Hmmm... Is creating patents for things like this "evil"? Seeking to prevent others from saving energy (unless they pay a toll) is not good for this planet, and I'm not sure if passes for "good".
So this worm is aimed at people are are smart enough to jailbreak an iPhone, but stupid enough not to change a default password. Sounds like a narrow band detection device.
I so loved Firefox and use to tell everyone to use it. I loved that it kicked IE's ass. Gotta love any open source project that goes up against Microsoft and wins.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can no longer stand to use Firefox. Like a slut that wins you over with fantastic sex, Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.
In fact, it seems way too fast. Is Google caching the web pages in a nearby Google server? Even sites that use little JavaScript seem to load really fast. Is something going on here?
The system will never prevent the application of the breaks
I guess you missed the bit about it being a TURBO. There is a check valve in the vacuum assist line. It is open when you have a low pressure (no turbo boost) to create a "vacuum assist" for the brakes. It closes when the turbo boost goes above atmospheric pressure. But if it fails, you have pressure on the vac assist, and rather than assist you, it prevent the application of brakes. In my opinion, this is a bad design, and if you combine it with a cruse control that suddenly accelerates the vehicle, you have a potential problem.
In the case of my own Audi 5000 turbo, it did indeed prevent me from applying the brakes. Yes, I did look down and was pressing the brake pedal with both feet. I could not budge it in the slightest.
Wrong. See my post above about my Audi experience and what I believe to be the root cause - the cruse control, and a malfunction in the brake assist check valve.
It might be true that some people hit the wrong pedal, but I actually owned an Audi 5000 Turbo and experienced sudden-acceleration.
I was driving down an Interstate highway in Texas, when the car suddenly began accelerating. I was on cruse control, and my feet were not touching any pedals. Since I'm comfortable at high speeds (past racer) and the weather and road were good, I was pretty calm. I put my foot behind the accelerator pedal and pulled back. It moved freely. I realized the cruse control had opened the throttle wide open.
I tapped the brakes to shut down the system. The pedal wouldn't move. I pressed hard with both feet, and could feel the arm flex, but it would not move. Realizing I had no brakes, and a wide open throttle, I hit the dash switch to shut off the cruse control. As the car slowed, the brakes slowly became operational. I noticed the turbo boost gage was now reading negative pressure. When the turbo boost was on, you could not apply the brakes.
It turns out that there was a check valve between the intake manifold and the brake booster. If it leaks/leaks, then high pressure air prevents the application of the brakes.
My belief is there was a bug in the cruse control, or it was susceptible to outside interference (trucker with hopped-up CB radio?) Combine that with the check valve issue and you have a car that could very well exhibit the behavior that 60 Minutes indicated. Those people said the car suddenly accelerated and the brakes didn't work. And that matches my experience exactly.
I contacted Audi USA, but they blew me off. The dealer didn't care either.
I'll let others argue whether this is a 'defect', but I've been cured of ever buying another Audi.
I am one of the lucky few that has actually used a true VR rig at Autodesk in the early 90's. And as others have pointed out, the OP is not VR. Much like the flying car, VR simply asks too much of you to gain widespread acceptance.
But augmented reality is a completely different game and stands a good chance of being the next big thing.
Since this is/. let's make the effort to get our terminology correct.
The OP shows us that AR is starting to arrive. If Apple showed up with iAR glasses, what apps would you want to use / create?
I see a lot of people running their computers for much longer than the past. It is amazing how many PCs are 6 to 10 years old, and still being used. Sure, part of this is XP vs. Vista. But a lot of this is the overall performance for _most_ people doesn't improve past boot time. The average person seems to spend most of their time in email or web browsing. To these people, app load time and web page response time are the key indicators of performance. A 1 GHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM, with a fresh copy of XP and Google Chrome is a pretty decent experience for that crowd.
I'm sure the hardware guys will see a spike in sales due to Windows 7, but I'm still waiting for a serious boost in performance. Solid State drives, along with "instant boot" operating systems are likely to be the next game changer. The iPhone shows us how important that is for that class of equipment. An instant boot tablet / laptop would be a pretty big hit, in my eyes.
My iPhone has conditioned me to no longer be willing to wait for the desktop PC to boot. I want it now, and at my fingertips.
I now keep a laptop (docked) on the kitchen counter in sleep mode. I just open it and use it. I can't tell you how handy that is. My desktop pc is often off, and in a different room. Being able to jot a quick note or pop up a web site is great.
I wonder if it would make sense to put a lightweight kernel and UI in ROM/SSD, boot off of that, and give us web surfing, etc, while the rest of the OS loads in the background?
I use optimistic locking, but I warn the user when someone might be editing the record. We penalize slow users in favor of faster users.
My app gives the user an 'edit' button. When they click it, they get a timestamp inserted in the record, and it is refreshed (thus they see if someone else is editing). If effect, this timestamp acts like a record lock, but if it is >5 minutes old, it is ignored. This means I don't have to have the server clearing old locks.
Anytime I display the data, the clients looks at the timestamp, and if it is 5 minutes old, I color the field yellow. This warns the user that an edit may be in progress. If they choose to hit the edit button, they risk losing their edits.
Downside: User 1 starts his edit, but takes 6 minutes. User 2 starts his edit @ 5.1 minutes (lock has 'expired') and completes before User 1. Thus User 1 loses his edit - and bitches to me.
Upside: When User 1 bitches, I point out that it is his fault that he didn't complete the task in a reasonable time, and the quicker (busier?) user wins. Solution - quit screwing around when you edit, or you might have to do it twice.
Yes, we have a lot of old timestamps sitting around, but the load on the server is light. We can flush those out easy enough at night.
I'm sure someone will point out something I've overlooked, but it seems to work pretty good for us.
Oh, if you hit the "cancel edit" button, we clear the timestamp, allowing others to edit. So in the case of a lock, user 2 can call user 1 and ask them to cancel the edit. I encourage users to communicate as a way to resolve these issues, rather than code a "my way or the highway" solution.
I find it quite odd that you take my comment about economic games (that I dislike) and slander me with accusations of being a xenophobe. Then you show your own bias against other groups. There is nothing I could say that could top what you said about yourself.
You know nothing of me, yet you flame me. This is your method of showing how "superior" you are? Odd.
I hope you get over whatever anger issues you have against "Southerners", and why you feel the need to slam them.
Funny - this very thing was being discussed around 1985 (I think), but using battery-backed RAM as a way to reduce boot time. The thinking was people wouldn't put up with a computer that took 30 seconds to start, and if we didn't have a 2-5 second boot time (equal to a TV), the personal computer would never fly. But since it took from 1985 (80386 chip) to 1995 (Windows 95) for a 32-bit OS to become popular, maybe 25 years is reasonable.
Or not. Man, this industry moves at a snails pace in a lot of areas. Why do we still live with the x86 instruction set. Is "the year of UNIX" here yet?
Anyway, three competitors will emerge:
- Someone will put NAND directly on the drive, and get an instant speed improvement. All the tech sites will rave about it and it will be an instant must-have item.
- Their competitor will figure out a way to put the OS files in NAND, for fast booting, via a utility or firmware. The marketing war begins.
- The third competitor will work with Microsoft or Apple to get OS support for fast boot. Apple will get there first and you'll see a commercial on TV with the Mac guy wondering why the PC guy takes the entire commercial to wake up.
In a single drive system, the cost will be about the same. Doing it on the drive will create an instant performance boost on any machine, and well worth the estimated $10 added cost.
I use DBAN if the drive is still good _AND_ I know where it is going (say - another PC at the same company). But I had a batch of small 20 GB IDE drives that were not worth the effort of DBAN'ing. I had a lot of them so the hammer method was out.
Took them to the tool room and clamped them into a power saw. Cut the entire batch in half in about 8 seconds. Fun to watch, too. I am pretty sure there will be no data recovery off those puppy's.
I guess I could do both if I _really_ had to be sure.
>> "the advanced companies were a real stickler for 24-bit per color channel standard."
Actually, it was 24-bit color - that's 8 bits per channel (3 channels x 8 bits = 24 bit color). The pitch was that was all the human eye could discern. Of course, when you manipulate it, you get rounding errors, leading to banding in the sky, etc.
Right now, high end dSLR cameras only do 14-bits per color channel. And that's pretty darn good.
I think what you are looking for is the equal of Peter Norton's "Inside the IBM PC" which gave us a look inside the new-at-the-time computer which is still with us to this day.
Well the best book on the subject is "His Needs, Her Needs" by Dr. Willard F. Harley, Jr.
The author was a marriage counselor who was distressed this his clients usually divorced anyway. He felt he was doing something wrong and started going to conferences and discussing methods with others in his field. He discovered the field's dirty secret - marriage counseling usually doesn't save the marriage.
This led him to begin his own research on what people need from a marriage for it to work. He discovered that generally men need 5 things and women need 5 things. This sounds really simple, but these things tend to be the driving force behind our actions. When she does something, rather than react to her actions, you will realize what the core problem is and be able to deal with it instead.
For me, it was also a book of self-discovery. I didn't really realize what drove me and this book helped me realize why my past relationships failed. I've been pretty happy since.
I have two copies of this book. One copy to loan to friends and another on my non-loan shelf to review from time-to-time.
This book is the best $12 I ever spent and I'd put on my top 10 must-read list.
The three 15000 RPM SCSI 320 drives in my workstation (HP XW8400) are very quiet. This machine is amazingly quiet - HP engineers at a trade show say that was one of their design goals and they certainly achieved it.
Well, $1.92 million divided by 24 songs = $80,000 per song. I wonder what the artists received per song? I hope this triggers a review of the true costs and show how much the artists get.
I wonder if this might show that RIAA members are actually scamming the artists and don't deserve the damages rewarded.
Question for Lawyer types: If I buy an item from you for $1, then sell them for $5000 each, should damages be affected by the huge disparity is cost vs price?
As for me, I'll continue to boycott buying anything from Sony, etc. It is against my moral code to support companies that behave in such an evil fashion.
I used to write reviews of CAD graphics subsystems for a couple of magazines, so a lot of the people in the business knew me. I'd see a screen flickering and ask why it was so crappy. The sales jocks would tell me how great it looked. So I'd change the refresh rate and they would be amazed at the improvements. Remember, these are the guys who sell the stuff, and work for the company that makes the stuff. I was always amazed at the complete lack of knowledge of these guys.
>> "that MC6800 you are talking about was garbage compared to an 8086.."
As someone who did assembly programming on an MC6800 and 8088, I agree with his statement.
I do wish IBM had selected the MC68000 rather than the Intel 8088, but I understand why they did it.
The IBM sales force was reporting that Apples were showing up in the accounting department running something called Visicalc. So the mission was to counter Apple by producing a low-cost machine to run Visicalc, but with some feature that would sell the machine (640K RAM vs Apple's 64K - hey it's 10x better!), but not encroach on the higher margin products. And get it out the door quick!
So it made sense to build a machine that could run CP/M and Visicalc quickly. It was simply a quick solution, not meant to be the foundation product it turned out to be.
Ah, I love this keyboard. When they started changing the design, I started stashing the originals. I still have three spares left over, in addition to the ones I'm using. I can't stand a straight keyboard.
No, more like the exoskeleton shown in the movie "Aliens".
Your examples are simply existing construction equipment, and are nothing like powered exoskeletons. Thus I contend that your links have little to do with the current conversation.
My comment was responding to the statements concerning the limitations of exoskeletons as weapons. The article was about a exoskeleton without indication of what it would be used for. But most comments suggest it is a weapon. I'm just pointing out that it could be used for other things. A helicopter is a lousy airplane, but has its own set of uses.
I agree with you, in the context of a weapon. But consider how useful this could be for construction. The ability to lift large objects (like beams) into position could be quite useful.
A four-legged version might be more useful, however.
Spinrite has become a standard part of my workflow. When a PC comes in for maintenance, I run Spinrite on it overnight to remap bad or weak sectors.
I had to run it on a high end HP workstation with a set of RAID 0 (striped) SCSI320 drives. This was one of those million dollar projects the engineer was working on, and had not copied his latest edits to the server. He needed the performance of his local drives, so he was not being unreasonable in keeping the files local. He forgot to copy the files to the server after a late night work session, and the workstation wouldn't boot the next morning. Major panic.
Spinrite worked on it for a few hours and everything came right back. Freaking amazing. Easy too.
I have no association with GRC, I've just used the product since the early 90's. I will not be without this product.
I own an iPhone and love it. But I still miss features my Palm V had, specifically Graffiti - the method of entering text via stylus. Once I learned not to look at the screen, I became really fast and could easily use it to take notes in a meeting. I hate entering text in the iPhone. I consider the predictive text to be an amusing feature brought over from the Newton. In 4 months it has only predicted the correct word maybe 10 or 20 times. But it replaces my word with the wrong one hundreds of times. Wish I could turn it off. I have actually considered carrying my old Palm V (yes it still works) with my iPhone.
If Palm brings out this phone with Graffiti, I'll dump my iPhone in a heartbeat.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... Is creating patents for things like this "evil"? Seeking to prevent others from saving energy (unless they pay a toll) is not good for this planet, and I'm not sure if passes for "good".
So this worm is aimed at people are are smart enough to jailbreak an iPhone, but stupid enough not to change a default password. Sounds like a narrow band detection device.
I so loved Firefox and use to tell everyone to use it. I loved that it kicked IE's ass. Gotta love any open source project that goes up against Microsoft and wins.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can no longer stand to use Firefox. Like a slut that wins you over with fantastic sex, Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.
In fact, it seems way too fast. Is Google caching the web pages in a nearby Google server? Even sites that use little JavaScript seem to load really fast. Is something going on here?
The system will never prevent the application of the breaks
I guess you missed the bit about it being a TURBO. There is a check valve in the vacuum assist line. It is open when you have a low pressure (no turbo boost) to create a "vacuum assist" for the brakes.
It closes when the turbo boost goes above atmospheric pressure. But if it fails, you have pressure on the vac assist, and rather than assist you, it prevent the application of brakes. In my opinion, this is a bad design, and if you combine it with a cruse control that suddenly accelerates the vehicle, you have a potential problem.
In the case of my own Audi 5000 turbo, it did indeed prevent me from applying the brakes. Yes, I did look down and was pressing the brake pedal with both feet. I could not budge it in the slightest.
Wrong. See my post above about my Audi experience and what I believe to be the root cause - the cruse control, and a malfunction in the brake assist check valve.
The Audi 5000S was never defective...
It might be true that some people hit the wrong pedal, but I actually owned an Audi 5000 Turbo and experienced sudden-acceleration.
I was driving down an Interstate highway in Texas, when the car suddenly began accelerating. I was on cruse control, and my feet were not touching any pedals. Since I'm comfortable at high speeds (past racer) and the weather and road were good, I was pretty calm. I put my foot behind the accelerator pedal and pulled back. It moved freely. I realized the cruse control had opened the throttle wide open.
I tapped the brakes to shut down the system. The pedal wouldn't move. I pressed hard with both feet, and could feel the arm flex, but it would not move. Realizing I had no brakes, and a wide open throttle, I hit the dash switch to shut off the cruse control. As the car slowed, the brakes slowly became operational. I noticed the turbo boost gage was now reading negative pressure. When the turbo boost was on, you could not apply the brakes.
It turns out that there was a check valve between the intake manifold and the brake booster. If it leaks/leaks, then high pressure air prevents the application of the brakes.
My belief is there was a bug in the cruse control, or it was susceptible to outside interference (trucker with hopped-up CB radio?) Combine that with the check valve issue and you have a car that could very well exhibit the behavior that 60 Minutes indicated. Those people said the car suddenly accelerated and the brakes didn't work. And that matches my experience exactly.
I contacted Audi USA, but they blew me off. The dealer didn't care either.
I'll let others argue whether this is a 'defect', but I've been cured of ever buying another Audi.
A ggreat deal of Microsoft security is unfortunately just like the underwear of Brittany Spears.
Not crazy about this analogy. After all, one is known to harbor viruses and infections, and the other..... uh.... never mind.
I am one of the lucky few that has actually used a true VR rig at Autodesk in the early 90's. And as others have pointed out, the OP is not VR. Much like the flying car, VR simply asks too much of you to gain widespread acceptance.
But augmented reality is a completely different game and stands a good chance of being the next big thing.
Since this is /. let's make the effort to get our terminology correct.
The OP shows us that AR is starting to arrive. If Apple showed up with iAR glasses, what apps would you want to use / create?
I see a lot of people running their computers for much longer than the past. It is amazing how many PCs are 6 to 10 years old, and still being used. Sure, part of this is XP vs. Vista. But a lot of this is the overall performance for _most_ people doesn't improve past boot time. The average person seems to spend most of their time in email or web browsing. To these people, app load time and web page response time are the key indicators of performance. A 1 GHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM, with a fresh copy of XP and Google Chrome is a pretty decent experience for that crowd.
I'm sure the hardware guys will see a spike in sales due to Windows 7, but I'm still waiting for a serious boost in performance. Solid State drives, along with "instant boot" operating systems are likely to be the next game changer. The iPhone shows us how important that is for that class of equipment. An instant boot tablet / laptop would be a pretty big hit, in my eyes.
My iPhone has conditioned me to no longer be willing to wait for the desktop PC to boot. I want it now, and at my fingertips.
I now keep a laptop (docked) on the kitchen counter in sleep mode. I just open it and use it. I can't tell you how handy that is. My desktop pc is often off, and in a different room. Being able to jot a quick note or pop up a web site is great.
I wonder if it would make sense to put a lightweight kernel and UI in ROM/SSD, boot off of that, and give us web surfing, etc, while the rest of the OS loads in the background?
I use optimistic locking, but I warn the user when someone might be editing the record. We penalize slow users in favor of faster users.
My app gives the user an 'edit' button. When they click it, they get a timestamp inserted in the record, and it is refreshed (thus they see if someone else is editing). If effect, this timestamp acts like a record lock, but if it is >5 minutes old, it is ignored. This means I don't have to have the server clearing old locks.
Anytime I display the data, the clients looks at the timestamp, and if it is 5 minutes old, I color the field yellow. This warns the user that an edit may be in progress. If they choose to hit the edit button, they risk losing their edits.
Downside: User 1 starts his edit, but takes 6 minutes. User 2 starts his edit @ 5.1 minutes (lock has 'expired') and completes before User 1. Thus User 1 loses his edit - and bitches to me.
Upside: When User 1 bitches, I point out that it is his fault that he didn't complete the task in a reasonable time, and the quicker (busier?) user wins. Solution - quit screwing around when you edit, or you might have to do it twice.
Yes, we have a lot of old timestamps sitting around, but the load on the server is light. We can flush those out easy enough at night.
I'm sure someone will point out something I've overlooked, but it seems to work pretty good for us.
Oh, if you hit the "cancel edit" button, we clear the timestamp, allowing others to edit. So in the case of a lock, user 2 can call user 1 and ask them to cancel the edit. I encourage users to communicate as a way to resolve these issues, rather than code a "my way or the highway" solution.
I find it quite odd that you take my comment about economic games (that I dislike) and slander me with accusations of being a xenophobe. Then you show your own bias against other groups. There is nothing I could say that could top what you said about yourself.
You know nothing of me, yet you flame me. This is your method of showing how "superior" you are? Odd.
I hope you get over whatever anger issues you have against "Southerners", and why you feel the need to slam them.
Just what the world economy needs. A single-country "cartel" that will cause prices to greatly rise. This should be interesting to watch.
I guess rare-earth metals are the new "oil".
Funny - this very thing was being discussed around 1985 (I think), but using battery-backed RAM as a way to reduce boot time. The thinking was people wouldn't put up with a computer that took 30 seconds to start, and if we didn't have a 2-5 second boot time (equal to a TV), the personal computer would never fly. But since it took from 1985 (80386 chip) to 1995 (Windows 95) for a 32-bit OS to become popular, maybe 25 years is reasonable.
Or not. Man, this industry moves at a snails pace in a lot of areas. Why do we still live with the x86 instruction set. Is "the year of UNIX" here yet?
Anyway, three competitors will emerge:
- Someone will put NAND directly on the drive, and get an instant speed improvement. All the tech sites will rave about it and it will be an instant must-have item.
- Their competitor will figure out a way to put the OS files in NAND, for fast booting, via a utility or firmware. The marketing war begins.
- The third competitor will work with Microsoft or Apple to get OS support for fast boot. Apple will get there first and you'll see a commercial on TV with the Mac guy wondering why the PC guy takes the entire commercial to wake up.
In a single drive system, the cost will be about the same. Doing it on the drive will create an instant performance boost on any machine, and well worth the estimated $10 added cost.
I use DBAN if the drive is still good _AND_ I know where it is going (say - another PC at the same company). But I had a batch of small 20 GB IDE drives that were not worth the effort of DBAN'ing. I had a lot of them so the hammer method was out.
Took them to the tool room and clamped them into a power saw. Cut the entire batch in half in about 8 seconds. Fun to watch, too. I am pretty sure there will be no data recovery off those puppy's.
I guess I could do both if I _really_ had to be sure.
>> "the advanced companies were a real stickler for 24-bit per color channel standard."
Actually, it was 24-bit color - that's 8 bits per channel (3 channels x 8 bits = 24 bit color). The pitch was that was all the human eye could discern. Of course, when you manipulate it, you get rounding errors, leading to banding in the sky, etc.
Right now, high end dSLR cameras only do 14-bits per color channel. And that's pretty darn good.
I think what you are looking for is the equal of Peter Norton's "Inside the IBM PC" which gave us a look inside the new-at-the-time computer which is still with us to this day.
Well the best book on the subject is "His Needs, Her Needs" by Dr. Willard F. Harley, Jr.
The author was a marriage counselor who was distressed this his clients usually divorced anyway. He felt he was doing something wrong and started going to conferences and discussing methods with others in his field. He discovered the field's dirty secret - marriage counseling usually doesn't save the marriage.
This led him to begin his own research on what people need from a marriage for it to work. He discovered that generally men need 5 things and women need 5 things. This sounds really simple, but these things tend to be the driving force behind our actions. When she does something, rather than react to her actions, you will realize what the core problem is and be able to deal with it instead.
For me, it was also a book of self-discovery. I didn't really realize what drove me and this book helped me realize why my past relationships failed. I've been pretty happy since.
I have two copies of this book. One copy to loan to friends and another on my non-loan shelf to review from time-to-time.
This book is the best $12 I ever spent and I'd put on my top 10 must-read list.
The three 15000 RPM SCSI 320 drives in my workstation (HP XW8400) are very quiet. This machine is amazingly quiet - HP engineers at a trade show say that was one of their design goals and they certainly achieved it.
Well, $1.92 million divided by 24 songs = $80,000 per song. I wonder what the artists received per song? I hope this triggers a review of the true costs and show how much the artists get.
I wonder if this might show that RIAA members are actually scamming the artists and don't deserve the damages rewarded.
Question for Lawyer types: If I buy an item from you for $1, then sell them for $5000 each, should damages be affected by the huge disparity is cost vs price?
As for me, I'll continue to boycott buying anything from Sony, etc. It is against my moral code to support companies that behave in such an evil fashion.
I used to write reviews of CAD graphics subsystems for a couple of magazines, so a lot of the people in the business knew me. I'd see a screen flickering and ask why it was so crappy. The sales jocks would tell me how great it looked. So I'd change the refresh rate and they would be amazed at the improvements. Remember, these are the guys who sell the stuff, and work for the company that makes the stuff. I was always amazed at the complete lack of knowledge of these guys.
>> "that MC6800 you are talking about was garbage compared to an 8086.."
As someone who did assembly programming on an MC6800 and 8088, I agree with his statement.
I do wish IBM had selected the MC68000 rather than the Intel 8088, but I understand why they did it.
The IBM sales force was reporting that Apples were showing up in the accounting department running something called Visicalc. So the mission was to counter Apple by producing a low-cost machine to run Visicalc, but with some feature that would sell the machine (640K RAM vs Apple's 64K - hey it's 10x better!), but not encroach on the higher margin products. And get it out the door quick!
So it made sense to build a machine that could run CP/M and Visicalc quickly. It was simply a quick solution, not meant to be the foundation product it turned out to be.
Ah, I love this keyboard. When they started changing the design, I started stashing the originals. I still have three spares left over, in addition to the ones I'm using. I can't stand a straight keyboard.
No, more like the exoskeleton shown in the movie "Aliens".
Your examples are simply existing construction equipment, and are nothing like powered exoskeletons. Thus I contend that your links have little to do with the current conversation.
My comment was responding to the statements concerning the limitations of exoskeletons as weapons. The article was about a exoskeleton without indication of what it would be used for. But most comments suggest it is a weapon. I'm just pointing out that it could be used for other things. A helicopter is a lousy airplane, but has its own set of uses.
I agree with you, in the context of a weapon. But consider how useful this could be for construction. The ability to lift large objects (like beams) into position could be quite useful.
A four-legged version might be more useful, however.
Spinrite has become a standard part of my workflow. When a PC comes in for maintenance, I run Spinrite on it overnight to remap bad or weak sectors.
I had to run it on a high end HP workstation with a set of RAID 0 (striped) SCSI320 drives. This was one of those million dollar projects the engineer was working on, and had not copied his latest edits to the server. He needed the performance of his local drives, so he was not being unreasonable in keeping the files local. He forgot to copy the files to the server after a late night work session, and the workstation wouldn't boot the next morning. Major panic.
Spinrite worked on it for a few hours and everything came right back. Freaking amazing. Easy too.
I have no association with GRC, I've just used the product since the early 90's. I will not be without this product.
I own an iPhone and love it. But I still miss features my Palm V had, specifically Graffiti - the method of entering text via stylus. Once I learned not to look at the screen, I became really fast and could easily use it to take notes in a meeting. I hate entering text in the iPhone. I consider the predictive text to be an amusing feature brought over from the Newton. In 4 months it has only predicted the correct word maybe 10 or 20 times. But it replaces my word with the wrong one hundreds of times. Wish I could turn it off. I have actually considered carrying my old Palm V (yes it still works) with my iPhone.
If Palm brings out this phone with Graffiti, I'll dump my iPhone in a heartbeat.