I looked at the 'whois' database, and found the address. It would be interesting to check out this business unit, and see if it actually existed. Is it a business still active, a business that went bankrupt (and might have been squatted), or a business starting up?. Does the address even exist? From a Google search of the address, there only seem to be two floors (if 1st floor is at street level, and they don't use the term ground floor). Usually the first number of the unit number is the floor level, and the remaining numbers the unit number. I can only find register companies at floors 1 and 2, nothing at 3, 4 or even 5. Looks like a hoax to me.
Oh yes, and wasn't 777 the codenumber relating to the movie "Antibody" where the good guys had to defuse the detonator by being shrunk down to microscopic size. Interesting the to note the person who replied to the hotmail account was "nxbomb".
I do have glasses, which I have to wear when reading. My friends had noticed something odd when I kept looking crosseyed when in the shopping mall, but were to polite to mention anything. It wasn't until I started wearing glasses that the crosseyed look went away, and everyone started giving me positive comments.
Was before I learned that some people can only see in a tiny area of their vision. Enough to read but not enough to hurriedly board an unfamiliar train arriving on the wrong platform.
Mammalian vision really consists of two parts: peripheral and central vision. Peripheral vision is really dedicated to monochrome vision and motion detection. Useful in all light levels and needed to orient yourself relative to surroundings. Central vision is used for colour and texture recognition (needed for reading/writing). Lose your peripheral vision, and you won't be able to tell where things have moved to when you shift your gaze onto something else. Lose your central vision (macula, 5% of retinal area, around 2.5mm in diameter), and you will still be able to tell when things move and where they have moved to, and orient yourself, but you won't be able to recognise faces or read text. Or there's night blindness and glare sensitivity, where the eye loses the ability to automatically adjust the brightness and contrast settings.
Coke can telephones and radios...
on
GPS Coke Can X-Rayed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How is this any different from those novelty coke can telephones and coke can radios. Once the object is hidden inside a hand-luggage bag, what the outer surface looks like isn't going to make any difference to an X-ray machine.
... personally I'd just wear glasses, and spend the money on a new computer. For me, glasses help boost your intellectual look (Don't something like 70% of engineers wear glasses?).
Women that I know will go from store to store in a seemingly random order, traversing the entire mall several times. Men on the other hand figure out where exactly they have to go and make one circuit and leave.
I believe the woman have prioritised the stores in the order that they are most likely to find something new/useful, and they also want to make sure they are getting value for money (From the discussions I have heard, there is nothing more annoying than to buy something at one shop, only to find the same item at a 50% discount somewhere else).
Maybe this goes back to the gatherer lifestyle, where they are looking to identify the best fruits/crops to take back to the cave.
Do politicians in America go out of their way to stifle innovation or is it just my perception?
Once a large corporation has invested billions in a particular technology (buying hardware, real estate, training staff) and started getting a return on their money, their greatest fear is "disruptive technology", where something will come along and totally wipe out their investment. It's much cheaper for them to lobby their elected officials and have the competitors legislated into bankruptcy.
You forget the attitude of the bureaucrat towards anything that "makes an economy more efficient" or "helps spread information". First, a flush of raw trembling fear. Then apply The Rules:
If it doesn't move, tax it. If it moves, regulate it until it stops moving. Then tax it.
Remember, anything not nailed down belongs to the government. Anything that can be pried loose by a legislative body is not nailed down.
Look at the things the bureaucrats taxed during the Industrial Revolution. Bricks were taxed for around 50 years. People reverted to having their houses decorated with stucco until this tax was repealed.
The bureaucrats also tried taxing the construction of buildings based on their width. Builders reduced this tax by building narrower buildings. Then the government tried taxing buildings based on their area. Builders reduced this tax by building smaller houses with more floors.
The Dell systems at work are well underway booting the OS before the CRT has even warmed up.
All the new PC's that are being bought where I work, come with LCD displays. The management wish to avoid exposure to any kind of pollution tax from disposal of CRT's.
From the places I've worked in, most schools, colleges and universities respond to the skills required from the local employers and milkround companies that visit them. If you want to persuade your school to change, you'll have to persuade the employers to change.
I'm sure I remember seeing modem dialup bulletin board systems implementated by companies such as Hayes, Hercules etc..., that allowed you to download updated device drivers for your home PC. And that was back in the 1980's.
Oh yes! I was asked to write a report on the history of 3D graphics accelerator cards. The fun part was tracing all the lawsuits between the different companies, the mergers, the companies dropping out of the market, companies popping back into the market (only to be shot out again). The Rambus/Infineon/Hitachi/Micron/Samsung never seemed to stop (As far as I can tell, they're still fighting it out. Lawsuits are still flying around like missiles in a game of "bzflag" with superflags. When the prize is worth $3 billion, it's not surprising nobody is going to give up.
During the overheated days of the late 1990s, the prospect that Rambus might hold a key patent involved in the memory used in 90 per cent of the world's personal computers lit a fuse under the stock price. It peaked at about $110 in 2000, after a licensing deal was signed with Hitachi. But it has been a much longer road than most investors thought, as Rambus has been tied up in one lawsuit after another. The stock bottomed out at about $3 a share in 2002.
After being sued by Micron in 2000, for example, Rambus countersued, claiming Micron had conspired with other memory makers such as Hynix and Infineon to keep the price of memory chips artificially high. That lawsuit is still working its way through the courts. Meanwhile, Rambus's legal battle with Infineon has also spawned suits aplenty. And the European Patent Office ruled earlier this month that Rambus's European patents are invalid, which could affect its case against other memory makers.
At the same time, however, Rambus won a victory in the Infineon case in October, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found Rambus did not commit fraud when it failed to disclose its pending patent applications to the industry body setting the new memory standard. That decision effectively means that the company's original patent-infringement lawsuit against Infineon can go ahead.
Investors and analysts are hoping the FTC ruling (which could still be appealed) will give Rambus even more ammunition in its ongoing fight with Micron, Infineon, Hynix and others to win royalty and licensing fees. And how big a windfall might that bring? In the Infineon case alone, Rambus estimates that it is owed royalties of about $3-billion. That helps explain why a company that only has about $100-million in annual sales is worth in excess of $3.3 -billion. Whether Rambus will ever live up to that market value will be decided by the courts.
Man, that would make the ultimate Lego/Meccano construction kit. I don't think the entire machine is actually in the picture either.
The best technical description I can come up with, is "crawler mounted excavator with a telescopic arm with a rotating digging element.
Machines like that are used in open cast coal mining. Explosives are used to break up the hard rock in order to get to the minerals/ores below. This excavator would be used to scoop up the rubble (might even crush it as well), before the conveyor belt at the back would unload the rubble onto a monster truck.
What, is it going to come complete with a periscope so that you can see the people sitting across from you?
I'd stick a webcam on the top, so I could see what everyone else was doing.
The system I envisaged would be for home use only, but light enough for the whole system to be carried out at once.
You haven't seen the latest laptops (Sony PCG-GRT range) - the largest screens go up to 17.1" and weigh around 10kgs. Since some airlines place the limit of handluggage at 5 kgs, it's already too heavy for air-travel, especially since airlines won't accept liability for any computers damaged if stored as baggage.
We already have oil-rig drilling pipeline construction robots. After the Piper Alpha disaster, the oil companies looked at ways of reducing their insurance costs. One way was to automate the construction of drilling pipes. Instead of having entire crews of men handling drill pipes on a platform 100 miles off the coast, they funded research into using machines. Essentially, they got the process down to a single guy operating a crane to pick up and move drilling pipes and a control system to accurately place the pipe and automatically fix it into place.
From the web site:
Record, pause, and play back live TV with a
personal video recorder that works similar to a
TIVO®.
Create your own digital library by recording, storing,
and burning up to 5000 CDs and 235 hours of video.
So, what happens after 235 hours? Do you have to buy a new system>
Saying that, I do believe there is a market for something between the size of a laptop and a desktop system.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a laptop that came with a detachable 20" LCD, a full size keyboard, and a small mainboard that supported the latest 3D graphics accelerators. With a laptop, I can take the system with me when moving across the country. With a desktop system, I need it transported by a third party.
Same thing happened with shoplifters and the installation of anti-theft system and a networked warning system. Sometimes when the electronic tag wiper system didn't work, customers would be told the alarm might go off, and that they should instead go back to another checkout door. Shoplifters picked up on this, and would try and walk out in the same way. If they got caught in one store, they'd just try another store. The shop owners eventually got wise to this, and set up a warning system. If a known shoplifter was intercepted in one store, all the other stores would be alerted. Sure it reduced crime in one area, but it just moved the problem to other areas.
Oddly enough, the police department in various parts of Scotland have discovered that the CCTV cameras installed on public buses have helped to catch criminals. Fixed point cameras are helpful in deterring crime in certain areas, but eventually criminals figure out the blind spots in the system.
I've seen the television sized screens on the double deckers. A 16" LCD display is mounted on the ceiling at the front of the top deck of the bus. There are around six cameras on the top of the bus which cover the staircase, both sides of the back row of the bus; the favourite location for drunk teenagers -neds (Non Educated Delinquents) and the front of the bus. The display cycles through the entire set of cameras. Quite entertaining if you can get a front row seat. Then you can watch the ned-cam as the bus goes through the city.
Blair will do anything that the Americans tell him just so that he can have his ego-trip of thinking he's Bush's best friend, even as Bush pounds him in the ass.
Just about every British prime minister has always tried to snuggle up with the US president (Thatcher with Reagan in the 1980's, although I can't say anything about John Major, then Blair with Bush, not sure about Blair with Clinton). Generally, British prime ministers will always put aside their principles and morals when there is the chance of large profits from foreign reconstruction or trade.
Just curious, how came we don't have stories about people using Linux and switching to windows? Because Microsoft no longer sells the installation disks of Windows XX with new systems. This was done to deter pirates. The only disk coming with the system is usually a system restore disk which will restore that specific machine to the original state it was in, when it left the manufacturer.
I don't think anyone would seriously consider spending an additional 250 pounds/dollars (retail price of Windows XP Home) when it only costs 50 pounds when installed with a new machine.
When have you had to restart in Linux? I can probably count on my hand the number of times I've had to restart due to it being necessary.... one... during install...
I've installed 'bzflag' on my system. On some occasions, when attempting to connect to a server, the game will just lock up. Originally, the only thing I could do was to press [Ctrl][Alt][1] and then reboot. Eventually, I figured out that I could just login and kill the process, and press [Ctrl][Alt][7] to get back to the X-server. I tried running 'bzflag' in windowed mode, but it traps the mouse pointer so I can't move out of the window.
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I looked at the 'whois' database, and found the address. It would be interesting to check out this business unit, and see if it actually existed. Is it a business still active, a business that went bankrupt (and might have been squatted), or a business starting up?. Does the address even exist?
From a Google search of the address, there only seem to be two floors (if 1st floor is at street level, and they don't use the term ground floor).
Usually the first number of the unit number is the floor level, and the remaining numbers the unit number. I can only find register companies at floors 1 and 2, nothing at 3, 4 or even 5.
Looks like a hoax to me.
Oh yes, and wasn't 777 the codenumber relating to the movie "Antibody" where the good guys had to defuse the detonator by being shrunk down to microscopic size. Interesting the to note the person who replied to the hotmail account was "nxbomb".
Sounds like marketing hype to me.
He was, but has now been promoted to the position of desktop manager, so his schedule is so busy, we never see him.
I do have glasses, which I have to wear when reading. My friends had noticed something odd when I kept looking crosseyed when in the shopping mall, but were to polite to mention anything. It wasn't until I started wearing glasses that the crosseyed look went away, and everyone started giving me positive comments.
Was before I learned that some people can only see in a tiny area of their vision. Enough to read but not enough to hurriedly board an unfamiliar train arriving on the wrong platform.
Mammalian vision really consists of two parts: peripheral and central vision. Peripheral vision is really dedicated to monochrome vision and motion detection. Useful in all light levels and needed to orient yourself relative to surroundings. Central vision is used for colour and texture recognition (needed for reading/writing). Lose your peripheral vision, and you won't be able to tell where things have moved to when you shift your gaze onto something else. Lose your central vision (macula, 5% of retinal area, around 2.5mm in diameter), and you will still be able to tell when things move and where they have moved to, and orient yourself, but you won't be able to recognise faces or read text.
Or there's night blindness and glare sensitivity, where the eye loses the ability to automatically adjust the brightness and contrast settings.
How is this any different from those novelty coke can telephones and coke can radios. Once the object is hidden inside a hand-luggage bag, what the outer surface looks like isn't going to make any difference to an X-ray machine.
... personally I'd just wear glasses, and spend the money on a new computer. For me, glasses help boost your intellectual look (Don't something like 70% of engineers wear glasses?).
Women that I know will go from store to store in a seemingly random order, traversing the entire mall several times. Men on the other hand figure out where exactly they have to go and make one circuit and leave.
I believe the woman have prioritised the stores in the order that they are most likely to find something new/useful, and they also want to make sure they are getting value for money (From the discussions I have heard, there is nothing more annoying than to buy something at one shop, only to find the same item at a 50% discount somewhere else).
Maybe this goes back to the gatherer lifestyle, where they are looking to identify the best fruits/crops to take back to the cave.
Do politicians in America go out of their way to stifle innovation or is it just my perception?
Once a large corporation has invested billions in a particular technology (buying hardware, real estate, training staff) and started getting a return on their money, their greatest fear is "disruptive technology", where something will come along and totally wipe out their investment. It's much cheaper for them to lobby their elected officials and have the competitors legislated into bankruptcy.
the Mill5 can record nearly any object in minutes and carve a duplicate in any stone in a few hours.'
If it can duplicate CD's and DVD's, the RIAA are going to be annoyed.
You forget the attitude of the bureaucrat towards anything that "makes an economy more efficient" or "helps spread information". First, a flush of raw trembling fear. Then apply The Rules:
If it doesn't move, tax it.
If it moves, regulate it until it stops moving.
Then tax it.
Remember, anything not nailed down belongs to the government. Anything that can be pried loose by a legislative body is not nailed down.
Look at the things the bureaucrats taxed during the Industrial Revolution. Bricks were taxed for around 50 years. People reverted to having their houses decorated with stucco until this tax was repealed.
Then the bureaucrats tried taxing buildings based on the number of windows present. People avoided this tax by bricking up their houses.
The bureaucrats also tried taxing the construction of buildings based on their width. Builders reduced this tax by building narrower buildings. Then the government tried taxing buildings based on their area. Builders reduced this tax by building smaller houses with more floors.
The bureacrats also tried taxing the glass in windows, and on tea imports
The Dell systems at work are well underway booting the OS before the CRT has even warmed up.
All the new PC's that are being bought where I work, come with LCD displays. The management wish to avoid exposure to any kind of pollution tax from disposal of CRT's.
From the places I've worked in, most schools, colleges and universities respond to the skills required from the local employers and milkround companies that visit them. If you want to persuade your school to change, you'll have to persuade the employers to change.
I'm sure I remember seeing modem dialup bulletin board systems implementated by companies such as Hayes, Hercules etc..., that allowed you to download updated device drivers for your home PC. And that was back in the 1980's.
That happens on our telephone and TV as well. More of a soft popping sound.
Oh yes! I was asked to write a report on the history of 3D graphics accelerator cards. The fun part was tracing all the lawsuits between the different companies, the mergers, the companies dropping out of the market, companies popping back into the market (only to be shot out again). The Rambus/Infineon/Hitachi/Micron/Samsung never seemed to stop (As far as I can tell, they're still fighting it out. Lawsuits are still flying around like missiles in a game of "bzflag" with superflags. When the prize is worth $3 billion, it's not surprising nobody is going to give up.
During the overheated days of the late 1990s, the prospect that Rambus might hold a key patent involved in the memory used in 90 per cent of the world's personal computers lit a fuse under the stock price. It peaked at about $110 in 2000, after a licensing deal was signed with Hitachi. But it has been a much longer road than most investors thought, as Rambus has been tied up in one lawsuit after another. The stock bottomed out at about $3 a share in 2002.
After being sued by Micron in 2000, for example, Rambus countersued, claiming Micron had conspired with other memory makers such as Hynix and Infineon to keep the price of memory chips artificially high. That lawsuit is still working its way through the courts. Meanwhile, Rambus's legal battle with Infineon has also spawned suits aplenty. And the European Patent Office ruled earlier this month that Rambus's European patents are invalid, which could affect its case against other memory makers.
At the same time, however, Rambus won a victory in the Infineon case in October, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found Rambus did not commit fraud when it failed to disclose its pending patent applications to the industry body setting the new memory standard. That decision effectively means that the company's original patent-infringement lawsuit against Infineon can go ahead.
Investors and analysts are hoping the FTC ruling (which could still be appealed) will give Rambus even more ammunition in its ongoing fight with Micron, Infineon, Hynix and others to win royalty and licensing fees. And how big a windfall might that bring? In the Infineon case alone, Rambus estimates that it is owed royalties of about $3-billion. That helps explain why a company that only has about $100-million in annual sales is worth in excess of $3.3 -billion. Whether Rambus will ever live up to that market value will be decided by the courts.
Man, that would make the ultimate Lego/Meccano construction kit. I don't think the entire machine is actually in the picture either.
The best technical description I can come up with, is "crawler mounted excavator with a telescopic arm with a rotating digging element.
Machines like that are used in open cast coal mining. Explosives are used to break up the hard rock in order to get to the minerals/ores below. This excavator would be used to scoop up the rubble (might even crush it as well), before the conveyor belt at the back would unload the rubble onto a monster truck.
What, is it going to come complete with a periscope so that you can see the people sitting across from you?
I'd stick a webcam on the top, so I could see what everyone else was doing.
The system I envisaged would be for home use only, but light enough for the whole system to be carried out at once.
You haven't seen the latest laptops (Sony PCG-GRT range) - the largest screens go up to 17.1" and weigh around 10kgs. Since some airlines place the limit of handluggage at 5 kgs, it's already too heavy for air-travel, especially since airlines won't accept liability for any computers damaged if stored as baggage.
We already have oil-rig drilling pipeline construction robots. After the Piper Alpha disaster, the oil companies looked at ways of reducing their insurance costs. One way was to automate the construction of drilling pipes. Instead of having entire crews of men handling drill pipes on a platform 100 miles off the coast, they funded research into using machines. Essentially, they got the process down to a single guy operating a crane to pick up and move drilling pipes and a control system to accurately place the pipe and automatically fix it into place.
From the web site:
Record, pause, and play back live TV with a
personal video recorder that works similar to a
TIVO®.
Create your own digital library by recording, storing,
and burning up to 5000 CDs and 235 hours of video.
So, what happens after 235 hours? Do you have to buy a new system>
Saying that, I do believe there is a market for something between the size of a laptop and a desktop system.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a laptop that came with a detachable 20" LCD, a full size keyboard, and a small mainboard that supported the latest 3D graphics accelerators. With a laptop, I can take the system with me when moving across the country. With a desktop system, I need it transported by a third party.
Same thing happened with shoplifters and the installation of anti-theft system and a networked warning system. Sometimes when the electronic tag wiper system didn't work, customers would be told the alarm might go off, and that they should instead go back to another checkout door. Shoplifters picked up on this, and would try and walk out in the same way. If they got caught in one store, they'd just try another store. The shop owners eventually got wise to this, and set up a warning system. If a known shoplifter was intercepted in one store, all the other stores would be alerted. Sure it reduced crime in one area, but it just moved the problem to other areas.
Oddly enough, the police department in various parts of Scotland have discovered that the CCTV cameras installed on public buses have helped to catch criminals. Fixed point cameras are helpful in deterring crime in certain areas, but eventually criminals figure out the blind spots in the system.
I've seen the television sized screens on the double deckers. A 16" LCD display is mounted on the ceiling at the front of the top deck of the bus. There are around six cameras on the top of the bus which cover the staircase, both sides of the back row of the bus; the favourite location for drunk teenagers -neds (Non Educated Delinquents) and the front of the bus. The display cycles through the entire set of cameras. Quite entertaining if you can get a front row seat. Then you can watch the ned-cam as the bus goes through the city.
Amongst the more than 3,000 in this auction (1 of 10) are state and federal law books
Yeah, they couldn't get approval to spend money on toilet rolls, so they used pages from the law books instead.
Blair will do anything that the Americans tell him just so that he can have his ego-trip of thinking he's Bush's best friend, even as Bush pounds him in the ass.
Just about every British prime minister has always tried to snuggle up with the US president (Thatcher with Reagan in the 1980's, although I can't say anything about John Major, then Blair with Bush, not sure about Blair with Clinton).
Generally, British prime ministers will always put aside their principles and morals when there is the chance of large profits from foreign reconstruction or trade.
Just curious, how came we don't have stories about people using Linux and switching to windows?
Because Microsoft no longer sells the installation disks of Windows XX with new systems. This was done to deter pirates. The only disk coming with the system is usually a system restore disk which will restore that specific machine to the original state it was in, when it left the manufacturer.
I don't think anyone would seriously consider spending an additional 250 pounds/dollars (retail price of Windows XP Home) when it only costs 50 pounds when installed with a new machine.
When have you had to restart in Linux? I can probably count on my hand the number of times I've had to restart due to it being necessary.... one... during install...
I've installed 'bzflag' on my system. On some occasions, when attempting to connect to a server, the game will just lock up. Originally, the only thing I could do was to press [Ctrl][Alt][1] and then reboot. Eventually, I figured out that I could just login and kill the process, and press [Ctrl][Alt][7] to get back to the X-server. I tried running 'bzflag' in windowed mode, but it traps the mouse pointer so I can't move out of the window.