I've been working on an idea for a few days that I think tops this:
1) Create an enclosed dome-shaped LCD with a radius of at least 2 meters and pixels as small as those found on standard desktop displays. Think the top half of a sphere closed with a flat floor. Easier said than done, but stick with it.
2) Make a sphere of flexible, transparent plastic and thread it through a small gap between the walls and floor of the LCD dome. This plastic floor will act as a 360-degree treadmill allowing the dome's occupant to walk in any direction without moving from its centre.
3) Develop sensors (Pressure? Motion?) and software that will notice when the occupant walks and alters the LCD background and transparent treadmill to give the sensation of movement while keeping him stationary.
4) Oh, you'll also need a photo-realistic graphics engine capable of pushing a few billion pixels every frame.
I think everything but 4) is entirely feasible with today's technology. I drew a cross-section to make things clearer: blue is the LCD dome; yellow is the transparent treadmill.
"...it is one of the few titles to have reached beyond the hardcore gaming community to strike a chord with women, gay men and others with little time for dungeons or dragons."
1) Telephones don't work like that. You don't strap your phone to your body when you're expecting an important call then lock it in a draw when you're finished. Often the important call comes unexpectedly, perhaps bringing vital news, saving lives, or even money. If you're genuinely in a situation where you do not want to receive calls, there already exists an off button.
2) It goes without saying that noises that damage hearing should not be made when the user has the phone to their ear. Where the noise comes from is irrelevant. Building expensive redundant hardware - like a second speaker - into a phone is pointless when there already exist well engineered software solutions. For example, imagine that you have your phone set to ring at the absolute maximum volume because you work in a noisy environment. If you have just finished a call and someone else rings immediately, modern phones will start off ringing at a low volume, gradually building to maximum until a button is pressed, giving you ample time to move the device away from your eye when it's making barely a whisper.
Solutions exist already to the problem of phones and loud noises. This is a stupid oversight, not a systematic flaw.
It's absolutely minute - far smaller than any other USB key device I've seen. It has a funny shaped contact at the end that looks like it shouldn't fit in a USB port but works perfectly.
It's made of study plastic and comes with a wallet-sized carrier/protector slightly larger than a credit card. Mine is a mere 64mb but they come in flavours all the way up to 1gb.
It works out of the box with no problems. You can use a small utility that comes on a mini-CD to add a password protected partition.
It even has a cool LCD embedded under a thin layer of plastic that gives a funky glow when transferring!
Heartily recommended. (Usual disclaimer: no relationship whatsoever with manufacturers or retailers other than I like their product.)
Thanks for pointing this out for us. A man on the brink of death, about to endure months of intensive treatment after one of the most horrific nuclear accidents in history, grasping for a reason to doubt the mortal danger he was in and the inevitable pain he would have to face. Hilarious.
I wish people who are unable to paraphrase effectively would just quote the article directly.
According to the linked BBC piece, the wave caused by a potential explosion would not be 3km high, it would be 16ft high. The New Scientist makes mention of a 3000m column of debris: that is material would reach a maximum height of 3km. This is entirely different from a tsunami-like wave baselessly alluded to by the Slashdot blurb.
Every other area of the lounge is equally as exhaustive - from iTunes configuration (you can do amazing things with smart playlists!) to headphones and case reviews. Visit the site instead of buying a book.
(Oh, and I'm in no way involved with the Lounge other than being a fan.)
I'm familiar with two currently implemented and successful systems for the distribution of commercial games:
Sony's EverQuest allows expansion packs to be bought and downloaded with a single click using credit card details already saved server side.
EverQuest is one of the few games that is practically unpiratable because of the massive cost of running a single server - each server consists of dozens of machines - and the amount of server-side content that is completely hidden from the client.
Valve's offers Counter Strike: Condition Zero for download through its proprietary content delivery system, Steam. Steam's bandwidth is provided by Valve itself and a select group of donors, although a peer-to-peer extension is planned.
CS:CZ does not rely on a centralised component for gameplay and so can be played singleplayer or on cracked servers relatively easily.
In Windows you just need to set Explorer to show hidden files and you can drag-and-drop music from your iPod to anywhere else.
There also exist many third party utilities for extracting music from iPods. These can be used to generate filenames, which the iPod often discards as it exclusively uses ID3 tags to populate its database.
Slashdot Mirror
A blogger linked to Ubuntu? Great story guys. Very worthy of the front page.
1) Create an enclosed dome-shaped LCD with a radius of at least 2 meters and pixels as small as those found on standard desktop displays. Think the top half of a sphere closed with a flat floor. Easier said than done, but stick with it.
2) Make a sphere of flexible, transparent plastic and thread it through a small gap between the walls and floor of the LCD dome. This plastic floor will act as a 360-degree treadmill allowing the dome's occupant to walk in any direction without moving from its centre.
3) Develop sensors (Pressure? Motion?) and software that will notice when the occupant walks and alters the LCD background and transparent treadmill to give the sensation of movement while keeping him stationary.
4) Oh, you'll also need a photo-realistic graphics engine capable of pushing a few billion pixels every frame.
I think everything but 4) is entirely feasible with today's technology. I drew a cross-section to make things clearer: blue is the LCD dome; yellow is the transparent treadmill.
Installer doesn't give any indication it's installing until you get a "Finished!" box. No choosing paths, no status indicator, nuffin.
.torrent file associations.
Two donation nag screens.
Steals
No scraping the server for total seeder/peer numbers.
No moving completed downloads. No advanced seeding rules. No selecting of individual within a torrent. No download speed capping.
25mb memory usage running just one torrent.
Nothing excites me about this client. I look forward to its apparent efficiency increases being incorporated into Azureus et al, though.
I don't say that Boston is the same as New York. Please don't do this to my country.
Seriously?
NEWSFLASH: SOMEONE WHO PLAYS EVERQUEST DOESN'T KNOW WHICH CASE TO CHOOSE
Liquid latex, my friend. Liquid latex.
I guess the (dubious) justification is that the competitior is 100% slower than us, so we must be 100% faster!
"...it is one of the few titles to have reached beyond the hardcore gaming community to strike a chord with women, gay men and others with little time for dungeons or dragons."
Just kidding.
2) It goes without saying that noises that damage hearing should not be made when the user has the phone to their ear. Where the noise comes from is irrelevant. Building expensive redundant hardware - like a second speaker - into a phone is pointless when there already exist well engineered software solutions. For example, imagine that you have your phone set to ring at the absolute maximum volume because you work in a noisy environment. If you have just finished a call and someone else rings immediately, modern phones will start off ringing at a low volume, gradually building to maximum until a button is pressed, giving you ample time to move the device away from your eye when it's making barely a whisper.
Solutions exist already to the problem of phones and loud noises. This is a stupid oversight, not a systematic flaw.
What if you're not wearing the jacket?
LCD=LED. Stupid mistake.
It's absolutely minute - far smaller than any other USB key device I've seen. It has a funny shaped contact at the end that looks like it shouldn't fit in a USB port but works perfectly.
It's made of study plastic and comes with a wallet-sized carrier/protector slightly larger than a credit card. Mine is a mere 64mb but they come in flavours all the way up to 1gb.
It works out of the box with no problems. You can use a small utility that comes on a mini-CD to add a password protected partition.
It even has a cool LCD embedded under a thin layer of plastic that gives a funky glow when transferring!
Heartily recommended. (Usual disclaimer: no relationship whatsoever with manufacturers or retailers other than I like their product.)
Thanks for pointing this out for us. A man on the brink of death, about to endure months of intensive treatment after one of the most horrific nuclear accidents in history, grasping for a reason to doubt the mortal danger he was in and the inevitable pain he would have to face. Hilarious.
According to the linked BBC piece, the wave caused by a potential explosion would not be 3km high, it would be 16ft high. The New Scientist makes mention of a 3000m column of debris: that is material would reach a maximum height of 3km. This is entirely different from a tsunami-like wave baselessly alluded to by the Slashdot blurb.
Repost
Maybe he could now invent the verb.
sadfd@afds.com
For example, their compendium of software includes:
A workaround for EU volume limitation
Ripping, encoding and tagging recommendations.
A utility to mass export Outlook contacts
News and Weather syndication downloaders.
By far the best way to retrieve your MP3s (a utility that sits on your iPod itself and is executable over a network!)
The fantastic iPod Agent, which creates beautiful XML music lists as well as performing loads of useful functions
Every other area of the lounge is equally as exhaustive - from iTunes configuration (you can do amazing things with smart playlists!) to headphones and case reviews. Visit the site instead of buying a book.
(Oh, and I'm in no way involved with the Lounge other than being a fan.)
What price would you consider picking up an N-Gage QD for? They'd have to offer me at least 100.
Change .org.uk to .co.uk and you're correct.
In no particular order:
Sony's EverQuest allows expansion packs to be bought and downloaded with a single click using credit card details already saved server side.
EverQuest is one of the few games that is practically unpiratable because of the massive cost of running a single server - each server consists of dozens of machines - and the amount of server-side content that is completely hidden from the client.
Valve's offers Counter Strike: Condition Zero for download through its proprietary content delivery system, Steam. Steam's bandwidth is provided by Valve itself and a select group of donors, although a peer-to-peer extension is planned.
CS:CZ does not rely on a centralised component for gameplay and so can be played singleplayer or on cracked servers relatively easily.
There also exist many third party utilities for extracting music from iPods. These can be used to generate filenames, which the iPod often discards as it exclusively uses ID3 tags to populate its database.
Duke Nukem Forever, and ever, and ever, and...