Slashdot Mirror
Wireless Monitors?
antiopus writes "I didn't think it was possible anytime soon due to bandwidth considerations, but ViewSonic has announced a wireless monitor. At only 10 inches and 800x600, I don't know if it'll be replacing my CRT anytime soon, but I can certainly foresee some interesting applications for wearable/portable computing."
One less cable,....well in about 5 more years when something realistic comes out and I buy it.
Sheesh.
-- Hulver's site
No more strangling myself with the cord to my eyeglass monitor!!!
Note from the article that the "10 inches" applies to the maximum range of the wirelessness. I guess it'll keep wire clutter off the desk. No other real use. Except maybe a sensitive Tempest monitor.
Now I can pump even MORE radiation into my brain. My cell phone, pager, laptop, computer, wireless mouse/keyboard and CB radio aren't enough... Must... have... cancer...
Dave------
http://cooltech.org
If it ain't cool, it ain't coolt
.. attach to the laptop to your OBD-2 compliant car - and away you go :)
3.243F6A8885A308D313
www.badassmofo.com
FAAQ IS COMING
It's a WinCE tablet running Terminal Server client.
It's not a wireless monitor, it's a WinCE tablet. You can use it as the WinXP equivalent of an X terminal, apparently.
that is just a "handheld" computer
Nothing like having ALL your data broadcasted into the airwaves. I guess you could shield your house / office.
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
Well, that's not exactly a monitor. No, it's just another one of those portable "pads" that nobody ever buys.
It's not a wireless monitor. It's a tablet PC running a terminal server client.
Next.
0xB
With this technology, they don't need to mess around with that silly optical TEMPEST stuff. Just turn on, tune in, and read out your private data.
206mhz strong arm 128MB ram 32MB flash looks doable, sure would beat winCE.net But might be price prohibitive.
Thanks for actually reading the article dumbass. They just put 802.11 in to your standard run-of-the-mill thin client device. Whoopee shit.
It works over LAN, which means you need software serving up your desktop over wireless LAN. It's not a wireless monitor - a wireless monitor would be a little SVGA dongle that plugs in to whatever video card you choose.
They don't even say if it uses your local video card when docked, you you might not get cool 3d and shiznit even when docked.
It's a bit of a misnomer. It's more like a wireless X-server than a wireless monitor.
Nothing special here. It's just a thin client.
Justin
How? I need to put this thing somewhere. The desk seems the best place for the wireless monitor, since it has to stand steady, so what's the advantage. Doesn't seem very useful in an office environment to me.
this sig has intentionally been left blank
I just hope that it is not restricted to using "Citrix® ICA® or Microsoft® RDP software.
"
SET HYPE_MACHINE=OFF
Neat toy, could be useful in a couple of applications. Like cordless mice. I'm still trying to envision a situation in which I would need a cordless monitor. After all, you still need a cord to plug it in.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
Knowing Slashdot... I restrained myself from totally flipping out, after ACTUALLY READING the page, it's just a badly named WinCE Tablet PC. Is it even possible to make a true wireless monitor? I'd think you'd need a whole new type of video card for that. Any thought?
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Add a wireless keyboard and mouse to this and I can finally play with some machines that I have hidden away because of the size and noise they make.
Now, stick four of these together and you have a decent viewable area. Just a question of time before we can get a 17"...
Now, where I find it useful is in a datacenter where you may have loads of servers (be it Windows or Unix-based that supports either RDP or Citrix, or even VNC) and some type of wired or wireless network that you can connect to any given server and monitor/troubleshoot it without the use of KVM's or continuously stand looking at a 1U rackmount LCD display.
I really don't see it picking up a lot of consumers, but it doesn't really say that it was meant specifically for consumers. Prosumers and Corporate users... maybe.
The problem I hate with wireless devices is having to replace batteries every two weeks or so. It's expensive and annoying.
Supposibly this monitor comes with a Rechargeable 1800 mAh Lithium Ion Battery Pack. I don't know much about batteries, but I suppose all you do is just plug this in and it recharges?
Did Taco or antiopus follow and read the link? This is a wireless tablet, not a monitor, running WinCE.
all I saw was a glorified PDA with a 10 inch screen running Citrix or RDP. I can't even imagine the latencies if that thing is 500 or so feet away.
what'e next, a wireless monitor for my PDA?
hmph.
you can take it anywhere... in dont need to stop your dvd anymore when going to bathroom to take a crap for example...
you can display a fullscreen picture of a very hot girl face on it and put on top of that VERY UGLY girl you fscking...
You still got to plug it in, right?
The editors would read more than the title of the articles they link to...
It's a tablet PC, and it DOES do resolutions of 1024x768.
Way to go editors!
This is really a WinCE terminal, not a monitor in the traditional sense.
Right now, I'm typing this on a wireless keyboard from a SunRay 150 display terminal connected to my workstaton via 802.11a.
Won't the MPAA be banning this technology soon enough? Pretty soon, you'll be able to transmit your HDTV feeds and such to all of the neighbors and share cable/satellite bills.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
It's a winCE PC tablet PC which they are marketing as a remote access device that uses Citrix or the winXP remote access software to access applications on a regular PC or server.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
it's already been said....I know but still I felt the need to chime in.
You had me all excited that I could finaly have a monitor in my kitchen well I'm cooking up my spinach puffs. If it were true there would truly be no need for a tv. I can watch DVD's anywhere I damn well please. No pausing movies to go out for a smoke...I don't have to stop reading to go grab a cup of java! But NO I still have to wait.
Butt head!
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
Under 'Liberate yourself from your desktop'
"Establish a one-to-one relationship with your PC."
Sorry, I prefer to be a slut and have relationships with lots of PCs.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Pay attention subscribers, this, and the "Comicbook periodic table" is what you're paying for. Hope you enjoy it!
hmmm........ now you can have your pr0n with you at the bathroom........... :))))
A wireless LCD monitor would certainly be welcome, but wireless keyboard and a Gyration Gyromouse are a bit more of a priority, as they're input devices which means you pretty much have to .aha. tangle .aha. with them.
Any good recommendations on a real quality wireless keyboard are welcome.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Mine is 2.5 lbs, has an integrated keyboard, mouse, soundcard, camera and hard drive.
It runs Linux and has a wireless network card.
(It's my 2 year old Sony vaio...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Wireless monitors are well and good, but how are they going to identify separate monitors? Does the broadcaster have a unique identifier so that only one monitor can read it?
You can see a whole slew of snooping opportunities...makes that reflective viewing of the monitor rather silly.
But having heard about project 'Mira' it's using 802.11b and the virst versions are meant to be an adjunct to your existing monitor. (dual headed solution)
In OEM quantity, adding the WinCE/wifi/battery only adds about $200 to the price of an LCD monitor anyway.
What's funny is, now that I've got WiFi, I'm using a laptop to do a VERY similar thing (remote control the home office computer from the kitchen) with the added benefit of having a second computer if da wife wants to surf the web while I want to do something. (AND having a real entry system...typing www.blah.com or fritz@wherever.org with any non keyboard entry system is kinda tough)
Further, With the laptop remoteing in, I have access to my email early on Sunday morning without waking up the parrots (they're in the home office) which would then wake up Wifey, makeing her cranky - and by extension - ME cranky.
In short, a good technology evolution, but it probably won't replace your monitor if you want fast games or full screen video (11 mbps is a pretty tiney pipe to run a DVD thru.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Tablet PCs run Windows XP. The AirPanel is a large PDA running the terminal server client.
Wirelessly access files, applications and/or data...New Windows CE .NET operating system from Microsoft And a touch display panel.
It's not so much a wireless monitor but a PC-integrated PDA. It runs Remote Desktop via 802.11b to your PC and uses a stylus to manipulate data on the monitor. Besides, how many monitors use PCMCIA cards? Also judging from the hardware inside (206 MHz, 128 meg SDram, 2Mb video card), it gives an impression of a 13" wide iPaq. If given the choice, I would stick with a notebook. Sure it's heavier than the 2+ lbs. monitor, but more current generations of laptops can handle much more than this monitor. If you really wanted to buy this for the desktop broadcasting, add an 802.11b and run your favorite remote desktop.
This
I work in the RF industry as a software engineer... I'm by no means an RF engineer, but I have to comment.
First of all, this is not a wireless monitor. It is a portable PC that communicates with other PCs via a network card. The video signal is NOT sent over the air.
The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical. It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF bandwidth and/or power required to do it would either kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you implement it.
Just a quick estimation (please don't criticize this, I have other work to do):
800 x 600 = 480,000 pixels
480 pixels x 16-bit = 7.68 Mb = 960 kB
960 kB x 60 Hz = 57.6 MB / s!
Given that 802.11b provides 11 Mb as a MAXIMUM (yes, that's bits, which translates to 1.4 MB / s), we'd only have about 1/50th the bandwidth necessary. And that doesn't account for automatic rate switching, interference, and other nodes on the network.
No thanks, who knows where that PC has been!
You would want *that* as a wearable?!? You must be stronger than I am!
it would be coo if it were a real wireless monitor, i wouldnt miss playing rogue spear when im getting food from my kitchen..... my kitchen is 10 feet from my computer, so i could :p
Heh... Those would be fun at LAN parties. Mess with the IR settings in the middle of a game so everyone gets someone elses display. hehehe. ... except yours.. of course. :)
=-Jippy
In a sense, all handheld computer with a screen are eligible to be called "wireless monitors" too !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Now a potential spy doesn't even need a van eck device to spy on your monitor - It broadcasts on purpose! (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=113139)
I'm an MIS Manager at a small company, and I very often find myself wishing that I had a portable wireless monitor. We run a lot of machines headless, and when they have problems, dragging a monitor over to them can be a real pain. What if all I had to do was get within range, turn on my display, and diagnose the problem? Man, that'd be sweet.
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
Honestly, I'm far more interested in using Viewsonic's ViewPad -- they're billing it as a "super-PDA," but it's really just a nice tablet computer. 10" TFT screen, built in 802.11, and onboard storage.
Anyone tried getting Linux running on one of these yet? I'd love it for my house, but I'm not about to drop the 1100 dollars of the lowest price on Pricewatch just to try and get it running, and I don't know of any decent X servers for WinCE.
--saint
This actually opens up a lot of possibilities here, because it actually has an OS underneath it (why WinCE?); just like fashion, we are going around in circles, back to 3270 dumb terminals computing model.
But it really make senses for single purpose terminals (like Tellers, Cashiers...) Low cost, simple, no wires.
Actually a wireless monitor (wireless in the sense that there is no cable going from the video card to the monitor) would actually not be that hard to accomplish. I have seen some pirate NES portables that actually broadcast thier signal using RF to tv's. It wouldbe against FCC regulations, but very technically doable today.
I think some are being to critical by looking at the now specs of this thing. Think about it, give it a couple of years and WAMMO, we've got ourselve a 21 inch wireless flatpanel, with wireless kbd and mice. Well, since we are dreaming might as well throw in a wireless printer/scanner and wireless speakers. This is a great breakthrough!
Meet the Jetsons . . . .
...enormous. What more is there to say?
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
'nuff said.
I think this is what the poster was thinking about. Someone with a desktop PC could take just the touchscreen LCD with him/her and walk around the house/office with it. That would be something perfect for me because I don't travel for my job and I have no need for a notebook.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
Go ahead and start the flaming, but wouldn't a wireless monitor have to have some sort of encryption built into the vidcard and the monitor (or tablet or whatever)? Otherwise, you could just monitor the proper bandwidth for these signals and port them to your own wireless - and then all sorts of fun would ensue (??)
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
This gives new meaning to remote desktop control.
Sheesh - just get one of these and a wireless card. Save yourself $100's. ..plus it runs Linux, use it as a wireless remote, mp3 player, etc..
"I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them." -Isaac Asimov
This is not a wireless monitor
IT's a TABLET pc with TERMINAL SERVER
I can do that with an 802.11 card and a remote desktop client running on a slim tablet, terminal, laptop or whatever.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
CmdrTaco not a person .. it's a news fetching bot that's still stuck on the 1st of april...
...can it run Linux? :)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
can I make a Beowulf cluster of these to make my own 30" wireless monitor?
;)
No, it's a *picture* of a mirror.
Not the same thing.
well I knew about msnbc - and now this thing can run ms ce.net - not so sure I would want this. I mean cnet was boring enough, now they want me to carry it around with me? just because MS and cnet merged doent mean their programming will get any more entertaining.
SIMEDA Gmbh has a VNC viewer for the new Java-enabled phones (e.g. all new models from Nokia coming out this spring) and PDAs. True, not very speedy (goes over GPRS), but more "wireless" than something that needs to be within a few meters of the desktop computer. And at least VNC is open, so you can connect to Unix, Windows, Mac, whatever. All that from your cell phone.
Take a look here, Ford just announced that the latest line of the Ford Focus will be a wireless car! Yes, that's right you'll be able to take the car anywhere you want without having to worry about those annoying connector cables.
/. story on this one?
Where's the
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
God only knows what type of radiation this thing will produce. A bit of brain cancer, anyone? =)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
This is far from a wireless monitor. It is a wireless thin client. BIG difference.
Y're one sick white supremecist fuck. I hope you burn in hell,
pig eater.
Not to say that this isn't cool, but it's really just a laptop with a 802.11 card running vnc minus the keyborad and some other hardware.
Why is having a wireless monitor so hard to fathom? I'm watching a wireless "monitor" now in fact. Its called my television. Seems to get channels fine from "thin" air. These images are transmitted by a remote "base station".... they even have a high resolution model available in some places. I think that we have the tech but its not being looked at correctly. Just my thoughts.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
now you've got a /. story.
- The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical.
So, you're telling me "TV" is impractical? TV is bearly more than 640x480x24(?) but there are dozens of devices to transmit analog video around. And none of them "kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer". (at least, not immediately.)You have failed to make any distinction between the digital world of the computer and the analog world of RF radio. For example, a T3 is transmitted within 6MHz of analog space -- that's one cable TV channel, btw.
AND, you are assuming every pixel on the screen is changing 60 times per second. That's rarely true. And at any rate, it's far more efficient to send the function calls that are drawing the pixels instead of all half million pixels over and over again.
You trying to tell me that its never going to be possible to transmit 1080p HDTV then? Damn, why do they come up with these unimplementable standards? ;)
"The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical. It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF bandwidth and/or power required to do it would either kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you implement it."
The defence presents evidence B: "television".
s/he was talking about wireless.
Actually, TV is more along 300 lines I think. Not to mention it's analog.. you may wonder what the difference is, but the fact is that going from analog to digital requires at least 10x more bandwidth. It's simply because analog is much more noise-tolerant... your signal may be affected, but it doesn't result in catastrophic loss as it does in digital systems.
So fine, lets do the HDTV comparison. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about HDTV to know what the exact bandwidth numbers are. But if you want to put a multi-million powerful antenna in your house and pay the monstrous power bill to be able to use a wireless monitor, more power to you. Granted, you don't need the range, but you certainly need the same amount of bandwidth as an HDTV station. Not to mention your best resoultion would be (about?) 1080 x 600.
To address the compression concerns, you can use MPEG2 compression on "lifelike" pictures with little noticeable loss in quality, especially on regular definition TVs. Don't think for a second that applies to word processing where per-pixel resolution is practically a requirement.
So fine, lets make a compression scheme that is good on static scenes. What happens then when you want to play a 3D game?
cluster of these things? It might equal a whole laptop. Maybe.
Having a laptop might actually make these things useful. Have your laptop be a server and then cart around a few of these to demo a product to a client. They would like your gadgets at least.
... the crack editorial staff of Slashdot diligently researches the article before posting it, by clicking on the included URL and reading 4 sentences to verify it's really a wireless monitor and not just a Windows CE piece of crap with wireless built in.
1 22 601
Are you guys actually paid?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=29085&cid=3
There are already a few devices that can be powered by RF - eg. security and ID tags. How long before we can run our PDAs this way?
-- SIGFPE
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Yes, but then if you're drawing vector graphics on a monitor, its no longer a monitor.
First off, that is what this Viewsonic device is effectively doing, via a limited OS.
Secondly, analog TV has nowhere near the resolution of a 1024x768 computer monitor. Ever seen super-sharp 1/8" tall letters on your tv? No? oh, right, because its only got 300-odd scan lines. WIth the current generation of technology, wireless monitors are totally impractical. Besies, considering the cost of building a super-high-bandwidth limited range RF transciever vs the cost of a 25-pin cable, it'll almost never fly. Small, wireless tablet-pc's OTOH are kinda cool though... just expensive. Finally, the whole "assuming every pixel changes 60 times per seond thing" doesn't work. Lets say you're in windows/linux with gnome, doing work processing, so, lets say 1/100'th of your pixels change every second on average. Thats fine with good compression, and when you have a whole screen refresh it'll take a bit longer. But then you can't do games like quake, where everything changes every second. Remember, averages don't work in reality.
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
That is sw33t. I didn't know Sony made wireless monitors t00!
how exactly do you get wireless electricity? thats a shitload of batteries if you ask me.
"you sonofabitch i didn't know!"
Sorry for the piecemeal replies, but I forgot to address this. In actuality, there is little difference between the two worlds you have mentioned, at least for the examples you have given.
There seems to be confusion between carrier frequencies and signal frequencies.. understandable for those who don't work in the RF industry. I have actually designed a cable modem, so I can address this directly.
Simply because something transmits at 900 MHz over the air does NOT mean that it has 900 MHz of bandwidth. If that were the case, you'd be wiping out a good chunk of the signals that exist from 450 MHz to 1.4 GHz, not to mention violating dozens of FCC regulations.
6 MHz, as you mentioned, is the signal frequency. These signal frequencies must be imposed upon carrier frequencies to coexist with each other over the air. For example, if you were to take a T3 with a 6 MHz signal frequency and use a 900 MHz carrier frequency, you would be taking up the band from 897 MHz to 903 MHz and probably violating FCC regulations even in that case.
Cable actually operates in much the same way as wireless comms with the added benefit of being highly immune to interference from outside sources. The 6 MHz signal would also have to be modulated to some carrier frequency before being transmitted over coax.
I saw this, and my first thought is it is perfect for the piano. It has audio already, so just plug in a mic and download some sheet music. With good software it should be able to tell where I am and automaticly turn pages. Put some speakers nearyby, and I can learn to play by ear from some tune, and after I give up on some hard section let the software give me sheet music for just that section. And it gives me a comptuer in the living room where I don't want a real one, but once in a while want to use one.
Note that piano software isn't exactly easy to write. Beginners make mistakes, while experts improvise, so it needs to allow very loose interpitations of where you are. Figguring out what notes are being played is also doable, but not easy. Probably more complex than a strongArm can do, but that is okay, I got a fast comptuer in the office to offload the hard work onto, just compress the audio and process it elsewhere)
Now if the cost is just reasonable
All I need to have is a few of these on my desk: "Damn it! Where did I put that desktop!?!?!?"
You trying to tell me that its never going to be possible to transmit 1080p HDTV then? Damn, why do they come up with these unimplementable standards?
He said it's not possible to transmit that over 802.11b fucknut.
If you want a dongle that plugs in to your video port and gives 800x600x60Hz video at 16 bits, that works out to 460 Mbits of bandwidth. So "Wireless Video" is somethere around "Wireless Gigabit Ethernet" in terms of feasibility. I don't even know if the FCC has a big enough chunk of bandwidth left that it hasn't sold.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
From the information Iv seen on them in the past, it seems:
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel... But it was just someone with a flashlight bringing more work.
Please enlighten us. One Cable TV Channel, running 60, 30 frame/s? What resolution would you give the best Cable TV, anything like 800x600? I'm sure it requires a bit more than 6 MHz for a steady stream of 'worst case' frame to frame. His math is crude, but it's hardly worth dwelling on. You'd still like some kind of scrambling so the neighbors and spooks can't track what you're doing, right?
Power of a transmitter could be very low, but you'd want to be sure your OC'd CPU doesn't leak noise from your modded PC case and interfer, so a bit of extra power might be called for. When it comes down to it, you should probably be running at least in the GHz range. Maybe at that power and frequency you could nuke some houseflies...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...how often do you change the battery ?
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
hahaha fag
And realizing that the submission and article were about two totally different subjects. Did anyone else think about Cryptonomicon and van Eck Phreaking?
Chances are if someone, somehow does get past the bandwith requirements for wireless monitors and implements it, they'll sacrifice security over speed. Imagine how easy it would be then to easedrop on someone's monitor session then.
Speaking from someone who has multiple monitors and computers at his desk, I'd love to go entirely wireless, it'd make my life so much easier. But unless it's wireless with high encryption, count me out.
With flat panel monitors your refresh rate is not 60Hz. I think 30Hz is fine as long as there is no monitor flicker and you aren't using it to play games.
I think it would be feasable to make a wireless monitor that does incremental updates. For normal desktop use very little of your monitor changes from frame to frame. Again movies and frame rate oriented video games would suck, but surfing the internet or programming, etc would be great and no reason to limit yourself to 800x600.
This is no where near what the wearable community has been able to create on their own. And all it seems to be, or will be as it is only a "dumb" terminal. (Not quite as dumb as we would all like to think, but stupid nonetheless) If it were running SA-Linux, and had a decent Microdrive, it would be a "cheap" (who knows how much they'll charge for this thing) alternative for a Linux laptop.
Imagine a compaq IPAQ w/vncviewer loaded on it, then give it a 10 inch monitor...
If I want a strong arm, I'll buy one that fits in my pocket... if I want a portable display, I'll buy a cyvisor.
Holy shit, this must be the new shit of 2002! I just went to www.thinkpad.com and found a whole slew of wireless monitors. Leave it up to the folks at IBM to even incorporate a wireless PC with the wireless monitor!
I hope they get some bluetooth access to my wireless monitor so I can sync it up with my old 1990's style wired monitor computer.
Live web cams
What is the "RF Industry" anyway?
I have cable internet, but not cable TV..
My parents have satellite TV, I have an antenna.
Both my folks and I get our video signals over the air, and none of us have cancer or cooked intestines.. So I'm sceptical of your scepticism.
Further, I work in the "Power Generation Industry" as a software engineer.. And even though to do my job I need to know nothing about power generation itself, I'll tell you for a fact that electricity can also be transmitted over the air. If done properly, it's even quite harmless.
That said, this is just a web-tablet running something like VNC or Terminal Server. So, while this is not sending video over the air, it serves as though it did. So what's the difference?
As for the plausibility of transmitting video signals wirelessly.. Well, been to Radio Shack lately? How about the X-10 wireless video camera website?
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
'touch' sensitive holographic monitor.
You'd think that if you kept the distances small, you could get fairly high quality wireless monitors, with low RF emissions. (I'm mainly interested in a couple of feet, from the PC to the monitor, not hundreds of feet.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well unless you're using a battery powered television, either you've invented wireless power or you're not using a wireless television ...
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I don't get the point. I would imagine the point being that you can leave your big lug of a double Athlon-or-whatever box in a dark room while happily hacking away using your wireless keyboard, mouse and - tadam - monitor, in the hot tub.
Why would the monitor have remote access software in it? Doesn't that just make it a computer?
If I have to use the screen itself as an interface, how am I expected to play True Combat?
This is no monitor, I understand. But it's not even the concept of a monitor.
MoitaCarrasco "Everyday I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I've stayed alive." - CARLIN
Even though it does have M$ on it, one could imagine the use of it.
A mobile computer where it uses you stationary machine. Not a heavy bastard but light to carry, big display. Take your PC to meetings, do that Sunday "morning" hangover surfing from bed, instead of using your "heavy" notebook. Of course one would miss that nice warming feeling the notebook gives.
I see that it includes Media Player and Internet Explorer as well as remote desktop software. If it can combine the two intelligently, it would make a killer combination. "Big heavy" MS apps like Word/Excel/Outlook can run on a "server" machine, and as they don't have rapidly changing complex content so can probably be passed relatively efficiently over Wireless LAN. Multimedia content *might* run locally on the webpad - passed compressed over the network and only decompressed after this bottleneck. If this were the case, it would (just) be possible to watch DVD quality video over a wireless connection!
What this needs is a clever custom interface so that apps execute on the server machine, apart from proxies for Media Player and IE which invoke the real apps on the "monitor". Of course, the same thing would (in theory) be possible with an X-based solution - has anyone done such a thing?
YOu know, from one of those online survey sites that promise you money if you take their surveys. Viewsonic was asking questions like "Would you buy this if it were only useful as a remote display" and "If we added such and such features would you be more likely to buy it?" I said I'd be very slightly likely to buy it if it was a full-fledged computer in its own right, and not at all likely to buy it if it were just a monitor.
Well, I guess someone over there was listening, or by that point it was just someone's attempt to justify the additional expense, because it turned into a full webpad. Pretty cool, now we just need some sort of readily available handwriting recognition for linux. Perhaps we could get palm to port graffiti now that they're their own company? It wouldn't be free but it works really damn well... I guess there's probably at least one handwriting recognition package for Unix, but I've never tried to hunt one down.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hi,
I hate to single out Taco for this, but Slashdot has finally jumped the shark. I used to enjoy the enlightening information that would find its way onto these pages, even if the grammar, spelling, or anything else wasn't exactly perfect.
Now, I come on here and slashdot is now starting to waste my time with high rate of idiotic and incorrect articles. Best wishes slashdot, it was fun knowing you.
Justin
forget tempest, who needs it when the friggen monitor is wireless!!
i hope we sell lots of these to china.
Something worth noting- TV does meet the bandwith without "cooking your intestines" adequately, but keep in mind that you're nowhere near the high-power transmitter. The transmitter for a wireless monitor wouldn't be that powerful, obviously, but prolonged use might ahve questionable effects....
and besides, if its just 640x480, what's the point?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Video Resolution/Built-in LCD Display
800 x 600 in landscape mode
600 x 800 in portrait mode
Duh.
"Windows and Linux can co-exist on the same machine." - Microsoft Corporation.
Looks to me like more of a WinCE handheld, but a really large one at that. Maybe we've embarked on the armhelds?
How long til someone gets linux running on this I can VNC into everything I own?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Actually, TV is more along 300 lines I think.
:).
720x240 at 60 Hz, interlaced to give you 720x480 at 30 Hz, if I remember correctly. Some of the rows/columns aren't visible, though.
Just as a data point, since the exact values aren't terribly relevant
Not to mention it's analog.. you may wonder what the difference is, but the fact is that going from analog to digital requires at least 10x more bandwidth. It's simply because analog is much more noise-tolerant... your signal may be affected, but it doesn't result in catastrophic loss as it does in digital systems.
It turns out that this isn't quite correct, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, there's no reason to transmit the display signal digitally. We've all been using analog CRTs for years without a problem; digital is only required within the computer, where we want to be able to manipulate data without loss. Lossiness on the final output stage is tolerable.
Secondly, it turns out that you can transmit digital signals much more densely than you estimate. A factor of 10 is what I'd expect for one bit per sample plus a little bit of error correction. You can actually get much, much more than this (a 56k modem gets around 4-6 bits per sample, if memory serves). More aggressive error correction codes let you correct for a surprising amount of noise, too.
In short, I think you could do it with only about a factor of 2 bandwidth increase, especially over short range under controllable conditions.
Lastly, you have a vast amount of bandwidth available. If there's enough airspace to transmit 60+ channels of television at relatively low frequencies, finding a window for monitors shouldn't be an unsolvable problem.
It's a tablet that runs Citrix. Not impressed.
Entrapment could be ever so easy: Look! He went to a child porno site!
Wasn't that you sitting outside my house breaking and entering my computer?
I was talking, not thinking. -D. Franz
Televisions blamed for emitting large doses of electromagnetic waves called "photons".
Film at 11
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
It's a tablet PC as mentioned in previous post. And the raw RF signal needs really high bandwidth, making wireless monitor impractical in the simplest setup. But here's a thought: What the tablet PC do is compressing the signal in some way (the Citrix or RDP) and transfer through WiFi. So if we have specially designed real-time video signal compression chips, theorectically we can achieve even more efficient results than the tablet PC with remote desktop.
Is there really a bandwidth problem? I have no idea how advance the current compression technology is. Maybe it is possible to squeeze into 10M bandwidth.
A sig is redundant.
it still needs to be plugged in, in order for it to get power... dosn't that sort of defeat the wireless part of it...
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
This is the revival of a product released over 8 years ago, the Wyse Winterm 2930: a DOS/Pen based wireless Citrix winterm.
There was no RDP support of course because it hadn't even been envisioned by Microsoft at the time - in fact, Microsoft was having tremendous legal headaches involving software licensing on Citrix's special "multiple simeotaneous user" versions of Windows NT 3.1 and later 3.5. This culminated in the establishment of MS's internal "Hydra" project and the creation of Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition and the later integration of this "Terminal Services" software into as much as possible all the way down into the Windows XP Home edition.
Which is why this is now a viable product - Cheap touch panels, better batteries, and a larger market should make this product fly again - even if it is made by someone else.
A real wireless monitor -- now that would be something to see!
~GoRK
Well as the last 500 million people pointed out it's not a wireless monitor, just a thing client with wi-fi...but...
) for a while waiting and waiting for them to release it. The "Available in Channels" month changes with each successive month unfortunately. I hope it's not vapourware because this thing has some great potential. Using it in conjunction with LCD projectors in rooms that you can't or don't want to wire with vid cable on the ceiling or hey everyone needs a flat panel on the wall in the bathroom - just drop the wireless keyboard in the magazine rack when not in use :)
at least someone is working on wireless computer video signal transmission. I have been following this product from linksys (http://www.linksys.com/products/presentation.asp
My 0.02
Most BIOSes nowadays have a "Spread Spectrum" option in the BIOS. In this case, it would be a good idea to enable it. Basically Spread Spectrum randomizes the CPU's PLL (phase-locked loop) clock generator to avoid creating excessive interferece on a single frequency.
wireless pr0n in bed?
It also has a wireless link to the outlet! Amazing!
Agreed. It appears they've simply come up with another name for marketing a stripped down network pc.
What's the range of these??
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Hi, this isn't a wireless monitor, It's a wireless
computer! It looks like we can get Linux on this
puppy! I've got Linux with Xwindows to fit on a
128MB flash! All you have to do is nfs mount
your large apps. Right now I have a Compaq MSN
companion running Linux and the LinkSYS USB wireles hub on my bureau in my bedroom. Now.. this
puppy would be cool it it's affordable, note I paid $89.00 for the MSN compaion and $44.00 for the compact flash. So... anyway. Cool!
>>It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF
>>bandwidth and/or power required to do it would >>either kill you, cook your intestines or give
>>you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you
>>implement it.
Ummmmmmm. ok - i'll bite.......
then how is DirectTV beaming 200 channels completely across north america without frying the entire population.....? How are the reglar TV stations in my area transmitting dozens of channels without killing me.
And i'd guess the power requirements for a 'wireless monitor' with a range of 50-100 feet would be a LOT less than a satellite 23,000 miles away (!) that has to deal with the atmosphere, rain fade, etc etc etc.
I know that this thing isn't a *real* wireless monitor (good job editors), but I have to question the statement that a real one would kill me when there are tons of RF transmissions around me every second pumping thru even more bandwidth.
I have a dream.
I have a dream that one day that my computer will be 100% wireless.
I have a dream that one day my noisy overclocked box can reside in my closet far away from my monitor and my keyboard and my mouse.
I have a dream that one day an encryption scheme would make this unhackable.
I have a dream, and one day my dream will ring true!
And that doesn't account for automatic rate switching, interference, and other nodes on the network.
And most of all, it doesn't account for the fact that PC Anywhere and others have already been doing it for years with less than 56K.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
sweet! wireless monitor, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, wireless headphones wireless modem (hopefull soon again) and a wireless network connection, all i need now is a wireless cpu so i can shove it in the freezer, or someplace else so the damn fan noise doesn't drive me insane.
Although wireless monitor technology could be used to get the wire off of the HUDs... but then again that just might be wishfull thinking...
mix this with a wireless keyboard/mouse combo and a quality bedpan and you've got a lethal combo for the hardcore lazy people :D
I did that long time ago, with a laptop!
I think the person in charge of this stupid product should be fired. If someone knows his/her name, let's see how long he/she will stay on that position.
Yes. I know this. However, you miss the point. If one can send a T3 (45mbps) of digital information in 6MHz of space (modulated on a much higher frequency), then you have the capability to transmit a computer screen. The eyeball frying power requirements is a function of the carrier frequency (900MHz is done to death) and the desired range of the device. (Noise becomes a big problem when the signal isn't on a shielded wire.) Do current 802.11a/b devices blind people? No.
Granted, the T3 instance is a bad example as T3's are rarely radio signals -- and when they are, they are on highly directional microwave carriers.
I already watch DVD wirelessly... Well, sort of. I rip the movie to my server, then watch it on my Powerbook. DVD is approx 9Mbps, WiFi (Airport, IEEE802.11b, whatever) is 11Mbps. No need for compression and local storage, just transfer the raw data.
And if you get 802.11a or g, it's even faster.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
just don't buy an Audrey II, they have a nasty habit of trying to eat their owners, not to mention the rest of the planet.
MORONS
Just read some of those tempest-Sites. They do this for almost twenty years now...
Van Eck Monitoring Device? hmm, quite a security risk under any circumstances.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
There's a proof-of-concept technology for wireless transmission of image data that dates back quite a ways, actually. And yes, there are battery-powered TVs.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Isn't this the same thing as Mira which Bill Gates debuted at CES in January?
I bought one of these and cracked it open. Guess what I found inside? WIRES!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I once accidentally disconnected the monitor cable and left it hanging from the computer. The monitor still worked fine except I didn't have color. Probably at about the same range, though the Apple did have somewhat less resolution.
Would be a great idea, even better would be one in the *shower*.
So the very radiation/fan noise that destroys you is also a source of succour?
Prolonging your years beyond measure while bringing horrible pain and mutilation...
Damn, I think it's beginning to happen to me too, after buying that Shuttle SV24, the PS2, the new video and the flashy cellphone... I guess we'll be Gollum together, at least.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
My calculations show that we'd need roughly 8x more bandwidth than 45 Mbps. Even with compression, overhead blah blah. But I'll give you all of that and say we can transmit a monitor screen with 45 Mbps of bandwidth.
Ever sit in front of a directional microwave antenna? Get that nice warm fuzzy feeling inside? Do you know what feeling is? Thank you for proving my original point.
All you need to do is entangle a video card and a monitor and voila! Wireless video with all the bandwidth you need and no distance restriction. Just that pesky entanglement problem to figure out. Maybe if you rubbed them together really hard....
Would that include a 10-inch, glowing "nerd!" sign? =)
Reminds me of the Dilbert strip about wearable computing.. The caption reads - "Wearable computers will become prevalent. This will not improve the image of computing professionals." The drawing shows Dilbert wandering around with huge electronic glasses on, waving his hands around with little sensors on the fingers as he works on his wearable computer. Some other guy stumbles past, waving his hands around, but without the equipment... Dilbert asks, "Are you a programmer too?" Guy replies, "Nope, I'm an idiot. Common mistake."
Microsoft is currently looking at products like this to create a network-like home computer. There were some articles about this on the Register for those who wish to dig. The question was how it would work since XP Home did not support remote access/multiple users. X windows anybody.
Ok, I can never get this right. So, Microsoft's good tuesdays and thursdays, and bad monday, wed. friday then? It's not even a flipping wireless monitor!
Geez...
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
that makes tempest seem so well... good now. Hey wait! Why not use the methods for reconstruction of EM fields as the basis for wireless monitors? HAHAHAHAHA
When religion ruled the world, it was called it the Dark Ages.
I'd rather have a product like the one HERE. 1) it's linux 2) it's got on-board processing so you can do more with it 3) it's linux
Check out http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc. It actually looks pretty cool.
Umm, this is just a thin client with a 802.11b card, how does this make it a wireless monitor? Is my laptop a wireless monitor if I use rdesktop to access a Win2K server...
This monitor and the similar one from Philips use WinCE & Citrix to do remote display. But what if I want to use Linux/VNC, Linux/Citrix or even my own code to display the user's sceen wirelessly?
:v)
Well, then my customers can't use Windows XP, because the EULA says you can't display the screen on anything but a Windows PC.
Anyone from the anti-trust suit listening? No, didn't think so.
Vik
I'm an engineering student at Boston U. There is a senior team working on a real wireless monitor for their design project. I'm not sure of the specs of their project, but i'm pretty sure they are using IR diodes. Wish i new more.
I certainly hope this isn't true. If it is, I'll have to throw out my TV and rabbit ears!
Stupid like a fox!
We have been playing with one of these for a while and it is cool. 802.11b to the touchscreen display, runs Windows2000 or 98 (proprietary network so no linux) But the Panasonic guys said if somebody wanted 1000 of these with linux they would do it!
*narf!*
In the frenzy that exists in the world to beef up security this will weaken it considerably. Why not just post your passwords on your monitor?
:-(
The FBI and other 3 letter organizations known or unknown must be looking forward to this as they will be able to use the Tempest attack against these devices.
A sad day for security
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
Some fun logic:
-> Is this a secure system? Didn't see any indication that it was on their website (and no, WEP doesn't count).
-> Are corporations going to use this in their board rooms? Not if they're concerned that their next M&A deal is being recorded remotely by their competitor via a "Silent Helicopter" circling the 50th floor... Yes, it's possible to do that creepy Van Eek (sp?) thing (assuming it's a CRT and not LCD), but I'm not talking about the NSA's creepy helicopters.
Follow up:
-> Should this product be re-marketed as a nifty CE tablet? Yes.
-> Should Viewsonic really be the ones to market this? Probably not; they're in the business of making nice monitors and should probably follow NEC's lead using by making only the monitor.
-- dforce
-> Am I paranoid? Yes.
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
Cook your intestines? Give you a bout of cancer?
Software engineer? You are not qualified to comment. In fact, you are full of shit.
I use GoToMyPC regularly. It's a fairly platform-independent (on the client; host is still Windows only) remote web-based access solution. Like PCAnywhere or Timbuktu or whatever, it communicates using only the GDI, keyboard and mouse.
I'd like a wireless pad with at least 1024x768, using the thin GoToMyPC client to view any PC host on my account; switch between PCs on the fly but never have to configure the pad itself for anything. Would anyone else go for that?
We can reduce ideas to bits and people to genes, but "can" does not imply "should".
I'll readily admit I'm an idiot in the RF arena, but I have a question. What about the 2.4GHz wireless transmitters that can send the signal from a TV to another TV/monitor? Surely they're not using that kind of bandwidth, are they? How is it done?
Not to mention the fact that TV's are fed by antennas. Is each channel taking up the equivalent bandwidth?
I study "Telecommunications Engineering", a mix of electrical/electronical engineering, computer science and other stuff. Doing the fourth of a 5 years degree, I can comment on a number of things on TV and its bandwidth requirements.
.75, so the bandwidth is BW=6.5*.75=5. We take 5.5MHz as there's more info, plus sound.
:-)
:)
I'll describe here the PAL system, which is the one used in Europe (NTSC is very similar), and later share some thoughts on this issue.
Video information (in plain old TV) is completely analog. It is represented by 3 components: Y, U and V (it's Y, I & Q in NTSC). To convert from RGB, which most computer-literate people are used to, you make
Y=.3R+.59G+.11B
U=R-Y
V=B-Y
Now back to the analog nature of the signal. Each one of the components (Y, U, V) is a continous function of the time, as the screen is scanned at 50 fields/sec (the even scan-lines form one field and the odd ones make the other; they're interlaced which means you first send one field, then the other), w/ 312.5 lines/field, of which only 287.5 are visible (since you have to re-position the electron beam).
The Y signal has a bandwidth of about 5.5MHz. The U & V signals are modulated together via QAM with BW1MHz. The modulated UV signal's spectrum overlaps the Y signal. This means they're both transmitted _at the same frequency_. They can be separated thanks to the "comb" property of the Y signal.
Here's one explanation of the BW thing: the worst case is having one black pixel, then one white, another black, etc. This way the frequency of the Y signal will be maximal. With 625/lines per frame (that is, the 2 fields), the whole screen would be represented by
1/2 * 625 * 625 * 4/3
"square waves" (if you represent Y against a time axis); as the aspect ration is 4/3, and one black pixel followed by a white one form a period of a square wave.
If you have 25 frames/sec, this makes
1/2 * 625 * 625 * 4/3 * 25 = 6.5 MHz
This is the worst-case scenario. Generally, the image will have less high-frequency information so we can apply a reduction factor (Bredford-Kell factor) which is about
So all you need to transfer a TV signal is:
1) 5.5MHz somewhere in your spectrum. You can center it anywhere you're allowed to so you don't make interferences w/ other devices and services. TV uses freqs starting from ~70MHz in VHF up to 900MHz in VHF, but this depends of your country's regulation.
2) a good enough signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), that is, the relation between the received signal power and the noise power.
Now going to digitizing everything... w/ for example MPEG2, you can fit 4 digital channels where you used to have one. How? Well, two things:
1) compression on the digital level, you know this stuff
2) efficient modulation. You can fit _several bits per Hertz_! The limit is given by the SNR you obtain. So, if there was an infinite SNR (aka no noise), you'd be able to transfer as many bits as you'd like per hertz!
The capacity (bits/sec) of a channel is given by Shannons' law:
C (bps) = W (Hz) * log2( 1 + SNR )
where W is the bandwidth you can use (for example, say 5 MHz in range 700 to 700MHz, that is, w/ a 700MHz carrier), and
SNR = signal power (W)/ noise power (W)
As to how wireless monitors could be implemented, here are some thoughts:
1) this isn't quite the same problem as the TV. TV is a broadcast service, you only have to use 5.5MHz per channel! Each wireless monitor would need 5.5MHz for it alone! Of course you can reuse the frequencies of the ones which are far away (as with a cellular phone), but anyway you wouldn't be able to have several monitors close to each other.
2) Despite this, that would be doable if the spectrum was cleaned and a large band was assigned to these devices. The emitters would carry a note: "No more than xx devices can be used in a yyy square meters area"
3) There's another solution: instead of analog info, use digital techniques: compression and bandwidth-efficient modulations! Compression is easy and can be implemented in hardware so it is real time. We need better quality than MPEG2, which runs from 3 to 15Mbps (thats 375KB/s to 1.875MB/s), but with say 20Mbps the quality would be very decent. These 20Mbps can be fitted in 1.25MHz if you use a fairly tight signal space like 512-QAM, but this would need that (a) your wireless monitor doesn't move so the signal amplitude doesn't change and (b) you use some sort of high-gain directional antenna so you can get by with little power (so you don't get cancer) and not get much noise. Of course this is again the worst-case scenario since you can use differential compression systems such as X's. This would have a huge impact in the required bandwidth.
4) There still would have to be a complex frequency band allocation mechanism, with negotiation when the PC is turned on, etc. Plus some way you can tell your monitor what frequency your PC is using. But this could also get automated.
5) Privacy concerns. You'd definitely want to have some encryption scheme over all this. It's OK as long as you're going digital.
Oh fuck, it's already 1:28AM here, in Madrid, Spain (BTW, remember Spain is in EUROPE, it's not a province of Mexico
Gotta study tomorrow, plus I don't really like this RF stuff (I'm more into signal processing
2.4GHz is not the bandwidth, is the carrier frequency!
:-( )
These devices use a frequency band, say from 2.40GHz to 2.41GHz. The bandwidth would be 2.41*10^9-2.40*10^9=1*10^7=10MHz.
Each analog TV channel takes around 6MHz, you need no more bandwidth than that, but it can be placed (more or less) anywhere you like in the spectrum (but there's regulation and interferences
wouldnt a screen with the ability to draw vector graphics just be a monitor with more features? Like adding an extra command set to a processor
So since its a wireless monitor, I'm sure I can look past the need for an aditional ICA Client license on my citrix farm right?
Yeah, so I'm going to establish a 1-1 relationship with my desktop PC by leaving my desk and accessing my desktop pc at crappy color depth over a low bandwidth network link using terminal server protocols and avoiding video and highly graphical apps?
Okay. Go bankrupt. See what I care.
So, anyway... This bucket of marketing droid spew makes me realise what I most hate about Macs [and now for something completely different] -- It's not really Macs (the kludgey pre-X OS has been mostly replaced, and the hardware isn't so overpriced anymore,) it's just Apple, and its "Reality Distortion Field(TM)" (as the Register calls it)...
Apple goes for really odd technical promotional ploys, like trying to hype the insignificantly (~10%-20%) better performance of their IO interconnect bus over PCland's northbridge/southbridge designs, when their processor bus (single clocked 133mhz) is so slow that they can't even go to DDR SDRAM, because they've already hit the bus bottleneck. (Compare with Athlon's double-pumped 133mhz bus, and Pentium 4's quad-pumped 133mhz bus.) Watch them try to promote their new G4 systems with DDR SDRAM L3 caches but half-speed PC133 ram against systems where the entire main memory is DDR SDRAM; see them try to sneak the "Well, their processors don't have L3 caches, so our platform must be faster." assertion under the radar. It's hilarious!
I'll avoid commenting on their facist intellectual property policy or their monopolistic microsoftian product tying practices. (Oops... Well, I can't take those adjectives back now...)
Anyway, this wouldn't really bother me so much if trade press hacks and clueless consumers didn't so often say that Apple was the most consumer-friendly thing since sliced bread all the time. User friendly? Sure. Consumer friendly? Caveat emptor.
I think the poster was talking about an actual wireless monitor, so the compression would have to be done in hardware; And building the amount of compression we're talking about here into the hardware isn't necessarily an easy solution to the latency problem ... it would be slow any way you look at it.
If you want to make it essentially a wireless graphical terminal (thus requiring a bunch of processing onboard, and reducing compatibility), there are a lot of tricks we can pull out of the hat. We could even go so far as to have video always decompressed on the far side of the connection. (That's non-trivial: we'd need to get a good collection of embedded processor video codecs going first...)
An Apple iBook, in comparison, provides way more functionality, a keyboard, and a bigger and better screen for $1199. (And you can run VNC with it. :)
Umm... anyone else see a problem here?
Bill Gates with the Viewsonic PC
Maybe he has a bird fetish.