I've been thinking that would be a great idea too. I t might be a fun thing to submit for the next "What Would Jobs Do?" contest. Either that, or apple should just release an iPod with a color screen that can deal with the iSight directly.
There are a bunch of these things embedded in the sidewalk on Vassar Street between Mass Ave and Main Street to mark the bike lanes on the newly-renovated sidewalk. They look pretty cool at night. (As far as I know, they're just plain solar-powered white LED lights, without any monitoring)
Besides the insurance benefits, I can imagine a deeply, um, theoretical benefit to having roads that monitor the cars passing over them:
1: Elect some really technocratic executives/legislators.
2: Enact laws which raise the speed limit when there are fewer cars on the road, with these monitoring studs used to report the traffic density. Then you can have them change color to indicate that the speed limit is raised And they could also report the data to some data network, letting road signs or even your dashboard indicate the raised speed limit.
"Read the Fine Article" -- this technology is for writing the master discs in factories. It probably takes a pretty big, scary looking machine to do it, too.
Once the media is written with this technique, it will be read in Blu-ray devices; that just takes a laser diode around 400 nm in wavelength. Such diodes aren't exactly common or cheap these days, but they are commercially available, and they're already being used in commercial Blu-ray players.
Based on a conversation I had with the guy who replaced my 3rd logic board in 10 months (under warranty), I believe the problem is that the graphics chip is mounted to logic board directly under the hard drive, in the lower left corner of the iBook. So just picking the iBook up by that corner can put a lot of pressure on the chip, and it eventually fails one way or another (I'd be curious to know whether it's the solder connections to the graphics chip breaking, or the die itself getting crunched). I've also heard that the new G4 iBooks avoid the design flaw somehow, though I haven't actually looked into where they put their graphics chip.
By the way, if you're in the Boston area, the Computer Loft in Allston, MA can do repairs under Applecare, and the people I dealt with there were very knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly. (Shameless plug because I got great service for my iBook there)
Techniques to make thinner wires will probably be useful for improving the efficiency a whole range of optoelectronic devices:
For LEDs, some light that might escape the device is reflected or absorbed by the tiny wires carrying the current into the junction. Thinner wires would mean an improvement (though perhaps small at this point) in the amount of light you get out of the device.
With light going in the other direction, photovoltaics (solar panels) and various detectors are all about getting as much light into a junction as possible, so thinner wires would help make better devices here too.
The tips are very delicate, and so far, they only seem to be made by photochemical etching. This is in contrast to Scanning Tunneling Electron micrscopes, which you can (and people do) make out of reasonably cheap parts.
This is because an STM tip can just be a pointy piece of wire, snipped off with pliers, and still give decent results some of the time. Also, there are easy techniques for making sharper STM tips yourself, such as electrochemical etching, which in this case is a very simple, easy-to-do-at-home process.
It's very intriguing that a mathematician has been able to mathematically prove that V-shaped cantilevers are worse for Atomic Force Microscopy.If the proof is so conclusive, however, it would have been nice for them to wait until they'd fabricated some straight-beam cantilever AFM tips, so that they could do a nice thorough study proving that they get better performance using them for actual data.
(It shouldn't be any more difficult, and it might be a little easier, even, to make straight beam cantilever tips than to make V-shaped ones. This is because the cantilever part of the tip is typically made by some sort of photochemical etching, and a straight beam is certainly a simpler shape to etch.)
Anyway, even with recent advancements in tip design technology atomic force microscopy is still rather inexact when it comes to getting good results consistently. As much as they try to design good tips, you'll never really know if you'll get good images from it until you mount it in the AFM and actually use it. I've certainly heard of grad students who will find a good tip (through trial and error) and become very protective of it (which is hard to do because they're extremely delicate), just because getting good results from Atomic Force Microscopy can often be tricky business, and a tip that you know is good is a great advantage.
Sawfish is GPL. It can be made to look like anything X can handle, with much less effort than it takes to write a new windowmanager. Sawfish can also manage windows by any policy you can dream up and write down in lisp, i.e. anything. And it's fast enough on anything less than, oh, perhaps 5 or 6 years old.
oops, you're right. I forgot about that one. Mjolnir is great, even if it's not very comfortable to sit in when it's open. and if you play the song "Flat Beat" by Mr. Oizo over Mjolnir at a reasonable volume, at certain parts of the beat loop, the whole room begins to vibrate noticeably.
Re:Check the Random Hall Laundry Server
on
MIT's Bathroom Server
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
mua-ha-ha. since the laundry server only serves teeny gobs of text, though, it seems like it's resisted the slashdotting.
you can't be from Random though, noone there has 6 girlfriends:)
oh, and while the web page for bathroom.mit.edu still seems to be too slashdotted to view, anyone with finger can finger bathroom@bathroom.mit.edu and get a current status in text.
Check the Random Hall Laundry Server
on
MIT's Bathroom Server
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
good ol' Random. It's too bad there's no webpage yet about Mjolnir, the homemade big-ass speaker built from a linear induction motor from a dishwasher-sized hard drive, a cone of sheet metal, and a cabinet of medium-density fiberboard.
Why? Producers know people like to watch fights,
as demonstrated by action movies and the WWF.
The good thing about robot fights is that no one gets hurt- it can satisfy the desire for violence without making us imagine performing acts of violence on other living things. Instead, it makes us want to build fighting robots to fight other robots.
I think that if robot fighting catches on enough, it will begin to displace human fighting in entertainment, and once there are lots of robot fighting shows, we will start to see other shows with robots doing different things, as a reaction by the producers to a saturated market.
Well, consider that in a committed homosexual relationship, both partners have to really want the child-- there are no 'accidental' children. When a gay/lesbian couple decides to have a kid, they know they're in it for the long haul.
Compare this to single parenting- there you only have one person, of one gender, raising the child or children. With a homosexual couple, at least there's another person to help out, even if they are the same gender as the other parent.
Single parenting is relatively acceptable in the U.S. these days; is there any situation where two stable parents instead of one single parent would be a bad thing? "All things being equal", as you said, shouldn't it then be better to be raised by a gay/lesbian couple than by a single parent?
I am very grateful to my straight parents for the way they brought me up. And I'm straight too. But I don't see their heterosexual relationship as having anything to do with my well-being. The only thing that mattered was that they loved me and took care of me.
Instantly accepting and respecting someone is called `being friendly', in my opinion.
Maybe you place a very very high value on the meaning of respect, as in "to consider worthy of high regard", but respect can also mean "to refrain from interfering with". As for accept, in this context, I think it means " to give admittance or approval to" or "to regard as proper, normal, or inevitable". So what's wrong with people who instantly accept and respect someone?
From my point of view, accepting and respecting someone instantly simply means you don't make fun of them instantly, and you don't turn them away. There's plenty of time to disrespect and reject people once you know for certain you don't like them-- there's no reason to get a head start on it.
Would you care to explain yourself more clearly?
How is respecting someone by default detrimental to the respector?
Sounds like a good proof of concept...
on
Green Mars
·
· Score: 2
And in the article, they even take into account that the atmosphere and temperature for the crops will have to be controlled, even if the soil can be used as it.
But what about taking care of the atmosphere for the colonists, if they're all eating asparagus? I mean, asparagus is tasty and nutritious, but what about the `side effects'? If asparagus is a staple of Martian colonists, will they all get used to the smell, or will it require more heavy-duty filtering equipment to remove the odor?
I wonder if perhaps foods that don't have the kind of `side effects' asparagus has should be considered first? Beans/legumes may be inevitable, since the colonists will need protein and only vegetarian diets will be feasible, but the side effects of legumes can be kept under control with Beano. To the best of my knowledge, no similar remedy exists for the side effects of asparagus.
wow. impressive. that's almost as funny as "Rasputin" by Boney M, which unfortunately has been running through my head frequently for the past few days.
Re:Tidal generators are the stuff dreams are made
on
Wave Driven Generators
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, I bothered to comment on how beyond reason his statement was. I hope you don't mind.
Which situation requires more energy? 10000 people in 10 sq miles, or 10000 people in 10000 square miles?
Ultimately, lowering the population density won't do a thing for your level of energy consumption if you don't lower the population at the same time.
Spreading people thinner takes more energy, not less... even if transportation becomes more efficient, for bulk goods like food, water, and perhaps even heat, central distribution will always be more economical than trying to send out thousands of shipments of groceries all over the one-person-per-square-mile wilderness.
Furthermore, regardless of energy costs, it is deleterious to the local environment to build roads and low density housing because of the effect it has on the watershed-- roads and roofs are impervious to rain, and when there are a lot of roads and roofs in an area, that means that when it rains, all the water runs into the streams at once, instead of slowly leaching through trees, grass, and soil. Streams run abnormally low until it rains, when the unaturally fast influx of water causes them to flood. Better to concentrate this damage in cities (where you can commit to sacrificing nature entirely) than wreck every watershed you can find across the land.
Question: Have you ever worked in a real office environment?
No. So I can only imagine the file format Wars you describe.
What I meant was, people will still just buy whatever ends up being cheaper. And if the cheapest thing is infernally expensive, then everyone who has no alternative but to pay is screwed.
The point of my mostly usesless post was that this Microsoft Office subscription thing might in some ways not be a bad thing. But I can also easily agree with you that it could suck for many people and businesses.
My thoughts on this are similar. Choice is generally good. If anyone doesn't like it then they don't have to buy it; don't the old versions work well enough anyway?
Besides, if the subscription cost is sufficiently low, then for the people who for some strange reason must have the lastest MS-Office-foo thing, a subscription service might end up being cheaper.
If the subscription cost doesn't end up being cheaper, well then, don't buy it.
I don't see any reason why MS shouldn't charge as much as it thinks it can get away with for software.... if it ends up charging to much, it will just hurt itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been thinking that would be a great idea too. I t might be a fun thing to submit for the next "What Would Jobs Do?" contest. Either that, or apple should just release an iPod with a color screen that can deal with the iSight directly.
There are a bunch of these things embedded in the sidewalk on Vassar Street between Mass Ave and Main Street to mark the bike lanes on the newly-renovated sidewalk. They look pretty cool at night. (As far as I know, they're just plain solar-powered white LED lights, without any monitoring)
Besides the insurance benefits, I can imagine a deeply, um, theoretical benefit to having roads that monitor the cars passing over them:
1: Elect some really technocratic executives/legislators.
2: Enact laws which raise the speed limit when there are fewer cars on the road, with these monitoring studs used to report the traffic density. Then you can have them change color to indicate that the speed limit is raised And they could also report the data to some data network, letting road signs or even your dashboard indicate the raised speed limit.
Quoting the Fine Article:
"Now entering mass production, the AS-1210 Micro-ATX mainboard integrates the fanless VIA Eden ESP processor..."
In this case, fanless probably means that the CPU is dissipating less than 10 Watts.
I'm quite impressed by VIA's offerings for low power, quiet desktop computing lately. My next computer will almost certainly be something of theirs.
"Read the Fine Article" -- this technology is for writing the master discs in factories. It probably takes a pretty big, scary looking machine to do it, too.
Once the media is written with this technique, it will be read in Blu-ray devices; that just takes a laser diode around 400 nm in wavelength. Such diodes aren't exactly common or cheap these days, but they are commercially available, and they're already being used in commercial Blu-ray players.
Based on a conversation I had with the guy who replaced my 3rd logic board in 10 months (under warranty), I believe the problem is that the graphics chip is mounted to logic board directly under the hard drive, in the lower left corner of the iBook. So just picking the iBook up by that corner can put a lot of pressure on the chip, and it eventually fails one way or another (I'd be curious to know whether it's the solder connections to the graphics chip breaking, or the die itself getting crunched). I've also heard that the new G4 iBooks avoid the design flaw somehow, though I haven't actually looked into where they put their graphics chip.
By the way, if you're in the Boston area, the Computer Loft in Allston, MA can do repairs under Applecare, and the people I dealt with there were very knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly. (Shameless plug because I got great service for my iBook there)
Techniques to make thinner wires will probably be useful for improving the efficiency a whole range of optoelectronic devices:
For LEDs, some light that might escape the device is reflected or absorbed by the tiny wires carrying the current into the junction. Thinner wires would mean an improvement (though perhaps small at this point) in the amount of light you get out of the device.
With light going in the other direction, photovoltaics (solar panels) and various detectors are all about getting as much light into a junction as possible, so thinner wires would help make better devices here too.
The tips are very delicate, and so far, they only seem to be made by photochemical etching. This is in contrast to Scanning Tunneling Electron micrscopes, which you can (and people do) make out of reasonably cheap parts.
This is because an STM tip can just be a pointy piece of wire, snipped off with pliers, and still give decent results some of the time. Also, there are easy techniques for making sharper STM tips yourself, such as electrochemical etching, which in this case is a very simple, easy-to-do-at-home process.
It's very intriguing that a mathematician has been able to mathematically prove that V-shaped cantilevers are worse for Atomic Force Microscopy.If the proof is so conclusive, however, it would have been nice for them to wait until they'd fabricated some straight-beam cantilever AFM tips, so that they could do a nice thorough study proving that they get better performance using them for actual data.
(It shouldn't be any more difficult, and it might be a little easier, even, to make straight beam cantilever tips than to make V-shaped ones. This is because the cantilever part of the tip is typically made by some sort of photochemical etching, and a straight beam is certainly a simpler shape to etch.)
Anyway, even with recent advancements in tip design technology atomic force microscopy is still rather inexact when it comes to getting good results consistently. As much as they try to design good tips, you'll never really know if you'll get good images from it until you mount it in the AFM and actually use it. I've certainly heard of grad students who will find a good tip (through trial and error) and become very protective of it (which is hard to do because they're extremely delicate), just because getting good results from Atomic Force Microscopy can often be tricky business, and a tip that you know is good is a great advantage.
Sawfish is GPL. It can be made to look like anything X can handle, with much less effort than it takes to write a new windowmanager. Sawfish can also manage windows by any policy you can dream up and write down in lisp, i.e. anything. And it's fast enough on anything less than, oh, perhaps 5 or 6 years old.
oops, you're right. I forgot about that one. Mjolnir is great, even if it's not very comfortable to sit in when it's open. and if you play the song "Flat Beat" by Mr. Oizo over Mjolnir at a reasonable volume, at certain parts of the beat loop, the whole room begins to vibrate noticeably.
mua-ha-ha. since the laundry server only serves teeny gobs of text, though, it seems like it's resisted the slashdotting.
:)
you can't be from Random though, noone there has 6 girlfriends
oh, and while the web page for bathroom.mit.edu still seems to be too slashdotted to view, anyone with finger can finger bathroom@bathroom.mit.edu and get a current status in text.
good ol' Random. It's too bad there's no webpage yet about Mjolnir, the homemade big-ass speaker built from a linear induction motor from a dishwasher-sized hard drive, a cone of sheet metal, and a cabinet of medium-density fiberboard.
what a bunch of 31337 H4X0R5
The good thing about robot fights is that no one gets hurt- it can satisfy the desire for violence without making us imagine performing acts of violence on other living things. Instead, it makes us want to build fighting robots to fight other robots.
I think that if robot fighting catches on enough, it will begin to displace human fighting in entertainment, and once there are lots of robot fighting shows, we will start to see other shows with robots doing different things, as a reaction by the producers to a saturated market.
Well, consider that in a committed homosexual relationship, both partners have to really want the child-- there are no 'accidental' children. When a gay/lesbian couple decides to have a kid, they know they're in it for the long haul.
Compare this to single parenting- there you only have one person, of one gender, raising the child or children. With a homosexual couple, at least there's another person to help out, even if they are the same gender as the other parent.
Single parenting is relatively acceptable in the U.S. these days; is there any situation where two stable parents instead of one single parent would be a bad thing? "All things being equal", as you said, shouldn't it then be better to be raised by a gay/lesbian couple than by a single parent?
I am very grateful to my straight parents for the way they brought me up. And I'm straight too. But I don't see their heterosexual relationship as having anything to do with my well-being. The only thing that mattered was that they loved me and took care of me.
Instantly accepting and respecting someone is called `being friendly', in my opinion.
Maybe you place a very very high value on the meaning of respect, as in "to consider worthy of high regard", but respect can also mean "to refrain from interfering with". As for accept, in this context, I think it means " to give admittance or approval to" or "to regard as proper, normal, or inevitable". So what's wrong with people who instantly accept and respect someone?
From my point of view, accepting and respecting someone instantly simply means you don't make fun of them instantly, and you don't turn them away. There's plenty of time to disrespect and reject people once you know for certain you don't like them-- there's no reason to get a head start on it.
Would you care to explain yourself more clearly?
How is respecting someone by default detrimental to the respector?
And in the article, they even take into account that the atmosphere and temperature for the crops will have to be controlled, even if the soil can be used as it.
But what about taking care of the atmosphere for the colonists, if they're all eating asparagus? I mean, asparagus is tasty and nutritious, but what about the `side effects'? If asparagus is a staple of Martian colonists, will they all get used to the smell, or will it require more heavy-duty filtering equipment to remove the odor?
I wonder if perhaps foods that don't have the kind of `side effects' asparagus has should be considered first? Beans/legumes may be inevitable, since the colonists will need protein and only vegetarian diets will be feasible, but the side effects of legumes can be kept under control with Beano. To the best of my knowledge, no similar remedy exists for the side effects of asparagus.
LIRC- Linux Infrared Remote Control
According to the FAQ, there is a driver for laptop IrDA ports in the CVS for the project.
wow. impressive. that's almost as funny as "Rasputin" by Boney M, which unfortunately has been running through my head frequently for the past few days.
Sorry, I bothered to comment on how beyond reason his statement was. I hope you don't mind.
Which situation requires more energy? 10000 people in 10 sq miles, or 10000 people in 10000 square miles?
Ultimately, lowering the population density won't do a thing for your level of energy consumption if you don't lower the population at the same time.
Spreading people thinner takes more energy, not less... even if transportation becomes more efficient, for bulk goods like food, water, and perhaps even heat, central distribution will always be more economical than trying to send out thousands of shipments of groceries all over the one-person-per-square-mile wilderness.
Furthermore, regardless of energy costs, it is deleterious to the local environment to build roads and low density housing because of the effect it has on the watershed-- roads and roofs are impervious to rain, and when there are a lot of roads and roofs in an area, that means that when it rains, all the water runs into the streams at once, instead of slowly leaching through trees, grass, and soil. Streams run abnormally low until it rains, when the unaturally fast influx of water causes them to flood. Better to concentrate this damage in cities (where you can commit to sacrificing nature entirely) than wreck every watershed you can find across the land.
Question: Have you ever worked in a real office environment?
No. So I can only imagine the file format Wars you describe.
What I meant was, people will still just buy whatever ends up being cheaper. And if the cheapest thing is infernally expensive, then everyone who has no alternative but to pay is screwed.
The point of my mostly usesless post was that this Microsoft Office subscription thing might in some ways not be a bad thing. But I can also easily agree with you that it could suck for many people and businesses.
My thoughts on this are similar. Choice is generally good. If anyone doesn't like it then they don't have to buy it; don't the old versions work well enough anyway?
Besides, if the subscription cost is sufficiently low, then for the people who for some strange reason must have the lastest MS-Office-foo thing, a subscription service might end up being cheaper.
If the subscription cost doesn't end up being cheaper, well then, don't buy it.
I don't see any reason why MS shouldn't charge as much as it thinks it can get away with for software.... if it ends up charging to much, it will just hurt itself.
Not that I particularly like or dislike any of the 'artists' you mentioned, but your post makes me wonder:
Are 'artists' like Van Gogh and Picasso examples of 'Pictrographic Clone Painting?'
I wonder if anyone has considered using a miniaturized version of this for data entry on handhelds?
If you can use your hands to type with combinations of two 8-way keys, why not do the same things with just your thumbs? (besides RSI)
Something like this could make a lot more sense than current input methods... no stylus to lose, etc.