It uses Google for translation
on
Yahoo IM Translator
·
· Score: 4, Informative
First I was exited to see an open source translation project, especially in combination with an instant messenger. The I realized that they simply send the messages to Google for translation. So no access to a translation engine and the quality of Googles translations.
There seems to be openLogos, a commercial translation system that has recently become available as open source based on Linux and PostgreSQL. Guess I'll have to give that one a try, it looked rather complicated. Has anybody any experience with openLogos or similar (freely available) systems?
People drowning usually have something in common: once they lost their consciousness, they don't move that much. In contrast, people will stay afloat by making the weirdest movements, and it is not trivial to determine whether someone is making strange movements because a) they cannot swim or b) they try to splash water on everybody around.
So identifying somebody who does not move and is sinking to the bottom of the pool seems much easier and will only require several thousand images of other peoples in trouble. Correctly identifying swimmers doing just fine would be much more complicated due to the infinite ways to swim without drowning.
For more background see Software Runaways: Monumental Software Disasters, ISBN: 013673443X, 1997 by Robert P. Glass includes the history of the Denver airport baggage handling system and 15 other desasters in large software systems, e.g. the FAA Air Traffic Control system (death by committee), American Airlines reservation system and others.
Be aware that this is not a technical book and mostly concerned about project management and the problems of defining the requirements of large projects years ahead of their finalization. All the project failures described are very large, complex projects including lots and lots of politics.
As a whole the book is rather depressing, because although in review the cause of failure seems rather obvious, but there is no obvious way to avoid them. It's also a rather dry subject, do not expect to many laughs. But it is great for a large picture on software development, a kind of "how not to do it" guide.
The problem with forcing Microsoft to unbundle WMP or IE is that it comes too late, the product has already been accepted by the market. The legal tools for handling this kind of behaviour are unsufficient. Since the products are distributed at no cost, customers see no reason to switch. The only way to prevent this would have been to force Microsoft to distribute WMP or IE in a similar way to their competitors, i.e. charge for it or at least make it a separate download. That way the market may have decided by choice instead by default setting.
To stop Microsoft from doing it again (Desktop Search? Music downloads via XBox2) they would have to be forced to compete in the market BEFORE they achieve a dominant position. I don't think this is legally possible.
Maybe you remember the MacExpo keynote from 1997, where Steve Jobs announced that a) Microsoft had aquired shares of Apple worth $US 150 million and b) guaranteed that they would continue to offer MS Office for MacOS for at least another five years. Today this is still recalled by a lot of PC fans as the day Microsoft saved Apple by buying stock. But what most people did not see was that at that time Apple already had several billions in reserve (I think it were four) and the stock Microsoft bought was basically symbolic, the major news was the Office deal. (http://antibogon.org/Stepwise/TheHolyGrail.html mentiones that Apple was worth $US 7 billion at that time.)
So if Apple now claims to be debt free this does not mean at all that they finally earned enought to pay back their debt. They could have done that years ago. It just means that they decided (for some strange fiscal reasons) to pay back everything in 2004 (remember, debt is positive from a tax point of view) and that, as usual, Steve Jobs takes this non-news and transforms it into holy water for the mac users.
I want to go down a road, switch my wearable to learning Spanish and see la Iglesia pop up right in front of me when I pass a church. When shopping for peaches I get Las peras son muy apreciadas.(Please note that I do not speak Spanish, so my examples may suck. That's exactly why I want that system.) The machine would know my position via GPS or 3G mobile phone localization services. Starting 2005 I could enter a Wal Mart and my AR system would send a message to the RFID chips on the shelf:
AR to stuff: What the hell are you?
stuff to AR: I am a banana.
AR to me: Esto es un plátano!
I would learn Spanish in no time even without the possibility to stay for some month in Spain, Mexico or South America.
Can you play a video game/watch a movie for 2 hours? If so, there is almost NO CHANCE IN HELL that you have ADHD, you just need to learn discipline.
People with ADHD often have the ability to hyperfocus over a long time, often ways better than someone without ADHD. So your suggestion is plain wrong. The difference between someone with ADHD and someone without is not so much their general ability to concentrate, but their inability to control what they concentrate on. I can easily follow five conversations at the same time, but I have problems to follow just one conversation when there are four other taking place in the same room.
Chriss
Re:Please be respectful on this topic
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
For me telling my last boss worked out quite fine. I'm pretty sure he saw some positive aspects, since he e.g. simply gave up searching for his keys himself when he found that I was ways faster than anybody else finding them, independent of where he had dropped them.
Since I never even take aspirin and already had to live with AHDH for 29 years before I even realized there was a name for my behavior and had arranged with a more or less fitting lifestyle, I had/have strong resentments against taking any drugs. To handle some of the problems I use some of the following tricks:
use external frameworks: I've learned that I am ways (10-20 times) more efficient when I have to go to the office than when working at home without any fixed schedule. Main reasons seem to be:
starts at a specific time (not 9PM, so no I'll just finish this first till late night)
makes it impossible to just walk around and follow any distractions (someone would notice)
stops at a specific time (so it's more difficult to break your own schedule or to tell yourself at 3AM you still got plenty of time to start)
Since I started being self-employed (again) I try to simulate the office.
I start at 10am, even if I only got three hours of sleep
I remove the name server from/etc/resolv.conf in the morning, so I can only reach my local machines and some that are noted in/etc/hosts (my own servers, python.org etc.) No more accidental surfing.
I try to keep interesting stuff off my desk
I keep track on my time in OpenOffice, so I always know whether I already have met my targets or if I have spend hour researching some of the infinite interesting side branches again. If the spread sheet would not remind me, I would have forgotten what I did all day by evening.
I make a lot of short term contracts with other people, so I have to report my own progress on at least a weekly basis
In a case of massive desperation I have tied myself to the chair (literally). You would be astonished how often I found myself in the other room wondering how the hell I got there again and again and again.
involve other people: Over time I learned that I can really concentrate to save somebody else's ass, but not mine. So I try to make sure to work with other people, because the moral pressure to not let them down will somewhat compensate my lack of staying with the priorities. If they are involved actively this also gives me some feedback I urgently need to not forget what I'm trying to do in the first place. I also told everybody I know what I'm trying to achieve, so everybody keeps asking how it's actually working out, also keeping me on track.
caffeine: I dislike coffee, so it's about 3l of Coke per day. To save my weight and teeth I switched to Coke light (hey, you can get used to anything), now my stomach is troubling me. You pay a price.
choice of job: I'm excellent at finding (keys as well as solutions) in a minimum of time and miserable with long term projects. I can handle very complex situations in my head, but never make a small step for a long term solution. This works just fine for trouble shooting, so I was a quite successful sysadmin as long as things where on fire (I quit when everything is running again) as well as as a programmer (as long as the time lines where impossible). What I'm best at is technical consulting for nearly doomed projects, where I can play all my magic and improvise a solution in a short time on a very high adrenaline level. Never hire me for something that takes more than eight weeks.
learning: Maybe other people can learn Python or Ruby in two days, but I can not. I can learn a lot about Python, Zope, WebDAV, XML-RPC, XQL, bioinformatics, BLAST, MPI, proteomics, NUMA, Chinese grammar, game physics, google ranking, CSS, ARM etc. in one day, but not Python alone in two. So I've basically given up on jobs that demand systematic learning of a specific topic in a short term, instead I give in to being an info junkie and base my consulting on my ability to connect hundreds of weird topics with each other t
Also why PCI? Why not talk to it via serial/usb/network? And why not make your own?
I'm coming from the software side, so for me an FPGA has always been kind of an hardware accelerator for my software. My prefered idea is to plug one of these into my machine, learn to program it to do a specific part in e.g. my webserver and never bother with the fact that it is really hardware. So I need the bandwidth of PCI to do something usefull and do not want to touch a soldering iron. I'm aware that there are many more possibilities, but asume that in total numbers more programmers are actualy interested in FPGA than hardware engineers, since there are many more programmers than hardware engineers.
Chriss
extreme applications have to be mind opening
on
Innovation on the Edge?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Lets talk about extreme applications, those which changed our views and methods to act. I do not believe that any application has ever been created without some examples been existent before, but there is often one specific version that got used widely and opened the eyes of a lot of people.
Spreadsheets: Visicalc was not the first, but the first on personal computers. These tools allow you to play with a number of different scenarios in a way you could never handle without them and therefore give a chance to see into the future.
1st person shooters: Doom (and Wolfenstein and hundreds of followers) realized least some of the promises of virtual reality. A artificial world, created in real time, in a way that was realistic without to much burden on your own fantasy, dense and moody enough to really immerse yourself into that world. A copy of our real world as an interface to a computer, more coming.
Communication (Email/News/Chat): The video text system Minitel pushed by France Telecom during the 80s and early 90s by giving away the (primitive) terminals for free. This is most likely the first electronic mass medium that existed with up to 35 million users, more than 50% of the whole population of France. Was used massively for mail and chat (and porn), but also included a micro payment system and was a huge ecommerce success more than a decade before the web became popular. Communication is the killer app of all killer apps.
ebay: ebay is its own category (and, of course, it's an application), everything else is a copy. First worldwide successful C2C business, could not exist without the web, but has proved that the low cost of a medium can generate markets where there was no margin before. Removed the costs for advertising, customer service, handling etc. by reducing its own function to a mere communication enabler.
Search engines: Google comes in mind, but Google is just a very clever version of Altavista, I do not remember who started it. Whenever you search in a text with your preferred text processor, you're using its search engine to run a full text search, so it's not really new. But applied to an enormous body of data (unsorted, in contrast to classical databases) gave us a kind of 'instant knowledge' unthinkable before. I own dozens of dictionaries and never leave without my Encyclopaedia Britannica (on my iBook), but nothing can compete with billions of pages of unstructured information at my fingertip.
web browsers: Mosaic was for many people the first look into the computer interface of the near future. A system, easy to use from a consumer and producer perspective, at low cost, to enable exchange and access anything that can be squeezed into HTML and some pictures.
bioinformatics tools: BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), a dedicated database for storing, comparing, finding and annotating sequences of DNA etc., to be run at home (if you want to) or in your lab or easily accessible on the web. Enabled researcher worldwide to get immediate access to the most current findings, therefore increasing the speed in which the humane genome could be decoded (and stealing Celeras show). This kind of technology will speed up our acquisition of knowledge in many ways.
When you look at this list, there are some common themes:
eases the access or handling of data
works on low tech machines
enforces communication
These will be found in a lot of 'extreme applications', be it p2p, encryption, proteomics or whatever.
I've been working as a system administrator at a German university till 1999. Back than 650 MByte/day was the average transfer per user per day (including students) within the DFN (Deutsches ForschungsNetz, the network of German universities). Considering the increased availability of broadband access this looks like a realistic prediction for 2007.
Usually you can not simply download a QuickTime movie, if it is not simply served from a webserver. But you can watch the movie with the plugin and then copy the movie from the browsers cache directory (you'll have to find the largest file, because it will have a completely useless name in the cache). With QuickTime Pro you should be able to save some, if not all movies. I guess it's still an $US29.99 update.
The option most browsers offer to ask for every cookie is not an acceptable alternative, neither is turning them of on. There are a number of sites that will deny me the access unless I accept their cookies. So I at least have to accept some cookies. But if I want to decide myself which cookies I'll accept, I am confronted with often five or more requests per viewed web page asking me to set a cookie. Not very convenient.
So most people simply accept all cookies. If a law forced the companies to ask me about cookies first, I'd have to answer with "no, thanks" only once per session, there being no reasonable explanation to ask me five times per page anymore. Companies could not longer count on annoying people until they accept cookies, which would be a good thing(tm).
debalelized: In contrast to competitive systems it also contains a controlling unit, which will follow without causing interruptions even the largest changes in polarity, as they will occur in very long distance transmissions.
Go, girl! Into the bright/light future of home networking.
While the mobile network providers in Germany all have announced or even implemented GPRS networks, their prices are higher than you seem to believe. Deutsche Telekom (which bought Voicestream) prices a block of 10Kb between 0.07DM and 0.69DM, depending on your basic package. This results in USD~33 to USD~323 per 10MB!
The lowest prices are only available by using GPRS with a Laptop or PDA and adding an hourly rate of USD~2.3. If you're using a WAP enables mobile phone, the price per Kb is trippled.
Since that obviously was not enough, you cannot use GPRS with the very popular SMS (short message service, a text message of 160 characters). These will still be charged on a per-message base, with prices being very stable over the last years with all providers. Price per SMS is USD~0.18, summing up to a hefty USD1,143 per 10Mb.
Strange thing is that while adaption of GPRS is very slow (partly due to the lack of GPRS enabled devices and a very bad start for WAP), SMS's still going crazy despite the high costs. I'm not sure about the prices in the rest of Europe, but believe there aren't that many GPRS-enabled GSM networks in use and their pricing is similar.
So it seems that a) the US is not that far behind due to greed and b) people do not really care about the price.
Both arguments are more or less the same. In the early days of NT 3.51 most people using it were computer literate administrators. Only when the market share of NT/W2K rose to levels where close to everyone uses it as a workstation the average users competence dropped. Should Linux reach 20% market share, these 20% will most likely not all be a bunch of computer dorks.
The three points you mention to prove Linux being revolutionary are:
- superior platform diversity
- first time cooperation of very many developers
- GPL
The revolutioners here would be:
- NetBSD
- Anything from the FSF
- RMS
All these predate Linux instead of being introduced by it, making it evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
This only works for 3D projections onto 2D screens, because there you know from where the viewer watches the image and therefore can determine which parts have to be hidden.
Forgot: Due to the principle it's based on the display couldn't display anything non transparent. Every voxel actually glows, so you can't display something like a house and expect the walls to hide what's inside, so you could only see inside through the windows. Everything will shine through. The same problem should apply to the new display.
Back when virtual reality was the future (late '80s), TI had a similar display. It was a fast rotating helix made of a transparant material. Due to the rotation every position inside the dome this thing rotated in was "filled" with material only once during every circle. If you fired a laser at that position when it was filled, it would glow in green or red, depending on the laser. And naturally only that position would glow, because the rest of the dome was empty right then.
So by rotating and timing the laser one could display volumetric data. Resolution was very low (a cube that occupied 1/5 of the whole height of the dispay consisted of about five voxels in each direction), but it looked pretty cool anyway.
Price was somewhere between $10K and $50K. TI intended to build a large version for air traffic controllers, so they could walk around a virtual sky in a dome and "see" the planes. Never heard of it again.
The display by Actuality Systems seems to use the same basic principles: rotation and timed illumination. I hope that this time we'll really see these things on the/a market.
Slashdot Mirror
First I was exited to see an open source translation project, especially in combination with an instant messenger. The I realized that they simply send the messages to Google for translation. So no access to a translation engine and the quality of Googles translations.
There seems to be openLogos, a commercial translation system that has recently become available as open source based on Linux and PostgreSQL. Guess I'll have to give that one a try, it looked rather complicated. Has anybody any experience with openLogos or similar (freely available) systems?
People drowning usually have something in common: once they lost their consciousness, they don't move that much. In contrast, people will stay afloat by making the weirdest movements, and it is not trivial to determine whether someone is making strange movements because a) they cannot swim or b) they try to splash water on everybody around.
So identifying somebody who does not move and is sinking to the bottom of the pool seems much easier and will only require several thousand images of other peoples in trouble. Correctly identifying swimmers doing just fine would be much more complicated due to the infinite ways to swim without drowning.
For more background see Software Runaways: Monumental Software Disasters, ISBN: 013673443X, 1997 by Robert P. Glass includes the history of the Denver airport baggage handling system and 15 other desasters in large software systems, e.g. the FAA Air Traffic Control system (death by committee), American Airlines reservation system and others.
Be aware that this is not a technical book and mostly concerned about project management and the problems of defining the requirements of large projects years ahead of their finalization. All the project failures described are very large, complex projects including lots and lots of politics.
As a whole the book is rather depressing, because although in review the cause of failure seems rather obvious, but there is no obvious way to avoid them. It's also a rather dry subject, do not expect to many laughs. But it is great for a large picture on software development, a kind of "how not to do it" guide.
The problem with forcing Microsoft to unbundle WMP or IE is that it comes too late, the product has already been accepted by the market. The legal tools for handling this kind of behaviour are unsufficient. Since the products are distributed at no cost, customers see no reason to switch. The only way to prevent this would have been to force Microsoft to distribute WMP or IE in a similar way to their competitors, i.e. charge for it or at least make it a separate download. That way the market may have decided by choice instead by default setting.
To stop Microsoft from doing it again (Desktop Search? Music downloads via XBox2) they would have to be forced to compete in the market BEFORE they achieve a dominant position. I don't think this is legally possible.
Maybe you remember the MacExpo keynote from 1997, where Steve Jobs announced that a) Microsoft had aquired shares of Apple worth $US 150 million and b) guaranteed that they would continue to offer MS Office for MacOS for at least another five years. Today this is still recalled by a lot of PC fans as the day Microsoft saved Apple by buying stock. But what most people did not see was that at that time Apple already had several billions in reserve (I think it were four) and the stock Microsoft bought was basically symbolic, the major news was the Office deal. (http://antibogon.org/Stepwise/TheHolyGrail.html mentiones that Apple was worth $US 7 billion at that time.)
So if Apple now claims to be debt free this does not mean at all that they finally earned enought to pay back their debt. They could have done that years ago. It just means that they decided (for some strange fiscal reasons) to pay back everything in 2004 (remember, debt is positive from a tax point of view) and that, as usual, Steve Jobs takes this non-news and transforms it into holy water for the mac users.
Posted from my blessed iBook
I want to go down a road, switch my wearable to learning Spanish and see la Iglesia pop up right in front of me when I pass a church. When shopping for peaches I get Las peras son muy apreciadas. (Please note that I do not speak Spanish, so my examples may suck. That's exactly why I want that system.)
The machine would know my position via GPS or 3G mobile phone localization services. Starting 2005 I could enter a Wal Mart and my AR system would send a message to the RFID chips on the shelf:
I would learn Spanish in no time even without the possibility to stay for some month in Spain, Mexico or South America.
People with ADHD often have the ability to hyperfocus over a long time, often ways better than someone without ADHD. So your suggestion is plain wrong. The difference between someone with ADHD and someone without is not so much their general ability to concentrate, but their inability to control what they concentrate on. I can easily follow five conversations at the same time, but I have problems to follow just one conversation when there are four other taking place in the same room.
Chriss
For me telling my last boss worked out quite fine. I'm pretty sure he saw some positive aspects, since he e.g. simply gave up searching for his keys himself when he found that I was ways faster than anybody else finding them, independent of where he had dropped them.
Chriss
Since I never even take aspirin and already had to live with AHDH for 29 years before I even realized there was a name for my behavior and had arranged with a more or less fitting lifestyle, I had/have strong resentments against taking any drugs. To handle some of the problems I use some of the following tricks:
Since I started being self-employed (again) I try to simulate the office.
I'm coming from the software side, so for me an FPGA has always been kind of an hardware accelerator for my software. My prefered idea is to plug one of these into my machine, learn to program it to do a specific part in e.g. my webserver and never bother with the fact that it is really hardware. So I need the bandwidth of PCI to do something usefull and do not want to touch a soldering iron. I'm aware that there are many more possibilities, but asume that in total numbers more programmers are actualy interested in FPGA than hardware engineers, since there are many more programmers than hardware engineers.
Chriss
Lets talk about extreme applications, those which changed our views and methods to act. I do not believe that any application has ever been created without some examples been existent before, but there is often one specific version that got used widely and opened the eyes of a lot of people.
Spreadsheets: Visicalc was not the first, but the first on personal computers. These tools allow you to play with a number of different scenarios in a way you could never handle without them and therefore give a chance to see into the future.
1st person shooters: Doom (and Wolfenstein and hundreds of followers) realized least some of the promises of virtual reality. A artificial world, created in real time, in a way that was realistic without to much burden on your own fantasy, dense and moody enough to really immerse yourself into that world. A copy of our real world as an interface to a computer, more coming.
Communication (Email/News/Chat): The video text system Minitel pushed by France Telecom during the 80s and early 90s by giving away the (primitive) terminals for free. This is most likely the first electronic mass medium that existed with up to 35 million users, more than 50% of the whole population of France. Was used massively for mail and chat (and porn), but also included a micro payment system and was a huge ecommerce success more than a decade before the web became popular. Communication is the killer app of all killer apps.
ebay: ebay is its own category (and, of course, it's an application), everything else is a copy. First worldwide successful C2C business, could not exist without the web, but has proved that the low cost of a medium can generate markets where there was no margin before. Removed the costs for advertising, customer service, handling etc. by reducing its own function to a mere communication enabler.
Search engines: Google comes in mind, but Google is just a very clever version of Altavista, I do not remember who started it. Whenever you search in a text with your preferred text processor, you're using its search engine to run a full text search, so it's not really new. But applied to an enormous body of data (unsorted, in contrast to classical databases) gave us a kind of 'instant knowledge' unthinkable before. I own dozens of dictionaries and never leave without my Encyclopaedia Britannica (on my iBook), but nothing can compete with billions of pages of unstructured information at my fingertip.
web browsers: Mosaic was for many people the first look into the computer interface of the near future. A system, easy to use from a consumer and producer perspective, at low cost, to enable exchange and access anything that can be squeezed into HTML and some pictures.
bioinformatics tools: BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), a dedicated database for storing, comparing, finding and annotating sequences of DNA etc., to be run at home (if you want to) or in your lab or easily accessible on the web. Enabled researcher worldwide to get immediate access to the most current findings, therefore increasing the speed in which the humane genome could be decoded (and stealing Celeras show). This kind of technology will speed up our acquisition of knowledge in many ways.
When you look at this list, there are some common themes:
- eases the access or handling of data
- works on low tech machines
- enforces communication
These will be found in a lot of 'extreme applications', be it p2p, encryption, proteomics or whatever.Chriss
from about the LoC
One LoC consists of
- 18 million books
- 2.5 million recordings
- 12 million photographs
- 4.5 million maps
- 54 million manuscripts
- 29 million other items
stored on 530 miles of bookshelves and growing.Chriss
I've been working as a system administrator at a German university till 1999. Back than 650 MByte/day was the average transfer per user per day (including students) within the DFN (Deutsches ForschungsNetz, the network of German universities). Considering the increased availability of broadband access this looks like a realistic prediction for 2007.
Chriss
You realize that inbetween the mid-1970s and today image compression happened and the oceans compress very well?
Chriss
Usually you can not simply download a QuickTime movie, if it is not simply served from a webserver. But you can watch the movie with the plugin and then copy the movie from the browsers cache directory (you'll have to find the largest file, because it will have a completely useless name in the cache). With QuickTime Pro you should be able to save some, if not all movies. I guess it's still an $US29.99 update.
Chriss
The option most browsers offer to ask for every cookie is not an acceptable alternative, neither is turning them of on. There are a number of sites that will deny me the access unless I accept their cookies. So I at least have to accept some cookies. But if I want to decide myself which cookies I'll accept, I am confronted with often five or more requests per viewed web page asking me to set a cookie. Not very convenient.
So most people simply accept all cookies. If a law forced the companies to ask me about cookies first, I'd have to answer with "no, thanks" only once per session, there being no reasonable explanation to ask me five times per page anymore. Companies could not longer count on annoying people until they accept cookies, which would be a good thing(tm).
Chriss
debalelized: In contrast to competitive systems it also contains a controlling unit, which will follow without causing interruptions even the largest changes in polarity, as they will occur in very long distance transmissions.
Go, girl! Into the bright/light future of home networking.
Chriss
While the mobile network providers in Germany all have announced or even implemented GPRS networks, their prices are higher than you seem to believe. Deutsche Telekom (which bought Voicestream) prices a block of 10Kb between 0.07DM and 0.69DM, depending on your basic package. This results in USD~33 to USD~323 per 10MB!
The lowest prices are only available by using GPRS with a Laptop or PDA and adding an hourly rate of USD~2.3. If you're using a WAP enables mobile phone, the price per Kb is trippled.
Since that obviously was not enough, you cannot use GPRS with the very popular SMS (short message service, a text message of 160 characters). These will still be charged on a per-message base, with prices being very stable over the last years with all providers. Price per SMS is USD~0.18, summing up to a hefty USD1,143 per 10Mb.
Strange thing is that while adaption of GPRS is very slow (partly due to the lack of GPRS enabled devices and a very bad start for WAP), SMS's still going crazy despite the high costs. I'm not sure about the prices in the rest of Europe, but believe there aren't that many GPRS-enabled GSM networks in use and their pricing is similar.
So it seems that a) the US is not that far behind due to greed and b) people do not really care about the price.
Chriss
Both arguments are more or less the same. In the early days of NT 3.51 most people using it were computer literate administrators. Only when the market share of NT/W2K rose to levels where close to everyone uses it as a workstation the average users competence dropped. Should Linux reach 20% market share, these 20% will most likely not all be a bunch of computer dorks.
Chriss
it's http://http://www.rom-o-matic.net/
chriss
The three points you mention to prove Linux being revolutionary are:
- superior platform diversity
- first time cooperation of very many developers
- GPL
The revolutioners here would be:
- NetBSD
- Anything from the FSF
- RMS
All these predate Linux instead of being introduced by it, making it evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Chriss
This only works for 3D projections onto 2D screens, because there you know from where the viewer watches the image and therefore can determine which parts have to be hidden.
Forgot: Due to the principle it's based on the display couldn't display anything non transparent. Every voxel actually glows, so you can't display something like a house and expect the walls to hide what's inside, so you could only see inside through the windows. Everything will shine through. The same problem should apply to the new display.
Back when virtual reality was the future (late '80s), TI had a similar display. It was a fast rotating helix made of a transparant material. Due to the rotation every position inside the dome this thing rotated in was "filled" with material only once during every circle. If you fired a laser at that position when it was filled, it would glow in green or red, depending on the laser. And naturally only that position would glow, because the rest of the dome was empty right then.
So by rotating and timing the laser one could display volumetric data. Resolution was very low (a cube that occupied 1/5 of the whole height of the dispay consisted of about five voxels in each direction), but it looked pretty cool anyway.
Price was somewhere between $10K and $50K. TI intended to build a large version for air traffic controllers, so they could walk around a virtual sky in a dome and "see" the planes. Never heard of it again.
The display by Actuality Systems seems to use the same basic principles: rotation and timed illumination. I hope that this time we'll really see these things on the/a market.
And yes, I want one.
The cheapest I've seen (verio) for web hosting is $3/GB. So while you're paying about $.17 to download it, their paying about $2.