Interesting... I've owned Macs since 1984 but haven't paid much attention to what they were doing in educational space. Except to admire the charcoal -grey Bell and Howell Apple ]['s my son used in elementary school, of course...
It emerged in 2001 that they discriminate against gays in their hiring practices. (Actually it had emerged well before that but I hadn't been paying attention).
The Salvation Army is no longer acceptable to me and I no longer contribute to them.
I don't see how any of this makes much difference.
I have an XO laptop, and it seems pretty clear at this point that the existing XO can do, technologically, what it's supposed to do. The hardware tradeoffs were very clever, very well thought out, and they seem to be manufacturing it successfully in quantity. I'm assuming that some teething pains and glitches, which are no worse that typical commercial products at first release, can be dealt with.
I'm not the intended audience for the software. I don't particularly like the Sugar UI, and can't judge how much is just because I just don't "get it" and how much is because I've been brainwashed by two decades of the Mac and Windows. It seems to me that the software has rather a lot of rough edges. But it doesn't matter. It's perfectly clear that the thing works, and is more than capable of being used in classrooms. The browser works, the Alto/Star/1984-Mac write and paint programs work, the PDF viewer works, the wireless access works.
The collaboration and social-networking stuff seems to sorta-kinda work. I have some reservations, but it's there, and there's nothing comparable built into Windows or standard Linux today.
It doesn't matter whether Intel throws a hissy-fit and stomps out or not. Nor does it matter that their hardware designer left: she completed her work and it was good work.
If their education premises are correct, this device is good enough to fulfill them.
And the XOs not comparable to anything anyone can do in the way of building a cheap Windows laptop. The XO has carved out a very distinct, very new, very innovative niche in product space. Nobody is going to be able to make the equivalent of an XO just by taking a standard Wintel laptop and paring down the OS and replacing the disk drive with 1, no, 2, no, 4, no 8 GB of flash, and adding a Windows version of TamTamJam.
If an Intel and/or a Microsoft truly signs on to the OLPC's education premises and puts in an equivalent amount of work producing something as good, as cheap, and as good a fit to the same product space, they might be able to trample OLPC but OLPC's goals could still be achieved. However, the likelihood of Intel and Microsoft doing this is about the same as the likelihood of GM producing a two-wheeled, pedal-powered Hummer that costs $139 and is suitable for a ten-year-old kid.
Is it really so selective that it prevents getting a high from cocaine, yet does not diminish the anesthetic effects of lidocaine, xylocaine, articane, prilocaine, etc.?
Do they have any way of validating that these techniques actually work?
How did they do the experiments? Did they have a pool of real terrorists and anxious innocent passengers and a way of doing double-blind testing?
Or was it the training just done by some expert consultants who possess an air of authority and a confident manner?
Is this any better than using graphology on the passenger's signature... or having a computer run a quick horoscope... or following the methods of the Malleus Maleficarum?
Is there any, any, any reason at all to believe in the validity of these techniques?
In order for Congress to pass such a law, they'd have to be angry at the RIAA for behaving badly.
In order for them to perceive the RIAA as behaving badly, they'd have to have the same sort of world view as I, Lawrence Lessig, probably most Slashdot readers, and probably most Americans who have any awareness of what's going on with (so-called) intellectual property.
But if they had that sort of world view, they would never have passed the DMCA and the various copyright extensions in the first place.
So, what's the point here? Unless it's a tongue-in-cheek Swiftian "modest proposal."
As a serious proposal, it makes about as much sense as suggesting that Congress pass a law allowing unrestricted legal immigration in order to increase the numbers of young workers and thus solve the demographic problems of Medicare and Social Security.
Last year, the FCC website said that converter boxes were available "now." I emailed them about it, because I couldn't find any, and they simply emailed me back a long email with the same text that appeared on the website... text that said they were available "now." No hints about what companies were providing them or where I could get one.
I was on the mailing list for email updates, and a couple of months ago, they emailed an update that the coupon program would begin on January 1st, 2008 and either stated or clearly implied that converters would be available then.
I called the 800 number on that date and, indeed, it is possible to request the coupons... but the message says that converters are, in fact, not yet available and that the coupons will not be mailed until mid-February.
"If anything it's an education scheme to improve a countries citizen's knowledge. It's going to take 10 maybe 15 years before we actually know if it worked of course."
I think it may be sooner than that.
The XO seems to include a generous dose of hands-on, tinkering, write-your-own-programs tools. In many ways it reminds me of the start of the PC revolution. One of the really sad things to me is that during the 1980s there were really large numbers of "laypersons" who bought Commodores and Ataris and Apples and IBM PCs for no good reason, just to see what they were like, and wrote trivial programs in BASIC and HyperCard and so forth. People bought magazines that had programs slightly more complicated than they could write for themselves and typed the darn things in.
For reasons that aren't completely clear to me, this has all gone by the wayside.
I don't say that everyone who writes a thirty-line BASIC program goes on to become a programmer, but I'll bet that a darned large percentage of the professional software engineers of today were shaped by junior-high-school experiences tinkering with software.
The guys who invented the airplane probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere without the years they spent tinkering with bicycles.
We'll know that it worked when there is a sudden wave of software innovation coming out of those Third World countries, and my bet is that we'll start to see it in less than "10-15 years."
"2) The web really goes beyond anything projected for IT in the past. Few writers envisaged a situation where anybody could publish pretty much any media from pretty much anywhere and have any other person access it. Consider teenagers and myspace as a simple example. The forecasts from 1950 talked about ordering more milk from the supermarket computer, but nothing as emergent as what we have today."
I think H. G. Wells' 1938 book World Brain had a few flashes of partial anticipation of the Internet in general, and Wikipedia in particular. It was indeed a proposal for a distributed global encyclopedia project in which the encyclopedists, at least, could "publish pretty much any media from pretty much anywhere and have any other person access it."
However, it was conceived of as a dignified, high-minded intellectual enterprise. (Much as early writers heralded Edison's invention of the phonograph as something that would preserve and propagate the great speeches of statesmen, and bring grand opera to the masses...)
Some "futures" that DID come to pass
on
The City of the Future
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
1) A moderately frequent detail in science-fiction stories was lights that would automatically turn themselves on when someone entered a room and turn themselves off when there was nobody in it.
I remember thinking this was utter nonsense, because, based on the price of photocells, relays, iconoscope tubes, or whatever it would have taken to do this circa 1950 or 1960, it didn't seem within the range of credibility that this would be economically feasible... especially given the low cost of electricity (and the expectation that nuclear power plants would soon make electricity "too cheap to meter.")
2) Google is not really equivalent to Isaac Asimov's Multivac, but it is a recognizable approximation. You do type in questions... in natural language if you like, Google is smart enough to ignore the extra words!--and it does draw on a huge worldwide base of human knowledge and present "answers" in direct, human readable form.
3) Flat TV you can hang on a wall. For a good five decades, Popular Science and the like were trumpeting invention after invention that was going to make it possible to have "flat TV you can hang on a wall." (One was a very shallow CRT, only a few inches deep, with an electron gun that fired in from the side and electromagnetic fields that deflected the beam toward the phosphor...) This hung fire for so long I thought I would never see it in my lifetime.
If Adobe and other companies want to retain their paying customers' trust, their applications shouldn't be doing unexplained things behind the user's back.
If they want to pop up a window saying "To insure better product quality, we would like to have this application send information to internet address thus-and-such. To read a detailed description of the information we send and how we use it, press 'details.' To allow us to do this, press 'allow.' If you do not want us to do this, press 'no,'" then everything would be cool.
But if an application does stuff we don't expect it to do, and they don't even mention it in advance, it's not terribly paranoid to assume that the reason is that they're doing something they don't want us to know about.
...all the limited-time and streaming-only music services have failed....
as far as I know, every attempt to deliver a pseudo-rental experience by providing a time-limited copy--as opposed to a physical copy that is physically returned--has failed.
All of the promoters of these schemes simply assert that consumers will perceive this as being just like a rental, only better because you don't have the inconvenience of having to return the copy.
But a decade of experience seems to show that whether consumers ought to perceive it that way, consumers in fact do not perceive it that way. They perceive it as a ripoff.
Why would anyone expect this venture to succeed? How, exactly, is it supposed to be different from the many predecessors, all using seemingly similar business models, all of which have failed?
Having come from a DECNet background, when I first encountered PC networking I was completely flummoxed by the situation.
MS-DOS and Windows users seem to take it for granted that a file that is across the network is accessed via different APIs, different user interfaces, and has generally different properties from files that are stored locally. In the MS-DOS days they were always mumbling about The Redirector. Why does a file need to be REdirected across the network? Why isn't it just directed, the way it would be directed to a disk volume or a floppy or what have you?
It isn't so long ago that most Windows programs couldn't even reference cross-network files in a straightforward way in a file open dialog. You first had to assign a "drive letter" and "map a network drive." (And, of course, all references to that file would break if you ever assigned the remote directory to a different drive letter).
And when they finally got around to fixing it in the OS, it only fixed it for new programs that were written to some new API. Existing programs, even things like Visual C++ utilities, continued to go through the mapping tapdance, because apparently the existing OS file dialog routines weren't updated to do things the new way.
The assumption that files across the network are totally differents sorts of thing from local files appeared to be so ingrained in the Windows culture that Windows people don't even understand why it is a criticism of Windows to mention this. They think it has to be that way, because, well, they're across the network. As if there were some physical property of 100-base-T cables that made them intrinsically different from SATA cables.
I've seen a skabillion... well, must have been forty or fifty stories... about companies that are just about to introduce a great electric car.
So far, only one has ever made it beyond the press release and concept car stage: the General Motors EV-1.
I'll believe the Chevy Volt when I see one in a showroom, and ditto the Aptera and all its brethren.
And deduct ten points for a Flash-heavy website about "a creative experience that puts you inside the mind of an Aptera engineer. The journey is a picturesque series of vignettes that lets you navigate through diverse surroundings. You will even learn a little about Aptera along the way: our vision, our inspiration, our goals. It's for those of us who think visually."
How about a little something for those of us who think numerically?
Since when does the FCC have anything to do with newspapers?
The FCC's own website says:
"The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions."
What is there about "radio, television, wire, satellite and cable" that the FCC doesn't understand?
I meant that "if you type in queries as complete sentences, Google doesn't to do any worse than if you don't." That is, even though it's not an advertised feature, you can use natural language with Google if you like. It just doesn't help you; you might just as well use truncated phrases.
Isaac Asimov's fictional Multivac was a huge computer with some near-universal knowledge database that answered natural-language questions, giving Asimov all sorts of opportunities to present philosophical conundrums as entertaining short stories.
In the 1960s and thereabouts, when I used to hack around on minicomputers, but personal computers weren't well known to the general public, I always found it difficult to explain what computers did. One of their commonest questions was "Well, how does it work, do you type in questions and does it answer them?" Programming in assembly language didn't really fit that description.
Many technological fantasies seem to remain surprisingly distance. I tried ViaVoice and gave up: it's not a "voice typewriter." Roomba is not a general-purpose housekeeping humanoid-form robot, and neither are the machines that weld automobile chassis.
However, it seems to me that Google is within striking distance of Asimov's "Multivac" fantasy.
Incidentally, if you type in queries as complete sentences Google seems to do any worse than if you don't. Sort of the converse of adventure games, where one begins by typing "Walk over to the table on the left and pick up the silver key with your left hand" and quickly learns to use telegraphic style: "Go table. Take key."
In December of 1995, he wrote: "I predict the Internet...will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
The only news here is the invention of a new scare word, "exaflood."
The only thing that could really make the Internet collapse would be to abandon the principles of neutrality and end-to-end connectivity, and I'm sure the dire alarmist predictions are intended to soften us up for some proposal... like one to hand over control of the Internet to the telcos so they can allocate bandwidth and prevent "exafloods."
By the way, what happened to all the "dark fiber" that was so spectacularly overbuilt during the dot-bomb era? Is all of it lit up now?
It's should be right up there in whatever pantheon includes the Joy Buzzer, the Dribble Glass, and the Whoopee Cushion. As Mad Magazine once said: "Fool your friends! Be popular!"
(And just imagine the big laffs you could have bringing one of these to an airport and surreptitiously slipping it into your pal's carry-on luggage... that should get either your pal or you onto the No-Fly list quicker than you can say "Jack Gilmore!")
No, probably not, although friction on glass does develop a static charge, and under the exact right bad conditions could conceivably cause a spark. As others have observed in this thread, premise, as presented in the posting, is stupid and promotional.
The safety of stuff in a fuel tank depends on a) how well the risks are understood, and b) how well the engineering to mitigate them is performed.
It's a standard rhetorical ploy to assert that because something is different from an older technology, it is automatically free from the problems of the older technology... and, without saying so in so many words, allowing the listener to infer that it does not have equivalently bad new problems of its own.
The first time I heard groove-skipping on a CD, I laughed out loud. With all the promotion of the digital perfection of the CD, the fact that it suffered from exactly the same problem as a vinyl LP was... delightful.
It will solve itself, because intrusive ads don't work.
Over the past few decades there's been an arms race to "cut through the clutter" with more and more novel, attention-grabbing, intrusive ads. They only work for a very short time. The first time you see an ad on a placard inside a supermarket cart, it grabs your attention. Then you tune it out. Lately the local supermarket have gone to putting ads on the floor, in some kind of tough plastic laminate. The first time you see it, it grabs your attention. Then you tune it out.
A few years back, they had little discount-coupon vending machines hanging off the shelves, flashing bright LEDs at you. I notice they're gone now. They probably worked for a while, then people tuned them out.
These will be a seven days' wonder, then advertisers will start studying the results, and I already know what they will find: the devices will be expensive to put in place, expensive to maintain, very effective for a short time at getting people to talk about the ads... and very ineffective at getting people to buy the product.
What's the "unique selling proposition" here? What, exactly, is the difference between reading "Ask your dermatologist about Enbrel," hearing someone tell it to you on a TV set, or hearing it inside your head as you walk down the street?
The unspoken assumption is that hearing the sound localized as coming from inside our heads will somehow turn it into a command hallucination and force us to obey. It won't. Not any more than "subliminal advertising" did. Not any more than using electronic echo effects, or making it sound like Darth Vader, or a "voice of God" echo effect would.
All that 1940s-50s-60s IBM gear was fun to watch. I think they designed it that way on purposes. The mechanical engineering in those things was as impressive as the electrical engineering. I only saw a RAMAC once, when I was in high school, on a gee-whiz tour of an IBM office... it was, I think, in White Plains, New York, but might have been in New York City.
It only had a single head, so it basically move in two dimensions. It would retract all the way out from the stack of disks then zip quickly to another disk and insert itself to read the other disk. During the visit I briefly saw it "vibrating" crazily back and forth on one of the disks. It was explained to me that it was copying a file.
They all had those great big lighted buttons; separate on and off buttons, no push-on-push-off nonsense. the "on" button was always slightly recessed, while the "off" button always projected slightly, so that any one accidentally bumping against the machine would be turning it off rather than on...
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting... I've owned Macs since 1984 but haven't paid much attention to what they were doing in educational space. Except to admire the charcoal -grey Bell and Howell Apple ]['s my son used in elementary school, of course...
I gave to the Salvation Army for thirty years.
It emerged in 2001 that they discriminate against gays in their hiring practices. (Actually it had emerged well before that but I hadn't been paying attention).
The Salvation Army is no longer acceptable to me and I no longer contribute to them.
I don't see how any of this makes much difference.
I have an XO laptop, and it seems pretty clear at this point that the existing XO can do, technologically, what it's supposed to do. The hardware tradeoffs were very clever, very well thought out, and they seem to be manufacturing it successfully in quantity. I'm assuming that some teething pains and glitches, which are no worse that typical commercial products at first release, can be dealt with.
I'm not the intended audience for the software. I don't particularly like the Sugar UI, and can't judge how much is just because I just don't "get it" and how much is because I've been brainwashed by two decades of the Mac and Windows. It seems to me that the software has rather a lot of rough edges. But it doesn't matter. It's perfectly clear that the thing works, and is more than capable of being used in classrooms. The browser works, the Alto/Star/1984-Mac write and paint programs work, the PDF viewer works, the wireless access works.
The collaboration and social-networking stuff seems to sorta-kinda work. I have some reservations, but it's there, and there's nothing comparable built into Windows or standard Linux today.
It doesn't matter whether Intel throws a hissy-fit and stomps out or not. Nor does it matter that their hardware designer left: she completed her work and it was good work.
If their education premises are correct, this device is good enough to fulfill them.
And the XOs not comparable to anything anyone can do in the way of building a cheap Windows laptop. The XO has carved out a very distinct, very new, very innovative niche in product space. Nobody is going to be able to make the equivalent of an XO just by taking a standard Wintel laptop and paring down the OS and replacing the disk drive with 1, no, 2, no, 4, no 8 GB of flash, and adding a Windows version of TamTamJam.
If an Intel and/or a Microsoft truly signs on to the OLPC's education premises and puts in an equivalent amount of work producing something as good, as cheap, and as good a fit to the same product space, they might be able to trample OLPC but OLPC's goals could still be achieved. However, the likelihood of Intel and Microsoft doing this is about the same as the likelihood of GM producing a two-wheeled, pedal-powered Hummer that costs $139 and is suitable for a ten-year-old kid.
Is it really so selective that it prevents getting a high from cocaine, yet does not diminish the anesthetic effects of lidocaine, xylocaine, articane, prilocaine, etc.?
Do they have any way of validating that these techniques actually work?
How did they do the experiments? Did they have a pool of real terrorists and anxious innocent passengers and a way of doing double-blind testing?
Or was it the training just done by some expert consultants who possess an air of authority and a confident manner?
Is this any better than using graphology on the passenger's signature... or having a computer run a quick horoscope... or following the methods of the Malleus Maleficarum?
Is there any, any, any reason at all to believe in the validity of these techniques?
In order for Congress to pass such a law, they'd have to be angry at the RIAA for behaving badly.
In order for them to perceive the RIAA as behaving badly, they'd have to have the same sort of world view as I, Lawrence Lessig, probably most Slashdot readers, and probably most Americans who have any awareness of what's going on with (so-called) intellectual property.
But if they had that sort of world view, they would never have passed the DMCA and the various copyright extensions in the first place.
So, what's the point here? Unless it's a tongue-in-cheek Swiftian "modest proposal."
As a serious proposal, it makes about as much sense as suggesting that Congress pass a law allowing unrestricted legal immigration in order to increase the numbers of young workers and thus solve the demographic problems of Medicare and Social Security.
Last year, the FCC website said that converter boxes were available "now." I emailed them about it, because I couldn't find any, and they simply emailed me back a long email with the same text that appeared on the website... text that said they were available "now." No hints about what companies were providing them or where I could get one.
I was on the mailing list for email updates, and a couple of months ago, they emailed an update that the coupon program would begin on January 1st, 2008 and either stated or clearly implied that converters would be available then.
I called the 800 number on that date and, indeed, it is possible to request the coupons... but the message says that converters are, in fact, not yet available and that the coupons will not be mailed until mid-February.
"If anything it's an education scheme to improve a countries citizen's knowledge. It's going to take 10 maybe 15 years before we actually know if it worked of course."
I think it may be sooner than that.
The XO seems to include a generous dose of hands-on, tinkering, write-your-own-programs tools. In many ways it reminds me of the start of the PC revolution. One of the really sad things to me is that during the 1980s there were really large numbers of "laypersons" who bought Commodores and Ataris and Apples and IBM PCs for no good reason, just to see what they were like, and wrote trivial programs in BASIC and HyperCard and so forth. People bought magazines that had programs slightly more complicated than they could write for themselves and typed the darn things in.
For reasons that aren't completely clear to me, this has all gone by the wayside.
I don't say that everyone who writes a thirty-line BASIC program goes on to become a programmer, but I'll bet that a darned large percentage of the professional software engineers of today were shaped by junior-high-school experiences tinkering with software.
The guys who invented the airplane probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere without the years they spent tinkering with bicycles.
We'll know that it worked when there is a sudden wave of software innovation coming out of those Third World countries, and my bet is that we'll start to see it in less than "10-15 years."
"2) The web really goes beyond anything projected for IT in the past. Few writers envisaged a situation where anybody could publish pretty much any media from pretty much anywhere and have any other person access it. Consider teenagers and myspace as a simple example. The forecasts from 1950 talked about ordering more milk from the supermarket computer, but nothing as emergent as what we have today."
I think H. G. Wells' 1938 book World Brain had a few flashes of partial anticipation of the Internet in general, and Wikipedia in particular. It was indeed a proposal for a distributed global encyclopedia project in which the encyclopedists, at least, could "publish pretty much any media from pretty much anywhere and have any other person access it."
However, it was conceived of as a dignified, high-minded intellectual enterprise. (Much as early writers heralded Edison's invention of the phonograph as something that would preserve and propagate the great speeches of statesmen, and bring grand opera to the masses...)
1) A moderately frequent detail in science-fiction stories was lights that would automatically turn themselves on when someone entered a room and turn themselves off when there was nobody in it.
I remember thinking this was utter nonsense, because, based on the price of photocells, relays, iconoscope tubes, or whatever it would have taken to do this circa 1950 or 1960, it didn't seem within the range of credibility that this would be economically feasible... especially given the low cost of electricity (and the expectation that nuclear power plants would soon make electricity "too cheap to meter.")
2) Google is not really equivalent to Isaac Asimov's Multivac, but it is a recognizable approximation. You do type in questions... in natural language if you like, Google is smart enough to ignore the extra words!--and it does draw on a huge worldwide base of human knowledge and present "answers" in direct, human readable form.
3) Flat TV you can hang on a wall. For a good five decades, Popular Science and the like were trumpeting invention after invention that was going to make it possible to have "flat TV you can hang on a wall." (One was a very shallow CRT, only a few inches deep, with an electron gun that fired in from the side and electromagnetic fields that deflected the beam toward the phosphor...) This hung fire for so long I thought I would never see it in my lifetime.
This seems so simple.
If Adobe and other companies want to retain their paying customers' trust, their applications shouldn't be doing unexplained things behind the user's back.
If they want to pop up a window saying "To insure better product quality, we would like to have this application send information to internet address thus-and-such. To read a detailed description of the information we send and how we use it, press 'details.' To allow us to do this, press 'allow.' If you do not want us to do this, press 'no,'" then everything would be cool.
But if an application does stuff we don't expect it to do, and they don't even mention it in advance, it's not terribly paranoid to assume that the reason is that they're doing something they don't want us to know about.
...all the limited-time and streaming-only music services have failed....
as far as I know, every attempt to deliver a pseudo-rental experience by providing a time-limited copy--as opposed to a physical copy that is physically returned--has failed.
All of the promoters of these schemes simply assert that consumers will perceive this as being just like a rental, only better because you don't have the inconvenience of having to return the copy.
But a decade of experience seems to show that whether consumers ought to perceive it that way, consumers in fact do not perceive it that way. They perceive it as a ripoff.
Why would anyone expect this venture to succeed? How, exactly, is it supposed to be different from the many predecessors, all using seemingly similar business models, all of which have failed?
If file locks are glitchy on network storage, why is it somehow the fault of the application? Surely it's the fault of the network storage!
Having come from a DECNet background, when I first encountered PC networking I was completely flummoxed by the situation.
MS-DOS and Windows users seem to take it for granted that a file that is across the network is accessed via different APIs, different user interfaces, and has generally different properties from files that are stored locally. In the MS-DOS days they were always mumbling about The Redirector. Why does a file need to be REdirected across the network? Why isn't it just directed, the way it would be directed to a disk volume or a floppy or what have you?
It isn't so long ago that most Windows programs couldn't even reference cross-network files in a straightforward way in a file open dialog. You first had to assign a "drive letter" and "map a network drive." (And, of course, all references to that file would break if you ever assigned the remote directory to a different drive letter).
And when they finally got around to fixing it in the OS, it only fixed it for new programs that were written to some new API. Existing programs, even things like Visual C++ utilities, continued to go through the mapping tapdance, because apparently the existing OS file dialog routines weren't updated to do things the new way.
The assumption that files across the network are totally differents sorts of thing from local files appeared to be so ingrained in the Windows culture that Windows people don't even understand why it is a criticism of Windows to mention this. They think it has to be that way, because, well, they're across the network. As if there were some physical property of 100-base-T cables that made them intrinsically different from SATA cables.
"And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."--Ecclesiastes 12:12
I've seen a skabillion... well, must have been forty or fifty stories... about companies that are just about to introduce a great electric car.
So far, only one has ever made it beyond the press release and concept car stage: the General Motors EV-1.
I'll believe the Chevy Volt when I see one in a showroom, and ditto the Aptera and all its brethren.
And deduct ten points for a Flash-heavy website about "a creative experience that puts you inside the mind of an Aptera engineer. The journey is a picturesque series of vignettes that lets you navigate through diverse surroundings. You will even learn a little about Aptera along the way: our vision, our inspiration, our goals. It's for those of us who think visually."
How about a little something for those of us who think numerically?
Since when does the FCC have anything to do with newspapers?
The FCC's own website says:
"The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions."
What is there about "radio, television, wire, satellite and cable" that the FCC doesn't understand?
You're right.
I meant that "if you type in queries as complete sentences, Google doesn't to do any worse than if you don't." That is, even though it's not an advertised feature, you can use natural language with Google if you like. It just doesn't help you; you might just as well use truncated phrases.
Isaac Asimov's fictional Multivac was a huge computer with some near-universal knowledge database that answered natural-language questions, giving Asimov all sorts of opportunities to present philosophical conundrums as entertaining short stories.
In the 1960s and thereabouts, when I used to hack around on minicomputers, but personal computers weren't well known to the general public, I always found it difficult to explain what computers did. One of their commonest questions was "Well, how does it work, do you type in questions and does it answer them?" Programming in assembly language didn't really fit that description.
Many technological fantasies seem to remain surprisingly distance. I tried ViaVoice and gave up: it's not a "voice typewriter." Roomba is not a general-purpose housekeeping humanoid-form robot, and neither are the machines that weld automobile chassis.
However, it seems to me that Google is within striking distance of Asimov's "Multivac" fantasy.
Incidentally, if you type in queries as complete sentences Google seems to do any worse than if you don't. Sort of the converse of adventure games, where one begins by typing "Walk over to the table on the left and pick up the silver key with your left hand" and quickly learns to use telegraphic style: "Go table. Take key."
In December of 1995, he wrote: "I predict the Internet...will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
The only news here is the invention of a new scare word, "exaflood."
The only thing that could really make the Internet collapse would be to abandon the principles of neutrality and end-to-end connectivity, and I'm sure the dire alarmist predictions are intended to soften us up for some proposal... like one to hand over control of the Internet to the telcos so they can allocate bandwidth and prevent "exafloods."
By the way, what happened to all the "dark fiber" that was so spectacularly overbuilt during the dot-bomb era? Is all of it lit up now?
ThinkGeek's Annoy-a-Tron.
It's should be right up there in whatever pantheon includes the Joy Buzzer, the Dribble Glass, and the Whoopee Cushion. As Mad Magazine once said: "Fool your friends! Be popular!"
(And just imagine the big laffs you could have bringing one of these to an airport and surreptitiously slipping it into your pal's carry-on luggage... that should get either your pal or you onto the No-Fly list quicker than you can say "Jack Gilmore!")
No, probably not, although friction on glass does develop a static charge, and under the exact right bad conditions could conceivably cause a spark. As others have observed in this thread, premise, as presented in the posting, is stupid and promotional.
The safety of stuff in a fuel tank depends on a) how well the risks are understood, and b) how well the engineering to mitigate them is performed.
It's a standard rhetorical ploy to assert that because something is different from an older technology, it is automatically free from the problems of the older technology... and, without saying so in so many words, allowing the listener to infer that it does not have equivalently bad new problems of its own.
The first time I heard groove-skipping on a CD, I laughed out loud. With all the promotion of the digital perfection of the CD, the fact that it suffered from exactly the same problem as a vinyl LP was... delightful.
It will solve itself, because intrusive ads don't work.
Over the past few decades there's been an arms race to "cut through the clutter" with more and more novel, attention-grabbing, intrusive ads. They only work for a very short time. The first time you see an ad on a placard inside a supermarket cart, it grabs your attention. Then you tune it out. Lately the local supermarket have gone to putting ads on the floor, in some kind of tough plastic laminate. The first time you see it, it grabs your attention. Then you tune it out.
A few years back, they had little discount-coupon vending machines hanging off the shelves, flashing bright LEDs at you. I notice they're gone now. They probably worked for a while, then people tuned them out.
These will be a seven days' wonder, then advertisers will start studying the results, and I already know what they will find: the devices will be expensive to put in place, expensive to maintain, very effective for a short time at getting people to talk about the ads... and very ineffective at getting people to buy the product.
What's the "unique selling proposition" here? What, exactly, is the difference between reading "Ask your dermatologist about Enbrel," hearing someone tell it to you on a TV set, or hearing it inside your head as you walk down the street?
The unspoken assumption is that hearing the sound localized as coming from inside our heads will somehow turn it into a command hallucination and force us to obey. It won't. Not any more than "subliminal advertising" did. Not any more than using electronic echo effects, or making it sound like Darth Vader, or a "voice of God" echo effect would.
All that 1940s-50s-60s IBM gear was fun to watch. I think they designed it that way on purposes. The mechanical engineering in those things was as impressive as the electrical engineering. I only saw a RAMAC once, when I was in high school, on a gee-whiz tour of an IBM office... it was, I think, in White Plains, New York, but might have been in New York City.
It only had a single head, so it basically move in two dimensions. It would retract all the way out from the stack of disks then zip quickly to another disk and insert itself to read the other disk. During the visit I briefly saw it "vibrating" crazily back and forth on one of the disks. It was explained to me that it was copying a file.
They all had those great big lighted buttons; separate on and off buttons, no push-on-push-off nonsense. the "on" button was always slightly recessed, while the "off" button always projected slightly, so that any one accidentally bumping against the machine would be turning it off rather than on...