No, the simplest explanation is that hardly any gamers have processors under 1Ghz, and any game claiming to run on 500MHz or above will be perceived as "old" and "not worth the money" because it doesn't use the capabilities of modern systems.
When the jobs in agriculture started disappearing, people were told to retrain and get jobs in manufacturing. When the textile and manufacturing jobs were being sent overseas, we were told to reeducate ourselves and move up the food chain to knowledge work. If you'd read the article (either time it was posted), the looming question that nobody can answer is, *what comes after knowledge?* The author waved his hands, and like you, said *oh, something else*.
How about modding? America can become the "Modding Center of the World." We'll mod all those overseas products like computers and gutless cars and home appliances. It'll be a nation of spoilers and neon.
Or,hmmm...I have it: meta-knowledge. All the American IT workers can sit and comment on other people's knowledge work, tie in political and moral concepts, and the comments that everyone likes will float to the foreground. A large archive of meta-knowledge will build up.
How this is different from what American IT workers currently do with their time, is beyond me.
My cell phone dials 911, and as a bonus, I can carry it with me. If I walk outside and am promptly crushed by a falling tree, I can still call 911 while the tree rests on my lower body.
One other neat thing about cell phones: you don't even have to have a cellular plan to get emergency service. So, go ahead and throw away your POTS, get a cable modem and Vonage or whatever. And bum an old unused cell phone off someone, or pick one up really cheap from eBay. You can keep it in your car, or easily accessible in your house somewhere. Hey, if you're really paranoid, you can keep an old cell phone on a charger in every room of your house.
I have a cable modem and a cell phone, which saves me money because I'd have the cell phone anyway, and I don't have to pay for a land line I'd never use.
One other thing: Jan often haunts the comp.arch.embedded newsgroup, so sometimes you can ask about things in the books there and get answers straight from the horse's mouth. This is why I love Usenet...Gordon McComb of "Robot Builder's Bonanza" is also a heavily involved regular at comp.robotics.misc.
I would like to second the recommendation, the book was quite useful to me as well.
For a simple USB device, nothing beats the HID drivers. Much of the time, what you want to do is already built into the driver; joysticks, mice, keyboards, volume controls, etc. For other things, you can use control transfers to send data packets to the device. Faster stuff is more difficult, but a lot of example code is building up, much more than when I was working on USB.
If you make your device emulate a standard HID, the added benefit is that it will work on most operating systems with little or no work developing host-side drivers.
That depends. Shoplifting becomes a felony at certain levels. For example, in Georgia, the threshold is $300.00, or it's your fourth offense for ANY amount, or you took $100 from three different stores within 7 days. Once you hit felony shoplifting, the minimum sentence is 1 year. The max is ten years. Other states have different rules no doubt, but Georgia's came up first in Google.
Not really a thing to be playing around with. If they catch this guy on tape taking these things, and he racks up to the threshold before they catch and convict him, he's doing time. That'll ruin your life pretty well.
Yeah, I know, I read that little comment and lost all respect for the guy and anything else he had to say. I don't shoplift, it's wrong and illegal. You can be convicted and maybe pay a fine, or worse spend time in jail, but either way you now have a felony record. That kind of stuff does not sit well with employers, and the records are easy to get.
I think the only time I ever shoplifted something was at a grocery store, and accidentally left a packet of seasoning or something in the bottom of the cart and it didn't get scanned. That and the Matchbox truck I took from pre-school when I was five, and felt guilty about from the minute I took it until now.
The old Quickcams were actually pretty decent even by today's standards. Most of today's webcams use CMOS sensors, which really need to see a pretty bright scene before the signal-to-noise ratio becomes acceptable. The old cameras used CCD sensors. You can adjust the exposure down so far, that even very dark scenes can be viewed without all the graininess of a CMOS sensor.
My old Quickcam VC fell a long ways onto a tiled floor, which broke the ball housing. So I took out the internals and built them into a little pan/tilt platform using two RC servos and some heat-formed plexiglass: Plexicam
I don't really think it's surprising. The "P" in public radio stands for "Public," meaning that tax dollars are at least partially responsible for the show going on the air. I shouldn't have to buy what I already bought.
I don't know about that. I think computer science concepts are going to be highly desirable in the nanotech and biomed industries, which are supposedly going to be the next Big Wave. It will take a lot of creative software to program those little beasties, and collect, organize, and simulate biological data.
Of course, the only Big Wave right now is from companies waving goodbye to their employees.
But I believe that soon enough there will be a definite need for creative programmers, more like researchers instead of a sweatshop good at punching out [ OK ] buttons. Of course, I'm an EE, and could use there being a few less EE graduates in the field right now....
Football players? You thought it was the fast talking? No no no...it's image. Football players had the strong, solid images while geeks had the wimpy, unexciting image.
Fast talking doesn't get you anywhere without a good image. Are you going to buy something from a fast-talking salesman who has shabby clothes and three-day stubble? As a company, you have to appear clean, strong, and dependable. One of the greatest fears of a customer, especially in software and engineering fields, is that you will disappear and render their investment useless should it ever break. I have seen long-time outside vendors be stricken permanently future bidding because of one or two problems or delays.
You can't have any slack in your performance or image, because customers won't give you any.
Do you have any suggestions, maybe, for someone who already has their engineering degree? I've coming up on two years out of school with my EE degree, and recently lost my temp mechanical engineering job. I've been looking, but it seems that the longer I go without any perceived electrical engineering experience, the more of an edge recent graduates have on me. I've been doing my own projects, but that never seems to count. The only thing I can think of right now is somehow getting consulting jobs, but without experience that's pretty tough also.
I want to be an engineer, I'm not going to be satisfied moving to a different career. My options are wearing very thin though.
Well, I didn't say it was the first digital watch, I said it was the first one available to consumers. I should have clarified that to mean "within the reach of the average consumer," I guess. Nevertheless an interesting look at the Pulsar and companies being sold and cheap quartz crystals and whatever else.
My dad actually has one. The red LED digits behind an inscrutable nearly-black red filter. Made by Texas Instruments, I think it was the first digital watch available to consumers.
Battery hog, too. Kept good time though. It still works, he let me use it for about a year when I was in college, and it was a good conversation starter. Not much good in direct sunlight, but that was never really a problem while I was an engineering student....
I think it DOES sound like "Microsoft" and the owner admits he knew this when registering the domain.
What is this country coming to! A company should have every right to defend its trademark against confusion. This website has serious potential to confuse the highly illiterate market segment that Microsoft aims for!
The analogy is more SCO as the art collector that bought the first known Picasso painting, and then claiming ownership of copyright of all subsequent Picasso paintings.
No, it's more like SCO sold a copy of one of their paintings to Picasso, and then claimed rights to all subsequent paintings done by Picasso, because he had seen their painting. Actually, most of Picasso's paintings do kinda look like they might have been influenced by SCO....
Ummm...no. Troll. You aren't going to get liquid or supersolid helium in a PC, what with the 60 atmosphere pressures, and temperatures hovering a hair away from 0 Kelvin.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the simplest explanation is that hardly any gamers have processors under 1Ghz, and any game claiming to run on 500MHz or above will be perceived as "old" and "not worth the money" because it doesn't use the capabilities of modern systems.
When the jobs in agriculture started disappearing, people were told to retrain and get jobs in manufacturing. When the textile and manufacturing jobs were being sent overseas, we were told to reeducate ourselves and move up the food chain to knowledge work. If you'd read the article (either time it was posted), the looming question that nobody can answer is, *what comes after knowledge?* The author waved his hands, and like you, said *oh, something else*.
How about modding? America can become the "Modding Center of the World." We'll mod all those overseas products like computers and gutless cars and home appliances. It'll be a nation of spoilers and neon.
Or,hmmm...I have it: meta-knowledge. All the American IT workers can sit and comment on other people's knowledge work, tie in political and moral concepts, and the comments that everyone likes will float to the foreground. A large archive of meta-knowledge will build up.
How this is different from what American IT workers currently do with their time, is beyond me.
If you live out in the unpopulated boondocks, you'd be dead before the ambulance finally got there.
My cell phone dials 911, and as a bonus, I can carry it with me. If I walk outside and am promptly crushed by a falling tree, I can still call 911 while the tree rests on my lower body.
One other neat thing about cell phones: you don't even have to have a cellular plan to get emergency service. So, go ahead and throw away your POTS, get a cable modem and Vonage or whatever. And bum an old unused cell phone off someone, or pick one up really cheap from eBay. You can keep it in your car, or easily accessible in your house somewhere. Hey, if you're really paranoid, you can keep an old cell phone on a charger in every room of your house.
I have a cable modem and a cell phone, which saves me money because I'd have the cell phone anyway, and I don't have to pay for a land line I'd never use.
Oh, we'll be telephone sanitizers, middle management, hairdressers....
One other thing: Jan often haunts the comp.arch.embedded newsgroup, so sometimes you can ask about things in the books there and get answers straight from the horse's mouth. This is why I love Usenet...Gordon McComb of "Robot Builder's Bonanza" is also a heavily involved regular at comp.robotics.misc.
I would like to second the recommendation, the book was quite useful to me as well.
For a simple USB device, nothing beats the HID drivers. Much of the time, what you want to do is already built into the driver; joysticks, mice, keyboards, volume controls, etc. For other things, you can use control transfers to send data packets to the device. Faster stuff is more difficult, but a lot of example code is building up, much more than when I was working on USB.
If you make your device emulate a standard HID, the added benefit is that it will work on most operating systems with little or no work developing host-side drivers.
That depends. Shoplifting becomes a felony at certain levels. For example, in Georgia, the threshold is $300.00, or it's your fourth offense for ANY amount, or you took $100 from three different stores within 7 days. Once you hit felony shoplifting, the minimum sentence is 1 year. The max is ten years. Other states have different rules no doubt, but Georgia's came up first in Google.
Not really a thing to be playing around with. If they catch this guy on tape taking these things, and he racks up to the threshold before they catch and convict him, he's doing time. That'll ruin your life pretty well.
Yeah, I know, I read that little comment and lost all respect for the guy and anything else he had to say. I don't shoplift, it's wrong and illegal. You can be convicted and maybe pay a fine, or worse spend time in jail, but either way you now have a felony record. That kind of stuff does not sit well with employers, and the records are easy to get.
I think the only time I ever shoplifted something was at a grocery store, and accidentally left a packet of seasoning or something in the bottom of the cart and it didn't get scanned. That and the Matchbox truck I took from pre-school when I was five, and felt guilty about from the minute I took it until now.
The old Quickcams were actually pretty decent even by today's standards. Most of today's webcams use CMOS sensors, which really need to see a pretty bright scene before the signal-to-noise ratio becomes acceptable. The old cameras used CCD sensors. You can adjust the exposure down so far, that even very dark scenes can be viewed without all the graininess of a CMOS sensor.
My old Quickcam VC fell a long ways onto a tiled floor, which broke the ball housing. So I took out the internals and built them into a little pan/tilt platform using two RC servos and some heat-formed plexiglass: Plexicam
Well...yeah...that's what happens when you think one thing and type another.
I don't really think it's surprising. The "P" in public radio stands for "Public," meaning that tax dollars are at least partially responsible for the show going on the air. I shouldn't have to buy what I already bought.
I don't know about that. I think computer science concepts are going to be highly desirable in the nanotech and biomed industries, which are supposedly going to be the next Big Wave. It will take a lot of creative software to program those little beasties, and collect, organize, and simulate biological data.
Of course, the only Big Wave right now is from companies waving goodbye to their employees.
But I believe that soon enough there will be a definite need for creative programmers, more like researchers instead of a sweatshop good at punching out [ OK ] buttons. Of course, I'm an EE, and could use there being a few less EE graduates in the field right now....
Football players? You thought it was the fast talking? No no no...it's image. Football players had the strong, solid images while geeks had the wimpy, unexciting image.
Fast talking doesn't get you anywhere without a good image. Are you going to buy something from a fast-talking salesman who has shabby clothes and three-day stubble? As a company, you have to appear clean, strong, and dependable. One of the greatest fears of a customer, especially in software and engineering fields, is that you will disappear and render their investment useless should it ever break. I have seen long-time outside vendors be stricken permanently future bidding because of one or two problems or delays.
You can't have any slack in your performance or image, because customers won't give you any.
Do you have any suggestions, maybe, for someone who already has their engineering degree? I've coming up on two years out of school with my EE degree, and recently lost my temp mechanical engineering job. I've been looking, but it seems that the longer I go without any perceived electrical engineering experience, the more of an edge recent graduates have on me. I've been doing my own projects, but that never seems to count. The only thing I can think of right now is somehow getting consulting jobs, but without experience that's pretty tough also.
I want to be an engineer, I'm not going to be satisfied moving to a different career. My options are wearing very thin though.
Well, I didn't say it was the first digital watch, I said it was the first one available to consumers. I should have clarified that to mean "within the reach of the average consumer," I guess. Nevertheless an interesting look at the Pulsar and companies being sold and cheap quartz crystals and whatever else.
My dad actually has one. The red LED digits behind an inscrutable nearly-black red filter. Made by Texas Instruments, I think it was the first digital watch available to consumers.
Battery hog, too. Kept good time though. It still works, he let me use it for about a year when I was in college, and it was a good conversation starter. Not much good in direct sunlight, but that was never really a problem while I was an engineering student....
It's ok, he had Subway for lunch.
I think it DOES sound like "Microsoft" and the owner admits he knew this when registering the domain.
What is this country coming to! A company should have every right to defend its trademark against confusion. This website has serious potential to confuse the highly illiterate market segment that Microsoft aims for!
The analogy is more SCO as the art collector that bought the first known Picasso painting, and then claiming ownership of copyright of all subsequent Picasso paintings.
No, it's more like SCO sold a copy of one of their paintings to Picasso, and then claimed rights to all subsequent paintings done by Picasso, because he had seen their painting. Actually, most of Picasso's paintings do kinda look like they might have been influenced by SCO....
"You want the evidence? You can't HANDLE the evidence!"
My brain now feels like it has no inside...or maybe no outside....
Ummm...no. Troll. You aren't going to get liquid or supersolid helium in a PC, what with the 60 atmosphere pressures, and temperatures hovering a hair away from 0 Kelvin.
But nevertheless, still extremely cool. I'll have to keep Google in mind, maybe look into the capabilities of Google Calculator some more.
Not to mention a thousand years of successors to keep an eye on and resume the download whenever it fails.