Okay, here's my guess for the real reason this is done in hardware:
The guy who developed this is probably a hardware engineer who is very familiar with that type of work. To him, the task of writing a generic mouse device filter software driver would have been more complex that making a hardware box that "any" mouse could be plugged into.
My opinion? This is not a commercial product, but a quick hack. Why not just create a USB pointing device specifically for people with this condition instead of making a special adapter box requiring you to also buy a mouse? Or better yet, write a generic software driver and make it freely available.
I noticed that this is being designed for SD form factor, but I'm curious if they would be able to make a type 2 CF card with 8 of these devices in it for 1 terrabyte.
What about data transfer rate? Are these things fast enough they could compete with hard disk drives? Could we be seeing petabyte hard drives sometime in the future?
This is only practicle if you use something like Gaim that automatically saves conversations for multiple IM services. Every few months I'll copy my old IM logs to a backup location, usually when I upgrade the client software in case they change the format of the file or what not.
It's actually pretty convienient to be able to search through old conversations. It makes a better journal than trying to thoughts out to yourself.
The largest amount of rebates I ever received was from my cellphone I got from T-Mobile and Amazon.com. Both T-Mobile and Amazon offered $150 rebates each, so I ended up getting this $280 for more than free. Of course, I didn't buy this phone knowing I would actually get all these rebates, but it was a nice surprise that I did.
Yes, but this wire is only 10 centimeters long, and 10 micrometers thick, and stores 10 GB. Just imagine how many meters of wire could fit on a small spool? 100 meters would be equal to 10 TB. Of course, my guess is that tape drives are approaching that capacity soon anyway.
You know, they don't just use the timber for %100 paper products. My guess is that they processes the wood for use in construction, and then whatever is left is turned to sawdust and used in paper.
Besides, most paper contains like 30% or more recycled content now days.
Hey, with any luck, maybe the cost of plastic will go way up and they will finally start making products out of metal like they used to. Tired of seeing all these cheap plastic laptops and such. Aluminum or some other lightweight metal would be much cooler.
I hate hearing this term because it makes it sound like a webbrowser is inherintely designed to show pop-up windows. It is simply a JavaScript command. If your web browser chooses not to implement it, then it doesn't show up. There is nothing to "block" you simply "ignore" the command to show the pop-up window.
That's pretty sad when the web developer doesn't even know how to create a basic website correctly. I only noticed this because when pages load, BMP's load from the bottom up, not top down because the format is backwards.
Use Agile Messenger. It's for the Symbian OS platform.
Charging per text message is ridiculus. They need to stop that. 128 bytes for a text message puts thousands of times less burden on their network than a phone converstion.
I've already tried one of those self checkout grocery store things and all I can say is that I'm not impressed. I don't see how moving the device to the shopping cart would make things any easier.
What is so difficult about going through a check out line? You might have to talk to a real person? Oh, how terrible. As much as I love technology and automation, I would rather pay a little more for my groceries then deal with the hassle of a self checkout system.
Now, if they had humanoid robots that did the check out that would be cool.
It's just marketing fluff. Integrated circuits have been measured in nanometers for quite some time now, it's nothing special really. Just because the most basic unit of your product is nanometers in size, doesn't mean it's some special kind of technology.
To me, nanotechnology means buildings things atom by atom. Not very many people have actually done that. I don't think it's fair to use the term nanotechnology for some chemical processes that produces these nanoscale structures. That's just to easy.
Yes, they could probably do this with a super computer. Just depends on how fine of a mesh you want to work with. The more detail, the more computational cost.
Heck, they are even doing "simulations" of car crashes in video games that look pretty impressive with parts flying out of the car etc. Although a real simulation would be quite a bit more complicated than this.
I've saved every e-mail I've sent/received (minus spam) since early 1998 or so. I've saved I don't see any reason not to. It's sort of a journal of my life. I'm making regular, multiple, and offsite backups so the longevity of the data should be possible.
I've only saved a few IRC and IM chatlogs before 2003 before I started using Gaim. Since then I've saved every IM conversation I've had since then.
I don't really think the data has any value except maybe to reminisce about old friendships, or what things used to be like. It was kind of weird reading an old IM conversation I had with someone telling them about this new "MP3" file format. Who knew it's popularity would explode and turn into a huge legal mess.
What good is a DVD if I can't encode it to play on a laptop (without an internal DVD drive) or a handheld computer?
I love how they keep giving consumers less options on how to watch movies. At this point, I've almost completely given up buying any new DVD's or music. I'll just stick to webcast radio or go see a movie in the theature every once and awhile. It's just not worth $25 for a crippled movie disc.
the problem with this is that like every other means to create databases that track/document individuals or groups, they will eventually end up being mined for data that will likely violate your right to privacy.
Typical government trick. Make new law and say it's only for good, it's for the children, or some such nonsense. And then, when it's convenient, use that law to spy on more innocent civilians.
And this is the same way the gun bans work. First they require registration, and then, once they know you own a weapon, they make it illegal, and can then easily confiscate.
Really, if they WANT more tax revenue, why don't they just wait until at least 50% of people own hybrids and then increase the gas tax so they get the same level of revenue they had before. It would have the added bonus (for the government) of putting extra burden against those who still drive gas guzzling vehicles. AND people don't have to shell out $500/more per new car for a ridiculus GPS dohicky.
Customers are PAYING Comcast for 3Mbps of bandwidth/month. VOIP is actually a low bandwidth utility, probably no more than 64kbps if even THAT. There is no "leeching" as you call it.
If Comcast wants to throw in their own VOIP service for a small fee on top of their existing broadband service they are more than welcome to do so.
BTW, can you explain to me why cable internet costs $57/month, basic cable TV $30/month. While together they cost about $60/month? Does Comcast automatically assume I want both of these?
So you start kids off having to wear badges with RFID tags in them? Then they get them in highschool, college maybe? And of course, when you're in the work force your employers will have you wear RFID badges too. Heck, if people are so used to wearing these bages all their lives, they may be willing to wear government issued badges, you know, for homeland security or some nonsense. If they have been taught since they were kids that wearing an RFID tracking badge is acceptable, why would they protest? We only tend to protest when things change, not things that creep on us.
On the downside, antialiasing sucks up a lot of processing power.
I don't see how this is possible. After scaling, the font should be properly cached as a bitmap. Thus, it would not use very much CPU after being rendered into memory. Has the author of this article actually benchmarked this to show how "slow" antialised fonts are? Or is he making stuff up.
Visual effects like drop shadows behind windows and menus, transparent menus and effects, and real-time effects also consume a lot of processing power. The catch for computer makers is that most users expect them.
Transparency and shadows should be accelerated by the video card. This should result in minimal CPU cycles being used for this. But really, if this eye candy is bothering you, just disable these features and you're computer is 100x faster again. Often, it's not the rendering of these effects that makes the computer slow, but the fact that an animation HAS to occur before something else happens.
support code that no one really understands What does he mean by this? He's equating more manageable code with slower code. Is he implying that complex, unmaintainable code is faster? I've never seen that to be the case.
Each of these programs pre-loads its own shared libraries
This is something I'll agree with. Each time I install a new driver for some device on my computer it requires a service on startup to use about 5MB-10MB of memory. My guess is that the driver developers don't think it's worth their time to optimize memory usage.
The reason why some applications are slower is simply because it was never in the requirements for them to be faster. It's just a quality control issue. There is a trade off between time to market and software performance. The performance usually is the last thing considered in a product (just get it working first).
And you can always just plug the phone in and use a headset. This would be exactly the same as using a landline (wired phone), only you can unplug the phone when it's done charging!
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Okay, here's my guess for the real reason this is done in hardware:
The guy who developed this is probably a hardware engineer who is very familiar with that type of work. To him, the task of writing a generic mouse device filter software driver would have been more complex that making a hardware box that "any" mouse could be plugged into.
My opinion? This is not a commercial product, but a quick hack. Why not just create a USB pointing device specifically for people with this condition instead of making a special adapter box requiring you to also buy a mouse? Or better yet, write a generic software driver and make it freely available.
I noticed that this is being designed for SD form factor, but I'm curious if they would be able to make a type 2 CF card with 8 of these devices in it for 1 terrabyte.
What about data transfer rate? Are these things fast enough they could compete with hard disk drives? Could we be seeing petabyte hard drives sometime in the future?
I don't see why they would need to bother with a PNG. The movie file only took 20 seconds to download for me.
This is only practicle if you use something like Gaim that automatically saves conversations for multiple IM services. Every few months I'll copy my old IM logs to a backup location, usually when I upgrade the client software in case they change the format of the file or what not.
It's actually pretty convienient to be able to search through old conversations. It makes a better journal than trying to thoughts out to yourself.
The largest amount of rebates I ever received was from my cellphone I got from T-Mobile and Amazon.com. Both T-Mobile and Amazon offered $150 rebates each, so I ended up getting this $280 for more than free. Of course, I didn't buy this phone knowing I would actually get all these rebates, but it was a nice surprise that I did.
Yes, but this wire is only 10 centimeters long, and 10 micrometers thick, and stores 10 GB. Just imagine how many meters of wire could fit on a small spool? 100 meters would be equal to 10 TB. Of course, my guess is that tape drives are approaching that capacity soon anyway.
Okay, for those interested here is how you go about doing this (CORRECTLY!):
1. Get a decent cellphone that supports WAV or MP3's as ring tones.
2. Download Winamp
3. Go here for winamp plugins that emulate NES games.
4. And some emulated music of course:
5. Play song in winamp, use the Nullsoft Disk Writer plug-in to generate a wave file
6. Edit in your favorite WAV editor to get a 30 second clip and save as MP3/WAV.
7. Save it to your phone. Sending it via bluetooth is easiest.
So there you go. No $2.50 charge for a ring tone. Takes some work, but it's WELL worth it.
Yeah, it looks like some faceless company is still trying to profit from that stupid thing?
this is the original!
http://www.webhamster.com/
I'm glad at least someone is keeping this infinite annoyance alive... wait... what am I saying???
You know, they don't just use the timber for %100 paper products. My guess is that they processes the wood for use in construction, and then whatever is left is turned to sawdust and used in paper.
Besides, most paper contains like 30% or more recycled content now days.
Hey, with any luck, maybe the cost of plastic will go way up and they will finally start making products out of metal like they used to. Tired of seeing all these cheap plastic laptops and such. Aluminum or some other lightweight metal would be much cooler.
I hate hearing this term because it makes it sound like a webbrowser is inherintely designed to show pop-up windows. It is simply a JavaScript command. If your web browser chooses not to implement it, then it doesn't show up. There is nothing to "block" you simply "ignore" the command to show the pop-up window.
I hope this doesn't mean it will be based entirely on the user interface of vi.
Come to California! We got both!
http://img.prod1.dngr.net/img/voicestream/componen ts/header/prepay_masthead.bmp
That's pretty sad when the web developer doesn't even know how to create a basic website correctly. I only noticed this because when pages load, BMP's load from the bottom up, not top down because the format is backwards.
Use Agile Messenger. It's for the Symbian OS platform.
Charging per text message is ridiculus. They need to stop that. 128 bytes for a text message puts thousands of times less burden on their network than a phone converstion.
I've already tried one of those self checkout grocery store things and all I can say is that I'm not impressed. I don't see how moving the device to the shopping cart would make things any easier.
What is so difficult about going through a check out line? You might have to talk to a real person? Oh, how terrible. As much as I love technology and automation, I would rather pay a little more for my groceries then deal with the hassle of a self checkout system.
Now, if they had humanoid robots that did the check out that would be cool.
It's just marketing fluff. Integrated circuits have been measured in nanometers for quite some time now, it's nothing special really. Just because the most basic unit of your product is nanometers in size, doesn't mean it's some special kind of technology.
To me, nanotechnology means buildings things atom by atom. Not very many people have actually done that. I don't think it's fair to use the term nanotechnology for some chemical processes that produces these nanoscale structures. That's just to easy.
Yes, they could probably do this with a super computer. Just depends on how fine of a mesh you want to work with. The more detail, the more computational cost.
Heck, they are even doing "simulations" of car crashes in video games that look pretty impressive with parts flying out of the car etc. Although a real simulation would be quite a bit more complicated than this.
I've saved every e-mail I've sent/received (minus spam) since early 1998 or so. I've saved I don't see any reason not to. It's sort of a journal of my life. I'm making regular, multiple, and offsite backups so the longevity of the data should be possible.
I've only saved a few IRC and IM chatlogs before 2003 before I started using Gaim. Since then I've saved every IM conversation I've had since then.
I don't really think the data has any value except maybe to reminisce about old friendships, or what things used to be like. It was kind of weird reading an old IM conversation I had with someone telling them about this new "MP3" file format. Who knew it's popularity would explode and turn into a huge legal mess.
What good is a DVD if I can't encode it to play on a laptop (without an internal DVD drive) or a handheld computer?
I love how they keep giving consumers less options on how to watch movies. At this point, I've almost completely given up buying any new DVD's or music. I'll just stick to webcast radio or go see a movie in the theature every once and awhile. It's just not worth $25 for a crippled movie disc.
the problem with this is that like every other means to create databases that track/document individuals or groups, they will eventually end up being mined for data that will likely violate your right to privacy.
Typical government trick. Make new law and say it's only for good, it's for the children, or some such nonsense. And then, when it's convenient, use that law to spy on more innocent civilians.
And this is the same way the gun bans work. First they require registration, and then, once they know you own a weapon, they make it illegal, and can then easily confiscate.
Really, if they WANT more tax revenue, why don't they just wait until at least 50% of people own hybrids and then increase the gas tax so they get the same level of revenue they had before. It would have the added bonus (for the government) of putting extra burden against those who still drive gas guzzling vehicles. AND people don't have to shell out $500/more per new car for a ridiculus GPS dohicky.
That's utter NONSENSE!
Customers are PAYING Comcast for 3Mbps of bandwidth/month. VOIP is actually a low bandwidth utility, probably no more than 64kbps if even THAT. There is no "leeching" as you call it.
If Comcast wants to throw in their own VOIP service for a small fee on top of their existing broadband service they are more than welcome to do so.
BTW, can you explain to me why cable internet costs $57/month, basic cable TV $30/month. While together they cost about $60/month? Does Comcast automatically assume I want both of these?
I'm more concerned that people would pay $470 million all together for a giant reflective bean.
Seems the money could have gone to a better use.
So you start kids off having to wear badges with RFID tags in them? Then they get them in highschool, college maybe? And of course, when you're in the work force your employers will have you wear RFID badges too. Heck, if people are so used to wearing these bages all their lives, they may be willing to wear government issued badges, you know, for homeland security or some nonsense. If they have been taught since they were kids that wearing an RFID tracking badge is acceptable, why would they protest? We only tend to protest when things change, not things that creep on us.
Okay a few comments here:
On the downside, antialiasing sucks up a lot of processing power.
I don't see how this is possible. After scaling, the font should be properly cached as a bitmap. Thus, it would not use very much CPU after being rendered into memory. Has the author of this article actually benchmarked this to show how "slow" antialised fonts are? Or is he making stuff up.
Visual effects like drop shadows behind windows and menus, transparent menus and effects, and real-time effects also consume a lot of processing power. The catch for computer makers is that most users expect them.
Transparency and shadows should be accelerated by the video card. This should result in minimal CPU cycles being used for this. But really, if this eye candy is bothering you, just disable these features and you're computer is 100x faster again. Often, it's not the rendering of these effects that makes the computer slow, but the fact that an animation HAS to occur before something else happens.
support code that no one really understands
What does he mean by this? He's equating more manageable code with slower code. Is he implying that complex, unmaintainable code is faster? I've never seen that to be the case.
Each of these programs pre-loads its own shared libraries
This is something I'll agree with. Each time I install a new driver for some device on my computer it requires a service on startup to use about 5MB-10MB of memory. My guess is that the driver developers don't think it's worth their time to optimize memory usage.
The reason why some applications are slower is simply because it was never in the requirements for them to be faster. It's just a quality control issue. There is a trade off between time to market and software performance. The performance usually is the last thing considered in a product (just get it working first).
And you can always just plug the phone in and use a headset. This would be exactly the same as using a landline (wired phone), only you can unplug the phone when it's done charging!