Can you say - devestation across a huge chunk of the planet ? All that mass, hanging like the sword of Damocles ? It's a bit different when you're worried about one little elevator car going splat from 100Km up. But if it's the whole friggin' skyscraper, AND it runs around the planet, wellll, there would be an earth shattering KABOOM !
Am I the only one who is concerned about the base fact that the concept of 'intuitive' is deeply cultural ? Reminds me of the kids who scored poorly on IW tests because it had questions like: Cup is to Saucer like Hat is to Head. The kids who had never seen a Saucer or a Hat were screwed.
In my experience (14 years of weapons system/ military test systems design) the real benefit of milspecs/standards is that they are mono-cultural- Military culture ONLY. They assume NOTHING, and define only those things that personnel who fit the military human standards (height, weight, strength, dexterity, vision, etc..) are capable of doing.
"Modern Intuitive" GUI's and CLI's are intuitive to the designer ONLY. Icon to hold documents together as a staple ? Great ! What about cultures that use straight pins instead of staples ? etc., etc, etc... Good design means knowing your audience. Great design means BEING your audience.
Yeah sure. Like they did so well with Microsoft Money. Let's face it- they don't know beans about financial software, much less ERP. And they don't have the galactic network of partners and pimps like the other bigs do. So they'll jump in, lose their assets, and jump out. Like they always do. Windows, Office. That's pretty much it.
FASB has been essentially accredited by the US Government, courtesty of Messrs Sarbanes and Oxley. As well as tossing a lot of money wasting BS at the rest of us. Sarbanes-Oxley- "A Jobs Program for Those Poor Big 3 Consulting Firms Who Pay our PAC Money !" Kind of like the Federal Reserve Bank is accredited by the US Gummint, but isn't part of it.
They just didn't design the mould properly. If we inspect closer, you'll see a big circle with an alien "M" in it for the trademark.
In separate news, I would be willing to expect that someone will point out that a planetoid like this little dude does not form in the 'interstellar void' where it is expected to be nicely spherical. This sucker grew up exposed to some mondo tides, so it's reasonable to assume that while the crust may have cooled significantly, the core may look like a kneaded bowl of bread dough, and be nice and toasty. Makes sense that there is a pressure ridge of crust all the way around it.
Hey- this planet has a pressure ridge of crust too ! Just worn down and cracked all over the place...
Note that most people just buy a new $9 keyboard when their old one craps out. The place I work puts Dells in the factory- they last about 3 - 6 years, but the keyboards last maybe 6 months before they're crapped up beyond belief. Dust, chemical, spray, metal powder, etc. Oh, and human chaff- hair, skin, misc fluids, etc... Do we buy expensive keyboard skins ? Only for the laptops, where the keyboard is the computer, and the Dell laptops are so very carefully designed so that anything that spills / drops on the keyboard goes RIGHT into the motherboard.
Keyboards break, unplug 'em and drop in another cheapo $9 keyboard.
Agreed- My first computer was a 6809 that I designed and built myself on a chunk of perfboard with some surplus (read thrown away at the lab I visited) sockets and a lot of chips and stuff that I begged, borrowed, or bought at Gateway Electronics in St. Louis (God, I miss those junk electronics surplus stores- they just don't exist that much any more). Wire wrapped for the better part of a month until I realized that I'd read my own netlist backwards- it was designed looking at the top of the chips, and I was looking at the bottom. D'oh ! Programmed it in assembler with a set of octal switches, and watched der blinkenlights. Believe it or not, my insanity was helped by the Boy Scouts at the time...
Nice interview, and sounds like a nice book to pick up at the Border's outlet near me next year. Unfortunately, Cult-o-Mac stuff like this book don't sell well around here. I particularly love the arguments about memory from the children on here.
C'mon- back in the day you didn't just automatically load every freaking library that your compiler offered you in the expectation that your users loved your bloatware. Hell, I remember paying $50 for a 1K RAM chip back in the 70's when boys built computers with wire-wrap guns and lots of gate chips. And when you could see a processor's cycles on a cheapo Korean War surplus o-scope.
And we had to code 5,000 lines each day, uphill both ways...
1- See what everyone else has been seeing for years. 2- "Document" it in sesquepedalian style. Make up a few new 'techno' words while you're at it, to add cachet. 3- Publish through guerilla marketing by giving abstract style releases couched in tabloid journalism style: "Two Headed Babies to Steal all IT Jobs in US by 2010. President to mobilize Marines.." 4- Charge frightened IT wonks and PHBs tons of $$ to see the entire document, which can be summarized in two words: "Well, Duh !" 5- Profit !!!!
I welcome the concept of an internal biological system rewiring the body's network. Damn well about time someone did some human research work- all those !frog amputees can walk for years, but not one human till now.
Anyone remember Nanette Davis, who had her network rewired externally so she could walk- in the 1980's ? I worked with Dr. Petrofsky's brother at the time- he wrote all the code on an Apple II with a Z80 board, and used a set of donated F-5 radar antenna gyros as a basic three axis inertial controller for the young lady. It was a hell of a hack for the 80's.
Now- can we use those cells to rewire my home network ? Or do I have to use plants and wires ?
Sure-
I remember sitting in the MACS (Manned Air Combat Simulator) as a teenager at the then McDonnell Douglas world HQ in St Louis in 1973. I got to sit in the cockpit of an F-18 (before they even built one), and watch a couple of real pilots in a couple of other spheres run simulated air to air missions between an F-15 and a simulated F-18. They had two setups, one in Va and one in St Louis, communicating over fast data lines. The whole thing was controlled by a big honkin Control Data Cyber 700 setup. Visual cues were provided by some computer generated imagery (mostly sky, aircraft, and stuff). Ground imagery was generated by a very detailed terrain model (I mean sticks and glue and felt and balsa wood) on a wall, with a fast TV camera running on a big XYZ gantry. It was incredibly cool.
I suffered a similar loss four years ago when my head met the floor after I encountered a frictionless surface, and some insensetive clod left the damn gravity turned on. In short, the nerve bundle between my brain and your olfactory sensor was squashed and strained as my brain imitated a superball bouncing around in a box.
The nerve bundles do, according to my Neurologist, regenerate over time. "Time"being" being years and decades. Supplements of Zinc are thought to help.
In four years, I've gone from smelling the same thing (burning blood, oh so wonderful) to faintly sensing almost everything. Part of it is probably brain re-training, and part of it is nerve regeneration.
Unfortunately, I don't think that this technology will function in the manner you hope. The Glands of Bowman and olfactory bulb that function as our sense of smell are screamingly complicated electro-chemical analytic systems. You'd have to cart around a full chemical assay lab on your back to equal these amazing biological systems. I believe that our best hope is for superior nervous tissue regeneration, which currently has its best hopes in the highly politicized "Stem Cell" arena.
Good luck, I know what you're feeling, and 'smell ya later'.
Me too, in NE Ohio. They come out and flag and paint little circles and arrows all over the place. Then a construction company came and dug a driveway (new house) down the road. Bzzt- Cable, Phone, Power, all toasted. Fix, splice, splice, done. Then the power guys came out and used the horizontal drill gizmo to run their replacement wire. And chewed up the cable and phone. Then the cable guys came out and ran their replacement wire with the horizontal boring machine. Then the phone guys came out and ran their horizontal bore, and cut the cable. Then the cable guys came back and cut the phone. Then the phone guys came back and reconnected their line. Lots of amusement for us civilians.
Sounds a lot like a commerical application for 1980's technology called "Adaptive Optics", primarily developed for applications in the Strategic Defense Initiative. Despite the marketing-speak (ok, Kaufmann-sprache), the attraction here should be a commercial application of adaptive-optics-on-Silicon. The display is not intended to be a 'holoprojector', but a more compact projector.
Combining the AO-Si micromirror assemblies with multi-color lasers Red, Green and Blue lasers (RGB for you guys paying attention) would make for a nice compact projector. Obviously from reading the article, it's all conceptual. Don't plan on having one for at least 1-3 years.
I'm very happy to hear that this dangerous criminal who was selling the tools necessary to manufacture Weapons of Mass Despair (Windows Software)to the public has been captured and will be properly punished.
Now if we can just get the person or persons responsible for wasting so much of my productive time with their crappy code....
Yeah yeah. Just remember that William Jefferson Clinton freaking sold this country to the Chinese during his presidency.
Gave them permanent MFM. Made them our 'trade equal'. All this bitching about 'Bush did this' or is 'gonna do that' makes me sick.
That rat bastard Clinton sold ALL our manufacturing jobs to the Chinese so he could get re-elected for four more years of intern ass-grabbing. Once he sold us all out, everything else started to follow. How the fuck do you think this country can afford 'high salaried jobs' when the base of our commerce all moved to China ?
Uhm-
Ferrite Core memory vibrated along the plane that they were magnetized in. Most of them were installed in vibration isolation enclosures. Of course, computers weighed a freakin' ton then, and did not tend to walk. They worked by hard magnetizing beads or toruses of ferrite (think iron)
All that said, I think the focus needs to be on the head structures. Now I was reading the discussion, and wondered about the application of the piezo sheet concept as the head to a drive instead of the drive itself. The other key to consider has less to do with the size and structure of the hardware and more the routing and connectivity of eeny little wires. A large-track head on silicon that can decode and communicate over fewer than a gazillion wires would be better for the industry.
Good Review, Nice wander thru Memory Lane
on
Digital Retro
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Every now and then I pick up my year 1 set of Byte Magazines and peek at the oldies but goodies, and the adds from the hopefuls. Those were the days, when Boys were Boys, and Women were- uh, well, if you were reading Byte Magazine you really had no idea what the hell Women were for. It was a real pity when the mag was essentially taken over by their advertising sales force, and died horribly.
Will you also have to store receipts from the CD that you bought and ripped into your iPod ? Remember, Ballmer sez that iPod users are all thieves...
Or I think it will be a good place to store those Ballmer inspired monkeyboy vid clips. This one is the best of the bunch: bPod
XM Antennas look good on top of a propellor beanie or tinfoil hat. Sort of a shark fin thingy. Couple that with a GPS receiver, RFID implant, and your basic mind control implant that goes along with it, and you have an army of geeks at your beck and call.
Slashdot Mirror
Discussed on Slashdot previuosly
Can you say - devestation across a huge chunk of the planet ? All that mass, hanging like the sword of Damocles ? It's a bit different when you're worried about one little elevator car going splat from 100Km up. But if it's the whole friggin' skyscraper, AND it runs around the planet, wellll, there would be an earth shattering KABOOM !
Am I the only one who is concerned about the base fact that the concept of 'intuitive' is deeply cultural ? Reminds me of the kids who scored poorly on IW tests because it had questions like: Cup is to Saucer like Hat is to Head. The kids who had never seen a Saucer or a Hat were screwed.
In my experience (14 years of weapons system/ military test systems design) the real benefit of milspecs/standards is that they are mono-cultural- Military culture ONLY. They assume NOTHING, and define only those things that personnel who fit the military human standards (height, weight, strength, dexterity, vision, etc..) are capable of doing.
"Modern Intuitive" GUI's and CLI's are intuitive to the designer ONLY. Icon to hold documents together as a staple ? Great ! What about cultures that use straight pins instead of staples ? etc., etc, etc... Good design means knowing your audience. Great design means BEING your audience.
Hmmm- there's a business model for Google- FroogleTunes ?
Yeah sure. Like they did so well with Microsoft Money. Let's face it- they don't know beans about financial software, much less ERP. And they don't have the galactic network of partners and pimps like the other bigs do. So they'll jump in, lose their assets, and jump out. Like they always do. Windows, Office. That's pretty much it.
FASB has been essentially accredited by the US Government, courtesty of Messrs Sarbanes and Oxley. As well as tossing a lot of money wasting BS at the rest of us. Sarbanes-Oxley- "A Jobs Program for Those Poor Big 3 Consulting Firms Who Pay our PAC Money !"
Kind of like the Federal Reserve Bank is accredited by the US Gummint, but isn't part of it.
In separate news, I would be willing to expect that someone will point out that a planetoid like this little dude does not form in the 'interstellar void' where it is expected to be nicely spherical. This sucker grew up exposed to some mondo tides, so it's reasonable to assume that while the crust may have cooled significantly, the core may look like a kneaded bowl of bread dough, and be nice and toasty. Makes sense that there is a pressure ridge of crust all the way around it. Hey- this planet has a pressure ridge of crust too ! Just worn down and cracked all over the place...
Note that most people just buy a new $9 keyboard when their old one craps out. The place I work puts Dells in the factory- they last about 3 - 6 years, but the keyboards last maybe 6 months before they're crapped up beyond belief. Dust, chemical, spray, metal powder, etc. Oh, and human chaff- hair, skin, misc fluids, etc... Do we buy expensive keyboard skins ? Only for the laptops, where the keyboard is the computer, and the Dell laptops are so very carefully designed so that anything that spills / drops on the keyboard goes RIGHT into the motherboard.
Keyboards break, unplug 'em and drop in another cheapo $9 keyboard.
Agreed- My first computer was a 6809 that I designed and built myself on a chunk of perfboard with some surplus (read thrown away at the lab I visited) sockets and a lot of chips and stuff that I begged, borrowed, or bought at Gateway Electronics in St. Louis (God, I miss those junk electronics surplus stores- they just don't exist that much any more). Wire wrapped for the better part of a month until I realized that I'd read my own netlist backwards- it was designed looking at the top of the chips, and I was looking at the bottom. D'oh !
Programmed it in assembler with a set of octal switches, and watched der blinkenlights.
Believe it or not, my insanity was helped by the Boy Scouts at the time...
Nice interview, and sounds like a nice book to pick up at the Border's outlet near me next year. Unfortunately, Cult-o-Mac stuff like this book don't sell well around here. I particularly love the arguments about memory from the children on here.
C'mon- back in the day you didn't just automatically load every freaking library that your compiler offered you in the expectation that your users loved your bloatware. Hell, I remember paying $50 for a 1K RAM chip back in the 70's when boys built computers with wire-wrap guns and lots of gate chips. And when you could see a processor's cycles on a cheapo Korean War surplus o-scope.
And we had to code 5,000 lines each day, uphill both ways...
You can expect airline pilots to start asking for them, especially after this Cleveland incident:
Sounds like a job fer da Gummint ! Quick ! Somebody pass a law !
Apple Insider sees a possible storage increase to 5GB. This will help them fit nicely into the price point niches.
1- See what everyone else has been seeing for years.
2- "Document" it in sesquepedalian style. Make up a few new 'techno' words while you're at it, to add cachet.
3- Publish through guerilla marketing by giving abstract style releases couched in tabloid journalism style: "Two Headed Babies to Steal all IT Jobs in US by 2010. President to mobilize Marines.."
4- Charge frightened IT wonks and PHBs tons of $$ to see the entire document, which can be summarized in two words: "Well, Duh !"
5- Profit !!!!
I welcome the concept of an internal biological system rewiring the body's network. Damn well about time someone did some human research work- all those !frog amputees can walk for years, but not one human till now. Anyone remember Nanette Davis, who had her network rewired externally so she could walk- in the 1980's ? I worked with Dr. Petrofsky's brother at the time- he wrote all the code on an Apple II with a Z80 board, and used a set of donated F-5 radar antenna gyros as a basic three axis inertial controller for the young lady. It was a hell of a hack for the 80's. Now- can we use those cells to rewire my home network ? Or do I have to use plants and wires ?
Sure- I remember sitting in the MACS (Manned Air Combat Simulator) as a teenager at the then McDonnell Douglas world HQ in St Louis in 1973. I got to sit in the cockpit of an F-18 (before they even built one), and watch a couple of real pilots in a couple of other spheres run simulated air to air missions between an F-15 and a simulated F-18. They had two setups, one in Va and one in St Louis, communicating over fast data lines. The whole thing was controlled by a big honkin Control Data Cyber 700 setup. Visual cues were provided by some computer generated imagery (mostly sky, aircraft, and stuff). Ground imagery was generated by a very detailed terrain model (I mean sticks and glue and felt and balsa wood) on a wall, with a fast TV camera running on a big XYZ gantry. It was incredibly cool.
The nerve bundles do, according to my Neurologist, regenerate over time. "Time"being" being years and decades. Supplements of Zinc are thought to help.
In four years, I've gone from smelling the same thing (burning blood, oh so wonderful) to faintly sensing almost everything. Part of it is probably brain re-training, and part of it is nerve regeneration.
Unfortunately, I don't think that this technology will function in the manner you hope. The Glands of Bowman and olfactory bulb that function as our sense of smell are screamingly complicated electro-chemical analytic systems. You'd have to cart around a full chemical assay lab on your back to equal these amazing biological systems. I believe that our best hope is for superior nervous tissue regeneration, which currently has its best hopes in the highly politicized "Stem Cell" arena.
Good luck, I know what you're feeling, and 'smell ya later'.
Me too, in NE Ohio. They come out and flag and paint little circles and arrows all over the place. Then a construction company came and dug a driveway (new house) down the road. Bzzt- Cable, Phone, Power, all toasted. Fix, splice, splice, done.
Then the power guys came out and used the horizontal drill gizmo to run their replacement wire. And chewed up the cable and phone.
Then the cable guys came out and ran their replacement wire with the horizontal boring machine.
Then the phone guys came out and ran their horizontal bore, and cut the cable.
Then the cable guys came back and cut the phone.
Then the phone guys came back and reconnected their line.
Lots of amusement for us civilians.
Combining the AO-Si micromirror assemblies with multi-color lasers Red, Green and Blue lasers (RGB for you guys paying attention) would make for a nice compact projector. Obviously from reading the article, it's all conceptual. Don't plan on having one for at least 1-3 years.
Now if we can just get the person or persons responsible for wasting so much of my productive time with their crappy code....
Gave them permanent MFM. Made them our 'trade equal'. All this bitching about 'Bush did this' or is 'gonna do that' makes me sick.
That rat bastard Clinton sold ALL our manufacturing jobs to the Chinese so he could get re-elected for four more years of intern ass-grabbing. Once he sold us all out, everything else started to follow. How the fuck do you think this country can afford 'high salaried jobs' when the base of our commerce all moved to China ?
Uhm- Ferrite Core memory vibrated along the plane that they were magnetized in. Most of them were installed in vibration isolation enclosures. Of course, computers weighed a freakin' ton then, and did not tend to walk. They worked by hard magnetizing beads or toruses of ferrite (think iron) All that said, I think the focus needs to be on the head structures. Now I was reading the discussion, and wondered about the application of the piezo sheet concept as the head to a drive instead of the drive itself. The other key to consider has less to do with the size and structure of the hardware and more the routing and connectivity of eeny little wires. A large-track head on silicon that can decode and communicate over fewer than a gazillion wires would be better for the industry.
Every now and then I pick up my year 1 set of Byte Magazines and peek at the oldies but goodies, and the adds from the hopefuls. Those were the days, when Boys were Boys, and Women were- uh, well, if you were reading Byte Magazine you really had no idea what the hell Women were for. It was a real pity when the mag was essentially taken over by their advertising sales force, and died horribly.
Will you also have to store receipts from the CD that you bought and ripped into your iPod ? Remember, Ballmer sez that iPod users are all thieves... Or I think it will be a good place to store those Ballmer inspired monkeyboy vid clips. This one is the best of the bunch: bPod
XM Antennas look good on top of a propellor beanie or tinfoil hat. Sort of a shark fin thingy. Couple that with a GPS receiver, RFID implant, and your basic mind control implant that goes along with it, and you have an army of geeks at your beck and call.