In the late 80's I was hired by Truevision (makers of graphics cards and paint software) and allowed to hire a team to create a new paint system for one of their latest graphic cards. At the time, Truevision was moving to a new building and we were asked how we wanted our room designed. The entire office environment was florescent lighting, which I personally can't stand... so we asked for the following:
A room without carpeting, so our rolling chairs would roll
A door with a lock so we could not be bothered
Incadesent lighting with a DIMMER so that we could set the appropriate level
An interior office so there would be no windows
A stereo system so that we could play our favorite music
We tended to leave the lights to almost off, very very dim, the music up high, and the door locked. We could easily go to each team members station merely by kicking and scooting around in our rolling chairs. It was a fantastic environment.
These days, however, I live in Hawaii. My workplace has greatly changed. Since I work out of my house I can design just about anything I wish. My lab is currently on the 2nd floor of my house and has huge windows on two sides that face North and West (I'm on the east side of the Big Island so this avoids morning sunlight problems). I look out over my landscaping which is full of fruit and flowers.
Of course, some things don't change... I still have the rolling chairs... I still have the stereo... I still prefer to get up at 4:00 AM and work awhile in the dark... but when the sun comes up, and the rainbows come out... and the exotic scents and birds arrive... it is a very nice programmiing experience.
Today and Today Only! A half price sale on END OF THE WORLD INSURANCE. Visit www.Newton666.com and get protected today! Don't leave your loved ones behind! A simple $5000 polcy started today will ensure that you or your heir will be able to board a rocket to take you off-world, on December 31, 2059. NO RETURNS!
Your post is dead on target. Way-back-when my company did the original website for Nine Inch Nails. In our meetings with Trent, one thing that always struck me was that he seemed to have more interest in producing than in playing. For people who think that NIN died, the opposite is true. He has gone on to produce many recordings for other artists. His studio in New Orleans is unbelievable (as I understand, he has one of the largest digital mixers in the midwest, thus he attracts alot of bands for recording).
This is obviously the proper way to go. NIN created their own label which then empowered them to create their own recording studio (in an old mortuary in fact) which leads them to produce other bands.
Think about it.... RIAA rapes you... labels rape you... and if you come out with a GOLD record - you had damn well do better next time or the label will look elsewhere. Thus, it's an always up-hill battle for the artist. The solution? Stop recording and start producing.
I'm just glad that even though I had years and years and years of music training... that I went into the computer industry instead - music is a hard industry to be successful in (though these days, computers aint doing much better THANK YOU GEORGE).
wow, cool:)) I bet that was spectacular. Was that the one I saw on the news?
It's kinda hard to drive a full tank of propane over a 2000 degree lava field to reach the tubes... not to mention you'd blow out the tires on the hot lava;))
Another perfect example of our government with it's head firmly planted up it's ass.
What's next... let's ban MATCHES and LIGHTERS... GOD KNOWS, SOMEONE MIGHT TRY TO LIGHT THEIR SHOES ON FIRE.
LETS BAN PROPANE HEATING... THEY MAKE PERFECT BOMBS (just ask me about dropping propane tanks into a lava tube... nice explosions result - and no, we didn't do it in the park boundries).
LETS BAN GASOLINE... YOU CAN MAKE NAPALM WITH GAS AND SOAP -- AND IN FACT, LETS BAN SOAP!!! THESE ARE ALL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!!!
Stupid asshole government - does everything in its power to keep us citizens in fear. QUITE FRANKLY... we should haul these self-elected assholes into a nice 5 x 9 cell on ground of terrorist threats against the citizens of america.
A few years ago I had the privledge to be in Tokyo for a couple of weeks. Riding the subway system I was delighted to see that the majority of japanese riders were reading comic books.
In japan, many of the comics are sold in huge very very thick oversize magazine style books. Some of these are several inches thick and larger than our normal magazine footprint.
Whereas, in America (and elsewhere) you really don't see adults reading comics in public often, in Japan adults were reading comics everywhere.
Personally, I prefer to get my political insights from the sunday comics in my local newspaper - rather than the liars on FAUX and SEE'NN News who merely parrot what the fucked up Bushie administration pays them to.
This patent will not survive long. In August of 1995 our company did an internet site for PICTORIAL in Indianapolis. Pictorial is the nations leading seller of testing for insurance employees (among other types of tests). We were requested to design an entire on-line testing system that would enable clients to take the tests online, have them graded automatically, and have the results of the test stored and also sent out to the client.
We complete the site in early 1996. I see that this company APPLIED for their patent in 1999.
While I know that our system was one of the early testing systems available - it was by no means the only one.
Again, another example of an utterly failed patent system awarding patents where prior art is VERY obvious.
Thanks for your advice. I agree with you on all you say. The gentleman I am discussing is in his 70's and is unlikely to want to switch to a Mac (not that I'm biased, I'm on a Mac at the moment myself and would not hesitate to mention it to him). While he does know how to touch type, the problem is that even super big words are very hard for him to see *quickly* (that is, with text bigger than I can stand, he still takes about 5 to 10 seconds to make out each word)... thus the training session would be hugely complex for him.
Another friend suggested him getting a 50 inch plasma screen so the text is REALLY BIG... also probably not a bad idea.
PS, being palestinian myself, I also enjoyed your analogy.
I live on the Big Island and can at this very moment, in fact, see the Keck observatory as a little white pimple on the top of Mauna Kea, from my computer room.
Keck is a very important observatory, and one of the many observatories up there. Since it placed adaptive optics into it's facility a couple years ago they have been producing stunning photographs and research.
However, how much would I pay to sit in their control room? Not much. Anyone can go up to the top of Mauna Kea for free, and hang around. Free tours of Keck are offered daily. You wouldn't be able to do/see much since the telescope time is so highly booked (e.g., you would see what was going on currently).
Another down side is that your at 13,800 ft. The air is very thin and altitude sickness is very very common. Not to mention that it is extremely cold up there.
Since I live on an active volcano in Hawaii, I'll add my 2 cents to this (especially since we spend much timie playing in the lava fields, cooking chicken in lava, etc).
When they dropped the geothermal wells here on the big island almost all of the attempts were met with destroyed drilling rigs - mainly due to excessive heat.
It doesn't make sense that they're going to actually drill into the 2000 degree stuff, unless they have some really really really temperature proof drill bits.
However, it is true that just because the lava is 2000+ degrees (F) that it will not *instantly* melt the cold rock it touches. We can (with special kevlar/spun glass gloves) actually pick up liquid flow - it picks up like taffy and will lift off the cold ground. However, lava in a tube, where it is constantly flowing, does eventually melt the surrounding rock - and can be a cause of lava tubes widening once they're created - but that requries constant contact to liquid magma over time.
I do not need to load some electronic buisness card to contact someone.
I can just write it down!
"Whenever anyone hands me something, it's like they're saying, "Here... you throw this away."
I solved the problem of my business card being thrown away by having high-quality full-color hologram business cards made. They wern't cheap ($1.16 a piece) but they are effective. I've had people years later (I've been doing this over 10 years) call me up and say they never got rid of my card and now they had some business for me.
There is just something about baubles that make people hold on to them (just look at trade show premiums).
A bit of googling will result in a number of articles and lectures on this subject. It appears that a manhole cover actually made it due to a nuclear test blast.
See here for one article, but others exist (try searching for: manhole nuclear space object).
The article ponders whether it is myth or not and provides a number of links to other sites *documenting* the situation.
But realistically, it depends on what you define as man made. Byproducts from many industrial products will certainly (at least some of them) escape the bounds of our planet due to issues such as wind, volcanos, etc... I'm certain that on a daily basis we throw off quite a bit of dna etc...
...I had a very hard time buying this year... but then I started to go down the unusual gift way. Sure, you could get mp3 players, pda's, etc... how geekishly boring. Or, you could get cool educational things that are just plain fun.
Consider these products from Teachers Source. That link should bring you directly to their magnetics page. There's lots of cool things on this page... but scroll down to the 4th item which is a Diamagnetic Levitation Demo. Now that's cool! Other things on that page are also cool, like the Eddy Current tubes.
Or check out their UV DETECTING PRODUCTS page. Those multi-colored UV detecting beads are pretty neat!.
The site is chock full of things that are unusual, conversational, and just play cool.
Note that the site is a FRAMES site and the links above take you right to the frame. The site home page is here.
If you are self motivated might I suggest you begin your own company. Base the company around internet communications as the primary means of finding / working with clients.
Once you do this, and build the base and generate income than start to look at where you would most like to live, regardless of where it is (assuming it has the minimum telecommunications requirements you want).
If you want to live in a paradise, follow your heart. If the big city is what you want... go for it. The bottom line is become self motivated and innovate. Develop serious goals and follow through until you achieve them.
Becomming dependent on yourself gives you the ability to be independent and free to follow your dreams.
Actually, no. For obvious reasons one would not do these things.
First, my trip program is not a 'script'. It's a C program and the source is not stored on the system. Second, it only exists in a private account and to run it I go super user and run it. It will not run otherwise. Third, I do not put it in a cron and it does not appear in any log files. Certainly, when I DO run it, it appears in the process table but the name of the program is inocculous (e.g., you would never realize it was what it was). The database we use is also prioprietary and not commercial.
These things are fairly obvious, and they would apply to Tripwire as well. If your using tripwire you certainly want to hide that fact as much as possible - so putting it in a CRON would be plain silly.
The point is, while it is not totally fool proof, rolling your own and being decerning on how you run it simply makes it harder, that's all. At some point too much time will be wasted looking and then trying to figure out how to deal with it. 3rd party programs by their very commercial nature are better understood and easier to circumvent (e.g., the more popular the commercial program is, the larger the chance that vulenerabilites are well known. A hand rolled obscure program easily falls between the cracks and can become invisible and thus effective).
Of course, an even more effective thought would be to actually HAVE something that looks like tripwire (e.g., proper directories and files) running in the cron. Then the haxor thinks they have it and never realize there's a little 'ksh' that's not a 'ksh' (and no, ours is not called 'ksh') watching 'em.
I also was looking to use Tripwire mainly to occassionally scan the system to ensure that no important files had been modified (duh). I was extremely put off by the price and tone of the website.
If your main interest is simply to retain a database with checksums of files on your drive, and occassionally compare them for new files/changes - roll you own. I did and it was both easy an effective.
Simply stated, I use a configuration file to specify what directories and/or files should be scanned. Likewise, the configuration file has filters that will reject scanning files if any part of the filename matches the filter. The program reads the config and then goes out and reads the files on the drive. I use two different checksum schemes that produce checksum strings of about 80 characters each. These are stored in a database with the absolute file name, it's inode, it's last modify date, it's size, and the checksums.
When the program scans it merely checks the files against the database. If a file is new, it reports it as new to a log and adds it to the database. If a file has changed it reports it as changed to the log and then corrects the information in the database to reflect the change. If no change has occured, nothing happens to the database.
The program spits out little run-time facts about how many files it's scanning, number new, number change and number unchanged. When the run is completed all you have to do is glance at the log and determine if any of the files that changed in the log are a concern and need to be checked out.
There are a couple of advantages to do it yourself... first, no fee to Tripwire. Second... Tripwire is a known product. If you get a hacker in your system and he finds tripwire you can bet he'll try to do something to circumvent it. On the other hand, having written your own tripwire (and don't call it tripwire) - the hacker will not know this, not be familiar with your mechanism, and thus, will be unable to circumvent it. And finally, if your scanner is pretty good, clean and useable, it becomes a nice competitive product against Tripwire.
"In October 2002, a pilot released his single engine aircraft's parachute and landed safely in a Texas mesquite- tree grove"
While I don't doubt the validity of the article, comments like this make me wonder.
We have Mesquite trees here in Hawaii (we call 'em Keawe). The trees support 2 to 3 inch thorns and drop branches like there's no tomorrow. I've been lost in a Keawe forest and let me tell you , by the time I made it out I was slashed dotted.
A friend of mine once pulled his car under a Keawe tree and popped two tires.
While I don't doubt that he landed safely thanks to the parachute... I DO doubt that he got out of the grove safely:))
Of course, maybe he just hunkered down... lit a few branches and grilled a delicious dinner and waited for helecopters to drop him a ladder.
Write a full page letter without picking up your pen one time. How does that letter look? Because that's exactly how you'd have to write it with your cool pen.
I can also think of a number of technologies for this particular situation as well. Silicon accelerameters could easily be used to detect movement side to side. Coupled with a simple tip switch (e.g., am I pushing on paper or not) this could kick in to determine amount of movement.
Again, there *are* solutions for this type of problem that does not include *paper with dots on it*. Quite frankly, that is simply not acceptable because in order for the pen to be useable you have to have the paper.
Consider the death of optical mice that require the special pads with dots in them.
Note that companies have produced similar technology for tablets.... such as Wacom. Their pen is totally passive (e.g., no power other than that radiated from the tablet) - yet it senses up/down/tilt/rotation as well as pressure and stroke. Now before you go off the deep end, yes, I understand how the WACOM technology works (I used to write drivers for them) and yes, it is not the same... but a similar mechanism can be created for a pen device that I believe would work well enough to be useful and not require a special pad or special paper.
In fact, just considering wacom technology - what would be the difference if you merely used the pen to write on a "clipboard". There are already those types of devices out there - they require no *special paper*. I'd prefer that to special paper because it would let me use just about ANY paper - as long as I was writing things down on the *clipboard*. Again, these devices already exist.
I don't think it's a far jump to getting rid of the paper and the clip board. Hmmmmm, to bad GPS resolution isn't enough to track the hand movement.
This just seems to me to be an overpriced way to sell a lot of specialized paper. The entire concept of paper where every sheet is unique (dot wise) from every other sheet means immediatly it's got a finite lifetime (like, imagine a warehouse fire where 2 million reams of the stuff disappear).
I'm surprised that nobody has done anything novel such as a small coil in the tip and a ink ball that has a partial metal structure. In such a system you should be able to sense the ball movement and direction. The ball would be super cheap and could be your renuable revenue stream by selling the replacement ink cartridges. Furthermore, such a sensor would be so small that it could easily be placed into just about any profile - not the bloated fat (and probably uncomfortable) pen they came up with.
I mean, isn't a pen nothing more than a very very very tiny mouse ball? Sensing it's rotation and position should not be hard asuming you can fiddle with the balls composition.
I don't see any novel technology here, only bad design.
As the song says... "it's aloha friday... no work till monday".
Here in da islands everyone wears aloha shirts. The only proper way to wear them is not tucked in. The shirts are colorful, extremely comfortable, and make a very loud statement.
Buck the tradition and switch to aloha shirts (try here for a selection).
Slashdot Mirror
actually, we wear rubber slippahs in hawaii... but if ya wanna lick, sure ;)
- A room without carpeting, so our rolling chairs would roll
- A door with a lock so we could not be bothered
- Incadesent lighting with a DIMMER so that we could set the appropriate level
- An interior office so there would be no windows
- A stereo system so that we could play our favorite music
We tended to leave the lights to almost off, very very dim, the music up high, and the door locked. We could easily go to each team members station merely by kicking and scooting around in our rolling chairs. It was a fantastic environment.These days, however, I live in Hawaii. My workplace has greatly changed. Since I work out of my house I can design just about anything I wish. My lab is currently on the 2nd floor of my house and has huge windows on two sides that face North and West (I'm on the east side of the Big Island so this avoids morning sunlight problems). I look out over my landscaping which is full of fruit and flowers.
Of course, some things don't change... I still have the rolling chairs... I still have the stereo... I still prefer to get up at 4:00 AM and work awhile in the dark... but when the sun comes up, and the rainbows come out... and the exotic scents and birds arrive... it is a very nice programmiing experience.
Aloha
Grilling is too good for the likes of the BSA. I recommend sauteing, or perhaps boiling in oil, or even deep fried.
Or better yet... barbequed over an open flame fueled with MS crap (I hear shit burns really good).
Today and Today Only! A half price sale on END OF THE WORLD INSURANCE. Visit www.Newton666.com and get protected today! Don't leave your loved ones behind! A simple $5000 polcy started today will ensure that you or your heir will be able to board a rocket to take you off-world, on December 31, 2059. NO RETURNS!
This is obviously the proper way to go. NIN created their own label which then empowered them to create their own recording studio (in an old mortuary in fact) which leads them to produce other bands.
Think about it.... RIAA rapes you... labels rape you... and if you come out with a GOLD record - you had damn well do better next time or the label will look elsewhere. Thus, it's an always up-hill battle for the artist. The solution? Stop recording and start producing.
I'm just glad that even though I had years and years and years of music training... that I went into the computer industry instead - music is a hard industry to be successful in (though these days, computers aint doing much better THANK YOU GEORGE).
Aloha Nui Loa
It's kinda hard to drive a full tank of propane over a 2000 degree lava field to reach the tubes... not to mention you'd blow out the tires on the hot lava ;))
What's next... let's ban MATCHES and LIGHTERS... GOD KNOWS, SOMEONE MIGHT TRY TO LIGHT THEIR SHOES ON FIRE.
LETS BAN PROPANE HEATING... THEY MAKE PERFECT BOMBS (just ask me about dropping propane tanks into a lava tube... nice explosions result - and no, we didn't do it in the park boundries).
LETS BAN GASOLINE... YOU CAN MAKE NAPALM WITH GAS AND SOAP -- AND IN FACT, LETS BAN SOAP!!! THESE ARE ALL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!!!
Stupid asshole government - does everything in its power to keep us citizens in fear. QUITE FRANKLY... we should haul these self-elected assholes into a nice 5 x 9 cell on ground of terrorist threats against the citizens of america.
In japan, many of the comics are sold in huge very very thick oversize magazine style books. Some of these are several inches thick and larger than our normal magazine footprint.
Whereas, in America (and elsewhere) you really don't see adults reading comics in public often, in Japan adults were reading comics everywhere.
Personally, I prefer to get my political insights from the sunday comics in my local newspaper - rather than the liars on FAUX and SEE'NN News who merely parrot what the fucked up Bushie administration pays them to.
We complete the site in early 1996. I see that this company APPLIED for their patent in 1999.
While I know that our system was one of the early testing systems available - it was by no means the only one.
Again, another example of an utterly failed patent system awarding patents where prior art is VERY obvious.
Another friend suggested him getting a 50 inch plasma screen so the text is REALLY BIG... also probably not a bad idea.
PS, being palestinian myself, I also enjoyed your analogy.
Aloha
Keck is a very important observatory, and one of the many observatories up there. Since it placed adaptive optics into it's facility a couple years ago they have been producing stunning photographs and research.
However, how much would I pay to sit in their control room? Not much. Anyone can go up to the top of Mauna Kea for free, and hang around. Free tours of Keck are offered daily. You wouldn't be able to do/see much since the telescope time is so highly booked (e.g., you would see what was going on currently).
Another down side is that your at 13,800 ft. The air is very thin and altitude sickness is very very common. Not to mention that it is extremely cold up there.
There are better ways to enjoy Hawaii :)
Repeat
{
1 st street left
2 nd street right
2 nd street left
fpaintf(stdwall,"HELLO WORLD") }
When they dropped the geothermal wells here on the big island almost all of the attempts were met with destroyed drilling rigs - mainly due to excessive heat.
It doesn't make sense that they're going to actually drill into the 2000 degree stuff, unless they have some really really really temperature proof drill bits.
However, it is true that just because the lava is 2000+ degrees (F) that it will not *instantly* melt the cold rock it touches. We can (with special kevlar/spun glass gloves) actually pick up liquid flow - it picks up like taffy and will lift off the cold ground. However, lava in a tube, where it is constantly flowing, does eventually melt the surrounding rock - and can be a cause of lava tubes widening once they're created - but that requries constant contact to liquid magma over time.
I can just write it down!
"Whenever anyone hands me something, it's like they're saying, "Here... you throw this away."
I solved the problem of my business card being thrown away by having high-quality full-color hologram business cards made. They wern't cheap ($1.16 a piece) but they are effective. I've had people years later (I've been doing this over 10 years) call me up and say they never got rid of my card and now they had some business for me.
There is just something about baubles that make people hold on to them (just look at trade show premiums).
See here for one article, but others exist (try searching for: manhole nuclear space object).
The article ponders whether it is myth or not and provides a number of links to other sites *documenting* the situation.
But realistically, it depends on what you define as man made. Byproducts from many industrial products will certainly (at least some of them) escape the bounds of our planet due to issues such as wind, volcanos, etc... I'm certain that on a daily basis we throw off quite a bit of dna etc...
But somehow, a manhole cover seems fitting.
Consider these products from Teachers Source. That link should bring you directly to their magnetics page. There's lots of cool things on this page... but scroll down to the 4th item which is a Diamagnetic Levitation Demo. Now that's cool! Other things on that page are also cool, like the Eddy Current tubes.
Or check out their UV DETECTING PRODUCTS page. Those multi-colored UV detecting beads are pretty neat!.
The site is chock full of things that are unusual, conversational, and just play cool.
Note that the site is a FRAMES site and the links above take you right to the frame. The site home page is here.
Aloha
Once you do this, and build the base and generate income than start to look at where you would most like to live, regardless of where it is (assuming it has the minimum telecommunications requirements you want).
If you want to live in a paradise, follow your heart. If the big city is what you want... go for it. The bottom line is become self motivated and innovate. Develop serious goals and follow through until you achieve them.
Becomming dependent on yourself gives you the ability to be independent and free to follow your dreams.
Aloha Nui Loa
...is the poor postal people who have to deliver it. Remember, their last mile is human :)
First, my trip program is not a 'script'. It's a C program and the source is not stored on the system. Second, it only exists in a private account and to run it I go super user and run it. It will not run otherwise. Third, I do not put it in a cron and it does not appear in any log files. Certainly, when I DO run it, it appears in the process table but the name of the program is inocculous (e.g., you would never realize it was what it was). The database we use is also prioprietary and not commercial.
These things are fairly obvious, and they would apply to Tripwire as well. If your using tripwire you certainly want to hide that fact as much as possible - so putting it in a CRON would be plain silly.
The point is, while it is not totally fool proof, rolling your own and being decerning on how you run it simply makes it harder, that's all. At some point too much time will be wasted looking and then trying to figure out how to deal with it. 3rd party programs by their very commercial nature are better understood and easier to circumvent (e.g., the more popular the commercial program is, the larger the chance that vulenerabilites are well known. A hand rolled obscure program easily falls between the cracks and can become invisible and thus effective).
Of course, an even more effective thought would be to actually HAVE something that looks like tripwire (e.g., proper directories and files) running in the cron. Then the haxor thinks they have it and never realize there's a little 'ksh' that's not a 'ksh' (and no, ours is not called 'ksh') watching 'em.
I also was looking to use Tripwire mainly to occassionally scan the system to ensure that no important files had been modified (duh). I was extremely put off by the price and tone of the website.
If your main interest is simply to retain a database with checksums of files on your drive, and occassionally compare them for new files/changes - roll you own. I did and it was both easy an effective.
Simply stated, I use a configuration file to specify what directories and/or files should be scanned. Likewise, the configuration file has filters that will reject scanning files if any part of the filename matches the filter. The program reads the config and then goes out and reads the files on the drive. I use two different checksum schemes that produce checksum strings of about 80 characters each. These are stored in a database with the absolute file name, it's inode, it's last modify date, it's size, and the checksums.
When the program scans it merely checks the files against the database. If a file is new, it reports it as new to a log and adds it to the database. If a file has changed it reports it as changed to the log and then corrects the information in the database to reflect the change. If no change has occured, nothing happens to the database.
The program spits out little run-time facts about how many files it's scanning, number new, number change and number unchanged. When the run is completed all you have to do is glance at the log and determine if any of the files that changed in the log are a concern and need to be checked out.
There are a couple of advantages to do it yourself... first, no fee to Tripwire. Second... Tripwire is a known product. If you get a hacker in your system and he finds tripwire you can bet he'll try to do something to circumvent it. On the other hand, having written your own tripwire (and don't call it tripwire) - the hacker will not know this, not be familiar with your mechanism, and thus, will be unable to circumvent it. And finally, if your scanner is pretty good, clean and useable, it becomes a nice competitive product against Tripwire.
While I don't doubt the validity of the article, comments like this make me wonder.
We have Mesquite trees here in Hawaii (we call 'em Keawe). The trees support 2 to 3 inch thorns and drop branches like there's no tomorrow. I've been lost in a Keawe forest and let me tell you , by the time I made it out I was slashed dotted.
A friend of mine once pulled his car under a Keawe tree and popped two tires.
While I don't doubt that he landed safely thanks to the parachute... I DO doubt that he got out of the grove safely :))
Of course, maybe he just hunkered down... lit a few branches and grilled a delicious dinner and waited for helecopters to drop him a ladder.
Aloha
...services such as this one which are low cost, require no special software, and are engineered specifically for mom 'n pop businesses.
I can also think of a number of technologies for this particular situation as well. Silicon accelerameters could easily be used to detect movement side to side. Coupled with a simple tip switch (e.g., am I pushing on paper or not) this could kick in to determine amount of movement.
Again, there *are* solutions for this type of problem that does not include *paper with dots on it*. Quite frankly, that is simply not acceptable because in order for the pen to be useable you have to have the paper.
Consider the death of optical mice that require the special pads with dots in them.
Note that companies have produced similar technology for tablets.... such as Wacom. Their pen is totally passive (e.g., no power other than that radiated from the tablet) - yet it senses up/down/tilt/rotation as well as pressure and stroke. Now before you go off the deep end, yes, I understand how the WACOM technology works (I used to write drivers for them) and yes, it is not the same... but a similar mechanism can be created for a pen device that I believe would work well enough to be useful and not require a special pad or special paper.
In fact, just considering wacom technology - what would be the difference if you merely used the pen to write on a "clipboard". There are already those types of devices out there - they require no *special paper*. I'd prefer that to special paper because it would let me use just about ANY paper - as long as I was writing things down on the *clipboard*. Again, these devices already exist.
I don't think it's a far jump to getting rid of the paper and the clip board. Hmmmmm, to bad GPS resolution isn't enough to track the hand movement.
I'm surprised that nobody has done anything novel such as a small coil in the tip and a ink ball that has a partial metal structure. In such a system you should be able to sense the ball movement and direction. The ball would be super cheap and could be your renuable revenue stream by selling the replacement ink cartridges. Furthermore, such a sensor would be so small that it could easily be placed into just about any profile - not the bloated fat (and probably uncomfortable) pen they came up with.
I mean, isn't a pen nothing more than a very very very tiny mouse ball? Sensing it's rotation and position should not be hard asuming you can fiddle with the balls composition.
I don't see any novel technology here, only bad design.
Here in da islands everyone wears aloha shirts. The only proper way to wear them is not tucked in. The shirts are colorful, extremely comfortable, and make a very loud statement.
Buck the tradition and switch to aloha shirts (try here for a selection).