Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
>> They aren't going to come until we get past "old" technology like monitors, keyboards, and mice.
Good point. A recent example of such a technology are the new TabletPCs, which forego legacy technologies, such as keyboards and mice, and opt for pen input and voice recognition (fyi, tablet pen input is a superset of mouse inputs, as it also has pressure sensitivity, and it's own data type, e.g. digital ink, so it doesn't count 'just' as a mouse. It's a whole different technology.).
My thinking is that the TabletPC is a possible place where you might see a new operating system crop up. Especially if you equip your Tablet with a GPS unit, a gyroscopic tilt indicator, a video camera, and are located in a big city. With those accessories, you're approaching some pretty nifty video conferencing and augmented reality applications which simply aren't possible with computers that are stuck on desktops.
My prediction for a possible future OS: A new distro developed for TabletPCs which focuses on video conferencing, telepresence, and augmented reality applications, which gets called something like TabletOS or PortalOS.
Perhaps we should set caps on the amount of money that people can sue doctors for, which will cause the doctors' insurance premiums to go down, which will, in turn, allow them to charge more reasonable rates. Perhaps people should learn that good health is not a god given right, and that not all accidents warrent a law suit. Perhaps the problem is the malpractice lawyers overeagerness to sue doctors because of the opportunity of multimillion dollar settlements.
Close, but not quite. The keyboard is extraneous for use as a video player. The iPod equivalent for movies is a slate style Tablet (with built in wire-stand for use, as needed). I just bought a Tablet myself, and the difference is obvious. The laptop is still trying to be a typewriter at some level, whereas the slate Tablet is obviously an interactive media (movie/video) display.
Personal experience and opinion: Tablets are the movie equivalent of iPods. Check them out.
For those of you who don't live in New York City, you may be interested to know that it can cost upwards of $750,000 to obtain a licence/emblem to operate a yellow-cab. The licenses are actually physical emblems which are welded to the hood of the cab, and if you don't have one of those emblems, you can't paint your cab yellow without it getting impounded. As I understand it, the emblems are minted in a manner similar to how a coin or a police badge is minted.
Anyhow, the city has put a cap on the number of cabs which can operate in Manhattan (something like 200,000 cabs, I think), in part just by not minting and selling any new emblems. The law of supply-and-demand has, naturally, driven the cost of licenses up. Interestingly, a cab emblem is considered a piece of real-estate, as I understand, and can be placed in a will. Furthermore, they're considered suitable collateral for taking out a mortgage or loan similar to a home-equity loan. As I understand it, a motivated cabbie can earn a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. And, as you would expect in such a situation, there have formed many cab-companies which try to gobble up all the emblems that they can and hire imigrant drivers who earn a fraction of the profit they make, the rest going to the owners of the cab companies.
Naturally, there are other limosine and cab services which operate in the city. But they don't get to paint their cars yellow.
Anyhow, the moral of the story is that this is a huge decision, involving what I suspect is a billion dollar industry. I don't know exactly how big the new york yellow-cab industry is, but it's real big. And there's lots of money involved in this decision.
I wonder if you have the right kind of persective on this stuff. To use an analogy which another poster used in this thread, it seems as though you're looking at the job with the eyes of a carpenter, rather than with the eyes of an architect. Take a look of that list of skills you listed for the 'web developer' position. Now, consider if you were to look at a similar job posting for a 'carpenter'. The skillset of a 'carpenter' might be "NAILS, PowerSaw, Router, HAMMER, LEVEL, TableSaw, JigSaw, MeasurTAPE, SANDER".
Now, if I posted such a job description, because I needed the floors and doorframes in my house redone, you can bet your bottom dollar that I wouldn't give the job to somebody who applied for the job with a resume listing "PAINTBUCKET, BRUSH, SprayGun, Plaster, PaintThinner, Stiring Stick".
And you know what? If I wanted to build a house, the skillset of things I'd want would be a half mile long, and include an architect who is familiar with carpentry, masonry, electricity, plumbing, and more. Then I'd want an engineer to be a project manager, who has all those skills, and who can supervise the other workers. And it's really not all that tough to find people out there with all that experience.
What you may be forgetting is that there are people out there who have photographic and videographic memories, who happen to be attracted to jobs involving digital photography, video editing, 3D design, and networking. There are lots of people out there who, for a school project, teach themselves how to build an entire website or film a movie short, and come away with that entire list of skills you just mentioned, plus tons more.
In my opinion, your perspective isn't wide enough and isn't giving due consideration to people who make home movies, run ezines or blogs just for the heck of it, or a zillion other hobbies which teach them those skills. Nor are you giving due consideration to any number of traits which are commonly found in geeks, ranging from obsessive compulsiveness, to perfectionism. Yes, there are people out there that have mad skills in all those areas that you listed. And those people often just run a weblog. Their real job might be to light stageshows or to teach highschool or whatever.
Anyhow, the point is, those skills listed for 'web developer' position are roughly on the same difficulty level as the skills needed to use a powersaw, or a torque wrench, or a welding torch, or a multimeter.
So, I'm a systems admin taking care of a high-performance Windows/Linux/Solaris/VVMS/Cisco imaging network at a major hospital in New York City. Magnetic resonance imagers, ultrasound scanners, digital flouroscope rooms, fiber obtic backbone, terrabyte array storage archives, etc. etc. We interface with GE, Philips, Cerner, Dell, Microsoft, Cisco, etc. etc.
That being said, there are a couple of key cross-platform skill sets that are invaluable in these types of heterogenous environments. The first and foremost skill set is people skills, of course. Being able to manage vendor call centers, sales personel, field service engineers, and so forth. Also, you gotta be able to deal with people, especially end users who you support. Unless you're in the IT industry and are writing code or maintaining trunk lines for a telcom, you're probably supporting the IT needs of some other industry, and therefore have end users. Those people are the ones who are going to make or break your career. If your end users love you, word will spread and you won't have any problems with your career. If not, look for another job. So, people skills are the number one skillset that can be taken from one operating system to another. I'd also recomend Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" as a good introductory book on how to handle people. Even if you think you're good with people, you might be surprised at some of the nuggets of wisdom that are hidden in there. (And for those of you with the typical knee-jerk response, the book is about overcoming manipulation, false pretences, and shallowness. It advocates sincere interest in other people, which you can't get from reading a book one time. So, do yourself a favor, and ignore the title. It's a somewhat unfortunate title for a fantastic book.)
From a tech perspective, you want to look at internetworking concepts. Specifically, the Open Standards Interface (OSI) Internetworking Model. Learn it and love it. It's the single most useful tool I've come across in understanding, implementing, and maintaining enterprise wide network-enabled applications (e.g. teleradiology, radiographic archiving & retrieval, electronic medical records, etc). It's good for everything from hospital systems, to grocery stores, to small offices, to factories, to anything else I can think of. If you learn the OSI Internetworking model, you can go just about anywhere. And yes, I'm talking about the 7 layer OSI model: Physical, Data, Network, Transportation, Session, Presentation, Application. Also, I would note that the OSI model can be used for much more than just ethernet and configuring network cards. The OSI model can also be used on sneakernet and be used to model physical sneakernet devices, such as video monitors, printers, scanners, speakers, and any other device that is connected to a bus and has some type of physical interface that is used to communicate information (e.g. audio waves, printed paper, video images, motion sensors, etc)... A true grasp of the OSI model can allow you to be troubleshooting Cisco switches in the morning, nuclear MRI scanners in the afternoon, and HDTV/THX home entertainment systems in the evening.
Anyhow, those two items, Dale's Book and the OSI Model, however, can provide you the cross-platform people skills and technical skills to work in nearly any environment you want.
I don't know about you, but I happen to have 2 eyes. And I find that having two monitors works out quite nicely. There's a Left Monitor, and a Right Monitor. Simple! Having a center monitor kind of confuses things. Kind of like having a third eye. I suppose having a third eye works for some people, but most of us do just fine with Left/Right.
That being said, the difference between having dual 19" monitors and dual 20" monitors is amazing.
That extra inch of monitor real estate on each monitor translates into a whopping 32% increase in screen real estate and screen resolution. If you're going to go with a dual monitor setup, go for the 20" monitors with 1600x1200 resolution. It may wind up being the best $500 upgrade you'll
ever see.
yes, but your 8 massive displays still don't display true 3D.
cost of two airplanes colliding > $40,000
cost of overradiating someone during cancer treatment > $40,000
cost of misdrilling an industrial 1,000ft oil well > $40,000
some applications just need 3D visualization, and all the processing power and 3D graphic cards and 2D monitors in the world simply won't allow you to effectively participate or utilize those industry applications if you don't have a real 3D visualization system.
and stereogoggle systems won't let you walk around the object, unless you're working in a true CAVE environment; and if you're working in a CAVE, well, let's just say that the pricetag is well into the six-figure range by then, what with the need for at least 4 stereo-enabled video projectors, the control application, the tracking hardware, and the stereogoggles.
your $400 pricetag shows that you're stuck in the consumer-market mentality. working at a hospital, i can vouch that we regularly buy equipment ranging from $20,000 to well over $1,000,000, (which is the price tag for a CT or MRI scanner). you can buy a used ultrasound scanner for about $40,000. and if we could, we would totally buy one of these things and put it into our reading room and have it be part of our post-processing, pre-surgical workflow procedure. $40,000 for a 3D visualization station to get a quick preview of your surgical target before operating? hells yeah, we would buy it for $40,000.
the problem with the Perspecta is that it's not FDA approved yet, so meat-and-potato hospitals aren't allowed to buy it yet.
Actually, it's primary focus *is* medical applications. True 3D visualization is notoriously hard to achieve. And your cheap $400 '3D' video cards aren't cutting it. That 2D monitor is still displaying information in 2D, no matter what kind of '3D' video card you're using. The problem is all in the hardware interface... whether it be stereogoggles or fishbowl monitors; there has to be a physical display capable of projecting images in 3D.
This product is quite useful, in it's present form, as a medical research tool. It does what it does rather well. The problem is that it's not FDA approved yet, and so can't be used at your standard meat-and-potatoes hospital. But it does already have DICOM compatible software applications written for it for viewing 3D medical data sets obtained from CT and MRI scanners.
It humours me how people are unwilling to go the final step and just make a freakin slate tablet. These swivel setups always remind me of someone dipping a toe into cold water, not sure if they want to jump in or not. I bet that IBM could make an amazing slate which would rock the competition (with an exception of the Electrovaya Scribbler, perhaps). At any rate, it seems to me that this is still a laptop, albeit with a 'Tablet configuration'. It's still not a slate, and I personally still group it in the 'laptop' abstract class rather than the 'tablet' abstract class.
Molds. Apparently, there was mold growing on the outside of Mir.
Also, virus and simple bacteria can survive those temperatures, I believe. At the very least, they can survive cryo-preservation.
Actually, there is an interesting point which is whether or not it's necessary for life to grow at the temperature Titan is currently at. Perhaps Titan has "Warm Ages" just like Earth has "Ice Ages". Hell, maybe every 10,000 years or so, the planet heats up 40 or 50 degrees... who knows? If so, maybe bacteria, molds, and other critters come out of some type of deep, frozen hibernation, and hang out until the end of the warm age.
For anything bigger than cellular organisms, however, the entropy and heat problem is going to be difficult to overcome. I would speculate on methan-based jelly-fish critters, however, as being plausible, although improbable.
Although, hell... maybe they got some shrimp type critters there like we have under the ice caps and down at the bottom of the trenches by the thermal vents. If there are liquid seas, then the pressure at the bottom of the sea is going to be fairly high, and there's still the possibility of some type of molten core. These things together pose the possibility of cold-water type critters, which there are plenty of under the ice-caps on earth.
Barco for your projection monitors, mirrors, and rigging equipment. Be prepared to pay $100,000 for a powerwall, and upwards of $1M for a full out CAVE. You may balk at the pricetag, although that's the market value... If you want to try designing and installing one yourself, by all means try... Just don't fool yourself regarding the cost of rigging, purchasing high-quality mirrors, architectural design costs, and purchasing high refresh rate projection monitors (e.g. 100+ Hz projectors). You're talking about industry solutions, so expect to pay industry prices.
Stereographics for your active shutter stereogoggle systems. $3,000 per pair of goggles (they are the best on the market, by the way). So, for a theatre setup, be prepared to spend $30,000 to $60,000 on goggles, or more.
Immersion for your haptics (gloves and such). They start at $20,000 per glove, and range up to $250,000 for a complete two-handed 6-degrees-of-freedom force-feedback system (e.g. telerobotics, telesurgery, and so forth).
After that, look towards OpenGL applications. Java3D can wrap around OpenGL, so Java3D is good too. VRML pretty much died, so don't worry too much about Cosmo Player or derivatives. You might want to check out Sense8, which is a pretty good all-purpose CAVE and VR appication programing environment. It has a number of modules, including WorldUp (for getting your hardware up and running), WorldToolKit (for designing your CAVE applications), and World2World (for connection your CAVE to others). I think licenses run around $50K per module, although I might be wrong... I know that Sense8 has had some internal restructuring within the past few years, so they might have restructured their licensing program.
After that, it's mostly a matter of somebody on your team learning how to program OpenGL or Java3D really, really well.
You want to know about Java3D and why people love it? Try looking towards the medical profession, especially radiology and surgical planning. There are a number of Java3D based DICOM viewers out there for viewing CT and MRI images, such as SPLViz and VisAdd.
The cross-platform portability means that the same CT and MRI images can be loaded up onto the same viewer on both the doctor's office PC workstation, their home macintosh or linux system, or even onto one of the esoteric workstations.
Radiograph images in most hospitals are obtained on VAX or QNX or HP Unix systems, and are then transmitted to Solaris or Windows workstations/servers for post processing. It's typical to have sometype of Oracle database sitting on an imaging archive (we have a 20TB archive, for example), feeding images to the clients sitting on workstations. Sometimes the images are saved as 3D volumetric data, although usually they're saved as 2D slices. So, you need some type of portable 3D viewing application that can sit on nearly any type of box, and can compile the radiographs for whatever local viewing equipment is available...
FYI, medical systems have to conform and perform according to federally mandated law, and there isn't the market pressure to compete with the newest processor on the market. Therefore, priorities are very different in the medical world. Pixel shading and texture mapping are generally on the bottom of our list of importance. True stereoscopic visualization and platform portability are near the top. For our purposes, Java3D outperforms all other competitors, because we *need* the portability, the garbage cleanup of java, and all of the other advantages of Java.
[Q] From W S McCollom: "I was looking at a UK magazine and ran across gobsmack. What can you tell me about this term?"
[A] It's a fairly recent British slang term: the first recorded use is only in the eighties, though verbal use must surely go back further. The usual form is gobsmacked, though gobstruck is also found. It's a combination of gob, mouth, and smacked. It means "utterly astonished, astounded". It's much stronger than just being surprised; it's used for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being suddenly hit in the face. It comes from northern dialect, most probably popularised through television programmes set in Liverpool, where it was common. It's an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob, originally from Scotland and the north of England, has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often in insulting phrases like "shut your gob!" to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to the Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.
So, as far as I can figure, there are 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year, which equals about 8760 hours in a year (give or take).
Now then, 3 million hours divided by 8760 hours per year equals approximately 342 years, modulo 4070 hours (i.e. approximately 169 days...).
Now then... how the hell do they get the idea that they've been up-and-running for 342 years? Are they counting things in parallel? Even if they were counting end-user operational hours, the number should at least be a couple orders-of-magnitude higher, no?
3M online operational hours sounds like fuddy-duddy accounting to me... although, obviously I haven't looked over the books. I would be interested to see how they came up with this number.
For any of you who actually know something or two about computer assisted surgery, this shouldn't come as a surprise at all. Medical doctors often use virtual-reality based surgical simulators to practice surgeries.
For an example of how medicine and video games intersect, check out Immersion Corporation for a run down of modern 3D haptics (input for computer systems other than keyboards and mice). Their medical products page gives a nice overview of modern haptic devices and applications, including endoscopes and laparoscope simulators.
Then, wonder over to the games products page, and notice which game pads and controllers use their technology. You might also be interested in noting that there are over 250 game titles which support their force-feedback gaming utilities, including Black & White, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D, Quake, Half Life and Madden NFL 2000.
What is the best software to use to create such a beast on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems?
For audio CDs, SoundForge formerly of Sonic Foundry, and now owned by Sony Pictures seems to be the industry favorite, and is generally considered the best multi-track audio sequencer around. Here is a review. You will also need Roxio or some other CD burning software to create the CD.
And conversely, has anyone used any of the music software on these platforms to actually analyze the contents of commercial subliminal CDs?
For that, you need some sampling software and some oscilloscope software. Talk to the DJ at your local club (the kind who has two decks and a microphone and a laptop). Your local DJ should be able to sample and analyze the CD for you, although it's not all that usefull... Audio signals layers get flattened to a single layer when burned to a CD, and it's difficult to separate the layers afterwords. That being said, we often times just used WinAmp to analyze audio signals. When analyzing audio spectrum, we would often run it through a video oscilloscope... Personally, I like to use G-Force as it's easy on the eyes and can analyze amplitude, frequency, and phase, at the same time. There are some software packages which people have written to try to seperate a flattened audio feed into seperate channels, although they usually don't work well (i.e. most of them are crap).
One common method of creating a "hidden message" is to write a short track and layer it inside the base by decreasing it's frequency and putting it below normal speaking range, down in the base range, with the drum beat. You can also take a message and put a white-noise mask over it, although signal loss is obviously a problem with that method. Obviously, you can also distort a message's temporal length, and make it veeerrrryyy sssllllloooowwww or vry fst. And you can also phase shift it, although that gets kinda weird.
A really good method for creating a good subliminal message, however, is to use symbolic messaging rather than embedded messaging. Basically, you separate your message into "chunks", and divide the chunks between different layers. As a somewhat silly example, which illustrates how this works, imagine that my subliminal message was "Impeach Bush". I would then chunk the message into "Impeach" and "Bush" obviously... Then I would sample two music clips, such as some dude saying the words "bush & beaver" and some chick singing the words "I'm just a wild peach". I'd loop the guy's sample to create one of those kinda annoying euro dance beats, and use the chick's sample as part of the refrain. If the refrain was sung three times throughout the song, and the last line to the refrain was "I'm just a wild peach", there would be three subliminal messages in the song, as the words transitioned from the girl saying "wild peach" to the guy saying "bush and beaver"... With the end effect of three subliminal messages in the CD approximating the impression "Impeach Bush".
By the way, there are a lot of twits on the slashdot forum today who are posting stuff like "subliminal messages are bullshit" and "subliminal messages don't work". I used to work at the National Opinion Research Center which is a demographics research center, and monitored things like commercials and subliminal messages. That was part of my job. Granted, we tended to concentrate on visual feeds, rather than auditory feeds. However, I can guarantee you that subliminal messages are extinsively used in communications. Often times, people create a subliminal message without even realizing it. Other times, they are sneakier and craft
So Jeff Burgar, accused cybersquatter, speaks for many Internet users when he views Icann and WIPO as defenders of the corporate trademark establishment. ''It's a business,'' he said. ''The arbitration process is geared to take domain names from one party and give them to another'' -- from the have-nots, he means, to the haves. ''The arbitrators are almost all of them attorneys who have a vested interest in looking out for big business or celebrities.''
After having actually read the entire 6 pages of the article, I would point out that most all of this article is about.COM names and companies litigating to gain all of the major variations of some trademark. Now, if a company exists named "Example", it seems fair that they should get the domain name EXAMPLE.COM. What doesn't necessarily follow and seem fair is that they should also get EXAMPLE.ORG or EXAMPLE.INFO.
Conversely, individuals who cybersquat names of corporations in the.COM domain isn't fair either. Individuals should stay out of the.COM domain as owners in all circumstances, because an individual is not a corporations... (Even sole-proporietership doesn't count in my opinion, although it is a point which could be argued, I suppose).
Anyhow... moral of the story? Better enforcement of the top level domains (com, org, net, info, edu) and expansion thereof. We are definately going to need more.
In fact, I predict that, eventually, society will need to open up every top level domain for usage to meet the demand for names.
There's an old legend about a Mapmaker, who was the finest mapmaker in his entire country. His maps were the most accurate, detailed, and well-documented maps available in the entire country; possibly the entire world.
One day, the King came to the Mapmaker, and requested a new map of the country, that would be more accurate than any map that had ever been made. And so, the Mapmaker made a map of the entire country that included every house, every road, and every lake. The map was so big, he had to store it in a barn.
The King was so delighted that he commissioned another map of the country, which was to be even more accurate. And so, the Mapmaker made a new map which was even more accurate, and included ever room and piece of furniture in the country, every foot path, and every well. The map was so big, he had to had to store the map in the fields behind the castle, and it had to be moved periodically so that the grass wouldn't die underneath.
The King was so thrilled with the new map, that he commissioned yet another map from the Mapmaker. It was to be the greatest map ever made. And so, the Mapmaker made another map, the best map ever made. The Mapmaker included every nail, every rock, every blade of grass, and every puddle in the entire country. When he was finished, he presented the map to the King, and there was a very big ceremony, for they had to unroll the map so the King could look at it. You see, the map was so detailed, that it was as big as the entire country! And when they unrolled the map, it blocked out the sun and stars in all the land.
Moral of the story: A map with a scale of 1:1 isn't of much use. Maps are usefull to the extent that they can compress information, are transportable, and are abstractions of reality.
Mr. Soto used to haunt rummage sales, thrift shops and flea markets, but he hurt his back in the mid-1990s, so he turned to the Internet.
That sentence, quoted from the article, describes his entire interest in spam. There are 10 types of people who shop... those who go to flea markets, and those who don't.
Flea markets, rummage sales, garage sales, yard sales, thrift stores, salvation army stores, craft festivals, 4H fairs, county fairs, state fairs... These kinds of activities are like crack cocain to certain types of buyers. My aunt used to make crafts that she would sell at the 4H fairs and craft festivals, and she would take me an my cousins to flea markets and rummage sales.
For those of you who aren't connected, it's a way of life for some people.
And this guy, because he hurt his back, is merely doing the online version....
Slashdot Mirror
Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
>> They aren't going to come until we get past "old" technology like monitors, keyboards, and mice.
Good point. A recent example of such a technology are the new TabletPCs, which forego legacy technologies, such as keyboards and mice, and opt for pen input and voice recognition (fyi, tablet pen input is a superset of mouse inputs, as it also has pressure sensitivity, and it's own data type, e.g. digital ink, so it doesn't count 'just' as a mouse. It's a whole different technology.).
My thinking is that the TabletPC is a possible place where you might see a new operating system crop up. Especially if you equip your Tablet with a GPS unit, a gyroscopic tilt indicator, a video camera, and are located in a big city. With those accessories, you're approaching some pretty nifty video conferencing and augmented reality applications which simply aren't possible with computers that are stuck on desktops.
My prediction for a possible future OS: A new distro developed for TabletPCs which focuses on video conferencing, telepresence, and augmented reality applications, which gets called something like TabletOS or PortalOS.
Perhaps we should set caps on the amount of money that people can sue doctors for, which will cause the doctors' insurance premiums to go down, which will, in turn, allow them to charge more reasonable rates. Perhaps people should learn that good health is not a god given right, and that not all accidents warrent a law suit. Perhaps the problem is the malpractice lawyers overeagerness to sue doctors because of the opportunity of multimillion dollar settlements.
Close, but not quite. The keyboard is extraneous for use as a video player. The iPod equivalent for movies is a slate style Tablet (with built in wire-stand for use, as needed). I just bought a Tablet myself, and the difference is obvious. The laptop is still trying to be a typewriter at some level, whereas the slate Tablet is obviously an interactive media (movie/video) display. Personal experience and opinion: Tablets are the movie equivalent of iPods. Check them out.
For those of you who don't live in New York City, you may be interested to know that it can cost upwards of $750,000 to obtain a licence/emblem to operate a yellow-cab. The licenses are actually physical emblems which are welded to the hood of the cab, and if you don't have one of those emblems, you can't paint your cab yellow without it getting impounded. As I understand it, the emblems are minted in a manner similar to how a coin or a police badge is minted.
Anyhow, the city has put a cap on the number of cabs which can operate in Manhattan (something like 200,000 cabs, I think), in part just by not minting and selling any new emblems. The law of supply-and-demand has, naturally, driven the cost of licenses up. Interestingly, a cab emblem is considered a piece of real-estate, as I understand, and can be placed in a will. Furthermore, they're considered suitable collateral for taking out a mortgage or loan similar to a home-equity loan. As I understand it, a motivated cabbie can earn a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. And, as you would expect in such a situation, there have formed many cab-companies which try to gobble up all the emblems that they can and hire imigrant drivers who earn a fraction of the profit they make, the rest going to the owners of the cab companies.
Naturally, there are other limosine and cab services which operate in the city. But they don't get to paint their cars yellow.
Anyhow, the moral of the story is that this is a huge decision, involving what I suspect is a billion dollar industry. I don't know exactly how big the new york yellow-cab industry is, but it's real big. And there's lots of money involved in this decision.
:-/
i counted 153.
gads. only 15%
i feel like i should get cracking and start reading more of them.
keeping things in perspective, i suppose that 153 isn't too shabby.
I wonder if you have the right kind of persective on this stuff. To use an analogy which another poster used in this thread, it seems as though you're looking at the job with the eyes of a carpenter, rather than with the eyes of an architect. Take a look of that list of skills you listed for the 'web developer' position. Now, consider if you were to look at a similar job posting for a 'carpenter'. The skillset of a 'carpenter' might be "NAILS, PowerSaw, Router, HAMMER, LEVEL, TableSaw, JigSaw, MeasurTAPE, SANDER".
Now, if I posted such a job description, because I needed the floors and doorframes in my house redone, you can bet your bottom dollar that I wouldn't give the job to somebody who applied for the job with a resume listing "PAINTBUCKET, BRUSH, SprayGun, Plaster, PaintThinner, Stiring Stick".
And you know what? If I wanted to build a house, the skillset of things I'd want would be a half mile long, and include an architect who is familiar with carpentry, masonry, electricity, plumbing, and more. Then I'd want an engineer to be a project manager, who has all those skills, and who can supervise the other workers. And it's really not all that tough to find people out there with all that experience.
What you may be forgetting is that there are people out there who have photographic and videographic memories, who happen to be attracted to jobs involving digital photography, video editing, 3D design, and networking. There are lots of people out there who, for a school project, teach themselves how to build an entire website or film a movie short, and come away with that entire list of skills you just mentioned, plus tons more.
In my opinion, your perspective isn't wide enough and isn't giving due consideration to people who make home movies, run ezines or blogs just for the heck of it, or a zillion other hobbies which teach them those skills. Nor are you giving due consideration to any number of traits which are commonly found in geeks, ranging from obsessive compulsiveness, to perfectionism. Yes, there are people out there that have mad skills in all those areas that you listed. And those people often just run a weblog. Their real job might be to light stageshows or to teach highschool or whatever.
Anyhow, the point is, those skills listed for 'web developer' position are roughly on the same difficulty level as the skills needed to use a powersaw, or a torque wrench, or a welding torch, or a multimeter.
So, I'm a systems admin taking care of a high-performance Windows/Linux/Solaris/VVMS/Cisco imaging network at a major hospital in New York City. Magnetic resonance imagers, ultrasound scanners, digital flouroscope rooms, fiber obtic backbone, terrabyte array storage archives, etc. etc. We interface with GE, Philips, Cerner, Dell, Microsoft, Cisco, etc. etc.
That being said, there are a couple of key cross-platform skill sets that are invaluable in these types of heterogenous environments. The first and foremost skill set is people skills, of course. Being able to manage vendor call centers, sales personel, field service engineers, and so forth. Also, you gotta be able to deal with people, especially end users who you support. Unless you're in the IT industry and are writing code or maintaining trunk lines for a telcom, you're probably supporting the IT needs of some other industry, and therefore have end users. Those people are the ones who are going to make or break your career. If your end users love you, word will spread and you won't have any problems with your career. If not, look for another job. So, people skills are the number one skillset that can be taken from one operating system to another. I'd also recomend Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" as a good introductory book on how to handle people. Even if you think you're good with people, you might be surprised at some of the nuggets of wisdom that are hidden in there. (And for those of you with the typical knee-jerk response, the book is about overcoming manipulation, false pretences, and shallowness. It advocates sincere interest in other people, which you can't get from reading a book one time. So, do yourself a favor, and ignore the title. It's a somewhat unfortunate title for a fantastic book.)
From a tech perspective, you want to look at internetworking concepts. Specifically, the Open Standards Interface (OSI) Internetworking Model. Learn it and love it. It's the single most useful tool I've come across in understanding, implementing, and maintaining enterprise wide network-enabled applications (e.g. teleradiology, radiographic archiving & retrieval, electronic medical records, etc). It's good for everything from hospital systems, to grocery stores, to small offices, to factories, to anything else I can think of. If you learn the OSI Internetworking model, you can go just about anywhere. And yes, I'm talking about the 7 layer OSI model: Physical, Data, Network, Transportation, Session, Presentation, Application. Also, I would note that the OSI model can be used for much more than just ethernet and configuring network cards. The OSI model can also be used on sneakernet and be used to model physical sneakernet devices, such as video monitors, printers, scanners, speakers, and any other device that is connected to a bus and has some type of physical interface that is used to communicate information (e.g. audio waves, printed paper, video images, motion sensors, etc)... A true grasp of the OSI model can allow you to be troubleshooting Cisco switches in the morning, nuclear MRI scanners in the afternoon, and HDTV/THX home entertainment systems in the evening.
Anyhow, those two items, Dale's Book and the OSI Model, however, can provide you the cross-platform people skills and technical skills to work in nearly any environment you want.
Wow. When I read this article, all I could think of was "Blebs! They're making effing blebs!"
If you haven't read it already, And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon is a really great short read by up-and-coming sci-fi author Paul Di Filippo.
Gads. Forget the diamond age. It appears that we're intering the age of blebs.
I don't know about you, but I happen to have 2 eyes. And I find that having two monitors works out quite nicely. There's a Left Monitor, and a Right Monitor. Simple! Having a center monitor kind of confuses things. Kind of like having a third eye. I suppose having a third eye works for some people, but most of us do just fine with Left/Right.
That being said, the difference between having dual 19" monitors and dual 20" monitors is amazing.
2560x1024 = 2.6 Megapixels
3200x1200 = 3.8 Megapixels
2.6/3.8 ~= 68%
That extra inch of monitor real estate on each monitor translates into a whopping 32% increase in screen real estate and screen resolution. If you're going to go with a dual monitor setup, go for the 20" monitors with 1600x1200 resolution. It may wind up being the best $500 upgrade you'll ever see.
yes, but your 8 massive displays still don't display true 3D. cost of two airplanes colliding > $40,000 cost of overradiating someone during cancer treatment > $40,000 cost of misdrilling an industrial 1,000ft oil well > $40,000 some applications just need 3D visualization, and all the processing power and 3D graphic cards and 2D monitors in the world simply won't allow you to effectively participate or utilize those industry applications if you don't have a real 3D visualization system. and stereogoggle systems won't let you walk around the object, unless you're working in a true CAVE environment; and if you're working in a CAVE, well, let's just say that the pricetag is well into the six-figure range by then, what with the need for at least 4 stereo-enabled video projectors, the control application, the tracking hardware, and the stereogoggles. your $400 pricetag shows that you're stuck in the consumer-market mentality. working at a hospital, i can vouch that we regularly buy equipment ranging from $20,000 to well over $1,000,000, (which is the price tag for a CT or MRI scanner). you can buy a used ultrasound scanner for about $40,000. and if we could, we would totally buy one of these things and put it into our reading room and have it be part of our post-processing, pre-surgical workflow procedure. $40,000 for a 3D visualization station to get a quick preview of your surgical target before operating? hells yeah, we would buy it for $40,000. the problem with the Perspecta is that it's not FDA approved yet, so meat-and-potato hospitals aren't allowed to buy it yet.
Actually, it's primary focus *is* medical applications. True 3D visualization is notoriously hard to achieve. And your cheap $400 '3D' video cards aren't cutting it. That 2D monitor is still displaying information in 2D, no matter what kind of '3D' video card you're using. The problem is all in the hardware interface... whether it be stereogoggles or fishbowl monitors; there has to be a physical display capable of projecting images in 3D. This product is quite useful, in it's present form, as a medical research tool. It does what it does rather well. The problem is that it's not FDA approved yet, and so can't be used at your standard meat-and-potatoes hospital. But it does already have DICOM compatible software applications written for it for viewing 3D medical data sets obtained from CT and MRI scanners.
It humours me how people are unwilling to go the final step and just make a freakin slate tablet. These swivel setups always remind me of someone dipping a toe into cold water, not sure if they want to jump in or not. I bet that IBM could make an amazing slate which would rock the competition (with an exception of the Electrovaya Scribbler, perhaps). At any rate, it seems to me that this is still a laptop, albeit with a 'Tablet configuration'. It's still not a slate, and I personally still group it in the 'laptop' abstract class rather than the 'tablet' abstract class.
Molds. Apparently, there was mold growing on the outside of Mir.
Also, virus and simple bacteria can survive those temperatures, I believe. At the very least, they can survive cryo-preservation.
Actually, there is an interesting point which is whether or not it's necessary for life to grow at the temperature Titan is currently at. Perhaps Titan has "Warm Ages" just like Earth has "Ice Ages". Hell, maybe every 10,000 years or so, the planet heats up 40 or 50 degrees... who knows? If so, maybe bacteria, molds, and other critters come out of some type of deep, frozen hibernation, and hang out until the end of the warm age.
For anything bigger than cellular organisms, however, the entropy and heat problem is going to be difficult to overcome. I would speculate on methan-based jelly-fish critters, however, as being plausible, although improbable.
Although, hell... maybe they got some shrimp type critters there like we have under the ice caps and down at the bottom of the trenches by the thermal vents. If there are liquid seas, then the pressure at the bottom of the sea is going to be fairly high, and there's still the possibility of some type of molten core. These things together pose the possibility of cold-water type critters, which there are plenty of under the ice-caps on earth.
Check out the following links:
Barco for your projection monitors, mirrors, and rigging equipment. Be prepared to pay $100,000 for a powerwall, and upwards of $1M for a full out CAVE. You may balk at the pricetag, although that's the market value... If you want to try designing and installing one yourself, by all means try... Just don't fool yourself regarding the cost of rigging, purchasing high-quality mirrors, architectural design costs, and purchasing high refresh rate projection monitors (e.g. 100+ Hz projectors). You're talking about industry solutions, so expect to pay industry prices.
Stereographics for your active shutter stereogoggle systems. $3,000 per pair of goggles (they are the best on the market, by the way). So, for a theatre setup, be prepared to spend $30,000 to $60,000 on goggles, or more.
Immersion for your haptics (gloves and such). They start at $20,000 per glove, and range up to $250,000 for a complete two-handed 6-degrees-of-freedom force-feedback system (e.g. telerobotics, telesurgery, and so forth).
After that, look towards OpenGL applications. Java3D can wrap around OpenGL, so Java3D is good too. VRML pretty much died, so don't worry too much about Cosmo Player or derivatives. You might want to check out Sense8, which is a pretty good all-purpose CAVE and VR appication programing environment. It has a number of modules, including WorldUp (for getting your hardware up and running), WorldToolKit (for designing your CAVE applications), and World2World (for connection your CAVE to others). I think licenses run around $50K per module, although I might be wrong... I know that Sense8 has had some internal restructuring within the past few years, so they might have restructured their licensing program.
After that, it's mostly a matter of somebody on your team learning how to program OpenGL or Java3D really, really well.
You want to know about Java3D and why people love it? Try looking towards the medical profession, especially radiology and surgical planning. There are a number of Java3D based DICOM viewers out there for viewing CT and MRI images, such as SPLViz and VisAdd.
The cross-platform portability means that the same CT and MRI images can be loaded up onto the same viewer on both the doctor's office PC workstation, their home macintosh or linux system, or even onto one of the esoteric workstations.
To get a better handle on why this images are needed, read up on this article: Combining Local and Remote Visualization Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering in Medical Applications, and check out the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center Website.
Once you dive around those articles and websites, you'll realize that Java3D supports alot of exotic hardware, such as 5 megapixel LCD monitors, Projection Tables for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Virtual Surgery Tables.
Radiograph images in most hospitals are obtained on VAX or QNX or HP Unix systems, and are then transmitted to Solaris or Windows workstations/servers for post processing. It's typical to have sometype of Oracle database sitting on an imaging archive (we have a 20TB archive, for example), feeding images to the clients sitting on workstations. Sometimes the images are saved as 3D volumetric data, although usually they're saved as 2D slices. So, you need some type of portable 3D viewing application that can sit on nearly any type of box, and can compile the radiographs for whatever local viewing equipment is available...
FYI, medical systems have to conform and perform according to federally mandated law, and there isn't the market pressure to compete with the newest processor on the market. Therefore, priorities are very different in the medical world. Pixel shading and texture mapping are generally on the bottom of our list of importance. True stereoscopic visualization and platform portability are near the top. For our purposes, Java3D outperforms all other competitors, because we *need* the portability, the garbage cleanup of java, and all of the other advantages of Java.
we're using laboratories which don't physically exist to detect things we can't actually see...
hmmm...... somehow this seems like a perverse application of a double negative.
From World Wide Words:
[Q] From W S McCollom: "I was looking at a UK magazine and ran across gobsmack. What can you tell me about this term?"
[A] It's a fairly recent British slang term: the first recorded use is only in the eighties, though verbal use must surely go back further. The usual form is gobsmacked, though gobstruck is also found. It's a combination of gob, mouth, and smacked. It means "utterly astonished, astounded". It's much stronger than just being surprised; it's used for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being suddenly hit in the face. It comes from northern dialect, most probably popularised through television programmes set in Liverpool, where it was common. It's an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob, originally from Scotland and the north of England, has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often in insulting phrases like "shut your gob!" to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to the Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.
... you just have an orthogonal universe.
So, would a mirror coating on a missle be an effective counter measure to this laser?
That shouldn't be too difficult to do... heck, I was silvering mirrors in highschool chemistry class.
So, as far as I can figure, there are 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year, which equals about 8760 hours in a year (give or take).
Now then, 3 million hours divided by 8760 hours per year equals approximately 342 years, modulo 4070 hours (i.e. approximately 169 days...).
Now then... how the hell do they get the idea that they've been up-and-running for 342 years? Are they counting things in parallel? Even if they were counting end-user operational hours, the number should at least be a couple orders-of-magnitude higher, no?
3M online operational hours sounds like fuddy-duddy accounting to me... although, obviously I haven't looked over the books. I would be interested to see how they came up with this number.
For any of you who actually know something or two about computer assisted surgery, this shouldn't come as a surprise at all. Medical doctors often use virtual-reality based surgical simulators to practice surgeries.
For an example of how medicine and video games intersect, check out Immersion Corporation for a run down of modern 3D haptics (input for computer systems other than keyboards and mice). Their medical products page gives a nice overview of modern haptic devices and applications, including endoscopes and laparoscope simulators.
Then, wonder over to the games products page, and notice which game pads and controllers use their technology. You might also be interested in noting that there are over 250 game titles which support their force-feedback gaming utilities, including Black & White, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D, Quake, Half Life and Madden NFL 2000.
What is the best software to use to create such a beast on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems?
For audio CDs, SoundForge formerly of Sonic Foundry, and now owned by Sony Pictures seems to be the industry favorite, and is generally considered the best multi-track audio sequencer around. Here is a review. You will also need Roxio or some other CD burning software to create the CD.
And conversely, has anyone used any of the music software on these platforms to actually analyze the contents of commercial subliminal CDs?
For that, you need some sampling software and some oscilloscope software. Talk to the DJ at your local club (the kind who has two decks and a microphone and a laptop). Your local DJ should be able to sample and analyze the CD for you, although it's not all that usefull... Audio signals layers get flattened to a single layer when burned to a CD, and it's difficult to separate the layers afterwords. That being said, we often times just used WinAmp to analyze audio signals. When analyzing audio spectrum, we would often run it through a video oscilloscope... Personally, I like to use G-Force as it's easy on the eyes and can analyze amplitude, frequency, and phase, at the same time. There are some software packages which people have written to try to seperate a flattened audio feed into seperate channels, although they usually don't work well (i.e. most of them are crap).
One common method of creating a "hidden message" is to write a short track and layer it inside the base by decreasing it's frequency and putting it below normal speaking range, down in the base range, with the drum beat. You can also take a message and put a white-noise mask over it, although signal loss is obviously a problem with that method. Obviously, you can also distort a message's temporal length, and make it veeerrrryyy sssllllloooowwww or vry fst. And you can also phase shift it, although that gets kinda weird.
A really good method for creating a good subliminal message, however, is to use symbolic messaging rather than embedded messaging. Basically, you separate your message into "chunks", and divide the chunks between different layers. As a somewhat silly example, which illustrates how this works, imagine that my subliminal message was "Impeach Bush". I would then chunk the message into "Impeach" and "Bush" obviously... Then I would sample two music clips, such as some dude saying the words "bush & beaver" and some chick singing the words "I'm just a wild peach". I'd loop the guy's sample to create one of those kinda annoying euro dance beats, and use the chick's sample as part of the refrain. If the refrain was sung three times throughout the song, and the last line to the refrain was "I'm just a wild peach", there would be three subliminal messages in the song, as the words transitioned from the girl saying "wild peach" to the guy saying "bush and beaver"... With the end effect of three subliminal messages in the CD approximating the impression "Impeach Bush".
By the way, there are a lot of twits on the slashdot forum today who are posting stuff like "subliminal messages are bullshit" and "subliminal messages don't work". I used to work at the National Opinion Research Center which is a demographics research center, and monitored things like commercials and subliminal messages. That was part of my job. Granted, we tended to concentrate on visual feeds, rather than auditory feeds. However, I can guarantee you that subliminal messages are extinsively used in communications. Often times, people create a subliminal message without even realizing it. Other times, they are sneakier and craft
So Jeff Burgar, accused cybersquatter, speaks for many Internet users when he views Icann and WIPO as defenders of the corporate trademark establishment. ''It's a business,'' he said. ''The arbitration process is geared to take domain names from one party and give them to another'' -- from the have-nots, he means, to the haves. ''The arbitrators are almost all of them attorneys who have a vested interest in looking out for big business or celebrities.''
.COM names and companies litigating to gain all of the major variations of some trademark. Now, if a company exists named "Example", it seems fair that they should get the domain name EXAMPLE.COM. What doesn't necessarily follow and seem fair is that they should also get EXAMPLE.ORG or EXAMPLE.INFO.
.COM domain isn't fair either. Individuals should stay out of the .COM domain as owners in all circumstances, because an individual is not a corporations... (Even sole-proporietership doesn't count in my opinion, although it is a point which could be argued, I suppose).
After having actually read the entire 6 pages of the article, I would point out that most all of this article is about
Conversely, individuals who cybersquat names of corporations in the
Anyhow... moral of the story? Better enforcement of the top level domains (com, org, net, info, edu) and expansion thereof. We are definately going to need more.
In fact, I predict that, eventually, society will need to open up every top level domain for usage to meet the demand for names.
There's an old legend about a Mapmaker, who was the finest mapmaker in his entire country. His maps were the most accurate, detailed, and well-documented maps available in the entire country; possibly the entire world.
One day, the King came to the Mapmaker, and requested a new map of the country, that would be more accurate than any map that had ever been made. And so, the Mapmaker made a map of the entire country that included every house, every road, and every lake. The map was so big, he had to store it in a barn.
The King was so delighted that he commissioned another map of the country, which was to be even more accurate. And so, the Mapmaker made a new map which was even more accurate, and included ever room and piece of furniture in the country, every foot path, and every well. The map was so big, he had to had to store the map in the fields behind the castle, and it had to be moved periodically so that the grass wouldn't die underneath.
The King was so thrilled with the new map, that he commissioned yet another map from the Mapmaker. It was to be the greatest map ever made. And so, the Mapmaker made another map, the best map ever made. The Mapmaker included every nail, every rock, every blade of grass, and every puddle in the entire country. When he was finished, he presented the map to the King, and there was a very big ceremony, for they had to unroll the map so the King could look at it. You see, the map was so detailed, that it was as big as the entire country! And when they unrolled the map, it blocked out the sun and stars in all the land.
Moral of the story: A map with a scale of 1:1 isn't of much use. Maps are usefull to the extent that they can compress information, are transportable, and are abstractions of reality.
Mr. Soto used to haunt rummage sales, thrift shops and flea markets, but he hurt his back in the mid-1990s, so he turned to the Internet.
... These kinds of activities are like crack cocain to certain types of buyers. My aunt used to make crafts that she would sell at the 4H fairs and craft festivals, and she would take me an my cousins to flea markets and rummage sales.
That sentence, quoted from the article, describes his entire interest in spam. There are 10 types of people who shop... those who go to flea markets, and those who don't.
Flea markets, rummage sales, garage sales, yard sales, thrift stores, salvation army stores, craft festivals, 4H fairs, county fairs, state fairs
For those of you who aren't connected, it's a way of life for some people.
And this guy, because he hurt his back, is merely doing the online version....