"gas station" Sorry, not a native speaker, as you could have guessed already from my post. Anyway, for those interested, here a discussion on the same subject, this time in relation to the murder of an 18 year old girl: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/76270/from/ rss09. Or, instead of that, just watch a video of a drifting tank (set to crappy music, in true youtube style).
Simple psychology: by showing that they are crap in photoshopping, you are more inclined to believe the other other pics that don't look photoshopped will probably be real. Do we need to explain everything out here!;)
To pass toll roads in switzerland and austria, you need to glue tags on your window. You can buy them for cash and they are not person or car related at the moment of sale. Once glued to the window, you won't get them off undamaged, though, very sticky. Point is, any system to check these tags while you are passing by will always have to read your number plate and the tag at the same time, otherwise it will be too late to check the untagged car after it noticed that the tag is missing. Now it could not save the data of the tagged cars, but who garantuees you this? Therefore, there is no way to avoid reading number plates for toll collecting. Probably the same happens when you go to a gas station, btw, where any car is videotaped. Saving tapes for eternity probably doesn't make much sense for the gas station owner, and they'll probably rotate the tapes every week or so, but still, your license plate is automatically read.
The Zonbu and Koolu are too much net-dependent it seems, as they call them 'thin clients', which means there should be a server, or am I wrong.
I just want and need the EEE! I need a normal layout keyboard (the EEE's one is a bit smaller I read, but that should be doable), and an application to write stuff and use the internet if broadband is available. That is what the EEE will do, I also need an ssh-client, not sure if that will be installable. Also it won't break your back when carrying around and the thing even works on batteries, it seems. And it doesn't break your bank either. If this thing even is able to play youtube vids, there is no reason for any man/woman of this day and age not to have one!
Message to ASUS: release this thing in europe! fast!
No, I didn't introduce her to right-clicking, just finding stuff in the start menu was already more than difficult. I would like to install things for her, but I am living about 700 kms away, which makes things difficult. Trying to talk her to installation menus is a pain as well. The problem solved itself more or less as the laptop of someone else in the family broke and needed a replacement fast. Putting the icons on the desktop is a nice idea, but when they are covered you have to make the windows smaller (not close them) to get access to them. This is all very hard for her, which made me realize how counterintuitive most computer interaction is. Not all moms are the same, but mine would be a good one to test devices for user-friendliness.
If there ever was a treshold that would stop this due to privacy reasons, it has long been passed. The German Autobahns have a huge system covering almost all the Autobahns tracking trucks for billing reasons. It is now still forbidden by law to use the system for law enforcement, the tracking is done independently from police databases. Though, as recently one police officer got killed at a tank stop, for which the offenders could have been caught using this system, and with the paranoid Schäuble as minister of interior, it will probably not take long before the police gets full control over that database. Face it, registrations like this are pretty harmless on itself, but also a part of the slow and seemingly unstoppable, erosion of privacy.
I use linux at work. At some point one mount partition was changed by the admins (not even the $HOME), which rendered openoffice and many other programs (amarok) unusable. I can not even play a cd on the dual core intel machine now!!! Probably I have to put on nolock in the/etc/fstab or whatever to get it working again. How is this easy to configure??? And why should it happen in the first place. Sorry, I really like Linux, I use it every day, and it's much better now than it was before, but it's still a horrible way to get stuff done. I haven't used enough of mac osx to get a good opinion about that. I had some problems with the standard apple mouse, too sensitive for my hand movements, but for the rest it looks promising.
Keeping a computer running is an impossibility for almost all people. A friend of mine had a driver for a laptop that stopped working in XP. To exactly find out what the problem was and where to get the driver, I needed about an hour. And windows XP is one of the most serviceable OS-es around (high availability of drivers, many forums with help, etc.). Actually I am fed up with it. I've been looking at the asus EEE-PC which comes with a linux OS that seems to interact like a PDA. In the view movies available you can see that there are buttons for 'write' 'e-mail' 'internet' and that the likes. Well, for 99% of what I am doing, I just want that. For 100% of what my mother would do, that would be enough. I am looking forward to get one, if it is as simple as it looks, I'll get one for my mother too.
Why? Because at the moment my mother will not use a computer, because almost every other action you do you will get a pop-up, asking you to decide on a technical question, with lots of choices. If you are not computer literate, this is a HUGE barrier to start. And what's up with the clicking. Sometimes you right-click, sometimes you left-click, sometimes you have to double click, sometimes you have to hold the button pressed. My mother asked me when you have to double-click and when not. Say, in the start menu, one click will be enough to start an application. But on the desktop, you'll have to double-click.
I hope the OPLC will be a bit like that, removing the non-obvious computer behavior that has settled itself into almost every desktop GUI around. As for your example about the kid, he was doing something technical, working with foreigners, getting used to the kind of work that is done with computers. Those skills start you up and get you somewhere. As a 16 year old I brought the newspaper around, how is that for a useless skill? But you learn how to deal with angry costumers, get responsibility (early starts!), and lots of things you add to your the luggage that make you who you are.
Do you have any clue how things happen in 90% of the world? You don't pay someone $100 per hour to repair for you, you do it yourself. Why are the still so many 80's versions of the Toyota Landcruiser around? Because you can repair them without high-tech equipment. Ideally the OPLC will be around a lot, and if there is one with a broken screen, and one with a broken motherboard, you can make one working laptop out of these two without having to send it somewhere or ask a repair shop. That is one laptop saved, a lot of money saved, and one family more that can write letters, have access to all the information on the internet, etc. This are small steps with huge implications, and that is what makes the world go round.
The cappuccino pcs have some pros I overlooked BTW, that is industrial grade quality and the availability of solid state industrial quality hard drives. Actually, with that in mind, they are in need a good price for what they're worth.
500 dollar for the base model with a celeron processor. Add 160 to go to the simplest core 2 duo, and you already passed the mac mini. Furthermore, apple learned from their mistakes and now deliver the mac mini with nothing less than 1 GB of ram. The cappuccino pc starts with 256 mb. I like the color options (black). If it would give me either half the mac for half the price, or the same as the mac for less than the price of a mac, this would be good for me. I don't care about the OS too much, I don't like any of them (based on recent experiences with all of them). I just need a machine to run some sort of office, watch DVDs, use the internets, and hear my music.
Indeed! I have been looking at mini-itx websites a bit and especially the casings are very costly! A question of bulk-economics I guess. It is such a shame that via has a small chance to get anywhere with these small costly systems. Also notebooks, for example, I can get a 400 euro notebook with the c7, but then only 256 meg of ram and a dvd/cd writer combination. Make this into something useful and you end up with the price of a fully-specced bottom line Dell. This VIA stuff should at least half their prices to get anywhere. A light 250 euro notebook with low specs and long battery life would be ideal for trips, and sell pretty well I guess. At the moment, VIA is just not there.
Ah, can you help me out here! Few points: (1.) I did the same on my VIA C3, as I found out that the CPU has a Northbridge fan-connector. I removed the very noisy 4 cm fan and replaced it with a Zallman heat sink. Unfortunately, the heatsink doesn't stick to well and always moves around over the chip, so if I accidentally hit the case the system reboots. I used the heatsink paste that came with it, but that seems only for conducting the heat, not helping the sticking. The two northbridge fan connector pins are not enough to keep it in place either. Any suggestions? (2.) Futhermore, since I replaced this, it slowed down a lot, and I have even slower video, and dvd decoding doesn't work anymore. I use some weird cybertrident onboard graphics card 4MB with DVD 'optimization' (yeah right). Do you use an external video card? I only have pci connectors, I am thinking about one of the last cards you can get for this, I can get a ATI Radeon 9250 for 60 euros (also fanless), any luck to get linux working with that? (3.) Noise: my harddrive makes the most noise now. Also the casing resonates along with the HD and power supply fans. How did you solve that? Which HD would be good? I need simple ATA IDE, so about 80 GB disk would be nice (4.) Do you have a fanless power supply?
I would be happy of you could help me further here!
As for this new system, if I look at the picture it has a non-default heath-sink covering the whole motherboard, so removing the fan with this heat sink doesn't help. But as someone else said, they might make a fanless version as they usually do.
I like this kind of stuff, but after comparing what building a system with this material would cost me, a mac mini would be way cheaper, and with the core duo in it, a heck of a lot faster as well.
So it might be practical in embedded applications where the size matters (that thing is so small, incredible). But for those things, having a fan is big downer! Fan means: can break down, means: will break down, means: maintenance costs! Will there be a fanless version?
The use of the word 'intentionally' makes your statistics plausible, the unintentional people that just use what they got is probably still the majority, though.
News of the day: amount of downloads and usage are not the same measurement methods. However, server logs catch the http headers sent by the browsers, still one of the more usable methods of measurement (except for browsers that stealth themselves as other browsers).
Anything that will be involved in medical treatment will have to undergo severe and standardized testing, starting in small trials and increasing the scale at every step. This is why a new drug takes about 10 years to be developed and it should stay that way, you cannot make this a parallel process without risking lives. Only when the severity of the disease exceeds any negative side effects the new treatment can have (e.g. very seldom high-mortality diseases) will the new treatment be set in at a higher speed.
The problem remains however, that the human defense system is amazingly complicated and based on specific protein interactions, with an immense diversity of proteins available. As soon as a treatment as shown here comes out, there is a big chance that a batch of people will not do well under the treatment, due to protein-protein interactions only appearing in individual cases. Just look at the antibody treatment that went wrong in the phase trials recently. I think that these kind of "living material" treatments still need new rigorous standard tests developed to test dangerous side-effects in advance. This will be more complicated than the tests performed on pharmaceutical drugs, as we are dealing with much more complicated systems here. The potential is high, but what we don't need are another few cases of new treatments going wrong. Extreme carefulness and patience is needed.
The final problem which is also the most difficult one to foresee, is how the treatment will be prescribed. New treatments often go to the people for which other treatment didn't work well enough, 'hard cases', who are mostly also the people with a lot of additional health problems. The tests were done on people with isolated health problems, fitting to the treatment. No-one can predict what will happen during this real-life usage, research the Baycol incident if you want to see a recent case of a release gone wrong, bringing down the whole pharmaceutical company that developed it. The drug itself was probably not bad, just not fitted to the people who it ended up being subscribed to. There is no standardized test to prevent this (yet?).
Amen to that. Just the other day I tried a demo PSP in the media store, hadn't touched one ever before. Now it didn't have any playable games on it, but instead a menu with demos. The thing has a horrible navigation!! The idea of using a circle, a square, a triangle and a cross might have been a good idea at the developer's brainstorming session, but how does this relate to how I think? Since the first GUIs I used, early 90s, the cross has been the sign to exit an application. On the PSP, it enters a menu or feature! To go back I had to press either the square (or the triangle, I cannot remember as it didn't really relate) or every now and then the top right button on the side of the thing. As for all the other functions, I had to think how the engineers have meant it to work to get anywhere. At some point this required unplugging the power cable to exit a menu (but that was maybe just bad demo software).
I think it shows how these machines are built by engineers, for engineering-puzzles-loving people. But guess what, most of us just want to relax, stop thinking and play a game without being frustrated. For all other things, there is something called "paid work".
Do you really believe that this scared MS? It just showed them that the one with the biggest amount of patent lawyers will win. Do you really think they will give up the stupid patents (wasn't there one on an 'isnot' patent?) in the MS patent-folder because they won a patent battle with another company? Nope.
Still let me be an optimist and hope that in the long run at least, the amount of new useless patents will diminish with all the recent victories of common sense.
For the Germans among us I can recommend the books of Thomas Vilgis. It doesn't cover the total range of food science and food history as McGee does, but does a nice job bringing the main physical principles of food technology.
As for the people that confuse this 'molecular gastronomy' with 'Engineered food' and preprocessed food, you miss the point. It is about taking the normal ingredients, you could even get it from the organic food store if you want, but trying to understand what the background-cause is of, for example, the cake that went wrong, or how to make a well-done steak. This can all be done without any chemical additives, just using good ingredients and the knowledge of the cooking process. This knowledge is still lacking a lot, it is very complicated physics and chemistry here, you also need to have a background in both to fully understand what is happening.
Well, the key still has the shape of a normal key.
A german company DOM has a bunch of new keys with movable elements inside the key, that already looks like a hard one to copy, I have no clue how this will affect lockpicking. It will probably be costly to get inside a room with a lock like this if the key accidentally gets lost.
manhole covers get stolen here in Europe too, metal is worth a lot these days. There are even gangs steeling whole electricity cables. I've never heard of someone cutting themselves through a wall, though I wonder how these houses look like, like trailers? Houses here mostly have "Aerated autoclaved concrete" bricks in the walls, which aren't very valuable, and will probably break when you try to remove them. Easy to break when you drive a small truck in such a wall, but no change to cut it through with a knife.
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I would mod this insightful, but, as with so many things, it is funny because it is true.
"gas station" Sorry, not a native speaker, as you could have guessed already from my post. Anyway, for those interested, here a discussion on the same subject, this time in relation to the murder of an 18 year old girl: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/76270/from/ rss09. Or, instead of that, just watch a video of a drifting tank (set to crappy music, in true youtube style).
Simple psychology: by showing that they are crap in photoshopping, you are more inclined to believe the other other pics that don't look photoshopped will probably be real. Do we need to explain everything out here! ;)
The commercials will probably be better than the other crap we will get to see. And more honest too, since at least they admit they are advertising.
To pass toll roads in switzerland and austria, you need to glue tags on your window. You can buy them for cash and they are not person or car related at the moment of sale. Once glued to the window, you won't get them off undamaged, though, very sticky. Point is, any system to check these tags while you are passing by will always have to read your number plate and the tag at the same time, otherwise it will be too late to check the untagged car after it noticed that the tag is missing. Now it could not save the data of the tagged cars, but who garantuees you this? Therefore, there is no way to avoid reading number plates for toll collecting. Probably the same happens when you go to a gas station, btw, where any car is videotaped. Saving tapes for eternity probably doesn't make much sense for the gas station owner, and they'll probably rotate the tapes every week or so, but still, your license plate is automatically read.
I just want and need the EEE! I need a normal layout keyboard (the EEE's one is a bit smaller I read, but that should be doable), and an application to write stuff and use the internet if broadband is available. That is what the EEE will do, I also need an ssh-client, not sure if that will be installable. Also it won't break your back when carrying around and the thing even works on batteries, it seems. And it doesn't break your bank either. If this thing even is able to play youtube vids, there is no reason for any man/woman of this day and age not to have one!
Message to ASUS: release this thing in europe! fast!
No, I didn't introduce her to right-clicking, just finding stuff in the start menu was already more than difficult. I would like to install things for her, but I am living about 700 kms away, which makes things difficult. Trying to talk her to installation menus is a pain as well. The problem solved itself more or less as the laptop of someone else in the family broke and needed a replacement fast. Putting the icons on the desktop is a nice idea, but when they are covered you have to make the windows smaller (not close them) to get access to them. This is all very hard for her, which made me realize how counterintuitive most computer interaction is. Not all moms are the same, but mine would be a good one to test devices for user-friendliness.
If there ever was a treshold that would stop this due to privacy reasons, it has long been passed. The German Autobahns have a huge system covering almost all the Autobahns tracking trucks for billing reasons. It is now still forbidden by law to use the system for law enforcement, the tracking is done independently from police databases. Though, as recently one police officer got killed at a tank stop, for which the offenders could have been caught using this system, and with the paranoid Schäuble as minister of interior, it will probably not take long before the police gets full control over that database. Face it, registrations like this are pretty harmless on itself, but also a part of the slow and seemingly unstoppable, erosion of privacy.
I use linux at work. At some point one mount partition was changed by the admins (not even the $HOME), which rendered openoffice and many other programs (amarok) unusable. I can not even play a cd on the dual core intel machine now!!! Probably I have to put on nolock in the /etc/fstab or whatever to get it working again. How is this easy to configure??? And why should it happen in the first place. Sorry, I really like Linux, I use it every day, and it's much better now than it was before, but it's still a horrible way to get stuff done. I haven't used enough of mac osx to get a good opinion about that. I had some problems with the standard apple mouse, too sensitive for my hand movements, but for the rest it looks promising.
Why? Because at the moment my mother will not use a computer, because almost every other action you do you will get a pop-up, asking you to decide on a technical question, with lots of choices. If you are not computer literate, this is a HUGE barrier to start. And what's up with the clicking. Sometimes you right-click, sometimes you left-click, sometimes you have to double click, sometimes you have to hold the button pressed. My mother asked me when you have to double-click and when not. Say, in the start menu, one click will be enough to start an application. But on the desktop, you'll have to double-click.
I hope the OPLC will be a bit like that, removing the non-obvious computer behavior that has settled itself into almost every desktop GUI around. As for your example about the kid, he was doing something technical, working with foreigners, getting used to the kind of work that is done with computers. Those skills start you up and get you somewhere. As a 16 year old I brought the newspaper around, how is that for a useless skill? But you learn how to deal with angry costumers, get responsibility (early starts!), and lots of things you add to your the luggage that make you who you are.
Do you have any clue how things happen in 90% of the world? You don't pay someone $100 per hour to repair for you, you do it yourself. Why are the still so many 80's versions of the Toyota Landcruiser around? Because you can repair them without high-tech equipment. Ideally the OPLC will be around a lot, and if there is one with a broken screen, and one with a broken motherboard, you can make one working laptop out of these two without having to send it somewhere or ask a repair shop. That is one laptop saved, a lot of money saved, and one family more that can write letters, have access to all the information on the internet, etc. This are small steps with huge implications, and that is what makes the world go round.
(sorry about this)
The cappuccino pcs have some pros I overlooked BTW, that is industrial grade quality and the availability of solid state industrial quality hard drives. Actually, with that in mind, they are in need a good price for what they're worth.
500 dollar for the base model with a celeron processor. Add 160 to go to the simplest core 2 duo, and you already passed the mac mini. Furthermore, apple learned from their mistakes and now deliver the mac mini with nothing less than 1 GB of ram. The cappuccino pc starts with 256 mb. I like the color options (black). If it would give me either half the mac for half the price, or the same as the mac for less than the price of a mac, this would be good for me. I don't care about the OS too much, I don't like any of them (based on recent experiences with all of them). I just need a machine to run some sort of office, watch DVDs, use the internets, and hear my music.
Indeed! I have been looking at mini-itx websites a bit and especially the casings are very costly! A question of bulk-economics I guess. It is such a shame that via has a small chance to get anywhere with these small costly systems. Also notebooks, for example, I can get a 400 euro notebook with the c7, but then only 256 meg of ram and a dvd/cd writer combination. Make this into something useful and you end up with the price of a fully-specced bottom line Dell. This VIA stuff should at least half their prices to get anywhere. A light 250 euro notebook with low specs and long battery life would be ideal for trips, and sell pretty well I guess. At the moment, VIA is just not there.
(1.) I did the same on my VIA C3, as I found out that the CPU has a Northbridge fan-connector. I removed the very noisy 4 cm fan and replaced it with a Zallman heat sink. Unfortunately, the heatsink doesn't stick to well and always moves around over the chip, so if I accidentally hit the case the system reboots. I used the heatsink paste that came with it, but that seems only for conducting the heat, not helping the sticking. The two northbridge fan connector pins are not enough to keep it in place either. Any suggestions?
(2.) Futhermore, since I replaced this, it slowed down a lot, and I have even slower video, and dvd decoding doesn't work anymore. I use some weird cybertrident onboard graphics card 4MB with DVD 'optimization' (yeah right). Do you use an external video card? I only have pci connectors, I am thinking about one of the last cards you can get for this, I can get a ATI Radeon 9250 for 60 euros (also fanless), any luck to get linux working with that?
(3.) Noise: my harddrive makes the most noise now. Also the casing resonates along with the HD and power supply fans. How did you solve that? Which HD would be good? I need simple ATA IDE, so about 80 GB disk would be nice
(4.) Do you have a fanless power supply?
I would be happy of you could help me further here!
As for this new system, if I look at the picture it has a non-default heath-sink covering the whole motherboard, so removing the fan with this heat sink doesn't help. But as someone else said, they might make a fanless version as they usually do.
So it might be practical in embedded applications where the size matters (that thing is so small, incredible). But for those things, having a fan is big downer! Fan means: can break down, means: will break down, means: maintenance costs! Will there be a fanless version?
The use of the word 'intentionally' makes your statistics plausible, the unintentional people that just use what they got is probably still the majority, though. News of the day: amount of downloads and usage are not the same measurement methods. However, server logs catch the http headers sent by the browsers, still one of the more usable methods of measurement (except for browsers that stealth themselves as other browsers).
The problem remains however, that the human defense system is amazingly complicated and based on specific protein interactions, with an immense diversity of proteins available. As soon as a treatment as shown here comes out, there is a big chance that a batch of people will not do well under the treatment, due to protein-protein interactions only appearing in individual cases. Just look at the antibody treatment that went wrong in the phase trials recently. I think that these kind of "living material" treatments still need new rigorous standard tests developed to test dangerous side-effects in advance. This will be more complicated than the tests performed on pharmaceutical drugs, as we are dealing with much more complicated systems here. The potential is high, but what we don't need are another few cases of new treatments going wrong. Extreme carefulness and patience is needed.
The final problem which is also the most difficult one to foresee, is how the treatment will be prescribed. New treatments often go to the people for which other treatment didn't work well enough, 'hard cases', who are mostly also the people with a lot of additional health problems. The tests were done on people with isolated health problems, fitting to the treatment. No-one can predict what will happen during this real-life usage, research the Baycol incident if you want to see a recent case of a release gone wrong, bringing down the whole pharmaceutical company that developed it. The drug itself was probably not bad, just not fitted to the people who it ended up being subscribed to. There is no standardized test to prevent this (yet?).
I think it shows how these machines are built by engineers, for engineering-puzzles-loving people. But guess what, most of us just want to relax, stop thinking and play a game without being frustrated. For all other things, there is something called "paid work".
fax & scan capabilities? My 1996 IBM Aptiva with windows 95 had fax & scan capabilities!
Still let me be an optimist and hope that in the long run at least, the amount of new useless patents will diminish with all the recent victories of common sense.
As for the people that confuse this 'molecular gastronomy' with 'Engineered food' and preprocessed food, you miss the point. It is about taking the normal ingredients, you could even get it from the organic food store if you want, but trying to understand what the background-cause is of, for example, the cake that went wrong, or how to make a well-done steak. This can all be done without any chemical additives, just using good ingredients and the knowledge of the cooking process. This knowledge is still lacking a lot, it is very complicated physics and chemistry here, you also need to have a background in both to fully understand what is happening.
Well, the key still has the shape of a normal key. A german company DOM has a bunch of new keys with movable elements inside the key, that already looks like a hard one to copy, I have no clue how this will affect lockpicking. It will probably be costly to get inside a room with a lock like this if the key accidentally gets lost.
manhole covers get stolen here in Europe too, metal is worth a lot these days. There are even gangs steeling whole electricity cables. I've never heard of someone cutting themselves through a wall, though I wonder how these houses look like, like trailers? Houses here mostly have "Aerated autoclaved concrete" bricks in the walls, which aren't very valuable, and will probably break when you try to remove them. Easy to break when you drive a small truck in such a wall, but no change to cut it through with a knife.