I remember seeing a lecture on field emitter display technology in a class at MIT in 1980. That's 25 years ago. Sure has been a slow technology to mature...
www.openlaszlo.org
has a platform for writing apps embedded in the browser, which runs on IE, Firefox, Safari, Linux, anything which supports the Flash plugin.
There is a open-source browser-independent rich internet app devleopment platform, called Laszlo, available from www.openlaszlo.org.
Yes, it compiles to the Flash virtual machine now, but it is being ported to other runtimes, and will probably be the standard rich internet app language eventually.
Let's see, $1700 for what is essentially a low-end PC with a 17" LCD. I could buy the same hardware for under $1000 easily.
So, what am I paying the extra $700 for? Obviously the "cool" factor. Except, what is cool about buying an overpriced PC with cheeseball plastic crap on it?
"And if this effect turns out to be real, it will be the paintstaking, not-by-press-conference slow work of real researchers who understand how science works, that will ironically provide actual justification."
Real technical breakthroughs generally come from people who can take risks, can think from many angles, and can stand some failures.
Your idea of a "real researcher" is someone who can only make incremental, if any, progress, and who cannot dare to risk the ridicule of the other "real researchers".
The plasma fusion guys seem to have sucked down billions of dollars to build their huge ungainly and ultimately unworkable Rube Goldberg devices.
If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now. The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.
I worked for a summer with Sarnoff's son. He was a real asshole. We were all student interns at Atari's "research" lab in Sunnyvale. The evening we met him, a group of us (MIT students) were working late. He saw us and called security because he didn't know who we were and was too much of a chicken shit to even say hello.
This is an idiotic "problem". If people weren't so stupid as to worship and adulate other people for being able to throw a ball farther or jump higher than other people, there wouldn't be a demand for this kind of thing.
As human beings, we have evolved large brains in order to avoid lifting heavy things and running away from predators. The Olympics is a celebration of brawn over brains. People who feel they must compete in it deserve whatever they get, and people who watch and cheer them on also deserve what they ask for.
If you ever tried using WAP and then have tried using iMode's CHTML, you would see why WAP is a steaming pile of doo doo.
CHTML is a nice clean subset of HTML (think HTML 2.0) which supports all the stuff you're used to, forms, gifs, etc.
WAP, on the other hand, has a broken idea about "decks" of cards, which they thought would be needed for 400 baud connections or whatever it was designed for.
Writing WAP applications is irritating, because they don't work. The gateway you're using has the wrong max packet size, or the phone you're using doesn't support the image format, or... the chances of your app working on someone's phone is close to zero.
iMode, on the other hand, works on all iMode phones, they have fanatical quality control and DoCoMo calls the compatibility shots.
Calling WAP a success but the implentation a failure is like calling Communism a success in theory, but it just had a poor implementation.
"I could be wrong though, because I only have XM in my car, so it doesn't have any kind of tape outputs or anything. "
Let's see, you state that we will always be able to make analog recordings from our radios, but your radio actually doesn't let you do that. I'd like to know if you think you can get golden eggs out of your refrigerator, well, *your* refrigerator doesn't seem to have any, but you're absolutely sure the rest of us will always be able to get them?
If the "content providers" had their way, you won't be able to even listen to your music on speakers, you'll only be able to use your biometrically matched headphones. See if I'm wrong.
Yep. In Japan, the wildly successful DoCoMo phones have sound quality that is metallic and barely acceptable compared to a nice old analog cell phone. People just don't know when they are getting the shaft.
A complex mathematical routine will have associated unit test code with it. You need to verify complex code anyway, because, guess what, Einstein, people put in bugs by mistake all the time. That's we software engineering uses testing to verify the correct functionality. That applies to closed source as well as open source equally. Remember the Approxium, I meean Pentium arithmetic bug?? Was that commies or jihadi terrorists at Intel. Oh yeah, wait, there was a Jihadi terrorist at Intel (Mike Hawash) Hmm...
My god, doesn't anyone see the conflict of interest here? WHenever they want to boost revenue in their anti-virus business unit, all the have to do is make Windows more insecure. No wait, that's impossible. Never mind.
My wife worked in a lab where a guy had just graduated with his PhD done on some esoteric measurements of semiconductor luminescence.
When my wife went to calibrate the spectrograph that he had used for taking single photon data, she found it was not really working at all. She discovered that when he had replaced the photomultiplier tube, he had not removed the black protective cover around it.
So the data he had taken was all random noise. She didn't have the heart to tell him, as he had already turned in his thesis.
He is a real liability to anyone he tries to "help". Remember him claiming it was "one of us" who DDOS'ed SCO. He is a mediocre programmer and a mid-level flamer who sadly was annointed by the press as some kind of spokeperson for the free software community.
unless there is some more definite shared interest than visiting a particular web site. I think finding common interests and discovering like-minded individuals is what forums and web logs are better at doing.
I recently installed Yahoo Messenger, because my daughter wanted to chat online. I looked at a couple of the chat rooms, even the purportedly technical ones were total cesspools. Slashdot would be a cesspool if not for the meta-moderation system, I always browse at level 4 or 5, and even then the discussion is marginally civilized.
It is scary because a bad person could take $200k and synthesize a virus that would, let's see, sterilize everyone on the planet, kill everyone, umm, you see the problem now?
That is a good idea. The death toll from rapid spread of flu and other potentially lethal diseases is due largely to air travel from foreign countries. Forget terrorists, discouraging foreign travellers will probably save hundreds of thousands of lives.
You know, as I scanned the list of stories on Slashdot, I saw this one and one on hacking your hard drive to get more storage, and I was about to read the hard drive story instead of this one, but my consience tugged at me and said "you care more about getting some hacked bytes out of your hard drive than about the future of democracy in America?". And I grudgingly read this story instead. If technically educated people like us can't be bothered with these problems, what hope is there for the voting system in this country?
Slashdot Mirror
I remember seeing a lecture on field emitter display technology in a class at MIT in 1980. That's 25 years ago. Sure has been a slow technology to mature...
www.openlaszlo.org has a platform for writing apps embedded in the browser, which runs on IE, Firefox, Safari, Linux, anything which supports the Flash plugin.
Yes, it compiles to the Flash virtual machine now, but it is being ported to other runtimes, and will probably be the standard rich internet app language eventually.
Let's see, $1700 for what is essentially a low-end PC with a 17" LCD. I could buy the same hardware for under $1000 easily.
So, what am I paying the extra $700 for?
Obviously the "cool" factor. Except, what is cool about buying an overpriced PC with cheeseball plastic crap on it?
Laszlo Systems just announced an open-source cross-platform XML/Javascript based app building tool. That is much more interesting news I would think.
Low power, compact, quiet.
Except for one thing, it needs to be able to reboot itself automatically after a power failure, something I have not seen laptops do for some reason.
Without the bash shell, Linus wouldn't have had anything to boot up to :-)
Brian Fox was the original author.
"And if this effect turns out to be real, it will be the paintstaking, not-by-press-conference slow work of real researchers who understand how science works, that will ironically provide actual justification."
Real technical breakthroughs generally come from people who can take risks, can think from many angles, and can stand some failures.
Your idea of a "real researcher" is someone who can only make incremental, if any, progress, and who cannot dare to risk the ridicule of the other "real researchers".
The plasma fusion guys seem to have sucked down billions of dollars to build their huge ungainly and ultimately unworkable Rube Goldberg devices.
If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now. The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.
I worked for a summer with Sarnoff's son. He was a real asshole. We were all student interns at Atari's "research" lab in Sunnyvale. The evening we met him, a group of us (MIT students) were working late. He saw us and called security because he didn't know who we were and was too much of a chicken shit to even say hello.
http://boston.laszlosystems.com/photos/images/2004 -08-03/IMG_0503.JPG
0 04 -08-03/IMG_0511.JPG
http://boston.laszlosystems.com/photos/images/2
This is a console for controlling interceptor fighter jets. It was part of a SAGE (used a lot of vacuum-tubes) computer system.
Note the cigaratte lighter in the upper left of the righthand picture with the joystick.
Someday I'm going to put a computer into this thing.
This is an idiotic "problem". If people weren't so stupid as to worship and adulate other people for being able to throw a ball farther or jump higher than other people, there wouldn't be a demand for this kind of thing.
As human beings, we have evolved large brains in order to avoid lifting heavy things and running away from predators. The Olympics is a celebration of brawn over brains. People who feel they must compete in it deserve whatever they get, and people who watch and cheer them on also deserve what they ask for.
If you ever tried using WAP and then have tried using iMode's CHTML, you would see why WAP is a steaming pile of doo doo.
... the chances of your app working on someone's phone is close to zero.
CHTML is a nice clean subset of HTML (think HTML 2.0) which supports all the stuff you're used to, forms, gifs, etc.
WAP, on the other hand, has a broken idea about "decks" of cards, which they thought would be needed for 400 baud connections or whatever it was designed for.
Writing WAP applications is irritating, because they don't work. The gateway you're using has the wrong max packet size, or the phone you're using doesn't support the image format, or
iMode, on the other hand, works on all iMode phones, they have fanatical quality control and DoCoMo calls the compatibility shots.
Calling WAP a success but the implentation a failure is like calling Communism a success in theory, but it just had a poor implementation.
"I could be wrong though, because I only have XM in my car, so it doesn't have any kind of tape outputs or anything. "
Let's see, you state that we will always be able to make analog recordings from our radios, but your radio actually doesn't let you do that. I'd like to know if you think you can get golden eggs out of your refrigerator, well, *your* refrigerator doesn't seem to have any, but you're absolutely sure the rest of us will always be able to get them?
If the "content providers" had their way, you won't be able to even listen to your music on speakers, you'll only be able to use your biometrically matched headphones. See if I'm wrong.
Yep. In Japan, the wildly successful DoCoMo phones have sound quality that is metallic and barely acceptable compared to a nice old analog cell phone. People just don't know when they are getting the shaft.
A complex mathematical routine will have associated unit test code with it. You need to verify complex code anyway, because, guess what, Einstein, people put in bugs by mistake all the time. That's we software engineering uses testing to verify the correct functionality. That applies to closed source as well as open source equally. Remember the Approxium, I meean Pentium arithmetic bug?? Was that commies or jihadi terrorists at Intel. Oh yeah, wait, there was a Jihadi terrorist at Intel (Mike Hawash) Hmm...
It's called "Aluminum Siding".
My god, doesn't anyone see the conflict of interest here? WHenever they want to boost revenue in their anti-virus business unit, all the have to do is make Windows more insecure. No wait, that's impossible. Never mind.
My wife worked in a lab where a guy had just graduated with his PhD done on some esoteric measurements of semiconductor luminescence.
When my wife went to calibrate the spectrograph that he had used for taking single photon data, she found it was not really working at all. She discovered that when he had replaced the photomultiplier tube, he had not removed the black protective cover around it.
So the data he had taken was all random noise. She didn't have the heart to tell him, as he had already turned in his thesis.
He is now a professor at MIT, sad to say.
He is a real liability to anyone he tries to "help". Remember him claiming it was "one of us" who DDOS'ed SCO. He is a mediocre programmer and a mid-level flamer who sadly was annointed by the press as some kind of spokeperson for the free software community.
It's time he just shut up.
unless there is some more definite shared interest than visiting a particular web site.
I think finding common interests and discovering like-minded individuals is what forums and web logs are better at doing.
I recently installed Yahoo Messenger, because my daughter wanted to chat online. I looked at a couple of the chat rooms, even the purportedly technical ones were total cesspools. Slashdot would be a cesspool if not for the meta-moderation system, I always browse at level 4 or 5, and even then the discussion is marginally civilized.
It is scary because a bad person could take $200k and synthesize a virus that would, let's see, sterilize everyone on the planet, kill everyone, umm, you see the problem now?
There was not a single illustration in the article. That is kind of ridiculous.
That is a good idea. The death toll from rapid spread of flu and other potentially lethal diseases is due largely to air travel from foreign countries. Forget terrorists, discouraging foreign travellers will probably save hundreds of thousands of lives.
You know, as I scanned the list of stories on Slashdot, I saw this one and one on hacking your hard drive to get more storage, and I was about to read the hard drive story instead of this one, but my consience tugged at me and said "you care more about getting some hacked bytes out of your hard drive than about the future of democracy in America?". And I grudgingly read this story instead. If technically educated people like us can't be bothered with these problems, what hope is there for the voting system in this country?