I've worked a lot with multi-user front-projection table displays (see here and here). People think that the shadowing caused by hands, etc. will be a big problem, but we've found that, in practice, it isn't. Many first-time users of our table believe that it is rear-projected, despite the bright projector hanging over their head.
In fact, the shadowing can sometimes be an advantage since you can often see things projected on top of your hands, which would be blocked in the rear-projection case.
Apparently it's not about good design, algorithms and code. It's about "accountability" and "responsibility", i.e. who to blame when the crappy code finally hits the real-world fan.
Who needs a good product when we have someone to point finger at?
A good history can be found in Rachel Maines' paper "Socially Camouflaged Technologies: the Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator" which was published in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, June 1989, Vol. 8, Issue 2, pages 3-11,23. It can be found here.
Another interesting article from Wired titled "Love Machines" can be found here.
"MouseField" is another project that does motion sensing with an optical mouse. They combine an RFID reader with an on-the-shelf optical mouse (or two) and do some cool user interface tricks.
Read about it here. The work was presented at Ubicomp 2004 a couple of months ago.
That is the story that I was told around the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. When I was there I heard from numerous sources (including the man who claimed to have caught him and had him expelled) that Gates was kicked out of Harvard for stealing computer time.
This was back in the era when computer time was expensive and accounted for. I was told that Gates had broken into an account to which he was not supposed to have access (a Harvard account billable to the NSA on a machine at an air force base), and ran up a very large bill. The figure was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
The story went that he was unrepentant even after being presented with the evidence, went before a disciplinary board and was kicked out of the university.
My 20GB Neuros, just over 12 months old, died on me last month. It was a horrible player so I don't mourn its passing much.
In looking for a new jukebox, gapless playback was an important issue for me. It is distressing to be listening to a screaming guitar on a Pink Floyd album and then have the music pause for half a second while the firmware figures out what to do next.
I like the size and design of the iPod and would have bought one if it had had the gapless playback feature. It didn't so I bought a Karma. The sound quality of the Karma is excellent and I haven't heard hint of gap in any of my albums.
I haven't experienced the hard drive lockup feature yet. The only problem I have had (repeatedly) is USB transfers to the player freezing. The only way I've found to solve this is to unhook the USB connection, rescan the Karma's drive, erase the partially transferred music and try it again.
USB 2.0 is much faster than the Neuros' USB 1.1 (Neuros promised me a free USB 2.0 upgrade but never delivered) and makes transferring the music a breeze. Encoding with LAME takes most of the time.
Before the GPL was even a gleam in Stallman's eye, I'd heard of similar scams.
It works like this: your small business gets an official looking letter from Company X claiming that you are violating their patent, but for a one-time fee of only $yyy (where $yyy is cheaper than a couple of hours of lawyer time) they will give you a license to use the patent.
Of course, the letters are just flooded out to small companies and no one at Company X has bothered to check whether the patent is even applicable. (Reverse engineering to discover patent infringement is time consuming and expensive.)
Before internet patent searches, it would have taken a lot of effort and lawyer time to verify Company X's claim, so many small businesses would just pay the small amount to avoid the hassle.
This scam sounds like an updated version. Developer beware.
Song Airlines' in-flight entertainment system runs Linux. The system allows the passengers to listen to MP3s, see a moving map or watch Dish Network live.
After my flight landed they rebooted the system and I saw a friendly penguin and a bunch of startup messages. I noted that they were using a non-GPLed video driver.
In fact, you probably won't even like a commercial projector unless it's very dark in the room or the projector is very bright (read "very expensive").
Front projection has a big gotcha. Notice how white your screen is? That's as black as the projected image can ever be. Any stray light really messes up the contrast.
Rear projection can provide much better contrast, but the systems are much larger and heavier.
Even more revealing is the Korean peninsula. South Korea is brightly lit, but there is a sharp divide at the 38th parallel: northward it is very dark indeed.
Grade inflation at Harvard University is rampant. It's so bad that, in a couple of the smaller humanities majors, everyone graduates suma cum laude.
I was a teaching fellow for a laboratory class that catered to both graduate and undergraduate students. I recall one student who skipped most of the labs, didn't turn in several of the homeworks, slept through the final and then was incensed because we gave them a "C". By all rights they should have failed.
Giving a student a failing grade at Harvard is next to impossible. The instructor has to jump through many bureaucratic hoops, including sending a written warning at midterm, before they are permitted to give a failing grade.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the shadowing can sometimes be an advantage since you can often see things projected on top of your hands, which would be blocked in the rear-projection case.
Apparently it's not about good design, algorithms and code. It's about "accountability" and "responsibility", i.e. who to blame when the crappy code finally hits the real-world fan.
Who needs a good product when we have someone to point finger at?
...it should write original poetry on each slice with a laser. Maybe toast haiku:
Waking on sunrise
Bread warms the still morning air.
My nose breathes delight.
Another interesting article from Wired titled "Love Machines" can be found here.
The all-sky optical SETI system at Harvard receives its funding from The Planetary Society and the Bosack-Kruger Charitable Foundation.
Read about it here. The work was presented at Ubicomp 2004 a couple of months ago.
That is the story that I was told around the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. When I was there I heard from numerous sources (including the man who claimed to have caught him and had him expelled) that Gates was kicked out of Harvard for stealing computer time.
This was back in the era when computer time was expensive and accounted for. I was told that Gates had broken into an account to which he was not supposed to have access (a Harvard account billable to the NSA on a machine at an air force base), and ran up a very large bill. The figure was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
The story went that he was unrepentant even after being presented with the evidence, went before a disciplinary board and was kicked out of the university.
My 20GB Neuros, just over 12 months old, died on me last month. It was a horrible player so I don't mourn its passing much.
In looking for a new jukebox, gapless playback was an important issue for me. It is distressing to be listening to a screaming guitar on a Pink Floyd album and then have the music pause for half a second while the firmware figures out what to do next.
I like the size and design of the iPod and would have bought one if it had had the gapless playback feature. It didn't so I bought a Karma. The sound quality of the Karma is excellent and I haven't heard hint of gap in any of my albums.
I haven't experienced the hard drive lockup feature yet. The only problem I have had (repeatedly) is USB transfers to the player freezing. The only way I've found to solve this is to unhook the USB connection, rescan the Karma's drive, erase the partially transferred music and try it again.
USB 2.0 is much faster than the Neuros' USB 1.1 (Neuros promised me a free USB 2.0 upgrade but never delivered) and makes transferring the music a breeze. Encoding with LAME takes most of the time.
All in all, I like the Karma a lot.
Before the GPL was even a gleam in Stallman's eye, I'd heard of similar scams.
It works like this: your small business gets an official looking letter from Company X claiming that you are violating their patent, but for a one-time fee of only $yyy (where $yyy is cheaper than a couple of hours of lawyer time) they will give you a license to use the patent.
Of course, the letters are just flooded out to small companies and no one at Company X has bothered to check whether the patent is even applicable. (Reverse engineering to discover patent infringement is time consuming and expensive.)
Before internet patent searches, it would have taken a lot of effort and lawyer time to verify Company X's claim, so many small businesses would just pay the small amount to avoid the hassle.
This scam sounds like an updated version. Developer beware.
(sung by the incomparable Tom Lehrer, of course)
Great advertising slogan if this system is running on windows.
Song Airlines' in-flight entertainment system runs Linux. The system allows the passengers to listen to MP3s, see a moving map or watch Dish Network live.
After my flight landed they rebooted the system and I saw a friendly penguin and a bunch of startup messages. I noted that they were using a non-GPLed video driver.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086837/
The technique is fast and the results are impressive.
DiamondVision installations
This is a paper from Siggraph 2000 about interfacing computers with modeling clay and lego style blocks:
http://www.merl.com/papers/TR2000-13/
Gates TV: All Bill all the time!
"Esphahnian" is the name of a character in the book.
It comes out of the box with a Java tic-tac-toe program.
In fact, you probably won't even like a commercial projector unless it's very dark in the room or the projector is very bright (read "very expensive").
Front projection has a big gotcha. Notice how white your screen is? That's as black as the projected image can ever be. Any stray light really messes up the contrast.
Rear projection can provide much better contrast, but the systems are much larger and heavier.
"Adaptively Cancelling Server Fan Noise" can be found here. They were able to lower the whine by 30dB and the broadband noise by 20dB.
Even more revealing is the Korean peninsula. South Korea is brightly lit, but there is a sharp divide at the 38th parallel: northward it is very dark indeed.
The real question is, will the new version have all of the thinly disguised mormon doctrine like the original did?
h tml or http://www.lib.msu.edu/lorenze1/bg.htm
See http://www.proaxis.com/~sherlockfam/art5.html or http://home.earthlink.net/~billotto/Mormon_N_BSG.
or anywhere else you can google up from "battlestar galactica" and "mormon".
Grade inflation at Harvard University is rampant. It's so bad that, in a couple of the smaller humanities majors, everyone graduates suma cum laude.
I was a teaching fellow for a laboratory class that catered to both graduate and undergraduate students. I recall one student who skipped most of the labs, didn't turn in several of the homeworks, slept through the final and then was incensed because we gave them a "C". By all rights they should have failed.
Giving a student a failing grade at Harvard is next to impossible. The instructor has to jump through many bureaucratic hoops, including sending a written warning at midterm, before they are permitted to give a failing grade.
Think of it as a cross between "My Neighbor Totoro", "Myst" and "Harry Potter".
Go see this film!