Does anyone know if you can do the opposite thing? That is, map the Alt key on a (in my case, Linux) PC to the Ctrl and vice versa?
I've used a Mac for years and prefer the Mac layout in terms of cutting/copying/pasting with the keyboard; the Ctrl key is too far out to the side for me to hit with my thumb, which is how I use the Command key on a Mac. (PC users seem to do Ctrl-V and the like using their little finger, which I find unnatural.)
You can't do this with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but you can get a conventional (dongle) wireless keyboard and mouse, plug them into a USB KVM switch with hotkey support, and control two computers from across the room. To switch between systems you press the hotkey combination: on mine it's a double-tap of the [Scroll Lock] key. I use this setup in my home to control a Linux and Power Mac box. The KVM is some $30 job from NewEgg; email me if you want the brand.
Actual dual-pairability of BT devices would be sweet, however I'm not sure if you're going to want to hold your breath on that. In the meantime, if you want to control two computers with one keyboard and mouse you have the ability right now.
Given that MS has a vested interest in continuing to sell Windows licenses, and Office licenses, and Terminal Server licenses... what you'd effectively have is Citrix. Except maybe replace the Citrix client with Internet Explorer.
That's MS's vision of "portable apps." Run them from as many Windows boxes as you can afford to license!
Very cool -- although I'm not sure that what that software does is exactly what I was thinking about. Perhaps it (or one of its components) do it and I'm just not seeing the capability demonstrated in the review. I suppose to do the panorama it has to be doing it in two dimensions.
I was thinking if you took several pictures of a mountain, for example, from various sides and heights, and wanted to create a 3-D model of the mountain, you'd need to be able to deduce the camera's position relative to the mountain in three-dimensional space based only on the visual information in the photo. This for a human isn't particularly hard to do; you use things like shadows and key features, but for a machine it might be tough especially without manually-defined reference points. Although based on reading the papers in another reply to my post (LionKimbro's) apparently this has been pretty well figured out, which I find very impressive.
I'll definitely give that Hugin software a shot though, I've been looking for something to create panoramas. And I'm very curious to see how it does at automatically defining the reference points. And it's open source and runs on my Mac and on Linux -- can't beat that.
At any rate, I've definitely been pleasantly surprised to see how far the state of the art has progressed beyond where I thought it was. Thanks for the link!
I agree. While I've never played with VMWare, you can be sure that if I was going to play with some new OS tomorrow, be it Windows or BSD or something exotic, I wouldn't do it by dual-booting my system. Old sub-800MHz Celeron systems are being given away if you look around/ask (esp. on Freecycle and Craigslist), although IMO any self-respecting geek probably has his or her door propped open with one.
I can see certain people who need to dual-boot, however. Mainly people with notebooks who want to run Linux but still need Windows for business reasons. Perhaps the virtualization software will make even this unnecessary in time, but if there's any processing overhead then it might be a no-go: a notebook running on batteries with clock speed scaled down might not have the cycles to support it.
But certainly for hobbyist purposes, I'd question the unnecessary risk of dual-booting a 'production' PC (one that you're using for your email/web/photos/etc.) because of the risk of screwing it up, plus just the added complexity you're adding to the system that you're trying to test. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, although I'm sure there are exceptional scenarios.
I think the person further up in the thread who speculated that their biggest opportunity is a set-top box is right on the money.
Limited-functionality office/internet/email machines are low-margin and seem like they're trying to provide a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. One that had most of it's applications on the server solves some problems that conventional PCs have, but requires a broadband internet connection to be practical. The people that have broadband are mostly not the people who are going to be happy with such a limited device. The target market for such an appliance are the folks still using dialup AOL on their Win95 box. Really to get them, you'd have to do a lot of bundling: maybe one monthly rate for cable TV, phone service (via Vonage/other VOIP), data, and a kiosk/appliance rental with remote storage and remote-delivered applications. However that would require a lot of negotiations with either cable companies or Telcos. It's possible, but I don't see it as being very likely.
The STB market is one that's been tried and for which there is a market, but nobody has managed to hit right yet. That's why I think it's a potential opportunity for Google. (The other company that has a history of doing things right when others have given up is Apple, but they got burned early by STBs and haven't shown much interest since.) A sealed box that interfaced to a TV and was controlled with wireless peripherals, and interoperated with PCs via Wifi as a DVR, browser, and music player could have potential. It would be upmarket, for the consumer that already has broadband, thereby avoiding the connectivity issue. However displays are a problem. Conventional NTSC TVs suck as computer displays, and HDTVs don't have sufficent penetration to warrant the kind of volume a $200 Wal-Mart accessory needs.
Maybe a few years from now this will be ready for prime time, but right now digital TV sets are still too expensive for the average person. I went in to Best Buy yesterday and was appalled at the cost difference between conventional and digital sets: while 27 or 32" analogs sold for around $200, you couldn't touch an HD set in that size for almost $500. Until that situation resolves itself and you see digital sets in most living rooms, the "livingroom PC" will always be limited.
I'm not sure that I buy your argument. Security updates seem to come out pretty quickly for my Debian server, and I paid essentially nothing for its OS.
If -- and I frankly don't believe that it's going to happen -- Google were to make a PC that had a Linux backend, their biggest job would be to distribute the security updates from the various installed components to users. Obviously they would have a vested interest in keeping it secure also, but it's not as if they'd be completely on their own in the same way Microsoft is.
Plus, if many of the applications resided on the server rather than locally, or were automatically updated from the server frequently, then there wouldn't be the problem of encouraging users to install security updates: it would all be done transparently without any intervention. This obviously necessitates a level of quality control on the updates so functionality isn't changed, which might require a monthly fee, but it's not out of the realm of possibility for an ad-supported system either.
Most people I know would gladly pay a few hundred dollars extra to not use Windows, if they had a real alternative.
However there's usually always some Catch-22 that keeps [Linux flavor of the week] from working out. The biggest one I've seen with home users is that they have pirated Windows applications that they're absolutely wed to, and can't afford to either not use, or buy a replacement for on another platform.
The number of people who actually use Windows because they enjoy it and think it's a good OS is quite small, I think. The public has a pretty negative perception of it in general, because of viruses and spyware; even non-technical business-people hate how it drives the hardware upgrade cycle so aggressively every few years. However Windows is a difficult thing to cut out, and it only takes one obscure productivity app to lock people in.
Windows exists and maintains its marketshare because of an equation that balances user dislike for it against the perceived pain of changing to anything else. Currently that perceived pain and expense greatly outweighs the annoyance Windows provides.
While I understand your point and think it's probably quite valid, for the record I've seen quite a few 11-year olds do things that I would probably tear out my hair trying to teach to my (boomer-generation) parents.:)
Obviously my phone -- a Motorola Razr -- probably isn't the best metric for ease of use. However, I still think phone manufacturers could make strides getting on par with digital cameras. Perhaps taking the pictures has gotten easier, but I've yet to see a camera that would mount out-of-the-box as Mass Storage to upload the photos to a computer. Perhaps this has been done also; if so I wish they'd advertise it more. Using standard (SD/MMC) cards would be a plus also.
I think that dynamic range is a shining example of a casualty of the "megapixel wars." Companies are competing to turn out more and more pixels per square millimeter of sensor, and per dollar, but there doesn't seem to be much effort going into sensor design: improving the range or experimenting with new designs.
Having more pixels is important, but if you know how to compose your shot (so you don't have to do a lot of zooming and cropping later), having a 3MP camera with a lot of dynamic range would be far preferable to a 6MP camera without the range. The difference in the quality of the photos would be palpable also. However, manufacturers don't bother going down that road because nobody wants to be the only brand on the shelf that's one "MP" lower than the others.
I used to sell digital cameras (non-commissioned) and my personal favorite brand was Minolta. I liked them because they had a fast shot-to-shot time and much better zoom than the competitors at the time; however they had somewhat less megapixels-per-dollar than the competitors. I pretty much had a set speech to explain why, for an average person making small prints, a 3.2MP camera with a 6x optical zoom was not inferior to a 4MP camera with a 2-3x optical zoom.
Similar to how microprocessor companies ignored many possible avenues of improvement, preferring to drive their clock speeds ever higher until they hit a wall, camera manufacturers are going to max out their pixels before bothering to do anything about dynamic range or adopt three-chip (or Foveon-type) color.
You know, as cynical as that is, you're quite right.
Kodak isn't the only company that's doing this either; there are a lot of "entry level" digitals that are basically aiming for the group of people who are moving up (or over, one might say) from disposable film cameras. There are a ton of these people around. They honestly don't care about quality in the same way that even the most novice photography student does: if the image is recognizable, and doesn't have hideously obvious defects like big dust specks (and maybe not even then), they don't care. They've been buying, using, and throwing away plastic-lensed disposables that are nothing but some 400 or 800 speed film with a shutter and a strobe light -- probably not much better than a box with a hole in it -- for years, and they're happy with the results.
What they really want from a digital camera has nothing to do with quality, it's immediate gratification and the ability to share pictures. Why do you think that Kodak's digitals have HUGE displays on the back? Because that's what a lot of people care about: they want to take a picture and then be able to show it off to their friends. For some, they may not even really look at the photo once they take it off of the camera; it's something taken in that moment, for use the moment later. The next thing people want is to be able to share (via email) pictures, and perhaps print a few off here and there, so those are the next easiest functions to do.
The quality of the image -- once you get above a certain point, which I think is about 1024x768 pixels -- doesn't matter to a lot of people. The reason people buy multi-megapixel cameras (aside from the fact that they "want the best" without knowing why, which is probably the dominant reason) is so they can zoom in on things in the frame later. Megapixels are like megahertz were a few years ago: people have this dim understanding that they should be buying more, but no idea why. However they do it anyway.
Kodak's cheap digitals are perfectly designed for a certain kind of person. They let you take an image, show it off to people on the big built-in screen, shove it into a dock and email or save or print it. For 90% of the people who buy them, that's all they ever have to do. If you want more from a camera, don't buy one of the entry level models!
There was a time when the fact that a camera was digital implied that it was somewhat high-end. That era is over, and you can't blame Kodak's engineers (whether they were in-house or outsourced) for designing a camera that matches its target market.
I think that what will eventually spell the end of the true entry-level digital cameras is when cellphone digitals become easier to use. Right now they're too complex for most people. I know quite a few people who have cellphones with cameras, but don't use them because they don't want to figure out how. There isn't (on most phones I've seen anyway) just one button that you can press to take a picture. On mine, it takes four (Camera->Capture->Store->In Camera), and that's three too many. And getting the pictures off requires having Bluetooth working and manually selecting the files -- no iPhoto/Picasa integration. Once the phone manufacturers make it easy enough for a braindead person to use (and this includes the sharing end, not just the picture-taking end), I think the demand for cheap dedicated still cameras will decrease sharply.
Just get two disposable cameras. Film is okay, if you count your frames, but now they've even got digital "disposables." Mount them horizontally on a flat piece of wood (I saw someone use what looked like a 1x2, but it's not like it matters) right next to each other. Depending on the kind of camera, they're small enough that placed next to each other the lenses are spaced almost the right distance apart. You can even space them wider apart if you want a more exaggerated 3-d effect.
Then just wind and shoot the cameras simultaneously. If you're taking pictures of anything moving, you have to be pretty lucky to catch the shutters at exactly the same time or else it'll look messed up. (But i've actually seen some pretty amazing stuff done this way of people on stage.) Also avoid using their flashes since they won't go off in sync and you may get strange shadows.
Then just get them developed and put on a CD, and make sure that the processor keeps them straight so you know afterwards which one is left and which one is right.
Then you can either print them and try to mount them in a stereoscope viewer, which is what I saw done with them (basically just two prints hung side by side with a divider in between that you put your nose up to), or you could probably produce a red/blue image in Photoshop. You need some tinkering to get the viewers right, but there are a lot of books on the subject.
There is also, if you want to blow a lot of money on such a project, there used to be a purpose-built Russian camera called the "FED" that used regular 35mm film and had two separate lenses. No idea if they're still making them or not.
I just did a little Googling and there is a Engadget tutorial available. It uses some assumedly PC-only software though, so I'm not too interested. Others might be, though.
You would not need just the images, but also very accurate positioning data on where the photos were taken.
In theory, perhaps you could extrapolate the positioning information by looking at static objects in the frame, shadows, etc., but I don't think that's anywhere near practical.
However if you had a cellphone with augmented GPS (WAAS or something like it) that had submeter accuracy or better, and you were taking pictures of a large object, and maybe included a compass chip or something like it to give you an azimuth reading, then I think you could do what you're talking about. At the very least you'd be able to easily construct a photographic panorama / flyaround (a la Quicktime VR). The work necessary to produce a 3-D model might be, as a physicist I knew used to say, "really nontrivial." At least working just from the images and telemetry data without any other subjective stuff (like selecting out the areas by hand as those 2-d photogrammetry systems have you doing, it seems).
But in general I think that's a very cool idea. It would be neat to see digital camera manufacturers start to embed GPS chips into cameras; at the very least it would be cool to open something in iPhoto and see a minimap of exactly where you took the photo. I know that there are some vacation photos of mine that I wish I knew exactly where I'd been standing when I took it, and there's no easy way to figure out now. It's not like the chips to do that would be bulky anymore, now that they've been miniaturized for cellphones. In fact I think I remember a fairly old Kodak DSLR (one of their really serious ones that were built on Nikon F1 frames) that had a serial port and might have been able to connect to a GPS, for that purpose. I think it's a feature that's ready for prime time.
For web developers anyway, this is (or ought to be -- if browsers were platform agnostic and standards compliant) the correct attitude to have. In fact, the user's choice of browser shouldn't matter either in an ideal world, that it does is unfortunate but for the present unavoidable.
Getting back to the original point of widgets, I think the Windows-compatibility issue (or lack therof) is irrelevant. Most widgets that I've seen are written by small hobby developers or individual users, or very small software companies. This is something that Mac and Linux users are familiar with, but based on my experience Windows users less so. For whatever reason, the Windows platform doesn't seem as favorable to small freeware developers. When I had to use a Windows machine and wanted to download any kind of small utility or application, it seemed like there was always a price-tag attached. That's not to say that there aren't Konfabulator widgets written by small developers for Windows, (and not having used them I can't comment on their quality), but if you're looking to write some freeware and aren't trying to make a buck from it, it seems like Linux or Mac OS are better platforms: sure, you have a smaller userbase and smaller audience, but you can achieve surprisingly deep penetration (and, to a certain extent, notoriety) into that market if what you write is good.
To make a very broad generalization, based on my experience with Windows and Mac/Linux freeware: there is obviously less of it for the less-popular platforms, but the quality seems to be significantly higher on average. Most of it is actually free (less shareware), and what does cost money is generally commercial-quality. I've never gotten the feeling I've had looking at some Windows shareware (that the author is just trolling for money from ignorant users), on any "alternative" platform.
Ah, I understand now. In that case, I agree completely -- Apple has always been bad at upgradability of its "consumer" products. I wasn't aware that the Mac Mini in particular was such a PITA, but it doesn't totally surprise me. As a company they've always seemed fascinated by the concept of the sealed "black box" (or perhaps white box) that the consumer couldn't really touch.
However their higher-tier products, the Power Macs in particular, don't hold to this. It seems to be a philosophy limited to their entry-level gear, and somewhat unfortunate.
Add that to the hoops that must be jumped through in order to open entry-level Apple products, and you have products that look great out of the box, but are terrible after long-term use.
I strenuously disagree with this. I've owned quite a few Apple products, and while not perhaps their full product line, enough so that I'm familiar with how they package and pack things. I think that their packaging is some of the best designed, ever. The iPod packaging isn't anything as special, but it's still not bad.
If anyone bought an original (CRT) iMac, then you remember the packaging that it came in: open box, lift out top foam, grab handle and remove computer, set on desk. Then pull out the mouse and keyboard, plug them in, and go. It was fairly brilliant; IIRC even Consumer Reports was impressed, and this was back when they were really Mac-haters.
It's been a while since I've bought a new machine from Apple, but I can't imagine that they've gone much downhill. They always seemed to put a lot more effort into the design of their packaging and initial "presentation" of the device to the customer than any other manufacturer I'm familiar with. (Granted they'd better, given what they charge for their gear...)
You aren't in the U.S., or else you don't deal with Verizon Wireless.
That six year old phone of yours isn't worth the plastic it's made out of; or at least that's the experience I've had. Go ahead and try to get it activated: Verizon won't touch it. Maybe if you have a GSM instead of a CDMA provider you can just put the chip in and it will work (provided you don't have a vendor lock on the phone), but for a great many people, the cell-phone upgrade cycle has been driven -- and driven hard -- by the cellphone companies.
First it was analog to digital phones. If you didn't upgrade, they couldn't force you, but if you wanted to change billing plans or anything else that required them to re-activate the phone, no way, Jose. Time to buy a new phone -- either pony up big bucks or accept a years-long contract to get a subsidized one. Then just recently it's been non-GPS enabled phones that are getting cut out. If you have a phone that doesn't have GPS, don't bother trying to get anything done to it with Verizon: you're stuck. They won't touch it, even to move between two numbers on the same customer account. If you want to do anything, you need to buy a new phone.
I have no doubt that three or four years from now, once people are starting to think about whether to get a new phone (which, at least in the U.S., basically implies re-contracting with a company for a 'term of years') or keep their old one, something else will come up that Verizon will use as an excuse to force another round of upgrades.
I still have a few of my old phones -- all in perfect working condition -- that aren't worth their plastic now because of Verizon's policies. About all they're good for is (maybe) being able to dial 911; the analog-only ones I'm not sure I'd even trust for that.
1) Quality. The files you can get from Allofmp3.com are significantly higher quality than I've ever gotten from P2P. There's also higher quality-of-service; you're probably not going to spend any time downloading a file halfway only to have it fail on you and waste your time. This alone might make it worthwhile to a lot of users. Plus, and this may not be as much of an issue now as it was previously, AoMP3 isn't vunerable to poisoning with dummy files.
2) Plausible deniability. AoMP3 looks enough like a legitimate site to fool a lot of people, including several attorneys (admittedly, not IP law attorneys) that I've showed it to. People who aren't familiar with the current state of online music purchasing could easily assume that it's a legitimate, legal site; it's not entirely obvious that the site is Russian and certainly not obvious that it might not be legal in Russia. Especially if someone else paid the money and put the credits onto your account -- the payment system is the only part that's very sketchy -- you don't even have to go through a clickthru IIRC (I've only seen it a few times).
3) Resistance to blocking. AoMP3 isn't -- to the best of my knowledge -- blocked by most institutions, nor easily filtered on a protocol or port level. I've heard that the files themselves are even sent using SSL. So users who are at an institution (like many colleges) that block P2P can still use AoMP3.
Plus, Allofmp3 is small fries compared to the big P2P services, plus the delivery of files over SSL makes it more difficult to intercept, plus it's harder to get end-users for "redistributing" material (which is what most of the file-sharing lawsuits have been over -- they're not getting people for downloading right now I don't believe, at least not yet). Given that there are thousands of easily identified users on U.S. filesharing networks who are actively redistributing content, I think it will be a while before the authorities get around to working on allofmp3.com. Especially when you consider that it would take international pressure to do so, pressure which could probably be easily diverted on the Russian end with enough hard currency in the right hands.
I'm not necessarily defending AoMP3; but there are rather obvious reasons why people use it, and don't use P2P.
I have never heard of a LUG (or Mac User Group, which is the other OS I use) in my area, although if there was an active one I'd probably join. That begs the question -- where and how do people find out about LUGs in their area, and how many users are muddling along (as I am) on their own, wishing they knew more people in their local area who also used Linux that were willing to help them?
I don't know what kind of "flack jacket" you're talking about that's comprised of "rticulated ceramic/steel plates with a touch of Kevlar fabric to hold it together" but it's nothing that I've ever seen. And a flak jacket from the Korean war, that was rated to stop a.50 BMG? That's ridiculous. There isn't any type of personal body armor that will stop a 50-cal, even today (unless you consider an armored vehicle a form of personal body armor).
I'll refer you over to the Body Armor page at Globalsecurity.org. "The [pre-Interceptor] "flak jacket," constructed of ballistic nylon, provided protection primarily from munitions fragments and was ineffective against most pistol and rifle threats. These vests also were very cumbersome and bulky and were restricted primarily to military use." This adequately describes the vests used up through Vietnam and which were even issued during the onset of the current war in Iraq. On the Interceptor system, which is current issue, "The outer tactical vest consists of a Kevlar weave that's very fine and will stop 9mm pistol rounds. Webbing on the front and back of the vest permits attaching such equipment as grenades, walkie-talkies and pistols. The Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI) is made of a boron carbide ceramic with a spectra shield backing that's an extremely hard material. It stops, shatters and catches any fragments up to a 7.62 mm round with a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per second."
The old, Vietnam-era vest would not stop a 7.62mm rifle round. Whether it would stop a 9mm handgun round I'm not sure, but there are plenty of reports of guys being killed by being shot through the flak vest. It was never intended to stop aimed rifle fire. And it certainly wasn't made from hinged solid plate! Here's a page with a photo. It was made primarily of nylon.
That the new armor system -- with plates -- can reliably stop rifle rounds is a big deal. It was not true before; I do not believe there was a personal armoring system available to the average troops in any war before this one, that would stop bullets. The WWII, Korea, and Vietnam "flak jackets" were exactly that -- to stop flak, that is, fragments produced by things exploding.
You are also mistaken about the 5.56mm round. It does too have a steel penetrator. Nonwithstanding my personal experience (fire one through several layers of 1/4" mild steel plate separated by a few inches and you can see the copper jacket and lead surround strip off, and the steel core continue), there are an abundance of references on the net. The current issue is called the M885 Ball round, it is a 62 grain bullet with a full copper jacket and lead surrounding a cylindrical steel core. It's commonly referred to as "Green tip" because the tips of the bullets are painted green to differentiate them from the older, solid-lead M193 round, which has no coloring on the tips.
You can get quite an argument going with people familiar with terminal ballistics by asking about whether the wound profile of the new M855 bullets (they're quite a bit messier than the old solid lead ones) are due to the bullets 'tumbling,' or breaking apart on impact, but it's quite well known that they have a steel penetrator, and that this was introduced principally to defeat new types of body armor. The Russians have a comparable cartridge, for similar reasons. (Best reference: http://matrix.dumpshock.com/raygun/basics/pmrb.htm l)
You win the prize. It's unfortunate that more people don't come to this entirely logical conclusion. A lot of people see "flak jacket" and immediately assume that it has the magic powers of a "bullet-proof vest" (as if such a thing existed).
I found a summary of information on the armor currently being used. The good ones are the Interceptor system, which are the ones I was describing with a lightweight vest and then trauma plate inserts. With plates inserted it weighs 16.4 pounds, without plates 8.4 pounds. The vest itself will stop a 9mm Parabellum handgun round (and assorted shrapnel, which is a good thing given that bombs seem to be popular with the enemy over there), the plates are necessary for it to stop a rifle bullet. It's manufactured by Point Blank Body Armor of Oakland Park, FL.
The less pleasant ones to wear are the older, much heavier and thicker Vietnam era flak vest. Apparently these were being issued to some people (who on paper were in combat-support roles where they wouldn't be as at-risk, I think, but reality disagreed) when there weren't enough Interceptor vests to go around. It was truly a "flak vest" and wasn't really intended to stop aimed weapons fire, in the same way that the old steel pot helmet couldn't stop a bullet either, but was worn for secondary protection. I think this is the one. Having personally worn one, it's a bitch.
One assumes that there is probably a way to release the valve manually and dump the water from the vest, if it's that hard to get out of. Although on second thought there might not be a way to get the water out, because that would allow air into the system and necessitate a lot more complexity in order to purge the air when it got back into the lines.
I think the idea is more that if you suddenly think your vehicle is about to get RPGed, that you can get out quickly and not get hung up by the cold-water hose. (So breakaway connectors at some point.) If you're going to be out of the vehicle for a while, you take off the cooling suit and leave it.
Given that most engagements in Iraq are very quick, lasting only a few minutes, whether the water stays in the vest or not may not be a huge concern. Either you're going to be getting back in the vehicle, or have an opportunity to take the vest off, within a few minutes of having to get out in a hurry.
The duty cycle on a piece of equipment used by NASCAR drivers isn't going to be anything like what it's going to experience in the military. How often do drivers race? Once a week, a few times a week? Once a day at most? How many connect/disconnect cycles are the connectors rated for? And the equipment is probably inspected after each use, and if it does fail, the consequences are relatively minor.
Especially when these things are new and there aren't enough to go around, I could easily see one of these suits getting near-continuous usage in the military. That's twenty four hours a day in dusty, dirty, physically abusive conditions, subjected to all sorts of vibration, crushing, pinching, and abrasion, until it's either obviously unserviceable or fails.
Adapting commercial off-the-shelf equipment for military usage isn't something that the people who design this stuff haven't though of. If there are civilian products like this already, I have no doubt that they probably have several for testing already. But that doesn't mean that they should just be sent out as-is; there are much more rigorous standards for military equipment than commercial stuff for a reason. I've seen what happens to COTS gear, even well made stuff, when it's subjected to military use for any length of time. It gets eaten up. In some cases that's okay -- it's considered practically disposable because it's cheap compared to mil-spec equivalents -- and people tend to get away with it in training sometimes as a result. But having stuff fail every 1000 hours versus every 10,000 hours means a lot more than just multiplying the manufacturing cost by 10, when you have a supply chain that stretches around the world.
I guess my biggest point is this: the people that develop these things aren't stupid. Neither are the people who maintain the supply chains, and do the cost/benefit analysis. You can be sure that somewhere, someplace, somebody probably made a spreadsheet and a powerpoint presentation on why it was a better move to develop a military version of these suits, than to just order a whole lot more of the COTS version. We may not ever see that analysis exactly, and as a result the system seems wasteful (which is a different argument in itself: one about transparency), but it doesn't mean that's actually the case.
The main objection to swamp coolers is that they'd require a lot more water to be carried along with vehicles than is currently called for.
Right now, if you're calculating what it takes to support a Humvee, you have spare parts, oil, and loads and loads of diesel. Adding another thing to the supply chain is not trivial. If you had water as an input as well, then you'd need to make sure you were bringing a lot more of it along. Every how many miles do you need to have a re-watering stop for the air-conditioners? At what rates do they consume water based on temperature and humidity? Can they use groundwater from rural wells, or does it need to be demineralized or distilled?
All of that is a lot more difficult than just saying "requires X gallons of #2 Diesel Fuel per unit per mile per hour" and using the existing body of knowledge about automotive air conditioners to calculate the increase in fuel consumption when the A/C is running.
Also, and I don't know if this was mentioned in the article, but these cooling suits were originally used (IIRC) on helicopters. Apparently the temperatures inside them can get just as beastly, and they either had some kind of chiller system already that could be attached to suits, or were retrofitted with one. I can't find any information on them quickly, but I think I read about it in Discover or one of the other more pedestrian science mags a few years back. Anyway, when you factor this in (obviously evaporative cooling isn't an option in an aircraft -- water is heavy) these suits in vehicles make more sense. They're using existing technology.
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Does anyone know if you can do the opposite thing? That is, map the Alt key on a (in my case, Linux) PC to the Ctrl and vice versa?
I've used a Mac for years and prefer the Mac layout in terms of cutting/copying/pasting with the keyboard; the Ctrl key is too far out to the side for me to hit with my thumb, which is how I use the Command key on a Mac. (PC users seem to do Ctrl-V and the like using their little finger, which I find unnatural.)
Any idea how to remap those keys?
You can't do this with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but you can get a conventional (dongle) wireless keyboard and mouse, plug them into a USB KVM switch with hotkey support, and control two computers from across the room. To switch between systems you press the hotkey combination: on mine it's a double-tap of the [Scroll Lock] key. I use this setup in my home to control a Linux and Power Mac box. The KVM is some $30 job from NewEgg; email me if you want the brand.
Actual dual-pairability of BT devices would be sweet, however I'm not sure if you're going to want to hold your breath on that. In the meantime, if you want to control two computers with one keyboard and mouse you have the ability right now.
That's not pedantic, that's a full revision difference. Practically an order of magnitude in the software world, if you will.
I'm willing to write it off as a typo, but still it's a pretty serious one.
Given that MS has a vested interest in continuing to sell Windows licenses, and Office licenses, and Terminal Server licenses ... what you'd effectively have is Citrix. Except maybe replace the Citrix client with Internet Explorer.
That's MS's vision of "portable apps." Run them from as many Windows boxes as you can afford to license!
Very cool -- although I'm not sure that what that software does is exactly what I was thinking about. Perhaps it (or one of its components) do it and I'm just not seeing the capability demonstrated in the review. I suppose to do the panorama it has to be doing it in two dimensions.
I was thinking if you took several pictures of a mountain, for example, from various sides and heights, and wanted to create a 3-D model of the mountain, you'd need to be able to deduce the camera's position relative to the mountain in three-dimensional space based only on the visual information in the photo. This for a human isn't particularly hard to do; you use things like shadows and key features, but for a machine it might be tough especially without manually-defined reference points. Although based on reading the papers in another reply to my post (LionKimbro's) apparently this has been pretty well figured out, which I find very impressive.
I'll definitely give that Hugin software a shot though, I've been looking for something to create panoramas. And I'm very curious to see how it does at automatically defining the reference points. And it's open source and runs on my Mac and on Linux -- can't beat that.
At any rate, I've definitely been pleasantly surprised to see how far the state of the art has progressed beyond where I thought it was. Thanks for the link!
I agree. While I've never played with VMWare, you can be sure that if I was going to play with some new OS tomorrow, be it Windows or BSD or something exotic, I wouldn't do it by dual-booting my system. Old sub-800MHz Celeron systems are being given away if you look around/ask (esp. on Freecycle and Craigslist), although IMO any self-respecting geek probably has his or her door propped open with one.
I can see certain people who need to dual-boot, however. Mainly people with notebooks who want to run Linux but still need Windows for business reasons. Perhaps the virtualization software will make even this unnecessary in time, but if there's any processing overhead then it might be a no-go: a notebook running on batteries with clock speed scaled down might not have the cycles to support it.
But certainly for hobbyist purposes, I'd question the unnecessary risk of dual-booting a 'production' PC (one that you're using for your email/web/photos/etc.) because of the risk of screwing it up, plus just the added complexity you're adding to the system that you're trying to test. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, although I'm sure there are exceptional scenarios.
I think the person further up in the thread who speculated that their biggest opportunity is a set-top box is right on the money.
Limited-functionality office/internet/email machines are low-margin and seem like they're trying to provide a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. One that had most of it's applications on the server solves some problems that conventional PCs have, but requires a broadband internet connection to be practical. The people that have broadband are mostly not the people who are going to be happy with such a limited device. The target market for such an appliance are the folks still using dialup AOL on their Win95 box. Really to get them, you'd have to do a lot of bundling: maybe one monthly rate for cable TV, phone service (via Vonage/other VOIP), data, and a kiosk/appliance rental with remote storage and remote-delivered applications. However that would require a lot of negotiations with either cable companies or Telcos. It's possible, but I don't see it as being very likely.
The STB market is one that's been tried and for which there is a market, but nobody has managed to hit right yet. That's why I think it's a potential opportunity for Google. (The other company that has a history of doing things right when others have given up is Apple, but they got burned early by STBs and haven't shown much interest since.) A sealed box that interfaced to a TV and was controlled with wireless peripherals, and interoperated with PCs via Wifi as a DVR, browser, and music player could have potential. It would be upmarket, for the consumer that already has broadband, thereby avoiding the connectivity issue. However displays are a problem. Conventional NTSC TVs suck as computer displays, and HDTVs don't have sufficent penetration to warrant the kind of volume a $200 Wal-Mart accessory needs.
Maybe a few years from now this will be ready for prime time, but right now digital TV sets are still too expensive for the average person. I went in to Best Buy yesterday and was appalled at the cost difference between conventional and digital sets: while 27 or 32" analogs sold for around $200, you couldn't touch an HD set in that size for almost $500. Until that situation resolves itself and you see digital sets in most living rooms, the "livingroom PC" will always be limited.
I'm not sure that I buy your argument. Security updates seem to come out pretty quickly for my Debian server, and I paid essentially nothing for its OS.
If -- and I frankly don't believe that it's going to happen -- Google were to make a PC that had a Linux backend, their biggest job would be to distribute the security updates from the various installed components to users. Obviously they would have a vested interest in keeping it secure also, but it's not as if they'd be completely on their own in the same way Microsoft is.
Plus, if many of the applications resided on the server rather than locally, or were automatically updated from the server frequently, then there wouldn't be the problem of encouraging users to install security updates: it would all be done transparently without any intervention. This obviously necessitates a level of quality control on the updates so functionality isn't changed, which might require a monthly fee, but it's not out of the realm of possibility for an ad-supported system either.
Most people I know would gladly pay a few hundred dollars extra to not use Windows, if they had a real alternative.
However there's usually always some Catch-22 that keeps [Linux flavor of the week] from working out. The biggest one I've seen with home users is that they have pirated Windows applications that they're absolutely wed to, and can't afford to either not use, or buy a replacement for on another platform.
The number of people who actually use Windows because they enjoy it and think it's a good OS is quite small, I think. The public has a pretty negative perception of it in general, because of viruses and spyware; even non-technical business-people hate how it drives the hardware upgrade cycle so aggressively every few years. However Windows is a difficult thing to cut out, and it only takes one obscure productivity app to lock people in.
Windows exists and maintains its marketshare because of an equation that balances user dislike for it against the perceived pain of changing to anything else. Currently that perceived pain and expense greatly outweighs the annoyance Windows provides.
While I understand your point and think it's probably quite valid, for the record I've seen quite a few 11-year olds do things that I would probably tear out my hair trying to teach to my (boomer-generation) parents. :)
Obviously my phone -- a Motorola Razr -- probably isn't the best metric for ease of use. However, I still think phone manufacturers could make strides getting on par with digital cameras. Perhaps taking the pictures has gotten easier, but I've yet to see a camera that would mount out-of-the-box as Mass Storage to upload the photos to a computer. Perhaps this has been done also; if so I wish they'd advertise it more. Using standard (SD/MMC) cards would be a plus also.
I think that dynamic range is a shining example of a casualty of the "megapixel wars." Companies are competing to turn out more and more pixels per square millimeter of sensor, and per dollar, but there doesn't seem to be much effort going into sensor design: improving the range or experimenting with new designs.
Having more pixels is important, but if you know how to compose your shot (so you don't have to do a lot of zooming and cropping later), having a 3MP camera with a lot of dynamic range would be far preferable to a 6MP camera without the range. The difference in the quality of the photos would be palpable also. However, manufacturers don't bother going down that road because nobody wants to be the only brand on the shelf that's one "MP" lower than the others.
I used to sell digital cameras (non-commissioned) and my personal favorite brand was Minolta. I liked them because they had a fast shot-to-shot time and much better zoom than the competitors at the time; however they had somewhat less megapixels-per-dollar than the competitors. I pretty much had a set speech to explain why, for an average person making small prints, a 3.2MP camera with a 6x optical zoom was not inferior to a 4MP camera with a 2-3x optical zoom.
Similar to how microprocessor companies ignored many possible avenues of improvement, preferring to drive their clock speeds ever higher until they hit a wall, camera manufacturers are going to max out their pixels before bothering to do anything about dynamic range or adopt three-chip (or Foveon-type) color.
You know, as cynical as that is, you're quite right.
Kodak isn't the only company that's doing this either; there are a lot of "entry level" digitals that are basically aiming for the group of people who are moving up (or over, one might say) from disposable film cameras. There are a ton of these people around. They honestly don't care about quality in the same way that even the most novice photography student does: if the image is recognizable, and doesn't have hideously obvious defects like big dust specks (and maybe not even then), they don't care. They've been buying, using, and throwing away plastic-lensed disposables that are nothing but some 400 or 800 speed film with a shutter and a strobe light -- probably not much better than a box with a hole in it -- for years, and they're happy with the results.
What they really want from a digital camera has nothing to do with quality, it's immediate gratification and the ability to share pictures. Why do you think that Kodak's digitals have HUGE displays on the back? Because that's what a lot of people care about: they want to take a picture and then be able to show it off to their friends. For some, they may not even really look at the photo once they take it off of the camera; it's something taken in that moment, for use the moment later. The next thing people want is to be able to share (via email) pictures, and perhaps print a few off here and there, so those are the next easiest functions to do.
The quality of the image -- once you get above a certain point, which I think is about 1024x768 pixels -- doesn't matter to a lot of people. The reason people buy multi-megapixel cameras (aside from the fact that they "want the best" without knowing why, which is probably the dominant reason) is so they can zoom in on things in the frame later. Megapixels are like megahertz were a few years ago: people have this dim understanding that they should be buying more, but no idea why. However they do it anyway.
Kodak's cheap digitals are perfectly designed for a certain kind of person. They let you take an image, show it off to people on the big built-in screen, shove it into a dock and email or save or print it. For 90% of the people who buy them, that's all they ever have to do. If you want more from a camera, don't buy one of the entry level models!
There was a time when the fact that a camera was digital implied that it was somewhat high-end. That era is over, and you can't blame Kodak's engineers (whether they were in-house or outsourced) for designing a camera that matches its target market.
I think that what will eventually spell the end of the true entry-level digital cameras is when cellphone digitals become easier to use. Right now they're too complex for most people. I know quite a few people who have cellphones with cameras, but don't use them because they don't want to figure out how. There isn't (on most phones I've seen anyway) just one button that you can press to take a picture. On mine, it takes four (Camera->Capture->Store->In Camera), and that's three too many. And getting the pictures off requires having Bluetooth working and manually selecting the files -- no iPhoto/Picasa integration. Once the phone manufacturers make it easy enough for a braindead person to use (and this includes the sharing end, not just the picture-taking end), I think the demand for cheap dedicated still cameras will decrease sharply.
You can do it for a lot cheaper than that.
Just get two disposable cameras. Film is okay, if you count your frames, but now they've even got digital "disposables." Mount them horizontally on a flat piece of wood (I saw someone use what looked like a 1x2, but it's not like it matters) right next to each other. Depending on the kind of camera, they're small enough that placed next to each other the lenses are spaced almost the right distance apart. You can even space them wider apart if you want a more exaggerated 3-d effect.
Then just wind and shoot the cameras simultaneously. If you're taking pictures of anything moving, you have to be pretty lucky to catch the shutters at exactly the same time or else it'll look messed up. (But i've actually seen some pretty amazing stuff done this way of people on stage.) Also avoid using their flashes since they won't go off in sync and you may get strange shadows.
Then just get them developed and put on a CD, and make sure that the processor keeps them straight so you know afterwards which one is left and which one is right.
Then you can either print them and try to mount them in a stereoscope viewer, which is what I saw done with them (basically just two prints hung side by side with a divider in between that you put your nose up to), or you could probably produce a red/blue image in Photoshop. You need some tinkering to get the viewers right, but there are a lot of books on the subject.
There is also, if you want to blow a lot of money on such a project, there used to be a purpose-built Russian camera called the "FED" that used regular 35mm film and had two separate lenses. No idea if they're still making them or not.
I just did a little Googling and there is a Engadget tutorial available. It uses some assumedly PC-only software though, so I'm not too interested. Others might be, though.
You would not need just the images, but also very accurate positioning data on where the photos were taken.
In theory, perhaps you could extrapolate the positioning information by looking at static objects in the frame, shadows, etc., but I don't think that's anywhere near practical.
However if you had a cellphone with augmented GPS (WAAS or something like it) that had submeter accuracy or better, and you were taking pictures of a large object, and maybe included a compass chip or something like it to give you an azimuth reading, then I think you could do what you're talking about. At the very least you'd be able to easily construct a photographic panorama / flyaround (a la Quicktime VR). The work necessary to produce a 3-D model might be, as a physicist I knew used to say, "really nontrivial." At least working just from the images and telemetry data without any other subjective stuff (like selecting out the areas by hand as those 2-d photogrammetry systems have you doing, it seems).
But in general I think that's a very cool idea. It would be neat to see digital camera manufacturers start to embed GPS chips into cameras; at the very least it would be cool to open something in iPhoto and see a minimap of exactly where you took the photo. I know that there are some vacation photos of mine that I wish I knew exactly where I'd been standing when I took it, and there's no easy way to figure out now. It's not like the chips to do that would be bulky anymore, now that they've been miniaturized for cellphones. In fact I think I remember a fairly old Kodak DSLR (one of their really serious ones that were built on Nikon F1 frames) that had a serial port and might have been able to connect to a GPS, for that purpose. I think it's a feature that's ready for prime time.
Mod parent up.
For web developers anyway, this is (or ought to be -- if browsers were platform agnostic and standards compliant) the correct attitude to have. In fact, the user's choice of browser shouldn't matter either in an ideal world, that it does is unfortunate but for the present unavoidable.
Getting back to the original point of widgets, I think the Windows-compatibility issue (or lack therof) is irrelevant. Most widgets that I've seen are written by small hobby developers or individual users, or very small software companies. This is something that Mac and Linux users are familiar with, but based on my experience Windows users less so. For whatever reason, the Windows platform doesn't seem as favorable to small freeware developers. When I had to use a Windows machine and wanted to download any kind of small utility or application, it seemed like there was always a price-tag attached. That's not to say that there aren't Konfabulator widgets written by small developers for Windows, (and not having used them I can't comment on their quality), but if you're looking to write some freeware and aren't trying to make a buck from it, it seems like Linux or Mac OS are better platforms: sure, you have a smaller userbase and smaller audience, but you can achieve surprisingly deep penetration (and, to a certain extent, notoriety) into that market if what you write is good.
To make a very broad generalization, based on my experience with Windows and Mac/Linux freeware: there is obviously less of it for the less-popular platforms, but the quality seems to be significantly higher on average. Most of it is actually free (less shareware), and what does cost money is generally commercial-quality. I've never gotten the feeling I've had looking at some Windows shareware (that the author is just trolling for money from ignorant users), on any "alternative" platform.
Ah, I understand now. In that case, I agree completely -- Apple has always been bad at upgradability of its "consumer" products. I wasn't aware that the Mac Mini in particular was such a PITA, but it doesn't totally surprise me. As a company they've always seemed fascinated by the concept of the sealed "black box" (or perhaps white box) that the consumer couldn't really touch.
However their higher-tier products, the Power Macs in particular, don't hold to this. It seems to be a philosophy limited to their entry-level gear, and somewhat unfortunate.
Add that to the hoops that must be jumped through in order to open entry-level Apple products, and you have products that look great out of the box, but are terrible after long-term use.
I strenuously disagree with this. I've owned quite a few Apple products, and while not perhaps their full product line, enough so that I'm familiar with how they package and pack things. I think that their packaging is some of the best designed, ever. The iPod packaging isn't anything as special, but it's still not bad.
If anyone bought an original (CRT) iMac, then you remember the packaging that it came in: open box, lift out top foam, grab handle and remove computer, set on desk. Then pull out the mouse and keyboard, plug them in, and go. It was fairly brilliant; IIRC even Consumer Reports was impressed, and this was back when they were really Mac-haters.
It's been a while since I've bought a new machine from Apple, but I can't imagine that they've gone much downhill. They always seemed to put a lot more effort into the design of their packaging and initial "presentation" of the device to the customer than any other manufacturer I'm familiar with. (Granted they'd better, given what they charge for their gear...)
You aren't in the U.S., or else you don't deal with Verizon Wireless.
That six year old phone of yours isn't worth the plastic it's made out of; or at least that's the experience I've had. Go ahead and try to get it activated: Verizon won't touch it. Maybe if you have a GSM instead of a CDMA provider you can just put the chip in and it will work (provided you don't have a vendor lock on the phone), but for a great many people, the cell-phone upgrade cycle has been driven -- and driven hard -- by the cellphone companies.
First it was analog to digital phones. If you didn't upgrade, they couldn't force you, but if you wanted to change billing plans or anything else that required them to re-activate the phone, no way, Jose. Time to buy a new phone -- either pony up big bucks or accept a years-long contract to get a subsidized one. Then just recently it's been non-GPS enabled phones that are getting cut out. If you have a phone that doesn't have GPS, don't bother trying to get anything done to it with Verizon: you're stuck. They won't touch it, even to move between two numbers on the same customer account. If you want to do anything, you need to buy a new phone.
I have no doubt that three or four years from now, once people are starting to think about whether to get a new phone (which, at least in the U.S., basically implies re-contracting with a company for a 'term of years') or keep their old one, something else will come up that Verizon will use as an excuse to force another round of upgrades.
I still have a few of my old phones -- all in perfect working condition -- that aren't worth their plastic now because of Verizon's policies. About all they're good for is (maybe) being able to dial 911; the analog-only ones I'm not sure I'd even trust for that.
Three reasons off the top of my head:
1) Quality. The files you can get from Allofmp3.com are significantly higher quality than I've ever gotten from P2P. There's also higher quality-of-service; you're probably not going to spend any time downloading a file halfway only to have it fail on you and waste your time. This alone might make it worthwhile to a lot of users. Plus, and this may not be as much of an issue now as it was previously, AoMP3 isn't vunerable to poisoning with dummy files.
2) Plausible deniability. AoMP3 looks enough like a legitimate site to fool a lot of people, including several attorneys (admittedly, not IP law attorneys) that I've showed it to. People who aren't familiar with the current state of online music purchasing could easily assume that it's a legitimate, legal site; it's not entirely obvious that the site is Russian and certainly not obvious that it might not be legal in Russia. Especially if someone else paid the money and put the credits onto your account -- the payment system is the only part that's very sketchy -- you don't even have to go through a clickthru IIRC (I've only seen it a few times).
3) Resistance to blocking. AoMP3 isn't -- to the best of my knowledge -- blocked by most institutions, nor easily filtered on a protocol or port level. I've heard that the files themselves are even sent using SSL. So users who are at an institution (like many colleges) that block P2P can still use AoMP3.
Plus, Allofmp3 is small fries compared to the big P2P services, plus the delivery of files over SSL makes it more difficult to intercept, plus it's harder to get end-users for "redistributing" material (which is what most of the file-sharing lawsuits have been over -- they're not getting people for downloading right now I don't believe, at least not yet). Given that there are thousands of easily identified users on U.S. filesharing networks who are actively redistributing content, I think it will be a while before the authorities get around to working on allofmp3.com. Especially when you consider that it would take international pressure to do so, pressure which could probably be easily diverted on the Russian end with enough hard currency in the right hands.
I'm not necessarily defending AoMP3; but there are rather obvious reasons why people use it, and don't use P2P.
Just out of curiosity, where are you located?
I have never heard of a LUG (or Mac User Group, which is the other OS I use) in my area, although if there was an active one I'd probably join. That begs the question -- where and how do people find out about LUGs in their area, and how many users are muddling along (as I am) on their own, wishing they knew more people in their local area who also used Linux that were willing to help them?
I'm sorry, but I have to call you out on this.
.50 BMG? That's ridiculous. There isn't any type of personal body armor that will stop a 50-cal, even today (unless you consider an armored vehicle a form of personal body armor).
I don't know what kind of "flack jacket" you're talking about that's comprised of "rticulated ceramic/steel plates with a touch of Kevlar fabric to hold it together" but it's nothing that I've ever seen. And a flak jacket from the Korean war, that was rated to stop a
I'll refer you over to the Body Armor page at Globalsecurity.org. "The [pre-Interceptor] "flak jacket," constructed of ballistic nylon, provided protection primarily from munitions fragments and was ineffective against most pistol and rifle threats. These vests also were very cumbersome and bulky and were restricted primarily to military use." This adequately describes the vests used up through Vietnam and which were even issued during the onset of the current war in Iraq. On the Interceptor system, which is current issue, "The outer tactical vest consists of a Kevlar weave that's very fine and will stop 9mm pistol rounds. Webbing on the front and back of the vest permits attaching such equipment as grenades, walkie-talkies and pistols. The Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI) is made of a boron carbide ceramic with a spectra shield backing that's an extremely hard material. It stops, shatters and catches any fragments up to a 7.62 mm round with a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per second."
The old, Vietnam-era vest would not stop a 7.62mm rifle round. Whether it would stop a 9mm handgun round I'm not sure, but there are plenty of reports of guys being killed by being shot through the flak vest. It was never intended to stop aimed rifle fire. And it certainly wasn't made from hinged solid plate! Here's a page with a photo. It was made primarily of nylon.
That the new armor system -- with plates -- can reliably stop rifle rounds is a big deal. It was not true before; I do not believe there was a personal armoring system available to the average troops in any war before this one, that would stop bullets. The WWII, Korea, and Vietnam "flak jackets" were exactly that -- to stop flak, that is, fragments produced by things exploding.
You are also mistaken about the 5.56mm round. It does too have a steel penetrator. Nonwithstanding my personal experience (fire one through several layers of 1/4" mild steel plate separated by a few inches and you can see the copper jacket and lead surround strip off, and the steel core continue), there are an abundance of references on the net. The current issue is called the M885 Ball round, it is a 62 grain bullet with a full copper jacket and lead surrounding a cylindrical steel core. It's commonly referred to as "Green tip" because the tips of the bullets are painted green to differentiate them from the older, solid-lead M193 round, which has no coloring on the tips.
You can get quite an argument going with people familiar with terminal ballistics by asking about whether the wound profile of the new M855 bullets (they're quite a bit messier than the old solid lead ones) are due to the bullets 'tumbling,' or breaking apart on impact, but it's quite well known that they have a steel penetrator, and that this was introduced principally to defeat new types of body armor. The Russians have a comparable cartridge, for similar reasons. (Best reference: http://matrix.dumpshock.com/raygun/basics/pmrb.htm l)
Also read:
http://www.geocities.com/odjobman/r1r42.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib
Ding ding ding!
You win the prize. It's unfortunate that more people don't come to this entirely logical conclusion. A lot of people see "flak jacket" and immediately assume that it has the magic powers of a "bullet-proof vest" (as if such a thing existed).
I found a summary of information on the armor currently being used. The good ones are the Interceptor system, which are the ones I was describing with a lightweight vest and then trauma plate inserts. With plates inserted it weighs 16.4 pounds, without plates 8.4 pounds. The vest itself will stop a 9mm Parabellum handgun round (and assorted shrapnel, which is a good thing given that bombs seem to be popular with the enemy over there), the plates are necessary for it to stop a rifle bullet. It's manufactured by Point Blank Body Armor of Oakland Park, FL.
The less pleasant ones to wear are the older, much heavier and thicker Vietnam era flak vest. Apparently these were being issued to some people (who on paper were in combat-support roles where they wouldn't be as at-risk, I think, but reality disagreed) when there weren't enough Interceptor vests to go around. It was truly a "flak vest" and wasn't really intended to stop aimed weapons fire, in the same way that the old steel pot helmet couldn't stop a bullet either, but was worn for secondary protection. I think this is the one. Having personally worn one, it's a bitch.
One assumes that there is probably a way to release the valve manually and dump the water from the vest, if it's that hard to get out of. Although on second thought there might not be a way to get the water out, because that would allow air into the system and necessitate a lot more complexity in order to purge the air when it got back into the lines.
I think the idea is more that if you suddenly think your vehicle is about to get RPGed, that you can get out quickly and not get hung up by the cold-water hose. (So breakaway connectors at some point.) If you're going to be out of the vehicle for a while, you take off the cooling suit and leave it.
Given that most engagements in Iraq are very quick, lasting only a few minutes, whether the water stays in the vest or not may not be a huge concern. Either you're going to be getting back in the vehicle, or have an opportunity to take the vest off, within a few minutes of having to get out in a hurry.
The duty cycle on a piece of equipment used by NASCAR drivers isn't going to be anything like what it's going to experience in the military. How often do drivers race? Once a week, a few times a week? Once a day at most? How many connect/disconnect cycles are the connectors rated for? And the equipment is probably inspected after each use, and if it does fail, the consequences are relatively minor.
Especially when these things are new and there aren't enough to go around, I could easily see one of these suits getting near-continuous usage in the military. That's twenty four hours a day in dusty, dirty, physically abusive conditions, subjected to all sorts of vibration, crushing, pinching, and abrasion, until it's either obviously unserviceable or fails.
Adapting commercial off-the-shelf equipment for military usage isn't something that the people who design this stuff haven't though of. If there are civilian products like this already, I have no doubt that they probably have several for testing already. But that doesn't mean that they should just be sent out as-is; there are much more rigorous standards for military equipment than commercial stuff for a reason. I've seen what happens to COTS gear, even well made stuff, when it's subjected to military use for any length of time. It gets eaten up. In some cases that's okay -- it's considered practically disposable because it's cheap compared to mil-spec equivalents -- and people tend to get away with it in training sometimes as a result. But having stuff fail every 1000 hours versus every 10,000 hours means a lot more than just multiplying the manufacturing cost by 10, when you have a supply chain that stretches around the world.
I guess my biggest point is this: the people that develop these things aren't stupid. Neither are the people who maintain the supply chains, and do the cost/benefit analysis. You can be sure that somewhere, someplace, somebody probably made a spreadsheet and a powerpoint presentation on why it was a better move to develop a military version of these suits, than to just order a whole lot more of the COTS version. We may not ever see that analysis exactly, and as a result the system seems wasteful (which is a different argument in itself: one about transparency), but it doesn't mean that's actually the case.
The main objection to swamp coolers is that they'd require a lot more water to be carried along with vehicles than is currently called for.
Right now, if you're calculating what it takes to support a Humvee, you have spare parts, oil, and loads and loads of diesel. Adding another thing to the supply chain is not trivial. If you had water as an input as well, then you'd need to make sure you were bringing a lot more of it along. Every how many miles do you need to have a re-watering stop for the air-conditioners? At what rates do they consume water based on temperature and humidity? Can they use groundwater from rural wells, or does it need to be demineralized or distilled?
All of that is a lot more difficult than just saying "requires X gallons of #2 Diesel Fuel per unit per mile per hour" and using the existing body of knowledge about automotive air conditioners to calculate the increase in fuel consumption when the A/C is running.
Also, and I don't know if this was mentioned in the article, but these cooling suits were originally used (IIRC) on helicopters. Apparently the temperatures inside them can get just as beastly, and they either had some kind of chiller system already that could be attached to suits, or were retrofitted with one. I can't find any information on them quickly, but I think I read about it in Discover or one of the other more pedestrian science mags a few years back. Anyway, when you factor this in (obviously evaporative cooling isn't an option in an aircraft -- water is heavy) these suits in vehicles make more sense. They're using existing technology.