After the £7m prize was announced for the first non-commercial person to get into space, it seems there are now several people aiming to win it. Cool.
You make it seem like a new prize... this article is just talking about the same old X-Prize, which has been around since 1996. In fact, almost a year ago there was an article in the BBC discussing several of the contenders, and Bennett was generally talked about as being a crazy risk-taker, and least likely to win. Another (closer to home) competitor is toy-inventor Brian Walker (aka Rocket Guy, about whom there was a Slashdot article, but I can't find it as Slashdot's search is down), as well as famous aircraft designer Bert Rutan and his company Scaled Composites.
There are several other contenders, and lots of cool animations and info to be found at the X-Prize homepage.
The only air space inside the box should be the space inside the computer case itself. Heavy things will be set on top of the box. Air is compressible.
If only it were that easy... I sent a well packed computer, and the only vacant space was within the case itself. However, the heatsink/fan got knocked off during transit and wreaked havoc bouncing around in the case (broken mobo, cpu and video card... however, the video card protected the modem and sound-card!)
Moral of the story: completely dismantle the computer! Pack each individual component well... if it can fall off, it will fall off...
I recently shipped a computer via UPS from Kelowna (in the interior of BC) to Vancouver, BC. Like the guy in the story, I wrapped it in bubble wrap, styrofoam and thick boxes.
When the computer arrived at it's destination, it looked very similar to yours. Upon opening the box, there was even external damage evident to the case of the computer, including chipped corners on the plastic front, as well as a dent and deep scrape on one side.
I opened up the case only to find the fan and heat sink dangling from the motherboard. The processor's core had been chipped, the motherboard scratched, and the video card beat up as well.
The system was a new one intended for business use in Vancouver. Having it DOA put a serious damper on the business in question. Fortunately it was insured.
With the promise of insurance money coming, I ordered replacements for the broken parts, but made the mistake of having them shipped UPS as well. Intent on minimizing the hassle to the customer, I ordered parts from within Vancouver and paid $20 extra for guaranteed overnight shipping. No damage this time, but 2 days late on a guaranteed overnight delivery, where the distance involved was somewhere about 40km!
In the end, it took about 3 months to see any of the insurance money from UPS. They were extremely uncooperative, sending two adjustors who had no clue of each other, asking the same questions, and filing two sets of independent paper-work, which further delayed the process!
Unfortunately, there are tales of horror for just about every shipping company... it doesn't matter if you go UPS, Purolator or FedEx, you're gambling when you send sensitive equipment...
Normal maintenance is typically a little more expensive. The Insight, as someone else already posted, takes special oil, and is less than straight forward to do an oil change on.
Also, the tires are a specially made low-rolling-resistance tire, and cost a little more (and are harder to find). I'm not sure about the tire radius and bolt pattern, but in a pinch there may be standard tires that'll fit...
The brakes are just plain normal brakes.... the regenerative braking doesn't actually consist of any parts at the wheel... to do regenerative braking, the current to the motor is cut, and it simply acts as a generator... it produces electricity as it spins, but this creates a force on the motor that causes it's spinning to slow down... via the drive to the tires, this makes your tires slow down... typically, regenerative braking is done by releasing the "gas" pedal, and normal brakes still exist for quick stopping (regenerative braking doesn't give huge braking power.... it's good for slowing down while cruising and such...)
The paper talks about a trailer mounted generator they designed that is hooked up to to the tZero to give it a much extended range over it's pure electric performance. They did some neat stuff to make the car drive the same as a car without a trailer (ie: for backing up!), and the trailer is actually rigidly attached with steerable wheels (linked to the cars steering). Neat concept... could be extended to be use fuel cells or anything else...
Recently, I've been putting some thought into the basic design of hybrid cars.
To me, hybrid cars should be designed almost completely as electric cars, with an external interface to a charging system of some kind. That "charging system" is simply a source of electric power for charging batteries. This could then be anything you desire, ie: fuel cells, gas engine, diesel engine, etc.
The efficiency of eletric motors is much higher than gasoline engines throughout their entire operating range, and can provide smooth acceleration over a large range, avoiding the need for any transmission (typically, a single reduction drive will do). In fact, eletric engines are small enough and have high enough power densities that it is very feasible to have 4 small motors (one at each tire) to drive the wheels independently. In this way, differentials and full width axles are also avoided (the work of a differential being done in software instead). Plus, this configuration allows for a very powerful all-wheel drive type system.
To make such a vehicle a hybrid, let the "charging system" be a traditional ultra-low emission gasoline/deisel engine, that is fine tuned to run at one specific RPM and power output for maximum fuel efficieny. This motor's sole task is to recharge batteries, and need only be capable of providing enough power to keep the batteries charged when the car is sustaining a given top speed.
Most cars have hugely larges engines, where the full power output is only ever used in acceleration. By having the engine only act as a charger, you only need roughly 1/4 the horsepower for your typical car (ie: a 20 kW engine would be MORE than sufficient). The surges of power needed by the electric motors are handled by the battery, which is recharged while cruising and idling.
Rough calculations show that we should eventually be able to acheive 80+ mpg in such a configuration. In fact, there is a completely electric sports-car (built for doing the 1/4 mile in 13s!) called a tZero that takes this approach. You can buy an external engine for recharging the batteries, and it achieves a net fuel economy of around 40MPG (keep in mind this is purely a high performance sports car).
Also, a similar system using a diesel engine should get even better mileage, as diesel engines have a higher Carnot cycle efficieny.
As things progress even further, instead of using an ICE/generator system, we can move to pure thermal->electricity systems, such as ultra efficient Magneto-hydrodynamic generators...
Sorry for the rant, but I think that there are a lot of cool things that could be done with hybrid cars if people would invest a little more time and money...
Re:Fascinating, but not practical, here's why:
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 1
Secondly, doing things on a chip or two is great, but the main problem in computing is communications. The major part of creating efficient communications protocols is determining the probability of a bit error. Probability is a very complicated science, even using the binary distribution, which is a very simple function (that just happens to escape me at the moment.) Now, add another bit, and you have to use a trinary distribution, which I'm sure exists but isn't very common (and not surprisingly, I can't recall that one either). Long story short, this theoretical math has been made practical in computer communications over a long period of time dating back 50 years, starting all over with 3 bits rather than 2 would be extremely complicated and VERY, VERY expensive.
Most of the math behind error-correcting codes/protocols has its roots in Claude Shannon's work on Information and Communication theory, which was generalized for arbitrary bases (and thus applies for base 3 as well). Since then, although work has focussed generally on base 2, mathematicians like to keep things general and most of it is easily extended to other bases.
I think that hardware design/tolerance issues would be the largest obstacle, rather the specifics of working in base 3. The point of the article was to show that base 3 is in most cases, the ideal base to pick (because of it's symmetry, and near optimality of representation), and that it simplifies many tasks. Unfortunately, mass re-education would need to occur, and a lot of developed intuition would be lost...
Maybe one day... but in the meantime, it's likely only to be appreciated by mathematicians...
If you telnet into the site and make a basic "GET / HTTP/1.0" request without any user-agent or extra headers, then you see some sort of weird test page:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 22:27:21 GMT
P3P:CP="BUS CUR CONo FIN IVDo ONL OUR PHY SAMo TELo"
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-control: private
Content-Length: 903
<HTML>
<HEAD> <TITLE> Test Page </TITLE> </HEAD>
<CENTER> <b> <i> Master Test Page <p>
This page is monitored heavily. Test all changes!!! </i> </b> </CENTER>
<P> <A HREF= "http://ads.msn.com/ads/installationtestpage. htm"> MSN Ad Rotator Test Page </A>
<P> <A HREF= "http://ads.msn.com/-pgexpires"> Ad Expiration Filter Dignostics Page </A>
<P> <A HREF= "http://www.msn.com/msnsmoke/ads-test/test.as p"> Ad Rotator Installation Test Page </A>
<P> <A HREF= "http://www.msn.com/msnsmoke/piglet/checkip.a sp"> msn.com URL generation page </A>
<P> <A HREF = "/msnsmoke/ra/default.htm" > Real Audio Servers Test Page </A>
<p> <A HREF = "/msnsmoke/ns/default.htm" > NetShow Servers Test Page </A>
<p> <A HREF = "/msnsmoke/denali/propdb/test_prop.asp" > User Props Test Page (Denali / NT 4.0 only) </A>
<p> <A HREF = "/msnsmoke/denali/MWSmokeTest.asp" > Denali "test it all" page </A>
</HTML>
Perhaps eBay should take a step forward here and make escrow transactions standard. If eBay itself would act as the escrow agent, and build it into their infrastructure, everybody wins. Typically, escrow fees are pretty tiny, and in reality, they make sense for most transactions.
If eBay set up a decent, reliable, and affordably priced system and made it inherent in the auction process, the masses would follow.
Hydrogen actually has a much higher energy density than gasoline, about 2.6x higher by weight. The problem in general is it has a lower energy density by volume, as even liquid hydrogen is only around one-tenth the density of gasoline. Thus, you need about 3 times the storage space for an equivalent amount of energy. Three times isn't a huge factor, and remember that's volume, not mass; the mass of that equivalent energy hydrogen fuel will still be 2.6 times lighter than the equivalent gasoline.
Note: These numbers are based on AvGas, and not kerosene, which only has a slightly higher energy density than straight 100LL AvGas.
I had the same feelings, but at the same time the technologies they advertise aren't far fetched. In fact, the "new" motor isn't "new", and the PowerChips and SolarChips are definitely not new.
From the gist of things they're claiming that efficiency of these devices can be improved through precisely designed structures printed with MEMS technology. Otherwise, the fundamental technologies they're using are those in use by everyone else...
The upper bound on efficiency of these things is governed by the Carnot cycle limit; so for a temperature gradient from T2 down to T1, your upper bound is (T2-T1)/T2. So, I the power generation is limited by the surface area of the thing (governing the wattage of heat going through it) and the temperature gradient itself.
I guess if we assume a skin temperature of 34 celsius (307 K), and an ambient temperature of 20 C (293 K), then our efficiency is bounded by about 4.5%. Given that we dissipate on average 64W/m^2 at idle, and a "fingernail" sized device (1.5 cm^2), we should have about 0.001 W available to us, or 0.4 mW assuming 100% of Carnot cycle efficiency. At 1.5V, this gives a maximum current output of 0.27 mA. Since they are getting about 10 microA, then we can assume they see an efficiency of about 4% themselves. So, it seems like there's room to grow!
Maybe they'll be able to power those PDA's after all!
There's a quick discussion here with regards to human-body-power available for wearable computing.
Also, there's another company that builds thermo-ionic power generating chips (cleverly named PowerChips) called Borealis. They see them being used as a second-stage on typical gas turbine/etc.. generators. They claim to see 20% efficiency wrt the Carnot cycle limit, a few orders of magnitude better than most thermo-electric (Peltier based) generators.
BTW: All these calculations are very "back of the envelope"!
A potential hijacking solution...
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
All the news out there has been hinting that the hijackers got control of the aircraft by luring the pilots out of the locked cockpit by killing passengers/flight attendants, and threatening to kill more. Typical company policy says that they are not to do that, despite it seeming like the right thing to do at the time.
Why not physically seperate the cockpit from the rest of the aircraft? Currently, regulations and company policy make it so that their should be a door between the cockpit and passenger cabin, and that door is normally locked. However, if the pilots had a seperate external entrance to the cockpit, it would make it pretty much impossible for the hijackers to threaten the pilots directly, or attempt to take over the controls.
Not to say this would prevent all hiijacks (you can still threaten the entire plane with a bomb or kill passengers to persuade the pilots), but it would prevent aircraft from being physically controlled by hijackers, and used as flying bombs.
Maybe not in Netscape, but the newest version of Konqueror does support ActiveX plugins (See this release, dated 10 Jul 01). So, the API is well enough documented that it is possible.
Having written a Netscape plug-in, and an ActiveX control for the same purpose, it's my opinion that the ActiveX road is more fully-featured, and allows you to do certain key things that the Netscape API doesn't. (One critical feature is the ability to do alpha blending with the document in the background; there's no way to access this data from the Netscape API).
It remains to be seen if Microsoft keeps this block out of Netscape-style plugins, but it may actually be a good thing in the end (provided Microsoft doesn't bar others from supporting ActiveX plugins).
Autorotation is reserved for helicopters only as
they have variable pitch blades. The SoloTrek,
however, has fixed pitch blades that produce
varied thrust simply by varying the rpm. Helicopters tend to run their blades in a vary narrow (nearly fixed) rpm range, and vary the
torque to the blade, and the pitch of the blades. This increases or decreases the angle of attack of the blade as it wings through the air, changing how much lift it produces.
When a helicopter auto-rotates, it flattens the
pitch of the blades such that they continue
wind-milling and store rotational energy. At the
last second, this energy is converted to lift by
yanking the collective and increasing the pitch
of the blades. However, with a fixed pitch
system, there is no way of converting the rotational energy to a burst of lift. Thus, the SoloTrek (and other fixed pitch VTOLs... ie: Moller SkyCar, Xantus and this cool co-axial helicopter are forced to use
parachutes to save their arse.
As I was going through the page I was fairly unimpressed, largely. Much of what was there has been in Photoshop (and probably the Gimp) for years now, i.e. filters to make photo's look like paintings or apply textures or whatever.
Yes, Photoshop and the Gimp have had similar filters for a long time, but that's not the point of the project. Filters that are used in the Gimp and Photoshop were hand created and are each specialized and unique. This algorithm provides a general framework for learning how to apply a given filter. Ie: it can be used to easily create filter types that didn't exist just based on sample inputs and outputs. It's broader than the relatively simple filter operations found in typical imaging tools...
I must admit though, the texturizing feature is damn cool.
Well, this is impressive and all, but if you assume a 4:3 aspect ratio and follow it through, you end up finding that the monitor has a resolution of pretty much exactly 200 dpi. Seeing as how cheap printers do 300 dpi, and commercial printers easily do 1200 dpi, then it's going to take *many* more pixels before computers monitors are "paper" quality... just imagine the mounds of memory and processing power needed to make a 22" 1200dpi monitor happen! (hmmm... 21120x15840x32bit resolution, at least.7 GB of display memory!)
That brings up another point... why do they need 2GB of memory for a 32 bit display of 9.2 megapixels? The display itself only needs about 35 MB of video memory! Do you really need 16 processors each with 128 MB of ram just to drive a monitor!?
Stuff like this really pisses me off, and not only when it's applied to product registration... too many apps are taking for granted that a user is always connected, and they simply don't function, or lose functionality if you are not connected and talking to the appropriate 'authority' (ie: these MS clearing-houses)... also, things like this have the capability to transparently send info about your computer (and anything that may be on it, private or otherwise) without you knowing... just out of sheer curiousity I'd like to see someone implement something similar to tcpdump, but that attempts to track traffic back to it's originating app... it'd be interesting to see what Real Networks, Adobe, and Windows apps are talking about during their frequent call-backs....
Actually, slide rules AREN'T dead. I'm an airplane pilot and have to be able to make various calculations in-flight. For instance, "you're flying a heading of 010 at 100 knots, the wind is from 090 at 10 knots, what angle of wind correction do you need, and what will your ground speed be?"
The calculation you've outlined doesn't even use the traditional slide-ruler... it uses the "wind" side of the E6-B, which is simply a tool for performing vector arithmetic. The slide ruler portion of the E6-B answers questions related to calculating distances, speeds, and times...
Although they definitely aren't mainstream, like a lot of the other technologies on this list, they definitely still have a place. Circular-slide-rules are still taught to and used by pilots all around the world... they are very useful for quick inflight calculations, and your average small airplane pilot uses them routinely (especially during training).
Slashdot Mirror
After the £7m prize was announced for the first non-commercial person to get into space, it seems there are now several people aiming to win it. Cool.
You make it seem like a new prize... this article is just talking about the same old X-Prize, which has been around since 1996. In fact, almost a year ago there was an article in the BBC discussing several of the contenders, and Bennett was generally talked about as being a crazy risk-taker, and least likely to win. Another (closer to home) competitor is toy-inventor Brian Walker (aka Rocket Guy, about whom there was a Slashdot article, but I can't find it as Slashdot's search is down), as well as famous aircraft designer Bert Rutan and his company Scaled Composites.
There are several other contenders, and lots of cool animations and info to be found at the X-Prize homepage.
The only air space inside the box should be the space inside the computer case itself. Heavy things will be set on top of the box. Air is compressible.
If only it were that easy... I sent a well packed computer, and the only vacant space was within the case itself. However, the heatsink/fan got knocked off during transit and wreaked havoc bouncing around in the case (broken mobo, cpu and video card... however, the video card protected the modem and sound-card!)
Moral of the story: completely dismantle the computer!
Pack each individual component well... if it can fall off, it will fall off...
I recently shipped a computer via UPS from Kelowna (in the interior of BC) to Vancouver, BC. Like the guy in the story, I wrapped it in bubble wrap, styrofoam and thick boxes.
When the computer arrived at it's destination, it looked very similar to yours. Upon opening the box, there was even external damage evident to the case of the computer, including chipped corners on the plastic front, as well as a dent and deep scrape on one side.
I opened up the case only to find the fan and heat sink dangling from the motherboard. The processor's core had been chipped, the motherboard scratched, and the video card beat up as well.
The system was a new one intended for business use in Vancouver. Having it DOA put a serious damper on the business in question. Fortunately it was insured.
With the promise of insurance money coming, I ordered replacements for the broken parts, but made the mistake of having them shipped UPS as well. Intent on minimizing the hassle to the customer, I ordered parts from within Vancouver and paid $20 extra for guaranteed overnight shipping. No damage this time, but 2 days late on a guaranteed overnight delivery, where the distance involved was somewhere about 40km!
In the end, it took about 3 months to see any of the insurance money from UPS. They were extremely uncooperative, sending two adjustors who had no clue of each other, asking the same questions, and filing two sets of independent paper-work, which further delayed the process!
Unfortunately, there are tales of horror for just about every shipping company... it doesn't matter if you go UPS, Purolator or FedEx, you're gambling when you send sensitive equipment...
Also, the tires are a specially made low-rolling-resistance tire, and cost a little more (and are harder to find). I'm not sure about the tire radius and bolt pattern, but in a pinch there may be standard tires that'll fit...
The brakes are just plain normal brakes.... the regenerative braking doesn't actually consist of any parts at the wheel... to do regenerative braking, the current to the motor is cut, and it simply acts as a generator... it produces electricity as it spins, but this creates a force on the motor that causes it's spinning to slow down... via the drive to the tires, this makes your tires slow down... typically, regenerative braking is done by releasing the "gas" pedal, and normal brakes still exist for quick stopping (regenerative braking doesn't give huge braking power.... it's good for slowing down while cruising and such...)
The paper talks about a trailer mounted generator they designed that is hooked up to to the tZero to give it a much extended range over it's pure electric performance. They did some neat stuff to make the car drive the same as a car without a trailer (ie: for backing up!), and the trailer is actually rigidly attached with steerable wheels (linked to the cars steering). Neat concept... could be extended to be use fuel cells or anything else...
To me, hybrid cars should be designed almost completely as electric cars, with an external interface to a charging system of some kind. That "charging system" is simply a source of electric power for charging batteries. This could then be anything you desire, ie: fuel cells, gas engine, diesel engine, etc.
The efficiency of eletric motors is much higher than gasoline engines throughout their entire operating range, and can provide smooth acceleration over a large range, avoiding the need for any transmission (typically, a single reduction drive will do). In fact, eletric engines are small enough and have high enough power densities that it is very feasible to have 4 small motors (one at each tire) to drive the wheels independently. In this way, differentials and full width axles are also avoided (the work of a differential being done in software instead). Plus, this configuration allows for a very powerful all-wheel drive type system.
To make such a vehicle a hybrid, let the "charging system" be a traditional ultra-low emission gasoline/deisel engine, that is fine tuned to run at one specific RPM and power output for maximum fuel efficieny. This motor's sole task is to recharge batteries, and need only be capable of providing enough power to keep the batteries charged when the car is sustaining a given top speed.
Most cars have hugely larges engines, where the full power output is only ever used in acceleration. By having the engine only act as a charger, you only need roughly 1/4 the horsepower for your typical car (ie: a 20 kW engine would be MORE than sufficient). The surges of power needed by the electric motors are handled by the battery, which is recharged while cruising and idling.
Rough calculations show that we should eventually be able to acheive 80+ mpg in such a configuration. In fact, there is a completely electric sports-car (built for doing the 1/4 mile in 13s!) called a tZero that takes this approach. You can buy an external engine for recharging the batteries, and it achieves a net fuel economy of around 40MPG (keep in mind this is purely a high performance sports car).
Also, a similar system using a diesel engine should get even better mileage, as diesel engines have a higher Carnot cycle efficieny.
As things progress even further, instead of using an ICE/generator system, we can move to pure thermal->electricity systems, such as ultra efficient Magneto-hydrodynamic generators...
Sorry for the rant, but I think that there are a lot of cool things that could be done with hybrid cars if people would invest a little more time and money...
Most of the math behind error-correcting codes/protocols has its roots in Claude Shannon's work on Information and Communication theory, which was generalized for arbitrary bases (and thus applies for base 3 as well). Since then, although work has focussed generally on base 2, mathematicians like to keep things general and most of it is easily extended to other bases.
I think that hardware design/tolerance issues would be the largest obstacle, rather the specifics of working in base 3. The point of the article was to show that base 3 is in most cases, the ideal base to pick (because of it's symmetry, and near optimality of representation), and that it simplifies many tasks. Unfortunately, mass re-education would need to occur, and a lot of developed intuition would be lost...
Maybe one day... but in the meantime, it's likely only to be appreciated by mathematicians...
If eBay set up a decent, reliable, and affordably priced system and made it inherent in the auction process, the masses would follow.
Just go here: http://www.missilebases.com
Note: These numbers are based on AvGas, and not kerosene, which only has a slightly higher energy density than straight 100LL AvGas.
From the gist of things they're claiming that efficiency of these devices can be improved through precisely designed structures printed with MEMS technology. Otherwise, the fundamental technologies they're using are those in use by everyone else...
I guess we'll just have to wait and see...
I guess if we assume a skin temperature of 34 celsius (307 K), and an ambient temperature of 20 C (293 K), then our efficiency is bounded by about 4.5%. Given that we dissipate on average 64W/m^2 at idle, and a "fingernail" sized device (1.5 cm^2), we should have about 0.001 W available to us, or 0.4 mW assuming 100% of Carnot cycle efficiency. At 1.5V, this gives a maximum current output of 0.27 mA. Since they are getting about 10 microA, then we can assume they see an efficiency of about 4% themselves. So, it seems like there's room to grow!
Maybe they'll be able to power those PDA's after all!
There's a quick discussion here with regards to human-body-power available for wearable computing.
Also, there's another company that builds thermo-ionic power generating chips (cleverly named PowerChips) called Borealis. They see them being used as a second-stage on typical gas turbine/etc.. generators. They claim to see 20% efficiency wrt the Carnot cycle limit, a few orders of magnitude better than most thermo-electric (Peltier based) generators.
BTW: All these calculations are very "back of the envelope"!
Why not physically seperate the cockpit from the rest of the aircraft? Currently, regulations and company policy make it so that their should be a door between the cockpit and passenger cabin, and that door is normally locked. However, if the pilots had a seperate external entrance to the cockpit, it would make it pretty much impossible for the hijackers to threaten the pilots directly, or attempt to take over the controls.
Not to say this would prevent all hiijacks (you can still threaten the entire plane with a bomb or kill passengers to persuade the pilots), but it would prevent aircraft from being physically controlled by hijackers, and used as flying bombs.
Just a thought...
Having written a Netscape plug-in, and an ActiveX control for the same purpose, it's my opinion that the ActiveX road is more fully-featured, and allows you to do certain key things that the Netscape API doesn't. (One critical feature is the ability to do alpha blending with the document in the background; there's no way to access this data from the Netscape API).
It remains to be seen if Microsoft keeps this block out of Netscape-style plugins, but it may actually be a good thing in the end (provided Microsoft doesn't bar others from supporting ActiveX plugins).
--
Chris
When a helicopter auto-rotates, it flattens the pitch of the blades such that they continue wind-milling and store rotational energy. At the last second, this energy is converted to lift by yanking the collective and increasing the pitch of the blades. However, with a fixed pitch system, there is no way of converting the rotational energy to a burst of lift. Thus, the SoloTrek (and other fixed pitch VTOLs... ie: Moller SkyCar, Xantus and this cool co-axial helicopter are forced to use parachutes to save their arse.
As I was going through the page I was fairly unimpressed, largely. Much of what was there has been in Photoshop (and probably the Gimp) for years now, i.e. filters to make photo's look like paintings or apply textures or whatever.
Yes, Photoshop and the Gimp have had similar filters for a long time, but that's not the point of the project. Filters that are used in the Gimp and Photoshop were hand created and are each specialized and unique. This algorithm provides a general framework for learning how to apply a given filter. Ie: it can be used to easily create filter types that didn't exist just based on sample inputs and outputs. It's broader than the relatively simple filter operations found in typical imaging tools...
I must admit though, the texturizing feature is damn cool.
Well, this is impressive and all, but if you assume a 4:3 aspect ratio and follow it through, you end up finding that the monitor has a resolution of pretty much exactly 200 dpi. Seeing as how cheap printers do 300 dpi, and commercial printers easily do 1200 dpi, then it's going to take *many* more pixels before computers monitors are "paper" quality... just imagine the mounds of memory and processing power needed to make a 22" 1200dpi monitor happen! (hmmm... 21120x15840x32bit resolution, at least .7 GB of display memory!)
That brings up another point... why do they need 2GB of memory for a 32 bit display of 9.2 megapixels? The display itself only needs about 35 MB of video memory! Do you really need 16 processors each with 128 MB of ram just to drive a monitor!?
Stuff like this really pisses me off, and not only when it's applied to product registration... too many apps are taking for granted that a user is always connected, and they simply don't function, or lose functionality if you are not connected and talking to the appropriate 'authority' (ie: these MS clearing-houses)... also, things like this have the capability to transparently send info about your computer (and anything that may be on it, private or otherwise) without you knowing... just out of sheer curiousity I'd like to see someone implement something similar to tcpdump, but that attempts to track traffic back to it's originating app... it'd be interesting to see what Real Networks, Adobe, and Windows apps are talking about during their frequent call-backs....
Actually, slide rules AREN'T dead. I'm an airplane pilot and have to be able to make various calculations in-flight. For instance, "you're flying a heading of 010 at 100 knots, the wind is from 090 at 10 knots, what angle of wind correction do you need, and what will your ground speed be?"
The calculation you've outlined doesn't even use the traditional slide-ruler... it uses the "wind" side of the E6-B, which is simply a tool for performing vector arithmetic. The slide ruler portion of the E6-B answers questions related to calculating distances, speeds, and times...
Although they definitely aren't mainstream, like a lot of the other technologies on this list, they definitely still have a place. Circular-slide-rules are still taught to and used by pilots all around the world ... they are very useful for quick inflight calculations, and your average small airplane pilot uses them routinely (especially during training).