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Sorry, better link would be this.

See my 2002 article about the history (and future) of that particular handwriting recognition technology:

http://www.wave-report.com/archives/2002/02220201.htm

I don't know the development history of the technology behind Apple's Ink.

Parascript began life as the company ParaGraph International,
which developed the handwriting recognition features of the Apple
Newton. Following the Newton, their next handwriting recognition
application was CalliGrapher, whose customer base eventually grew
to over 1 million end users and 35 OEMs. ParaGraph and many of
its technologies were bought by SGI, which created a subsidiary
later acquired by Vadem. Vadem subsequently sold CalliGrapher
technologies to Microsoft. Today, the CalliGrapher technology
forms a part of Transcriber, the handwriting recognition software
included in all Pocket PCs and Tablet PCs.

Apple recently announced that the next version of the Mac OS will
have native support for pen input, known as Inkwell. While Apple
has announced that this is based on "Newton Technology," Dr.
Kitainik stated that Parascript has not been working with them.
While Inkwell is probably based on the ParaGraph Newton software,
Apple has apparently continued the development in-house.

Every trial so far has resulted in cancellation of services because the interference ruins too many other things.

There are full-scale commercial roll-outs of BPL in Europe and South America. Not trials--full commercial roll-outs. And they began literally years ago.

I interviewed the Chairman of Chilectra (subsidiary of power company Endesa) in 2002, when they were beginning their commercial roll-out in Santiago, Chile.

Main.net technology is already being deployed commercially in several countries in Europe.

Nay-sayers like the parent (an AC, what a surprise) base their opinions on ancient information like the failed Norweb trial in England in 1997. Well cable modems and DSL didn't work very well either in 1997. Literally hundreds of BPL trials have been conducted successfully since then, with many companies world-wide now involved in commercial roll-out.

As a tech reporter in the DC area I started covering BPL (at that time called powerline communications or PLC) in 2002. I'm no longer a reporter (having stepped over to the dark side of "corporate communications"), but still follow the industry from afar.

Here are three articles:

CITI Powerline Communications II - August 2002

UPLC 2002

CITI Powerline III - April 2003

Amateur radio operators have been opposed to PLC/BPL since the very beginning, because it operates in their spectrum. The entire culture of ham radio revolves around the limits of performance--how far can you hear, how far can you transmit. As such, ham radio operators are extremely sensitive to interference--far more sensitive than most commercial deployments. What a municipal emergency system can easily tolerate, a ham radio operator would consider a disastrous travesty. This is why the cries of the ham radio lobby need to be taken with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, PLC/BPL does indeed create interference. No one questions that. The question is--is it sufficient to interfere with essential services? So far the answer appears to be no. While the ARRL and other ham labs and lobbies can demonstrate harmful interference to their operations, I have not seen an independently verifiable report that a BPL commercial trial has caused real harm to essential services such as municipal emergency, military, air traffic control, etc.

This sort of thing is what field trials are conducted to test. There have been dozens of commercial trials of BPL in the U.S. alone, in addition to numerous trials and some full commercial roll-outs in Europe and South America. I do not know of one report of actually reported harmful interference to essential or commercial services. Compare to the number of verifed emergency communication problems due to Nextel since 2001, for instance.

The remaining unanswered question is one of cumulative interference. Even supposing that individual field trials have not caused any harmful interference to essential services, can we be sure that wide-spread deployment would not? This is one of the questions that concerns the FCC and others, because it is a question that is not easily answered prior to wide-scale deployment. And the fact is neither the FCC nor other regulatory bodies are legally equipped to regulate industries based on measurements such as average interference level or overall noise floor. They are equipped and accustomed to regulating individual point sources only (such as an antenna or device). It is uncharted territory both legally and technically.

Finally, I've seen some ignorance about the technology and the potential industry in posts above.

Yes, BPL can travel over long distance wires but it requires amplification for longer distances. This limits its cost-effectiveness for rural deployments. BPL is probably not a rural magic bullet.

Yes, power companies have the tech to become telcos because most power companies have fiber pushed out pretty far into their network. It would very easy for them to coopt some of that capacity to push the BPL signal out to the medium voltage lines where it would travel to the home. However there are regulatory limits to what power co.s can do, so any BPL sales would have to be through a subsidiary/separate company, with all the state regulatory and network leasing paperwork that entails.

Transformers are non-issues because every BPL company has a cheap solution to either bypass it or shape the signal to pass through the transformer. The IP of how to do this is the foundation of the companies and therefore the industry. Transformers don't matter.

Finally, to address TFA itself. Who cares ab

As a tech reporter in the DC area I started covering BPL (at that time called powerline communications or PLC) in 2002. I'm no longer a reporter (having stepped over to the dark side of "corporate communications"), but still follow the industry from afar.

Here are three articles:

CITI Powerline Communications II - August 2002

UPLC 2002

CITI Powerline III - April 2003

Amateur radio operators have been opposed to PLC/BPL since the very beginning, because it operates in their spectrum. The entire culture of ham radio revolves around the limits of performance--how far can you hear, how far can you transmit. As such, ham radio operators are extremely sensitive to interference--far more sensitive than most commercial deployments. What a municipal emergency system can easily tolerate, a ham radio operator would consider a disastrous travesty. This is why the cries of the ham radio lobby need to be taken with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, PLC/BPL does indeed create interference. No one questions that. The question is--is it sufficient to interfere with essential services? So far the answer appears to be no. While the ARRL and other ham labs and lobbies can demonstrate harmful interference to their operations, I have not seen an independently verifiable report that a BPL commercial trial has caused real harm to essential services such as municipal emergency, military, air traffic control, etc.

This sort of thing is what field trials are conducted to test. There have been dozens of commercial trials of BPL in the U.S. alone, in addition to numerous trials and some full commercial roll-outs in Europe and South America. I do not know of one report of actually reported harmful interference to essential or commercial services. Compare to the number of verifed emergency communication problems due to Nextel since 2001, for instance.

The remaining unanswered question is one of cumulative interference. Even supposing that individual field trials have not caused any harmful interference to essential services, can we be sure that wide-spread deployment would not? This is one of the questions that concerns the FCC and others, because it is a question that is not easily answered prior to wide-scale deployment. And the fact is neither the FCC nor other regulatory bodies are legally equipped to regulate industries based on measurements such as average interference level or overall noise floor. They are equipped and accustomed to regulating individual point sources only (such as an antenna or device). It is uncharted territory both legally and technically.

Finally, I've seen some ignorance about the technology and the potential industry in posts above.

Yes, BPL can travel over long distance wires but it requires amplification for longer distances. This limits its cost-effectiveness for rural deployments. BPL is probably not a rural magic bullet.

Yes, power companies have the tech to become telcos because most power companies have fiber pushed out pretty far into their network. It would very easy for them to coopt some of that capacity to push the BPL signal out to the medium voltage lines where it would travel to the home. However there are regulatory limits to what power co.s can do, so any BPL sales would have to be through a subsidiary/separate company, with all the state regulatory and network leasing paperwork that entails.

Transformers are non-issues because every BPL company has a cheap solution to either bypass it or shape the signal to pass through the transformer. The IP of how to do this is the foundation of the companies and therefore the industry. Transformers don't matter.

Finally, to address TFA itself. Who cares ab

As a tech reporter in the DC area I started covering BPL (at that time called powerline communications or PLC) in 2002. I'm no longer a reporter (having stepped over to the dark side of "corporate communications"), but still follow the industry from afar.

Here are three articles:

CITI Powerline Communications II - August 2002

UPLC 2002

CITI Powerline III - April 2003

Amateur radio operators have been opposed to PLC/BPL since the very beginning, because it operates in their spectrum. The entire culture of ham radio revolves around the limits of performance--how far can you hear, how far can you transmit. As such, ham radio operators are extremely sensitive to interference--far more sensitive than most commercial deployments. What a municipal emergency system can easily tolerate, a ham radio operator would consider a disastrous travesty. This is why the cries of the ham radio lobby need to be taken with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, PLC/BPL does indeed create interference. No one questions that. The question is--is it sufficient to interfere with essential services? So far the answer appears to be no. While the ARRL and other ham labs and lobbies can demonstrate harmful interference to their operations, I have not seen an independently verifiable report that a BPL commercial trial has caused real harm to essential services such as municipal emergency, military, air traffic control, etc.

This sort of thing is what field trials are conducted to test. There have been dozens of commercial trials of BPL in the U.S. alone, in addition to numerous trials and some full commercial roll-outs in Europe and South America. I do not know of one report of actually reported harmful interference to essential or commercial services. Compare to the number of verifed emergency communication problems due to Nextel since 2001, for instance.

The remaining unanswered question is one of cumulative interference. Even supposing that individual field trials have not caused any harmful interference to essential services, can we be sure that wide-spread deployment would not? This is one of the questions that concerns the FCC and others, because it is a question that is not easily answered prior to wide-scale deployment. And the fact is neither the FCC nor other regulatory bodies are legally equipped to regulate industries based on measurements such as average interference level or overall noise floor. They are equipped and accustomed to regulating individual point sources only (such as an antenna or device). It is uncharted territory both legally and technically.

Finally, I've seen some ignorance about the technology and the potential industry in posts above.

Yes, BPL can travel over long distance wires but it requires amplification for longer distances. This limits its cost-effectiveness for rural deployments. BPL is probably not a rural magic bullet.

Yes, power companies have the tech to become telcos because most power companies have fiber pushed out pretty far into their network. It would very easy for them to coopt some of that capacity to push the BPL signal out to the medium voltage lines where it would travel to the home. However there are regulatory limits to what power co.s can do, so any BPL sales would have to be through a subsidiary/separate company, with all the state regulatory and network leasing paperwork that entails.

Transformers are non-issues because every BPL company has a cheap solution to either bypass it or shape the signal to pass through the transformer. The IP of how to do this is the foundation of the companies and therefore the industry. Transformers don't matter.

Finally, to address TFA itself. Who cares ab

According to the wired article: Agents will also be able to use facial identification software to compare the person to the digitized photo, which is not feasible with current passports.

Which is interesting because, according to this the error rate for real time facial recognition: the current error rate is 20% [...] this implies that out of 50,000 match scores there are 1,000 errors.

Enjoy the wait. Remind me how many of the 9/11 hijackers had invalid passports?

The other day I was wondering why n-in-1 USB card readers that supported the xD format were so bloody expensive when compared to their non-xD brothers and sisters. It didn't take long to come to the conclusion that it must cost more to license xD than other formats, otherwise, the price disparity wouldn't make much sense to anyone.

Sure enough, after looking into it, there is a royalty that one has to pay to use the xD connector. On this site there's a blurb that reads under the "Media Cards" sub-heading:

Of these cards, only the last one has a royalty charged for the use of the connector. As our contact stated - the IP holders have finally gotten it right not to charge those seeking to be able to accept their media on products the OEM designs. In the case of the XD Picture Card, the royalties were characterized as "high."

Here's some information you can get here on the new 1GB xD card:

The ultra-compact xD-Picture Card will have a 1GB version early in 2005, according to Fuji Photo Film and Olympus, which have jointly developed the new addition.

Dubbed the M1GB, the 'M' stands for 'Multi Level Cell', a new high-density flash memory technology. MLC purportedly offers a capacity potential of up to 8GB. The mini cards measure just 20mm x 25mm x 1.7mm.

While such storage in such a small dimension would once have been considered fantastic, the need for greater capacity is being driven by the higher resolution offered by multi-mega pixel digital cameras.

The xD-Picture Card was launched in September 2002.

OLED = Organic Light-Emitting Diode

That's basically what the pen computer mentioned a week or so ago was on about - another example of a device looking at integrating a small-scale projector (Picture of pen computer in use). The keyboard was from canesta and the display was an LED projector. The article was a bit hazy on whether their display model contained a working version or not, but as the prototype did cost around $30,000, it might be a few weeks before it gets particularly cheap.

What ever happened to OLED screens. They werre supposed to be the next big thing as far as display technology goes.

http://www.wave-report.com/tutorials/oled.htm

This also helps explain why OLED displays will replace LCDs later, rather than sooner: they haven't broken even on their LCD manufacturing investments yet. The only company really pushing OLED forward is Kodak (who also discovered it), both because they don't have anything sunk into LCD so there's nothing to canibalize, and because they've got to innovate now that film is dying (netcraft confirms it). :)

--

Article 1

Article 2

Can be found here

The only link I could find on PPL's pilot program was here

Quoted below:

PPL, PA

Al Richenbacher, Manager of PPL's Market Development Group, reported on
PPL's test of PLC in Emmaus, PA, working with Main.net. They chose
Main.net due to their extensive track record of trials in Europe, and the
ability of Main.net to pass their PLC signal through the transformer. I
confirmed this during Q and A--Main.net can pass their signal through a
transformer rather than couple around it.

If the trial goes well, PPL would look to go to commercial deployment in
2003.

PPL is also considering partnering with Amperion, to provide MV backhaul.
This would primarily be to service business customers with bandwidths of
T1 and below.

PPL is currently in the middle of developing their own back office
(billing, provisioning, etc), to service their PLC offerings.

Al would not reveal their total cost per customer on the trials, but
stated that it appeared to be favorable when compared to DSL and cable.

Initial penetration is expected to be less than 10%. But, with a smart
build strategy Al stated that this would be enough to pass break even.

PPL has an internal group that works with the state regulatory commission.
Conversations so far have only been preliminary but the reaction from the
commission has been positive and encouraging.

Everyone knows a timelord selected the 2.4GHz frequency to save us from x10.com. (Like duh man!)
The timelord went back in time and changed the oven frequency in order to save us!
He knew after 2001, radiation leaks from microwave ovens would interfere with x10 videocameras! x10 Camera Frequency.
Even though 2.4GHz would also interfere with 802.11b, etc., stopping x10 was more important!
Future proliferation of x10 videocameras had to be stopped since the easy to use cameras only encouraged viewing nudity and thus would harm more of "the children".
Politicaly correcting history required any spectrum be sacrificed!

Besides, it really was the only way to stop the x10 pop-under ads!

according to this (rather old (2001)) paper, lifetime of polymer dislpays is around 10.000 hours against usual TFTs living around 50.000 hours.

Let's assume they doubled it since 2001, its 20.000 hours.

Unless they produce them for the half of the costs of usual TFTs, I wouldn't like to throw away my TV every 2 1/3 years...

how is that possible? Check out http://www.uniax.com/. They use Flash for nav so I can't give a direct link, but click on "how it works" and then check out either the FAQ or the OLED section. It's pretty cool...

Also check out this site for more info on OLEDs.

Karma whore I am...

In April 1999, the Defense Department signed a $219M contract with Iridium for service, equipment, etc. I don't know thye exact terms (duration, etc.) but it had to be at least a year, and couldn't take effect much before June 1999. [Here's a link]

The DoD was involved from the beginning, sitting in on the design and planning for the network, and reportedly constructing a $100M DoD-only ground station.

If they stay on board, than the numbers for this new iridium venture could change. In the short term, the DoD money alone (assuming it was sensibly structures as monthly payments) could cover maintanance, taking much of the strain off the business plan, and allowing otherwise impractical applications to be profitable.