Your confusion is because there are two meanings to "what the product does". The author's meaning is "what the product accomplishes". The confusing meaning is "what the product does in order to produce the intended result".
The author's meaning refers to a specification such as "a conveyance which moves several dozen people between two fixed locations". That says what the product does as a result. The other meaning of "what the product does in order to do that" is avoided in that specification. Using only that "movement" specification, if the conveyance has no windows then one of the people inside might not know if the conveyance does the movement using rails, wings, roads, or rivers, nor whether it is powered by wind, coal, grain [animals], kerosene, or gravity [raft, glider, or roller coaster].
I imagine it will be a method similar to this that helps us discover...
I imagine it will be a method similar to this which will help us discover what type of cheese the moon is made of, and why the surface of it resembles rock.
Even I can design a rocket which is colder than room temperature. It doesn't need two tanks, either, only a single tank with a liquid "gas".
It would be a mouse which can chill a keg of favorite beverage.
Sorta like my dad's stories about his pharmacy classes. Rule 1: Do not lick the spoon.
We will always need astronauts to assume certain risks to develop the technology that allows for human exploration of space. ... We want to explore and colonize space,
There is a limit of how much exploration is "needed".
What we need is to get some of our eggs out of this basket which is at the bottom of a gravity well.
Sure, we could only transport ourselves through space and live only on our planets and moons. But it would be nice to also learn how to live in space, so humans have better control over where they go and what they can do. And better control of what is done to them.
It's called a "rubbing". Artists often do it with paper and charcoal. Genealogists often make copies of tombstones. It also is popular at the U.S. Vietnam Veteran's Memorial.
This printer creates virtual rubbings. Connect two optical mice to a print head, then print a dot wherever one should be. (Two mice are needed to detect rotation)
Accelerometers can be used instead of optical mouse technologies.
Detecting up/down precisely would also allow printing perfectly horizontally or vertically.
Using a video camera to detect horizontal or vertical patterns also could be used for alignment. Even for detecting the edge of a piece of paper.
Using bubbles or small blocks, a device with accelerometers can detect position in 3 dimensions and "print" 3-D objects.
"Skywriting"
"Matrix skywriting"
There have been people making devices for spray-painting on streets. Like an inkjet printhead using paint sprayers.
Have highway paint trucks been doing this for decades?
"10 feet..OK, there should be another white line here..SPRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY"
(memo to self: give people with too much time an array of highway paint trucks...)
Sufficiently powerful rockets on the mouse will hold it against the table so you can't lift it, thus it won't get confused about its position. Problem solved.
Use parallel-port sound devices with USB parallel devices.
Make D/A converters driven from USB parallel devices. (or driven from one bit, like the Apple II audio was made by turning a single bit on and off)
Open up cheap CD/CD-ROM players and feed digital audio signal to decoder through wires, instead of from CD player mechanism. Requires generating that digital audio signal and knowing if this can even be done easily.
Distribution:
If using USB then run USB cable, extenders, and hubs around the house, generating the sound where it is needed.
Distribute line-level audio and put small amplifier in each room with speakers. Volume control is on the amplifier.
Install PBX (phone switch) and speakerphones. Connect as many phones as desired to sound cards. Computer can phone/intercom the specific room for each sound.
Use separate FM transmitters for each set of speakers. In the USA, there are restrictions such as not transmitting audio from radio stations.
Status output in each room:
Play status messages as audio, whether pre-recorded ("Alarm set for" "six" "A.M.") or using text-to-speech.
Put a cheap parallel or serial LCD in each room. Driven by USB parallel/serial or serial (and serial-to-parallel converters) signals. Note that these little LCDs are cheap and these are used with Linux to display system status messages.
Computer can send messages (SMS or audio phone call) to each person's cell phone.
Put cheap (black and white?) TV in each room. Feed it with 75-ohm coax (as with "cable TV"), or wireless TV transmitter. Show the same video signal on all TVs. To show private messages, use X-10 "appliance" controller to turn power on or off separately for each TV. Or generate separate video signal for each TV -- and then you may as well send the audio along with that video.
Use bass speaker in basement to send thumps with Morse code to all the floors and walls in the house.
Control input from each room:
Get X-10 transmitters (available as separate devices with various amounts of buttons, wired and wireless versions available, as well as audiovisual IR controllers with X-10 RF transmitters). Either use "relay" X-10 controllers sensed by computer parallel ports, or use a 2-way X-10 computer device so computer can hear all X-10 signals.
Put infrared-to-serial receivers in each room. use an ordinary IR controller to tell LIRC what to do.
Put wireless remote control repeaters in each room. Normally used to send infrared signals around a house for remote control of consumer audio. Use a single infrared-to-serial receiver to tell LIRC what to do. Works fine if usually no commands are being sent, so there won't be much interference from multiple senders.
Give everyone a PDA with wireless LAN interface. Use that to send commands to computer and display results.
Use your cell phone to send messages to a computer with voice commands, touchtone, SMS, Blackberry...
Use your cell phone with Internet access or email to chat with a web page which sends commands to your computer (and it can display messages to phone). Note that many SMS systems have email interfaces.
Obviously, you merely play all six sounds together.
Multiplexed.
If I remember right, 20,000 Hz * 4 cycles per wave = 80,000 samples per second * 6 streams = 480,000 samples per second total.
So you emit the correct voltage for one set of speakers for 1/480,000th of a second, turn off the signal to that speaker, turn on the signal to another speaker, emit the correct voltage for that other speaker...and somehow do this without leaking all over the AM broadcast band.
Somehow I don't think that is what he had in mind.
Successful life tends to leave behind rather noticable evidence, evidence that we would probably have detected by now.
Visit Antarctica and see how easy it is to detect life at random points on the continent. Feel free to do it as we have done on Mars - by dropping one life-oriented chemical test on a random point, and by taking pictures from orbit.
As cool as it would be to find out (along with the scientific significance of the data), should we really contaminate that ecosystem if it exists? As much as we try not to, any intervention would upset a potentially fragile system.
The various asteroids which hit Earth in the past millions of years could have already carried some of our life to Mars.
I wonder if Cerf writes in Pearl, learned FOURTRAN, knows Eunuchs, prefers cereal or perilous interfaces, and if he likes the commercials during the Souper Bowl.
Depends whether you want to get your message on the record quickly in case someone listens. Later you can build your railroad track to the ISP and send the detailed documentation.
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The author's meaning refers to a specification such as "a conveyance which moves several dozen people between two fixed locations". That says what the product does as a result. The other meaning of "what the product does in order to do that" is avoided in that specification. Using only that "movement" specification, if the conveyance has no windows then one of the people inside might not know if the conveyance does the movement using rails, wings, roads, or rivers, nor whether it is powered by wind, coal, grain [animals], kerosene, or gravity [raft, glider, or roller coaster].
I imagine it will be a method similar to this which will help us discover what type of cheese the moon is made of, and why the surface of it resembles rock.
Surely It Draws Nigh and Fires at Will.
It would be a mouse which can chill a keg of favorite beverage.
Sorta like my dad's stories about his pharmacy classes. Rule 1: Do not lick the spoon.
Rule 2: Do not sniff when cyanide is involved.
We want to explore and colonize space,
There is a limit of how much exploration is "needed".
What we need is to get some of our eggs out of this basket which is at the bottom of a gravity well.
Sure, we could only transport ourselves through space and live only on our planets and moons. But it would be nice to also learn how to live in space, so humans have better control over where they go and what they can do. And better control of what is done to them.
Print someone else's face over your own.
This printer creates virtual rubbings. Connect two optical mice to a print head, then print a dot wherever one should be. (Two mice are needed to detect rotation)
Accelerometers can be used instead of optical mouse technologies.
Detecting up/down precisely would also allow printing perfectly horizontally or vertically.
Using a video camera to detect horizontal or vertical patterns also could be used for alignment. Even for detecting the edge of a piece of paper.
Using bubbles or small blocks, a device with accelerometers can detect position in 3 dimensions and "print" 3-D objects.
"Skywriting"
"Matrix skywriting"
There have been people making devices for spray-painting on streets. Like an inkjet printhead using paint sprayers.
Have highway paint trucks been doing this for decades?
"10 feet..OK, there should be another white line here..SPRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY"
(memo to self: give people with too much time an array of highway paint trucks...)
Sufficiently powerful rockets on the mouse will hold it against the table so you can't lift it, thus it won't get confused about its position. Problem solved.
Distribution:
Status output in each room:
Control input from each room:
The companies which sell multiple-output soundcards agree with you that is great.
Multiplexed.
If I remember right, 20,000 Hz * 4 cycles per wave = 80,000 samples per second * 6 streams = 480,000 samples per second total.
So you emit the correct voltage for one set of speakers for 1/480,000th of a second, turn off the signal to that speaker, turn on the signal to another speaker, emit the correct voltage for that other speaker...and somehow do this without leaking all over the AM broadcast band.
Somehow I don't think that is what he had in mind.
"I can't do that, Dave.
You haven't completed your TPS reports."
Just a sec, I have a printout of the announcement of that someplace in this pile...
Well, yes, there are radios at the human bases.
Have we sent an RF scanner to Mars to listen to their radios?
If everything goes smoothly, you don't know if there is something which you missed in your test.
If something fails, your test was a success in giving you information about something to fix.
Visit Antarctica and see how easy it is to detect life at random points on the continent. Feel free to do it as we have done on Mars - by dropping one life-oriented chemical test on a random point, and by taking pictures from orbit.
The various asteroids which hit Earth in the past millions of years could have already carried some of our life to Mars.
Define "upset" and "contaminate".
But is Generalissimo Francesco Franco still dead? Has anyone opened the box?
According to the article, Tilley has a complex.
Nieu News Knew New Wieu-Fieu.
Well, what SCO Products might be affected by the GPL and IPL?
Uh.. Yeah.
Or, to keep a story short: "was".
Ever read of the killer in the SF classic "Macroscope"? Operates at astronomical distances. (That is not enough of a description to be a spoiler)
I wonder if Cerf writes in Pearl, learned FOURTRAN, knows Eunuchs, prefers cereal or perilous interfaces, and if he likes the commercials during the Souper Bowl.
Depends whether you want to get your message on the record quickly in case someone listens. Later you can build your railroad track to the ISP and send the detailed documentation.