(Thank god somebody modded me up so I could post a third time today. Stupid fascists.)
I forgot to mention that the link cables work fine under Linux. The calculator geeks can be found here and the Linux software to drive the cable and do the uploads/downloads (plus a GCC port, I think) can be found here
I have the TI-89 and it handles math and physics beautifully, including pretty-print output, "spreadsheets", function/parametric/3d/polar graphing and the greek alphabet. It is programmable (in a BASIC type language) right on the device. You can buy a keyboard to make this simpler (though the 92, which is functionally identical to the 89, is more PDA-shaped and won't need one). If you buy the GraphLink cable you can upload and download files (including programs in ASM). People have written games and PDA-like functions for things like address books. The only feature missing on your list is an alarm.
Price: $100 (+$15 for the cable from WalMart).
This book is destined
on
Perl and XML
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
to become a short-lived classic. Let me explain what I mean.
It does a great job of covering the intricacies of both Perl and XML--how to use them separately, how to use them together and how to use them to solve problems. It also does a great job of exposing the flaws of each language and for this reason it is bound to put itself "out of a job". The author correctly points out that Perl is best suited for quick, unmaintainable hacks and not serious, large-scale engineering. And XML, as he notes, it bloated by ivory-tower academic requirements and has made (and will make) zero headway in the Real World.
My recommendation is to borrow the book at the library, because when these dead-end technologies reach end-of-life it won't be very useful anymore.
While I applaud efforts to bring the less advantaged (such as the Native Americans living in the region) online, I can't help but wonder if this is going to cause more harm than good. Weren't there some stories recently about icebergs melting or cracking or something? Sending high speed (==high energy) photons through the region is unlikely to help that problem much. I don't think anybody wants to "wire the world" at the cost of rising sea levels.
The Open Source community lambasts Microsoft for making security an add-on "feature" instead of engineering it into the lowest, most fundamental levels of the product. We know (and apparently they don't) that security is about more than slapping a lock on the outside and calling it safe. You have to think of protocols, transactions, etc and every stage and with all contingencies in mind.
UI design is the same way and apparently no one in the Linux/UNIX world understands this. You can't make a program intuitive to use by programming it willy-nilly and then putting the right-sized buttons or icons of the correct 16-bit colors on the top. Ease-of-use must be factored in on Day One.
That's why it saddens me to seen GNOME come out with their UI design guidelines fully 4 years after they started programming and after at least two major releases.
If UI design bugs (costing thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars via confusion and "human" error) got the same press that MS's security problems did, ZDNet would have the same biased field days that Slashdot enjoys on a monthly basis.
Are knowledgeable people still buying into that hype after what the Surgeon General released the most recent study? Hello, beaming electromagnetic rays into your head is harmful.
If you remember your first year physics class, electric field strength
from a point source is q/(4pi*epsilon0*r^2). The charge q inside a
cell phone is pretty high, somewhere around 12 volts and the distance
to your head is obviously pretty small, call it less than 1 cm. This
means the polarizing effect of cell power on the electrically active
neurons in your brain is more pronounced than that of the Sun.
No one doubts that the sun affects our brains and it is 93 billion
kilometers away, why all this skepticism over cell phones?
Great news, but
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
I look forward to the day when space travel is cheap, profitable and tourism-capable. I can see the scientific value in researching blue-sky proposals. That said, space elevators will never work.
First of all, you have the technical issues. There are no NEO objects strong enough to support hanging an elevator from. Computer control to keep the Earth end at a constant height (which essentially requires solving the n-body problem where n = several dozen) in real time is impossibly hard. Not to mention the fact that the engine to lift the elevator car has to put out the same energy that a rocket engine does (conservation of energy, heard of it?).
Even assuming these issues could be magically fixed somehow, we have the socio-political issues. In order to be geosynchronous it has to be over the equator. Which is either in the ocean, in South Africa or in the middle of the Amazon. The ocean is inconvenient for mass transit on the elevator. The Amazon is needed for biodiversity. Which leaves South Africa--a political hotbed. Not that they'd want it--it'd be a huge eyesore, hovering on the horizon from hundreds of miles away. Even if we paid them to take it the PC crowd would say we were "exploiting the poor blacks" in SA.
Why don't they funnel more of that money into anti-gravity, that's more promising.
I understand you are a geek. I have an outdoor grill that I tricked out with a few add-ons. For instance, I added a small form-factor mobo with a 100GB HD and about 512MB RAM, running Linux, natch. I ran the parallel cables to the gas valve and built a robotic spatula arm from Legos which I then attacked to my serial port. Now I can just put the patties on the grill and the whole thing is cooked by itself. Best of all, I mounted some speakers on the side and NFS-mounted my MP3 collection from the toaster in the house over my wireless network so I can have some tunes while I wait for the burgers.
My question is: I could dump a bunch of fruit in a cup but it isn't a smoothie unless I use the blender (which is a cutting, not a heating, device). I could put a slab of chicken breast, a chunk of cheese and a tortilla on a plate, but it isn't a quesadilla unless I shred the first two AND wrap them inside the third. Apple pie is the same way. So isn't it a little simplistic to say that cooking = food + heat?
Gobe can be found here and the features they have in their product can be found here. That particular product is Windows-only but version 2.0 is BeOS as well.
I just don't happen to believe that mere knowledge justifies the torture of innocent creatures. Would it be OK to kill human children in order to figure out how to quickly factor prime numbers?
While I applaud the concern these scientists have for people less fortunate than they, I have to wonder if they've been blinded by society's perception of the handicapped. Most handicapped people I know disdain offers of help and some even go so far as to celebrate their different abilities. I can't imagine any of them wanting to attach a robotic hand to their arm in an obscene attempt to become some kind of pseudo-human simulacrum.
Maybe future efforts along this vein should include more than just computer scientists and mechanical/electric engineers. Maybe they should have a psychologist or even, *gasp*, a handicapped person on the team.
Aerogel does have some cool properties. For those that don't know, Aerogel is a substance that looks as insubstantial as smoke but is actually stronger than steel (weight for weight). It also has great heat conduction properties that make it an excellent insulator. And, as this article points out, because it is kind of...foamy, it traps small particles well.
The downside is that, as a gelatin (as in Jello), Aerogel is made out of "animal byproducts". And not the kind of byproduct you can get by just tickling an animal, either--you have to kill them. For instance, the main source of gelatin in the US is horses' hooves. This cruel exploitation is the kind of thing that has given space research a bad name and is why I, in my role as Chairman of the National Science Advisory Board for Social Change, recommended to Bush that he cut space funding by 2/3's this year.
A tiny plane like a model will never make it across the Atlantic because airplanes don't scale down. Lift (==control) rises as the square of the size whereas weight rises as the cube. So when you have a tiny plane it is mostly lift. Which sounds great, except that human reaction times and amounts are grossly oversized to control something so unstable. Flying around the backyard is fine, choppy winds and extensive times are another.
And don't even get me started on the inadequacy of the power source to last that long. Crazy dreamer.
This is very simple. The software industry is trying to protect it's IP and make some money. This is not evil. Stealing from them is evil. We can all agree on that much. If you personally (or speaking for your company) don't want the protections afforded by IP law, don't use them. You can continue to allow people to steal your content if you wish.
As for not wanting to be seen as making warranties, that seems pretty slimy to me. I'm with Ralph Nader on this one--there is an implied "warranty of merchantability" with software. If you make your software available to people with claims about how it will check your email every 5 minutes, then I should have the right to sue you if it deletes my hard drive.
"...address the environmental impact of large-scale farming..."
I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who has seen the light regarding this practice. Large-scale farming is probably the absolute worst thing we could be doing to the environment. Monocultural plants lacking biodiversity are a haven for bacteria and virii. Growing and cutting the plants down every year pulls carbon out of the soil and launches it into the atmosphere. Tilling the soil makes it more susceptible to erosion. Irrigation reduces the availability (and cleanliness) of drinking water. Without doubt, if we discontinued farming altogether we would be better off.
In the land of Congress and PHB's, "management" is usually synonymous with "telling you what you can and cannot do". That makes "rights management" an oxymoron and people who subscribe to them regularmorons. That it is digital is just sickening.
The Real Life world has a lot of problems, problems that were specifically engineered out of the online world. Things such as anonymity, file downloading, and HTTP were all designed expressly for the purpose of doing morally good things that were inexplicably illegal--like looking at porn. Now those jackbooted thugs are cyberstomping us and we need to fight back! Boycott!
I can't believe that surveyors could be more than a meter or two off, which makes me think of a conspiracy theory. They want everybody to get a GPS receiver so that "suspicious individuals" (non-conforming geeks like you and I) can be tracked via satellite. It isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, I've heard of cases like this plus there's the Enemy of the State.
Back in 1998, when Linux was cool, I started a project to convert our lab to Linux servers, desktops, embedded, etc. The project itself was still exploratory, just seeing what this baby could do, you know. Well, we had our yearly audit (as a federal grant-getting institution we need to have accounting/insurance/safety/security audits, etc). When I showed the GAO guy my Linux test boxes he nearly blew a gasket and told me to yank those out of there ASAP.
These were his claims (before you mod me down, remember that I disagree with his assessment, I'm just the messenger here)
He said they'd found massive security issues with Linux
He said the reliability wasn't quite high enough for those mission critical items we performed
He said their was nobody to call when it broke
He said that the haphazardly "open" way it had been developed practically guaranteed the existence of bugs
He also said that the licensing issues prevented our lab from putting the results of our experiments in the public domain
So anyway, I'm glad the gov't is taking a second look. Hopefully Linux has improved since then.
Hackers, like those at DefCon, are devoted to Truth, Justice and the USian Way. These guys are devoted to ferreting out the truth about computer security, no matter how well it is hidden. Your life or the life of someone you love was probably saved due to their unceasing efforts towards the betterment of Mankind. Bugs like those in Micro$ucks Internet Exploiter can have unimaginable consequences for our economy and our national security. That these guys selflessly spend hours crafting test virii to expose these bugs should be honored, not harassed by the Secret Police.
If anyone is a Nazi, it is you for suggesting that we all goosestep to the tune of Herr Gates!
I went to a DefCon a few years ago and the place was crawling with feds. That's not surprising since the guys at those conventions are potential world-class criminals. What annoyed and disturbed me was that I, basically a nobody, was traced back to my home and lab. For about 3 years afterwards I would hear odd clicks on a lot of my phonecalls and I had all of my nuclear-related grant proposals denied on the basis of "security".
Anyway, my point is that these DefCon thingies are totally hard-core and you need to be careful.
I'm sure some people are going to dismiss this with some cynical remark, but I'd like to go on record as saying that this device Will Transform The World. I mean, think about. Light-powered fans--when it gets hot, the fan runs faster. Amazing!
And there's zero pollution. Whatever these polymers are, they are probably naturally occurring and easy to mine so it's really just a matter of slapping the thing together and putting it in a patch of sun. I wonder if Saran Wrap would work?
Anyway, this is definitely one of the Big Stories of the year and maybe the century. What a world we live in.
but this announcement is just hype from one of the savviest marketing companies around. They may be opening a new plant--I have no way of know that. What I do know is that a.1 micron process is physically impossible.
1 micron = 1000 nanometers, therefore.1 micron = 100 nanometers. Visible light extends from red (750 nm) down to blue (450). 100 nm is invisible to the human eye. There's no way someone could have designed a chip that small, build a machine to manufacture them or find the chips after they'd been made.
Please Slashdot, show a little skepticism before printing press releases like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot to mention that the link cables work fine under Linux. The calculator geeks can be found here and the Linux software to drive the cable and do the uploads/downloads (plus a GCC port, I think) can be found here
I have the TI-89 and it handles math and physics beautifully, including pretty-print output, "spreadsheets", function/parametric/3d/polar graphing and the greek alphabet. It is programmable (in a BASIC type language) right on the device. You can buy a keyboard to make this simpler (though the 92, which is functionally identical to the 89, is more PDA-shaped and won't need one). If you buy the GraphLink cable you can upload and download files (including programs in ASM). People have written games and PDA-like functions for things like address books. The only feature missing on your list is an alarm.
Price: $100 (+$15 for the cable from WalMart).
It does a great job of covering the intricacies of both Perl and XML--how to use them separately, how to use them together and how to use them to solve problems. It also does a great job of exposing the flaws of each language and for this reason it is bound to put itself "out of a job". The author correctly points out that Perl is best suited for quick, unmaintainable hacks and not serious, large-scale engineering. And XML, as he notes, it bloated by ivory-tower academic requirements and has made (and will make) zero headway in the Real World.
My recommendation is to borrow the book at the library, because when these dead-end technologies reach end-of-life it won't be very useful anymore.
While I applaud efforts to bring the less advantaged (such as the Native Americans living in the region) online, I can't help but wonder if this is going to cause more harm than good. Weren't there some stories recently about icebergs melting or cracking or something? Sending high speed (==high energy) photons through the region is unlikely to help that problem much. I don't think anybody wants to "wire the world" at the cost of rising sea levels.
UI design is the same way and apparently no one in the Linux/UNIX world understands this. You can't make a program intuitive to use by programming it willy-nilly and then putting the right-sized buttons or icons of the correct 16-bit colors on the top. Ease-of-use must be factored in on Day One.
That's why it saddens me to seen GNOME come out with their UI design guidelines fully 4 years after they started programming and after at least two major releases.
If UI design bugs (costing thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars via confusion and "human" error) got the same press that MS's security problems did, ZDNet would have the same biased field days that Slashdot enjoys on a monthly basis.
If you remember your first year physics class, electric field strength from a point source is q/(4pi*epsilon0*r^2). The charge q inside a cell phone is pretty high, somewhere around 12 volts and the distance to your head is obviously pretty small, call it less than 1 cm. This means the polarizing effect of cell power on the electrically active neurons in your brain is more pronounced than that of the Sun. No one doubts that the sun affects our brains and it is 93 billion kilometers away, why all this skepticism over cell phones?
First of all, you have the technical issues. There are no NEO objects strong enough to support hanging an elevator from. Computer control to keep the Earth end at a constant height (which essentially requires solving the n-body problem where n = several dozen) in real time is impossibly hard. Not to mention the fact that the engine to lift the elevator car has to put out the same energy that a rocket engine does (conservation of energy, heard of it?).
Even assuming these issues could be magically fixed somehow, we have the socio-political issues. In order to be geosynchronous it has to be over the equator. Which is either in the ocean, in South Africa or in the middle of the Amazon. The ocean is inconvenient for mass transit on the elevator. The Amazon is needed for biodiversity. Which leaves South Africa--a political hotbed. Not that they'd want it--it'd be a huge eyesore, hovering on the horizon from hundreds of miles away. Even if we paid them to take it the PC crowd would say we were "exploiting the poor blacks" in SA.
Why don't they funnel more of that money into anti-gravity, that's more promising.
My question is: I could dump a bunch of fruit in a cup but it isn't a smoothie unless I use the blender (which is a cutting, not a heating, device). I could put a slab of chicken breast, a chunk of cheese and a tortilla on a plate, but it isn't a quesadilla unless I shred the first two AND wrap them inside the third. Apple pie is the same way. So isn't it a little simplistic to say that cooking = food + heat?
Gobe can be found here and the features they have in their product can be found here. That particular product is Windows-only but version 2.0 is BeOS as well.
name=cypherpunk
pwd=cypherpunks
What features doesn't eXist have that you need?
more accurate to paint them white and let the sun do the work.
I just don't happen to believe that mere knowledge justifies the torture of innocent creatures. Would it be OK to kill human children in order to figure out how to quickly factor prime numbers?
Maybe future efforts along this vein should include more than just computer scientists and mechanical/electric engineers. Maybe they should have a psychologist or even, *gasp*, a handicapped person on the team.
The downside is that, as a gelatin (as in Jello), Aerogel is made out of "animal byproducts". And not the kind of byproduct you can get by just tickling an animal, either--you have to kill them. For instance, the main source of gelatin in the US is horses' hooves. This cruel exploitation is the kind of thing that has given space research a bad name and is why I, in my role as Chairman of the National Science Advisory Board for Social Change, recommended to Bush that he cut space funding by 2/3's this year.
And don't even get me started on the inadequacy of the power source to last that long. Crazy dreamer.
As for not wanting to be seen as making warranties, that seems pretty slimy to me. I'm with Ralph Nader on this one--there is an implied "warranty of merchantability" with software. If you make your software available to people with claims about how it will check your email every 5 minutes, then I should have the right to sue you if it deletes my hard drive.
I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who has seen the light regarding this practice. Large-scale farming is probably the absolute worst thing we could be doing to the environment. Monocultural plants lacking biodiversity are a haven for bacteria and virii. Growing and cutting the plants down every year pulls carbon out of the soil and launches it into the atmosphere. Tilling the soil makes it more susceptible to erosion. Irrigation reduces the availability (and cleanliness) of drinking water. Without doubt, if we discontinued farming altogether we would be better off.
The Real Life world has a lot of problems, problems that were specifically engineered out of the online world. Things such as anonymity, file downloading, and HTTP were all designed expressly for the purpose of doing morally good things that were inexplicably illegal--like looking at porn. Now those jackbooted thugs are cyberstomping us and we need to fight back! Boycott!
Just a thought.
These were his claims (before you mod me down, remember that I disagree with his assessment, I'm just the messenger here)
So anyway, I'm glad the gov't is taking a second look. Hopefully Linux has improved since then.
If anyone is a Nazi, it is you for suggesting that we all goosestep to the tune of Herr Gates!
Anyway, my point is that these DefCon thingies are totally hard-core and you need to be careful.
And there's zero pollution. Whatever these polymers are, they are probably naturally occurring and easy to mine so it's really just a matter of slapping the thing together and putting it in a patch of sun. I wonder if Saran Wrap would work?
Anyway, this is definitely one of the Big Stories of the year and maybe the century. What a world we live in.
1 micron = 1000 nanometers, therefore .1 micron = 100 nanometers. Visible light extends from red (750 nm) down to blue (450). 100 nm is invisible to the human eye. There's no way someone could have designed a chip that small, build a machine to manufacture them or find the chips after they'd been made.
Please Slashdot, show a little skepticism before printing press releases like this.