Could somebody please explain why somebody would willingly squint at a tiny screen, and peck at a tiny keyboard to type out some message, reminiscent of the days of the telegraph, instead of just dialing the same damn phone and, god forbid, actually *speak* to someone?
Mobile spam is largely an American phenomenon, thanks to your toothless privacy laws and unscrupulous business ethic. I never received a single piece of spam during the year that I lived in the UK and two years in Holland.
Your mobile is already a doggy leash if you allow it to be...text messaging doesn't make much difference in that respect. Learn to control it otherwise it will control you.
Text messages are, in practice, LESS intrusive than voice mail. You can skim text messages faster than you can listen to voicemail. You can furtively read off or type into the phone you're holding under your desk rather than conspicously raising it to your ear. And the phone doesn't have to ring a trillion times before it takes the message.
Text is a lifesaver at clubs, pubs and football games. How often have you gotten the directions wrong because you can't understand a voicemail thanks to all the background noise? Or because you lost the scrap of paper that you jotted it all down on? No such problems with text.
Judging by anecdotes such as yours, it seems that the biggest obstacle to widespread use of SMS in the America is the aggravation caused by spam. Well, that's more indicative of the flaws in your business culture than of the (lack of) utility of SMS.
99% SMS reception in Europe? How the hell do you know that, given that you have no indication (except by anecdote) of messages that didn't reach you? Judging the number of irate "why didn't you respond to my text" complaints I've received, I have lost plenty of SMS messages while I lived in the UK and in Holland. But, thanks to the aforementioned problem, I have no idea what the loss rate is! The only way to know is to conduct a study in Europe similar to the one described in the quoted article.
While I agree that a solid understanding of computer science theory is what separates a SW engineer from a hacker, you should not dismiss the important of experience in a particular language.
Different languages are fundamentally different in terms of capabilities, style and design philosophy. Use any one language for long enough and it will fundamentally change the way you think and work, partly due to the realities of the language, partly due to the unique culture of the developer community that surrounds it. Put a bunch of experienced VB, C and Perl developers in the same room and pretty soon the gulf between them will be apparent.
Furthermore, when a job ad requires 5 years proficiency in C++ on Windows, the implication is that you would be intimately familiar with MFC and Win32 API. It takes a lot of experience to truly harness these beasts effectively, not least because they are so imperfect and unruly! In the real world, developers don't spend all their time implementing the bubble-sort routines they learned in a CS course.
The "language matters much less than theory" refrain is only true for junior positions where nobody knows anything anyway.
2- A console does not need a $350+ video card upgrade every 12 months to run the current batch of games.
This raises an interesting angle that is not immediately obvious. Because PCs are easily upgradeable, PC game publishers have less of an incentive to refine their products to eek out every last drop of power available in hardware, something that is difficult to do anyway given how diverse the hardware is. So PC gamers are drawn into a never ending arms-race, which inevitably leaves the less fanatical or more frugal gamers behind.
Console game publishers, on the other hand, write for a market in which the upgrade cycle is much slower, and the hardware is homogenous and proprietary. This forces/allows them to focus their creativity on writing truly ingenious games, and to refine the software to make the best possible use of the hardware. The result for the consumer is a product that performs just as well but costs less.
Take Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2, released a year go, for example. Even though the PS2 is about half a generation behind the XBox in power, the gameplay, graphics and sound effects surpassed that of the first batch of XBox games, and still equals that of many of today's PC games. And, given that it's much more difficult to apply patches to console games than to PC games, console game publishers are forced to adhere to much higher QA standards before making a release. Pretty much everyone agrees that PC games are far buggier than console games.
The PC industry in general could draw useful lessons from these observations.
The study seemed to be checking for typos in citations. Just because a scientist has copied the text of a (wrongly typed) citation does not mean s/he has not read the paper.
How ironic, you obviously have not read the study you are criticising! The study is not discussing mere typos, it is discussing the misuse of citations taken out of context -- i.e. if the researchers had bothered to read the paper they're citing, then they would realise that the citation they use means something quite different than what they think!!!
I bought these plenty of these pirate DVDs on my last trip to China, and the quality varies. You can more or less apply this rule of thumb:
if the movie hasn't been released on DVD yet, it is usually of the theatre-screening-captured-on-a-camcorder variety. Just like the theatre experience, complete the sounds of the audience coughing and chewing popcorn, but obviously terrible picture and sound quality.
if the movie has been officially released on DVD, then these are usually perfect copies. The discs are sometimes flawed, though, as they are cheaply laminated. I don't know what their shelf life is.
If you don't care about the moral issues of piracy, then these DVDs are a great deal. You can expect about one of every three that you buy to be duds, but even then at less than $1 a pop, I ended up with well over 50 movies for less than $100 spent.
Filtering isn't effective if it also blocks legitimate mail, and from anecdotal evidence it seems to do that excessively.
All my friends who work in places that have spam filtering implemented complain incessantly of emails not received, often times important emails on which their work depends.
Hrm... all AC units that I know of cool the air by removing the humidity. Not sure how else you could mechanically cool a room...
First, removing humidity WARMS air, it does not cool it. In fact, in poorer countries where electricity is expensive, "air coolers" are in widespread use which consist of a fan blowing air across a wet membrane, thus HUMIDIFYING the air. The air is cooled because heat is consumed in the spontaneous state change of water from liquid to vapour (which has a higher entropy).
ACs work on the same principle, except freon is used instead of water and it is encased in a looped circulation system where it is recompressed back into a liquid (using electrical power), and the excess heat is exchanged with outside air via cooling fins.
This, of course, is what your air conditioner system is for. It's not there just to cool the place; the AC also dehumidifies the air.
Not necessarily. Best if you check if that holds true for your particular AC, as cooling and dehumidifying are two separate functions.
That's not a bug, that's a feature!
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I found the following passage from the article to be quite amusing:
"The 'one-liter' car has a number of highly practical, almost luxurious details...reversing is aided by a rearview camera..."
The rearview camera is being marketed as a luxury feature, when in fact it is there because the minimalist, aerodynamical profile of the car means there's no rear window to see out of!
Hovercraft are very aerodynamically inefficient and slow. They have only succeeded in certain niches where other watercraft are even slower (40 knots at best for submerged hulls, 60-70 knots for hydro/jetfoils) or where amphibious capability is required (especially military applications).
A wing-in-ground-effect vehicle could theoretically fit the bill. In practice, however, they usually prove to be unstable at very high-speeds - any momentary disturbance in the supporting air-cushion results in certain disaster.
I presume that this guy is predicting that we'll interact with the computer through voice only, without need for keyboard or mouse. If so, then this prediction is way off, because speech recognition is only one small part of the puzzle.
Think of it this way. Sit with someone and walk them through performing relatively simple tasks, but try to do it without being able to point to the screen.
"Click on the red button, no, no, not that one, the one next to the green button, then tab into the next text field, type this in a-p-p-l-e-space-j-u-i-c-e, ok, now right click, enter, then select brown from the third drop down box, oh what's a drop down box?"
Pretty complicated, huh? And that's with perfect speech recognition software in your buddy's head.
To carry out tasks beyond the mundane like dictation will require a radical interface redesign, along with some pretty cool AI. Now, I think this technology might be within grasp by 2012, but far from widely deployed. As we've seen, Microsoft (and the market) likes incremental rather than radical change.
.....what gives? I talk to my computer all the time..I guess I'm ahead of the times.
Me too! The conversations usually go like this:
Me: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL? It: Affirmative, Dave, I read you. Me: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. It: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Me: What's the problem? It: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. Me: What are you talking about, HAL? It: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Me: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL? It: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. Me: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL? It: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
The cynic in me thinks NASA wants to shut down the ISS anyway (so it should be), and the Russians are just a convenient political scapegoat. Let's face it -- the darn thing is too expensive and of little practical benefit. No hard science comes out of it that could be achieved by much cheaper means, earthbound or not. The only reason why the ISS is still aloft is because of some irrational public fascination with manned space exploration. Time for us to wake up from that dream and focus on real work.
...and other countries with ubiquitous lanes for low-speed (scooters and bikes) traffic. In fact, city-dwelling Western Europeans in general would likely welcome the Segway much more willingly than Americans. No knee-jerk bias towards cars.
This is a perfect example of how inadequate laws make life cumbersome for both corporations and their customers.
From the company's standpoint, EULA's could be a real headache, because the company has to hammer out pages upon pages of legalese to cover its own arse.
From the consumer's perspective, ever-expanding EULA's are just as much a nuisance as a potential pitfall when not read properly. It becomes impractical to read them, yet the less you read them before agreeing, the more you expose yourself to being taken advantage of.
The solution is more laws and better laws, and this is where the government CAN do good. If most things that are common sense can be nailed down in public law (i.e. we're not responsible if you scald yourself with hot coffee, we will not spam you, etc.), then EULAs could be trimmed and focused on the unique essentials of a particular situation. That would benefit both consumers and corporations. The only losers in this situation would be all the parasitic lawyers and the sneaky folks with dubious EULAs (*cough* Microsoft *cough*).
1) Thousandths of an inch are useful in measuring machine tolerances, while millimeters are two gross and micrometers too fine.
Millimeters are two gross? As in 2 x 144?;-) I think you mean "too coarse".
2)Celcius is not fine grained enough to figure out how to dress for the weather, while Fahrenheit allows one to easily judge whether or not to wear a jacket.
You have got to be kidding me. Do you wear a hundred layers of tissue paper, peeling them off one by one at 1 Fahrenheit incremements? I've survived so far just by putting on a jacket when it get's close to freezing.
3) In the English System, force is the fundemental unit and mass is the derived unit, while in the metric system, mass is fundemental and force is derived. This works well for science and engineering, but Joe Sixpack thinks in terms of weight on earth -- pounds of force.
Oh please. So you're telling me that everyone who uses the metric system gets terribly confused when they have to speak in precise terms of mass vs. force? You must be denser *grin* than I thought.
I fail to see how a jet train will make much difference given that passenger rail travel is generally a failure in North America.
There is the immediate issue of population density - it is not high enough to economically justify the huge construction and maintenance costs. Very few passenger routes (mainly between large cities in the North East) actually turn a profit.
Of course, this exact same argument could be levelled against passenger car travel, as the hidden subsidies in the form of public roadworks, tax benefits to car manufacturers and oil companies, etc. all add up to about 4 times as much as the visible cost of owning and operating the average car.
The issue then becomes, at the core, one of culture. We are wedded to our cars, they are ingrained into our very way of life far more than their mere utilitarian purpose entails. Life in America revolves around the car, not the other way around. Given that, passenger rail travel has no hope of succeeding beyond a few niche markets.
Finally, the high-speed rail travel is only moderately successful even in its ideal arenas of rail-crazy Europe and Japan. The Eurostar, Thalys and ICE make a profit (and that's BEFORE accounting for public subsidies) only over middle distances connecting the major hubs, i.e. London, Brussels, Paris. Other routes to Switzerland, Germany and the South of France have always been making huge financial losses, even more so now with the advent of low-cost, low-frills airlines that get there in half the time.
On a ski trip to Japan with a group of friends, the cabins we were staying in had electrically heated toilet seats. No cold bums when you go take a dump. One of these gizmos had a crack in the material, and when one friend sat down without drying himself off after a shower, he got a huge electric shock. Unfortunately our friend became momentarily incontinent, and I had to clean up the mess while he went to get first aid for the burns to his butt!
A "plastic" is any material that is easily molded at a low temperature into the desired shape of a final product. Though many plastics are derived from petrochemicals, some are derived from alcohol-based polymers, and some others from vegetable resins. The name "plastic" describes a material's physical properties, not its composition. Also, not all plastics are affected by exposure to UV light.
Based on my quick skim of the articles on this invention, I'm not aware exactly what type of plastic is being used. But it is the nanorods that are the breakthrough "active ingredient", so it should be fairly easy to substitute whatever plastic would be most appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Could somebody please explain why somebody would willingly squint at a tiny screen, and peck at a tiny keyboard to type out some message, reminiscent of the days of the telegraph, instead of just dialing the same damn phone and, god forbid, actually *speak* to someone?
You could say the exact same thing about email.
Mobile spam is largely an American phenomenon, thanks to your toothless privacy laws and unscrupulous business ethic. I never received a single piece of spam during the year that I lived in the UK and two years in Holland.
Your mobile is already a doggy leash if you allow it to be...text messaging doesn't make much difference in that respect. Learn to control it otherwise it will control you.
Text messages are, in practice, LESS intrusive than voice mail. You can skim text messages faster than you can listen to voicemail. You can furtively read off or type into the phone you're holding under your desk rather than conspicously raising it to your ear. And the phone doesn't have to ring a trillion times before it takes the message.
Text is a lifesaver at clubs, pubs and football games. How often have you gotten the directions wrong because you can't understand a voicemail thanks to all the background noise? Or because you lost the scrap of paper that you jotted it all down on? No such problems with text.
Judging by anecdotes such as yours, it seems that the biggest obstacle to widespread use of SMS in the America is the aggravation caused by spam. Well, that's more indicative of the flaws in your business culture than of the (lack of) utility of SMS.
99% SMS reception in Europe? How the hell do you know that, given that you have no indication (except by anecdote) of messages that didn't reach you? Judging the number of irate "why didn't you respond to my text" complaints I've received, I have lost plenty of SMS messages while I lived in the UK and in Holland. But, thanks to the aforementioned problem, I have no idea what the loss rate is! The only way to know is to conduct a study in Europe similar to the one described in the quoted article.
There's a funny example of engrish in the pages that you referred to here: "Because of Japanese reguration isn't suitable to develop new airplane."
While I agree that a solid understanding of computer science theory is what separates a SW engineer from a hacker, you should not dismiss the important of experience in a particular language.
Different languages are fundamentally different in terms of capabilities, style and design philosophy. Use any one language for long enough and it will fundamentally change the way you think and work, partly due to the realities of the language, partly due to the unique culture of the developer community that surrounds it. Put a bunch of experienced VB, C and Perl developers in the same room and pretty soon the gulf between them will be apparent.
Furthermore, when a job ad requires 5 years proficiency in C++ on Windows, the implication is that you would be intimately familiar with MFC and Win32 API. It takes a lot of experience to truly harness these beasts effectively, not least because they are so imperfect and unruly! In the real world, developers don't spend all their time implementing the bubble-sort routines they learned in a CS course.
The "language matters much less than theory" refrain is only true for junior positions where nobody knows anything anyway.
2- A console does not need a $350+ video card upgrade every 12 months to run the current batch of games.
This raises an interesting angle that is not immediately obvious. Because PCs are easily upgradeable, PC game publishers have less of an incentive to refine their products to eek out every last drop of power available in hardware, something that is difficult to do anyway given how diverse the hardware is. So PC gamers are drawn into a never ending arms-race, which inevitably leaves the less fanatical or more frugal gamers behind.
Console game publishers, on the other hand, write for a market in which the upgrade cycle is much slower, and the hardware is homogenous and proprietary. This forces/allows them to focus their creativity on writing truly ingenious games, and to refine the software to make the best possible use of the hardware. The result for the consumer is a product that performs just as well but costs less.
Take Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2, released a year go, for example. Even though the PS2 is about half a generation behind the XBox in power, the gameplay, graphics and sound effects surpassed that of the first batch of XBox games, and still equals that of many of today's PC games. And, given that it's much more difficult to apply patches to console games than to PC games, console game publishers are forced to adhere to much higher QA standards before making a release. Pretty much everyone agrees that PC games are far buggier than console games.
The PC industry in general could draw useful lessons from these observations.
The study seemed to be checking for typos in citations. Just because a scientist has copied the text of a (wrongly typed) citation does not mean s/he has not read the paper.
How ironic, you obviously have not read the study you are criticising! The study is not discussing mere typos, it is discussing the misuse of citations taken out of context -- i.e. if the researchers had bothered to read the paper they're citing, then they would realise that the citation they use means something quite different than what they think!!!
if the movie hasn't been released on DVD yet, it is usually of the theatre-screening-captured-on-a-camcorder variety. Just like the theatre experience, complete the sounds of the audience coughing and chewing popcorn, but obviously terrible picture and sound quality.
if the movie has been officially released on DVD, then these are usually perfect copies. The discs are sometimes flawed, though, as they are cheaply laminated. I don't know what their shelf life is.
If you don't care about the moral issues of piracy, then these DVDs are a great deal. You can expect about one of every three that you buy to be duds, but even then at less than $1 a pop, I ended up with well over 50 movies for less than $100 spent.
Filtering isn't effective if it also blocks legitimate mail, and from anecdotal evidence it seems to do that excessively.
All my friends who work in places that have spam filtering implemented complain incessantly of emails not received, often times important emails on which their work depends.
Hrm... all AC units that I know of cool the air by removing the humidity. Not sure how else you could mechanically cool a room...
First, removing humidity WARMS air, it does not cool it. In fact, in poorer countries where electricity is expensive, "air coolers" are in widespread use which consist of a fan blowing air across a wet membrane, thus HUMIDIFYING the air. The air is cooled because heat is consumed in the spontaneous state change of water from liquid to vapour (which has a higher entropy).
ACs work on the same principle, except freon is used instead of water and it is encased in a looped circulation system where it is recompressed back into a liquid (using electrical power), and the excess heat is exchanged with outside air via cooling fins.
This, of course, is what your air conditioner system is for. It's not there just to cool the place; the AC also dehumidifies the air.
Not necessarily. Best if you check if that holds true for your particular AC, as cooling and dehumidifying are two separate functions.
I found the following passage from the article to be quite amusing:
"The 'one-liter' car has a number of highly practical, almost luxurious details...reversing is aided by a rearview camera..."
The rearview camera is being marketed as a luxury feature, when in fact it is there because the minimalist, aerodynamical profile of the car means there's no rear window to see out of!
Hovercraft are very aerodynamically inefficient and slow. They have only succeeded in certain niches where other watercraft are even slower (40 knots at best for submerged hulls, 60-70 knots for hydro/jetfoils) or where amphibious capability is required (especially military applications).
A wing-in-ground-effect vehicle could theoretically fit the bill. In practice, however, they usually prove to be unstable at very high-speeds - any momentary disturbance in the supporting air-cushion results in certain disaster.
I presume that this guy is predicting that we'll interact with the computer through voice only, without need for keyboard or mouse. If so, then this prediction is way off, because speech recognition is only one small part of the puzzle.
Think of it this way. Sit with someone and walk them through performing relatively simple tasks, but try to do it without being able to point to the screen.
"Click on the red button, no, no, not that one, the one next to the green button, then tab into the next text field, type this in a-p-p-l-e-space-j-u-i-c-e, ok, now right click, enter, then select brown from the third drop down box, oh what's a drop down box?"
Pretty complicated, huh? And that's with perfect speech recognition software in your buddy's head.
To carry out tasks beyond the mundane like dictation will require a radical interface redesign, along with some pretty cool AI. Now, I think this technology might be within grasp by 2012, but far from widely deployed. As we've seen, Microsoft (and the market) likes incremental rather than radical change.
.....what gives? I talk to my computer all the time..I guess I'm ahead of the times.
Me too! The conversations usually go like this:
Me: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
It: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Me: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
It: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Me: What's the problem?
It: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Me: What are you talking about, HAL?
It: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Me: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL?
It: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Me: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
It: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Interesting perspective.
The cynic in me thinks NASA wants to shut down the ISS anyway (so it should be), and the Russians are just a convenient political scapegoat. Let's face it -- the darn thing is too expensive and of little practical benefit. No hard science comes out of it that could be achieved by much cheaper means, earthbound or not. The only reason why the ISS is still aloft is because of some irrational public fascination with manned space exploration. Time for us to wake up from that dream and focus on real work.
...and other countries with ubiquitous lanes for low-speed (scooters and bikes) traffic. In fact, city-dwelling Western Europeans in general would likely welcome the Segway much more willingly than Americans. No knee-jerk bias towards cars.
This is a perfect example of how inadequate laws make life cumbersome for both corporations and their customers.
From the company's standpoint, EULA's could be a real headache, because the company has to hammer out pages upon pages of legalese to cover its own arse.
From the consumer's perspective, ever-expanding EULA's are just as much a nuisance as a potential pitfall when not read properly. It becomes impractical to read them, yet the less you read them before agreeing, the more you expose yourself to being taken advantage of.
The solution is more laws and better laws, and this is where the government CAN do good. If most things that are common sense can be nailed down in public law (i.e. we're not responsible if you scald yourself with hot coffee, we will not spam you, etc.), then EULAs could be trimmed and focused on the unique essentials of a particular situation. That would benefit both consumers and corporations. The only losers in this situation would be all the parasitic lawyers and the sneaky folks with dubious EULAs (*cough* Microsoft *cough*).
1) Thousandths of an inch are useful in measuring machine tolerances, while millimeters are two gross and micrometers too fine.
;-) I think you mean "too coarse".
Millimeters are two gross? As in 2 x 144?
2)Celcius is not fine grained enough to figure out how to dress for the weather, while Fahrenheit allows one to easily judge whether or not to wear a jacket.
You have got to be kidding me. Do you wear a hundred layers of tissue paper, peeling them off one by one at 1 Fahrenheit incremements? I've survived so far just by putting on a jacket when it get's close to freezing.
3) In the English System, force is the fundemental unit and mass is the derived unit, while in the metric system, mass is fundemental and force is derived. This works well for science and engineering, but Joe Sixpack thinks in terms of weight on earth -- pounds of force.
Oh please. So you're telling me that everyone who uses the metric system gets terribly confused when they have to speak in precise terms of mass vs. force? You must be denser *grin* than I thought.
I fail to see how a jet train will make much difference given that passenger rail travel is generally a failure in North America.
There is the immediate issue of population density - it is not high enough to economically justify the huge construction and maintenance costs. Very few passenger routes (mainly between large cities in the North East) actually turn a profit.
Of course, this exact same argument could be levelled against passenger car travel, as the hidden subsidies in the form of public roadworks, tax benefits to car manufacturers and oil companies, etc. all add up to about 4 times as much as the visible cost of owning and operating the average car.
The issue then becomes, at the core, one of culture. We are wedded to our cars, they are ingrained into our very way of life far more than their mere utilitarian purpose entails. Life in America revolves around the car, not the other way around. Given that, passenger rail travel has no hope of succeeding beyond a few niche markets.
Finally, the high-speed rail travel is only moderately successful even in its ideal arenas of rail-crazy Europe and Japan. The Eurostar, Thalys and ICE make a profit (and that's BEFORE accounting for public subsidies) only over middle distances connecting the major hubs, i.e. London, Brussels, Paris. Other routes to Switzerland, Germany and the South of France have always been making huge financial losses, even more so now with the advent of low-cost, low-frills airlines that get there in half the time.
On a ski trip to Japan with a group of friends, the cabins we were staying in had electrically heated toilet seats. No cold bums when you go take a dump. One of these gizmos had a crack in the material, and when one friend sat down without drying himself off after a shower, he got a huge electric shock. Unfortunately our friend became momentarily incontinent, and I had to clean up the mess while he went to get first aid for the burns to his butt!
A "plastic" is any material that is easily molded at a low temperature into the desired shape of a final product. Though many plastics are derived from petrochemicals, some are derived from alcohol-based polymers, and some others from vegetable resins. The name "plastic" describes a material's physical properties, not its composition. Also, not all plastics are affected by exposure to UV light.
Based on my quick skim of the articles on this invention, I'm not aware exactly what type of plastic is being used. But it is the nanorods that are the breakthrough "active ingredient", so it should be fairly easy to substitute whatever plastic would be most appropriate.