True, in that most powerplants involve rotary motion at some stage, they could drive a gas compressor... but then you'd have distribution costs (having to take liquid nitrogen to gas stations via truck, inviting the whole Terminator 2 scenario... or perhaps via pipeline, but that'd be quite an infrastructure.) I wonder if liquid air would work just as well... gas stations could make it on premises that way.
Here we go again... same load of uninformed bull as usual about power generation.
Power generation is dirty however you slice it (unless you use solar or hydro or some other "free" energy). Compressing gas so you can extract energy later by expanding it, is just another way of storing energy that you had to generate somewhere. Just like storing electricity in a battery directly.
The advantage over an internal combustion engine, is the huge gain in efficiency of using a big powerplant (where it's in the power company's best interest to spare no expense to make it more efficient, because it helps their bottom line in the long run) vs. millions of little engines designed for performance rather than efficiency. If everybody had a V8 in their backyard running their own generator rather than buying power from the power company, you could kiss clean air goodbye.
...afaik. The energy density of liquid nitrogen is not that great. Whereas electric cars still have a lot of room for growth... lithium ion has still not gotten practical for instance, and NiMH are not used enough because they are too expensive. The flywheel storage solutions are looking promising too... they can be designed to directly replace lead-acid batteries (same form factor, same voltage) yet have a higher power density. And there are fuel cells, but that is not as mature a technology. All of these methods are easy to integrate into an electric car platform.
A liquid nitrogen car would need some kind of engine to convert the expansion of the gas into rotary motion, which is inelegant and mechanically complex... and not being able to directly drive the wheels, it would entail a need for transmission, clutch, driveline, differential, and all that other yucky stuff which internal-combustion cars have, but which could be eliminated using a proper electric design.
About the only plus I can think of is free air conditioning (a non-trivial consideration in Phoenix, where I live!), because the exhaust (non-toxic nitrogen gas) is actually quite cool. But in a conventional electric vehicle, air conditioning takes a small percentage of the power necessary to actually move the car, so it's not impossible to have the creature comforts we're used to.
In short I'd expect EVs to become mainstream long before the liquid nitrogen idea does, but maybe it will surprise us and find some niche where it fits better.
I share a decent-sized one with 2 other coworkers. Luckily, we're all introverts. There was an extrovert in there for a while, and it was really distracting; but he left. All the other extrovert programmers are in the next office. I don't think it was planned this way, but it's cool.
In order, my preference would be my own office; a large cube with high walls and fairly completely enclosed; or share an office with the right kind of people. Now, it may still be true that being alone would allow me to goof off too much, but I think coworkers are more of a distraction. And once in a while I encounter a problem that requires some deep thought, where I need to be able to talk to myself, out loud... and at the job where I had to do this the most (was doing some computer graphics stuff, working out affine tranforms and stuff like that), we had the "open office" thing going on - just a bunch of desks in a big room. There was a guy there who had a very loud voice, not that he was yelling on purpose, just his normal speaking voice was sort of bellowing and penetrating... you couldn't help but hear everything he said even 20 or 30 feet away. So I'd occasionally disappear and find a storage room or an empty office where I could sit and think. Then my boss the SOB had the nerve to tell me he didn't trust me to leave the office and I needed to tell him where I was going. God that guy was a jerk, I can't believe I stayed there so damn long...
Anyway, my ideal office I think would be a high floor on a skyscraper downtown, with lots of smallish offices around the periphery with nice views, so that everybody can have one; surrounding a huge meeting/recreation space. The idea of movable furniture so spontaneous meetings can happen sounds good in theory, but I've never tried it; and I don't like the idea of being "homeless" either, having to use this movable furniture all the time and not having a desk of my own. Whatever you do for meetings and "war rooms" should be supplemental, not the normal way of working. If the extroverts like to spend all their time working that way, they can do so, in the large space outside the offices. Everyone should have high-end laptops with wireless ethernet, so they can take them to the meetings, but also have a full docking setup at the desk, with a large monitor and keyboard. Needless to say the laptops should not be required to run Windows. There should be no admin; because any good programmer can administrate his own laptop. Every admin I've known has been a big obstacle and just somebody to avoid at all costs. You don't make use of them, you work around them.
Nobody should stand in the way of telecommuting. Just give me an SSH connection into some kind of Unix server, and I'll be happy (can forward X connections over it too).
I know of at least two X11 implementations...
on
Pipes In GUI's
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· Score: 1
There's Piper, which is exactly what you are talking about... I think it assumes that programs always have stdin and stdout, and you simply draw a data flow diagram showing the connections between them. And then you can save a configuration for later use.
The older thing like this which I know of, is Khoros, a library of image processing utilities, which you could wire together with Cantata. However cantata allows each module to have multiple inputs and outputs (for example, there might be a module which takes two images and blends them together). Seems like a really good idea to me, and I think the GUI could be reused for other tasks besides image processing, because cantata is only a shell for starting up multiple processes and connecting their inputs and outputs together. Khoral Research tries to make money off this product, but it looks like you can still download some stuff from ftp://ftp.khoral.com/pub/khoros/. I was running it on my Linux box in 1996 or so, and prior to that, had used it at ASU on a Sun.
You mention these vector terminals... what ever happened to the idea? Does software which uses this protocol still exist (on the server side)? What software emulators are available? Did this protocol include an event model (notify server that mouse was clicked on this primitive or these
coordinates)?
In ours, Jupiter is the "vacuum cleaner" - it attracts many potential meteors away from inner planets so that they are much less likely to have catastrophic impacts. Now if we could just spot the smaller planets from so far away... and transwarp engines would be nice too...
There is a version of VNC for the Mac, and also MacX. Either will allow you to view X programs running remotely on your Linux box. VNC is slow on old 68K Macs, though. It works better with uniform color schemes as opposed to fancy bitmap E schemes and pretty backgrounds.
Unfortunately I have not found a free MacOS X server which runs full-screen. With MacX, you can have an X root window in a Macintosh window (with its requisite title bar and menubar) or you can have a separate window for each X client and no root window.
I have also successfully run Debian on my IIci but it's kinda slow and it hung for some reason. I haven't gotten as far as installing X yet, because I can't seem to install anything with dselect or apt... it hangs while "resolving dependencies". Granted, the installation is maybe a year old, so maybe this is an old bug that's since been fixed.
Being able to categorize images in a general way would be pretty cool. If they're hell-bent on recognizing porn and get good at it, it should be generally useful technology.
At the NYTimes article, it mentions "One [experimental system], called Lookout, automatically reads electronic mail messages and attempts to schedule requests for appointments and meetings."
Aaargh, guess we can't use that epithet for Outlook anymore...
When I clicked the link I got "Your browser sent a message this server could not understand." Erase the space between "tic" and "ker" near the end and try again.
I agree, this is the way to go. I spent part of my weekend writing some Java code for TINI to detect the state of some magnetic door switches with one-wire sensors in them. Where most security systems can only tell you that something in a "zone" got violated, I'll be able to pinpoint which door was opened or which motion sensor was tripped - and without having to run a separate set of wires to each device, because the one-wire system is a serial bus. Each device has a unique serial number.
Now as for a CardKey replacement... just use an iButton. That is a one-wire device which is embedded in an indestructible stainless steel can, like an oversized watch battery. You can carry it on a keyfob. It has a unique serial number, and you could use it to unlock a door by just pressing it against a circular "blue dot" reader. The computer reads its serial number and allows access. You could also use one-wire devices to operate electrical door strikes and such, although I haven't seen a packaged solution for this yet; it would take some hacking. pointsix.com sells one-wire relays which might be useful; you can use them to turn anything on or off from the one-wire bus. There are also smart-card like iButtons have processors in them and can run Java code via the JavaCard API.
The literary degeneration of our time never ceases to amaze me...
The line is "beat their swords into plowshares." Meaning, put an end to war and use the tools of war for peacetime activities.
A plowshare is the blade of a plow, the part that cuts into the dirt. The plow was made of wood back when that phrase was used, so it doesn't make sense to beat a plow into a plowshare.
Plow = plough, plowshare = ploughshare. The "ough" is just Old English, that's all.
I'd like to see someone try to create a clone of it. It was my favorite math program in college (but I haven't tried Mathematica... I hear it's pretty good). It has a really friendly way of editing equations, and the results really look good too - like TeX.
I think a project like this could be started using some code from LyX's equation editor, but I would like to see it use the same keymappings as those of MathCAD because they are much quicker. Of course it should be able to produce TeX output, for easy integration into technical papers. (One of MathCAD's drawbacks is that you usually need to do your whole paper in MathCAD itself... this was especially true in the pre-Windows versions when I first got started using it.)
It should then be integrated with one or more freeware backends... and some promising ones exist already, such as Maple, and some others listed on SAL.
Someday, if it doesn't get done in the meantime, I might be interested in heading up the UI effort, but I'm not enough of a mathematician to create the algorithms from scratch. I'm also too busy with other projects to start this now.
I *should* test this out with a photoslide and a flashlight and have a friend project the slide image to see what the best angle and location are.
Actually you will need a lens to project the image, in front of the flashlight and slide. It'd be easier to test with a slide projector. Check thrift stores for old ones (there are types which are more compact and cheaper than the usual carousel kind).
The AWT is too much of a kludge. It started out OK but then there was Swing... the Java equivalent of the client-side rendering that we're trying to avoid here. And plain old AWT widgets just aren't sufficiently sexy or abundant.
About all I can say about Linux is that so far, it won't work because it doesn't like the PCMCIA hard drive. I used a DOS-based distro that loads via LoadLin to avoid the LILO issues, and the kernel loads, then times out while trying to access hdc1 (why is it hdc1 instead of hda1? Weird.) I bought and tried 3 different brands and sizes of hard drives too, so it's probably not because of a specific PCMCIA implementation. And I tried several different vintages of kernels. And I tried the "old disk-only driver" for IDE. Was going to start asking around on the kernel-dev list since I've asked everywhere else I can think of and haven't gotten a satisfactory answer; but haven't gotten around to it.
I have Windows for Pen (based on 3.1) on my Dauphin DTR-1, and I'm loathe to actually use that, but I bet it'd work. Drivers for the pen are available... I saw that somewhere.
Others have suggested GeoWorks, that old competitor to Windows that died miserably... except they got bought and it's now part of a package called New Deal Office. There's some stuff here.
Gem would also be interesting.
General 730T links:
GlobalMonitor 730T page - these guys sold me my 730T on ebay, they sell quite a few, and they have been helpful in setting up a means to exchange info among their customers. But they still haven't posted my comments yet.
the best quality mouse there is. Some people think the need for a special mouse pad is a drawback, but I don't understand why... its purpose is to make it really accurate. It will never skip because of gunk building up on the rollers the way ball mice all eventually do. And the latest ones don't even require an external power supply the way the old ones did; my new one plugs right into the PS/2 port. The emulation is transparent so no need for special drivers as with the old serial ones either.
Unfortunately you can't buy them in stores but you can order direct from MouseSystems. At least I did before... looks like the website is kindof hosed right now though. Lousy marketing, great mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
True, in that most powerplants involve rotary motion at some stage, they could drive a gas compressor... but then you'd have distribution costs (having to take liquid nitrogen to gas stations via truck, inviting the whole Terminator 2 scenario... or perhaps via pipeline, but that'd be quite an infrastructure.) I wonder if liquid air would work just as well... gas stations could make it on premises that way.
Power generation is dirty however you slice it (unless you use solar or hydro or some other "free" energy). Compressing gas so you can extract energy later by expanding it, is just another way of storing energy that you had to generate somewhere. Just like storing electricity in a battery directly.
The advantage over an internal combustion engine, is the huge gain in efficiency of using a big powerplant (where it's in the power company's best interest to spare no expense to make it more efficient, because it helps their bottom line in the long run) vs. millions of little engines designed for performance rather than efficiency. If everybody had a V8 in their backyard running their own generator rather than buying power from the power company, you could kiss clean air goodbye.
A liquid nitrogen car would need some kind of engine to convert the expansion of the gas into rotary motion, which is inelegant and mechanically complex... and not being able to directly drive the wheels, it would entail a need for transmission, clutch, driveline, differential, and all that other yucky stuff which internal-combustion cars have, but which could be eliminated using a proper electric design.
About the only plus I can think of is free air conditioning (a non-trivial consideration in Phoenix, where I live!), because the exhaust (non-toxic nitrogen gas) is actually quite cool. But in a conventional electric vehicle, air conditioning takes a small percentage of the power necessary to actually move the car, so it's not impossible to have the creature comforts we're used to.
In short I'd expect EVs to become mainstream long before the liquid nitrogen idea does, but maybe it will surprise us and find some niche where it fits better.
In order, my preference would be my own office; a large cube with high walls and fairly completely enclosed; or share an office with the right kind of people. Now, it may still be true that being alone would allow me to goof off too much, but I think coworkers are more of a distraction. And once in a while I encounter a problem that requires some deep thought, where I need to be able to talk to myself, out loud... and at the job where I had to do this the most (was doing some computer graphics stuff, working out affine tranforms and stuff like that), we had the "open office" thing going on - just a bunch of desks in a big room. There was a guy there who had a very loud voice, not that he was yelling on purpose, just his normal speaking voice was sort of bellowing and penetrating... you couldn't help but hear everything he said even 20 or 30 feet away. So I'd occasionally disappear and find a storage room or an empty office where I could sit and think. Then my boss the SOB had the nerve to tell me he didn't trust me to leave the office and I needed to tell him where I was going. God that guy was a jerk, I can't believe I stayed there so damn long...
Anyway, my ideal office I think would be a high floor on a skyscraper downtown, with lots of smallish offices around the periphery with nice views, so that everybody can have one; surrounding a huge meeting/recreation space. The idea of movable furniture so spontaneous meetings can happen sounds good in theory, but I've never tried it; and I don't like the idea of being "homeless" either, having to use this movable furniture all the time and not having a desk of my own. Whatever you do for meetings and "war rooms" should be supplemental, not the normal way of working. If the extroverts like to spend all their time working that way, they can do so, in the large space outside the offices. Everyone should have high-end laptops with wireless ethernet, so they can take them to the meetings, but also have a full docking setup at the desk, with a large monitor and keyboard. Needless to say the laptops should not be required to run Windows. There should be no admin; because any good programmer can administrate his own laptop. Every admin I've known has been a big obstacle and just somebody to avoid at all costs. You don't make use of them, you work around them.
Nobody should stand in the way of telecommuting. Just give me an SSH connection into some kind of Unix server, and I'll be happy (can forward X connections over it too).
The older thing like this which I know of, is Khoros, a library of image processing utilities, which you could wire together with Cantata. However cantata allows each module to have multiple inputs and outputs (for example, there might be a module which takes two images and blends them together). Seems like a really good idea to me, and I think the GUI could be reused for other tasks besides image processing, because cantata is only a shell for starting up multiple processes and connecting their inputs and outputs together. Khoral Research tries to make money off this product, but it looks like you can still download some stuff from ftp://ftp.khoral.com/pub/khoros/. I was running it on my Linux box in 1996 or so, and prior to that, had used it at ASU on a Sun.
...so conceivably you could name your variables in any language, but the keywords are still in English.
You mention these vector terminals... what ever happened to the idea? Does software which uses this protocol still exist (on the server side)? What software emulators are available? Did this protocol include an event model (notify server that mouse was clicked on this primitive or these
coordinates)?
In ours, Jupiter is the "vacuum cleaner" - it attracts many potential meteors away from inner planets so that they are much less likely to have catastrophic impacts. Now if we could just spot the smaller planets from so far away... and transwarp engines would be nice too...
Unfortunately I have not found a free MacOS X server which runs full-screen. With MacX, you can have an X root window in a Macintosh window (with its requisite title bar and menubar) or you can have a separate window for each X client and no root window.
I have also successfully run Debian on my IIci but it's kinda slow and it hung for some reason. I haven't gotten as far as installing X yet, because I can't seem to install anything with dselect or apt... it hangs while "resolving dependencies". Granted, the installation is maybe a year old, so maybe this is an old bug that's since been fixed.
Being able to categorize images in a general way would be pretty cool. If they're hell-bent on recognizing porn and get good at it, it should be generally useful technology.
Aaargh, guess we can't use that epithet for Outlook anymore...
There is just no point in continuing this show anymore; both stars have wanted to be done with it.
When I clicked the link I got "Your browser sent a message this server could not understand." Erase the space between "tic" and "ker" near the end and try again.
Oh, I thought that it meant after the employee makes an embarrassing comment, the management is red-faced...
I built a 5V regulated power supply in one last weekend. See it here.
I agree, this is the way to go. I spent part of my weekend writing some Java code for TINI to detect the state of some magnetic door switches with one-wire sensors in them. Where most security systems can only tell you that something in a "zone" got violated, I'll be able to pinpoint which door was opened or which motion sensor was tripped - and without having to run a separate set of wires to each device, because the one-wire system is a serial bus. Each device has a unique serial number.
Now as for a CardKey replacement... just use an iButton. That is a one-wire device which is embedded in an indestructible stainless steel can, like an oversized watch battery. You can carry it on a keyfob. It has a unique serial number, and you could use it to unlock a door by just pressing it against a circular "blue dot" reader. The computer reads its serial number and allows access. You could also use one-wire devices to operate electrical door strikes and such, although I haven't seen a packaged solution for this yet; it would take some hacking. pointsix.com sells one-wire relays which might be useful; you can use them to turn anything on or off from the one-wire bus. There are also smart-card like iButtons have processors in them and can run Java code via the JavaCard API.
From Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory...
- The line is "beat their swords into plowshares." Meaning, put an end to war and use the tools of war for peacetime activities.
- A plowshare is the blade of a plow, the part that cuts into the dirt. The plow was made of wood back when that phrase was used, so it doesn't make sense to beat a plow into a plowshare.
- Plow = plough, plowshare = ploughshare. The "ough" is just Old English, that's all.
All of these words are defined at everything.I'd like to see someone try to create a clone of it. It was my favorite math program in college (but I haven't tried Mathematica... I hear it's pretty good). It has a really friendly way of editing equations, and the results really look good too - like TeX.
I think a project like this could be started using some code from LyX's equation editor, but I would like to see it use the same keymappings as those of MathCAD because they are much quicker. Of course it should be able to produce TeX output, for easy integration into technical papers. (One of MathCAD's drawbacks is that you usually need to do your whole paper in MathCAD itself... this was especially true in the pre-Windows versions when I first got started using it.)
It should then be integrated with one or more freeware backends... and some promising ones exist already, such as Maple, and some others listed on SAL.
Someday, if it doesn't get done in the meantime, I might be interested in heading up the UI effort, but I'm not enough of a mathematician to create the algorithms from scratch. I'm also too busy with other projects to start this now.
The AWT is too much of a kludge. It started out OK but then there was Swing... the Java equivalent of the client-side rendering that we're trying to avoid here. And plain old AWT widgets just aren't sufficiently sexy or abundant.
Looks pretty painful to build to me. And easy to accidentally connect 2 or 3 pins to the same pad.
About all I can say about Linux is that so far, it won't work because it doesn't like the PCMCIA hard drive. I used a DOS-based distro that loads via LoadLin to avoid the LILO issues, and the kernel loads, then times out while trying to access hdc1 (why is it hdc1 instead of hda1? Weird.) I bought and tried 3 different brands and sizes of hard drives too, so it's probably not because of a specific PCMCIA implementation. And I tried several different vintages of kernels. And I tried the "old disk-only driver" for IDE. Was going to start asking around on the kernel-dev list since I've asked everywhere else I can think of and haven't gotten a satisfactory answer; but haven't gotten around to it.
I have Windows for Pen (based on 3.1) on my Dauphin DTR-1, and I'm loathe to actually use that, but I bet it'd work. Drivers for the pen are available... I saw that somewhere.
Others have suggested GeoWorks, that old competitor to Windows that died miserably... except they got bought and it's now part of a package called New Deal Office. There's some stuff here.
Gem would also be interesting.
General 730T links:the best quality mouse there is. Some people think the need for a special mouse pad is a drawback, but I don't understand why... its purpose is to make it really accurate. It will never skip because of gunk building up on the rollers the way ball mice all eventually do. And the latest ones don't even require an external power supply the way the old ones did; my new one plugs right into the PS/2 port. The emulation is transparent so no need for special drivers as with the old serial ones either.
Unfortunately you can't buy them in stores but you can order direct from MouseSystems. At least I did before... looks like the website is kindof hosed right now though. Lousy marketing, great mouse.
wishful thinking...
Oh well I have laserdiscs, just need a player.