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guanxi writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article about hacking and specifically, the "hacker's nirvana on wheels", all the way from hot-rodding to reprogramming your digital ignition. Of course, I neither endorse nor recommend any of the procedures mentioned, any of which may be inherently dangerous to your life and your warranty. "

em.a18 writes "There is a good article in the NYTimes about how we use music and how it changes after Napster. The article even suggests some good business models. Nicely done!" Yeah you need a free registration to read it, but it's a good piece. I like the quote 'With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again. '

levin writes "An article in the latest issue of IEEE spectrum discusses modular robots--robots made of small, identical components or modules. These robots can slither, roll like a tank tread, inchworm, or crawl like a spider. The idea is that modular robots will be not only cheaper to build because the modules are all the same, but will be more able to repair themselves (by shedding damaged modules). Even cooler, each of the 5cm cube modules in Xerox PARC's polybot sports its own PowerPC 555 and 1mb ram."

Daktaklakpak writes: "Found this interesting article on the IEEE Spectrum. It details the different attempts to make transistors based on electronic spin. Apparently, this technology is related to the MRAM that we've been hearing so much about."

Daktaklakpak writes: "Found this interesting article on the IEEE Spectrum. It details the different attempts to make transistors based on electronic spin. Apparently, this technology is related to the MRAM that we've been hearing so much about."

jscribner writes: "Tis the season for tech forecasts and wrap-ups; I got to post this discussion on www.research.ibm.com; it's about how (merely 30 years after Feynman's speech) nanotechnology is finally being applied to chip and storage technologies. The IBM Research article covers RF (Radio Frequency) MEMS, micro-actuator MEMS, and the Millipede project. You can also find some interesting material on IDA's MEMS site and the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems."

zosa writes: "The New York American Red Cross is in dire need of technology equipment and services. The field workers and sites have little, if any, means of communication and the central office is processing way too much on completely paper systems. Your help in acquiring these resources would be greatly appreciated." You can read more over at this page. Finally something that the average Slashdot reader can do to help.

Christopher Thomas writes: "IEEE Spectrum has a scathing review of venture capitalists this month. Authors Nick Tredennick and Brion Shimamoto paint a devastatingly cynical picture of venture capitalism from the engineers' perspective." Funny to read, but probably 100% accurate. Wow.

Christopher Thomas writes: "IEEE Spectrum has a scathing review of venture capitalists this month. Authors Nick Tredennick and Brion Shimamoto paint a devastatingly cynical picture of venture capitalism from the engineers' perspective." Funny to read, but probably 100% accurate. Wow.

Ralph Bearpark asks: "June's IEEE Software mag carries an article titled 'The Cable Modem Traffic Jam' that claims (amongst other things) that 'a 56K dial-up modem can at times be faster than a cable modem and access can be more reliable' due to neighborhood bandwidth hogs, billing system bottlenecks server overloads, and various other problems, many of which apparently also apply to xDSL."

"Now, I had been seriously considering upgrading to cable, but now I'm not so sure whether it will be worth the extra cash. What is your experience? Is broadband really slowing down?"

I'm working at a cable-modem connected computer which really does seem sometimes to lag behind good old 56K -- anyone out there have advice on avoiding The Great Slowdown?

BitMan sent in an overview of the next step in addressing large disk drives. I tend to run into these every few years when I try to add a new, large drive to an older machine and find out that some factor is keeping me from being able to use the full drive capacity. Well, the next step will push those limits out quite a ways, giving us a few more years of ever-increasing drive space.

BitMan writes: "If you haven't heard, there has been a new disk geometry limitation looming for some time at 128GB (gigabytes of 2^30 bytes), which is 137GB (gigabytes of 10^9 bytes). As many will note, there have been various BIOS and OS limitations in disk geometry before -- e.g., 512/528MB, 2GB, 8GB, 32/33GB, etc... But what makes the latest 128/137GB "limit" different is that it revolves around the "hard, physical addressing" limitations of the ATA (AT Attachment) interface. 28-bits are used for addressing, which results in the 2^28 sector * 512 bytes/sector = 128/137GB limitation. As such, hardware fiends like myself were wondering when the industry would get around to addressing this "hard" limitation in the ATA interface.

Fortunately, the solution is already in the works. The ANSI ATA committee has accepted a proposal from Maxtor that extends the ATA bus addressing to 48-bits. This allows for up to 128 pB (petabytes of 2^50), which is 144pB (petabytes of 10^15), sizes. This should tide the PC world over until the 2TB (terabytes of 2^40) limit is reached, which is the maximum number of sectors a 32-bit OS can address -- i.e. 2^32 sector * 512 bytes/sector = 2TB.

In addition to breaking the addressing limitation, another addressing limitation was overcome for performance considerations. The maximum number of sectors transferrable in any command was boosted from 8-bit = 256 sectors/command (~128KB max. transfer/command) to 16-bit = 65,536 sectors/command (~32MB max. transfer/command). This should increase ATA/IDE performance in burst transfers and many other operations.

A whitepaper on the new proposal can be found here from Maxtor. Small correction in the article: Maxtor says 144 pB (petabytes) = 144,000 GB (gigabytes), which is quite incorrect. 144pb (petabytes of 10^15) = 144,000 TB (terabytes of 10^12) = 144,000,000 GB (gigabytes of 10^9).

Thanx goes to the most excellent StorageReview site where I first heard of this."

BitMan sent in an overview of the next step in addressing large disk drives. I tend to run into these every few years when I try to add a new, large drive to an older machine and find out that some factor is keeping me from being able to use the full drive capacity. Well, the next step will push those limits out quite a ways, giving us a few more years of ever-increasing drive space.

BitMan writes: "If you haven't heard, there has been a new disk geometry limitation looming for some time at 128GB (gigabytes of 2^30 bytes), which is 137GB (gigabytes of 10^9 bytes). As many will note, there have been various BIOS and OS limitations in disk geometry before -- e.g., 512/528MB, 2GB, 8GB, 32/33GB, etc... But what makes the latest 128/137GB "limit" different is that it revolves around the "hard, physical addressing" limitations of the ATA (AT Attachment) interface. 28-bits are used for addressing, which results in the 2^28 sector * 512 bytes/sector = 128/137GB limitation. As such, hardware fiends like myself were wondering when the industry would get around to addressing this "hard" limitation in the ATA interface.

Fortunately, the solution is already in the works. The ANSI ATA committee has accepted a proposal from Maxtor that extends the ATA bus addressing to 48-bits. This allows for up to 128 pB (petabytes of 2^50), which is 144pB (petabytes of 10^15), sizes. This should tide the PC world over until the 2TB (terabytes of 2^40) limit is reached, which is the maximum number of sectors a 32-bit OS can address -- i.e. 2^32 sector * 512 bytes/sector = 2TB.

In addition to breaking the addressing limitation, another addressing limitation was overcome for performance considerations. The maximum number of sectors transferrable in any command was boosted from 8-bit = 256 sectors/command (~128KB max. transfer/command) to 16-bit = 65,536 sectors/command (~32MB max. transfer/command). This should increase ATA/IDE performance in burst transfers and many other operations.

A whitepaper on the new proposal can be found here from Maxtor. Small correction in the article: Maxtor says 144 pB (petabytes) = 144,000 GB (gigabytes), which is quite incorrect. 144pb (petabytes of 10^15) = 144,000 TB (terabytes of 10^12) = 144,000,000 GB (gigabytes of 10^9).

Thanx goes to the most excellent StorageReview site where I first heard of this."

pedestrian writes: "Computer.org the IEEE site has an excellent, quite detailed, article about using 'a flexible piezoelectric foil stave to harness sole-bending energy and a reinforced PZT dimorph to capture heel-strike energy' and its potential to power 'wearable microelectronics'."

More updates and links below on HavenCo, robots that kick balls, and what can already be said to be one of the millenium's most anticipated movies thus far. Oh, and some nice auditory/textual backup to the recent story about RMS vs. Goliath.

Not asking, not telling. jeffthompson writes: "The Havenco web site says it is now fully operational and open for business." A lot of people seemed convinced that Havenco wouldn't even be around by this time, but sticking around is the best revenge. I'd like to go aboard one day, promise I'll wear a blindfold and not look at anything ...

GNU, Linux, GNU/Linux, Freedom and the American Way. bkuhn writes: "Now, both the electronic audio and transcript of RMS' NYU talk are available."

The audio is in Ogg format, and the transcription is in blessed plaintext. Thanks!

Sign #37 of the coming apocalypse: Speaking of Mundie, software Freedom (and free-ness), Simone Paddock of O'Reilly writes with news that might raise a few eyebrows:

"Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie set off a compelling debate recently when he discussed Microsoft's Shared Source Philosophy, which blends the sharing of source code with the preservation of intellectual property rights.

Tim O'Reilly invited him to attend the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Convention (July 23-27, 2001 in San Diego). Mundie not only agreed to attend, he agreed to speak.

Mundie will discuss ways in which shared source differs from open source, and how the Shared Source Philosophy supports a strong software business case for commercial software use."

Michael Tiemann (CTO of Red Hat) will speak after Mundie, and a panel of IP law and software experts (including Tim O'Reilly) will discuss the issues raised. Sounds worth being in San Diego for. If you're interested, there's more information online.

In the Tolkein, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense. SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "This is a follow-up on the recently-released LOTR trailer. It's now available for download. Two versions are available to suit your bandwidth and patience. Unfortunately, it's still only available in Real format, but I guess we can't have everything."

Semi-alive and kicking. IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Stephen Cass writes:

IEEE Spectrum , the house magazine of the IEEE is launching an online forum devoted to the noble sport of robosoccer . Robosoccer is different from things like Battle Bots or Robot Wars in that the robots play in teams and the whole thing is completely autonomous once started. There are a number of competitions, the biggest of which is the annual Robocup tournament, which will be held in Seattle this year. Robosoccer is a great reasearch tool for exploring A.I., automous agent behaviour, computer vision, simulation and mechanical and electrical design. It attracts participants ranging from high school students to academic researchers.

Our website (which incidentally runs slashcode) will also be a clearing house for us to award sponsorship money for teams building robosoccer robots as well as a place to exchange information.

Hard to get enough of Robots playing soccer, and prize money means you can buy more marshmallows to roast at your victory bonfire.

More updates and links below on HavenCo, robots that kick balls, and what can already be said to be one of the millenium's most anticipated movies thus far. Oh, and some nice auditory/textual backup to the recent story about RMS vs. Goliath.

Not asking, not telling. jeffthompson writes: "The Havenco web site says it is now fully operational and open for business." A lot of people seemed convinced that Havenco wouldn't even be around by this time, but sticking around is the best revenge. I'd like to go aboard one day, promise I'll wear a blindfold and not look at anything ...

GNU, Linux, GNU/Linux, Freedom and the American Way. bkuhn writes: "Now, both the electronic audio and transcript of RMS' NYU talk are available."

The audio is in Ogg format, and the transcription is in blessed plaintext. Thanks!

Sign #37 of the coming apocalypse: Speaking of Mundie, software Freedom (and free-ness), Simone Paddock of O'Reilly writes with news that might raise a few eyebrows:

"Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie set off a compelling debate recently when he discussed Microsoft's Shared Source Philosophy, which blends the sharing of source code with the preservation of intellectual property rights.

Tim O'Reilly invited him to attend the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Convention (July 23-27, 2001 in San Diego). Mundie not only agreed to attend, he agreed to speak.

Mundie will discuss ways in which shared source differs from open source, and how the Shared Source Philosophy supports a strong software business case for commercial software use."

Michael Tiemann (CTO of Red Hat) will speak after Mundie, and a panel of IP law and software experts (including Tim O'Reilly) will discuss the issues raised. Sounds worth being in San Diego for. If you're interested, there's more information online.

In the Tolkein, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense. SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "This is a follow-up on the recently-released LOTR trailer. It's now available for download. Two versions are available to suit your bandwidth and patience. Unfortunately, it's still only available in Real format, but I guess we can't have everything."

Semi-alive and kicking. IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Stephen Cass writes:

IEEE Spectrum , the house magazine of the IEEE is launching an online forum devoted to the noble sport of robosoccer . Robosoccer is different from things like Battle Bots or Robot Wars in that the robots play in teams and the whole thing is completely autonomous once started. There are a number of competitions, the biggest of which is the annual Robocup tournament, which will be held in Seattle this year. Robosoccer is a great reasearch tool for exploring A.I., automous agent behaviour, computer vision, simulation and mechanical and electrical design. It attracts participants ranging from high school students to academic researchers.

Our website (which incidentally runs slashcode) will also be a clearing house for us to award sponsorship money for teams building robosoccer robots as well as a place to exchange information.

Hard to get enough of Robots playing soccer, and prize money means you can buy more marshmallows to roast at your victory bonfire.

More updates and links below on HavenCo, robots that kick balls, and what can already be said to be one of the millenium's most anticipated movies thus far. Oh, and some nice auditory/textual backup to the recent story about RMS vs. Goliath.

Not asking, not telling. jeffthompson writes: "The Havenco web site says it is now fully operational and open for business." A lot of people seemed convinced that Havenco wouldn't even be around by this time, but sticking around is the best revenge. I'd like to go aboard one day, promise I'll wear a blindfold and not look at anything ...

GNU, Linux, GNU/Linux, Freedom and the American Way. bkuhn writes: "Now, both the electronic audio and transcript of RMS' NYU talk are available."

The audio is in Ogg format, and the transcription is in blessed plaintext. Thanks!

Sign #37 of the coming apocalypse: Speaking of Mundie, software Freedom (and free-ness), Simone Paddock of O'Reilly writes with news that might raise a few eyebrows:

"Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie set off a compelling debate recently when he discussed Microsoft's Shared Source Philosophy, which blends the sharing of source code with the preservation of intellectual property rights.

Tim O'Reilly invited him to attend the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Convention (July 23-27, 2001 in San Diego). Mundie not only agreed to attend, he agreed to speak.

Mundie will discuss ways in which shared source differs from open source, and how the Shared Source Philosophy supports a strong software business case for commercial software use."

Michael Tiemann (CTO of Red Hat) will speak after Mundie, and a panel of IP law and software experts (including Tim O'Reilly) will discuss the issues raised. Sounds worth being in San Diego for. If you're interested, there's more information online.

In the Tolkein, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense. SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "This is a follow-up on the recently-released LOTR trailer. It's now available for download. Two versions are available to suit your bandwidth and patience. Unfortunately, it's still only available in Real format, but I guess we can't have everything."

Semi-alive and kicking. IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Stephen Cass writes:

IEEE Spectrum , the house magazine of the IEEE is launching an online forum devoted to the noble sport of robosoccer . Robosoccer is different from things like Battle Bots or Robot Wars in that the robots play in teams and the whole thing is completely autonomous once started. There are a number of competitions, the biggest of which is the annual Robocup tournament, which will be held in Seattle this year. Robosoccer is a great reasearch tool for exploring A.I., automous agent behaviour, computer vision, simulation and mechanical and electrical design. It attracts participants ranging from high school students to academic researchers.

Our website (which incidentally runs slashcode) will also be a clearing house for us to award sponsorship money for teams building robosoccer robots as well as a place to exchange information.

Hard to get enough of Robots playing soccer, and prize money means you can buy more marshmallows to roast at your victory bonfire.

n7lyg writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an opinion piece this month on Open-source Biology and Its Impact on Industry. The article speculates about advancements in biology and biological-based manufacturing and how it is likely impossible for anyone to keep control of the Intellectual Property around genetic engineering. If software was as easy to produce and prevalent as DNA, then it would be similarly impossible to control software as IP."

n7lyg writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an opinion piece this month on Open-source Biology and Its Impact on Industry. The article speculates about advancements in biology and biological-based manufacturing and how it is likely impossible for anyone to keep control of the Intellectual Property around genetic engineering. If software was as easy to produce and prevalent as DNA, then it would be similarly impossible to control software as IP."

glinden writes: "Two telescopes at the Kech Observatory have been optically linked to form the Keck Interferometer. The resolving power of this combined telescope will apparently be sufficient to see earth-sized planets around nearby stars." quoll contributes a link to NASA's own version of the story, too.

nikhil_g writes " National Geographic has the tidbits about an attempt that sounds as bizzare as they come. It seems to be on horizon with a US Team also planning sooner than the Australian attempt in 2002. " Feed Mag has more complete coverage as well. It's certainly a...uh...active way to spend your time.

drkhong writes: "...at least if you've got a good cooling system. IEEE Spectrum has an article about the next generation ICs. Using superconducting materials cooled down to 5K a peak of 750GHz has already been reached. Just think about how far light goes within one clock cycle, and then tell me you aren't impressed." These low-temperature devices are made of niobium (a superconducting metal), and use something called Josephson junction devices, resulting in chips for which the article states "there are no known physical barriers to decreasing size by a factor of 10 and thus increasing speed by a factor of 10, using lithography to move from today's 3-m linewidth to 0.3 m."

drkhong writes: "...at least if you've got a good cooling system. IEEE Spectrum has an article about the next generation ICs. Using superconducting materials cooled down to 5K a peak of 750GHz has already been reached. Just think about how far light goes within one clock cycle, and then tell me you aren't impressed." These low-temperature devices are made of niobium (a superconducting metal), and use something called Josephson junction devices, resulting in chips for which the article states "there are no known physical barriers to decreasing size by a factor of 10 and thus increasing speed by a factor of 10, using lithography to move from today's 3-m linewidth to 0.3 m."

JWhitlock asks: "My wife recently purchased a Handspring Visor. There is a program that turns your Palm-based handheld into a learning remote control, which seems like a cool (and possibly useful) application, since I have at least four remotes, and digital cable's navigation system is nearly worthless. One problem - she won't let me install it. She's under the illusion that her toy is just for productivity, or that I'll steal it if I play with it too much. In any case, I do have a laptop with an Infrared port to play with, but there appears to be no software out there that uses it. Is this because it's not technically feasible, or has no one else thought of it?"

code_rage writes "IEEE Spectrum Magazine has an article by James Oberg which enumerates some of the problems which have cropped up and will crop up during assembly of Space Station Alpha (or whatever it is called this week). The article lists many software problems, including safety related issues. Also a problem which was news to me: the U.S.-supplied Solar Arrays operate at a high voltage, which would place astronauts at risk of a potentially deadly plasma discharge during EVA. The workarounds include some Catch-22's."

Once a year, would-be cyborgs and their creators congregate for a few days of catching up with each other and the state of the art at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers's conference, sponsored by the IEEE and corporate sponsors like Microsoft and Compaq. Ever-lighter and more colorful head-mounted displays, innovative input devices and boundary-stretching ideas on human/machine interaction conspire to attract strange looks from startled pedestrians or frank admiration from fellow participants. When ISWC2000 began Monday in Atlanta. it marked the fourth such gathering -- the event has been held in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Cambridge, Mass. ISWC is about equal parts trade show, academic conference, and family reunion for a visibly different kind of family. Since ALS had ended just one day before, I stayed in the Peachtree state an extra few days to check it out. Read on to see what I found.

Excuse me, is that a StrongArm? A survey of the show floor reveals that wearable computing in the year 2000 is still a small, specialized field. Despite cyberpunk literature, Max Headroom, AT&T "You Will" commercials and cell-phones equipped with earbud mics to get us used to the idea, the cost and discomfort of wearing one's own computer still makes it anything but mainstream. Input devices are awkward, displays are expensive and for the most part too obtrusive for casual use. The interface discomfort is more than just physical, too -- it's semantic. Many of the computers demonstrated at ISWC 2000 will run the same applications as your desktop PC (since they're based on shrunken X86 hardware), but simply aren't built for it when it comes to interface. Typing a letter is still easier at a standard keyboard and a conventional monitor than with a forearm keyboard and a monochrome eyepiece, in part because "typing a letter" is something we're much comfortable with in another setting. The niche that wearables will fill is still being hewn -- by the people at ISWC, in fact.

Unlike Comdex, CES, or even Linux World, there are no hordes rushing the door seeking T-shirts and yo-yos. The attendees mostly seem focused on the technology at hand, and catching up with what their academic colleages or business competition are doing. As you might expect, that means improving battery life, devising and improving useful applications, tweaking both input and output devices to be more intuitive, and making the actual hardware of wearable computing more comfortable.

Three basic groups come to strut their stuff at this kind of event: Systems vendors, component manufacturers, and academics. In a field as technical and experimental as wearable computing, rigidly separating the three is difficult sometimes. Besides which, some of the companies which could be selling wearables are at present still circling the outskirts before entering the field outright (like IBM, whose Linux-equipped wristwatches were demonstrated to oohs and aahs, and Compaq, whose iPaq is belt-mountable and capable, but not a "wearable computer"), and some former industry bigwigs have returned to academia, like Steven Schwartz, who headed research for Xybernaut before migrating to his current position at the MIT Media Lab.

The few true systems vendors tend to be focused on industrial and government applications, the kind of roles that can justify the latest, most capable hardware even if pricey: that means their market is focused on high-margin sales and hardware which doesn't much see the shy side of $3,000, but which is polished and presentable with ergonomics, true wearability and niceties like voice recognition and wireless communication present and accounted for.

The component vendors, on the other hand, span a huge range -- everything from budget displays (like the $500 M1 from Tek Gear) to materials which could serve as the infrastructure for future wearable systems, like the high-tech fabrics developed by Bekaert -- Bekaert's Douglas Watson showed me spool of thread I assumed was some sort of fortified cotton, or perhaps silk, but which turned out to be stainless steel. "It turns out that steel ends up having many of the same characteristics and flexibility as cotton or polyesther, when you get to the same filament diameter, he said. And at a company called Foster-Miller, Senior Engineer of Materials Technology Brian Farrel showed off the items on a table display which included military-stength cloth straps through which are woven nearly any kind of data cable, from USB to fiber-optics, or in some cases electical power connections. Foster-Miller also had vests stuffed full of haptic sensors, developed as part of a program to help fight spatial disorientation among pilots. (A gentle nudge from one of the sensors helps orient pilots who may have briefly lost their true orientation.)

Companies specializing in nothing but display systems, like MicroOptical and Liteye wowed visitors with their latest displays as well. The most-worn displays among the wearable-equipped, though, seems to be the lightweight Micro-Optical.

And probably most important in the long term, there are academic groups -- research groups from CMU, Columbia, MIT, and GA Tech are all represented. Xybernaut and VIA may sell complete systems to industrial users and the military, but universities are still the biggest source of design ideas and basic research in everything from software to analysing the potential of wearable hardware to cause musculoskeletal distress. (More about academic types on Friday.)

Established players If you're looking to buy a wearable system outright (or have a few pitched to you), ISWC is one of the few opportunities to try on a range of devices and actually play with wearable computing outside of the design studios and graduate labs of elite universities, and without forking over thousands of dollars.

There are relatively few companies who've been around long enough or sold enough computers to call major players in the wearables market, but two old names in the young field are VIA and Xybernaut, both of which had booths on hand to demonstrate their latest machines and give hints about future models.

Xybernaut, perhaps the best recognized name among wearable manufacturers, demonstrated several variations on their XXXX. While it's hard to not call many of the devices around the floor "futuristic," Xybernaut's sleek machines practically define the term.

VIA (from high-tech Minnesota) showed their devices, too: their current model, the VIA II, is about the size of two very fat wallets, and flexes to allows the sides to fit comfortably against the body. Plans are also in the works for a model integrating a low-power 600Mhz chip and 128MB of RAM. (Now from where does that sound familiar?) The folks at VIA promise an announcement about that new model at Comdex, but there aren't that many lines to read between here.

Not-so-established players Tiqit, a commerical offshoot of work at Stanford's Wearable Computing Laboratory, demonstrated their "matchbook sized" machine (I say more like a pack of cigarettes), which they claim is the world's smallest complete x86 PC, and that it is shipping now. Unusual in that it relies on a 486 chip rather than the ARM, StrongARM and low-power 586s which seem to dominate the show, the Tiqt instead favors sheer tininess over computing power. It still has enough muscle to serve web pages, edit text, and do most of the functions that wearables are called on to do at present, with the exception of processor-intensive chores like speech recognition.

Another academic offshoot, this one from Georgia Tech's famed wearables program with Thad Starner is called Charmed Technologies (about which more in the second installment) -- but check out their site for plans free for your use to build your own wearable computer case, fitting standard PC104 board, before it gets slashdotted.

... but then I'd have to kill you.

John Murray, Director of Software Engineering for Pacific Consultants LLC, was showing off something a bit more exotic than even the other complete wearable systems: field-computers that PCLLC is building in limited quantities for the U.S. Army, having beaten out giants like Raytheon to build for the Army the ruggedized wearable system known as Land Warrior.

The system is built for abuse -- connections are all military-grade and waterproofed. This all comes at a weight cost that probably puts military-spec wearables off most people's list: around 16 pounds worth of electronics, batteries and cabling is joined by an external antenna the diameter of a gun barrel, a shoulder-mounted GPS receiver, a small flat-panel display and a full-color 640x480 prism display manufactured by NAME. The processing unit (a 166MHz Pentium processor on a PC104 board, mated to 800MB of flash disk and 64MB of RAM) is carried separately from the radio-spectrum communications module, which contains a standard 802.11 card.

Ron Hill, a retired Army Sergeant (first class), and now with the Omega Training Group, was in full camo dress and wearing the system. Murray pointed out that the cable connecting the wireless module to the CPU (worn around Hill's back) is actually a USB connection, finegled into military-style cable and connectors. Other than such specialized connections, though, the componenents themselves are fairly standard, just ruggedized.

If the weight wasn't enough to dissuade you, though, this might be: all told, Murray says the system costs ten to twelve thousand dollars per person. "But we're still early on. Those costs should drop considerably as we increase the numbers. That cost is with each system being built one at a time, and we're a small shop."

Right now, the system is running windows 2000; part of that was expediency, because we only had 9 months to develop the thing, and part of that was because the military wanted it to run with certain pre-existing pieces of software." Murray admitted interest in switching to a real-time OS such as QNX, or perhaps a Linux-based real-time system.

Try this on for size Not everyone fits into one of the neat categories of vendor or academic, though, and not all of the wearables at the show look like bladerunner props, either. Jonny Farringdon, Senior Scientist in Wearable Technologies at Philips' UK Research Laboratories, held forth in a booth festooned with heat-sensing bras, gloves which measure sexual arousal (well, galvanic skin conduction), and other oddities which might not seem odd for long. Specifically, two of the jackets on display at the booth went on sale this month in Europe as part of Levi's Industrial Clothing Division line.

"4 of the jackets [in that line] contain fully-integrated electronics," he says, pointing to a khaki parka, as he begins unfolding and peeling the velcro around a multitude of pockets and flaps to reveal the inventory of a small electronics store scattered through its folds, and headphones which snake through the fabric. "Microphone in the collar, GSM mobile phone, MP3 player, remote control. All hidden and discrete -- it looks like you're wearing a jacket."

He demonstrates the system integration built into the jacket/system with a sample phone call. "Let's say some one rings you up It knows, it switches the music off, it patches the phone call through the same headphones, you talk -- not into the collar, you just talk -- and when you're done, it hangs up and switches the music back on." And it works the other way, too. "If I want to make a call, I dial by saying your name, it looks at your number, connects the call, switches the music off. If the call is taking a long time to connect -- as GSM calls tend to do -- it plays me music in the background, then when the call connects it switches the music off. I can play you my MP3s through my phone."

Check back Friday for more on the academic aspects of the ISWC2000 in Take 2: Vested Interests.

perbert writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article in their October 2000 issue (and an online version) on new affordable ready-to-wear computers." Soon it won't require months of work to morph yourself into a gargoyle ;)

perbert writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article in their October 2000 issue (and an online version) on new affordable ready-to-wear computers." Soon it won't require months of work to morph yourself into a gargoyle ;)

MoNickels writes "Diffie & Hellman will receive a $100,000 fellowship from the Marconi Foundation for their work in encryption. The panel discussion Oct. 10 at Columbia University in New York should be rich. Check out these names: George Heilmeier (former head of Bellcore) will speak, then the panel will include Diffie and Hellman, Eric Ash, Leonard Kleinrock (inventor of packet switching) and Paul Baran (co-inventor of packet switching)."

jdean writes: "I thought I'd take a minute and toot my own horn and mention my article on the O'Reilly Network which gives a roundup of the various Linux certifications currently available. It's part of my series on Linux certification."

Knight engineer writes "IEEE-USA, the USA branch of The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers has decided to fight the UCITA. Are you ready to help?" IEEE has been against UCITA for a while, I guess they're organizing some sort of "grass roots" effort now.

Constellation writes: "The IEEE is posting an article on how a tether (a long thin piece of wire) can be used to increase to orbit of, or deorbit, a spacecraft. The article also details NASA's plans to test this technology in December. A further article describes how a similar technology will be applied to Mir later this year, or early next year." Sure -- while you're up there, why not drag a 5km wire around for a while?

Constellation writes: "The IEEE is posting an article on how a tether (a long thin piece of wire) can be used to increase to orbit of, or deorbit, a spacecraft. The article also details NASA's plans to test this technology in December. A further article describes how a similar technology will be applied to Mir later this year, or early next year." Sure -- while you're up there, why not drag a 5km wire around for a while?

Constellation writes: "The IEEE is posting an article on how a tether (a long thin piece of wire) can be used to increase to orbit of, or deorbit, a spacecraft. The article also details NASA's plans to test this technology in December. A further article describes how a similar technology will be applied to Mir later this year, or early next year." Sure -- while you're up there, why not drag a 5km wire around for a while?

Constellation writes: "The IEEE is posting an article on how a tether (a long thin piece of wire) can be used to increase to orbit of, or deorbit, a spacecraft. The article also details NASA's plans to test this technology in December. A further article describes how a similar technology will be applied to Mir later this year, or early next year." Sure -- while you're up there, why not drag a 5km wire around for a while?

Quite a number of people have written about this story - here, ContinuousPark writes: "IEEE's Spectrum magazine has an interesting article with a step-by-step account on Crusoe's design process. It also talks about how they got the venture capital by creating the term 'code morphing,' how they hired their staff and how is it to work there, among other details."

Quite a number of people have written about this story - here, ContinuousPark writes: "IEEE's Spectrum magazine has an interesting article with a step-by-step account on Crusoe's design process. It also talks about how they got the venture capital by creating the term 'code morphing,' how they hired their staff and how is it to work there, among other details."

EngrBohn writes "Joe Pranevich has posted the latest & greatest Wonderful World of Linux 2.4 at LinuxToday. 'In the beginning, there was Linus and his 386 ... Several years and many thousands of lines of code later, Linux 2.2 was released ... Linus (and company) continued to hack away at the Linux OS and the 2.4 release of the Linux kernel is nearing completion. Submitted for your approval, this document describes some of the new features in Linux 2.4.'" Helps sort out rumors, half-truths and innuendo. I hope Joe's estimate is conservative on getting CDs shipping with point-four; usually it seems like the distro houses are pretty swift to incorporate.

EngrBohn writes: "Just when you thought the DeCSS saga couldn't get more interesting. 2600 Australia plans to broadcast the DeCSS code at 12 frames per second for 15 seconds on Australian television sometime in the next few weeks in part of a commercial by MindShare. Too bad this'll be too late for the Obfuscated DeCSS Contest. "

EngrBohn writes "The August issue of IEEE Spectrum mentions a proposal by the International Electrotechnical Commission to introduce new prefixes for words that indicate powers-of-two (page 18 of the print issue). This would replace kilobytes (kB) with kibibytes (KiB), megabytes (MB) with mebibytes (MiB), gigabytes (gB) with gibibytes (GiB), and so on. The rationale is two-fold. First is to restore the integrity of the SI prefixes to meaning powers-of-ten. Second is to eliminate ambiguity over whether, for example, a megabyte is 10**6 bytes or 2**20 bytes. Think this is a non-issue? I noticed this morning that Iomega's 100MB Zip disks have a 10**8 byte capacity, and Maxtor also considers a megabyte to be 10**6 bytes. "

EngrBohn writes "The August issue of IEEE Spectrum mentions a proposal by the International Electrotechnical Commission to introduce new prefixes for words that indicate powers-of-two (page 18 of the print issue). This would replace kilobytes (kB) with kibibytes (KiB), megabytes (MB) with mebibytes (MiB), gigabytes (gB) with gibibytes (GiB), and so on. The rationale is two-fold. First is to restore the integrity of the SI prefixes to meaning powers-of-ten. Second is to eliminate ambiguity over whether, for example, a megabyte is 10**6 bytes or 2**20 bytes. Think this is a non-issue? I noticed this morning that Iomega's 100MB Zip disks have a 10**8 byte capacity, and Maxtor also considers a megabyte to be 10**6 bytes. "

EngrBohn writes "Federal Computer Weekly evaluated Unix workstations by Compaq, HP, IBM, and Sun -- they specified minimum hardware requirements and a maximum price; beyond that, all was fair. They did not include *BSD, Linux, or WinNT due to space limitations. Here's a chart (in PDF) comparing the workstations. IBM's RS6000 43P Model 260 won on technical merit, but it exceeded the $15K price cap. "

EngrBohn writes "This NY Times article reports on SpamCop, a website that will extract the real origin of anonymous (and spoofed) spam and then notify the spammer's network administrator. This basic service is free of charge, and for a $15 membership, additional services are available. " Cool-maybe I can get their home address and hire bounty...um...er.

EngrBohn writes " A Federal judge has ruled that anonymous "defamation" on the Internet is not covered under Free Speech". This relates to the case of an anonymous user on Yahoo!, who was making claims about Xircom in chat boards, referring to their products as "faulty" and poorly designed. Recently, Raytheon went through a similar situation. (Link is NY Times: Free Login required).

EngrBohn writes "According to the EE Times, Toshiba has developed paper-thin IC packages, getting ICs down to 50microns thick. First marketed product is to be ultra-thin flash memories stacked into a SmartMedia card. Envisioned applications include mounting a circuit on a curved surface and, for the conspiracy theorists, a postage-stamp-sized transmitter & antenna that can be pasted to any surface. "

David McWha writes "The cover story of the May issue of IEEE Spectrum is on open source systems, and gives a good balanced view of the competition between Windows NT and various Unices (including Linux). There is a nice unbiased review of the pros and cons of each. The whole story from the history through to the commercial model of open source is there. The article is available online, but you have to be an IEEE member to get in, so join! "

Todd Bradshaw wrote in with an excerpt from Linus' chapter in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution". Linus' number one rule for keeping the kernel healthy is to avoid new system interfaces.

EngrBohn writes "CNN reports that a portion of the CDA dealing with adult cable channels is unconstitutional. Not only did the CDA place an undue burdon on adult-only content channels (eg, Playboy) that weren't on adult-sometimes content channels (eg, HBO), but the three judges also ruled that one of the underlying principles of CDA was unsupported: "the Justice Department presented 'no clinical evidence linking child viewing of pornography to psychological harms.'" "

EngrBohn writes "They've changed the contents of the web page! This morning, Nicolai Langfeldt [janl@math.uio.no], a fellow subscriber to the Beowulf mailing list, informed me that they changed all references to Linux such that they now read Digital-UNIX: This is odd. The page appears to have been changed, it reads 'Digital-Unix' all over, instead of 'Linux'. The reference is still the same. :-("

Matt Martin writes "CNN is discussing an alleged meeting between MS and Netscape in 1995 about forming an alliance in the Web-Browser market. Andreesen describes the visit as being "like a visit from Don Corleone." " Ouch. That ain't gonna help.