It's weird though what they will and won't let you view. You can't see the roof of the White House but you can look at the NSA activity out at Yakima Firing Center in Washington.
I'd like to see the next dimension that Google Maps add be time. It would be cool if it were possible to have all of the satellite imagery from the last 40 years or so going right up to today with a fleet of googlesats providing near real-time imagery and then scroll through it all. Man, this makes me wish I were smart enough to work at Google.
Wrong, violence is the answer, if you're using the court system. What does the court system rely on? Well, it relies on cops. Let's say you go to court against a scumbag like this and you lose your lawsuit. You say "fuck the courts" and continue your behavior anyways. What happens? Well the judge gets a couple of cops to come over and make you stop doing whatever it is you're doing. What do these cops have? Pistols, nightsticks, shotguns, automatic weapons, tasers, pepper spray and the ability to use them in certain defined circumstances. What happens to you if you keep doing whatever it is you're doing when the police come? Well, they either kill you or they capture you and put you in jail. What happens if you try to get out of jail? Well, men with guns will shoot you. Violence is the foundation of the state. One of the reasons people abide by the decrees of a court is because violence and loss of liberty will be inflicted upon them if they don't.
OK, so it's 2005 and we don't have colonies on the moon, atomic powered flying cars, supersonic transports or fusion power plants or many of the other technologies that the future was supposed to bring. On the other hand we have the internet, which no one really foresaw and which has drastically changed our lives in the last ten years. We haven't cured cancer yet but we've learned a Hell of a lot about the immune system because of a nasty plague called AIDS and we know more about DNA and heredity than anyone would have thought we would 30 years ago.
As far as the number of patents declining I'd have to say that this isn't the greatest metric for measuring technological innovation. From the number of crap patents out there (Amazon One-Click, NTPs patents, etc, etc, etc) I'd have to say that just because lots of patents are being generated doesn't mean that innovation is thriving or perishing (In fact I'd fear that too many patents would stifle innovation by preventing people from experimenting with new technologies).
The reason I have such a problem with Huebner's analysis can be summed up by this one quote from TFA:
Huebner disagrees. "It doesn't matter if it is humans or machines that are the source of innovation. If it isn't noticeable to the people who chronicle technological history then it is probably a minor event."
So, if something passes under the radar of those stalwarts who have charged themselves with chronicling technological history then it really doesn't matter. By this logic a technological historian of the early 1970s would probably have been writing volumes about the space program and nuclear research while ignoring things such as the nascent revolution in semi-conductors that was being created by the folks at Intel and other engineers in Silicon Valley, which by any measure has affected our daily lives as much, if not more than the space program or nuclear research. By admitting this Huebner is, at least to me, showing that his analyses are totally arbitrary and therefore valueless.
If you think nuke power is a loss you are an idiot. How on earth can decommisionning and waste transport can amount to the thousands of TeraWatthours produced by nuclear
It can't and it doesn't. Helen Caldecott is a stupid fucking cunt who parlayed a talent for self promotion and an M.D into a career as an international anti-nuclear activist. She uses her medical credentials to blather about the hazards of nuclear power about as credibly as Bill Frist used his when he remotely diagnosed Terri Schiavo as not being in a persistent vegetative state.
As we go towards speaker systems with more and more speakers Dolby ProLogic being replaced with Dolby 5.1, being replaced with 6.1, being replaced with 7.1 being replaced with 10.2 or 13.1 it is going to be more and more difficult to build a home theatre receiver that can handle all of these channels and that comes in some sort of reasonable form factor (My Denon receiver already weighs in at around 50 pounds). Add to this the difficulty of the cabling for systems such as this and you're going to see the rise of systems using smart speakers with built-in amplifiers connected in some sort of bus arrangement.
The advantage of this over the mondo home theatre receiver is that amplifiers can be better matched to the output characteristics of a speaker, thus reducing the power necessary which reduces their size (your home theatre receiver is so big because the emplifiers inside of it have to be able to drive a wide variety of speakers with varying impedance characteristics). With a smart system you'd hook your speakers up to firewire or ethernet cabling, assign each speaker its place in the system (hardware address "foo" is the center channel, hardware address "bar" is the subwoofer, hardware address "baz" is the left front, etc), plug the speakers into a power outlet and let the whole thing rip.
In an ideal world a standard would be worked out that would allow you to mix and match speakers and receivers, which would actually become controller/switchboxes from different manufacturers. Unfortunately we're not in an ideal world so we'll end up with a raft of incompatible systems, plus the **AAs will probably insist that some sort of onerous DRM scheme be applied to any digital bitstream. Oh well, at least it was a nice dream.
Um, no. The vulnerabilities exposed are most often in Microsoft products, which allow the user to be owned. Someone needs to thwap the "Officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department" upside the head with a clue by four.
Unfortunately you can't do that any more. It's now a PATRIOT act violation, plus the TSA no longer allows clue by fours in carry on luggage.
They made them out of carbon fiber and titanium now? I know this sounds wierd - but does it look cool?
Mostly. A below knee prosthesis consists of three components, the socket and suspension, which holds the prosthesis onto the stump (or 'residual limb' if you want to be PC about it), the pylon, and the foot itself. There is generally a cosmetic foot that you wear with most feet, called a foot shell or foot cosmesis, this allows the foot to properly fill out a shoe. Some people also have a cosmesis fabricated to cover the socket and pylon for the leg. The problem with cosmeses is that they're expensive and they wear out quickly, so a lot of people skip them. Women are more likely than men to use a cosmesis (Heather Mills McCartney, Paul McCartney's wife, has some damned good ones) but a lot of people skip them entirely. If you're generally wearing long pants it's really not an issue. In addition you can have the carbon fiber of the socket laminated with a variety of designs, one that I saw at a prosthetics fab was a green lizard scale pattern, pretty cool.
I have an Otto Bock
Luxon Max foot. Which is connected to a titanium pylon. The pylon is connected to an Otto Bock
4R86 torsion adapter which allows limited twisting motion of the socket relative to the foot.
These days most sockets are generally vacuum casted, although there are places that still make plaster molds of the stump and build off of them. A mold is taken of the stump and the resulting form is put into a 3D digitizer. The prosthetist then uses a specialized 3D CAD program (Shapemaker is one such) to adjust this for fit. This is really an art, the guy I go to is really good at it. The idea is to have the entire interior surface of the socket contacting the stump to support the weight of the patient. Despite what you might think (and what I used to think before I lost my leg) the weight of the patient is not concentrated on the end of the stump. This is called a "total surface bearing" socket and again, it's a real art to building these. Most of the problems people have with their prosthetics are due to socket fit. For some patients the prosthetist will build a series of test or 'check' sockets out of cheaper materials such as plastic or fiberglass. This allows checking the fit of the socket and is also good for patients with recent amputations who generally experience a great deal of shrinkage of their stumps in the months following their amputations.
Inside the socket you wear a silicone liner that fits over your stump, this provides protection for the skin on your stump, an important thing, especially if the stump is like mine, which is mostly skin graft. To deal with volume fluctuations during the day you pad the outside of the liner with cloth socks. Then you have a silicone sleeve that slides up over your thigh to hold the whole thing on.
The cost for a simple prostehetic like mine is about 8 grand, a lot of this is labor, getting a good socket fit and adjusting the components to fit together properly takes a lot of skill, you don't just bolt it all together and walk out of the office. The cost for a more sophisticated prosthesis, such as an above knee prosthesis using an Otto Bock
C-Leg can hit 50 to 60 grand once the cost of the components and the labor of the prosthetist is figured in.
It's amazing how your life can change in a short period of time. Two and a half years ago I knew absolutely nothing about any of this. As far as cool looking, well, it's not as good as the original equipment but it beats the Hell out of being on crutches or in a wheelchair, and I guess it looks cooler than either of those alternatives.
Clarion workshop, from everything I've read they combine the masturbatory inclusiveness of a bad SF con with the masturbatory inclusiveness of an academic conference. I fail to see how any of the ideas they lay out for SF in the Mundane Manifesto are in any way new or interesting. Poul Anderson wrote Tau Zero and The Stars are Only Fire, which didn't use any magical FTL physics. Larry Niven wrote A World Out of Time which didn't use any magical FTL physics. A lot of P.K. Dick's stuff is, quite frankly, crap (Clans of the Alphane Moon anyone?) and Neuromancer is as dated as disco and cyberpunk fanboyz are every bit as annoying and disconnected from reality as Star Wars fanboys or Star Trek fanboys.
Those who have actually been reading SF, and not wanking at SF writing workshops, realize that there is more to SF than human looking aliens in latex prosthetics on badly written TV shows. It seems to me that the authors of the Mundane Manifesto have stopped their navel gazing long enough to set up a straw man and weakly thrash at it in the appearance of doing something cool.
There are plenty of authors out there writing SF that is thoroughly grounded in our understanding of physics and does not rely on any magic such as FTL, time travel, parallel universes, etc, etc, etc, and there have been for years. Of course these authors probably aren't hanging around Clarion East wanking away writing articles with titles such as Was Marx a Mundane.
I've always wanted a T-shirt that I could program with changing text so I could download Warren Zevon lyrics to it and walk around all day with my shirt saying things like:
They made hypocrite judgments
after the fact,
but the name of the game
is be hit and hit back
Send lawyers, guns and money,
the shit has hit the fan.
Strength and Muscle and Jungle Work
If you can't take the punches
it don't mean a thing
Every once in a while I forget why I hate software developers so much and then I read a post like this and remember, it's because so many of them are such arrogant fucktards who are convinced that because they sat through a bunch of brain-hammeringly dull CS courses that they somehow have become members of God's own IT elite.
True story: I used to work for a major internet retailer as a UNIX systems engineer/administrator. This major internet retailer, named after a large river, had a warehouse in Seattle. The warehouse operations manager was a very smart cookie, not a programmer or developer, but still very smart. One day this manager needed a tool to check shipment status, he requested this from the software developers, but they were too busy wanking over "good programming practices" (whatever those are, from a plurality of the developers I've worked with it seems that their good practices are "overpromise and underdeliver", "blame the hardware" and avoid being oncall if at all possible) to develop this for him. So this warehouse operations manager went and got himself a PERL book and sat down and wrote a tool that did what he wanted it to do.
When the software developers found out about this they were aghast. Aaaaacccckkkk! Someone other them then writing a tool, a member of the unwashed actually coding, God forbid! Of course the developers found a lot to bitch about in his tool, it wasn't very good PERL they said, it ran out of his home directory, it beat the shit out of the database and our NetApp filers, etc, etc, etc, yadda, yadda, yadda. But all of them missed one point, if they had gotten off of their asses and used all of the good programming practices that developers keep nattering on about to develop the tool he requested he wouldn't have had to sit down and write this thing (which really wasn't that bad, he had followed the style that most PERL books use in their example code). If they had done their jobs he wouldn't have had to do theirs (as well as his).
Of course I worked with lots and lots of people who called themselves software developers who wrote code that pounded our systems to their knees by running full table scans against databases, writing vital log files to a directory that was NFS mounted from a personal Linux workstation, leaking memory, running out of control and pegging the CPU, etc, etc, etc, etc, and they were writing most of their code in C and C++, those darling languages of those who call themselves professional software developers.
I guess what I'm trying to say is "go fuck yourself you arrogant prick!" You're not as smart as you think you are. You're not as good of a programmer as you think you are and you obviously know nothing about REALBasic (it ain't GWbasic or even Vbasic) and if it helps users get their job done then it's a good thing in my book, even if it isn't in yours.
Go for extreme body modification. Have something amputated. For what it's worth the people at my company don't seem to have a problem with me wearing shorts, which show off the lovely piece of titanium and carbon fiber that replaced my left leg below the knee after a motorcycle accident two years ago. In fact many of them were surprised by it, which I chalk up to the good work of my physical therapists in teaching me how to walk again and my prosthetist in building really good legs.
I agree, the original poster isn't working with a large enough sample set. Get a couple of hundred Alphas ranging from a GS140 to a A1000 in the same place and watch them for a month or so and you'd see a lot of kernel panics. Ditto for HP boxen or Suns. Anyone who has worked in a large scale UNIX environment knows better.
I mean, what the hell has SGI done in half a decade that's caused anyone to talk about them in positive terms? Nada.
Well their new Altix line, which uses Itanium CPUs, is pretty slick. Do you want lots and lots of CPUs and a good NUMA architecture? Then check out what they did with Project Columbia. I'm a lot more impressed with SGI now than I was when they were in the business of making UNIX workstations that ran a really shitty version of UNIX (Irix sucks and blows at the same time) but which had shiny and colorful plastic cases and names such as "Octane", "Fuel" and "Viagra" (oh wait, I made that last one up).
satellites that could constantly monitor the entire Sun. If we were to put a satellite into the Earth-Sun L1, L4 and L5 points we'd have good coverage of 120 degrees of the Sun's surface. An L3 satellite, appropriately stabilised in its orbit (which we'd also have to do with the L1 satellite) would give us coverage of the side of the Sun opposite the Earth. This data could be relayed back to Earth via the satellites at L4 and L5. This would leave some blind spots which could be filled in by placing a satellite in Venus-Sun L4 and L5 points (Venus Equilateral anyone?) and relaying back to Earth appropriately.
It would be really cool to be able to have data from the entire Solar surface instead of our currently limited view. It would also be handy to know if a solar storm was brewing on another part of the Sun and was likely to let loose when that portion of the Sun rotated to face Earth.
you find out that Kheit is an IP lawyer who had worked for Apple and NeXT. Sounds to me like a bitter ex-employee.
I want to know what Kheit and the other naysayers think Apple's options were. Motorola failed to deliver on faster chips and IBM has such a huge cash cow with the CPU business for the new X-box and PS/3 that you have to wonder how much effort they'd be willing to make to produce faster desktop chips for Apple.
Apple is already falling behind in the laptop world, for $1000 less than Apple sells their top of the line G4 laptop I can get a Toshiba with a 17" screen, built-in wireless, super drive, 100Gb hard drive, 3.33 Ghz CPU and 533Mhz front side bus. OK, sure, megahertz comparisons are hard but when you're comparing two CPUs and one of them is clocked twice as fast and has a faster front side bus then it's pretty much over. Sure, the Toshiba is a brick compared to the PowerMac 17" (although it's a very solid brick, I've owned Toshibas and like them quite a bit) but if you don't want a brick with a huge screen you have smaller and lighter options.
I'm not really happy about this decision but the naysayers such as Kheit aren't saying anything other than "we're pissed off because we're losing the PowerPC", they certainly aren't offering any kind of alternative strategy for what Apple could have done instead of switching CPU architectures. Perhaps they'd be happier if Apple continued on as a sort of red-headed bastard step-child of IBM and Freescale and faded into obscurity as their CPU offerings became less and less relevant and less and less competitive to what Intel and AMD were offering.
From what I heard it has a short battery life [10hrs], I know it costs alot and the service providers rape you 7 ways from sunday.
From what I've heard your sister and mom star in porno flicks that prominently feature Tom Delay and a very well hung stallion. It must be true because I heard it somewhere, which is why I'm posting it on/..
I'm a Blackberry user through NexTel. The service is the same price as my T-mobile service was and the battery life of my 7510 and 7520 were exemplary, especially given the amount of e-mail I have forwarded to the device.
It's not a good product for several reasons [not all of which are technical] and I for one would be glad to get rid of them.
None of which you elaborate on.
They're a bunch of smartass punks anyways. I went through the job interview process with them in Waterloo and they'd sit you down todo puzzles. Finally I turned around "do you know how to build a cryptosystem or multiply large numbers quickly?" The guy said no and I said "figures."
Backstory: They were hiring me for my crypto-math knowledge not to see if I could quickly write programs to solve geometric puzzles [which while fun is a bit nerve shaking during an interview].
Now the truth comes out, you don't like the company because they didn't hire you because you couldn't solve the puzzles and you came off like a dick in the interview. Now who's the "smartass punk" here?
I wonder if this is because OpenFirmware is too open, thus leading to the possibility that someone could produce a hardware knock-off that would undercut Apple's sales of Intel based hardware.
Nope. According to this
article the actual number of the beast is not 666 but is instead 616. Come to think of it I'm surprised that this wasn't a/. news item.
No kidding. And then you have idiot programs such as Oracle RAC and Veritas NetBackup which need to have.rhosts files so that they can install client software.
My strategy for getting rid of telnet has been to disable it on all new hosts (easy since it's disabled out of the box on new SuSE and RedHat installs. Then when people complain I go and show them how port forwarding works with X-windows and when they realize that they don't have to run xhost and set their display environment variable if they're using ssh -X they become ssh converts. This is good because it means that I haven't had to use my fallback position yet, which is to tell the users that we didn't have enough money to buy telnet and rsh licenses for new UNIX systems.
I've got my whole thing planned out. I'm going to add random lights on the case, make it transparent AND ugly (that's a must), and stick "sponsorship" decals on it. I'm also going to find as many Intel Pentium 4 stickers as I can so it goes faster! I'm going to win for sure.
Seriously though, case modding is really fun for people who don't have the money to add performance to their PC. In fact, you can find various things around the house to make your case Martha Stewart friendly!
God you're a fucking tool! OK, I think that a lot of case mods are silly, and I think that a lot of Star Wars fans are silly. But this is a pretty cool and creative case mod and desk. Here's someone who has a passion and the creativity to express it. Isn't that a big part of being a geek? I think it's pretty cool myself, even if I wouldn't want one for in my house. (Although I'm surprised that Lucas hasn't licensed this out to Herman Miller as
a design for office cubicles. God knows he's whored out everything else in Star Wars)
I have about 80gb of MP3s. Way too much to fit on an HD based ipod. But I want to be able to take a long trip without killing the batteries in my laptop, I want something that I can used to tune out the panhandlers on the subway, something cheap and light and robust.
How about an iPod shuffle? 512 Mb of $99 or 1Gb for $149, rugged, long battery life and can be used as a flash drive. Or if you're interested you can get a refurbished iPod mini, 4Gb model for $169 from the Apple store, 10 bucks cheaper than the Zen Micro 4Gb, and that's not a bullshit "after mail-in rebate" price either, unlike the offered price of the Zen MIcro at www.nomadworld.com.
The Muvo accomplishes that, I doubt the ipod ever could. I guess you can just keep a backup of your music collection for when your ipod's HD fails (which it almost certainly will).
Wow! You must have one of those new laptops that have the entropy proof hard drive that never fails! I gotta get me one of those. That's sarcasm by the way dipshit, if you don't have your 80Gb of music backed up on that laptop you're going to find out the hard way about hardware failures. My music collection that I load my iPods from is stored on a RAID-1 mirror, and I back that up to a firewire drive and keep the firewire drive in a Pelican case locked inside of a fire-resistant safe.
I have heard that if you don't use the ipod a lot, you won't likely get the battery problem. The thing is, I DO use my mp3 player a lot so it wouldn't work for me.
Yeah, I use mine a couple of hours a day. I generally plug it in every couple of days, and I haven't seen a problem with battery life on any of my iPods since my first 10Gb model in 2002 (which was still usable if I plugged it in every night). Apple has fixed the battery problem.
I have over 120 Gb of MP3s, mostly ripped at 320 VBR so I can get decent sound on my stereo. But I don't keep them all on my iPod. I do keep about 30 Gb on my iPod though, which is about 9 days worth of music, which isn't bad. I update the selection every once in a while . I suppose that if I were some sort of pathetic fetishist I would want all of my music with me all of the time. But you know what? I really don't need to listen to my Christmas music in June.
And yeah, I can store my docs on the Muvo as well. USB2.0 connector, no cable required, use it as a USB flash device.
Wow, how stunningly original of Creative, building a a storage device for music that can also store documents. Someone hand them a Nobel prize. This feature has been on the iPod since day one, and the iPod also has the nice ability to act as a bootable, external firewire disk drive.
The muvo will also function as a voice record (but will not code into mp3, unfortunately).
A feature which I'm sure is as useful as all of those camera phones out there.
The thing I wish it had was the ability to play ogg files.
See, this is where you mark yourself as a total feeb and loser. No-one, outside of the kind of person who spends his lonely nights dry humping a cardboard cut out of Lara Croft cares about fucking Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis is the OS/2 of music compression codecs. It's the answer to a question that no one is asking.
I may have gone off on a little bit of a tirade, please excuse me. But when the media hype of the ipod seems to be high enough for some rebate on a dead ipod to become a story on slashdot, I have to speak up.
Yes, and when ignorant fanboyz such as yourself who have never used an iPod post rapturous reviews of a Creative labs product I have to speak up too.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see the next dimension that Google Maps add be time. It would be cool if it were possible to have all of the satellite imagery from the last 40 years or so going right up to today with a fleet of googlesats providing near real-time imagery and then scroll through it all. Man, this makes me wish I were smart enough to work at Google.
is
NOT
the
answer
Wrong, violence is the answer, if you're using the court system. What does the court system rely on? Well, it relies on cops. Let's say you go to court against a scumbag like this and you lose your lawsuit. You say "fuck the courts" and continue your behavior anyways. What happens? Well the judge gets a couple of cops to come over and make you stop doing whatever it is you're doing. What do these cops have? Pistols, nightsticks, shotguns, automatic weapons, tasers, pepper spray and the ability to use them in certain defined circumstances. What happens to you if you keep doing whatever it is you're doing when the police come? Well, they either kill you or they capture you and put you in jail. What happens if you try to get out of jail? Well, men with guns will shoot you. Violence is the foundation of the state. One of the reasons people abide by the decrees of a court is because violence and loss of liberty will be inflicted upon them if they don't.
As far as the number of patents declining I'd have to say that this isn't the greatest metric for measuring technological innovation. From the number of crap patents out there (Amazon One-Click, NTPs patents, etc, etc, etc) I'd have to say that just because lots of patents are being generated doesn't mean that innovation is thriving or perishing (In fact I'd fear that too many patents would stifle innovation by preventing people from experimenting with new technologies).
The reason I have such a problem with Huebner's analysis can be summed up by this one quote from TFA:
Huebner disagrees. "It doesn't matter if it is humans or machines that are the source of innovation. If it isn't noticeable to the people who chronicle technological history then it is probably a minor event."
So, if something passes under the radar of those stalwarts who have charged themselves with chronicling technological history then it really doesn't matter. By this logic a technological historian of the early 1970s would probably have been writing volumes about the space program and nuclear research while ignoring things such as the nascent revolution in semi-conductors that was being created by the folks at Intel and other engineers in Silicon Valley, which by any measure has affected our daily lives as much, if not more than the space program or nuclear research. By admitting this Huebner is, at least to me, showing that his analyses are totally arbitrary and therefore valueless.
It can't and it doesn't. Helen Caldecott is a stupid fucking cunt who parlayed a talent for self promotion and an M.D into a career as an international anti-nuclear activist. She uses her medical credentials to blather about the hazards of nuclear power about as credibly as Bill Frist used his when he remotely diagnosed Terri Schiavo as not being in a persistent vegetative state.
The advantage of this over the mondo home theatre receiver is that amplifiers can be better matched to the output characteristics of a speaker, thus reducing the power necessary which reduces their size (your home theatre receiver is so big because the emplifiers inside of it have to be able to drive a wide variety of speakers with varying impedance characteristics). With a smart system you'd hook your speakers up to firewire or ethernet cabling, assign each speaker its place in the system (hardware address "foo" is the center channel, hardware address "bar" is the subwoofer, hardware address "baz" is the left front, etc), plug the speakers into a power outlet and let the whole thing rip.
In an ideal world a standard would be worked out that would allow you to mix and match speakers and receivers, which would actually become controller/switchboxes from different manufacturers. Unfortunately we're not in an ideal world so we'll end up with a raft of incompatible systems, plus the **AAs will probably insist that some sort of onerous DRM scheme be applied to any digital bitstream. Oh well, at least it was a nice dream.
Unfortunately you can't do that any more. It's now a PATRIOT act violation, plus the TSA no longer allows clue by fours in carry on luggage.
Mostly. A below knee prosthesis consists of three components, the socket and suspension, which holds the prosthesis onto the stump (or 'residual limb' if you want to be PC about it), the pylon, and the foot itself. There is generally a cosmetic foot that you wear with most feet, called a foot shell or foot cosmesis, this allows the foot to properly fill out a shoe. Some people also have a cosmesis fabricated to cover the socket and pylon for the leg. The problem with cosmeses is that they're expensive and they wear out quickly, so a lot of people skip them. Women are more likely than men to use a cosmesis (Heather Mills McCartney, Paul McCartney's wife, has some damned good ones) but a lot of people skip them entirely. If you're generally wearing long pants it's really not an issue. In addition you can have the carbon fiber of the socket laminated with a variety of designs, one that I saw at a prosthetics fab was a green lizard scale pattern, pretty cool.
I have an Otto Bock Luxon Max foot. Which is connected to a titanium pylon. The pylon is connected to an Otto Bock 4R86 torsion adapter which allows limited twisting motion of the socket relative to the foot.
These days most sockets are generally vacuum casted, although there are places that still make plaster molds of the stump and build off of them. A mold is taken of the stump and the resulting form is put into a 3D digitizer. The prosthetist then uses a specialized 3D CAD program (Shapemaker is one such) to adjust this for fit. This is really an art, the guy I go to is really good at it. The idea is to have the entire interior surface of the socket contacting the stump to support the weight of the patient. Despite what you might think (and what I used to think before I lost my leg) the weight of the patient is not concentrated on the end of the stump. This is called a "total surface bearing" socket and again, it's a real art to building these. Most of the problems people have with their prosthetics are due to socket fit. For some patients the prosthetist will build a series of test or 'check' sockets out of cheaper materials such as plastic or fiberglass. This allows checking the fit of the socket and is also good for patients with recent amputations who generally experience a great deal of shrinkage of their stumps in the months following their amputations.
Inside the socket you wear a silicone liner that fits over your stump, this provides protection for the skin on your stump, an important thing, especially if the stump is like mine, which is mostly skin graft. To deal with volume fluctuations during the day you pad the outside of the liner with cloth socks. Then you have a silicone sleeve that slides up over your thigh to hold the whole thing on.
The cost for a simple prostehetic like mine is about 8 grand, a lot of this is labor, getting a good socket fit and adjusting the components to fit together properly takes a lot of skill, you don't just bolt it all together and walk out of the office. The cost for a more sophisticated prosthesis, such as an above knee prosthesis using an Otto Bock C-Leg can hit 50 to 60 grand once the cost of the components and the labor of the prosthetist is figured in.
It's amazing how your life can change in a short period of time. Two and a half years ago I knew absolutely nothing about any of this. As far as cool looking, well, it's not as good as the original equipment but it beats the Hell out of being on crutches or in a wheelchair, and I guess it looks cooler than either of those alternatives.
Those who have actually been reading SF, and not wanking at SF writing workshops, realize that there is more to SF than human looking aliens in latex prosthetics on badly written TV shows. It seems to me that the authors of the Mundane Manifesto have stopped their navel gazing long enough to set up a straw man and weakly thrash at it in the appearance of doing something cool.
There are plenty of authors out there writing SF that is thoroughly grounded in our understanding of physics and does not rely on any magic such as FTL, time travel, parallel universes, etc, etc, etc, and there have been for years. Of course these authors probably aren't hanging around Clarion East wanking away writing articles with titles such as Was Marx a Mundane.
They made hypocrite judgments after the fact, but the name of the game is be hit and hit back
Send lawyers, guns and money, the shit has hit the fan.
Strength and Muscle and Jungle Work
If you can't take the punches it don't mean a thing
He's just an excitable boy
My baby is a basket case
I would be so cool if I had that.
True story: I used to work for a major internet retailer as a UNIX systems engineer/administrator. This major internet retailer, named after a large river, had a warehouse in Seattle. The warehouse operations manager was a very smart cookie, not a programmer or developer, but still very smart. One day this manager needed a tool to check shipment status, he requested this from the software developers, but they were too busy wanking over "good programming practices" (whatever those are, from a plurality of the developers I've worked with it seems that their good practices are "overpromise and underdeliver", "blame the hardware" and avoid being oncall if at all possible) to develop this for him. So this warehouse operations manager went and got himself a PERL book and sat down and wrote a tool that did what he wanted it to do.
When the software developers found out about this they were aghast. Aaaaacccckkkk! Someone other them then writing a tool, a member of the unwashed actually coding, God forbid! Of course the developers found a lot to bitch about in his tool, it wasn't very good PERL they said, it ran out of his home directory, it beat the shit out of the database and our NetApp filers, etc, etc, etc, yadda, yadda, yadda. But all of them missed one point, if they had gotten off of their asses and used all of the good programming practices that developers keep nattering on about to develop the tool he requested he wouldn't have had to sit down and write this thing (which really wasn't that bad, he had followed the style that most PERL books use in their example code). If they had done their jobs he wouldn't have had to do theirs (as well as his).
Of course I worked with lots and lots of people who called themselves software developers who wrote code that pounded our systems to their knees by running full table scans against databases, writing vital log files to a directory that was NFS mounted from a personal Linux workstation, leaking memory, running out of control and pegging the CPU, etc, etc, etc, etc, and they were writing most of their code in C and C++, those darling languages of those who call themselves professional software developers.
I guess what I'm trying to say is "go fuck yourself you arrogant prick!" You're not as smart as you think you are. You're not as good of a programmer as you think you are and you obviously know nothing about REALBasic (it ain't GWbasic or even Vbasic) and if it helps users get their job done then it's a good thing in my book, even if it isn't in yours.
Well their new Altix line, which uses Itanium CPUs, is pretty slick. Do you want lots and lots of CPUs and a good NUMA architecture? Then check out what they did with Project Columbia. I'm a lot more impressed with SGI now than I was when they were in the business of making UNIX workstations that ran a really shitty version of UNIX (Irix sucks and blows at the same time) but which had shiny and colorful plastic cases and names such as "Octane", "Fuel" and "Viagra" (oh wait, I made that last one up).
It would be really cool to be able to have data from the entire Solar surface instead of our currently limited view. It would also be handy to know if a solar storm was brewing on another part of the Sun and was likely to let loose when that portion of the Sun rotated to face Earth.
I want to know what Kheit and the other naysayers think Apple's options were. Motorola failed to deliver on faster chips and IBM has such a huge cash cow with the CPU business for the new X-box and PS/3 that you have to wonder how much effort they'd be willing to make to produce faster desktop chips for Apple.
Apple is already falling behind in the laptop world, for $1000 less than Apple sells their top of the line G4 laptop I can get a Toshiba with a 17" screen, built-in wireless, super drive, 100Gb hard drive, 3.33 Ghz CPU and 533Mhz front side bus. OK, sure, megahertz comparisons are hard but when you're comparing two CPUs and one of them is clocked twice as fast and has a faster front side bus then it's pretty much over. Sure, the Toshiba is a brick compared to the PowerMac 17" (although it's a very solid brick, I've owned Toshibas and like them quite a bit) but if you don't want a brick with a huge screen you have smaller and lighter options.
I'm not really happy about this decision but the naysayers such as Kheit aren't saying anything other than "we're pissed off because we're losing the PowerPC", they certainly aren't offering any kind of alternative strategy for what Apple could have done instead of switching CPU architectures. Perhaps they'd be happier if Apple continued on as a sort of red-headed bastard step-child of IBM and Freescale and faded into obscurity as their CPU offerings became less and less relevant and less and less competitive to what Intel and AMD were offering.
From what I've heard your sister and mom star in porno flicks that prominently feature Tom Delay and a very well hung stallion. It must be true because I heard it somewhere, which is why I'm posting it on /..
I'm a Blackberry user through NexTel. The service is the same price as my T-mobile service was and the battery life of my 7510 and 7520 were exemplary, especially given the amount of e-mail I have forwarded to the device.
It's not a good product for several reasons [not all of which are technical] and I for one would be glad to get rid of them.
None of which you elaborate on.
They're a bunch of smartass punks anyways. I went through the job interview process with them in Waterloo and they'd sit you down todo puzzles. Finally I turned around "do you know how to build a cryptosystem or multiply large numbers quickly?" The guy said no and I said "figures."
Backstory: They were hiring me for my crypto-math knowledge not to see if I could quickly write programs to solve geometric puzzles [which while fun is a bit nerve shaking during an interview].
Now the truth comes out, you don't like the company because they didn't hire you because you couldn't solve the puzzles and you came off like a dick in the interview. Now who's the "smartass punk" here?
My strategy for getting rid of telnet has been to disable it on all new hosts (easy since it's disabled out of the box on new SuSE and RedHat installs. Then when people complain I go and show them how port forwarding works with X-windows and when they realize that they don't have to run xhost and set their display environment variable if they're using ssh -X they become ssh converts. This is good because it means that I haven't had to use my fallback position yet, which is to tell the users that we didn't have enough money to buy telnet and rsh licenses for new UNIX systems.
Seriously though, case modding is really fun for people who don't have the money to add performance to their PC. In fact, you can find various things around the house to make your case Martha Stewart friendly!
God you're a fucking tool! OK, I think that a lot of case mods are silly, and I think that a lot of Star Wars fans are silly. But this is a pretty cool and creative case mod and desk. Here's someone who has a passion and the creativity to express it. Isn't that a big part of being a geek? I think it's pretty cool myself, even if I wouldn't want one for in my house. (Although I'm surprised that Lucas hasn't licensed this out to Herman Miller as a design for office cubicles. God knows he's whored out everything else in Star Wars)
How about an iPod shuffle? 512 Mb of $99 or 1Gb for $149, rugged, long battery life and can be used as a flash drive. Or if you're interested you can get a refurbished iPod mini, 4Gb model for $169 from the Apple store, 10 bucks cheaper than the Zen Micro 4Gb, and that's not a bullshit "after mail-in rebate" price either, unlike the offered price of the Zen MIcro at www.nomadworld.com.
The Muvo accomplishes that, I doubt the ipod ever could. I guess you can just keep a backup of your music collection for when your ipod's HD fails (which it almost certainly will).
Wow! You must have one of those new laptops that have the entropy proof hard drive that never fails! I gotta get me one of those. That's sarcasm by the way dipshit, if you don't have your 80Gb of music backed up on that laptop you're going to find out the hard way about hardware failures. My music collection that I load my iPods from is stored on a RAID-1 mirror, and I back that up to a firewire drive and keep the firewire drive in a Pelican case locked inside of a fire-resistant safe.
I have heard that if you don't use the ipod a lot, you won't likely get the battery problem. The thing is, I DO use my mp3 player a lot so it wouldn't work for me.
Yeah, I use mine a couple of hours a day. I generally plug it in every couple of days, and I haven't seen a problem with battery life on any of my iPods since my first 10Gb model in 2002 (which was still usable if I plugged it in every night). Apple has fixed the battery problem.
I have over 120 Gb of MP3s, mostly ripped at 320 VBR so I can get decent sound on my stereo. But I don't keep them all on my iPod. I do keep about 30 Gb on my iPod though, which is about 9 days worth of music, which isn't bad. I update the selection every once in a while . I suppose that if I were some sort of pathetic fetishist I would want all of my music with me all of the time. But you know what? I really don't need to listen to my Christmas music in June.
And yeah, I can store my docs on the Muvo as well. USB2.0 connector, no cable required, use it as a USB flash device.
Wow, how stunningly original of Creative, building a a storage device for music that can also store documents. Someone hand them a Nobel prize. This feature has been on the iPod since day one, and the iPod also has the nice ability to act as a bootable, external firewire disk drive.
The muvo will also function as a voice record (but will not code into mp3, unfortunately).
A feature which I'm sure is as useful as all of those camera phones out there.
The thing I wish it had was the ability to play ogg files.
See, this is where you mark yourself as a total feeb and loser. No-one, outside of the kind of person who spends his lonely nights dry humping a cardboard cut out of Lara Croft cares about fucking Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis is the OS/2 of music compression codecs. It's the answer to a question that no one is asking.
I may have gone off on a little bit of a tirade, please excuse me. But when the media hype of the ipod seems to be high enough for some rebate on a dead ipod to become a story on slashdot, I have to speak up.
Yes, and when ignorant fanboyz such as yourself who have never used an iPod post rapturous reviews of a Creative labs product I have to speak up too.