Bill Gates has donated perhaps $1G but his organization's attempts to lock in countries is worth much more.. and possibly his donations support that. Developing countries have 2 needs - they need to satisfy potentially destructive political realities, and once they've gotten beyond that they need to best leverage their assets to develop their future. If a country is being given official aid, so long as there is a viable free alternative (or lower cost when tco calculated), commercial interests have no business selling to them. Even giving it away for free is bad if it is done by a known rapacious monopoly, and risky even if done by other companies with lock-in tactics, for what is then really going on is a bargaining away of that country's potential, either by hapless individuals or far more likely, someone who intends to make a profit. Of course if Gates wants to invest a cool billion in cash altruistically that is another story. Perhaps a story we'd like to hear.. how do organizations in fact organize that level of giving and make sure it goes to good use? How can we believe Gates is altruistic when his company is the corporate equivalent of a gang-backed serial killer?
This sounds amazing. IANA astrophysicist but it seems amateurs could do some real very long baseline interferometry with these things like the VLBA does.
It also puts military-level technology again into public hands, this seems pretty dangerous - high school kids's satellites could enable terrorist missile navigation.. oh well I guess this is inevitable.
Perhaps someone experienced could provide some input into the kinds of things this would make possible?
I'm wondering if it would enable:
- distributed seti, heck distributed lots of things.. monitoring of airspace anyone? - precise geolocation similarly for vlba? If you can shoot the sun and have a compass, should be able to solve for own location? - distributed measurement of environment for atmospheric simulations i.e. on ships at sea to gather wind vectors? - high-efficiency use of wireless spectrum, maybe also data transmission in noisy environments?
from the faq, "atoms are also excellent sensors". Would this enable: - teraherz scanners (well maybe it isn't that fast, only 9 GHz) and doppler analyzers - portable detectors of acceleration, gravity, relativistic effects, sonar,..what? - also one manufacturer I remember had a very interesting application of very short radio pulses that could be used to make virtual barriers I think the military was interested in it.. Until there page was taken down..
Also I'm intrigued by the latest computer graphics research into structured light and recording of light fields with distributed cameras. It would seem that an audience with a lot of handycams and these chips could be producing an extremely interesting record of say a sporting event. A camera with a few of these chips might be quite useful.
What kind of things would be possible with off the shelf hardware and a couple of these chips?
Would these enable casual interferometry in day or night?
On the downside I saw a $10 spam sandwich by Dean and Deluca in their Shibuya Station (Tokyo) store yesterday. So some people can already make enough trouble without advanced technology perhaps. Still, the ultimate geek toy? (not the spam.. the clock)
I feel sorry for the guys who have been spending a lot of time on tis yaAGC.. cool but is there a good reason for a light green on light grey simulated lcd display? I can barely make out what the figures are supposed to me and it would seem to cause fatigue. On the heels of the Siemens story.
Obviously this is anti-evolutionary dehumanizing stuff. It is human to want to sit back and tell other people to do the work, this would mean you work your ass off forever. You burn more calories, and just work work work. Whereas laziness is a virtue for perl programmers (and maybe many other pursuits) that is, the point is not to do nothing but to use the minimum amount of time needed and just focus on the fun part.
I first thought maybe I should sign up for this gene thing but now I think it is scary. It is the kind of thing a future corporate suit collective could easily launch in a closed environment.. just making sure the managers don't get dosed. Presumably current outsourcing is based on a gradient in standard of living but when everyone is at the same standard then what? Will outsourcing contracts require genetic testing in the future? I'd rather have the switch to turn something like that on and off myself, or have no such gene at all and just hypnotize myself to clean the house and love it periodically. I think getting married probably would do that too.. not?
If I remember correctly diamond chips are interesting because they can easily bind to organic molecules. I believe I saw a sample chip made by some students and Sumitomo is into it too.
Does silicon carbide have any such properties? (i.e. anything besides heat resistance?)
The flip side of course is for high temperature operation which I think is a bit scary, maybe the chip itself can handle it but what about the stuff next to it? I would rather have lower temperature circuits. As it is only a very tiny volume of the space in your computer can be said to be nanoscale microelectronics.
Come to think of it this is something you could farm out to Chinese programmers. Anybody want to do a writeup and a budget that would be useable for a business plan, including third-party certification of cloniness? Of course the office clone would be GPL but maybe you could make some money on selling it to companies that want to spend money, just less than they are paying.
Okay I hate word too and try to do all my work on linux, except sometimes I absolutely must open my NT box to get word and powerpoint work done. Here is reality. I am going to state the business reality and then a solution that will work.
In the business world, just about everyone uses word. Everyone hates word. I hate it more than most possibly, but in general the rule is that if you do not accept and return word and powerpoint documents, you cannot get work done and probably will lose jobs if you are a freelancer. I always request rtf, or plain text, and mentioned OOo but that is not sufficient. These days many companies also rely on word's document comparison function, it is part of the business process now even if it is insecure and buggy. Business users do not use every little thing, they know word sucks and only use the bare minimum to get the job done. To me this is full word compatibility, basic editing, table of contents, outlining, word counting, auto dictionary lookup, underline/superscript/bold/italic/coloring, tables, document comparison, and maybe a few others. Also it must start immediately and never cause you grief if you use it for the bare minimum. As far as I can see business users have found that MS Word 2000 fulfills all these objectives and there is no reason to buy any later version. That looks like a target to me!
Now about where I am coming from.. Don't even talk to me about trying to write a document with history checking turned on, I am totally fed up with trying to figure out whether this comma has an invisible barrier next to it so I have to delete it from the left side instead of the right side, etc. Don't talk to me about clippy. Microsoft and Word in particular get me so angry I become incoherent, and then we can't talk.
Now maybe I am a bit more strict since I require English and Japanese too. But OpenOffice, though I want to like it and have used it a lot, unfortunately sucks badly. Its suckiness is more apparent when you are using one version older, or using Japanese, or exchanging Word documents, or using on a limited system, or trying (really trying hard, honestly!) to design HTML docs in it, or trying to print anything (in Japanese again, but I will be experimenting more with my new printer)... okay it sucks. Hey it has a lot of great stuff but it is not ready for prime time and it is slow. Word processors are tough things to build! They deserve a medal so far anyway!
But the only solution I can see to this mess is the crystal clear, utterly simple, icky solution that you don't want to hear but is convincing, the way a spaceship falling on you is convincing.
Solution: Make a 100% identical-looking, identically-operating clone of Microsoft Word 2000 and Powerpoint 2000. And Excel 2000 too. Make it free. Make it fast. If you feel you must add new things to it, make a mode that removes them from menus so you have only a clone of the ms software.
Guess what? It will cost a lot of money and a lot of programmers, and it won't be fun (unless you enjoy screwing MS badly which might include a lot of people), and it will require professionals involved (management, programming, documentation). Probably it would be much better for the world to give that money to people doing non-clone software, after all MS still has $30bn in cash they will be around making trouble for a while. But if you have a millionaire who really wants to screw Bill Gates, you could do worse than to take away MS' bread and butter which is MS Office.
I trust a Buffalo external 100gb hd. I have used a number of them and also compared prices, as far as I can see Buffalo always works and is priced well too. Mine does usb 1/2 and firewire, I have used it with win98, win2k, and linux, desktops and laptops, currently it has vfat and ext3 partitions, it just works, period. It would be nice to have raid in it, or a faster interface, but probably the best thing right now would be for me to get another one and back it up!
THought the money could have been better used on research (or does Duke do that?..)
on the other hand you could record your lectures and listen to them later even if you were zoned out during the class. And you could intentionally fall asleep with it droning in your ears for accelerated (hypnotic?) learning.
Seriously though, I saw my brother's laptop when he was at Harvard Business School. There, they are serious about outfitting students for business and of course everyone is paying a lot for it. But, there is a web portal site that has *everything* on it, and I dare say it could hold audio of lectures if they wanted it.
Well more power into the students' hands is a good thing, though I heavily dislike the idea that it is Duke's property while they are at Duke. That is total bullshit. I would be interested in hearing some of the lectures though if Duke doesn't mind..
The point is not that the people being sued probably were committing acts illegal where they lived. The point is that a massive organization is steamrolling over individuals to make an impression, whereas those individuals would never have bought for example, enough music to refinance their house, etc. The RIAA is also doing things which they didn't used to do 10 or 20 years ago, when people recorded a lot of their music off the radio as one poster mentioned.
I don't buy RIAA music, haven't since I noticed the price of CDs in the stores was getting intolerable, this was 15 years ago. Somehow though I don't think removing one customer from their market is going to make a big dent.
Look, they're asking for it. This wave of litigation against individuals seems like a first for the judge because usually, customers don't tolerate that kind of shit. The RIAA believes it can get away with it and continue to feed you shit at high prices and you will continue to buy it. They are DARING you to fight back. Think about it.
So what else can you do? Well, if you are in business you could financially support non-RIAA or anti-RIAA bands, stations, software, or organziations. If you are in the prime RIAA demographic you can work hard to get all of your friends to stop buying RIAA music (especially the ones who are visible about it).
Ad agencies are beginning to realize the P2P type social networking (not just Internet-based, think word of mouth) gets much higher quality candidates (potential customers) than ordinary advertising. This can be turned around on the RIAA and suitable software / funding could magnify it. I think the iPod thing at Duke is fantastic. Now think of how to ensure that those iPods could massively reduce the amount of income the RIAA would get from that University, think and do something about it.
I don't buy RIAA music. I do like to watch live concerts on TV, and sometimes like what I hear on the radio (though I don't hear much of that either these days). These days cellphone subscriptions are starting to have a very large effect on record companies by removing disposable income from young people that would have gone to the RIAA. I am not for promoting illegal activities. I do see though a very unsettling trend of corporations taking over America (and elsewhere) and believe that litigation by the RIAA against potential customers , and the media slant on the affair (well there is a law against it so..) is a symptom of that.
The RIAA is within its legal rights at the moment to take these kinds of actions. It think it will be interesting to see their response if their customers exercise their legal rights to not purchase, to publicize, to organize, and to legally foment discord and financial destruction in the RIAA. Perhaps a good first plan of attack is to create a fund to hire artists away from the RIAA.
Remember, it is a lot like smoking. Every time you buy an RIAA product, you are saying "Thank you, please hit me again" to these nasty people. But the RIAA is always looking for new customers and new artists, every year. There is no reason why we couldn't start to put the pressure on them. Food for thought.
IANA physicist but the pdf is accessible to anyone with high school physics and some interest in physics news. More accessible references below.
Most of the posts are supposing the physicists doing this are real dumb. That in itself, is stupid. I think one or two have interesting points (e.g. "Einstein is Saf e") and most of the others are way off base. The paper is a summary of research by other people. The problem being discussed was noticed by Allais 50 years ago when he ran a month long pendulum experiment (three drops per minute I believe) that happened to intersect the time of an eclipse. The paper goes over a number of possible reasons for error and includes some as yet unpublished data on experiments intended to uncover them. The possibilities are c reative and followed up scientifically, for example one is done in remote China with nobody within 200 meters. All tests showed the suggested errors to be miniscule, although the paper does suggest that a combination of them might just cover it.
It would appear that a significant anomaly has been detected by various experiments and that professional scientists are taking it much more seriously than say cold fusion. It also is clear that there is a lot still to learn about gravity and that NASA is one of the groups that is working hard to figure out why its space probes don't move as expected. Some people even think gravity moves 20 times faster than light and other stories. It is not a shut case yet. In the paper mentioned in the post, they are saying that most people couldn't in the past solve the problem because they were thinking in terms of the Moon "shielding" the Earth from gravity, which the paper does not believe. They think it is more like an extra horizontal force that sometimes occurs during eclipses (of which there are different kinds including variations of angles). So all the posts about shielding are off base.
NASA has suggested that if experimental error really can't be the culprit, it might be caused by the same thing that apparently is accelerating Voyager more than expected.
I'd like to quote from a NASA article on the people who built Gravity Probe B.
A National Research Council panel, among them Cliff Will, wrote in 1995, "In the course of its design work on Gravity Probe B, the team has made brilliant and original contributions to basic physics and technology. Its members were among the first to measure the London moment of a spinning superconductor, the first to exploit the su perconducting bag method for excluding magnetic flux, and the first to use a 'porous plug' for confining superfluid helium without pressure buildup. They invented and proved the concept of a drag-free satellite, and most recently some members of the group have pioneered differential use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to create a highly reliable and precise aircraft landing system."
I think that is cool. It says to me we have a good chance about learning a lot more about gravity and lots of other fundamental physics in the near to medium term future.
The paper also notes that one more individual experiment will not solve it; many simultaneous and comprehensive experiements are needed over the next few eclipses. It also suggests that it might be interesting to investigate "gravitational lensing by relativistic dark matter" although I cannot tell if that suggests we are in the midst of a river of high speed dark matter or what, something invisible passing between the Earth and Moon? Somebody with astrophysics degree please finally step in. Sounds like it might be interesting to have the ISS get involved too!
Well Google going IPO is bound to create a heap o cash (tm) one way or another but it would seem they have simultaneously shot themselves in the foot repeatedly and torpedoed net-based ipos for other companies no? I'm basing my comment on slashdot news which is a funny feeling I have to admit, but would they not have been very likely to earn more if they did it the old fashioned way?
I suppose Google employees are also able to buy Google shares on the market and ride them up, but mostly I'm curious about what they are going to do with the cash now.
It would be interesting if they purchased some patents and GPL'd them.. though I guess they are mainly going to try to be everything to everyone everywhere that you need to search for information. Too much even for Google I'm afraid. I guess if it had gone well they could have helped other companies get IPOs for discount rates.
Wish them luck though. Well now off to read the Economist but posting first so no real facts will sully my knee-jerk reaction!:)
No unix.. but Have Spacesuit Will Travel?
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Neat game, scrabble. I loved it, would like to try a unix version. However there was no mention of anything to do with computers, the link does not point to a unix anagram program either. The author had interesting coverage of a tournament (first scrabble one on Slashdot? if so it is worth it) though it does seem a bit self flattering.
More info on how ordinary mortals can train themselves to perform at this level, in particular how does he memorize words like gey without knowing what they mean? (Does he have a just have a kind of photographic memory but not care what words mean? Is this not bad?) Anyway I am going to have to look on freshmeat..
.. 20 seconds later.. so maybe we are talking about
Anaquiz which seems to help you memorize the dictionary (is this why he doesn't know words' meanings but knows which are legal?)
The anaquiz
screenshot is quite intriguing. I think the story link to the unix program must be anaquiz.
I see also the
Judge scrabble adjucation system, and
Scrabaid which seems to be a scrabble coach.. any other links to tools for improving memory (I remember a mnemonic trainer story a year ago) would be interesting.
For example in a story of Robert Heinlein's called Have Spacesuit Will Travel in which an engineer teen hacker successfully refurbishes a spacesuit and later makes good use of the distances of the planets from the Sun which he had luckily memorized with a cool limerick. Any other modern limericks or ways to memorize constellations and other astronomical phenomena would be quite useful if anyone knows of them.
Thought experiment 1: What experiment is missing on cassini?
Te2: What is the cheapest, lowest tech experiment that has a nonzero chance at finding ET, that makes the most of the qualities suggested in the above post?
Te3: Given current technology or that conceivable within 5 years if you worked hard at it, what method of seeking patterns in any natural phenomena would achieve the highest degree of parallelism and potential discernment of a pattern out of a high number of samples?
I'm interested in your replies, even though my Dad says he doesn't want to meet a Bug. Even if I had that viewpoint I'd rather know they were coming.. and maybe the above thought experiments could help select the ones we want to meet. It just might be that this kind of an attitude could mean a lot to the Earth, sooner than later. We've already been broadcasting for 50 years, ET can sense even a 100 year thin bubble of radiation. Why not search DNA, or look for nanoscale structure in cosmic dust. Or maybe it is just a matter of a new way of looking at things we already see every day..
Someone mentioned something simple. It would be very elegant if something really simple like say, the MEMS mirrors on a TI light valve that drives an ordinary projector, could detect a SETI, if we'd only thought of it. As I understand it (please correct if wrong) the hydrogen band is one area of little noise and relatively good conductivity through space.. a natural wavelength to look at. I'm not saying gravity waves are the thing, or that they even exist, but if surveys of patterns in ambient energy are show certain characteristics, it would be interesting to see how simple and inexpensive a device can be made that would record patterns *not* falling into those trends.
So it might be interesting to look for simple (geometric? time-bound? beautiful?) patterns in phenomena we have been seeing, or start recording physical phenomena with more sensitivity with the expectation of ever faster, internetworked, intelligent and quantum computing. For example what kind of a pattern would you get if you slewed a diffraction grating made of neutronium on an orbit that coasted through the troposphere of a sun? What kinds of patterns in radioactivity or infrared are common? Some things may require higher resolution surveys but some may be well within the realm of a species at our level, if say 0.1% of world GNP was put into it per year. And some modes of communication might even be within the realm of a single underfunded individual with a unique point of view.
There may be an alien that rewards elegance and be sending funnily polarized or spinning vortices of electromagnetic current, there may be all kinds of ETs and a bunch of them may be mathematicians.
On a side note, too bad we have to plunge through Saturn instead of gliding through its windy layers. No information-bearing processes in all that mass of chemicals and lightning? I don't think so. Why do you?
My theory (and the rant that Slashdot/firefox lost last week) is that ET has little patience for whiners like the "no news yet, we must really be alone still!" crowd. I'd like to think there are lots of opportunities for communication, and civilizations at the beginning of space technology might be able to make up for such a handicap with creativity, empathy, intelligence, humor, and philosophy. ET likes origami and tricks of the light! He likes both classical and rock in moderation! He likes creative chefs, he likes hackers! (hope not on rye) It is conceivable that a cloud chamber like the one I built a long time ago for a science fair might be sufficient for someone with a microscope and a quantum computer, or possibly the data we need is already available for free online but we just need a very sweet, smart filter with a sense of beauty or maybe even humor. You could write that filter with free software.
There is an interesting press evaluation system called CARMA which does this.. I had to study it once, interesting. It requires humans to manually grade articles on long questionnaires. Well it lets you find out which authors are sympathetic and which are nasty. Presumably it helps you find people like this individual. I suppose Microsoft subscribes to CARMA too..
By the way, I have bought a lot of Dell machines in the past. So I hope they know they are their own worst enemy. Who is going to recommend Dell but someone who has used them?
Now if they came out with a competitive box suitable for high-end 3D graphics simulation (i.e. CAD, astronomy, art displays, video conferencing) say something that SGI would be proud to have, with RAID 5 controller, and put a 5 YEAR WARRANTY on all parts, then I would consider it very seriously against say a G5 or any other machine. Same with laptops, they are going to work a lot harder to win back their customers.
As I write this on a Dell Inspiron 7500 (redhat 9) let me tell you. First I really like this machine. But I really hate companies that phase out the people who recommend them, a lot more.
Like they phased out linux service. I bought this in the U.S. and came to Japan, they wouldn't fix it here. Can't easily get a Japanese windows unless you go through the Japan office. Fine. Wiped most of windows, linux on here. Had to figure out all the hardware crap myself. Haven't got enough memory on this and don't want to send it in for a month, find that too. Broken battery (probably due to lugging it through town on wheels), little help. Now if Dell can give me top products at a reasonable price (and this *was* pc of the year some years ago), I'll buy it. But when the only part of their online service I find interesting is the refurbished parts catalog. Oh yeah, if you want to look for parts on line forget it, you end up wading through refurbished instead. When I bought this I was told to wait for a big HD to come out, well I never got it for the second bay because it was never in stock, then got dumped apparently. Now I am looking at new computers. I need a desktop pc and I want a system with high performance opengl (I'm not a gamer, I want to make displays). I'm thinking seriously about getting a G5, though it may soon be supplemented with an Alienware laptop which I've been drooling over. Before I buy those two though I'll 90% likely be building a linux box for myself. For me Dell has to seriously shake off an old bad service image and a new bad quality image. It's not like they don't have competition.
Less conspicuous in wild.. cans and cameras
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I'd think a pringles or coke can would be a bit less conspicuous..
On the other hand you know those security video cameras used in public places which can be remote controlled to rotate and zoom in on someone's face? They are usually hidden in smoked glass domes in ceiling or, I suppose, in less conspicuous ways in places like casinos or board rooms. Sounds like another good aiming device, I saw one $500 dollar model in Akihabara recently you can operate from a web page. Same shop for a few hundred bucks also sold remote cameras accessible via UHF.
I'd be worried if I carried anything with Bluetooth (so far I've resisted..) The more it penetrates it seems the more tiny yagi antennas you'll see. Only saving grace I could imagine is if the yagi antenna is left powered up maybe you could detect it as the camera pans across you... IANA EM Engineer but would not a yagi antenna also transmit towards you any noise from say the video camera's motor or power supply? If so a detector might be in order..
A) clues from Steve Jobs, he's able to sit up in bed so he will probably be slowed down almost to their speed
B) new hardware, they could tie up closely with a big consumer manufacturer (like Matsushita?) and drive Java into places it can generate some bucks
C) new customers, which is the only reason to get Novell or SuSE it seems (especially Europe) though if Sun tries to manage any of it or push "Java desktop" those customers will probably burn rubber in the other direction.
For years I've wished linux had vector based desktop so I could have a 3d scroll wheel embedded in irix window frames. You make the wheel turn by dragging over it with the mouse, and all icons in a window grow or shrink smoothly. I also like the way icons would shoot animated rays out for a few seconds after clicking to indicate the program was loading.
I tried one in the store a month ago in Tokyo. It looked and felt real nice, quite light. The text updated in two passes but even that seemed organic, not like an ordinary raster. The quality was sort of like etch a sketch on rice paper. Anyway you could sometimes see a bit of a previous page in there.
The MASSIVE BARRIER to me though was the DRM. I would want to put MY files on it, not theirs. (And they didn't have enough content either).
I approached the display with trepidation, knowing DRM was not for me. I have read I guess hundreds of books in ascii on my palm.
But unfortunately in addition to reading books a few lines at a time in tiny print on the train or in bed, I would sometimes jot down notes and check some astro software on it. I lost everything on the palm 3 times when the battery ran out. And the final nail in the coffing was pouring coffee on the vaio that had with its integral memory stick port a way to put files into the palm (and copy photos off my phone).
Anyway, there are tons of problems with the article from what I understand (not having read it) but I can tell you if the manufacturer would separate ebooks from the readers everyone would be happy. I'd certainly want to buy their reader if it had open networking and no DRM in it. I *don't* want someone telling me what to read. I spend plenty of money on books and newspapers, and I also get a lot of other stuff I want to read. If the sony reader had a bunch of ports along its side for different kinds of sticks and connectors, and maybe a big hard disk (if light), I would really want it. I figure they couldn't make enough or didn't want to sell to much of this quality display so they are testing the waters with this, then will use the bad response to sell the idea in-house that the hardware has to be opened. There are mutually antagonistic divisions I understand in the company, we just have to wait a little for other companies to jump in. It was nice though, slow but relatively low-stress reading. Hope somebody publishes a hack of one.
Wow, I must have missed a few heavy memes this year. I thought the Segway was mainly for industrial use since still expensive, heavier duty for e.g. postmen, and biggest problem being ordinances. Dean Kamen invented a wheelchair that goes up and down stairs didn't he? He isn't a panderer to burgeoisie, I think polo is just one of the things people will try to use these things for when they are cheap enough. The quotes here make it sound like an idiocy but the only dumb thing sounds to me using it in an urban landscape not designed for it, hurting people with the callousness of your need to write an article, etc. Next you'll tell us the White Knight is just going to be an expensive elevator for rich dudes to the zero-g sex park in the sky. Come on people! The neat thing isn't the parts it is the balancing and gyro all beautifully integrated together, a new IT-enabled way for humans to move. Is anyone reputable saying it's a failure?
I wonder how heavy those things are, and how much it will cost them timewise in the aggregate. Imagine nearly killing yourself on small things that add up to a win or lose at the end, but always know you have this dead weight. Or are the cyclists happy about it because it is better for the fans? Do they weigh everyone's gps units to make sure they are the same? I can see people shaving off the edges of the silicon..
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates has donated perhaps $1G but his organization's attempts to lock in countries is worth much more.. and possibly his donations support that. Developing countries have 2 needs - they need to satisfy potentially destructive political realities, and once they've gotten beyond that they need to best leverage their assets to develop their future. If a country is being given official aid, so long as there is a viable free alternative (or lower cost when tco calculated), commercial interests have no business selling to them. Even giving it away for free is bad if it is done by a known rapacious monopoly, and risky even if done by other companies with lock-in tactics, for what is then really going on is a bargaining away of that country's potential, either by hapless individuals or far more likely, someone who intends to make a profit. Of course if Gates wants to invest a cool billion in cash altruistically that is another story. Perhaps a story we'd like to hear.. how do organizations in fact organize that level of giving and make sure it goes to good use? How can we believe Gates is altruistic when his company is the corporate equivalent of a gang-backed serial killer?
This sounds amazing. IANA astrophysicist but it seems amateurs could do some real very long baseline interferometry with these things like the VLBA does.
..what?
It also puts military-level technology again into public hands, this seems pretty dangerous - high school kids's satellites could enable terrorist missile navigation.. oh well I guess this is inevitable.
Perhaps someone experienced could provide some input into the kinds of things this would make possible?
I'm wondering if it would enable:
- distributed seti, heck distributed lots of things.. monitoring of airspace anyone?
- precise geolocation similarly for vlba? If you can shoot the sun and have a compass, should be able to solve for own location?
- distributed measurement of environment for atmospheric simulations i.e. on ships at sea to gather wind vectors?
- high-efficiency use of wireless spectrum, maybe also data transmission in noisy environments?
from the faq, "atoms are also excellent sensors". Would this enable:
- teraherz scanners (well maybe it isn't that fast, only 9 GHz) and doppler analyzers
- portable detectors of acceleration, gravity, relativistic effects, sonar,
- also one manufacturer I remember had a very interesting application of very short radio pulses that could be used to make virtual barriers I think the military was interested in it.. Until there page was taken down..
Also I'm intrigued by the latest computer graphics research into structured light and recording of light fields with distributed cameras. It would seem that an audience with a lot of handycams and these chips could be producing an extremely interesting record of say a sporting event. A camera with a few of these chips might be quite useful.
What kind of things would be possible with off the shelf hardware and a couple of these chips?
Would these enable casual interferometry in day or night?
On the downside I saw a $10 spam sandwich by Dean and Deluca in their Shibuya Station (Tokyo) store yesterday. So some people can already make enough trouble without advanced technology perhaps. Still, the ultimate geek toy? (not the spam.. the clock)
I feel sorry for the guys who have been spending a lot of time on tis yaAGC.. cool but is there a good reason for a light green on light grey simulated lcd display? I can barely make out what the figures are supposed to me and it would seem to cause fatigue. On the heels of the Siemens story.
Obviously this is anti-evolutionary dehumanizing stuff. It is human to want to sit back and tell other people to do the work, this would mean you work your ass off forever. You burn more calories, and just work work work. Whereas laziness is a virtue for perl programmers (and maybe many other pursuits) that is, the point is not to do nothing but to use the minimum amount of time needed and just focus on the fun part.
I first thought maybe I should sign up for this gene thing but now I think it is scary. It is the kind of thing a future corporate suit collective could easily launch in a closed environment.. just making sure the managers don't get dosed. Presumably current outsourcing is based on a gradient in standard of living but when everyone is at the same standard then what? Will outsourcing contracts require genetic testing in the future? I'd rather have the switch to turn something like that on and off myself, or have no such gene at all and just hypnotize myself to clean the house and love it periodically. I think getting married probably would do that too.. not?
If I remember correctly diamond chips are interesting because they can easily bind to organic molecules. I believe I saw a sample chip made by some students and Sumitomo is into it too.
Does silicon carbide have any such properties? (i.e. anything besides heat resistance?)
The flip side of course is for high temperature operation which I think is a bit scary, maybe the chip itself can handle it but what about the stuff next to it? I would rather have lower temperature circuits. As it is only a very tiny volume of the space in your computer can be said to be nanoscale microelectronics.
Come to think of it this is something you could farm out to Chinese programmers. Anybody want to do a writeup and a budget that would be useable for a business plan, including third-party certification of cloniness? Of course the office clone would be GPL but maybe you could make some money on selling it to companies that want to spend money, just less than they are paying.
Okay I hate word too and try to do all my work on linux, except sometimes I absolutely must open my NT box to get word and powerpoint work done. Here is reality. I am going to state the business reality and then a solution that will work.
In the business world, just about everyone uses word. Everyone hates word. I hate it more than most possibly, but in general the rule is that if you do not accept and return word and powerpoint documents, you cannot get work done and probably will lose jobs if you are a freelancer. I always request rtf, or plain text, and mentioned OOo but that is not sufficient. These days many companies also rely on word's document comparison function, it is part of the business process now even if it is insecure and buggy. Business users do not use every little thing, they know word sucks and only use the bare minimum to get the job done. To me this is full word compatibility, basic editing, table of contents, outlining, word counting, auto dictionary lookup, underline/superscript/bold/italic/coloring, tables, document comparison, and maybe a few others. Also it must start immediately and never cause you grief if you use it for the bare minimum. As far as I can see business users have found that MS Word 2000 fulfills all these objectives and there is no reason to buy any later version. That looks like a target to me!
Now about where I am coming from.. Don't even talk to me about trying to write a document with history checking turned on, I am totally fed up with trying to figure out whether this comma has an invisible barrier next to it so I have to delete it from the left side instead of the right side, etc. Don't talk to me about clippy. Microsoft and Word in particular get me so angry I become incoherent, and then we can't talk.
Now maybe I am a bit more strict since I require English and Japanese too. But OpenOffice, though I want to like it and have used it a lot, unfortunately sucks badly. Its suckiness is more apparent when you are using one version older, or using Japanese, or exchanging Word documents, or using on a limited system, or trying (really trying hard, honestly!) to design HTML docs in it, or trying to print anything (in Japanese again, but I will be experimenting more with my new printer)... okay it sucks. Hey it has a lot of great stuff but it is not ready for prime time and it is slow. Word processors are tough things to build! They deserve a medal so far anyway!
But the only solution I can see to this mess is the crystal clear, utterly simple, icky solution that you don't want to hear but is convincing, the way a spaceship falling on you is convincing.
Solution: Make a 100% identical-looking, identically-operating clone of Microsoft Word 2000 and Powerpoint 2000. And Excel 2000 too. Make it free. Make it fast. If you feel you must add new things to it, make a mode that removes them from menus so you have only a clone of the ms software.
Guess what? It will cost a lot of money and a lot of programmers, and it won't be fun (unless you enjoy screwing MS badly which might include a lot of people), and it will require professionals involved (management, programming, documentation).
Probably it would be much better for the world to give that money to people doing non-clone software, after all MS still has $30bn in cash they will be around making trouble for a while. But if you have a millionaire who really wants to screw Bill Gates, you could do worse than to take away MS' bread and butter which is MS Office.
I trust a Buffalo external 100gb hd. I have used a number of them and also compared prices, as far as I can see Buffalo always works and is priced well too. Mine does usb 1/2 and firewire, I have used it with win98, win2k, and linux, desktops and laptops, currently it has vfat and ext3 partitions, it just works, period. It would be nice to have raid in it, or a faster interface, but probably the best thing right now would be for me to get another one and back it up!
THought the money could have been better used on research (or does Duke do that?..)
on the other hand you could record your lectures and listen to them later even if you were zoned out during the class. And you could intentionally fall asleep with it droning in your ears for accelerated (hypnotic?) learning.
Seriously though, I saw my brother's laptop when he was at Harvard Business School. There, they are serious about outfitting students for business and of course everyone is paying a lot for it. But, there is a web portal site that has *everything* on it, and I dare say it could hold audio of lectures if they wanted it.
Well more power into the students' hands is a good thing, though I heavily dislike the idea that it is Duke's property while they are at Duke. That is total bullshit. I would be interested in hearing some of the lectures though if Duke doesn't mind..
The point is not that the people being sued probably were committing acts illegal where they lived. The point is that a massive organization is steamrolling over individuals to make an impression, whereas those individuals would never have bought for example, enough music to refinance their house, etc. The RIAA is also doing things which they didn't used to do 10 or 20 years ago, when people recorded a lot of their music off the radio as one poster mentioned.
I don't buy RIAA music, haven't since I noticed the price of CDs in the stores was getting intolerable, this was 15 years ago. Somehow though I don't think removing one customer from their market is going to make a big dent.
Look, they're asking for it. This wave of litigation against individuals seems like a first for the judge because usually, customers don't tolerate that kind of shit. The RIAA believes it can get away with it and continue to feed you shit at high prices and you will continue to buy it. They are DARING you to fight back. Think about it.
So what else can you do? Well, if you are in business you could financially support non-RIAA or anti-RIAA bands, stations, software, or organziations. If you are in the prime RIAA demographic you can work hard to get all of your friends to stop buying RIAA music (especially the ones who are visible about it).
Ad agencies are beginning to realize the P2P type social networking (not just Internet-based, think word of mouth) gets much higher quality candidates (potential customers) than ordinary advertising. This can be turned around on the RIAA and suitable software / funding could magnify it. I think the iPod thing at Duke is fantastic. Now think of how to ensure that those iPods could massively reduce the amount of income the RIAA would get from that University, think and do something about it.
I don't buy RIAA music. I do like to watch live concerts on TV, and sometimes like what I hear on the radio (though I don't hear much of that either these days). These days cellphone subscriptions are starting to have a very large effect on record companies by removing disposable income from young people that would have gone to the RIAA. I am not for promoting illegal activities. I do see though a very unsettling trend of corporations taking over America (and elsewhere) and believe that litigation by the RIAA against potential customers , and the media slant on the affair (well there is a law against it so..) is a symptom of that.
The RIAA is within its legal rights at the moment to take these kinds of actions. It think it will be interesting to see their response if their customers exercise their legal rights to not purchase, to publicize, to organize, and to legally foment discord and financial destruction in the RIAA. Perhaps a good first plan of attack is to create a fund to hire artists away from the RIAA.
Remember, it is a lot like smoking. Every time you buy an RIAA product, you are saying "Thank you, please hit me again" to these nasty people. But the RIAA is always looking for new customers and new artists, every year. There is no reason why we couldn't start to put the pressure on them. Food for thought.
Most of the posts are supposing the physicists doing this are real dumb. That in itself, is stupid. I think one or two have interesting points (e.g. "Einstein is Saf e") and most of the others are way off base. The paper is a summary of research by other people. The problem being discussed was noticed by Allais 50 years ago when he ran a month long pendulum experiment (three drops per minute I believe) that happened to intersect the time of an eclipse. The paper goes over a number of possible reasons for error and includes some as yet unpublished data on experiments intended to uncover them. The possibilities are c reative and followed up scientifically, for example one is done in remote China with nobody within 200 meters. All tests showed the suggested errors to be miniscule, although the paper does suggest that a combination of them might just cover it.
It would appear that a significant anomaly has been detected by various experiments and that professional scientists are taking it much more seriously than say cold fusion. It also is clear that there is a lot still to learn about gravity and that NASA is one of the groups that is working hard to figure out why its space probes don't move as expected. Some people even think gravity moves 20 times faster than light and other stories. It is not a shut case yet. In the paper mentioned in the post, they are saying that most people couldn't in the past solve the problem because they were thinking in terms of the Moon "shielding" the Earth from gravity, which the paper does not believe. They think it is more like an extra horizontal force that sometimes occurs during eclipses (of which there are different kinds including variations of angles). So all the posts about shielding are off base.
NASA has suggested that if experimental error really can't be the culprit, it might be caused by the same thing that apparently is accelerating Voyager more than expected.
I'd like to quote from a NASA article on the people who built Gravity Probe B.
I think that is cool. It says to me we have a good chance about learning a lot more about gravity and lots of other fundamental physics in the near to medium term future.
The paper also notes that one more individual experiment will not solve it; many simultaneous and comprehensive experiements are needed over the next few eclipses. It also suggests that it might be interesting to investigate "gravitational lensing by relativistic dark matter" although I cannot tell if that suggests we are in the midst of a river of high speed dark matter or what, something invisible passing between the Earth and Moon? Somebody with astrophysics degree please finally step in. Sounds like it might be interesting to have the ISS get involved too!
Links:
NASA decrypting the eclipse ('99)
Gravitational Anomalies - Literature List
In Search of Gravitomagnetism (NASA Gravity Probe B)
Well Google going IPO is bound to create a heap o cash (tm) one way or another but it would seem they have simultaneously shot themselves in the foot repeatedly and torpedoed net-based ipos for other companies no? I'm basing my comment on slashdot news which is a funny feeling I have to admit, but would they not have been very likely to earn more if they did it the old fashioned way?
:)
I suppose Google employees are also able to buy Google shares on the market and ride them up, but mostly I'm curious about what they are going to do with the cash now.
It would be interesting if they purchased some patents and GPL'd them.. though I guess they are mainly going to try to be everything to everyone everywhere that you need to search for information. Too much even for Google I'm afraid. I guess if it had gone well they could have helped other companies get IPOs for discount rates.
Wish them luck though. Well now off to read the Economist but posting first so no real facts will sully my knee-jerk reaction!
More info on how ordinary mortals can train themselves to perform at this level, in particular how does he memorize words like gey without knowing what they mean? (Does he have a just have a kind of photographic memory but not care what words mean? Is this not bad?) Anyway I am going to have to look on freshmeat..
I see also the Judge scrabble adjucation system, and Scrabaid which seems to be a scrabble coach.. any other links to tools for improving memory (I remember a mnemonic trainer story a year ago) would be interesting.
For example in a story of Robert Heinlein's called Have Spacesuit Will Travel in which an engineer teen hacker successfully refurbishes a spacesuit and later makes good use of the distances of the planets from the Sun which he had luckily memorized with a cool limerick. Any other modern limericks or ways to memorize constellations and other astronomical phenomena would be quite useful if anyone knows of them.
Thought experiment 1: What experiment is missing on cassini?
Te2: What is the cheapest, lowest tech experiment that has a nonzero chance at finding ET, that makes the most of the qualities suggested in the above post?
Te3: Given current technology or that conceivable within 5 years if you worked hard at it, what method of seeking patterns in any natural phenomena would achieve the highest degree of parallelism and potential discernment of a pattern out of a high number of samples?
I'm interested in your replies, even though my Dad says he doesn't want to meet a Bug. Even if I had that viewpoint I'd rather know they were coming.. and maybe the above thought experiments could help select the ones we want to meet. It just might be that this kind of an attitude could mean a lot to the Earth, sooner than later. We've already been broadcasting for 50 years, ET can sense even a 100 year thin bubble of radiation. Why not search DNA, or look for nanoscale structure in cosmic dust. Or maybe it is just a matter of a new way of looking at things we already see every day..
Someone mentioned something simple. It would be very elegant if something really simple like say, the MEMS mirrors on a TI light valve that drives an ordinary projector, could detect a SETI, if we'd only thought of it. As I understand it (please correct if wrong) the hydrogen band is one area of little noise and relatively good conductivity through space.. a natural wavelength to look at. I'm not saying gravity waves are the thing, or that they even exist, but if surveys of patterns in ambient energy are show certain characteristics, it would be interesting to see how simple and inexpensive a device can be made that would record patterns *not* falling into those trends.
So it might be interesting to look for simple (geometric? time-bound? beautiful?) patterns in phenomena we have been seeing, or start recording physical phenomena with more sensitivity with the expectation of ever faster, internetworked, intelligent and quantum computing. For example what kind of a pattern would you get if you slewed a diffraction grating made of neutronium on an orbit that coasted through the troposphere of a sun? What kinds of patterns in radioactivity or infrared are common? Some things may require higher resolution surveys but some may be well within the realm of a species at our level, if say 0.1% of world GNP was put into it per year. And some modes of communication might even be within the realm of a single underfunded individual with a unique point of view.
There may be an alien that rewards elegance and be sending funnily polarized or spinning vortices of electromagnetic current, there may be all kinds of ETs and a bunch of them may be mathematicians.
On a side note, too bad we have to plunge through Saturn instead of gliding through its windy layers. No information-bearing processes in all that mass of chemicals and lightning? I don't think so. Why do you?
My theory (and the rant that Slashdot/firefox lost last week) is that ET has little patience for whiners like the "no news yet, we must really be alone still!" crowd. I'd like to think there are lots of opportunities for communication, and civilizations at the beginning of space technology might be able to make up for such a handicap with creativity, empathy, intelligence, humor, and philosophy. ET likes origami and tricks of the light! He likes both classical and rock in moderation! He likes creative chefs, he likes hackers! (hope not on rye) It is conceivable that a cloud chamber like the one I built a long time ago for a science fair might be sufficient for someone with a microscope and a quantum computer, or possibly the data we need is already available for free online but we just need a very sweet, smart filter with a sense of beauty or maybe even humor. You could write that filter with free software.
There is an interesting press evaluation system called CARMA which does this.. I had to study it once, interesting. It requires humans to manually grade articles on long questionnaires. Well it lets you find out which authors are sympathetic and which are nasty. Presumably it helps you find people like this individual. I suppose Microsoft subscribes to CARMA too..
By the way, I have bought a lot of Dell machines in the past. So I hope they know they are their own worst enemy. Who is going to recommend Dell but someone who has used them?
Now if they came out with a competitive box suitable for high-end 3D graphics simulation (i.e. CAD, astronomy, art displays, video conferencing) say something that SGI would be proud to have, with RAID 5 controller, and put a 5 YEAR WARRANTY on all parts, then I would consider it very seriously against say a G5 or any other machine. Same with laptops, they are going to work a lot harder to win back their customers.
As I write this on a Dell Inspiron 7500 (redhat 9) let me tell you. First I really like this machine. But I really hate companies that phase out the people who recommend them, a lot more.
Like they phased out linux service. I bought this in the U.S. and came to Japan, they wouldn't fix it here. Can't easily get a Japanese windows unless you go through the Japan office. Fine. Wiped most of windows, linux on here. Had to figure out all the hardware crap myself. Haven't got enough memory on this and don't want to send it in for a month, find that too. Broken battery (probably due to lugging it through town on wheels), little help. Now if Dell can give me top products at a reasonable price (and this *was* pc of the year some years ago), I'll buy it. But when the only part of their online service I find interesting is the refurbished parts catalog. Oh yeah, if you want to look for parts on line forget it, you end up wading through refurbished instead. When I bought this I was told to wait for a big HD to come out, well I never got it for the second bay because it was never in stock, then got dumped apparently. Now I am looking at new computers. I need a desktop pc and I want a system with high performance opengl (I'm not a gamer, I want to make displays). I'm thinking seriously about getting a G5, though it may soon be supplemented with an Alienware laptop which I've been drooling over. Before I buy those two though I'll 90% likely be building a linux box for myself. For me Dell has to seriously shake off an old bad service image and a new bad quality image. It's not like they don't have competition.
I'd think a pringles or coke can would be a bit less conspicuous..
On the other hand you know those security video cameras used in public places which can be remote controlled to rotate and zoom in on someone's face? They are usually hidden in smoked glass domes in ceiling or, I suppose, in less conspicuous ways in places like casinos or board rooms. Sounds like another good aiming device, I saw one $500 dollar model in Akihabara recently you can operate from a web page. Same shop for a few hundred bucks also sold remote cameras accessible via UHF.
I'd be worried if I carried anything with Bluetooth (so far I've resisted..) The more it penetrates it seems the more tiny yagi antennas you'll see. Only saving grace I could imagine is if the yagi antenna is left powered up maybe you could detect it as the camera pans across you... IANA EM Engineer but would not a yagi antenna also transmit towards you any noise from say the video camera's motor or power supply? If so a detector might be in order..
A) clues from Steve Jobs, he's able to sit up in bed so he will probably be slowed down almost to their speed
B) new hardware, they could tie up closely with a big consumer manufacturer (like Matsushita?) and drive Java into places it can generate some bucks
C) new customers, which is the only reason to get Novell or SuSE it seems (especially Europe) though if Sun tries to manage any of it or push "Java desktop" those customers will probably burn rubber in the other direction.
D) IBM managers (ouch)
For years I've wished linux had vector based desktop so I could have a 3d scroll wheel embedded in irix window frames. You make the wheel turn by dragging over it with the mouse, and all icons in a window grow or shrink smoothly. I also like the way icons would shoot animated rays out for a few seconds after clicking to indicate the program was loading.
I tried one in the store a month ago in Tokyo. It looked and felt real nice, quite light. The text updated in two passes but even that seemed organic, not like an ordinary raster. The quality was sort of like etch a sketch on rice paper. Anyway you could sometimes see a bit of a previous page in there.
The MASSIVE BARRIER to me though was the DRM. I would want to put MY files on it, not theirs. (And they didn't have enough content either).
I approached the display with trepidation, knowing DRM was not for me. I have read I guess hundreds of books in ascii on my palm.
But unfortunately in addition to reading books a few lines at a time in tiny print on the train or in bed, I would sometimes jot down notes and check some astro software on it. I lost everything on the palm 3 times when the battery ran out. And the final nail in the coffing was pouring coffee on the vaio that had with its integral memory stick port a way to put files into the palm (and copy photos off my phone).
Anyway, there are tons of problems with the article from what I understand (not having read it) but I can tell you if the manufacturer would separate ebooks from the readers everyone would be happy. I'd certainly want to buy their reader if it had open networking and no DRM in it. I *don't* want someone telling me what to read. I spend plenty of money on books and newspapers, and I also get a lot of other stuff I want to read. If the sony reader had a bunch of ports along its side for different kinds of sticks and connectors, and maybe a big hard disk (if light), I would really want it. I figure they couldn't make enough or didn't want to sell to much of this quality display so they are testing the waters with this, then will use the bad response to sell the idea in-house that the hardware has to be opened. There are mutually antagonistic divisions I understand in the company, we just have to wait a little for other companies to jump in. It was nice though, slow but relatively low-stress reading. Hope somebody publishes a hack of one.
Wow, I must have missed a few heavy memes this year. I thought the Segway was mainly for industrial use since still expensive, heavier duty for e.g. postmen, and biggest problem being ordinances. Dean Kamen invented a wheelchair that goes up and down stairs didn't he? He isn't a panderer to burgeoisie, I think polo is just one of the things people will try to use these things for when they are cheap enough. The quotes here make it sound like an idiocy but the only dumb thing sounds to me using it in an urban landscape not designed for it, hurting people with the callousness of your need to write an article, etc. Next you'll tell us the White Knight is just going to be an expensive elevator for rich dudes to the zero-g sex park in the sky. Come on people! The neat thing isn't the parts it is the balancing and gyro all beautifully integrated together, a new IT-enabled way for humans to move. Is anyone reputable saying it's a failure?
to not have a private opinion on windows. The page is down, was that a joke or was there something up once that got hastily removed?
I wonder how heavy those things are, and how much it will cost them timewise in the aggregate. Imagine nearly killing yourself on small things that add up to a win or lose at the end, but always know you have this dead weight. Or are the cyclists happy about it because it is better for the fans? Do they weigh everyone's gps units to make sure they are the same? I can see people shaving off the edges of the silicon..