When I was a kid, my aunt gave me a set of toy "friction-drive" gyro cars that were pretty awesome. They were a sort of like normal friction drive toy cars, except their flywheel had a huge gyroscopic moment and were much faster compared to the usual ones. They were just a tad larger than normal matchbox cars, and after revving them up, you could let them go on the floor and they'd skitter along for a good minute or two.
They had 4 wheels, but due to the gyro they could do pretty neat tricks, like drive along sideways on 2 wheels (which was pretty spiff, especially considering that was one of the big stunts they'd always have on movies and TV shows like Night Rider and Dukes of Hazzard). You could also prop them up on their bumpers and they'd just stand there and rumble and precess. Plus they'd just feel weird while holding them in your hands, like when you hold a spinning hard drive.
Navy friend told me about the "Armageddon Mode" on Aegis cruisers, that will pretty much take down everything in the sky without any human intervention: http://www.navsource.org/archives/01/57s5.htm
Needless to say, the navy never really engages it. But it's there. Waiting. Patiently.
My experiences with those: Rockbox: buy a cheapo Sansa media player. Futz around with the neat but futzy interface. Finally the thin gets bricked after a month of use (not firmware updates or even updating the media library, just occasional use). That was a few years ago, so "it's probably better now"
XBMC : haven't played with it on Android yet, maybe soon. I wasn't impressed with it on the PC, but probably because I'm not a big fan of TV-style menu interfaces.
After playing briefly with the other Android media players (Apollo, Google Play, TwistedPlayer), I ended up shelling out money for Winamp Pro. The lyrics plugin mostly works (a lot of my music is too obscure, I guess?), the album art lookup plugin works, it has nice desktop control widgets, and I found the interface a bit less confusing to navigate. Also it supports internet streaming radio, which is good because I mostly can't be bothered to spend time maintaining my own playlist.
But nowadays I mostly stream internet radio using the SomaFM app (another paid app:/ ), because it's even simpler and more stable at keeping a stream playing than Winamp.
I figure the less time I spend getting background music up and playing, the more time I have for doing stuff I actually enjoy. My personal library of music just needs to be searchable enough for when I want to bring up something specific.
plus... slow SD card = useless SD card in a few years. They're big enough now to be useful for/something/ . But not always fast enough to be usable for anything.
A fast one might still be useful for something... booting a Raspberry Pi 2000, or just transferring movies between laptops.
But the slow SD cards are going to the bottom of the bin no matter how big they are.
Let's track everyone! Make a site where you can upload your dashcam recordings, and it grinds through all the GPS log and footage to generate a big database of every license plate encountered. Then you can overlay some markers over cars of convicted sex offenders. Or politicians who have had their cars sighted at certain dens of sin and iniquity. It all depends on how you word it whether it will be banned or mandated.
And yes, I'm pretty happy with the Intel GPU in my wife's $400 Toshiba Satellite. And I'm looking forward to when Intel is a more serious contender in the GPU arena with solid OSS drivers. But the only reason I'd pay more than $1k for a laptop would be to get a half-decent nVidia or Radeon onboard. For most of what I would do on high-end hardware, I'd rather have higher FSAA & FPS than more pixels, but I'm strange like that.
For a hardcore vi guy, I am kind of OK with Emacsians but just can't stand the sight of people who can't make up their minds or try to appease both the religions.
Cool, you must be talking about me!
I'm most comfortable in Emacs for long programming assignments. But I'll bring up vi to make small edits to config files on random boxes.
On Windows I use emacs but also do a lot in Notepad++ , which has lots of very useful plugins that I'm starting to become reliant upon.
Not open source, but Sublime Text is cross-platform has some very interesting features that are worth experiencing. The multi-line editing is something I kinda expected someone to make for a long time, but this is the first implementation of it I've seen.
No, market them here in the USA. Actually, that's all US companies really seem to do with any product (cars, etc.)
Asia/always/ had a rich and broad ecosystem of the latest / greatest new technology products when it came to computers, personal electronics, cars, etc. All US companies do is pick a few good ones and dumb them down into a handful of brands that can be effectively mass-marketed to the US. As an aside, it's remarkable how little branding means in Asia... products are mostly sold on specs alone. Even Nintendo game prices would fluctuate based on the MB of ROM in the cartridge and the market demand/popularity over time, and not based on how much Nintendo spent on the marketing campaign for the characters and agreed to fix prices with distributors over a long period of time.
So the shift really is that the asian companies are getting better at simplifying their product lines to market directly to the bulk of americans.
As for robotic assembly, maybe that would work for building widgets that never change, but technology products change too fast too afford to keep your robotic workforce up-to-date.
I'm afraid the only viable financial future in the US is in the collecting on and enforcing of intellectual property. Kinda like how Old Imperial Europe collected its money from colonial and trade royalties. But we kinda know how that played out eventually.
Nah, pretty sure it's an alien attack. I'm probably just as surprised as they are that we haven't launched counterattacks on each other and obliterated ourselves "Monsters on Maple St." style so they can descend and subdue the survivors and colonize our planet in relative peace.
Yeah, unfortunately, World of Tanks is not exactly a casual game... there are a lot of aspects you have to figure out before you can start really start enjoying it.
On the plus side, that means you can rely more on old age and deceit over youth and vigor (and twitch reflexes)
* gun penetration vs. armor: Your reticle should turn green if your gun should be able to pen your target's armor (might have to set an option in the config menu). But yeah, in the early days, I simply turned on the tank tier overlay, and ran away from any tank 2 tiers higher than me.
* fog of war: The game employs more of a hide-n-seek mechanic, esp. evident in higher tier battles (pretty much starting around Tier 7-8, where people can lose a lot of credits if their tank is destroyed regardless of whether they win or lose the battle). If any of the enemy can 'see' you, then most likely, all of them are also going to be shooting at you. This would put off any noob that runs into the middle of the field. As a noob, you should really be hiding in the bushes behind your friends, and taking pot shots at distant targets. But I got halfway through the tiers before I realized that (also before I bothered reading the visibility / camo guide).
* artillery: Don't need to worry about these in Tier I battles, but the NLOS (non line-of-sight) artillery adds another thing you can't see that you have to hide from. And you won't really understand how to effectively hide from them until you play as artillery yourself.
* crew training: it's more important to maintained a well-trained crew than to grind through the tank tech tree. I think most people overlook this element of the game, esp. in the early tiers. Crew training is pretty much the only thing I spend gold (real money) on.
* tank leveling: Don't rush to upgrade to the next tier, just rush to upgrade your tank in your current tier. You want to spend most of your time having the most upgraded tank / crew in your tier, than to rush to become the least-upgraded tank in the next tier.
But yes... I never really got drawn into any of the MMORPG-style games, because I hate grinding, and I'd rather rely on "real" skill than fake skill stats. WoT does a great job at this, and I've been enjoying it much more than, say, EVE pvp combat.
PC: World of Tanks (15 minute battles, free to play)
Android: Wordfeud: Scrabble where you can play multiple people at once, and have up to 2 days per turn. Chess Online: timed games against similarly-ranked players... you can wrap up pretty quickly SketchIt Online: Pictionary, and sometime penis. Zombie, Run! : Get from point A to point B IRL, while running away from zombies on your GPS map.
I bought Brain Age 2 for my son's DSi, but couldn't get him to play it. I want to like it, but it just smacks too much of crackpot snakeoil salesman / infomercial "get smart quick" vibe.
We do like the "Math Workout" app on Android. Are there any other good ones for Android / DSi / 3DS that do a good job tracking your progress? Super Scribblenauts 2 is pretty awesome, and the kids enjoy it.
So it's certainly an incremental improvement in that respect. I'd like to see power consumption numbers. The ION doesn't need a fan.
I'm still pretty happy with my ION Linux server, though. It's in one of the bigger shoeboxes so I can fit a DVD burner and an SSD in addition to a 1TB HDD. It also has an e-SATA port, which this ZBox doesn't. But I haven't found any cheap external eSATA HD enclosures to replace the NexStar one that failed after a few years.
As for gaming, it makes a pretty good minecraft server. And the client is playable too, but just barely.
Unfortunately, slashdot has had a pretty awful record with mobile sites. Though I guess the "classic" mobile site sorta works all right, and even looks like the "full" site. http://slashdot.org/palm isn't terribly useful either. The "new / beta" site is unfortunately one of the worst mobile sites I've tried to use. Some gripes I'd like to see addressed (using Dolphin on Android):
* Please allow long-clicks to work. I use them to open new links in a new tab in the background. I don't want to sit there waiting for pages to load every time I'm forced to going back and forth. The facebook mobile site is also atrocious in this respect, not only do they not let you open links in a new tab, when you go "back", they dump you at the top of your feed, and you have to scroll way down and do the crappy incremental reload just to get back where you were.
* There is no immediate feedback when I click a story. Then I always end up going back too far.
* Clipped story summaries? I'd rather just read the twitter feed. Show the whole thing! Or at least have a button to expand to the entire summary without loading the entire story page. I know the screen is small, but I can scroll down to the next headline if I'm not interested.
* mbeta site ought to work in a "real" desktop browser as well.
http://m.fark.com/ is probably the best mobile version of a site I've seen. I even like it better than the desktop site.
How about officially picking up maintenance for AvantSlash? Back in the day, it was an awesome way to reformat Slashdot for mobile / offline browsing on Avantgo / Plucker.
Yeah, yeah you can configure motion to just log pictures / video at regular intervals, and then log more / at a higher framerate when it detects some threshold of activity. Then you can show your boss that something wasn't happening at a particular timestamp as well.
Hey, another interesting idea! Toss all your streams through a VLC VBR streaming encoder and monitor the bitrate. Then you can graph it using something like ntop or a munin plugin and see the peaks during the timestamps that some movement is happening. If the camera records and streams h.264 instead of mjpeg, then you might not even need the VLC part...
Yeah, yeah, it's a hack. Just trying to manage expectations this time:P
Sure, every once in a while, someone wins a Darwin Award for doing something stupid. But by and large, aside from some reproductive defects, just about everyone has a shot at keeping their broken code in the gene pool.
So unless someone wants to try their hand at widespread artificial selection again, the next best thing would be to learn how to treat the deficiencies caused by broken genetic code. And maybe even eventually figure out how to grow humans with better vision, bigger brains, etc., once we get over parts of the GMO debate.
Meh, those are more engineering than science. But I think there are a lot more opportunities for groundbreaking engineering at this point.
To add some more practical things to your list:
Robotic Cars Cheap, sustainable houses (there's a LOT of improvement we could still stand to have there) Asteroid mining Optimized education (still a LOT of improvement to be made here, and not by just throwing computing devices at it) Gene therapy (since human evolution has pretty much stopped since there aren't any selective pressures)
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a kid, my aunt gave me a set of toy "friction-drive" gyro cars that were pretty awesome. They were a sort of like normal friction drive toy cars, except their flywheel had a huge gyroscopic moment and were much faster compared to the usual ones. They were just a tad larger than normal matchbox cars, and after revving them up, you could let them go on the floor and they'd skitter along for a good minute or two.
They had 4 wheels, but due to the gyro they could do pretty neat tricks, like drive along sideways on 2 wheels (which was pretty spiff, especially considering that was one of the big stunts they'd always have on movies and TV shows like Night Rider and Dukes of Hazzard). You could also prop them up on their bumpers and they'd just stand there and rumble and precess. Plus they'd just feel weird while holding them in your hands, like when you hold a spinning hard drive.
Would be neat if I could find toys like this for my kids nowadays... I guess this is the closest thing I can google today: http://www.toywiz.com/gxracetarmac.html?gclid=CLepvbuO17UCFSRxQgodDycA2A
Navy friend told me about the "Armageddon Mode" on Aegis cruisers, that will pretty much take down everything in the sky without any human intervention:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/01/57s5.htm
Needless to say, the navy never really engages it. But it's there. Waiting. Patiently.
Nice... I still get a laugh from http://www.turbovan.net/van.html too
Yeah, so to actually address the guy's question, I think most Android music apps are pretty crappy. There I said it.
I think he was hoping to get some recommendation along the lines of "just install rockbox" ( http://www.rockbox.org/ ) or the Android edition of XBMC ( http://xbmc.org/download/ ) ".
My experiences with those:
Rockbox: buy a cheapo Sansa media player. Futz around with the neat but futzy interface. Finally the thin gets bricked after a month of use (not firmware updates or even updating the media library, just occasional use). That was a few years ago, so "it's probably better now"
XBMC : haven't played with it on Android yet, maybe soon. I wasn't impressed with it on the PC, but probably because I'm not a big fan of TV-style menu interfaces.
After playing briefly with the other Android media players (Apollo, Google Play, TwistedPlayer), I ended up shelling out money for Winamp Pro. The lyrics plugin mostly works (a lot of my music is too obscure, I guess?), the album art lookup plugin works, it has nice desktop control widgets, and I found the interface a bit less confusing to navigate. Also it supports internet streaming radio, which is good because I mostly can't be bothered to spend time maintaining my own playlist.
But nowadays I mostly stream internet radio using the SomaFM app (another paid app :/ ), because it's even simpler and more stable at keeping a stream playing than Winamp.
I figure the less time I spend getting background music up and playing, the more time I have for doing stuff I actually enjoy. My personal library of music just needs to be searchable enough for when I want to bring up something specific.
plus... slow SD card = useless SD card in a few years. They're big enough now to be useful for /something/ . But not always fast enough to be usable for anything.
A fast one might still be useful for something... booting a Raspberry Pi 2000, or just transferring movies between laptops.
But the slow SD cards are going to the bottom of the bin no matter how big they are.
Let's track everyone! Make a site where you can upload your dashcam recordings, and it grinds through all the GPS log and footage to generate a big database of every license plate encountered. Then you can overlay some markers over cars of convicted sex offenders. Or politicians who have had their cars sighted at certain dens of sin and iniquity. It all depends on how you word it whether it will be banned or mandated.
OK, but
2560x1700 = 4 MP
1920x1080 = 2 MP
1366x768 = 1 MP
And you're probably only doing something full-motion video or 3D intensive on one of those screens at a time.
I'm pleasantly surprised it made it to the "High End GPU" list, albeit pretty far down.
http://videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
And yes, I'm pretty happy with the Intel GPU in my wife's $400 Toshiba Satellite. And I'm looking forward to when Intel is a more serious contender in the GPU arena with solid OSS drivers. But the only reason I'd pay more than $1k for a laptop would be to get a half-decent nVidia or Radeon onboard. For most of what I would do on high-end hardware, I'd rather have higher FSAA & FPS than more pixels, but I'm strange like that.
Hmm, the price would make sense if they actually had a nice video card in there...
But an Intel HD 4000 ?
I'm not expecting that to keep up with the high-res display. Though I guess with all of the touchscreen smudges, it wouldn't matter as much...
For a hardcore vi guy, I am kind of OK with Emacsians but just can't stand the sight of people who can't make up their minds or try to appease both the religions.
Cool, you must be talking about me!
I'm most comfortable in Emacs for long programming assignments. But I'll bring up vi to make small edits to config files on random boxes.
On Windows I use emacs but also do a lot in Notepad++ , which has lots of very useful plugins that I'm starting to become reliant upon.
Not open source, but Sublime Text is cross-platform has some very interesting features that are worth experiencing. The multi-line editing is something I kinda expected someone to make for a long time, but this is the first implementation of it I've seen.
Start building them here in the USA.
If labor costs are too high, use robots.
No, market them here in the USA. Actually, that's all US companies really seem to do with any product (cars, etc.)
Asia /always/ had a rich and broad ecosystem of the latest / greatest new technology products when it came to computers, personal electronics, cars, etc. All US companies do is pick a few good ones and dumb them down into a handful of brands that can be effectively mass-marketed to the US. As an aside, it's remarkable how little branding means in Asia... products are mostly sold on specs alone. Even Nintendo game prices would fluctuate based on the MB of ROM in the cartridge and the market demand/popularity over time, and not based on how much Nintendo spent on the marketing campaign for the characters and agreed to fix prices with distributors over a long period of time.
So the shift really is that the asian companies are getting better at simplifying their product lines to market directly to the bulk of americans.
As for robotic assembly, maybe that would work for building widgets that never change, but technology products change too fast too afford to keep your robotic workforce up-to-date.
I'm afraid the only viable financial future in the US is in the collecting on and enforcing of intellectual property. Kinda like how Old Imperial Europe collected its money from colonial and trade royalties. But we kinda know how that played out eventually.
Nah, pretty sure it's an alien attack. I'm probably just as surprised as they are that we haven't launched counterattacks on each other and obliterated ourselves "Monsters on Maple St." style so they can descend and subdue the survivors and colonize our planet in relative peace.
Or my favorite... "the shell went clean through one side of the tank and out the other, but didn't actually hit anything important inside"
I hear that purposefully transposing "brake" & "break" is the preferred method of trolling spelling nazis these days.
But they probably say that about everything.
Seconded (pun very much intended)
Quantity > Quality (if that makes any sense)
Yeah, unfortunately, World of Tanks is not exactly a casual game... there are a lot of aspects you have to figure out before you can start really start enjoying it.
On the plus side, that means you can rely more on old age and deceit over youth and vigor (and twitch reflexes)
* gun penetration vs. armor: Your reticle should turn green if your gun should be able to pen your target's armor (might have to set an option in the config menu). But yeah, in the early days, I simply turned on the tank tier overlay, and ran away from any tank 2 tiers higher than me.
* fog of war: The game employs more of a hide-n-seek mechanic, esp. evident in higher tier battles (pretty much starting around Tier 7-8, where people can lose a lot of credits if their tank is destroyed regardless of whether they win or lose the battle). If any of the enemy can 'see' you, then most likely, all of them are also going to be shooting at you. This would put off any noob that runs into the middle of the field. As a noob, you should really be hiding in the bushes behind your friends, and taking pot shots at distant targets. But I got halfway through the tiers before I realized that (also before I bothered reading the visibility / camo guide).
* artillery: Don't need to worry about these in Tier I battles, but the NLOS (non line-of-sight) artillery adds another thing you can't see that you have to hide from. And you won't really understand how to effectively hide from them until you play as artillery yourself.
* crew training: it's more important to maintained a well-trained crew than to grind through the tank tech tree. I think most people overlook this element of the game, esp. in the early tiers. Crew training is pretty much the only thing I spend gold (real money) on.
* tank leveling: Don't rush to upgrade to the next tier, just rush to upgrade your tank in your current tier. You want to spend most of your time having the most upgraded tank / crew in your tier, than to rush to become the least-upgraded tank in the next tier.
But yes... I never really got drawn into any of the MMORPG-style games, because I hate grinding, and I'd rather rely on "real" skill than fake skill stats. WoT does a great job at this, and I've been enjoying it much more than, say, EVE pvp combat.
http://fark.com/ ... it's all the not-news that doesn't matter.
Yeah, my favorite time-wasters at the moment (most tend to rely on playing with other humans):
Web:
http://fantasticcontraption.com/ : build 2D rigs to solve puzzles.
http://freerice.com/ : buff your SAT words, earn grains of rice for charity
http://youdontknowjack.com/ : nice weekly trivia quiz, 1-2 players (maybe, haven't done this for a decade or so)
PC:
World of Tanks (15 minute battles, free to play)
Android:
Wordfeud: Scrabble where you can play multiple people at once, and have up to 2 days per turn.
Chess Online: timed games against similarly-ranked players... you can wrap up pretty quickly
SketchIt Online: Pictionary, and sometime penis.
Zombie, Run! : Get from point A to point B IRL, while running away from zombies on your GPS map.
But mostly I just Fark and Slashdot.
Either that, or the progress bar overestimates, and then just makes you wait at the end until it hits its estimate right on the mark!
Actually, MS should do this. It would make them look like geniuses.
I bought Brain Age 2 for my son's DSi, but couldn't get him to play it. I want to like it, but it just smacks too much of crackpot snakeoil salesman / infomercial "get smart quick" vibe.
We do like the "Math Workout" app on Android. Are there any other good ones for Android / DSi / 3DS that do a good job tracking your progress? Super Scribblenauts 2 is pretty awesome, and the kids enjoy it.
Yeah, I think the real comparison should be with the ION nettops, which come in a similar form factor.
Intel Atom D525 @ 1.80GHz - 728
Intel Celeron 847E @ 1.10GHz - 1,1136
nVidia ION GPU - 104
nVidia GT 610 - 340
So it's certainly an incremental improvement in that respect.
I'd like to see power consumption numbers. The ION doesn't need a fan.
I'm still pretty happy with my ION Linux server, though. It's in one of the bigger shoeboxes so I can fit a DVD burner and an SSD in addition to a 1TB HDD. It also has an e-SATA port, which this ZBox doesn't. But I haven't found any cheap external eSATA HD enclosures to replace the NexStar one that failed after a few years.
As for gaming, it makes a pretty good minecraft server. And the client is playable too, but just barely.
Unfortunately, slashdot has had a pretty awful record with mobile sites. Though I guess the "classic" mobile site sorta works all right, and even looks like the "full" site. http://slashdot.org/palm isn't terribly useful either. The "new / beta" site is unfortunately one of the worst mobile sites I've tried to use. Some gripes I'd like to see addressed (using Dolphin on Android):
* Please allow long-clicks to work. I use them to open new links in a new tab in the background. I don't want to sit there waiting for pages to load every time I'm forced to going back and forth. The facebook mobile site is also atrocious in this respect, not only do they not let you open links in a new tab, when you go "back", they dump you at the top of your feed, and you have to scroll way down and do the crappy incremental reload just to get back where you were.
* There is no immediate feedback when I click a story. Then I always end up going back too far.
* Clipped story summaries? I'd rather just read the twitter feed. Show the whole thing! Or at least have a button to expand to the entire summary without loading the entire story page. I know the screen is small, but I can scroll down to the next headline if I'm not interested.
* mbeta site ought to work in a "real" desktop browser as well.
http://m.fark.com/ is probably the best mobile version of a site I've seen. I even like it better than the desktop site.
How about officially picking up maintenance for AvantSlash? Back in the day, it was an awesome way to reformat Slashdot for mobile / offline browsing on Avantgo / Plucker.
Yeah, yeah you can configure motion to just log pictures / video at regular intervals, and then log more / at a higher framerate when it detects some threshold of activity. Then you can show your boss that something wasn't happening at a particular timestamp as well.
Yeah, I should have put my last paragraph first.
Hey, another interesting idea! Toss all your streams through a VLC VBR streaming encoder and monitor the bitrate. Then you can graph it using something like ntop or a munin plugin and see the peaks during the timestamps that some movement is happening. If the camera records and streams h.264 instead of mjpeg, then you might not even need the VLC part...
Yeah, yeah, it's a hack. Just trying to manage expectations this time :P
Natural selection, how does it work?
Sure, every once in a while, someone wins a Darwin Award for doing something stupid. But by and large, aside from some reproductive defects, just about everyone has a shot at keeping their broken code in the gene pool.
So unless someone wants to try their hand at widespread artificial selection again, the next best thing would be to learn how to treat the deficiencies caused by broken genetic code. And maybe even eventually figure out how to grow humans with better vision, bigger brains, etc., once we get over parts of the GMO debate.
Meh, those are more engineering than science. But I think there are a lot more opportunities for groundbreaking engineering at this point.
To add some more practical things to your list:
Robotic Cars
Cheap, sustainable houses (there's a LOT of improvement we could still stand to have there)
Asteroid mining
Optimized education (still a LOT of improvement to be made here, and not by just throwing computing devices at it)
Gene therapy (since human evolution has pretty much stopped since there aren't any selective pressures)