Maybe. As you know, in Win7 toss the windows to one side or the other, and it'll enlarge to half screen. If you can make yourself always toss windows to the right, for instance, that gives you half the screen on the left for tools and icons. (I work this way now, on a 1920X1200 screen, and would love to do the same thing on a 4K screen.)
Of course, 4K is just becoming available at a time when the latest version of Windows wants us to work full screen all the time. That's going to be an interesting tussle.
Anyone working on a page layout or making fine adjustments on a photograph would appreciate the extra resolution. I remain "enh" on 4K in entertainment -- I think 1080P is more than enough, assuming that the content is authored reasonably well, something that's more important than mere resolution -- but 4K on the computer screen, for content creation, would be a godsend. Finally, enough room to have both tools and content on the screen at the same time!
> Hauer explains: 'Four editors side-by-side each with over a hundred lines of code, and enough room to spare for a project navigator, console, and debugger. Enough room to visualize the back-end service code, the HTML template, the style-sheet, the client-side script, and the finished result in a web browser — all at once without one press of Alt-tab.
"Yeah, got one of those. It'd do all that, except the OS only allows me to display one fullscreen app at a time. In really REALLY high resolution, though. There is that."
I think that part of the benefit is having experience living in space, and dealing with the technical and psychological issues of a long term presence in space. A bonus seems to be that the shuttle being canceled seems to have given a boost to private spacebound freight transport. All of this is valuable experience for other projects, be they other near-earth habitats or travel to other planets or the asteroids.
> I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.
No, that's actually not true at all. As I alluded to in my original response, Blue Iris (the software I'm using) has sensitivity adjustments for how much motion causes the motion sensor to trip, and it allows you to block out certain areas where motion is common, like trees in wind. After a bit of adjustment, my system would not trip on a cat (although it'll trip on a dog if it's large enough). I had close to zero false positives, but I'd get an alert on my phone with a photo if, for instance, someone dropped off a package at the door.
We had trouble in the neighborhood with someone going around letting dogs out of people's back yards. I thought I knew who it was, and caught her doing it to us on camera. Got a clear shot of her face and a clip of her doing the deed, turned it into the homeowner's association. Their lawyer apparently contacted her and she doesn't do it anymore.
When my daughter was in grade school, there was a time when she was a latchkey kid, as her bus got her home an hour or so before wife got home. (I work in IT, which means late hours.) It was important to me to get that alert and see daughter enter the front door. I'd text her "welcome home".
In summary, the important thing to me wasn't necessarily the alarm itself, but immediate information on what was actually going on at the house. That's worth much more to me than a trigger on a window that doesn't convey any information except that it has tripped, and could be circumvented. It's hard to disable a camera when you can't approach the house without tripping the motion sensor.
The Bulldog cameras I used are the ones with the fringe of IR LEDs around the sensor. They kinda look like the Eye of Mordor at night, but the night vision is very useable.
"No use having the person walk out with the only recording"... Exactly. I think my solution has a little overkill; it sends the clip to one server 15 miles away and one server 200 miles away.
The software also provides a smartphone-friendly website.
Google "blue iris security software". I think it's $50 for the full version. It supports a wide variety of security cameras, including those pan and tilt wifi models.
I paired Blue Iris with a 4 channel capture card (about $100) and four Bulldog wired cameras (about $28 apiece) and a few minutes work with dyndns and the built-in web server, and I can monitor my house from anywhere I have network access, and any movement will send snapshots to my phone and record an AVI that gets sent to a secure server. The software supports configurable "dead zones", so if you have a tree that trips the motion detector in the wind you can block it out.
To my knowledge, this is the absolute cheapest you can go and have a usable configuration.
His phone description describes my iPhone nicely, although I rarely use the video phone capability. (Robot cars were a touch premature, but just a touch.)
As far as the Moonbase is concerned, there seems to have been a distinct lack of thinking what the places would be good for in sixties science fiction, or, alternately, great optimism in how easy spaceflight was going to be. I'm calling that a technological prediction failure.
You may be right on the technical side in that most scifi authors had us using a much more efficient/powerful fuel than RP-1/LOX (usually abbreviated to "atomic powered" or some such) but I submit that with Saturn 5 - level technology we could have had a colony on the moon, and that it would have only gotten easier as new materials and new technologies were developed. I think it's more true that we didn't really have a good enough reason to be there. Which, I submit is at least partly sociological.
Now that there's an interest in Hydrogen 3 mining, there might someday be a real reason to go back. But I think first we need practical fusion reactors, and that's been 50 years in our future since Asimov wrote the article.
Asimov thought we'd automate everything and everyone would basically have access to everything they really desired. He thought everyone living like kings and never having to work would make everyone a bit depressed and dissatisfied with their lives.
How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?
Only the rich can afford ennui in america.
Dunno about that. A friend spent three years on unemployment and freely admitted ennui was his biggest problem. Maybe it's not necessarily an affliction of the rich, but an affliction of the idle, regardless of reason.
I wonder if the predictions were merely misunderstood. For instance:
"colonies on the moon"
I submit we had the technology to sustain a colony on the moon as early as the late sixties; we simply didn't have the will or the funding. The original article mentions a vehicle "with large soft tires intended to negotiate the uneven terrain" on the moon. There have been several on the moon since 1964. There's one chugging around there now.
I think of the technological predictions he arguably got wrong, most of them could be accomplished with current technology, but were simply not practical or did not catch on.
For instance, practical videophones have been available for some time -- every cell phone with a front facing camera is capable -- but most people don't use the feature, for the same reason videophones didn't catch on in the eighties and nineties. And again didn't catch on at home now that we have broadband to the last mile. It's a social thing, rather than a technological thing -- people don't necessarily want to be looked at when they're making a call.
In summary, of the parts he arguably got wrong, the reasons tend to be social rather than technical.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a great idea. Now that you've described it, I want one too.
Maybe. As you know, in Win7 toss the windows to one side or the other, and it'll enlarge to half screen. If you can make yourself always toss windows to the right, for instance, that gives you half the screen on the left for tools and icons. (I work this way now, on a 1920X1200 screen, and would love to do the same thing on a 4K screen.)
Of course, 4K is just becoming available at a time when the latest version of Windows wants us to work full screen all the time. That's going to be an interesting tussle.
Anyone working on a page layout or making fine adjustments on a photograph would appreciate the extra resolution. I remain "enh" on 4K in entertainment -- I think 1080P is more than enough, assuming that the content is authored reasonably well, something that's more important than mere resolution -- but 4K on the computer screen, for content creation, would be a godsend. Finally, enough room to have both tools and content on the screen at the same time!
ok ok, so "fullscreen" may have been redundant in this case.
> Hauer explains: 'Four editors side-by-side each with over a hundred lines of code, and enough room to spare for a project navigator, console, and debugger. Enough room to visualize the back-end service code, the HTML template, the style-sheet, the client-side script, and the finished result in a web browser — all at once without one press of Alt-tab.
"Yeah, got one of those. It'd do all that, except the OS only allows me to display one fullscreen app at a time. In really REALLY high resolution, though. There is that."
I think that part of the benefit is having experience living in space, and dealing with the technical and psychological issues of a long term presence in space. A bonus seems to be that the shuttle being canceled seems to have given a boost to private spacebound freight transport. All of this is valuable experience for other projects, be they other near-earth habitats or travel to other planets or the asteroids.
> I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.
So, pretty much business as usual, then.
No, that's actually not true at all. As I alluded to in my original response, Blue Iris (the software I'm using) has sensitivity adjustments for how much motion causes the motion sensor to trip, and it allows you to block out certain areas where motion is common, like trees in wind. After a bit of adjustment, my system would not trip on a cat (although it'll trip on a dog if it's large enough). I had close to zero false positives, but I'd get an alert on my phone with a photo if, for instance, someone dropped off a package at the door.
We had trouble in the neighborhood with someone going around letting dogs out of people's back yards. I thought I knew who it was, and caught her doing it to us on camera. Got a clear shot of her face and a clip of her doing the deed, turned it into the homeowner's association. Their lawyer apparently contacted her and she doesn't do it anymore.
When my daughter was in grade school, there was a time when she was a latchkey kid, as her bus got her home an hour or so before wife got home. (I work in IT, which means late hours.) It was important to me to get that alert and see daughter enter the front door. I'd text her "welcome home".
In summary, the important thing to me wasn't necessarily the alarm itself, but immediate information on what was actually going on at the house. That's worth much more to me than a trigger on a window that doesn't convey any information except that it has tripped, and could be circumvented. It's hard to disable a camera when you can't approach the house without tripping the motion sensor.
I'm not sure what you mean. Blue Iris does not come from Google. To my knowledge it's a one-man operation.
www.blueirissoftware.com/
The Bulldog cameras I used are the ones with the fringe of IR LEDs around the sensor. They kinda look like the Eye of Mordor at night, but the night vision is very useable.
"No use having the person walk out with the only recording"... Exactly. I think my solution has a little overkill; it sends the clip to one server 15 miles away and one server 200 miles away.
The software also provides a smartphone-friendly website.
Of course you could do it yourself, but for $50 I can set it up quickly and get on to other projects. Your mileage may vary, as always.
Google "blue iris security software". I think it's $50 for the full version. It supports a wide variety of security cameras, including those pan and tilt wifi models.
I paired Blue Iris with a 4 channel capture card (about $100) and four Bulldog wired cameras (about $28 apiece) and a few minutes work with dyndns and the built-in web server, and I can monitor my house from anywhere I have network access, and any movement will send snapshots to my phone and record an AVI that gets sent to a secure server. The software supports configurable "dead zones", so if you have a tree that trips the motion detector in the wind you can block it out.
To my knowledge, this is the absolute cheapest you can go and have a usable configuration.
His phone description describes my iPhone nicely, although I rarely use the video phone capability. (Robot cars were a touch premature, but just a touch.)
As far as the Moonbase is concerned, there seems to have been a distinct lack of thinking what the places would be good for in sixties science fiction, or, alternately, great optimism in how easy spaceflight was going to be. I'm calling that a technological prediction failure.
You may be right on the technical side in that most scifi authors had us using a much more efficient/powerful fuel than RP-1/LOX (usually abbreviated to "atomic powered" or some such) but I submit that with Saturn 5 - level technology we could have had a colony on the moon, and that it would have only gotten easier as new materials and new technologies were developed. I think it's more true that we didn't really have a good enough reason to be there. Which, I submit is at least partly sociological.
Now that there's an interest in Hydrogen 3 mining, there might someday be a real reason to go back. But I think first we need practical fusion reactors, and that's been 50 years in our future since Asimov wrote the article.
Asimov thought we'd automate everything and everyone would basically have access to everything they really desired. He thought everyone living like kings and never having to work would make everyone a bit depressed and dissatisfied with their lives.
Compared to 1964, we do, and we are.
How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?
Only the rich can afford ennui in america.
Dunno about that. A friend spent three years on unemployment and freely admitted ennui was his biggest problem. Maybe it's not necessarily an affliction of the rich, but an affliction of the idle, regardless of reason.
> How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?
It's not. Just read Slashdot and you will see plenty of malaise.
Or watch any reality TV show.
In a way, the "algae bar" prediction did come true.
2014 has just started.
I wonder if the predictions were merely misunderstood. For instance:
"colonies on the moon"
I submit we had the technology to sustain a colony on the moon as early as the late sixties; we simply didn't have the will or the funding. The original article mentions a vehicle "with large soft tires intended to negotiate the uneven terrain" on the moon. There have been several on the moon since 1964. There's one chugging around there now.
I think of the technological predictions he arguably got wrong, most of them could be accomplished with current technology, but were simply not practical or did not catch on.
For instance, practical videophones have been available for some time -- every cell phone with a front facing camera is capable -- but most people don't use the feature, for the same reason videophones didn't catch on in the eighties and nineties. And again didn't catch on at home now that we have broadband to the last mile. It's a social thing, rather than a technological thing -- people don't necessarily want to be looked at when they're making a call.
In summary, of the parts he arguably got wrong, the reasons tend to be social rather than technical.
Kaizans definitely have their place, but like any solution, it's not appropriate absolutely everywhere.
But you can do a kaizan on your own. I have, when appropriate.
You're oversharing again.
So stop dicking around already and put a dog in a Faraday cage to see if we can get a dog that doesn't poop!
They tried that. It worked for about a week.
Then, the dog exploded.