I have some video display code that currently uses triangle strips. I'm planning to change to quads so that geometry correction can be done more easily in my app. I could certainly do it with triangles, but it's just a lot easier with quads. This is used on workstation machines so I'm hoping (although I haven't dived into it yet) that the driver, rather than the hardware, won't have to re-work everything piece by piece.
The interstate highway system in the US was built by the government to increase bandwidth on the highways. It made it much easier to get lots of cars and trucks across the country cheaply, and did in fact create a lot of jobs both for the highway workers as well as auto workers. Making the automobile an unalienable right seemed like a good idea in the 50's with 30 cent gas; now, maybe not so much.
The last 30 years or so have made it seem that we might have been better off going more slowly and letting the market decide if highways were better than rail or possibly other transport systems that never got to see the light of day due to unrealistically inexpensive highway travel. It's seems equally obvious at this point in time that more internet bandwidth is also an unalienable right. On the other hand, it's hard to say what unintended consequences might come from mandating perhaps unrealistically inexpensive bandwidth for communications.
I can't think of any reason why cheap unlimited internet bandwidth might be counterproductive. On the other hand cheap unlimited travel seemed like a good idea 60 years ago before pollution and energy became the problems they are now. I think we should pay for the bits we use now at a realistic market rate that isn't skewed by mixing the price of content along with the price of bandwidth to make it seem cheaper.
I was very excited to see this come out & watched it within hours of release. Unfortunately, the very first scene has some of the worst acting/directing I've ever seen. Sure they're teenage actors and this is really a technology demo, not a film for the masses, but it wouldn't have taken much to get this small part right. As soon as I saw that 15 second section I nearly shut if off. I'm glad I didn't because the tech stuff was very interesting, but only to geeks.
While you can argue for hours over what the film does and doesn't get right, it simply is not on the same level as Big Buck Bunny. Everyone I show that to loves it, kids and adults alike, and it gives me the opportunity to talk about open source principles to people who would never know this sort of thing exists.
I would never be able to show this film to people and get that effect because it is in fact just like many Hollywood movies: good effects, but awful writing, directing and acting. It looks like something made by geeks with too much spare time while Big Buck Bunny looks like an old time Disney or Looney Tunes short film: funny and thoughtful with perfect timing.
I'm very sorry to say that this film is a showcase of people's stereotype of geeks.
I guess it's old news, but this sounds exactly like what was being described in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. Actors there were paid to read/act short pieces of text/commands to reply to a young girl's questions. In the story, the girl was asking a book to explain a concept to her. Not much different from what happens with a chatbot.
I guess this might also relate to the earlier post on online math courses. Presumably grad students could be given micropayments to answer specific questions for an online course that the teacher doesn't have the time/inclination to answer.
My real concern in using this sort of thing for important information/decisions is how the answers get moderated quickly. Wikipedia has a pretty good, though certainly not perfect, way to deal with this, but it's not necessarily fast enough for real time issues.
FM has also been extremely vocal about vp8/webm. While I'm the format certainly has its problems, both technical and legal, I can't help but believe the slow advance of the project is at least partly because a supposed expert on open source spent a lot of his time ranting about it.
I am far from unbiased on the situation since the I feel an unencumbered video codec would make the world a better place. Even knowing my bias, I can't help but be really upset at this revelation. On the other hand all's fair in love & war, so Oracle has a right to hire a shill to promote their agenda.
Maybe the real culprit in this is the wider web's need to have an expert, even a self proclaimed one, tell people what to do so they don't have to do all the work to find the truth themselves.
Nice. I did the same thing but I had blocked it out of my memory. I had really forgotten about Gazette and the long listings of code you could type in from the magazine. I'll have to check the basement to see if I have any of them left. I found it really hard to throw that stuff away. I know I still have a 64 down there with an old vic20 keyboard I had mounted and wired in through a multipin connector hot glued into the side of the c64's case. I thought I was one cool cat with a keyboard I could sit back in my chair with. I wasn't afraid to take it apart and just try things with it. I guess it really did change my life.
Actually high cellulose content products don't work much at all. You need a high nitrogen content material (poop is the preferred material, ideally bird stuff because it contains the urine as well). There is a particular ratio of carbon to nitrogen that works best and by using various combinations of poop and different vegetable matter you get a mixture that gives the most methane and the least CO2. Vegetable leaf matter by itself will work, slowly, but produces a much higher CO2 to methane ratio so is not very useful for combustion. I assume that actual fruit and vegatables have higher nitrogen content than the leaves.
I built a few methane digesters in the 70's and I can tell you that it's not as easy as it sounds to actually produce useful amounts of methane. There is a lot of continuous mixing that has to happen or thick viscous mats form and keep things from working right. This consumes energy. You also can't really compress methane much without using more energy to compress it than you get out of it.
Of course if it's armageddon and you have lots of pig poop & crazy midgets to run things, this could actually work.
I think this sort of thing could find a lot of use in school programs, whether robotics, engineering or programming courses. Schools would like the MS part and being able to use a "high level" language would make it popular to supplement some programming courses. MS would certainly cut deals on price to get the schools involved.
While all of us here know that it's really simple to program an arduino, or propeller, or for that matter a pic with assembler, I think schools will be able to more easily justify an expense if MS is behind it along with a.net api. While I would prefer them to take a different approach, anything that will get kids into tinkering with home made projects is a very very good thing.
I have a fair amount of experience with assembler and some limited c programming on microcontrollers (mostly pic, but some propeller), but I sometimes wish I could just knock off a quick proof of concept with an easy language and a board with enough power & memory that I don't have to worry too much about how I do things. I'd likely never do that for a real project, but in the end the most important/expensive thing is my time.
If a tool is appropriate for a particular job, I don't think you should lose sleep over whose name is on the box. This is the main reason I rely mostly on open source solutions, and also why I sometimes use closed, propriety ones.
In Kurt Vonnegut's 1997 novel Hocus Pocus, the United States is brought to its knees financially by a company called Microsecond Arbitrage. Everyone invests through them and makes lots of money until a glitch happens and someone else's computer is faster that day. Then the entire country loses its shirt.
Pat Metheny is touring now with a "robot band" on his Orchestrion tour. There are a couple videos on the web and a fairly good writeup on Wired: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/01/robot-band-backs-pat-metheny-on-orchestrion-tour
Pat's website has more info about his reasons for this approach: http://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/
Not much tech weenie info, but pretty interesting for the musically minded.
We're a small AV company, 8 employees, and even we have 40-50 wireless mics. We got rid of our old ones and bought new ones that were all in the allegedly safe bands. However, even though we don't have to worry about breaking the law, now we will never really be able to know if the mics will actually work in any given location.
We travel a lot to convention locations around the country. While the databases that the FCC talks about sound nice, in practice they simply do not exist in any meaningful way. There is no one out there asking us to input our frequencies into a DB somewhere, and even if there was, it wouldn't help when we travel.
We will, of course, invest in spectrum analyzers we can take on the road, but even then we won't know if someone powers up after we've done our sweep and settled on frequencies. This is a big problem because if a mic goes out on the CEO of a big company we may have to comp a portion, or all, of a show to keep them happy.
I'm happy to have better wireless communications available, but it won't come without a big cost to us and companies like us.
VRML was hurt by people expecting to see cyberspace like in the movies. The actual reality was that it was a way to do simple visualizations when you didn't have the horsepower to do it "for real". I still believe that even with all its warts, it was a terrific piece of work for its time period. .
My current (and very talented) designers spend hours producing scenes that can barely be properly viewed on quad core, gigabyte graphics card machines. The scenes are beautifully detailed and very pretty, but I can't seem to get through to them that there is also a place for extremely basic quick "sketches" for mundane functional uses - we do audio visual work and use visualization for planning purposes.
. More than ten years ago, VRML, along with some simple java code for creating it automatically from a 2D sketch, allowed me to, in less than an hour, create a fly through that would run comfortably on a 486 with a 16 MB graphics card. I wouldn't begin to put the simple textures from that up to the beautiful work done today, but it got the job done.
Where did the black holes come from, after only a billion years since the big bang? I think most stars survive for a few billion years before possibly contracting & maybe forming a black hole.
Did these early black holes form in a different way?
It may be that the tubes are used with concentrating reflectors, so that the back side is in fact the highest output and the front side is just a little extra from the direct illumination. The tube design would also allow a fluid to be circulated to pick up any heat gain that would go along with the concentrating reflectors.
suggests that it's something like an "analog" digital potentiometer. There was some experimentation for a while (and I guess still is) using analog computers and circuits that work like this.
The first computer I ever built was simply 3 potentiometers and an analog milliammeter (circa 1969). Setting two of the pots to particular positions on a dial would cause the meter to move up. The third pot was turned until the meter went back to zero. The dial on that pot then showed the "answer". It could be used to do simple multiplication and division.
I suppose those pots did in fact hold a sort of "memory". The memristor would probably be most useful for sensors and the type of "computation" I mentioned above.
You really need to decide exactly what you want to end up with before you start talking about how to start. The point of all this is to have something to show people.
Will you stream it from the web? -- I doubt you'll be able to stream high def very well
Will you distribute DVDs? -- There's not much use for HD here for a while
Will you show it at trade shows? -- Renting an HD deck & plasma will be extremely pricey
For a real world solution, go to an Audio Visual company and rent a "Folsom ImageProHD" scan converter. Use that to dump it as Component, Standard Def video into a DVCAM or miniDV deck and then edit that as you would any other video. The ImagePro is an extremely high quality scan converter. You should be able to rent it for about $500 a day, plus about $100 a day for a good component input DV deck. The quality will be very good and anyone can look at the finished product.
If you're really stuck on HD, the ImagePro will also output various HD formats. I rent these units regularly in my work (they go for between $8K & $12K depending on the model) and they are great.
Don't get too caught up on theoretical quality issues. I see people do it all the time, and they waste a lot of money that would be better spent on beer. IMHO
can be a very bad thing with power over ethernet. I suppose most equipment would be ok with power on the wrong pins since it's probably 5v anyway. However, some equipment (such as cat5 audio/video distribution boxes) aren't usually made to handle power at the wrong place or even worse, if it's at 12v. For the correct app, it's really convenient, but I think "universal power supply" is a little optimistic.
While this is pretty impressive stuff, I think we should be wary of how it gets "information" to digest and correlate. If it gets high quality, well researched articles, it will potentially be a great tool to get the "highlights" on a subject and provide a starting point for your own research. However, if it is given less qualified articles to index, it will develop a poor and possibly perverse view of a given subject. Poorly informed people tend to talk the loudest and longest, so I'm concerned about a "finder of fact" set loose on the internet. Likewise I'm concerned about that same "finder of fact" given a limited set of information filtered by people, even if they're well meaning.
I suppose this is true of all information gathering, computerized or not. It's the potential efficiency of a system like this that scares me.
You should be able to get a decent projector for $1500 - $3000 depending on what your tastes are. The most important thing is to actually look at lots of projectors in stores that are showing what you want to watch, whether it be broadcast sports, widescreen DVD movies, or computer games. Don't get a used one, save up for another few months and buy a new one. New bulbs cost $300-$600 and the brightness drops drastically after about half the bulbs rated life (the rated life varies a lot, but a bulb should last a couple years unless you never leave your house...
If you're only interested in regular video, not computer projection or HDTV, the resolution of the projector is a red herring. If not, get a 1024x768 res unit.
Most people seem to think DLP style projectors have a better video image and LCD style projectors have a better computer image. LCD styles have a very high black level (a black image is dark gray on the screen) whereas DLP have a nice black. Again, this is more important for video than computer images. Just remember a good LCD projector is going to look better than a fair DLP projector no matter what, so use your eyes when shopping.
Don't get anything with less than 1000 lumens brightness. Around 1500 is probably OK for up to a 5' wide screen if you don't keep the lights up too high. Much more than 2000 is probably wasted unless you have a very big screen or want to use it somewhere in addition to your living room.
HDTV is hard to figure out. Many projectors say they handle it, but it's usually scan converted down inside the projector since 1080i is a bit over 1900 pixels wide and even 720p is 1280 pixels wide, so unless you have at least a 1280x1024 projector, the whole HDTV thing is a little bit of a sales con. If HD is important to you, you should look at the higher resolution units. As I said, look at it in the store. If it looks good to you, that's all that matters.
Analog will certainly not go away, but it's usefulness will be kept to certain areas such as where the relative security of a switched circuit (to the extent that those actually exist any more) is imortant. Also don't forget that most people in the world don't own computers or have connections capable of audio/video conferencing.
However, for small businesses, this is a great thing. I'd just like to see a system where linux users could a/v chat with windows/mac users without the other users having to be gurus. I've tried getting some people with home offices to work with me via a/v conferencing, but most of them find it excruciatingly difficult to install a plugin to their browser, much less set up an h323 application.
I'd like to hear from anyone successfully doing this with anyone other than another geek.
I'd also like to plug elo touchsystems. I used one of their systems quite a few years ago (a modified 21" mitsu monitor using their acoustic wave technology) for a project. I was in way over my head and they were very helpful. The product still works after some very serious abuse.
I have one of the units. The developers kit comes with a touch sensitive lcd screen. The "html" you write just makes buttons and things on the lcd for you to interact with.
When you "click" a button on the touch screen, a string of several bytes representing one of up to 255 commands is sent to whatever device you connect the amulet unit to. All the amulet does is convert a touch on the lcd screen to a number and send it out serially.
While it's certainly a nifty thing, and I actually have a use for it (custom control of some A/V gear), I think the whole thing is a little over hyped, not that we aren't used to that...
ps - it's not just for medical devices. You can control your garbage disposal with it if you're so inclined.
Slashdot Mirror
I have some video display code that currently uses triangle strips. I'm planning to change to quads so that geometry correction can be done more easily in my app. I could certainly do it with triangles, but it's just a lot easier with quads. This is used on workstation machines so I'm hoping (although I haven't dived into it yet) that the driver, rather than the hardware, won't have to re-work everything piece by piece.
I believe that was Steven Wright, but whoever said it was correct
70% of students have LaTeX installed?
The interstate highway system in the US was built by the government to increase bandwidth on the highways. It made it much easier to get lots of cars and trucks across the country cheaply, and did in fact create a lot of jobs both for the highway workers as well as auto workers. Making the automobile an unalienable right seemed like a good idea in the 50's with 30 cent gas; now, maybe not so much.
The last 30 years or so have made it seem that we might have been better off going more slowly and letting the market decide if highways were better than rail or possibly other transport systems that never got to see the light of day due to unrealistically inexpensive highway travel. It's seems equally obvious at this point in time that more internet bandwidth is also an unalienable right. On the other hand, it's hard to say what unintended consequences might come from mandating perhaps unrealistically inexpensive bandwidth for communications.
I can't think of any reason why cheap unlimited internet bandwidth might be counterproductive. On the other hand cheap unlimited travel seemed like a good idea 60 years ago before pollution and energy became the problems they are now. I think we should pay for the bits we use now at a realistic market rate that isn't skewed by mixing the price of content along with the price of bandwidth to make it seem cheaper.
I was very excited to see this come out & watched it within hours of release. Unfortunately, the very first scene has some of the worst acting/directing I've ever seen. Sure they're teenage actors and this is really a technology demo, not a film for the masses, but it wouldn't have taken much to get this small part right. As soon as I saw that 15 second section I nearly shut if off. I'm glad I didn't because the tech stuff was very interesting, but only to geeks.
While you can argue for hours over what the film does and doesn't get right, it simply is not on the same level as Big Buck Bunny. Everyone I show that to loves it, kids and adults alike, and it gives me the opportunity to talk about open source principles to people who would never know this sort of thing exists.
I would never be able to show this film to people and get that effect because it is in fact just like many Hollywood movies: good effects, but awful writing, directing and acting. It looks like something made by geeks with too much spare time while Big Buck Bunny looks like an old time Disney or Looney Tunes short film: funny and thoughtful with perfect timing.
I'm very sorry to say that this film is a showcase of people's stereotype of geeks.
I guess it's old news, but this sounds exactly like what was being described in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. Actors there were paid to read/act short pieces of text/commands to reply to a young girl's questions. In the story, the girl was asking a book to explain a concept to her. Not much different from what happens with a chatbot.
I guess this might also relate to the earlier post on online math courses. Presumably grad students could be given micropayments to answer specific questions for an online course that the teacher doesn't have the time/inclination to answer.
My real concern in using this sort of thing for important information/decisions is how the answers get moderated quickly. Wikipedia has a pretty good, though certainly not perfect, way to deal with this, but it's not necessarily fast enough for real time issues.
FM has also been extremely vocal about vp8/webm. While I'm the format certainly has its problems, both technical and legal, I can't help but believe the slow advance of the project is at least partly because a supposed expert on open source spent a lot of his time ranting about it.
I am far from unbiased on the situation since the I feel an unencumbered video codec would make the world a better place. Even knowing my bias, I can't help but be really upset at this revelation. On the other hand all's fair in love & war, so Oracle has a right to hire a shill to promote their agenda.
Maybe the real culprit in this is the wider web's need to have an expert, even a self proclaimed one, tell people what to do so they don't have to do all the work to find the truth themselves.
Nice. I did the same thing but I had blocked it out of my memory. I had really forgotten about Gazette and the long listings of code you could type in from the magazine. I'll have to check the basement to see if I have any of them left. I found it really hard to throw that stuff away. I know I still have a 64 down there with an old vic20 keyboard I had mounted and wired in through a multipin connector hot glued into the side of the c64's case. I thought I was one cool cat with a keyboard I could sit back in my chair with. I wasn't afraid to take it apart and just try things with it. I guess it really did change my life.
Actually high cellulose content products don't work much at all. You need a high nitrogen content material (poop is the preferred material, ideally bird stuff because it contains the urine as well). There is a particular ratio of carbon to nitrogen that works best and by using various combinations of poop and different vegetable matter you get a mixture that gives the most methane and the least CO2. Vegetable leaf matter by itself will work, slowly, but produces a much higher CO2 to methane ratio so is not very useful for combustion. I assume that actual fruit and vegatables have higher nitrogen content than the leaves.
I built a few methane digesters in the 70's and I can tell you that it's not as easy as it sounds to actually produce useful amounts of methane. There is a lot of continuous mixing that has to happen or thick viscous mats form and keep things from working right. This consumes energy. You also can't really compress methane much without using more energy to compress it than you get out of it.
Of course if it's armageddon and you have lots of pig poop & crazy midgets to run things, this could actually work.
I think this sort of thing could find a lot of use in school programs, whether robotics, engineering or programming courses. Schools would like the MS part and being able to use a "high level" language would make it popular to supplement some programming courses. MS would certainly cut deals on price to get the schools involved.
While all of us here know that it's really simple to program an arduino, or propeller, or for that matter a pic with assembler, I think schools will be able to more easily justify an expense if MS is behind it along with a .net api. While I would prefer them to take a different approach, anything that will get kids into tinkering with home made projects is a very very good thing.
I have a fair amount of experience with assembler and some limited c programming on microcontrollers (mostly pic, but some propeller), but I sometimes wish I could just knock off a quick proof of concept with an easy language and a board with enough power & memory that I don't have to worry too much about how I do things. I'd likely never do that for a real project, but in the end the most important/expensive thing is my time.
If a tool is appropriate for a particular job, I don't think you should lose sleep over whose name is on the box. This is the main reason I rely mostly on open source solutions, and also why I sometimes use closed, propriety ones.
In Kurt Vonnegut's 1997 novel Hocus Pocus, the United States is brought to its knees financially by a company called Microsecond Arbitrage. Everyone invests through them and makes lots of money until a glitch happens and someone else's computer is faster that day. Then the entire country loses its shirt.
Word to the wise.....
I feel so dirty when I agree with Steve Jobs.
Pat Metheny is touring now with a "robot band" on his Orchestrion tour. There are a couple videos on the web and a fairly good writeup on Wired: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/01/robot-band-backs-pat-metheny-on-orchestrion-tour
Pat's website has more info about his reasons for this approach: http://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/
Not much tech weenie info, but pretty interesting for the musically minded.
We're a small AV company, 8 employees, and even we have 40-50 wireless mics. We got rid of our old ones and bought new ones that were all in the allegedly safe bands. However, even though we don't have to worry about breaking the law, now we will never really be able to know if the mics will actually work in any given location.
We travel a lot to convention locations around the country. While the databases that the FCC talks about sound nice, in practice they simply do not exist in any meaningful way. There is no one out there asking us to input our frequencies into a DB somewhere, and even if there was, it wouldn't help when we travel.
We will, of course, invest in spectrum analyzers we can take on the road, but even then we won't know if someone powers up after we've done our sweep and settled on frequencies. This is a big problem because if a mic goes out on the CEO of a big company we may have to comp a portion, or all, of a show to keep them happy.
I'm happy to have better wireless communications available, but it won't come without a big cost to us and companies like us.
VRML was hurt by people expecting to see cyberspace like in the movies. The actual reality was that it was a way to do simple visualizations when you didn't have the horsepower to do it "for real". I still believe that even with all its warts, it was a terrific piece of work for its time period.
.
My current (and very talented) designers spend hours producing scenes that can barely be properly viewed on quad core, gigabyte graphics card machines. The scenes are beautifully detailed and very pretty, but I can't seem to get through to them that there is also a place for extremely basic quick "sketches" for mundane functional uses - we do audio visual work and use visualization for planning purposes.
.
More than ten years ago, VRML, along with some simple java code for creating it automatically from a 2D sketch, allowed me to, in less than an hour, create a fly through that would run comfortably on a 486 with a 16 MB graphics card. I wouldn't begin to put the simple textures from that up to the beautiful work done today, but it got the job done.
Where did the black holes come from, after only a billion years since the big bang? I think most stars survive for a few billion years before possibly contracting & maybe forming a black hole.
Did these early black holes form in a different way?
It may be that the tubes are used with concentrating reflectors, so that the back side is in fact the highest output and the front side is just a little extra from the direct illumination. The tube design would also allow a fluid to be circulated to pick up any heat gain that would go along with the concentrating reflectors.
suggests that it's something like an "analog" digital potentiometer. There was some experimentation for a while (and I guess still is) using analog computers and circuits that work like this.
The first computer I ever built was simply 3 potentiometers and an analog milliammeter (circa 1969). Setting two of the pots to particular positions on a dial would cause the meter to move up. The third pot was turned until the meter went back to zero. The dial on that pot then showed the "answer". It could be used to do simple multiplication and division.
I suppose those pots did in fact hold a sort of "memory". The memristor would probably be most useful for sensors and the type of "computation" I mentioned above.
You really need to decide exactly what you want to end up with before you start talking about how to start. The point of all this is to have something to show people.
Will you stream it from the web? -- I doubt you'll be able to stream high def very well
Will you distribute DVDs? -- There's not much use for HD here for a while
Will you show it at trade shows? -- Renting an HD deck & plasma will be extremely pricey
For a real world solution, go to an Audio Visual company and rent a "Folsom ImageProHD" scan converter. Use that to dump it as Component, Standard Def video into a DVCAM or miniDV deck and then edit that as you would any other video. The ImagePro is an extremely high quality scan converter. You should be able to rent it for about $500 a day, plus about $100 a day for a good component input DV deck. The quality will be very good and anyone can look at the finished product.
If you're really stuck on HD, the ImagePro will also output various HD formats. I rent these units regularly in my work (they go for between $8K & $12K depending on the model) and they are great.
Don't get too caught up on theoretical quality issues. I see people do it all the time, and they waste a lot of money that would be better spent on beer. IMHO
can be a very bad thing with power over ethernet. I suppose most equipment would be ok with power on the wrong pins since it's probably 5v anyway. However, some equipment (such as cat5 audio/video distribution boxes) aren't usually made to handle power at the wrong place or even worse, if it's at 12v. For the correct app, it's really convenient, but I think "universal power supply" is a little optimistic.
While this is pretty impressive stuff, I think we should be wary of how it gets "information" to digest and correlate. If it gets high quality, well researched articles, it will potentially be a great tool to get the "highlights" on a subject and provide a starting point for your own research. However, if it is given less qualified articles to index, it will develop a poor and possibly perverse view of a given subject. Poorly informed people tend to talk the loudest and longest, so I'm concerned about a "finder of fact" set loose on the internet. Likewise I'm concerned about that same "finder of fact" given a limited set of information filtered by people, even if they're well meaning.
I suppose this is true of all information gathering, computerized or not. It's the potential efficiency of a system like this that scares me.
You should be able to get a decent projector for $1500 - $3000 depending on what your tastes are. The most important thing is to actually look at lots of projectors in stores that are showing what you want to watch, whether it be broadcast sports, widescreen DVD movies, or computer games. Don't get a used one, save up for another few months and buy a new one. New bulbs cost $300-$600 and the brightness drops drastically after about half the bulbs rated life (the rated life varies a lot, but a bulb should last a couple years unless you never leave your house ...
...
If you're only interested in regular video, not computer projection or HDTV, the resolution of the projector is a red herring. If not, get a 1024x768 res unit.
Most people seem to think DLP style projectors have a better video image and LCD style projectors have a better computer image. LCD styles have a very high black level (a black image is dark gray on the screen) whereas DLP have a nice black. Again, this is more important for video than computer images. Just remember a good LCD projector is going to look better than a fair DLP projector no matter what, so use your eyes when shopping.
Don't get anything with less than 1000 lumens brightness. Around 1500 is probably OK for up to a 5' wide screen if you don't keep the lights up too high. Much more than 2000 is probably wasted unless you have a very big screen or want to use it somewhere in addition to your living room.
HDTV is hard to figure out. Many projectors say they handle it, but it's usually scan converted down inside the projector since 1080i is a bit over 1900 pixels wide and even 720p is 1280 pixels wide, so unless you have at least a 1280x1024 projector, the whole HDTV thing is a little bit of a sales con. If HD is important to you, you should look at the higher resolution units. As I said, look at it in the store. If it looks good to you, that's all that matters.
Good luck, I wish I could afford one
Analog will certainly not go away, but it's usefulness will be kept to certain areas such as where the relative security of a switched circuit (to the extent that those actually exist any more) is imortant. Also don't forget that most people in the world don't own computers or have connections capable of audio/video conferencing.
However, for small businesses, this is a great thing. I'd just like to see a system where linux users could a/v chat with windows/mac users without the other users having to be gurus. I've tried getting some people with home offices to work with me via a/v conferencing, but most of them find it excruciatingly difficult to install a plugin to their browser, much less set up an h323 application.
I'd like to hear from anyone successfully doing this with anyone other than another geek.
I'd also like to plug elo touchsystems. I used one of their systems quite a few years ago (a modified 21" mitsu monitor using their acoustic wave technology) for a project. I was in way over my head and they were very helpful. The product still works after some very serious abuse.
I have one of the units. The developers kit comes with a touch sensitive lcd screen. The "html" you write just makes buttons and things on the lcd for you to interact with.
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When you "click" a button on the touch screen, a string of several bytes representing one of up to 255 commands is sent to whatever device you connect the amulet unit to. All the amulet does is convert a touch on the lcd screen to a number and send it out serially.
While it's certainly a nifty thing, and I actually have a use for it (custom control of some A/V gear), I think the whole thing is a little over hyped, not that we aren't used to that
ps - it's not just for medical devices. You can control your garbage disposal with it if you're so inclined.