Actually, you can download small apps for the Rex (I mentioned this earlier). Mine now has several games on it, a unit converter, a scientific calculator and a multi-stopwatch. Obviously, the complexity of the programs is limited by the fixed "slot" size the Rex allocates, but the capability is there.
As far as digital paper is concerned, you're probably out of luck for the time being, since it's being targeted mostly towards billboards and signs. You probably don't want your pda to have 1cm pixels. Plus, even if they did make the digital paper, you'd still need to have all the electronics attached, so I doubt if you could roll it up. It might be a while until they come up with something viable.
They're not producing them anymore, but they're still for sale, and Intel still offers tech support. I bought mine some time ago though, so I don't know much about availability.
It's really a pity since it's such a good product. Grab it while you can, keep it while it lasts or until it becomes truly obsolete. I hope maybe another company will sometime figure out there's a market for this kind of thing.
This Fossil is great - I wish it had appeared earlier. Still, some quibbles that will prevent me from ever buying one. Here goes.
I used to have a great Casio calculator watch. It had storage for phone numbers, a calendar, and could serve as a four-function calculator. Great stuff.
Since it didn't sync with a computer, you had to input data by hand. This was at the same time a limitation and a blessing - numbers had to be typed in one by one, but you could always type something in whenever you needed to take a note.
Back to the Fossil.
You can't type things in. This is key if someone gives you a phone number, or you stumble across something you need to remember. You come off looking like a nerd, but I'd much rather look like a nerd with a cool watch than a nerd with a cool watch and lots of paper scraps in his shirt pocket.
It syncs your entire address book. I for one don't want every single address that's on my computer to be sent to my watch. Searching and browsing is a pain, and I'd much rather only have numbers that I need on hand. My Casio only ever had at most 40 numbers in it - important ones.
Because of its limitations, I got a Xircom Rex MiniPDA (basically a PCMCIA card with a touch-screen that does addresses, notes, calendar, and third-party apps). In the end, I threw out the Casio and got an analog watch. The Rex does everything I'd ever need a PDA to do, and it's tiny. This sounds like a product plug - must stop now.
RXTE is a pretty old satellite. From the page, I see it has given great results and continues to do so. That's pretty neat.
Still, I recently read about another x-ray satellite out there that's newer and likely to be still more important for future x-ray imaging. Chandra observatory was launched by NASA not long ago. You can get more information at chandra.harvard.edu.
Feel free to check out both pages and see the differences between RXTE and Chandra.
It's good to see they're thinking ahead. If with QinetiQ 1 you don't succeed, you can always build QinetiQ 2, and QinetiQ 3, and so forth. With numbering, failure is wisely considered a part of the program! Just don't tell that to the guys flying up. As long as the funding keeps flowing in, they can always find someone to strap themselves into the gondola of doom.
We intend to fly QinetiQ 1 on a clear day, enabling people to see it with the naked eye from up to 600 miles away. Potentially several hundred million people will witness the flight as a live event.
So if the thing is as high as the Empire State Building (~1400ft), is it still likely to be visible from 600 miles away? Somehow I doubt it - that's like standing on top of the Sears Towers and seeing the Empire State Building!
the mission to Pluto cannot launch until 2006
and Mission times, depending on the launch vehicle selected, will be from 10-12 years
but.. any further delay in sending a probe would have meant losing the chance of seeing Pluto's atmosphere before it froze and condensed in 2015
Now add the years. Launch in 2006, + 10 mission years = 2016. By then, Pluto will be nothing but a great big block of ice. Did NASA forget how to add? Am I missing something?
True, but imagine trying to actually operate a fly by remote control in 3D. With the cockroach, you can basically just move in two dimensions by walking forward/backward and rotating, but it's much more complicated with a fly since you have to account for aerodynamics and the like - a fly is more than a tiny RC airplane. Entirely apart from the difficulty of simply flying the thing, I doubt human operators would find it easy to emulate "fly-like" flitting flying patterns.
The last problem is that, unlike cockroaches, flies can't carry five times their weight while flying around, so you'd have to really miniaturize the electronic equipment. After all, you'd need two cameras (for 3D viewing), wireless transmission equipment and electrodes, all really lightweight and attached in such a way that it doesn't get in the way of wings or legs.
All in all, I think remote-control flies might still be quite a while off. Cockroaches will have to do for now.
The great thing is, the cockroaches (more info at ZZZ) can be radio controlled, which solves many of the problems with cats, such as unpredictability and uncontrollability. Plus, they're slightly less conspicuous.
Of course, if seen, it might be harder to avoid getting killed than with a cat.
On a slightly offtopic note, does anyone remember the game Bad Mojo, where you had to steer a cockroach around a bunch of obstacles? That might be good training for future spy-insect operators:-)
Yes, sure Linux is free, but systems need to be administered. And the fact is, you can hire just anybody to be an NT sysadmin, but Linux admins really need to know what they're doing. They're more expensive to hire and maintained, and difficult to replace if necessary.
So entirely apart from the valid concerns about turning an entire working system around, you still have to worry about comparing the cost of Windows licenses with the expected costs of Linux sysadmins and tech support.
Whoa, slow down, things are getting mixed up. Old stone tools have nothing to do with human language at all. While language may be a prerequisite for civilization, stone tools are not. We can hypothesize all we want on when our ancestors learned to speak (and somehow, we'd have to define what a true "language" is, versus a collection of grunts and hand signals), but this discovery sheds no light on it at all.
All we know from this is that people used bone tools; I assume this means knives and spear heads, mostly. The article also mentions "modern behaviour" - I'm not quite sure what that is, exactly. Still I doubt that creating bone tools (which is arguably not easy) requires "civilization" or "language". That's a different discussion entirely.
Can anyone clarify what "Modern behaviour" means in this context?
I like the current interface - it's clean, presents information well and is appropriate to the spirit of the site. What do I care if they change the colors and so forth to make it look "new"? I actually think slashdot is the most aesthetic slash site I've seen.
The design of the interface is almost intrinsic to slashcode, because it was designed to present exactly this kind of news and boards. What would you like the interface to look like?
Good point, though I'm not sure the NSF is very high on the government's list of priorities right now (not that it ever has been, really) - it's all about defense now. I'm also not sure that selling the shuttles means that NASA gets less money from the government, just that it has more money to allocate to other projects instead of shuttle maintenance.
I have nothing against the private sector per se, but I agree that in this case it might not be a good idea.
A lot of the R&D that happens on board the shuttle is quite subsidized, and I'm afraid that corporations are not going to be as friendly to researchers. What that means is that possibly some research projects won't be able to afford execution in space. We may somehow lose out on valuable basic research, which would be a shame.
Perhaps the government could continue subsidizing research done on corporate spacecraft, through some extension of the NSF, or so.
I would support privatization 100% if they would give Boeing or Lockheed a contract to redesign the shuttle
What about these X40 or so (I'm not sure about the number) reusable shuttles that Lockheed has been designing for years? Perhaps NASA is thinking of selling the old shuttle because soon they'll start buying a new fleet.
The new Lockheed design is sure to have been expensive - considering that NASA basically paid for the thing, I wouldn't be surprised if it were an exclusive deal.
When I was in Korea some time ago, I ran across a multiplayer Unreal Tournament VR setup in an arcade. Basically, we would wear goggles and hold gun-shaped gamepads while standing in little pods. I played "Fractal" deathmatch against three other guys, and ended up incredibly dizzy five minutes later. The only VR feature that was really available was aiming by head-movements - jumping, running, firing, etc, were all controlled from the game pad.
This cave system would be a cool improvement, since it would probably be much less dizzying than wearing goggles. Running and jumping might be fun as well, but your range and of movement in real life would be much restricted compared to the things that can be done with a gamepad. I'd like to see it though.
I don't know much about ozone and such, but why would the size of the hole start to decline? Are we producing additional ozone that could somehow refill the hole? Is the remainder of the ozone layer spreading out to fill the gap?
Are there any meteorologists/ecologists out there who know how this works?
It could also detect chemicals, which would be useful in chemical warfare as well as biological analysis.
They need to market this as technology for personal anthrax detectors. Plenty of coverage there...
"Yeah, we only need a few more years to develop it. Uh, huh."
(...) the Akkad culture of central Iraq (...) the fifth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom, (...) early settlements in the Holy Land
If a meteor hit the ocean in what today is Iraq, how much damage would it cause to Egypt, and how? Weather probably wouldn't change much, but we could expect floods. Egypt was quite used to having the Nile flood every year, and would not have been too vulnerable in the first place. Seems like the event might not be so major as to be responsible for the beginning of the civilization's downfall.
How big would a meteor have to be to cause significant damage all the way in Egypt?
The article doesn't say they vanished "without a trace" anywhere. Actually, it says many civilizations "went into sudden decline", which is different entirely. We know they went into decline, and we know which civilizations they were.
Now, IANAA, but there might be no truly objective record of this at all - nobody would write "today, a meteor struck my town". All we have are epics of Gilgamesh, and other legends, that other posts here are trying to interpret in these terms. The point is, we do have legends, and plenty of them, but we don't know what they mean.
Of course, it's a cool idea to integrate the gaming console and the DVD player - everybody's doing it, as tons of posts have pointed out.
The problem with the cube design is that unlike a PS2, it simply doesn't fit into a component stack because of its shape (except on top, where connecting controllers is awkward). It doesn't fit into the VCR space in standard TV cabinets. The only circumstance in which it's sensibly usable is when nothing else is really attached to the TV unit.
Note that the "plain" Nintendo Cube doesn't have this problem. It's a console, and as such is fine hidden on the floor behind the TV. But if you have as much as a VCR plugged in, wouldn't it make sense to have the DVD player nearby, rather than somewhere on the floor? Not to mention if DVD is to be an integrated part of a more complex entertainment system.
This article talks a lot about how useful this X-Pinch machine is and what can be done with it, but doesn't really explain what an X-Pinch is from a physical perspective. A previous comment mentioned a Z-Pinch machine and linked to a Scientific American article that described it as a magnetic field that somehow "pinches" a plasma around the Z-axis - not a very intelligible explanation. I tried a search engine, but you can imagine what kind of sites come up for "X-Pinch":-)
Does anyone know how these "pinches" work, or have a link to a good site or paper that explains what they are?
Wrong. They're going to do an amazing job. Here's why: "...we've got some people on the production that are real nut jobs. But they're good to have around. They bring a real passion to the work..."
These nutjobs are going to make sure the film is true to the book and shares its appeal. If those nutjobs weren't there, and this were a purely traditional Hollywood production, I would be extremely afraid. But I think it's in good hands.
The Armagh Observatory has perhaps the best page about the Leonids that I've found online. It includes information about predictions, rates, storm likelihood, America vs Asia, danger to spacecraft, viewing and photography tips. Try it.
Of course, this one made it to Slashdot now because it showed up on ArsTechnica yesterday, and people just started submitting en masse.
What's interesting is that in Michael's previous story, the Leonids were "expected to peak around 15,000 per hour". Now the estimate is around 4,200.
Wonder what the estimate will be in two weeks...
Slashdot Mirror
As far as digital paper is concerned, you're probably out of luck for the time being, since it's being targeted mostly towards billboards and signs. You probably don't want your pda to have 1cm pixels. Plus, even if they did make the digital paper, you'd still need to have all the electronics attached, so I doubt if you could roll it up. It might be a while until they come up with something viable.
They're not producing them anymore, but they're still for sale, and Intel still offers tech support. I bought mine some time ago though, so I don't know much about availability.
It's really a pity since it's such a good product. Grab it while you can, keep it while it lasts or until it becomes truly obsolete. I hope maybe another company will sometime figure out there's a market for this kind of thing.
I used to have a great Casio calculator watch. It had storage for phone numbers, a calendar, and could serve as a four-function calculator. Great stuff.
Since it didn't sync with a computer, you had to input data by hand. This was at the same time a limitation and a blessing - numbers had to be typed in one by one, but you could always type something in whenever you needed to take a note.
Back to the Fossil.
- You can't type things in. This is key if someone gives you a phone number, or you stumble across something you need to remember. You come off looking like a nerd, but I'd much rather look like a nerd with a cool watch than a nerd with a cool watch and lots of paper scraps in his shirt pocket.
- It syncs your entire address book. I for one don't want every single address that's on my computer to be sent to my watch. Searching and browsing is a pain, and I'd much rather only have numbers that I need on hand. My Casio only ever had at most 40 numbers in it - important ones.
Because of its limitations, I got a Xircom Rex MiniPDA (basically a PCMCIA card with a touch-screen that does addresses, notes, calendar, and third-party apps). In the end, I threw out the Casio and got an analog watch. The Rex does everything I'd ever need a PDA to do, and it's tiny. This sounds like a product plug - must stop now.RXTE is a pretty old satellite. From the page, I see it has given great results and continues to do so. That's pretty neat.
Still, I recently read about another x-ray satellite out there that's newer and likely to be still more important for future x-ray imaging. Chandra observatory was launched by NASA not long ago. You can get more information at chandra.harvard.edu.
Feel free to check out both pages and see the differences between RXTE and Chandra.
It's good to see they're thinking ahead. If with QinetiQ 1 you don't succeed, you can always build QinetiQ 2, and QinetiQ 3, and so forth. With numbering, failure is wisely considered a part of the program! Just don't tell that to the guys flying up.
As long as the funding keeps flowing in, they can always find someone to strap themselves into the gondola of doom.
We intend to fly QinetiQ 1 on a clear day, enabling people to see it with the naked eye from up to 600 miles away. Potentially several hundred million people will witness the flight as a live event.
So if the thing is as high as the Empire State Building (~1400ft), is it still likely to be visible from 600 miles away? Somehow I doubt it - that's like standing on top of the Sears Towers and seeing the Empire State Building!
and
Mission times, depending on the launch vehicle selected, will be from 10-12 years
but..
any further delay in sending a probe would have meant losing the chance of seeing Pluto's atmosphere before it froze and condensed in 2015
Now add the years. Launch in 2006, + 10 mission years = 2016. By then, Pluto will be nothing but a great big block of ice. Did NASA forget how to add? Am I missing something?
True, but imagine trying to actually operate a fly by remote control in 3D. With the cockroach, you can basically just move in two dimensions by walking forward/backward and rotating, but it's much more complicated with a fly since you have to account for aerodynamics and the like - a fly is more than a tiny RC airplane. Entirely apart from the difficulty of simply flying the thing, I doubt human operators would find it easy to emulate "fly-like" flitting flying patterns.
The last problem is that, unlike cockroaches, flies can't carry five times their weight while flying around, so you'd have to really miniaturize the electronic equipment. After all, you'd need two cameras (for 3D viewing), wireless transmission equipment and electrodes, all really lightweight and attached in such a way that it doesn't get in the way of wings or legs.
All in all, I think remote-control flies might still be quite a while off. Cockroaches will have to do for now.
The great thing is, the cockroaches (more info at ZZZ) can be radio controlled, which solves many of the problems with cats, such as unpredictability and uncontrollability. Plus, they're slightly less conspicuous. :-)
Of course, if seen, it might be harder to avoid getting killed than with a cat.
On a slightly offtopic note, does anyone remember the game Bad Mojo, where you had to steer a cockroach around a bunch of obstacles? That might be good training for future spy-insect operators
So entirely apart from the valid concerns about turning an entire working system around, you still have to worry about comparing the cost of Windows licenses with the expected costs of Linux sysadmins and tech support.
All we know from this is that people used bone tools; I assume this means knives and spear heads, mostly. The article also mentions "modern behaviour" - I'm not quite sure what that is, exactly. Still I doubt that creating bone tools (which is arguably not easy) requires "civilization" or "language". That's a different discussion entirely.
Can anyone clarify what "Modern behaviour" means in this context?
I like the current interface - it's clean, presents information well and is appropriate to the spirit of the site. What do I care if they change the colors and so forth to make it look "new"? I actually think slashdot is the most aesthetic slash site I've seen.
The design of the interface is almost intrinsic to slashcode, because it was designed to present exactly this kind of news and boards. What would you like the interface to look like?
Good point, though I'm not sure the NSF is very high on the government's list of priorities right now (not that it ever has been, really) - it's all about defense now. I'm also not sure that selling the shuttles means that NASA gets less money from the government, just that it has more money to allocate to other projects instead of shuttle maintenance.
I have nothing against the private sector per se, but I agree that in this case it might not be a good idea.
A lot of the R&D that happens on board the shuttle is quite subsidized, and I'm afraid that corporations are not going to be as friendly to researchers. What that means is that possibly some research projects won't be able to afford execution in space. We may somehow lose out on valuable basic research, which would be a shame.
Perhaps the government could continue subsidizing research done on corporate spacecraft, through some extension of the NSF, or so.
What about these X40 or so (I'm not sure about the number) reusable shuttles that Lockheed has been designing for years? Perhaps NASA is thinking of selling the old shuttle because soon they'll start buying a new fleet.
The new Lockheed design is sure to have been expensive - considering that NASA basically paid for the thing, I wouldn't be surprised if it were an exclusive deal.
This cave system would be a cool improvement, since it would probably be much less dizzying than wearing goggles. Running and jumping might be fun as well, but your range and of movement in real life would be much restricted compared to the things that can be done with a gamepad. I'd like to see it though.
I don't know much about ozone and such, but why would the size of the hole start to decline? Are we producing additional ozone that could somehow refill the hole? Is the remainder of the ozone layer spreading out to fill the gap?
Are there any meteorologists/ecologists out there who know how this works?
They need to market this as technology for personal anthrax detectors. Plenty of coverage there...
"Yeah, we only need a few more years to develop it. Uh, huh."
If a meteor hit the ocean in what today is Iraq, how much damage would it cause to Egypt, and how? Weather probably wouldn't change much, but we could expect floods. Egypt was quite used to having the Nile flood every year, and would not have been too vulnerable in the first place. Seems like the event might not be so major as to be responsible for the beginning of the civilization's downfall.
How big would a meteor have to be to cause significant damage all the way in Egypt?
The article doesn't say they vanished "without a trace" anywhere. Actually, it says many civilizations "went into sudden decline", which is different entirely. We know they went into decline, and we know which civilizations they were.
Now, IANAA, but there might be no truly objective record of this at all - nobody would write "today, a meteor struck my town". All we have are epics of Gilgamesh, and other legends, that other posts here are trying to interpret in these terms. The point is, we do have legends, and plenty of them, but we don't know what they mean.
The problem with the cube design is that unlike a PS2, it simply doesn't fit into a component stack because of its shape (except on top, where connecting controllers is awkward). It doesn't fit into the VCR space in standard TV cabinets. The only circumstance in which it's sensibly usable is when nothing else is really attached to the TV unit.
Note that the "plain" Nintendo Cube doesn't have this problem. It's a console, and as such is fine hidden on the floor behind the TV. But if you have as much as a VCR plugged in, wouldn't it make sense to have the DVD player nearby, rather than somewhere on the floor? Not to mention if DVD is to be an integrated part of a more complex entertainment system.
This article talks a lot about how useful this X-Pinch machine is and what can be done with it, but doesn't really explain what an X-Pinch is from a physical perspective. A previous comment mentioned a Z-Pinch machine and linked to a Scientific American article that described it as a magnetic field that somehow "pinches" a plasma around the Z-axis - not a very intelligible explanation. I tried a search engine, but you can imagine what kind of sites come up for "X-Pinch" :-)
Does anyone know how these "pinches" work, or have a link to a good site or paper that explains what they are?
Wrong. They're going to do an amazing job. Here's why:
"...we've got some people on the production that are real nut jobs. But they're good to have around. They bring a real passion to the work..."
These nutjobs are going to make sure the film is true to the book and shares its appeal. If those nutjobs weren't there, and this were a purely traditional Hollywood production, I would be extremely afraid. But I think it's in good hands.
The Armagh Observatory has perhaps the best page about the Leonids that I've found online. It includes information about predictions, rates, storm likelihood, America vs Asia, danger to spacecraft, viewing and photography tips. Try it.
What's interesting is that in Michael's previous story, the Leonids were "expected to peak around 15,000 per hour". Now the estimate is around 4,200.
Wonder what the estimate will be in two weeks...