Slashdot Mirror
Research news from IBM
Ryan Amos wrote in to let us know that IBM has announced succesful research into plastic transistors. These transistors, if used, will require less power and be less fragile then current ones-but I'm sure they're still years out as the researcher interviewed declined to comment on how soon they will enter the market. In other IBM news, the company announced an initiative to build a talking web browser for the blind. Projects like that give me some modicum of hope for civilization.
IBM seems pretty hip to the open source community. Odd, considering how they neglected Team OS/2. Maybe they learn from their mistakes.
Anyone want to speculate on if we'll see an IBM Distribution of Linux?
I was under the impression that blind people could somehow use lynx to view (word?) web pages. I mean not that this isn't good news, but I'm curious as to what added functionality this new system will bring.
there is no info I can find on the ibm site regarding support for aural css...
if it supports this it would be reather cool...
I saw a writeup about the browser for the blind. It's quote sophisticated, and has a lot of custom features to fit it to the serialized output metaphor (as opposed to a visual display, where things are in parallel).
Maybe people who put up websites without any textual content, just images, can be sued for discrimination against the Americans with Disabilities Act? (That would be in the U.S. only.) Perhaps the ADA would finally do some good...
Lucent Technologies is also doing this. They can get about 50 functioning transistors on a plastic bag. They figure they need about 150 before they can license it for a useful project.
If this works, Mattel can sell a Thinking Barbie.
Ever comb your hair on a dry winter day with a plastic comb? They conduct the hell out of static electricity!
Um... plastic combs don't conduct static electricity. The reason that they get the static charge is because they don't conduct electrons well. (In a basic sense)
.. but very few sites will keep their pages accessible. The Three Rivers Freenet is one exception to this, tho..
Umm...
IBM's browser is NOT the first talking Browser for the Blind
www.prodworks.com
features a very nice browser, PWWebspeak
that has been out for several years...
etc etc
go to the lynx websites/newsgroups
theres stuff there about it
besides, if netscape etc were done right, they
would be 'output independent' , in other words
it would be simple as shit to make it output in
any combination of visual, tactile, audio,
in any language, (written english, spoken russian, written arabic, spoken mandarin,
japanese braille, moon, fingerspelling for deafblind, etc)
Will these thingies be resistant to Electromagnetic Impules (generated by "nuclear Devices" in the "Goldeneye" manner) like radio tubes are?
sure it can, not all plastic can conduct electricity, but if the basic rough idea of conducting is just passing electron from one end to another, some plastic can be design to do that, just like metal. (a bunch of carbon ring constructed as long chain for eg.)
note: conducting polymer are likelier to have much lower conducting efficiency than cheap metal wire, like copper for eg.
actually by jsut having about 500 integrated transistor, one can do a lot of stuff already. (Phillips corp already have a published lab prototype of plastic IC) (okay not exactly super computer) but consider groceries stores application, ID tags, etc...all with manufacturing cost of printing potato chip bags (less than a 0.1 penny per square feet)
try to do that with silicon chip.
ehrss...I seriously doubt it, don't even think about EMP, most of this plastic transistor can only operate in a whimpy operating temperature range. (think of your wet tupper ware inside a microwave oven)
so hell no..this thing will melt in nuclear war,
but on the other side, this thing are so cheap to make potentially. The planet will literally be littered with this plastic transistor. (think about novel packaging.....blinking potato chip bags, that can do moving label)
The BLINUX project holds all sorts of tools and documentation for blind linux users. One of those is BLYNX, a project based around Lynx.
BLINUX is at http://leb.net/blinux/ and BLYNX is at http://leb.net/blinux/blynx/index.html. There are mirrors, but I believe that's the main site.
Lynx allows you to mess with all sorts of things: as the previous poster suggests, one of the options is indeed numbered links. I use this facility all the time as it's quicker than hitting the cursor keys a lot :)
This is not to say, of course, that IBM don't need to create a browser which works for the blind. The more of them the better, in my opinion! I'm sure there's more than just Lynx, too. These are just the pages I happen to know about.
Philips has some kind of plastic IC also.
They released it either earlier his month or late
last.
electrical conducting materials.
As one of the respondents already pointed out, transistors are based on semi-conducting materials. Moreover, on silicon chips I was under the impression they were etched to allow electrical conductors to be deposited, e.g. Aluminum (and IBM is planning to use Copper).
Plastics are a vernacular term, probably meant to connote that many are made by quick processing that goes from a melt to a solid state rapidly, which along with the long chain lengths and protruding chemical structures results in a glassy physical state (i.e. non-crystalline). A glassy state material is not a rigid as a crystal and near its glass transition point may be deformed, or stretched. Indeed, these properties are use in safety helmets. Historically plastics were based on hydrocarbon chains (viewed only as an industrial product), which are classed as non-conductors. More recent research in light weight batteries, have shifted the focus to unsaturated bonding in polymer chains where at least some electrons are not as tightly held and able to allow electron jumping or some level of electrical conductivity.
There is more to these stories, but I may have already told you than you really wished to know!
But Emacs can be a web browser (and a reasonable one at that).
Electrical insulators are just semiconductors with high energy gaps. Just like semiconductors are insulators with low energy gaps.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
...without the means to make them into plastic integrated circuits. Somehow I suspect lithography and ion deposition isn't going to quite cut it. (Of course, the link broke for me so I could be completely wrong...)
two products I read about for Unix/emacs.
OK so they are not Web browsers... but AsTeR
reads LaTeX in a structured way. The idea is not
new... of course the implementation may well be.
-- LaTeX, The Best There Is
IIRC Philips are making this stuff already ("throw-away circuitry")
Hope they include an option to turn images off.
Hmm, aside from telling the user what was a link and what wasnt..(I guess it could read off the hypertext when highlighted, say if using a variant of Lynx.., which would then give the user an idea..)
..Couple years ago I helped a guy setup software that read everything on the screen..he was blind, and this was for Win95.. allowed him to navigate completely thru the OS...wait a sec! Just realised here..he used the internet.. So I assume this already exists, or it would have been pretty boring for him. Wish I remembered more about the particulars.. Hmm. Lemme go read the article now.
C
--
driph
Doh..wow, copy and paste hell. Anyways, here's a working link if anyone really wants it. Sigh. "WebSpeak PLUS is available for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, 98 and NT. It includes a software speech synthesizer, called SoftVoice, and the Windows 95, 98 and NT versions will include the E-Mail package when that software is made generally available." www.prodworks.com C
--
driph
How the !#% are they supposed to conduct electricity?
(first?)
---
The way I read the announcement, they're not just
announcing an initiative to build one, they're
announcing its availability *now*... Right?
-- Craig Miller Austin, TX
Back in the old days (pre '97 heeheehee), when the Web was predominantly single-page, low-graphics, Lynx and similar aids for the Blind worked well. Now, with all the snazzy things going on in UI design, the blind are screwed. This mimics problems the blind are having in modern WIMP-based jobs. Under the old C-L OSes (DOS, UNIX, OS/370, VMS, etc), a blind person could be a very good worker, and compete on a level ground with sighted people. Nowdays, with heavy emphasis on GUI-based RAD tools, the blind person is left out in the cold. It's a real social problem. I'm totally interested in seeing what IBM has come out with - anything to aid the blind in keeping up with the "progress" of the Web is excellent.
And to the person above who rambles about "output independence" - CLUE! CLUE! CLUE! Information should be divided between two areas: raw information, and presentation of that information. Back 4 years ago, this was the way things were, with HTML being essentially raw data, and the Browser being the Presentation tool that interpreted that data to the user, in whatever form was appropriate. That's why Lynx for the blind worked well. Unfortunately, it seems that the HTML designers (along with other people designing Web pages) want to embed lots of formatting (ie PRESENTATION) information in the data stream. This makes is hard (if not impossible) for the client to display it's information in any way other than that dictated by the data stream. BAD. BAD. BAD.
WEB DESIGNERS: you should ALWAYS have a non-graphic, non-framed, text-based alternative to your site.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
may mean that I no longer have to make sure my pages pass the lynx test, something anyone who writes web pages ought to do. That will give me a little more design leeway. (I'm not using style sheets yet.) The $149 price tag may mean that more blind people and institutions will be able to afford the reader. Screen readers and the pwWebSpeak program have been pretty expensive, I think. I'm looking forward to trying the program.
Seth