What I want is to be able to access a menu list from the keyboard quickly while exploring, not remember various different short cuts.
This is Control-F2 on OS X. This selects the menu and allows to browse it with the cursor keys.
Alt+character has always been the way to type various special characters and ligatures on the Mac. Wasting this for another way to access menu entries instead was never an option for an OS that grew up with DTP.
While I think the "smell out terrorists" idea is absurd and deserves no further discussion, smell-profiling itself may prove to be a valid idea. And as often all the *other* uses of such technology may have a real impact. Drug use, gender, emotional state, age etc. being detected by some smell detectors opens new fields in surveillance and control. And I'm not sure I like that at all.
And if you look at how dogs can follow and search people by their individual smell I see no real reason why "smell fingerprinting" shouldn't work.
1) Listen to all popular music (for various classes of popular). 2) Figure out why that music is popular (for its class). 3) Listen to any *new* track and figure out if it is like those popular tracks (and any popular class).
But what if you like to discover *new* music and not music that is like the other music you like? I mean, before the crackdown on webradio there were gazillions of (private, run by an individual or small group) stations and when I tried a new station and liked the first two or three tracks I heard (did not happen that often) I could rely on the fact that I would like many of the tracks that got played there. Even if I hardly knew any of them and even if they were extremely different. There's more to musical likes and dislikes than statistics and AIs can unearth.
There's still the possibility that there's something wrong with our understanding of mass and gravity in a subtle way. The flyby anomaly is not explained either yet and it may well be that a similar thing is going on in the center of the galaxy on a much larger scale.
But I certainly agree that any test of any theory is welcome here. There's something fishy with our understanding of the universe and I can't stand this;-)
Install two bulkheads some distance apart and pressurize the space in between to 75 kPa.
Bulkheads 370 meters across won't be easy. But if you could do it, you could build some serious city in there. Including a copy of the Empire State Building.
Since I strongly suspect that Apple would do this only if and when e-ink has gotten much better (at least much faster), this is not totally impossible... I'm not a fanboi, though.
An iPod touch is the better reader. Cheaper, too.
on
The Kindle Killer Arrives
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've read more than 120 books now on my iPod touch (which is very much an iPhone with no phone), no problems. Yes, a larger screen would be nice and you have to set a sensible brightness level (too bright in a rather dark environment is bad) but mostly I just forget that I'm reading on an electronic device and not a real book. I just read. There's not much more to say here, I'd say. I think the e-ink displays are overrated. They may have some slight advantages but they're far from perfect.
And the iPod has the advantage of being small and light enough to be safely held in one hand and to go into any pocket, which is great. And compared to most ebook readers the iPod is cheap. And it can be *so* much more than just an ebook reader.
The point is that solar panels in zero gravity (and at very low accelerations) can be made nearly as lightweight as you want to make them. It's just plain engineering. It may be hard to do, but there is no physical reason you couldn't spread out square miles of solar panels out in space. This is very different from chemical engines which are already pretty close to their physical limits. We are in no way near such limits with solar panels. Treating the sun as a large fusion reactor beaming power at you and harvesting as much of this power as you can could well be a working approach in the long run.
Where to get the power from is a main problem in spaceflight, regardless of engine. Anything you have to carry with you is a problem since you have to accelerate it along. Chemical engines get their power by burning fuel and fuel is heavy. The only way to overcome that problem is to use power you *don't* have to carry. That means getting power beamed to you from elsewhere and this can be either from the sun (solar power) or via microwave or laser. Electric engines have an advantage here because you can beam electricity but not fuels.
By the way: There already were a probe going from low earth orbit to the Moon with nothing else than solar power and an ion engine. Look up Smart-1.
I'm pretty sure that with the demonstrated launch failure rate of rockets there will be more than just the eco-hippies getting up. And while you may care or not, those in a position to actually decide and take the responsibility very much shy away from such things.
Besides, large-scale nuclear power in space is in no way off-the-shelf technology. And if you have to pour lots of money into that, using that money for developing lightweight solar technology and going the solar-electric route is not only safer, it can also much easier be scaled up and down and be used for other useful things (like probes and solar power satellites or communication satellites) while your MW reactor in space would never be much more than a very expensive one-off stunt without any long-term consequences for spaceflight. The ability to deploy large, mass-produced, lightweight solar panels may make a difference for both large and small projects, though. And it's a general engineering effort with lots of companies having good expertise in it. There is a *market* for such technology. Pushing the state of the art here is useful, there's money in it.
Nuclear power in space is very much a dead end. You don't need to be an eco-hippy to see that. People don't like it, politicians and managers don't like to take the responsibility, you can't make money from it, it gives no spin-offs, you'll never have private companies involved: it's a single-purpose, money wasting government exercise. SF from the past, not more.
I think the real reason blogs took off was that their owners took control of them, you can't (To my knowledge) setup your own exclusive Usenet group to be run however you like. With a blog you can have this absolute control and ownership.
Of course you can set up your very own NNTP server with any amount of newsgroups you like in the very same way as an web server with a blog. You point with a nntp:// link to it instead of a http:/// link, that's all. [and the slashdot URL parser sucks jovian moons through nanotubes, by the way -- argh!]
The thing is that the usenet community is very much stuck in a mindset of 20 years ago and neither the protocols, nor server and client software has ever been taken the step into the modern (distributed and unregulated) net. While there were quite a few of heated discussions going on back then, nobody ever sat down and coded and got something up and running. Which is very different to the blog scene, which did get things up and running and no shortage of that at all.
Every email has a message ID and points at the email it refers to. Every sane email client under the sun has had threading since ages. It's not that email has a problem here, it's just that many email clients suck.
E-mail has no such dependencies. The only way to take it down is to take down the Internet in general. (Spam overloading aside.)
And even then it's quite trivial to set up small networks using UUCP or SMTP to get email going again...
Anyway, the major reason that email isn't getting the attention it deserves (other than by spammers) is the fact that it's very hard to make money from it. It's somewhat like a free service available to all and the companies living off the net are too eager to have it fallen by the wayside and to have you use other services they *can* exploit and lock you in.
It's the same with mailing lists and usenet being replaced by a myriad of different blogs and forums. A few years ago I was able to read and participate in dozens of lists and newsgroups investing maybe half an hour a day. Now keeping track of a similar diversitude of blog articles and comment threads and forums and RSS feeds and Twitters and whatnot would require me to be on it full-time. It's madness.
The thing is that "the Cloud" means absolutely nothing in most cases. In almost every single case there're just remote servers storing your data as with every web app and every IMAP server since ages. The word "cloud" is just used to imply that there's something foggy you don't know anything about and to make you think that it can't fail. But of course in fact the data is stored somewhere and if there's no backup and someone wrecks the server your data is gone for good, as it always is in such cases.
I've had not a single case yet where "your data is stored somewhere where you can reach it only over the internet and you have no idea where exactly it is and how safe it is there" couldn't be used instead of "cloud". Using the "cloud" misnomer allows companies to outsource data storage to the cheapest bidder without telling you anything about it and at the same time sounding modern and innovative.
It's the same as speeding in foggy weather: Just because you can't see anything dangerous doesn't mean you're safe. It just means you feel safe as long as nothing is in your way and anything happening to you will come as a big surprise out of nothing.
A real "cloud" would mean distributed and redundant data storage in a network of servers independent of the service providers.
Yeah, but there's no rule that says that the code has to be hand-written. If it uses all the right APIs chances are that Apple will never even notice how the app was generated in the first place.
Either look at old SF (for historical reasons) or look very carefully at what you want to look at all. The thing is that basically most in-between SF is basically Fantasy. Everyone educated enough to do the numbers knows that the stars are just too far away. Most SF is lies and lies and lies. If you actually want to look into the future not only of science but of society you need to look very hard.
One thing I would advise to read is Iain M. Banks. Read The Player of Games or Exsession. There are others, but there are a lot of books that aren't well written or even in any way interesting.
Oh, and of course Lovecraft. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a must-read, as many others of him.
What about a simple, largish, multitouch trackpad instead of a mouse? Ever since I switched to a MacBook I've been wondering about that. I tried a mouse on my MacBook (the unibody thing) a few times but I hardly ever used it at all. The MacBook trackpad ist just too good. Then I've tried to buy an large external trackpad to use with an external keyboard (it makes no sense to wear out a notebook keyboard when you're sitting at your desk) but to no avail.
So, why there isn't a large, USB-connected trackpad to use with a keyboard? These things should be simple and cheap, but try to buy one!
If you measure distance in terms of available air to breathe though it's still much larger.
Really, two years or more in the Age of Sail was a very different thing. You could (and they frequently did) call to a port or some island to get supplies, breathing was free and there were much more options for ending the journey somewhat gracefully while for space travelers going back to Earth and getting safely back to the ground is the one and only option. Space is so much larger and emptier than even the oceans of Earth that you'd need more speed and power to make it small enough for our humble bodies and minds than practical (and often enough even physically possible).
But this does not mean that VASIMIR isn't a great thing. If you keep near enough to the sun and have no tight time constraints and lightweight solar cells this could be very useful. And for a selected few missions it could even be useful for manned spaceflight. Solar-electric Mars missions for example. The Soviets back then have analyzed Mars missions for decades and in the end solar-electric won hands-down even with old-fashioned ion-drives. I have often wondered why NASA didn't end up with the same conclusions and then realized that this never was blue-sky researching, NASA is somewhat pre-occupied with burning chemicals...
BTW, the constant acceleration is for longer manned missions probably very useful, even if very weak. Casting along in free fall for two years is one thing and accelerating all the time with an even very limited sense of direction and "up" and "down" another. Being able to find lost stuff on the ground the next day or so is a very small convenience that may add up after a year or two to a larger one.
Google always comes up with good ideas and has the hardware and the sheer number of users to make it into a somewhat useful beta product, but the user interface and the finish almost always is so bad that the software actually sucks. Any tiny company without such a large userbase would go under with such products, nobody would care. Google's just too large too really fail, that's all. I think there's a lesson in that.
Really, this obsession with boot times is maddening. Having sane and reliable support for sleep/hibernate is much more important. Why? Because just booting up your system gets you only half the way. You will have to launch your apps, open files to work on and so on. If you can just suspend and wake a system you can start working were you left off.
I have only started to understand this after I got my Macbook. Close the lid, sleep. Open it, start working where I left it two seconds later.
I disagree. Especially in this age of "reality" TV and celebrities famous for being famous, I suspect there are plenty of qualified scientists and engineers who would be happy to gain a place in the history books as the first earth people to walk on another planet.
I'm not saying I'm one of them, but think about it: actually being on another planet! Can you really tell me that's not something you would be interested in? Yes, the price (never returning to earth, living the rest of your days in hardship, dying on a barren world) may be too steep for you or me, but I think it's unfair to judge someone as automatically mentally incompetent just because their priorities are different from yours.
What timespan you mean with "rest of your days"? If we're talking about some realistic mission I think this would mean weeks, maybe a few months with maybe a dozen EVAs out of your aluminium can. Anything else (years or decades) is even more SF than a mission with a return ticket.
It is also unfair to say their deaths would be for nothing. There would need to be major technological advances to get people that far, even without bringing them home. Plus: humans! On another planet! That is literally the stuff of science fiction.
If we're smart, the U.S. will partner with the rest of the planet, to avoid any "claiming" of Mars for any one country. Can't you just imagine another country with different priorities sending a single human on a one-way trip, just to plant a flag and lay claim to the entire planet and all minerals and materials contained therein before they died? Even a less-technologically advanced country could do that relatively quickly, while we're wasting time figuring out how to bring our guys home.
The space race is on! Again!
I still think that this is the equivalent to a suicide bomber in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sending someone up there, wasting billions for having him die a lonely death after a few weeks with less scientific output than a 185 kg rover is just a bad joke. You even won't get soil samples back.
Really people, if you want to have a human colony on mars, these are the kinds of tough choices that MUST be made. If they asked, I'd go in an instant.
Anyone who says and *means* that wouldn't even make it through the training phase, much less through the transfer flight. You need to be a sober professional and not a suicidal dreamer for that. Never mind, but you just don't know what you're talking about. If going to Mars no matter what is so important to you that you'd go on a one-way mission, you're not qualified for spaceflight.
A self-sustained Mars colony is just totally impossible now and will be so for a long time. There's hardly anything useful there and your equipment would wear out fast. The Apollo spacesuits were nearly worn out and leaking after three EVAs and we have hardly any better yet. Even getting at a handful of water could be all you manage to do. Once. Forget it.
Slashdot Mirror
You press Control-F2 and use the cursor keys to get to Some Option.
This is Control-F2 on OS X. This selects the menu and allows to browse it with the cursor keys.
Alt+character has always been the way to type various special characters and ligatures on the Mac. Wasting this for another way to access menu entries instead was never an option for an OS that grew up with DTP.
They always take a while. "The sources are not there!" is the usual cry and when they show up a while later, nobody says a single word...
While I think the "smell out terrorists" idea is absurd and deserves no further discussion, smell-profiling itself may prove to be a valid idea. And as often all the *other* uses of such technology may have a real impact. Drug use, gender, emotional state, age etc. being detected by some smell detectors opens new fields in surveillance and control. And I'm not sure I like that at all.
And if you look at how dogs can follow and search people by their individual smell I see no real reason why "smell fingerprinting" shouldn't work.
But what if you like to discover *new* music and not music that is like the other music you like? I mean, before the crackdown on webradio there were gazillions of (private, run by an individual or small group) stations and when I tried a new station and liked the first two or three tracks I heard (did not happen that often) I could rely on the fact that I would like many of the tracks that got played there. Even if I hardly knew any of them and even if they were extremely different. There's more to musical likes and dislikes than statistics and AIs can unearth.
There's still the possibility that there's something wrong with our understanding of mass and gravity in a subtle way. The flyby anomaly is not explained either yet and it may well be that a similar thing is going on in the center of the galaxy on a much larger scale.
But I certainly agree that any test of any theory is welcome here. There's something fishy with our understanding of the universe and I can't stand this ;-)
Bulkheads 370 meters across won't be easy. But if you could do it, you could build some serious city in there. Including a copy of the Empire State Building.
Try Stanza, it's even free. There's also Kindle.app from Amazon, iSilo, eReader and several others.
Since I strongly suspect that Apple would do this only if and when e-ink has gotten much better (at least much faster), this is not totally impossible... I'm not a fanboi, though.
I've read more than 120 books now on my iPod touch (which is very much an iPhone with no phone), no problems. Yes, a larger screen would be nice and you have to set a sensible brightness level (too bright in a rather dark environment is bad) but mostly I just forget that I'm reading on an electronic device and not a real book. I just read. There's not much more to say here, I'd say. I think the e-ink displays are overrated. They may have some slight advantages but they're far from perfect.
And the iPod has the advantage of being small and light enough to be safely held in one hand and to go into any pocket, which is great. And compared to most ebook readers the iPod is cheap. And it can be *so* much more than just an ebook reader.
The point is that solar panels in zero gravity (and at very low accelerations) can be made nearly as lightweight as you want to make them. It's just plain engineering. It may be hard to do, but there is no physical reason you couldn't spread out square miles of solar panels out in space. This is very different from chemical engines which are already pretty close to their physical limits. We are in no way near such limits with solar panels. Treating the sun as a large fusion reactor beaming power at you and harvesting as much of this power as you can could well be a working approach in the long run.
Where to get the power from is a main problem in spaceflight, regardless of engine. Anything you have to carry with you is a problem since you have to accelerate it along. Chemical engines get their power by burning fuel and fuel is heavy. The only way to overcome that problem is to use power you *don't* have to carry. That means getting power beamed to you from elsewhere and this can be either from the sun (solar power) or via microwave or laser. Electric engines have an advantage here because you can beam electricity but not fuels.
By the way: There already were a probe going from low earth orbit to the Moon with nothing else than solar power and an ion engine. Look up Smart-1.
I'm pretty sure that with the demonstrated launch failure rate of rockets there will be more than just the eco-hippies getting up. And while you may care or not, those in a position to actually decide and take the responsibility very much shy away from such things.
Besides, large-scale nuclear power in space is in no way off-the-shelf technology. And if you have to pour lots of money into that, using that money for developing lightweight solar technology and going the solar-electric route is not only safer, it can also much easier be scaled up and down and be used for other useful things (like probes and solar power satellites or communication satellites) while your MW reactor in space would never be much more than a very expensive one-off stunt without any long-term consequences for spaceflight. The ability to deploy large, mass-produced, lightweight solar panels may make a difference for both large and small projects, though. And it's a general engineering effort with lots of companies having good expertise in it. There is a *market* for such technology. Pushing the state of the art here is useful, there's money in it.
Nuclear power in space is very much a dead end. You don't need to be an eco-hippy to see that. People don't like it, politicians and managers don't like to take the responsibility, you can't make money from it, it gives no spin-offs, you'll never have private companies involved: it's a single-purpose, money wasting government exercise. SF from the past, not more.
Of course you can set up your very own NNTP server with any amount of newsgroups you like in the very same way as an web server with a blog. You point with a nntp:// link to it instead of a http:/// link, that's all. [and the slashdot URL parser sucks jovian moons through nanotubes, by the way -- argh!]
The thing is that the usenet community is very much stuck in a mindset of 20 years ago and neither the protocols, nor server and client software has ever been taken the step into the modern (distributed and unregulated) net. While there were quite a few of heated discussions going on back then, nobody ever sat down and coded and got something up and running. Which is very different to the blog scene, which did get things up and running and no shortage of that at all.
Every email has a message ID and points at the email it refers to. Every sane email client under the sun has had threading since ages. It's not that email has a problem here, it's just that many email clients suck.
And even then it's quite trivial to set up small networks using UUCP or SMTP to get email going again...
Anyway, the major reason that email isn't getting the attention it deserves (other than by spammers) is the fact that it's very hard to make money from it. It's somewhat like a free service available to all and the companies living off the net are too eager to have it fallen by the wayside and to have you use other services they *can* exploit and lock you in.
It's the same with mailing lists and usenet being replaced by a myriad of different blogs and forums. A few years ago I was able to read and participate in dozens of lists and newsgroups investing maybe half an hour a day. Now keeping track of a similar diversitude of blog articles and comment threads and forums and RSS feeds and Twitters and whatnot would require me to be on it full-time. It's madness.
The thing is that "the Cloud" means absolutely nothing in most cases. In almost every single case there're just remote servers storing your data as with every web app and every IMAP server since ages. The word "cloud" is just used to imply that there's something foggy you don't know anything about and to make you think that it can't fail. But of course in fact the data is stored somewhere and if there's no backup and someone wrecks the server your data is gone for good, as it always is in such cases.
I've had not a single case yet where "your data is stored somewhere where you can reach it only over the internet and you have no idea where exactly it is and how safe it is there" couldn't be used instead of "cloud". Using the "cloud" misnomer allows companies to outsource data storage to the cheapest bidder without telling you anything about it and at the same time sounding modern and innovative.
It's the same as speeding in foggy weather: Just because you can't see anything dangerous doesn't mean you're safe. It just means you feel safe as long as nothing is in your way and anything happening to you will come as a big surprise out of nothing.
A real "cloud" would mean distributed and redundant data storage in a network of servers independent of the service providers.
Yeah, but there's no rule that says that the code has to be hand-written. If it uses all the right APIs chances are that Apple will never even notice how the app was generated in the first place.
Either look at old SF (for historical reasons) or look very carefully at what you want to look at all. The thing is that basically most in-between SF is basically Fantasy. Everyone educated enough to do the numbers knows that the stars are just too far away. Most SF is lies and lies and lies. If you actually want to look into the future not only of science but of society you need to look very hard.
One thing I would advise to read is Iain M. Banks. Read The Player of Games or Exsession. There are others, but there are a lot of books that aren't well written or even in any way interesting.
Oh, and of course Lovecraft. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a must-read, as many others of him.
What about a simple, largish, multitouch trackpad instead of a mouse? Ever since I switched to a MacBook I've been wondering about that. I tried a mouse on my MacBook (the unibody thing) a few times but I hardly ever used it at all. The MacBook trackpad ist just too good. Then I've tried to buy an large external trackpad to use with an external keyboard (it makes no sense to wear out a notebook keyboard when you're sitting at your desk) but to no avail.
So, why there isn't a large, USB-connected trackpad to use with a keyboard? These things should be simple and cheap, but try to buy one!
If you measure distance in terms of available air to breathe though it's still much larger.
Really, two years or more in the Age of Sail was a very different thing. You could (and they frequently did) call to a port or some island to get supplies, breathing was free and there were much more options for ending the journey somewhat gracefully while for space travelers going back to Earth and getting safely back to the ground is the one and only option. Space is so much larger and emptier than even the oceans of Earth that you'd need more speed and power to make it small enough for our humble bodies and minds than practical (and often enough even physically possible).
But this does not mean that VASIMIR isn't a great thing. If you keep near enough to the sun and have no tight time constraints and lightweight solar cells this could be very useful. And for a selected few missions it could even be useful for manned spaceflight. Solar-electric Mars missions for example. The Soviets back then have analyzed Mars missions for decades and in the end solar-electric won hands-down even with old-fashioned ion-drives. I have often wondered why NASA didn't end up with the same conclusions and then realized that this never was blue-sky researching, NASA is somewhat pre-occupied with burning chemicals...
BTW, the constant acceleration is for longer manned missions probably very useful, even if very weak. Casting along in free fall for two years is one thing and accelerating all the time with an even very limited sense of direction and "up" and "down" another. Being able to find lost stuff on the ground the next day or so is a very small convenience that may add up after a year or two to a larger one.
Google always comes up with good ideas and has the hardware and the sheer number of users to make it into a somewhat useful beta product, but the user interface and the finish almost always is so bad that the software actually sucks. Any tiny company without such a large userbase would go under with such products, nobody would care. Google's just too large too really fail, that's all. I think there's a lesson in that.
Really, this obsession with boot times is maddening. Having sane and reliable support for sleep/hibernate is much more important. Why? Because just booting up your system gets you only half the way. You will have to launch your apps, open files to work on and so on. If you can just suspend and wake a system you can start working were you left off.
I have only started to understand this after I got my Macbook. Close the lid, sleep. Open it, start working where I left it two seconds later.
I disagree. Especially in this age of "reality" TV and celebrities famous for being famous, I suspect there are plenty of qualified scientists and engineers who would be happy to gain a place in the history books as the first earth people to walk on another planet.
I'm not saying I'm one of them, but think about it: actually being on another planet! Can you really tell me that's not something you would be interested in? Yes, the price (never returning to earth, living the rest of your days in hardship, dying on a barren world) may be too steep for you or me, but I think it's unfair to judge someone as automatically mentally incompetent just because their priorities are different from yours.
What timespan you mean with "rest of your days"? If we're talking about some realistic mission I think this would mean weeks, maybe a few months with maybe a dozen EVAs out of your aluminium can. Anything else (years or decades) is even more SF than a mission with a return ticket.
It is also unfair to say their deaths would be for nothing. There would need to be major technological advances to get people that far, even without bringing them home. Plus: humans! On another planet! That is literally the stuff of science fiction.
If we're smart, the U.S. will partner with the rest of the planet, to avoid any "claiming" of Mars for any one country. Can't you just imagine another country with different priorities sending a single human on a one-way trip, just to plant a flag and lay claim to the entire planet and all minerals and materials contained therein before they died? Even a less-technologically advanced country could do that relatively quickly, while we're wasting time figuring out how to bring our guys home.
The space race is on! Again!
I still think that this is the equivalent to a suicide bomber in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sending someone up there, wasting billions for having him die a lonely death after a few weeks with less scientific output than a 185 kg rover is just a bad joke. You even won't get soil samples back.
Anyone who says and *means* that wouldn't even make it through the training phase, much less through the transfer flight. You need to be a sober professional and not a suicidal dreamer for that. Never mind, but you just don't know what you're talking about. If going to Mars no matter what is so important to you that you'd go on a one-way mission, you're not qualified for spaceflight.
A self-sustained Mars colony is just totally impossible now and will be so for a long time. There's hardly anything useful there and your equipment would wear out fast. The Apollo spacesuits were nearly worn out and leaking after three EVAs and we have hardly any better yet. Even getting at a handful of water could be all you manage to do. Once. Forget it.