Why would I check my neighbor's lock because mine is broken?
Let's make it a closer analogy:
I walk up to my door, open it, and discover it's not my apartment. Oops. It's my neighbor's and it should have been locked.
Then I think, what about the others? So I start jiggling knobs, and a cop walks around the corner and catches me at it.
You think he'll believe me when I say I was just checking locks? And was I right to try to find all the unlocked doors on the floor just because my neighbor's is unlocked?
yes. the point that design patents have a finite lifetime, and after that, stuff starts to look the same because the one that got it right didn't just copy the first one.
They have camera-carrying UAVs for that already. And satellites. This would be better for if you're in a space you can't see from the air.
Throw one of these into a cave or building, see if there are any bad guys around the corner, etc.
And as for what I've seen of high-zoot paintball matches, it consists primarily of hiding behind something and lobbing thousands of paintballs into the air trying to get lucky when the enemy peeks out from the thing it's hiding behind lobbing thousands of paintballs at you. A camera tells you little more than what you know from where the constant tik-tik-tik of the paintball gun is coming from.
There's usually a cm or so of travel in the handle, and a few mm at the pads, before any contact is made.
The human control system learns to adjust for rather large amounts of lag and control imprecision. American cars wouldn't have survived the 50s, 60s, and 70s without that.
Optical transmission? How? By line-of-sight? That might work in good weather, for the front brake. But how are you going to get it to the back brake? And what if a drop of water or mud gets on the sending or receiving unit? Optical fiber is still a cable, so that's not a real change, either.
RF could work if more than just channel crosstalk is eliminated as a source of unreliability.
Trains fail to a stop state because they don't stop within feet when the brakes are applied, and are stabilized by having two tracks and no steering.
Jam on the brakes when someone isn't expecting it on a bicycle and they could easily be pitched to the ground.
The contact patch on a bicycle with rolling wheels is experiencing static friction because it isn't sliding. The contact patch on a bicyle with suddenly non-rolling wheels is sliding and experiencing kinetic friction, which is far less than static friction. The bicycle's lateral force input from the ground is instantly reduced by a large fraction, and its force vector is directed counter to the direction of travel rather than purely laterally, so the bicycle's natural ability to stabilize itself under the rider is totally eliminated. Unless the rider is highly experienced at being put into a skid in random situations (not at all the same thing as putting himself into a skid in known situations), his chance of getting into a stable skidding attitude is going to be minuscule.
Yes, but they will be easy to replace with Netgear brakes, which stop working due to firmware updates, then start working with the next firmware update.
The devil you know is better than the devil you don't.
They do not even pretend to take into account various forms of interference, reliability of individual components
I was wondering about that yesterday when this story first broke. The article I read had no details other than the zillion digits in the reliability number, which told me immediately that someone wasn't doing the math right.
Turns out they're not doing the math at all. It's not a reliable brake, it's a reliable channel-assignment method.
They get that reliability number by putting conditions on the test and excluding all of the mechanical and electrical parts of the system.
I bet if I can put more conditions on the test and exclude more parts of the system, I can make their channel-assignment technique 100.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000% reliable.
He was a twitter Top Tweet, and a top-10 story on Google news. Still is, at the moment. Surprising, since they list only 44 news sources. This is a story with a narrow journalistic focus that is getting an enormous amount of internet action. Evidence that the web at large is still disproportionately geeky.
Well, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I do understand it, and it doesn't look coordinated at all. It looks like a boilerplate framework with ill-fitting data automatically populated into it.
Bad analogy: Imagine taking slashcode and using it to implement eBay. It just wouldn't look like it was meant to do that.
Or look at any of a hundred merchant sites that try put too much info into a gallery view because they're simply not paying attention to how much information is in those fields in the database. Then when you go to the item details, it's just a pretty-printed dump of the entire DB entry for the item, with some horizontal bars. This is a good analogy, because this is exactly what Amazon looks like in most cases.
It looks like nobody cares at all about the pixels, and is spending the least money and time possible on the presentation as though they know it doesn't matter, because if the item is sellable it will sell at a baseline rate no matter how you present the information, as long as it's there. My inference from that is that Amazon doesn't care about making extra profit from window dressing to induce a buying decision. And my conclusion was that Amazon was leaving a metric assload of money on the ground because of it. Probably to drive more bricks-and-mortar businesses out of business so they could eventually just raise prices and still not spend on sales.
The revelation that Bezos is OCD about the website is totally gobsmacking.
The whole point of a Senate is to have a group of men to take a deep look at what the House (which was always supposed to be the popular voice of the people) passes in the heat of the moment, and it was designed to prevent the President from becoming a Caesar.
Well, no. The point of Congress and the judiciary is to keep the President from becoming a Caesar. The point of the Senate was to give property a voice in Congress to go with the voice of the people over in the House. About a hundred years ago, we got wise to that and changed Senate appointment to a democratic vote of the people, so now it's just a harder way to get into Congress and attracts those who have enough political clout they could wipe their nose on a House seat. They tend to be the more experienced types, and, some time in the past, more deliberate. So it got that reputation as a body.
Now, however, owing to the resurgence of pettiness as the primary means of political discourse, it's indistinguishable from the House except in the cost incurred in stealing the votes necessary to enter it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would I check my neighbor's lock because mine is broken?
Let's make it a closer analogy:
I walk up to my door, open it, and discover it's not my apartment. Oops. It's my neighbor's and it should have been locked.
Then I think, what about the others? So I start jiggling knobs, and a cop walks around the corner and catches me at it.
You think he'll believe me when I say I was just checking locks? And was I right to try to find all the unlocked doors on the floor just because my neighbor's is unlocked?
yes. the point that design patents have a finite lifetime, and after that, stuff starts to look the same because the one that got it right didn't just copy the first one.
I bet the box is different, too.
So the problem isn't that someone buying one will be confused by the similarities, it's that someone stealing one will.
In the case of the iPad, one of the primary uses is to impress people from across the room.
So, yes, 10 feet is the usual using distance.
...That's the real story here.
yeah, I just reposted your post as mine. whaddaya gonna do, sue me?
I'm betting that's just ignorance of the difference, not the lack of any. They're there, and they're easy to see once you know them.
The thing about the Samsun/Apple similarities is that it's hard to find any that you can see even if you know they're there.
The patent system cares.
And you would too, if you were creative.
Accidentally walking into a neighbor's apartment is an accident.
Doing it repeatedly because now you know they leave the door unlocked is a crime.
Use 36 video cameras and an attitude sensor, and combine the images and stabilize them to a particular attitude in realtime.
Now you can toss this thing at random and always see a 4-pi steradial view of the area no matter how it's tumbling.
They have camera-carrying UAVs for that already. And satellites. This would be better for if you're in a space you can't see from the air.
Throw one of these into a cave or building, see if there are any bad guys around the corner, etc.
And as for what I've seen of high-zoot paintball matches, it consists primarily of hiding behind something and lobbing thousands of paintballs into the air trying to get lucky when the enemy peeks out from the thing it's hiding behind lobbing thousands of paintballs at you. A camera tells you little more than what you know from where the constant tik-tik-tik of the paintball gun is coming from.
i have nothing to add about it, it's just hard to work that meme into /. any more
Maybe... he was on an island... being a Real Pirate King!
Does he like lacrosse?
No, it's never been done because nobody doing real-time RF control was doing it for bicycle brakes. They had other fish to fry.
This guy does it to something we've all frobbed and suddenly it's news. Tells you a lot about what journalism is.
There's usually a cm or so of travel in the handle, and a few mm at the pads, before any contact is made.
The human control system learns to adjust for rather large amounts of lag and control imprecision. American cars wouldn't have survived the 50s, 60s, and 70s without that.
Optical transmission? How? By line-of-sight? That might work in good weather, for the front brake. But how are you going to get it to the back brake? And what if a drop of water or mud gets on the sending or receiving unit? Optical fiber is still a cable, so that's not a real change, either.
RF could work if more than just channel crosstalk is eliminated as a source of unreliability.
Trains fail to a stop state because they don't stop within feet when the brakes are applied, and are stabilized by having two tracks and no steering.
Jam on the brakes when someone isn't expecting it on a bicycle and they could easily be pitched to the ground.
The contact patch on a bicycle with rolling wheels is experiencing static friction because it isn't sliding. The contact patch on a bicyle with suddenly non-rolling wheels is sliding and experiencing kinetic friction, which is far less than static friction. The bicycle's lateral force input from the ground is instantly reduced by a large fraction, and its force vector is directed counter to the direction of travel rather than purely laterally, so the bicycle's natural ability to stabilize itself under the rider is totally eliminated. Unless the rider is highly experienced at being put into a skid in random situations (not at all the same thing as putting himself into a skid in known situations), his chance of getting into a stable skidding attitude is going to be minuscule.
Wear your helmets, kids.
A lot of people said that about fly-by-wire vs. mechanical and hydraulic linkages.
Yes, but they will be easy to replace with Netgear brakes, which stop working due to firmware updates, then start working with the next firmware update.
The devil you know is better than the devil you don't.
They do not even pretend to take into account various forms of interference, reliability of individual components
I was wondering about that yesterday when this story first broke. The article I read had no details other than the zillion digits in the reliability number, which told me immediately that someone wasn't doing the math right.
Turns out they're not doing the math at all. It's not a reliable brake, it's a reliable channel-assignment method.
They get that reliability number by putting conditions on the test and excluding all of the mechanical and electrical parts of the system.
I bet if I can put more conditions on the test and exclude more parts of the system, I can make their channel-assignment technique 100.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000% reliable.
Then they'll owe me royalties.
But you can still do the stuff he made you care about.
Is a man you never met any less alive just because he's dead?
(I've had some email exchanges with him, so that question may be a little harder for me...)
That's surprising, because it was easily the narrowest computer book on any shelf.
He was a twitter Top Tweet, and a top-10 story on Google news. Still is, at the moment. Surprising, since they list only 44 news sources. This is a story with a narrow journalistic focus that is getting an enormous amount of internet action. Evidence that the web at large is still disproportionately geeky.
It has a -1 you didn't understand me selection. But nobody gets it.
Well, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I do understand it, and it doesn't look coordinated at all. It looks like a boilerplate framework with ill-fitting data automatically populated into it.
Bad analogy: Imagine taking slashcode and using it to implement eBay. It just wouldn't look like it was meant to do that.
Or look at any of a hundred merchant sites that try put too much info into a gallery view because they're simply not paying attention to how much information is in those fields in the database. Then when you go to the item details, it's just a pretty-printed dump of the entire DB entry for the item, with some horizontal bars. This is a good analogy, because this is exactly what Amazon looks like in most cases.
It looks like nobody cares at all about the pixels, and is spending the least money and time possible on the presentation as though they know it doesn't matter, because if the item is sellable it will sell at a baseline rate no matter how you present the information, as long as it's there. My inference from that is that Amazon doesn't care about making extra profit from window dressing to induce a buying decision. And my conclusion was that Amazon was leaving a metric assload of money on the ground because of it. Probably to drive more bricks-and-mortar businesses out of business so they could eventually just raise prices and still not spend on sales.
The revelation that Bezos is OCD about the website is totally gobsmacking.
The whole point of a Senate is to have a group of men to take a deep look at what the House (which was always supposed to be the popular voice of the people) passes in the heat of the moment, and it was designed to prevent the President from becoming a Caesar.
Well, no. The point of Congress and the judiciary is to keep the President from becoming a Caesar. The point of the Senate was to give property a voice in Congress to go with the voice of the people over in the House. About a hundred years ago, we got wise to that and changed Senate appointment to a democratic vote of the people, so now it's just a harder way to get into Congress and attracts those who have enough political clout they could wipe their nose on a House seat. They tend to be the more experienced types, and, some time in the past, more deliberate. So it got that reputation as a body.
Now, however, owing to the resurgence of pettiness as the primary means of political discourse, it's indistinguishable from the House except in the cost incurred in stealing the votes necessary to enter it.