AFAIK (it still says it on the LLE webpage) The Laboratory for Laser Energetics here at UR already houses the world's most powerful ultraviolet laser, the Omega Laser. Apparently these new petawatt lasers will make it the most biggest laser of any kind. Anyone know what it will be edging out?
Funny how stupid they're being about this. It's like a coffee company cracking down on truck stop sales. Who buys role-playing miniatures? Geeks. Who's most likely to turn to the internet while shopping? Geeks. Good luck selling WH40K miniatures to 17-year-old girls who hang out in malls.
Interestingly, they're going the opposite way of companies like IBM who refuse to sell computers and computer parts in retail stores.
Dexxa no longer exists. We would like to thank all our customers for their support for the past years.
If you have technical questions about Dexxa products you purchased in the past, please consult our technical support pages. This website will be maintained until the end of 2002.
And yes, I'd assume Dexxa was a logitech rebrander - not only do all their "products" look exactly like logitech equivalents, their webpage is essentially a recolored version of logitech's old page.
I think the more pertainent question is how long it'll take Microsoft to shanghai this code (embrace, extend, whatever) for their signed DRM drivers. If it can filter DVD content before it gets sent to applications, it could potentially be used to block copyrighted data from being recorded, or displayed by non-endorsed, non-liscensed software. This sounds alot like the driver tricks considered for sound cards, that would refuse to send unencrypted sound to the computer.
Wales? c'mon.
on
Wireless Wales
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
So how big is Wales anyway... like four football fields? I'd have a harder time WiFing my dorm room. The crap that makes the/. frontpage these days... Why don't you post when they get full wireless in Boston or someplace worthwhile.
Why use mylar airbags when we've got plenty of used-up old conservatives lying around? Lets' throw Rush Limbaugh out there to protect us from asteroids...
In April, Sir Roger Penrose, a British math professor who has worked with Stephen Hawking on such topics as relativity, black holes, and whether time has a beginning, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, which Penrose said copied a pattern he created (a pattern demonstrating that "a nonrepeating pattern could exist in nature") for its Kleenex quilted toilet paper. Penrose said he doesn't like litigation but, "When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by a multinational to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a Knight of the Realm, then a last stand must be taken".
Of course with this new technology will come the standard moral debate over animal rights. Dell and Compaq will embrace it, offering their animal-byproduct computers, while Gateway will cater to the hippie-techies by offering guaranteed vegan computers made with real silicon. Vegan musicians like Moby will use Microsoft's new rights-management facilities to allow only vegan computers to play their music. And Intel will make headlines with it's buyout of Purdue foods.
So, sir. What kind of insurance did you have in mind?
Do you have an amateur rocketeer package? I need coverage for fuel tank explosion, fiery re-entry, parachute failure, oxygen leakage, missile-defense laser damage, and front-and-rear collision.
There are no plans for orbit, just to fulfill the childhood dream of a private citizen.
This story is, of course, very reminiscent of the famous Darwin Award winner Larry Walters, who soared at 16,000 ft. on a lawn chair fitted with dozens of weather balloons. Walters is also quoted as saying "Since I was 13 years old, I've dreamed of going up into the clear blue sky in a weather balloon."
Mr. Walker, in what was has Larry Walters' flight been an inspiration (or warning!) to you?
"Yeah, I've just been typing on my PDA too long. This is really making me nauseous."
"I know how you feel. Here, have some dramamine."
"Thanks, man.::gulp:: A little while ago I almost passed out. Looked up to see I'd just told my boss how attractive his mother is, and accidentally fired off an email to my wife complaining about the water quality in Ecuador."
"No good, dude. If there's such a thing as a gadget that's too easy to use, I think you've found it. Here, try this. It's called a keyboard."
Moby's music would be considered by many "alternative" and consequently it doesn't get a lot (any) air play.
Umm, have you been listening to the radio recently? Moby's single We Are All Made Of Stars is getting lots of airplay in mainstream radio stations. It's currently #19 on the Billboard Dance/Club list, and the album is at #35 on the Billboard top albums list. I think it's safe to say that Moby has moved into the mainstream.
If you ask me (or him), Moby is not condemning people for burning/filesharing his music. He's just trying to explain that his music is more popular than the record sales give him credit for. From the Launch article:
"I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing," he added. "I'm not writing this to voice my opinions. My concern is the way that the industry looks at the success of a musician or of a record that sells or doesn't sell."
He's not bitching, he's just musing. Give him some credit.
Several months ago there was an article on/. about the BriQ, a powerful Linux/PowerPC box squeezed into the size of a CDROM drive. The only connectivity of the unit is an ethernet jack, a serial port, and the front panel. A couple weeks ago I was given a project at work to develop a menu system/UI that would run on the front panel of a BriQ to be used as a demonstration unit. The BriQ's front panel consists of a 20x2 VFD display, a tri-color (red, green, yellow) LED, and 2 buttons.
Control of the panel is simple: writing to/dev/lcd displays characters on the VFD (or changes the LED color w/ control characters), and reading from/dev/lcd gets the state of the buttons. I was able to develop a UI (in Perl) that used those buttons and the display to not only display status messages, but perform basic system tasks like rebooting and setting manual network configuration settings.
Unfortunately none of the displays that I've seen online have included anything in the way of input on the same serial connection, which would increase the usefulness of these status displays immensely. C'mon, don't tell me X (especially w/ proprietary drivers like nVidia or Matrox) has never frozen on you, leaving you to find some other machine to ssh in from and fix things. With a simple secondary I/O system like the one on the BriQ, one could not only have a really cool gadget, but also provide a needed backup interface for those computers that do double-duty as workstations and servers. Or even to get monitorless servers started up on strange networks w/out DHCP.
The DOJ was pressuring MS to release it's APIs etc., in the interest of fair trade. Now MS claims that doing that would put national security at risk.
What's the solution for the DOJ (who holds the reigns now)?? Simple: force MS to adopt open standards and open code modules in the future. Given that the MS business model is based on leveraging its "secret" elements, this could force them to abandon nearly all of their anticompetitive practices.
If Kinko's does it like all the copy shops I've seen, the pdf's aren't real digitized texts, they're just the scans, in image format, on a pdf. Not exactly the best way to store a book of info.
Here is the schematics, from the patent:
on
The Magic Box Hoax
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· Score: 5, Funny
From the bottom of the patent:
+--------------+ | | Data | YHBT | Data =====+ YHL +===== In | HAND | Out | | +--------------+
What is the point?
on
Tron 2.0 Game
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Seriously... Tron was a movie that predicted, essentially, the first-person shooter. Wow! Whaddya know? Those predictions came true! Except what it didn't predict was the balance of technological advances that would occur in the process of making computer games. Graphics rendering obviously is much more advanced than they predicted. My desktop computer can render almost photorealistic scenes in real-time, whereas the TRON supercomputer had to render everything as blue-and-white lines.
And a technology that they greatly overestimated was the human-computer interface. The people in TRON are in a true virtual-reality environment, while gamers now (including those who will play this game) are still stuck using WASD and a mouse.
So my question is, what's the point of taking a step backwards in graphics, and failing to take a step forward in HCI? I think it would be more "faithful" to the spirit of TRON to bring the story up-to-date, with modern graphics, and just pretend to have a better interface. For the same reason Sam Raimi (rightly) brought Spider-Man up-to-date with biological web-shooters etc. There's no reason to accentuate the miscalculations of the past in a modern adaptation of an old tale.
For the last time, there's nothing special about these things. They're just laptops that aren't portable. Maybe ok for setting up an internet kiosk somewhere but I can't imagine anyone actually getting one for personal use.
Slashdot Mirror
Now we can get Apple to pull their old ads, knowing that Linux is Ghandi's official OS.
AFAIK (it still says it on the LLE webpage) The Laboratory for Laser Energetics here at UR already houses the world's most powerful ultraviolet laser, the Omega Laser. Apparently these new petawatt lasers will make it the most biggest laser of any kind. Anyone know what it will be edging out?
Funny how stupid they're being about this. It's like a coffee company cracking down on truck stop sales. Who buys role-playing miniatures? Geeks. Who's most likely to turn to the internet while shopping? Geeks. Good luck selling WH40K miniatures to 17-year-old girls who hang out in malls.
Interestingly, they're going the opposite way of companies like IBM who refuse to sell computers and computer parts in retail stores.
And yes, I'd assume Dexxa was a logitech rebrander - not only do all their "products" look exactly like logitech equivalents, their webpage is essentially a recolored version of logitech's old page.
I think the more pertainent question is how long it'll take Microsoft to shanghai this code (embrace, extend, whatever) for their signed DRM drivers. If it can filter DVD content before it gets sent to applications, it could potentially be used to block copyrighted data from being recorded, or displayed by non-endorsed, non-liscensed software. This sounds alot like the driver tricks considered for sound cards, that would refuse to send unencrypted sound to the computer.
So how big is Wales anyway... like four football fields? I'd have a harder time WiFing my dorm room. The crap that makes the /. frontpage these days... Why don't you post when they get full wireless in Boston or someplace worthwhile.
Why use mylar airbags when we've got plenty of used-up old conservatives lying around? Lets' throw Rush Limbaugh out there to protect us from asteroids...
Of course with this new technology will come the standard moral debate over animal rights. Dell and Compaq will embrace it, offering their animal-byproduct computers, while Gateway will cater to the hippie-techies by offering guaranteed vegan computers made with real silicon. Vegan musicians like Moby will use Microsoft's new rights-management facilities to allow only vegan computers to play their music. And Intel will make headlines with it's buyout of Purdue foods.
So, sir. What kind of insurance did you have in mind?
Do you have an amateur rocketeer package? I need coverage for fuel tank explosion, fiery re-entry, parachute failure, oxygen leakage, missile-defense laser damage, and front-and-rear collision.
This story is, of course, very reminiscent of the famous Darwin Award winner Larry Walters, who soared at 16,000 ft. on a lawn chair fitted with dozens of weather balloons. Walters is also quoted as saying "Since I was 13 years old, I've dreamed of going up into the clear blue sky in a weather balloon."
Mr. Walker, in what was has Larry Walters' flight been an inspiration (or warning!) to you?
Nope. Seems that before his death, The Who bassist John Entwistle was cast in the Two Towers. As an Ent. Who whistles.
...k, I'll shut up now...
"Dude, you don't look so good... you ok?"
::gulp:: A little while ago I almost passed out. Looked up to see I'd just told my boss how attractive his mother is, and accidentally fired off an email to my wife complaining about the water quality in Ecuador."
"Yeah, I've just been typing on my PDA too long. This is really making me nauseous."
"I know how you feel. Here, have some dramamine."
"Thanks, man.
"No good, dude. If there's such a thing as a gadget that's too easy to use, I think you've found it. Here, try this. It's called a keyboard."
Don't be misled. Today is Chinese April Fools Day.
Umm, have you been listening to the radio recently? Moby's single We Are All Made Of Stars is getting lots of airplay in mainstream radio stations. It's currently #19 on the Billboard Dance/Club list, and the album is at #35 on the Billboard top albums list. I think it's safe to say that Moby has moved into the mainstream.
If you ask me (or him), Moby is not condemning people for burning/filesharing his music. He's just trying to explain that his music is more popular than the record sales give him credit for. From the Launch article:
He's not bitching, he's just musing. Give him some credit.Several months ago there was an article on /. about the BriQ, a powerful Linux/PowerPC box squeezed into the size of a CDROM drive. The only connectivity of the unit is an ethernet jack, a serial port, and the front panel. A couple weeks ago I was given a project at work to develop a menu system/UI that would run on the front panel of a BriQ to be used as a demonstration unit. The BriQ's front panel consists of a 20x2 VFD display, a tri-color (red, green, yellow) LED, and 2 buttons.
Control of the panel is simple: writing to /dev/lcd displays characters on the VFD (or changes the LED color w/ control characters), and reading from /dev/lcd gets the state of the buttons. I was able to develop a UI (in Perl) that used those buttons and the display to not only display status messages, but perform basic system tasks like rebooting and setting manual network configuration settings.
Unfortunately none of the displays that I've seen online have included anything in the way of input on the same serial connection, which would increase the usefulness of these status displays immensely. C'mon, don't tell me X (especially w/ proprietary drivers like nVidia or Matrox) has never frozen on you, leaving you to find some other machine to ssh in from and fix things. With a simple secondary I/O system like the one on the BriQ, one could not only have a really cool gadget, but also provide a needed backup interface for those computers that do double-duty as workstations and servers. Or even to get monitorless servers started up on strange networks w/out DHCP.
that Legally Blonde was nominated for almost every category, you have to ask yourself...
Do I really care???
Short a few good child actors? Pschaw... just CG 'em! I thought Yoda did a pretty darn good job in AotC...
The DOJ was pressuring MS to release it's APIs etc., in the interest of fair trade. Now MS claims that doing that would put national security at risk.
What's the solution for the DOJ (who holds the reigns now)?? Simple: force MS to adopt open standards and open code modules in the future. Given that the MS business model is based on leveraging its "secret" elements, this could force them to abandon nearly all of their anticompetitive practices.
Don't bother.
If Kinko's does it like all the copy shops I've seen, the pdf's aren't real digitized texts, they're just the scans, in image format, on a pdf. Not exactly the best way to store a book of info.
ah. here it is.
From the bottom of the patent:
+--------------+
| |
Data | YHBT | Data
=====+ YHL +=====
In | HAND | Out
| |
+--------------+
Seriously... Tron was a movie that predicted, essentially, the first-person shooter. Wow! Whaddya know? Those predictions came true! Except what it didn't predict was the balance of technological advances that would occur in the process of making computer games. Graphics rendering obviously is much more advanced than they predicted. My desktop computer can render almost photorealistic scenes in real-time, whereas the TRON supercomputer had to render everything as blue-and-white lines.
And a technology that they greatly overestimated was the human-computer interface. The people in TRON are in a true virtual-reality environment, while gamers now (including those who will play this game) are still stuck using WASD and a mouse.
So my question is, what's the point of taking a step backwards in graphics, and failing to take a step forward in HCI? I think it would be more "faithful" to the spirit of TRON to bring the story up-to-date, with modern graphics, and just pretend to have a better interface. For the same reason Sam Raimi (rightly) brought Spider-Man up-to-date with biological web-shooters etc. There's no reason to accentuate the miscalculations of the past in a modern adaptation of an old tale.
when "apt-get update & apt-get -f dist-upgrade" runs it for me.
For the last time, there's nothing special about these things. They're just laptops that aren't portable. Maybe ok for setting up an internet kiosk somewhere but I can't imagine anyone actually getting one for personal use.