If I lived within 200 miles of this, I'd over there in a flash. I want nothing more right now than to play Tetris on a 14 story building.
Seriously, though, the only flaw I saw in their system was the refresh rate. I know when I play, the pieces are moving so fast that their "screen" wouldn't be able to keep up (I'm not trying to brag).
Are there any Tetris masters out there who have had a chance to play on this beast? I would like to know how well it keeps up with really fast play.
For reference: I have scored 470,000 points on the Nintendo version and have broken computer versions by playing too fast. There was a version playing on the Internet that kept a global high score list and I was always at the top. I would love to hear some other people's high scores to have something against which I can compete.
It is actually a person playing the game. They have a console of sorts set up where passersby can play the game. They also have a stereo set up that pumps out the original music.
If I lived anywhere within 200 miles, I'd be over there NOW.
According to another post here on/. they have pumped the original music through a large stereo system. He heard it last night and said it was pretty cool. Of course, I guess this post is redundant... Oh, well.
I guess while I was writing the parent comment my karma jumped beyond to the point where I can post at Score:2 instead of one (woohoo:) I didn't notice or else I would've only put the parent post at 1 instead of 2.
Sorry if I misled you to believe the parent post was insightful or important:)
I know linux isn't just X, but since about all I use my home computer for lately (I am too busy at school to play anymore) is Netscape (for email and web stuff) I use X a lot. My card works fine in X, but the text scrolling is 10x slower than in windows (and, yeah, I could put in another card, but it would have to be AGP).
As for power management, no I don't have a laptop, but I like for my hard drives to spin down and the monitor to go into powersave mode. I don't know enough about linux to run my own powersave commands, and linux doesn't autodetect my motherboards APM.
But that just makes my point: for people like me, linux is just difficult. I know A LOT about computers and such, but I'm not a programmer and I have only a background in using UNIX, no in-depth knowledge. Don't get me wrong, I know I can make my machine run better in linux for only a few bucks and a little How-to reading on my part... I'm just lazy. And windows is for lazy people.
One of their main points about the switch was that they couldn't get adequate driver support for things like barcode scanners, projectors and other peripheral things. I think the driver reason is pretty justifiable.
I am dual booting with Linux and Win98, but i pretty much always use Win98 because my video card, Rendition V1000 (yes, it's 4 years old and way outdated), is only "supported" in Linux and not accelerated. That means that video (even text scrolling) SUCKS in Linux on my machine, yet runs beautifully in Windows. Power Management from my motherboard (a year old MicroStar) isn't recognized either by Linux, so no power management in Linux.
And barcode scanners, projectors, etc. that they mentioned as things for which Linux doesn't have much support are pretty hairy even in windows. Yes, they could write their own drivers, but what if a product gets updated or discontinued? Will they have to spend the time/money to write new drivers every time someone wants a new device on their system or a currently supported device gets discontinued?
This is a major area where Linux needs work, but until then I think Wyse is justified in this decision.
I totally support Open Source and all that, but I am not a developer. Since it is still a relatively new field to the larger corporations, the developers who support open source are going to have to work overtime to make it a viable choice to the broader market.
The name of the effect they are researching is called the Serrano Effect. The jist of the effect is that when you pass 70,000 V through an asymmetric capacitor, it moves.
Yes, this does violate Newton's 3rd Law, and they know that, they just aren't sure why. It isn't explained by any kind of electrostatics or other laws (again, I'm not on this project so I don't know the other effects that it isn't). They think it might be electro-gravity.
I couldn't find any info about it on the web (in the 5 minutes that I looked), but I may be researching on it this summer with them if you want more information. You can email me: boarder@NOSPAMpurdue.edu
The article said something about them doing projects similar to NASA's future propulsion projects. That is on what I was basing the parent post. If this isn't what they are doing and it really is only antigravity, consider me wrong:)
They are not doing research in antigravity, they are doing research into all viable forms of propellantless thrusters. This includes antigravity thrusters but also a lot more things (most of which are phenomena we don't currently understand very well, yet).
Some of the things this involves are warp drives, magnetic levitation (MagLev at Boeing, which is propellentless, but not massless), and a lot of other really weird concepts I can't explain well.
My friend was a research assistant on one of these projects, and the best he could explain one of these weird phenomena was that if you induce a current in a bar made of a special material, it will shoot in an axial direction from some unknown force (no, not the simple right-hand rule of electricity and magnetism). I can't explain it, but he said the military is already using it as a massless thruster on their spy satellites to move through orbits very quickly and efficiently.
I think I will disagree with your statement about Titanic only winning because of popularity.
If you notice, it didn't win ANY Oscars for acting. There's a reason: the acting sucked.
It won all but one of its Oscars for technical or artistic things like screenplay and music or sound/visual editting (like the Matrix).
The only non-technical/artistic award was for best picture (and to a lesser extent, best director). If 100 million people loved it and watched it 20 times, and it evinced emotions in the viewer, AND it won all those other awards I think it deserved best picture even though I personally hated the movie.
Technically, it deserved those awards completely. Artistically, (screenplay, music, etc) I'm not so sure, but I'm not an artist either. I think Cameron deserved best director, but I don't like it as best picture.
Well, when I was a freshm-eng in the dorms 5 years ago, we could rent this device called a DOV (pronounced dove) unit. I don't know exactly what it was technically, but it went through the phone lines and acted somewhat like a cross between a modem and NIC. You were always connected (at around 20 Kbps), but had to initiate the connection (or something like that, I didn't want one since a 14 Kbps modem was almost as fast and I was poor.
They may have something like this for the students. Or it may be a modem.
SoloTrek is the best one of these personal VTOLs I've seen. It fits in nicely with the ones you mentioned. And they all kick this little helicopter's butt.
Q : Can it auto-rotate? A : No. there is no provision on this model for simplicity sake. A ballistic chute will be provided for future models
What you are talking about is (I think) 1)the way the engine gets rid of the torque created by the spinning motor (usually solved with a tail rotor) 2)is used for steering purposes
As for the electric motor you mentioned, I didn't see that anywhere. They do have gas engines on it, though, that burn 5 gal/hr, which at 60mph is only 20 mpg. I'll take my car thank you.
I'm sorry, as an aeronautical engineering student, I'll have to agree with the first AC. This thing looks totally unsafe. I wonder how hard it would be to bank it into the ground or do something totally stupid like that.
If you want something totally cool, try the SoloTrek (tm). Discussed in this slashdot story, it has the same basic concept, but it has been developed with safety and ergonomics in mind. I can't wait to get one of those. I'll pass on this one, though.
Don't want your doctor getting email about your crap? Unplug it from the network hub.
I can't wait to get the ScreenFridge or something like it. We already use the fridge as the ultimate message machine (we even keep a log on it as to when the dog was last taken out and what he "did"), so why not make it digital? You could have recipes on it or just leave notes. It could have cool screensavers like "Magnetic Poetry." And once the gradeschools get up to speed, you could post your kid's "e-test" that got an "A"
There are a lot of other apps, too. Think of a bed that knew on which side you were sleeping and on which side your significant other was and then adjusted the comfort to suit your wants (or medical needs).
Don't forget about the fact that all this internetting of appliances will need bandwidth. With the bandwidth needed and since this stuff will be sufficiently far in the future, we will finally have almost enough bandwidth for the best thing I can possibly imagine (besides mind controlled computers that don't need keyboards or mice): Movies on Demand I would totally love to tell my television to start playing any movie I want whenever I want.
I'm not sure if that will happen or not. What is the state of internet access in school systems in Europe? Libraries, etc? Are they are being installed and updated as quickly as here? That might be a telling factor, too.
Although some of our infrastructure may be a little outdated with respect to Europe (not that I know any of this), I think with the current push of the media, government, and big business the US will stay on top simply because everybody here wants to. We are also impatient and jealous so if there is something faster out there, we want it now.
I think, if anything, the large industrialized nations will even out in terms of who has the best access for its citizens, etc.
I posted this earlier in reply to a comment but I haven't seen anyone make any good informative posts about the reality of this research. Sorry if this is a little redundant of my other post.
One of my professors is working on these projects right now and has been for awhile. The US military has had stuff in the past, just not what you may consider "exoskeleton." They loosely considered Rocketpacks and things like in Alien(s? when Ripley put on the big loader robot suit thing and kicked the mother's ass) as exoskeletons.
He is working on the propulsion parts right now. One of the problems they have with "skins" that make you stronger is that they can crush you. That would suck.
The leaping great heights is done using jet/rocket devices. As for the power problem, I think rotational inertia storage a la Rolex's Oyster Perpetual motion stuff would help if you have the suit "turned off." That could charge the batteries during unpowered walking or during rocket assisted leaping.
I am going to talk with him about working on these projects and maybe submitting a proposal myself.
Most of the current proposals call for rockets or other thrusters to propel you to those heights instead of the instantaneous impulse like a normal jump. There are other things that can help the high g-forces if you want the impulse type jump, though (as some posts in this thread have mentioned).
... from one of my earlier posts:
One of my professors is working on these projects right now and has been for awhile. The US military has had stuff in the past, just not what you may consider "exoskeleton." They loosely considered Rocketpacks and things like in Alien(s? when Ripley put on the big loader robot suit thing and kicked the mother's ass) as exoskeletons.
He is working on the propulsion parts right now. One of the problems they have with "skins" that make you stronger is that they can crush you. That would suck. The leaping great heights is done using jet/rocket devices.
One of my professors is working on these projects right now and has been for awhile. The US military has had stuff in the past, just not what you may consider "exoskeleton." They loosely considered Rocketpacks and things like in Alien(s? when Ripley put on the big loader robot suit thing and kicked the mother's ass) as exoskeletons.
He is working on the propulsion parts right now. One of the problems they have with "skins" that make you stronger is that they can crush you. That would suck.
The leaping great heights is done using jet/rocket devices. As for the power problem, I think rotational inertia storage a la Rolex's Oyster Perpetual motion stuff would help if you have the suit "turned off." That could charge the batteries during unpowered walking or during rocket assisted leaping.
I am going to talk with him about working on these projects and maybe submitting a proposal myself.
Why don't you try to negotiate with Coka-Cola for them to trade you for cocaine.ch or some other variation. You kind of are taking their name, and you haven't put the site up yet (I don't think) so I think they should have the name. But as a gesture of good faith, see if they'll work with you on the topic.
The Ansible in Ender's Game, et. al. is a real principle of quantum mechanics.
In short (IANA physicist, just an engineer) when a photon is split in half, each half communicates instantaneously because it is just one thing (or something like that). Theoretically, if you split the photon into two parts and then seperate the photon, whatever you do to one will show up on the other.
This was ACTUALLY tested about two years ago over in Europe. They seperated the semi-photons by like a mile or 4 miles (can't recall) and they couldn't simultaneously measure the position of one and the velocity of the other (that whole Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle combined with the fact that any measurement interferes with the state of the measured thing). Einstein predicted this but could never prove it (too far ahead of technology); he also hated this idea.
Anyway, I read all this in Popular Science about 2.5 years ago (I don't remember the issue). You can try to find it if you like.
So, NO, this magnetic comm. thing is nothing like the ansible in any way except fast communication. The magnetic thing is hyper-light speed, the ansible is instantaneous.
For the record, I can't even imagine how this magnetic thing could actually do anything except come up with data that looks like info traveled faster than light, but was just doctored data... or something.
Look, the FCC may be "burdensome" and overbearing on some things, but they are by no means useless.
There has to be restrictions on airwaves (with current technology) otherwise anybody could interfere with anybody. Think about it. You know all those FCC disclaimers on electronic equipment that says it can't interfere with other equipment and so on? That's there for a reason. If I could transmit anything I want on any channel, I couldn't be blamed if, say, I caused a commercial jet to crash. That also means that anybody could tap in on your cellular and cordless phone conversations (they already can very easily but this would make it more legal and even easier).
You know all those satellites that pump information down from the heavens? Without logical, organized, and restrictions you could make any satellite completely useless just by the interference your satellite causes.
The FCC may seem like a beurocratic waste of money, but there ARE real needs for them right now.
Well, I just ran the numbers and assuming they were in a LMO (low Mars orbit) of roughly 180 miles altitude (289.89 km) and that the orbit the people were in was circular (very unlikely, but it helps the calculation tremendously) and that the people were 100m from the target, REMO; they would only need.189 m/s of delta-v to do a Hohmann Transfer. This is all assuming a lot of unrealistic stuff, but you are correct, this isn't very much delta-v so simple conservation of linear momentum can be assumed to get them there.
I guess I should've ran numbers before posting. Oh, well, we can all use a little science lesson.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, though, the only flaw I saw in their system was the refresh rate. I know when I play, the pieces are moving so fast that their "screen" wouldn't be able to keep up (I'm not trying to brag).
Are there any Tetris masters out there who have had a chance to play on this beast? I would like to know how well it keeps up with really fast play.
For reference: I have scored 470,000 points on the Nintendo version and have broken computer versions by playing too fast. There was a version playing on the Internet that kept a global high score list and I was always at the top. I would love to hear some other people's high scores to have something against which I can compete.
If I lived anywhere within 200 miles, I'd be over there NOW.
According to another post here on /. they have pumped the original music through a large stereo system. He heard it last night and said it was pretty cool. Of course, I guess this post is redundant... Oh, well.
I didn't notice or else I would've only put the parent post at 1 instead of 2.
Sorry if I misled you to believe the parent post was insightful or important :)
As for power management, no I don't have a laptop, but I like for my hard drives to spin down and the monitor to go into powersave mode. I don't know enough about linux to run my own powersave commands, and linux doesn't autodetect my motherboards APM.
But that just makes my point: for people like me, linux is just difficult. I know A LOT about computers and such, but I'm not a programmer and I have only a background in using UNIX, no in-depth knowledge. Don't get me wrong, I know I can make my machine run better in linux for only a few bucks and a little How-to reading on my part... I'm just lazy. And windows is for lazy people.
I am dual booting with Linux and Win98, but i pretty much always use Win98 because my video card, Rendition V1000 (yes, it's 4 years old and way outdated), is only "supported" in Linux and not accelerated. That means that video (even text scrolling) SUCKS in Linux on my machine, yet runs beautifully in Windows. Power Management from my motherboard (a year old MicroStar) isn't recognized either by Linux, so no power management in Linux.
And barcode scanners, projectors, etc. that they mentioned as things for which Linux doesn't have much support are pretty hairy even in windows. Yes, they could write their own drivers, but what if a product gets updated or discontinued? Will they have to spend the time/money to write new drivers every time someone wants a new device on their system or a currently supported device gets discontinued?
This is a major area where Linux needs work, but until then I think Wyse is justified in this decision.
I totally support Open Source and all that, but I am not a developer. Since it is still a relatively new field to the larger corporations, the developers who support open source are going to have to work overtime to make it a viable choice to the broader market.
Yes, this does violate Newton's 3rd Law, and they know that, they just aren't sure why. It isn't explained by any kind of electrostatics or other laws (again, I'm not on this project so I don't know the other effects that it isn't). They think it might be electro-gravity.
I couldn't find any info about it on the web (in the 5 minutes that I looked), but I may be researching on it this summer with them if you want more information. You can email me: boarder@NOSPAMpurdue.edu
The article said something about them doing projects similar to NASA's future propulsion projects. That is on what I was basing the parent post. If this isn't what they are doing and it really is only antigravity, consider me wrong :)
This includes antigravity thrusters but also a lot more things (most of which are phenomena we don't currently understand very well, yet).
Some of the things this involves are warp drives, magnetic levitation (MagLev at Boeing, which is propellentless, but not massless), and a lot of other really weird concepts I can't explain well.
My friend was a research assistant on one of these projects, and the best he could explain one of these weird phenomena was that if you induce a current in a bar made of a special material, it will shoot in an axial direction from some unknown force (no, not the simple right-hand rule of electricity and magnetism).
I can't explain it, but he said the military is already using it as a massless thruster on their spy satellites to move through orbits very quickly and efficiently.
If you notice, it didn't win ANY Oscars for acting. There's a reason: the acting sucked.
It won all but one of its Oscars for technical or artistic things like screenplay and music or sound/visual editting (like the Matrix).
The only non-technical/artistic award was for best picture (and to a lesser extent, best director). If 100 million people loved it and watched it 20 times, and it evinced emotions in the viewer, AND it won all those other awards I think it deserved best picture even though I personally hated the movie.
Technically, it deserved those awards completely.
Artistically, (screenplay, music, etc) I'm not so sure, but I'm not an artist either.
I think Cameron deserved best director, but I don't like it as best picture.
my $.02
They may have something like this for the students.
Or it may be a modem.
You're right, and 12mpg is much worse.
SoloTrek
is the best one of these personal VTOLs I've seen. It fits in nicely with the ones you mentioned.
And they all kick this little helicopter's butt.
Q : Can it auto-rotate?
A : No.
there is no provision on this model for simplicity sake. A ballistic chute will be provided for future models
What you are talking about is (I think)
1)the way the engine gets rid of the torque created by the spinning motor (usually solved with a tail rotor)
2)is used for steering purposes
As for the electric motor you mentioned, I didn't see that anywhere. They do have gas engines on it, though, that burn 5 gal/hr, which at 60mph is only 20 mpg. I'll take my car thank you.
I'm sorry, as an aeronautical engineering student, I'll have to agree with the first AC. This thing looks totally unsafe. I wonder how hard it would be to bank it into the ground or do something totally stupid like that.
If you want something totally cool, try the SoloTrek (tm).
Discussed in this slashdot story, it has the same basic concept, but it has been developed with safety and ergonomics in mind. I can't wait to get one of those. I'll pass on this one, though.
I can't wait to get the ScreenFridge or something like it. We already use the fridge as the ultimate message machine (we even keep a log on it as to when the dog was last taken out and what he "did"), so why not make it digital? You could have recipes on it or just leave notes. It could have cool screensavers like "Magnetic Poetry." And once the gradeschools get up to speed, you could post your kid's "e-test" that got an "A"
There are a lot of other apps, too. Think of a bed that knew on which side you were sleeping and on which side your significant other was and then adjusted the comfort to suit your wants (or medical needs).
Don't forget about the fact that all this internetting of appliances will need bandwidth. With the bandwidth needed and since this stuff will be sufficiently far in the future, we will finally have almost enough bandwidth for the best thing I can possibly imagine (besides mind controlled computers that don't need keyboards or mice):
Movies on Demand
I would totally love to tell my television to start playing any movie I want whenever I want.
This stuff will be cool.
Although some of our infrastructure may be a little outdated with respect to Europe (not that I know any of this), I think with the current push of the media, government, and big business the US will stay on top simply because everybody here wants to. We are also impatient and jealous so if there is something faster out there, we want it now.
I think, if anything, the large industrialized nations will even out in terms of who has the best access for its citizens, etc.
One of my professors is working on these projects right now and has been for awhile. The US military has had stuff in the past, just not what you may consider "exoskeleton." They loosely considered Rocketpacks and things like in Alien(s? when Ripley put on the big loader robot suit thing and kicked the mother's ass) as exoskeletons.
He is working on the propulsion parts right now. One of the problems they have with "skins" that make you stronger is that they can crush you. That would suck.
The leaping great heights is done using jet/rocket devices. As for the power problem, I think rotational inertia storage a la Rolex's Oyster Perpetual motion stuff would help if you have the suit "turned off." That could charge the batteries during unpowered walking or during rocket assisted leaping.
I am going to talk with him about working on these projects and maybe submitting a proposal myself.
Most of the current proposals call for rockets or other thrusters to propel you to those heights instead of the instantaneous impulse like a normal jump. There are other things that can help the high g-forces if you want the impulse type jump, though (as some posts in this thread have mentioned).
One of my professors is working on these projects right now and has been for awhile. The US military has had stuff in the past, just not what you may consider "exoskeleton." They loosely considered Rocketpacks and things like in Alien(s? when Ripley put on the big loader robot suit thing and kicked the mother's ass) as exoskeletons.
He is working on the propulsion parts right now. One of the problems they have with "skins" that make you stronger is that they can crush you. That would suck. The leaping great heights is done using jet/rocket devices.
He is working on the propulsion parts right now. One of the problems they have with "skins" that make you stronger is that they can crush you. That would suck.
The leaping great heights is done using jet/rocket devices. As for the power problem, I think rotational inertia storage a la Rolex's Oyster Perpetual motion stuff would help if you have the suit "turned off." That could charge the batteries during unpowered walking or during rocket assisted leaping.
I am going to talk with him about working on these projects and maybe submitting a proposal myself.
Why don't you try to negotiate with Coka-Cola for them to trade you for cocaine.ch or some other variation. You kind of are taking their name, and you haven't put the site up yet (I don't think) so I think they should have the name. But as a gesture of good faith, see if they'll work with you on the topic.
In short (IANA physicist, just an engineer) when a photon is split in half, each half communicates instantaneously because it is just one thing (or something like that). Theoretically, if you split the photon into two parts and then seperate the photon, whatever you do to one will show up on the other.
This was ACTUALLY tested about two years ago over in Europe. They seperated the semi-photons by like a mile or 4 miles (can't recall) and they couldn't simultaneously measure the position of one and the velocity of the other (that whole Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle combined with the fact that any measurement interferes with the state of the measured thing). Einstein predicted this but could never prove it (too far ahead of technology); he also hated this idea.
Anyway, I read all this in Popular Science about 2.5 years ago (I don't remember the issue). You can try to find it if you like.
So, NO, this magnetic comm. thing is nothing like the ansible in any way except fast communication. The magnetic thing is hyper-light speed, the ansible is instantaneous.
For the record, I can't even imagine how this magnetic thing could actually do anything except come up with data that looks like info traveled faster than light, but was just doctored data... or something.
I can't believe this hasn't been moderated up yet and the posts that don't really say anything are.
Or maybe we can setup "Internet 3: just for porn and pirates"
There has to be restrictions on airwaves (with current technology) otherwise anybody could interfere with anybody. Think about it. You know all those FCC disclaimers on electronic equipment that says it can't interfere with other equipment and so on? That's there for a reason. If I could transmit anything I want on any channel, I couldn't be blamed if, say, I caused a commercial jet to crash. That also means that anybody could tap in on your cellular and cordless phone conversations (they already can very easily but this would make it more legal and even easier).
You know all those satellites that pump information down from the heavens? Without logical, organized, and restrictions you could make any satellite completely useless just by the interference your satellite causes.
The FCC may seem like a beurocratic waste of money, but there ARE real needs for them right now.
I guess I should've ran numbers before posting.
Oh, well, we can all use a little science lesson.