That concept only works if there's a 1 - 1 mapping between individuals (each of whom has a tablet) and TVs. In households that's simply not the case as even the people who have tablets aren't obsessively attached to them, so having to get up and find yours (as other peoples' would be security locked) defeats the whole idea of a remote control.
Further, not everyone in a family (think 2 year-olds to grandparents) has a tablet or would be able to read/use the interface.
The idea only works for people who live alone or who are always within reach of a tablet - which sounds like an incredibly sad way to live
This sounds a lot like overkill, considering the amount of processing power in a tablet (and their beavy battery demands - the TV tablet will spend most of it's time on charge - which is even more inconvenient). Since all new TVs already contain a fair amount of "intelligence" the obvious choice is to increment what's already in the box, rather than needing to get a tablet computer for every member of the family - or one that can be used by everyone: from age 2 to age 100.
Ideally, the need for controlling a TV should be on the decrease very soon. Hopefully it's not too long a wait until they are able to learn who wants to watch what and come up with their own plan to record, play and manage the various viewers' schedule.
But the range is the key. If your adversary is standing off 100,000 km away - halfway to the Moon, then throwing rocks at them is futile. Your only chance of attacking them in anything less than glacial time is with lightspeed.
The faster that any kinetic weapons travel, the greater the energy needed to alter trajectory. That needs more fuel, more weight and therefore they represent a larger target, themselves - and the fewer of them a capital vessel could support/contain. However a 200MW reactor (roughly Typhoon submarine class), suitable shielded for thermal emissions could power a nice big laser canon in pulse mode (provided the crew are prepared to hold their breath for a few seconds while the capacitor bank charges up).
So far as detecting emissions goes, you can only detect those emitted in your direction. If all the heat/IR is directed away from the "battlefield" it's invisible to anyone not in its path.
There would be no orbital combat, as whoever's craft came into sight of the opposition's ground-based lasers would get fried - instantly.
Similarly, there would be no meaningful conflict between a planet-based civilisation and a space-based one. The "spacies" would simply drop rocks on the planet (superiority is being at the top of the gravity well), a la Footfall. The only scenarios that could give rise to a space "war" would be a war of independence: The Moon or Mars vs. Earth (but ref. Footfall), or inter-factional wars for territory between space-based operations.
First, actions would take place over distances of 1000's of kilometres. Maneuvering would be slow and expensive in fuel use - as would any change in course or speed. In that respect it would be like a naval action from the days of sail.
However the weapons would be directed energy, rather than projectile and the vessels themselves would be almost impossible to detect - partly because of the distances and partly because of the stealthy designs they would employ. Visual detection methods would be almost obsolete, the only exception being to look out for occultations.
Yes, you're absolutely right - there is no possibility that this app can/should be taken seriously. That it's being promoted as developed by 2 doctors is a more worrying issue (or would be, if I cared), as the more credulous members of society, with no self-control, will make the basic error of believing what it tells them.
In practice it's just a bit of silliness for people who feel the need to justify the amount of coffee they drink. Hopefully the next version will link coffee intake with biorhythms - so we can see exactly how much credibility to give it.
It might be worth just deleting the whole sorry mess. That way no compromising photos (or either party) can find their way onto a social website. The question then becomes: who trusts who to delete everything and not keep a copy for themselves.
Try this. Turn down your TV sound and try to work out what a programme is about. Now try the same with the sound audible and the picture blank (or just looking away). It's almost impossible to follow any programme without listening to the audio channel, but remove the video and little is lost (the exception is probably sports programmes, but for everything else it works).
Although the video component takes up the overwhelming amount of bandwidth - and cost both for production and TV set manufacture, it's the least important aspect of a programme.
The only thing that stops TV from being "radio with pictures" is the marketing of programmes, since this is ultimately where all the money is.
Add to that all the photos you take, maybe your home videos too and it's easy to get up to a TB - or more. Buy yourself a PVR that records HD content and even 2TB fills up pretty quick if you don't keep on top of cleaning up content after you've watched it.
Maybe your post should be updated to: If it weren't for video, the hard drive industry would be a lot smaller.
Sadly New Scientist seems to have developed a political agenda. My memory (possibly a "grass is greener" memory) was that it was impartial and would report on scientific thinking across the spectrum. Nowadays it seems to pander to the trendy as opposed to the rational. I'm sure that's just a reflection of its readership (and advertising/sponsorship) but I do tend to view a lot of it's content as a "they would say that, wouldn't they" skepticism.
If you have a traditional (with only a certain amount of the work done by robots) manufacturing base then the number of widgets you ship depends on the number of people you employ. One person makes X widgets per hour. That's great for mass employment, so long as the demand for widgets keeps up and nobody can produce X+1 widgets per employee per hour somewhere cheaper.
For software that model doesn't work. You still need designers, testers, sales people and all the traditional "overhead" people you had in order to get a manufacturing operation up and running. But once the software goes into production, the link between the number of units and the number of employees fails. That is very nice for customers (and for the bottom line), but it's not so great for the proportion of the population who are better at doing things manually than mentally.
If America's software "future" does come to pass - rather than come to pass it by - what is the future for all the ex-manufacturers who are now surplus to requirements? Or the next generation of non-softies for whom there are no prospects? You can't just ignore them and you can't just support them on the taxes from the people who do work in the software "future" - as those people can just up sticks and go somewhere with a lower tax regime.
Although some understanding of what goes on inside a computer (and possibly the ability to alter it) is nice, it's a long, long way down the list of stuff that people should be taught in order to lead happy and fulfilled lives.
Just where on that list it should be is tricky and will vary with each individuals' situation. Personally I'd put it somewhere between learning a second language (higher) and being able to play a musical instrument (lower) in the order of things that make a decently educated member of society.
It would be interesting to see what the Russians and the Chinese could manage. If they were able to put their differences to one side and learn to trust (or at least work with) each other. The Russians have the heavy lift, the Chinese have the money. Both can put up manned missions.
If such an axis did emerge, I wonder with that would provide a sufficient boot up the arse to get the americans back into the game?
pollute an area of space millions of kilometres from anything I personally give a shit about.
Though in space things don't stay where you put them - they have an annoying habit of forming closed orbits (unless they're going fast enough). So the area of space that you personally don't give a shit about could soon find itself on an intersecting path with a person, place or planet that you do have some small gravitational attachment to.
Added to which, if the engine does go <bang> then it's hard to say which pieces will go in which directions, and at what speed - so making any predictions about where they'll end up a little bit impossible.
The only safe way to do it is to stash the rocket at a Lagrange point and fire it from there, in a direction that will never let its orbit (powered or unpowered) intersect with Earth's.
And as for flying it into the sun - make sure there are no pesky inner planets anywhere near. One small orbital perturbation and that whole radioactive mess could miss the Sun and come swinging back to make a meteor shower you really wouldn't want to get too close to.
This sort of program alone - almost - makes the license fee worth the money.
I guess you forgot the smiley-face.
The "licence fee" (in reality a tax: collected under force of law and threat of punishment for non-payment if you own a TV) is £145 per year (about 220USD) and gifts the BBC about £3Bn annually. This pays for a series of 9 TV advertisement free channels and a whole slew of radio stations: both national and local.
For £3 Bil, I'd expect a dam' sight more than 3 hours of astronomy every year - hell, I'd expect a direct feed from a dedicated space telescope.
As for commercial channels not going anywhere near this sort of (non-soap, non-reality, non gameshow) programming. it's not hard to see why. They are trying to complete against a corporation that gives away its product for free. A corp. that has its income guaranteed irrespective of downturns and recessions - or even competition. Since BBC TV channels don't have ad-breaks, they don't run the risk of losing a proportion of their audience every 10 minutes and don't have to limit themselves to programmes that the advertisers want to sponsor or buy space around.
It would be interesting to see if a more fair and commercially balanced TV-scape would give rise to some healthy competition (instead of a scramble to stay alive) that would raise the quality, and maybe even the breadth, of programming across the board if all the broadcasters got a share of the licence fee and they all had to put up with the same commercial realities.
Just make the pass phrase a biblical quote. Change it each week and you kill 2 birds. How likely is it that the basketball players will have a bible handy AND your religious classes will have an incentive to read it to find the reference.
It's true - programmers hate doing anything other than writing code. They hate meetings, they hate documentation, they hate testing and they hate support work. Coding is fun, it's play, it's making stuff - all the rest is work, and they (sorry: we) don't "do" work.
However, everyone else is complicit in the failing. In interviews candidates may be given short assignments: write a piece of code to do <X> but they never get failed if there are no comments inthe code -and they are never asked to comment it: just to write the code. So long as it compiles and appears to give a correct result for a narrow range of test data (usually 1 sample) that's all. Job done, interview passed.
A better way is to package up the tasks at the management level. You don't get to start on the next module until the last one is finished. Finished means the boss has signed it off - and that means it's properly documented. The problem here is that it requires a technically competent boss. One who won't sign off on "increment X" as a valid comment. This also means that the blame for faiilure to deliver sits where it deserves to. If the number of modules per month for a given softie falls below adequacy: say goodbye. The code they produced may be brilliant, but most places want "finished" or "working" above brilliant, any day.
I think they were just looking for an excuse to disband and/or find a new hobby
The society didn't disband. they just moved out - 2 years ago. Check their webiste.
I'd guess that they simply found a better location. I wouldn't be surprised if Swansea promenade suffered a lot of bad light pollution and their website gives the impression that they've got a better location, elsewhere. Maybe even, for less money.
Although it might sound nice for Swansea council to say "yes, we built an observatory on the promenade", it doesn't sound like it' was particularly successful if it's been 2 years since the previous users left and it's still empty. You have to wonder whether it was built with utility in mind (carvings? stained glass?) for astronomy, or simply as a vanity project for the council to spend public money on.
After all, that's what engineering is about: taking a situation (or problem) and finding a way to bend it to do your will. They are also conservative (with a small "c") and tend to be risk-averse: not wishing to release a product until it works perfectly.
Unless they are properly managed (and who would manage the american president? The chinese? The bankers? The mob? <choose one or suggest another>) they/we also tend to design overly complex solutions. Given that lawyers have more to gain from finding loopholes, exceptions and workarounds than a lawmaker has from preventing them, laws made by engineers would be ineffective - if they ever got to the state of perfection where they got passed into law. As a consequence, I reckon that a country run by engineers left to their own devices, would soon become a dictatorship - although none of the engineers would ever wish to create one, it would just happen.
Unless you can demonstrate that having a separate IT department can save the company money, there are very few sensible reasons (legal requirements may be a sensible reason) for changing a successful organisational set up.
... and didn't ask for. Something that they can't support, as they have no programmers. Now you want them to pay you some extra money for it?
It seems to me that the professional attitude would have been to tell whoever is in charge that you have "some downtime" and if they like, you could use that time to improve their internal processes or whatever it was that they have as a priority.
If you want to know what to do, my response would be to document your work, package it up and THEN release it under a free license to that everyone gets the benefit from it. Since your hobby seems to be producing software, you can pursue that on your own free time.
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Further, not everyone in a family (think 2 year-olds to grandparents) has a tablet or would be able to read/use the interface.
The idea only works for people who live alone or who are always within reach of a tablet - which sounds like an incredibly sad way to live
This sounds a lot like overkill, considering the amount of processing power in a tablet (and their beavy battery demands - the TV tablet will spend most of it's time on charge - which is even more inconvenient). Since all new TVs already contain a fair amount of "intelligence" the obvious choice is to increment what's already in the box, rather than needing to get a tablet computer for every member of the family - or one that can be used by everyone: from age 2 to age 100.
Ideally, the need for controlling a TV should be on the decrease very soon. Hopefully it's not too long a wait until they are able to learn who wants to watch what and come up with their own plan to record, play and manage the various viewers' schedule.
Right on the ranges wrong on the rest
But the range is the key. If your adversary is standing off 100,000 km away - halfway to the Moon, then throwing rocks at them is futile. Your only chance of attacking them in anything less than glacial time is with lightspeed.
The faster that any kinetic weapons travel, the greater the energy needed to alter trajectory. That needs more fuel, more weight and therefore they represent a larger target, themselves - and the fewer of them a capital vessel could support/contain. However a 200MW reactor (roughly Typhoon submarine class), suitable shielded for thermal emissions could power a nice big laser canon in pulse mode (provided the crew are prepared to hold their breath for a few seconds while the capacitor bank charges up).
So far as detecting emissions goes, you can only detect those emitted in your direction. If all the heat/IR is directed away from the "battlefield" it's invisible to anyone not in its path.
So long as they radiate their IR away from the area of operations they could not be detected. There's no Tyndall effect in space.
For orbital combat...
There would be no orbital combat, as whoever's craft came into sight of the opposition's ground-based lasers would get fried - instantly.
Similarly, there would be no meaningful conflict between a planet-based civilisation and a space-based one. The "spacies" would simply drop rocks on the planet (superiority is being at the top of the gravity well), a la Footfall. The only scenarios that could give rise to a space "war" would be a war of independence: The Moon or Mars vs. Earth (but ref. Footfall), or inter-factional wars for territory between space-based operations.
First, actions would take place over distances of 1000's of kilometres. Maneuvering would be slow and expensive in fuel use - as would any change in course or speed. In that respect it would be like a naval action from the days of sail.
However the weapons would be directed energy, rather than projectile and the vessels themselves would be almost impossible to detect - partly because of the distances and partly because of the stealthy designs they would employ. Visual detection methods would be almost obsolete, the only exception being to look out for occultations.
Yes, you're absolutely right - there is no possibility that this app can/should be taken seriously. That it's being promoted as developed by 2 doctors is a more worrying issue (or would be, if I cared), as the more credulous members of society, with no self-control, will make the basic error of believing what it tells them.
In practice it's just a bit of silliness for people who feel the need to justify the amount of coffee they drink. Hopefully the next version will link coffee intake with biorhythms - so we can see exactly how much credibility to give it.
It might be worth just deleting the whole sorry mess. That way no compromising photos (or either party) can find their way onto a social website. The question then becomes: who trusts who to delete everything and not keep a copy for themselves.
You get all the 1's - she gets all the 0's
TVs are ultimately about picture quality
Try this. Turn down your TV sound and try to work out what a programme is about. Now try the same with the sound audible and the picture blank (or just looking away). It's almost impossible to follow any programme without listening to the audio channel, but remove the video and little is lost (the exception is probably sports programmes, but for everything else it works).
Although the video component takes up the overwhelming amount of bandwidth - and cost both for production and TV set manufacture, it's the least important aspect of a programme.
The only thing that stops TV from being "radio with pictures" is the marketing of programmes, since this is ultimately where all the money is.
Maybe your post should be updated to: If it weren't for video, the hard drive industry would be a lot smaller.
Sadly New Scientist seems to have developed a political agenda. My memory (possibly a "grass is greener" memory) was that it was impartial and would report on scientific thinking across the spectrum. Nowadays it seems to pander to the trendy as opposed to the rational. I'm sure that's just a reflection of its readership (and advertising/sponsorship) but I do tend to view a lot of it's content as a "they would say that, wouldn't they" skepticism.
If you have a traditional (with only a certain amount of the work done by robots) manufacturing base then the number of widgets you ship depends on the number of people you employ. One person makes X widgets per hour. That's great for mass employment, so long as the demand for widgets keeps up and nobody can produce X+1 widgets per employee per hour somewhere cheaper.
For software that model doesn't work. You still need designers, testers, sales people and all the traditional "overhead" people you had in order to get a manufacturing operation up and running. But once the software goes into production, the link between the number of units and the number of employees fails. That is very nice for customers (and for the bottom line), but it's not so great for the proportion of the population who are better at doing things manually than mentally.
If America's software "future" does come to pass - rather than come to pass it by - what is the future for all the ex-manufacturers who are now surplus to requirements? Or the next generation of non-softies for whom there are no prospects? You can't just ignore them and you can't just support them on the taxes from the people who do work in the software "future" - as those people can just up sticks and go somewhere with a lower tax regime.
Although some understanding of what goes on inside a computer (and possibly the ability to alter it) is nice, it's a long, long way down the list of stuff that people should be taught in order to lead happy and fulfilled lives.
Just where on that list it should be is tricky and will vary with each individuals' situation. Personally I'd put it somewhere between learning a second language (higher) and being able to play a musical instrument (lower) in the order of things that make a decently educated member of society.
It would be interesting to see what the Russians and the Chinese could manage. If they were able to put their differences to one side and learn to trust (or at least work with) each other. The Russians have the heavy lift, the Chinese have the money. Both can put up manned missions.
If such an axis did emerge, I wonder with that would provide a sufficient boot up the arse to get the americans back into the game?
pollute an area of space millions of kilometres from anything I personally give a shit about.
Though in space things don't stay where you put them - they have an annoying habit of forming closed orbits (unless they're going fast enough). So the area of space that you personally don't give a shit about could soon find itself on an intersecting path with a person, place or planet that you do have some small gravitational attachment to.
Added to which, if the engine does go <bang> then it's hard to say which pieces will go in which directions, and at what speed - so making any predictions about where they'll end up a little bit impossible.
The only safe way to do it is to stash the rocket at a Lagrange point and fire it from there, in a direction that will never let its orbit (powered or unpowered) intersect with Earth's.
And as for flying it into the sun - make sure there are no pesky inner planets anywhere near. One small orbital perturbation and that whole radioactive mess could miss the Sun and come swinging back to make a meteor shower you really wouldn't want to get too close to.
Have you ever tried to watch American television?
Frequently - whenever I'm in the country. Have you ever wondered why so many of the successful/high-quality dramas on British TV are american imports?
This sort of program alone - almost - makes the license fee worth the money.
I guess you forgot the smiley-face.
The "licence fee" (in reality a tax: collected under force of law and threat of punishment for non-payment if you own a TV) is £145 per year (about 220USD) and gifts the BBC about £3Bn annually. This pays for a series of 9 TV advertisement free channels and a whole slew of radio stations: both national and local.
For £3 Bil, I'd expect a dam' sight more than 3 hours of astronomy every year - hell, I'd expect a direct feed from a dedicated space telescope.
As for commercial channels not going anywhere near this sort of (non-soap, non-reality, non gameshow) programming. it's not hard to see why. They are trying to complete against a corporation that gives away its product for free. A corp. that has its income guaranteed irrespective of downturns and recessions - or even competition. Since BBC TV channels don't have ad-breaks, they don't run the risk of losing a proportion of their audience every 10 minutes and don't have to limit themselves to programmes that the advertisers want to sponsor or buy space around.
It would be interesting to see if a more fair and commercially balanced TV-scape would give rise to some healthy competition (instead of a scramble to stay alive) that would raise the quality, and maybe even the breadth, of programming across the board if all the broadcasters got a share of the licence fee and they all had to put up with the same commercial realities.
Just make the pass phrase a biblical quote. Change it each week and you kill 2 birds. How likely is it that the basketball players will have a bible handy AND your religious classes will have an incentive to read it to find the reference.
It's true - programmers hate doing anything other than writing code. They hate meetings, they hate documentation, they hate testing and they hate support work. Coding is fun, it's play, it's making stuff - all the rest is work, and they (sorry: we) don't "do" work.
However, everyone else is complicit in the failing. In interviews candidates may be given short assignments: write a piece of code to do <X> but they never get failed if there are no comments inthe code -and they are never asked to comment it: just to write the code. So long as it compiles and appears to give a correct result for a narrow range of test data (usually 1 sample) that's all. Job done, interview passed.
A better way is to package up the tasks at the management level. You don't get to start on the next module until the last one is finished. Finished means the boss has signed it off - and that means it's properly documented. The problem here is that it requires a technically competent boss. One who won't sign off on "increment X" as a valid comment. This also means that the blame for faiilure to deliver sits where it deserves to. If the number of modules per month for a given softie falls below adequacy: say goodbye. The code they produced may be brilliant, but most places want "finished" or "working" above brilliant, any day.
I think they were just looking for an excuse to disband and/or find a new hobby
The society didn't disband. they just moved out - 2 years ago. Check their webiste.
I'd guess that they simply found a better location. I wouldn't be surprised if Swansea promenade suffered a lot of bad light pollution and their website gives the impression that they've got a better location, elsewhere. Maybe even, for less money.
Although it might sound nice for Swansea council to say "yes, we built an observatory on the promenade", it doesn't sound like it' was particularly successful if it's been 2 years since the previous users left and it's still empty. You have to wonder whether it was built with utility in mind (carvings? stained glass?) for astronomy, or simply as a vanity project for the council to spend public money on.
After all, that's what engineering is about: taking a situation (or problem) and finding a way to bend it to do your will. They are also conservative (with a small "c") and tend to be risk-averse: not wishing to release a product until it works perfectly.
Unless they are properly managed (and who would manage the american president? The chinese? The bankers? The mob? <choose one or suggest another>) they/we also tend to design overly complex solutions. Given that lawyers have more to gain from finding loopholes, exceptions and workarounds than a lawmaker has from preventing them, laws made by engineers would be ineffective - if they ever got to the state of perfection where they got passed into law. As a consequence, I reckon that a country run by engineers left to their own devices, would soon become a dictatorship - although none of the engineers would ever wish to create one, it would just happen.
When there are so many too choose from abroad?
Funnily enough, a lot of countries, for whom the USA is one of the "abroad" find themselves asking that very same question.
Unless you can demonstrate that having a separate IT department can save the company money, there are very few sensible reasons (legal requirements may be a sensible reason) for changing a successful organisational set up.
... and didn't ask for. Something that they can't support, as they have no programmers. Now you want them to pay you some extra money for it?
It seems to me that the professional attitude would have been to tell whoever is in charge that you have "some downtime" and if they like, you could use that time to improve their internal processes or whatever it was that they have as a priority.
If you want to know what to do, my response would be to document your work, package it up and THEN release it under a free license to that everyone gets the benefit from it. Since your hobby seems to be producing software, you can pursue that on your own free time.