Ungh. Anything with "Click here! It's FREE!" (in blatant colours) and wants to chart my social network makes me very suspicious...
No matter how ingenious and useful the technology is, it won't get my -- and probably quite a few other users' -- trust before it is presented in a more credible manner. And before it gets the trust of a considerable user base, the system isn't considerably useful, now is it? (ok, so i know the system already has a considerable user base, but so does Kazaa, and look what happened to them).
An interesting bit: All other of those "coolest inventions" had relevant or correct pictures (not iTunes, though), but the fish skin bikini story surprisingly showed a picture from the next story, glowing fabric...
The pics on Skini's site make up for any omissions (steamy stuff!)
Ah, when you put it that way, the picture is completely different! Now it looks to me like the upper half of, yes, a hacker, sitting by his/her terminal, facing to the left. The upper block is a head, the rest is the left shoulder-elbow-arm-hand.
This could lead to a whole new psychological science. Instead of showing us Rorschach ink blots, they could show us big 3x3 pixel pictures!
Hey, the car already has a cooling system. Real Men would just route some of the car's air conditioning to cool the computer (Real Women would probably be doing something more sensible).
If cookies worry you, try the link from one of the advertisements. In includes your hostname or ip address. Even if i know this information gets logged with each web transaction, i still got a hiccup.
But what is the point of such an application if you cannot get the values to input? Or do they mean that any Capable Geek should know that?
There is a wonderful little program, rather misleadingly named MiniGPS, which can tell you the Area ID, Cell ID and signal strength, measured in dBm, for any Series60 gsm phone (like my Nokia 3650:). What makes this program Truly Nifty is that it can switch my profile to "not-at-work" when i am at home, and "at-work" when i'm there. Good stuff. All i now need to do is register the program... or just code my own;)
So, if i don't update my department's machines before i'm off to holidays, something terrible might happen. And if i do update, and then head off for holiday, something will.
OK, maybe those machines will stay up for when i am away (yeah, right).
Well, for me, my cell phone number has always been a part of my (geek) personality. Losing the operator number (-50) wouldn't be the end of the world, but the phone number is mine.
Having a list of users who are not on the operator the address sounds like a routing problem to me. You would need to list a bunch of numbers which need to be treated as "special cases", which would mean that every number called to would first need to be looked up.
Stupid.
Here's my solution: Reserve a prefix for the people who want to have a "perennial" telephone number, a kind of a "forwarding number". Heck, i have a few mail addresses myself that forward to another inbox. Shouldn't be too hard with telephones; they have call diverting there already. This is the same, innit?
On a side note, they will soon introduce the possibility to keep your number while changing operators here in Finland. The charging scheme was a bit complex. There are a few leading thoughts on telephone costs here. First, the caller should always know how much the call will cost. Second, the receiving party will not have to pay for answering the phone (unless s?he is abroad, and then pays for the forwarding costs from "home" to the destination). However, since different operator have different costs, who will then pay for the difference? Sure as heck not the operators...
I think Gromit looks really good, but the surroundings made me think "uh, Gromit Goes Half Mesa"... and i don't even play Half-Life (i don't need to -- i have a real life;)
You can already get the approximate position of a (GSM) cell phone by triangulating (?) its position using the base stations the cell phone is connected to. The GPS chip addition (didn't know about this one, btw!) will just pinpoint you easier.
I really don't understand what the fuss is all about. The military has surely had this technology for ages, along with every thinkable agency and "enemy". It's just a normal radio frequency jammer, one in the long line of other technical warfare devices, like radio jammers and EMP guns to wipe out magnetical data or stop a car. It doesn't take an electrical engineer to invent one (well, actually, it does:).
All organizations have this technology, but it's only when it falls in the hand of the "stupid" (uncontrolled/uncontrollable) individual that these organizations start making noise.
Due to the technology involved, you'd have to sit straight in front of the monitor to see the picture in glorious three dee (correct me if i'm wrong here!).
Now if you were geeky enough to have a twin monitor setup (like i do at work), you would probably have to tweak the monitor angles to allow 3D on both displays. Also, you could not move (strafe) your head around too much, which i do all the time with these two monitors, or you'd lose the effect. Oh, and anybody looking at the display from the side, except from maybe certain angles, would not get three dee. But then, i payed for it, so it's my three dee;)
On the other hand, since they will probably charge a truckoad of money for a relatively simple solution, few could probably afford two of these puppies.
Hmm.. i think the phone won't be too popular here in Europe; at least not while the system is on the same frequency as GSM. On the other hand, it's not on the "free" overpopulated 2.4 GHz (microwave, WLAN) area.
What i'd like to see is this phone working with a Bluetooth or DECT link instead. DECT would be better for range, but Bluetooth would be, well, niftier;)
Why not put some piezoelectric technology in the players' tennis shoe while they're at it? Give some extra oomph into their spring:)
Still, how much power can this piezo element gather anyhow? Enough to drive a LED on the tennis shoe (or ball;) or to actually do something useful? Somehow i feel that the power gained from the impact when the player hits the ball with his/her piezo-racket would not be too much, and so the dampening effect would be pretty weak. Or then they have very efficient (and lightweight) mechanics in it.
There's a book (fiction, pulp) called "Deep Lie" in which the russians had (among other fun things) a fleet of stealth WIG planes. At the time of reading that, last summer, i thought it was just nifty science fiction. Seems i was wrong:)
The book is light summer reading. Especially fun if you're from coastal Sweden, Finland or Estonia, which is where much of the stuff in the book takes place.
What i don't see is why a WIG plane couldn't be adapted for ground use.
Time travel is a disturbing thing, at least to me. First, think that i would travel to tomorrow (keep it simple). The me of now would skip one day and exist only the day after this. Thus, i would not exist during the time between now and tomorrow (some people would rather enjoy that... "Hey, why not take a week while you're at it!").
But what freaks me out is that if i were to travel to yesterday, i would already exist in yesterday. After travelling there, there would thusly be two of me. But what would happen when yesterday became today, and say that one of me wouldn't care to go back to the day before? There would be two of me.
Forget cloning. Just time-travel me to one epsilon back in time, and there'd be two of me, only one epsilon different in age. Then repeat.
Time-transport some fascist-fundamentalist-idiotist back just a jiffy an umpteen times, and you have an army of fascist-fundamentalist-idiots. With guns and all.
Here in Finland we give our kids a cell phone. If they need to call home, they call home. If the parents need to call their kids, they can call their kids.
A friend of mind, father of a teenager, has a deal with his kid. He provides the phone + pays the bills (you can set a limit to that as well), as long as the kid promises to answer the phone when his father calls. If not rightaway --nobody should be forcedly tied to the phone-- then within reasonable time.
Even a one-or-two-character SMS message will do;
? = where/how/when are you? Are you ok?
.. = hang on
. = yes
! = sure! or, look behind you! i'm already here:)
The monochrome display seems a little dull, doesn't it. But, hey! Just add a green laser and a blue laser... and you've got RGB! Yow!
And i guess they will have the product safe when it's out on the market. I hope they don't screw up too many beta testers' vision while developing the Nomad.
There is a simple solution for this: a packet filtering modue at the operator's SMS software. And since Nokia wouldn't like their mobile phones to crash, they will of cource gladly supply such a patch, right:)
Since you can't update every single terminal (ie phone), you would have to filter out the bad messages at the operator. And why not. After all, that's the logical place.
It's just like bad packets get filtered out at the filewall/switch and not at the workstation.
Slashdot Mirror
Ungh. Anything with "Click here! It's FREE!" (in blatant colours) and wants to chart my social network makes me very suspicious...
No matter how ingenious and useful the technology is, it won't get my -- and probably quite a few other users' -- trust before it is presented in a more credible manner. And before it gets the trust of a considerable user base, the system isn't considerably useful, now is it? (ok, so i know the system already has a considerable user base, but so does Kazaa, and look what happened to them).
~llauren
An interesting bit: All other of those "coolest inventions" had relevant or correct pictures (not iTunes, though), but the fish skin bikini story surprisingly showed a picture from the next story, glowing fabric...
The pics on Skini's site make up for any omissions (steamy stuff!)
~llauren
Uh, Rackspace?
~llauren
Ah, when you put it that way, the picture is completely different! Now it looks to me like the upper half of, yes, a hacker, sitting by his/her terminal, facing to the left. The upper block is a head, the rest is the left shoulder-elbow-arm-hand.
This could lead to a whole new psychological science. Instead of showing us Rorschach ink blots, they could show us big 3x3 pixel pictures!
~llauren
52 m^2 is a lot when laid out. In comparison, my old (and probably quite a few others') student flat was about 19 m^2...
Hey, the car already has a cooling system. Real Men would just route some of the car's air conditioning to cool the computer (Real Women would probably be doing something more sensible).
Happy Sysadmin Day!
If cookies worry you, try the link from one of the advertisements. In includes your hostname or ip address. Even if i know this information gets logged with each web transaction, i still got a hiccup.
Happy SysAdmin Day!
But what is the point of such an application if you cannot get the values to input? Or do they mean that any Capable Geek should know that?
There is a wonderful little program, rather misleadingly named MiniGPS, which can tell you the Area ID, Cell ID and signal strength, measured in dBm, for any Series60 gsm phone (like my Nokia 3650 :). What makes this program Truly Nifty is that it can switch my profile to "not-at-work" when i am at home, and "at-work" when i'm there. Good stuff. All i now need to do is register the program... or just code my own ;)
So, if i don't update my department's machines before i'm off to holidays, something terrible might happen. And if i do update, and then head off for holiday, something will.
OK, maybe those machines will stay up for when i am away (yeah, right).
~rL
Actually, wouldn't three video projectors have done the same job, with more immersion and at a cheaper price?
Well, for me, my cell phone number has always been a part of my (geek) personality. Losing the operator number (-50) wouldn't be the end of the world, but the phone number is mine.
Having a list of users who are not on the operator the address sounds like a routing problem to me. You would need to list a bunch of numbers which need to be treated as "special cases", which would mean that every number called to would first need to be looked up.
Stupid.
Here's my solution: Reserve a prefix for the people who want to have a "perennial" telephone number, a kind of a "forwarding number". Heck, i have a few mail addresses myself that forward to another inbox. Shouldn't be too hard with telephones; they have call diverting there already. This is the same, innit?
On a side note, they will soon introduce the possibility to keep your number while changing operators here in Finland. The charging scheme was a bit complex. There are a few leading thoughts on telephone costs here. First, the caller should always know how much the call will cost. Second, the receiving party will not have to pay for answering the phone (unless s?he is abroad, and then pays for the forwarding costs from "home" to the destination). However, since different operator have different costs, who will then pay for the difference? Sure as heck not the operators...
I think Gromit looks really good, but the surroundings made me think "uh, Gromit Goes Half Mesa"... and i don't even play Half-Life (i don't need to -- i have a real life ;)
You can already get the approximate position of a (GSM) cell phone by triangulating (?) its position using the base stations the cell phone is connected to. The GPS chip addition (didn't know about this one, btw!) will just pinpoint you easier.
I really don't understand what the fuss is all about. The military has surely had this technology for ages, along with every thinkable agency and "enemy". It's just a normal radio frequency jammer, one in the long line of other technical warfare devices, like radio jammers and EMP guns to wipe out magnetical data or stop a car. It doesn't take an electrical engineer to invent one (well, actually, it does :).
All organizations have this technology, but it's only when it falls in the hand of the "stupid" (uncontrolled/uncontrollable) individual that these organizations start making noise.
The first thing i thought of when i saw the picture of the Duex was ``.. hmm, that's one nifty condom holder.''
Duex. Durex. Can't be a coincidence :)
Due to the technology involved, you'd have to sit straight in front of the monitor to see the picture in glorious three dee (correct me if i'm wrong here!).
Now if you were geeky enough to have a twin monitor setup (like i do at work), you would probably have to tweak the monitor angles to allow 3D on both displays. Also, you could not move (strafe) your head around too much, which i do all the time with these two monitors, or you'd lose the effect. Oh, and anybody looking at the display from the side, except from maybe certain angles, would not get three dee. But then, i payed for it, so it's my three dee ;)
On the other hand, since they will probably charge a truckoad of money for a relatively simple solution, few could probably afford two of these puppies.
Hmm.. i think the phone won't be too popular here in Europe; at least not while the system is on the same frequency as GSM. On the other hand, it's not on the "free" overpopulated 2.4 GHz (microwave, WLAN) area.
What i'd like to see is this phone working with a Bluetooth or DECT link instead. DECT would be better for range, but Bluetooth would be, well, niftier ;)
Why not put some piezoelectric technology in the players' tennis shoe while they're at it? Give some extra oomph into their spring :)
Still, how much power can this piezo element gather anyhow? Enough to drive a LED on the tennis shoe (or ball ;) or to actually do something useful? Somehow i feel that the power gained from the impact when the player hits the ball with his/her piezo-racket would not be too much, and so the dampening effect would be pretty weak. Or then they have very efficient (and lightweight) mechanics in it.
There's a book (fiction, pulp) called "Deep Lie" in which the russians had (among other fun things) a fleet of stealth WIG planes. At the time of reading that, last summer, i thought it was just nifty science fiction. Seems i was wrong :)
The book is light summer reading. Especially fun if you're from coastal Sweden, Finland or Estonia, which is where much of the stuff in the book takes place.
What i don't see is why a WIG plane couldn't be adapted for ground use.
~llauren
Time travel is a disturbing thing, at least to me. First, think that i would travel to tomorrow (keep it simple). The me of now would skip one day and exist only the day after this. Thus, i would not exist during the time between now and tomorrow (some people would rather enjoy that... "Hey, why not take a week while you're at it!").
But what freaks me out is that if i were to travel to yesterday, i would already exist in yesterday. After travelling there, there would thusly be two of me. But what would happen when yesterday became today, and say that one of me wouldn't care to go back to the day before? There would be two of me.
Forget cloning. Just time-travel me to one epsilon back in time, and there'd be two of me, only one epsilon different in age. Then repeat.
Time-transport some fascist-fundamentalist-idiotist back just a jiffy an umpteen times, and you have an army of fascist-fundamentalist-idiots. With guns and all.
Buy, now i'm scared!
Here in Finland we give our kids a cell phone. If they need to call home, they call home. If the parents need to call their kids, they can call their kids.
A friend of mind, father of a teenager, has a deal with his kid. He provides the phone + pays the bills (you can set a limit to that as well), as long as the kid promises to answer the phone when his father calls. If not rightaway --nobody should be forcedly tied to the phone-- then within reasonable time.
Even a one-or-two-character SMS message will do;
. = yes
! = sure! or, look behind you! i'm already here
The monochrome display seems a little dull, doesn't it. But, hey! Just add a green laser and a blue laser... and you've got RGB! Yow!
And i guess they will have the product safe when it's out on the market. I hope they don't screw up too many beta testers' vision while developing the Nomad.
~llaurén
From the BBC story (see above for link)
Researchers in Texas have cloned a cat, producing a two-month-old kitten called Cc:.
</bbc>
Doesn't anybody else think it's strange that they produced a two-month-old kitten by cloning? I mean, even cloned beings would be born at age zero.
On the other hand, we've seen adults born by cloning in the movies before, so why not a kitten?
There is a simple solution for this: a packet filtering modue at the operator's SMS software. And since Nokia wouldn't like their mobile phones to crash, they will of cource gladly supply such a patch, right :)
Since you can't update every single terminal (ie phone), you would have to filter out the bad messages at the operator. And why not. After all, that's the logical place.
It's just like bad packets get filtered out at the filewall/switch and not at the workstation.