Intriguing as it sounds, regenerative braking doesn't really help all that much. It's probably not worth doing unless you get it almost for free.
On my Prius, I typically see an average of less than two of those "50 Wh regenerated" symbols per five minutes of driving, or perhaps 1000 per hour of commuting driving. Figure 50 mph, so over a total of 50 miles, with maybe 1.1 gallons of gas consumed, 1000 watt-hours is regenerated.
One gallon of gas = 125,000 BTU = 36650 watt-hours, so the regenerated energy is equivalent to about 1/36th of a gallon, and thus contributes perhaps 3% or about 1.5 mpg to the fuel efficiency.
Other Prius owners have reported similar calculations; this is the right ballpark, anyway.
So even if you triple the regeneration efficiency (I believe on the Prius the efficiency of the regeneration-storage-reuse cycle is about 30%), you are still only talking about an improvement of 3 mpg over the Prius.
The article says "Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
That's a completely baffling statement to me. So baffling as to trigger my BS detector.
Presumably the point of producing it in the car is to avoid the need to store the gaseous hydrogen. But electrolysing hydrogen requires energy--the hydrogen is not a source of energy so much as it is a storage medium for energy. So where would that energy come from?
From a gasoline-powered generator in your car? Or what?
Sounds like a smooth-talking snake-oil salesman who's answer to everything is "yes, we've solved that problem too."
The former Walt Disney World attraction, "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride," ended with the car breaking through railroad crossing gates and heading down the railroad tracks, apparently directly toward an oncoming train. In reality, all that is there besides the sound effects is a dazzlingly bright headlight, making it almost impossible to see that you are heading toward a doorway in the black-painted room.
As you emerge after your "collision," the final scene in the ride show numerous devils with tridents.
If Walt Disney, always a good judge of such things, thought that kids would enjoy the virtual experience, not merely of dying, but of being consigned to eternal damnation, it does not seems a far stretch to assume that gamers may enjoy it as well.
What the article doesn't say is that this phenomenon increases in middle age, both with respect to seeing and hearing. I'm not sure how much is due to actual declines in visual and auditory acuity; I'm inclined to think it's a cognitive effect, like common memory loss.
I've always supposed Lewis Carroll's poem, from _Sylvie and Bruno,_ was referring to this effect. Certainly "He thought he saw... he looked again and found it was..." is happening to me more frequently.
He thought he saw an Elephant, That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. "At length I realise," he said, "The bitterness of Life!"
He thought he saw a Buffalo Upon the chimney-piece: He looked again, and found it was His Sister's Husband's Niece. "Unless you leave this house," he said, "I'll send for the Police!"
He thought he saw a Rattlesnake That questioned him in Greek: He looked again, and found it was The Middle of Next Week. "The one thing I regret," he said, "Is that it cannot speak!"
He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk Descending from the bus: He looked again, and found it was A Hippopotamus. "If this should stay to dine," he said, "There won't be much for us!"
He thought he saw a Kangaroo That worked a coffee-mill: He looked again, and found it was A Vegetable-Pill. "Were I to swallow this," he said, "I should be very ill!"
He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four That stood beside his bed: He looked again, and found it was A Bear without a Head. "Poor thing," he said, "poor silly thing! It's waiting to be fed!"
He thought he saw an Albatross That fluttered round the lamp: He looked again, and found it was A Penny-Postage Stamp. "You'd best be getting home," he said: "The nights are very damp!"
He thought he saw a Garden-Door That opened with a key: He looked again, and found it was A Double Rule of Three: "And all its mystery," he said, "Is clear as day to me!"
He thought he saw a Argument That proved he was the Pope: He looked again, and found it was A Bar of Mottled Soap. "A fact so dread," he faintly said, "Extinguishes all hope!"
An airplane needs an engine to fly, and when that engine is destroyed and crashes somewhere near where you shot it down. A satellite needs no engine to fly, and when you shoot at it, it becomes thousands of little satellites, all of which continue to "fly" at 25,000 miles per hour.
I hope the people shooting at (not "down") this satellite have seen "Fantasia." In _The Sorceror's Apprentice,_ Mickey Mouse decides that the best way to deal with an out-of-control magic broom is to chop it into thousands of pieces... all of which just keep right on going, making the problem worse instead of better.
Any sort of free intellectual activity, following what interests you to see where it leads, makes authoritarians uneasy. Bad governments seek to exercise power by restricting information. Anyone who's just naturally curious and follows their bliss for the sheer joy of finding things out represents a danger to authoritarians.
It's not just political speech that's dangerous, it's anything that seeks truth that might not always align with propaganda.
That's why the freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution are so precious.
What about the thousands of people--often abused women in dangerous situations--who have been given donated cell phones through numerous charitable organizations so that they can dial 911 in an emergency?
Have they been warned about the upcoming transition? Are the cell phone companies going to give them new digital phones?
Yes, here comes a lazy, selfish, and mean-spirited comment.
I participated in the G1G1 program half for altruistic reasons and half for selfish reasons. (A perfect match for the program, right?) I thought that if nothing else, the XO would make a very satisfactory eBook reader for the wealth of public domain material available from Project Gutenberg.
As with so much about the XO, the hardware is great, and the software is flaky.
I don't see how the Read activity can be regarded as adequate for reading textbooks, at least not in its present form.
The "Read" activity is... unpredictable. It's not clear what file formats it's supposed to work with. The one that works most reliably is PDF. In particular, downloads from Manybooks.net, with translation format set to PDF, Large Print gives access to what seems to be most if not all of Project Gutenberg, with formatting that works quite well for the XO.
My first attempt at reading for pleasure from the XO went very well; the screen was legible, the package was portable, I enjoyed the story (L. Frank Baum, "The Master Key," a very entertaining read by the way).
Until I tried to continue reading a day later and found myself back at page 1, having lost my place.
When you go back in the Journal to a book you've been reading, sometimes it appears to reopen the book at the page where you closed it, and sometimes it loses your place and reopens at page 1. I haven't been able to characterize the behavior well enough to report it as a bug.
The "Keep" feature, which I would have expected to be the right way to save the state of the Read activity, always reports a "Keep error."
There is no way to bookmark a page, at least not one that I've been able to find.
The XO is not clever about the journal titles that it assigns to downloaded eBooks, nor does it attempt to automatically generate metadata for them, so they are hard to find in the Journal unless one goes in and manually enters things like title and author for every eBook.
The Read activity does not appear to have any way to suppress the display of the mouse pointer. Which on the XO is a bit on the big and intrusive side.
It seems to behave badly on long PDF documents. This, too, is hard to pin down, but any full-length novels... especially full-length Victorian novels... strain its capability.
Now, I'm sure someone will say "It's open source, so fix it." The honest response I'm too lazy and have other things to do with my spare time, but I will point out that the promise that you could directly view the source of any XO activity directly on the XO itself does not appear to be realized, at least not in the G1G1 as shipped. Nor is it at all clear to me that Pippy, which appears to be the development environment included, would be up to the task of modifying the Read actvity.
I've had this argument with so many managerial types over so many years...
The big problem with Windows is not whether it's good or whether it's bad, it's that it's a pig in a poke. There are no stable specifications for what Windows is or isn't, and what's in Windows and what isn't. People make business decisions on things like the "fact" that Windows "comes with Toolbook" (yes, no kidding). It comes with Toolbook for as long as Microsoft thinks it should, then it doesn't. You can repeat this ad nauseam for any important characteristic of Windows, without even getting into questions of what kinds of DRM are actually enforced to what degree.
There is no specification for Windows. As a simple technical matter we have even had problems determining which DLLs and OCXes are "part of" Windows: there does not seem to be a standard list of what a full directory listing of a "standard" Windows installation is supposed to look like. The same Windows CD will install slightly different sets of files on different PCs.
This is equally true of the Mac OS. It comes with HyperCard, until it doesn't. The characteristics of what QuickTime will and won't do, how many Macs can be "authorized" under iTunes changes, etc.
This is not necessarily a characteristic of proprietary software in general. I grew up in an environment where the word "specifications" meant a document that was written by a buyer, often the government or the military, but in any case an entity with the clout to say "we are interesting in buying something that does X, Y, and Z." And software vendors would either pass up the business, which they could not afford to do, or supply a known product that met known specifications. The FORTRAN compiler darn well better meet the FORTRAN spec...
I've tried to get people that make business decisions to understand that if they go with Microsoft, they cannot make their judgement not solely on the basis of what Microsoft is delivering today: they are committing their company's future to their guesses about what Microsoft will be doing in the future.
As long as the people who make purchasing decisions about Windows don't care about having a real set of specs and holding Microsoft to them, Windows will continue to be a pig in a poke.
WARF is old and famous, one of the very first attempts to fund university research by patenting and commercializing research.
It was founded in the 1920s by a professor who invented the process for putting vitamin D in milk.
I believe they also had the patent for homogenizing milk (do you see a pattern here?)
And then, of course, there is WARFarin, the trade name for the anti-coagulation agent dicoumadin, which was discovered when a distressed farmer showed up at the University of Wisconsin's ag school with a bucket of blood from a dead heifer (the pattern continues) and wanted to know what had happened.
In order for their pretty web page even to be worth a glance, they are required to give some sort of answer to the sonic boom question. They don't need to answer the question "how can we fly at Mach 5 without creating a sonic boom," but they do need to answer the question "What about it?" An answer could be something like "We think public opinion has changed and people won't really mind," or "we're sure that unknown technological breakthroughs will occur to solve this problem before the plane flies," or "we don't think people will mind flying X hours subsonic in order to be over uninhabited areas before going supersonic, and we don't believe whales care," or whatever...
But they need to say something about it.
If they're not saying anything about it, it's just an SF magazine cover, not a serious proposal.
A distinction should be made between creativity, which does involve mysterious flashes of insight, and innovation, which is "99% perspiration." Frankly, articles like this always sound to me like attempts to devalue creativity. Creativity by itself doesn't buy you a thing: it's a necessary, though not a sufficient condition for innovation. Creativity is a very annoying phenomenon to managers, who wish that with the right methodology they could use a team of interchangeable staffers as a substitute for those awkward, hard-to-manage creative people.
I don't think the "epiphany" stories are all nonsense, or false. (I don't have time to check these in depth now, so if they're like George Washington and the cherry tree, so be it...)
Kekule supposedly intuited the ring structure of the benzine molecule while dozing in front of a fireside, dreamed of carbon chains as being snakes, and suddenly dreamed of one of the snakes biting his own tail.
Mozart claimed that whole symphonies popped into his head in a flash. I don't know if that claim has been critically examined, or how you'd test such a thing. I believe it, although I'm sure his right brain was laboring hard for days before sending the news to his left brain.
It is not uncommon for writers to maintain that they get the inspiration for entire novels in a single flash, know what the last sentence will be before they write the first one, and have to hurry to get it down on paper before they forget it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed, although some are skeptical about the truth of the story, to have lost much of an important poem through being interrupted while trying to capture it by a "person from Porlock:"
"On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"
"These are games that were originally written to run in Windows XP, are broken in Vista, but magically work in Linux." Right, on an XP emulator. Well, duh.
Presumably if they were run on a Vista emulator, they'd break.
If they ran on Linux without Wine, then, yes, I'd be impressed.
Seriously, I cannot recall ever ever ever having an administration in office that was so intellectually dishonest.
Every administration uses "spin." Every administration puts its best foot forward. Every administration releases reports that give high marks to its own efforts, and it takes a skeptical and knowledgeable commentator to point out the flaws or jiggered priorities.
When Reagan said that trees cause pollution, or that all the radioactive waste from a reactor would fit under an ordinary office desk, these were misleading, but they were striking, and they were literally true, and made what were at least legitimate debating points.
But this administration's statements don't contain any facts in them at all. These guys just say whatever they think sounds good off the top of their heads, and hope that it will magically become true because they're saying it.
I said: "I find this paper very disturbing." You said: "You seem to be judging it without reading it, which I find disturbing." You're right. I did. I was a jerk.
"a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution)..."
Frederick W. Taylor, advocate of "scientific management," and who literally articulated as a principle that everything could and should be done in "the one best way." In my experience, it is managers, not engineers, who tend to have the "one best way" mindset. Recently, things that used to be called "recommendations" are now called "best practices," and as nearly as I can tell nobody ever has or thinks they need any data to back up the idea that the "best practices" are actually best.
Engineers, in my experience, are the very last people to claim there is "one best way." On the contrary... the more conservative engineers are constantly articulating tradeoffs (different ways presenting different combinations of good and bad features), while the bolder ones are constantly coming up with wild new ideas. Sometimes it is difficult for a group of engineers ever to stop brainstorming, because they are so intrigued by the challenge of finding new ways to do things... and, if nothing else, because they like the competitive one-upping of thinking of ways to do something that their colleagues didn't think of.
I find this paper very disturbing. I lived through the McCarthy years... There was no definition of the word "Communist." A communist meant anyone the government didn't like. If you pointed out that some reputed "Communist" was, simply, factually, not a Communist, not only did it not matter but it made you suspect yourself. (During the McCarthy era, for example, all homosexuals were automatically "Communists.")
These days, the word "terrist" seems to have the same sort of elusive meaning. It's only a matter of time before it becomes meaningless to point out that someone is, simply and factually, not a terrist. So what, if they were friends with terrists and didn't turn them in... or if they had a "terrist mind-set..." or if they were an engineer, because, just as all homosexuals were automatically Communists, all engineers automatically have "terrist mind-sets."
Yeah, right. A big company's approach to all difficult problems is to imagine a solution for them and create a name for that solution. Problem? Vista is bloated. Solution: create the name "MinWin."
If Microsoft wanted to reduce Vista's bloat, they'd just reduce it.
They might, if they had any good faith about it, analyze and SQA vLite and license it or offer and approved version. Or structure the present Vista so that it installs a reasonable core and allows you to "opt in" to the extra stuff.
What's likely happening is a turf battle between all the managers that want their bloat in the product, are threatened by any suggestions that it be trimmed, and will fight it's being trimmed to the death--or at least for a couple of years when they move on to their next assignment.
If MinWin happens at all, what will happen is that they'll trim Vista by 20% and then pack on 100% of new bloat.
As defined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity... what Csíkszentmihályi calls "optimum performance."
In my own view (and experience), it is closely related to "happiness."
Charles Kingsley wrote "We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about." Enthusiasm is obviously related to flow.
"Dave Grannan, the company's chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs)"
I am not impressed. I will bet you a nickel that he tried that out prior to the demonstration, and made sure there was nothing similar that might come up by accident. I would be impressed if he had given the mike to reporter Michael Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald had tried it.
At trade shows, I used to watch all sorts of demonstrations of OCR and voice recognition technology. In the old days, I would always ask to try it myself. Whenever I was allowed to, it was always a grotesque, dismal failure (followed by lame assertions that it would be fine if I gave it a little more training). In more recent times, demonstrators at trade shows have smartened up and refuse to depart from the script or allow any third party to try the stuff.
A lot of this reminds me of a gadget that was made for Lionel train sets... not by Lionel, I don't think... called something like "Voice Commander." The box showed a kid saying "Stop! Please move forward! Stop! Please back up!" and the train obeying.
It wasn't exactly a scam, it was just... well... one of these "limited phrasebook" deals. In this case, the limited phrasebook consisted of the single letter "P." The "microphone" actually had a little vane activated by air movement, and the letter "P" was about the only thing that would trip it. So if you said anything with the letter "P" in it, it would momentarily interrupt the current. Meanwhile, Lionel trains were designed with a stepping switch in them, and periodic interruptions would sequentionally cause the train to stop, go forward, stop, and go in reverse.
So, yeah, you could control the train with your voice. But it didn't necessarily do what you told it to do.
I agree that today's applications go a little farther than that, but I still have the feeling that the people who say that speech recognition is have lowered the bar for what "speech recognition" ought to mean.
I also have the impression that over the last ten years, what has happened is not that speech recognition has improved much, but that it's stayed the same and gotten cheaper... so crappy speech recognition is finding it's way everywhere.
I'm still ticked off at the "hands-free" gadget I got for my cell phone that was supposed to do voice recognition (or, correctly, use the voice recognition built into the phone). When you're driving in traffic, and its says "Should I place the call?" and you say "Yes," and it says "Did you say 'yes,'" and I say "Yes," and... lather, rinse and repeat, with my voice gradually becoming less and less intelligible with frustration... I am not at all sure that the demand on my attention is negligible.
I take that back. The article does say that the system can be trained to ignore "hospitals" and "bananas." It doesn't, however, say how, or say that the researchers have actually done this, or what the error rate is.
It doesn't, however, say how it can tell the difference between a terrorist's "suitcase nuclear weapon" and a legitimate nuclear weapon being shipped by the military.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting... I wonder how HD-DVD and Blu-Ray compare in this regard? Anybody know?
Blink, blink... nope, just middle-aged synapses misfiring again.
Intriguing as it sounds, regenerative braking doesn't really help all that much. It's probably not worth doing unless you get it almost for free.
On my Prius, I typically see an average of less than two of those "50 Wh regenerated" symbols per five minutes of driving, or perhaps 1000 per hour of commuting driving. Figure 50 mph, so over a total of 50 miles, with maybe 1.1 gallons of gas consumed, 1000 watt-hours is regenerated.
One gallon of gas = 125,000 BTU = 36650 watt-hours, so the regenerated energy is equivalent to about 1/36th of a gallon, and thus contributes perhaps 3% or about 1.5 mpg to the fuel efficiency.
Other Prius owners have reported similar calculations; this is the right ballpark, anyway.
So even if you triple the regeneration efficiency (I believe on the Prius the efficiency of the regeneration-storage-reuse cycle is about 30%), you are still only talking about an improvement of 3 mpg over the Prius.
The article says "Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
That's a completely baffling statement to me. So baffling as to trigger my BS detector.
Presumably the point of producing it in the car is to avoid the need to store the gaseous hydrogen. But electrolysing hydrogen requires energy--the hydrogen is not a source of energy so much as it is a storage medium for energy. So where would that energy come from?
From a gasoline-powered generator in your car? Or what?
Sounds like a smooth-talking snake-oil salesman who's answer to everything is "yes, we've solved that problem too."
...do I get a Slashdot article?
How about my friend Sam? He's decided not to run for Congress, either. And Frances, no congressional run for her. Lewis, him neither.
The former Walt Disney World attraction, "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride," ended with the car breaking through railroad crossing gates and heading down the railroad tracks, apparently directly toward an oncoming train. In reality, all that is there besides the sound effects is a dazzlingly bright headlight, making it almost impossible to see that you are heading toward a doorway in the black-painted room.
As you emerge after your "collision," the final scene in the ride show numerous devils with tridents.
If Walt Disney, always a good judge of such things, thought that kids would enjoy the virtual experience, not merely of dying, but of being consigned to eternal damnation, it does not seems a far stretch to assume that gamers may enjoy it as well.
Let me add my praises to all the others. It's a very good book and a very interesting book.
And the material on Bill Gates is an interesting read in his own right. (And yes, Bill Gates was a programmer).
_Inventors At Work_, also published by Microsoft Press (and regrettably out of print), by a different author, is excellent, too.
I wonder if there are any other titles in the same series?
What the article doesn't say is that this phenomenon increases in middle age, both with respect to seeing and hearing. I'm not sure how much is due to actual declines in visual and auditory acuity; I'm inclined to think it's a cognitive effect, like common memory loss.
I've always supposed Lewis Carroll's poem, from _Sylvie and Bruno,_ was referring to this effect. Certainly "He thought he saw... he looked again and found it was..." is happening to me more frequently.
He thought he saw an Elephant,
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
"At length I realise," he said,
"The bitterness of Life!"
He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister's Husband's Niece.
"Unless you leave this house," he said,
"I'll send for the Police!"
He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
"The one thing I regret," he said,
"Is that it cannot speak!"
He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
"If this should stay to dine," he said,
"There won't be much for us!"
He thought he saw a Kangaroo
That worked a coffee-mill:
He looked again, and found it was
A Vegetable-Pill.
"Were I to swallow this," he said,
"I should be very ill!"
He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a Head.
"Poor thing," he said, "poor silly thing!
It's waiting to be fed!"
He thought he saw an Albatross
That fluttered round the lamp:
He looked again, and found it was
A Penny-Postage Stamp.
"You'd best be getting home," he said:
"The nights are very damp!"
He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
"And all its mystery," he said,
"Is clear as day to me!"
He thought he saw a Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
"A fact so dread," he faintly said,
"Extinguishes all hope!"
An airplane needs an engine to fly, and when that engine is destroyed and crashes somewhere near where you shot it down. A satellite needs no engine to fly, and when you shoot at it, it becomes thousands of little satellites, all of which continue to "fly" at 25,000 miles per hour.
I hope the people shooting at (not "down") this satellite have seen "Fantasia." In _The Sorceror's Apprentice,_ Mickey Mouse decides that the best way to deal with an out-of-control magic broom is to chop it into thousands of pieces... all of which just keep right on going, making the problem worse instead of better.
Any sort of free intellectual activity, following what interests you to see where it leads, makes authoritarians uneasy. Bad governments seek to exercise power by restricting information. Anyone who's just naturally curious and follows their bliss for the sheer joy of finding things out represents a danger to authoritarians.
It's not just political speech that's dangerous, it's anything that seeks truth that might not always align with propaganda.
That's why the freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution are so precious.
What about the thousands of people--often abused women in dangerous situations--who have been given donated cell phones through numerous charitable organizations so that they can dial 911 in an emergency?
Have they been warned about the upcoming transition? Are the cell phone companies going to give them new digital phones?
Yes, here comes a lazy, selfish, and mean-spirited comment.
I participated in the G1G1 program half for altruistic reasons and half for selfish reasons. (A perfect match for the program, right?) I thought that if nothing else, the XO would make a very satisfactory eBook reader for the wealth of public domain material available from Project Gutenberg.
As with so much about the XO, the hardware is great, and the software is flaky.
I don't see how the Read activity can be regarded as adequate for reading textbooks, at least not in its present form.
The "Read" activity is... unpredictable. It's not clear what file formats it's supposed to work with. The one that works most reliably is PDF. In particular, downloads from Manybooks.net, with translation format set to PDF, Large Print gives access to what seems to be most if not all of Project Gutenberg, with formatting that works quite well for the XO.
My first attempt at reading for pleasure from the XO went very well; the screen was legible, the package was portable, I enjoyed the story (L. Frank Baum, "The Master Key," a very entertaining read by the way).
Until I tried to continue reading a day later and found myself back at page 1, having lost my place.
When you go back in the Journal to a book you've been reading, sometimes it appears to reopen the book at the page where you closed it, and sometimes it loses your place and reopens at page 1. I haven't been able to characterize the behavior well enough to report it as a bug.
The "Keep" feature, which I would have expected to be the right way to save the state of the Read activity, always reports a "Keep error."
There is no way to bookmark a page, at least not one that I've been able to find.
The XO is not clever about the journal titles that it assigns to downloaded eBooks, nor does it attempt to automatically generate metadata for them, so they are hard to find in the Journal unless one goes in and manually enters things like title and author for every eBook.
The Read activity does not appear to have any way to suppress the display of the mouse pointer. Which on the XO is a bit on the big and intrusive side.
It seems to behave badly on long PDF documents. This, too, is hard to pin down, but any full-length novels... especially full-length Victorian novels... strain its capability.
Now, I'm sure someone will say "It's open source, so fix it." The honest response I'm too lazy and have other things to do with my spare time, but I will point out that the promise that you could directly view the source of any XO activity directly on the XO itself does not appear to be realized, at least not in the G1G1 as shipped. Nor is it at all clear to me that Pippy, which appears to be the development environment included, would be up to the task of modifying the Read actvity.
I've had this argument with so many managerial types over so many years...
The big problem with Windows is not whether it's good or whether it's bad, it's that it's a pig in a poke. There are no stable specifications for what Windows is or isn't, and what's in Windows and what isn't. People make business decisions on things like the "fact" that Windows "comes with Toolbook" (yes, no kidding). It comes with Toolbook for as long as Microsoft thinks it should, then it doesn't. You can repeat this ad nauseam for any important characteristic of Windows, without even getting into questions of what kinds of DRM are actually enforced to what degree.
There is no specification for Windows. As a simple technical matter we have even had problems determining which DLLs and OCXes are "part of" Windows: there does not seem to be a standard list of what a full directory listing of a "standard" Windows installation is supposed to look like. The same Windows CD will install slightly different sets of files on different PCs.
This is equally true of the Mac OS. It comes with HyperCard, until it doesn't. The characteristics of what QuickTime will and won't do, how many Macs can be "authorized" under iTunes changes, etc.
This is not necessarily a characteristic of proprietary software in general. I grew up in an environment where the word "specifications" meant a document that was written by a buyer, often the government or the military, but in any case an entity with the clout to say "we are interesting in buying something that does X, Y, and Z." And software vendors would either pass up the business, which they could not afford to do, or supply a known product that met known specifications. The FORTRAN compiler darn well better meet the FORTRAN spec...
I've tried to get people that make business decisions to understand that if they go with Microsoft, they cannot make their judgement not solely on the basis of what Microsoft is delivering today: they are committing their company's future to their guesses about what Microsoft will be doing in the future.
As long as the people who make purchasing decisions about Windows don't care about having a real set of specs and holding Microsoft to them, Windows will continue to be a pig in a poke.
WARF is old and famous, one of the very first attempts to fund university research by patenting and commercializing research.
It was founded in the 1920s by a professor who invented the process for putting vitamin D in milk.
I believe they also had the patent for homogenizing milk (do you see a pattern here?)
And then, of course, there is WARFarin, the trade name for the anti-coagulation agent dicoumadin, which was discovered when a distressed farmer showed up at the University of Wisconsin's ag school with a bucket of blood from a dead heifer (the pattern continues) and wanted to know what had happened.
In order for their pretty web page even to be worth a glance, they are required to give some sort of answer to the sonic boom question. They don't need to answer the question "how can we fly at Mach 5 without creating a sonic boom," but they do need to answer the question "What about it?" An answer could be something like "We think public opinion has changed and people won't really mind," or "we're sure that unknown technological breakthroughs will occur to solve this problem before the plane flies," or "we don't think people will mind flying X hours subsonic in order to be over uninhabited areas before going supersonic, and we don't believe whales care," or whatever...
But they need to say something about it.
If they're not saying anything about it, it's just an SF magazine cover, not a serious proposal.
A distinction should be made between creativity, which does involve mysterious flashes of insight, and innovation, which is "99% perspiration." Frankly, articles like this always sound to me like attempts to devalue creativity. Creativity by itself doesn't buy you a thing: it's a necessary, though not a sufficient condition for innovation. Creativity is a very annoying phenomenon to managers, who wish that with the right methodology they could use a team of interchangeable staffers as a substitute for those awkward, hard-to-manage creative people.
I don't think the "epiphany" stories are all nonsense, or false. (I don't have time to check these in depth now, so if they're like George Washington and the cherry tree, so be it...)
Kekule supposedly intuited the ring structure of the benzine molecule while dozing in front of a fireside, dreamed of carbon chains as being snakes, and suddenly dreamed of one of the snakes biting his own tail.
Mozart claimed that whole symphonies popped into his head in a flash. I don't know if that claim has been critically examined, or how you'd test such a thing. I believe it, although I'm sure his right brain was laboring hard for days before sending the news to his left brain.
It is not uncommon for writers to maintain that they get the inspiration for entire novels in a single flash, know what the last sentence will be before they write the first one, and have to hurry to get it down on paper before they forget it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed, although some are skeptical about the truth of the story, to have lost much of an important poem through being interrupted while trying to capture it by a "person from Porlock:"
"On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"
"These are games that were originally written to run in Windows XP, are broken in Vista, but magically work in Linux." Right, on an XP emulator. Well, duh.
Presumably if they were run on a Vista emulator, they'd break.
If they ran on Linux without Wine, then, yes, I'd be impressed.
Seriously, I cannot recall ever ever ever having an administration in office that was so intellectually dishonest.
Every administration uses "spin." Every administration puts its best foot forward. Every administration releases reports that give high marks to its own efforts, and it takes a skeptical and knowledgeable commentator to point out the flaws or jiggered priorities.
When Reagan said that trees cause pollution, or that all the radioactive waste from a reactor would fit under an ordinary office desk, these were misleading, but they were striking, and they were literally true, and made what were at least legitimate debating points.
But this administration's statements don't contain any facts in them at all. These guys just say whatever they think sounds good off the top of their heads, and hope that it will magically become true because they're saying it.
I said: "I find this paper very disturbing."
You said: "You seem to be judging it without reading it, which I find disturbing."
You're right. I did. I was a jerk.
"a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution)..."
Frederick W. Taylor, advocate of "scientific management," and who literally articulated as a principle that everything could and should be done in "the one best way." In my experience, it is managers, not engineers, who tend to have the "one best way" mindset. Recently, things that used to be called "recommendations" are now called "best practices," and as nearly as I can tell nobody ever has or thinks they need any data to back up the idea that the "best practices" are actually best.
Engineers, in my experience, are the very last people to claim there is "one best way." On the contrary... the more conservative engineers are constantly articulating tradeoffs (different ways presenting different combinations of good and bad features), while the bolder ones are constantly coming up with wild new ideas. Sometimes it is difficult for a group of engineers ever to stop brainstorming, because they are so intrigued by the challenge of finding new ways to do things... and, if nothing else, because they like the competitive one-upping of thinking of ways to do something that their colleagues didn't think of.
I find this paper very disturbing. I lived through the McCarthy years... There was no definition of the word "Communist." A communist meant anyone the government didn't like. If you pointed out that some reputed "Communist" was, simply, factually, not a Communist, not only did it not matter but it made you suspect yourself. (During the McCarthy era, for example, all homosexuals were automatically "Communists.")
These days, the word "terrist" seems to have the same sort of elusive meaning. It's only a matter of time before it becomes meaningless to point out that someone is, simply and factually, not a terrist. So what, if they were friends with terrists and didn't turn them in... or if they had a "terrist mind-set..." or if they were an engineer, because, just as all homosexuals were automatically Communists, all engineers automatically have "terrist mind-sets."
Many posters commented yesterday that the whole story didn't make sense... particularly the curious vague comments about Apple and iPods.
The many posters who said it sounded fishy were all correct!
Yeah, right. A big company's approach to all difficult problems is to imagine a solution for them and create a name for that solution. Problem? Vista is bloated. Solution: create the name "MinWin."
If Microsoft wanted to reduce Vista's bloat, they'd just reduce it.
They might, if they had any good faith about it, analyze and SQA vLite and license it or offer and approved version. Or structure the present Vista so that it installs a reasonable core and allows you to "opt in" to the extra stuff.
What's likely happening is a turf battle between all the managers that want their bloat in the product, are threatened by any suggestions that it be trimmed, and will fight it's being trimmed to the death--or at least for a couple of years when they move on to their next assignment.
If MinWin happens at all, what will happen is that they'll trim Vista by 20% and then pack on 100% of new bloat.
As defined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity... what Csíkszentmihályi calls "optimum performance."
In my own view (and experience), it is closely related to "happiness."
Charles Kingsley wrote "We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about." Enthusiasm is obviously related to flow.
And multitasking is compatible with neither.
"Dave Grannan, the company's chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs)"
I am not impressed. I will bet you a nickel that he tried that out prior to the demonstration, and made sure there was nothing similar that might come up by accident. I would be impressed if he had given the mike to reporter Michael Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald had tried it.
At trade shows, I used to watch all sorts of demonstrations of OCR and voice recognition technology. In the old days, I would always ask to try it myself. Whenever I was allowed to, it was always a grotesque, dismal failure (followed by lame assertions that it would be fine if I gave it a little more training). In more recent times, demonstrators at trade shows have smartened up and refuse to depart from the script or allow any third party to try the stuff.
A lot of this reminds me of a gadget that was made for Lionel train sets... not by Lionel, I don't think... called something like "Voice Commander." The box showed a kid saying "Stop! Please move forward! Stop! Please back up!" and the train obeying.
It wasn't exactly a scam, it was just... well... one of these "limited phrasebook" deals. In this case, the limited phrasebook consisted of the single letter "P." The "microphone" actually had a little vane activated by air movement, and the letter "P" was about the only thing that would trip it. So if you said anything with the letter "P" in it, it would momentarily interrupt the current. Meanwhile, Lionel trains were designed with a stepping switch in them, and periodic interruptions would sequentionally cause the train to stop, go forward, stop, and go in reverse.
So, yeah, you could control the train with your voice. But it didn't necessarily do what you told it to do.
I agree that today's applications go a little farther than that, but I still have the feeling that the people who say that speech recognition is have lowered the bar for what "speech recognition" ought to mean.
I also have the impression that over the last ten years, what has happened is not that speech recognition has improved much, but that it's stayed the same and gotten cheaper... so crappy speech recognition is finding it's way everywhere.
I'm still ticked off at the "hands-free" gadget I got for my cell phone that was supposed to do voice recognition (or, correctly, use the voice recognition built into the phone). When you're driving in traffic, and its says "Should I place the call?" and you say "Yes," and it says "Did you say 'yes,'" and I say "Yes," and... lather, rinse and repeat, with my voice gradually becoming less and less intelligible with frustration... I am not at all sure that the demand on my attention is negligible.
I take that back. The article does say that the system can be trained to ignore "hospitals" and "bananas." It doesn't, however, say how, or say that the researchers have actually done this, or what the error rate is.
It doesn't, however, say how it can tell the difference between a terrorist's "suitcase nuclear weapon" and a legitimate nuclear weapon being shipped by the military.