Man, this is such a great comment -- Whenever I see a spam article, I look to someone who has posted out this comment form as a synopsis to find out whether or not the article is worth reading.
What's actually a little more amazing is that their motion is not actually perfect and synchronized exactly. They are time synchronized, I'm sure, but they have to figure out balance and rates of movement (and a billion other things I'm sure) independent of each other and then make it all happen on cue.
Well, the USB in the ipod is not host mode, so you can't really attach something to it; but firewire is a different story.. In theory you could do all kinds of things with that.
Yes; you can reuse both the screen and the buttons if you want. The buttons are hooked directly into the I-Bus and the navigation unit reads the button presses over I-Bus. The head unit part of a Nav system car doesn't actually do more than display an image and put button presses onto the I-Bus. The radio tuner and all the other stuff is located in the trunk. There is also room in the factory nav screen that you could probably put a touchscreen overlay in there also..
To use the screen, you can build a VGA->RGBS converter and patch directly into the display after removing your nav computer. The other option is to buy a modified TV module that can show video while driving and patch the computer into that. The steering wheel buttons are also sent on I-Bus.
The main problem you have in reusing the buttons on your wheel or around the nav screen is that some other peice of electronics in your car (usually the radio tuner or the nav computer) is going to do something other than what you want when you push them. There has been some talk on the HackTheIbus yahoo group about building I-Bus "filters" using microcontrollers that trap or re-route I-Bus messages... This gets pretty complicated obviously, but if you just simply remove the Nav computer and radio, you'll have no problems:)
Even still, repurposing the OEM screen would likely be more trouble than it's worth. (Plus, the OEM nav system is worth quite a bit in the aftermarket -- definately more than the $1300 the option cost) Building in a regular VGA screen is not that difficult.
If you have more questions, feel free to email me. Since we apparently have the same cars, I've probably run into the same problems you'd hit if you decide to take on a similar project.
Slashdot tends to link car-pc stuff as if it's new and different from time to time, and they always link to some fringe stuff like one particular piece of software or one person's particular (usually fairly hackish) installation. They have actually linked to the dashpc project before -- when the interface was built in perl/tk and barely worked! (Actually it's still pretty hard to install and make work -- I'd say it's at least as hard to install as MythTV) Anyway, the reality is that there are hundreds or even thousands of computer projects driving around out there, and there are many possibilities for what one can do on any type of budget from an old 486 embedded board with a LCD display that plays MP3's to a full-on LAN of fast pc's for backseat passengers to play games.
The best resource I found when I started looking into car-pc stuff were the message boards at MP3Car.com. They have sections for hardware, software, cabling, audio, gps, networking, OBD-II, etc. There are thousands of users on there, and everyone is very helpful. The archives contain a lot of good information that became invaluable to me when I was building my own car-pc project. It is currently going through a new overhaul where I am fixing some problems with the original design and functionality and adding some new stuff like OBD-II and reversing camera as well.
Motherboards with a lot of onboard hardware (coincidentally these are often the boards that LinuxBIOS supports) frequently will not have such a feature, though, as things like the VGA BIOS are run from the BIOS itself and not from an auxillary ROM. This is, at least, the case with the EPAI boards.
Even if your motherboard has a failsafe state, it's not a good idea to rely on it as a safety net. Do you know how to access the failsafe state when you have a working BIOS?
I was recently doing some research to get started working with LinuxBIOS. The first thing I have done is to order a BIOS Savior.. This is a little gadget that runs about 15 bucks. It puts a switch on the outside of your case allowing you to switch to an alternate BIOS. With it, you can happily screw up your LinuxBIOS image all you want and still be able to boot your computer from the original BIOS.
Some motherboards have a dual BIOS or similar arrangement; however, there is not always a foolproof way to switch to your backup if the primary BIOS is hosed..
Keep these things in mind if you want to start playing with LinuxBIOS
This kind of brings up some interesting questions --
What happens when/if someone develops a search engine that really is better (gasp! horror!) than Google? Will people still continue to use Google because it's entrenched in their brains? Will people say Google and mean another search engine?
Oh ok I found it finally. I guess I was too hasty with the above:
Vocera Communications System Pricing and Availability The Vocera Communications System will be available October 2002. It will be sold through select value-added resellers across the United States. The Vocera Communications System pricing is based on purchases of Vocera Server Software, Vocera Communications Badges, and software maintenance agreement. Server software licenses start at a list price of $20,000 for a 75-seat users' license and the Vocera Communications Badge, which can be shared by shift-based workers, is listed at $400.
Ouch! Oh well, I guess that explains why they are targeting the medical industry:)
I know that they price the entire solution for a company rather than sell out individual devices, but damn do I hate it when you can't even get a ballpark idea how much something costs. When a company does this, it just feels like it's going to cost "too much" even if it's not!
This kind of reminds me of that time they wanted to make the hindenberg shiny so they put some thermite in the silver color... and we all know how that ended up!
I never meant to suggest that a compression algorithm that preserves the original "exactly" is any better than one that does not. I do plenty of processing on still photographs to fix color/contrast/film grain noise, etc. The last comment was just sort of an idea for another way to make a comparison...
Along the lines of the superresolution stuff, I have read a good deal about things like VidFIRE used by the BBC and others in film to video restoration projects. Clearly, this is a good example of a situation where the algorithm produces a visually superior result although over half of the visual data in the output is not even present in the input.. I assume that a lot of inverse telecine software is doing a similar kind of interpolation work during the mastering process for a DVD...
Still the original point of this test determining the best quality codec to recompress MPEG2 rather than "the best codec" I think is still valid, and a double blind test is the best way to do it..
If the artifact is in the MPEG2 stream (which it is, inevatably) then you still end up testing the codec's ability to either preserve the original image (with the artifacts) or do something else with it. If a visual test is determining the "better" compressor, a codec which eliminates or smooths a compression artifact in the source material, albeit maybe at a huge loss of visual detail/sharpness in the affected area might appear to be superior to a codec that does a better job of 100% preserving the original image.
I would assume there is some software out there that does this, but I kind of wonder if it's possible just to analyze the source original vs the image through the codec with a 'likeness' algorighm that calculates color differences and determines mathematically how similar the source is to the destination.. but then again I know that wouldn't necessarily be a fair comparison either:)
This is exactly what I was going to point out. The test is actually showing which codec is the best at recompressing MPEG2 (which is still a relevant test when you are talking about moving a DVD onto your handheld or something), not which is the best for compressing raw uncompressed footage. In recompression, if you use two encoding algorighms that use much different techniques, often you lose a lot of the detail of the original. Use the analogy of rotating one polarized lens over another... Both lenses remove some of the light going through them, but the closer you get them to 90 degrees from each other the more light they will remove...
I would also be curious to see a comparison of codecs based on using 1:5 compression consumer level DV souce material.
$1M is a hardly trivial amount of money for EV1 to have given SCO. I would seriously look into alternative companies if my current hosting provider starting flushing millions of dollars down the toilet buying nacent assets. That kind of behavior is going to end up costing ME money as their customer no matter how large or small my account might be -- the question is, will their bad decisions cost me more money in the long run than it will cost to switch providers in the short term?
If your servers/services are easy to migrate around, as they probably ought to be for any size company large or small, the expense of moving it could be very easy to make a decision like this.
How about this one: If you are a company that has a website hosted on an EV1 machine (covered by EV1's license from SCO) but also has a local server (or two or ten) at your office that runs Linux (not covered by any SCO license), you'd have to think really hard about staying with EV1. If you do, you are supporting the claim that SCO is correct and exposing your own company to to litigation. If you really believe this, you might ought to pay the huge fees to license your own servers! Remember, that any time a company gives into SCO's licensing demands, it creates more ammunition for SCO to use in court. If you stick with EV1 and silently support SCO, but rely on Linux/OSS on the side, you are simply setting yourself up for a world of hurt if SCO wins the case.
First, the software is commercial and proprietary (LinSpot takes a cut off of your bandwidth sales), yet seems to tie itself dubiously to OSS. Although I have not actually looked at the application myself, I suspect that there are likely untold amounts of license violations in LinSpot. Read these two faq entries while keeping in mind the way the software is advertised and used:
From the LinSpot FAQ:
1.6 WHAT'S UP WITH THE PENGUIN? First of all, we LOVE penguins! Secondly, it is the logo of the GNU/Linux operating system. The 'Tux' penguin logo is originally created by Larry Ewing using The GIMP as a drawing tool. With it, we want to honour the OpenSource projects who are at the basis of LinSpot: the Apache Web Server, the ISC DHCP server, the ISC BIND Nameserver, the SQUID Web Proxy Cache and lots of other things created by motivated programmers across the globe. The penguin puts the end-users into the spotlight!
4.3 WHY THE NAME LINSPOT? Inside LinSpot there's a lot of OpenSource software: the following OpenSource projects are packaged with LinSpot: Apache Web Server, ISC DHCP server, ISC Bind Nameserver, Squid Proxy server and several other smaller ones. With the first 3 letters we want to bring tribute to Linux and the OpenSource community, as they form the basis of the current Internet and it's popularity. Linux is the best known icon reflecting this FLOSS community! Also, LinSpot is free and wants to spread rapidly, just like Linux.
The other information in the FAQ is very telling, including the telltale "Investment Opportunity" section that is present in the websites of so many dubious businesses.
I would caution any user against attempting to use this application. There are several good alternatives that are not difficult to set up including using NoCatAuth with a micropayment system. Since LinSpot happily handles the billing of the users for you and then sends you your 'share' later, you'll really have to decide whether or not you trust them to do the right thing, since they do not seem to be forthright in their other business practices.\
At any rate, this software hardly deserves a "1.0" release or attention on slashdot. It could likely be a scam, though I have no evidence to beleive that it is anything more than a really dubious, hacky, misguided implementation of someone else's good idea.
For a $1000 cabinet, you'd be better off buying the Slikstik cabinet, though, keep in mind that the wood and other materials needed to build only the cabinet cost about $150 or perhaps far less if you use a painted cabinet rather than using laminates or melamines and take off the coin door.
I spent a total of about $1600 building my cabinet from scratch, but that includes all hardwareincluding the new 27" arcade monitor, computer hardware, and controls.
Just set a budget (both for your money and your time) and buy the best stuff you can. The cabinet takes the most time to build, followed by the control panel; however building vs buying a cabinet is where you will save the most money. The other good option is to buy (or often times get for free) non working machines from a local amusement vendor and restore them, then fit your own cpanel to them. This has the greatest cost/time benefit for you; plus you can recycle. The drawback is that you don't get the flexibility that building whatever you want brings you.
The maintainer of the BYOAC website is putting out a 500+ page book on the cabinet building subject, so it might be worth getting one of those when it comes out before you make any decisions..
Keep in mind there is also a big red anode right on top of your CRT that carries up to 20kV and in many monitors holds the charge after the thing is off and unplugged. If you don't know how to discharge a CRT, you can very easily kill yourself with most any monitor or a TV. I guess that you would stop them from sticking their hand/face in there the same way that you keep them from grabbing the big red wire inside a CRT -- build it into a box! With a laser projector you do have the luxury of being able to easily do rear projection at extreme angles without any expensive optics like are required in current model rear projection monitors..
Slashdot Mirror
Man, this is such a great comment -- Whenever I see a spam article, I look to someone who has posted out this comment form as a synopsis to find out whether or not the article is worth reading.
What's actually a little more amazing is that their motion is not actually perfect and synchronized exactly. They are time synchronized, I'm sure, but they have to figure out balance and rates of movement (and a billion other things I'm sure) independent of each other and then make it all happen on cue.
Well, the USB in the ipod is not host mode, so you can't really attach something to it; but firewire is a different story.. In theory you could do all kinds of things with that.
Yes; you can reuse both the screen and the buttons if you want. The buttons are hooked directly into the I-Bus and the navigation unit reads the button presses over I-Bus. The head unit part of a Nav system car doesn't actually do more than display an image and put button presses onto the I-Bus. The radio tuner and all the other stuff is located in the trunk. There is also room in the factory nav screen that you could probably put a touchscreen overlay in there also..
:)
To use the screen, you can build a VGA->RGBS converter and patch directly into the display after removing your nav computer. The other option is to buy a modified TV module that can show video while driving and patch the computer into that. The steering wheel buttons are also sent on I-Bus.
The main problem you have in reusing the buttons on your wheel or around the nav screen is that some other peice of electronics in your car (usually the radio tuner or the nav computer) is going to do something other than what you want when you push them. There has been some talk on the HackTheIbus yahoo group about building I-Bus "filters" using microcontrollers that trap or re-route I-Bus messages... This gets pretty complicated obviously, but if you just simply remove the Nav computer and radio, you'll have no problems
Even still, repurposing the OEM screen would likely be more trouble than it's worth. (Plus, the OEM nav system is worth quite a bit in the aftermarket -- definately more than the $1300 the option cost) Building in a regular VGA screen is not that difficult.
If you have more questions, feel free to email me. Since we apparently have the same cars, I've probably run into the same problems you'd hit if you decide to take on a similar project.
Slashdot tends to link car-pc stuff as if it's new and different from time to time, and they always link to some fringe stuff like one particular piece of software or one person's particular (usually fairly hackish) installation. They have actually linked to the dashpc project before -- when the interface was built in perl/tk and barely worked! (Actually it's still pretty hard to install and make work -- I'd say it's at least as hard to install as MythTV) Anyway, the reality is that there are hundreds or even thousands of computer projects driving around out there, and there are many possibilities for what one can do on any type of budget from an old 486 embedded board with a LCD display that plays MP3's to a full-on LAN of fast pc's for backseat passengers to play games.
The best resource I found when I started looking into car-pc stuff were the message boards at MP3Car.com. They have sections for hardware, software, cabling, audio, gps, networking, OBD-II, etc. There are thousands of users on there, and everyone is very helpful. The archives contain a lot of good information that became invaluable to me when I was building my own car-pc project. It is currently going through a new overhaul where I am fixing some problems with the original design and functionality and adding some new stuff like OBD-II and reversing camera as well.
Incedentally, various inflation calculators put $750,000 1961 dollars at a little under or over $4.5MM of today's money.
Or get yourself a flash cart and PocketNES. PocketNES is the one and only reason I bought a GBA.
Motherboards with a lot of onboard hardware (coincidentally these are often the boards that LinuxBIOS supports) frequently will not have such a feature, though, as things like the VGA BIOS are run from the BIOS itself and not from an auxillary ROM. This is, at least, the case with the EPAI boards.
Even if your motherboard has a failsafe state, it's not a good idea to rely on it as a safety net. Do you know how to access the failsafe state when you have a working BIOS?
All jokes aside, it's actually a good product. It's cheap, too.
I was recently doing some research to get started working with LinuxBIOS. The first thing I have done is to order a BIOS Savior.. This is a little gadget that runs about 15 bucks. It puts a switch on the outside of your case allowing you to switch to an alternate BIOS. With it, you can happily screw up your LinuxBIOS image all you want and still be able to boot your computer from the original BIOS.
Some motherboards have a dual BIOS or similar arrangement; however, there is not always a foolproof way to switch to your backup if the primary BIOS is hosed..
Keep these things in mind if you want to start playing with LinuxBIOS
This kind of brings up some interesting questions --
What happens when/if someone develops a search engine that really is better (gasp! horror!) than Google? Will people still continue to use Google because it's entrenched in their brains? Will people say Google and mean another search engine?
Ouch! Oh well, I guess that explains why they are targeting the medical industry
I know that they price the entire solution for a company rather than sell out individual devices, but damn do I hate it when you can't even get a ballpark idea how much something costs. When a company does this, it just feels like it's going to cost "too much" even if it's not!
This kind of reminds me of that time they wanted to make the hindenberg shiny so they put some thermite in the silver color... and we all know how that ended up!
having an exhaust pipe that you can fit a soccer ball inside doesn't hurt either
I have these tires on my car. They are fscking sxweet!!!!!
I mean telecine not IVTC.. sorry.. either way, there is interpolation going on and probably some motion estimation in higher end software
I never meant to suggest that a compression algorithm that preserves the original "exactly" is any better than one that does not. I do plenty of processing on still photographs to fix color/contrast/film grain noise, etc. The last comment was just sort of an idea for another way to make a comparison...
Along the lines of the superresolution stuff, I have read a good deal about things like VidFIRE used by the BBC and others in film to video restoration projects. Clearly, this is a good example of a situation where the algorithm produces a visually superior result although over half of the visual data in the output is not even present in the input.. I assume that a lot of inverse telecine software is doing a similar kind of interpolation work during the mastering process for a DVD...
Still the original point of this test determining the best quality codec to recompress MPEG2 rather than "the best codec" I think is still valid, and a double blind test is the best way to do it..
If the artifact is in the MPEG2 stream (which it is, inevatably) then you still end up testing the codec's ability to either preserve the original image (with the artifacts) or do something else with it. If a visual test is determining the "better" compressor, a codec which eliminates or smooths a compression artifact in the source material, albeit maybe at a huge loss of visual detail/sharpness in the affected area might appear to be superior to a codec that does a better job of 100% preserving the original image.
:)
I would assume there is some software out there that does this, but I kind of wonder if it's possible just to analyze the source original vs the image through the codec with a 'likeness' algorighm that calculates color differences and determines mathematically how similar the source is to the destination.. but then again I know that wouldn't necessarily be a fair comparison either
This is exactly what I was going to point out. The test is actually showing which codec is the best at recompressing MPEG2 (which is still a relevant test when you are talking about moving a DVD onto your handheld or something), not which is the best for compressing raw uncompressed footage. In recompression, if you use two encoding algorighms that use much different techniques, often you lose a lot of the detail of the original. Use the analogy of rotating one polarized lens over another... Both lenses remove some of the light going through them, but the closer you get them to 90 degrees from each other the more light they will remove...
I would also be curious to see a comparison of codecs based on using 1:5 compression consumer level DV souce material.
$1M is a hardly trivial amount of money for EV1 to have given SCO. I would seriously look into alternative companies if my current hosting provider starting flushing millions of dollars down the toilet buying nacent assets. That kind of behavior is going to end up costing ME money as their customer no matter how large or small my account might be -- the question is, will their bad decisions cost me more money in the long run than it will cost to switch providers in the short term?
If your servers/services are easy to migrate around, as they probably ought to be for any size company large or small, the expense of moving it could be very easy to make a decision like this.
How about this one: If you are a company that has a website hosted on an EV1 machine (covered by EV1's license from SCO) but also has a local server (or two or ten) at your office that runs Linux (not covered by any SCO license), you'd have to think really hard about staying with EV1. If you do, you are supporting the claim that SCO is correct and exposing your own company to to litigation. If you really believe this, you might ought to pay the huge fees to license your own servers! Remember, that any time a company gives into SCO's licensing demands, it creates more ammunition for SCO to use in court. If you stick with EV1 and silently support SCO, but rely on Linux/OSS on the side, you are simply setting yourself up for a world of hurt if SCO wins the case.
From the LinSpot FAQ:
The other information in the FAQ is very telling, including the telltale "Investment Opportunity" section that is present in the websites of so many dubious businesses.
I would caution any user against attempting to use this application. There are several good alternatives that are not difficult to set up including using NoCatAuth with a micropayment system. Since LinSpot happily handles the billing of the users for you and then sends you your 'share' later, you'll really have to decide whether or not you trust them to do the right thing, since they do not seem to be forthright in their other business practices.\
At any rate, this software hardly deserves a "1.0" release or attention on slashdot. It could likely be a scam, though I have no evidence to beleive that it is anything more than a really dubious, hacky, misguided implementation of someone else's good idea.
For a $1000 cabinet, you'd be better off buying the Slikstik cabinet, though, keep in mind that the wood and other materials needed to build only the cabinet cost about $150 or perhaps far less if you use a painted cabinet rather than using laminates or melamines and take off the coin door.
I spent a total of about $1600 building my cabinet from scratch, but that includes all hardwareincluding the new 27" arcade monitor, computer hardware, and controls.
Just set a budget (both for your money and your time) and buy the best stuff you can. The cabinet takes the most time to build, followed by the control panel; however building vs buying a cabinet is where you will save the most money. The other good option is to buy (or often times get for free) non working machines from a local amusement vendor and restore them, then fit your own cpanel to them. This has the greatest cost/time benefit for you; plus you can recycle. The drawback is that you don't get the flexibility that building whatever you want brings you.
The maintainer of the BYOAC website is putting out a 500+ page book on the cabinet building subject, so it might be worth getting one of those when it comes out before you make any decisions..
~GoRK
Well, at least now I know for sure my browser doesn't wait for vsync or double buffer...
Keep in mind there is also a big red anode right on top of your CRT that carries up to 20kV and in many monitors holds the charge after the thing is off and unplugged. If you don't know how to discharge a CRT, you can very easily kill yourself with most any monitor or a TV. I guess that you would stop them from sticking their hand/face in there the same way that you keep them from grabbing the big red wire inside a CRT -- build it into a box! With a laser projector you do have the luxury of being able to easily do rear projection at extreme angles without any expensive optics like are required in current model rear projection monitors..