I followed the link and read the story about the "great husband" that Curtis is because he can lower the lights and turn on the Barry White CD from the other room (this turns on his wife?) I guess they don't have X10 controls for, uh, 'battery operated' appliances...
Or, Curtis can show his kids he cares without even leaving his home office.
Finally, Curtis can water the lawn automatically.
I don't have a wife, kids, or a lawn. My NYC studio apartment is so small that I can get to most things in it in a couple of steps anyway.
Here's my problem: I'm a geek (I'm reading and posting here, right?) and I like gadgets. Can anyone suggest a realistic scenario taking into account my limited needs for this possible toy? (I certainly appreciate the geek's desire to do something simply because it's possible - I tried to turn my HP48 into a remote control - but that's not what I'm after.)
I thought of something I could do myself - turn my stereo into an alarm. (I don't already have a clock radio but with such a device I could maybe even play a CD/tape/etc.) Anyone have any other suggestions?
I'm trying the Win32 version on NT 4.0. The preferences dialog is alot like that on Communicator 4.51, except that there's no "View" button next to the "Manual proxy configuration" radio button. Does anyone know how to get this to work?
Perhaps something's no good with my JRE - displaying windows seems slow, and they don't fully paint 'til they've been obscured, then uncovered.
Other than that, I tried loading some local files and I thought it was slower than Comm. 4.51. It also renders tables without side borders. Is that correct?
I'm no expert, but I can't help but wonder about two of Dr. Ditto's (I love that name!) assumptions:
That supercomputers are too big, and
that the robot has to carry its brain around with it.
Sure supercomputers (defined for these purposes as machines useful for real-time image recognition) are big now, but I would think that by the time he (a) gets those leech neurons wired together in a useful way and (b) figures out how to connect them to the robot parts, that such computing power will need considerably less space.
By the same token why not have the "brain" separate from the "body"? The "body" would have a sort of pre-processor that would decide what to send to the main "brain". This would act sort of like an autonomous nervous system to handle "reflexes" and similar things that couldn't handle the latency of remote communication.
Thanks to/., we can all be armchair mad scientists, too!
I get depressed when I think that hardware choices are dependent on proprietary (well, not human-readable) data formats. I often joke that the only things any of us would recognize in a million years are ASCII and cockroaches.
Even with a portable format, though, you've got to get it from one machine to another. If you don't have a cassette drive on the PIII box you win from Dell, you won't get those records off your Commodore Pet.
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I followed the link and read the story about the "great husband" that Curtis is because he can lower the lights and turn on the Barry White CD from the other room (this turns on his wife?) I guess they don't have X10 controls for, uh, 'battery operated' appliances...
Or, Curtis can show his kids he cares without even leaving his home office.
Finally, Curtis can water the lawn automatically.
I don't have a wife, kids, or a lawn. My NYC studio apartment is so small that I can get to most things in it in a couple of steps anyway.
Here's my problem: I'm a geek (I'm reading and posting here, right?) and I like gadgets. Can anyone suggest a realistic scenario taking into account my limited needs for this possible toy? (I certainly appreciate the geek's desire to do something simply because it's possible - I tried to turn my HP48 into a remote control - but that's not what I'm after.)
I thought of something I could do myself - turn my stereo into an alarm. (I don't already have a clock radio but with such a device I could maybe even play a CD/tape/etc.) Anyone have any other suggestions?
Perhaps something's no good with my JRE - displaying windows seems slow, and they don't fully paint 'til they've been obscured, then uncovered.
Other than that, I tried loading some local files and I thought it was slower than Comm. 4.51. It also renders tables without side borders. Is that correct?
That supercomputers are too big, and
that the robot has to carry its brain around with it.
Sure supercomputers (defined for these purposes as machines useful for real-time image recognition) are big now, but I would think that by the time he (a) gets those leech neurons wired together in a useful way and (b) figures out how to connect them to the robot parts, that such computing power will need considerably less space.
By the same token why not have the "brain" separate from the "body"? The "body" would have a sort of pre-processor that would decide what to send to the main "brain". This would act sort of like an autonomous nervous system to handle "reflexes" and similar things that couldn't handle the latency of remote communication.
Thanks to /., we can all be armchair mad scientists, too!
Even with a portable format, though, you've got to get it from one machine to another. If you don't have a cassette drive on the PIII box you win from Dell, you won't get those records off your Commodore Pet.
Don't forget: Disparaging the boot is a bootable offense.
I hope nobody combines the prequel and the Melissa 'virus'. Now that would cause trouble.