A lot of readers seem to be missing the point here. The real advantage of this prototype is that it's passive - no batteries, no chemical reactions, nothing. It keeps your fingers warmer by absorbing some heat from your body (that would eventually have ended up in the air) and transferring the heat to your fingertips.
So yes, hand warmers are cheap and effective, but they'll die after a few hours once the reaction finishes.
Keeping your core temp high is a nice idea, but let's say you already have a nice coat and things - I think having some gloves that would passively heat my fingers would be nicely appreciated. Their was a post about how if it's a matter of life-or-death, you should maintain your core temp, but I think the more realistic application of these gloves would be to maintain comfort of your digits when you know you're going to be outside.
Again, the system is passive - no batteries, no chemical reactions, nothing at all. You'd put them on and forget about it.
Sounds a lot like the keyboard my brother use to swear by . . . an old 124-key Gateway Anykey. An image of it is in this article. Another rave about it is here.
Google for 'gateway anykey' and you'll find lots of comments about it, the programmable macros, remappable keys, etc etc. It's a pretty slick keyboard, but I never liked how it had the 8-way arrow keys instead of the standard inverted-T.
They're both pretty slick devices. I remember in high school we used the CBL's with pH probes to do titrations (of course, we had to first do them manually with cabbage juice as an indicator)
When I was substitute teaching, the CBR (which is primarily a motion detector) was very useful to demonstrate to students why an equation and graph of the form y=mx+b was useful. TI has overhead projectors for their calculators, and one of their programs allows you to plot using the motion detector in real time. This wast he "A HA!" moment for a lot of my students, when they saw that the slope was rate (how fast they walked) and the intercept was their starting point from the sensor. Of course, we did some game type stuff, where you turn the projector off, and ask for a volunteer to come up, and walk in front of the sensor to get a graph that has a line with slope 10m/s, and intercept of 2 meters. The kid on crutches had a blast trying to do this. It's also fun trying to watch them when you ask them to get lines with undefined slope, and is a good lead in as to why a vertical line is not a function . . . man I miss teaching . ..
I thought it was amusing that people thought they were sticking it to MS because they already do - when I had a co-op with them, none of their machines ran office - we all got to use the Lotus office suite . . .
iRiver's 512 meg solid state device, is probably about 1.95 cubic inches (I halved the volume of the rectangular prism, 3.9 cubic inches, formed by the dimensions, since it's closer to a triangular prism), or 68% smaller than the iPod.
The Rio Nitrus which is probably closest in terms of capacity, is 4.32 cubic inches, or 29% smaller than the iPod.
Surprisingly, the Rio Chiba, they're flash based 256 meg product is larger at 5.18 cubic inches, or only 15% smaller than an iPod.
Creative's got a player that's pretty comprable at 4 gigs but it's $300 and 5.4 cubic inches, or only 11% smaller than the iPod.
I could go on and on, but the point is that you're not going to get much smaller than the iPod mini for the capacity, nor the pricepoint . . . whether the extra $50 for 11 gigs is worth it is going to depend upon how you use it. Like I said earlier, for me docking and changing my playlists wouldn't be a big deal, and with 4 gigs, I imagine this wouldn't be necessary more than weekly (even at 256 kB/s, you'd have over 4 days of music). So for me, what someone else may consider a marginally smaller size, is something that I'd be much more likely to use, rather than leave on my desk because it doesn't fit in my pocket well.
As others have said, it's a matter of what you value (physical size vs. capacity), but the mini would meet my usage patterns much better than a standard iPod (which I feel is too big to add to my pockets)
You're absolutely right, the iPod mini isn't much cheaper.
But for me the reduction in size is awesome. (There's a nice comparison pic here)
While I like the capacity the regular iPods offer, I'll sacrifice the extra bulk to drop down to a smaller form factor that I have to sync a bit more frequently. The small size is definitely better for those who would like to use it at the gym, and for those of us who just like tiny things. (and before any of you karma-whores go for the cheap joke, I'm not referring to penises with the previous sentence;)
The colors, while cute, aren't quite my thing (I'm not big on pastels).
The coffee house I've been frequenting (Mudhouse in Springfield, MO) has free WiFi for anyone that comes in. No WEP, no fees, no nothing. In fact, they just have a consumer SMC access point, and I'm guessing that whoever set it up was a non-techy. Anyone can access the admin functions by using the web interface, and while there is an admin password, if you know the name of the coffeeshop, you could change that too.
So how does this work? How come they haven't been hacked or had tons of b/w leeches? I think all this works because the coffee house was a pretty decent community to start with. It serves the local college kids, is part of the monthly art walk (they act as a gallery for a local artist), and you'll usually see/hear a group of teenage/college-age church groups, and lots of people who just want to sit and chat and have coffee. There's an honor system, and it seems to work. (Case in point would be my accessing the admin functions, but not changing anything, just taking a peek to see what kind of setup they were running.)
I'd estimate the coffeeshop seats maybe 60 people, and you'll see maybe 3 or 4 laptops on a Friday or Saturday night. The model probably works cause the kind of atmosphere the coffee shop has - they have board games you can borrow, and there's almost always a group playing Scrabble, and usually a group playing Skip-Bo or some other card game. They also have two large bookshelves filled with books (it seems to be a popular site for people to release books from bookcrossing.com).
I'd imagine in a town of 50k, just plugging in a WAP would work fine. All these people suggesting traffic shaping, changing WEP keys daily, etc etc might want to consider that a social solution might work just as well as a technical one in this case.
Your parallel seems lacking to me in that people generally realize they have limitations when it comes to literacy. When it comes to computers and general tech literacy, people generally don't realize they have limits, and when they do hit these limits, they decide that whomever provided them the software should fix it. As the parent poster stated, that often means that library patrons expect tech support.
Do you honestly believe having one demo machine that shows the software working is going to placate someone who wants it running on their machine? Of course not, they're going to want to know why it doesn't work on their computer, and what they need to do to make it work, not just the fact that the software can work. In fact, I would guess most people already realize the software probably can work, just that they can't figure out how to get it to work on their computer.
I'm not sure what help file you're quoting? I've cut and paste from the help file (cut and paste "ms-its:C:\WINDOWS\Help\SCEconcepts.chm::/windows_ security_default_settings.htm" into the Run dialog to access where this is coming from)
Power Users
The Power Users group primarily provides backward compatibility for running non-certified applications. The default permissions that are allotted to this group allow this group's members to modify computerwide settings. If non-certified applications must be supported, then end users will need to be part of the Power Users group.
Members of the Power Users group have more permissions than members of the Users group and fewer than members of the Administrators group. Power Users can perform any operating system task except tasks reserved for the Administrators group. The default Windows2000 and WindowsXP Professional security settings for Power Users are very similar to the default security settings for Users in WindowsNT4.0. Any program that a user can run in WindowsNT4.0, a Power User can run in Windows2000 or WindowsXP Professional.
Power Users can:
Run legacy applications, in addition to Windows2000 or WindowsXP Professional certified applications.
Install programs that do not modify operating system files or install system services.
Customize systemwide resources including printers, date, time, power options, and other Control Panel resources.
Create and manage local user accounts and groups.
Stop and start system services which are not started by default.
And from the description in lusrmgr.msc for the Power Users group "Power Users possess most administrative powers with some restrictions. Thus, Power Users can run legacy applications in addition to certified applications"
Perhaps you're on a domain and the domain policies are preventing the actions you mention? Or you're not running a default installation of WinXP?
I haven't used WinXP Home, but in Pro, if you open the lusrmgr.msc, you'll see that while the Control Panel GUI only shows "limited" and "administrator" labels for the acounts, there are many other user groups (i.e. Power User, Backup Operators, Remote Desktop Users, etc etc)
I'm the same way, with way too many t-shirts . . . five years of college results in lots of free shirts . . . but anyway, I think companies and the like should start giving out free boxers instead, since that's the limiting factor for me in having to do laundry . . .
Bleh, if you're going to use a source, at least make sure it supports your argument . ..
The link answers the question "What is the best temperature to brew coffee?" Not "What is the best temperature to serve coffee?"
According to this study most of the subjects liked their coffee at ~140F.
This review of coffee machines (scroll down to the end of the page and look at "2 Temperature") states "Also, to maintain your coffee at the ideal drinking temperature of 160 degrees, preheat your cup for about ten seconds using steam or hot water." (emphasis added)
So, while you may have a higher pain threshold than many, and like to risk burns, I think it's reasonbale to ask providers not to serve a product which "can cause third-degree burns (the worst kind) in two to seven seconds." (Quotation from the bottom of this article)
I'm surprised that eye-fatigue wasn't an issue. I would imagine scanning over a 100" display, having your eyes move from one corner to the other, would be rather tiring. Of course, depending on the distance from the screen, the movement of the eyes wouldn't be any more than on your standard monitor . . .
I'm going to assume that ARIA used something resembling base-10 mathematics... $60 mill equates to 2 million CDs, or 20 million tracks worth of downloads.
I would guess that the ARIA would argue that $60 mil equates to 2 millions CDs, or 2 million tracks worth of downloads, since they probably realize many people buys CDs for just 1, maybe 2 songs . . . Of course, such an argument could also shoot them in the foot, as they'd be admitting that the quality of albums isn't great . . .
Why is everyone assuming that just because he said "my company" that he's the owner of said company? When I first read the parent post, I assumed that he was an employee . ..
Your post is a little confusing. You mention the two extremes and suggest that the amount of data per person is a bell curve. By definition a bell curve is a normal distribution and is symmetric. If the distribution really is a bell curve, and you ignored your outliers, you'd have the same average of 800 megs per person . ..
The question really should be is it a normal distribution - I would guess yes . . .
The average healthy male is 45% muscle mass, so for the 80 pound weekling, it'd be 80 + 80*.45*.25 for a whopping 89 lbs . . . I don't think the jocks are that worried;)
By publishing a "work around" for the CD copy protections, Halderman might have exposed himself to risk of procecution under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA.) SunComm president Peter Jacobs reports that they have no plans to pursue such a case, however, saying "this isn't one of the weighty issues of the world
amazing how the position has changed so rapidly (the above article was from 10ish EDT on the 8th)
On a related note, what do you all think about students starting to use the web as a primary source? I work primarily with children and computers, and one of the listservs I'm on, we had a discussion about whether students were losing research skills by relying on the web. My argument was more that students were being taught the research skillls - i.e. read the works cited, look for other pieces by the author, etc etc. Of course, the Internet has made it much more important to cross-check facts and sources, but you should be doing that with any research you do.
This question also is interesting as one of the organizations I work with required the purchase of a set of encyclopedias as the director felt that it was important for the kids to have the skills to use an encylopedia. I considered this a waste of resources, when CD-ROM encylopedias are a fraction of the cost of dead-tree versions, and easier to keep up to date.
Any thoughts on whether the expenditure was justified?
While it's nice to have the lecture notes avaialble digitally, I always made the effort to make sure that if I did print them out to go to class, and then make lots of notes in the margins, using various colors or ink. This required me to pay attention, and be active in my learning process, rather than passive.
Of course, I forced myself to do this as well, since I tended not to study at all, so the 3-5 hours a week of lecture per class were often the only times I'd look at the material . . . .
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of readers seem to be missing the point here. The real advantage of this prototype is that it's passive - no batteries, no chemical reactions, nothing. It keeps your fingers warmer by absorbing some heat from your body (that would eventually have ended up in the air) and transferring the heat to your fingertips.
So yes, hand warmers are cheap and effective, but they'll die after a few hours once the reaction finishes.
Keeping your core temp high is a nice idea, but let's say you already have a nice coat and things - I think having some gloves that would passively heat my fingers would be nicely appreciated. Their was a post about how if it's a matter of life-or-death, you should maintain your core temp, but I think the more realistic application of these gloves would be to maintain comfort of your digits when you know you're going to be outside.
Again, the system is passive - no batteries, no chemical reactions, nothing at all. You'd put them on and forget about it.
Sounds a lot like the keyboard my brother use to swear by . . . an old 124-key Gateway Anykey. An image of it is in this article. Another rave about it is here.
Google for 'gateway anykey' and you'll find lots of comments about it, the programmable macros, remappable keys, etc etc. It's a pretty slick keyboard, but I never liked how it had the 8-way arrow keys instead of the standard inverted-T.
some possible reasons are at
m l
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a991126.ht
TI does have DAQ, both in it's Calculator Based Ranger (CBR) and it's Calculator Based Laboratory (CBL). Of course they also sell books, curriculum, etc, to really capitalize on the market.
.
They're both pretty slick devices. I remember in high school we used the CBL's with pH probes to do titrations (of course, we had to first do them manually with cabbage juice as an indicator)
When I was substitute teaching, the CBR (which is primarily a motion detector) was very useful to demonstrate to students why an equation and graph of the form y=mx+b was useful. TI has overhead projectors for their calculators, and one of their programs allows you to plot using the motion detector in real time. This wast he "A HA!" moment for a lot of my students, when they saw that the slope was rate (how fast they walked) and the intercept was their starting point from the sensor. Of course, we did some game type stuff, where you turn the projector off, and ask for a volunteer to come up, and walk in front of the sensor to get a graph that has a line with slope 10m/s, and intercept of 2 meters. The kid on crutches had a blast trying to do this. It's also fun trying to watch them when you ask them to get lines with undefined slope, and is a good lead in as to why a vertical line is not a function . . . man I miss teaching . .
I thought it was amusing that people thought they were sticking it to MS because they already do - when I had a co-op with them, none of their machines ran office - we all got to use the Lotus office suite . . .
iRiver's 512 meg solid state device, is probably about 1.95 cubic inches (I halved the volume of the rectangular prism, 3.9 cubic inches, formed by the dimensions, since it's closer to a triangular prism), or 68% smaller than the iPod.
The Rio Nitrus which is probably closest in terms of capacity, is 4.32 cubic inches, or 29% smaller than the iPod.
Surprisingly, the Rio Chiba, they're flash based 256 meg product is larger at 5.18 cubic inches, or only 15% smaller than an iPod.
Creative's got a player that's pretty comprable at 4 gigs but it's $300 and 5.4 cubic inches, or only 11% smaller than the iPod.
I could go on and on, but the point is that you're not going to get much smaller than the iPod mini for the capacity, nor the pricepoint . . . whether the extra $50 for 11 gigs is worth it is going to depend upon how you use it. Like I said earlier, for me docking and changing my playlists wouldn't be a big deal, and with 4 gigs, I imagine this wouldn't be necessary more than weekly (even at 256 kB/s, you'd have over 4 days of music). So for me, what someone else may consider a marginally smaller size, is something that I'd be much more likely to use, rather than leave on my desk because it doesn't fit in my pocket well.
As others have said, it's a matter of what you value (physical size vs. capacity), but the mini would meet my usage patterns much better than a standard iPod (which I feel is too big to add to my pockets)
You're absolutely right, the iPod mini isn't much cheaper.
;)
But for me the reduction in size is awesome. (There's a nice comparison pic here)
While I like the capacity the regular iPods offer, I'll sacrifice the extra bulk to drop down to a smaller form factor that I have to sync a bit more frequently. The small size is definitely better for those who would like to use it at the gym, and for those of us who just like tiny things. (and before any of you karma-whores go for the cheap joke, I'm not referring to penises with the previous sentence
The colors, while cute, aren't quite my thing (I'm not big on pastels).
The coffee house I've been frequenting (Mudhouse in Springfield, MO) has free WiFi for anyone that comes in. No WEP, no fees, no nothing. In fact, they just have a consumer SMC access point, and I'm guessing that whoever set it up was a non-techy. Anyone can access the admin functions by using the web interface, and while there is an admin password, if you know the name of the coffeeshop, you could change that too.
So how does this work? How come they haven't been hacked or had tons of b/w leeches? I think all this works because the coffee house was a pretty decent community to start with. It serves the local college kids, is part of the monthly art walk (they act as a gallery for a local artist), and you'll usually see/hear a group of teenage/college-age church groups, and lots of people who just want to sit and chat and have coffee. There's an honor system, and it seems to work. (Case in point would be my accessing the admin functions, but not changing anything, just taking a peek to see what kind of setup they were running.)
I'd estimate the coffeeshop seats maybe 60 people, and you'll see maybe 3 or 4 laptops on a Friday or Saturday night. The model probably works cause the kind of atmosphere the coffee shop has - they have board games you can borrow, and there's almost always a group playing Scrabble, and usually a group playing Skip-Bo or some other card game. They also have two large bookshelves filled with books (it seems to be a popular site for people to release books from bookcrossing.com).
I'd imagine in a town of 50k, just plugging in a WAP would work fine. All these people suggesting traffic shaping, changing WEP keys daily, etc etc might want to consider that a social solution might work just as well as a technical one in this case.
Your parallel seems lacking to me in that people generally realize they have limitations when it comes to literacy. When it comes to computers and general tech literacy, people generally don't realize they have limits, and when they do hit these limits, they decide that whomever provided them the software should fix it. As the parent poster stated, that often means that library patrons expect tech support.
Do you honestly believe having one demo machine that shows the software working is going to placate someone who wants it running on their machine? Of course not, they're going to want to know why it doesn't work on their computer, and what they need to do to make it work, not just the fact that the software can work. In fact, I would guess most people already realize the software probably can work, just that they can't figure out how to get it to work on their computer.
Perhaps you're on a domain and the domain policies are preventing the actions you mention? Or you're not running a default installation of WinXP?
Actually, Power Users can do almost everything an Admin can do. They can't create Admin accounts, and they can install most programs. A nice reference table comparing accounts is at http://www.bc.edu/offices/help/meta-elements/doc/a rticles/html/SW-WinXPUserAccounts.shtml
I haven't used WinXP Home, but in Pro, if you open the lusrmgr.msc, you'll see that while the Control Panel GUI only shows "limited" and "administrator" labels for the acounts, there are many other user groups (i.e. Power User, Backup Operators, Remote Desktop Users, etc etc)
Looks like Anonymous Coward is user 121762 (http://slashdot.org/~AnonymousCoward)
I'm the same way, with way too many t-shirts . . . five years of college results in lots of free shirts . . . but anyway, I think companies and the like should start giving out free boxers instead, since that's the limiting factor for me in having to do laundry . . .
Bleh, if you're going to use a source, at least make sure it supports your argument . . .
The link answers the question "What is the best temperature to brew coffee?" Not "What is the best temperature to serve coffee?"
According to this study most of the subjects liked their coffee at ~140F.
This review of coffee machines (scroll down to the end of the page and look at "2 Temperature") states "Also, to maintain your coffee at the ideal drinking temperature of 160 degrees, preheat your cup for about ten seconds using steam or hot water." (emphasis added)
So, while you may have a higher pain threshold than many, and like to risk burns, I think it's reasonbale to ask providers not to serve a product which "can cause third-degree burns (the worst kind) in two to seven seconds." (Quotation from the bottom of this article)
I'm surprised that eye-fatigue wasn't an issue. I would imagine scanning over a 100" display, having your eyes move from one corner to the other, would be rather tiring. Of course, depending on the distance from the screen, the movement of the eyes wouldn't be any more than on your standard monitor . . .
Why is everyone assuming that just because he said "my company" that he's the owner of said company? When I first read the parent post, I assumed that he was an employee . . .
Your post is a little confusing. You mention the two extremes and suggest that the amount of data per person is a bell curve. By definition a bell curve is a normal distribution and is symmetric. If the distribution really is a bell curve, and you ignored your outliers, you'd have the same average of 800 megs per person . . .
The question really should be is it a normal distribution - I would guess yes . . .
Kind of hard to find anything on this game (at least in english). Here's a short review in english.
.
Looks like the following are official sites (Taiwanese and Korean respectively)
http://www.spgame.com.tw/
http://spgame.com/
Seems to be some kind of multiplayer RPG that's got an anime feel to it . .
only if you're body is pure muscle mass . . .
;)
The average healthy male is 45% muscle mass, so for the 80 pound weekling, it'd be 80 + 80*.45*.25 for a whopping 89 lbs . . . I don't think the jocks are that worried
actually, according to the Register article you have to click "yes" to an EULA before it installs the copy protection program . . .
amazing how the position has changed so rapidly (the above article was from 10ish EDT on the 8th)
On a related note, what do you all think about students starting to use the web as a primary source? I work primarily with children and computers, and one of the listservs I'm on, we had a discussion about whether students were losing research skills by relying on the web. My argument was more that students were being taught the research skillls - i.e. read the works cited, look for other pieces by the author, etc etc. Of course, the Internet has made it much more important to cross-check facts and sources, but you should be doing that with any research you do.
This question also is interesting as one of the organizations I work with required the purchase of a set of encyclopedias as the director felt that it was important for the kids to have the skills to use an encylopedia. I considered this a waste of resources, when CD-ROM encylopedias are a fraction of the cost of dead-tree versions, and easier to keep up to date.
Any thoughts on whether the expenditure was justified?
While it's nice to have the lecture notes avaialble digitally, I always made the effort to make sure that if I did print them out to go to class, and then make lots of notes in the margins, using various colors or ink. This required me to pay attention, and be active in my learning process, rather than passive.
Of course, I forced myself to do this as well, since I tended not to study at all, so the 3-5 hours a week of lecture per class were often the only times I'd look at the material . . . .