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Comment: Can this robot do my workout for me? (Score 1) 77

by Michael_gr (#38075546) Attached to: Robot Controls Person's Arm To Manipulate Objects
I wonder if it's possible to get this system to do your workout for you. Like, you program it to do a hundred bench presses and then lift weights for an hour. All the while you could, I dunno, watch TV on LCD goggles or something. Or, even better - suppose you could get this system to work on your arm muscles while you play video games using one of those brain-control interfaces. I would love to have a system like this.

Comment: And if there wasn't a limit... (Score 1) 183

by Michael_gr (#37805934) Attached to: Microsoft's Office365 Limits Emails To 500 Recipients
...I'm sure you'd be publishing an alarmist article about how Office365 could easily be used for spam. 500 distinct recipients per day sound pretty decent to me, and far above anything a normal human being would need. If you need more you are either: 1. sending to a mailing list, in which case, boo-hoo, just use another product 2. a spammer.

Comment: I think this is how it works: (Score 1) 191

by Michael_gr (#37753826) Attached to: Real 3D Display; 3 Years Out?
I googled some phrases from the article and it seems this is not a freestanding hologram but a table-shpaed block of material that can display volumetric images inside itself. Imagine layering a number of transparent LCD screens on top of each other and displaying cross sections of something to get the entire obejct - this is how this probably works. The resulting images are transparent and not photorealistic: this will be useful for presenting data - medical or geographical - but not for gaming, movies or (damn!) porn.

Comment: There's no plan there... (Score 5, Insightful) 221

by Michael_gr (#36868668) Attached to: A Congressman and an Astronaut Propose a New Plan For NASA
Only a call to create a plan. The article is wrongfully disdainful of private rocket companies. Nine years ago, SpaceX started developing their launch systems. They started from scratch. They Spent maybe 10% of the equivalent NASA budget for Constellation. And they have something to show for it - several successful launches, a space capsule that has successfully returned form orbit and is being fitted for a manned launch, and a heavy launch vehicle in the works. NASA, in the mean time, was creating a *derived* system and yet ran into technological problems and have yet to produce a single piece of hardware that can do anything. Obama is diverting funds from a slow-moving, conservative, wasteful government agency and cancelled an under-performing, over-budget, technologically conservative (and yet riddled with problems) program. The money was diverted to the free market. And yet, all the space-loving republicans who touted the free market's ability to compete with NASA are now howling and complaining. Why? cause it's OBAMA, that's why.

Comment: So late? (Score 1) 220

by Michael_gr (#36274408) Attached to: Alaska Airlines Jettisons Paper Manuals For iPads
I was working for a company that developed a tablet-like device for airline pilots back in 1996! Sure, it didn't have touch and it was 486 based and it was thicker, but it's really nothing new. What do pilots from other countries use? I won't be surprised to hear that the US is very conservative in this area.

Comment: Gimp is not as good as PS was a decade ago (Score 1) 460

by Michael_gr (#32794440) Attached to: Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day
Let me see, here's the list of stuf gimp is still missing: Native CMYK work and output - crucial for print ability to add spot channels (again, for print - used for special dyes and lamination) native 16 bit per channel support - crucial fro digital imaging and some esoteric tasks Clipping layers - use one layer to mask another vector masks on raster layers Layer groups - introduced in latest beta Layer effects - shadow, glow, storke - that change in real time according to layer data vector layers (not paths - layers with vector data filled with color/pattern/gradient) adjustment layers - layers that do non-destructive editing smart objects - add external files as layers, scale them while keeping the original data single, do-it-all transform tool strong text tools (being addressed currently in gimp) automatic layer boundary management that's just off the top of my head, and I'm not even talking about interface, just functionality! I know both gimp and photoshop inside and out, know where every command is on both - Photoshop is so much ahead of Gimp it's absurd to even discuss both in the same article. Comparing Gimp and PS on simple tasks such as overlaying a couple of images is like taking a Lamborghini Gallardo out to the local corner store and back at 25mph and then claiming it performs just as well as your used Toyota Yaris.

Robot, n.: University administrator.

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