Remember: during development, the optic nerve is part of the brain itself, and the amount of circuitry inside the brain proper which is tuned for visual processing is immense. Getting individual pixels into the brain -- the current accomplishment -- is of course a technical acheivement. But processing it like sighted people do is a challenge of similar magnitude to brain transplants. On the other hand, it might be possible for those who've lost their vision. (But those blind since birth is another story entirely.)
Perhaps this will finally get large numbers of people to understand how damaging the current patent system can be. (And it won't stop the research, but it will make people think.)
(Note: quoted from http://zform.org/news.html. My wife -- who is blind -- tried the games and were impressed. The game will be under the GPL when released.)
On July 1st-7th the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) held its annual conference. On the NFB tradeshow floor, Zform presented the latest version of its technology prototype. The game lets two players explore several virtual 3D environments populated by some interesting creatures. Zform's specially designed Audio User Interface (AUI) provides blind-accessiblity. This prototype uses the Quake engine for graphics, providing a solid graphical experience that attracted many players with sight at the conference. The game's networking allowed two players, regardless of sight, to play together.
Our engineering team was proud to see how much sighted and blind attendees enjoyed playing the prototype. Attendees were generous in their praise and gave valuable suggestions on how to improve the prototype further.
We'll be beta testing some Zform games in the coming months. If you are interested in being a beta-tester for Zform Games, join our newsletter.
Well, if Adobe truly feels that he shouldn't be in jail -- but cannot force the US Govt to withdraw the charges -- then it can help prove its sincerity by paying *all* of his legal bills. And he should get high-powered EFF lawyers and have them bill Adobe their full rates.
Interesting that you should mention Java Web Start. It looks awfully useful, and we're considering it for extranet deployment of the front-end of a large three-tier java system as new versions come out. But I see extremely little about people using it, and was wondering if there is some reason that it isn't being used. What else do people do for reployment of new releases of relatively thick clients inside of customer's firewalls in the real world?
Then contribute to your favorite Open Source project by attemping to find bugs in their code. The time-consuming task is finding the important or obscure bugs -- once found, you (or someone else) can fix them off your company's payroll.
It's been a full fifteen minutes since the original post, and I've already seen many articles bragging about how Linux can't be bought or otherwise made to "go away." Yet the Halloween documents point out how M$ is going to try to smash open-source: not with copyright, but with patents. They will find (or buy $$$) some lousy, overbroad, fundamental patent which is relied upon deep in the kernel, and while that won't dissuade the hobbyist, it will dissuade the system adminstrator and company management. And they'll keep throwing this sand in companies' face each time they consider using Linux in earnest. ("You, the company are responsible for violating our patents, regardless of how open the copyright is", they will say.) I hope I'm wrong. Perhaps smaller, more self-contained systems such as the *BSD might be less vulnerable, but that's another discussion.
Marshall
Actually, Braille is typed with 6 keys (in positions SDFJKL essentially) and space bar. Of the 2^6 - 1 combinations, 26 are alphas (there is a capital prefix character), A-J double as [0-9] (with a separate numeric prefix), and the remainder code punctuation and dipthongs and other common letter combinations. But, yes, my wife types as fast on it as she can on QWERTY.
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Remember: during development, the optic nerve is part of the brain itself, and the amount of circuitry inside the brain proper which is tuned for visual processing is immense. Getting individual pixels into the brain -- the current accomplishment -- is of course a technical acheivement. But processing it like sighted people do is a challenge of similar magnitude to brain transplants. On the other hand, it might be possible for those who've lost their vision. (But those blind since birth is another story entirely.)
Perhaps this will finally get large numbers of people to understand how damaging the current patent system can be. (And it won't stop the research, but it will make people think.)
On July 1st-7th the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) held its annual conference. On the NFB tradeshow floor, Zform presented the latest version of its technology prototype. The game lets two players explore several virtual 3D environments populated by some interesting creatures. Zform's specially designed Audio User Interface (AUI) provides blind-accessiblity. This prototype uses the Quake engine for graphics, providing a solid graphical experience that attracted many players with sight at the conference. The game's networking allowed two players, regardless of sight, to play together. Our engineering team was proud to see how much sighted and blind attendees enjoyed playing the prototype. Attendees were generous in their praise and gave valuable suggestions on how to improve the prototype further. We'll be beta testing some Zform games in the coming months. If you are interested in being a beta-tester for Zform Games, join our newsletter.
Well, if Adobe truly feels that he shouldn't be in jail -- but cannot force the US Govt to withdraw the charges -- then it can help prove its sincerity by paying *all* of his legal bills. And he should get high-powered EFF lawyers and have them bill Adobe their full rates.
Interesting that you should mention Java Web Start. It looks awfully useful, and we're considering it for extranet deployment of the front-end of a large three-tier java system as new versions come out. But I see extremely little about people using it, and was wondering if there is some reason that it isn't being used. What else do people do for reployment of new releases of relatively thick clients inside of customer's firewalls in the real world?
Then contribute to your favorite Open Source project by attemping to find bugs in their code. The time-consuming task is finding the important or obscure bugs -- once found, you (or someone else) can fix them off your company's payroll.
It's been a full fifteen minutes since the original post, and I've already seen many articles bragging about how Linux can't be bought or otherwise made to "go away." Yet the Halloween documents point out how M$ is going to try to smash open-source: not with copyright, but with patents. They will find (or buy $$$) some lousy, overbroad, fundamental patent which is relied upon deep in the kernel, and while that won't dissuade the hobbyist, it will dissuade the system adminstrator and company management. And they'll keep throwing this sand in companies' face each time they consider using Linux in earnest. ("You, the company are responsible for violating our patents, regardless of how open the copyright is", they will say.) I hope I'm wrong. Perhaps smaller, more self-contained systems such as the *BSD might be less vulnerable, but that's another discussion. Marshall
I ordered mine about as long ago, and it arrived just a few days ago. Marahsll
Actually, Braille is typed with 6 keys (in positions SDFJKL essentially) and space bar. Of the 2^6 - 1 combinations, 26 are alphas (there is a capital prefix character), A-J double as [0-9] (with a separate numeric prefix), and the remainder code punctuation and dipthongs and other common letter combinations. But, yes, my wife types as fast on it as she can on QWERTY.