Back at the Second West Coast Computer Faire in San Jose (in 1978 if the web is to be trusted) there was a company making a graphics card for S-100 bus CP/M machines. They had a Star Wars game to demo their product.
It was a 2-player head-to-head game. One side the Empire, the other side the Rebel Alliance. Each person had his own CRT and joystick controller. The Empier player had three TIE fighters and the death star that they could shoot from, switchable via buttons on the joystick controller. The Rebel Alliance player had four X-wing fighters.
Obviously, the plot was to either destroy the death star or destroy the rebel base (by blowing up the moon). The players would fly through space and fight each other's fighters and the rebel palyer even had to fly through the trench and try to hit the exhaust port.
It was a really great game for its time. Too bad it required so much special hardware. And the other problem was that it took a while to play especially at a booth at a convention.
Funny, I don't remember the company that made it nor the name of the game.
Actually, I thought it was much longer than just nine years ago and I thought it got pulled because people didn't like the idea of the trading ("bribing to pollute" was another way of putting it).
Since I don't seem to remember anything correctly, can others shed some more insight on this and how it'll foreshadow trading under the Kyoto treaty?
Yeah, there are differences, but there are a lot of parallels too.
I thought that functional MRI (checking for the oxygen levels in the blood stream with MRI) had gotten to the point where it was better than PET. No need for a patient to ingest/breathe radioactive isotopes (especially large amounts if you want a good real-time image), abundance of MRI imagers, etc.
Okay, embarassing secret time- I actually just read about fMRI in wired and said, "aha, that's why I haven't heard much about PET for a while."
Maybe it's a cultural politeness thing, but you never see Japanese yapping away on their phones on the subway, just immersed in messaging, games or whatever.
I think I heard that they usually turn their ringer off when they leave the house and only turn it back on when the return.
Since there are already DoCoMo camera phones that can scan barcodes by taking a picture of them (This one even looks like it can read 2D bar codes), I assume they'll use something like that instead of a laser-driven scanner that may have problems with contrast, the LCD's polarizers, etc.
Either way, I figure that it still won't be as quick to get people through a line as just having someone visually inspecting tickets and tearing off the stubs.
The real problem here is that the article was written by someone with no knowledge of the subject.
There's a magazine article with different details, a few more facts and knowledge of a different aspect the subject.
I could have sworn it was the latest issue of I.D. (not to be confused with iD Magazine) but their website does not seem to have the latest issue (the new water issue). I don't have it here at work, so I could be mistaken- it could be another of my magazines.
For all the use of the Internet, I certainly have an awful lot of magazine subscriptions.
It's stuff like this (value added services?), Cingular's comics and instant messaging that are turning cell phones into more than just a handset you talk into.
I like it, but I fear that it'll get to the point where it's too hard to figure out how to access a given extra feature. Obviously they'll have to work on the UI to select from all these (marginally) useful features.
That said, I'm still just using my phone as a phone, so maybe they already have that solved, but I wouldn't know.
I forgot about the Baen Webscriptions service, but it does suggest another interesting experiment-
After N months of subscriptions, try offering a free dead tree book. See whether people buy a copy of a book they've already read (but might want to have a "permanant" (sp?) copy of either for personal consumption or as a gift) and see how long ago they downloaded said book or see if they buy a new title (the assumption being that they're trying to maximize their content consumption).
And another follow-on- offer the bonus book as either a dead tree or electronic copy. If they accept the electronic copy, then you might want to think about offering a plan with more titles. If they want a dead tree, hang onto that author.
The interesting thing (to me) is the development of flexible heat pipes. I'm assuming that it uses tubes stuffed with something with great capillary action, maybe CoolMax fabric or something. Don't know if it really needs to be aligned all that well- would probably work better if it were, of course. Either that, or just extrude the tubes with a lot of fins inside for good capillary action. Further developments would be to fabricate a material/plastic with really fine vanes in it, sew it into a bladder shape and fill it with fluid (remembering to seal the seams- this is the GoreTex company that's also working on this). Either way, I'd be worried about fluid loss or bursting of the flexible heat pipes or the resivours at the ends.
And can you imnagine seeing a snowboarder/skier/whoever with these opera-length gloves on? Either they'd need to get capri-style sleeves on their jackets or learn to put the gloves on before putting the jacket. I can just see the new 1/2 sleeve fashion now- and the convertible jackets with zip-off forearms.
Never mind trying to take the gloves off to reach into a pocket or something. How many people here pull their gloves off with their teeth especially when reaching for something quickly? (especially since the other hand is probably already otherwise occupied) Try that with a glove that covers your forearm.
There are things call Heat Recovery Ventilators and Energy Recovery Ventilators that exchange inside and outside air and heat (let in outside air while bringing it to inside temperatures while exhausting the inside air). Basically they're just heat exchangers. Some even match humidity levels (forget which- HRV or ERV's- go ahead an look them up yourself, there are a number of companies that make them)
I believe these only need a fan (or two) and no heat pump- more efficient and achieves the same thing.
There are some new accessories available as well, mostly made by Belkin. Of note are the microphone and flash card (CF, MMC, SD, SM, MemoryStick) reader.
What you will get is a computer with a color screen and a pointer device, windows, icons, and menus.
You forgot the keyboard.
I don't believe that the desktop paradigm is the only possible computer user interface. It's only the dominant UI because the people designing, improving and using the UI all work at desks. Once computers become more ubiquitous, even in other parts of the world where there is less of a desktop user population, so the desktop will be more foreign to more users (though there will be/has been the QWERTY point where it has so much momentum that it's the default even if something better does come along).
For instance, I can see a computer IU based on another very well known and mature interface that Tim made a brief reference to- the automobile.
Again, this is more of an industrialized world paradigm, but I'm sure there are more people who drive than work at desks. And it fits the "navigating" the web metaphor better. Instead of having a mouse as the pointing device, have a steering wheel as the directional control. High pagerank items can be on the primary roads while individuals' pages can be on side streets. Higher traffic levels would indicate more network traffic, speed and acceleration would be limited by the capabilities of the computer, and other strained metaphors.
But that comes back to the argument "designers could do such cool things if the customer weren't so old-fashioned."
So, yeah, maybe they could design a great computer UI, but the hard part is subtly shifting the current designs to slowly morph it into their end product without leaving anybody behind. Either that, or they've got to make a completely different product that doesn't even try to replace the existing computer and UI- but then that's describing any of the internet appliances or set top boxes that have come and gone in the past few years (then again, handhelds came and went for years before Palm's Pilot came on the market).
Given how an entertaiment system has actually caused a plane to crash, it's perfectly reasonable that the FAA wants anything wired into the aircraft to be certified.
Wireless, that's another story. Though I wonder what certification is required for the DC accessory jacks that many planes are now sprouting.
I've been saying all along that SIMMs are cheap (especially SDR- you probably don't need anything too fast). Just make a camera that has a number of SIMM slots (ruggedized, of course) and loops through the memory space. Then when you want to save anything, hit a button to actually save the last N minutes/megabytes/gigabytes to the PC Card, flag it as read-only for later downloading (to something like a 1394 hard drive... or video iPod:) and/or concurrently send it to the WAN-enabled server in the truck.
Yeah, if the battery dies then you've lost everything, but a small battery backup for the memory isn't that hard and with RAM- even DRAM and not SRAM- you're not drawing power as fast as you would be with HDD, flash, or optical so your main battery is going to last longer anyway. Okay, the storage mechanism probably isn't the biggest drain in the camera- the CCD and LCD are probably big power hogs.
I'd assume that for news reporters, most of the footage is shot and either edited in place or sent directly to the station for editing later. Yeah, a filesystem for saving and deleting takes would be helpful (if there isn't already one) and anything like RAM, flash, HDD, or optical are going to work well with that too. DRAM storage is optimal for the short, take-retake-send-straight-to-the-home-office usage pattern of news organizations.
Intel itself also has a low power 386 that RIM uses in their Blackberry. Considering that this thing is a two-way pager and can still last a while (insert handwaving here), I don't think the 386 uses that much power- not compared to the radio at least.
Just project onto a piece of foam. Make a small Thermarest pad and it can roll up into a pretty small ball.
For projected keyboards, you might even have better accuracy if the surface deforms and reflects the light randomly (except for the issue of a finger being in the way:) A special matte or selectively retroreflective surface would also be good and it would be easy enough to emboss/stitch/whatever home key bumps on the foam too.
Browsing I do a mixture or pen and keyboard. I definitely like browsing in tablet mode with the pen it just feels more natural, however entering URL's with the pen is still 50/50 so if I have to pull out the keyboard it's back to landscape mode.
Why not just use the pop-up keyboard if you only need to enter one URL at a time?
Do a Google search on "tanatlum shortage" and you'll see that there was a flury of articles about a year and a half ago. This prompted development of other electrolytic capacitors, one of which is the aluminum electrolyte that seems to be having problems.
I assume that it's only taken this long to find the problem due to the development time and time to qualify (ha!) and integrate these new caps onto boards. Needless to say, I guess they needed to develop the caps better, but they may have rushed to market since there was little else available (at a decent price).
This just looks like a miniturized optical mouse fit onto the head of a pin erm... pen.
Microsoft already has some experience with this kind of input method (sorry, link to original site is dead) when it got the researcher for BT (formerly British Telecom, as all the news articles say:) who developed the SmartQuill.
So, I don't see how this laser pen is going to be any more revolutionary than the smartquill- the smartquill argueably has better accuracy since the laser pen (if it is a glorified optical mouse) cannot tell where the pen has been moved if it's off the "writing" surface, the smartquill doesn't even need a writing surface, and the smartquill could also easily have a cool scrolling display depending on how you tilt the unit.
The smartquill has been in development for over four years and still nothing has become of it- though maybe MS is biding its time for the right platform and application to come along (ie: handwriting recognition on a smartphone- but why would MS want to go into that market?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Back at the Second West Coast Computer Faire in San Jose (in 1978 if the web is to be trusted) there was a company making a graphics card for S-100 bus CP/M machines. They had a Star Wars game to demo their product.
It was a 2-player head-to-head game. One side the Empire, the other side the Rebel Alliance. Each person had his own CRT and joystick controller. The Empier player had three TIE fighters and the death star that they could shoot from, switchable via buttons on the joystick controller. The Rebel Alliance player had four X-wing fighters.
Obviously, the plot was to either destroy the death star or destroy the rebel base (by blowing up the moon). The players would fly through space and fight each other's fighters and the rebel palyer even had to fly through the trench and try to hit the exhaust port.
It was a really great game for its time. Too bad it required so much special hardware. And the other problem was that it took a while to play especially at a booth at a convention.
Funny, I don't remember the company that made it nor the name of the game.
Ah yes, pollution credits. The US EPA tried this once.
Actually, I thought it was much longer than just nine years ago and I thought it got pulled because people didn't like the idea of the trading ("bribing to pollute" was another way of putting it).
Since I don't seem to remember anything correctly, can others shed some more insight on this and how it'll foreshadow trading under the Kyoto treaty?
Yeah, there are differences, but there are a lot of parallels too.
I guess this idea is better/simpler/cheaper/safer than water cooling.
I thought that functional MRI (checking for the oxygen levels in the blood stream with MRI) had gotten to the point where it was better than PET. No need for a patient to ingest/breathe radioactive isotopes (especially large amounts if you want a good real-time image), abundance of MRI imagers, etc.
Okay, embarassing secret time- I actually just read about fMRI in wired and said, "aha, that's why I haven't heard much about PET for a while."
Again, way behind the Japanese.
Maybe it's a cultural politeness thing, but you never see Japanese yapping away on their phones on the subway, just immersed in messaging, games or whatever.
I think I heard that they usually turn their ringer off when they leave the house and only turn it back on when the return.
Since there are already DoCoMo camera phones that can scan barcodes by taking a picture of them (This one even looks like it can read 2D bar codes), I assume they'll use something like that instead of a laser-driven scanner that may have problems with contrast, the LCD's polarizers, etc.
Either way, I figure that it still won't be as quick to get people through a line as just having someone visually inspecting tickets and tearing off the stubs.
Follow the MSN link on the Tissot T-Tactile page for the manufacturer's product info page.
There's a magazine article with different details, a few more facts and knowledge of a different aspect the subject.
I could have sworn it was the latest issue of I.D. (not to be confused with iD Magazine) but their website does not seem to have the latest issue (the new water issue). I don't have it here at work, so I could be mistaken- it could be another of my magazines.
For all the use of the Internet, I certainly have an awful lot of magazine subscriptions.
Okay, why is this headline visible on The Register's main page but not from their desktop news panel? Is this just not a big headline?
Thanks, now I'll remember to ignore the desktop news panel since it's useless.
It's stuff like this (value added services?), Cingular's comics and instant messaging that are turning cell phones into more than just a handset you talk into.
I like it, but I fear that it'll get to the point where it's too hard to figure out how to access a given extra feature. Obviously they'll have to work on the UI to select from all these (marginally) useful features.
That said, I'm still just using my phone as a phone, so maybe they already have that solved, but I wouldn't know.
I forgot about the Baen Webscriptions service, but it does suggest another interesting experiment-
After N months of subscriptions, try offering a free dead tree book. See whether people buy a copy of a book they've already read (but might want to have a "permanant" (sp?) copy of either for personal consumption or as a gift) and see how long ago they downloaded said book or see if they buy a new title (the assumption being that they're trying to maximize their content consumption).
And another follow-on- offer the bonus book as either a dead tree or electronic copy. If they accept the electronic copy, then you might want to think about offering a plan with more titles. If they want a dead tree, hang onto that author.
The interesting thing (to me) is the development of flexible heat pipes. I'm assuming that it uses tubes stuffed with something with great capillary action, maybe CoolMax fabric or something. Don't know if it really needs to be aligned all that well- would probably work better if it were, of course. Either that, or just extrude the tubes with a lot of fins inside for good capillary action. Further developments would be to fabricate a material/plastic with really fine vanes in it, sew it into a bladder shape and fill it with fluid (remembering to seal the seams- this is the GoreTex company that's also working on this). Either way, I'd be worried about fluid loss or bursting of the flexible heat pipes or the resivours at the ends.
And can you imnagine seeing a snowboarder/skier/whoever with these opera-length gloves on? Either they'd need to get capri-style sleeves on their jackets or learn to put the gloves on before putting the jacket. I can just see the new 1/2 sleeve fashion now- and the convertible jackets with zip-off forearms.
Never mind trying to take the gloves off to reach into a pocket or something. How many people here pull their gloves off with their teeth especially when reaching for something quickly? (especially since the other hand is probably already otherwise occupied) Try that with a glove that covers your forearm.
There are things call Heat Recovery Ventilators and Energy Recovery Ventilators that exchange inside and outside air and heat (let in outside air while bringing it to inside temperatures while exhausting the inside air). Basically they're just heat exchangers. Some even match humidity levels (forget which- HRV or ERV's- go ahead an look them up yourself, there are a number of companies that make them)
I believe these only need a fan (or two) and no heat pump- more efficient and achieves the same thing.
There are some new accessories available as well, mostly made by Belkin. Of note are the microphone and flash card (CF, MMC, SD, SM, MemoryStick) reader.
What you will get is a computer with a color screen and a pointer device, windows, icons, and menus.
You forgot the keyboard.
I don't believe that the desktop paradigm is the only possible computer user interface. It's only the dominant UI because the people designing, improving and using the UI all work at desks. Once computers become more ubiquitous, even in other parts of the world where there is less of a desktop user population, so the desktop will be more foreign to more users (though there will be/has been the QWERTY point where it has so much momentum that it's the default even if something better does come along).
For instance, I can see a computer IU based on another very well known and mature interface that Tim made a brief reference to- the automobile.
Again, this is more of an industrialized world paradigm, but I'm sure there are more people who drive than work at desks. And it fits the "navigating" the web metaphor better. Instead of having a mouse as the pointing device, have a steering wheel as the directional control. High pagerank items can be on the primary roads while individuals' pages can be on side streets. Higher traffic levels would indicate more network traffic, speed and acceleration would be limited by the capabilities of the computer, and other strained metaphors.
But that comes back to the argument "designers could do such cool things if the customer weren't so old-fashioned."
So, yeah, maybe they could design a great computer UI, but the hard part is subtly shifting the current designs to slowly morph it into their end product without leaving anybody behind. Either that, or they've got to make a completely different product that doesn't even try to replace the existing computer and UI- but then that's describing any of the internet appliances or set top boxes that have come and gone in the past few years (then again, handhelds came and went for years before Palm's Pilot came on the market).
Given how an entertaiment system has actually caused a plane to crash, it's perfectly reasonable that the FAA wants anything wired into the aircraft to be certified.
Wireless, that's another story. Though I wonder what certification is required for the DC accessory jacks that many planes are now sprouting.
I've been saying all along that SIMMs are cheap (especially SDR- you probably don't need anything too fast). Just make a camera that has a number of SIMM slots (ruggedized, of course) and loops through the memory space. Then when you want to save anything, hit a button to actually save the last N minutes/megabytes/gigabytes to the PC Card, flag it as read-only for later downloading (to something like a 1394 hard drive... or video iPod :) and/or concurrently send it to the WAN-enabled server in the truck.
Yeah, if the battery dies then you've lost everything, but a small battery backup for the memory isn't that hard and with RAM- even DRAM and not SRAM- you're not drawing power as fast as you would be with HDD, flash, or optical so your main battery is going to last longer anyway. Okay, the storage mechanism probably isn't the biggest drain in the camera- the CCD and LCD are probably big power hogs.
I'd assume that for news reporters, most of the footage is shot and either edited in place or sent directly to the station for editing later. Yeah, a filesystem for saving and deleting takes would be helpful (if there isn't already one) and anything like RAM, flash, HDD, or optical are going to work well with that too. DRAM storage is optimal for the short, take-retake-send-straight-to-the-home-office usage pattern of news organizations.
The Register has an article about Samsung and IXI's Personal Mobile Gateways
Intel itself also has a low power 386 that RIM uses in their Blackberry. Considering that this thing is a two-way pager and can still last a while (insert handwaving here), I don't think the 386 uses that much power- not compared to the radio at least.
Just project onto a piece of foam. Make a small Thermarest pad and it can roll up into a pretty small ball.
:) A special matte or selectively retroreflective surface would also be good and it would be easy enough to emboss/stitch/whatever home key bumps on the foam too.
For projected keyboards, you might even have better accuracy if the surface deforms and reflects the light randomly (except for the issue of a finger being in the way
Do a Google search on "tanatlum shortage" and you'll see that there was a flury of articles about a year and a half ago. This prompted development of other electrolytic capacitors, one of which is the aluminum electrolyte that seems to be having problems.
I assume that it's only taken this long to find the problem due to the development time and time to qualify (ha!) and integrate these new caps onto boards. Needless to say, I guess they needed to develop the caps better, but they may have rushed to market since there was little else available (at a decent price).
And of course, the problem with doing that experiment was the even for Millikan's it was only selectively filtered data points that got published.
See this or this.
So there you go, an interesting experiment and insight into fraud when the experimenter knew what the results were supposed to be.
This just looks like a miniturized optical mouse fit onto the head of a pin erm... pen.
:) who developed the SmartQuill.
:)
Microsoft already has some experience with this kind of input method (sorry, link to original site is dead) when it got the researcher for BT (formerly British Telecom, as all the news articles say
So, I don't see how this laser pen is going to be any more revolutionary than the smartquill- the smartquill argueably has better accuracy since the laser pen (if it is a glorified optical mouse) cannot tell where the pen has been moved if it's off the "writing" surface, the smartquill doesn't even need a writing surface, and the smartquill could also easily have a cool scrolling display depending on how you tilt the unit.
The smartquill has been in development for over four years and still nothing has become of it- though maybe MS is biding its time for the right platform and application to come along (ie: handwriting recognition on a smartphone- but why would MS want to go into that market?
Wasn't there an unofficial (read: not really in the news, but the people who could do the most about it knew) boycot around that time?
:)
And the RIAA, which also knew about it conveniently forgets to mention it when they talk about depressed sales.
Of course, I think I first heard that here, so take it for what that's worth