Give the public a device with incredible flexibility and utility for all sorts of portable applications, and they'll say "yeah, so what?"
Give them an elegant, intuitive interface for that same device, and they'll buy millions of them.
Frankly, I think computers as a whole have gotten too abstract. We don't see devices for information gathering (web browsing) that aren't coupled to communications (cell phone) devices. We don't see devices for content creation (graphical workstations) that don't have every other computer application bundled along with them (desktop pc). For the vast majority of cases, the devices we use offer long lists of capabilities of which we use a small portion.
Having said all this, I own a Motorola A780 and I love it. I use the phone, calendar, and alarm many times daily. I use the 1.3MP still/video camera several times a week and the media player about once a week. I use the task list and notepad a few times a month. I never play games on it. If it had a better calculator, I would use that much more often. Other than that, I don't really even know what else it can do. When I bought it, I decided to add 256MB of transflash for media storage ($35 and the largest I could get), which I've used extensively. It wasn't cheap, and it doesn't have the best battery life (it handles three-day trips out of town on business), and it certainly could have better camera quality, but most of the features are good enough that I feel happy with the purchase. Of course, you can't buy them easily in the USA.
There are some applications that can be coupled, but until the interfaces all take several bounding leaps forward, the combination devices are going to have a difficult time making any headway in the market. Who wants to pay $500 for a mediocre combination device that does a few things pretty well when they can pay $600 and get each device separately with top-of-the-line quality? Me, but only because I hate having a bunch of crap in my pocket.
ah, the caltrop form factor would be ideal. while the individual prongs would make for excellent buttons in the UI, the unit would have the added benefit of playing a particular sound, activated when your pursuer steps upon it. surely, the sound of "hey, watch it, buddy" accompanied by the immediate debilitating foot pain would provide superior deterrent over either individual effect alone.
thank you! i've been waiting to use the word caltrop in conversation for weeks, and this is the next best thing.:D
If you have a non-Windows machine that doesn't autoexecute anything because that's clearly a security risk, the DRM is completely ineffective. This sounds like either a major oversight, rampant ignorance, or both, on the part of the developers. Or maybe they believe "this linux thing" is just a fad. It amazes me that this sort of serious security risk would be employed as a method of controlling data access at a time in US history when security is a major industry.
well, that may be true, but until the mesh topology network technology becomes more popular and more advanced, we're still at the mercy of the network. in a large network of small processing cores, the importance of network integrity is significantly greater than in smaller networks, especially if redundant systems share a common network. if a switch dies, the potential for stranded data is larger if there are more nodes connected through that switch.
this all begs the question of when this technology will be applied to neural networks and artificial intelligence.
PLCs are also integral components of avionics and flight control systems. I can imagine an individual picotux unit wired directly to each cluster of sensors or actuator drivers in a giant network of tiny pieces, all broadcasting their respective data chunks over 100bt. Instead of having a single computer driving the whole contraption, you'd have a swarm of little guys.
oh, and I love the guy asking "uh.. how do you feel about dating ppl from/." despite the husband reference. i am male and always had support for the tinkering i did. too many of the girls i knew had negative support. it bothers me, too. my wife is a perfect example. she was pushed into "girly" stuff even though she really wanted to learn science and math. now, she's a graphic designer, which is one of the most technically inclined jobs women are "allowed" into.
a much better solution is aqueous sodium borohydride, a liquid at standard temperature and pressure. using certain catalysts, sodium borohydride can be made to liberate its hydrogen into gaseous state, leaving inert aqueous sodium borate. then, using a double-bladder tank system, a full tank of borohydride can be passed through the catalytic reactor, filling the other bladder (with no change in total volume) with the borate mixture. the process can then be reversed at a fuelling station. unfortunately, this process is still not refined enough for use in real world applications, but it does eliminate many of the issues that still remain, such as the production of hydrogen and distribution to fuelling stations.
the hindenberg was simply a giant balloon full of hydrogen. however, the explosion was not caused by hydrogen combustion. hydrogen is lighter than air and burns clear (with faint blue). if you look at the flames from the images, you'll notice that the flames are orange and originate at or below the balloon. this is because the actual cause was a highly flammable surface coating used to keep the fabric in tact and feep the hydrogen from leaking out.
Years ago, Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore, MD provided health insurance, educational allowance, and housing, all included in a package deal they offered to their workers. The workers were not obligated to take the services, but they were use-it-or-lose-it services and if they didn't use them, they didn't get a pay raise to balance things out. In some respects, this is unbalanced, since a poor homeless man with a wife and three sick children would use all the services, while a single healthy man would need none of them. The company would spend far more to keep the homeless man than the single man for the same basic amount of work produced by either.
Unfortunately, greed and government regulation drove the operational costs higher, and the company was unable to continue providing these services, so the packages were ultimately phased out.
Actually, I meant that using an unreliable transporter that may or may not turn the transportees into goo is unethical. Besides, what does it gain you to transport the enemy onboard your ship, where they can take over from the inside?
Oh, and don't get me started on site-to-site transport. They never used it except in a handful of episodes, one of which was my favorite of the TNG eps where Data goes nuts and returns to find Dr Soong (great episode!). Why hae turbolifts if you have site-to-site transport?? Madness.
Who cares if the enemies get fried by the transporter?
In the future, humanity has evolved to have an enormous respect for life, human(oid) or otherwise. You can't just vaporize your opponent. That's not nice. Sure, you *could* do it, but it's unethical. Just like the USA *could* nuke the middle east, but it's unethical.
Eventually, people will grow to understand that murder, for whatever reason (including self-defense), is wrong. Well, that is unless you plan to eat the deceased. Then, it's a food chain issue. Of course, the food chain in nonlinear in the future, due to the addition of millions of new species from other planets. I don't think there's any easy way to justify killing the pets of citizens of other planets, even if you plan to eat them (the pets, I mean), because there is no longer a "food chain" because of the light years of distance.
Humanity is not ready for technology, let alone transporters or fusion or warp drive. We need to learn how to live in peace without all the nationalism, racism, ethnic cleansing, and bigotry we see today. Yes, it's gotten better, but not by much. After all, why else would we have invented the Geneva Conventions?
maybe P&F didn't know how to measure the saturation of their electrodes. McKubre is using 2002 technology, not 1989 technology. He's also using laser light to stimulate the activity in the electrodes, which (at 780nm) seems to have a significant impact on the reaction rates. Remember, also, that if it is fusion and the modern theories on fusion products are accurate, the reaction would produce parts per billion trace amounts of tritium, free neutrons, and the ever-ellusive neutrino. It's hard enough to measure neutral particles when they're in abundance, and damn near impossible to measure them in trace amounts.
I'm not saying I think the MIT consortium should have lied to Congress about their results, but I understand their argument for suspicion of those results. It can be difficult to convince hot fusion research scientists that the thing they have struggled with for 20 years can be done much easier and cheaper in a few years with high voltage and heavy water.
There are a few scientists (Mizuno and Manarev, for example http://guns.connect.fi/innoplaza/energy/story/Kana rev/coldfusion/) who believe the reaction does not require heavy water, but rather can be achieved through advanced electrical control techniques and an iron electrode. I have most of the parts to replicate their work, but no lab space or time to do it just now.
the PhD advisor's name is Dr. Economy. When you think about it, that's really funny, because it means his name is Doctor James Economy, Doctor of Philosophy. which one is it? economy or philosophy?
i guess i'll have to wait a few years for that bagel and cream cheese. i wonder if this will drive down the price of caviar, which would no longer require all the shipping overheads. wait, but this brings up a new question. how does teleportation affect the taste?
i will never understand the concept of private property. whose land was it when the europeans came to "america," mistaking it for india, and forcably displaced the "indians"? when you conquer someone else through military force, what gives you the right to own their land? what if they were just renting?
i have a tablet pc. how long do i have to wait before there is a "sleek, sophisticated, museum quality" stylus for my clicking pleasure? when are people going to catch on that the mouse is a dieing breed.
so, does this mean i can grow a replacement penis in a mold on my shoulder if for some reason i break it?
and if i do it twice at the same time, will i have supercool shoulder spikes?! rock on!
commence vigorous masturbation!
wait... since when is upper management the best position in the company?? if you're looking for more money and extra responsibility, that's probably best, but if you want to enjoy your job, not so much. that is, unless you enjoy taking the legal rap for your CEO's actions.
Abiword is the devil. It once locked my computer for an hour before finally giving up and issuing a STOP error. Might be a Micro$oft problem, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time. OpenOffice is much better, even if it does create idle processes that eat up lots of virtual memory.
Following a tunnel in a flight simulator is hard. That much is true, especially if the tunnel doesn't follow a smooth curve and have obstructions jutting out randomly. But I believe much of the trouble there is that flight simulators lack a fundamental sensory input to the pilot - acceleration. I believe the human brain relies heavily on inertial "feedback" from the body, mostly the inner ear, to "right" itself in a fall. You never really hear about deaf gymnasts.
As for the "No brain required" part, it isn't necessarily easier to align a cross in some display. Ask any fighter pilot how difficult it is to acquire a target lock on a Mig-29 in a dogfight. Aligning elements in a display is generally easy in smooth, mostly level flight, but in a critical situation (ie, tunnel flight, stalling, or dynamic instability) it can be easy to lose control and watch the cross woosh off-screen.
Of course, at that point, you've already soiled yourself and become nauseous from the vibration.
It's Toyota Prius. I have one, and I love it. It cost a lot, but it's still cheaper than the SUVs that use 4x more fuel and produce substantially more pollution. Well, SUVs are great and actually are more fuel efficient when transporting a full load than other vehicles, but the SUV owners don't use them in this way, so they're wasting a lot of fuel.
Honda has two hybrids on the market in America - Insight (2-seater pure hybrid), and Civic (4-seater sedan with a hybrid option).
I'm very interested to see how long it takes before people (not just small pockets, but more globally) start believing in LENR-CANR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions - Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions) http://lenr-canr.org/... known to the layman as cold fusion, which has been shown to produce anomalous surplus energy in over 1000 experiments since 1989.
This article is claiming that NASA was the first to -do- the experiments, but when I graduated from University of Maryland last year, there was a lot of excitement in the aerospace department about the Australian HiFlight experiment, where they actually -did- the experiment successfully, for around $5 million, compared to NASA's failed experiment a few months prior, which crashed into the Pacific Ocean, wasting a phenomenal $300 million. Let's compare.
Five bright guys from Australia acquire funding from venture capitalists and government grants to test the same basic principle, using a simpler (and thus less error-prone) experimental approach, and achieve almost a full minute of raw data.
A few hundred people at NASA stretch their budget, rush through a test that is ill-designed, and fail miserably, acquiring no useful data because the test was aborted before the engine was even engaged.
It seems to me that this is just further evidence that small teams of talented and experienced people are driven to do more with less money. With all those employees wasting time all over the place, it's no surprize they fail. It's no wonder NASA's budget has dwindled so much. The governments need to put more money into private industry, where the real magic happens. I pay taxes. Don't I have the right to contribute to the decision of how that money is spent?
Yes, but helicopters are inherently safer than fixed wing craft, due to their ability to autorotate, a state in which the pilot maintains attitude control during unpowered descent. Autorotation is what limits the speed of small seed pods falling from trees. Unless there is a mechanical failure or serious atmospheric disturbance, helicopters can't crash.
That is, as long as the pilot is conscious.
Slashdot Mirror
Give the public a device with incredible flexibility and utility for all sorts of portable applications, and they'll say "yeah, so what?"
Give them an elegant, intuitive interface for that same device, and they'll buy millions of them.
Frankly, I think computers as a whole have gotten too abstract. We don't see devices for information gathering (web browsing) that aren't coupled to communications (cell phone) devices. We don't see devices for content creation (graphical workstations) that don't have every other computer application bundled along with them (desktop pc). For the vast majority of cases, the devices we use offer long lists of capabilities of which we use a small portion.
Having said all this, I own a Motorola A780 and I love it. I use the phone, calendar, and alarm many times daily. I use the 1.3MP still/video camera several times a week and the media player about once a week. I use the task list and notepad a few times a month. I never play games on it. If it had a better calculator, I would use that much more often. Other than that, I don't really even know what else it can do. When I bought it, I decided to add 256MB of transflash for media storage ($35 and the largest I could get), which I've used extensively. It wasn't cheap, and it doesn't have the best battery life (it handles three-day trips out of town on business), and it certainly could have better camera quality, but most of the features are good enough that I feel happy with the purchase. Of course, you can't buy them easily in the USA.
There are some applications that can be coupled, but until the interfaces all take several bounding leaps forward, the combination devices are going to have a difficult time making any headway in the market. Who wants to pay $500 for a mediocre combination device that does a few things pretty well when they can pay $600 and get each device separately with top-of-the-line quality? Me, but only because I hate having a bunch of crap in my pocket.
ah, the caltrop form factor would be ideal. while the individual prongs would make for excellent buttons in the UI, the unit would have the added benefit of playing a particular sound, activated when your pursuer steps upon it. surely, the sound of "hey, watch it, buddy" accompanied by the immediate debilitating foot pain would provide superior deterrent over either individual effect alone.
:D
thank you! i've been waiting to use the word caltrop in conversation for weeks, and this is the next best thing.
If you have a non-Windows machine that doesn't autoexecute anything because that's clearly a security risk, the DRM is completely ineffective. This sounds like either a major oversight, rampant ignorance, or both, on the part of the developers. Or maybe they believe "this linux thing" is just a fad. It amazes me that this sort of serious security risk would be employed as a method of controlling data access at a time in US history when security is a major industry.
well, that may be true, but until the mesh topology network technology becomes more popular and more advanced, we're still at the mercy of the network. in a large network of small processing cores, the importance of network integrity is significantly greater than in smaller networks, especially if redundant systems share a common network. if a switch dies, the potential for stranded data is larger if there are more nodes connected through that switch.
this all begs the question of when this technology will be applied to neural networks and artificial intelligence.
PLCs are also integral components of avionics and flight control systems. I can imagine an individual picotux unit wired directly to each cluster of sensors or actuator drivers in a giant network of tiny pieces, all broadcasting their respective data chunks over 100bt. Instead of having a single computer driving the whole contraption, you'd have a swarm of little guys.
so, what did you launch in your trebuchet?
/." despite the husband reference. i am male and always had support for the tinkering i did. too many of the girls i knew had negative support. it bothers me, too. my wife is a perfect example. she was pushed into "girly" stuff even though she really wanted to learn science and math. now, she's a graphic designer, which is one of the most technically inclined jobs women are "allowed" into.
oh, and I love the guy asking "uh.. how do you feel about dating ppl from
a much better solution is aqueous sodium borohydride, a liquid at standard temperature and pressure. using certain catalysts, sodium borohydride can be made to liberate its hydrogen into gaseous state, leaving inert aqueous sodium borate. then, using a double-bladder tank system, a full tank of borohydride can be passed through the catalytic reactor, filling the other bladder (with no change in total volume) with the borate mixture. the process can then be reversed at a fuelling station. unfortunately, this process is still not refined enough for use in real world applications, but it does eliminate many of the issues that still remain, such as the production of hydrogen and distribution to fuelling stations.
the hindenberg was simply a giant balloon full of hydrogen. however, the explosion was not caused by hydrogen combustion. hydrogen is lighter than air and burns clear (with faint blue). if you look at the flames from the images, you'll notice that the flames are orange and originate at or below the balloon. this is because the actual cause was a highly flammable surface coating used to keep the fabric in tact and feep the hydrogen from leaking out.
Years ago, Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore, MD provided health insurance, educational allowance, and housing, all included in a package deal they offered to their workers. The workers were not obligated to take the services, but they were use-it-or-lose-it services and if they didn't use them, they didn't get a pay raise to balance things out. In some respects, this is unbalanced, since a poor homeless man with a wife and three sick children would use all the services, while a single healthy man would need none of them. The company would spend far more to keep the homeless man than the single man for the same basic amount of work produced by either.
Unfortunately, greed and government regulation drove the operational costs higher, and the company was unable to continue providing these services, so the packages were ultimately phased out.
Actually, I meant that using an unreliable transporter that may or may not turn the transportees into goo is unethical. Besides, what does it gain you to transport the enemy onboard your ship, where they can take over from the inside?
Oh, and don't get me started on site-to-site transport. They never used it except in a handful of episodes, one of which was my favorite of the TNG eps where Data goes nuts and returns to find Dr Soong (great episode!). Why hae turbolifts if you have site-to-site transport?? Madness.
Who cares if the enemies get fried by the transporter?
In the future, humanity has evolved to have an enormous respect for life, human(oid) or otherwise. You can't just vaporize your opponent. That's not nice. Sure, you *could* do it, but it's unethical. Just like the USA *could* nuke the middle east, but it's unethical.
Eventually, people will grow to understand that murder, for whatever reason (including self-defense), is wrong. Well, that is unless you plan to eat the deceased. Then, it's a food chain issue. Of course, the food chain in nonlinear in the future, due to the addition of millions of new species from other planets. I don't think there's any easy way to justify killing the pets of citizens of other planets, even if you plan to eat them (the pets, I mean), because there is no longer a "food chain" because of the light years of distance.
Humanity is not ready for technology, let alone transporters or fusion or warp drive. We need to learn how to live in peace without all the nationalism, racism, ethnic cleansing, and bigotry we see today. Yes, it's gotten better, but not by much. After all, why else would we have invented the Geneva Conventions?
maybe P&F didn't know how to measure the saturation of their electrodes. McKubre is using 2002 technology, not 1989 technology. He's also using laser light to stimulate the activity in the electrodes, which (at 780nm) seems to have a significant impact on the reaction rates. Remember, also, that if it is fusion and the modern theories on fusion products are accurate, the reaction would produce parts per billion trace amounts of tritium, free neutrons, and the ever-ellusive neutrino. It's hard enough to measure neutral particles when they're in abundance, and damn near impossible to measure them in trace amounts.
a rev/coldfusion/) who believe the reaction does not require heavy water, but rather can be achieved through advanced electrical control techniques and an iron electrode. I have most of the parts to replicate their work, but no lab space or time to do it just now.
I'm not saying I think the MIT consortium should have lied to Congress about their results, but I understand their argument for suspicion of those results. It can be difficult to convince hot fusion research scientists that the thing they have struggled with for 20 years can be done much easier and cheaper in a few years with high voltage and heavy water.
There are a few scientists (Mizuno and Manarev, for example http://guns.connect.fi/innoplaza/energy/story/Kan
the PhD advisor's name is Dr. Economy. When you think about it, that's really funny, because it means his name is Doctor James Economy, Doctor of Philosophy. which one is it? economy or philosophy?
i guess i'll have to wait a few years for that bagel and cream cheese. i wonder if this will drive down the price of caviar, which would no longer require all the shipping overheads. wait, but this brings up a new question. how does teleportation affect the taste?
i will never understand the concept of private property. whose land was it when the europeans came to "america," mistaking it for india, and forcably displaced the "indians"? when you conquer someone else through military force, what gives you the right to own their land? what if they were just renting?
i have a tablet pc. how long do i have to wait before there is a "sleek, sophisticated, museum quality" stylus for my clicking pleasure? when are people going to catch on that the mouse is a dieing breed.
viva la voice and touch!
it's not really surprising to me to see the words "vagina" and "better view" in the same article on slashdot...
so, does this mean i can grow a replacement penis in a mold on my shoulder if for some reason i break it? and if i do it twice at the same time, will i have supercool shoulder spikes?! rock on! commence vigorous masturbation!
wait... since when is upper management the best position in the company?? if you're looking for more money and extra responsibility, that's probably best, but if you want to enjoy your job, not so much. that is, unless you enjoy taking the legal rap for your CEO's actions.
Abiword is the devil. It once locked my computer for an hour before finally giving up and issuing a STOP error. Might be a Micro$oft problem, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time. OpenOffice is much better, even if it does create idle processes that eat up lots of virtual memory.
Opera + MSN
Following a tunnel in a flight simulator is hard. That much is true, especially if the tunnel doesn't follow a smooth curve and have obstructions jutting out randomly. But I believe much of the trouble there is that flight simulators lack a fundamental sensory input to the pilot - acceleration. I believe the human brain relies heavily on inertial "feedback" from the body, mostly the inner ear, to "right" itself in a fall. You never really hear about deaf gymnasts. As for the "No brain required" part, it isn't necessarily easier to align a cross in some display. Ask any fighter pilot how difficult it is to acquire a target lock on a Mig-29 in a dogfight. Aligning elements in a display is generally easy in smooth, mostly level flight, but in a critical situation (ie, tunnel flight, stalling, or dynamic instability) it can be easy to lose control and watch the cross woosh off-screen. Of course, at that point, you've already soiled yourself and become nauseous from the vibration.
It's Toyota Prius. I have one, and I love it. It cost a lot, but it's still cheaper than the SUVs that use 4x more fuel and produce substantially more pollution. Well, SUVs are great and actually are more fuel efficient when transporting a full load than other vehicles, but the SUV owners don't use them in this way, so they're wasting a lot of fuel. Honda has two hybrids on the market in America - Insight (2-seater pure hybrid), and Civic (4-seater sedan with a hybrid option). I'm very interested to see how long it takes before people (not just small pockets, but more globally) start believing in LENR-CANR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions - Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions) http://lenr-canr.org/ ... known to the layman as cold fusion, which has been shown to produce anomalous surplus energy in over 1000 experiments since 1989.
This article is claiming that NASA was the first to -do- the experiments, but when I graduated from University of Maryland last year, there was a lot of excitement in the aerospace department about the Australian HiFlight experiment, where they actually -did- the experiment successfully, for around $5 million, compared to NASA's failed experiment a few months prior, which crashed into the Pacific Ocean, wasting a phenomenal $300 million. Let's compare.
Five bright guys from Australia acquire funding from venture capitalists and government grants to test the same basic principle, using a simpler (and thus less error-prone) experimental approach, and achieve almost a full minute of raw data.
A few hundred people at NASA stretch their budget, rush through a test that is ill-designed, and fail miserably, acquiring no useful data because the test was aborted before the engine was even engaged.
It seems to me that this is just further evidence that small teams of talented and experienced people are driven to do more with less money. With all those employees wasting time all over the place, it's no surprize they fail. It's no wonder NASA's budget has dwindled so much. The governments need to put more money into private industry, where the real magic happens. I pay taxes. Don't I have the right to contribute to the decision of how that money is spent?
With all the federal concern on terrorism, what protections are in place or proposed to safeguard the development efforts against digital attack?
Yes, but helicopters are inherently safer than fixed wing craft, due to their ability to autorotate, a state in which the pilot maintains attitude control during unpowered descent. Autorotation is what limits the speed of small seed pods falling from trees. Unless there is a mechanical failure or serious atmospheric disturbance, helicopters can't crash. That is, as long as the pilot is conscious.