your OS shouldn't give a fat rat's patootie about anything anyone does, ever. protected memory, process management, yadda yadda, that's how you really stay safe.
mostly, i tell friends to go IE -> FFox, Hotmail -> Gmail, Win -> Mac because i know it'll be a better experience for them. it's also a general thing to improve the computing of all: reducing the load of viruses and other security problems is in everyone's interest. and i KNOW most of the technologies i preach, so i can better train friends and coworkers on how to use them.
plus, yes, eff MS.
- emilio
two things that could damn the Bush administration
on
Pre-Election Discussion
·
· Score: 2, Informative
- if people knew how much Donald Rumsfeld was directly responsible for the limited number of troops on the ground in Iraq and the interrogation tactics used at Abu Ghraib. see it at PBS's Frontline.
- if people knew that Bush was thinking about Iraq before his election and before 9-11, solely for political gain.
these two thoroughly research points could turn the stomach of even hard line republicans. everyone should realize that this administration has been playing the worst kind of politics by capitalizing on tradgedy and fear beyond normal scaremongering.
my dual 2.5GHz PowerMac G5 idles at 52C (125F) on CPU A and 50C (122F) on CPU B. the memory controller is actually one of the hotter things, it idles at 62C (143F). however, it's not the hottest thing, of course: at full load (DVD rip+encode or playing 15 videos at once + MP3 + tasks + flicking around Exposé) both CPUs have hit a max of 83C (181F) (the computer is supposed to automatically sleep around 90C or so).
so why so effing hot? i mean, this idles at the max temp my athlon 2500 peaks at! it certainly idles at a hotter temp than it needs to, but i have no problem with that: the system runs the fans dynamically to keep the noise down, so at idle it's not as cool as it could be. the difference in noise in my room when i sleep the athlon is ridiculous - the G5 sounds like a slightly loud external hard drive that's spun up. the system also has a liquid cooling system to quench the processors. this seems to just keep the processors within their range. the value that i see in it is response to new heat - the CPU temps flick around a lot and are very responsive to load and the loss of load. after ramping up the CPUs to >80C, it take about three or four seconds after the load drops for the CPU temps to drop 15-20C, then maybe a total of ten or twelve seconds to drop to idle temp.
for some real-world perspective... a DVD rip+encode with HandBrake with using ffmpeg engine, MP3 audio, 2-pass encoding, and gunning for your average 700MB movie time (800-1300kbps?) takes slightly less than the length of the DVD. an hour and a half long movie took about and hour and fifteen minutes to get on to my hard drive. MP3 ripping in iTunes will run up to 28x, but it's not fully loading the processors so i wonder about a drive read bottleneck. the first night i got it, i was at a loss for how to really test the speed on it, so i just decided to open up a shitload of videos. basically i played a DVD (fluff, the GPU does that), opened up something in VLC, opened up about 13 videos in QuickTime of various sizes and formats, played some MP3 music (fluff again, that's ball sweat of a cutting edge proc), and still had enough processing power to comfortably navigate files, chat, browse web pages, and flick around Exposé. around all of these things plus one is when a few of the videos would start stuttering and expose would start dropping frames to keep collapse speed uniform. anything past this would really start robbing time from videos.
all in all? it's fast. it's quiet. it gets hot, but it takes care of itself. coming from a 375MHz G3-upgraded PowerMac 7600 (vintage '98), i'm not doing too shabby. i just decided i'd scramjet at mach 7 to the top of the pack and then sit there for another few years.
speaking as a budding interface designer... it's never the users' fault. never. you just didn't design the interface right. even if your users are "abnormal" (blind, deaf, color blind, short), well, you still didn't account for them. users are never "too dumb" or "non-technical," they're just naive and you didn't prepare them enough.
"it's the interface, stupid."
ok, ok, maybe this helpful journalistic organization is thinking like a programmer. in which case it's always the user's fault, never the program's.
i'm a mac guy, been so for a decade and a half. i've got a winXP box that is intended just for games and as a web browser testbed and a platform for occasional academic software needs. i still fucking hate it.
my mac is old. really old. it's 375MHz, ok? and that's with an upgrade... meanwhile, the PC is a 1.8GHz Athlon with much more memory and MUCH more hard drive space. so why do i still use the mac for everything important (mail, irc, www, aim/icq, html, etc)? because i never feel like i'm working with windows, just against it.
using windows seems like i'm constantly haggling over just how useful of a "user experience" i can get out of it. granted, i'm more familiar with the mac, but after a several years of using windows at home and on jobs i still feel like i'm working with a smart-but-tantrum-prone child that really wants to do things their way, but will bend if you take the time to talk to it (or hit up the MS kbase).
people have accused the MacOS, 9 and X, of pandering to the home and school users at the expense of the power user. this may be true so far as administrative and hardware tools are concerned. but for general desktop use, file handling, typical system settings or other areas, it always feels like windows thinks i'm much more of an idiot than the mac OS does. "would you like to clean up your hard drive?" NO. "you should clean up your desktop!" NO. "i'm gonna put a pretty freakin' sidebar on every window!" NO. "how about i ask you every time what you want to do with this inserted media, and never remember?" NO. sitting down at a fresh OS X installation, i spend about two minutes setting things up just the way i like them. with windows XP, it's a good fifteen-twenty minutes of turning off bubbly GUI crap, all the "helpers" and "wizards," dangerous services, hidden files, effects, and so on. sure, the mac has some of that crap, too, but it never feels like the same pain in the ass - like windows doesn't want me to play with that stuff.
pretty much the only times the windows box isn't pissing me off are: (1) i'm playing a fullscreen game, and can't even see the GUI; (2) i'm watching a fullscreen video, and can't even see the GUI; (3) i'm using a program that's virtually identical across multiple platforms (itunes, adobe cs, firefox).
my friend mig had a great idea for XP, or really any software: when you install, there's a two big buttons: "HOME/BUSINESS USER" and "POWER USER" - and alllll those little bullshit settings and helpers and pretty crap just disappear after you click "POWER USER." of course, these aren't even touching on the ridiculous security problems that windows has... but since i hate all those problems, i make sure to run a tight ship and try to never have them (not using IE is a great place to start).
ultimately, i feel like i have to fight windows more to get what i want out of it. no interface is perfect, even the oh-sacred-holy mac os (no, not that much of a zealot), and i think far too much crap gets introduced when you have engineers and marketers designing features without a good interface designer or product manager there to lay the smack down.
NOO! not lil' mary! oregon trail was a solid school entertainer through elementary school (around age 5-11 in the US) as you took the role of a westward-bound 19th century pioneer family's leader. wasn't so much of a line-by-line history lesson as it was a "here's what it was like" lesson, where you had to buy supplies, make route decisions, manage money, catch food, etc. never had to slaughter villages of native tribes or give them smallpox, but i guess the army had already blazed that trail.
be it alcohol, marijuana, or some other form of mind-bending, drugs are a great way to get party-minded geeks off their asses.
i'm a mac guy with plenty of windows PC skills, and i've gotten really, really tired of fixing peoples' piece of shit computers because windows is a massive security hole. most things involve spyware, viruses, trojans, little green men, steve ballmer playing with wires, etc... these aren't hard to fix (not like a borked partition map or such) but they're just a pain. now that i'm living on a college campus, all the naive users out there are clamoring for help as soon as they smell geek.
bitterly, i resolved to not waste my time unless there's a pretty (AND SINGLE, wtf) girl or some nice dank involved. mac users get all the help they need because, well, fuck windows.
saw this exact thing in finland, three years ago, and who knows how long they'd been doing it.
movie tickets to get put on-call, coffee and a croissant (or ruisbread?), there are places where you have a series of SMS numbers and short code messages to send to them, then your phone just gets billed (terribly, terribly secure, i know). f'rinstance, the cafe at the bus station in helsinki has a secondary menu with popular items and their codes. if the line is too long you can order through there while you chunk away at one of their computers and then listen as tika-tika-tika your order comes out of a small credit card-looking machine on the counter. heck, you could even order a few minutes before you got there; this comes in handy, too, when your country is dark and under snow for several months out of the year. i'm surprised it took a tech-savvy place like korea this long to make it noteworthy.
aside from the typical california perks (weather, diversity, rad food, etc) this is where you can see lots of companies that make cool shit and museums that show cool shit. there are several hostels in the area, and public transportation is decent, although renting a car for a day or two might be advisable if you're trekking out to business park country. a quick google search turns up a decent article on geeky destinations around the valley, worth checking out for the list at the end. there are some guide sites out there tha cover lots of this stuff: let the big g be your friend.
you could do the super mega geeky thing, of course, and get pictures of yourself in front of company signs around they valley - we're riddled with them from san jose to san mateo. give corporate people a holler via email far enough ahead of time and you might even score a tour or the location of a museum. email SGI and ask if tours/demos are available for the Reality Center. visit fry's electronics for a geek-mecca epiphany (i suggest the cavenous san jose location); but beware, traveler, for to ask for help of a sales associate at fry's is to ask satan to take a little piece of your soul. this is also the time of your journey where you'll be asking "i wonder how much money i have, and how much it would cost to ship some hardware home..."
san francisco is beautiful and cool and yadda yadda; check out the museums, the parks and the nightlife. the exploratorium is big and WAY FREAKIN' COOL. make sure to get a good afternoon for just that and the nice area around it. check out the SFMOMA and the whole area around there - right across the street is the geeky-cool Sony Metreon with a sony store that has pretty much everything they carry in north america, plus big expensive video games and theaters. san francisco is also the terminal for many green tortoise bus tours that take you to beautiful parks around the west coast (quickly cementing your preference for it, trust me). they also have a hostel and buses that take you to seattle, portland and los angeles.
other things to do in california... rent a car and drive the coast on hwy 1 - if you can, from san francisco to los angeles! it is quite solidly some of the most beautiful coastline in the world, from smooth white beaches in the south to how-the-hell-did-they-wrap-a-road-around-that sharp rocks in the north. skip disneyland in southern california and go to six flags or universal studios. do all the usual touristy stuff, and check out venice beach, i'm sure you'll run into some crazy aussies there, plus there's a hostel nearby. visit a national park (do this on green tortoise, probably). get clam chowder at the jenner inn in jenner, ca. avoid the central valley (the "midwest" of the united states pretty much starts 60 miles inland california).
also, you'll be sorely disappointed to find that 99% of the country thinks that fosters is what all aussies drink. some well stocked british or hipster pubs might have VB, as well as the occasional aussie pub. bring your own marmite/vegemite/donteverconfuseitfornutellamite, because you australians are just freaky. no one knows what a "cone" is, we call them "bowls." if you're a crazy eastern aussie, like all the others i've met, people will probably love you and buy you drinks and tell you about the great fosters commercials you've been missing. the chicks (guys?) will dig you. if you're from the west... i don't know.
Mac users have known about this for years. Witness the bumper sticker from a few years ago (from a MacWorld con? I can't remember anymore...):
"Windows 98 = Macintosh '89"
Yeah, MS does put some neat and genuinely innovative stuff into their OS's, but that's just "some." They have all this money, yet nary an interface design department that I can tell of.
well, the first thing that definitely comes to mind is william gibson. not that we're scampering about information networks with electrode tiaras and viewing everything as three-dimensional constructs piped into our optic nerves, but that we probably will be in the next couple decades. of course, i suppose this isn't about what will be but what already is, in which case gibson will have had more of an impact on language with the word "cyberspace." read "neuromancer" (which i'm sure you have already, so read it again) or anything else in the cyberspace series; i feel that gibson has a good talent for thinking about natural extensions of modern technology (superconductiong quantum interference devices, anyone?). he also wrote about things like cybercrime, implants, and genetically designed "vat-grown" food and replacement body parts. read "burning chrome" (again) as well - his collection of short stories has some gems in it, too.
another is, of course, star trek - quintessential pop sci-fi. the past ten or so years has seen a new sector of the personal electronics market grow around watches-that-are-more-than-a-watch. barometers (and thus altimiters), compases, gps, temperature, depth gauges etc. all being packaged in something relatively tiny and man-portable - might not look like a tricorder but definitely follows it by providing at-hand sensory readings. ST: TNG's PADDs (those nifty portable flatscreen display devices, for the uninitiated) have surely affected the design of today's PDAs.
(alduos huxley's "brave new world" would be great for the class. genetic modification, a culture placated by drugs, cloning, and the moral ramifications thereof.)
i can think of a few other current technologies that seem to have come from sci-fi (although i couldn't provide you with a bibliography). stun guns/tasers and other nonlethal weapons (glue guns, net guns, emp, etc.), energy weapons (lasers, railguns, yadda yadda), and telemedicine (anne mccafferey's "the ship who searched", perhaps?).
good luck, and let us know how it went at the end of the semester!
Well, ok, I knew that there would be a bunch of ST:TNG-related questions on here because, well, we're a bunch of geeks. So here's something kind of related to Trek, but more along the lines of show biz...
What sort of problems have you had, if any, with typecasting, and what did you do to break those? I would imagine you could get pidgeonholed into the "brainy adolescent" or "anything sci-fi" parts and productions, especially with the mythical proportions that Trek can get to within the industry (positive and negative).
So, a FOAF is in the US Air Force, where they taught him Mandarin and he's working somewhere in Maryland... But that's not important right now. Anyway, as you can imagine, he dosen't talk much about what he does, but all we've been able to get out of him is that he uses his language training and uses UNIX...
What was it that I heard about the NSA having acres of supercomputers in sub-basements of their HQ? I would bet there aren't many Windows installs down there.
now, i've never tried this, but this is the first thing that came to mind after reading hemos' question...
for years, many high-end audio installations that went into cars have been supplemented with the addition of noise-dampening materials attached to the interior of the car's body panels. typically, these are rubber-clad asphalt sheets (i understand they also doing some polymer-whatnots now) a few millimeters thick, and they function by turning vibrations into low-level heat (nothing significant). this has the plusses of dampening both road noise and the noise of your two twelve-inch subwoofers... and while your computer probably isn't cranking out that level of sound (i should hope), it wouldn't be a stretch to think that this would work as well for a computer case, especially a multi-drive, multi-fan box.
this stuff would be pretty easy to install, just buy a sheet and cut it up to be attached (some are self-adhesive) on the inside surfaces of your case and wherever else you could cram it (inside drive face plates, etc.). a possibility would be that you could cut sheets to place under/around hard drive mounts to absorb their vibration, but i wouldn't overdo it, as i'm sure these sheets have quite an insulating capacity. a cursory search on google turned up this informative, if shoddy page, but i'd shop around, of course.
on another note, i've seen in catalogs a similar product to these sheets but in a spraycan form - this might be better, as it might be cheaper and definitely easier to apply. while it might not offer the same sound dampening, i'm sure it would be acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
so, what, i show a tumor some multivariate calculus proofs and watch it shrivel? big deal, that would make my whole body shrivel.
your OS shouldn't give a fat rat's patootie about anything anyone does, ever. protected memory, process management, yadda yadda, that's how you really stay safe.
[B]- slurpee[/B]
mostly, i tell friends to go IE -> FFox, Hotmail -> Gmail, Win -> Mac because i know it'll be a better experience for them. it's also a general thing to improve the computing of all: reducing the load of viruses and other security problems is in everyone's interest. and i KNOW most of the technologies i preach, so i can better train friends and coworkers on how to use them. plus, yes, eff MS. - emilio
- if people knew how much Donald Rumsfeld was directly responsible for the limited number of troops on the ground in Iraq and the interrogation tactics used at Abu Ghraib. see it at PBS's Frontline.
- if people knew that Bush was thinking about Iraq before his election and before 9-11, solely for political gain.
these two thoroughly research points could turn the stomach of even hard line republicans. everyone should realize that this administration has been playing the worst kind of politics by capitalizing on tradgedy and fear beyond normal scaremongering.
for literal heat, this puppy is pretty hot.
my dual 2.5GHz PowerMac G5 idles at 52C (125F) on CPU A and 50C (122F) on CPU B. the memory controller is actually one of the hotter things, it idles at 62C (143F). however, it's not the hottest thing, of course: at full load (DVD rip+encode or playing 15 videos at once + MP3 + tasks + flicking around Exposé) both CPUs have hit a max of 83C (181F) (the computer is supposed to automatically sleep around 90C or so).
so why so effing hot? i mean, this idles at the max temp my athlon 2500 peaks at! it certainly idles at a hotter temp than it needs to, but i have no problem with that: the system runs the fans dynamically to keep the noise down, so at idle it's not as cool as it could be. the difference in noise in my room when i sleep the athlon is ridiculous - the G5 sounds like a slightly loud external hard drive that's spun up. the system also has a liquid cooling system to quench the processors. this seems to just keep the processors within their range. the value that i see in it is response to new heat - the CPU temps flick around a lot and are very responsive to load and the loss of load. after ramping up the CPUs to >80C, it take about three or four seconds after the load drops for the CPU temps to drop 15-20C, then maybe a total of ten or twelve seconds to drop to idle temp.
for some real-world perspective... a DVD rip+encode with HandBrake with using ffmpeg engine, MP3 audio, 2-pass encoding, and gunning for your average 700MB movie time (800-1300kbps?) takes slightly less than the length of the DVD. an hour and a half long movie took about and hour and fifteen minutes to get on to my hard drive. MP3 ripping in iTunes will run up to 28x, but it's not fully loading the processors so i wonder about a drive read bottleneck. the first night i got it, i was at a loss for how to really test the speed on it, so i just decided to open up a shitload of videos. basically i played a DVD (fluff, the GPU does that), opened up something in VLC, opened up about 13 videos in QuickTime of various sizes and formats, played some MP3 music (fluff again, that's ball sweat of a cutting edge proc), and still had enough processing power to comfortably navigate files, chat, browse web pages, and flick around Exposé. around all of these things plus one is when a few of the videos would start stuttering and expose would start dropping frames to keep collapse speed uniform. anything past this would really start robbing time from videos.
all in all? it's fast. it's quiet. it gets hot, but it takes care of itself. coming from a 375MHz G3-upgraded PowerMac 7600 (vintage '98), i'm not doing too shabby. i just decided i'd scramjet at mach 7 to the top of the pack and then sit there for another few years.
speaking as a budding interface designer... it's never the users' fault. never. you just didn't design the interface right. even if your users are "abnormal" (blind, deaf, color blind, short), well, you still didn't account for them. users are never "too dumb" or "non-technical," they're just naive and you didn't prepare them enough.
"it's the interface, stupid."
ok, ok, maybe this helpful journalistic organization is thinking like a programmer. in which case it's always the user's fault, never the program's.
i'm a mac guy, been so for a decade and a half. i've got a winXP box that is intended just for games and as a web browser testbed and a platform for occasional academic software needs. i still fucking hate it.
my mac is old. really old. it's 375MHz, ok? and that's with an upgrade... meanwhile, the PC is a 1.8GHz Athlon with much more memory and MUCH more hard drive space. so why do i still use the mac for everything important (mail, irc, www, aim/icq, html, etc)? because i never feel like i'm working with windows, just against it.
using windows seems like i'm constantly haggling over just how useful of a "user experience" i can get out of it. granted, i'm more familiar with the mac, but after a several years of using windows at home and on jobs i still feel like i'm working with a smart-but-tantrum-prone child that really wants to do things their way, but will bend if you take the time to talk to it (or hit up the MS kbase).
people have accused the MacOS, 9 and X, of pandering to the home and school users at the expense of the power user. this may be true so far as administrative and hardware tools are concerned. but for general desktop use, file handling, typical system settings or other areas, it always feels like windows thinks i'm much more of an idiot than the mac OS does. "would you like to clean up your hard drive?" NO. "you should clean up your desktop!" NO. "i'm gonna put a pretty freakin' sidebar on every window!" NO. "how about i ask you every time what you want to do with this inserted media, and never remember?" NO. sitting down at a fresh OS X installation, i spend about two minutes setting things up just the way i like them. with windows XP, it's a good fifteen-twenty minutes of turning off bubbly GUI crap, all the "helpers" and "wizards," dangerous services, hidden files, effects, and so on. sure, the mac has some of that crap, too, but it never feels like the same pain in the ass - like windows doesn't want me to play with that stuff.
pretty much the only times the windows box isn't pissing me off are: (1) i'm playing a fullscreen game, and can't even see the GUI; (2) i'm watching a fullscreen video, and can't even see the GUI; (3) i'm using a program that's virtually identical across multiple platforms (itunes, adobe cs, firefox).
my friend mig had a great idea for XP, or really any software: when you install, there's a two big buttons: "HOME/BUSINESS USER" and "POWER USER" - and alllll those little bullshit settings and helpers and pretty crap just disappear after you click "POWER USER." of course, these aren't even touching on the ridiculous security problems that windows has... but since i hate all those problems, i make sure to run a tight ship and try to never have them (not using IE is a great place to start).
ultimately, i feel like i have to fight windows more to get what i want out of it. no interface is perfect, even the oh-sacred-holy mac os (no, not that much of a zealot), and i think far too much crap gets introduced when you have engineers and marketers designing features without a good interface designer or product manager there to lay the smack down.
"Mary has died of typhoid!"
NOO! not lil' mary! oregon trail was a solid school entertainer through elementary school (around age 5-11 in the US) as you took the role of a westward-bound 19th century pioneer family's leader. wasn't so much of a line-by-line history lesson as it was a "here's what it was like" lesson, where you had to buy supplies, make route decisions, manage money, catch food, etc. never had to slaughter villages of native tribes or give them smallpox, but i guess the army had already blazed that trail.
i'm a mac guy with plenty of windows PC skills, and i've gotten really, really tired of fixing peoples' piece of shit computers because windows is a massive security hole. most things involve spyware, viruses, trojans, little green men, steve ballmer playing with wires, etc... these aren't hard to fix (not like a borked partition map or such) but they're just a pain. now that i'm living on a college campus, all the naive users out there are clamoring for help as soon as they smell geek.
bitterly, i resolved to not waste my time unless there's a pretty (AND SINGLE, wtf) girl or some nice dank involved. mac users get all the help they need because, well, fuck windows.
saw this exact thing in finland, three years ago, and who knows how long they'd been doing it.
movie tickets to get put on-call, coffee and a croissant (or ruisbread?), there are places where you have a series of SMS numbers and short code messages to send to them, then your phone just gets billed (terribly, terribly secure, i know). f'rinstance, the cafe at the bus station in helsinki has a secondary menu with popular items and their codes. if the line is too long you can order through there while you chunk away at one of their computers and then listen as tika-tika-tika your order comes out of a small credit card-looking machine on the counter. heck, you could even order a few minutes before you got there; this comes in handy, too, when your country is dark and under snow for several months out of the year. i'm surprised it took a tech-savvy place like korea this long to make it noteworthy.
aside from the typical california perks (weather, diversity, rad food, etc) this is where you can see lots of companies that make cool shit and museums that show cool shit. there are several hostels in the area, and public transportation is decent, although renting a car for a day or two might be advisable if you're trekking out to business park country. a quick google search turns up a decent article on geeky destinations around the valley, worth checking out for the list at the end. there are some guide sites out there tha cover lots of this stuff: let the big g be your friend.
you could do the super mega geeky thing, of course, and get pictures of yourself in front of company signs around they valley - we're riddled with them from san jose to san mateo. give corporate people a holler via email far enough ahead of time and you might even score a tour or the location of a museum. email SGI and ask if tours/demos are available for the Reality Center. visit fry's electronics for a geek-mecca epiphany (i suggest the cavenous san jose location); but beware, traveler, for to ask for help of a sales associate at fry's is to ask satan to take a little piece of your soul. this is also the time of your journey where you'll be asking "i wonder how much money i have, and how much it would cost to ship some hardware home..."
san francisco is beautiful and cool and yadda yadda; check out the museums, the parks and the nightlife. the exploratorium is big and WAY FREAKIN' COOL. make sure to get a good afternoon for just that and the nice area around it. check out the SFMOMA and the whole area around there - right across the street is the geeky-cool Sony Metreon with a sony store that has pretty much everything they carry in north america, plus big expensive video games and theaters. san francisco is also the terminal for many green tortoise bus tours that take you to beautiful parks around the west coast (quickly cementing your preference for it, trust me). they also have a hostel and buses that take you to seattle, portland and los angeles.
other things to do in california... rent a car and drive the coast on hwy 1 - if you can, from san francisco to los angeles! it is quite solidly some of the most beautiful coastline in the world, from smooth white beaches in the south to how-the-hell-did-they-wrap-a-road-around-that sharp rocks in the north. skip disneyland in southern california and go to six flags or universal studios. do all the usual touristy stuff, and check out venice beach, i'm sure you'll run into some crazy aussies there, plus there's a hostel nearby. visit a national park (do this on green tortoise, probably). get clam chowder at the jenner inn in jenner, ca. avoid the central valley (the "midwest" of the united states pretty much starts 60 miles inland california).
also, you'll be sorely disappointed to find that 99% of the country thinks that fosters is what all aussies drink. some well stocked british or hipster pubs might have VB, as well as the occasional aussie pub. bring your own marmite/vegemite/donteverconfuseitfornutellamite, because you australians are just freaky. no one knows what a "cone" is, we call them "bowls." if you're a crazy eastern aussie, like all the others i've met, people will probably love you and buy you drinks and tell you about the great fosters commercials you've been missing. the chicks (guys?) will dig you. if you're from the west... i don't know.
good luck!
Mac users have known about this for years. Witness the bumper sticker from a few years ago (from a MacWorld con? I can't remember anymore...):
"Windows 98 = Macintosh '89"
Yeah, MS does put some neat and genuinely innovative stuff into their OS's, but that's just "some." They have all this money, yet nary an interface design department that I can tell of.
well, the first thing that definitely comes to mind is william gibson. not that we're scampering about information networks with electrode tiaras and viewing everything as three-dimensional constructs piped into our optic nerves, but that we probably will be in the next couple decades. of course, i suppose this isn't about what will be but what already is, in which case gibson will have had more of an impact on language with the word "cyberspace." read "neuromancer" (which i'm sure you have already, so read it again) or anything else in the cyberspace series; i feel that gibson has a good talent for thinking about natural extensions of modern technology (superconductiong quantum interference devices, anyone?). he also wrote about things like cybercrime, implants, and genetically designed "vat-grown" food and replacement body parts. read "burning chrome" (again) as well - his collection of short stories has some gems in it, too.
another is, of course, star trek - quintessential pop sci-fi. the past ten or so years has seen a new sector of the personal electronics market grow around watches-that-are-more-than-a-watch. barometers (and thus altimiters), compases, gps, temperature, depth gauges etc. all being packaged in something relatively tiny and man-portable - might not look like a tricorder but definitely follows it by providing at-hand sensory readings. ST: TNG's PADDs (those nifty portable flatscreen display devices, for the uninitiated) have surely affected the design of today's PDAs.
(alduos huxley's "brave new world" would be great for the class. genetic modification, a culture placated by drugs, cloning, and the moral ramifications thereof.)
i can think of a few other current technologies that seem to have come from sci-fi (although i couldn't provide you with a bibliography). stun guns/tasers and other nonlethal weapons (glue guns, net guns, emp, etc.), energy weapons (lasers, railguns, yadda yadda), and telemedicine (anne mccafferey's "the ship who searched", perhaps?).
good luck, and let us know how it went at the end of the semester!
Well, ok, I knew that there would be a bunch of ST:TNG-related questions on here because, well, we're a bunch of geeks. So here's something kind of related to Trek, but more along the lines of show biz...
/. just ate wilwheaton.net)
What sort of problems have you had, if any, with typecasting, and what did you do to break those? I would imagine you could get pidgeonholed into the "brainy adolescent" or "anything sci-fi" parts and productions, especially with the mythical proportions that Trek can get to within the industry (positive and negative).
(And BTW, your little spot on TNN is funny.)
(And I think
So, a FOAF is in the US Air Force, where they taught him Mandarin and he's working somewhere in Maryland... But that's not important right now. Anyway, as you can imagine, he dosen't talk much about what he does, but all we've been able to get out of him is that he uses his language training and uses UNIX...
What was it that I heard about the NSA having acres of supercomputers in sub-basements of their HQ? I would bet there aren't many Windows installs down there.
now, i've never tried this, but this is the first thing that came to mind after reading hemos' question...
for years, many high-end audio installations that went into cars have been supplemented with the addition of noise-dampening materials attached to the interior of the car's body panels. typically, these are rubber-clad asphalt sheets (i understand they also doing some polymer-whatnots now) a few millimeters thick, and they function by turning vibrations into low-level heat (nothing significant). this has the plusses of dampening both road noise and the noise of your two twelve-inch subwoofers... and while your computer probably isn't cranking out that level of sound (i should hope), it wouldn't be a stretch to think that this would work as well for a computer case, especially a multi-drive, multi-fan box.
this stuff would be pretty easy to install, just buy a sheet and cut it up to be attached (some are self-adhesive) on the inside surfaces of your case and wherever else you could cram it (inside drive face plates, etc.). a possibility would be that you could cut sheets to place under/around hard drive mounts to absorb their vibration, but i wouldn't overdo it, as i'm sure these sheets have quite an insulating capacity. a cursory search on google turned up this informative, if shoddy page, but i'd shop around, of course.
on another note, i've seen in catalogs a similar product to these sheets but in a spraycan form - this might be better, as it might be cheaper and definitely easier to apply. while it might not offer the same sound dampening, i'm sure it would be acceptable.
- emilio
neurostyle dot net - it's all in your head
- emilio