Especially the new micro-reactor types like this one discussed on slashdot earlier. While I dont think that the most effective application of these is in power generation for neighborhoods or small towns, I can see where a self-contained reactor that will generate 200kW for 4 decades might be useful in ships and spacecraft.
It makes me sad how much baseless fear there is of nuclear power out there. A coolant leak is a pretty major breakdown as Nuclear disasters go, and AFAIK nothing truly bad happened in this situation. I'm not saying that nothing could happen- but properly maintained and operated nuclear power is far safer than the majority of fossil-fuel based technologies out there and significantly more cost-effective as well.
Highly doubtful. The objects move just fine after he has successfully targeted them. I think it has more to do with human performance. Taking another look at the video, and the better quality one on their website, I'll have to agree with you on that.
They don't need efficient interfaces, just fun and cool ones... kind of like the Wiimote. Thats exactly the point I was trying to make with that. With a no-touch multi-touch interface with position tracking using inexpensive hardware (a $40 wiimote, mostly open-source software, a few IR-LEDs that cost pennies and a pair of $5 gloves) you could create a really cool interface for a game. Even if Nintendo or a 3rd party developer doesn't come out with a game for the Wii that takes advantage of 'hacks' like this, a FOSS (or even closed-source) PC game created around a position aware no-touch 3D interface would be really really cool.
It seemed to me like the app was just lagging a bit, its possible that the demo was just put together inefficiently on a slow computer- the other demonstrations by the original hacker were very impressive and smooth. I have no doubt that this could lead to an extremely well-polished and affordable interface in the not-so-distant future.
You know what would be really amazing- if they integrated the 3-d "face" tracking hack into the system and built a 3-d/2-d hybrid no-touch interface. Moving around with the gloves on would change your perspective laterally. somehow turning on "mouse mode" by say pressing two fingers together would allow you to move a cursor 2-dimensionally from that perspective which becomes locked and a pressing down a third finger could act as a 'click.' Sort of a continuous virtual workspace- replacing the Compiz Cube with a cylinder, although I find it hard to imagine ways in which adding that 3-d aspect would be a productivity boost. It could definitely be used to make really freaking cool games. A 3-d RTS in which you can actually move around on the battlefield by changing position relative to the screen?
The first article was about the original hack which used a test interface and IR-reflective tape. This article seems to be about a project to implement the no-touch hack in a more usable fashion in an actual application. Definitely a step forward and pretty cool.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned that this apparently has a DVD-RW built-in. That makes it, in something a little thicker than the Air, less weight, a swappable battery, an optical drive and a heck of a lot more ports.
The day these machines stop being black and boxy is the day many of us stop buying them. I know that a lot of my friends were outraged when they started selling them in silver. I just ain't a thinkpad if it ain't black.
As someone who's used IBM Thinkpads for a while, I have to ask: is it actually a Thinkpad, or is it based on Lenovo's own designs (like the ideapad)? If it comes with the titanium-alloy reinforced case, the HDAPS and support from IBM's standard thinkpad support line I'm sold. If not... *shrug*
A quick glance at the picture suggests it could be either way- it has the keyboard light that most thinkpad users come to love and adore yet the screen hinge looks plastic instead of the heavy duty metal hinges that give thinkpads that smooth and secure feel while adjusting the screen you just don't see with most other laptops.
Its fairly logical to think that if its so expensive to get stuff into space, just build it there. While manned missions to the moon and on to mars would certainly be amazing, I fail to see the point of a manned mission to an asteroid. Just send a probe and play around with altering a small asteroid's orbit and bring it into a lunar orbit. Creating an automated system that collects small asteroids (small enough that they'd burn up in atmosphere) and bring them to the moon to be processed would be a tremendous step forward in human expansion into space. Unfortunately, I don't think anything like this would happen until commercial space missions start making it further out there.
For anyone that hasn't heard of him, I'd strongly recommend you check out Bill Stone's TED talk. The whole thing is pretty cool, but its the last chapter in the video thats really amazing.
Like the iPods, the mechanics (structure) involved to make the battery as easy to remove as say, the macbook, would add a significant amount to the size of the unit. The battery latch on the macbook is roughly the size of a nickel. Would you like your ipod to be 1/8" thicker just to add a latch for the battery? I completely understand what you're here, I was just trying to make the point that proposing this 'solution' to assuage peoples' concerns about not having a swappable battery is a little... disingenuous to the ideal of the Mac as easy to use. If someone doesn't want to buy a Mac cause they can't swap batteries, being able to swap batteries by opening up the case isn't going to change that.
And considering the claimed battery life, it almost erases the need to carry a spare battery. For a lot of people, I can see this being the case, but equally not the case for many other people that want ultraportables. A 5 hour battery life on a 16 hour flight would be a bit... lacking. Not to mention people that travel to underdeveloped regions. Especially considering the 5 hour rating is probably the max not the minimum. I'd much rather have a slightly larger laptop (like a thinkpad X61) with the oversized battery giving 10 hours of juice and keep the original 5 hour battery in my bag for emergencies.
Having the battery screwdriver accessible is a good thing for the long run so you can replace the battery once it dies, but most of the complaints I've personally heard about the non-swappable battery are related to the Air's role as an ultraportable and not being able to swap batteries on long haul flights or trips when power may not be available- which a screwdriver to the case doesn't really address. Even an external USB battery expander would defeat the purpose of an ultraportable- it'd be a little awkward to have a brick sticking out of the side of your sleek sexy ultra thin Air.
that Jobs just didn't think too much of the new laptop within his reality distortion field.
For good reason too. Its the first product from apple that I can unequivocally call technically inferior to its competitors. Yes, its thinner, but on average its other dimensions are larger (roughly 2 inches wider and half an inch deeper than a thinkpad X61), its a little heavier or the same weight, its MUCH more expensive ($1800 vs $1150 for a comparably equipped X61) and has nowhere near the number of ports ( 1 USB, headphone jack and micro DVI compared to 3 USB, 1 firewire, 1 monitor out, a pc card slot, headphone + mic jack, modem and ethernet on an X61). I'm sorry OS X is nice but its not worth $650 and on a lot more constrained hardware, even if the hardware is sexier and slimmer.
I think your tin foil cap was on a little too tight today. There are a lot of practical reasons Lenovo would have chosen Suse for the thinkpads. Even before the MS deal, SLED was one of the distros IBM used to put through a compatibility certification program for thinkpads. SLED also comes with a lot of software explicitly for thinkpad-specific hardware. I know the fingerprint reader drivers and GUI were there the last time I tried OpenSuse, and I may be mistaken but I believe the HDAPS drivers were also pre-installed. I've tried installing these manually in Ubuntu and its a bitch. Suse distros in general have had superior thinkpad-specific hardware support.
I think in this case "consumer friendly" means mass-marketability. With the thinkpad line, having bright colors or high quality speakers was always a non-option. Don't get me wrong, I'm personally quite fond of the thinkpad's "business black" but (from experience) most consumers want a laptop that 'looks cute' more so than one thats functionally superior (not an attempt to bash apple). Its been much to my dismay that at least two friends of mine opted for 14" Dells over similarly priced and spec'd T-series (I have access to employee pricing) because they liked being able to put colored shells on it.
I only hope that the ideapad and thinkpad support lines stay different. I've had nothing but professional and rapid support from thinkpad service (in Atlanta GA), to some degree because I think they're used to mostly dealing with business people and students. I've never had a support call in which the problem was obviously (even to me) hardware related last longer than 5 minutes- always resulting in a depot repair box being overnighted to me. I've never had a depot repair last longer than a day- even with a mobo replacement, they overnighted me the machine back. If their customer base becomes more "consumerized" I'm afraid whomever's responsible for the current state of their customer service won't be able to keep justifying not reducing the quality of their support in favor of maintaining a higher profit margin.
Strapping kites onto oil tankers will only help perpetuate the outdated, unsustainable economies we rely on today. Developing technologies that save the shipping company $1600/day is a waste of time and effort. I think I see what you're getting at here, but it seems to me that if the technology were applied to other sea-faring craft such as cargo ships or passenger ferries it could have the same effect. Or if not merely fuel-saving, then it could at least lower power consumption requirements such that a weaker propulsion mechanism based on an alternative energy source would suffice for transportation. I believe that the application of the kite towards oil tankers doesn't mean that it is only applicable to oil tankers. There's a huge number of ships in the world's waters that aren't oil tankers.
After having used a Gen2 Zune a friend of mine recently purchased, if ungrateful children end up returning them, they'll have done so without ever bothering to actually use it. As an mp3 player the new Zune is definitely a pretty decent quality machine. In fact, I know several friends that purchased one and all of them love it for its base function as a media player. The screen is large and crisp, well suited to video. Audio quality is perceived to be indistinguishable from other popular mainstream media players. Build quality is good- they have a nice satisfying heft and feel to the body. Just enough weight and stiffness to the build to give the user confidence that its well built.
As one of the few people I've ever met that complains about the iPod's scroll-wheel and UI in general rather vocally, you might want to take my comments with a grain or two of salt. I've always been a Creative/iRiver/Samsung user and nothing I've seen from apple has really driven me to consider changing my stance on this. If I were thinking about getting a larger HD based media player with good video support, I can see myself drifting from a Zen/Vision:W/Vision:M to a Zune however even after having made an effort to borrow the new offerings from apple and give them a trial whirl, I've yet to understand what draws so many people to the iPod. Oddly, the majority of my friends seem to feel the same way- not counting the one or two apple fanatics I know.
Higher Ed. Has below average skills in handling their own IT Infrastructure.
I'd have to take serious issue with a rather gross over-generalization like that. I know many universities with rather pitiful IT services and many with infrastructure that challenges those of Fortune companies. Even in my area you can look at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (a liberal arts school often cited as being one of the the best public universities in the nation overall) whose "IT" infrastructure is limited to the networked computers on campus, wireless access points around campus, their website and e-mail servers. Compare that to neighbor North Carolina State University (a large primarily engineering oriented university) whose IT department(s) (the College of Engineering has its own entire IT staff and support infrastructure) services an immense network of machines running WinXP, Solaris, RHEL and OS X, several high performance computing clusters including the 'Load Sharing Facility' (a system allowing students to execute processes distributed over the campus' computing resources), e-mail and webhosting services for the campus, a virtual computing lab for remote access to applications available on campus, free tech support for students (handles both Windows and *NIX/Mac support issues), wireless access around campus, etc, etc.
Case in point, there are many places of higher education with much more than "below average skills in handling their own IT infrastructure," and not just Ivy League universities and schools with multi-billion dollar endowments (granted, NC State just reached their first billion dollar milestone- but most of that money is being sunk into the new engineering campus being built. Centennial Campus was recently recognized as the "Top Research Science Park of the Year" by the AURP. Here's a news blurb if you're interested in reading about it.) Email is perhaps the least manpower intensive IT service for a University to provide and typically considered the most menial by IT staff (play with beowulf cluster... or set up squirrel mail... such a tough decision) and I have to question the assumption that Universities outsource it because their IT staffs aren't skilled enough to handle it themselves. This may be the case for a small minority, but most certainly not applicable to every University in the States- or outside of it.
The metaphors we're using now work pretty well, and UI changes in the future will probably consist more of refinements of these rather than totally new things, at least until and unless there is a major advance in display technology.
This is why I feel that of the technologies displayed, multitouch has the potential to be the most pervasively applied. It's intuitive, it's useful- it's just plain cool. The bit in the demo with the digital camera and the phone represents the core of what kind of potential a technology like that has- provided said technology properly implements industry standards and doesn't seek to castrate features like that. Given Microsoft's track record with standards, its quite possible that this may be an issue that will have to be dealt with in the future, but we can hope it wont come to be.
Perhaps multitouch tables will spur the development and implementation of high throughput, short range and low power consumption wireless protocols? There's just something intrinsically cool about being able to share documents, images and videos just by setting my laptop down on said table and tossing those files around to various other devices.
Actually I miss those days. The first mp3 player I ever owned (Creative Nomad MuVo) worked like that and I loved the thing. Its been harder and harder to find newer models that support that. My current player (samsing YP-Z5) is an MTP player that can be put into a UMS mode where you can drag-n-drop music onto and off of it.
Slashdot Mirror
You would be so terrified to hear how many people I've met that refer to Office as Windows.
"Hey man, do you have a copy of Windows you can install on my computer? You know, with Word, Excel and PowerPoint?"
*shudders*
Especially the new micro-reactor types like this one discussed on slashdot earlier. While I dont think that the most effective application of these is in power generation for neighborhoods or small towns, I can see where a self-contained reactor that will generate 200kW for 4 decades might be useful in ships and spacecraft.
It makes me sad how much baseless fear there is of nuclear power out there. A coolant leak is a pretty major breakdown as Nuclear disasters go, and AFAIK nothing truly bad happened in this situation. I'm not saying that nothing could happen- but properly maintained and operated nuclear power is far safer than the majority of fossil-fuel based technologies out there and significantly more cost-effective as well.
They don't need efficient interfaces, just fun and cool ones... kind of like the Wiimote. Thats exactly the point I was trying to make with that. With a no-touch multi-touch interface with position tracking using inexpensive hardware (a $40 wiimote, mostly open-source software, a few IR-LEDs that cost pennies and a pair of $5 gloves) you could create a really cool interface for a game. Even if Nintendo or a 3rd party developer doesn't come out with a game for the Wii that takes advantage of 'hacks' like this, a FOSS (or even closed-source) PC game created around a position aware no-touch 3D interface would be really really cool.
It seemed to me like the app was just lagging a bit, its possible that the demo was just put together inefficiently on a slow computer- the other demonstrations by the original hacker were very impressive and smooth. I have no doubt that this could lead to an extremely well-polished and affordable interface in the not-so-distant future. You know what would be really amazing- if they integrated the 3-d "face" tracking hack into the system and built a 3-d/2-d hybrid no-touch interface. Moving around with the gloves on would change your perspective laterally. somehow turning on "mouse mode" by say pressing two fingers together would allow you to move a cursor 2-dimensionally from that perspective which becomes locked and a pressing down a third finger could act as a 'click.' Sort of a continuous virtual workspace- replacing the Compiz Cube with a cylinder, although I find it hard to imagine ways in which adding that 3-d aspect would be a productivity boost. It could definitely be used to make really freaking cool games. A 3-d RTS in which you can actually move around on the battlefield by changing position relative to the screen?
The first article was about the original hack which used a test interface and IR-reflective tape. This article seems to be about a project to implement the no-touch hack in a more usable fashion in an actual application. Definitely a step forward and pretty cool.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned that this apparently has a DVD-RW built-in. That makes it, in something a little thicker than the Air, less weight, a swappable battery, an optical drive and a heck of a lot more ports.
As someone who's used IBM Thinkpads for a while, I have to ask: is it actually a Thinkpad, or is it based on Lenovo's own designs (like the ideapad)? If it comes with the titanium-alloy reinforced case, the HDAPS and support from IBM's standard thinkpad support line I'm sold. If not... *shrug*
A quick glance at the picture suggests it could be either way- it has the keyboard light that most thinkpad users come to love and adore yet the screen hinge looks plastic instead of the heavy duty metal hinges that give thinkpads that smooth and secure feel while adjusting the screen you just don't see with most other laptops.
Its fairly logical to think that if its so expensive to get stuff into space, just build it there. While manned missions to the moon and on to mars would certainly be amazing, I fail to see the point of a manned mission to an asteroid. Just send a probe and play around with altering a small asteroid's orbit and bring it into a lunar orbit. Creating an automated system that collects small asteroids (small enough that they'd burn up in atmosphere) and bring them to the moon to be processed would be a tremendous step forward in human expansion into space. Unfortunately, I don't think anything like this would happen until commercial space missions start making it further out there.
For anyone that hasn't heard of him, I'd strongly recommend you check out Bill Stone's TED talk. The whole thing is pretty cool, but its the last chapter in the video thats really amazing.
Now we just need one that can play WoW for my friends so they can get their lives back!
Having the battery screwdriver accessible is a good thing for the long run so you can replace the battery once it dies, but most of the complaints I've personally heard about the non-swappable battery are related to the Air's role as an ultraportable and not being able to swap batteries on long haul flights or trips when power may not be available- which a screwdriver to the case doesn't really address. Even an external USB battery expander would defeat the purpose of an ultraportable- it'd be a little awkward to have a brick sticking out of the side of your sleek sexy ultra thin Air.
Isn't the whole point of the 'Apple experience' to never have to do something like open up your laptop's case with a screwdriver?
I think your tin foil cap was on a little too tight today. There are a lot of practical reasons Lenovo would have chosen Suse for the thinkpads. Even before the MS deal, SLED was one of the distros IBM used to put through a compatibility certification program for thinkpads. SLED also comes with a lot of software explicitly for thinkpad-specific hardware. I know the fingerprint reader drivers and GUI were there the last time I tried OpenSuse, and I may be mistaken but I believe the HDAPS drivers were also pre-installed. I've tried installing these manually in Ubuntu and its a bitch. Suse distros in general have had superior thinkpad-specific hardware support.
I know IBM used to certify some of their thinkpad models to be compatible with Suse or RHEL, I'm not sure if Lenovo has / will continue this.
I think in this case "consumer friendly" means mass-marketability. With the thinkpad line, having bright colors or high quality speakers was always a non-option. Don't get me wrong, I'm personally quite fond of the thinkpad's "business black" but (from experience) most consumers want a laptop that 'looks cute' more so than one thats functionally superior (not an attempt to bash apple). Its been much to my dismay that at least two friends of mine opted for 14" Dells over similarly priced and spec'd T-series (I have access to employee pricing) because they liked being able to put colored shells on it.
I only hope that the ideapad and thinkpad support lines stay different. I've had nothing but professional and rapid support from thinkpad service (in Atlanta GA), to some degree because I think they're used to mostly dealing with business people and students. I've never had a support call in which the problem was obviously (even to me) hardware related last longer than 5 minutes- always resulting in a depot repair box being overnighted to me. I've never had a depot repair last longer than a day- even with a mobo replacement, they overnighted me the machine back. If their customer base becomes more "consumerized" I'm afraid whomever's responsible for the current state of their customer service won't be able to keep justifying not reducing the quality of their support in favor of maintaining a higher profit margin.
Where's the mafiaa tag???
After having used a Gen2 Zune a friend of mine recently purchased, if ungrateful children end up returning them, they'll have done so without ever bothering to actually use it. As an mp3 player the new Zune is definitely a pretty decent quality machine. In fact, I know several friends that purchased one and all of them love it for its base function as a media player. The screen is large and crisp, well suited to video. Audio quality is perceived to be indistinguishable from other popular mainstream media players. Build quality is good- they have a nice satisfying heft and feel to the body. Just enough weight and stiffness to the build to give the user confidence that its well built.
As one of the few people I've ever met that complains about the iPod's scroll-wheel and UI in general rather vocally, you might want to take my comments with a grain or two of salt. I've always been a Creative/iRiver/Samsung user and nothing I've seen from apple has really driven me to consider changing my stance on this. If I were thinking about getting a larger HD based media player with good video support, I can see myself drifting from a Zen/Vision:W/Vision:M to a Zune however even after having made an effort to borrow the new offerings from apple and give them a trial whirl, I've yet to understand what draws so many people to the iPod. Oddly, the majority of my friends seem to feel the same way- not counting the one or two apple fanatics I know.
I'd have to take serious issue with a rather gross over-generalization like that. I know many universities with rather pitiful IT services and many with infrastructure that challenges those of Fortune companies. Even in my area you can look at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (a liberal arts school often cited as being one of the the best public universities in the nation overall) whose "IT" infrastructure is limited to the networked computers on campus, wireless access points around campus, their website and e-mail servers. Compare that to neighbor North Carolina State University (a large primarily engineering oriented university) whose IT department(s) (the College of Engineering has its own entire IT staff and support infrastructure) services an immense network of machines running WinXP, Solaris, RHEL and OS X, several high performance computing clusters including the 'Load Sharing Facility' (a system allowing students to execute processes distributed over the campus' computing resources), e-mail and webhosting services for the campus, a virtual computing lab for remote access to applications available on campus, free tech support for students (handles both Windows and *NIX/Mac support issues), wireless access around campus, etc, etc.
Case in point, there are many places of higher education with much more than "below average skills in handling their own IT infrastructure," and not just Ivy League universities and schools with multi-billion dollar endowments (granted, NC State just reached their first billion dollar milestone- but most of that money is being sunk into the new engineering campus being built. Centennial Campus was recently recognized as the "Top Research Science Park of the Year" by the AURP. Here's a news blurb if you're interested in reading about it.) Email is perhaps the least manpower intensive IT service for a University to provide and typically considered the most menial by IT staff (play with beowulf cluster... or set up squirrel mail... such a tough decision) and I have to question the assumption that Universities outsource it because their IT staffs aren't skilled enough to handle it themselves. This may be the case for a small minority, but most certainly not applicable to every University in the States- or outside of it.
This is why I feel that of the technologies displayed, multitouch has the potential to be the most pervasively applied. It's intuitive, it's useful- it's just plain cool. The bit in the demo with the digital camera and the phone represents the core of what kind of potential a technology like that has- provided said technology properly implements industry standards and doesn't seek to castrate features like that. Given Microsoft's track record with standards, its quite possible that this may be an issue that will have to be dealt with in the future, but we can hope it wont come to be.
Perhaps multitouch tables will spur the development and implementation of high throughput, short range and low power consumption wireless protocols? There's just something intrinsically cool about being able to share documents, images and videos just by setting my laptop down on said table and tossing those files around to various other devices.
Actually I miss those days. The first mp3 player I ever owned (Creative Nomad MuVo) worked like that and I loved the thing. Its been harder and harder to find newer models that support that. My current player (samsing YP-Z5) is an MTP player that can be put into a UMS mode where you can drag-n-drop music onto and off of it.