Re:Heads up display in your eyeball!
on
Wearable PCs
·
· Score: 1
Well this isn't too far off. Microvision Is developing Virtual Retinal Displays that use a low power laser to directly stimulate the retina. I imagine with some fine tuning you could get it to overlay the real world image. Until then you'll still have to use standard HUD technology.
As far as an input device goes, you're missing the obvious. Impliment the keyboard and/or mouse in software. The whole point to wearables is to take ubiquitous computing with you. You shouldn't have to look like a "freak" to wear a computer. Imagine something similar to the "keyboard" in "Johnny Mnemonic" Use either a head mounted camera or maybe wrist mounted EKG sensors to detect the electrical impulses to the finger muscles. That way you just move your fingers. Even today, you can use a camera to track your finger (if you've got a flourescent thimble on). You can use that for a mouse; and I imagine with some beefed up software (and probably hardware too) you could get a computer to track and interpret the the patterns of a typing on a keyboard. (of course I'm designing this in a complete vaccuum, so I might as well say that a future wearable computer will have an integrated time travel device.)
I just want to know if X10 is going to use disembodied porn-star heads for this ad campaign like they do for their camera. (Come on. We've all seen the ads on ZDnet.) Afterall sex sells.
Saddly it worked for Carnegie. When you hear "Carnegie" what do you think of? Answer: Carnegie Hall. If you were forced to come up with a second answer it would undoubtly be, the Carnegie Foundation, if for no other reason than PBS. You don't think about the blood of the working class. He successfully bought himself a new image in history. Even when you read the history books (i'm talking school books, not REAL books) his entry is basically, "He got rich with oil. Became a monopolist. Hung out with Rockerfeller. Oh yeah and he built a bunch of libraries, and concert halls, and all sorts of nice things for the community. He really gave back to society in the end, we salute him."
pffft. I seriously doubt it would work. There's probably anything over a threshold just gets tossed (or more likely edited out). So instead of your post sending off big alarms, it gets filed into the "hippie punk" file as:
Hey,
That's easy. Just force every whatever-user to use Emacs, and force them to insert at least three M-x spook commands into whatever they create. And of course we need someone to update the spook.el database with current `bad words', since no matter how much I use the command, it never inserts `kosovo' or `UCK' or `Milosevic'.
Cheers//Frank
[Hippie Punk Trigger Word Block Removed]
[that's two M-x spook commands' worth of crud]
And then of course they run it through their Ultra-Advanced Natural Language Parser to determine if you're actually talking "bad".
I don't know about snubbed. Every professor I had sung the praises of Perl. The reason why Perl isn't used, and the reason it is so powerful, is because it abstracts out so much detail. You don't need to know anything about memory management, the garbage collector takes care of it. Want a hash table? Just type, "%htable"!
I occasionally interview people at work. I met a 4.8 GPA master's student who didn't know the first thing about advanced data structures. Why? He was taught using Perl!
I'm sorry, but Perl is by far one of the best (if not the best) utility languages it out there. Granted I wouldn't want to make a ray tracer with it, but still you can't beat it for all the miscellaneous tasks that come up during the day. Most of the posts I've seen deriding Perl, can be summed up as, "Ehh Perl! _____ is much better for CGI and WWW!" Now I'm not here to debate that, but I can't stand by and let people pigeon hole it as simply a "web" language. It's a general text manipulation language. Yes you can do CGI with it, but it can also do so much more. I've used it as a code generator, and for numerous build scripts.
Perl is somthing that should be every hacker's toolbox. It just makes life so much easier. Sure you can probably do all the stuff I use Perl for with something else (shell scripts come to mind), but why would you? Perl may not be the perfect too for the job, but it certainly gets the job done.
Linux is not ready for the masses. Frankly I kind of wonder if it will ever be. I know I personally don't like having to write code for the masses. Even more to the point, you will never be able to get the hairdresser down the street to recompile her kernel.
The "Free Press" writer is who we talk about when we say "The Masses". Sadly he'd probably be deemed a "power user" because he can change his background. The Great Unwashed are people that have VCRs that flash "12:00" because they can't grasp the concept of hitting clock-set-clock. They're people like him that say, "MY GOD! 20 PAGES! WHY DON"T I JUST READ _WAR_AND_PEACE_!!"
The Geek and Unwashed Masses shall never meet. One thinks it's nice that Windows askes you 5 times if you want to delete an entire directory, the other let's out primal screams. However they both scream when they see the error message, "Something's broken". One group, because they expect the monitor to open a dimensional gateway to Hell, the other because it's not a stack trace.
Simply put, the Great Unwashed Masses, don't think like us, and we have no desire to think like them.
I submitted this story, but I'm number 30 in the queue, and I wonder about my chances of actually getting it posted, so I'm also going to reply to this article.
MSNBC is saying AOL want's to use the iToaster for a branded computer. Read about it here
I submitted this story, but I'm number 30 in the queue, and I wonder about my chances of actually getting it posted, so I'm also going to reply to this article. MSNBC is saying AOL want's to use the iToaster for a branded computer. Read about it here
Well I'm glad Woz comes out good. There's just something about a guy that says, "I'm tired of this. I'm going to be come a 5th grade teacher." that you just got to like.
Re:What do you think Littleton WAS?
on
Bootlegging Buffy
·
· Score: 0
Has it occurred to you, Jon, that there ARE demons from Hell in American high schools? It would sure explain a lot.
Well I would think a group of fucked-in-the-head kids with parents that didn't pay any attention to them (You don't just wake up one morning and say, "Hey Jack you wan't to shoot up the school today?" "Uhh...Okay.") would be the more likely. Afterall no one has observed a demon since the beginning of time. (Remember the Carl Sagan's example of the of the unobservable dragon in Demon Haunted World? (I would have linked it to Amazon, but I can't get that damn URL to work. >:( ) (What's the difference between a dragon you can not observe and one that doesn't exist?))
I'm no psychologist, but I would hypothesize that the similar mechanics that lead to suicide and good-ol'-fashioned testostorone-based rage apply to shooting-sprees.
And I don't think half-baked rationalism can explain what is happening to our society.
I don't think alarmism and relying on the paranormal is the answer either.
If anyone here actually watched the "Buffy" when the "Graduation Day" was supposed to be run, they would have seen a deally saying "Uhh, we're not going to run this episode right now. We'll run it sometime during the summer." So the episode hasn't been canceled, as Katz has erroniously reported, but simply postponed.
As a side note I would just like to say, that if your graduation keynote speaker ascends to a 20-foot-fire-breathing-serpent-demon, you are DUTY BOUND to slay him. So you see the airing the episode would actually be doing a service to high-school students nationwide. (After all high schools are filled with demons.
Everyone here agrees Linux is great. If we didn't we wouldn't be here. However there's this subset of the community that wants to conquer the desktop. While that's a noble idea (As one post put it, "Since when do you have to pass an IQ test to gain freedom?".), this "user-friendly" approach is the wrong way to go. Infact I think this is the most likely cause for a balkinization of Linux.
I chose the word "balkinization" carefully. In the Unix world for the most part its, "Oh it's Solaris", "Oh it's Irix", "Oh you're running AIX". Sure there's the hardcore users ("Solaris Sucks! Linux Rulz!"), but most people don't care that much. (I for one use Solaris at work, and Linux at home. I don't really care. It's all UNIX to me.) However this "user-friendly" vs "hacker" distributions is a volatile issue. (Just look at this thread.)
Some have said, "Let the newbies have thier own distributuion and we'll have our own.". Let's say this happens, now which one do you think is going to be more popular distribution? Sure for a while, "Hacker Linux" simply because that's who the current users are, but with the exposure Linux has gotten recently, do you really think the masses are going to pass up "Mr. Roger's Linux Neighborhood"?
In a year, Linux reaches critical mass and all of a sudden all the big vendors port their flagship products to Linux. Hell even Microsoft, knowing that a Linux user's money is just as good as the next guy's, ports Office and even makes the win95 shell a window manager. (The new users, gobble it up, because they don't share the anti-Microsoft feelings of the rest of us.)
Undoubtedly the commercial vendors of the future will behave like the new commercial vendors of today. Which means distribution-specific ports. (There's many example of this, most recently "Code Warrior for RedHat") I imagine this distribution requirement would go beyond linking only with a certain library, or only making the the program available in a certain package format, but to require the toolkit for "Mr. Roger's GUI". After all, we all want the programs to look-and-feel consistant (unlike today's X enviroments (Just compare Netscape and Ghostview)).
The "Hacker" community get's upset at vendors and the "Mr. Roger's" community (or would "neighborhood" be more appropriate here:)) saying that they are forced to support the the "Mr. Roger's" toolkit because that's what all the new apps are for. They're upset at the new users, because they innudate the newsgroups and sites like/. with comments like "How do I change my background?" and "STOP IT! I'M NOT AN ENGINEER!!!", making them completly unusable by the "Hacker" camp. The "hackers" eventually say, "Go to Hell losers! We're going this way!" and the new users say, "Good! You're just a bunch of nerds anyway! Linux is OUR OS now!", and the two groups never talk again. So you see Linux isn't just fractionalized, but balkinized, because of the extreme hatred each camp feels for the other one.
The main problem I have with the "Linux for the Masses" camp is, theire just a little too eager to spread the word. Is there any real reason why the hairdresser across the street needs to be running Linux instead of win98? All she does is run AOL and occasionally types something in Word. That's all she wants. She doesn't want to be playing around with/etc/fstab and/etc/rc/rc.local files.
I started running Linux in Nov94, because I was a CS major, and I wanted a UNIX on my desk so I didn't have to telnet to the bogged down server when I had to do projects. I got into UNIX, and pretty soon, I had my mail routed to my machine, and was serving my own web and ftp site. (Yes, I was running NCSA httpd back in 94 and whatever the new version of NCSA Mosaic was available. It was UIUC after all.)
What the Linux community needs is to make a bit easier to mainatin Linux. The package tools step in this direction, but we really don't need every man, woman, and child running Linux. We need to keep the open friendly community feel, but not at the expense of removing the right-of-passage (installation woes) we've all gone through. After all, when you've finally gotten Linux working, it feels good, and you know you've crossed into a new world.
Sure this is long, and it may ramble a bit, but everything I've said has come out of my love for the community.
-- Coaxial (a.k.a. Jonathan Koren) koren@cig.mot.com (If you really think I'm talking for Motorola, you've got another thing comming.)
It wasn't just a "children's game" it was exactly like "Sticky Bear Learns to Read".
There for a while if you bought a "home" system from gw2k it came pre-loaded with Bob. During the hype, I even saw Steven Spillberg do an interview wearing a Bob hat. (I read that the name "Bob" was chosen because it was a friendly name, and it made your computer "fun".) Of course, Ziff-Davis (via "PC World") (M$'s propaganda-arm) hereld it as wonderful piece of software that everyone should have.
Instead of the normal windows and other standard GUI stuff, you had rooms. And of course they looked rooms of a house. You could had the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the office, and some others. Then by clicking on the background, you launched applications. (i.e. clicking on the radio in the kitchen launched `character map`, or something else equally non-sequir)
Since a big house can be scary, you had what would later become an microsoft Assistant. You could chose between a dog, or cat, or "caffine-addicted" dinosaur (I think the dinosaur was/is available in Office) Of course each assistant had it's own different personality, and offered such knowlegeable suggestions on par with "Turning on you computer is the first step twords being productive" or "Double clicking is a great way to start a program".
Slashdot Mirror
linux.com has pulled that story.
"Red Hat has informed
LWN that the
information was not
correct, and that Mr.
Sands has not talked to
their legal department."
My search is over and I all to slashdot. :)
Well this isn't too far off. Microvision Is developing Virtual Retinal Displays that use a low power laser to directly stimulate the retina. I imagine with some fine tuning you could get it to overlay the real world image. Until then you'll still have to use standard HUD technology.
As far as an input device goes, you're missing the obvious. Impliment the keyboard and/or mouse in software. The whole point to wearables is to take ubiquitous computing with you. You shouldn't have to look like a "freak" to wear a computer. Imagine something similar to the "keyboard" in "Johnny Mnemonic" Use either a head mounted camera or maybe wrist mounted EKG sensors to detect the electrical impulses to the finger muscles. That way you just move your fingers. Even today, you can use a camera to track your finger (if you've got a flourescent thimble on). You can use that for a mouse; and I imagine with some beefed up software (and probably hardware too) you could get a computer to track and interpret the the patterns
of a typing on a keyboard. (of course I'm designing this in a complete vaccuum, so I might as well say that a future wearable computer will have an integrated time travel device.)
I just want to know if X10 is going to use disembodied porn-star heads for this ad campaign like they do for their camera. (Come on. We've all seen the ads on ZDnet.) Afterall sex sells.
On the StarWars personality test posted last time (monster.com ?) I scored as Old Obi-Wan. On this one, I scored both Old and Young Obi-Wan.
Openness: Yoda (80%)
Conscientious: Han Solo (3%)
Extraversion: Old Obi-Wan (22%)
Agreeableness: Young Obi-Wan (83%)
Neuroticism: Leia (18%)
Saddly it worked for Carnegie. When you hear "Carnegie" what do you think of? Answer: Carnegie Hall. If you were forced to come up with a second answer it would undoubtly be, the Carnegie Foundation, if for no other reason than PBS. You don't think about the blood of the working class. He successfully bought himself a new image in history. Even when you read the history books (i'm talking school books, not REAL books) his entry is basically, "He got rich with oil. Became a monopolist. Hung out with Rockerfeller. Oh yeah and he built a bunch of libraries, and concert halls, and all sorts of nice things for the community. He really gave back to society in the end, we salute him."
Damn.
I thought they expanded until they offered free email. But the auctions should definatly be a corallary.
And then of course they run it through their Ultra-Advanced Natural Language Parser to determine if you're actually talking "bad".
what you didn't notice that the Gateway was upgradable to "2560 megs" of ram. Uhh yeah, right.
So what does that make the Cubs? (besides the 1908 World Champions Baby!)
loyal Cub fan
I don't know about snubbed. Every professor I had sung the praises of Perl. The reason why Perl isn't used, and the reason it is so powerful, is because it abstracts out so much detail. You don't need to know anything about memory management, the garbage collector takes care of it. Want a hash table? Just type, "%htable"!
I occasionally interview people at work. I met a 4.8 GPA master's student who didn't know the first thing about advanced data structures. Why? He was taught using Perl!
I'm sorry, but Perl is by far one of the best (if not the best) utility languages it out there. Granted I wouldn't want to make a ray tracer with it, but still you can't beat it for all the miscellaneous tasks that come up during the day.
Most of the posts I've seen deriding Perl, can be summed up as, "Ehh Perl! _____ is much better for CGI and WWW!" Now I'm not here to debate that, but I can't stand by and let people pigeon hole it as simply a "web" language. It's a general text manipulation language. Yes you can do CGI with it, but it can also do so much more. I've used it as a code generator, and for numerous build scripts.
Perl is somthing that should be every hacker's toolbox. It just makes life so much easier. Sure you can probably do all the stuff I use Perl for with something else (shell scripts come to mind), but why would you? Perl may not be the perfect too for the job, but it certainly gets the job done.
Linux is not ready for the masses. Frankly I kind of wonder if it will ever be. I know I personally don't like having to write code for the masses. Even more to the point, you will never be able to get the hairdresser down the street to recompile her kernel.
The "Free Press" writer is who we talk about when we say "The Masses". Sadly he'd probably be deemed a "power user" because he can change his background. The Great Unwashed are people that have VCRs that flash "12:00" because they can't grasp the concept of hitting clock-set-clock. They're people like him that say, "MY GOD! 20 PAGES! WHY DON"T I JUST READ _WAR_AND_PEACE_!!"
The Geek and Unwashed Masses shall never meet. One thinks it's nice that Windows askes you 5 times if you want to delete an entire directory, the other let's out primal screams. However they both scream when they see the error message, "Something's broken". One group, because they expect the monitor to open a dimensional gateway to Hell, the other because it's not a stack trace.
Simply put, the Great Unwashed Masses, don't think like us, and we have no desire to think like them.
I submitted this story, but I'm number 30 in the queue, and I wonder about my chances of actually getting it posted, so I'm also going to reply to this article.
MSNBC is saying AOL want's to use the iToaster for a branded computer. Read about it here
I submitted this story, but I'm number 30 in the queue, and I wonder about my chances of actually getting it posted, so I'm also going to reply to this article.
MSNBC is saying AOL want's to use the iToaster for a branded computer. Read about it here
"German Engineered Linux"
That pretty much says it all.
Well I'm glad Woz comes out good. There's just something about a guy that says, "I'm tired of this. I'm going to be come a 5th grade teacher." that you just got to like.
Well I would think a group of fucked-in-the-head kids with parents that didn't pay any attention to them (You don't just wake up one morning and say, "Hey Jack you wan't to shoot up the school today?" "Uhh...Okay.") would be the more likely. Afterall no one has observed a demon since the beginning of time. (Remember the Carl Sagan's example of the of the unobservable dragon in Demon Haunted World? (I would have linked it to Amazon, but I can't get that damn URL to work. >:( ) (What's the difference between a dragon you can not observe and one that doesn't exist?))
I'm no psychologist, but I would hypothesize that the similar mechanics that lead to suicide and good-ol'-fashioned testostorone-based rage apply to shooting-sprees.
And I don't think half-baked rationalism can explain what is happening to our society.I don't think alarmism and relying on the paranormal is the answer either.
If anyone here actually watched the "Buffy" when the "Graduation Day" was supposed to be run, they would have seen a deally saying "Uhh, we're not going to run this episode right now. We'll run it sometime during the summer." So the episode hasn't been canceled, as Katz has erroniously reported, but simply postponed.
As a side note I would just like to say, that if your graduation keynote speaker ascends to a 20-foot-fire-breathing-serpent-demon, you are DUTY BOUND to slay him. So you see the airing the episode would actually be doing a service to high-school students nationwide. (After all high schools are filled with demons.
It's zero-gravity ergonomics. Haven't you been paying attention? :)
Everyone here agrees Linux is great. If we didn't we wouldn't be here. However there's this subset of the community that wants to conquer the desktop. While that's a noble idea (As one post put it, "Since when do you have to pass an IQ test to gain freedom?".), this "user-friendly" approach is the wrong way to go. Infact I think this is the most likely cause for a balkinization of Linux.
:)) saying that they are forced to support the the "Mr. Roger's" toolkit because that's what all the new apps are for. They're upset at the new users, because they innudate the newsgroups and sites like /. with comments like "How do I change my background?" and "STOP IT! I'M NOT AN ENGINEER!!!", making them completly unusable by the "Hacker" camp. The "hackers" eventually say, "Go to Hell losers! We're going this way!" and the new users say, "Good! You're just a bunch of nerds anyway! Linux is OUR OS now!", and the two groups never talk again. So you see Linux isn't just fractionalized, but balkinized, because of the extreme hatred each camp feels for the other one.
/etc/fstab and /etc/rc/rc.local files.
I chose the word "balkinization" carefully. In the Unix world for the most part its, "Oh it's Solaris", "Oh it's Irix", "Oh you're running AIX". Sure there's the hardcore users ("Solaris Sucks! Linux Rulz!"), but most people don't care that much. (I for one use Solaris at work, and Linux at home. I don't really care. It's all UNIX to me.) However this "user-friendly" vs "hacker" distributions is a volatile issue. (Just look at this thread.)
Some have said, "Let the newbies have thier own distributuion and we'll have our own.". Let's say this happens, now which one do you think is going to be more popular distribution? Sure for a while, "Hacker Linux" simply because that's who the current users are, but with the exposure Linux has gotten recently, do you really think the masses are going to pass up "Mr. Roger's Linux Neighborhood"?
In a year, Linux reaches critical mass and all of a sudden all the big vendors port their flagship products to Linux. Hell even Microsoft, knowing that a Linux user's money is just as good as the next guy's, ports Office and even makes the win95 shell a window manager. (The new users, gobble it up, because they don't share the anti-Microsoft feelings of the rest of us.)
Undoubtedly the commercial vendors of the future will behave like the new commercial vendors of today. Which means distribution-specific ports. (There's many example of this, most recently "Code Warrior for RedHat") I imagine this distribution requirement would go beyond linking only with a certain library, or only making the the program available in a certain package format, but to require the toolkit for "Mr. Roger's GUI". After all, we all want the programs to look-and-feel consistant (unlike today's X enviroments (Just compare Netscape and Ghostview)).
The "Hacker" community get's upset at vendors and the "Mr. Roger's" community (or would "neighborhood" be more appropriate here
The main problem I have with the "Linux for the Masses" camp is, theire just a little too eager to spread the word. Is there any real reason why the hairdresser across the street needs to be running Linux instead of win98? All she does is run AOL and occasionally types something in Word. That's all she wants. She doesn't want to be playing around with
I started running Linux in Nov94, because I was a CS major, and I wanted a UNIX on my desk so I didn't have to telnet to the bogged down server when I had to do projects. I got into UNIX, and pretty soon, I had my mail routed to my machine, and was serving my own web and ftp site. (Yes, I was running NCSA httpd back in 94 and whatever the new version of NCSA Mosaic was available. It was UIUC after all.)
What the Linux community needs is to make a bit easier to mainatin Linux. The package tools step in this direction, but we really don't need every man, woman, and child running Linux. We need to keep the open friendly community feel, but not at the expense of removing the right-of-passage (installation woes) we've all gone through. After all, when you've finally gotten Linux working, it feels good, and you know you've crossed into a new world.
Sure this is long, and it may ramble a bit, but everything I've said has come out of my love for the community.
--
Coaxial
(a.k.a. Jonathan Koren)
koren@cig.mot.com
(If you really think I'm talking for Motorola, you've got another thing comming.)
It wasn't just a "children's game" it was exactly like "Sticky Bear Learns to Read".
There for a while if you bought a "home" system from gw2k it came pre-loaded with Bob. During the hype, I even saw Steven Spillberg do an interview wearing a Bob hat. (I read that the name "Bob" was chosen because it was a friendly name, and it made your computer "fun".) Of course, Ziff-Davis (via "PC World") (M$'s propaganda-arm) hereld it as wonderful piece of software that everyone should have.
Instead of the normal windows and other standard GUI stuff, you had rooms. And of course they looked rooms of a house. You could had the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the office, and some others. Then by clicking on the background, you launched applications. (i.e. clicking on the radio in the kitchen launched `character map`, or something else equally non-sequir)
Since a big house can be scary, you had what would later become an microsoft Assistant. You could chose between a dog, or cat, or "caffine-addicted" dinosaur (I think the dinosaur was/is available in Office) Of course each assistant had it's own different personality, and offered such knowlegeable suggestions on par with "Turning on you computer is the first step twords being productive" or "Double clicking is a great way to start a program".
I need to track down a copy of Bob.