"On to what would the image be projected? Would there not have to be some kind of screen or bubble on which the image resides?"
The type of hologram which would be used here relies on a wide beam of coherant (laser) light passing through a transparent plate which has been altered somehow to create the holographic image. Currently, this plate can be (at least) a photographically exposed glass plate or a special thermoplastic plate. When the laser light passes through the plate, wave interfearance creates an image which changes based on the viewing angle.
It sounds like scientists have found a way to replace the glass plate with an electronically controlled media. Since the image can be changed electronically, there is the potential to create a moving 3-D image.
Since you still have to look through the plate, the image would not just float in mid-air.
I am just remembering the basics from my optics class. Someone with a lot more knowledge please correct my errors!
If the output signal is known, the speaker output can be cancelled electronically from the microphone input. The cancellation would not be perfect, but could be enough for acceptable quality on the recorded input.
" Go over the adslreports and you'll find that Linksys users are recommended to put their antennae at a 90 degree angle w.r.t. each other."
A general rule-of-thumb on the amateur radio side of things is that a 90-degree polarity difference between transmitter and receiver will result in a 20dB loss in line-of-sight communication. Whether the difference is actually 20dB, I don't know, but there is a loss. Why linksys would recommend this is beyond me (maybe so they can sell better/more expensive versions to overcome the 20dB loss?).
"Is the right to access speech protected by the 1st? I know the right to produce speech is, but I'm uncertain of the other."
I think that free (not as in beer) access to speech is absolutly necessary to ensure the right to produce speech. An extreame example: I construct a sound-proof chamber, and allow you to say whatever you want inside. You have the right to say whatever you want, but I have effectivly muzzeled your expression by not allowing anyone else to hear it.
"How can the north pole move even more "north" than where it is?"
Whats moving is the earths magnetic pole, which is not in the same location as the earths rotational pole. Since direction is/should be based on the rotational pole, the magnetic pole can move further north until the magnetic pole and the rotational pole share the same location. If two poles were so coincide, than yes, the magnetic pole could only move south.
"In any case, he said, names such as Amazon.com and Apple -- two other generic words -- have been adjudged valid trademarks because they've acquired a 'secondary meaning' through their strong association to products." (Microsoft's Lawyer)
The problem here is that Microsoft's "Windows" is not a secondary meaning to "thing you look through", but the same generic "subpart of display" which is used by X, Mac, libcurses, and others.
1. I don't know the nature of either signal, but 55MHz is a decent amount of seperation. If there are pieces of 802.11 equipment which are really transmitting 55MHz too high, their manufactures deserve a bitchslapping from the FCC.
2. If satelite radio receivers are having a hard time dealing with a signal 55MHz away, their manufactures need to send the design teams back to school.
3. If someone is running 802.11 equipment at power levels which overwhelm nearby satelite receivers listening 55MHz away, they probably need to re-engineer their setup to use less power and/or use an antenna with a different pattern.
4. If none of the above scenarios are true, this is probably Sirius looking for a little extra elbow room. If granted, their next move (a few years from now) will probably be to pettition the FCC for use of the now underutilized spectrum.
Despite being a govenment agency, the FCC a knowledgeable technical staff to sort this kind of thing out. Occasionally the FCC even listens to them!
" Governments plant mines. Why isn't anyone prosecuting the ones who gave the orders? They are known individuals, politicians and generals."
Prosecution will not make the mines disappear. No matter how many people you charge with warcrimes, someone still needs to clean up millions of unexploded munitions throughout the world. Better a robot than me.
If you dropped 3000 tennis balls randomly over North America, how many would land on a moving car? Now consider that the oceans are many times large than North America and there are far fewer ships in the oceans than cars in North America. It becomes very unlikely that a significant number of these bots will be clobbered by ships.
"A _field_ test of this would probabli yield a even worse picture, methinks..."
The method used is very simple, and could be vastly improved by using better/more sensors, more computing power (for higher order filters/longer convolutions), or more time to experimentally tune the process to the characteristics of the target display. It must be assumed that the big boys (i.e. world governments, maybe some corporations) have access to all three of the above.
To me, it seems easier to reboot to windows than to try to get the few windows apps I need to use to work under wine. I did downlaod the crossover plug-ins after they were mentioned on slashdot a few days ago, but have yet to play around with them much. It seems, though, that they use the native windows dlls, so I would still need my windows partition around to have somewhere to install the dlls.
I'm not a CS major, but a EE major who has a work-study job with the computer center. Here are some of my observations:
1. Many students prefer the Sun boxes to the NT boxes, especially in the ME program. The CAD software they use is availible both on the NT machines and on the Sun machines. The main reason for the Sun preferece is that the software (and underlying OS) is much more stable. It was not uncommon in my ME-101 CAD class to lose hours of work when the software crashed and corrupted the file.
2. There are two things that keep a windows partition on my machine: Games and the ability to open word/excel/matlab documents distributed by professors and project groups. (I won't touch AIM with a 10 foot pole, but the lack of a decent AIM client has been mentioned by some other students as a reason why they keep windows around.
3. Some of the techinical staff seem to have become very frusterated with Microsoft's tatics, licensing, and upgrade cycle. When asked a while ago why we didn't have Office 2000 in the labs, one administrator clearly stated that they would not pay Microsoft repeatedly for the same product; without any new and useful features in the latest MS offerings, there is no reason to upgrade.
I have no doubt that it takes vast amounts of money for the record labels to do their business. On the price of CD's, however, I would like to bring up this point: Mixed media cd's aside, a cd and a tape contain the same intellectual property. Due to their nature, I believe CD's are cheaper to mass produce (someone in the know, please correct me if I'm wrong). If there is any price difference, a CD should be cheaper than a tape conataining the same intellectual property. To me, this implies that there is artificial inflation in the price of the CD. Still, this does not make it right to download the music and not pay for it.
I believe the key issue here it that the record labels know that they have a good thing going with CD's and feel that their entire business is treatened by technology which is quickly making the record labels irrelevant.
The Kettering University Science and Math Department often refers to themselves as the S&M department. They once (might still, I haven't looked lately), had a bulliten board with the caption "S&M Faculty" listing the various faculty memebers and their acheivments.
" I'd be some little wiggly bacteria thing. Big deal."
I think the discovery of any kind of life, past or present, even some little wiggly bacteria thing, it would be a very big deal. First, it would show that Earth is not unique. If life can gain a foothold on two planets in the same solar system, it could imply that life very common in the universe. Second, the similarities and differences between a bacteria on Mars and a bacteria evolved under similar conditions on Earth could provide insight into the evolutionary process.
Not necessarily, you can have a machine running a sniffer/monitor on either side of the halted firewall. On the inside, it would only log anything that made it through the firewall, but would be protected by the firewall. On the outside, it would be able to log any attacks against the firewall, but would itself be unprotected.
Actually this paper won't really make a whole big difference in compression any time soon. It's all about solving the problems that come up when you have a bunch
of samples that aren't evenly spaced (that whole 'non-uniform' thing in the title), which is not really an issue for digital images, audio, or video, since the conditions
for sampling those things are pretty easy to control
There are lots of comression applications for this research. (Although who knows how they would compare to current methods). Let's say I have an image I want to compress. I look at this image and notice that there are areas with high detail and areas with low detail. To the best of my understanding, the transforms used in JPEG compression require me to sample uniformly, so I have to throw out the same amount of information throughout the image. Since the transforms presented in the paper allow for non-uniform samples, I can pick and choose how many samples I throw out, and from where. This might allow me to keep most of the samples from the high-detail areas of the image, and throw out most of the samples from the low-detail areas of the image. Whether this would improve size/quality compared to current methods is unclear.
The article suggests that this is still a lossy compression with small amounts of data loss. I know Doctors that would take that admission as a condemnation of the
technique.
From what I read, the paper does not represent a compression technique, but a better way to fill in the missing data between samples, especially when the samples are nonuniform, or samples are missing. This would allow you to remove data for storage/transport and recover a similar image later, or as it would probably be used with medical imaging, to recover data lost during the imaging process due to sampling and quantizing error. In the second case, the fracture shouldn't be lost if done correctly.
Funny thing, my name is Mark Moss. I've read your posts before, but assumed your username was simply random coincidence. However, the details about the e-mail back-up failure sounds remarkably similar to a recent situation where I work. If your username is more that just random coincidance, please let me know.
This is good, unless you want something with decent speed. Let's see, most serial ports will support 115,200 Baud. Some go higher, but if you want something portable, better stick to 115,200. That comes out to one bit every 8.7uS or so. Including start and stop bits (forget parity for now), that comes out to one 8-bit sample every 87uS. This gives you a sample frequency of 11.5kHz. Not very fast.
The bottle-neck is going to be the serial line. In order to get a decent sample rate, you will have to store the sample in RAM, increasing the complexity of the circuit. Also, you will run into the limit of what can be pumped through the micro. I'll be generous and assume a 20MHz (50nS) instruction cycle (honestly, I haven't looked at the chip you mentioned, adjust up or down accordingly). For each sample the micro will have to do something like this: Read ADC Port->Start Next Sample->Write RAM Port->Increment RAM Address. If you can keep the micro to four instruction samples, you can take a sample every 200nS, or at a 5MHz rate. Much better, but not steller performance.
If you are going to look at analog/repetitive signals, you can pick up an older analog scope for a couple hundred dollars if you look around. Likewise, if you look for a deal, you can find used scopemeter type instruments for a little more. I'm really not trying to shoot you (or the original poster) down, but this is something that may make more sense to buy than to build.
I believe the doors are designed to be relativly weak, so although the lock might hold, the door would simply crumble around the lock. If the door were stronger, the bulkhead rather than the door would fail in case of depressurization on either side of the door.
I haven't seen the ThinkGeek round cables up close, but you can buy round ribbon cable. The ribbon cable comes from the manufacturer folded up inside a round outer jacket. I suspect this is what the round IDE cables are made out of. Hopefully, the cable would have been somewhat tested by the manufacturer (both of the raw cable and of the IDE cable assemblies), so there shouldn't been any "preexisting conditions".
Slashdot Mirror
"On to what would the image be projected? Would there not have to be some kind of screen or bubble on which the image resides?"
The type of hologram which would be used here relies on a wide beam of coherant (laser) light passing through a transparent plate which has been altered somehow to create the holographic image. Currently, this plate can be (at least) a photographically exposed glass plate or a special thermoplastic plate. When the laser light passes through the plate, wave interfearance creates an image which changes based on the viewing angle.
It sounds like scientists have found a way to replace the glass plate with an electronically controlled media. Since the image can be changed electronically, there is the potential to create a moving 3-D image.
Since you still have to look through the plate, the image would not just float in mid-air.
I am just remembering the basics from my optics class. Someone with a lot more knowledge please correct my errors!
If the output signal is known, the speaker output can be cancelled electronically from the microphone input. The cancellation would not be perfect, but could be enough for acceptable quality on the recorded input.
" Go over the adslreports and you'll find that Linksys users are recommended to put their antennae at a 90 degree angle w.r.t. each other."
A general rule-of-thumb on the amateur radio side of things is that a 90-degree polarity difference between transmitter and receiver will result in a 20dB loss in line-of-sight communication. Whether the difference is actually 20dB, I don't know, but there is a loss. Why linksys would recommend this is beyond me (maybe so they can sell better/more expensive versions to overcome the 20dB loss?).
"Is the right to access speech protected by the 1st? I know the right to produce speech is, but I'm uncertain of the other."
I think that free (not as in beer) access to speech is absolutly necessary to ensure the right to produce speech. An extreame example: I construct a sound-proof chamber, and allow you to say whatever you want inside. You have the right to say whatever you want, but I have effectivly muzzeled your expression by not allowing anyone else to hear it.
"How can the north pole move even more "north" than where it is?"
Whats moving is the earths magnetic pole, which is not in the same location as the earths rotational pole. Since direction is/should be based on the rotational pole, the magnetic pole can move further north until the magnetic pole and the rotational pole share the same location. If two poles were so coincide, than yes, the magnetic pole could only move south.
"In any case, he said, names such as Amazon.com and Apple -- two other generic words -- have been adjudged valid trademarks because they've acquired a 'secondary meaning' through their strong association to products." (Microsoft's Lawyer)
The problem here is that Microsoft's "Windows" is not a secondary meaning to "thing you look through", but the same generic "subpart of display" which is used by X, Mac, libcurses, and others.
1. I don't know the nature of either signal, but 55MHz is a decent amount of seperation. If there are pieces of 802.11 equipment which are really transmitting 55MHz too high, their manufactures deserve a bitchslapping from the FCC.
2. If satelite radio receivers are having a hard time dealing with a signal 55MHz away, their manufactures need to send the design teams back to school.
3. If someone is running 802.11 equipment at power levels which overwhelm nearby satelite receivers listening 55MHz away, they probably need to re-engineer their setup to use less power and/or use an antenna with a different pattern.
4. If none of the above scenarios are true, this is probably Sirius looking for a little extra elbow room. If granted, their next move (a few years from now) will probably be to pettition the FCC for use of the now underutilized spectrum.
Despite being a govenment agency, the FCC a knowledgeable technical staff to sort this kind of thing out. Occasionally the FCC even listens to them!
" Governments plant mines. Why isn't anyone prosecuting the ones who gave the orders? They are known individuals, politicians and generals."
Prosecution will not make the mines disappear. No matter how many people you charge with warcrimes, someone still needs to clean up millions of unexploded munitions throughout the world. Better a robot than me.
If you dropped 3000 tennis balls randomly over North America, how many would land on a moving car? Now consider that the oceans are many times large than North America and there are far fewer ships in the oceans than cars in North America. It becomes very unlikely that a significant number of these bots will be clobbered by ships.
"A _field_ test of this would probabli yield a even worse picture, methinks..."
The method used is very simple, and could be vastly improved by using better/more sensors, more computing power (for higher order filters/longer convolutions), or more time to experimentally tune the process to the characteristics of the target display. It must be assumed that the big boys (i.e. world governments, maybe some corporations) have access to all three of the above.
To me, it seems easier to reboot to windows than to try to get the few windows apps I need to use to work under wine. I did downlaod the crossover plug-ins after they were mentioned on slashdot a few days ago, but have yet to play around with them much. It seems, though, that they use the native windows dlls, so I would still need my windows partition around to have somewhere to install the dlls.
I'm not a CS major, but a EE major who has a work-study job with the computer center. Here are some of my observations:
1. Many students prefer the Sun boxes to the NT boxes, especially in the ME program. The CAD software they use is availible both on the NT machines and on the Sun machines. The main reason for the Sun preferece is that the software (and underlying OS) is much more stable. It was not uncommon in my ME-101 CAD class to lose hours of work when the software crashed and corrupted the file.
2. There are two things that keep a windows partition on my machine: Games and the ability to open word/excel/matlab documents distributed by professors and project groups. (I won't touch AIM with a 10 foot pole, but the lack of a decent AIM client has been mentioned by some other students as a reason why they keep windows around.
3. Some of the techinical staff seem to have become very frusterated with Microsoft's tatics, licensing, and upgrade cycle. When asked a while ago why we didn't have Office 2000 in the labs, one administrator clearly stated that they would not pay Microsoft repeatedly for the same product; without any new and useful features in the latest MS offerings, there is no reason to upgrade.
I have no doubt that it takes vast amounts of money for the record labels to do their business. On the price of CD's, however, I would like to bring up this point: Mixed media cd's aside, a cd and a tape contain the same intellectual property. Due to their nature, I believe CD's are cheaper to mass produce (someone in the know, please correct me if I'm wrong). If there is any price difference, a CD should be cheaper than a tape conataining the same intellectual property. To me, this implies that there is artificial inflation in the price of the CD. Still, this does not make it right to download the music and not pay for it.
I believe the key issue here it that the record labels know that they have a good thing going with CD's and feel that their entire business is treatened by technology which is quickly making the record labels irrelevant.
The Kettering University Science and Math Department often refers to themselves as the S&M department. They once (might still, I haven't looked lately), had a bulliten board with the caption "S&M Faculty" listing the various faculty memebers and their acheivments.
" I'd be some little wiggly bacteria thing. Big deal."
I think the discovery of any kind of life, past or present, even some little wiggly bacteria thing, it would be a very big deal. First, it would show that Earth is not unique. If life can gain a foothold on two planets in the same solar system, it could imply that life very common in the universe. Second, the similarities and differences between a bacteria on Mars and a bacteria evolved under similar conditions on Earth could provide insight into the evolutionary process.
1. Console based programs without a command history.
2. Programs with no undo button.
3. Counter-intuitive key bindings. (ex: Hitting backspace in a form field in IE should not take me back.)
"If I was born on one of these ships, I'd dedicate my whole life to inventing a warp drive so I could get the hell out of that tin can."
Which brings up a question: The first generation choose to go, but do they have the right to deprive their children of the choice not to go?
"There's no logging!"
Not necessarily, you can have a machine running a sniffer/monitor on either side of the halted firewall. On the inside, it would only log anything that made it through the firewall, but would be protected by the firewall. On the outside, it would be able to log any attacks against the firewall, but would itself be unprotected.
Actually this paper won't really make a whole big difference in compression any time soon. It's all about solving the problems that come up when you have a bunch of samples that aren't evenly spaced (that whole 'non-uniform' thing in the title), which is not really an issue for digital images, audio, or video, since the conditions for sampling those things are pretty easy to control
There are lots of comression applications for this research. (Although who knows how they would compare to current methods). Let's say I have an image I want to compress. I look at this image and notice that there are areas with high detail and areas with low detail. To the best of my understanding, the transforms used in JPEG compression require me to sample uniformly, so I have to throw out the same amount of information throughout the image. Since the transforms presented in the paper allow for non-uniform samples, I can pick and choose how many samples I throw out, and from where. This might allow me to keep most of the samples from the high-detail areas of the image, and throw out most of the samples from the low-detail areas of the image. Whether this would improve size/quality compared to current methods is unclear.
The article suggests that this is still a lossy compression with small amounts of data loss. I know Doctors that would take that admission as a condemnation of the technique.
From what I read, the paper does not represent a compression technique, but a better way to fill in the missing data between samples, especially when the samples are nonuniform, or samples are missing. This would allow you to remove data for storage/transport and recover a similar image later, or as it would probably be used with medical imaging, to recover data lost during the imaging process due to sampling and quantizing error. In the second case, the fracture shouldn't be lost if done correctly.
If I hand out documents as .ps files, half of my students can't even read them.
ps2pdf?
Funny thing, my name is Mark Moss. I've read your posts before, but assumed your username was simply random coincidence. However, the details about the e-mail back-up failure sounds remarkably similar to a recent situation where I work. If your username is more that just random coincidance, please let me know.
Friendly Regards,
SagSaw
The (other?) real Mark Moss
This is good, unless you want something with decent speed. Let's see, most serial ports will support 115,200 Baud. Some go higher, but if you want something portable, better stick to 115,200. That comes out to one bit every 8.7uS or so. Including start and stop bits (forget parity for now), that comes out to one 8-bit sample every 87uS. This gives you a sample frequency of 11.5kHz. Not very fast.
The bottle-neck is going to be the serial line. In order to get a decent sample rate, you will have to store the sample in RAM, increasing the complexity of the circuit. Also, you will run into the limit of what can be pumped through the micro. I'll be generous and assume a 20MHz (50nS) instruction cycle (honestly, I haven't looked at the chip you mentioned, adjust up or down accordingly). For each sample the micro will have to do something like this: Read ADC Port->Start Next Sample->Write RAM Port->Increment RAM Address. If you can keep the micro to four instruction samples, you can take a sample every 200nS, or at a 5MHz rate. Much better, but not steller performance.
If you are going to look at analog/repetitive signals, you can pick up an older analog scope for a couple hundred dollars if you look around. Likewise, if you look for a deal, you can find used scopemeter type instruments for a little more. I'm really not trying to shoot you (or the original poster) down, but this is something that may make more sense to buy than to build.
I believe the doors are designed to be relativly weak, so although the lock might hold, the door would simply crumble around the lock. If the door were stronger, the bulkhead rather than the door would fail in case of depressurization on either side of the door.
I haven't seen the ThinkGeek round cables up close, but you can buy round ribbon cable. The ribbon cable comes from the manufacturer folded up inside a round outer jacket. I suspect this is what the round IDE cables are made out of. Hopefully, the cable would have been somewhat tested by the manufacturer (both of the raw cable and of the IDE cable assemblies), so there shouldn't been any "preexisting conditions".