I think of it being sort of a graduation day when we learn how to remove ourselves completely from the evolutionary fray.
sorry, couldnt resist.
there werethree of us in our office that ripped our rather large cd collections.
we are up to approximately 140gb.
when you have so many mp3s, new problems arise.
every jukebox i have ever tried gets rather unhappy when you feed it that many files.
we built our own web-based system for playing, built around a relational db and it was pretty neat, though a total hack job.
now we are building in our spare time a system that is jini based and has distributed services for playback, indexing / importing, and perhaps ripping and re-encoding as well as a few other things.
its all controllable by a web browser. players are independant of the remote control, as well. everything is distributed. this gives you the ability to control players running on other machines, such as set the playlist for the machine running down the hall, and control its volume. what use this has i dont know, but its kinda fun.
Salon is an awesome site. People are going to have to get used to the idea that they can't get everything for free anymore.
Salon has been on the hairy edge of going under for a while. If you enjoy reading their articles, now is the time to sign up for salon premium. Then, two problems will be solved:
- no more annoying adds
- Salon won't dissappear
i guess i should read the faq before posting. I retract my earlier complaints.
ReplayTV is NOT going to offer two tuners because then why would people want to order multiple units?
The multiple unit setup sounds pretty much ideal - the thing sounds as scalable as you might want it to be
As an owner of a hacked ReplayTV (i stuck in an 80gb drive) i can tell you that, imho for most people going beyond 80 or 100 hours is not all that helpful. The ReplayTV is a time-shifting device, not an archiving device.
As the space you have for storage goes up, the problem you immediately run into is the inability to record two things at the same time. This happens more often than you might think, principally because networks compete for the same audience by sheduling shows that have similar appeal opposite each other (the bastards) like for example, X-Files and Dark Angel.
So, personally, i think that ReplayTV would be better served by sticking in an extra tuner in there in preference to a bigger harddrive.
Tivo has announced a unit with two tuners, but i believe it only works with directtv. similarly, the microsoft ultimatetv can record two things at the same time, but only off directtv.
Of course, once there are two tuners in there, it will be easier to use up the space. Harddrives are upgradeable, however.
Another approach, since these new units are going to be networkable, would be to be able to network two or more units together. Have them negotiate between them who is going to record what when, and then present one user interface to control all of them. that would be nifty, though an expensive way to be able to record two things at once...
also, as i understand it, there is nothing preventing someone other than microsoft from implementing java as a crl for .net. all that microsoft has implied is that it won't be them.
i wish i had some moderator points, so i could mod this up.
I would agree with the above post. If I had it to do over again, I would probably go the physics / cs double major.
As it was, I got an EE (with a concentration in computer engineering) undergrad degree, which more than adequately prepared me for a CS masters degree.
My experience is that either you have the sort of mind for programming or you dont. If you do, then any math / physics / cs / ce undergraduate degree will serve you adequately. If you dont' then whatever program you choose will likely be unpleasant.
This idea has always really appealed to me, because its so simple in concept, and so elegant.
However, the reason for even considering building one, is that it will greatly reduce the cost of getting things to orbit. However, to build this thing will require an unbelievable number of spaceflights, using old, expensive technologies...
So, can you justify bankrupting yourself to build something that might recoup your investment far in the future, or do you put it off until spaceflight becomes cheap enough to justify building it? And, once spaceflight becomes that cheap, is there a need to build it anymore?
I think it should be done, and that it probably will, eventually, I just dont think it really will be a bootstrapping sort of technology that will catapult us into space - we cant build the thing until we are already able to get their easily.
dude,
he said SWITCH
but, true, i just bought a 8 port switch the other day for $129
yah, but strictly speaking people (at least people in the better-off parts of the world for now) aren't evolving anymore.
With natural selection, an individual's likelyhood of passing on their genes is dependant on their fitness for their particular environment. More "fit" individuals have a better chance of passing on their genes than less "fit" ones. Successive generations get more and more "fit".
However, people now change their environment to suit them. Cant reach the food? - buy a ladder. Sun too bright? Put on some coppertone. Too ugly to land a mate? Start a rock band. Have some debilitating inherited genetic disorder? Go to the clinic and get some gene therapy.
I dont think that the companies that are providing these free PCs and internet access are doing it out of the kindness of their corporate hearts.
What is not really mentioned in Jon's article, is that sticking a pc in each employees home, complete with net connection, also gives the corporation a pipe directly to the employee that is available 24/7. It gives the employer another means of trying to coax more work out of the employee.
That said, I think it is still a good thing.
I haven't listened to them in years. i must be getting old. Their site, though is nauseating. Apparently they recently changed access to their chat and forums to be "members-only" - probably were sick of getting shit for their position on the whole digital music thing, would be my guess.
they even have advertisements on there for wine and chocolate! How lame can you get...
Uhhhh.. Its been a while, but it was my understanding that you can't "shield" magnetic fields like this. You can't wrap metal foil around something and consider it shielded like you can do with electrical fields.
For an example at the other end of the scale, First and second generation MRI machines used large iron domes erected around the magnets. These domes would perturb and draw in the fieldlines emanating from the mri's main magnet, because iron is much more ferromagnetic than the surrounding air. It didnt shield stuff outside the dome, though it did reduce how far the field emanated from the mri magnet by essentially reshaping its fieldlines.
The amount of iron or similar material was of course proportional to both the strenght of the field emnanated by the mri, and to the amount and rapidity with which you wanted the fieldstrength to decrease past the dome (typically, the goal was 5 gauss field strength at any point where patients or the general public might be able to access, as this is the federal safety limit for pacemakers and other metallic implants).
Putting this much iron near the mri has the unfortunate side-effect of screwing up the mri magnet's magnetic field, so small bits of iron would be strategically spaced to offset this distortion (shimming).
New MRI machines usually are actively shielded. The current-carrying superconductive coils that make up the MRI Magnet (3 sets, one for each axis) essentially have a complimentary set that generate fields act in unison but opposite to the main coils, thus "cancelling out" the fields generated outside the bore of the magnet. same issues apply with one field screwing up the other, and lots of calculations and adjustments have to be made to fix things. Active shielding greatly increases the rate at which the field weakens outside the magnet, to the point where now it is easy to cram even a 1.5 tesla magnet in a truck or even motorhome-sized vehicle and drive it down the highway while the field is up.
The point of this long-winded post is that even though we are talking about much smaller field strengths, I suspect that the shielding issues will be more than trivial.
Also, I wonder how sensitive these things will be to EMPs? (Just saw "Until the End Of the World" again the other night.)
I have been thinking... Really, right now the only use for a pda is to bring some useful subset of the data and capabilities found on your pc with you. Some compromises have to be made to account for the smaller cpus, memory, storage, and imput limitations of the pda. blah blah blah.
You could argue that some experiences on a well-designed pda are BETTER than a pc (i sure can find someones phone number quicker on a pda sitting in my pocket than in MS outlook, for example). Perhaps the designers of the palmos when faced with many more limitations in possible user interfaces had to pay greater attention to how people actually use things.
It seems like the trends towards ubiquitous computing are accellerating. There's the "wireless bandwidth everywhere" trend. There's the alternate display / input devices trend, the most exciting of which to me are the eInk efforts and the similar research that is happening at Xerox with regards to electronic paper. CPU and storage go up and up and up in speed / size.
A future that I envision will have computer displays and connectivity everywhere. Your news might be delivered to your wallpaper in your bathroom. The tag in your shirt might let you order a replacement by pressing on it. Your shoes might always know where you are, and inform the rest of your clothing your exact location.
All of your data might be stored on the equivalent of a "home server" or it might be distrubuted around the internet such that you cant say exactly where it is. If there is connectivity everywhere you are, and your necessary information is reachable from wherever you are, why carry a pda or anything with you at all?
I used to be the biggest proponent of the manned exploration of space. I really wanted to be able to go there before I died. Now, though, with the exception of the nuke ourselves / asteroid impact total destruction of our species argument, it seems to me that we would be better off funnelling any spending into basic science.
I know from a political standpoint that is unlikely (noone seems to want to fund basic science), but its kind of like moore's law all over again.
As that recent slashdot posting that argued that any computationally intensive project that takes more than 2.5 years to complete should be put off for 2.5 years, because it will actually be finished sooner if started with the much higher performance computers available then (for equivalent $$), the same goes for space exploration.
Why risk people and tremendous capital on missions of questionable utility other than for PR and warm fuzzy feelings, when funnelling that money into research on fancy new interplanetary drives, automated probes, infrastructure (like that solar system internet thingie), etc. etc. might get us there as quickly, but much more safely and efficiently?
we need to do better than what we did with the moon. Sure, we muscled our way there, using crude technology and brute force. And, we haven't been back in decades. And, going back now would be extremely difficult. We need technology and infrastructure and a plan that will get us out into space permanently.
This is a great topic, one I've been meaning to post myself.
What I have been looking for specifically is a wrap-around sort of desk, like in Zero Effect or the Matrix, that would comfortably and spaciously hold 3 21" monitors and a large laptop. It looks like its possible to construct something pretty neat from anthro, but they dont seem to want to return my emails...
Does anyone out there have any experience or suggestions?
thanks,
chris
Hi
I was about ready to do it myself, and had been planning for this winter (there are many activities that you can't do within 3 or 6 months of the surgery, incl scubadiving or general watersports (i like to kayak), so i wanted to time it so that it wouldnt impact fun things).
However, i started to read some alarming things about it. While the percentages of people who have markedly improved vision is high, and quite a high percentage of those end up with 20/20 vision, what isnt often quoted is that a large percentage of people have significantly worsened night vision, permanently. Many people are no longer able to drive at night at all.
My night vision is already not so hot. Also, if your vision isnt stable, it will of course continue to not be stable after your surgery. This is also a problem i have been having, though at least my vision has been improving.
There are several alternative surgery technologies that show great promise and less risk that have not been approved yet. Things are changing so fast that it just seems prudent to not take such a risk until the techniques are more mature...
Sorry i dont have pointers to where I read this stuff or actual facts and figures. That time magazine cover from a few weeks ago was worth reading. If I were you, though, I would hesitate to make such a huge decision based on anecdotal evidence and on an immature technology, when things are changing so rapidly...
just my 2c
-chris
As I take a momentary break from Java coding:
It seems to me that reports of Java's death are greatly exaggerated...
Wasn't there a post on slashdot just last week that showed Java's continuing rise in popularity, at the expense of C++ and C, forcasting a landscape totally dominated by java and perl a few years out?
Every programmer that I know prefers java (where appropriate) to anything else. Java may not have lived up to its hype, but what has??
Man, stories like this really are really annoying. Especially after having been online for about 16 hours straight, trying to finish up a project...
Aside from chemical addiction / dependency involving substances like heroin and nicotine, its an issue with the PERSON, not the thing that they are addicted to. (Unless microsoft has figured out how to put subliminal messages in their dialog boxes, or to tune monitor emissions to control our brains.)
I'm sure there are people out there addicted to picking their nose, or farting showtunes...
An interesting thing about the internet is it really can serve as just a conduit to information. Maybe for example, a large portion of these people are really addicted to nose-picking, and the internet is just serving as a convenient way for them to read everything they can about new nose-picking techniques. I guess we will never know.
Its just more of the same shit, more news to print that casts a negative light on technological change and those who embrace it, instead of trying to understand what might make some people want to escape their lives into their computers...
Hi.
Posting to this thread is probably like beating a dead horse, but what the hell... It's cathartic.
First of all, I must say that the two Katz articles were definitely the most moving things that I have read in some time. Like most everyone that responded to this thread, I was something of a freak in grammar school and beyond. I was way too smart for my own good. I didn't have many experiences as horrible as some of those that you have posted here, and I was liked; there was just so little common ground between me and my peers (or my parents for that matter), that I turned inward. Being quiet and shy, no one noticed, except for the occasional teacher that took advantage of me, I'm assuming because they felt threatened, and a few wonderful ones that encouraged me any way they could.
I still have bad feelings about those days, but for the last several years I have been congratulating myself (as many of you seem to be doing) on my accomplishments. Many of the people I went to high school with probably look back on those years as the best ones of their life, and here I am, an obscenely well paid software developer and owner of my own consulting company, with so many options available its daunting...
After reading Katz's articles, though, something became clear. In a very real sense, I still am that boy. I still harbor a lot of bad feelings from those days. Healing is not the same thing as learning to cope via avoidance and denial, and ego self-inflation. In fact, such things prevent healing. I am still upset. When I read the stories about kids expressing their understanding of some of the possible catalysts for this tragedy being punished for it, I get so angry. And, when I hear that the Congress is going to look into the effects of Doom on our Nation's youth, I come closer to understanding how years of torture can drive someone over the edge towards violence and hate than I really want to be.
-chris