We rushed to the Moon for political purposes, and all we have to show for it now is some grainy footage and a bunch of lucite encased rocks.
Our trips to Mars should serve as the beginning to the eventual human expansion into space, and not some cheap theatrical stunt. They should be accomplished in a considered and sustainable manner.
All us dot-bombers know what happens when you throw together a grand plan in too little time. Think IBM, not eLaundryBasket.com.
Re:Either a hoax or a tragedy
on
XBox Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
The "9 months, which is more than 50% of the year," probably refers to sales volume. The last three months of the year likely represent the other 50% or so, due to holiday shopping.
As for the spelling errors- you'd be surprised at how many director and VP level executives can barely craft an English sentence. At the company I work for, (a major tv/movie/web conglomerate) we have exactly ONE proofreader to intercept the veritable torrent of press releases and marketing communications the execs unleash onto an unsuspecting public. Stuff usually makes it out to the puiblic after a spellcheck, and nothing more.
Mattel and Intel went in on a joint venture called the "Smart Toy Lab." The main idea was to make toys that were useless without a PC. I was the main designer for the LA wing, but had to fly up to the Portland office for presenations of Intel hardware.
Some of the products of this unholy union include the Intel Me2Cam and the QX-3 PC Microscope.
They're impressive beasts, but one has to wonder why they've spent nearly a billion dollars on this. For improving mass production techniques? Possibly, but there are surely better ways. As transport of the future? Hardly.
The idea of a humanoid robot is one that has gripped our culture with fascination for nearly a century (Metropolis, Star Wars, etc.) The reason these robots don't exist is because the enormous amount of development needed to create even a crappy one served as a barrier to entry.
Apparently Honda sees this as a growth industry in the future, and wants first mover advantage into this field. Who wouldn't want a monopoly on artificial slave labor? Or being the sole supplier of mecha-infantry to the risk averse US Army?
We investigated this for a toy at Mattel
on
Focusing Audio
·
· Score: 2
The idea was to create a "fart thrower," a flashlight sized audio device that could throw pre-sampled and newly sampled sounds across a classroom.
I followed up with Media Lab about this possibility and at the time (summer 1999) they were predicting two more years of development before it was commercially viable. Mattel wanted a toy for Christmas, so no go. Oh well- short sighted (sounded?) American business strikes again.
True, the moon doesn't have life on it, like the Earth does. But it's still a unique environment, one unlike any other in the universe. (How many other planets can you think of with a single, large moon?)
When I worked at the advanced toy division of Mattel, we had the idea that we would use Nitinol to replace the gears and motors that currently drive all the "Walking" (really, more like "Crawling") Barbie dolls. Our intent was to eliminate weight and noise, along with eccentric movement caused by unbalanced motors.
Unfortunately, we ran into a few problems- one being that Nitinol contracted based on the application of heat, and expanded when that heat was removed. Within the plastic body of the doll, heat built up too quickly, and the Nitinol lost its responsiveness after a few cycles. We even had a scheme where we had tiny moving heatsinks (copper tabs, IIRC) that would, as a part of the limb movement, come into contact with the wire at the end of the arc in order to wick heat away. Didn't sufficiently solve our heat problem. That's probably why all the "robots" you see that use Nitinol as a motive force have the wire exposed to the open air.
Another issue was that the length of the contraction was not 100% predictable. The obvious solution was to call for more contraction than you need and then mechanically stop the motion at the desired point, but that's a waste of energy, and exacerbates the heat issue from before.
I personally felt that we should stop trying to apply the wire like muscles- i.e. using them as motive power for the lever-like limbs, as a human does it- and instead create rotary "calliopes" of muscle wire, which would transform linear energy into constant rotary energy which would then be transferred via traditional gearing. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to go beyond the sketch stage with it- Mattel shut down the ToyLab as part of its budget cuts after their disastrous purchase of the Learning Company.
Programs like Premiere and Avid Media Composer don't keep the entire video clips in memory- it would never work with 500MB clips being the routine. Instead, they are stored on RAID arrays or fibre channel-connected Storage Area Networks. Although fast, there is still appreciable time involved when it comes time to render the clips, as the information has to be pulled off disk, processed, and rewritten to disk. With a super-fast (i.e. RAM speed:-) disk, video editors and the like will see a large increase in speed.
My Crappy Dot-Com just went Tats Up
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 1
The dot-com e-com site I worked for last Christmas (ToyTime.com) just went quietly tats-up on Monday, putting ~100 people out of work (I had quit a couple of months before). I could rant about why the company was doomed to failure, but the short version boils down to company culture. The management was 100% oriented toward the IPO (which of course never happened) and threw together a shoddy ripoff of another, established e-com site in order to give the appearance of a functioning company.
As a result, my #1 biggest criteria for jobs going forward is company culture. If the management is a raft of flaming assfaces, like at the now-dead ToyTime.com, then forget it.
The immense gulf between interacting with humans and interacting with computers is that computers lack context sensitivity.
During a conversation with a human, you can communicate very efficiently because you both share the same knowledge of the context of the conversation. Thus, two or three word sentence fragments can substitute for entire concepts, like "There" instead of "the information you are currently looking for is located over there."
With a computer, you need to explicitly feed it all the information it needs, in the correct context before it will return a satisfactory result. Misspell a search entry and the computer will gleefully return all instances of "Slashgot" it find. (the exception is certain search engines that incorporate spelling traps as part of the parse function, but that falls under the heading of "clever" rather than "artificially intelligent.")
Of course, for a computer to react "intelligently" to your context, it will either have to laboriously form a worldview based on the limited information you provide (tracking the sites you visit frequently, forming a list of preferred search strings) or we'll have to provide expanded sensory inputs for the computer. Currently, if you delete a file you needed, you say "Oh darn," but you don't notify the computer that you made a mistake that should not be repeated. A future, sensory-enhanced computer could perceive from the tone of your voice and from the image of your face in your hands that it should, in the future, not REALLY delete the Photoshop file you've been working on all day, but rather move it to a hidden location for possible recovery, or force a backup to remote media before it deletes the local copy.
So, to answer your question, I think AI has great value in expanding the machine's understanding of your needs and wants outside of the current, severely constrained communication channels.
Is it just me or is most of the stuff that Neilson says just common sense? Don't get me wrong, his ideas are great for people who are clueless (and there are a lot of them), but I wouldn't call his notions revolutionary.
If these concepts were "common" sense, one would expect the majority of websites to follow them, with the poorly designed websites being the anomalies. However, the inverse is true. Neilsen's concepts may be simple, but applying them seems to be beyond the ability of most Web-exposed firms... usually due to prejudices held from other media, or internal corporate power struggles.
(what's up with the usability expert having an horribly designed site anyway?)
You're confusing usability design with graphic design. As a graphic designer, Neilsen rubs me the wrong way in his almost fanatical drive for function over form. However, I endeavor to incorporate his concepts of usability into aesthetically pleasing designs (the Web is, after all, a visual medium) to avoid having eminently usable designs that are graphically repulsive (like his). The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, but there's usually some areas of give-and-take (file size vs. download time chief among them).
Sure, digital isn't going to kill film anytime soon- but you didn't throw away your gas-fired oven when you got a microwave, did you?
When the ultimate usage of your images is going to be digital, such as a photo galley posted to a web page, the simplicity of downloading your photos to your computer far exceeds any "convenience" of dropping off your film at a half hour developing stand, then scanning each photo. When you factor in the cost of film and development, especially if you don't intend to make prints of the images, a digital camera becomes a far simpler and cheaper solution.
Additionally, when you don't have to worry about "wasting" film, you're free to take many more photos than you would with a film camera. I shoot over 300 pictures a month on my Fuji MX-1700; my wife still has film in her camera from last Thanksgiving!
Many posters here are presuming that wireless automatically means internet access over pcs networks etc. There's another, "unseen" market, that I think Palm is going for.
Just about every office worker in America sits in front of a computer, which is anchored in their office/cubicle. However, they still have to get up and walk around to ask people questions, deliver papers/material, and have meetings. Questions and appointments generated during these trips usually have to wait until the user walks back to their computer and either queries it or enters the commitment in their calendar.
With a short-range wireless Palm device, users could keep continuous contact with their e-mail and time manager software. They'd be able to take notes in meetings that save straight to their desktop, rather than transferring a note from their Palm. The Palm device would serve as a mobile terminal to the desktop.
IMHO, Palm is looking to create a "must have" accessory for every office worker in America, rather than build more expensive geek toys for those of us who need to check our e-mail fifty times a day (it's a bigger market segment, after all).
...by the competition, specifically Mattel. (geek-unfriendly Mattel, from what I read here on/.)
A little more than a year ago I was working as a designer for the Mattel Toylab, a "toy think tank" that developed product in conjunction with Intel's Smart Toy Lab (in Portland) and other Mattel divisions. We went out and bought a Mindstorms, with the expressed purpose to open the box and build a working robot within an hour without reading the instructions. Well, no one managed to do it... Mindstorms is too complex for no-brainer assembly, which is a large part of the appeal for engineers and the like.
However, Mattel's audience consists mainly of children 3-10, so we were tasked with the creation of a "no brainer Mindstorms robot." We came up with a sphere-shaped central driver unit, radio controlled or pre-programmable a la "Big Track," with snap on robot-accessories (it would come with two utility arms, the others would be sold seperately, of course:-)
The idea was to sell a robot that kids could have up and running within minutes of opening the box, yet still have a feeling of "pride of construction" (from snapping on the arms etc.) Software included with the robot would allow kids to simulate how much better their robot could be if they went out and bought the extra accessories (essentially an advertisement masquerading as educational software).
The project got to the prototype phase, but then stalled- partly due to Mattel's financial trouble causing the company to stop looking forward, and start falling back on "safe" bets (a bad idea IMHO) but also due to the fact it would have been too cheap! The robot would have sold for $40-$60 (not surprising, considering it was just a tarted-up remote control vehicle- programming was limited to "movement macros") and thus would be "losing" the $140-$120 that Mindstorms was capturing. By the time I left Mattel for a dot-com startup, I was seeing far more complex robots being prototyped, but these were mainly from the Intel portion of the lab, and were all-in-one solutions- no assembly required. Most involved remote surveillance via video and sound transmitted wirelessly to your PC from a radio controlled "robot."
So, don't be surprised if the next robots to market sport an "Intel Inside" sticker!
Short of a breakup [and that possibility seems remote at this point, given the government's language lately], the worst thing that could happen to Microsoft is for Judge Jackson to hand down a verdict that Microsoft violated anti trust laws (which is going further than the "finding of fact" he released last year).
Regardless of the relative size of any fines or other restrictions on Microsoft's business practices, such a ruling would open Microsoft to enormous amounts of follow-on litigation. Litigation means legal bills, and while MSFT may have the dough to beat ANYone in court, they certainly don't have the resources to beat EVERYone... That's mentioned toward the end of this CNNfn story.
Ironic counterpart to Bill Joy article
on
Nanomedicine
·
· Score: 4
The intense focus on the idea of introducting nanobots into the body for the purpose of medicine is the sort of thing Bill Joy warns about in an article reported on Slashdot earlier today.
I paged through all ten chapters of the Nanomedicine article and I failed to find a single instance of the possible dangers of nanobots-run-amok, or the chance that a malevolent force could use them as a weapon. Without a consciousness that the technology could go wrong, or that it could be used for evil, Joy asserts that progress for the sake of progress could have dire consequences.
They have gone all out on this one, with real people wearing little devices and moving around to give data to computers as to the most realistic way the characters should move.
That's called "motion capture," and while it's a great way to get gross movements into your animation, it actually requires quite a bit of work to achieve truly top-flight results.
Animation isn't about exactly replicating natural motion; otherwise you'd just dress a bunch of actors up in silly suits. The movements of animated characters are carefully exaggerated to elicit an emotional response; hang out on animation mailing lists for a while (www.hash.com) and read their discussions about bounce, squash, stretch etc.
Once the motion capture has "roughed in" the character's motions, the animator will often go in and DELETE much of the information to achieve an economy of motion and a stylistic edge to the animation. That's why good animated characters can seem so supernaturally graceful and natural... someone busted their ass to get it done!
About ten years ago I was working for a government "think tank" here in Los Angeles. One afternoon a frantic supervisor yanked me out of my office and, along with a few other fellas, drove us about 1/2 mile down the street to an intersection covered with THOUSANDS of sheets of paper... all SECRET documents!
Seems the messenger between facilities had taken off with a box left on TOP of the van; a few blocks down the road the box fell off and burst into a rain of classified schematics! (I think that particular project had something to do with hypervelocity missiles).
We spent the next half hour frantically snatching up documents-literally ripping them out of curious onlooker's hands. Around the time we finished cleaning up the last of the visible strays, a dark blue sedan pulled up with two Men In Dark Blue- Pentagon security auditors. They ended up pulling the clearance of the van driver (a serious career limiting move) and we suffered from increased ultra-paranoid security in our facility for the next few months.
In the end, 17 individual sheets were unaccounted for, although we received reports of individual sheets washing up on the beach (they had been carried down to the ocean in storm sewers) for the next few months. The more cycnical employees "pshawed" the whole thing... saying "you couldn't find a Russian to buy it off you, they had all that shit six months ago."
Note for non-guvmint types: "Secret" was one of the three levels of classified documents we worked with; "Confidential," "Secret," and "Top Secret." Each individual is cleared to one level, which allows access to documents at that level and below. My classification was "Secret."
Most of the time I'm at a computer nowadays, I've got at least a 1.5Kb/sec connection to the internet. Add 11Kb/s wireless connection to the mix (IEEE 802.11), make it pervasive, and all you need is some big, fat disk somewhere serving up your entire CD collection.
Or write "Napster-on-the-Fly" and listen to other people's CD collections!;-)
The current Mac OS has a reputation for being easy to use, but it's far from perfect out of the box. There's a long history of third party apps and extensions designed to improve usability. For example, utilities like Boomerang and Default Folder addressed serious shortcomings in the system-wide Open/Save dialogs.
I expect we'll see similar utilites spring up in response to user complaints about OS X. One request I've already heard multiple times: segregating the dock by type of object (application, folder, document) so you can develop a "muscle memory" about where the item you're looking for is, rather than searching the entire dock each time. If Apple doesn't provide this (OS X is still in "preview" stage, after all) I expect a third party will step in with a shareware or freeware solution.
As time passes, more people grow up with on-screen interfaces as their primary education and entertainment media. How will this affect the science of usability, and affect our notions of complexity in user interfaces given more sophisticated (or at least tech-acclimated) users?
Slashdot Mirror
We rushed to the Moon for political purposes, and all we have to show for it now is some grainy footage and a bunch of lucite encased rocks.
Our trips to Mars should serve as the beginning to the eventual human expansion into space, and not some cheap theatrical stunt. They should be accomplished in a considered and sustainable manner.
All us dot-bombers know what happens when you throw together a grand plan in too little time. Think IBM, not eLaundryBasket.com.
The "9 months, which is more than 50% of the year," probably refers to sales volume. The last three months of the year likely represent the other 50% or so, due to holiday shopping.
As for the spelling errors- you'd be surprised at how many director and VP level executives can barely craft an English sentence. At the company I work for, (a major tv/movie/web conglomerate) we have exactly ONE proofreader to intercept the veritable torrent of press releases and marketing communications the execs unleash onto an unsuspecting public. Stuff usually makes it out to the puiblic after a spellcheck, and nothing more.
Mattel and Intel went in on a joint venture called the "Smart Toy Lab." The main idea was to make toys that were useless without a PC. I was the main designer for the LA wing, but had to fly up to the Portland office for presenations of Intel hardware.
Some of the products of this unholy union include the Intel Me2Cam and the QX-3 PC Microscope.
Huh? No vanity replacement of body parts?
What are breast implants and penile implants, then? Lots of people have them (around here, at least- Venice Beach, California).
They're impressive beasts, but one has to wonder why they've spent nearly a billion dollars on this. For improving mass production techniques? Possibly, but there are surely better ways. As transport of the future? Hardly.
The idea of a humanoid robot is one that has gripped our culture with fascination for nearly a century (Metropolis, Star Wars, etc.) The reason these robots don't exist is because the enormous amount of development needed to create even a crappy one served as a barrier to entry.
Apparently Honda sees this as a growth industry in the future, and wants first mover advantage into this field. Who wouldn't want a monopoly on artificial slave labor? Or being the sole supplier of mecha-infantry to the risk averse US Army?
The idea was to create a "fart thrower," a flashlight sized audio device that could throw pre-sampled and newly sampled sounds across a classroom.
I followed up with Media Lab about this possibility and at the time (summer 1999) they were predicting two more years of development before it was commercially viable. Mattel wanted a toy for Christmas, so no go. Oh well- short sighted (sounded?) American business strikes again.
Apple Interface Designer Bruce Tognazzini suggested this in a recent column.
As one poster pointed out, a feature that involuntarily cripples your cellphone will be a tough sell.
True, the moon doesn't have life on it, like the Earth does. But it's still a unique environment, one unlike any other in the universe. (How many other planets can you think of with a single, large moon?)
Pluto and its moon Charon are more of a "double planet" system than the Earth and Moon.
When I worked at the advanced toy division of Mattel, we had the idea that we would use Nitinol to replace the gears and motors that currently drive all the "Walking" (really, more like "Crawling") Barbie dolls. Our intent was to eliminate weight and noise, along with eccentric movement caused by unbalanced motors.
Unfortunately, we ran into a few problems- one being that Nitinol contracted based on the application of heat, and expanded when that heat was removed. Within the plastic body of the doll, heat built up too quickly, and the Nitinol lost its responsiveness after a few cycles. We even had a scheme where we had tiny moving heatsinks (copper tabs, IIRC) that would, as a part of the limb movement, come into contact with the wire at the end of the arc in order to wick heat away. Didn't sufficiently solve our heat problem. That's probably why all the "robots" you see that use Nitinol as a motive force have the wire exposed to the open air.
Another issue was that the length of the contraction was not 100% predictable. The obvious solution was to call for more contraction than you need and then mechanically stop the motion at the desired point, but that's a waste of energy, and exacerbates the heat issue from before.
I personally felt that we should stop trying to apply the wire like muscles- i.e. using them as motive power for the lever-like limbs, as a human does it- and instead create rotary "calliopes" of muscle wire, which would transform linear energy into constant rotary energy which would then be transferred via traditional gearing. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to go beyond the sketch stage with it- Mattel shut down the ToyLab as part of its budget cuts after their disastrous purchase of the Learning Company.
Fast access to offline storage- video clips, etc.
:-) disk, video editors and the like will see a large increase in speed.
Programs like Premiere and Avid Media Composer don't keep the entire video clips in memory- it would never work with 500MB clips being the routine. Instead, they are stored on RAID arrays or fibre channel-connected Storage Area Networks. Although fast, there is still appreciable time involved when it comes time to render the clips, as the information has to be pulled off disk, processed, and rewritten to disk. With a super-fast (i.e. RAM speed
The dot-com e-com site I worked for last Christmas (ToyTime.com) just went quietly tats-up on Monday, putting ~100 people out of work (I had quit a couple of months before). I could rant about why the company was doomed to failure, but the short version boils down to company culture. The management was 100% oriented toward the IPO (which of course never happened) and threw together a shoddy ripoff of another, established e-com site in order to give the appearance of a functioning company.
As a result, my #1 biggest criteria for jobs going forward is company culture. If the management is a raft of flaming assfaces, like at the now-dead ToyTime.com, then forget it.
The immense gulf between interacting with humans and interacting with computers is that computers lack context sensitivity.
During a conversation with a human, you can communicate very efficiently because you both share the same knowledge of the context of the conversation. Thus, two or three word sentence fragments can substitute for entire concepts, like "There" instead of "the information you are currently looking for is located over there."
With a computer, you need to explicitly feed it all the information it needs, in the correct context before it will return a satisfactory result. Misspell a search entry and the computer will gleefully return all instances of "Slashgot" it find. (the exception is certain search engines that incorporate spelling traps as part of the parse function, but that falls under the heading of "clever" rather than "artificially intelligent.")
Of course, for a computer to react "intelligently" to your context, it will either have to laboriously form a worldview based on the limited information you provide (tracking the sites you visit frequently, forming a list of preferred search strings) or we'll have to provide expanded sensory inputs for the computer. Currently, if you delete a file you needed, you say "Oh darn," but you don't notify the computer that you made a mistake that should not be repeated. A future, sensory-enhanced computer could perceive from the tone of your voice and from the image of your face in your hands that it should, in the future, not REALLY delete the Photoshop file you've been working on all day, but rather move it to a hidden location for possible recovery, or force a backup to remote media before it deletes the local copy.
So, to answer your question, I think AI has great value in expanding the machine's understanding of your needs and wants outside of the current, severely constrained communication channels.
Eh, you're right... if I hadn't already posted I'd moderate you up! :-)
Is it just me or is most of the stuff that Neilson says just common sense? Don't get me wrong, his ideas are great for people who are clueless (and there are a lot of them), but I wouldn't call his notions revolutionary.
If these concepts were "common" sense, one would expect the majority of websites to follow them, with the poorly designed websites being the anomalies. However, the inverse is true. Neilsen's concepts may be simple, but applying them seems to be beyond the ability of most Web-exposed firms... usually due to prejudices held from other media, or internal corporate power struggles.
(what's up with the usability expert having an horribly designed site anyway?)
You're confusing usability design with graphic design. As a graphic designer, Neilsen rubs me the wrong way in his almost fanatical drive for function over form. However, I endeavor to incorporate his concepts of usability into aesthetically pleasing designs (the Web is, after all, a visual medium) to avoid having eminently usable designs that are graphically repulsive (like his). The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, but there's usually some areas of give-and-take (file size vs. download time chief among them).
Sure, digital isn't going to kill film anytime soon- but you didn't throw away your gas-fired oven when you got a microwave, did you?
When the ultimate usage of your images is going to be digital, such as a photo galley posted to a web page, the simplicity of downloading your photos to your computer far exceeds any "convenience" of dropping off your film at a half hour developing stand, then scanning each photo. When you factor in the cost of film and development, especially if you don't intend to make prints of the images, a digital camera becomes a far simpler and cheaper solution.
Additionally, when you don't have to worry about "wasting" film, you're free to take many more photos than you would with a film camera. I shoot over 300 pictures a month on my Fuji MX-1700; my wife still has film in her camera from last Thanksgiving!
Many posters here are presuming that wireless automatically means internet access over pcs networks etc. There's another, "unseen" market, that I think Palm is going for.
Just about every office worker in America sits in front of a computer, which is anchored in their office/cubicle. However, they still have to get up and walk around to ask people questions, deliver papers/material, and have meetings. Questions and appointments generated during these trips usually have to wait until the user walks back to their computer and either queries it or enters the commitment in their calendar.
With a short-range wireless Palm device, users could keep continuous contact with their e-mail and time manager software. They'd be able to take notes in meetings that save straight to their desktop, rather than transferring a note from their Palm. The Palm device would serve as a mobile terminal to the desktop.
IMHO, Palm is looking to create a "must have" accessory for every office worker in America, rather than build more expensive geek toys for those of us who need to check our e-mail fifty times a day (it's a bigger market segment, after all).
...by the competition, specifically Mattel. (geek-unfriendly Mattel, from what I read here on /.)
:-)
A little more than a year ago I was working as a designer for the Mattel Toylab, a "toy think tank" that developed product in conjunction with Intel's Smart Toy Lab (in Portland) and other Mattel divisions. We went out and bought a Mindstorms, with the expressed purpose to open the box and build a working robot within an hour without reading the instructions. Well, no one managed to do it... Mindstorms is too complex for no-brainer assembly, which is a large part of the appeal for engineers and the like.
However, Mattel's audience consists mainly of children 3-10, so we were tasked with the creation of a "no brainer Mindstorms robot." We came up with a sphere-shaped central driver unit, radio controlled or pre-programmable a la "Big Track," with snap on robot-accessories (it would come with two utility arms, the others would be sold seperately, of course
The idea was to sell a robot that kids could have up and running within minutes of opening the box, yet still have a feeling of "pride of construction" (from snapping on the arms etc.) Software included with the robot would allow kids to simulate how much better their robot could be if they went out and bought the extra accessories (essentially an advertisement masquerading as educational software).
The project got to the prototype phase, but then stalled- partly due to Mattel's financial trouble causing the company to stop looking forward, and start falling back on "safe" bets (a bad idea IMHO) but also due to the fact it would have been too cheap! The robot would have sold for $40-$60 (not surprising, considering it was just a tarted-up remote control vehicle- programming was limited to "movement macros") and thus would be "losing" the $140-$120 that Mindstorms was capturing. By the time I left Mattel for a dot-com startup, I was seeing far more complex robots being prototyped, but these were mainly from the Intel portion of the lab, and were all-in-one solutions- no assembly required. Most involved remote surveillance via video and sound transmitted wirelessly to your PC from a radio controlled "robot."
So, don't be surprised if the next robots to market sport an "Intel Inside" sticker!
Short of a breakup [and that possibility seems remote at this point, given the government's language lately], the worst thing that could happen to Microsoft is for Judge Jackson to hand down a verdict that Microsoft violated anti trust laws (which is going further than the "finding of fact" he released last year).
Regardless of the relative size of any fines or other restrictions on Microsoft's business practices, such a ruling would open Microsoft to enormous amounts of follow-on litigation. Litigation means legal bills, and while MSFT may have the dough to beat ANYone in court, they certainly don't have the resources to beat EVERYone... That's mentioned toward the end of this CNNfn story.
The intense focus on the idea of introducting nanobots into the body for the purpose of medicine is the sort of thing Bill Joy warns about in an article reported on Slashdot earlier today.
I paged through all ten chapters of the Nanomedicine article and I failed to find a single instance of the possible dangers of nanobots-run-amok, or the chance that a malevolent force could use them as a weapon. Without a consciousness that the technology could go wrong, or that it could be used for evil, Joy asserts that progress for the sake of progress could have dire consequences.
They have gone all out on this one, with real people wearing little devices and moving around to give data to computers as to the most realistic way the characters should move.
That's called "motion capture," and while it's a great way to get gross movements into your animation, it actually requires quite a bit of work to achieve truly top-flight results.
Animation isn't about exactly replicating natural motion; otherwise you'd just dress a bunch of actors up in silly suits. The movements of animated characters are carefully exaggerated to elicit an emotional response; hang out on animation mailing lists for a while (www.hash.com) and read their discussions about bounce, squash, stretch etc.
Once the motion capture has "roughed in" the character's motions, the animator will often go in and DELETE much of the information to achieve an economy of motion and a stylistic edge to the animation. That's why good animated characters can seem so supernaturally graceful and natural... someone busted their ass to get it done!
About ten years ago I was working for a government "think tank" here in Los Angeles. One afternoon a frantic supervisor yanked me out of my office and, along with a few other fellas, drove us about 1/2 mile down the street to an intersection covered with THOUSANDS of sheets of paper... all SECRET documents!
Seems the messenger between facilities had taken off with a box left on TOP of the van; a few blocks down the road the box fell off and burst into a rain of classified schematics! (I think that particular project had something to do with hypervelocity missiles).
We spent the next half hour frantically snatching up documents-literally ripping them out of curious onlooker's hands. Around the time we finished cleaning up the last of the visible strays, a dark blue sedan pulled up with two Men In Dark Blue- Pentagon security auditors. They ended up pulling the clearance of the van driver (a serious career limiting move) and we suffered from increased ultra-paranoid security in our facility for the next few months.
In the end, 17 individual sheets were unaccounted for, although we received reports of individual sheets washing up on the beach (they had been carried down to the ocean in storm sewers) for the next few months. The more cycnical employees "pshawed" the whole thing... saying "you couldn't find a Russian to buy it off you, they had all that shit six months ago."
Note for non-guvmint types: "Secret" was one of the three levels of classified documents we worked with; "Confidential," "Secret," and "Top Secret." Each individual is cleared to one level, which allows access to documents at that level and below. My classification was "Secret."
Most of the time I'm at a computer nowadays, I've got at least a 1.5Kb/sec connection to the internet. Add 11Kb/s wireless connection to the mix (IEEE 802.11), make it pervasive, and all you need is some big, fat disk somewhere serving up your entire CD collection.
;-)
Or write "Napster-on-the-Fly" and listen to other people's CD collections!
The current Mac OS has a reputation for being easy to use, but it's far from perfect out of the box. There's a long history of third party apps and extensions designed to improve usability. For example, utilities like Boomerang and Default Folder addressed serious shortcomings in the system-wide Open/Save dialogs.
I expect we'll see similar utilites spring up in response to user complaints about OS X. One request I've already heard multiple times: segregating the dock by type of object (application, folder, document) so you can develop a "muscle memory" about where the item you're looking for is, rather than searching the entire dock each time. If Apple doesn't provide this (OS X is still in "preview" stage, after all) I expect a third party will step in with a shareware or freeware solution.
As time passes, more people grow up with on-screen interfaces as their primary education and entertainment media. How will this affect the science of usability, and affect our notions of complexity in user interfaces given more sophisticated (or at least tech-acclimated) users?