Posts by annodomini2

Key question you haven't answered

Yes you don't wear a watch, but do you wear sunglasses?

I think this is where the distinction will be made, as long as they don't feel like you have a bowling ball strapped to your head, or give you significant eye strain as a result, I think this will be an interesting concept.

The glasses situation is a good point, will people requiring vision correction be required to wear contact lenses to use this?

The key to it's success as with most products will depend on it's benefit to cost ratio. If they try and pull the marketing must have and charge 3x price of a top end smartphone, I think it'll go the way of the early touchscreen devices, nice idea, but too expensive. Comparable to a top end SP or less (please, please, please! ;) ) and you may stand a chance of hitting the ground running.

They using a '65 Stingray for the ad's?

Stabilisation

Will there be sufficient air pressure at the launch altitude to allow the winged surfaces to stabilise the direction of the craft?

Cheap fuel on orbit

May be the key to kick starting the commercialisation of space.

There are lots of old satellites in parking orbits, now they may not be able to refuel them as:

A: They weren't designed for it.

B: Their systems are probably dead.

However they do possess a lot of processed materials that have the potential to be recycled, this is currently not cost effective due to launch costs, I.e. it's cheaper to put a new unit it up, than trying to recover old units.

But... If fuel was available relatively cheaply for recovery machines to move them to a location (on orbit) where the materials could be reused the capability to create on orbit systems may start to appear.

Given current launch costs this could potentially be quite lucrative.

I realise this is very idealistic, but at the same time if there is no dreaming then we will never get there.

The main issue I forsee is that existing satellites use hydrazine for thruster fuel, making hydrazine on orbit may be a challenge and that units intended for refuelling may need technology updates beyond the refuelling mechanisms.

Interesting Pre-cept

Sounds like Nokia are trying to play the long game.

Android got into the market by appealing nerd/geek/[insert other stereotype] segment of the market. Some of this segment will be software engineers, which gets them interested in the App side.

So they sneakily had a dev base, before the system went mainstream, this is where WinPho 7/8 falls down. Windows Phone has been in the market for ages, and it's predecessors were absolute garbage. 7 and 8 are an improvement, but they missed the boat.

The only thing that may save them is that Apple appears to have lost it's direction.

The fundamental weakness in this concept is that the steam has run out on the 3D printing fad, simply because the stuff you get out of the affordable home machines is so crap and the amount of effort required to get these machines working correctly, far outweighs the benefits.

There will be resurgence when the off the shelf tech gets to an affordable price point, but to me this is a cliche headline marketing bumpf. Rather than a solution to a non-existent problem.

The weakness in this...

Given the 1984 states that many Governments security services would like, there would probably some form of regulation making this illegal.

Yes, this tech may prevent your face being recognised, but given it uses visible light. It is also obvious.

So as you are trying to fool the sensors, the sensors can detect that you are trying to fool them, making you a target.

T-800 heading straight for you!

"We trust computers to fly jets... why not trust them with our petabytes?"

Cost and safety/mission criticality.

90% of the code used in aircraft is there to detect when something goes wrong, this code is also implemented in different ways across different platforms with the results analysed and double checked.

There are very strict standards that must be adhered to for the code to be even allowed to go anywhere near a plane and then it needs to be further tested before it is allowed to fly.

As stated above, this is not infallible and still subject to human error.

The cost and time to implement these systems is astronomical compared to a PC operating system based application.

Is it possible to do it? Yes. Will a business do it, probably not, simply as the cost and timescales would put them so behind the market that the business would be bankrupt before they sold license 1.

[See image]

Critical point

The malware in question is 'unspecified' no where in the article does this state that this was a targeted attack.

Or that the malware was designed to disrupt the operation of these systems.

The fact they got infected is obviously a major security fail, but no where is it stated that the reason the machines were infected was deliberate.

"IE 9 has been available since March 2011"

If you're running vista or above, many corporate environments still have large collections of XP (occasionally older) machines.