Back then I was thinking of how this could overcome the heating problem we would get if we could change the characteristics of each transistor in a 3D layered transistor array. Imagine having a FPGA with 10x10x10 layers, all cross addressable and connectable, Diagonally as well as parallel.
[quote] It may be the biggest art hack ever: a project to install 25,000 individually addressable LED lights [/quote]
Uhm, have you ever seen peoples Christmas led projects? Google it, check it on youtube. There are literally roofs made as video screens with millions of leds all over the house, all individually addressable.
Your post sends me mixed messages. First you are telling us that you started out with Qbasic (that's pretty old-school, that's from when I was a kid, and I'm no youngin anymore I can tell ya)...and then you're asking about internship. From where I come from, internship is for the kids right out of school, not for 40-50 year old computer dinosaurs like you and me (if...you're around my age). I've been around since Pong and Zx-80(81) days, democoder on C-64, Amiga, Atari etc...In fact, I know that if I where to start all over again, I'd go the education way today....back in the days, things where different, you could just take any computer and code stuff from scratch, no libraries, no pre defined variables, no gazillion calls to various OS related libraries and locales.
If you're indeed in my age group, then I can offer a little advice, it may not be right for you, but chances are - if you're like me, then you're better off following your passion instead of trying to start off where the kids today are starting, they'll rip you apart and probably reverse engineer your soul (not kidding about that) before you can say DirectX.
Find a special niche instead, use your "old school" abilities where it'll do you real good, that's what I do. Even though I have all the latest gear, latest ARM microcontroller kits from TI and whatnot and love to play with my toys, I'll be no match for any kid around 20 today that knows his worth in salt.
You have to weigh in the choices of what you REALLY want do do. After 30+ years in IT, I've toned things down, trying to find real meaning in life instead, discover new places, see where my ready-knowledge can be put to good use, repair arcade machines perhaps? Old retro collectors items can be worth a fortune, not to mention the old mainframe systems no young person seem to know, who's going to repair and maintain those? Etc...find a niche, and you'll find happiness.
Like you, I grew up in the 80's with Commodore64, Atari, Amiga, BBC, Dragon32 (and yuck, ugly green PC and overpriced Apple), the toys where battling like crazy to set the standard for the future, rarely anyone did - but they did SOMETHING important, they made everything we have today - possible, faster processors made digital home video editing and cable-by-internet possible, it also made it possible for us to toss away the entire laptop, and carry the entire world in our pockets, Smartphones aren't THAT old, but very practical. I wouldn't want to be without one. It releases me from sitting in front of the computer, and I can basically do what I need - right in the middle of the forest if that need be.
But you're right, most of todays "revolutionary" gadgets, doesn't have the same feel of "revolution", because most toys can do what the other toys already does. And we usually end up paying for ALL THE TOYS, since each toy have their OWN LICENSE for different games, videos, net-services, functions etc. Which sucks.
I just bought the Nintendo Wii U (against my better judgement), But I was REALLY hungry for something new. Sure...it's a touch screen king size play-doh fisher-price remote control, I guess thats new...but it's nothing new as a whole...everything has been done before, and in a few days...I just got bored again.
I have far more fun inventing my own gadgets in my electronics lab, here I have millions of Discretes (components from the 80-90s and even today), and can hack together really weird stuff.
When I grew up, this was normal for kids, they too went to the local electronics store - modded their Commodore 64 to get faster loading times etc. Built their own modems to communicate digitally via HAM radio (or just a cheapo CB radio) with some simple components, cheap off the shelves.
I used to be a demo-coder / gfx artist back in the C-64 & Amiga days, we did both ASCII art, and pixel art.
Geek art is special to us, I'm in my 40's and amongst some of the "geek" artist pieces I do - is with 80's electronics components, I puzzle them together as "working art", meaning...it's like a digital sculpture that can be hung up on the wall, and it can DO stuff;)
Some of my friends make pixel art with beads & pearls, Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man etc. Very cool stuff. It's a special generation that will be remembered for this art. I can pretty much guarantee you that original artwork from those days will be worth a fortune in the future, pretty much like certain collectible games and retro computers are now.
Welcome to the MS experience - Metro. Shoot to kill in style!
Instructions:
To aim and launch missile: 1) Swipe the screen to bring up the monitor section. 2) Monitor your target and doubletap on the suspect. 3) Swipe an "X" across each target you want to eliminate. 4) Doubletap to confirm.
If you get an error message: 16472112.13a41d1e.00123dq2.1337effd then please contact customer service. Thank you for sharing your Microsoft Experience.
I have what I like to call a "Dumb-TV", made by the brand Denver Electronics. No seriously, it's the dumbest TV on the planet. It's marketed as a "Smart-TV", but read on, and make your own judgement:
It's your typical super feature filled tv, with recording capabilities, Digital TV (DVB-T & C etc.). Media Playback, Pictures, Videos and whatnot... Wonderful...if it actually worked...
1) Every time I turn on the TV, the TV goes into Schizo-mode. I'll give you 2 channels today...no...4 channels...if you wait 10 more minutes, maybe 10 channels. 2) If you try to watch video via the scart plug (eg, the DVD player), sometimes it comes up with a message: No activity, want to turn off? (It waits until you press ok or cancel) 3) Sometimes it falls asleep - while still on, then a menu will sit and wait for you, until you press OK. (means...backlight still on, a small square saying "No activity for a while, sleep? OK or CANCEL" 4) When you insert a USB memory...it will let you watch TV for 20 seconds, before this HUGE menu covers the ENTIRE screen, geefully informing you of all your amazing multi-media experiences awaiting you. USB CARD INSERTED - OK? OK or CANCEL... The idiot TV will block your TV viewing until you take action. 5) It's amazing schizophrenic mode will be sure to forget that your USB CARD has already been inserted the last time, so the next time you turn on the TV, it will let you watch TV for half a minute before finally....UH OH...You have an USB CARD INSERTED...HERE's a GIANT menu to block your TV, now make a choice!!! 6) Sometimes it will FIGHT you for ON/OFF mode. Is it on? Maybe it doesn't WANT to be turned on?! You press ON...the LED indicates that it understands, starts searching but decides to fall asleep instead.. OH you meant ON?! OK...press TWICE...and the TV is ON! 7) And it loves to inform you about useless stuff...such as.... CHANNEL 7 or 9 aren't currently transmitting, want to delete these unused channels? YES, No, Cancel! 8) It'll do this until you run out of channels.:)
Russel Crowe throwing phones at people may be closer to reality than you think.</p></quote>
MMmm... now there is a horrifying picture, Russel Crowe and phones...in 3D!
Speaking of 3D, here's a free idea...albeit I think something similar has been done with a normal screen:
1) Get yourself one of those transparent OLED displays. 2) Put it on a spinning motor (clocked and timed and synched) 3) Calculate where the pixels should be in 3D space when the screen is spinning. Voila. Real 3D, now you can look anywhere you want.
Actually, It's been around for a while, but there is a new technique that works better than you may ever have seen, I've seen it, needs some brushing up - but it works far better than Nintendo 3DS & LG Optimus 3D type parallax glasses free screens.
This screen was demoed in Copenhagen, I think it was about 6 years ago at the 3D festival, it was the most impressive "parallax type" plasma screen I've ever seen, it was a movement based parallax screen, albeit limited to about 30-40 cm of "walking" before you would clearly see a "shift" that breaks up the image, but it was very convincing, you COULD in fact LOOK AROUND the object, albeit limited, but FAR better than the stereoscopic parallax images that the 3D phones & Nintendo have.
I bet that'll blow your mind too. But for now, the technology is just too expensive, as you'd need at least 10 tracks of 3D video (same film from 10 different angles) just to use this technology, better yet...if it was real 3D rendering data (eg. rendering in real-time) you'd be limiting this technology to animated movies only (which I think...was the case of that screen they demoed).
But I can promise you this, the technology is here, I bet ya won't like the price tag.
American kids (or any other kid for that matter) aren't as dumb and unintuitive as we may want to think.
Because of this, we have the "maker generation" today. These are kids of any age that build stuff out of anything they have laying around. What can be more creative than that? Lego is no different, except it was made with the very idea that you could make anything you want out of these building blocks. Just take a look at Lego Mindstorm to get an idea about what I'm talking about here. (And of course, google make magazine, and makers everywhere).
American kids are just as curious and impressive to me as they where back in the days where we used electronics kits to build stuff with. Many of the kids today make LEVELS for video games and that is just as creative or advanced as what we did back in our days. (I'm in my mid forties and grew up with Lego and Electronics).
...that people back in those days actually believed that the moon was one BIG ball of cheese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_is_made_of_green_cheese
You could just plug it in, and play straight away few seconds later, nothing beats that feeling. Today everything has to boot forever, it takes several minutes just to wait for another game to boot up, I hate that. I live with it, but I don't like it.
With todays amazing solid state drive developments, this shouldn't be impossible. USB-memory sticks costs almost as little as CD's and Floppy Disks did back in the days, so we're getting there.
Well...I guess when you start misreading slashdot and ends up a bunch of people calling you troll, then it's a pretty good sign you had enough to drink, eh?;) It's kind of like at the bar, when you're rambling tin foil theories and your friends have long left the table...
It's not easy for her, she has probably heard all this fuzz about RFID tags and who knows what she thinks those things are. Yes they can transmit a radio signal, yes they can contain and ID number, heck they can even contain a complete picture of the girl, including name, address and anything else you want to put on a ROM/Ram chip in there.
But I've experimenting with RF (radio transmissions basically ALL my life as a radio amateur, yes...I'm one of those that build and construct my own gear, so I know a bit about this stuff), and I can tell you...any ID badge of this size, will not - and CAN not - due to laws of physics and much more, transmit a signal over any significant distance, not to mention battery capacity in a small badge like that (trust me on this one, I've been building and constructing record breaking bugging devices that can reach over 1km over 3 weeks on a 3v battery) and I know for a fact, you simply - can not - break the laws of physics when it comes to burning energy and emissions etc. reach that far with those badges, it just isn't possible. YET.
But I can understand her, she's a layman, she have NO clue if this is possible or not, given that scenario - I think myself...I'd refuse to carry any sort of RFID badge, if I suspected that it would do me no good, and would be of no use to me. Who knows? I've worked at several schools - and we do have RFID badges to open doors, usually accompanied with a 4 digit code we need to enter after exposing the badge to the reader surface. Even so, this RFID signal is read and transmitted several inches if not less, of no use to any sniffers or spies nearby. So no worries there. But then again, understanding this, requires knowledge, of which I suspect - she has none.
...depending how LONG that person has been a techie though.
Most over 40's techies have an experience that the younger techies doesn't even have (and would LOVE to have), is the hands-on experience how the insides of a computer REALLY work. Sure, any young technician can learn to program, anyone of them can complete any engineering course and school, with brilliant results, but that's just it - results aren't what they used to be. We have a LOT of theory today, they rarely get to try everything out in real life.
Sitting and working in front of a computer, with simulated circuits simply won't provide the total knowledge, and even though they can come up with amazing new innovations, show fantastic skills etc. many of them come short if they fail to see why their design doesn't work as well in real life as in the simulated environment.
This is where us old techies simply excel over the youngsters. I've had numerous dazed looks on the various younger techs faces when I within few seconds to minutes, points out the flaw in their design, when they eagerly show me formulas and huge math equations + simulations to show me how "flawless" their design SHOULD be, and desperately want me to agree with their designs. Then I show them HOW it COULD be done, and many of them say - what you just did doesn't make sense - but it work - it shouldn't work - but it works.
To us old techies, the inner workings of everything, from scratch, from transistors to assembly code etc. are second nature, because we grew up with everything from scratch. We weren't served a huge bunch of books, a ready to use computer with a gazillion libraries, we often had to construct everything from scratch, including designing the logic, often on a breadboard - programming the OS ourselves etc.
So techies over 40 with experience from the start of it all - can't even be replaced.
I would like a calculator to be just a calculator and nothing else.
One of the things that I like about my TI83+ is that when I power it on, it's there, ready to use instantly. I also have the TI-nspire with the 84+ keypad plugin, and it's a joke. If I don't use it for a few days, the system has to RE-LOAD and it's like booting windows on a calculator, very annoying. And the touch-pad is a joke too. You have to fiddle with it for minutes in order to have the arrow appear.
TI - find back to your roots, let a calculator just be a calculator. I want it to be ready when I am.
Like a little slip of a cover is worth the bitching !! Deal with it !! Live with it !! Take it like a man !! Or are you a little girl crying because her doll's clothing has a wrinkle !!
sometimes I want to know which neighborhood I'm about to waste several hundred thousand dollars on, googling people, finding out who their friends are, who they hang out with, what they are like - can tell me quite a lot about what I'm to expect of the neighborhood. I don't feel like moving in next to hells angels & gangsta territory, or a drug infested area.
I usually don't bother googling people, but if they BOTHER me - eg. don't play nice...then I consider googling them and beyond. By nice I mean common nice polite behavior, doesn't bully me, my neighbors or friends...in other words - perfectly normal people. If you're a bully and approach me in a "this is MY turf" kind of manner, you can betcha I'll do much more than google you, I'll dig in the deep underworld of the internet, I'll google who you hang out with, note all the cars registration numbers that is parked in front of your place, google their friends, search and map everyone until I have you at a spot where I know I can protect me from you.
It's very rare for me to have to act on someone, out of the numerous times I've dug into peoples lives...I've only needed that kind of information TWICE. Once was when a smart-mouth tried ridiculing me in front of potential friends and acquaintances, I didn't say anything. Dug like mad into everything he did, had done, past and present. Came back. Next time he tried to smart-mouth me, I handed him little hints and tidbits about what I know about him, such as - oh yeah...and your business...wasn't your company under investigation back in 1998? I remember reading about that somewhere in a newspaper...good memory eh?
Shut him up - right away. And he did nothing but talk nice about me and to me after that.
Same story for the other case. So yeah...play nice, behave like you want others to behave, and everything will be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Check this video out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEof8E2cF8o
Back then I was thinking of how this could overcome the heating problem we would get if we could change the characteristics of each transistor in a 3D layered transistor array. Imagine having a FPGA with 10x10x10 layers, all cross addressable and connectable, Diagonally as well as parallel.
[quote] It may be the biggest art hack ever: a project to install 25,000 individually addressable LED lights [/quote]
Uhm, have you ever seen peoples Christmas led projects? Google it, check it on youtube. There are literally roofs made as video screens with millions of leds all over the house, all individually addressable.
Your post sends me mixed messages. First you are telling us that you started out with Qbasic (that's pretty old-school, that's from when I was a kid, and I'm no youngin anymore I can tell ya)...and then you're asking about internship. From where I come from, internship is for the kids right out of school, not for 40-50 year old computer dinosaurs like you and me (if ...you're around my age). I've been around since Pong and Zx-80(81) days, democoder on C-64, Amiga, Atari etc...In fact, I know that if I where to start all over again, I'd go the education way today....back in the days, things where different, you could just take any computer and code stuff from scratch, no libraries, no pre defined variables, no gazillion calls to various OS related libraries and locales.
If you're indeed in my age group, then I can offer a little advice, it may not be right for you, but chances are - if you're like me, then you're better off following your passion instead of trying to start off where the kids today are starting, they'll rip you apart and probably reverse engineer your soul (not kidding about that) before you can say DirectX.
Find a special niche instead, use your "old school" abilities where it'll do you real good, that's what I do. Even though I have all the latest gear, latest ARM microcontroller kits from TI and whatnot and love to play with my toys, I'll be no match for any kid around 20 today that knows his worth in salt.
You have to weigh in the choices of what you REALLY want do do. After 30+ years in IT, I've toned things down, trying to find real meaning in life instead, discover new places, see where my ready-knowledge can be put to good use, repair arcade machines perhaps? Old retro collectors items can be worth a fortune, not to mention the old mainframe systems no young person seem to know, who's going to repair and maintain those? Etc...find a niche, and you'll find happiness.
So true.
Like you, I grew up in the 80's with Commodore64, Atari, Amiga, BBC, Dragon32 (and yuck, ugly green PC and overpriced Apple), the toys where battling like crazy to set the standard for the future, rarely anyone did - but they did SOMETHING important, they made everything we have today - possible, faster processors made digital home video editing and cable-by-internet possible, it also made it possible for us to toss away the entire laptop, and carry the entire world in our pockets, Smartphones aren't THAT old, but very practical. I wouldn't want to be without one. It releases me from sitting in front of the computer, and I can basically do what I need - right in the middle of the forest if that need be.
But you're right, most of todays "revolutionary" gadgets, doesn't have the same feel of "revolution", because most toys can do what the other toys already does. And we usually end up paying for ALL THE TOYS, since each toy have their OWN LICENSE for different games, videos, net-services, functions etc. Which sucks.
I just bought the Nintendo Wii U (against my better judgement), But I was REALLY hungry for something new. Sure...it's a touch screen king size play-doh fisher-price remote control, I guess thats new...but it's nothing new as a whole...everything has been done before, and in a few days...I just got bored again.
I have far more fun inventing my own gadgets in my electronics lab, here I have millions of Discretes (components from the 80-90s and even today), and can hack together really weird stuff.
When I grew up, this was normal for kids, they too went to the local electronics store - modded their Commodore 64 to get faster loading times etc. Built their own modems to communicate digitally via HAM radio (or just a cheapo CB radio) with some simple components, cheap off the shelves.
This world really needs something *new*
I used to be a demo-coder / gfx artist back in the C-64 & Amiga days, we did both ASCII art, and pixel art.
;)
Geek art is special to us, I'm in my 40's and amongst some of the "geek" artist pieces I do - is with 80's electronics components, I puzzle them together as "working art", meaning...it's like a digital sculpture that can be hung up on the wall, and it can DO stuff
Some of my friends make pixel art with beads & pearls, Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man etc. Very cool stuff. It's a special generation that will be remembered for this art. I can pretty much guarantee you that original artwork from those days will be worth a fortune in the future, pretty much like certain collectible games and retro computers are now.
Welcome to the MS experience - Metro. Shoot to kill in style!
Instructions:
To aim and launch missile:
1) Swipe the screen to bring up the monitor section.
2) Monitor your target and doubletap on the suspect.
3) Swipe an "X" across each target you want to eliminate.
4) Doubletap to confirm.
If you get an error message: 16472112.13a41d1e.00123dq2.1337effd
then please contact customer service. Thank you for sharing your Microsoft Experience.
When oh when are you going to learn how to write without abusing ellipsis punctuation? And learn how to spell the very basic and simple word "its"?
Ah, so YOU are the one who wrote the firmware for my television set!? Bad coder, BAD coder!
So, you're saying my TV is smarter than I give it credit for?
:)
(BTW: awesome reply!)
I have what I like to call a "Dumb-TV", made by the brand Denver Electronics. No seriously, it's the dumbest TV on the planet. It's marketed as a "Smart-TV", but read on, and make your own judgement:
...if it actually worked...
....UH OH...You have an USB CARD INSERTED...HERE's a GIANT menu to block your TV, now make a choice!!! :)
It's your typical super feature filled tv, with recording capabilities, Digital TV (DVB-T & C etc.). Media Playback, Pictures, Videos and whatnot...
Wonderful
1) Every time I turn on the TV, the TV goes into Schizo-mode. I'll give you 2 channels today...no...4 channels...if you wait 10 more minutes, maybe 10 channels.
2) If you try to watch video via the scart plug (eg, the DVD player), sometimes it comes up with a message: No activity, want to turn off? (It waits until you press ok or cancel)
3) Sometimes it falls asleep - while still on, then a menu will sit and wait for you, until you press OK. (means...backlight still on, a small square saying "No activity for a while, sleep? OK or CANCEL"
4) When you insert a USB memory...it will let you watch TV for 20 seconds, before this HUGE menu covers the ENTIRE screen, geefully informing you of all your amazing multi-media experiences awaiting you. USB CARD INSERTED - OK? OK or CANCEL... The idiot TV will block your TV viewing until you take action.
5) It's amazing schizophrenic mode will be sure to forget that your USB CARD has already been inserted the last time, so the next time you turn on the TV, it will let you watch TV for half a minute before finally
6) Sometimes it will FIGHT you for ON/OFF mode. Is it on? Maybe it doesn't WANT to be turned on?! You press ON...the LED indicates that it understands, starts searching but decides to fall asleep instead.. OH you meant ON?! OK...press TWICE...and the TV is ON!
7) And it loves to inform you about useless stuff...such as.... CHANNEL 7 or 9 aren't currently transmitting, want to delete these unused channels? YES, No, Cancel!
8) It'll do this until you run out of channels.
Yep, dumb TV technology at it's best.
Russel Crowe throwing phones at people may be closer to reality than you think.</p></quote>
MMmm... now there is a horrifying picture, Russel Crowe and phones...in 3D!
Speaking of 3D, here's a free idea...albeit I think something similar has been done with a normal screen:
1) Get yourself one of those transparent OLED displays.
2) Put it on a spinning motor (clocked and timed and synched)
3) Calculate where the pixels should be in 3D space when the screen is spinning. Voila. Real 3D, now you can look anywhere you want.
That'd work!
Actually, It's been around for a while, but there is a new technique that works better than you may ever have seen, I've seen it, needs some brushing up - but it works far better than Nintendo 3DS & LG Optimus 3D type parallax glasses free screens.
This screen was demoed in Copenhagen, I think it was about 6 years ago at the 3D festival, it was the most impressive "parallax type" plasma screen I've ever seen, it was a movement based parallax screen, albeit limited to about 30-40 cm of "walking" before you would clearly see a "shift" that breaks up the image, but it was very convincing, you COULD in fact LOOK AROUND the object, albeit limited, but FAR better than the stereoscopic parallax images that the 3D phones & Nintendo have.
I bet that'll blow your mind too. But for now, the technology is just too expensive, as you'd need at least 10 tracks of 3D video (same film from 10 different angles) just to use this technology, better yet...if it was real 3D rendering data (eg. rendering in real-time) you'd be limiting this technology to animated movies only (which I think...was the case of that screen they demoed).
But I can promise you this, the technology is here, I bet ya won't like the price tag.
American kids (or any other kid for that matter) aren't as dumb and unintuitive as we may want to think.
Because of this, we have the "maker generation" today. These are kids of any age that build stuff out of anything they have laying around. What can be more creative than that? Lego is no different, except it was made with the very idea that you could make anything you want out of these building blocks. Just take a look at Lego Mindstorm to get an idea about what I'm talking about here. (And of course, google make magazine, and makers everywhere).
American kids are just as curious and impressive to me as they where back in the days where we used electronics kits to build stuff with. Many of the kids today make LEVELS for video games and that is just as creative or advanced as what we did back in our days. (I'm in my mid forties and grew up with Lego and Electronics).
...that people back in those days actually believed that the moon was one BIG ball of cheese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_is_made_of_green_cheese
And you would have the console everyone missed.
You could just plug it in, and play straight away few seconds later, nothing beats that feeling.
Today everything has to boot forever, it takes several minutes just to wait for another game to boot up, I hate that. I live with it, but I don't like it.
With todays amazing solid state drive developments, this shouldn't be impossible. USB-memory sticks costs almost as little as CD's and Floppy Disks did back in the days, so we're getting there.
And the first console to do this, will win.
My guess would be Alan Turing, but then again...
(yes, I went there!)
Oh dang...I promised myself I wouldn't booze for a while, but you're giving me too many ideas...
Beer Sausages...oh wait, they exist... ...(oellebroed in Danish)
Beer bread
Beer googles with actual beer in them...
Free beer, especially on tap - is a good story any day.
And I've got a picture of Niels Bohr on my wall of scientists, where I drink my beer, so 3 times cheers for mr. beers ...Bohr!
Cheers,
Well...I guess when you start misreading slashdot and ends up a bunch of people calling you troll, then it's a pretty good sign you had enough to drink, eh? ;)
It's kind of like at the bar, when you're rambling tin foil theories and your friends have long left the table...
I think I misread it. Too much work, too much beer. Beer + commenting on slashdot doesnt mix well, lesson learned ;)
(I hope)...
It's not easy for her, she has probably heard all this fuzz about RFID tags and who knows what she thinks those things are. Yes they can transmit a radio signal, yes they can contain and ID number, heck they can even contain a complete picture of the girl, including name, address and anything else you want to put on a ROM/Ram chip in there.
But I've experimenting with RF (radio transmissions basically ALL my life as a radio amateur, yes...I'm one of those that build and construct my own gear, so I know a bit about this stuff), and I can tell you...any ID badge of this size, will not - and CAN not - due to laws of physics and much more, transmit a signal over any significant distance, not to mention battery capacity in a small badge like that (trust me on this one, I've been building and constructing record breaking bugging devices that can reach over 1km over 3 weeks on a 3v battery) and I know for a fact, you simply - can not - break the laws of physics when it comes to burning energy and emissions etc. reach that far with those badges, it just isn't possible. YET.
But I can understand her, she's a layman, she have NO clue if this is possible or not, given that scenario - I think myself...I'd refuse to carry any sort of RFID badge, if I suspected that it would do me no good, and would be of no use to me. Who knows? I've worked at several schools - and we do have RFID badges to open doors, usually accompanied with a 4 digit code we need to enter after exposing the badge to the reader surface. Even so, this RFID signal is read and transmitted several inches if not less, of no use to any sniffers or spies nearby. So no worries there. But then again, understanding this, requires knowledge, of which I suspect - she has none.
and everyone wants it.
...depending how LONG that person has been a techie though.
Most over 40's techies have an experience that the younger techies doesn't even have (and would LOVE to have), is the hands-on experience how the insides of a computer REALLY work. Sure, any young technician can learn to program, anyone of them can complete any engineering course and school, with brilliant results, but that's just it - results aren't what they used to be. We have a LOT of theory today, they rarely get to try everything out in real life.
Sitting and working in front of a computer, with simulated circuits simply won't provide the total knowledge, and even though they can come up with amazing new innovations, show fantastic skills etc. many of them come short if they fail to see why their design doesn't work as well in real life as in the simulated environment.
This is where us old techies simply excel over the youngsters. I've had numerous dazed looks on the various younger techs faces when I within few seconds to minutes, points out the flaw in their design, when they eagerly show me formulas and huge math equations + simulations to show me how "flawless" their design SHOULD be, and desperately want me to agree with their designs. Then I show them HOW it COULD be done, and many of them say - what you just did doesn't make sense - but it work - it shouldn't work - but it works.
To us old techies, the inner workings of everything, from scratch, from transistors to assembly code etc. are second nature, because we grew up with everything from scratch. We weren't served a huge bunch of books, a ready to use computer with a gazillion libraries, we often had to construct everything from scratch, including designing the logic, often on a breadboard - programming the OS ourselves etc.
So techies over 40 with experience from the start of it all - can't even be replaced.
I would like a calculator to be just a calculator and nothing else.
One of the things that I like about my TI83+ is that when I power it on, it's there, ready to use instantly.
I also have the TI-nspire with the 84+ keypad plugin, and it's a joke. If I don't use it for a few days, the system has to RE-LOAD and it's like booting windows on a calculator, very annoying. And the touch-pad is a joke too. You have to fiddle with it for minutes in order to have the arrow appear.
TI - find back to your roots, let a calculator just be a calculator. I want it to be ready when I am.
Like a little slip of a cover is worth the bitching !! Deal with it !! Live with it !! Take it like a man !! Or are you a little girl crying because her doll's clothing has a wrinkle !!
Ballmer, is that you?
sometimes I want to know which neighborhood I'm about to waste several hundred thousand dollars on, googling people, finding out who their friends are, who they hang out with, what they are like - can tell me quite a lot about what I'm to expect of the neighborhood. I don't feel like moving in next to hells angels & gangsta territory, or a drug infested area.
I usually don't bother googling people, but if they BOTHER me - eg. don't play nice...then I consider googling them and beyond. By nice I mean common nice polite behavior, doesn't bully me, my neighbors or friends...in other words - perfectly normal people. If you're a bully and approach me in a "this is MY turf" kind of manner, you can betcha I'll do much more than google you, I'll dig in the deep underworld of the internet, I'll google who you hang out with, note all the cars registration numbers that is parked in front of your place, google their friends, search and map everyone until I have you at a spot where I know I can protect me from you.
It's very rare for me to have to act on someone, out of the numerous times I've dug into peoples lives...I've only needed that kind of information TWICE. Once was when a smart-mouth tried ridiculing me in front of potential friends and acquaintances, I didn't say anything. Dug like mad into everything he did, had done, past and present. Came back. Next time he tried to smart-mouth me, I handed him little hints and tidbits about what I know about him, such as - oh yeah...and your business...wasn't your company under investigation back in 1998? I remember reading about that somewhere in a newspaper...good memory eh?
Shut him up - right away. And he did nothing but talk nice about me and to me after that.
Same story for the other case. So yeah...play nice, behave like you want others to behave, and everything will be fine.