Because out in the *real* world of work and the office, microsoft unfortunately rules the roost. You can't just create a little linux based utopian world inside schools and release people into the big bad world of M$ software. I can't imagine employers taking somone very seriously if they'd never used Microsoft Office plus outlook, never used windows explorer, set up a windows network, used a windows based printer driver, never used Sage- and those are basic office functions without any specialisation, such as Autocad & Archicad for architecture and manufacturing, plus Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Premiere, Director and Flash for multimedia production....
Linux is ok for openoffice, internet, mail and programming, but if you actually want to *do* something with the computer that isn't programming there's no wealth of professional grade software out there for professionals who are reliant on computer technology.
The only real-world usable alternative to the scourge of M$ might be OSX and its Apple-made successors. It's easy to use, has a large library of *real* software written for it and doesn't cost the earth.
Why on earth would Apple go into business with a company that sucks as much balls as blockbuster; my favourite prediction I heard about Apple 18 months ago was that they're going to go on to offer full HD movies for download using iTMS (iTunes Movie Store:o) ).
It looks increasingly as though they're creeping towards that model with iTMS, Steve Jobs' is now Disney's biggest shareholder, giving him power to start with Disney & Pixar's content (which would be well worth seeing in HD at home) and to get movie execs on board in the same way he persuaded the music industry to trust him.
Steve Jobs wants to get Apple into your living room in HD, and I think thet they think that iTunes delivering video would be an excellent way to do it. It's not an unreasonable suggestion- look at how much iTMS has changed the way online music download is percieved, with the service streaking towards 1,000,000,000 songs downloaded.
How long before we have our billionth movie download? Probably long before the billionth HD DVD or Blu Ray disc is sold.
You don't have an iPod? You're obviously a lying music pirate and should be locked up for trying to evade the RIAA lawsuit you deserve. Not even having a computer or internet connection is no excuse, you're obviously up to *some* sort of shenannigans, just like that computerless grandmother we sued. We got her good, the lying old witch. No computer my butt!
The important thing to remember here is that Hydrogen isn't a clean fuel unless it is produced by a renewable energy source- if the H2 is being produced using electricity from a coal-burning power plant, then there is basically no benefit to atmospheric CO2 levels, although air pollution in traffic will be reduced- good news for cyclists.
What if you to produce your own Hydrogen at home- say with a small turbine or a set of Solar Panels that run all day & fill up a tank, ready to fuel your morning commute. For a large initial investment it would produce free fuel and mean you have a fuel source in your own home. You wouldn't pay tax on your fuel either, unless the govornment wants to charge you more money for water you convert into pollution-free fuel (unless you count water vapour as a pollutant). It'd get a lot of people to work and back, and if there's a shortfall, then you can use a fuel station or switch to Petrol.
You could use the O2 for a free oxygen bar in your home too! Mmmmmm, atmospherrric!
Hehe, the current *is* tiny, and we understand what electricity does to the body a bit better than radiation. Anyway I only said I was a *tiny* bit paranoid to the extent that i mostly keep it in a bag (which distances it maybe 2-3 inches) and sometimes just keep it in my pocket.
I've always had a problem with vibrating ring in that
1- you have to be in contact with the phone to feel the vibrations, and I'm a teeny paranoid about microwave radiation & illnesses, so I keep my phone in my bag if I have one, leaving it a few more inches away. Other people don't always have pockets, and people in general miss vibrating rings because they don't feel them.
2- they aren't that quiet if you've got your phone on a table and it starts vibrating like mad, causing a rattle that's as annoying as some ringtones.
In trying to come up with a solution, my own idea is to have a discreet wireless (bluetooth) wristband that passes a tiny electrical pulse across your skin to alert you of an incoming call. The tingle would be something similar to the effect of TENS ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tens&btnG=Goo gle+Search )but obviously not enough to stimulate the muscles in the area & therefore cause involuntary movement of the limb:0) Having used TENS for back pain, it's not an unpleasant tingling, and can be scaled down to the point where it just feels like someone's pressing your skin lightly with their thumb.
It would be a completely noisless alarm that alerts only the mobile phone user without creating any light. The only problem might be powering the device (normal TENS machines for medicine use 9v batteries) & making sure the wearer doesn't look like a complete twit, as is the case with a lot of bluetooth headsets.
I'm the web designer in a 50 person company who does our sites, manages our email accounts, and does web design work for outside companies. I've been absolutely dying for google to do this since it occurred to me that they could do this.
This could be a great revenue stream for google if they want to resell this solution on at relatively modest cost to companies of various sizes- it'd unify instant messaging and email for users under that domain, with tracking & search of previous converstaions and emails for later reference, and itd allow normal POP3 use of the account for normal desktop use.
If a company is going to force this kind of licensing patent issue on another company, then they should be obliged to issue this kind of legal action within a number (say 90? 120?) days of first learning about any infringement. This company has clearly waited until MPEG-4 is hugely popular, having been implemented in popular technologies like Qucktime, the PSP, in HD DVD codecs (I believe in the form of H.264), Nero Digital and Xvid..........
If a company with any patent rights had asserted its right in the first place, then maybe they would be in the right here, but to allow a technology to grow for a number of years and then assert your claim to large amounts of money is immoral and should be illegal.
What if a company like Apple submits and then counter-sue the company for deliberately allowing a free lunch then asserting it's patent, causing financial and legal pain to Apple et. Al.
It's like a bar giving out water to customers and then trying to back-charge for it when they're halfway through the evening, under threat of kicking them out of the bar otherwise.
It's not that hard to find a new species- walk into any isolated forested region on earth and before you know it you'll be batting away unclassified insects, hacking your way through undiscovered shrubs, and if you're really unlucky, being poisoned by some new snake venom or frog toxin. People should realise that we really don't know shit about what's in the rainforests of the Amazon, never mind Papua New Guinea.
This is, however an excellent discovery, and I don't mean to just dismiss the achievements of the scientists involved- I just want to point out that there are thousands of types of plants and animals out there that we haven't classified yet.
Oh? Aha, I meant that each house would heat its own water via a roof panel and a heat exchanger- the water would go up to the roof at 2-3 degrees C and come back at maybe 10-15 degrees, then it'd be put through a heat exchanger to produce water at around 70-80 degrees, which is I think about right for domestic consumption
Systems like this already exist and work well even in cold climates. Also, geothermal heat exchangers work well even in areas with permafrost- geothermal exchangers use a water/antifreeze which gets chilled to subzero temparatures and pumped underground to return at a few degrees above zero- they're very efficient and at Irish energy prices pay for themselves in 5-6 years. My super-simple diagram is at http://www.mhac.biz/geothermal.htm
BTW the pipes don't go far underground, they might do 10-15 laps around the garden, 5-6 meters underground and come back in with the heat of the earth.
With the cost of energy going up and the cost of generating your own energy coming down, I think we'll start to see more and more people in the west becoming more independant of the Grid system- using maybe 20% of what they use now and generating the rest of their energy in whatever way suits them or the time of year- californian suburbanites with solar panels, Idaho farmers with a few turbines each, that kind of thing. The grid system is, I think, a product of the past and something we'll learn to get away from- it makes more sense from my POV
Also, the spread of low cost local power generation methods could see that nightime map of the earth become a bit brighter in the developing world, as it won't take as massive a infrastructural investment to supply power to a village in, say, subsaharan africa.
If you're going to generate a given amount of hot water, why not use it for heating and bathing anyway? A significant proportion of our energy usage goes on heating & hot water anyway.
If we take your charging for a glass of water analogy for a moment, the problem right now is that there are only a few select places where you can actually get those glasses of water, and if I was thirsty I wouldn't give a toss whether I paid or not.
This model of charging will hopefully see more places actually offer wifi services, whether free of charge or not. Actually, I doubt whether places that currently don't charge for access would ever charge, as it would affect their competitiveness- imagine two coffee shops that are side by side- one charges, the other doesn't. Where do you buy your coffee?
What it might allow for is for a few home users who are beside public parks, public spaces, near busy car parks and other communal areas to open their home connections (which may soon be the much longer range 802.11n standard) and get a few dollars back every month to pay for their overpriced DSL connection.
That can only be a good thing, as it increases the number of spots available in a given urban area.
Yea but if the car is at a set of traffic lights among 20 other similar cars, the GPS co-ordinates, with say 15M accuracy for a tiny device like this, would only point out which group of cars the supect is. Extra information is always good, especially in a case like this.
The next step in the development is, of course, to deploy a lil' spider-bot to crawl under the car and disable it by cutting a fuel line or drilling a hole in the fuel tank.
Also, it might be useful to put a small UV strobe on this type of device, to make tracking by helicopter much, much easier (as if spotting someone doing 120mph in a 50 zone wasn't easy enough) as CCDs will pick up UV light without any modification. I could imagine that helping if the suspect fled to the cover of trees. That said, it just occurred to me that a lot of choppers have IR vision as well, which makes things easier than any strobe. D'oh.
Of course, my opinion of people who drive like this is that police choppers should be armed with Hellfire missiles, and that this little beacon should be used to just take these people out with one, but that's just my opinion. Fuckers.
1. Get out of vehicle
2. Fetch hammer from trunk
3. "PUT YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD WHERE I CAN SEE 'EM"
The point of the technology is to stop high speed pursuits from becoming more dangerous- by ensuring that the suspect cannot get away, police vehicles can back off a few hundred meters and wait for the driver to stop of his own accord/come to his senses/run out of fuel. The moment he stops, the police wil be on him in seconds and he'll be arrested.
Yea, the games list is Doom 3, UT 2004, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, and the 3DMark06 benchmarking tool. Whatever happened to trying Battlefield 2 (a hugely detailed game when you scale things up), F.E.A.R (reputedly tough on video hardware) or something like the latest Age of Empires game.
Half Life 2 has been out for a year- there are tougher tests for a video card, like the Lost Coast expansion pack
The thing about working somewhere like Google is that there's usually someone smarter on campus. If you wanna bitch about something, or if you need help, there's probably a guy with a PhD to talk to 2 desks over.
This guy has no-one to bitch to about his job, and needed the release.
Slashdot Mirror
Lemme guess, the mascot for the local football team....... a penguin?
Because out in the *real* world of work and the office, microsoft unfortunately rules the roost. You can't just create a little linux based utopian world inside schools and release people into the big bad world of M$ software. I can't imagine employers taking somone very seriously if they'd never used Microsoft Office plus outlook, never used windows explorer, set up a windows network, used a windows based printer driver, never used Sage- and those are basic office functions without any specialisation, such as Autocad & Archicad for architecture and manufacturing, plus Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Premiere, Director and Flash for multimedia production....
Linux is ok for openoffice, internet, mail and programming, but if you actually want to *do* something with the computer that isn't programming there's no wealth of professional grade software out there for professionals who are reliant on computer technology.
The only real-world usable alternative to the scourge of M$ might be OSX and its Apple-made successors. It's easy to use, has a large library of *real* software written for it and doesn't cost the earth.
Why on earth would Apple go into business with a company that sucks as much balls as blockbuster; my favourite prediction I heard about Apple 18 months ago was that they're going to go on to offer full HD movies for download using iTMS (iTunes Movie Store :o) ).
It looks increasingly as though they're creeping towards that model with iTMS, Steve Jobs' is now Disney's biggest shareholder, giving him power to start with Disney & Pixar's content (which would be well worth seeing in HD at home) and to get movie execs on board in the same way he persuaded the music industry to trust him.
Steve Jobs wants to get Apple into your living room in HD, and I think thet they think that iTunes delivering video would be an excellent way to do it. It's not an unreasonable suggestion- look at how much iTMS has changed the way online music download is percieved, with the service streaking towards 1,000,000,000 songs downloaded.
How long before we have our billionth movie download? Probably long before the billionth HD DVD or Blu Ray disc is sold.
You don't have an iPod? You're obviously a lying music pirate and should be locked up for trying to evade the RIAA lawsuit you deserve. Not even having a computer or internet connection is no excuse, you're obviously up to *some* sort of shenannigans, just like that computerless grandmother we sued. We got her good, the lying old witch. No computer my butt!
The important thing to remember here is that Hydrogen isn't a clean fuel unless it is produced by a renewable energy source- if the H2 is being produced using electricity from a coal-burning power plant, then there is basically no benefit to atmospheric CO2 levels, although air pollution in traffic will be reduced- good news for cyclists.
What if you to produce your own Hydrogen at home- say with a small turbine or a set of Solar Panels that run all day & fill up a tank, ready to fuel your morning commute. For a large initial investment it would produce free fuel and mean you have a fuel source in your own home. You wouldn't pay tax on your fuel either, unless the govornment wants to charge you more money for water you convert into pollution-free fuel (unless you count water vapour as a pollutant). It'd get a lot of people to work and back, and if there's a shortfall, then you can use a fuel station or switch to Petrol.
You could use the O2 for a free oxygen bar in your home too! Mmmmmm, atmospherrric!
Unless you're from Northern Ireland, like myself, and will never have a british passport. They'll have to catch me first.
Hehe, the current *is* tiny, and we understand what electricity does to the body a bit better than radiation. Anyway I only said I was a *tiny* bit paranoid to the extent that i mostly keep it in a bag (which distances it maybe 2-3 inches) and sometimes just keep it in my pocket.
I've always had a problem with vibrating ring in that
o gle+Search )but obviously not enough to stimulate the muscles in the area & therefore cause involuntary movement of the limb :0) Having used TENS for back pain, it's not an unpleasant tingling, and can be scaled down to the point where it just feels like someone's pressing your skin lightly with their thumb.
1- you have to be in contact with the phone to feel the vibrations, and I'm a teeny paranoid about microwave radiation & illnesses, so I keep my phone in my bag if I have one, leaving it a few more inches away. Other people don't always have pockets, and people in general miss vibrating rings because they don't feel them.
2- they aren't that quiet if you've got your phone on a table and it starts vibrating like mad, causing a rattle that's as annoying as some ringtones.
In trying to come up with a solution, my own idea is to have a discreet wireless (bluetooth) wristband that passes a tiny electrical pulse across your skin to alert you of an incoming call. The tingle would be something similar to the effect of TENS ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tens&btnG=Go
It would be a completely noisless alarm that alerts only the mobile phone user without creating any light. The only problem might be powering the device (normal TENS machines for medicine use 9v batteries) & making sure the wearer doesn't look like a complete twit, as is the case with a lot of bluetooth headsets.
I'm the web designer in a 50 person company who does our sites, manages our email accounts, and does web design work for outside companies. I've been absolutely dying for google to do this since it occurred to me that they could do this.
This could be a great revenue stream for google if they want to resell this solution on at relatively modest cost to companies of various sizes- it'd unify instant messaging and email for users under that domain, with tracking & search of previous converstaions and emails for later reference, and itd allow normal POP3 use of the account for normal desktop use.
If a company is going to force this kind of licensing patent issue on another company, then they should be obliged to issue this kind of legal action within a number (say 90? 120?) days of first learning about any infringement. This company has clearly waited until MPEG-4 is hugely popular, having been implemented in popular technologies like Qucktime, the PSP, in HD DVD codecs (I believe in the form of H.264), Nero Digital and Xvid..........
If a company with any patent rights had asserted its right in the first place, then maybe they would be in the right here, but to allow a technology to grow for a number of years and then assert your claim to large amounts of money is immoral and should be illegal.
What if a company like Apple submits and then counter-sue the company for deliberately allowing a free lunch then asserting it's patent, causing financial and legal pain to Apple et. Al.
It's like a bar giving out water to customers and then trying to back-charge for it when they're halfway through the evening, under threat of kicking them out of the bar otherwise.
Perhaps we should coin a new phrase....... Valuable, as in Pie :0)
And yours was one of the most pointless posts I've ever read. Shut up or contribute.
It's not that hard to find a new species- walk into any isolated forested region on earth and before you know it you'll be batting away unclassified insects, hacking your way through undiscovered shrubs, and if you're really unlucky, being poisoned by some new snake venom or frog toxin. People should realise that we really don't know shit about what's in the rainforests of the Amazon, never mind Papua New Guinea.
This is, however an excellent discovery, and I don't mean to just dismiss the achievements of the scientists involved- I just want to point out that there are thousands of types of plants and animals out there that we haven't classified yet.
Oh? Aha, I meant that each house would heat its own water via a roof panel and a heat exchanger- the water would go up to the roof at 2-3 degrees C and come back at maybe 10-15 degrees, then it'd be put through a heat exchanger to produce water at around 70-80 degrees, which is I think about right for domestic consumption
Systems like this already exist and work well even in cold climates. Also, geothermal heat exchangers work well even in areas with permafrost- geothermal exchangers use a water/antifreeze which gets chilled to subzero temparatures and pumped underground to return at a few degrees above zero- they're very efficient and at Irish energy prices pay for themselves in 5-6 years. My super-simple diagram is at http://www.mhac.biz/geothermal.htm
BTW the pipes don't go far underground, they might do 10-15 laps around the garden, 5-6 meters underground and come back in with the heat of the earth.
With the cost of energy going up and the cost of generating your own energy coming down, I think we'll start to see more and more people in the west becoming more independant of the Grid system- using maybe 20% of what they use now and generating the rest of their energy in whatever way suits them or the time of year- californian suburbanites with solar panels, Idaho farmers with a few turbines each, that kind of thing. The grid system is, I think, a product of the past and something we'll learn to get away from- it makes more sense from my POV
Also, the spread of low cost local power generation methods could see that nightime map of the earth become a bit brighter in the developing world, as it won't take as massive a infrastructural investment to supply power to a village in, say, subsaharan africa.
If you're going to generate a given amount of hot water, why not use it for heating and bathing anyway? A significant proportion of our energy usage goes on heating & hot water anyway.
If we take your charging for a glass of water analogy for a moment, the problem right now is that there are only a few select places where you can actually get those glasses of water, and if I was thirsty I wouldn't give a toss whether I paid or not.
This model of charging will hopefully see more places actually offer wifi services, whether free of charge or not. Actually, I doubt whether places that currently don't charge for access would ever charge, as it would affect their competitiveness- imagine two coffee shops that are side by side- one charges, the other doesn't. Where do you buy your coffee?
What it might allow for is for a few home users who are beside public parks, public spaces, near busy car parks and other communal areas to open their home connections (which may soon be the much longer range 802.11n standard) and get a few dollars back every month to pay for their overpriced DSL connection.
That can only be a good thing, as it increases the number of spots available in a given urban area.
Yea but if the car is at a set of traffic lights among 20 other similar cars, the GPS co-ordinates, with say 15M accuracy for a tiny device like this, would only point out which group of cars the supect is. Extra information is always good, especially in a case like this.
The next step in the development is, of course, to deploy a lil' spider-bot to crawl under the car and disable it by cutting a fuel line or drilling a hole in the fuel tank.
Also, it might be useful to put a small UV strobe on this type of device, to make tracking by helicopter much, much easier (as if spotting someone doing 120mph in a 50 zone wasn't easy enough) as CCDs will pick up UV light without any modification. I could imagine that helping if the suspect fled to the cover of trees. That said, it just occurred to me that a lot of choppers have IR vision as well, which makes things easier than any strobe. D'oh.
Of course, my opinion of people who drive like this is that police choppers should be armed with Hellfire missiles, and that this little beacon should be used to just take these people out with one, but that's just my opinion. Fuckers.
Oh yea,
1. Get out of vehicle
2. Fetch hammer from trunk
3. "PUT YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD WHERE I CAN SEE 'EM"
The point of the technology is to stop high speed pursuits from becoming more dangerous- by ensuring that the suspect cannot get away, police vehicles can back off a few hundred meters and wait for the driver to stop of his own accord/come to his senses/run out of fuel. The moment he stops, the police wil be on him in seconds and he'll be arrested.
Cause too many people are taking him too seriously :D
Yea, the games list is Doom 3, UT 2004, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, and the 3DMark06 benchmarking tool. Whatever happened to trying Battlefield 2 (a hugely detailed game when you scale things up), F.E.A.R (reputedly tough on video hardware) or something like the latest Age of Empires game.
Half Life 2 has been out for a year- there are tougher tests for a video card, like the Lost Coast expansion pack
The thing about working somewhere like Google is that there's usually someone smarter on campus. If you wanna bitch about something, or if you need help, there's probably a guy with a PhD to talk to 2 desks over.
This guy has no-one to bitch to about his job, and needed the release.
So, the first rule of Google is..... you don't talk about Google?
I misread that as 'WMDs Exploit sold underground for $4,000'.
Of course, WMDs would read 'WMDs exploit sold by administration for $Several hundred billion '
Better name - the iFrag
Sorry