Yeah case in point is the magnetic power connector on macbooks. Such a beautiful, robust thing. My new eeepc has a tiny cylindrical power plug, similar to those on small nokia phones. I am sure it will break within the next year.
Design is important but marketing sells product. Without Jobs, Apple nearly went out of business and they still had their original designs. Jobs was a viral marketing engine because of his persona. Other computer makers employ professionals to do their marketing and that works too.
I bought a new netbook (ASUS eeepc) one week ago and decided to give unity a good go. I actually like the dock thing on the left. I like the way it unifies "starting" and "displaying". Its one less thing to worry about. But the version in 11.04 is buggy as all hell. Every morning I struggle with firefox. Unity opens it on the laptop screen (according to the top bar) and doesn't display it anywhere. Then I click the top bar and it displays on the laptop screen but with no way to move it to the external monitor. By experiment I found that I can use ALT+drag on the very top of the firefox window to drag it to the external monitor, then I maximize it all all is well.
Terminals are worse. At one point unity became convinced that the bottom of the terminal window was at the top of the laptop screen and the top of the terminal window was in the middle of the same screen so it displayed the entire terminal upside down. It seems to allow some windows to be resized to have a negative height.
I am upgrading to 11.10 right now and I will see how I go. Time remaining 1 day and 21 hours;)
According to your link the issue is with multitouch. My LG android phone doesn't have that so it should be safe. My HP touchpad does and I expect HP would have been in trouble over that if they hadn't bailed from the market.
Software bots are pretty advanced these days. Throw in a text to speech translator and inputs from sensors in different parts of the body. I reckon you could persuade granddad to leave his net worth to a robot. And he would die happy.
Some of them really do look around and say that the world NEEDS superheroes
The world just needs normal citizens to stand up and do the right thing by society. And yes, occasionally this means taking the law into your own hands.
Sure, ultimately it will be big business, but which established business wants to upset their nice market niche to go after it? The only way it will get started will be for somebody to start from scratch. Buy launches from SpaceX, etc, and ship their product back to the market. Its not the job of the US Government to fund exploration for resources outside the US (okay ignore Iraq). If fossil fuels start to seriously run out I would expect the US to build their own solar power plants in orbit, with materials mined on the asteroids.
The space program made sense in the cold war when there was a lot of competition for access to space and each side was afraid of the other. Even now the US has a strategic need to be able to put hardware (both manned and unmanned) into low earth orbit. But I don't think this requirement extends to the moon and beyond. If we want to send humans to Mars and beyond it will not be funded by the US taxpayers. The money will have to come from elsewhere.
My uncle applied for work in Antarctica. They gave him really rigorous medical tests and found a tumor. He is alive now (20 years later) because he wanted to be a diesel mechanic in Antarctica.
Maybe but teh reality is that you would be risking lives to get one person home early and when they got home they would still be a stroke patient. Its hard for some people but some times in an emergency the best thing to do is nothing and the best place to be is where you are. If you don't like that don't go to Antarctica. Its just barely spring here in Melbourne (and in the rest of the southern hemisphere). The sun is creeping south slowly.
We all have some control over our EEG, just not in the same way for all people. Now that EEGs can be made compact, and attached to a portable computer its actually fairly easy to useful stuff with the signals thus detected. I don't think this will be made transparent to the user without years of practice. It won't feel like a normal limb.
I think there is a more general behavioral issue at play here. The designer of the original morris mini hoped that by improving cornering ability he would reduce the number of crashes. It just allowed the drivers to corner faster for the same number of crashes. Maybe this is because the acceptable number of crashes is a constant and drivers tweak other variables to stay at the desired point. Similarly the money for energy and monitors is a constant so consumers adjust their behavior to spend at the desired rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody has to wait in line. The next day you can just walk in and buy one.
I wonder if he just stops there and lets it keep itself balanced all night.
Yeah case in point is the magnetic power connector on macbooks. Such a beautiful, robust thing. My new eeepc has a tiny cylindrical power plug, similar to those on small nokia phones. I am sure it will break within the next year.
Woosh
how much of a dork you look like talking to your phone
Yeah what kind of weirdo would talk into a telephone?
Design is important but marketing sells product. Without Jobs, Apple nearly went out of business and they still had their original designs. Jobs was a viral marketing engine because of his persona. Other computer makers employ professionals to do their marketing and that works too.
But can you actually talk into the mouse?
For what it is worth I think the apple desktop is pretty horrible (from using my wife's macbook) and unity, while not perfect, is an improvement.
I bought a new netbook (ASUS eeepc) one week ago and decided to give unity a good go. I actually like the dock thing on the left. I like the way it unifies "starting" and "displaying". Its one less thing to worry about. But the version in 11.04 is buggy as all hell. Every morning I struggle with firefox. Unity opens it on the laptop screen (according to the top bar) and doesn't display it anywhere. Then I click the top bar and it displays on the laptop screen but with no way to move it to the external monitor. By experiment I found that I can use ALT+drag on the very top of the firefox window to drag it to the external monitor, then I maximize it all all is well.
Terminals are worse. At one point unity became convinced that the bottom of the terminal window was at the top of the laptop screen and the top of the terminal window was in the middle of the same screen so it displayed the entire terminal upside down. It seems to allow some windows to be resized to have a negative height.
I am upgrading to 11.10 right now and I will see how I go. Time remaining 1 day and 21 hours ;)
WHOA! there. No one said anything about them talking
Oh yeah good point. Since we are starting from scratch we may as well get it right.
According to your link the issue is with multitouch. My LG android phone doesn't have that so it should be safe. My HP touchpad does and I expect HP would have been in trouble over that if they hadn't bailed from the market.
Software bots are pretty advanced these days. Throw in a text to speech translator and inputs from sensors in different parts of the body. I reckon you could persuade granddad to leave his net worth to a robot. And he would die happy.
And what's wrong with the old fashioned way
Mine's broken down.
Some of them really do look around and say that the world NEEDS superheroes
The world just needs normal citizens to stand up and do the right thing by society. And yes, occasionally this means taking the law into your own hands.
Sure, ultimately it will be big business, but which established business wants to upset their nice market niche to go after it? The only way it will get started will be for somebody to start from scratch. Buy launches from SpaceX, etc, and ship their product back to the market. Its not the job of the US Government to fund exploration for resources outside the US (okay ignore Iraq). If fossil fuels start to seriously run out I would expect the US to build their own solar power plants in orbit, with materials mined on the asteroids.
The space program made sense in the cold war when there was a lot of competition for access to space and each side was afraid of the other. Even now the US has a strategic need to be able to put hardware (both manned and unmanned) into low earth orbit. But I don't think this requirement extends to the moon and beyond. If we want to send humans to Mars and beyond it will not be funded by the US taxpayers. The money will have to come from elsewhere.
Yeah but that was a robot, right? Like a cruise missile with legs.
My uncle applied for work in Antarctica. They gave him really rigorous medical tests and found a tumor. He is alive now (20 years later) because he wanted to be a diesel mechanic in Antarctica.
Maybe but teh reality is that you would be risking lives to get one person home early and when they got home they would still be a stroke patient. Its hard for some people but some times in an emergency the best thing to do is nothing and the best place to be is where you are. If you don't like that don't go to Antarctica. Its just barely spring here in Melbourne (and in the rest of the southern hemisphere). The sun is creeping south slowly.
We all have some control over our EEG, just not in the same way for all people. Now that EEGs can be made compact, and attached to a portable computer its actually fairly easy to useful stuff with the signals thus detected. I don't think this will be made transparent to the user without years of practice. It won't feel like a normal limb.
> i'm a bad person.
Then so am I but I blame Dr Strangelove.
I think there is a more general behavioral issue at play here. The designer of the original morris mini hoped that by improving cornering ability he would reduce the number of crashes. It just allowed the drivers to corner faster for the same number of crashes. Maybe this is because the acceptable number of crashes is a constant and drivers tweak other variables to stay at the desired point. Similarly the money for energy and monitors is a constant so consumers adjust their behavior to spend at the desired rate.
My wife kept clicking Junk in apple mail to delete messages after she had read them, then asked me why she never saw any new messages.
I live in Victoria so there is little chance of me taking a picture of him for wikipedia. Maybe his brother could submit one?
Oh no not Bob Katter.