Philips has been making these for ages (link. They are expensive as heck (~$1500) and haven't caught on. However, they do require a Windows PC, so maybe they're targeting the wrong market: one that doesn't like their wallet being flogged to hamburger for basic hardware. So perhaps Apple could pull it off.
I'm a consulting electrical engineer with experience designing and programming USB keyboard devices...what would you pay for a low-profile keyboard with several programmable buttons (four in a row, matching fingertip spacing?) on a short USB cord, and how many other people do you know who would want something similar? Velcro this to the back of the tablet PC, near where you would grip it? Might also be useful on the back of a normal Wacom tablet, if you want to use it handheld instead of on the desk.
Make a telephone that plugs directly into your network, with handsets that actually communicate over 802.11. That'd be Wi-Fi friendly! In fact, do away with the phone base station and phone line altogether, and use VoIP wireless phones. You can even get ones that automatically switch between VoIP and cellular. One *ring* to rule them all....
Indeed.
I always thought my engineering textbooks would have been much more appreciated if they had a hot chick on every page. Every class would have been like that one with the hot teacher!
I said, "to effectively use" didn't I? What good is a gigabit network if you're severely limited by your hard drive and peripheral bus abilities? Even if you're transferring data from RAM on one PC to RAM on another, you still have to load the data into RAM....
To effectively use a gigabit pipe, especially for sustained transfers, you need gigabit integrated into the motherboard and a fast RAID or fast Serial ATA. You also cannot expect commodity hardware to route gigabit through PCI, get a switch.
It works just as you described with Sprint.
Also, Yahoo has SMS notification ability. It can let you know if you have an email; plus, with the Yahoo WAP and a data-capable phone, you can get into your Yahoo account and read email, IM etc.
That's an extremely good point, the explanation of the screenshots mentions that the software only does screen captures when the user is actively using the computer. Just because all he used his computer for was Solitaire doesn't mean that's all he ever did. Unlike most Slashdotters, many jobs require you to spend most of your time away from the computer.
If everyone here had a button they pushed when they started and stopped doing actual work, the results would be very enlightening. I'd say this thread has to be one of the most hypocritical I've seen for a while.
Um...sell your soul? I assume you're one of the hardcore nerds who want to stay locked in the code-factory forever, and never increase their skillset or even their pay beyond cost-of-living increases? What is this stigma against management? Sure, a lot of them seem to be useless. That's a great reason for smart people to try to get into management. If you have good ideas, you can get much more accomplished by guiding others through the overall plan while they take care of the grunt work.
It'll burn you out on life? Where do you get that idea? How many managers do you know that don't want to do anything but eat dinner and sleep after going home? Most managers I know are active during their off hours because they don't have extremely tedious work. If you develop your people skills enough, managing isn't even that much stress. Also, where are you getting this "quiet desperation" crap? You think merely throwing a random quote at something makes it relevant? Unless a manager is truly incompetent, I don't know one who is quietly desperate about the easier hours, the bigger house and bank account, and improved lifestyle for their family.
The calculations are pretty interesting when you look at them. No matter what mass an object is, accelerating it at constant Earth gravity will attain lightspeed in almost exactly one Earth year and require the total conversion to energy of exactly the mass of that object. Messed up, huh?
My advice is to work your tail off right now, focus on your job and move up in the company until you achieve a management position. At that point, your job will mostly be personal interaction, aerial views of ongoing projects, and helping develop specifications. That won't burn you out on programming, so you'll be fresh enough to do personal projects. You'll also stay in the loop on current technologies, but not be forced to slog through code unless you want to.
Most of the items really could have existed by now. It would have been possible with the hard work and ingenuity of our engineers over the last 50 years. However, the visionaries did not account for one thing:
Affordable computers.
Compare the advances in vehicles and transportation infrastructure to the advances in computing technology. Virtually all of our work has been focused on rapidly advancing semiconductor technology and computer programming ability. Imagine if that energy was instead focused on mechanical innovations like flying cars and high-speed rail. We'd have them by now.
Am I suggesting this was the wrong way to do things? Absolutely not! That vast complex mechanical infrastructure would be the result of billions of man-hours in design, and would require significant human intervention to operate. What we are doing now is getting our processing and data management development out of the way first. The ability to store vast amounts of data, communicate instantly, run complex algorithms, and develop intellegent control systems will make all other technological development much more efficient.
The Silicon Revolution has been a time of building new tools. Building the machines that will help us build better machines. No longer does this mean tying a rock to a stick in order to make a better hammer; we now work with our minds and computers are the tools we use to expand the influence of our thoughts. Computers were once an end unto themselves; now they have grown to a high level of usefulness and are already being applied to further develop other fields.
This was a little sidetrack that 1950 could never have seen, but it was a highly necessary and important one.
Um...why not just have a nice little locking valve. Then you just put the pan under the car, press the button, and the oil comes out. Then you don't have to fish around in the dirty oil for the $200 bolt. Also: shift-on-the-fly 4WD has been around for ages.
I've removed a front-wheel transmission and replaced the clutch though, and in that case it sure would have been nice to tap in a code and the transmission neatly drops itself on the wood blocks under the car.
Re:'Detecting a pulse' for those who don't have on
on
Living Without a Pulse
·
· Score: 1
The simple answer is that iPod owners all have a monster case of buyer's remorse, and eagery sieze upon things which might help them argue it was worth $400 when you can just buy a $40 CD Walkman and have as much music as you can listen to in a day, and batteries that last longer than 8 hours.
I never said it was a worthwhile hack, I just thought it was interesting and a step above the typical "look I can put words on my iPod" style of hack. The iPod's still and overpriced hunk of yuppie bling.
They only used the Pocket PC to record the remote-control waveforms. It's not specifically required, and only the iPod with the little IR transmitter is needed to use the remote. If a database of IR waveforms was developed, you technically would only need the IR adapter and download the correct set of audio files.
Actually, this is pretty neat compared to most iPod text-file "hacks". They record little songs that are the IR waveforms, then play them from the headphone jack with the IR accessory. You only use the Pocket PC to record the initial IR waveforms.
There's no reason you couldn't do a similar thing with a regular PC and IR detector, or possibly a laptop. There's also the possibility of making downloadable packs of audio files that could be traded for different remotes or audio equipment, so all you need is the iPod and IR accessory.
Slashdot Mirror
Philips has been making these for ages (link. They are expensive as heck (~$1500) and haven't caught on. However, they do require a Windows PC, so maybe they're targeting the wrong market: one that doesn't like their wallet being flogged to hamburger for basic hardware. So perhaps Apple could pull it off.
They wouldn't need motivation to develop the time-saving widgets, they would just do it.
I'm a consulting electrical engineer with experience designing and programming USB keyboard devices...what would you pay for a low-profile keyboard with several programmable buttons (four in a row, matching fingertip spacing?) on a short USB cord, and how many other people do you know who would want something similar? Velcro this to the back of the tablet PC, near where you would grip it? Might also be useful on the back of a normal Wacom tablet, if you want to use it handheld instead of on the desk.
johnny_sas:
eliviate
Yoda:
Do or do not; there is no try. If spelling of a word you know not, knowledge of this you must gain before writing it.
Make a telephone that plugs directly into your network, with handsets that actually communicate over 802.11. That'd be Wi-Fi friendly! In fact, do away with the phone base station and phone line altogether, and use VoIP wireless phones. You can even get ones that automatically switch between VoIP and cellular. One *ring* to rule them all....
Nice, and if there's any metal or foil in the roof, it will act as a reflector to beam the signal down through the house.
Indeed. I always thought my engineering textbooks would have been much more appreciated if they had a hot chick on every page. Every class would have been like that one with the hot teacher!
I said, "to effectively use" didn't I? What good is a gigabit network if you're severely limited by your hard drive and peripheral bus abilities? Even if you're transferring data from RAM on one PC to RAM on another, you still have to load the data into RAM....
To effectively use a gigabit pipe, especially for sustained transfers, you need gigabit integrated into the motherboard and a fast RAID or fast Serial ATA. You also cannot expect commodity hardware to route gigabit through PCI, get a switch.
It works just as you described with Sprint. Also, Yahoo has SMS notification ability. It can let you know if you have an email; plus, with the Yahoo WAP and a data-capable phone, you can get into your Yahoo account and read email, IM etc.
That's an extremely good point, the explanation of the screenshots mentions that the software only does screen captures when the user is actively using the computer. Just because all he used his computer for was Solitaire doesn't mean that's all he ever did. Unlike most Slashdotters, many jobs require you to spend most of your time away from the computer. If everyone here had a button they pushed when they started and stopped doing actual work, the results would be very enlightening. I'd say this thread has to be one of the most hypocritical I've seen for a while.
Um...sell your soul? I assume you're one of the hardcore nerds who want to stay locked in the code-factory forever, and never increase their skillset or even their pay beyond cost-of-living increases? What is this stigma against management? Sure, a lot of them seem to be useless. That's a great reason for smart people to try to get into management. If you have good ideas, you can get much more accomplished by guiding others through the overall plan while they take care of the grunt work.
It'll burn you out on life? Where do you get that idea? How many managers do you know that don't want to do anything but eat dinner and sleep after going home? Most managers I know are active during their off hours because they don't have extremely tedious work. If you develop your people skills enough, managing isn't even that much stress. Also, where are you getting this "quiet desperation" crap? You think merely throwing a random quote at something makes it relevant? Unless a manager is truly incompetent, I don't know one who is quietly desperate about the easier hours, the bigger house and bank account, and improved lifestyle for their family.
The calculations are pretty interesting when you look at them. No matter what mass an object is, accelerating it at constant Earth gravity will attain lightspeed in almost exactly one Earth year and require the total conversion to energy of exactly the mass of that object. Messed up, huh?
My advice is to work your tail off right now, focus on your job and move up in the company until you achieve a management position. At that point, your job will mostly be personal interaction, aerial views of ongoing projects, and helping develop specifications. That won't burn you out on programming, so you'll be fresh enough to do personal projects. You'll also stay in the loop on current technologies, but not be forced to slog through code unless you want to.
Most of the items really could have existed by now. It would have been possible with the hard work and ingenuity of our engineers over the last 50 years. However, the visionaries did not account for one thing:
Affordable computers.
Compare the advances in vehicles and transportation infrastructure to the advances in computing technology. Virtually all of our work has been focused on rapidly advancing semiconductor technology and computer programming ability. Imagine if that energy was instead focused on mechanical innovations like flying cars and high-speed rail. We'd have them by now.
Am I suggesting this was the wrong way to do things? Absolutely not! That vast complex mechanical infrastructure would be the result of billions of man-hours in design, and would require significant human intervention to operate. What we are doing now is getting our processing and data management development out of the way first. The ability to store vast amounts of data, communicate instantly, run complex algorithms, and develop intellegent control systems will make all other technological development much more efficient.
The Silicon Revolution has been a time of building new tools. Building the machines that will help us build better machines. No longer does this mean tying a rock to a stick in order to make a better hammer; we now work with our minds and computers are the tools we use to expand the influence of our thoughts. Computers were once an end unto themselves; now they have grown to a high level of usefulness and are already being applied to further develop other fields.
This was a little sidetrack that 1950 could never have seen, but it was a highly necessary and important one.
Um...why not just have a nice little locking valve. Then you just put the pan under the car, press the button, and the oil comes out. Then you don't have to fish around in the dirty oil for the $200 bolt. Also: shift-on-the-fly 4WD has been around for ages.
I've removed a front-wheel transmission and replaced the clutch though, and in that case it sure would have been nice to tap in a code and the transmission neatly drops itself on the wood blocks under the car.
Oh, I see you tried it on a nearby co-worker too.
The one, the only, BATMAN! High-flying stunts and TOTAL DESTRUCTION! You pay for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge!
I'm not sure if it's the wording, but does anyone else completely fail to understand what this post means?
The simple answer is that iPod owners all have a monster case of buyer's remorse, and eagery sieze upon things which might help them argue it was worth $400 when you can just buy a $40 CD Walkman and have as much music as you can listen to in a day, and batteries that last longer than 8 hours. I never said it was a worthwhile hack, I just thought it was interesting and a step above the typical "look I can put words on my iPod" style of hack. The iPod's still and overpriced hunk of yuppie bling.
They only used the Pocket PC to record the remote-control waveforms. It's not specifically required, and only the iPod with the little IR transmitter is needed to use the remote. If a database of IR waveforms was developed, you technically would only need the IR adapter and download the correct set of audio files.
If you read the article, you would see the point. Or even if you read one or two of the comments in this thread.
You went to the trouble of finding those links, but couldn't read the article to find out whether you were completely wrong about it?
RTFA. Please.
Actually, this is pretty neat compared to most iPod text-file "hacks". They record little songs that are the IR waveforms, then play them from the headphone jack with the IR accessory. You only use the Pocket PC to record the initial IR waveforms. There's no reason you couldn't do a similar thing with a regular PC and IR detector, or possibly a laptop. There's also the possibility of making downloadable packs of audio files that could be traded for different remotes or audio equipment, so all you need is the iPod and IR accessory.