It's not just a wheel. The wheel is just the physical interface. There's also the way it scrolls through long lists quickly...
Bullshit! IT IS JUST A WHEEL! The way it scrolls through long lists quickly, it's no different than any other application where a wheel is used to translate rotational motion into linear input.
All the best interface designs are obvious... in retrospect.
Fine, it's a convenient interface design. But it isn't in any way novel or unique, and has in fact been used for input forever.
The wheel is what makes the iPod unique...
And I could make a portable music player with a plastic fish pasted onto it that lip-synched all the songs played on it, and that would be unique too, but it doesn't mean I get to patent the stupid thing.
We've been using wheels for input since, well, since forever! Those big round things that have been on ships for centuries and centuries? They're wheels! They translate rotation into linear input. What's that thing on the iPod? It's a wheel! It translates rotation into linear input!
Hello???
Fucking Steve Jobs thinks he's patented the fucking wheel! And you know who's to blame? That other fucking idiot, Jeff Bezos, with the infinitely moronic One-Click patent. The two dufuses are slugging it out, vying to be the one who holds the world's most ridiculous patent!
None of this would be possible if it weren't for the fact that the people working at the USPTO seem to have been genetically engineered to be utterly devoid of critical thinking skills! I mean, hiring the merely stupid would not do, because at least then there's a chance of a ridiculous idea being rejected. It's like we cross-bred a human being with a rock, gave it a diploma for knowing how to inhale before exhaling, and then shipped the result off to Washington so it could have an "APPROVED" stamp crazy-glued into it's rat-like claw!
You're obviously an expert in all this. Why don't you phone up an offer your services;-)
Nine times out of ten when a stupid science story makes its way to print, its the fault of the reporter. She either didn't understand the subject matter, or (and this is true about all subjects) she isn't a very good reporter.
At wild guess I'd say the scientists are surprised because it is surprising, maybe not to you , but to the experts who have extensivley studied data from previous mars missions presumably.
We already knew olivine existed on the surface of Mars based on the results from the orbiter, so again, it really isn't surprising we'd find olivine on the surface of Mars.
Sigh! why is that geeks think that because they can write a few lines of code that they're experts one everything
Simple. Programmers are forced to think. If you can't think clearly, then your code doesn't work.
Engineers (the type who build *real* things) have the same burden, however it isn't tested nearly as often as it is for programmers. A programmer gets daily, if not hourly or minute-by-minute feedback on the quality of his thought process.
Scientists on the other hand generally receive their feedback very, very slowly.
The net effect is that it takes longer for bad scientists to be washed out of the system than it does for bad programmers.
Ergo, I've come to be very skeptical of taking the word of a scientist based solely on his being called a scientist. And when I say scientist, I don't mean the engineers at NASA who got the rover to the surface of Mars. I'm talking about the guys who are responsible for figuring out which rock to visit, what tests to perform, which theory to try to prove or disprove.
It's easy to tell a good programmer from a bad programmer. But a good planetary scientist from a bad planetary scientist? How do you do that?
It would be called the Sun phone. What they'd do is launch a big balloon and have it hover over your large metropolitan areas. The phone gives you seemless voice capabiities, and then you plug it into your computer and you've got hi-speed access. And then the really cool feature... the thing lights up, just like the real Sun (only this Sun would be visible at night.)
Yeah, it's just a marketing gimmick I guess, but it seemed like such a good fit. And besides, what else is Sun going to do? Manufacture over-priced blade servers?
I mean, they're the ones who are always talking about the windstorms that plague the planet, yes?
And for how long have these windstorms been occurring? Millions and millions of years?
So it seems reasonable to conclude that the dust/soil on the planet is going to be fairly homogenous by now.
They talk about the rock abrasion tool and the various spectrometers and what not, but the tool I'd like to hear about is the shovel. The dried lakebeds on Mars are no doubt little different than the dried lakebeds on Earth. To get to anything really interesting, you need to dig.
Another question I have had is in forming a new institution how would you deal with the detrimental effects that are brought on by the very success of that institution?
Space. Lots and lots of space. Another reason to fret over our future. If instead of automobiles we all owned interstellar-capable spacecraft then this conversation would be moot, wouldn't it?
It's probably our last best hope. Our Ace in the hole. Technology. The crazy man is at the wheel and he's heading for the brick wall. Your first instinct is to stop, but maybe the solution is to help him stomp on the accelerator.
Patriot wasn't really about "watering the tree of liberty with blood", it was the now very tired tale of the good guy avenging bad deeds wrought by the bad guy. Yeah, there was a subtext that was the American Revolution, but it wasn't really the story.
I'll grant you that it's a subtle distinction.
I'll give you Braveheart, if only because the tyranny was portrayed as be widely experienced by many, not just the protaganist. Then again, it was far enough removed from our contemporary existance so as to be harmless, and the protaganist died a fairly unseemly death in the end.
Matrix is a good example too, but here the oppressors are machines, and while maybe you and I get it, I'll bet you that most were into the hi-wire kung fu action. Witness the popular (if not critical) success of the sequels.
The movie I want to see has a bunch of guys like us putting our lives on the line in an effort to overthrow the government, and winning (and getting the girl, living happily everafter, etc.) Not going to happen.
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I would just point out that you seem to be a intelligent fellow, and that your perceptions--along with the attendant behaviors--are not experienced by more than a few percentage points of American society.
To put it another way, there's no reason why your vision of a solution wouldn't have worked for any of the thousands of tyrannies that came before this one. The problem is always that the people aren't ready to take on the responsibility. And that is often a condition deliberately imposed by the "masters."
I'm a (l|L)ibertarian, I believe that ultimately the only viable society is the one that is both free and vigilant. But it does seem as though such a society requires a period of incubation. And as long as somebody keeps pulling the plug, I am forced to consider steps to deprive that somebody of their hand.
Oh please. Nobody got more pissed off than Jean Luc.
And why shouldn't he? Every time Riker prances from one end of the bridge to the other the whole ship keels over.
Then there's Wesley, who is always breaking the really important shit.
And finally, what about Troi? Sure, I'd love to fuck her, but to listen to her go on and on and on with this "how does that make you feel?" crap. I think that if I were Picard I'd rather get anally assaulted by a chainsaw.
BTW, the "black" guy on DS9 is named Sisko, and he was part of a marvelous ensemble cast... perhaps the best acting Trek has ever seen. A lot of that has to do with the setting, being on a space station allowed for a lot more interaction with different people and so on, but a lot of it was talent too. Nana Visitor was at times truly remarkable. I'd single out Avery Brooks as well... if the man were white, we'd probably be into our second DS9 movie by now.
This sort of shit should be left to email with the SO, you know?
I mean, you're going to have a hard time selling that to anyone who has seen any of the other Treks.
That said, Mulgrew had like twelve minutes to prepare for the role, and most of the scripts for Voyager massively sucked.
Just like Enterprise. I mean, c'mon, we're talking about a series that is supposed to trace mankind's first steps into the cosmos and what's the first thing we see? A fucking Klingon!
Anyways, season three started out really good. The Night of the Living Dead episode with the Vulcans was actually extraordinary. Bakula seems to have had an encounter with a cattle prod as is acting now. T'Pol is showing more skin (just go with it.) The marines were a nice addition, if only because they're pissing Malcolm off, which means we get to see what he looks like when he's experiencing an emotion. I like Trip, but if it's a choice between him and the beagle, well...
Basically, the problem with Trek ever since Gene died has been that Berman and Braga think they're writers. They aren't. Compare the by-lines before Gene died and after. Before you had a rich assortment of talent putting out the stories. After, at least half of the stores are by Berman and Braga. They can't even fill 42 minutes with a story, they have to split the episode up and fill it with extraneous crap all of the time.
Trek should be allowed to die, if only because it goes public domain that much sooner. And as spent as the concept seems today, I have a feeling that in a few years, after our leaders have sent us to hell and back and we're light a few billion people, the rest of us will finally get it.
Everyone's going to be begging to be a Trekkie.
Re:Spirit not that impressive...?
on
News from Mars
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· Score: 1
Whoa! We had images of the surface of Venus???
Where was the news media?
I'm getting ready to grind the rock too
on
News from Mars
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I just don't take pictures or issue press releases. Probably best that way.
I don't see that the two are necessarily incompatible.
It may be that our being a fat, successful, lazy, insecure people is to blame for creating this elite, or it may be that our "masters" have caused us to be fat, lazy, and so forth.
Or more likely, both are true.
Consider the media. Consider the way it continually panders to the basest, more sensationalist stories. You would claim that we have the power to turn those stations off, and you would be right if you were talking about you and I perhaps, but what of the upcoming generation that doesn't know better?
They will continue eating this crap up, and those who control the media know what the consequence will be: another generation of fat, lazy, stupid voters that they can easily manipulate into doing or believing anything at all.
Witness the war in Iraq. Something like half of Americans believe Saddam had something to do with 9/11--despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever and that the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever is readily available to those who would seek it--or that something like half of Americans still believe Saddam had WMD's that he could use to destroy American cities.
Why do these people believe this? Because the media--even the supposedly "liberal" media--willingly goes along with the lie. Why else would they do that if there weren't an agenda?
Your argument would be a lot better if it were being made before we ceded so much of this power. But now that's it lost? How do you and I--and the minority of other people out there who understand what's going on--convince the rest of us, without access to very same media that largely created the problem in the first place?
Hollywood doesn't make movies about people voting but lots of movies about "watering the tree of liberty with blood".
I think it's suprising that you posted that on Martin Luther King day.
I think it's surprising that a guy who calls himself "mental telepathy" would be surprised by anything at all.
That said...
The America MLK faced is a very different beast than what we're facing today. Nor is Ghandi's experience particularly relevant today either.
Power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our masters will not cede such power by choice. And it seems to me the longer we wait to confront them, the harder it's going to be to prevail.
They're talking about taking away our compilers and our documentation. What's next? Electricity and books? Fire and language? The same rationale put forward in this sinister report applies equally to all technologies; to all human abilities, great and small.
It's about taking away power from the masses and conferring it onto the elite instead.
Who do you think is going to line up in support of legislation controlling access to computer technology? All kinds of candidates come to mind, all seeking to better their opportunity by denying us ours. The RIAA. The MPAA. Microsoft. Law enforcement. Almost any major news organization. The list goes on and on.
This is simply a different facet of the same threat that's been building now for a long time in this country.
As another poster here so deftly points out in his sig, the answer to 1984 is 1776.
They're saying the Hubble won't get serviced because there isn't enough time to do it before the shuttle fleet is retired. And since the date for the retirement of shuttle was selected after the Mars announcement, I think it's fair to say that Hubble is being neglected for budgetary reasons.
The article states only that Java is being used for the software used to send commands to the rover and process the output.
I'm assuming that the limited amount of power the rover has access to would forbid the use of Java, would that be right? And if everything is controlled from the ground anyways, we're not talking about especially complicated code in any case, so why bother with the overhead?
Then again, if they're sending code to the rover maybe Java does make sense; bytecode tends to be smaller than machine code, so you get better utilization of upstream bandwidth.
It is extremely cool. I got my niece and nephew one for Christmas, and had the totally righteous pleasure of helping them build a robot and watching them program it (well, watching my 10-year-old niece program it, my much younger nephew had ideas of his own as to the proper use of the technology.)
This is great news from Lego. *This* should be their future. There are so many different directions they can go with this the mind staggers at the possibilities.
What I want to see are smart bricks, i.e., bricks that are able to communicate with one another in some limited fashion. They've already got the ability to send power through the little Lego connector dealies, why not data? This would allow an assembled robot to communicate its design to the computer; it would also allow a program to discover whether the robot has been damaged.
And how about RFID tags for these bricks? The most fabulously awesome robot would be one that goes around the house looking for lost Lego pieces.
It needs to be cheaper too. By cutting the cost in half they'll end up selling way more than double the units. The way it's priced now, your average mom and dad are going to choose something like the XBox instead... they're not going to understand the tremendous potential these toys can unlock in a young mind.
The whole point to the Macintosh experience is the interface. Lose that, and you lose a good deal of the incentive for shelling out the big bucks for these machines.
I mean, I love Apple hardware, but to pay a premium for it just to use an interface I find horribly flawed? And when Sony has hardware that's just as elegant, that lets me run my choice of OS?
Using Windows NT 4 was tolerable, and I enjoyed going back to classic Mac for my personal stuff.
Then came (for me) Windows 2000, at about the same time OS X was coming out. I was pretty much on the fence at this point, largely because I couldn't believe Apple would stick with the dock.
Finally, with Windows XP, which was extremely usable, and an OS X that had the worst imaginable implementation of the Finder--and still had the dock as the primary application/process UI--the choice was really quite clear.
try this: drag your Applications folder to the document area of the dock. now you have an application menu! (right-click or click-and-hold)
Ahem, right-click?
And click-and-hold takes an eternity in I'm-busy-doin-stuff-with-my-computer mode. Might as open up a terminal.
As far as I'm concerned, replacing two UI gadgets with one isn't a blunder -- it's efficency.
Sure, if you're like the original NeXT devotee and you only had a handful of applications to keep track of. Steve Jobs likes the dock because the four or five applications he has to use on a daily basis comfortably fit on it. If you're doing lots of stuff on your box however--development, graphics, multimedia, connectivity, etc--the dock gets very old, very quickly.
And what I find interesting is that while I hear a lot of spirited defense of the dock, no one has managed to mount a defense of Apple/NeXT's decision to do away with the Application/Process menus.
(and not only did they do away with them, in the beginning they made it as hard as possible for third-parties to emulate them.)
FWIW, I think the NeXT browser is elegant too. I do from time to time still use OS X, and the browser totally saves the otherwise miserable experience I have with the Finder (on Jaguar, haven't paid for Panther yet.)
Slashdot Mirror
So by painting a picture of a circle on a track pad, you think you should get a patent?
It's not just a wheel. The wheel is just the physical interface. There's also the way it scrolls through long lists quickly...
... in retrospect.
Bullshit! IT IS JUST A WHEEL! The way it scrolls through long lists quickly, it's no different than any other application where a wheel is used to translate rotational motion into linear input.
All the best interface designs are obvious
Fine, it's a convenient interface design. But it isn't in any way novel or unique, and has in fact been used for input forever.
The wheel is what makes the iPod unique...
And I could make a portable music player with a plastic fish pasted onto it that lip-synched all the songs played on it, and that would be unique too, but it doesn't mean I get to patent the stupid thing.
I mean, c'mon... IT'S A WHEEL!!!
We've been using wheels for input since, well, since forever! Those big round things that have been on ships for centuries and centuries? They're wheels! They translate rotation into linear input. What's that thing on the iPod? It's a wheel! It translates rotation into linear input!
Hello???
Fucking Steve Jobs thinks he's patented the fucking wheel! And you know who's to blame? That other fucking idiot, Jeff Bezos, with the infinitely moronic One-Click patent. The two dufuses are slugging it out, vying to be the one who holds the world's most ridiculous patent!
None of this would be possible if it weren't for the fact that the people working at the USPTO seem to have been genetically engineered to be utterly devoid of critical thinking skills! I mean, hiring the merely stupid would not do, because at least then there's a chance of a ridiculous idea being rejected. It's like we cross-bred a human being with a rock, gave it a diploma for knowing how to inhale before exhaling, and then shipped the result off to Washington so it could have an "APPROVED" stamp crazy-glued into it's rat-like claw!
And I'm paying taxes for this???
ENOUGH ALREADY!!!
You're obviously an expert in all this. Why don't you phone up an offer your services ;-)
Nine times out of ten when a stupid science story makes its way to print, its the fault of the reporter. She either didn't understand the subject matter, or (and this is true about all subjects) she isn't a very good reporter.
At wild guess I'd say the scientists are surprised because it is surprising, maybe not to you , but to the experts who have extensivley studied data from previous mars missions presumably.
We already knew olivine existed on the surface of Mars based on the results from the orbiter, so again, it really isn't surprising we'd find olivine on the surface of Mars.
Sigh! why is that geeks think that because they can write a few lines of code that they're experts one everything
Simple. Programmers are forced to think. If you can't think clearly, then your code doesn't work.
Engineers (the type who build *real* things) have the same burden, however it isn't tested nearly as often as it is for programmers. A programmer gets daily, if not hourly or minute-by-minute feedback on the quality of his thought process.
Scientists on the other hand generally receive their feedback very, very slowly.
The net effect is that it takes longer for bad scientists to be washed out of the system than it does for bad programmers.
Ergo, I've come to be very skeptical of taking the word of a scientist based solely on his being called a scientist. And when I say scientist, I don't mean the engineers at NASA who got the rover to the surface of Mars. I'm talking about the guys who are responsible for figuring out which rock to visit, what tests to perform, which theory to try to prove or disprove.
It's easy to tell a good programmer from a bad programmer. But a good planetary scientist from a bad planetary scientist? How do you do that?
It would be called the Sun phone. What they'd do is launch a big balloon and have it hover over your large metropolitan areas. The phone gives you seemless voice capabiities, and then you plug it into your computer and you've got hi-speed access. And then the really cool feature... the thing lights up, just like the real Sun (only this Sun would be visible at night.)
Yeah, it's just a marketing gimmick I guess, but it seemed like such a good fit. And besides, what else is Sun going to do? Manufacture over-priced blade servers?
I mean, they're the ones who are always talking about the windstorms that plague the planet, yes?
And for how long have these windstorms been occurring? Millions and millions of years?
So it seems reasonable to conclude that the dust/soil on the planet is going to be fairly homogenous by now.
They talk about the rock abrasion tool and the various spectrometers and what not, but the tool I'd like to hear about is the shovel. The dried lakebeds on Mars are no doubt little different than the dried lakebeds on Earth. To get to anything really interesting, you need to dig.
It's very late for me, so let me be brief.
Another question I have had is in forming a new institution how would you deal with the detrimental effects that are brought on by the very success of that institution?
Space. Lots and lots of space. Another reason to fret over our future. If instead of automobiles we all owned interstellar-capable spacecraft then this conversation would be moot, wouldn't it?
It's probably our last best hope. Our Ace in the hole. Technology. The crazy man is at the wheel and he's heading for the brick wall. Your first instinct is to stop, but maybe the solution is to help him stomp on the accelerator.
G'night.
Bravo!
Patriot wasn't really about "watering the tree of liberty with blood", it was the now very tired tale of the good guy avenging bad deeds wrought by the bad guy. Yeah, there was a subtext that was the American Revolution, but it wasn't really the story.
I'll grant you that it's a subtle distinction.
I'll give you Braveheart, if only because the tyranny was portrayed as be widely experienced by many, not just the protaganist. Then again, it was far enough removed from our contemporary existance so as to be harmless, and the protaganist died a fairly unseemly death in the end.
Matrix is a good example too, but here the oppressors are machines, and while maybe you and I get it, I'll bet you that most were into the hi-wire kung fu action. Witness the popular (if not critical) success of the sequels.
The movie I want to see has a bunch of guys like us putting our lives on the line in an effort to overthrow the government, and winning (and getting the girl, living happily everafter, etc.) Not going to happen.
Or, it will happen, but be censored by the government for thirty-some years.
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I would just point out that you seem to be a intelligent fellow, and that your perceptions--along with the attendant behaviors--are not experienced by more than a few percentage points of American society.
To put it another way, there's no reason why your vision of a solution wouldn't have worked for any of the thousands of tyrannies that came before this one. The problem is always that the people aren't ready to take on the responsibility. And that is often a condition deliberately imposed by the "masters."
I'm a (l|L)ibertarian, I believe that ultimately the only viable society is the one that is both free and vigilant. But it does seem as though such a society requires a period of incubation. And as long as somebody keeps pulling the plug, I am forced to consider steps to deprive that somebody of their hand.
Oh please. Nobody got more pissed off than Jean Luc.
And why shouldn't he? Every time Riker prances from one end of the bridge to the other the whole ship keels over.
Then there's Wesley, who is always breaking the really important shit.
And finally, what about Troi? Sure, I'd love to fuck her, but to listen to her go on and on and on with this "how does that make you feel?" crap. I think that if I were Picard I'd rather get anally assaulted by a chainsaw.
BTW, the "black" guy on DS9 is named Sisko, and he was part of a marvelous ensemble cast... perhaps the best acting Trek has ever seen. A lot of that has to do with the setting, being on a space station allowed for a lot more interaction with different people and so on, but a lot of it was talent too. Nana Visitor was at times truly remarkable. I'd single out Avery Brooks as well... if the man were white, we'd probably be into our second DS9 movie by now.
The reason we won't put the Hubble at the L2 point is because Bush can't pronounce Lagrange. Ergo, no announcement. Thus, no funding.
Janeway was the best captain by FAR.
This sort of shit should be left to email with the SO, you know?
I mean, you're going to have a hard time selling that to anyone who has seen any of the other Treks.
That said, Mulgrew had like twelve minutes to prepare for the role, and most of the scripts for Voyager massively sucked.
Just like Enterprise. I mean, c'mon, we're talking about a series that is supposed to trace mankind's first steps into the cosmos and what's the first thing we see? A fucking Klingon!
Anyways, season three started out really good. The Night of the Living Dead episode with the Vulcans was actually extraordinary. Bakula seems to have had an encounter with a cattle prod as is acting now. T'Pol is showing more skin (just go with it.) The marines were a nice addition, if only because they're pissing Malcolm off, which means we get to see what he looks like when he's experiencing an emotion. I like Trip, but if it's a choice between him and the beagle, well...
Basically, the problem with Trek ever since Gene died has been that Berman and Braga think they're writers. They aren't. Compare the by-lines before Gene died and after. Before you had a rich assortment of talent putting out the stories. After, at least half of the stores are by Berman and Braga. They can't even fill 42 minutes with a story, they have to split the episode up and fill it with extraneous crap all of the time.
Trek should be allowed to die, if only because it goes public domain that much sooner. And as spent as the concept seems today, I have a feeling that in a few years, after our leaders have sent us to hell and back and we're light a few billion people, the rest of us will finally get it.
Everyone's going to be begging to be a Trekkie.
Whoa! We had images of the surface of Venus???
Where was the news media?
I just don't take pictures or issue press releases. Probably best that way.
I don't see that the two are necessarily incompatible.
It may be that our being a fat, successful, lazy, insecure people is to blame for creating this elite, or it may be that our "masters" have caused us to be fat, lazy, and so forth.
Or more likely, both are true.
Consider the media. Consider the way it continually panders to the basest, more sensationalist stories. You would claim that we have the power to turn those stations off, and you would be right if you were talking about you and I perhaps, but what of the upcoming generation that doesn't know better?
They will continue eating this crap up, and those who control the media know what the consequence will be: another generation of fat, lazy, stupid voters that they can easily manipulate into doing or believing anything at all.
Witness the war in Iraq. Something like half of Americans believe Saddam had something to do with 9/11--despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever and that the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever is readily available to those who would seek it--or that something like half of Americans still believe Saddam had WMD's that he could use to destroy American cities.
Why do these people believe this? Because the media--even the supposedly "liberal" media--willingly goes along with the lie. Why else would they do that if there weren't an agenda?
Your argument would be a lot better if it were being made before we ceded so much of this power. But now that's it lost? How do you and I--and the minority of other people out there who understand what's going on--convince the rest of us, without access to very same media that largely created the problem in the first place?
Hollywood doesn't make movies about people voting but lots of movies about "watering the tree of liberty with blood".
Huh? Can you name just one?
I think it's suprising that you posted that on Martin Luther King day.
I think it's surprising that a guy who calls himself "mental telepathy" would be surprised by anything at all.
That said...
The America MLK faced is a very different beast than what we're facing today. Nor is Ghandi's experience particularly relevant today either.
Power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our masters will not cede such power by choice. And it seems to me the longer we wait to confront them, the harder it's going to be to prevail.
They're talking about taking away our compilers and our documentation. What's next? Electricity and books? Fire and language? The same rationale put forward in this sinister report applies equally to all technologies; to all human abilities, great and small.
It's about taking away power from the masses and conferring it onto the elite instead.
Who do you think is going to line up in support of legislation controlling access to computer technology? All kinds of candidates come to mind, all seeking to better their opportunity by denying us ours. The RIAA. The MPAA. Microsoft. Law enforcement. Almost any major news organization. The list goes on and on.
This is simply a different facet of the same threat that's been building now for a long time in this country.
As another poster here so deftly points out in his sig, the answer to 1984 is 1776.
Unfortunately, violence happens to be the only way to secure liberty. Nothing else works.
This shit continues until finally we, the people, rise up and smite these bastards.
Of course, when we rise up, they sick Apache helicopters on our ass.
We are so fucked.
They're saying the Hubble won't get serviced because there isn't enough time to do it before the shuttle fleet is retired. And since the date for the retirement of shuttle was selected after the Mars announcement, I think it's fair to say that Hubble is being neglected for budgetary reasons.
A tad defensive, aren't we?
The article states only that Java is being used for the software used to send commands to the rover and process the output.
I'm assuming that the limited amount of power the rover has access to would forbid the use of Java, would that be right? And if everything is controlled from the ground anyways, we're not talking about especially complicated code in any case, so why bother with the overhead?
Then again, if they're sending code to the rover maybe Java does make sense; bytecode tends to be smaller than machine code, so you get better utilization of upstream bandwidth.
(Anybody know what OS the rover uses?)
It is extremely cool. I got my niece and nephew one for Christmas, and had the totally righteous pleasure of helping them build a robot and watching them program it (well, watching my 10-year-old niece program it, my much younger nephew had ideas of his own as to the proper use of the technology.)
This is great news from Lego. *This* should be their future. There are so many different directions they can go with this the mind staggers at the possibilities.
What I want to see are smart bricks, i.e., bricks that are able to communicate with one another in some limited fashion. They've already got the ability to send power through the little Lego connector dealies, why not data? This would allow an assembled robot to communicate its design to the computer; it would also allow a program to discover whether the robot has been damaged.
And how about RFID tags for these bricks? The most fabulously awesome robot would be one that goes around the house looking for lost Lego pieces.
It needs to be cheaper too. By cutting the cost in half they'll end up selling way more than double the units. The way it's priced now, your average mom and dad are going to choose something like the XBox instead... they're not going to understand the tremendous potential these toys can unlock in a young mind.
The whole point to the Macintosh experience is the interface. Lose that, and you lose a good deal of the incentive for shelling out the big bucks for these machines.
I mean, I love Apple hardware, but to pay a premium for it just to use an interface I find horribly flawed? And when Sony has hardware that's just as elegant, that lets me run my choice of OS?
Using Windows NT 4 was tolerable, and I enjoyed going back to classic Mac for my personal stuff.
Then came (for me) Windows 2000, at about the same time OS X was coming out. I was pretty much on the fence at this point, largely because I couldn't believe Apple would stick with the dock.
Finally, with Windows XP, which was extremely usable, and an OS X that had the worst imaginable implementation of the Finder--and still had the dock as the primary application/process UI--the choice was really quite clear.
In Mac OS 8 there was an item in the Finder's File menu that would let you stick an alias of a file/application in the Apple menu.
It even had a command-key equivalent if memory serves.
It couldn't be easier.
try this: drag your Applications folder to the document area of the dock. now you have an application menu! (right-click or click-and-hold)
Ahem, right-click?
And click-and-hold takes an eternity in I'm-busy-doin-stuff-with-my-computer mode. Might as open up a terminal.
As far as I'm concerned, replacing two UI gadgets with one isn't a blunder -- it's efficency.
Sure, if you're like the original NeXT devotee and you only had a handful of applications to keep track of. Steve Jobs likes the dock because the four or five applications he has to use on a daily basis comfortably fit on it. If you're doing lots of stuff on your box however--development, graphics, multimedia, connectivity, etc--the dock gets very old, very quickly.
And what I find interesting is that while I hear a lot of spirited defense of the dock, no one has managed to mount a defense of Apple/NeXT's decision to do away with the Application/Process menus.
(and not only did they do away with them, in the beginning they made it as hard as possible for third-parties to emulate them.)
FWIW, I think the NeXT browser is elegant too. I do from time to time still use OS X, and the browser totally saves the otherwise miserable experience I have with the Finder (on Jaguar, haven't paid for Panther yet.)