Nope, just a practical implementation for magic tech gizmos from Minority Report and Matrix Reloaded. If you have a 3D capable display that doesn't require glasses, you can add infrared tracking that Holotouch invented and you can suddenly track control objects with hands in 3D. Imagine being able to drag and drop or draw on the virtual screen (that floats in front of the actual screen) with your fingers. That's pretty cool and has a lot of applications in every area.
It's important to note that the extra LCD screen is placed on top of conventional LCD display (check the article), not a CRT monitor, as the blurb suggests.
If it used a CRT monitor, it would hardly be a laptop, wouldn't it?
Here are two articles (part 1 and part 2) about the history of flying submarines. Great stuff. It's in Russian, so you will need to use the fish or just check out the photos.
Well, if there was someone at Dell, whose full-time job was thinking about customers, they could have told every client who buys a Windows machine that MIcrosoft fucked up and people need to use Windows Update to install critical patches. Had the person admitted that he is a clueless user, Dell should have done it for them.
It's not the responsibility of the client to check for fixes and updates right after buying the product. The assumption is that when you are buying the product, it should be working properly at least for some time.
Carmakers recall cars when there are serious problems. Many of hardware and software errors can be fixed with a patch, but that doesn't take away Dell's and MS's responsibility for fixing.
Freebies: Often they come with the fine print that you exempt yourself from the list for 18 months. Sweepstakes: Ditto
Who in their right mind doesn't understand that?:) If someone is stupid enough to fall for these tricks, they deserve to get telephone harrassment. There is such thing as free lunch, but most lunches ain't it.:)
Re:Something to keep in mind.
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 1
As one of the articles mentions, the materials include audio and video lectures. What else do you need?:) In most schools worldwide you just sit in the lecture-hall and listen to the professor. In developed countries you just sit and listen (and doodle or make some random notes), in developing countries you have to write down everything...
Group work is the only thing missing from MIT materials and it is not the most important thing, since it is usually also missing in most other schools.
Granted, it could be taken to absurd extremes Like checking the trash in the ghettos to find out the concentration of stolen Coke cans.:) And install scanners in the airports to check for stolen razor blades. On the other hand, this would allow to automatically dispose of food with expired dates.
The only important thing is to keep an eye on the society. Don't let it turn to evil, otherwise it will abuse any technology that someone invents.
Re:Something to keep in mind.
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 1
That's one course. There are 700 course currently available. Surely there are some where individual work is enough. I am not trying to say that visiting MIT physically + having access to online materials is the same as only having access to online materials. My point is that quite often individual distant learning is much more effective than visiting a real school, especially if you can't come to MIT and have to settle for whatever crappy school is nearby.
Re:This idea is genius.
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 3, Funny
That's precisely the attitude that Richard Feynman had when he graduated from MIT.
When I was an undergraduate at MIT I loved it. I thought it was a great place, and I wanted to go to graduate school there too, of course. But when I went to Professor Slater and told him of my intentions, he said, "We won't let you in here."
I said, "What?"
Slater said, "Why do you think you should go to graduate school at MIT?"
"Because MIT is the best school for science in the country."
"You think that?"
"Yeah."
"That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is."
Re:This idea is genius.
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 1
I haven't read MIT financials, but I guess they can survive on donations alone. If it turns out that traditional offline education model is obsolete and everyone and their cat is "attending" MIT virtually, then thousands of rich MIT graduates will stand in line to give their money to MIT. And we are talking about million dollar donations here.
The only thing MIT had to worry about was becoming obsolete as other universities were becoming as good or better in teaching. It looks like they solved that problem already, even before it appeared.:)
Re:Something to keep in mind.
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 1
There is a difference between reading it only because it's interesting and completing the material. If you have sufficient motivation, you can easily get much more from these materials than you can ever get from actual courses in most universities. Of course, whether you will know as much as MIT graduates is debatable. MIT argues that this is no replacement for actually attending their institute, but that surely depends on people. If you have motivation, you can easily get better than some of MIT graduates who took the same course. And in most cases (if you actually study and not just read it for fun) you will be better than graduates in ordinary (crappy) schools everywhere in the world.
Hey, look. Junks Jerzey (to whose post I replied) said "The physical internet is not dying, of course. That's just silly." The Auerbach guy speaks about some really crazy idea of background traffic noise that he didn't prove with any hard data and that is most probably completely false.
I disagree with both of them, but was taking about the services. People will not go to private networks, at least the overwhelming majority won't - and there are many reasons for that. I personally don't care much about these problems. Yes, there are some annoyances, but I have ads blocked, pop-ups blocked, spam mostly blocked, the PCs firewalled and sometimes virus-checked. Yes, there are definitely some problems from time to time, but that's rare enough for me not to worry too much.
There are almost no private groups that want to communicate only between themselves. And if there are (like a crew on the air carrier), then I will not lose anything when they quit the Internet, since they don't want to communicate with me anyway.
The trend is actually quite opposite. Everyone is moving to the public network, even the train networks and nuclear power stations. I don't see anything new that would reverse this trend. So any solution would be built within the Internet and is likely to be satisfactory for people. The only thing that worries me a bit is possible loss of privacy and anonymity (not that there is much now).
I think everybody can detain you until police arrives if they have a reason to believe this is necessary. It doesn't mean, IMO, that they would be immune from a civil suit, though.
We'll enter the store with the detector turned off. Then we'll turn it on and walk in the store (and eventually out of the store) jamming all RFID receivers. And of course, if this device would have at least moderate working distance, good luck to the guards finding who has it.:) It's not visible like a backpack, it might be so hidden as not to be found even if they know where to look.:)))
And it shows. Do you have anything than an unrelated anecdote to back this up? Honestly, if you know something relevant about store guards that can be applied in this case, I would be really interested.
But I don't think the store security has any right to search you. So you can always say you are innocent and wait for the police. And it doesn't seem that the device is designed to jam anti-theft device, but to jam the spies on your body.
Of course there are risks. 1) US govt may decide blocking RFID is terrorism 2) Corporations may decide it's infridgment on their IP Either way, blockers are banned
This reminds me of the discovery of X-Rays. New glasses were sold that supposedly allowed you to see through clothes and then new clothes that supposedly blocked X-Rays...
No, they have good reading comprehension, but a low tolerance for those with poor writing skills (i.e. they were able to figure out what the message regardless of its poor delivery).
Your post shows that your English is not perfect either. E.g. you use certain latin abbreviations incorrectly.:) Anyway, if blunte understood me just fine, why didn't he address my post, but instead simply repeated his original position?
those rules then fall by the wayside
You seem to agree that "languages are organic", but you don't really understand what it means. Rules are not set by the scholars for others to follow. Rules are formulated in order to codify the consensus of language users. In retrospect merging 'then' and 'than' would be perfectly acceptable and today noone has the moral authority to violently oppose this (if this is indeed happening and not, say, emerging of the word 'thon').
If that should happen often enough, we might just eventually be reduced to something akin to grunts, as someone put it earlier. As Preed put it so well, "I weep for the species."
If language is so fragile, how did it emerge in the first place? You aren't trying to insult my intelligence, are you? And don't weep for the species, it will be just fine, I assure you.
the difference between "then" and "than". Do you forget the difference between "+" and "-"?
Your 1337 Inglish skillz are all good and stuff, but when did you last check your logic faculties?:) People mix up 'then' and 'than' not because they don't know the difference between the two concepts, but simply because they forget which concept has which letter. You know difference between "+" and "-", but do you know the difference between WinPaintChar and WinDrawChar? You know that there are two different functions and you even know what kind of function is best for every situation, but can you be sure to always remember which one is called which? Do you want me to IM you every time you fuck up and ridicule you?:)
As for the argument that "languages are organic" and "change is good", I'll agree to an extent. However, "organic" doesn't imply "anarchic". A comedian (Steve Martin?) once jokingly suggested that we teach kids the wrong meanings of words to our kids. I would never teach my daughter that "no" means "yes". Hopefully, neither would you.
As I said above, the rules should be set according to the way language is used (with the intent of teaching young people how the language is spoken by others), but not try to influence this. And in any case, in this whole picture I see no place for grammanazis at all. If you don't like how others speak, STFU or GTFOOH. It is simply extremely impolite, sort of Internet way of saying "you momma is a bitch" or "you freak". People speak the way they do. Especially when they actually type. Moreso when they do it for a quick/. post. And particularly when English is not their first language, like in my case. In my country, when a foreigner makes a mistake we do not tell him "Learn to spell, you idiot". Instead we ignore the error, because we know that practice and comfort are more important than pointless nagging.
Both comments are insightful. Yes, it would be good if people could (in the US and elsewhere) design new systems that are really-really good and implement them without considerations for initial inconveniences. For some things the planned economy is definitely better.
However, the chances of this happening in the US with the Internet or cars are slim. This is where MhzJnky's comment enters the picture. He says that even though US is stuck with blind and stupid market, eventually it will work out. Will it be the optimal solution? May be not. Will it be the one that people are content with? Probably.
She clicks on the wrong link in a Google search and gets a site that opens 20+ full screen windows and has to kill the browser to get rid of them.
And now that her browser is dead, she can't use the Internet.:)
Seriously, this isn't really a serious problem. And when it will become very serious, the result will be a solution, not a death of the Internet (web/e-mail/IM/whatever). Yeah, it sucks to live during the time of changes (for some), but once the changes are over, everything is back to normal.
1) If it is an important e-mail, everyone should enable receipt confirmation and/or reading confirmation flags. 2) In my experience ISPs send "your address/IP/whatever is blackholed/blacklisted/banned/whatever", whenever I happen to be blocked (happened two times so far, both cases were "cross-border" both resolved). 3) You can use a variety of free webmail services, some of which do not even require subscription to send the e-mail. Unless the recepient's ISP blocked the entire Net, your e-mail will probably come through. 4) You are right that it was university's mistake. I am more than sure that SPEWS and other blacklists do warn users that false positives are possible. And if you know how to set up a blacklist-based filter, you should have enough clue to understand this warning.
You want client-side filtering. Most people want server-side filtering. Who are you to dictate them what they should use? If you don't like that your ISP filters your e-mail, let them know, they might be able to disable filtering for you. If they just can't, get a better e-mail service. There are many ways - buy a domain for e-mail and then you can probably demand your ISP to not filter it, or do anything else.
If the majority of the clients want the ISP to filter their e-mail, it should be free to do so. If you don't want that, tell that to the ISP or connect to another one.
And hopefully one of the many ways to get into the federal prison. The whole system of blacklists is completely voluntary and not inforced in any way. It's not like there is cartel of evil ISPs that decided to block some sysadmin from sending and receiving e-mail.
Slashdot Mirror
My best guess is they found it somewhere on the roof or in the bushes near the undeground parking lot...
Nope, just a practical implementation for magic tech gizmos from Minority Report and Matrix Reloaded. If you have a 3D capable display that doesn't require glasses, you can add infrared tracking that Holotouch invented and you can suddenly track control objects with hands in 3D. Imagine being able to drag and drop or draw on the virtual screen (that floats in front of the actual screen) with your fingers. That's pretty cool and has a lot of applications in every area.
It's important to note that the extra LCD screen is placed on top of conventional LCD display (check the article), not a CRT monitor, as the blurb suggests.
If it used a CRT monitor, it would hardly be a laptop, wouldn't it?
Here are two articles (part 1 and part 2) about the history of flying submarines. Great stuff. It's in Russian, so you will need to use the fish or just check out the photos.
Well, if there was someone at Dell, whose full-time job was thinking about customers, they could have told every client who buys a Windows machine that MIcrosoft fucked up and people need to use Windows Update to install critical patches. Had the person admitted that he is a clueless user, Dell should have done it for them.
It's not the responsibility of the client to check for fixes and updates right after buying the product. The assumption is that when you are buying the product, it should be working properly at least for some time.
Carmakers recall cars when there are serious problems. Many of hardware and software errors can be fixed with a patch, but that doesn't take away Dell's and MS's responsibility for fixing.
Freebies: Often they come with the fine print that you exempt yourself from the list for 18 months.
:) If someone is stupid enough to fall for these tricks, they deserve to get telephone harrassment. There is such thing as free lunch, but most lunches ain't it. :)
Sweepstakes: Ditto
Who in their right mind doesn't understand that?
As one of the articles mentions, the materials include audio and video lectures. What else do you need? :) In most schools worldwide you just sit in the lecture-hall and listen to the professor. In developed countries you just sit and listen (and doodle or make some random notes), in developing countries you have to write down everything...
Group work is the only thing missing from MIT materials and it is not the most important thing, since it is usually also missing in most other schools.
Granted, it could be taken to absurd extremes :) And install scanners in the airports to check for stolen razor blades. On the other hand, this would allow to automatically dispose of food with expired dates.
Like checking the trash in the ghettos to find out the concentration of stolen Coke cans.
The only important thing is to keep an eye on the society. Don't let it turn to evil, otherwise it will abuse any technology that someone invents.
That's one course. There are 700 course currently available. Surely there are some where individual work is enough. I am not trying to say that visiting MIT physically + having access to online materials is the same as only having access to online materials. My point is that quite often individual distant learning is much more effective than visiting a real school, especially if you can't come to MIT and have to settle for whatever crappy school is nearby.
I haven't read MIT financials, but I guess they can survive on donations alone. If it turns out that traditional offline education model is obsolete and everyone and their cat is "attending" MIT virtually, then thousands of rich MIT graduates will stand in line to give their money to MIT. And we are talking about million dollar donations here.
:)
The only thing MIT had to worry about was becoming obsolete as other universities were becoming as good or better in teaching. It looks like they solved that problem already, even before it appeared.
There is a difference between reading it only because it's interesting and completing the material. If you have sufficient motivation, you can easily get much more from these materials than you can ever get from actual courses in most universities. Of course, whether you will know as much as MIT graduates is debatable. MIT argues that this is no replacement for actually attending their institute, but that surely depends on people. If you have motivation, you can easily get better than some of MIT graduates who took the same course. And in most cases (if you actually study and not just read it for fun) you will be better than graduates in ordinary (crappy) schools everywhere in the world.
Hey, look. Junks Jerzey (to whose post I replied) said "The physical internet is not dying, of course. That's just silly." The Auerbach guy speaks about some really crazy idea of background traffic noise that he didn't prove with any hard data and that is most probably completely false.
I disagree with both of them, but was taking about the services. People will not go to private networks, at least the overwhelming majority won't - and there are many reasons for that. I personally don't care much about these problems. Yes, there are some annoyances, but I have ads blocked, pop-ups blocked, spam mostly blocked, the PCs firewalled and sometimes virus-checked. Yes, there are definitely some problems from time to time, but that's rare enough for me not to worry too much.
There are almost no private groups that want to communicate only between themselves. And if there are (like a crew on the air carrier), then I will not lose anything when they quit the Internet, since they don't want to communicate with me anyway.
The trend is actually quite opposite. Everyone is moving to the public network, even the train networks and nuclear power stations. I don't see anything new that would reverse this trend. So any solution would be built within the Internet and is likely to be satisfactory for people. The only thing that worries me a bit is possible loss of privacy and anonymity (not that there is much now).
I think everybody can detain you until police arrives if they have a reason to believe this is necessary. It doesn't mean, IMO, that they would be immune from a civil suit, though.
We'll enter the store with the detector turned off. Then we'll turn it on and walk in the store (and eventually out of the store) jamming all RFID receivers. And of course, if this device would have at least moderate working distance, good luck to the guards finding who has it. :) It's not visible like a backpack, it might be so hidden as not to be found even if they know where to look. :)))
And it shows.
Do you have anything than an unrelated anecdote to back this up? Honestly, if you know something relevant about store guards that can be applied in this case, I would be really interested.
But I don't think the store security has any right to search you. So you can always say you are innocent and wait for the police. And it doesn't seem that the device is designed to jam anti-theft device, but to jam the spies on your body.
Of course there are risks.
1) US govt may decide blocking RFID is terrorism
2) Corporations may decide it's infridgment on their IP
Either way, blockers are banned
This reminds me of the discovery of X-Rays. New glasses were sold that supposedly allowed you to see through clothes and then new clothes that supposedly blocked X-Rays...
Your post shows that your English is not perfect either. E.g. you use certain latin abbreviations incorrectly. :) Anyway, if blunte understood me just fine, why didn't he address my post, but instead simply repeated his original position?
You seem to agree that "languages are organic", but you don't really understand what it means. Rules are not set by the scholars for others to follow. Rules are formulated in order to codify the consensus of language users. In retrospect merging 'then' and 'than' would be perfectly acceptable and today noone has the moral authority to violently oppose this (if this is indeed happening and not, say, emerging of the word 'thon').
If language is so fragile, how did it emerge in the first place? You aren't trying to insult my intelligence, are you? And don't weep for the species, it will be just fine, I assure you.
Your 1337 Inglish skillz are all good and stuff, but when did you last check your logic faculties? :) People mix up 'then' and 'than' not because they don't know the difference between the two concepts, but simply because they forget which concept has which letter. You know difference between "+" and "-", but do you know the difference between WinPaintChar and WinDrawChar? You know that there are two different functions and you even know what kind of function is best for every situation, but can you be sure to always remember which one is called which? Do you want me to IM you every time you fuck up and ridicule you? :)
As I said above, the rules should be set according to the way language is used (with the intent of teaching young people how the language is spoken by others), but not try to influence this. And in any case, in this whole picture I see no place for grammanazis at all. If you don't like how others speak, STFU or GTFOOH. It is simply extremely impolite, sort of Internet way of saying "you momma is a bitch" or "you freak". People speak the way they do. Especially when they actually type. Moreso when they do it for a quick /. post. And particularly when English is not their first language, like in my case. In my country, when a foreigner makes a mistake we do not tell him "Learn to spell, you idiot". Instead we ignore the error, because we know that practice and comfort are more important than pointless nagging.
BTW, you might enjoy reading this node. :)
Oh come on! Don't kill the massager, I beg you. :)))
Both comments are insightful. Yes, it would be good if people could (in the US and elsewhere) design new systems that are really-really good and implement them without considerations for initial inconveniences. For some things the planned economy is definitely better.
However, the chances of this happening in the US with the Internet or cars are slim. This is where MhzJnky's comment enters the picture. He says that even though US is stuck with blind and stupid market, eventually it will work out. Will it be the optimal solution? May be not. Will it be the one that people are content with? Probably.
She clicks on the wrong link in a Google search and gets a site that opens 20+ full screen windows and has to kill the browser to get rid of them.
:)
And now that her browser is dead, she can't use the Internet.
Seriously, this isn't really a serious problem. And when it will become very serious, the result will be a solution, not a death of the Internet (web/e-mail/IM/whatever). Yeah, it sucks to live during the time of changes (for some), but once the changes are over, everything is back to normal.
Internet is dying! In other news, Moore's Law will soon be invalid. Please tune to our news at 10 to watch the broadcast of the impending doom.
1) If it is an important e-mail, everyone should enable receipt confirmation and/or reading confirmation flags.
2) In my experience ISPs send "your address/IP/whatever is blackholed/blacklisted/banned/whatever", whenever I happen to be blocked (happened two times so far, both cases were "cross-border" both resolved).
3) You can use a variety of free webmail services, some of which do not even require subscription to send the e-mail. Unless the recepient's ISP blocked the entire Net, your e-mail will probably come through.
4) You are right that it was university's mistake. I am more than sure that SPEWS and other blacklists do warn users that false positives are possible. And if you know how to set up a blacklist-based filter, you should have enough clue to understand this warning.
You want client-side filtering. Most people want server-side filtering. Who are you to dictate them what they should use? If you don't like that your ISP filters your e-mail, let them know, they might be able to disable filtering for you. If they just can't, get a better e-mail service. There are many ways - buy a domain for e-mail and then you can probably demand your ISP to not filter it, or do anything else.
If the majority of the clients want the ISP to filter their e-mail, it should be free to do so. If you don't want that, tell that to the ISP or connect to another one.
This may be his last hope to get off their list.
And hopefully one of the many ways to get into the federal prison. The whole system of blacklists is completely voluntary and not inforced in any way. It's not like there is cartel of evil ISPs that decided to block some sysadmin from sending and receiving e-mail.