For instance, lighter/cheaper IR-to-vis conversion would not just be cool for night driving, but also for emergency workers, home security systems, scientific instruments (the journal article also lists "semiconductor wafer inspection"), optical computing, and so on...
Essentially any digital camera sensor (including webcams) can pick up the type of infrared light that this device does (~1000nm). I'm a little confused about how it could get any cheaper. If this device could also pick up mid- and far-infrared, now that would be a breakthrough, because sensors that can handle those wavelengths are still thousands of (US) dollars.
The authors of TFA (and the source article they based it on) confuse the issue by assuming that all infrared is the same thing. Based on the "green glow" look and the "830nm illumination" mentioned in another post, this system is working with near-infrared light (like conventional night vision systems), which is completely different from thermal infrared systems. This system will not function as a thermal imager. If something is very hot (just below the point of glowing incandescently in visible light), it will register on a near-infrared system, but it's not a cheap FLIR replacement (sadly).
I used to believe something along those lines. Then my PC was infected with a worm when I plugged an mp3 player into the USB port. I'd bought the player new, factory-sealed, so it must have picked it up at the manufacturing plant. I disabled all autorun/autoplay after that, but I'm still wary enough that I run Avast to help avoid another similar situation.
Also, none of the things you mention will detect/remove a rootkit if one does manage to make its way onto your PC. I cleaned one up off of a PC that belongs to my sister a few weeks ago, and that was a headache. I did a scan of the infected drive in an external USB case, and that got nearly all of the infected files taken care of, but because most virus scanners apparently don't scan the MBR of non-boot drives, the rootkit was still waiting there and I had to use the Windows recovery console to write a new MBR.
As far as I can tell, her PC was infected through some variation of the "malicious PDF in a hidden IFRAME which belongs to an online advertisement" scenario, because she was already using Firefox exclusively. So maybe you should at least add "don't install Adobe Reader, or if you do, disable browser integration, update it daily, and set Firefox to download PDFs instead of opening them" and "install and use AdBlock Plus, and possibly NoScript" to your list.
For my part, I figured it was the Army experimenting with ways to inventory their humans, and maybe to posthumously ID them.
FWIW (which may not be much), I have a barcode tattooed on my arm, and someone who saw it once told me that her son was in the US Army's Special Forces, and they'd been considering using barcode tattoos instead of dog tags, but decided implanted chips were better (which isn't hard, given how long it takes to give someone a barcode tattoo, especially in a way that will remain machine-readable).
I'd be a little surprised if they'd done it without informing the soldiers, though.
My a priori experience with Voir Dire is that it eliminates people who have any opinions of anything at all.
I was summoned for jury duty a few weeks ago, and made it a point to express opinions during the selection process (a coworker of mine had the same theory that you are expressing, and I was interested in testing it). I wasn't trying to get out of serving, so the opinions were reasonable. I was still selected. I think in at least most cases, the point is not to eliminate anyone with any sort of opinion, just people who either have extreme opinions related to the case or who seem to have little room in their minds for doubt that their existing opinions are correct.
If they're stored using the encryption schemes present in windows, then it doesn't matter how complex your password is - it can still be easily cracked (trivially if lanman is enabled), or you can simply use the hash without cracking it.
If the LM hashes are disabled and the password is greater than about 10 characters long, or if the password is greater than 14 characters long (which disables the LM hash for that account), I am not aware of an easy way to crack them. The Ophcrack tables for NTLM hashes max out at 9 characters (and the character set is restricted for that length), with a table size of 52GB.
Are there tables available for e.g. 14-character passwords stored as an NTLM hash? My back-of-a-napkin calculations put the size of such a thing as being about 20 exabytes (for the same restricted character set as the 9-character Ophcrack table). I'm not an expert in the area though.
Steve Jobs seems to think he invented it, and the idea of calling a tablet a "pad".
Are tablets not roughly the same size as the "PADD" devices that were used in Star Trek, starting with The Next Generation in the late 80s? I thought that's where the modern term had originated (or if not there, than wherever the Star Trek designers picked it up). The usage model is certainly extremely similar.
I wondered for a moment if the GRiDpad had preceeded the Star Trek props, but those seem to have been released in the 90s. Still well before Steve Jobs appropriated the term, of course (assuming The Register isn't completely fabricating that story).
The point of Mini is just to have a simple, fast browser that renders text quickly. For reading articles on my BlackBerry I haven't found a better option.
I think that says more about the sad state of RIM's platform than anything in Opera's favour. I mean, it's great that RIM finally figured out how to make tables render more or less correctly (at least in one viewing mode), but they're still light years behind almost every other smartphone vendor.
In turn, the existence of Opera Mini to me is the equivalent of developers throwing up their hands and saying "OK, RIM, we've finally figured out you're never going to provide a usable dev platform for your phones, so we'll write our own browser for someone else's server platform and limit your phones to being used as a remote display and keyboard/trackball for them."
Also yes I realize there are probably "Free" programs that write G-Codes
Unfortunately, the last time I checked (about six months ago), there wasn't anything free (in any sense) that would produce useful general-purpose G-Code. LumenLab had something that would turn a bitmap into a very basic piece of G-Code (back when they were still selling the awesome RoGR kit, at least), but there was nothing I could find that would convert a 3D part design into G-Code.
I'd be happy to find that that was no longer the case. I was disappointed that there were several options for reasonably-priced DIY CNC systems, but actually using them required getting ahold of extremely expensive CAD software and commercial add-ons to export G-Code.
Even low end state taskforces can buy in p2p tracking software to find your 'unique' MAC.
Given that the MAC address isn't transmitted outside whatever subnet the device is on, how can "tracking software" (P2P or otherwise) determine your MAC address unless it is either on the same subnet or uses software that's somehow been installed on the target PC?
It would be very difficult to put a striped polarising filter in front of a TV.
I seem to remember that 3D TVs with polarized screens were shown at a convention or somesuch within the last twelve months. I'm glad they don't seem to have caught on. I'd much rather see a TV do alternate frames (60Hz per eye/120Hz for the screen) at full resolution than the interlaced half-resolution that you'd get with a polarization-based stereo display. I also have to imagine from a hardware perspective it's a lot easier to double the frame rate to 120Hz than it is to double the vertical resolution to 2160 pixels.
I've always thought there were some awesome possibilities for AR applications. But it seems to me that a large percentage of them would be at their best in an indoor environment, where GPS signals don't penetrate. I have to imagine there was a reason the governments of the world went with radio frequencies like that for GPS and its non-US equivalents, but has there been any work done coming up with something that would provide similar functionality indoors?
My understanding is that the way this sort of thing is handled (and this was hinted at by haruharaharu in another reply to my original post) at the component level. If the component is something simple like a switch, then you would have hardware features (like the debouncing I mentioned) as well as potentially firmware/software-level checks of the switch. Most PCs have a simple variation on this for the keyboard input - if a key's line is held closed during POST, the PC throws an alert because it considers the keyboard broken. For more complicated components (like a temperature sensor), the checks would be things like "is data being received from the sensor at all?" "is the data within 'sane' limits?" and so on. If any of those checks fail, then the component is treated as failed and data from it isn't processed. So in the case of the temperature sensor, if it suddenly reports that the temperature is 3 million degrees, then the thermal shutdown code is not triggered because the safety check fails the sensor first. There are some other approaches too - IBM mainframes and the Space Shuttle computers use hardware designs where there are two or three processors doing the job that would be handled by a single processor in a normal computer. All of the processors perform the exact same task. If the results are different, then the system knows that there is a hardware failure in one of the processors. In the case of the mainframe, the processor pair in question is taken offline and the processing is handed off to one of the other pairs in the system. So effectively the system *has* error-checking of each transistor in the processor without explicit checks of them individually. You're right in that this makes it a lot more work to design and build the system in the first place. I'm sure that's why this sort of thing is generally reserved for situations where people are likely to be killed in the event of a non-graceful failure (or at least situations where people are willing to pay through the nose for a computing system). It's a really interesting subject to research, if you have the time. I was exclusively a software person when I was younger, and studying the hardware side of things really opened my eyes as to what was going on behind the scenes.
Of course if someone goes in with a debugger and forces x == y, then the code will fail. However, that doesn't mean the scenario is plausible or even possible to begin with.
Working with electronic and/or mechanical systems is a lot different than working with pure software code. Read up on switch debouncing to start with, and you may begin to understand. Designers of those systems - especially ones that can kill people when they malfunction - must take into account things like what will happen if there's an electrical short or some other unexpected deviation from the intended design.
I was fine with advertising on websites when it was limited to (non-controversial) static images without sound. I started using ad-blocking software when website advertising became animated, sound-producing, and often included content that wouldn't be appreciated where I work. I became more aggressive about it when it expanded to include things that cover up the content on the site I'm reading, or similar popup-style behaviour. Having had it hidden from me for years now, I find unfiltered websites a mind-numbing barrage of distraction that teeters on the edge of unusability. I had a similar experience when I moved away from watching television. I love films and serials, but I no longer have any interest in watching them in broadcast/cable/satellite form due to the ADD-inducing advertising model.
you can install Linux even when there are multiple hard drives in your computer (you can only install Windows 7 if there is one and only one hard drive installed)
Er, what? Every version of Windows I've installed (back to 95 on floppy disks) supported multiple hard drives. The 9x series would format all of the installed drives prior to installing Windows itself, but that was fixed for the NT-based versions.
Linux will support RAID - 0, 1, 1+0, etc - Windows 7 only supports RAID 0, and RAID 1 for those who buy Professional or Ultimate, and cannot do RAID 1+0
Do you really want your OS taking on the overhead of RAID? Desktop motherboards with hardware RAID 0/1/0+1 are easy to find and cheap. How many desktop users actually have the four hard drives necessary (at a bare minimum) for 0+1 anyway?
Linux will not magically create a 100MB partition that you cannot erase and is essential to the operating system, unlike Windows 7 that will refuse to boot after removing the 100MB magic partition using Knoppix and cannot repair even with the original installation disks
100MB is about 1/100th of a percent of a common 1TB hard drive, right? Who cares? Why were you trying to remove it?
There are lots of things to like about Linux and hate about Windows (and vice-versa), but I don't think any of the things you mention are significant for the average desktop user of either.
I would suggest Kubuntu as an alternative. The KDE UI is much closer to Windows than Gnome is, and it retains the other user-friendly aspects of Ubuntu (including the parts that Ubuntu inherits from Debian, obviously). I also think it looks more polished, but obviously that's just my opinion. I started using Kubuntu on my laptop and my media PC a year or two ago and think it's great. I'd be running it on my workstation at home if I didn't have the need for some Windows-only apps.
Actually this problem is potentially much worse on SSD's. Erase blocks are huge, and read-modify-write really sucks on flash.
Couldn't this be addressed (at least in part) by a battery-backed write cache like better RAID controllers use? Set it up like SAN snapshots (so it just stores the diff between what's in the actual flash storage and what's been changed so far), and then write the changed blocks when it's most advantageous (e.g. when there's an entire block's worth of data, so it would all have to be erased by the flash storage anyway). Maybe combine that with something like a disk defrag, except instead of storing frequently-sequentially-read data in physical sequence, store frequently-written data (regardless of if it's sequentially-read or not) in physical sequence.
We were told that one should not write unless he writes correctly, because the writing skills we were given have the idea that you always write for some kind of "serious" publication.
That's not the only reason one should write correctly. The written nature of many words contains information about their relationship to other words. I've used this example on Slashdot before, but a year or two ago I ran across a post online where someone was trying to use the term "molecular structure", but had spelled the first word something like "maleculur". If someone knows the correct spelling, they'll realize that "molecular" is derived from "molecule", and if they ever take a chemistry class will understand why the term "mole" is being used. Someone who only "knows how the word sounds" loses out on that relationship, and if they e.g. ever happen upon a word like "malevolence" may think "maleculur structure" is semantically related to the Latin word for evil.
That's a lot of money to fork over for a device that won't find a lot of use.
There's a lot of things I'd like about a device with this form-factor if it ran Linux instead of the iPhone OS or Android, and assuming I could give it mobile internet access via BlueTooth with my G1 (I have no idea if this is technically possible and/or restricted by T-Mobile). I like my G1, but the screen is too small to read news or technical information comfortably. A bigger display would also let me see larger sections of maps, etc. I could potentially stop carrying a paper notebook to meetings at work, and be able to pull up documents instead of reading a printed handout. I also have a specific use in mind that's pretty niche-market: I'd like to use one as a portable display for my DSLR, so that I could get a reasonably high-resolution view of images as I shot them, instead of using the tiny LCD on the camera itself. I know there's commercial software (CaptureOne, etc.) that does this, so I assume there must be a Linux equivalent, even if it's just pointing one of the RAW-viewing apps at the flash card in the camera over USB. I would greatly prefer this to a laptop because it's half the size when in use, but has more or less the same screen area. The reason I'd rather see it run Linux (or even Windows) is that I've gotten pretty disillusioned about the number of specialized apps that have (or more accurately, *haven't*) been written for Android. With Linux I know I can get what I need. My only real concern is how I'd carry it around, since it's too big to fit in a pocket. I keep having visions of a Tron-disc-style lightweight backpack.
It's basically saying, "look at this plane that kicks ass" without specifying exactly how much ass it will kick.
For years I've thought someone should introduce an SI unit to help quantify this sort of thing. I figure the unit should be called the Gracie*, with one Gracie representing one ass kicked every second. Hopefully this wouldn't require a big debate over standardizing the "ass" unit.
Yeah, I immediately thought of the BodyBugg (which has been around for a couple of years at least) when I saw the description. I believe that even has more sensors built in and costs less. I was considering getting one myself for awhile, until I found out that all the processing of the raw sensor data happens on the manufacturer's servers, so you are forced into subscribing to their service.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer to believe that Gopher failed because the world wasn't ready for the awe-inspiring virtual reality experience that was TurboGopher VR.
For instance, lighter/cheaper IR-to-vis conversion would not just be cool for night driving, but also for emergency workers, home security systems, scientific instruments (the journal article also lists "semiconductor wafer inspection"), optical computing, and so on...
Essentially any digital camera sensor (including webcams) can pick up the type of infrared light that this device does (~1000nm). I'm a little confused about how it could get any cheaper. If this device could also pick up mid- and far-infrared, now that would be a breakthrough, because sensors that can handle those wavelengths are still thousands of (US) dollars.
The authors of TFA (and the source article they based it on) confuse the issue by assuming that all infrared is the same thing. Based on the "green glow" look and the "830nm illumination" mentioned in another post, this system is working with near-infrared light (like conventional night vision systems), which is completely different from thermal infrared systems.
This system will not function as a thermal imager. If something is very hot (just below the point of glowing incandescently in visible light), it will register on a near-infrared system, but it's not a cheap FLIR replacement (sadly).
I used to believe something along those lines. Then my PC was infected with a worm when I plugged an mp3 player into the USB port. I'd bought the player new, factory-sealed, so it must have picked it up at the manufacturing plant. I disabled all autorun/autoplay after that, but I'm still wary enough that I run Avast to help avoid another similar situation.
Also, none of the things you mention will detect/remove a rootkit if one does manage to make its way onto your PC. I cleaned one up off of a PC that belongs to my sister a few weeks ago, and that was a headache. I did a scan of the infected drive in an external USB case, and that got nearly all of the infected files taken care of, but because most virus scanners apparently don't scan the MBR of non-boot drives, the rootkit was still waiting there and I had to use the Windows recovery console to write a new MBR.
As far as I can tell, her PC was infected through some variation of the "malicious PDF in a hidden IFRAME which belongs to an online advertisement" scenario, because she was already using Firefox exclusively. So maybe you should at least add "don't install Adobe Reader, or if you do, disable browser integration, update it daily, and set Firefox to download PDFs instead of opening them" and "install and use AdBlock Plus, and possibly NoScript" to your list.
For my part, I figured it was the Army experimenting with ways to inventory their humans, and maybe to posthumously ID them.
FWIW (which may not be much), I have a barcode tattooed on my arm, and someone who saw it once told me that her son was in the US Army's Special Forces, and they'd been considering using barcode tattoos instead of dog tags, but decided implanted chips were better (which isn't hard, given how long it takes to give someone a barcode tattoo, especially in a way that will remain machine-readable).
I'd be a little surprised if they'd done it without informing the soldiers, though.
My a priori experience with Voir Dire is that it eliminates people who have any opinions of anything at all.
I was summoned for jury duty a few weeks ago, and made it a point to express opinions during the selection process (a coworker of mine had the same theory that you are expressing, and I was interested in testing it). I wasn't trying to get out of serving, so the opinions were reasonable. I was still selected.
I think in at least most cases, the point is not to eliminate anyone with any sort of opinion, just people who either have extreme opinions related to the case or who seem to have little room in their minds for doubt that their existing opinions are correct.
If they're stored using the encryption schemes present in windows, then it doesn't matter how complex your password is - it can still be easily cracked (trivially if lanman is enabled), or you can simply use the hash without cracking it.
If the LM hashes are disabled and the password is greater than about 10 characters long, or if the password is greater than 14 characters long (which disables the LM hash for that account), I am not aware of an easy way to crack them. The Ophcrack tables for NTLM hashes max out at 9 characters (and the character set is restricted for that length), with a table size of 52GB.
Are there tables available for e.g. 14-character passwords stored as an NTLM hash? My back-of-a-napkin calculations put the size of such a thing as being about 20 exabytes (for the same restricted character set as the 9-character Ophcrack table). I'm not an expert in the area though.
Steve Jobs seems to think he invented it, and the idea of calling a tablet a "pad".
Are tablets not roughly the same size as the "PADD" devices that were used in Star Trek, starting with The Next Generation in the late 80s? I thought that's where the modern term had originated (or if not there, than wherever the Star Trek designers picked it up). The usage model is certainly extremely similar.
I wondered for a moment if the GRiDpad had preceeded the Star Trek props, but those seem to have been released in the 90s. Still well before Steve Jobs appropriated the term, of course (assuming The Register isn't completely fabricating that story).
The point of Mini is just to have a simple, fast browser that renders text quickly. For reading articles on my BlackBerry I haven't found a better option.
I think that says more about the sad state of RIM's platform than anything in Opera's favour. I mean, it's great that RIM finally figured out how to make tables render more or less correctly (at least in one viewing mode), but they're still light years behind almost every other smartphone vendor.
In turn, the existence of Opera Mini to me is the equivalent of developers throwing up their hands and saying "OK, RIM, we've finally figured out you're never going to provide a usable dev platform for your phones, so we'll write our own browser for someone else's server platform and limit your phones to being used as a remote display and keyboard/trackball for them."
Also yes I realize there are probably "Free" programs that write G-Codes
Unfortunately, the last time I checked (about six months ago), there wasn't anything free (in any sense) that would produce useful general-purpose G-Code. LumenLab had something that would turn a bitmap into a very basic piece of G-Code (back when they were still selling the awesome RoGR kit, at least), but there was nothing I could find that would convert a 3D part design into G-Code.
I'd be happy to find that that was no longer the case. I was disappointed that there were several options for reasonably-priced DIY CNC systems, but actually using them required getting ahold of extremely expensive CAD software and commercial add-ons to export G-Code.
Even low end state taskforces can buy in p2p tracking software to find your 'unique' MAC.
Given that the MAC address isn't transmitted outside whatever subnet the device is on, how can "tracking software" (P2P or otherwise) determine your MAC address unless it is either on the same subnet or uses software that's somehow been installed on the target PC?
It would be very difficult to put a striped polarising filter in front of a TV.
I seem to remember that 3D TVs with polarized screens were shown at a convention or somesuch within the last twelve months. I'm glad they don't seem to have caught on. I'd much rather see a TV do alternate frames (60Hz per eye/120Hz for the screen) at full resolution than the interlaced half-resolution that you'd get with a polarization-based stereo display. I also have to imagine from a hardware perspective it's a lot easier to double the frame rate to 120Hz than it is to double the vertical resolution to 2160 pixels.
I've always thought there were some awesome possibilities for AR applications. But it seems to me that a large percentage of them would be at their best in an indoor environment, where GPS signals don't penetrate.
I have to imagine there was a reason the governments of the world went with radio frequencies like that for GPS and its non-US equivalents, but has there been any work done coming up with something that would provide similar functionality indoors?
My understanding is that the way this sort of thing is handled (and this was hinted at by haruharaharu in another reply to my original post) at the component level.
If the component is something simple like a switch, then you would have hardware features (like the debouncing I mentioned) as well as potentially firmware/software-level checks of the switch. Most PCs have a simple variation on this for the keyboard input - if a key's line is held closed during POST, the PC throws an alert because it considers the keyboard broken.
For more complicated components (like a temperature sensor), the checks would be things like "is data being received from the sensor at all?" "is the data within 'sane' limits?" and so on. If any of those checks fail, then the component is treated as failed and data from it isn't processed. So in the case of the temperature sensor, if it suddenly reports that the temperature is 3 million degrees, then the thermal shutdown code is not triggered because the safety check fails the sensor first.
There are some other approaches too - IBM mainframes and the Space Shuttle computers use hardware designs where there are two or three processors doing the job that would be handled by a single processor in a normal computer. All of the processors perform the exact same task. If the results are different, then the system knows that there is a hardware failure in one of the processors. In the case of the mainframe, the processor pair in question is taken offline and the processing is handed off to one of the other pairs in the system. So effectively the system *has* error-checking of each transistor in the processor without explicit checks of them individually.
You're right in that this makes it a lot more work to design and build the system in the first place. I'm sure that's why this sort of thing is generally reserved for situations where people are likely to be killed in the event of a non-graceful failure (or at least situations where people are willing to pay through the nose for a computing system).
It's a really interesting subject to research, if you have the time. I was exclusively a software person when I was younger, and studying the hardware side of things really opened my eyes as to what was going on behind the scenes.
Of course if someone goes in with a debugger and forces x == y, then the code will fail. However, that doesn't mean the scenario is plausible or even possible to begin with.
Working with electronic and/or mechanical systems is a lot different than working with pure software code. Read up on switch debouncing to start with, and you may begin to understand. Designers of those systems - especially ones that can kill people when they malfunction - must take into account things like what will happen if there's an electrical short or some other unexpected deviation from the intended design.
I was fine with advertising on websites when it was limited to (non-controversial) static images without sound.
I started using ad-blocking software when website advertising became animated, sound-producing, and often included content that wouldn't be appreciated where I work. I became more aggressive about it when it expanded to include things that cover up the content on the site I'm reading, or similar popup-style behaviour.
Having had it hidden from me for years now, I find unfiltered websites a mind-numbing barrage of distraction that teeters on the edge of unusability. I had a similar experience when I moved away from watching television. I love films and serials, but I no longer have any interest in watching them in broadcast/cable/satellite form due to the ADD-inducing advertising model.
Or if you want KDE, I suggest any KDE distro except Kubuntu, which may just be the worst KDE distro, if not the worst distro of all time.
Any specific reason(s)?
you can install Linux even when there are multiple hard drives in your computer (you can only install Windows 7 if there is one and only one hard drive installed)
Er, what? Every version of Windows I've installed (back to 95 on floppy disks) supported multiple hard drives. The 9x series would format all of the installed drives prior to installing Windows itself, but that was fixed for the NT-based versions.
Linux will support RAID - 0, 1, 1+0, etc - Windows 7 only supports RAID 0, and RAID 1 for those who buy Professional or Ultimate, and cannot do RAID 1+0
Do you really want your OS taking on the overhead of RAID? Desktop motherboards with hardware RAID 0/1/0+1 are easy to find and cheap. How many desktop users actually have the four hard drives necessary (at a bare minimum) for 0+1 anyway?
Linux will not magically create a 100MB partition that you cannot erase and is essential to the operating system, unlike Windows 7 that will refuse to boot after removing the 100MB magic partition using Knoppix and cannot repair even with the original installation disks
100MB is about 1/100th of a percent of a common 1TB hard drive, right? Who cares? Why were you trying to remove it?
There are lots of things to like about Linux and hate about Windows (and vice-versa), but I don't think any of the things you mention are significant for the average desktop user of either.
I would suggest Kubuntu as an alternative. The KDE UI is much closer to Windows than Gnome is, and it retains the other user-friendly aspects of Ubuntu (including the parts that Ubuntu inherits from Debian, obviously). I also think it looks more polished, but obviously that's just my opinion.
I started using Kubuntu on my laptop and my media PC a year or two ago and think it's great. I'd be running it on my workstation at home if I didn't have the need for some Windows-only apps.
Actually this problem is potentially much worse on SSD's. Erase blocks are huge, and read-modify-write really sucks on flash.
Couldn't this be addressed (at least in part) by a battery-backed write cache like better RAID controllers use? Set it up like SAN snapshots (so it just stores the diff between what's in the actual flash storage and what's been changed so far), and then write the changed blocks when it's most advantageous (e.g. when there's an entire block's worth of data, so it would all have to be erased by the flash storage anyway).
Maybe combine that with something like a disk defrag, except instead of storing frequently-sequentially-read data in physical sequence, store frequently-written data (regardless of if it's sequentially-read or not) in physical sequence.
We were told that one should not write unless he writes correctly, because the writing skills we were given have the idea that you always write for some kind of "serious" publication.
That's not the only reason one should write correctly. The written nature of many words contains information about their relationship to other words. I've used this example on Slashdot before, but a year or two ago I ran across a post online where someone was trying to use the term "molecular structure", but had spelled the first word something like "maleculur".
If someone knows the correct spelling, they'll realize that "molecular" is derived from "molecule", and if they ever take a chemistry class will understand why the term "mole" is being used.
Someone who only "knows how the word sounds" loses out on that relationship, and if they e.g. ever happen upon a word like "malevolence" may think "maleculur structure" is semantically related to the Latin word for evil.
That's a lot of money to fork over for a device that won't find a lot of use.
There's a lot of things I'd like about a device with this form-factor if it ran Linux instead of the iPhone OS or Android, and assuming I could give it mobile internet access via BlueTooth with my G1 (I have no idea if this is technically possible and/or restricted by T-Mobile).
I like my G1, but the screen is too small to read news or technical information comfortably. A bigger display would also let me see larger sections of maps, etc. I could potentially stop carrying a paper notebook to meetings at work, and be able to pull up documents instead of reading a printed handout.
I also have a specific use in mind that's pretty niche-market: I'd like to use one as a portable display for my DSLR, so that I could get a reasonably high-resolution view of images as I shot them, instead of using the tiny LCD on the camera itself. I know there's commercial software (CaptureOne, etc.) that does this, so I assume there must be a Linux equivalent, even if it's just pointing one of the RAW-viewing apps at the flash card in the camera over USB.
I would greatly prefer this to a laptop because it's half the size when in use, but has more or less the same screen area.
The reason I'd rather see it run Linux (or even Windows) is that I've gotten pretty disillusioned about the number of specialized apps that have (or more accurately, *haven't*) been written for Android. With Linux I know I can get what I need.
My only real concern is how I'd carry it around, since it's too big to fit in a pocket. I keep having visions of a Tron-disc-style lightweight backpack.
It's basically saying, "look at this plane that kicks ass" without specifying exactly how much ass it will kick.
For years I've thought someone should introduce an SI unit to help quantify this sort of thing. I figure the unit should be called the Gracie*, with one Gracie representing one ass kicked every second. Hopefully this wouldn't require a big debate over standardizing the "ass" unit.
* After the Gracie brothers.
...or did someone fabricate this part of the Wikipedia article?
The Sukhoi PAK FA... NATO reporting name: Firefox
This is old news, and just a variation on a theme
Yeah, I immediately thought of the BodyBugg (which has been around for a couple of years at least) when I saw the description. I believe that even has more sensors built in and costs less. I was considering getting one myself for awhile, until I found out that all the processing of the raw sensor data happens on the manufacturer's servers, so you are forced into subscribing to their service.