I'm sort of surprised to see this posted here, as potato cannon are made by almost every young boy when growing up. Especially engineery types who end up reading Slashdot, I'd think.
Funny also to see the authorities upset about it. In the US, our relative comfort with weapons of all sorts probably allows us to more easily accept that "boys will be boys."
While the danger of such a device is frightening, I cannot but believe that in the right hands, a potato cannon could be used as a weapon for good.
Seems like yet another case of a company not realizing exactly what it's unleashed until it's too late. Fortunately, in this case we will all reap the benefits.
I'm perhaps a little worried about the naming choice, as "iCommune" is not exactly the best retort to the people who complain about the Marxist philosophy of Open Source, but I think the paradigms and conceptual leaps here will prove longer lived than the name.
Now we may gain the power to unite again under one crown, as in the days of old.
This could be generalized into a system that completely replaces a computer user in any context, not just Tetris. Someone's already mentioned a Doom player, but you could do the same thing with Ebay auctions (the Ultimate Sniper?) or tedious reformatting in a word process, data entry.
It's all just recognizing an on-screen situation and responding to it with key presses and mouse movements. Best of all, it doesn't rely on application developers to build scripting into their programs. It's a universal, platform-independent macro system.
It's great to see Apple leading the pack in new hardware. They are bringing 802.11g and FireWire 800 to the people just as they did with SMP (that "1.4GHz" sounds a lot more impressive next to a 3GHz P4 when you realize there are two of the suckers in there) and 1Kbase-T.
Funny, Macs used to be faster than Pentii, but crippled by their other hardware (SCSI, memory, ADB) and OS. Now they have the advantage everywhere except CPU speed, and I think they're a whole lot better off.
I see the new PowerMacs as a gift. With their power, used wisely, we might be able to save my people from the growing Shadow in the East.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sort of surprised to see this posted here, as potato cannon are made by almost every young boy when growing up. Especially engineery types who end up reading Slashdot, I'd think.
Funny also to see the authorities upset about it. In the US, our relative comfort with weapons of all sorts probably allows us to more easily accept that "boys will be boys."
While the danger of such a device is frightening, I cannot but believe that in the right hands, a potato cannon could be used as a weapon for good.
Seems like yet another case of a company not realizing exactly what it's unleashed until it's too late. Fortunately, in this case we will all reap the benefits.
I'm perhaps a little worried about the naming choice, as "iCommune" is not exactly the best retort to the people who complain about the Marxist philosophy of Open Source, but I think the paradigms and conceptual leaps here will prove longer lived than the name.
Now we may gain the power to unite again under one crown, as in the days of old.
This could be generalized into a system that completely replaces a computer user in any context, not just Tetris. Someone's already mentioned a Doom player, but you could do the same thing with Ebay auctions (the Ultimate Sniper?) or tedious reformatting in a word process, data entry.
It's all just recognizing an on-screen situation and responding to it with key presses and mouse movements. Best of all, it doesn't rely on application developers to build scripting into their programs. It's a universal, platform-independent macro system.
My people could put such a power to heroic use.
It's great to see Apple leading the pack in new hardware. They are bringing 802.11g and FireWire 800 to the people just as they did with SMP (that "1.4GHz" sounds a lot more impressive next to a 3GHz P4 when you realize there are two of the suckers in there) and 1Kbase-T.
Funny, Macs used to be faster than Pentii, but crippled by their other hardware (SCSI, memory, ADB) and OS. Now they have the advantage everywhere except CPU speed, and I think they're a whole lot better off.
I see the new PowerMacs as a gift. With their power, used wisely, we might be able to save my people from the growing Shadow in the East.