Linkage by juxtaposition is a common logical fallacy, prevalent in the media, unfortunately. A desensitization to which was why I added that remark: it was not indended for the careful reader, but for the "average/. reader who has an interest in science". Yeah, that's an odd market, I'm sure. =)
Aprocryphal story related to me by my academic advisor:
William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was invited to witness a demonstration of Faraday's electrical equipment. Gladstone asked, "This is quite interesting, Faraday, but of what practical worth is it?" Faraday replied, "One day, sir, you may tax it."
Consider the pace of development of technology versus that of science. Through the course of human history, (major) scientific discoveries are indeed rare, but occur at reasonably regular intervals. We've been quite overdue for a non-technological discovery for quite a while, now. Also, I had *no* idea this story would be accepted for anything but science.slashdot.org (if at all), so didn't spend time 'dumbing down' my presentation. Oops.;-)
Tell me how a keystoke logger is going to stop me from *pasting* something over a secure session? And even if they do, somehow, notice a suspicious paste, how do they know *what* was pasted?
The solution is quite clear, actually: bring your own machine to work. That or put a provision in your contract that allows you to have unmonitored access to your home machine. Or, if working with sensitive data that must *not* be jeopardized, just accept that you're "air gapped" from personal/public connunications and move on, though in these cases (I've worked in one establishment like this), the establishment usually provides 'public-access' machines for people to use for non-work-related activities while on breaks/outside normal hours.
It's the same as a phone, really. Some places record and monitor all calls, most places don't, many just don't care. Caveat signor (f00'lish for "Let the contractor beware")!
Use ssh or WinVNC (like I do) or somesuch to remotely access your home system, and run your personal stuff THERE. At work, the only non work-related software I run is WinAMP, WinVNC client and a web client. At home, I run an email client, IRC, ICQ, Kazaa, etcetera....
So long as the employer doesn't mind you connecting to your home machine (and you can encrypt that connection, somehow), then what you do with it is your own business.
Of course, you can still paste memos over VNC/ssh, so this just defers the problem somewhat.;-)
I understand Moore's Law quite well, actually. I made that post as an ironic commentary of the *original* author's message....
Anyway, as you noted, a variation on the 18 month interval (to 12 months) yields a doubling figure that applies historically, at least generally... until now. A thousandfold increase is a pretty damned exciting breakthrough!
This is *way* beyond Moore's Law, though. They're proposing a thousand-fold increase in storage densities, which equates to (approximately) ten doublings, not one every year and a half. According to Moore's Law, we shouldn't be approaching those densities for another 15 years....
So, who's been lying to us all along? The hard drive manufacturers or the physicists? =]
Like I said before, some of the DoF are rather obtuse or tend to run 'coupled'. I know several people who can totally independantly control the final joint on their fingers, though. Even most 'normal' people can if they do this:
1) hold fingers out straight 2) bend at 'middle' joint, trying to keep the 'final' (third) joint straight 3) once there, try to bend the final joint (should be easy enough, since that's the normal 'grip' position) 4) play with it a bit and you should be able to demonstrate some rudimentary control over those last joints
Okay, now for the thumb....
Hooboy.;-)
The Middle2 they refer to is a 'tilting' motion, similar to the one you mentioned between fingers. Make a gesture like you're holding a guitar neck. Now hold on to the base of your thumb, HARD, and try to move the rest of your thumb over as if you were operating a click pen. Move back and forth and you'll notice that there's about a 10 or 15 degree rotation orthogonal to the primary bending direction. In this image, there's a metal post through the middle joint of the thumb. That's the axis of rotation for this effect.
Keep in mind that, unlike the fingers, the thumb's base isn't fixed to the wrist, but has 2 DoF all of it's own.
So, we have one bend for the 'last' (distal) joint, one bend and a perpendicular tilt for the 'middle' (medial) joint, and two more rotational components for the 'base' (proximal): a roll to point your thumb, and a bend to open/close the whole thumb arrangement. That's 5 DoF. *phew*
Anyway, I'll reiterate: most of these DoFs are essentially useless for UI purposes. 10 per hand is plenty. The face has tons more, the shoulders have 5 each (vertical and horizontal translation, rotate out, rotate up and rotate the whole arm), etcetera. Humans have a ridiculously large number of ways to move. All I want is to tap into 16 or so of them at a time, rather than 2 or 6 continuous (mouse and SpaceOrb, respectively) or 108 discrete (keyboard) axes....
Of course, dancers, sculpters, musicians and so on will always want more, but they don't read SlashDot, do they?! =D
You've made a good, informative post that should have been moderated higher. Alas I have no points to spend, and I can't moderate in a discussion anyway. Heh.... Please allow me to address your key points, however.
A meter is a bit arbitrary, and will give you problems with limits and data bandwidth.
On the contrary, the bandwidth isn't an issue, as you demonstrated, but may be a bit limiting, if it was a cubic area (which it won't be, but that's beside the point).... you are probably going to be better off working with half a meter vertically and... either a meter and a half, or two meters [horizontally]...
The intention (not clearly stated in my original message) was to provide a box-like work area, with absolute precision greatest near the 'keyboard' area, and poorest overhead or off to the sides. Most people work with tools or whatever immediately in front of them. A sphere with a 1m radius, centered inside an 'enhanced' keyboard (fancy base station?) would easily meet the requirements for precision near the middle while preserving some sort of sensitivity (even if imprecise) at the extremes.
Also of note is that the fingertips are rarely more than 150 mm from the center of your palm...
My actual design calls for an absolute position and orientation of the hand body (local coordinate system), and relative coordinates for the fingertips from there. Like I said, LOTS of room for compression. With humans, the relative positions of the fingertips (to each other, the hand body and the other fingers) is what matters most. This data is much more important than absolute positions, since we have visual and tactil feedback mechanisms for dealing with absolutes.
With regard to your surgeon example, I must point out that this is intended to be a consumer product, not a medical one, hence the sub-100$ price tag. The same sort of technology could easily be scaled up in precision and accuracy, however, with a parallel increase in cost and complexity. Unfortunately, the reverse is not yet true: though medical-quality VR gloves do exist, there's no way to scale them down to viable consumer levels due to invasiveness, awkwardness, costs and the rest of it. Well, it's been tried, but you end up with junk like the PowerGlove. A new approach is needed! =]... 18kbps. Even if you ad overhead, such as a stop bit every dimension, and a start bit for every sample, the bandwidth requirements are not high. At least not by modern communications standards anyway. The problem is that we do not have that many devices that are both moving (which will cause wire and fibres to ultimately breakdown) and sensing their environment that use this kind of bandwidth.
Moving parts, bulky, heavy gloves and tethers are annoying at best and would kill the marketability, for sure. For it to be acceptable, it would need low-weight, small-size fingertip reflectors or sensors that won't make you look like a total fool. Ideally, it would be stitched into a thin Spandex or even fishnet glove, with plastic 'runners' that could look like fashion accessories.
I suspect that whatever solution you put together will be regularly susceptible to failure due the the multiple moving parts required to track the hands of the user. You might be able to find a way to do it with fingertip and palm sensors that wirelessly communicate with each other, or that each communicate with a base station of some sort. One example would be a two camera system working with florescent fingertips that the user would wear. Similar in effect to a motion capture system.
Ever used one of those? I have and it's about the stupidest looking thing on this Earth. Sorry, but unless you can just pull on a non-obtrusive glove and start hacking away, it's never going to fly.
My design (sorry, but I'm not giving the core details away just yet) has only a pair of thin wires running out to each fingertip. These can easily be woven into the glove material itself, run along flat sheets, like in disk drives, printers and the like, or even just use braided connection wire. The wrists (or backs of the hands, depending), will have the conditioning circuitry and will either run a tether or communicate wirelessly to a base station for connection to the PC. There's really not that much to go wrong, and if something does, it'll just be an easily-repairable open-circuit....
Oh, well, best of luck to you in your venture...
Thanks! I'll post to/. when I've got a working prototype. Might take a few years at this rate, though. =)
I'm afraid you did miscount, but I may have too. I said 24, but this page demonstrates 23:
http://www.shadow.org.uk/products/newhand.shtml
In any case, half of them are too tricky to use consciously, but that still leaves over 10 per hand. Two hands = 20+ DoF, easily. Add in shoulders and elbows, head and jaw and it just gets better.... =)
You've been watching too much Minority Report again, havent you?
Ironically, I'd just acquired some crucial components to make my glove thing a possibility a week before that movie came out. I was disgusted at the ludicrous gyrations and oversimplification of their tracking device... total Hollywood garbage.
Yes, I'm ignoring your humour. Yes, I've been thinking about this for about ten years now. No, it won't look or work anything like the 'glove' in Minority Report.
20 degrees of freedom? doesn't this thing still need to be attached to your arm?
Sure. Each hand has 24 degrees of freedom, the elbow has 2, the shoulder has 5. That's 62 rotational/translational modes. Yeah, some of it is hard to specify (like making that Vulcan greeting geek-gesture), which is why I went with 10 DoF per side.
Why hasn't anyone built a *REAL* dataglove for the masses yet? The PowerGlove is a lame-ass mockery of a real 3-space input device and is only good for use in simplistic games or other 'toy' applications!
Wow, that reads like a Flamebait.;-)
What I'd really like to see is a cheap-in-volume 'glove pair' input device (say 100$ for the MS version and 30$ for the Logitech one, like mice or keyboards) that would stream the positions of the fingers and hands over a hot-pluggable USB connection. I have a bazillion applications for that sort of device, and even a good headstart on a way to produce one on my own for about 300$ per pair (and a whole lot of time I just don't have). I'm sure *someone* has already had similar thoughts....
For reference purposes, my (rather fluid) specifications are for a system that: - spits out positions of the fingertips accurate to 1 cubic mm or so within a cubic meter in your 'work area' (ie: a volume sitting above a traditional keyboard's location at a desk) - tethered or wireless, as the case may be (wireless is an extra cost, of course, but not THAT much extra - it's mainly the short battery life that sucks for this) - 60 Hz or better refresh rate for each of the sensed positions - serial or USB input stream, similar to a 2D mouse's, only with a LOT more coordinates... this is emminently compressible data, too, should bandwidth prove an issue (though there's always FireWire and USB2.0, I guess)
So, why should everyone have one of these? Well, I can't give away ALL my secrets, but people laughed at the mouse, didn't they? =) A 3D desktop metaphor requires a 3D interface device, and 'air mice' sort of suck. Wands are only good for limited applications... remember light pens? (They're the same thing as a mouse, in a 2D sense, and you don't see many light pens kicking around today, do you? =] )
How would you like to type on a virtual keyboard, configured any way you want it to be, anywhere in space you chose to place it? How about a 20-DoF controller for videogames? Music synthesis with 20+ DoFs, each affecting a different component of the sound (left hand for timber and right for pitch, volume and sequencing)? Just as the mouse hardware drove the creation of a billion 2D applications, so will 3D 'glove' hardware drive a billion more.
But only, ONLY if it's CHEAP. If anyone knows an electrical engineer that wants to work on the hardware end of a project with me (I've got the hardware feasability, sample applications and reconstruction algorithms mostly worked out... but no time to spend on implementation), give 'em my email.... f00Dave@bigfoot.com
God, that was a lot longer that I'd expected it to be. Must be the heat. =)
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
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Going Up?
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The whole point is to get rid of the radwaste... it's *garbage*, so we'll want to spend as little time and money on it as we can. Ergo, strap a disposable 'crawler' on the container (cheap in mass quantities), send it up the ribbon and then just let the whole mess sail off unguided and unpowered to the Moon, where it digs itself a shiny new crater. This solution is cheap, recoverable if we need it later, and no longer a problem for Earth, right? Right.
Think practical, not fanciful, when dealing with politicians, money and engineers. =]
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
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Going Up?
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I'm willing to bet that a 'dump site' could be chosen quite far away from the site of any currently-proposed or reasonably-conceivable colony. Further, the Moon is a damned huge chunk of rock. Assume that a dump site covers, oh, a million or so square miles (yeah, a squished square, on the equator, about a thousand miles on an edge. The actual target site is a square mile in the middle of it. That still leaves about 36 million square miles of surface area. For comparison purposes, the entire surface area of *North America* is about 9.3 million square miles.
Basically, if there's water under some crater in the dump site, there's going to be water somewhere ELSE, too. Keep in mind: the moon has no ecosystem to destabilize, no indigenous life, no open bodies of water to pollute and won't be an 'eyesore', even if we DID smash thousands of tons of radwaste into a square mile or ten... now, if you started to write "Chairface" on it with a Big Frickin' Laser, that's another story. =)
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
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Going Up?
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Sounds good, save that if the 'waste gets hit by a rock from space, I doubt it'll do any more damage to the container than the initial impact did. Odds on a huge rock hitting a small container that's already going to be under the middle of a crater, somewhere are vanishingly small. And even if it did, it'll just smear the active ingredients around, or turn it into ejecta. Either way, it's *waste*, so we don't care what happens to it, right? =]
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
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The point is that we don't WANT to spend fuel on this problem and Hohmann orbits require a burn. Like I said, there's not enough velocity at 'release' to have the orbit intersect the Sun. Now, plowing the radwaste into the Moon is a much better idea, overall, and should be easily accomplished from The Ribbon (I haven't done the math to be sure, hence the 'should', but since the Moon already has the Earth's orbital velocity, there's obviously a LOT less delta-V required....).
Besides, as I said in another reply, we might WANT that radwaste in the future, sometime. =)
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
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Going Up?
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Yes, sorry, I meant a lot of V to get rid of (or delta V to be added) in order to create an orbit that will intersect with the Sun's atmosphere. But sure, who cares if there's radwaste kicking around in space, somewhere reasonably far away from where we expect to end up going? It would be a hell of a lot cheaper to just drop it on Venus or Mars, saving that we might want to live there someday (Mars, anyway, Venus is probably not worth it).
The only thing that makes smashing radwaste into a planet better than just setting it adrift is that, unless it's got solar escape velocity, it's just going to hang around our solar system forever. That's just delaying the problem. Further, if you dump stuff somewhere, and some future civilization decides it's actually USEFUL, then it's sort of hard to get it back from the Sun, eh? =)
The Moon is a much more logical dumping ground for radwaste, IMHO.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
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Going Up?
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· Score: 5, Informative
The energy required to actually launch something 'into the Sun' from Earth is enormous. The Earth's orbital velocity is around 30 km/s, or 108000 km/h (~64800 mph). That's a LOT of delta-V to get rid of! I'll leave the details to the science geeks, but even with a gravitational slingshot (say off Venus), you're not gonna kill all that speed without entering atmosphere. The alternative would be to haul shit up to the graviational midpoint then let it slide along the shaft, accellerating and getting whipped off at 1G at the end of it, aiming it to smack into Jupiter or something, instead.;-)
That whole 'spiraling into the sun' thing bugs me.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/e ar thfact.html
I am afraid you are totally wrong, this could happen in open-source enviroments but also in closed development enviroments. The big difference is than i a closed-source project you even do not realise that you have been trojaned!!!
And how am I "totally wrong"? The timebomb I described *was* a closed-source project. Closed-source doesn't meant no-source, it merely means that the access to it is limited to some extent.
Knee-jerk reactions like yours don't help the 'cause' of Open Source development. Next time please take a deep breath and think about how your post will be interpreted before you send it. Thanks.
Security, Antisecurity and a Purposeless Anecdote
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· Score: 4, Interesting
And on the other hand, there's stories like this one and that one about anti-security "features" in the same package.
Now, my question is this: is this indicative of open-source development projects, in general? [Yeah, it's faster to fix issues, but if the distros are *causing* issues in the first place, well....;-) ]
Reminds me of a company I worked for that was timebombed by a previous programmer. Unfortunately for him, when we looked at the source code, all was well (he'd copied the sources back over his modified ones used in the binary build)... but he'd left the.bak files. Guess what was in the.bak files. Good, now guess how we discovered a few other potential surprises he'd left for the rest of us to encounter.
Anyway, I can't see how a disgruntled coder could really affect an open-source project, unless there's personality factors at play that I don't know about. Anyone have some meat on this OpenSSL mess?
It took me a while to figure out not everyone hears that high-pitched whine. Though, it doesn't bother me as much now as it used to. I'm not sure whether the desensitization is physical, psycological or both.
It's partly biological: your ceiling lowers as you age. It's partly psychological: as you watch the Idiot Box, you begin to subconsciously 'tune out' the tone. It's partly mechanical: TV technology has improved, resulting in thinner laminations (or whatever) in the flyback transformers, thereby reducing the emitted high-frequency noise.
Of course, it didn't help that 99% of the engineers working on TV technology were 50+, so couldn't hear the tone in the first place. My worst nightmare was having to sit and code support stuff out on the 'floor' of an air traffic control center, next to racks and racks of CRT drivers, all screeching at ~21KHz, and being the only one who could hear it.
Eventually, the techies got really tired of hearing me complain about it, so hooked up a spectrum analyzer to a microphone to prove to me that it didn't exist. Guess where the big spike was.... Anyway, they moved my work area.;-D
Slashdot Mirror
Well, damn. I guess I was right to include the term "apochryphal" then, what? =)
Linkage by juxtaposition is a common logical fallacy, prevalent in the media, unfortunately. A desensitization to which was why I added that remark: it was not indended for the careful reader, but for the "average /. reader who has an interest in science". Yeah, that's an odd market, I'm sure. =)
Aprocryphal story related to me by my academic advisor:
William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was invited to witness a demonstration of Faraday's electrical equipment. Gladstone asked, "This is quite interesting, Faraday, but of what practical worth is it?" Faraday replied, "One day, sir, you may tax it."
Consider the pace of development of technology versus that of science. Through the course of human history, (major) scientific discoveries are indeed rare, but occur at reasonably regular intervals. We've been quite overdue for a non-technological discovery for quite a while, now. Also, I had *no* idea this story would be accepted for anything but science.slashdot.org (if at all), so didn't spend time 'dumbing down' my presentation. Oops. ;-)
Tell me how a keystoke logger is going to stop me from *pasting* something over a secure session? And even if they do, somehow, notice a suspicious paste, how do they know *what* was pasted?
The solution is quite clear, actually: bring your own machine to work. That or put a provision in your contract that allows you to have unmonitored access to your home machine. Or, if working with sensitive data that must *not* be jeopardized, just accept that you're "air gapped" from personal/public connunications and move on, though in these cases (I've worked in one establishment like this), the establishment usually provides 'public-access' machines for people to use for non-work-related activities while on breaks/outside normal hours.
It's the same as a phone, really. Some places record and monitor all calls, most places don't, many just don't care. Caveat signor (f00'lish for "Let the contractor beware")!
Use ssh or WinVNC (like I do) or somesuch to remotely access your home system, and run your personal stuff THERE. At work, the only non work-related software I run is WinAMP, WinVNC client and a web client. At home, I run an email client, IRC, ICQ, Kazaa, etcetera....
;-)
So long as the employer doesn't mind you connecting to your home machine (and you can encrypt that connection, somehow), then what you do with it is your own business.
Of course, you can still paste memos over VNC/ssh, so this just defers the problem somewhat.
I understand Moore's Law quite well, actually. I made that post as an ironic commentary of the *original* author's message....
... until now. A thousandfold increase is a pretty damned exciting breakthrough!
Anyway, as you noted, a variation on the 18 month interval (to 12 months) yields a doubling figure that applies historically, at least generally
Like you said, just a diversion.
This is *way* beyond Moore's Law, though. They're proposing a thousand-fold increase in storage densities, which equates to (approximately) ten doublings, not one every year and a half. According to Moore's Law, we shouldn't be approaching those densities for another 15 years....
So, who's been lying to us all along? The hard drive manufacturers or the physicists? =]
Like I said before, some of the DoF are rather obtuse or tend to run 'coupled'. I know several people who can totally independantly control the final joint on their fingers, though. Even most 'normal' people can if they do this:
;-)
1) hold fingers out straight
2) bend at 'middle' joint, trying to keep the 'final' (third) joint straight
3) once there, try to bend the final joint (should be easy enough, since that's the normal 'grip' position)
4) play with it a bit and you should be able to demonstrate some rudimentary control over those last joints
Okay, now for the thumb....
Hooboy.
The Middle2 they refer to is a 'tilting' motion, similar to the one you mentioned between fingers. Make a gesture like you're holding a guitar neck. Now hold on to the base of your thumb, HARD, and try to move the rest of your thumb over as if you were operating a click pen. Move back and forth and you'll notice that there's about a 10 or 15 degree rotation orthogonal to the primary bending direction. In this image, there's a metal post through the middle joint of the thumb. That's the axis of rotation for this effect.
Keep in mind that, unlike the fingers, the thumb's base isn't fixed to the wrist, but has 2 DoF all of it's own.
So, we have one bend for the 'last' (distal) joint, one bend and a perpendicular tilt for the 'middle' (medial) joint, and two more rotational components for the 'base' (proximal): a roll to point your thumb, and a bend to open/close the whole thumb arrangement. That's 5 DoF. *phew*
Anyway, I'll reiterate: most of these DoFs are essentially useless for UI purposes. 10 per hand is plenty. The face has tons more, the shoulders have 5 each (vertical and horizontal translation, rotate out, rotate up and rotate the whole arm), etcetera. Humans have a ridiculously large number of ways to move. All I want is to tap into 16 or so of them at a time, rather than 2 or 6 continuous (mouse and SpaceOrb, respectively) or 108 discrete (keyboard) axes....
Of course, dancers, sculpters, musicians and so on will always want more, but they don't read SlashDot, do they?! =D
You've made a good, informative post that should have been moderated higher. Alas I have no points to spend, and I can't moderate in a discussion anyway. Heh.... Please allow me to address your key points, however.
... you are probably going to be better off working with half a meter vertically and ... either a meter and a half, or two meters [horizontally]...
... 18kbps. Even if you ad overhead, such as a stop bit every dimension, and a start bit for every sample, the bandwidth requirements are not high. At least not by modern communications standards anyway. The problem is that we do not have that many devices that are both moving (which will cause wire and fibres to ultimately breakdown) and sensing their environment that use this kind of bandwidth.
/. when I've got a working prototype. Might take a few years at this rate, though. =)
A meter is a bit arbitrary, and will give you problems with limits and data bandwidth.
On the contrary, the bandwidth isn't an issue, as you demonstrated, but may be a bit limiting, if it was a cubic area (which it won't be, but that's beside the point).
The intention (not clearly stated in my original message) was to provide a box-like work area, with absolute precision greatest near the 'keyboard' area, and poorest overhead or off to the sides. Most people work with tools or whatever immediately in front of them. A sphere with a 1m radius, centered inside an 'enhanced' keyboard (fancy base station?) would easily meet the requirements for precision near the middle while preserving some sort of sensitivity (even if imprecise) at the extremes.
Also of note is that the fingertips are rarely more than 150 mm from the center of your palm...
My actual design calls for an absolute position and orientation of the hand body (local coordinate system), and relative coordinates for the fingertips from there. Like I said, LOTS of room for compression. With humans, the relative positions of the fingertips (to each other, the hand body and the other fingers) is what matters most. This data is much more important than absolute positions, since we have visual and tactil feedback mechanisms for dealing with absolutes.
With regard to your surgeon example, I must point out that this is intended to be a consumer product, not a medical one, hence the sub-100$ price tag. The same sort of technology could easily be scaled up in precision and accuracy, however, with a parallel increase in cost and complexity. Unfortunately, the reverse is not yet true: though medical-quality VR gloves do exist, there's no way to scale them down to viable consumer levels due to invasiveness, awkwardness, costs and the rest of it. Well, it's been tried, but you end up with junk like the PowerGlove. A new approach is needed! =]
Moving parts, bulky, heavy gloves and tethers are annoying at best and would kill the marketability, for sure. For it to be acceptable, it would need low-weight, small-size fingertip reflectors or sensors that won't make you look like a total fool. Ideally, it would be stitched into a thin Spandex or even fishnet glove, with plastic 'runners' that could look like fashion accessories.
I suspect that whatever solution you put together will be regularly susceptible to failure due the the multiple moving parts required to track the hands of the user. You might be able to find a way to do it with fingertip and palm sensors that wirelessly communicate with each other, or that each communicate with a base station of some sort. One example would be a two camera system working with florescent fingertips that the user would wear. Similar in effect to a motion capture system.
Ever used one of those? I have and it's about the stupidest looking thing on this Earth. Sorry, but unless you can just pull on a non-obtrusive glove and start hacking away, it's never going to fly.
My design (sorry, but I'm not giving the core details away just yet) has only a pair of thin wires running out to each fingertip. These can easily be woven into the glove material itself, run along flat sheets, like in disk drives, printers and the like, or even just use braided connection wire. The wrists (or backs of the hands, depending), will have the conditioning circuitry and will either run a tether or communicate wirelessly to a base station for connection to the PC. There's really not that much to go wrong, and if something does, it'll just be an easily-repairable open-circuit....
Oh, well, best of luck to you in your venture...
Thanks! I'll post to
I'm afraid you did miscount, but I may have too. I said 24, but this page demonstrates 23:
http://www.shadow.org.uk/products/newhand.shtml
In any case, half of them are too tricky to use consciously, but that still leaves over 10 per hand. Two hands = 20+ DoF, easily. Add in shoulders and elbows, head and jaw and it just gets better.... =)
You've been watching too much Minority Report again, havent you?
... total Hollywood garbage.
Ironically, I'd just acquired some crucial components to make my glove thing a possibility a week before that movie came out. I was disgusted at the ludicrous gyrations and oversimplification of their tracking device
Yes, I'm ignoring your humour. Yes, I've been thinking about this for about ten years now. No, it won't look or work anything like the 'glove' in Minority Report.
20 degrees of freedom? doesn't this thing still need to be attached to your arm?
;-)
Sure. Each hand has 24 degrees of freedom, the elbow has 2, the shoulder has 5. That's 62 rotational/translational modes. Yeah, some of it is hard to specify (like making that Vulcan greeting geek-gesture), which is why I went with 10 DoF per side.
Think outside the box, man.
Too expensive, not nearly accurate enough. Sorry, try again. ;-)
Why hasn't anyone built a *REAL* dataglove for the masses yet? The PowerGlove is a lame-ass mockery of a real 3-space input device and is only good for use in simplistic games or other 'toy' applications!
;-)
... this is emminently compressible data, too, should bandwidth prove an issue (though there's always FireWire and USB2.0, I guess)
... remember light pens? (They're the same thing as a mouse, in a 2D sense, and you don't see many light pens kicking around today, do you? =] )
... but no time to spend on implementation), give 'em my email.... f00Dave@bigfoot.com
Wow, that reads like a Flamebait.
What I'd really like to see is a cheap-in-volume 'glove pair' input device (say 100$ for the MS version and 30$ for the Logitech one, like mice or keyboards) that would stream the positions of the fingers and hands over a hot-pluggable USB connection. I have a bazillion applications for that sort of device, and even a good headstart on a way to produce one on my own for about 300$ per pair (and a whole lot of time I just don't have). I'm sure *someone* has already had similar thoughts....
For reference purposes, my (rather fluid) specifications are for a system that:
- spits out positions of the fingertips accurate to 1 cubic mm or so within a cubic meter in your 'work area' (ie: a volume sitting above a traditional keyboard's location at a desk)
- tethered or wireless, as the case may be (wireless is an extra cost, of course, but not THAT much extra - it's mainly the short battery life that sucks for this)
- 60 Hz or better refresh rate for each of the sensed positions
- serial or USB input stream, similar to a 2D mouse's, only with a LOT more coordinates
So, why should everyone have one of these? Well, I can't give away ALL my secrets, but people laughed at the mouse, didn't they? =) A 3D desktop metaphor requires a 3D interface device, and 'air mice' sort of suck. Wands are only good for limited applications
How would you like to type on a virtual keyboard, configured any way you want it to be, anywhere in space you chose to place it? How about a 20-DoF controller for videogames? Music synthesis with 20+ DoFs, each affecting a different component of the sound (left hand for timber and right for pitch, volume and sequencing)? Just as the mouse hardware drove the creation of a billion 2D applications, so will 3D 'glove' hardware drive a billion more.
But only, ONLY if it's CHEAP. If anyone knows an electrical engineer that wants to work on the hardware end of a project with me (I've got the hardware feasability, sample applications and reconstruction algorithms mostly worked out
God, that was a lot longer that I'd expected it to be. Must be the heat. =)
The whole point is to get rid of the radwaste ... it's *garbage*, so we'll want to spend as little time and money on it as we can. Ergo, strap a disposable 'crawler' on the container (cheap in mass quantities), send it up the ribbon and then just let the whole mess sail off unguided and unpowered to the Moon, where it digs itself a shiny new crater. This solution is cheap, recoverable if we need it later, and no longer a problem for Earth, right? Right.
Think practical, not fanciful, when dealing with politicians, money and engineers. =]
I'm willing to bet that a 'dump site' could be chosen quite far away from the site of any currently-proposed or reasonably-conceivable colony. Further, the Moon is a damned huge chunk of rock. Assume that a dump site covers, oh, a million or so square miles (yeah, a squished square, on the equator, about a thousand miles on an edge. The actual target site is a square mile in the middle of it. That still leaves about 36 million square miles of surface area. For comparison purposes, the entire surface area of *North America* is about 9.3 million square miles.
... now, if you started to write "Chairface" on it with a Big Frickin' Laser, that's another story. =)
s s_acts/MoonFa cts.htmle rica/north _america.htmi r.htm
Basically, if there's water under some crater in the dump site, there's going to be water somewhere ELSE, too. Keep in mind: the moon has no ecosystem to destabilize, no indigenous life, no open bodies of water to pollute and won't be an 'eyesore', even if we DID smash thousands of tons of radwaste into a square mile or ten
(Quick) References:
http://www.spacegrant.hawaii.edu/cla
http://www.globalgeografia.com/north_am
http://caboodle.tripod.com/tick/cha
Sounds good, save that if the 'waste gets hit by a rock from space, I doubt it'll do any more damage to the container than the initial impact did. Odds on a huge rock hitting a small container that's already going to be under the middle of a crater, somewhere are vanishingly small. And even if it did, it'll just smear the active ingredients around, or turn it into ejecta. Either way, it's *waste*, so we don't care what happens to it, right? =]
The point is that we don't WANT to spend fuel on this problem and Hohmann orbits require a burn. Like I said, there's not enough velocity at 'release' to have the orbit intersect the Sun. Now, plowing the radwaste into the Moon is a much better idea, overall, and should be easily accomplished from The Ribbon (I haven't done the math to be sure, hence the 'should', but since the Moon already has the Earth's orbital velocity, there's obviously a LOT less delta-V required....).
Besides, as I said in another reply, we might WANT that radwaste in the future, sometime. =)
Yes, sorry, I meant a lot of V to get rid of (or delta V to be added) in order to create an orbit that will intersect with the Sun's atmosphere. But sure, who cares if there's radwaste kicking around in space, somewhere reasonably far away from where we expect to end up going? It would be a hell of a lot cheaper to just drop it on Venus or Mars, saving that we might want to live there someday (Mars, anyway, Venus is probably not worth it).
The only thing that makes smashing radwaste into a planet better than just setting it adrift is that, unless it's got solar escape velocity, it's just going to hang around our solar system forever. That's just delaying the problem. Further, if you dump stuff somewhere, and some future civilization decides it's actually USEFUL, then it's sort of hard to get it back from the Sun, eh? =)
The Moon is a much more logical dumping ground for radwaste, IMHO.
The energy required to actually launch something 'into the Sun' from Earth is enormous. The Earth's orbital velocity is around 30 km/s, or 108000 km/h (~64800 mph). That's a LOT of delta-V to get rid of! I'll leave the details to the science geeks, but even with a gravitational slingshot (say off Venus), you're not gonna kill all that speed without entering atmosphere. The alternative would be to haul shit up to the graviational midpoint then let it slide along the shaft, accellerating and getting whipped off at 1G at the end of it, aiming it to smack into Jupiter or something, instead. ;-)
e ar thfact.html
That whole 'spiraling into the sun' thing bugs me.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/
I am afraid you are totally wrong, this could happen in open-source enviroments but also in closed development enviroments. The big difference is than i a closed-source project you even do not realise that you have been trojaned!!!
And how am I "totally wrong"? The timebomb I described *was* a closed-source project. Closed-source doesn't meant no-source, it merely means that the access to it is limited to some extent.
Knee-jerk reactions like yours don't help the 'cause' of Open Source development. Next time please take a deep breath and think about how your post will be interpreted before you send it. Thanks.
On the one hand, there's stories about the improved security and paranoia of OpenSSH.
;-) ]
... but he'd left the .bak files. Guess what was in the .bak files. Good, now guess how we discovered a few other potential surprises he'd left for the rest of us to encounter.
And on the other hand, there's stories like this one and that one about anti-security "features" in the same package.
Now, my question is this: is this indicative of open-source development projects, in general? [Yeah, it's faster to fix issues, but if the distros are *causing* issues in the first place, well....
Reminds me of a company I worked for that was timebombed by a previous programmer. Unfortunately for him, when we looked at the source code, all was well (he'd copied the sources back over his modified ones used in the binary build)
Anyway, I can't see how a disgruntled coder could really affect an open-source project, unless there's personality factors at play that I don't know about. Anyone have some meat on this OpenSSL mess?
"Once you're down to a certain size it's like 'what's the difference between a 5-inch and a 6-inch airplane.'"
Ooo! and Ahh....
What? You mean 'airplane' isn't a euphemism? =]
It took me a while to figure out not everyone hears that high-pitched whine. Though, it doesn't bother me as much now as it used to. I'm not sure whether the desensitization is physical, psycological or both.
;-D
It's partly biological: your ceiling lowers as you age. It's partly psychological: as you watch the Idiot Box, you begin to subconsciously 'tune out' the tone. It's partly mechanical: TV technology has improved, resulting in thinner laminations (or whatever) in the flyback transformers, thereby reducing the emitted high-frequency noise.
Of course, it didn't help that 99% of the engineers working on TV technology were 50+, so couldn't hear the tone in the first place. My worst nightmare was having to sit and code support stuff out on the 'floor' of an air traffic control center, next to racks and racks of CRT drivers, all screeching at ~21KHz, and being the only one who could hear it.
Eventually, the techies got really tired of hearing me complain about it, so hooked up a spectrum analyzer to a microphone to prove to me that it didn't exist. Guess where the big spike was.... Anyway, they moved my work area.