wow, apparently laying out my straight goods, given my 30 years of computer experience makes me a troll... i'll crawl back under the bridge, but not before adding:
a modern OS is one that:
- can grow forwards (ie has a stale date a few years off)
- is robust (doesn't get too funny when given a hard ride)
- feels slick (GUI stuff acts snappy and has some design which isn't obtrusive)
- incorporates UI advances like multi-touch
- helps users do their tasks both with cues and inherently getting what meta tasks people will want to try and do.. again, without being too obtrusive. I always gotta slap windows back like an overly helpful younger brother who gets in the way more than helps.
- has integrated accessory devices in a comprehensive way with useful basic apps
- has multiple security features (firewall, virtual sandboxes, etc.)
- and last but not least "DOES NOT INVALIDATE THE PAST" so, if something worked before, it continues to work THE SAME WAY!! That is why I'm on an Intel Mac with an XP partition and Parallels virtualization so I can do it all at once. I can run XP with my apps, or boot from a perfectly clean fresh install to run securely, without fear of a corrupted.dll stack. heck I can even run a virtual OS X inside OS X and copy, paste, move files between. Also does linux concurrently. my whole computing world doesn't stop if one bit fails.
- if something else can do that, i'm game, not a brand suck at all.
the motorola series macs had too little in the way of software for me, so i stayed on dos 3.1 Then i hung on to 98 as long as i could because of stability. once XP was stable and everyone refreshed their drivers, i migrated to xp. XP has been a great workhorse, and always will be good enough for something.. there just was never an elegant way that i found to manage all those.dll's and registry entries... meaning that one bad install could de-stabilize an entire portion of that house of cards... sometimes to the point of a re-install.. sure you can ghost image and so on, but the inherent mix of data, apps, OS, and bit-rot got just too messy for me to feel really comfortable with. not to mention the endless exploits. Sure XP is good, but you can't really say that across the board because so many people have lame duck XP's due to any number of factors. Vista felt like a glam front end to try and spruce up the "classic" look of windows, but that was all it had for me, stumbling blocks in basics like audio and file management made me nervous.
windoze variants just don't feel like a modern OS.
if XP wasn't so crufty for ones whole computer life to be sitting on top of... the experience and the stress is like taking a cross country road trip in a 1986 Ford Fiesta. And Vista.. was a poor launch, not to mention the uber-triple nagware affiliate bundles that all the laptop players crammed in, making for a maze of questions, cluttered desktop and auto install/update go away!!! AAARARARARARGAGGGGG! *feh*
i'm still a windows user, but mostly from a stable image inside a Parallel's virtual machine inside of OS X. now that feels modern to me.
not to say I'm a fan boi, cuz i miss some windows deets, like windows explorer always being active, even in a modal dialog. just saying that the few hundred extra up front is well worth the flexibility and reduced servicing downtime i've experienced.
My prediction is mac market share will go up steadily over the next few years while microsoft gets itself sorted out and all those college boys they hired get some real world experience. i'm sorry, in good conscience i can't recommend windows to anyone in the market for a new computer, unless its a cheap tower for straight ahead production work.
The hi-res image shows a strong purple colour and a vivid blue bit on the top edge of the blackness. Is this real? Or is it a chromatic artifact from the calibration being unfinished?
I got into computers because I could hack the BASIC games on an Apple ][+
Accessibility is king! But finding which thread to grab amidst the jumble of a modern GUI OS is tricky!!
I have just started playing with "Processing" and it seems to have a nice mix of understandable code and super powerful libraries to take advantage of: cross platform, modern hardware and complex meta-behaviours that we might expect.
As well, I am "sandboxing" with "Parallels" on top of OSX and I have found it to be very stable. (It allows virtualization of Windows flavours, OS X & varieties of linuxen concurrently) The images can be booted Read Only or not. Creating a bulletproof, clean starting environment is what kids(and productions) need, and virtualization images might be part of this.
I'm new to virtualization, but it feels like the future to me. Since I have taught in hands-on Lab settings I think this is a better solution for a shared use lab than straight up disk imaging... It would allow week by week, class by class customization of the Boot Image, and changes could always be rolled back.
It seems I can virtualize any disk image, whether it is generated from an install, or a "crystalized" live CD.
If I instantiate from a live CD image within OS X, then I have a consistent read-only OS with what I might run elsewhere off a CD & memory stick.
OS X becomes "home", live CD becomes "away", sandboxed XP gets started "clean" each time, so no cruft n kak.
I've felt dodgy using so many systems since rootkits started making the rounds that I'm ready to be double gloved. And anyways, its always a tightrope with XP, all those DLL's n registry entries just come crashing down in an ugly heap, leaving me to go back to a ghost image, or weighing the benefits of a re-build/repair, vs fresh re-install.. and all because of some bunk adware laden utility which seemed like a good idea at the time..
I finally feel completely liberated. I advocate buying a Mac, with XP and Parallels as a base system, add linux and stir.. I'm new to Parallels, so I'm sure It'll pinch me some way or other.
Since I'm reading this as I'm killing time, while I'm installing XP on a Macbook, in a "Parallels" virtual environment, I'm getting a kick out of this.
Making a fresh virtual image of OS X next. Then, which free linux flavour is fun these days? Does Gentoo still have a decent live CD? Apparently I can even install Windows 7, not sure why I would tho.
Did the pilots shut down the flight computers in an effort to get the controls to respond appropriately? Professional Pilots are "do-ers", and right or wrong, they ALWAYS have a reason for their choices.
Did the flight computer failure mode fail to (dis)engage? I've heard about the manual control levels that an Airbus flight system degrades through. It looks like the computer wouldn't get out of the way soon enough, so the flight crew kicked it in the head.
They received the airplane in a un-recoverable, un-flyable, disintegrating condition from mach turbulence destroying lift and ultimately the aircraft. (coffin corner)
Cascading failures generally occur from a synergy of multiple causes. In this case:
- A narrow flight envelope due to altitude and varying wind-speed in the storm. (had they climbed, trying to avoid the storm?)
- Pilot over-reliance on automated flight assist in marginal conditions.
- Failure of physical airspeed instruments due to severe icing from a massive updraft.
- Increased thrust from engines ingesting water contained in the 100mph updraft. (coffin corner!)
- Altitude increase from 100 mph updraft. (coffin corner!)
- Inappropriate computer control responses, destabilizing flight dynamics, leading to overspeed and unrecoverable loss of lift (mach stall).
- Turbulence and chaos of a severe storm masking the initial flight computer deviations.
hmmm, aren't those fat multi-color pens and multi-color typewriter ribbon evidence of prior art?
hope they don't find out about using carbon paper (CC = carbon copy) to transfer a copy of the letter you're typing onto another document or i'll have to pay insane royalties each time i forward those dumb internet chain letters i send to over 9000 of my friends!!
Direction of travel is not the same as Heading.
Heading (the direction the vessel is pointed) can be different than direction of travel at sea, or in the air due to movement of the water/air itself.
I don't remember the detail of the story; However, the point of it being a failure due to GPS issue was relayed by my friend (the daughter). The vessel was a packer named "The Salty Isle" and is known by some in the BC area. The seafood-diver fleet was in the area and made a midnight storm rescue of all hands from a nasty rock.
I seem to recall that the amount of current in the passage (at night) was the problem, and that the drift was not noted by the Skipper with the GPS instrument because of a constant reading, whereas with their LORAN set, a drift would have been noted by a varying value. Ya can tear it apart and IANAGPSLORANO, sorry.
But do read Critical Path, it is worthwhile, including Fuller's description of a Geoscope which it seems Google Earth is modelled after.
A friends mom escaped the wreck of a 90ft Fish Packer as it hit the rocks at night in a passage with strong currents due to a problem caused by relying on GPS. It was due to something like how it derived the heading vs the direction of travel or some-such.
Moral of the story was that using static ground stations like LORAN, this would not have occurred. Anyhow, now ground stations have been dismantled and vessel's receivers scrapped and there is nothing groundbased to replace GPS with should GPS fail. High altitude communications aircraft seem viable; however, there again is a reliance on something that is not physically bolted down and easily fixable.
An interesting footnote is mentioned by Buckminster Fuller in his 50 year summation masterwork "Critical Path": on pages 186-7. The Americans started their radio-accurate mapping from Compass Island in Penobscot Bay in Maine, and proceeded by radio triangulation to work their way down to South America, across the Atlantic and up Africa to Europe. This was needed for accurately guiding bombers above the clouds, as the ground survey maps were often 10's of miles incorrect.
The Germans had done this as well for Europe and perhaps Russia, so when Berlin fell, the Russians went in early and took the German mapping data. Russia had radio-accurate maps of all of Europe and published data from the US, while the US did not have maps of Russia. This lead to the importance in the cold war of US spy planes and satellites for basic mapping for targeting ICBM's, including as suggested by Fuller a US presence in Iran and Afghanistan as radio triangulation bases. Russia performed massive deceptions of fake cities and so on to perpetuate this information gradient.
So we should build it at the top of a hill to maximize the potential energy?
Or manufacture using solar electricity it in geo-stationary orbit and sell it as counterweights for a space elevator which transmits energy mechanically to the surface of the earth?
Our culture could do many amazing things if we tried to be half as creative as folks who don't have our near unlimited capital, credit, power and resources.
I have to say that we are least suited to survive anywhere but here. People from most places in the world are tougher and more resourceful by necessity. I have complete respect.
Latin American culture has shown itself to be incredibly ingenious with minimal resources. This fence is a boondoggle.
I spoke with someone who ran the border several times. One technique is to soak their clothes in a bucket of ice water to get past infrared sensors.
The Mythbusters did a great sensor test, where a simple pane of glass was enough to walk in front of infrared sensors, and a bedsheet over the head hosed ultrasonic sensors at close range. Walking very slowly worked too.
I had the same idea, probably you did too, but our name doesn't have nearly the clout as a "Researcher from Carnegie Mellon". After seeing their prototype, I could have made better.
My concept is: Little ridge lines around the areas of the "virtual button", needs less air, can be a more rigid material, because its only a small deformation, our finger tips are pretty good at sensing detail.
Another concept was an array of mechanical oscillators (tappers or vibrators) under the screen, so the buttons have different feeling, although the surface remains flat. For those with rare earth magnets in their fingertips, a little EM field would cause varying sensations. And I'm sure that the materials tech geniuses have, or very soon will have a plastic that will feel smooth or rough if they run a current inside it.
Slashdot Mirror
wow, apparently laying out my straight goods, given my 30 years of computer experience makes me a troll... i'll crawl back under the bridge, but not before adding:
.dll stack. heck I can even run a virtual OS X inside OS X and copy, paste, move files between. Also does linux concurrently. my whole computing world doesn't stop if one bit fails.
.dll's and registry entries... meaning that one bad install could de-stabilize an entire portion of that house of cards... sometimes to the point of a re-install.. sure you can ghost image and so on, but the inherent mix of data, apps, OS, and bit-rot got just too messy for me to feel really comfortable with. not to mention the endless exploits. Sure XP is good, but you can't really say that across the board because so many people have lame duck XP's due to any number of factors. Vista felt like a glam front end to try and spruce up the "classic" look of windows, but that was all it had for me, stumbling blocks in basics like audio and file management made me nervous.
a modern OS is one that:
- can grow forwards (ie has a stale date a few years off)
- is robust (doesn't get too funny when given a hard ride)
- feels slick (GUI stuff acts snappy and has some design which isn't obtrusive)
- incorporates UI advances like multi-touch - helps users do their tasks both with cues and inherently getting what meta tasks people will want to try and do.. again, without being too obtrusive. I always gotta slap windows back like an overly helpful younger brother who gets in the way more than helps.
- has integrated accessory devices in a comprehensive way with useful basic apps
- has multiple security features (firewall, virtual sandboxes, etc.)
- and last but not least "DOES NOT INVALIDATE THE PAST" so, if something worked before, it continues to work THE SAME WAY!! That is why I'm on an Intel Mac with an XP partition and Parallels virtualization so I can do it all at once. I can run XP with my apps, or boot from a perfectly clean fresh install to run securely, without fear of a corrupted
- if something else can do that, i'm game, not a brand suck at all.
the motorola series macs had too little in the way of software for me, so i stayed on dos 3.1 Then i hung on to 98 as long as i could because of stability. once XP was stable and everyone refreshed their drivers, i migrated to xp. XP has been a great workhorse, and always will be good enough for something.. there just was never an elegant way that i found to manage all those
windoze variants just don't feel like a modern OS.
if XP wasn't so crufty for ones whole computer life to be sitting on top of... the experience and the stress is like taking a cross country road trip in a 1986 Ford Fiesta. And Vista.. was a poor launch, not to mention the uber-triple nagware affiliate bundles that all the laptop players crammed in, making for a maze of questions, cluttered desktop and auto install/update go away!!! AAARARARARARGAGGGGG! *feh*
i'm still a windows user, but mostly from a stable image inside a Parallel's virtual machine inside of OS X. now that feels modern to me.
not to say I'm a fan boi, cuz i miss some windows deets, like windows explorer always being active, even in a modal dialog. just saying that the few hundred extra up front is well worth the flexibility and reduced servicing downtime i've experienced.
My prediction is mac market share will go up steadily over the next few years while microsoft gets itself sorted out and all those college boys they hired get some real world experience. i'm sorry, in good conscience i can't recommend windows to anyone in the market for a new computer, unless its a cheap tower for straight ahead production work.
about the size of the Pacific Ocean, according to one astronomer's estimates.
The hi-res image shows a strong purple colour and a vivid blue bit on the top edge of the blackness. Is this real? Or is it a chromatic artifact from the calibration being unfinished?
Have they detailed the calibration milestones?
Sure sounds a lot like those spyware scans that list 542 threats(cookies) have been found! zomgwtfbbq!!11
If the info is real, it seems national governments should purchase the list in its entirety in order to protect their citizens.
Then they can lose the laptop, scrap the hard drives and it will show up in vendors stalls in Saharan Africa allowing the cycle to continue.
First, I put on my robe and wizard hat.
I got into computers because I could hack the BASIC games on an Apple ][+
Accessibility is king! But finding which thread to grab amidst the jumble of a modern GUI OS is tricky!!
I have just started playing with "Processing" and it seems to have a nice mix of understandable code and super powerful libraries to take advantage of: cross platform, modern hardware and complex meta-behaviours that we might expect.
As well, I am "sandboxing" with "Parallels" on top of OSX and I have found it to be very stable. (It allows virtualization of Windows flavours, OS X & varieties of linuxen concurrently) The images can be booted Read Only or not. Creating a bulletproof, clean starting environment is what kids(and productions) need, and virtualization images might be part of this.
I'm new to virtualization, but it feels like the future to me. Since I have taught in hands-on Lab settings I think this is a better solution for a shared use lab than straight up disk imaging... It would allow week by week, class by class customization of the Boot Image, and changes could always be rolled back.
It seems I can virtualize any disk image, whether it is generated from an install, or a "crystalized" live CD.
If I instantiate from a live CD image within OS X, then I have a consistent read-only OS with what I might run elsewhere off a CD & memory stick.
OS X becomes "home", live CD becomes "away", sandboxed XP gets started "clean" each time, so no cruft n kak. I've felt dodgy using so many systems since rootkits started making the rounds that I'm ready to be double gloved. And anyways, its always a tightrope with XP, all those DLL's n registry entries just come crashing down in an ugly heap, leaving me to go back to a ghost image, or weighing the benefits of a re-build/repair, vs fresh re-install.. and all because of some bunk adware laden utility which seemed like a good idea at the time..
I finally feel completely liberated. I advocate buying a Mac, with XP and Parallels as a base system, add linux and stir.. I'm new to Parallels, so I'm sure It'll pinch me some way or other.
Since I'm reading this as I'm killing time, while I'm installing XP on a Macbook, in a "Parallels" virtual environment, I'm getting a kick out of this.
Making a fresh virtual image of OS X next. Then, which free linux flavour is fun these days? Does Gentoo still have a decent live CD? Apparently I can even install Windows 7, not sure why I would tho.
Unthinkable!
clear water
*duh*
Did the pilots shut down the flight computers in an effort to get the controls to respond appropriately? Professional Pilots are "do-ers", and right or wrong, they ALWAYS have a reason for their choices.
Did the flight computer failure mode fail to (dis)engage? I've heard about the manual control levels that an Airbus flight system degrades through. It looks like the computer wouldn't get out of the way soon enough, so the flight crew kicked it in the head.
They received the airplane in a un-recoverable, un-flyable, disintegrating condition from mach turbulence destroying lift and ultimately the aircraft. (coffin corner)
Cascading failures generally occur from a synergy of multiple causes. In this case:
- A narrow flight envelope due to altitude and varying wind-speed in the storm. (had they climbed, trying to avoid the storm?)
- Pilot over-reliance on automated flight assist in marginal conditions.
- Failure of physical airspeed instruments due to severe icing from a massive updraft.
- Increased thrust from engines ingesting water contained in the 100mph updraft. (coffin corner!)
- Altitude increase from 100 mph updraft. (coffin corner!)
- Inappropriate computer control responses, destabilizing flight dynamics, leading to overspeed and unrecoverable loss of lift (mach stall).
- Turbulence and chaos of a severe storm masking the initial flight computer deviations.
Marble Cake Also The Game
No, no. It was a space goat...
some of my favorite typefaces are black.
hmmm, aren't those fat multi-color pens and multi-color typewriter ribbon evidence of prior art?
/fat freddy sez
hope they don't find out about using carbon paper (CC = carbon copy) to transfer a copy of the letter you're typing onto another document or i'll have to pay insane royalties each time i forward those dumb internet chain letters i send to over 9000 of my friends!!
Direction of travel is not the same as Heading. Heading (the direction the vessel is pointed) can be different than direction of travel at sea, or in the air due to movement of the water/air itself.
I don't remember the detail of the story; However, the point of it being a failure due to GPS issue was relayed by my friend (the daughter). The vessel was a packer named "The Salty Isle" and is known by some in the BC area. The seafood-diver fleet was in the area and made a midnight storm rescue of all hands from a nasty rock.
I seem to recall that the amount of current in the passage (at night) was the problem, and that the drift was not noted by the Skipper with the GPS instrument because of a constant reading, whereas with their LORAN set, a drift would have been noted by a varying value. Ya can tear it apart and IANAGPSLORANO, sorry.
But do read Critical Path, it is worthwhile, including Fuller's description of a Geoscope which it seems Google Earth is modelled after.
A friends mom escaped the wreck of a 90ft Fish Packer as it hit the rocks at night in a passage with strong currents due to a problem caused by relying on GPS. It was due to something like how it derived the heading vs the direction of travel or some-such.
Moral of the story was that using static ground stations like LORAN, this would not have occurred. Anyhow, now ground stations have been dismantled and vessel's receivers scrapped and there is nothing groundbased to replace GPS with should GPS fail. High altitude communications aircraft seem viable; however, there again is a reliance on something that is not physically bolted down and easily fixable.
An interesting footnote is mentioned by Buckminster Fuller in his 50 year summation masterwork "Critical Path": on pages 186-7. The Americans started their radio-accurate mapping from Compass Island in Penobscot Bay in Maine, and proceeded by radio triangulation to work their way down to South America, across the Atlantic and up Africa to Europe. This was needed for accurately guiding bombers above the clouds, as the ground survey maps were often 10's of miles incorrect.
The Germans had done this as well for Europe and perhaps Russia, so when Berlin fell, the Russians went in early and took the German mapping data. Russia had radio-accurate maps of all of Europe and published data from the US, while the US did not have maps of Russia. This lead to the importance in the cold war of US spy planes and satellites for basic mapping for targeting ICBM's, including as suggested by Fuller a US presence in Iran and Afghanistan as radio triangulation bases. Russia performed massive deceptions of fake cities and so on to perpetuate this information gradient.
What about the supplies?
So we should build it at the top of a hill to maximize the potential energy?
Or manufacture using solar electricity it in geo-stationary orbit and sell it as counterweights for a space elevator which transmits energy mechanically to the surface of the earth?
Our culture could do many amazing things if we tried to be half as creative as folks who don't have our near unlimited capital, credit, power and resources. I have to say that we are least suited to survive anywhere but here. People from most places in the world are tougher and more resourceful by necessity. I have complete respect.
Latin American culture has shown itself to be incredibly ingenious with minimal resources. This fence is a boondoggle. I spoke with someone who ran the border several times. One technique is to soak their clothes in a bucket of ice water to get past infrared sensors. The Mythbusters did a great sensor test, where a simple pane of glass was enough to walk in front of infrared sensors, and a bedsheet over the head hosed ultrasonic sensors at close range. Walking very slowly worked too.
Hammer
Doorstop
2" lift monitor stand
I had the same idea, probably you did too, but our name doesn't have nearly the clout as a "Researcher from Carnegie Mellon". After seeing their prototype, I could have made better.
My concept is: Little ridge lines around the areas of the "virtual button", needs less air, can be a more rigid material, because its only a small deformation, our finger tips are pretty good at sensing detail.
Another concept was an array of mechanical oscillators (tappers or vibrators) under the screen, so the buttons have different feeling, although the surface remains flat. For those with rare earth magnets in their fingertips, a little EM field would cause varying sensations. And I'm sure that the materials tech geniuses have, or very soon will have a plastic that will feel smooth or rough if they run a current inside it.