There is a company called Titan Technologies which does this in real-time.
I saw them at the last Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco (although I think the actual group doing this stuff was from another company or a subsidiary of Titan). They were displaying a couple of very interesting systems. Both were based on a custom chip that took video streams in, and output the rotation, scaling, and translation factors needed to match up successive frames.
The first application was a scene painter/mosaic tool, which worked in real time. The other was a "video stabilizer/sharpener", which allowed you to stabilize jerky video, and composite successive frames together for increasing sharpness. The demo was based on videotape from a digital video camera, taken from a car, and stabilizing video of a truck they were following. It was quite jerky before processing (again, in real time), and you could easily read the license plate in the stabilized image.
Actually, the light-painting technique is quite different.
It's just selective illumination of different parts of the image, usually for artistic effects. (the same type of artistry used in Start Trek TOS, resulting in fuzzy women:)
There was (is?) a product called the Hosemaster which was intended for this.
Actually, SIMD (SSE2) can only get 2 double precision operations in a single clock cycle. The 128-bit wide SSE2 registers can only hold 2 64-bit doubles each.
The Athlon can execute 3 macro-ops per cycle, but the MMX instructions all take at least 2 macro-ops, so you only get 1.5 instructions per cycle, assuming everything about the execution environment is optimal (all code and data are in cache, there are no conflicts between instructions trying to use the same excecution units, all data is properly aligned, etc.) The main difference between a supercomputer and a PC is that the supercomputer operates close to the theoretical maximum most of the time - you actually get something like 90% or better of theoretical performance unless you use terrible code. On a PC, you get close theoretical performance when running benchmarks, and at no other time:)
(it's like getting an industrial tool versus a consumer tool - the industrial tool has the same specs, but it's meant to run continuously for years without breaking. The consumer tool will overheat, need replacement parts, etc. etc.)
I remember a story almost exactly like this, but the rocket wasn't a home-brew. Basically, people would pay to get launched into sub-orbit, then they would parachute back down. This guy's rocket didn't eject him, or the parachute wouldn't deploy correctly or something, so the "thrills company" couldn't pick him up. He was befriended by the smart dolphins, and the rest is history...
The capacity was the same as some 3.5" drives of the same era (a whopping 1.2G or 2.4G, IIRC), but the BigFoot drives were quieter and somewhat faster. The low noise was due to a slower rotational speed - which still gave the same transfer speed as the smaller drives, since there was more disk flying under the head due to the increased platter radius. These drives were also very thin - like 0.75".
The frequency of an antenna is determined by its' size and the speed of current flow in the material (among other things). The "tuning" of an antenna is dependent on what fraction of a wavelength (at the frequency of interest) is present on the antenna element(s) at one time. This is where you get the terms quarter-wave, half-wave, etc.
A measure of the effectiveness of an antenna is the "capture area". This is the effective size of the antenna. The conductivity of the material is important here - the better the conductor, the smaller the antenna can be made. (actually, some research shows that a superconducting antenna could be infinitessimally small, and still give the capture area of a full-wave antenna.)
There are a zillion variables in antenna design, and it seems like voodoo, but the net effect is that you can change a bunch of parameters, including the size, and end up with many different antenna configurations tuned to the same frequency.
Umm. This is a repeat.
on
ULTra Robo-Taxi
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Well, I'd say you've got some of this right and some wrong.
Yes, the director's cut should be the version that the director wanted to make, rather than the one the studios / MPAA / marketroids required. The director's cut should probably also have alternate versions (different beginnings / endings, directors version vs. released version, etc.) - but you can only fit so much on a DVD.
Also, you need to realize that things end up on the cutting room floor for a number of reasons, not just because they suck. Even on high budget movies, they are always trying to cut costs. (I worked on an effect on the new Spike Jonze movie, Adaptation, and even though it's a $100M+ budget, they still needed (or wanted) to cut out as much as possible from the cost of the effect. They need the money to pay the actors' exorbitant wages and the myriad little expenses that crop up in a production.) So the "junk" that gets put into the special edition may be scenes (or visual effects, or surround effects...) that couldn't be used for reasons other than artistic failings. Actually, one of the main drivers for cutting pieces of a film is the overall duration of the movie. The longer the movie, the a) more it costs to print, b) less the theaters can show it (since there are a fixed number of hours per day), and c) less today's 8-minute-attention-span teenagers will want to see it.
So, it's possible that Mr. Scott et. al. are just trying to milk a successful franchise fora ll it's worth, but there may be true artistic reasons for making a revised version of the movie.
There is a Sci-Fi series in which the space elevator is featured prominently, the Mars colonization series by Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars.
These are excellent books detailing many aspects of Mars colonization. (one of the quotes on the cover is something like "... these should be required reading for the next generation of mars colonists")
At any rate - if you want to read about some possible futures (without too much pseudo-science), these are an excellent bunch of books.
In high school (way back when the PC was relatively new), the computer club had to raise $800 to get an exernal hard drive to run our BBS - a 10MB hard drive (the Sider, for anyone who remembers).
That's $80/MB, and we got a good deal.
It's amazing what 20 years has done to the price of hardware.
My point was that it may be a device which harnesses a different type of energy (which you and I don't know how to manage), rather than a device which creates its' own energy from nothing.
If one could, for instance, harness the energy of the sun orbiting around the center of the galaxy, then it might seem to be "self-sustaining", but would actually be like a familiar device in principle. (far-fetched, I know - I'm only pointing out other types of nearby energy that are abundant and ubiquitous)
I've noticed a lot of posts saying that this is junk or unworkable.
According to the article, the device uses off the shelf parts and previously known principles to provide more energy than is put in.
The inventor does not claim to have made a perpetual motion device (that's an assumption that was made by Michael when he posted the story), he only claims to extract more electrical energy than is put into the machine.
I can think of at least one other device that fits into this category, and we all know about it: the solar cell is also "a self-sustaining unit which at the same time provides surplus electrical energy". You just take this little thing outside, and you get electricity out of it. Until it breaks.
There are other simple devices that take energy from something other than an obvious fuel (a PN diode will capture microwave energy - not much, but an array of them might be able to get a useful amount of energy)
I, for one, wouldn't assume that the machine is impossble or that it doesn't work just because I don't know the principles behind it. He may have invented a "Zero-Point Energy Cell" - like a solar cell, but it gets its' energy from a source other than solar radiation.
Don't be too quick to deny something that you have no knowledge of.
(that said, I'm not sure I believe the guy - I just don't think anyone posting on Slashdot has enough information to determine the truth of the matter).
This improves upon an old chip by Votrax, called the SC-01A.
That chip required you to pump it phonemes, rather than text. Phonemes are the actual sounds that are strung together to form syllables, then words - there were 64 of them, including pauses of varying length. So you had to have an external microprocessor with a text-to-phoneme algorithm (not too big - just a few K in 6502 or Z80 assembly), then you would feed the phonemes to the chip. This chip actually sounded pretty good (for its' day) if it was used correctly. You usually had to have some good filtering on the output, and had to be careful about generating phoneme strings.
The chip in the TI-99/4A worked the same way, except that the speech synthesizer cartridge included the text-to-phoneme algorithm (and a new BASIC command "SAY". It worked ok, but not great. Unfortunately, the implementation of the "say" command in TI BASIC didn't allow you to specify phonemes, so you had to do things like "tayck thuh kawttin owt uv yoar mowth" to get it to pronounce things correctly. It still sounded worse than the computer in War Games. I'm not sure if this chip was the SPO256-AL2 or not, I seem to remember that TI was down on using chips from other companies at the time.
So, the big deal is that they now have an easy way to dump text in one side of a chip, and get something you can drop into a speaker on the other side. Plus it does it in two languages.
That's a far cry from the crap we had in the 80's. But, you should note that it's not a speech synthesizer, it's just a fast playback device, which chooses the order of playback based on text input.
As for all the people mentioning the various software speech synthesizers, don't forget SAM - "Software Automated Mouth" for the Commodore 64. I think that was actually based on something that had been around for the Atari 400/800's since the very early 80's. And none of those computers was on a single chip (though they're about as powerful as a modern watch:)
A friend and I had considered making a small (EEPROM-sized) board to emulate an SC-01A. We didn't plan to put the text to speech on it, just an EEPROM full of recorded phonemes and a little microcontroller to interface to the outside world. Never got around to it - oh well.
Get a server motherboard/system. Try SuperMicro - I have an old dual-PPro motherboard of theirs, which has 8 PCI slots plus 2 ISA slots. This is accomplished by using an i960 I/O processor, which has an integrated PCI bridge. Of course, this has to be in a server case, because the motherboard is about 6 inches wider than standard AT size. (call me - I'll make you a deal on it:) Their new motherboards also have a bunch of slots (most are 6 PCI+1AGP, but no ISA).
Basically, the two choices boil down to either spending large amounts of money on a server motherboard and case, or getting boards with combined functions that may not be the perfect thing, but are (hopefully) less expensive.
(disclaimer: I helped develop this product 10 years ago, and I currently do consulting work for Ergomedics, Inc.)
The BackCycler is a product which is specifically desined to reduce low back pain. It accomplishes this by using CPM - "Continuous Passive Motion" (also known as CSM - "Continuous Spinal Motion"). The device goes on your chair, much like the little lumbar support pillows you can get. It has an air bladder, which is inflated and deflated in timed cycles. This flexes the lumbar vertebrae, changing the position of the spine, which prevents muscle fatigue from being in one position too long, and stimulates better blood flow. There's a flash demo of this here.
If you already have back pain, then you may even be able to get your insurance company to buy one for you (as the web site says, it's "medically proven technology").
Their software (for Linux) isn't that great, but the hardware at Smart Technologies is excellent.
I saw a demo of their first generation whiteboard at about 3 years ago, and it was fantastic. They used a serial protocol (though I'm not sure if they publish it). They do have driver software for Linux. One interesting advantage to using a low data rate serial protocol is that you can record anything that people have written (and erased), so you don't have to worry about screen captures or other low-resolution saves before erasing stuff. You can also replay things later.
They even have rear projection whiteboards and plasma panel overlays.
As for software, there have been several suggestions already, and I would think that a group of Linux-savvy scientists should be able to convince this cool hardware to work with some of that cool software. (at least in theory:)
A lot of people have mentioned that the electronics cost must be higher than $10, because they would need at least a microcontroller and an RF front end.
Actually, if you invest a fair chunk of cash in the beginning, then the unit price goes way down.
The cost of getting an ASIC (Application Specific IC) designed is continually dropping, and the price of the ASICs are very low once they are in production. Atmel has a system of cell-based ASICs, which basically consist of an a-la-carte function list that you can mix and match as you please. They have RF, microcontroller, USB, ethernet, counters, timers, and a bunch of other stuff available. They aren't the only game in town, either - there's a lot of competition in the chip business. The ASIC route also solves the size issue, since the main reason for chips to be as large as they are is the packaging. If the chips were much smaller (or everything is integrated into one IC), it would be impossible to solder them to PC boards.
Once you pay the design costs ($50k to $250k), you have one or two chips that are cheap in high quantity (and 300 million is VERY high quantity).
There are a bunch of comments asking "why is it bad to make money from your research"?
There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is when the people (corporations) that fund research get to decide which research project will get funded. Even this works OK when the funding entity has a "good" motive (wealthy person whose spouse died of cancer funds cancer research), but the problem is that there are a lot more wealthy and greedy people than there are wealthy and altruistic people (not researched, merely observed).
Mobil isn't going to fund a university that researches methods of eliminating oil from the world's energy supply - it's not in their best interest. This type of research IS in the world's best interest, but not the oil company's.
There is no financial reason for people like Einstein or Hawking (or Dirac or Bohr or Tesla or Feynman or...) to be able to pursue their research, at least not in the near term. These "pure research" people need funding just as much as (or more than) the people researching the best way to make a supercomputer (a lucrative proposition).
The other problem with corporate or government funding is that there is ALWAYS an "ulterior" motive for the funding: NASA gets funding because the Air Force wants to become the Space Force, The internet is developed because the DOD wants a research and military data infrastructure (ARPANET), etc. As an offshoot of this type of funding, we get trips to the moon and pure scientific data from Voyager and other space probes (and the internet:).
It is easy to see where Corporate America and Political America screw the people. In the case of news, we have the excellent example of US television covering the 1996 Olympic Beach Volleyball Quarterfinals (where the Americans were playing), and not broadcasting the Soccer Gold medal competition where top-ranked Argentina lost to the basically unknown Nigeria because the US had already been eliminated. This type of reporting happens all the time - the major news services are not interested in bringing us the news - they are interested in selling more newspapers with something like the OJ hype or the Lewinsky "issue", while there wars going on around the world. That isn't news reporting, it's selling more potato chips to Americans who couldn't care less about the rest of the world.
Actually, there is a different application here
on
Linux In A Box
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· Score: 1
Thanks. I've heard of the LRP, and looked into using it for our router/firewall here.
That's a different beast, though. All of the firewalling code relies on routing. A packet exists on one subnet (on one interface), and if certain conditions are met, it will be passed through to another subnet (on the other interface). This is great, but I think it would be better if this could be done with a bridge instead of a router. A company with a class A/B/C network has to split their net into multiple subnets for a router-based firewall to work, but not for a bridge-based firewall.
For some info on this technique, check out This link.
Since a bridge looks like a wire to the outside world (it has no effect on the topology of the network), a potential intruder won't know whether their packet has hit a firewall or not. A bridge that rejects a packet looks like the target machine (behind the firewall) is physically disconnected from the network. A traceroute won't identify the firewall (since the packets don't have to go through an IP "interface"), so that makes it harder for someone to figure out what machine to target for an attack.
I think that some of this functionality is available in the new 2.4x kernels, since they have disconnected the ethernet interfaces from the IP addresses (for other reasons). (This HOWTO has info on bridge/firewalling)
The next thing to do is to actually give a bridge an IP address - the same address for either NIC. You'd still have to know which "side" a packet comes from, for the firewalling to work. Once you have this setup, you can contact the machine (if you know its' address), but it doesn't show up if you try to contact something beyond it. Additionally, you can do things like have remote users (whose IP addresses change each time they dial in) use your SMTP/FTP/whatever boxes by authenticating to the brigde/firewall, and having the authentication script add a temporary IPChains-like entry for the dynamic address. That fixes a lot of the problems with spammers using relay hosts. (yes, this sounds a lot like a slightly modified proxy server)
Maybe this is a good separate topic for discussion on/.
Network (infrastructure) Appliance?
on
Linux In A Box
·
· Score: 2
Well, if we can do a Bridge/Firewall with it, it will be really cool.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a company called Titan Technologies which does this in real-time.
I saw them at the last Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco (although I think the actual group doing this stuff was from another company or a subsidiary of Titan). They were displaying a couple of very interesting systems. Both were based on a custom chip that took video streams in, and output the rotation, scaling, and translation factors needed to match up successive frames.
The first application was a scene painter/mosaic tool, which worked in real time. The other was a "video stabilizer/sharpener", which allowed you to stabilize jerky video, and composite successive frames together for increasing sharpness. The demo was based on videotape from a digital video camera, taken from a car, and stabilizing video of a truck they were following. It was quite jerky before processing (again, in real time), and you could easily read the license plate in the stabilized image.
It was *very* cool.
Actually, the light-painting technique is quite different.
:)
It's just selective illumination of different parts of the image, usually for artistic effects. (the same type of artistry used in Start Trek TOS, resulting in fuzzy women
There was (is?) a product called the Hosemaster which was intended for this.
Actually, SIMD (SSE2) can only get 2 double precision operations in a single clock cycle. The 128-bit wide SSE2 registers can only hold 2 64-bit doubles each.
:)
The Athlon can execute 3 macro-ops per cycle, but the MMX instructions all take at least 2 macro-ops, so you only get 1.5 instructions per cycle, assuming everything about the execution environment is optimal (all code and data are in cache, there are no conflicts between instructions trying to use the same excecution units, all data is properly aligned, etc.)
The main difference between a supercomputer and a PC is that the supercomputer operates close to the theoretical maximum most of the time - you actually get something like 90% or better of theoretical performance unless you use terrible code. On a PC, you get close theoretical performance when running benchmarks, and at no other time
(it's like getting an industrial tool versus a consumer tool - the industrial tool has the same specs, but it's meant to run continuously for years without breaking. The consumer tool will overheat, need replacement parts, etc. etc.)
Linux may run OK on the unit, but I wouldn't expect any support from Shuttle.
If you go to their site www.spacewalker.com, you get a nice message:
THE SHUTTLE WEBSITE don't support Netscape browser or another browser.
Please use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or above to view our website!
Thanks your cooperation.
So, Linux may support it, but they don't support Linux.
Hmmm.
I remember a story almost exactly like this, but the rocket wasn't a home-brew. Basically, people would pay to get launched into sub-orbit, then they would parachute back down. This guy's rocket didn't eject him, or the parachute wouldn't deploy correctly or something, so the "thrills company" couldn't pick him up. He was befriended by the smart dolphins, and the rest is history...
They were made by Quantum.
The capacity was the same as some 3.5" drives of the same era (a whopping 1.2G or 2.4G, IIRC), but the BigFoot drives were quieter and somewhat faster. The low noise was due to a slower rotational speed - which still gave the same transfer speed as the smaller drives, since there was more disk flying under the head due to the increased platter radius. These drives were also very thin - like 0.75".
Nope.
The frequency of an antenna is determined by its' size and the speed of current flow in the material (among other things). The "tuning" of an antenna is dependent on what fraction of a wavelength (at the frequency of interest) is present on the antenna element(s) at one time. This is where you get the terms quarter-wave, half-wave, etc.
A measure of the effectiveness of an antenna is the "capture area". This is the effective size of the antenna. The conductivity of the material is important here - the better the conductor, the smaller the antenna can be made. (actually, some research shows that a superconducting antenna could be infinitessimally small, and still give the capture area of a full-wave antenna.)
There are a zillion variables in antenna design, and it seems like voodoo, but the net effect is that you can change a bunch of parameters, including the size, and end up with many different antenna configurations tuned to the same frequency.
I guess it takes a while for MSN to get old news from the BBC.
Yes, the director's cut should be the version that the director wanted to make, rather than the one the studios / MPAA / marketroids required. The director's cut should probably also have alternate versions (different beginnings / endings, directors version vs. released version, etc.) - but you can only fit so much on a DVD.
Also, you need to realize that things end up on the cutting room floor for a number of reasons, not just because they suck. Even on high budget movies, they are always trying to cut costs. (I worked on an effect on the new Spike Jonze movie, Adaptation, and even though it's a $100M+ budget, they still needed (or wanted) to cut out as much as possible from the cost of the effect. They need the money to pay the actors' exorbitant wages and the myriad little expenses that crop up in a production.) So the "junk" that gets put into the special edition may be scenes (or visual effects, or surround effects...) that couldn't be used for reasons other than artistic failings. Actually, one of the main drivers for cutting pieces of a film is the overall duration of the movie. The longer the movie, the a) more it costs to print, b) less the theaters can show it (since there are a fixed number of hours per day), and c) less today's 8-minute-attention-span teenagers will want to see it.
So, it's possible that Mr. Scott et. al. are just trying to milk a successful franchise fora ll it's worth, but there may be true artistic reasons for making a revised version of the movie.
Somewhat off-topic, but...
There is a Sci-Fi series in which the space elevator is featured prominently, the Mars colonization series by Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars.
These are excellent books detailing many aspects of Mars colonization. (one of the quotes on the cover is something like "... these should be required reading for the next generation of mars colonists")
At any rate - if you want to read about some possible futures (without too much pseudo-science), these are an excellent bunch of books.
$10 per MB - that's cheap.
In high school (way back when the PC was relatively new), the computer club had to raise $800 to get an exernal hard drive to run our BBS - a 10MB hard drive (the Sider, for anyone who remembers).
That's $80/MB, and we got a good deal.
It's amazing what 20 years has done to the price of hardware.
You're right.
My point was that it may be a device which harnesses a different type of energy (which you and I don't know how to manage), rather than a device which creates its' own energy from nothing.
If one could, for instance, harness the energy of the sun orbiting around the center of the galaxy, then it might seem to be "self-sustaining", but would actually be like a familiar device in principle. (far-fetched, I know - I'm only pointing out other types of nearby energy that are abundant and ubiquitous)
According to the article, the device uses off the shelf parts and previously known principles to provide more energy than is put in.
The inventor does not claim to have made a perpetual motion device (that's an assumption that was made by Michael when he posted the story), he only claims to extract more electrical energy than is put into the machine.
I can think of at least one other device that fits into this category, and we all know about it: the solar cell is also "a self-sustaining unit which at the same time provides surplus electrical energy". You just take this little thing outside, and you get electricity out of it. Until it breaks.
There are other simple devices that take energy from something other than an obvious fuel (a PN diode will capture microwave energy - not much, but an array of them might be able to get a useful amount of energy)
I, for one, wouldn't assume that the machine is impossble or that it doesn't work just because I don't know the principles behind it. He may have invented a "Zero-Point Energy Cell" - like a solar cell, but it gets its' energy from a source other than solar radiation.
Don't be too quick to deny something that you have no knowledge of.
(that said, I'm not sure I believe the guy - I just don't think anyone posting on Slashdot has enough information to determine the truth of the matter).
This improves upon an old chip by Votrax, called the SC-01A.
:)
That chip required you to pump it phonemes, rather than text. Phonemes are the actual sounds that are strung together to form syllables, then words - there were 64 of them, including pauses of varying length. So you had to have an external microprocessor with a text-to-phoneme algorithm (not too big - just a few K in 6502 or Z80 assembly), then you would feed the phonemes to the chip. This chip actually sounded pretty good (for its' day) if it was used correctly. You usually had to have some good filtering on the output, and had to be careful about generating phoneme strings.
The chip in the TI-99/4A worked the same way, except that the speech synthesizer cartridge included the text-to-phoneme algorithm (and a new BASIC command "SAY". It worked ok, but not great. Unfortunately, the implementation of the "say" command in TI BASIC didn't allow you to specify phonemes, so you had to do things like "tayck thuh kawttin owt uv yoar mowth" to get it to pronounce things correctly. It still sounded worse than the computer in War Games. I'm not sure if this chip was the SPO256-AL2 or not, I seem to remember that TI was down on using chips from other companies at the time.
So, the big deal is that they now have an easy way to dump text in one side of a chip, and get something you can drop into a speaker on the other side. Plus it does it in two languages.
That's a far cry from the crap we had in the 80's. But, you should note that it's not a speech synthesizer, it's just a fast playback device, which chooses the order of playback based on text input.
As for all the people mentioning the various software speech synthesizers, don't forget SAM - "Software Automated Mouth" for the Commodore 64. I think that was actually based on something that had been around for the Atari 400/800's since the very early 80's. And none of those computers was on a single chip (though they're about as powerful as a modern watch
A friend and I had considered making a small (EEPROM-sized) board to emulate an SC-01A. We didn't plan to put the text to speech on it, just an EEPROM full of recorded phonemes and a little microcontroller to interface to the outside world. Never got around to it - oh well.
Get a server motherboard/system. Try SuperMicro - I have an old dual-PPro motherboard of theirs, which has 8 PCI slots plus 2 ISA slots. This is accomplished by using an i960 I/O processor, which has an integrated PCI bridge. Of course, this has to be in a server case, because the motherboard is about 6 inches wider than standard AT size. (call me - I'll make you a deal on it :) Their new motherboards also have a bunch of slots (most are 6 PCI+1AGP, but no ISA).
Get a motherboard like the Acer AK73-1394(A). It has 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, and integrated FireWire. Get a Matrox Marvel G450 eTV or the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon, both of which have a TV tuner on the card. Use a USB to multiport serial adapter for the serial ports. Get a PCI DIO card from ComputerBoards or equivalent.
Basically, the two choices boil down to either spending large amounts of money on a server motherboard and case, or getting boards with combined functions that may not be the perfect thing, but are (hopefully) less expensive.
Have fun.
The BackCycler is a product which is specifically desined to reduce low back pain. It accomplishes this by using CPM - "Continuous Passive Motion" (also known as CSM - "Continuous Spinal Motion"). The device goes on your chair, much like the little lumbar support pillows you can get. It has an air bladder, which is inflated and deflated in timed cycles. This flexes the lumbar vertebrae, changing the position of the spine, which prevents muscle fatigue from being in one position too long, and stimulates better blood flow. There's a flash demo of this here.
If you already have back pain, then you may even be able to get your insurance company to buy one for you (as the web site says, it's "medically proven technology").
Happy sitting.
I saw a demo of their first generation whiteboard at about 3 years ago, and it was fantastic. They used a serial protocol (though I'm not sure if they publish it). They do have driver software for Linux. One interesting advantage to using a low data rate serial protocol is that you can record anything that people have written (and erased), so you don't have to worry about screen captures or other low-resolution saves before erasing stuff. You can also replay things later.
They even have rear projection whiteboards and plasma panel overlays.
As for software, there have been several suggestions already, and I would think that a group of Linux-savvy scientists should be able to convince this cool hardware to work with some of that cool software. (at least in theory :)
Have fun.
Here it is again: 2001-03-17 14:07:21
Actually, if you invest a fair chunk of cash in the beginning, then the unit price goes way down.
The cost of getting an ASIC (Application Specific IC) designed is continually dropping, and the price of the ASICs are very low once they are in production. Atmel has a system of cell-based ASICs, which basically consist of an a-la-carte function list that you can mix and match as you please. They have RF, microcontroller, USB, ethernet, counters, timers, and a bunch of other stuff available. They aren't the only game in town, either - there's a lot of competition in the chip business. The ASIC route also solves the size issue, since the main reason for chips to be as large as they are is the packaging. If the chips were much smaller (or everything is integrated into one IC), it would be impossible to solder them to PC boards.
Once you pay the design costs ($50k to $250k), you have one or two chips that are cheap in high quantity (and 300 million is VERY high quantity).
When I went to that page, I was quickly referred to Microsoft's IE page.
t .org")>-1)
/ ie /";
I managed to stop the redirect, and this is what I found:
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdo
location.href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows
else
document.write(''+'<Link Rel="StyleSheet" HRef="../article.css" Type="text/css">'+
'<Title>Sorry, Non-Internet Explorer compatible browsers are not supported!</Title>'+
<snip>
blah blah blah
</snip>
</Script>
I guess he thinks that will keep him from getting Slashdotted.
I will never have an interesting signature.
In the US, it's "plagiarized".
(that's a horse of a different colour)
Even better - put it on an AVR :)
There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is when the people (corporations) that fund research get to decide which research project will get funded. Even this works OK when the funding entity has a "good" motive (wealthy person whose spouse died of cancer funds cancer research), but the problem is that there are a lot more wealthy and greedy people than there are wealthy and altruistic people (not researched, merely observed).
Mobil isn't going to fund a university that researches methods of eliminating oil from the world's energy supply - it's not in their best interest. This type of research IS in the world's best interest, but not the oil company's.
There is no financial reason for people like Einstein or Hawking (or Dirac or Bohr or Tesla or Feynman or ...) to be able to pursue their research, at least not in the near term. These "pure research" people need funding just as much as (or more than) the people researching the best way to make a supercomputer (a lucrative proposition).
The other problem with corporate or government funding is that there is ALWAYS an "ulterior" motive for the funding: NASA gets funding because the Air Force wants to become the Space Force, The internet is developed because the DOD wants a research and military data infrastructure (ARPANET), etc. As an offshoot of this type of funding, we get trips to the moon and pure scientific data from Voyager and other space probes (and the internet :).
It is easy to see where Corporate America and Political America screw the people. In the case of news, we have the excellent example of US television covering the 1996 Olympic Beach Volleyball Quarterfinals (where the Americans were playing), and not broadcasting the Soccer Gold medal competition where top-ranked Argentina lost to the basically unknown Nigeria because the US had already been eliminated. This type of reporting happens all the time - the major news services are not interested in bringing us the news - they are interested in selling more newspapers with something like the OJ hype or the Lewinsky "issue", while there wars going on around the world. That isn't news reporting, it's selling more potato chips to Americans who couldn't care less about the rest of the world.
That's a different beast, though. All of the firewalling code relies on routing. A packet exists on one subnet (on one interface), and if certain conditions are met, it will be passed through to another subnet (on the other interface). This is great, but I think it would be better if this could be done with a bridge instead of a router. A company with a class A/B/C network has to split their net into multiple subnets for a router-based firewall to work, but not for a bridge-based firewall.
For some info on this technique, check out This link.
Since a bridge looks like a wire to the outside world (it has no effect on the topology of the network), a potential intruder won't know whether their packet has hit a firewall or not. A bridge that rejects a packet looks like the target machine (behind the firewall) is physically disconnected from the network. A traceroute won't identify the firewall (since the packets don't have to go through an IP "interface"), so that makes it harder for someone to figure out what machine to target for an attack.
I think that some of this functionality is available in the new 2.4x kernels, since they have disconnected the ethernet interfaces from the IP addresses (for other reasons). (This HOWTO has info on bridge/firewalling)
The next thing to do is to actually give a bridge an IP address - the same address for either NIC. You'd still have to know which "side" a packet comes from, for the firewalling to work. Once you have this setup, you can contact the machine (if you know its' address), but it doesn't show up if you try to contact something beyond it. Additionally, you can do things like have remote users (whose IP addresses change each time they dial in) use your SMTP/FTP/whatever boxes by authenticating to the brigde/firewall, and having the authentication script add a temporary IPChains-like entry for the dynamic address. That fixes a lot of the problems with spammers using relay hosts. (yes, this sounds a lot like a slightly modified proxy server)
Maybe this is a good separate topic for discussion on /.
Well, if we can do a Bridge/Firewall with it, it will be really cool.