Nor a Manual Typewriter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter (Be sure to check out the Hansen Writing Ball a little down on the left hand side... It will make you very glad for the keyboards we have today...)
Several items are coming to a head in the laptop market that will drastically reduce power usage.
1) SSD Hard Drive. The hard drive is one of the biggest power consumers in the laptop today, by changing to an SSD, this can be drastically reduced. Yes, they are more expensive and they are smaller capacity than a HD, but in addition to being less power hungry, they are also much faster, smaller, and lighter.
2) Digital Paper Displays. The back lighting required by current LCDs is very expensive to run power consumption wise. They also require power 100% of the time to maintain the image itself even though this is much less than the back light power requirements. As the digital paper displays become more commercialized, we will see them start to take over the laptop market. Digital paper does not use back lighting and does not require power to maintain the image, only to change the image. Thus drastically reducing the amount of power required for the display.
3) Wireless network adapter. There are several changes coming in the Wireless world in the near future that will reduce the power requirements of wireless networking. As 802.11n moves from draft to production standards and the equipment become inter operable, we will see more usage of the N mode networking which will allow for most network cards to run at lower power for the same connectivity we see today. WiMax and other similar technologies will also bring lower power consumption for wireless networking.
4) Sub 40nm chips. As we shrink circuits smaller and smaller, we are finding that they, in general, require less power to operate. In addition, new materials, such as the new High-k materials, are required to allow circuits to operate correctly at this smaller scale and these new materials are also introducing power savings. As RAM, CPU, and main chipset chips are moved to the smaller die size we will find they use less and less power.
5) Non-Volatile MRAM. Another power consumer is main memory. Even if the system is idle, RAM requires power just to maintain the data stored in it. New technologies are just coming to fruition that will create RAM that does not require power constantly but will be just as fast as current RAM offerings and not have the life span problems that Flash RAM has.
Combine all of these changes with the fact that we may see Li-Ion batteries that have 3-5 times the capacity of today's Li-Ion batteries on a size to size or weight to weight ratio, I expect that over the next 5 years we will see personal electronic devices shrink to down to the point where they are practically non-existent
Rather than tripling the life of a current battery, I can see this being used to power a laptop off a battery the size of a current cell phone battery and shrinking cell phone batteries to the size of a nickel. This will drastically reduce the size of several of our common devices such as Bluetooth headsets, cell phones, iPods (and other MP3 players), digital cameras, etc. In many such devices, the battery is still the single largest and heaviest component and being able to shrink this by a factor of 3-5 will drastically affect the size and weight of them.
Does this not appear fake to anyone else? Especially the picture from "space". Note that the ground around the logo is blank and not the normal scrub brush you would find in the desert and can clearly see outside the blank area. Even the construction picture looks fake and there is no link to the video.
Ah, well. I must admire the advertising firm who came up with this. All the credit and exposure they would have gotten from actually doing this without the expense... Oh, and they didn't have the environmental impact people are complaining about either.
I have been in a very similar situation before. I solved it by sending the offending person an invoice for my time at $80 / hour. When they called to say what is this invoice, appologize and tell them you account for all your time spent and accidentaly included them in your invoicing run. When they see that they have spent hundreds of pounds/dollars/drachma of your time, they are usually much more circumspect in asking for help. I did this to my sister and she stopped calling to ask questions every day, now she only calls when she cannot figure it out after doing research.
Another method that I used on my mother was "Buy a Dell" and then when she calls for help, just say you are too busy to speak right now but she could call the Dell help line which was part of the package she got when she bought the Dell. Now I only get calls like this:
Mom: "Oh good, your there, hold on a minute" Mouse: click click click Mom: "Great it worked, thanks, talk to you later"
She just wanted to know I was there to get her out of trouble if she tried something she had never done before. She tried it, it worked, and that was the conversation. Almost any time she has a problem she will call Dell first and only if they cannot help does she call me.
You can use some sailing tricks to make any bag you have seem bigger. Check out the following video of how to coil a line and you don't even need velcro or a twist tie.
One simple way to save the UMD format would be for Sony to GIVE a PSP to every man, woman, and child on the planet (MWCOTP). Then the market for UMD would be a reasonable size, even if they restricted it to every other MWCOTP.
Hmm, I wonder if I can patent a marketing idea... Give a new gizmo/toy/gadget to exactly one child in each family that has more than one child who is at least within 3 years of age of the others... That way the parents would have to buy one for the other child / children just to keep the peace.
1) Cost - creating a mirror that much bigger becomes very very expensive over a certain size. Even if this technology to improve the sensitivity makes the sensor twice as expensive you are still saving money. Remember, these are not bathroom mirrors, we are talking about optically perfect mirrors of great size.
2) Size and Weight - If we are using the satelites to capture this information rather than ground based devices then size and weight are a critical factor. This technology would weigh nothing more (or minimally more) while a 1/3 bigger mirrow would weigh 1/3 more.
3) Currently, I believe, we are using radio waves and so therefore we would not be using mirrors. If we were to go to light transmittion, we would probably need to have detectors in space, and I would bet that at least one of them would be in orbit around mars. That said, a bigger mirror again means more size and weight that would have to be transported all the way to Mars.
Also, your math is wrong, 1.63 is not the square root of 3, 1.732050808 is the square root of 3.
For the latency crowd out there, use UDP packets rather than TCP packets and then re-request the sending of any missing packets over time. This emulates TCP over UDP but at a higher level that allows transmittion to continue while waiting for acknowledgement of packets received..
Did I miss something or did the article not say that Mr. Meyer left apple in 1994? He seems to have worked on Mac System 7 OS, created a handheld device running Mac OS, and then was put on the newton team. It did not say anything about being the brain behind the iPod.
If Cisco were to buy both you could then have a set top box that was your router/firewall/WAP/Tivo(PVR)/games console/VOIP server all in one. Since Cisco (via the Linksys brand) has been open to hacking^h^h^h^h^h^h^h end user modification of their systems it could be a very interesting development.
What makes you think Apple did not design the software in the iPod to record your playing history and then report this back? The iPod could record the songs played, if you skip or restart a song, and even if you turn the volume up or down for a particular song. This would be valuable marketing information that they could then either use to suggest songs to you and/or sell to the music industry for a profit. Imagine a music chart that was the top 100 songs listened to on iPods around the world. You could even categorize them by country.
Now if this was the paranoid list I would post this Anonymously.
I am assuming that computer scientists like electrical engineers will set a threshold for "on" and anything beyond the threshold is considered to be a one. That is, the finger does not have to be completely extended to count as one. That makes it easy to do, also you will find it easier if you keep your palms facing you as you are counting.
I am a Touch Typist and I see no use to having every keycap be changable. The advantage of having the keys static is that you can touch type very very quickly. Changing what a key does is doable today but would be confusing since you probably would not move the keycaps around on your keyboard every time you changed the layout (i.e. from application to application) but having software that would do this doesn't seem to be particularly useful in most cases. Ok, having the "Web Keys" or "Application Keys" or whatever those new extra keys are called that will launch various applications have dynamic keycaps and be easily programable would be nice, and I could see where having the line number displayed on the down arrow key might be nice in vi (ok, vim) but really, most people who need to know that either use a graphical editor that displays the current line number or knows the key commands necessary for their editor of choice to show them. I certainly would not pay $500 for one of these keyboards.
This would seem to indicate that if you pointed the Hubble at earth you would have a resolution of ~21.6 mm per pixel.
600km = 600,000 m = 3 m per arc-second
3m per arc-second x 0.0072 arc-seconds =.0216m or 21.6 mm
Noting that the orbit is approximately 600km and probably is not exactly circular, not to mention the odd mountain and death valley. I think google should put in a bid to buy the hubble when they decide to decommission it:) Imaging google Earth at 21mm resolution!
on another planet first. A change of this scale has the possibility of globally altering weather patterns and is not something we can undo. Even on a single storm, if we prevent it and there are bad consequences, there is no way to reverse our interference. I would be happy to see them try this on another planet for several reasons, not the least of which is that it will be many many years in the future.
On another note, if they had invested a few million dollars in reinforcing the dikes that protected New Orleans it would have prevented 95% of the damage (i.e. almost all due to flodding). Compare that to the cost of weather control even on a single instance, it seems more cost effective to defend against it.
A few years ago, a friend and I were watching CNN and they showed a map of the Eastern US... the Ocean east of the US was clearly labeled "Pacific Ocean".
When doing a comparison like this (ptr==null) you should always put the L-Value on the right (null==ptr) so that when you make the mistake of using the assignment operator (=) instead of the "is equal to" operator (==) you receive a syntax error.
if (ptr=null) { // This code changes the value of ptr to null // Since Null equates to false, this code NEVER runs. } else { // This code ALWAYS runs }
if (null=ptr) { // However if you do it this way, // A syntax error is thrown on compile }
The one thing that everyone here seems to say is "there is still a wire"... of course there is still a wire... ONE wire... I don't know about the rest of you, but on my desk I have the following:
Laptop Computer
2nd Laptop Computer
Cell phone charger
Bluetooth Headset Charger
USB Hard Drive (3.5" requires its own power)
Telephone
MP3 Player
PDA
and on occasion:
Electric Razor
Portable DVD Player
Various other electronic devices
Flashlight
This means that I have eight power cables on my desk at all times (ok, most times) and I end up carrying with me four or more power cables / bricks all the time. If I had a power pad built into my desk or even as a deskpad I could replace twelve or more cables with one. I would also have one that I would carry with me that would plug in once and power all my devices. I have been trying to figure out a way to setup one DC Power point and power everything off that but with various power requirements it has not been feasable. If this comes to fruition and is adopted by many companies (even as an add on) I thing it would greatly improve my cable situation.
A second use (though minor) would be to allow those wireless keyboards and mice to be useful rather than just anoying. Every time I go to use a wireless mouse it has gone to sleep and about one in four times it has no power left to work. If you had a power pad as a mouse pad, that wireless mouse could stay active all the time (or a much longer idle time before sleep) and never have dead batteries.
If this technology is adopted widely enough it will start to be incorporated directly into cubicles and other office furniture. Eventually we will see it in things like airports etc and we will probably see an increase in the "airport fee / tax" that is charged to help cover the cost of the power used.
I agree that what it was designed for it does fine. It even syncronizes my contacts at a fair rate. I admit that I started using bluetooth without any real knowledge of it's specification as it came with my mobile phone and I purchased a Bluetooth adapter for my laptop shortly there after. Using bluetooth as a wire replacement for headsets and the like is nice, however, there are those of us who see it as another device connectivity network for transferring data of any kind and I would like to see it up in the 10-11 Mbit range (ok, I admit it, the 100 Mbit range:) however, the tradeoff would be power consumption and space which would be unacceptible for a mobile phone and for a headset, though they are doing some incredible things with low power 802.11a/b/g stuff today.
Slashdot Mirror
"all information processing machines send their secrets into the electromagnetic ether."
An abacus doesn't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus
Nor does an old fashioned adding machine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adding_machine#Burroughs.27s_calculating_machine
(Be sure to check out the image of the Burroughs adding machine near the bottom of the page.)
Nor a Manual Typewriter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter
(Be sure to check out the Hansen Writing Ball a little down on the left hand side... It will make you very glad for the keyboards we have today...)
Several items are coming to a head in the laptop market that will drastically reduce power usage.
1) SSD Hard Drive. The hard drive is one of the biggest power consumers in the laptop today, by changing to an SSD, this can be drastically reduced. Yes, they are more expensive and they are smaller capacity than a HD, but in addition to being less power hungry, they are also much faster, smaller, and lighter.
2) Digital Paper Displays. The back lighting required by current LCDs is very expensive to run power consumption wise. They also require power 100% of the time to maintain the image itself even though this is much less than the back light power requirements. As the digital paper displays become more commercialized, we will see them start to take over the laptop market. Digital paper does not use back lighting and does not require power to maintain the image, only to change the image. Thus drastically reducing the amount of power required for the display.
3) Wireless network adapter. There are several changes coming in the Wireless world in the near future that will reduce the power requirements of wireless networking. As 802.11n moves from draft to production standards and the equipment become inter operable, we will see more usage of the N mode networking which will allow for most network cards to run at lower power for the same connectivity we see today. WiMax and other similar technologies will also bring lower power consumption for wireless networking.
4) Sub 40nm chips. As we shrink circuits smaller and smaller, we are finding that they, in general, require less power to operate. In addition, new materials, such as the new High-k materials, are required to allow circuits to operate correctly at this smaller scale and these new materials are also introducing power savings. As RAM, CPU, and main chipset chips are moved to the smaller die size we will find they use less and less power.
5) Non-Volatile MRAM. Another power consumer is main memory. Even if the system is idle, RAM requires power just to maintain the data stored in it. New technologies are just coming to fruition that will create RAM that does not require power constantly but will be just as fast as current RAM offerings and not have the life span problems that Flash RAM has.
Combine all of these changes with the fact that we may see Li-Ion batteries that have 3-5 times the capacity of today's Li-Ion batteries on a size to size or weight to weight ratio, I expect that over the next 5 years we will see personal electronic devices shrink to down to the point where they are practically non-existent
Yes, but they are aware of the overflow / wraparound when it happens, therefore they can count to 1024.
Rather than tripling the life of a current battery, I can see this being used to power a laptop off a battery the size of a current cell phone battery and shrinking cell phone batteries to the size of a nickel. This will drastically reduce the size of several of our common devices such as Bluetooth headsets, cell phones, iPods (and other MP3 players), digital cameras, etc. In many such devices, the battery is still the single largest and heaviest component and being able to shrink this by a factor of 3-5 will drastically affect the size and weight of them.
Does this not appear fake to anyone else? Especially the picture from "space". Note that the ground around the logo is blank and not the normal scrub brush you would find in the desert and can clearly see outside the blank area. Even the construction picture looks fake and there is no link to the video.
Ah, well. I must admire the advertising firm who came up with this. All the credit and exposure they would have gotten from actually doing this without the expense... Oh, and they didn't have the environmental impact people are complaining about either.
Too bad for which? Warcraft or South Park?
I have been in a very similar situation before. I solved it by sending the offending person an invoice for my time at $80 / hour. When they called to say what is this invoice, appologize and tell them you account for all your time spent and accidentaly included them in your invoicing run. When they see that they have spent hundreds of pounds/dollars/drachma of your time, they are usually much more circumspect in asking for help. I did this to my sister and she stopped calling to ask questions every day, now she only calls when she cannot figure it out after doing research.
Another method that I used on my mother was "Buy a Dell" and then when she calls for help, just say you are too busy to speak right now but she could call the Dell help line which was part of the package she got when she bought the Dell. Now I only get calls like this:
Mom: "Oh good, your there, hold on a minute"
Mouse: click click click
Mom: "Great it worked, thanks, talk to you later"
She just wanted to know I was there to get her out of trouble if she tried something she had never done before. She tried it, it worked, and that was the conversation. Almost any time she has a problem she will call Dell first and only if they cannot help does she call me.
You can use some sailing tricks to make any bag you have seem bigger. Check out the following video of how to coil a line and you don't even need velcro or a twist tie.
. htm
http://www.videos.sailingcourse.com/coiling_lines
One simple way to save the UMD format would be for Sony to GIVE a PSP to every man, woman, and child on the planet (MWCOTP). Then the market for UMD would be a reasonable size, even if they restricted it to every other MWCOTP.
Hmm, I wonder if I can patent a marketing idea... Give a new gizmo/toy/gadget to exactly one child in each family that has more than one child who is at least within 3 years of age of the others... That way the parents would have to buy one for the other child / children just to keep the peace.
A couple of things here.
1) Cost - creating a mirror that much bigger becomes very very expensive over a certain size. Even if this technology to improve the sensitivity makes the sensor twice as expensive you are still saving money. Remember, these are not bathroom mirrors, we are talking about optically perfect mirrors of great size.
2) Size and Weight - If we are using the satelites to capture this information rather than ground based devices then size and weight are a critical factor. This technology would weigh nothing more (or minimally more) while a 1/3 bigger mirrow would weigh 1/3 more.
3) Currently, I believe, we are using radio waves and so therefore we would not be using mirrors. If we were to go to light transmittion, we would probably need to have detectors in space, and I would bet that at least one of them would be in orbit around mars. That said, a bigger mirror again means more size and weight that would have to be transported all the way to Mars.
Also, your math is wrong, 1.63 is not the square root of 3, 1.732050808 is the square root of 3.
For the latency crowd out there, use UDP packets rather than TCP packets and then re-request the sending of any missing packets over time. This emulates TCP over UDP but at a higher level that allows transmittion to continue while waiting for acknowledgement of packets received..
Did I miss something or did the article not say that Mr. Meyer left apple in 1994? He seems to have worked on Mac System 7 OS, created a handheld device running Mac OS, and then was put on the newton team. It did not say anything about being the brain behind the iPod.
If Cisco were to buy both you could then have a set top box that was your router/firewall/WAP/Tivo(PVR)/games console/VOIP server all in one. Since Cisco (via the Linksys brand) has been open to hacking^h^h^h^h^h^h^h end user modification of their systems it could be a very interesting development.
Everyone on Slashdot should enter these bills as "have it in my possesion now" and they would have data that would show FTL travel in an atmosphere :)
$1 - 2003 - H55702090C
$1 - 2001 - F00883623F
$5 - 2001 - CE12036300A
Nothing like playing mind games with researchers...
Even if it's not a black hole, experiments that produce surprising results are always welcome.
I would have said "experiments that produce surprising results and are reproducable are always welcome."
Cold Fusion (for one, there are others) produced surprising results but these results were not reproducable by others.
What makes you think Apple did not design the software in the iPod to record your playing history and then report this back? The iPod could record the songs played, if you skip or restart a song, and even if you turn the volume up or down for a particular song. This would be valuable marketing information that they could then either use to suggest songs to you and/or sell to the music industry for a profit. Imagine a music chart that was the top 100 songs listened to on iPods around the world. You could even categorize them by country.
Now if this was the paranoid list I would post this Anonymously.
I am assuming that computer scientists like electrical engineers will set a threshold for "on" and anything beyond the threshold is considered to be a one. That is, the finger does not have to be completely extended to count as one. That makes it easy to do, also you will find it easier if you keep your palms facing you as you are counting.
I am a Touch Typist and I see no use to having every keycap be changable. The advantage of having the keys static is that you can touch type very very quickly. Changing what a key does is doable today but would be confusing since you probably would not move the keycaps around on your keyboard every time you changed the layout (i.e. from application to application) but having software that would do this doesn't seem to be particularly useful in most cases. Ok, having the "Web Keys" or "Application Keys" or whatever those new extra keys are called that will launch various applications have dynamic keycaps and be easily programable would be nice, and I could see where having the line number displayed on the down arrow key might be nice in vi (ok, vim) but really, most people who need to know that either use a graphical editor that displays the current line number or knows the key commands necessary for their editor of choice to show them. I certainly would not pay $500 for one of these keyboards.
In the virus source code, just #include eliza.h and you are all set...
This would seem to indicate that if you pointed the Hubble at earth you would have a resolution of ~21.6 mm per pixel.
.0216m or 21.6 mm
:) Imaging google Earth at 21mm resolution!
600km = 600,000 m = 3 m per arc-second
3m per arc-second x 0.0072 arc-seconds =
Noting that the orbit is approximately 600km and probably is not exactly circular, not to mention the odd mountain and death valley. I think google should put in a bid to buy the hubble when they decide to decommission it
This is just too good to pass up so I won't!
Did they plan for the Y10K bug?
Built in 1996... must run Windows 95... must have been rebooted too many times to count already.
Current computer uptime records are very sub 100 years.
Stonehenge was designed for the same thing and it is only 5000 years old.
etc...
etc...
etc...
on another planet first. A change of this scale has the possibility of globally altering weather patterns and is not something we can undo. Even on a single storm, if we prevent it and there are bad consequences, there is no way to reverse our interference. I would be happy to see them try this on another planet for several reasons, not the least of which is that it will be many many years in the future.
On another note, if they had invested a few million dollars in reinforcing the dikes that protected New Orleans it would have prevented 95% of the damage (i.e. almost all due to flodding). Compare that to the cost of weather control even on a single instance, it seems more cost effective to defend against it.
A few years ago, a friend and I were watching CNN and they showed a map of the Eastern US... the Ocean east of the US was clearly labeled "Pacific Ocean".
I about died laughing.
- Laptop Computer
- 2nd Laptop Computer
- Cell phone charger
- Bluetooth Headset Charger
- USB Hard Drive (3.5" requires its own power)
- Telephone
- MP3 Player
- PDA
- Electric Razor
- Portable DVD Player
- Various other electronic devices
- Flashlight
This means that I have eight power cables on my desk at all times (ok, most times) and I end up carrying with me four or more power cables / bricks all the time. If I had a power pad built into my desk or even as a deskpad I could replace twelve or more cables with one. I would also have one that I would carry with me that would plug in once and power all my devices. I have been trying to figure out a way to setup one DC Power point and power everything off that but with various power requirements it has not been feasable. If this comes to fruition and is adopted by many companies (even as an add on) I thing it would greatly improve my cable situation.and on occasion:
A second use (though minor) would be to allow those wireless keyboards and mice to be useful rather than just anoying. Every time I go to use a wireless mouse it has gone to sleep and about one in four times it has no power left to work. If you had a power pad as a mouse pad, that wireless mouse could stay active all the time (or a much longer idle time before sleep) and never have dead batteries.
If this technology is adopted widely enough it will start to be incorporated directly into cubicles and other office furniture. Eventually we will see it in things like airports etc and we will probably see an increase in the "airport fee / tax" that is charged to help cover the cost of the power used.
I agree that what it was designed for it does fine. It even syncronizes my contacts at a fair rate. I admit that I started using bluetooth without any real knowledge of it's specification as it came with my mobile phone and I purchased a Bluetooth adapter for my laptop shortly there after. Using bluetooth as a wire replacement for headsets and the like is nice, however, there are those of us who see it as another device connectivity network for transferring data of any kind and I would like to see it up in the 10-11 Mbit range (ok, I admit it, the 100 Mbit range :) however, the tradeoff would be power consumption and space which would be unacceptible for a mobile phone and for a headset, though they are doing some incredible things with low power 802.11a/b/g stuff today.