Re:Apple reminds me more of Commodore every day
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There is no future in a $400 (about $250 too expensive) firewire-only (5% of computer users) hardrive-based (read: fragile) mp3 player. Any one of these critical flaws might doom the product - take them all together and you have another classic corporate farce.
(i) I'd love a $150 MP3 player, but it isn't going to happen, you can't even get much of a flash memory based MP3 player in the UK for 150UKP let alone $150, $400 isn't cheap, but this is a bleading edge MP3 player and Apple technology to boot. I don't think its as stupid a price as some seem to believe.
(ii) Firewire is in a bit of chicken and egg situation, devices like this are what will drive its popular support. Being able to transfer a whole CDs worth of MP3s in minutes rather than hours is a godsend. Somebody has to try and lead the way.
(iii) As others have noted, the buffering will largely ameliorate any fragility, and anyway, how else are you going to get 5G of memory? This is not going to happen with Flash memory any time soon (at least not at a sane price anyway).
I'm unsure whether this thing will take off or not, but I don't think you are justified in damning it to the degree which you do, or with these arguments.
Sculpture, paintings, and the like all have one thing in common: they are each completely unique. When you buy a work of those arts, you know you have something that is one-of-a-kind. It was created at one time by the artist's hand, and no copy or duplicate will ever be just like it.
A rung below these "fine arts" you have lithographs and woodcuts...<snip>... These are never as valuable as one-of-a-kind artworks, but are still considered "art" because of the above.
Rare posters and collectibles are a rung lower yet...<snip>...
Computer-generated art falls into this category as well, then. While it is without question artistic and creative, it is not unique. Existing in digital form, it can be reproduced ad infinitum as long as the digital data exists.
...<snip>...
I think your missing the point, what you are talking about is the value of these objects to a collector. He or she may have no appreciation of the merit of the art, and may simply be collecting it as an investment. Just because it isn't unique doesn't mean, its not art, just that someone who is obsessed or sees the need to have a unique item, can't, for some forms of art.
I don't think music has any less value for being pretty much infinitely repeatable (to a degree anyway), nore are many pieces of literature.
This seems to be a confusion of the abstract art with the medium in which it is expressed. Whilst the medium, may make the abstract more concrete, frequently it isn't really the art itself. --
The prime cost of putting things into space is not material, but the rockets you build to put them up there...<snip>
The main issue with this idea (as is outlined very early on) is that they are rad hard. Solar Cells in orbit loose a significant proportion of their efficiency due to radiation effects. I have seen solar panels loose 5% due to the effects of one solar flare. Anything that makes the panels more rad hard keeps them working longer, keeps the satellite (or more of it) operating for longer. Neither Mass or Cost is the prime issue here (although they obviously have significance).
Whilst this code may tell you something about the way the GPS satelites actually work, that probably doesn't hold any great suprises, anyone can get hold of the underlying basis of GPS (and quite a lot of the detail). Whilst the nitty gritty of some of the corrections done to the GPS signal are complex the basic description is simple enough.
In terms of security, I would bet that the actually commanding of the spacecraft, and quite possibly telemetry from it, are secured by hardware encryption devices, the details of which have not been revealed (including their keys). This will not allow any hacker (who just happens to have a suitable ground station) to access or disrupt the GPS system. --
You might also look into other forms of communication.
Or, another (albeit unlikely) option may be to use Amateur Packet Radio, lots of suitable equipment out there (you could even uplink to a satellite with a suitable antenna !) but technically this may be overly complex for you, and you would need an amateur radio licence as well.
Whilst this idea, as given, is severely brain damaged and will in all likelyhood get no further, there is at least one good use of the technology - anti-theft.
Now a VCR or TV which I could tell to only work within the locale of my house would be a strong deterent to theft. Of course, to work it would have to be one-time programmed with the local coordinates and need to be integrated at the level of the silicon (and how would it be reprogrammed if you moved?) but its a thought. Combine it with a cheap GSM phone design and it can even phone you up and tell you where it is. --
Can they get it inserted into a stable orbit around the rock again?
Possibly, but why would they want too? They have exhausted the possibilities of that anyway, thats why the decided to land (ok, it was more complex than that, it has a lot to do with budgets as well as science).
Can they escape the gravity of the rock entirely?
Again, possibly, but why? All the instruments are designed to look at an asteroid from close up. There are probably too low on fuel anyway, and I doubt there is enough budget to do anything useable.
Can they skitter across the landscape, trying for more landing sites and near-ground imaging?
Which is probably what they are doing, taking more and more risks each time, because the are only going to have very very limited amounts of access left on the DSN [1]. Probably so long as the press is interested NASA will find them time on it though.
Footnote [1] Initially typed as DNS...<sigh> I need to get out more:-) --
Doing something useful on the surface is harder
on
NEAR to Fly Once More
·
· Score: 2
Just landing on the surface has limited scientific use, any lander which wants to really investigate primordial bodies such as asteroids and comets need to be somewhat more firmly attached. Look at the Rosetta site for an idea of some of the problems that landing on and doing science with a comet can cause. --
I was somewhat suprised to see that many of the posts to this discussion fall into two categories (i) Why didn't you write this web pages correctly in the first instance & (ii) You can avoid doing it by this...
The original request was for advice and suggestions on how to deal with this, and more or less stating that they didn't want to use any get out clause.
I think this attitude should be applauded, all too many people are willing to avoid this sort of problem, and an honest request for help and suggestions on a difficult subject should be met with positive help and advice. It is very easy to throw stones.
Personally I think that pragmatically you should do your best to ensure the major pages are dealt with and have a rolling program of gradually updating those pages that it is practical and sensible to changes. You should also have along with this, some sort of standard for web pages that advises on making new and updated pages as multiple-sense friendly (or whatever the PC term is) as possible. --
Essentially yes, thats what happens. I am by no means an expert on this, but you certainly used to get devices that allowed a line of text to be "displayed" in braille using small pins (presumably raised by electromagnets or similar).
1. These really don't hold that much - 8 MB can't even store very large word-processing/spreadsheet documents let alone presentations/databases/mp3s (can't forget them)
It all depends on what you want to store on it, yes storing your complete working environment on it (as has been suggested in the past for some new storage medium) is probably unworkable, but storing temporary files, or sensitive data (like crypto keys and password) could be quite usable. And remember 8M is not so little, many PDAs get by with a lot less, iirc the various Palm species and clones top out at 8M.
If this sort of device becomes popular, then larger version will appear, indeed the URL given by someone else details devices with 64M of storage.
2.USB is not completely popular yet, or at least not completely supported. Many computers are still in use that don't have a USB port, or that don't have them installed.
True, but it is a start. The only reasonable alternatives would be parallel or serial ports, and frankly there are too many weird things hanging off of those already (dongles, Zip drives, scanners, and even occasionally printers). USB is reasonably fast, becoming more ubiquitous and supporting is getting better with time.
3.USB ports are most frequently in the back of a computer, making these little things very hard to use - my primary desktop is in a cabinet with minimal access to the back (but it's easy to pull out for hardware changes..I just don't need to mess with my cables often). This reminds me of A/V in ports on TVs and VCRs - too often they're annoyingly in the back.
Popularity could changes that, my TV has S-Video and Phone A/V connectors on the front (under a small cover) for easy access with video games and cameras. The same could happen with USB if necessary. With laptops this is not even a problem.
4. Way too expensive. These should be $10, not $50, so students would want to buy them over a $0.50 floppy disk.
As with any technology, popularity may bring it down.
5. As others have pointed out, if put on a keychain one would have to leave their keys in the USB port in order to access it - dumb..if it was removable (without removing keyring, like a button trigger)
The IBM version seems to allow the key to be removed from the keyring.
then there's the ever present danger of losing such a small device.
You can't have it both ways, its small and convenient, so there is always going to be a risk of losing it.
Just my thoughts, but hey, I could be wrong. Watch me buy one in the next few years in spite of myself.
I'm tempted myself, and I can't think of a good reason why I need one! (Aside from a new toy:-)
Oh, and I supposed it is just a coincedence that this will allow people to track where everyone drives in the UK?
This will not allow anyone to track anything. The GPS reciever in the car will limit the speed of the car based on the reception of Satellite transmitted signals. There is no transmitter needed in this design, there is no reason to include one.
<paranoid>On the other hand, if someone wanted to monitor you movements based on the transmissions from you mobile phone...</paranoid>
Whilst some elements of this message are very clever and clearly show a great deal of thought I find other elements very odd.
As others have pointed out, the inclusion of the largest currently known prime is rather odd and would probably not help decode the message. It also introduces concepts like "raising to a power" in a very human-centric manner. Using some form of operator as is done for many other mathematical symbols would probably be much easier to understand. There is little point in using representative systems borrowed from our own evolved systems, rather than going for a totally new and clear system. Using a simpler base, such as binary, and maybe a system using postfix rather than infix notation.
The symbols themselves seem to owe something to existing symbols, several of the numbers and symbols such as equality appear to be based upon our own symbols, I would have thought that using totally arbitrary symbol, with a great deal of redundancy (to allow for the inevitable noise and degradation in the recieved message) would make more sense.
The use of arrows and lines pointing to graphs seems also to represent traditional human ways of doing things.
Overall the message appears to be trying to say so many different things. I think they may have been better off trying to explain a few more simple concepts repeatedly, and in different manners, rather than try and show how "clever" we are.
You wont get it like A&E doesn't get my business...
I got a very surreal image from that, in the UK, A&E means the "Accident and Emergency" department at a Hospital, although given the somewhat more market driven nature of USA healthcare, maybe that meaning is correct <Boggle>...
Yep, and the whole thing could be demolished by allowing the speeder bikes some limited smarts - an ability to miss big obvious trees but still needs some pilot ability to avoid more complex situations. This could reduce the mean-time-between-crashes but still allow some spectacular bangs.
Ho hum, novelish site, but a little too cranky to spend much time on.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no future in a $400 (about $250 too expensive) firewire-only (5% of computer users) hardrive-based (read: fragile) mp3 player. Any one of these critical flaws might doom the product - take them all together and you have another classic corporate farce.
(i) I'd love a $150 MP3 player, but it isn't going to happen, you can't even get much of a flash memory based MP3 player in the UK for 150UKP let alone $150, $400 isn't cheap, but this is a bleading edge MP3 player and Apple technology to boot. I don't think its as stupid a price as some seem to believe.
(ii) Firewire is in a bit of chicken and egg situation, devices like this are what will drive its popular support. Being able to transfer a whole CDs worth of MP3s in minutes rather than hours is a godsend. Somebody has to try and lead the way.
(iii) As others have noted, the buffering will largely ameliorate any fragility, and anyway, how else are you going to get 5G of memory? This is not going to happen with Flash memory any time soon (at least not at a sane price anyway).
I'm unsure whether this thing will take off or not, but I don't think you are justified in damning it to the degree which you do, or with these arguments.
--
Sculpture, paintings, and the like all have one thing in common: they are each completely unique. When you buy a work of those arts, you know you have something that is one-of-a-kind. It was created at one time by the artist's hand, and no copy or duplicate will ever be just like it.
A rung below these "fine arts" you have lithographs and woodcuts...<snip>... These are never as valuable as one-of-a-kind artworks, but are still considered "art" because of the above.
Rare posters and collectibles are a rung lower yet...<snip>...
Computer-generated art falls into this category as well, then. While it is without question artistic and creative, it is not unique. Existing in digital form, it can be reproduced ad infinitum as long as the digital data exists.
...<snip>...
I think your missing the point, what you are talking about is the value of these objects to a collector. He or she may have no appreciation of the merit of the art, and may simply be collecting it as an investment. Just because it isn't unique doesn't mean, its not art, just that someone who is obsessed or sees the need to have a unique item, can't, for some forms of art.
I don't think music has any less value for being pretty much infinitely repeatable (to a degree anyway), nore are many pieces of literature.
This seems to be a confusion of the abstract art with the medium in which it is expressed. Whilst the medium, may make the abstract more concrete, frequently it isn't really the art itself.
--
Remember you can file just about any suit you want. It's not getting it laughed out of court that's the hard part.
...and for a prime example of such stupidity see
UNITED STATES ex rel. Gerald MAYO v. SATAN AND HIS STAFF
on the Wacky Court Cases site. Its an old item, but worth a chuckle if you've never seen it before.
--
The prime cost of putting things into space is not material, but the rockets you build to put them up there...<snip>
The main issue with this idea (as is outlined very early on) is that they are rad hard. Solar Cells in orbit loose a significant proportion of their efficiency due to radiation effects. I have seen solar panels loose 5% due to the effects of one solar flare. Anything that makes the panels more rad hard keeps them working longer, keeps the satellite (or more of it) operating for longer. Neither Mass or Cost is the prime issue here (although they obviously have significance).
--
Whilst this code may tell you something about the way the GPS satelites actually work, that probably doesn't hold any great suprises, anyone can get hold of the underlying basis of GPS (and quite a lot of the detail). Whilst the nitty gritty of some of the corrections done to the GPS signal are complex the basic description is simple enough.
In terms of security, I would bet that the actually commanding of the spacecraft, and quite possibly telemetry from it, are secured by hardware encryption devices, the details of which have not been revealed (including their keys). This will not allow any hacker (who just happens to have a suitable ground station) to access or disrupt the GPS system.
--
You might also look into other forms of communication.
Or, another (albeit unlikely) option may be to use Amateur Packet Radio, lots of suitable equipment out there (you could even uplink to a satellite with a suitable antenna !) but technically this may be overly complex for you, and you would need an amateur radio licence as well.
--
Whilst this idea, as given, is severely brain damaged and will in all likelyhood get no further, there is at least one good use of the technology - anti-theft.
Now a VCR or TV which I could tell to only work within the locale of my house would be a strong deterent to theft. Of course, to work it would have to be one-time programmed with the local coordinates and need to be integrated at the level of the silicon (and how would it be reprogrammed if you moved?) but its a thought. Combine it with a cheap GSM phone design and it can even phone you up and tell you where it is.
--
Can they get it inserted into a stable orbit around the rock again?
:-)
Possibly, but why would they want too? They have exhausted the possibilities of that anyway, thats why the decided to land (ok, it was more complex than that, it has a lot to do with budgets as well as science).
Can they escape the gravity of the rock entirely?
Again, possibly, but why? All the instruments are designed to look at an asteroid from close up. There are probably too low on fuel anyway, and I doubt there is enough budget to do anything useable.
Can they skitter across the landscape, trying for more landing sites and near-ground imaging?
Which is probably what they are doing, taking more and more risks each time, because the are only going to have very very limited amounts of access left on the DSN [1]. Probably so long as the press is interested NASA will find them time on it though.
Footnote [1] Initially typed as DNS...<sigh> I need to get out more
--
Just landing on the surface has limited scientific use, any lander which wants to really investigate primordial bodies such as asteroids and comets need to be somewhat more firmly attached. Look at the Rosetta site for an idea of some of the problems that landing on and doing science with a comet can cause.
--
I was somewhat suprised to see that many of the posts to this discussion fall into two categories (i) Why didn't you write this web pages correctly in the first instance & (ii) You can avoid doing it by this...
The original request was for advice and suggestions on how to deal with this, and more or less stating that they didn't want to use any get out clause.
I think this attitude should be applauded, all too many people are willing to avoid this sort of problem, and an honest request for help and suggestions on a difficult subject should be met with positive help and advice. It is very easy to throw stones.
Personally I think that pragmatically you should do your best to ensure the major pages are dealt with and have a rolling program of gradually updating those pages that it is practical and sensible to changes. You should also have along with this, some sort of standard for web pages that advises on making new and updated pages as multiple-sense friendly (or whatever the PC term is) as possible.
--
Braille?
How's that supposed to work?
Little pimples raise up on the screen?
Essentially yes, thats what happens. I am by no means an expert on this, but you certainly used to get devices that allowed a line of text to be "displayed" in braille using small pins (presumably raised by electromagnets or similar).
--
--
1. These really don't hold that much - 8 MB can't even store very large word-processing/spreadsheet documents let alone presentations/databases/mp3s (can't forget them)
:-)
It all depends on what you want to store on it, yes storing your complete working environment on it (as has been suggested in the past for some new storage medium) is probably unworkable, but storing temporary files, or sensitive data (like crypto keys and password) could be quite usable. And remember 8M is not so little, many PDAs get by with a lot less, iirc the various Palm species and clones top out at 8M.
If this sort of device becomes popular, then larger version will appear, indeed the URL given by someone else details devices with 64M of storage.
2.USB is not completely popular yet, or at least not completely supported. Many computers are still in use that don't have a USB port, or that don't have them installed.
True, but it is a start. The only reasonable alternatives would be parallel or serial ports, and frankly there are too many weird things hanging off of those already (dongles, Zip drives, scanners, and even occasionally printers). USB is reasonably fast, becoming more ubiquitous and supporting is getting better with time.
3.USB ports are most frequently in the back of a computer, making these little things very hard to use - my primary desktop is in a cabinet with minimal access to the back (but it's easy to pull out for hardware changes..I just don't need to mess with my cables often). This reminds me of A/V in ports on TVs and VCRs - too often they're annoyingly in the back.
Popularity could changes that, my TV has S-Video and Phone A/V connectors on the front (under a small cover) for easy access with video games and cameras. The same could happen with USB if necessary. With laptops this is not even a problem.
4. Way too expensive. These should be $10, not $50, so students would want to buy them over a $0.50 floppy disk.
As with any technology, popularity may bring it down.
5. As others have pointed out, if put on a keychain one would have to leave their keys in the USB port in order to access it - dumb..if it was removable (without removing keyring, like a button trigger)
The IBM version seems to allow the key to be removed from the keyring.
then there's the ever present danger of losing such a small device.
You can't have it both ways, its small and convenient, so there is always going to be a risk of losing it.
Just my thoughts, but hey, I could be wrong. Watch me buy one in the next few years in spite of myself.
I'm tempted myself, and I can't think of a good reason why I need one! (Aside from a new toy
--
--
Oh, and I supposed it is just a coincedence that this will allow people to track where everyone drives in the UK?
This will not allow anyone to track anything. The GPS reciever in the car will limit the speed of the car based on the reception of Satellite transmitted signals. There is no transmitter needed in this design, there is no reason to include one.
<paranoid>On the other hand, if someone wanted to monitor you movements based on the transmissions from you mobile phone...</paranoid>
--
--
Whilst some elements of this message are very clever and clearly show a great deal of thought I find other elements very odd.
As others have pointed out, the inclusion of the largest currently known prime is rather odd and would probably not help decode the message. It also introduces concepts like "raising to a power" in a very human-centric manner. Using some form of operator as is done for many other mathematical symbols would probably be much easier to understand. There is little point in using representative systems borrowed from our own evolved systems, rather than going for a totally new and clear system. Using a simpler base, such as binary, and maybe a system using postfix rather than infix notation.
The symbols themselves seem to owe something to existing symbols, several of the numbers and symbols such as equality appear to be based upon our own symbols, I would have thought that using totally arbitrary symbol, with a great deal of redundancy (to allow for the inevitable noise and degradation in the recieved message) would make more sense.
The use of arrows and lines pointing to graphs seems also to represent traditional human ways of doing things.
Overall the message appears to be trying to say so many different things. I think they may have been better off trying to explain a few more simple concepts repeatedly, and in different manners, rather than try and show how "clever" we are.
I got a very surreal image from that, in the UK, A&E means the "Accident and Emergency" department at a Hospital, although given the somewhat more market driven nature of USA healthcare, maybe that meaning is correct <Boggle>...
--
> Fully international edition - DVD Region Zero - playable everywhere.
:-(
Which is good, unfortunatley, their web page doesn't seem to admit the possibility of people outside of the USA wanting to order it
Yep, and the whole thing could be demolished by allowing the speeder bikes some limited smarts -
an ability to miss big obvious trees but still needs some pilot ability to avoid more complex situations. This could reduce the mean-time-between-crashes but still allow some spectacular bangs.
Ho hum, novelish site, but a little too cranky to spend much time on.