I noticed that Discover cards seem to have an interesting protection feature as well- disposable electronically generated card numbers for individual transactions. Seems ideal to me.
In Montreal, roads are pretty unpleasant. We have lots of signage, and people just barely obey the laws. I usually don't feel safe on the road.
When I was in the Netherlands (Holland), I stayed in a town where there were no stop lights, and no stop signs (Almelo).
It worked really well, and the residents all told me they far preferred it to having strict traffic ordinance. The only accident I saw while I was there, was a 'farmer' who sped through a blind intersection and clipped the bumper of another car (he was going nearly double the speed limit).
I think that we would be far better off with that kind of system.
Also of interest: their town was very much based on a grid system.
The article linked to in the top level post is a cleverly crafted imitation of Jakob Nielson's original frames discussion. It is made to look like Jacob Nielson's work, which it isn't.
On his home page, Jakob Nielson specifically states that.
Even the sites that reported about the Nielson 'Alertbox about AJAX' have now realized they were hoodwinked.
It must very much suck for Nielson to have other people imitate him, to the point where it is difficult to distinguish his viewpoint from the imitations. Chris McEvoy, the author of the spoof, goes on to both apologize and gloat over the success of his prank.
Cross platform (First and most important!)
I expect the chat program to tackle at the very least windows, mac and linux.
Small footprint
Way too many IM's are bloated to the point where the system is appreciably slow.
File transfer utility
We all need to send a zip, or gif at some point. Though I find the 'user pictures' cute, I think they add significant bloat.
Accept/Decline contacts
This is critical. If you can't keep someone off your contacts, IM spam ensues.
Contact notifier window
A list of who is online & offline.
Low bandwidth
Low bandwith usually results low latency, when the connection is slow.
Audio connection
I'd like to be able to have a voice conversation, with text IM's.
Video connection
I'd also like to be able to add a video stream.
Open standard, and open network
Way too many clients lock their network, and so we have this huge network fragmentation. I don't mind if my friends want their own clients which have the nice bubbly windows and 'user photos', I just don't want to *have* to run them myself.
Extensibility via modular plugins.
If someone want to play a game via their IM, then go right ahead.
Conferencing ability
I'm not sure how often I would use this, but it would be very useful when I do need to use it.
I've used the mindstorms a few times. I also do some hardware development. (I'm a ph.d. chemistry student at McGill University in Montreal)
The RCX/game comparison you show is very misleading.
The RCX houses an MSP430 microcontroller, which is a 16-bit Texas Instruments microcontroller. I know this because I program these microcontrollers, and have met the people who designed them from scratch. The microcontroller alone is more than you estimate the cost of the RCX to be, at around 10 USD. (see www.ti.com/msp430)
The LCD is probably about 10$, and the lego shell probably costs them a few more dollars. The buttons probably cost a dollar, and the various circuit boards probably adds between 5 and 10$. Not to mention that the small motors, sensors and the electrical connector bricks would be *FAR* more expensive than the standard lego bricks to produce.
The price you estimate for the 'brick game' on the other hand, is probably way under cost. Just because you bought it for 1.83 from a mom & pop retail place doesn't mean that even close to covers the original manufacturing cost. Likely it was bought as overstock. By the looks of it, the brick game is about 20 years old. What do you think an original game-boy costs now? How about an NES? My guess it that it probably retailed at 20-30 USD when it was first sold (and probably didn't sell too well).
I agree that the mindstorms sets are ridiculously expensive, but I think it's just that at the moment, that is the going market price for an introductory robotics set. Mindstorms is still WAY cheaper than any other alternative with even close to the same functionality.
Your essay is well written, but I think your facts are far from sound.
I disagree entirely. Phone numbers aside, many cellular phones these days cost nearly 1000$. If they don't justify some higher level of protection (render them unusable for thieves, protect the owner from liability for expenses incurred by calls by a thief, etc...)
I think we need a combination of the technologies, such as gait detection, facial and voice recognition. Because the sensors being employed are already a part of the phone hardware, I think it's silly not to include them.
More importantly, this would only identify you correctly if you always carried the phone in the same orientation and location of your body. It's perfect for people who clip their phones to their belt. How about the many who carry it in a handbag, or in various pockets?
I think it's a great idea nonetheless, since it still increases the odds that a password protection scheme will actually be activated when it's needed.
I know what you mean. I've also used PIC's a lot (although I prefer the ubicom/SX chips for their speed). This is a great technique for handling concurrent processes in a menatally manageable way.
This is very similar to the technique used to multitask in the interrupts. To time-share the interrupts it's common to use a similar jump-table structure.(so that you can have serial comm and pwm and the like all happening at once with proper predictable timing)
Then again, might as well go with a more reasonable and pleasant microcontroller, like the MSP430.
(I also program uC's for medical device related things. I'm just finishing up my Ph.D. in analytical chemistry... working on some photon time-of-flight spectrometers for in-vivo measurements.)
I agree as to the usefulness of this story. I think there should be more like this.
I'm a chemist, just finishing my Ph.D. The current periodic table is in wide use because it is very functional. Although the whole galaxy picture is cute, it lacks in both simplicity and functionality.
I can't imagine how this would actually *help* anyone trying to remember details. I find it really funny that it's described as a 'mneumonic aid'.
I find it REALLY funny that this became a slashdot article.
Swamp coolers wouldn't work here. I'm in Montreal, not too far from the poster, and it's nearly 100% humidity on EVERY hot day. Since the water needs to be able to evaporate, it wouldn't really work well.
The humidity is actually the bigger part of what makes it so uncomfortable: your sweat never really evaporates, so you just can't cool down, unlike warmer, drier climates.
One of the advantages of his homebrew A/C is that it'd double nicely as a dehumidifier.
While the objections posted are valid, there are REALLY easy fixes.
First: Icewater is great, but who said he has to use ice made in a fridge in his place? Ice from a corner store isn't that expensive. Plus near a campus, he might be able to grab some from departmental fridges around (although he might end up with interesting nicknames).
Second: He could just skip the garbage can entirely. By attaching the assembly straight onto a tap in his place, he could just leave the assembly with a constant (slow) flow of water. I know that pretty much everywhere here in Canada, there is no extra water tax. It is horribly environmentally unsound to use the drinking water for this, but, then again so is using gobs of electricity in a normal A/C.
Third: If you wanted to homebrew a better system based on a fridge, why not just buy an old crappy fridge and strip it down to the coils and compressor. It'd cost relatively little (find a crappy, barely functional fridge in the trash somewhere on moving day:]), and be WAY better than blocking doors and windows with a whole fridge.
Although the idea is a combination of abhorrent and hilarious, this is quite probably just a joke. I read it this morning prior to slashdottedness.
It would be cool if it was possible to embed electronics that seamlessly into clothing, but it isn't possible- at least not according to what I've seen, and I work a lot in designing portable electronic instrumentation.
It would take some extreme perversion to have parents constantly monitoring the pubic temperature of their daughters. That's far more invasive than tracking one's location. I'm surprised that they didn't suggest putting in a humidity sensor: far more effective than temperature. I'm also surprised they didn't also include a remote shocker for dissuation.
I think that using something like that would be equivalent to giving written permission to your wife to do bad things to your reproductive organs.
Actually, under windows, matlab runs faster than compiled C/C++ code. It's really well optimized.
Too bad matlab for mac isn't optimized (fortran 90/95 compiled with the absoft compilers runs much more quickly, albeit being a royal PITA).
I'd agree with your characterization that lots of scientists use matlab, I'm a caase in point. The main reason is the simplicity of plotting, and exporting the plots to presentations/papers.
Although Lucas may be tired of making star wars movies, or perhaps simply not want to be remembered as 'the guy who made star wars', I think it would be silly for them to not continue the stories.
They have a storyline that is at least as interesting as the star trek franchise, although I wouldn't want to see it exploited to death as star trek has been.
Most non-geeks I talk to express interest in seeing further star wars movies, and that's definitely my hope.
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I saw it yesterday, and it was pretty good. I just feel bad for people who will see all 6 movies in order, because a lot of the excitement of episodes 4-6 came from the surprises inherent in the relationships between characters. Now that it's all laid out so clearly, it might make 4-6 much less interesting.
I'd like to see more star wars prequels.
Whle skimming your post I first thought you were suggesting they should use a summer launch date, citing the segway as an example of success.
That would be a pretty funny argument, and I think it's about as valid as any other for missing the holidays when launching a gaming console.
It's sad that we follow corporate holidays so well as consumers- but we do. Almost all parents buy their kids big presents in December, then don't buy much for a while after. Big 'N' is silly to skip the holiday season.
I find it interesting how successful the xbox is.
I don't buy PC's with windows anymore, and generally regard MS as making poor software, but the only console I'd buy at this point is the xbox.
I don't think they are violating the spirit of open source development, although I can understand why you do. I think they're just doing things their own way. I also do things my own way while developing. To me, that's the best part of open source programming; collaborating without having any real burdens, is a very good intermediate.
I'm not quite sure where Microsoft came into the discussion... As per Microsoft giving away code, I think it's great if it's relevant. At least the mac platform-specific open source code is in some ways useful. At the very worst, it gives a pretty good idea of how to structure the lower-level libraries for future implementations.
I think that Apple is clever if they are using arguments like "why consider Linux if you could use OS X". But very few people who would buy a mac would want a linux system. For my needs, a linux system doesn't work, because things are not yet mature enough for my daily toil. I have chipped in source every once in a while, but it's not a stable platform that I can use. If I used linux, I'd need to also have windows installed to get a small (but important) portion of my work done. To me, that's not acceptable. Os X gives me that chance to migrate fully. It's not great, but it's miles ahead of the competition for my needs.
I'm not sure I'd classify the linux desktop market as being even near the size of the mac desktop market. Linux and BSD power lots of the web services we see. Os X powers a lot of desktops... But then again, I only roughly follow the stats. I can say that I can think of about 200 people whose computer habits I know, about 10 people use macs, and 3 use linux as desktops.
They are making useable electronic source code available. They may not have been using CVS at all? Even the linux kernel people were using a proprietary version tracking system, why not a private company?
Why is it lying? They are implementing features, just not in the context preferred by the KHTML group. I'm sure the apple developers really do feel that they are contributing their source to the ocmmunity. They are probably not using CVS for code management. I wouldn't expect them to do anything but use the apple libraries, and work however they feel is best, seeing as that's their dev. platform.
Whose comment were you replying to? I'd think you were trolling, but I can't even figure out what point you're trying to make.
You don't like apple? Fair enough. That's really nice, but I don't really care.
False.... which is LGPL, they are required to.
I guess you're disagreeing with the 'make available the source you based your code on' bit. Sure, I'm using very general terms. There are licenses where this is not necessary. LGPL, which is in question here, follows exactly what I said: you have to redistribute the source.
That would be fine, but... that's self-serving
Um, yeah, they're in BUSINESS! They try to capture market share, sell products and make money. As per them being an open source contributor, at least they give some code back. There are not all that many people who contribute anything at all.
As per Apple marketing itself 'against' Linux... HAHAHA ROFLOL. So you're saying they're trying to steal linux users? The tiny linux desktop market? Who are you kidding? They're trying to steal microsoft windows users by taking BSD, making it run on cool hardware and adding some cuteness. Have you tried using Os X?
Thanks for the CAPS! Because all CAPS MAKE your comment MORE pleasant TO READ! Perhaps what you were trying to achieve was something more like underlining, bolding, or italics.
According to what I've read, they did release the modified source.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that Discover cards seem to have an interesting protection feature as well- disposable electronically generated card numbers for individual transactions. Seems ideal to me.
http://www.discovercard.com/deskshop/
Francis
In Montreal, roads are pretty unpleasant. We have lots of signage, and people just barely obey the laws. I usually don't feel safe on the road.
When I was in the Netherlands (Holland), I stayed in a town where there were no stop lights, and no stop signs (Almelo).
It worked really well, and the residents all told me they far preferred it to having strict traffic ordinance. The only accident I saw while I was there, was a 'farmer' who sped through a blind intersection and clipped the bumper of another car (he was going nearly double the speed limit).
I think that we would be far better off with that kind of system.
Also of interest: their town was very much based on a grid system.
The article linked to in the top level post is a cleverly crafted imitation of Jakob Nielson's original frames discussion. It is made to look like Jacob Nielson's work, which it isn't.
On his home page, Jakob Nielson specifically states that.
Even the sites that reported about the Nielson 'Alertbox about AJAX' have now realized they were hoodwinked.
It must very much suck for Nielson to have other people imitate him, to the point where it is difficult to distinguish his viewpoint from the imitations. Chris McEvoy, the author of the spoof, goes on to both apologize and gloat over the success of his prank.
Useful features:
I expect the chat program to tackle at the very least windows, mac and linux.
Way too many IM's are bloated to the point where the system is appreciably slow.
We all need to send a zip, or gif at some point. Though I find the 'user pictures' cute, I think they add significant bloat.
This is critical. If you can't keep someone off your contacts, IM spam ensues.
A list of who is online & offline.
Low bandwith usually results low latency, when the connection is slow.
I'd like to be able to have a voice conversation, with text IM's.
I'd also like to be able to add a video stream.
Way too many clients lock their network, and so we have this huge network fragmentation. I don't mind if my friends want their own clients which have the nice bubbly windows and 'user photos', I just don't want to *have* to run them myself.
If someone want to play a game via their IM, then go right ahead.
I'm not sure how often I would use this, but it would be very useful when I do need to use it.
Hi Latif,
I've used the mindstorms a few times. I also do some hardware development. (I'm a ph.d. chemistry student at McGill University in Montreal)
The RCX/game comparison you show is very misleading.
The RCX houses an MSP430 microcontroller, which is a 16-bit Texas Instruments microcontroller. I know this because I program these microcontrollers, and have met the people who designed them from scratch. The microcontroller alone is more than you estimate the cost of the RCX to be, at around 10 USD. (see www.ti.com/msp430)
The LCD is probably about 10$, and the lego shell probably costs them a few more dollars. The buttons probably cost a dollar, and the various circuit boards probably adds between 5 and 10$. Not to mention that the small motors, sensors and the electrical connector bricks would be *FAR* more expensive than the standard lego bricks to produce.
The price you estimate for the 'brick game' on the other hand, is probably way under cost. Just because you bought it for 1.83 from a mom & pop retail place doesn't mean that even close to covers the original manufacturing cost. Likely it was bought as overstock. By the looks of it, the brick game is about 20 years old. What do you think an original game-boy costs now? How about an NES? My guess it that it probably retailed at 20-30 USD when it was first sold (and probably didn't sell too well).
I agree that the mindstorms sets are ridiculously expensive, but I think it's just that at the moment, that is the going market price for an introductory robotics set. Mindstorms is still WAY cheaper than any other alternative with even close to the same functionality.
Your essay is well written, but I think your facts are far from sound.
Francis Esmonde-White
I disagree entirely. Phone numbers aside, many cellular phones these days cost nearly 1000$. If they don't justify some higher level of protection (render them unusable for thieves, protect the owner from liability for expenses incurred by calls by a thief, etc...)
I think we need a combination of the technologies, such as gait detection, facial and voice recognition. Because the sensors being employed are already a part of the phone hardware, I think it's silly not to include them.
I completely agree.
More importantly, this would only identify you correctly if you always carried the phone in the same orientation and location of your body. It's perfect for people who clip their phones to their belt. How about the many who carry it in a handbag, or in various pockets?
I think it's a great idea nonetheless, since it still increases the odds that a password protection scheme will actually be activated when it's needed.
I know what you mean. I've also used PIC's a lot (although I prefer the ubicom/SX chips for their speed). This is a great technique for handling concurrent processes in a menatally manageable way.
This is very similar to the technique used to multitask in the interrupts. To time-share the interrupts it's common to use a similar jump-table structure.(so that you can have serial comm and pwm and the like all happening at once with proper predictable timing)
Then again, might as well go with a more reasonable and pleasant microcontroller, like the MSP430.
(I also program uC's for medical device related things. I'm just finishing up my Ph.D. in analytical chemistry... working on some photon time-of-flight spectrometers for in-vivo measurements.)
I agree as to the usefulness of this story. I think there should be more like this.
Your server is providing a great speed.
Bittorrent was giving me 0.2 kB/s... Now I have 370 kB/s. It has actually download 50 megs since I started typing the reply.
Thanks!
Francis
As serveral people have pointed out, Gmail is still in beta, they have just opened the sign-up model slightly.
I'm a chemist, just finishing my Ph.D. The current periodic table is in wide use because it is very functional. Although the whole galaxy picture is cute, it lacks in both simplicity and functionality.
I can't imagine how this would actually *help* anyone trying to remember details. I find it really funny that it's described as a 'mneumonic aid'.
I find it REALLY funny that this became a slashdot article.
1. I think few days would necessitate actual ice in the cooling bucket.
2. The way to go (if attaching to the faucet) would be to put a return pipe going back to the drain. Hence no big mud puddle. :)
P.S. Is it just me, or is the new anti-bot login feature sometimes REALLY difficult to distinguish the letters in?
Swamp coolers wouldn't work here. I'm in Montreal, not too far from the poster, and it's nearly 100% humidity on EVERY hot day. Since the water needs to be able to evaporate, it wouldn't really work well.
The humidity is actually the bigger part of what makes it so uncomfortable: your sweat never really evaporates, so you just can't cool down, unlike warmer, drier climates.
One of the advantages of his homebrew A/C is that it'd double nicely as a dehumidifier.
While the objections posted are valid, there are REALLY easy fixes.
First: Icewater is great, but who said he has to use ice made in a fridge in his place? Ice from a corner store isn't that expensive. Plus near a campus, he might be able to grab some from departmental fridges around (although he might end up with interesting nicknames).
Second: He could just skip the garbage can entirely. By attaching the assembly straight onto a tap in his place, he could just leave the assembly with a constant (slow) flow of water. I know that pretty much everywhere here in Canada, there is no extra water tax. It is horribly environmentally unsound to use the drinking water for this, but, then again so is using gobs of electricity in a normal A/C.
Third: If you wanted to homebrew a better system based on a fridge, why not just buy an old crappy fridge and strip it down to the coils and compressor. It'd cost relatively little (find a crappy, barely functional fridge in the trash somewhere on moving day :]), and be WAY better than blocking doors and windows with a whole fridge.
Good job on the hack!
Although the idea is a combination of abhorrent and hilarious, this is quite probably just a joke. I read it this morning prior to slashdottedness.
It would be cool if it was possible to embed electronics that seamlessly into clothing, but it isn't possible- at least not according to what I've seen, and I work a lot in designing portable electronic instrumentation.
It would take some extreme perversion to have parents constantly monitoring the pubic temperature of their daughters. That's far more invasive than tracking one's location. I'm surprised that they didn't suggest putting in a humidity sensor: far more effective than temperature. I'm also surprised they didn't also include a remote shocker for dissuation.
I think that using something like that would be equivalent to giving written permission to your wife to do bad things to your reproductive organs.
Actually, under windows, matlab runs faster than compiled C/C++ code. It's really well optimized.
Too bad matlab for mac isn't optimized (fortran 90/95 compiled with the absoft compilers runs much more quickly, albeit being a royal PITA).
I'd agree with your characterization that lots of scientists use matlab, I'm a caase in point. The main reason is the simplicity of plotting, and exporting the plots to presentations/papers.
Although Lucas may be tired of making star wars movies, or perhaps simply not want to be remembered as 'the guy who made star wars', I think it would be silly for them to not continue the stories. They have a storyline that is at least as interesting as the star trek franchise, although I wouldn't want to see it exploited to death as star trek has been. Most non-geeks I talk to express interest in seeing further star wars movies, and that's definitely my hope. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I saw it yesterday, and it was pretty good. I just feel bad for people who will see all 6 movies in order, because a lot of the excitement of episodes 4-6 came from the surprises inherent in the relationships between characters. Now that it's all laid out so clearly, it might make 4-6 much less interesting. I'd like to see more star wars prequels.
Whle skimming your post I first thought you were suggesting they should use a summer launch date, citing the segway as an example of success.
That would be a pretty funny argument, and I think it's about as valid as any other for missing the holidays when launching a gaming console.
It's sad that we follow corporate holidays so well as consumers- but we do. Almost all parents buy their kids big presents in December, then don't buy much for a while after. Big 'N' is silly to skip the holiday season.
I find it interesting how successful the xbox is.
I don't buy PC's with windows anymore, and generally regard MS as making poor software, but the only console I'd buy at this point is the xbox.
2 cents, nothing more...
I love the new Microsoft mantra.
Today while repeating it to coworkers (while trying to install windows (aaargh), I spouted it out in a far more accurate form.
Microsoft: it just works sometimes
I don't think they are violating the spirit of open source development, although I can understand why you do. I think they're just doing things their own way. I also do things my own way while developing. To me, that's the best part of open source programming; collaborating without having any real burdens, is a very good intermediate.
I'm not quite sure where Microsoft came into the discussion... As per Microsoft giving away code, I think it's great if it's relevant. At least the mac platform-specific open source code is in some ways useful. At the very worst, it gives a pretty good idea of how to structure the lower-level libraries for future implementations.
I think that Apple is clever if they are using arguments like "why consider Linux if you could use OS X". But very few people who would buy a mac would want a linux system. For my needs, a linux system doesn't work, because things are not yet mature enough for my daily toil. I have chipped in source every once in a while, but it's not a stable platform that I can use. If I used linux, I'd need to also have windows installed to get a small (but important) portion of my work done. To me, that's not acceptable. Os X gives me that chance to migrate fully. It's not great, but it's miles ahead of the competition for my needs.
I'm not sure I'd classify the linux desktop market as being even near the size of the mac desktop market. Linux and BSD power lots of the web services we see. Os X powers a lot of desktops... But then again, I only roughly follow the stats. I can say that I can think of about 200 people whose computer habits I know, about 10 people use macs, and 3 use linux as desktops.
They are making useable electronic source code available. They may not have been using CVS at all? Even the linux kernel people were using a proprietary version tracking system, why not a private company?
Why is it lying? They are implementing features, just not in the context preferred by the KHTML group. I'm sure the apple developers really do feel that they are contributing their source to the ocmmunity. They are probably not using CVS for code management. I wouldn't expect them to do anything but use the apple libraries, and work however they feel is best, seeing as that's their dev. platform.
Whose comment were you replying to? I'd think you were trolling, but I can't even figure out what point you're trying to make.
You don't like apple? Fair enough. That's really nice, but I don't really care.
I guess you're disagreeing with the 'make available the source you based your code on' bit. Sure, I'm using very general terms. There are licenses where this is not necessary. LGPL, which is in question here, follows exactly what I said: you have to redistribute the source.
Um, yeah, they're in BUSINESS! They try to capture market share, sell products and make money. As per them being an open source contributor, at least they give some code back. There are not all that many people who contribute anything at all.
As per Apple marketing itself 'against' Linux... HAHAHA ROFLOL. So you're saying they're trying to steal linux users? The tiny linux desktop market? Who are you kidding? They're trying to steal microsoft windows users by taking BSD, making it run on cool hardware and adding some cuteness. Have you tried using Os X?
Good flamebait though!
Thanks for the CAPS! Because all CAPS MAKE your comment MORE pleasant TO READ! Perhaps what you were trying to achieve was something more like underlining, bolding, or italics.
According to what I've read, they did release the modified source.
They probably had the web site return a different page:
congrats, you just WON something. Please enter your NAME, ADDRESS, TELEPHONE NUMBER, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, and CREDIT CARD INFORMATION BELOW!!!