When I read this article I was expecting to see another machine based on the ammonia absorption cycle. I was pleasantly surprised to see something new. This is interesting and should be followed to see if it becomes reality.
It's been possible to build an air-water condenser using the ammonia absorption cycle since the 1800s. Blow air across the cold outer surface and the heat exchange causes condensation. A gentleman proposed "oasis machines" which would be a condenser hidden in a decorative pool / fountain from which local villagers could draw water. It was self contained and needed no outside electricity, perhaps solar. He proposed it as a solution to providing water to villagers in Africa, etc. A poster above did mention the problem of the water lacking in mineral nutrients.
A clarification - I meant to say that the same type of glasses are used with the digital cinema projectors, but the technology is different. The projectors project a full frame in each polarization simultaneously, whereas the home theater sized LCD flat panel displays show left and right eyes on every other vertical line simultaneously. With the projection system, each eye has a full resolution image, and on the LCD each eye sees 1/2 vertical resolution, which is not an issue on a smaller display.
Guys, you don't want an autostereoscopic display based on lenticular imaging - basically the same thing you see on cracker jack prizes. There is no autostereoscopic display that looks anywhere near as good as polarized glasses or shutter glasses at 120hz or above. (60hz per eye) the resolution and viewing angles are simply too poor.
The current state of the art in personal 3D displays are LCD or plasma displays that have a polarizing layer on every other line, so you can view them with the nice, lightweight RealD style circularly polarized glasses - the same ones deployed with about 1,800 3D movie screens at the moment using the Sony XSRD digital cinema projectors. They look absolutely stunning. unfortunately for a 40" screen, it costs about $10,000. Hopefully they can get the manufacturing process down so that it is less expensive in the future. I imagine it is currently a very hands-on process of laying the strips down individually.
There is enough vertical resolution in full HD (1080 lines) that it looks DAMN good. I could not tell that each eye was only looking at an image with 1/2 the vertical resolution. The human brain is -very good- at putting together stereoscopic vision to give you something more than what you are looking at.
If they made a smaller version of the polarized LCD display that could fit on a laptop, it'd be a great thing for traveling demos.
I have seen a demo of realtime conversion - it actually works, but only about 80% good. Occasionally you'll see some problems. I saw a demo at NAB in April at Samsung's booth that blew my mind because it was actually that good, but it's still nothing compared to real stereoscopic capture. Basically it looks like a series of parallax planes, a step down from the real thing. But shockingly, it DOES work. My best guess is that it takes into account a variety of factors including haze and color, detail, dimensions and inference from motion.
I consider it to be a gimmick that distracts from real 3D content. It's -very- clever, but it is no substitute for real stereoscopic content.
On a personal level, we just planned a large camping trip for 19 people on Memorial Day Weekend through email, and it would have been a lot easier had we been able to conveniently embed maps and such into the conversation, and had it flow a little more real time.
On a business level, we have employees on two coasts and this might be a useful tool. Though how much of this is really P2P and how much of the data resides in the cloud? The encryption issue stated by a poster above is also a big one, and I would want all business related traffic encrypted.
Yes, that's exactly why it is so, the most people for the least cels. However, if you don't live in a big city (I don't) or are 'on the road' or like to travel around the rural areas and small towns of this great nation and have pretty consistent coverage, it's a poor option.
Japan is 100% 3G even in outlying areas, though I am sure NTT DoCoMo probably has a lot of Government subsidy and assistance to pull that off and is something of a monopoly. Still, the relative cost of cel service with unlimited data in Japan was pretty cheap last time I asked my friend in Tokyo.
It would be nice if one of the cel companies could figure out how to be like FedEx - i.e. offer to deliver to practically anywhere, knowing full well that the rural areas will be run at a loss on a # of subscribers per cel basis, with the urban subscribers making up for it.
Then there is the problem with the ultra-greenies here in CA, not even allowing a well disguised cel tower in areas such as big sur and the north coast, along Highway 1.
As above posters mentioned, AT&T's service always comes with so many strings that it's hardly worth paying for. Plus their high speed coverage generally only extends to large urban areas.
Anyone have any comments on Verizon's data service offerings? I'd potentially like to do a tethered modem or a MiFi type device. I'm tired of the iPhone and it's inability to anything truly useful without jailbreaking it.
I think it's OK that they started with the Voodoo era. That was the first major leap in no-nonsense 3D gaming accessible to anyone who could afford the card. I've been computing since the early 80s so I have a pretty good perspective on it.
I remember the first thing that blew my mind was Unreal, the single player game, then UT. The way the level designers used the card's features were great, along with a deep, rich color palette.
Wholeheartedly agree with poster. I read "Sheep" and it came off like a Hunter S. Thompson work. Pretty bizarre. Blade Runner the movie script was much more suited to moviemaking, it eliminated a lot of the unnecessary detail and focused on the core elements of the story. By then it was barely recognizable, but that's a very good thing. I think this is the best way to adapt a lot of sci fi work.
When you take books literally, you end up with Lord of the Rings, which is paced very slowly, and kind of drones on like an HBO miniseries with a bigger budget.
What would have been way better is a follow on to Shadow Warrior. SW was so damn funny with John Galt as the voice. I really, really wanted to see a modern SW game with more epic SW dialogue. Oh well.
"You want to wash wang? or you want to watch Wang wash wang?"
The iPhone is a nice technology demonstrator, but it's things like this that make it useless. Complete control over content, no tethering, no background apps, no user space that mounts as a USB thumbdrive, severely restricted syncing options (you can only sync to one computer, so if you want to load some stuff from your laptop on to your iphone while on the road, you have to erase everything you put on it with your desktop, for example.) No apps allowed that 'duplicate existing functionality' on the iPhone - meaning you have to wait for apple to fix the ongoing bugs in the mail client and Safari - namely that the mail client doesn't properly download POP3 messages even when you ask it to ("0 bytes remaining" and never displays the message unless it connects to Wifi) and Safari still has that dumb bug where it re-loads pages when you switch between windows. Painful when you're not on 3G.
There's a lot you can do with a hacked phone, but then you're missing out on everything else. It's kind of a lose-lose situation. It works well within its very limited scope, and if you're happy with that scope, it's a great product. If you want it to be more useful, it's deeply frustrating.
There's a pretty good write up of those days at MOS in the Rise and Fall of Commodore book that was reviewed here on Slashdot some time ago.
I'm glad the 6502 made the list, along with the 68000 that the Amiga used so well along with Paula, Agnes, Denise etc and its successors the 68020, 040 etc. 8088 of course, and the 555 still in use today as others have mentioned. SPARC was pretty big in its day. Z80. ARM1. Those are the ones that stick out in my head the most.
And yea the Crusoe, I dunno about that.
It's amazing how most of these names are not much more than a word or phrase in the eyes of most people born in the 1990s or late 1980s. To us older chickens they were almost breathing, anthropomorphic beings because of how tightly you could weave assembly code around them and take advantage of their physical properties, bugs and nuances to perform hacks. When computers stopped being quaint hobby machines, they lost their soul. Early steam engines were similar, with highly polished brass, brightwork and victorian scroll work, imbued with the personality of their creators. When the railroads got real big, they became commodities, were painted black and weren't assigned a crew for life, so there was no pride of ownership. Now we are in the the era of the Dell box...I don't build my own machines anymore because it doesn't make any financial sense.
Ever since battery technology made high performance, high fly time electrics possible, the indoor/outdoor electric RC genre has exploded.
One of the people who revolutionized this market is a friend of mine who runs wildrc.com. He invented a very durable electric flyer called the IFO. It's made of kite materials - rip stop polyester and carbon fiber rods. Just in the time that the IFO has been in existence, the batteries and motors have evolved so that his original 5 minute flight time has increased to the point where you get bored before the batteries run out - 20 mins to 1/2 hour in some cases.
Lots of people are experimenting with computer controlled flight, and on the high end you have companies like Aerovironment doing military UAVs and solar aircraft.
I remember visiting hobby shops in the 1980s and wishing there were more electric RC airplanes and helicopters, there was maybe one at the time and it had a 4 minute flying time. Everything R/C was also ridiculously expensive, especially the radios.
Windows XP was not a continuation of the 95-98-98SE-ME hybrid 16/32bit product line. It is a continuation of Windows NT->2K line, which was 32-bit pure and already very stable in comparison. Apples and oranges.
except for the fact that after I boot vista up on a 2GB machine, there's only a few hunded megs of RAM left. On XP, there's only a few hundred megs of ram USED after booting.
I immediately uninstalled it on a new PC after finding out what an unbelievable resource pig Vista is. Good lord.
XP is the most reliable and long lived OS they've ever made. Unfortunately XP32 cannot take advantage of 4GB+ of RAM, so its days are numbered.
Doesn't sound like there is any advantage to doing it this way, since you still have to use it with AT&T. I'd rather amortize some of the phone cost over the contract.
I won my iPhone in a contest, and that's the only reason I still have it, I didn't pay for it. The thing is a hamstrung, nerfed piece of junk thanks to Apple's very restrictive development and usage policies. I want something I can tether, and something that I can run apps in the background with, something I can use as a USB drive, etc. etc. Not the right thing for a geek. It's fine for the secretary crowd. Also, the original one I had died, and they replaced it for free, good on apple for that. Had they charged I wouldn't have bothered. It's an intriguing technology demonstration, but not very useful.
Compared to anything mentioned, the cleanest form of energy is nuclear power, all factors considered. It's the only thing we should be looking at in the long run as a primary source of power for the grid. Wind and solar are great for local uses but not on a large scale. They are incredibly land intensive for a very small output. A nuclear power plant's physical footprint for the power it generates is practically nil.
People just have to stop equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons, and realizing that modern reactors are far, far safer than reactors from half a century ago. Unfortunately, the United States has lost 30 or 40 years of reactor development time compared to other countries.
As usual, radical environmentalists are their own worst enemy. They advocate alternative energy, and then jump up and down when a new solar installation is built on a fictionally endangered habitat or a wind farm causes migratory bird strikes. You can't have it all ways.
You must find a viable replacement for fossil fuels before eliminating them or taxing them to death. Solar and wind alone are not a viable replacement at that scale.
We tried migrating a company with 40 users maybe three years ago, to Sun's boxed version. It was a complete and utter failure. Maybe it's gotten better now, but I'd be pretty weary. There were a thousand and one little incompatibilities. Plus some of our people use Excel for things god never intended it to do.
One thing is we deal with the government a lot, which always has the latest version of Office. Keeping up with that using non-MS software is pretty hard.
I think if your office only does very general word processing and spreadsheet use, it might work. But a lot of people have noted the powerpoint issues.
Basically, if it doesn't just work perfectly, it's a support nightmare. When we tried the experiment, I remember we'd author something, send it off, it'd come back with revisions from a customer with real MS office, we'd open it and it'd be all messed up, and that would happen going the other direction as well.
I don't think I'm ready to try that experiment any time soon. It's not worth the money saved, yet.
How would you decide who gets the money? Would you need to demonstrate suitable skill in coding first? There should be some sort of filtering criteria so the money isn't thrown away, especially since you are redistributing other people's wealth.
Perhaps some type of competition format for ideas would do best. Various private companies such as Google have done this, I believe.
I find it bizarre that no one did it before, because it is such an easy thing to do, to combine multiple inexpensive CCDs and a processor that manages the capture and recording of both, synced with a timing circuit.
I built my own digital stereo rig out of two old Sony U30s and used it for about a year until one of the cameras died.
It needs to be combined with a service where you send your pics in and get back stereo cards with a cardboard viewer. Those make great gifts and actually work very well. I would buy it in three seconds if it were on the market today. Lets hope this product gets made and sold.
If you want a much more comfortable viewing experience for a little bit of money, I recommend the Pokescope viewer. It's a marvelous little invention that not only has an ingenious folding design, but uses prisms instead of lenses so there's infinite focus.
I find free-viewing either parallel or cross-eye to be horrible and headache inducing. It's the same technique that's used to view those stereo scramble posters that were unfortunately popular for a while. It took a long time before I got the technique down, and I always hated it.
I spent years messing around with LCD shutter glasses and high end CRTs, but find for casual viewing the Pokescope is great.
Now that LCD panels are creeping back into the 120hz refresh range and with shorter persistence, LCD shutterglasses will once again become easier to use, but they remain expensive as they are not passive.
The best digital stereo display I ever saw was a prototype from Kodak at Siggraph maybe 5 years ago. They set up a pair of screens inside a box with a lensing and mirroring system as such that your eyes were relaxed and focused on infinity when viewing. It was a very expensive, high end device, but if you delt with stereo photography for a living, it would be a nice thing to have. I don't know that they ever made a product out of it.
Some folks in SF also came up with a method for printing polarized 3D images on an inkjet, was called stereojet. You could view the prints or backlit transparencies with passive polarized 3D glasses. I envisioned doing an art gallery show with all stereo prints, but the costs and time involved were too great for me at the time. I don't know if they are still offering stereojet printing services.
Slashdot Mirror
When I read this article I was expecting to see another machine based on the ammonia absorption cycle. I was pleasantly surprised to see something new. This is interesting and should be followed to see if it becomes reality.
It's been possible to build an air-water condenser using the ammonia absorption cycle since the 1800s. Blow air across the cold outer surface and the heat exchange causes condensation. A gentleman proposed "oasis machines" which would be a condenser hidden in a decorative pool / fountain from which local villagers could draw water. It was self contained and needed no outside electricity, perhaps solar. He proposed it as a solution to providing water to villagers in Africa, etc. A poster above did mention the problem of the water lacking in mineral nutrients.
A clarification - I meant to say that the same type of glasses are used with the digital cinema projectors, but the technology is different. The projectors project a full frame in each polarization simultaneously, whereas the home theater sized LCD flat panel displays show left and right eyes on every other vertical line simultaneously. With the projection system, each eye has a full resolution image, and on the LCD each eye sees 1/2 vertical resolution, which is not an issue on a smaller display.
Guys, you don't want an autostereoscopic display based on lenticular imaging - basically the same thing you see on cracker jack prizes. There is no autostereoscopic display that looks anywhere near as good as polarized glasses or shutter glasses at 120hz or above. (60hz per eye) the resolution and viewing angles are simply too poor.
The current state of the art in personal 3D displays are LCD or plasma displays that have a polarizing layer on every other line, so you can view them with the nice, lightweight RealD style circularly polarized glasses - the same ones deployed with about 1,800 3D movie screens at the moment using the Sony XSRD digital cinema projectors. They look absolutely stunning. unfortunately for a 40" screen, it costs about $10,000. Hopefully they can get the manufacturing process down so that it is less expensive in the future. I imagine it is currently a very hands-on process of laying the strips down individually.
There is enough vertical resolution in full HD (1080 lines) that it looks DAMN good. I could not tell that each eye was only looking at an image with 1/2 the vertical resolution. The human brain is -very good- at putting together stereoscopic vision to give you something more than what you are looking at.
If they made a smaller version of the polarized LCD display that could fit on a laptop, it'd be a great thing for traveling demos.
I have seen a demo of realtime conversion - it actually works, but only about 80% good. Occasionally you'll see some problems. I saw a demo at NAB in April at Samsung's booth that blew my mind because it was actually that good, but it's still nothing compared to real stereoscopic capture. Basically it looks like a series of parallax planes, a step down from the real thing. But shockingly, it DOES work. My best guess is that it takes into account a variety of factors including haze and color, detail, dimensions and inference from motion.
I consider it to be a gimmick that distracts from real 3D content. It's -very- clever, but it is no substitute for real stereoscopic content.
The first bootprint was likely obliterated by the lunar ascent engine exhaust on the way out. Hello!
On a personal level, we just planned a large camping trip for 19 people on Memorial Day Weekend through email, and it would have been a lot easier had we been able to conveniently embed maps and such into the conversation, and had it flow a little more real time.
On a business level, we have employees on two coasts and this might be a useful tool. Though how much of this is really P2P and how much of the data resides in the cloud? The encryption issue stated by a poster above is also a big one, and I would want all business related traffic encrypted.
Good stuff though, can't wait to play with it.
Yes, that's exactly why it is so, the most people for the least cels. However, if you don't live in a big city (I don't) or are 'on the road' or like to travel around the rural areas and small towns of this great nation and have pretty consistent coverage, it's a poor option.
Japan is 100% 3G even in outlying areas, though I am sure NTT DoCoMo probably has a lot of Government subsidy and assistance to pull that off and is something of a monopoly. Still, the relative cost of cel service with unlimited data in Japan was pretty cheap last time I asked my friend in Tokyo.
It would be nice if one of the cel companies could figure out how to be like FedEx - i.e. offer to deliver to practically anywhere, knowing full well that the rural areas will be run at a loss on a # of subscribers per cel basis, with the urban subscribers making up for it.
Then there is the problem with the ultra-greenies here in CA, not even allowing a well disguised cel tower in areas such as big sur and the north coast, along Highway 1.
As above posters mentioned, AT&T's service always comes with so many strings that it's hardly worth paying for. Plus their high speed coverage generally only extends to large urban areas.
Anyone have any comments on Verizon's data service offerings? I'd potentially like to do a tethered modem or a MiFi type device. I'm tired of the iPhone and it's inability to anything truly useful without jailbreaking it.
I think it's OK that they started with the Voodoo era. That was the first major leap in no-nonsense 3D gaming accessible to anyone who could afford the card. I've been computing since the early 80s so I have a pretty good perspective on it.
I remember the first thing that blew my mind was Unreal, the single player game, then UT. The way the level designers used the card's features were great, along with a deep, rich color palette.
Wholeheartedly agree with poster. I read "Sheep" and it came off like a Hunter S. Thompson work. Pretty bizarre. Blade Runner the movie script was much more suited to moviemaking, it eliminated a lot of the unnecessary detail and focused on the core elements of the story. By then it was barely recognizable, but that's a very good thing. I think this is the best way to adapt a lot of sci fi work.
When you take books literally, you end up with Lord of the Rings, which is paced very slowly, and kind of drones on like an HBO miniseries with a bigger budget.
What would have been way better is a follow on to Shadow Warrior. SW was so damn funny with John Galt as the voice. I really, really wanted to see a modern SW game with more epic SW dialogue. Oh well.
"You want to wash wang? or you want to watch Wang wash wang?"
The iPhone is a nice technology demonstrator, but it's things like this that make it useless. Complete control over content, no tethering, no background apps, no user space that mounts as a USB thumbdrive, severely restricted syncing options (you can only sync to one computer, so if you want to load some stuff from your laptop on to your iphone while on the road, you have to erase everything you put on it with your desktop, for example.) No apps allowed that 'duplicate existing functionality' on the iPhone - meaning you have to wait for apple to fix the ongoing bugs in the mail client and Safari - namely that the mail client doesn't properly download POP3 messages even when you ask it to ("0 bytes remaining" and never displays the message unless it connects to Wifi) and Safari still has that dumb bug where it re-loads pages when you switch between windows. Painful when you're not on 3G.
There's a lot you can do with a hacked phone, but then you're missing out on everything else. It's kind of a lose-lose situation. It works well within its very limited scope, and if you're happy with that scope, it's a great product. If you want it to be more useful, it's deeply frustrating.
There's a pretty good write up of those days at MOS in the Rise and Fall of Commodore book that was reviewed here on Slashdot some time ago.
I'm glad the 6502 made the list, along with the 68000 that the Amiga used so well along with Paula, Agnes, Denise etc and its successors the 68020, 040 etc. 8088 of course, and the 555 still in use today as others have mentioned. SPARC was pretty big in its day. Z80. ARM1. Those are the ones that stick out in my head the most.
And yea the Crusoe, I dunno about that.
It's amazing how most of these names are not much more than a word or phrase in the eyes of most people born in the 1990s or late 1980s. To us older chickens they were almost breathing, anthropomorphic beings because of how tightly you could weave assembly code around them and take advantage of their physical properties, bugs and nuances to perform hacks. When computers stopped being quaint hobby machines, they lost their soul. Early steam engines were similar, with highly polished brass, brightwork and victorian scroll work, imbued with the personality of their creators. When the railroads got real big, they became commodities, were painted black and weren't assigned a crew for life, so there was no pride of ownership. Now we are in the the era of the Dell box...I don't build my own machines anymore because it doesn't make any financial sense.
Good times to remember.
Ever since battery technology made high performance, high fly time electrics possible, the indoor/outdoor electric RC genre has exploded.
One of the people who revolutionized this market is a friend of mine who runs wildrc.com. He invented a very durable electric flyer called the IFO. It's made of kite materials - rip stop polyester and carbon fiber rods. Just in the time that the IFO has been in existence, the batteries and motors have evolved so that his original 5 minute flight time has increased to the point where you get bored before the batteries run out - 20 mins to 1/2 hour in some cases.
Lots of people are experimenting with computer controlled flight, and on the high end you have companies like Aerovironment doing military UAVs and solar aircraft.
I remember visiting hobby shops in the 1980s and wishing there were more electric RC airplanes and helicopters, there was maybe one at the time and it had a 4 minute flying time. Everything R/C was also ridiculously expensive, especially the radios.
Now 20+ years later my wishes came true...
Was his server also running on an iPhone?
Windows XP was not a continuation of the 95-98-98SE-ME hybrid 16/32bit product line. It is a continuation of Windows NT->2K line, which was 32-bit pure and already very stable in comparison. Apples and oranges.
except for the fact that after I boot vista up on a 2GB machine, there's only a few hunded megs of RAM left. On XP, there's only a few hundred megs of ram USED after booting.
I immediately uninstalled it on a new PC after finding out what an unbelievable resource pig Vista is. Good lord.
XP is the most reliable and long lived OS they've ever made. Unfortunately XP32 cannot take advantage of 4GB+ of RAM, so its days are numbered.
--M
Doesn't sound like there is any advantage to doing it this way, since you still have to use it with AT&T. I'd rather amortize some of the phone cost over the contract.
I won my iPhone in a contest, and that's the only reason I still have it, I didn't pay for it. The thing is a hamstrung, nerfed piece of junk thanks to Apple's very restrictive development and usage policies. I want something I can tether, and something that I can run apps in the background with, something I can use as a USB drive, etc. etc. Not the right thing for a geek. It's fine for the secretary crowd. Also, the original one I had died, and they replaced it for free, good on apple for that. Had they charged I wouldn't have bothered. It's an intriguing technology demonstration, but not very useful.
Compared to anything mentioned, the cleanest form of energy is nuclear power, all factors considered. It's the only thing we should be looking at in the long run as a primary source of power for the grid. Wind and solar are great for local uses but not on a large scale. They are incredibly land intensive for a very small output. A nuclear power plant's physical footprint for the power it generates is practically nil.
People just have to stop equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons, and realizing that modern reactors are far, far safer than reactors from half a century ago. Unfortunately, the United States has lost 30 or 40 years of reactor development time compared to other countries.
As usual, radical environmentalists are their own worst enemy. They advocate alternative energy, and then jump up and down when a new solar installation is built on a fictionally endangered habitat or a wind farm causes migratory bird strikes. You can't have it all ways.
You must find a viable replacement for fossil fuels before eliminating them or taxing them to death. Solar and wind alone are not a viable replacement at that scale.
We tried migrating a company with 40 users maybe three years ago, to Sun's boxed version. It was a complete and utter failure. Maybe it's gotten better now, but I'd be pretty weary. There were a thousand and one little incompatibilities. Plus some of our people use Excel for things god never intended it to do.
One thing is we deal with the government a lot, which always has the latest version of Office. Keeping up with that using non-MS software is pretty hard.
I think if your office only does very general word processing and spreadsheet use, it might work. But a lot of people have noted the powerpoint issues.
Basically, if it doesn't just work perfectly, it's a support nightmare. When we tried the experiment, I remember we'd author something, send it off, it'd come back with revisions from a customer with real MS office, we'd open it and it'd be all messed up, and that would happen going the other direction as well.
I don't think I'm ready to try that experiment any time soon. It's not worth the money saved, yet.
How would you decide who gets the money? Would you need to demonstrate suitable skill in coding first? There should be some sort of filtering criteria so the money isn't thrown away, especially since you are redistributing other people's wealth.
Perhaps some type of competition format for ideas would do best. Various private companies such as Google have done this, I believe.
Here's the official page for it: http://www.fujifilm.com/products/digital_cameras/topics/2008/0922_02.html
Someone FINALLY decided to do a proper, twin lens stereo camera. Fuji announced a prototype at Photokina this year:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0809/08092209fujifilm3D.asp
I find it bizarre that no one did it before, because it is such an easy thing to do, to combine multiple inexpensive CCDs and a processor that manages the capture and recording of both, synced with a timing circuit.
I built my own digital stereo rig out of two old Sony U30s and used it for about a year until one of the cameras died.
It needs to be combined with a service where you send your pics in and get back stereo cards with a cardboard viewer. Those make great gifts and actually work very well. I would buy it in three seconds if it were on the market today. Lets hope this product gets made and sold.
--Mike
If you want a much more comfortable viewing experience for a little bit of money, I recommend the Pokescope viewer. It's a marvelous little invention that not only has an ingenious folding design, but uses prisms instead of lenses so there's infinite focus.
I find free-viewing either parallel or cross-eye to be horrible and headache inducing. It's the same technique that's used to view those stereo scramble posters that were unfortunately popular for a while. It took a long time before I got the technique down, and I always hated it.
I spent years messing around with LCD shutter glasses and high end CRTs, but find for casual viewing the Pokescope is great.
Now that LCD panels are creeping back into the 120hz refresh range and with shorter persistence, LCD shutterglasses will once again become easier to use, but they remain expensive as they are not passive.
The best digital stereo display I ever saw was a prototype from Kodak at Siggraph maybe 5 years ago. They set up a pair of screens inside a box with a lensing and mirroring system as such that your eyes were relaxed and focused on infinity when viewing. It was a very expensive, high end device, but if you delt with stereo photography for a living, it would be a nice thing to have. I don't know that they ever made a product out of it.
Some folks in SF also came up with a method for printing polarized 3D images on an inkjet, was called stereojet. You could view the prints or backlit transparencies with passive polarized 3D glasses. I envisioned doing an art gallery show with all stereo prints, but the costs and time involved were too great for me at the time. I don't know if they are still offering stereojet printing services.