I think it's high time we start building many wearable computers with full video and souond. A bunch of geeks with these could help make sure the real footage is available. Steve Mann has alot to say on uses for wearable computers with video.
The Matrox Meteor II card in PC/104-Plus format with MJPEG compression doughter board could be used for capture. Storage could be to a set of 25GByte Travelstars from IBM. All the rest of the parts is old hat for wearable use. The only thing not there yet is the drivers for the Meteor II.
A Glasstron LDI-D100B (800x600) has different images for each eye, but it will set you back $4475 US. It uses a field sequential stereo rather than two video inputs. I'm not a fan of that, but then it's one of the cheeper units on the market. www.cgsd.com sells it as well as other Glasstron units.
The data I've seen on Glastron battery life leads me to belive they were created to eat batteries. For the SVGA unit in SVGA mode it chews 1500mA on a 7.4V battery.
Seams like a place to ask. I'm trying to track down details on the Mini PCI spec from PCI SIG. I just need gross details like size of board, connector used, etc. It's a spec to make daughter cards for laptops to a common standard so each manufacturer donsen't need their own format. Email me with them. I want this because over the weekend I came up with the idea of standard for motherboards and expansion cards for wearable computers. Wearable Board Standard My document sofar is rather slim, but it's a start with a bunch of ideas that all seam well founded.
I was at a new years party and one of the other geeks there needed to log into the systems at his work. So he fires up his laptop (provided by work). Jan 4th, 1980... It even had a Y2K ready sticker on it. We all had a bit of a laugh. As for the systems at work, all up and running fine. They were all UNIX boxes of one sort or another.
On the way home I went past one stoplight that was out. Don't know if it was Y2K related or not.
Thinking about how often a friends company web pages have been updated (two years out of date). I wonder how many of their customers will realize this long outtage has happened. The other thing with Windows being so flakey I wonder how many people will think this is busisness as usual. I wonder...
Does a private individual have the right to make a program that executes a proprietary algorithm, if they used a clean-room method to find this algorithm?
Yes, unless the algorithm is patented.
Not quite so. You can use any patented design you wish in anything you make so long as you don't try to sell or distribute it. The patent laws specifically allow this form of use. It is there so inventors can use pattented designs in new designs, or figure out new uses for previously existing designs. Our US pattent law was really setup as a means to make the designs of new devices available to others. As part of the bargin the original designer gets protection from others ripping off the design for a number of years. In exchange for that protection the designer has to publish the design thus allowing others to look at and learn from it.
If I were them I'd pick up the pieces and continue from where I left off. I would go on. This is only a minor setback. If you need cash, call in a few loans from friends and relatives, etc.
One thing to think about is if you buy windows solely so you can run tax software under it to do your taxes, then it should be countable as expenses related to tax preparation and as such deductable.
Forget the keyboard, use a chording style instead. With only one hand and chording one can do all possibly key combinations easily. No need for tactile feadback either. Keys are struck by relative positions of the fingers in relationship to each other. Each finger is capible of 3 easy to determin states (up, middle, down) and the thumb is capible of 5 states (up, down, left, right, middle) or more. That gives you 405 possible combinations. Not all are useable by all people as some people tend to move the pinky with the ring finger, but that can be worked around with alternate chords or finger training. To keep from typing while using the hand for other things, you asign a sequence of moves to turn on and off the keyboard. Like balling it into a fist or strumming the fingers in a wave pattern. To bad this was already patened a few years ago or I would have then.
Use gold contacts. You can also get fully sealed contacts. Get a DigiKey catalog, look through the contactsd section, they have waterproof contacts. Place all contacts on the bottom of the box so if they do develope a leak it still won't leak into the box. Take a look at a telephone company box on a telephone pole. They aren't even water proof. They are just designed to shead water well, and if water makes it into them, they have a clear path for it to exit without it going over any circutry. As for what I'd use, I'd look at using the heavy plastic electrical boxes designed for outdoor use. Grainger has them (you should be ale to order through them as the community or as a busisness).
My concerns: Heat, Power, Size, Antenna, Software.
Heat: You need to make sure the you have enough ability to get rid of the heat generated in them so they continue to work over the summer.
Power: Is this network supposed to continue to work if the power goes out? If so you will need some sort of battery backup. The other power issue is related to the heat generated... The more power hungry your system, the greater the heat load from the power supply. Use a good quality switching power supply, not a cheep PC one.
Size: The larger it is, the easier it is for someone to hit with a rock/etc. Also the more tempting it is as a target.
Antenna: Where will it be located? What type? If it is inside the box then the box can't be metal. If it is outside the box, then that requires yet another waterproof connector. If it has to be located on top of the box then that is a possible source of a leak. Make sure the internal antenna wire dosen't funnel water onto the PCB.
Software: What software are you going to run to provide the roaming abillity provided by the access points?
Things I would do:
Use all commodity parts that have atleast three different manufacturers that make them.
Try to find a manufacturer of RF Lan access points that has an environmentally hardened access point. If so use it, and forget the rest of this list, and possibly the triple source requirement too.
Keep the parts count down.
Look for components that can handle as wide of tempeture range as possible.
Use a Single Board Computer with PCMCIA card slot. Look for a board that has an analog to digital converter so you can hook up a thermalcouple and read the current tempeture. Digital output lines for controlling a small heater and air circulation fan. The parallel port or unused serial port can also provide digital output lines. Look for hardware monitering equipment like found on modern motherboards. This would be helpfull for detecting failures of one system (like the cooling fan or heater) that may lead to a more costly failure and service outtage latter.
Use all solid state design. This means using a flash memory disk instead of rotating. This is better for hot and cold conditions.
PCMCIA RF Lan card of commodity design that can use an external antenna.
Try to mount the antenna on the bottom side of the box if the box will be set with any altitude.
If needed look into having a heating element in the box to keep it's tempeture high enough in winter. Typically this can also be hooked into a dew sensor to warm the box to keep dew and frost from forming on it. Most electronics are specified for a non-condensing environment.
If summer heat will be a problem, use an alumimum enclosure and a fan to circulate air within the enclusure. If needed one can go to peltier junction heat pumps, but this is an increase in complexity and expense. It may be better/cheeper to get components that meet military tempeture specs.
When I first heard of digital movie theatres I wondered how they managed it. It looks like they didn't. It seams they have a bit of a ways to go yet before it's realistic. Something tells me they will have to quadruple the resolution before they get good enough images. They also still have the data nightmare to solve.
On the other hand I'm intrigued by the MaxiVision48 mentioned. That sounds promicing. It's still film, but it gets past the 24 frames per second flicker problem that keeps me out of the theatres.
Ignore the Y2K/Millenium / Linux zealots quip. This is very true. Almost everybody I know who has some sort of mental disorder also had problems as a child. They were abused by one or more of their parents, relatives, and or schoolmates. Think twice before you let somebody abuse some one else.
This formalizes in a better manner what I do than anything I've read before. I've always refered to attack vectors before. A sequence of steps to attack something is a vector. This allows for multiple vectors to converge at common points. It shows the commonalities between differnt attacks better. I would extend the design to allow more of a net type structure. One may start out on one path, but based on possibilities diverge on to one of a few different paths and eventually come back to the same path.
It's hard to squeeze a 100GByte address space into 2GByte chunks...
In my opinion if you go with 32bit CPUs in your cluster you get what you deserve. Go directly to 64bit CPUS, do not pass GO, do not try to save $200. In the long run it isn't worth it.
I think we need to start out with this very important question. What do you want to use it for? Depending on how you want to use it will determine the style of cluster you need. Each style has it's plusses and minuses. Some are better for batch processing, other are better at handling large amounts of interactive work. What do you need?
Just out of curiosity, if the school can identify those being bullied is it too much to ask that they step in to stop the bullying instead of attacking the victim thereby increasing the likelihood that the victim will feel marginalized, angry and violent. I know I would...
One needs to make the school administration know that this is the way to go. If I wasn't bullied constantly through grade school and high school I would never have had thoughts about killing some of my classmates. It's very plain and simple to me, the bullies need to be stopped.
Lego Mindstorms is only some assembly required. I'm personally working on the "all assembly required" version of robotics. For a beginner, Lego Mindstorms is great. I'm even considering getting a set or two for myself. For some of us nuts it's a little low in the programibility and speed area.
""You can say whatever you want, but if we don't like it you may disappear""
I'd rewrite this to.
You can say whatever you want, but we are listening.
Still allows for free speech, but kinda puts a damper on free expression. IMHO free expression is much more important than free speech as free speech is only a subset of free expression.
Not sure about this - where does it say I have to ship source to non purchasers? As far as I know, the GPL doesn't say anything about people I haven't sold to - there is nothing stopping me refusing to sell my binaries to anyone - I just can't stop any of my customers doing that.
It has been my understanding that this comes from section 3b of GNU Copyleft License.
"Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange ".
It's that "any third party" mention that makes this so.
Slashdot Mirror
I sugest the RedHat lawyers that did the SEC filing go after them for copyright infringment.
I think it's high time we start building many wearable computers with full video and souond. A bunch of geeks with these could help make sure the real footage is available. Steve Mann has alot to say on uses for wearable computers with video.
The Matrox Meteor II card in PC/104-Plus format with MJPEG compression doughter board could be used for capture. Storage could be to a set of 25GByte Travelstars from IBM. All the rest of the parts is old hat for wearable use. The only thing not there yet is the drivers for the Meteor II.
A Glasstron LDI-D100B (800x600) has different images for each eye, but it will set you back $4475 US. It uses a field sequential stereo rather than two video inputs. I'm not a fan of that, but then it's one of the cheeper units on the market. www.cgsd.com sells it as well as other Glasstron units.
The data I've seen on Glastron battery life leads me to belive they were created to eat batteries. For the SVGA unit in SVGA mode it chews 1500mA on a 7.4V battery.
Seams like a place to ask. I'm trying to track down details on the Mini PCI spec from PCI SIG. I just need gross details like size of board, connector used, etc. It's a spec to make daughter cards for laptops to a common standard so each manufacturer donsen't need their own format. Email me with them. I want this because over the weekend I came up with the idea of standard for motherboards and expansion cards for wearable computers. Wearable Board Standard My document sofar is rather slim, but it's a start with a bunch of ideas that all seam well founded.
I was at a new years party and one of the other geeks there needed to log into the systems at his work. So he fires up his laptop (provided by work). Jan 4th, 1980... It even had a Y2K ready sticker on it. We all had a bit of a laugh. As for the systems at work, all up and running fine. They were all UNIX boxes of one sort or another.
On the way home I went past one stoplight that was out. Don't know if it was Y2K related or not.
Thinking about how often a friends company web pages have been updated (two years out of date). I wonder how many of their customers will realize this long outtage has happened. The other thing with Windows being so flakey I wonder how many people will think this is busisness as usual. I wonder...
Make sure you are polite when you call.
Does a private individual have the right to make a program that executes a proprietary algorithm, if they used a clean-room method to find this algorithm?
Yes, unless the algorithm is patented.
Not quite so. You can use any patented design you wish in anything you make so long as you don't try to sell or distribute it. The patent laws specifically allow this form of use. It is there so inventors can use pattented designs in new designs, or figure out new uses for previously existing designs. Our US pattent law was really setup as a means to make the designs of new devices available to others. As part of the bargin the original designer gets protection from others ripping off the design for a number of years. In exchange for that protection the designer has to publish the design thus allowing others to look at and learn from it.
If I were them I'd pick up the pieces and continue from where I left off. I would go on. This is only a minor setback. If you need cash, call in a few loans from friends and relatives, etc.
One thing to think about is if you buy windows solely so you can run tax software under it to do your taxes, then it should be countable as expenses related to tax preparation and as such deductable.
Forget the keyboard, use a chording style instead. With only one hand and chording one can do all possibly key combinations easily. No need for tactile feadback either. Keys are struck by relative positions of the fingers in relationship to each other. Each finger is capible of 3 easy to determin states (up, middle, down) and the thumb is capible of 5 states (up, down, left, right, middle) or more. That gives you 405 possible combinations. Not all are useable by all people as some people tend to move the pinky with the ring finger, but that can be worked around with alternate chords or finger training. To keep from typing while using the hand for other things, you asign a sequence of moves to turn on and off the keyboard. Like balling it into a fist or strumming the fingers in a wave pattern. To bad this was already patened a few years ago or I would have then.
You can get PC/104 to PCMCIA adapter cards. Then you could use a PCMCIA radio lan card.
Use gold contacts. You can also get fully sealed contacts. Get a DigiKey catalog, look through the contactsd section, they have waterproof contacts. Place all contacts on the bottom of the box so if they do develope a leak it still won't leak into the box. Take a look at a telephone company box on a telephone pole. They aren't even water proof. They are just designed to shead water well, and if water makes it into them, they have a clear path for it to exit without it going over any circutry. As for what I'd use, I'd look at using the heavy plastic electrical boxes designed for outdoor use. Grainger has them (you should be ale to order through them as the community or as a busisness).
My concerns: Heat, Power, Size, Antenna, Software.
Things I would do:
When I first heard of digital movie theatres I wondered how they managed it. It looks like they didn't. It seams they have a bit of a ways to go yet before it's realistic. Something tells me they will have to quadruple the resolution before they get good enough images. They also still have the data nightmare to solve.
On the other hand I'm intrigued by the MaxiVision48 mentioned. That sounds promicing. It's still film, but it gets past the 24 frames per second flicker problem that keeps me out of the theatres.
Ignore the Y2K/Millenium / Linux zealots quip. This is very true. Almost everybody I know who has some sort of mental disorder also had problems as a child. They were abused by one or more of their parents, relatives, and or schoolmates. Think twice before you let somebody abuse some one else.
This formalizes in a better manner what I do than anything I've read before. I've always refered to attack vectors before. A sequence of steps to attack something is a vector. This allows for multiple vectors to converge at common points. It shows the commonalities between differnt attacks better. I would extend the design to allow more of a net type structure. One may start out on one path, but based on possibilities diverge on to one of a few different paths and eventually come back to the same path.
It's hard to squeeze a 100GByte address space into 2GByte chunks...
In my opinion if you go with 32bit CPUs in your cluster you get what you deserve. Go directly to 64bit CPUS, do not pass GO, do not try to save $200. In the long run it isn't worth it.
I think we need to start out with this very important question. What do you want to use it for? Depending on how you want to use it will determine the style of cluster you need. Each style has it's plusses and minuses. Some are better for batch processing, other are better at handling large amounts of interactive work. What do you need?
When I follow a link I use the middle mouse button to open a new window. The original stays where it was.
Just out of curiosity, if the school can identify those being bullied is it too much to ask that they step in to stop the bullying instead of attacking the victim thereby increasing the likelihood that the victim will feel marginalized, angry and violent. I know I would...
One needs to make the school administration know that this is the way to go. If I wasn't bullied constantly through grade school and high school I would never have had thoughts about killing some of my classmates. It's very plain and simple to me, the bullies need to be stopped.
Others who are doing robotics can be found via searches, or by following the links on most robotics clubs pages. I'm directly involved with Twin Cities Robotics. There are a bunch of others around the country, Portland Area Robotics (PARTS), Seattle Robotics Society (SRS), Triangle Amateur Robotics, Dallas Personal Robotics Group, Central Illinois Robot Club, Home Brew Robotics, and San Francisco Robotics Society of America to name a few.
""You can say whatever you want, but if we don't like it you may disappear""
I'd rewrite this to.
You can say whatever you want, but we are listening.
Still allows for free speech, but kinda puts a damper on free expression. IMHO free expression is much more important than free speech as free speech is only a subset of free expression.
Read the GPL and you will see how much it warrants the software will work... IE. none.
Not sure about this - where does it say I have to ship source to non purchasers? As far as I know, the GPL doesn't say anything about people I haven't sold to - there is nothing stopping me refusing to sell my binaries to anyone - I just can't stop any of my customers doing that.
It has been my understanding that this comes from section 3b of GNU Copyleft License.
"Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange ".
It's that "any third party" mention that makes this so.