Ender's Game, found that book in high school it's long been one of my favorites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game#Plot_summary
Interesting how back in '85 sci-fi had already locked on to this emerging tech... and possible abuses.
With out being overly obvious, you realize this is a 2-3mb app with 1.2 gigs of map data? You realize Android apps have access to a SD card? Just my Google listen (podcasts) has nearly 2G of data alone stored on my SD card.
I got a My Touch 3G for $99 on the "Oprah sale" about a month ago, I live in podunk and as such have yet to see a 3G connection... I 'opted out' of the data plan, so my TCO is currently much lower than the normal smart phone user. Why would I dumb down my smart phone, it has wifi... around here just about every public building has a public wifi access point (even the grocery store), I don't use my phone while I'm driving... so it has entirely been a non-issue.
It is a good phone, a definite upgrade from my old flip phone. Even the weakest aspect of the phone (the camera) is an upgrade from my old phone...
I got the phone before the 1.6 update was rolled out and the improvement going from 1.5 to 1.6 was significant. If that is any indication of what is in store when 2.0 is released, I'm flat out excited.
Oh and the toys, the google star map alone is worth the price of admission... I have never been so impressed with a portable device, and I've had all sorts of smartphones shoved down my throat by employers (Windows Mobile and Blackberries mostly I guess, I've only played with friends iPhones and have yet to see any new palm devices).
So I for one hope that Android really does take off, I know it has impressed me.
I just discovered the 2D barcode. I Just got an Android phone and it can read these in a blink. Now I just ordered a pile of new business cards with QR's for my contact info on the back. I think this is awesome, and am really surprised this is not used ALOT more.
Lets see I have a touchscreen in my kitchen, (old 12" ELOtouch, SFF celeron, WIFI) for recipes, shopping lists, and watching my recorded TV/listening to music while in the kitchen. Whole family loves the thing, and it just gets wiped off like the rest of the counter tops. It does have a wireless keyboard with a trackball, but I don't think that has been pulled off the top of the fridge for a long time.
I have a Hitachi slate windows PC in the living room (can't get the fingerprint reader to work in linux), everyone in the family has a profile setup on it, and logs in with a finger swipe. I use the thing for drawing all the time, and find it a really comfortable way to compute. Of course for real text entry or coding work I still have to drag out a standard form factor laptop as using the onscreen keyboard is tedious and not nearly as fast as touch typing. I do have a BT keyboard I could use with it, but standard laptops just have an ergonomic advantage for text entry. My only real complaint about the slate is that it does not respond to finger input. I love the pressure sensitive stylus and it does wonders in Alias Sketchbook, but it would be nice if I could 'smudge' pencil and move the paper around with my fingers... much as I would with a normal drawing pad. On a funny note, I do still 'wipe away' the screen after using the eraser... like there are virtual rubber bbs on my tablet pc.
I've owned all sorts of various touch screen toys (Palm, PPC, TomTom) over the years. One thing I can say for certain is that touch screen technology is starting to finally feel mature.
Finally I just picked up a 'MyTouch 3g' phone. I just absolutely love the Android UI! Simple, fast and for what it is (a social communication device, or a phone with toys) perfectly suitable. So around my home at least the "Touch revolution" started long time ago (the ELO Touchscreen is nearly 10 years old, tablet at least five), and I'm glad the rest of the world is starting to catch on.
~WTF is up with trying to format an okay looking post here... tryed plain text, html (including using tags)... I give up, at least the 'code' option at least picks up the carriage returns.
Lets see; My PC has a 46" monitor, looks like a stereo component (read no association with work), it does require some brain effort to read the guide and choose a channel with the remote. But the fact that the wife can manage it, mean that it has to be pretty close to zero brain effort.
Of course because it is a PVR it is never shut completely off, so I would say normal 'boot time', that is the time it takes for it so wake from sleep is indeed faster than the power on cycle of the LCD TV connected to it.
There *are* a lot of cards out there with a HDMI on them, more ever day. These cards also have an internal header to connect the video card to the SPDIF header on your motherboard (or other audio card with a SPDIF header). So they do indeed carry audio.
I was really starting to believe that my son and I where the only people left on earth that use that left hand layout. Way way back when binding your movement to home row was l33t, this was the way everyone I knew who played FPSs bound there keys for the LAN parties. Always kind of wondered where wasd came from, and how they strafe left and run at the same time.
Good to know there is someone else out there that is constantly remapping there keys to esdf.
I was burning through tapes; all that rewinding to reset the counter, so I could find my programs. I was also failing 4th grade spelling. So the first program I ever wrote was a spelling program. You started it up, entered the spelling list and it would go through the list three times flashing the word up and then waiting for you to enter it. Repeating the word if you got it wrong. I aced a whole semester of spelling got the floppy drive and was the happest geek kid ever!
Are there any phones that do not support mail? My Motorola KRZR K1m supports POP and IMAP out of the box, supports syncing my inbox, contacts and calender directly with work's exchange server; and all of the above works fine with tmo's 5.99 tzones addon. I can check gmail and yahoo on the built in browser (less than ideal, but works in a pinch).
While it may not be as nice of an experience as a PDA of some sort, it is a piece of equipment that is always in my pocket.
With the news of Windows 7 breaking binary compatibility with previous versions of the OS, talks of greater modularization and MS's obvious moves in the OSS space... I keep *dreaming* that Windows 7 will actually just be a desktop environment sitting on top of GNU/Linux kernel.
Call me crazy but I would find a strange source of glee if I could choose "Windows 7" as my session from GDM.
I think I'll be taking a hit for admitting I use Vista but anyone who runs a HTPC understands the WAF, and she just likes MCE better than the rest. This machine has been running 2005 MCE forever so when Vista came out I picked up a copy of premium to play with and threw it on there.
It was running on there very well (not doing much other than playing xvids). It hsd some issues, like I couldn't seem to get any sort of DTS out of the spdif, wouldn't keep my speaker setup (just trying to set it as 5.1, always resets to stereo).
I waited patiently for SP1 and jumped at installing it when MS sent me the link.
Oh what a mistake, it completely killed the machine... I had to reinstall the video driver, audio driver, VFD driver... Then at least it seemed worked find. Would NOT connect to my WPA2 WAP, and Vista MCE would not start.
I am sure I have to take some of the blame for this, I had hacked the termsrv.dll so I could have two simultaneous logins (the limited TV login on the TV, and my Admin login via RDP)... and who knows what extensions I had installed into MCE to play with. Plus I had Win DVD and the Klite codec pack installed.
Of course being your normal techy who works in a support role, you get mildly excited when something huge goes wrong, and worked for an entire day attempting the normal stuff to try and back this out. Hoping I could allow the family some normal evening TV time. Nothing I did worked, it felt like a cascading failure, the more I tried to fix it, the worst it got.
Finally defeated, I resigned myself to just reinstall Vista, it's a fairly simplistic install and figured it would only take a hour or two to get reinstalled. But then Vista began to bluescreen during the install, sometime after formatting the discs.
So I threw Ubuntu on there and checked everything out to make sure all the hardware was functioning perfectly. Works great, but I could not get Vista back on the machine.
Now the PC is back running MCE2005 happily and I think I'm going to take a shot at putting Linux on the beast again (I tried Gentoo before but couldn't get the digital audio working properly over the spdif, I think this time I'll try a prepackaged HTPC distro).
The site this story links too is the most Wii unfriendly site I've seen on the thing. The Wii seems unable to zoom to the body of text, you have to actually back out of the image... I guess I'll have to read it later.
I for one can not forgive yahoo for killing the All-Seeing Eye. The fact that they picked up this property and then just let it die, has proven to me that Yahoo really cares nothing about there users.
Now I don't really have any problems with people attempting to work out new useable GUI variations (ever tryed to use windows/x.org with a touch screen?). The general premise if LCARS is great, but rather than trying to be true to the pictures thrown up on the TeeVee, why arn't they taking the basic idea and creating something functional out of it?
All the ?random? colors and numbers are useless fluff, get rid of that junk and start with basic functions, like how submenus will come before the elbows, with primary information on top and wigets below...
Slashdot Mirror
Ender's Game, found that book in high school it's long been one of my favorites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game#Plot_summary Interesting how back in '85 sci-fi had already locked on to this emerging tech... and possible abuses.
With out being overly obvious, you realize this is a 2-3mb app with 1.2 gigs of map data? You realize Android apps have access to a SD card? Just my Google listen (podcasts) has nearly 2G of data alone stored on my SD card.
I got a My Touch 3G for $99 on the "Oprah sale" about a month ago, I live in podunk and as such have yet to see a 3G connection... I 'opted out' of the data plan, so my TCO is currently much lower than the normal smart phone user. Why would I dumb down my smart phone, it has wifi... around here just about every public building has a public wifi access point (even the grocery store), I don't use my phone while I'm driving... so it has entirely been a non-issue. It is a good phone, a definite upgrade from my old flip phone. Even the weakest aspect of the phone (the camera) is an upgrade from my old phone... I got the phone before the 1.6 update was rolled out and the improvement going from 1.5 to 1.6 was significant. If that is any indication of what is in store when 2.0 is released, I'm flat out excited. Oh and the toys, the google star map alone is worth the price of admission... I have never been so impressed with a portable device, and I've had all sorts of smartphones shoved down my throat by employers (Windows Mobile and Blackberries mostly I guess, I've only played with friends iPhones and have yet to see any new palm devices). So I for one hope that Android really does take off, I know it has impressed me.
I just discovered the 2D barcode. I Just got an Android phone and it can read these in a blink. Now I just ordered a pile of new business cards with QR's for my contact info on the back. I think this is awesome, and am really surprised this is not used ALOT more.
Lets see I have a touchscreen in my kitchen, (old 12" ELOtouch, SFF celeron, WIFI) for recipes, shopping lists, and watching my recorded TV/listening to music while in the kitchen. Whole family loves the thing, and it just gets wiped off like the rest of the counter tops. It does have a wireless keyboard with a trackball, but I don't think that has been pulled off the top of the fridge for a long time.
I have a Hitachi slate windows PC in the living room (can't get the fingerprint reader to work in linux), everyone in the family has a profile setup on it, and logs in with a finger swipe. I use the thing for drawing all the time, and find it a really comfortable way to compute. Of course for real text entry or coding work I still have to drag out a standard form factor laptop as using the onscreen keyboard is tedious and not nearly as fast as touch typing. I do have a BT keyboard I could use with it, but standard laptops just have an ergonomic advantage for text entry. My only real complaint about the slate is that it does not respond to finger input. I love the pressure sensitive stylus and it does wonders in Alias Sketchbook, but it would be nice if I could 'smudge' pencil and move the paper around with my fingers... much as I would with a normal drawing pad. On a funny note, I do still 'wipe away' the screen after using the eraser... like there are virtual rubber bbs on my tablet pc.
I've owned all sorts of various touch screen toys (Palm, PPC, TomTom) over the years. One thing I can say for certain is that touch screen technology is starting to finally feel mature.
Finally I just picked up a 'MyTouch 3g' phone. I just absolutely love the Android UI! Simple, fast and for what it is (a social communication device, or a phone with toys) perfectly suitable. So around my home at least the "Touch revolution" started long time ago (the ELO Touchscreen is nearly 10 years old, tablet at least five), and I'm glad the rest of the world is starting to catch on.
~WTF is up with trying to format an okay looking post here... tryed plain text, html (including using tags)... I give up, at least the 'code' option at least picks up the carriage returns.
How would they put the commercials into the mirror?
Lets see; My PC has a 46" monitor, looks like a stereo component (read no association with work), it does require some brain effort to read the guide and choose a channel with the remote. But the fact that the wife can manage it, mean that it has to be pretty close to zero brain effort.
Of course because it is a PVR it is never shut completely off, so I would say normal 'boot time', that is the time it takes for it so wake from sleep is indeed faster than the power on cycle of the LCD TV connected to it.
There *are* a lot of cards out there with a HDMI on them, more ever day. These cards also have an internal header to connect the video card to the SPDIF header on your motherboard (or other audio card with a SPDIF header). So they do indeed carry audio.
And yes it will be partially because of the fact that they did not include the DRM.
Although I feel in love with the game way back when it was 2d... I haven't played any of them since.
I was really starting to believe that my son and I where the only people left on earth that use that left hand layout. Way way back when binding your movement to home row was l33t, this was the way everyone I knew who played FPSs bound there keys for the LAN parties. Always kind of wondered where wasd came from, and how they strafe left and run at the same time.
Good to know there is someone else out there that is constantly remapping there keys to esdf.
I was burning through tapes; all that rewinding to reset the counter, so I could find my programs. I was also failing 4th grade spelling. So the first program I ever wrote was a spelling program. You started it up, entered the spelling list and it would go through the list three times flashing the word up and then waiting for you to enter it. Repeating the word if you got it wrong. I aced a whole semester of spelling got the floppy drive and was the happest geek kid ever!
Are there any phones that do not support mail? My Motorola KRZR K1m supports POP and IMAP out of the box, supports syncing my inbox, contacts and calender directly with work's exchange server; and all of the above works fine with tmo's 5.99 tzones addon. I can check gmail and yahoo on the built in browser (less than ideal, but works in a pinch).
While it may not be as nice of an experience as a PDA of some sort, it is a piece of equipment that is always in my pocket.
With the news of Windows 7 breaking binary compatibility with previous versions of the OS, talks of greater modularization and MS's obvious moves in the OSS space... I keep *dreaming* that Windows 7 will actually just be a desktop environment sitting on top of GNU/Linux kernel.
Call me crazy but I would find a strange source of glee if I could choose "Windows 7" as my session from GDM.
I think I'll be taking a hit for admitting I use Vista but anyone who runs a HTPC understands the WAF, and she just likes MCE better than the rest. This machine has been running 2005 MCE forever so when Vista came out I picked up a copy of premium to play with and threw it on there.
It was running on there very well (not doing much other than playing xvids). It hsd some issues, like I couldn't seem to get any sort of DTS out of the spdif, wouldn't keep my speaker setup (just trying to set it as 5.1, always resets to stereo).
I waited patiently for SP1 and jumped at installing it when MS sent me the link.
Oh what a mistake, it completely killed the machine... I had to reinstall the video driver, audio driver, VFD driver... Then at least it seemed worked find. Would NOT connect to my WPA2 WAP, and Vista MCE would not start.
I am sure I have to take some of the blame for this, I had hacked the termsrv.dll so I could have two simultaneous logins (the limited TV login on the TV, and my Admin login via RDP)... and who knows what extensions I had installed into MCE to play with. Plus I had Win DVD and the Klite codec pack installed.
Of course being your normal techy who works in a support role, you get mildly excited when something huge goes wrong, and worked for an entire day attempting the normal stuff to try and back this out. Hoping I could allow the family some normal evening TV time. Nothing I did worked, it felt like a cascading failure, the more I tried to fix it, the worst it got.
Finally defeated, I resigned myself to just reinstall Vista, it's a fairly simplistic install and figured it would only take a hour or two to get reinstalled. But then Vista began to bluescreen during the install, sometime after formatting the discs.
So I threw Ubuntu on there and checked everything out to make sure all the hardware was functioning perfectly. Works great, but I could not get Vista back on the machine.
Now the PC is back running MCE2005 happily and I think I'm going to take a shot at putting Linux on the beast again (I tried Gentoo before but couldn't get the digital audio working properly over the spdif, I think this time I'll try a prepackaged HTPC distro).
The site this story links too is the most Wii unfriendly site I've seen on the thing. The Wii seems unable to zoom to the body of text, you have to actually back out of the image...
I guess I'll have to read it later.
I for one can not forgive yahoo for killing the All-Seeing Eye. The fact that they picked up this property and then just let it die, has proven to me that Yahoo really cares nothing about there users.
Now I don't really have any problems with people attempting to work out new useable GUI variations (ever tryed to use windows/x.org with a touch screen?). The general premise if LCARS is great, but rather than trying to be true to the pictures thrown up on the TeeVee, why arn't they taking the basic idea and creating something functional out of it?
All the ?random? colors and numbers are useless fluff, get rid of that junk and start with basic functions, like how submenus will come before the elbows, with primary information on top and wigets below...