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Domain: caesar.de

Stories and comments across the archive that link to caesar.de.

Comments · 6

  1. Others are doing it too by rxmd · · Score: 2, Informative · on Data Mining Used to Create New Materials

    This approach has been popular for quite some time now. For example, there is a research group at CAESAR in Bonn, Germany, called Combinatorial Material Science that has been doing something similar for the last five years or so in the field of material science, especially regarding thin films.

  2. Re:"the right daughterboards" by yppiz · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Universal Radio Grabber: the USRP
    The parent poster writes: Be careful of that seemingly innocuous qualification: "with the right software and daughterboards"... both imply serious limitations to the technology....Even with a reasonably fast processor (say 3 GHz) today, you are typically only be able to process, at most, a few million samples per second -- especially if you are performing complicated modulation/demodulation, coding/decoding, filtering and protocol processing. Each sample may require substantial computation, and that limits the number of samples you can process per second. That, in its turn, affects the bandwidth that a processor can address (i.e. how wide a part of the radio spectrum you can "see" at any one time).

    I'll bet it's not long before the USRP/GnuRadio people hook up with the graphics card as a compute engine folks. Graphics cards are well suited for high-speed signal processing, and would give you the ability to process high-bandwidth signals in realtime even on an ordinary PC.

    GPGPU: General-Purpose computation on GPUs
    The FFT on a GPU
    GPU-FFTlib - Graphics Card based Implementation of the Fast Fourier Transform

    --Pat

  3. They're German, not Spanish by rxmd · · Score: 1 · on New Graphic Displays for the Blind

    The researchers are German, not Spanish. The research is actually taking place in the microrobotics group at the caesar applied sciences research center in Bonn, Germany. The prize is awarded by a Spanish organization, which is why the ceremony is taking place in Spain.

  4. They're German, not Spanish by rxmd · · Score: 1 · on New Graphic Displays for the Blind

    The researchers are German, not Spanish. The research is actually taking place in the microrobotics group at the caesar applied sciences research center in Bonn, Germany. The prize is awarded by a Spanish organization, which is why the ceremony is taking place in Spain.

  5. Met him last week! by rxmd · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Math Whiz Breaks Calculation Record
    Actually, I was quite astonished to see this on Slashdot, as I had lunch with the guy last Thursday where I work. He's nice in persion, but one of the secretaries at work said he stinks and should wash more often. I'm afraid I didn't notice it quite as badly...

    He has an interesting way of getting along financially. Basically, he's living off an exclusive contract with the German TV station RTL where he's featured every now and then in shows. He also gives lectures on mathematical topics; RTL makes him charge a very steep EUR 2500 per lecture (about $3000). I think originally he studied psychology; he's still running the psychiatrist's practice in Cologne that he startet off with.

    We were joking about him tackling the Millenium Problems now; I wonder if he's serious about that... but then, there's more to it than calculating in your head really fast.

  6. Re:Hm... by rxmd · · Score: 1 · on Croquet Project Releases Initial Developer Release
    I've never understood what makes 3D environments better than 2D for applications and input devices made for 2D displays. In my opinion, the new spatial dimension you can move through is what makes it bad since it takes longer time to accomplish tasks.
    Perhaps the guiding factor is not the convenience of the interface, but rather the intuitiveness of the interface.
    To be honest, most 3D environments I've worked with feel horribly un-intuitive when I have to use them through a 2D interface. There are two exceptions:
    • First-person shooters. But then, you are very restricted in what you do. And 3D chat communities based on a FPS or TPS visualisation have been tried countless times. It's just that when I want to interact with people I have different priorities than when I'm running around shooting them. For example, it feels horribly un-intuitive (for me at least) to interact with a group of people, constantly having to hit some buttons or moving my mouse around just to keep them all in view. In a FPS, that's OK, because the interaction itself is rather straightforward, click, shoot, that's it. But in chat or (worse) collaborative working it gets really distracting. I don't see how this is more intuitive than having everything laid out on a 2D desktop, all in view.
    • 3D modelling or CAD software. Here, the interface isn't really intuitive at first; it took me a while to get used to 4-way viewing, but it has the advantage of precision. However, again there is no collaboration, and the interaction is very straigtforward.
    As soon as interaction is supposed to be a little more complicated than pointing and clicking, I find the need to constantly adjust my 2D view area extremely distracting and un-intuitive.

    It's a different thing with 3D visualization tools; I've had the pleasure to work with some CAVE-men, and there it was OK, because it conformed to how I usually work in 3D meatspace.