Sorry, just noticed that I wasn't logged in when I posted this. There was quite a bit of work done to implement this idea in the mid 1990's but a combination of a lack of ubiquitous hardware (cellphones were analog and none could run applications and routers cost thousands of dollars from Cisco) and intense offensive efforts on the part of telcos and some government agencies ultimately killed it and scuttled much of the work already done. Today's landscape and issues are different and perhaps it is time to implement this with fresh ideas.
I've seen this idea proposed at least since the mid 1980's. The problem is the so-called "spatial light modulator" which doesn't exist beyond something a few millimetres on a side capable of not much more than making a fuzzy dot, and that only in the monochromatic light of the laser. The problems, to be practical, are being able to produce a plane larger than the area to be viewed that can change the phase of the source light precisely (with fractional wavelength accuracy) in real time at a density of greater than 25,000 pixels per linear inch and the bandwidth and computing horsepower to run it. No one has shown a way it can be done with today's technology for arbitrary images even though there has been much interesting work put into it over the decades. It's still out of reach for now.
There is a way to address the issues and we can produce full colour displays that have both horizontal and vertical parallax as well as addressing the focus issue. Gabriel Lippmann, who won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1908 for his invention of a method of true spectral colour photography that were actually true full colour holograms which he produced a half a century before Dennis Gabor's work, also proposed a method of 3D imaging which became known as Integral Photography. Using an array of tiny lenses (NOT prisms as in lenticular displays) one can reconstruct wavefronts using a subtractive approach (subtracting phase components from discrete samples of white diffuse light) instead of the additive one used in modern holography. Numerous examples of varying quality exist going back many decades. Although impractical at the time, today it can be done. Back in the mid 1980's I received a patent (US patent 4,878,735) on using diffractive elements for the lens array and have a description of the technology in terms of it being an optical computing architecture (which I called "Integral MicroOptics") at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with some pictures if you are interested). Interestingly, the Patent office introduced a typo in the title of the patent calling "zone plates" "tone plates" and that has never been fixed! (Being a musician, I've always gotten a laugh out of that!)
I still have an image of a notice on the outside of the original Windows 3.1 package that reads "Notice to User: By breaking the seal of this envelope, you accept the terms of the enclosed license agreement."
According to John Deere you can't own a tractor here either, but they still expect you to pay them for it. Ever since the DMCA put the legal framework in place, large corporations have been in a frenzy stealing away ownership of the things we buy (or even already have) and converting private ownership to a licensing model. Tractors are just the latest but we've already seen it with cars, books, movies, music, software, and even housing, food, and water. The CEO of Nestle has been talking up the notion that his company should own the air and people should have to pay an ongoing fee to use it.
It took some time to get things set up and working well but with a low-latency kernel and Jackd as a core I now have a well-integrated audio system using Ardour as a multi-track recorder, Rosegarden with a USB midi interface for midi recording and editing, QSynth with the Fluidsynth GUI for a sample-based synth, Hydrogen for percussion, and sometimes other Jack-based applications as needed. Jack syncs everything up and makes it all work together in real time as an integrated system and Ardour records all the tracks and produces the final mix. I also use Audacity separately to record a track from an external mixer board or for processing a raw track or sometimes the final mix. I wish I could do as much with video on that system.
Interesting work with a lot of unobvious possibilities. "Lensless" is a little misleading. Pinholes are just the center circle of a zone plate. Zone plates are lenses that work by diffraction instead of refraction. They look like a bulls-eye (see http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for a quick and simple primer). The diameter of the hole determines the focal length - hence too big OR too small leads to fuzzier images. The have a couple of big drawbacks - the focal length is a function of wavelength hence objects in the image have rainbow edges and the aperture of a focused pinhole is small (the f-stop). The effective f-stop can be increased at will by adding additional zones around the pinhole but zone plates that work by blocking areas can only achieve efficiencies of around 10%. That can be improved to around 90% or more by replacing the opaque zones with tapered phase-shifting zones. Back in the mid 1980's I worked with a similar technology using arrays of zone plates which we called Integral MicroOptics. We used arrays of micro-zone plates (and pinholes) to capture image data over large sheets (hence from many angles at once) and then reconstruct that data with full parallax in 3D and color, both stored and in real time and sometimes with some optical computing applied - all using passive devices! They were the equivalent of full color holograms using a subtractive technology instead of an additive one, hence no lasers were required and the more diffuse the light the better. It was amazing what could be done with thin flat sheets of plastic and printing but the technology of the day was too crude to get very far. Today much more could be achieved. If interested you can see the original paper from 1986 at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with updated graphics and a link to the original) and http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for some images created using the technology at that time.
Although there were internal documents, I don't believe any public papers were ever published on this project. The group's purpose was to identify technologies and get a head start on medical technologies useful in the 10 to 15 year time frame, and the company kept the work quiet. This project was about building a gas chromatograph on a chip to analyse blood gasses in real time non-invasively. In addition to etching the chromatograph tube as a channel, we also fabricated an on-chip thermal conductivity sensor and a "no moving parts" valve and compressor using fluidic logic also on the chip. We actually had the components working and were looking at building an integrated prototype that would self-calibrate and be able to do 10 samples/second of samples obtained through the skin. My "vacuum tube on a chip" experiment was something I tried using parts from those other experiments. The interesting thing we found was that heaters became unnecessary when the dimensions got very small, due to "surface electron clouds" or tunnelling we didn't have the time to find out. I do have an SEM picture of the sensor (which also worked as a heater) which I have posted at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... if you're interested in seeing it. We worked closely with Dr. Henry Guckel at the University of Wisconsin. He was profoundly knowledgeable and helpful on that project and I later worked with him again on a separate optical computing/imaging project later (more on that elsewhere in that web site). If you haven't already, you might want to look into some of his other work which was published. Best of luck and let me know if I can be of more assistance.
Not an air raid siren, for sure, but you'd be surprised at how loud that little speaker could be driven full bore rail-to-rail with a square wave at resonance with the case. Even when in an enclosed office on the fourth floor it could be heard inside offices in the adjacent office building.
There is a story (I've heard it from several sources over the years but I won't vouch for its veracity) about an early translation program that the US military commissioned, sometime in the sixties I think, that illustrates some of the problems. This program was meant to translate English to Russian and vice versa. At the demo all the higher-ups were there, typically not having a clue about the complexity or pitfalls of the task. One of them suggested that the phrase "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" be entered, translated into Russian, and the resulting phrase translated back to English. The technician did what he was told and I have visions of cabinet-sized tape drives spinning furiously for awhile until the processing was complete. Finally, the printer spat out the result. I hear the technician dropped the paper and ran away. When someone picked up the printout it said "The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten!"
Reminds me of something I wrote back around 1981. Working with the early IBM PC at the machine code level several flaws surfaced and for fun I packaged them all together in the boot sector of a 5 1/4" floppy which we put in a "break glass" box and put on the wall (There were no hard drives yet, the XT wasn't out yet). If you placed the floppy in the boot drive it would destroy the hardware in a few seconds. First, there was a bit on the original IBM display adapter (mono text only) which would lock the horizontal sweep on the standard IBM monitor forcing the horizontal output power transistor to overheat and burn out. You would see the display image collapse while the monitor would squeal while smoke (literally!) would come out the sides and back, and die with a $200 repair to fix it. Second, there were no stops on the head movement on those original floppy drives - with the right loop they would step out until the heads fell off inside the case with a pair of clunks if you had a 2 drive system. (Not a difficult repair, but you had to know what your were doing and get into the floppy drives themselves to fix it.) Finally, the speaker ran off of a shift register which could be loaded with a really nasty PWM sound and set to free run. With interrupts disabled and the CPU halted, the machine sat there smoking with a very loud nerve-rattling siren, completely dead and unable to boot. It would require major physical repairs to get it working again. The monitor would stink for weeks afterwards.
There are those who are actively working at making sure those skills are NOT taught:
"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills... critical thinking skills and similar programs [which] have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." --2012 STATE [Texas] REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM.
Unfortunately, these same people also control the largest school system in the country which determines the course materials used by many other school systems.
Ctrl-S was always for pausing the display, I didn't know it was also saving anything - must have been some social engineering on the part of the NSA to make it save my work also. In any case, I prefer saving things at the points of my choosing on my own media. The real issue today is where does it save it? It's one thing to have a temp copy on hardware and media in your possession but something entirely more ominous if all the steps in your works-in-progress are being journaled forever in some corporate or government database entirely outside of your control or knowledge with only the appearance of "it's just a copy for your own good."
In the very earliest days of the Mac I remember having to buy a by then obsolete Lisa to write and compile because the Mac couldn't be used for that yet, then reboot it with a special OS to write a Mac disk so you could then try to run it on a nearby Mac because you couldn't run it on the Lisa. I was porting a package from the PC at the time and not too long before that the compile on the PC took most of a day sitting around swapping floppies for hours hoping there wouldn't be some dumb typo 5 hours in - not much better than the punched cards (except you could edit on a screen).
At least with the forms one could see the code and make changes, but it was up to you to see any errors. Punch cards gave you one line per card and disaster if if the wind got you while you were carrying your box(es) full of cards on the way to drop them off at the computer center so you could come back the next day to pick up your syntax errors. Still, both were a big step up from patch panels. Around 1981 I was working for a large medical instrumentation company (at that point I had an Apple II on my desk and z80 and 6800 machines nearby) and one day saw the dumpster full of wired up patch panels. Curious, I asked about it and found out that those were backups of old "code" that had been stored "just in case." My department head told me that they were keeping them around for when all the fuss over microcomputers would blow over and everything would get back to normal.
The bowl was plastic with the inside forming a hemisphere. Fill it with water, take it outside to freeze, have a couple of beers while waiting, then take out a 6" f/1.0 lens made of ice. Focus the sun on a piece of paper or something flammable. It's not the greatest lens for imaging but it will start paper on fire. Water can make interesting optics, both liquid and solid.
Agreed, unless you don't have one handy. The point was for the kids (they were 2nd grade) to think about stuff around them in new ways. I used to win bar bets when I lived in Wisconsin by claiming to be able to start a fire using the bowl that the peanuts were in and some water. Only worked when it was sunny and freezing outside, though, but it was a good excuse to have another couple of beers.
Back around 1985 I worked with a teacher in a grade school with a lot of low income students creating a microscope that the kids could build and use out of trash quickly. We used a cardboard box that used to hold wooden matches and cut a flap in the wide sides so light could illuminate the inside and covered one end with aluminum foil. Other boxes could also be used but the slide made it easy to focus. A small hole was punched in the center of the foil. The object to be examined was placed inside on top of the part of the box that slid in and out (which was now exposed to light) and a drop of water put in the hole in the foil. It worked remarkably well and the kids had a great time with it looking at all sorts of things inside and outdoors but maybe the greatest thing was that the kids started thinking about how things worked and coming up with novel solutions rather than just buying something to do the job.
Of course they don't want to make it simple, it would destroy their business. A friend who was a CFO at the time use to refer to Intuit as "The Devil" in the way they were always putting themselves into your business and then holding you hostage later. The tax industry produces nothing of value and should be replaced and the billions of dollars and millions of people put to better use. It wouldn't be hard. The government makes the money, puts it into circulation, and then at the point of greatest dispersion the huge tax industry works to get some of it back based on rules so lengthy, complex, and open to interpretation that no one person can understand them all anymore let alone apply them fairly. If you can afford the guns you can shoot your way out but for everyone else you just keep paying out. It's a formula for strife, conflict, anger, and fraud. If I ran a business that way I would have to make all my customers keep track of everything - every transaction, every special and refund all year long and then all have all their documentation on one special day for a grand reckoning. I'd probably need a bunch of armed guards that day, too. Everyone would have to keep all these records for years just in case. I would need an army of accountants and more of my resources would be tied up in that system than the whole rest of the business! Of course, that is exactly what we have with the tax system today and the industry that thrives off of it. The entire tax system and the huge industry supporting it could be replaced by a few people and a small truck (or maybe just a small computer). At the point where the money is created and goes into circulation a portion is sent to the IRS. Done. Billions saved, resources freed, and all the pain gone, just the memory of how ridiculous it used to be.
It's all a monumental waste consuming time and resources that could be better used. The government makes the money, puts it into circulation, and then at the point of greatest dispersion makes everyone work hard to get some of it back. It's a formula for strife, conflict, anger, and fraud. If I ran a store that way I would have to make all my customers keep track of everything - every transaction, every special, and any refunds all year long and then all show up with all their documentation on one special day for a grand reckoning. I'd probably need a bunch of armed guards that day, too. I would need an army of accountants and more of my resources would be tied up in that system than the whole rest of the business! Of course, that is exactly what we have with the tax system today. The entire tax system and the huge industry supporting it could be replaced by a few people and a small truck (or maybe just a small computer). At the point where the money is created and goes into circulation a portion is sent to the IRS. Done. Billions saved, resources freed, and all the pain gone - just a bad memory like emptying chamber pots out the window and hoping that somehow the street will get cleaned up soon.
The Oculus Rift was an amazing design and the first practical and affordable VR tool to come out of the woodwork in a long time. Sad it has come to this. Especially sad for the Kickstarter supporters. That being said, I'm sure that much has been learned along the way. I suspect the creative people will soon drift away and, hopefully now flush with cash, can take the next step and do something even more amazing and build on what they now know. How about a 180 degree horizontal/90 degree vertical field of view in something much smaller and lighter? I remember putting on a LEEPsystems headset back in the late 1980's and the immersion was stunning because of that - anything less is like wearing blinders. I don't remember the actual specs but the field of view was around that, I'll have to dig it out - I'm sure I still have some of their old tech papers. I remember it stated that if you can see the frame around the display then it's not really virtual reality. They even had a demo film camera and viewer to show off the optics (they had to use CRT's back then and only film could show off the possible detail). It wasn't so lightweight but their lens design did the trick and seems to have disappeared into the past. The other thing they did was put most of the resolution in the center with less detail out toward the edges so that the apparent resolution was much greater than the actual. A redesign of that concept with modern displays and trackers, maybe tracking eye movements to move the resolution to where it would matter would be a huge next step.
I remember the Heinlein story - it's been many years, I'll have to dust off that old book and read it again - but I also recall that regular LED's have always done this too, but just very poorly on the light to electricity conversion part. Seems I remember a project long ago taking advantage of this - something from Forrest Mims maybe?
It's a sad old story I remember living through myself back in the late 1990's and apparently nothing has changed. Back then I was one of the founders of long-gone Nobell Communications which was then in the middle of rolling out the first wireless broadband IP network in Austin. The extent and energy that certain organizations, one of which was SBC (who later bought AT&T, but they were not alone) put into obstructing and doing whatever they could to shut down the effort was something that would make works of fiction pale. Finding locations for infrastructure was one of the most difficult jobs and one solution was to use existing poles in certain areas. SBC pulled the same crap back then when we insisted that we were not a telco or cable company and had no intention of becoming one (we did connect and handle IP broadcasts of live music at a number of clubs during SXSW back then, though). It turned out, however, that many pole easements were owned by Austin Energy, not SBC, and, working with them and the City Council, we ultimately got rights to use those utility poles as well as city owned buildings and rooftops. I also remember that at the time there was a huge amount of city-owned dark fiber available. I no longer live there and don't know what the situation is anymore but I know that there are creative people at Google as well as in Austin with a lot of resources at their disposal and I trust that together they will find a way to jump over that thrashing dinosaur.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, just noticed that I wasn't logged in when I posted this. There was quite a bit of work done to implement this idea in the mid 1990's but a combination of a lack of ubiquitous hardware (cellphones were analog and none could run applications and routers cost thousands of dollars from Cisco) and intense offensive efforts on the part of telcos and some government agencies ultimately killed it and scuttled much of the work already done. Today's landscape and issues are different and perhaps it is time to implement this with fresh ideas.
I've seen this idea proposed at least since the mid 1980's. The problem is the so-called "spatial light modulator" which doesn't exist beyond something a few millimetres on a side capable of not much more than making a fuzzy dot, and that only in the monochromatic light of the laser. The problems, to be practical, are being able to produce a plane larger than the area to be viewed that can change the phase of the source light precisely (with fractional wavelength accuracy) in real time at a density of greater than 25,000 pixels per linear inch and the bandwidth and computing horsepower to run it. No one has shown a way it can be done with today's technology for arbitrary images even though there has been much interesting work put into it over the decades. It's still out of reach for now. There is a way to address the issues and we can produce full colour displays that have both horizontal and vertical parallax as well as addressing the focus issue. Gabriel Lippmann, who won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1908 for his invention of a method of true spectral colour photography that were actually true full colour holograms which he produced a half a century before Dennis Gabor's work, also proposed a method of 3D imaging which became known as Integral Photography. Using an array of tiny lenses (NOT prisms as in lenticular displays) one can reconstruct wavefronts using a subtractive approach (subtracting phase components from discrete samples of white diffuse light) instead of the additive one used in modern holography. Numerous examples of varying quality exist going back many decades. Although impractical at the time, today it can be done. Back in the mid 1980's I received a patent (US patent 4,878,735) on using diffractive elements for the lens array and have a description of the technology in terms of it being an optical computing architecture (which I called "Integral MicroOptics") at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with some pictures if you are interested). Interestingly, the Patent office introduced a typo in the title of the patent calling "zone plates" "tone plates" and that has never been fixed! (Being a musician, I've always gotten a laugh out of that!)
I still have an image of a notice on the outside of the original Windows 3.1 package that reads "Notice to User: By breaking the seal of this envelope, you accept the terms of the enclosed license agreement."
According to John Deere you can't own a tractor here either, but they still expect you to pay them for it. Ever since the DMCA put the legal framework in place, large corporations have been in a frenzy stealing away ownership of the things we buy (or even already have) and converting private ownership to a licensing model. Tractors are just the latest but we've already seen it with cars, books, movies, music, software, and even housing, food, and water. The CEO of Nestle has been talking up the notion that his company should own the air and people should have to pay an ongoing fee to use it.
It took some time to get things set up and working well but with a low-latency kernel and Jackd as a core I now have a well-integrated audio system using Ardour as a multi-track recorder, Rosegarden with a USB midi interface for midi recording and editing, QSynth with the Fluidsynth GUI for a sample-based synth, Hydrogen for percussion, and sometimes other Jack-based applications as needed. Jack syncs everything up and makes it all work together in real time as an integrated system and Ardour records all the tracks and produces the final mix. I also use Audacity separately to record a track from an external mixer board or for processing a raw track or sometimes the final mix. I wish I could do as much with video on that system.
Interesting work with a lot of unobvious possibilities. "Lensless" is a little misleading. Pinholes are just the center circle of a zone plate. Zone plates are lenses that work by diffraction instead of refraction. They look like a bulls-eye (see http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for a quick and simple primer). The diameter of the hole determines the focal length - hence too big OR too small leads to fuzzier images. The have a couple of big drawbacks - the focal length is a function of wavelength hence objects in the image have rainbow edges and the aperture of a focused pinhole is small (the f-stop). The effective f-stop can be increased at will by adding additional zones around the pinhole but zone plates that work by blocking areas can only achieve efficiencies of around 10%. That can be improved to around 90% or more by replacing the opaque zones with tapered phase-shifting zones. Back in the mid 1980's I worked with a similar technology using arrays of zone plates which we called Integral MicroOptics. We used arrays of micro-zone plates (and pinholes) to capture image data over large sheets (hence from many angles at once) and then reconstruct that data with full parallax in 3D and color, both stored and in real time and sometimes with some optical computing applied - all using passive devices! They were the equivalent of full color holograms using a subtractive technology instead of an additive one, hence no lasers were required and the more diffuse the light the better. It was amazing what could be done with thin flat sheets of plastic and printing but the technology of the day was too crude to get very far. Today much more could be achieved. If interested you can see the original paper from 1986 at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with updated graphics and a link to the original) and http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for some images created using the technology at that time.
Although there were internal documents, I don't believe any public papers were ever published on this project. The group's purpose was to identify technologies and get a head start on medical technologies useful in the 10 to 15 year time frame, and the company kept the work quiet. This project was about building a gas chromatograph on a chip to analyse blood gasses in real time non-invasively. In addition to etching the chromatograph tube as a channel, we also fabricated an on-chip thermal conductivity sensor and a "no moving parts" valve and compressor using fluidic logic also on the chip. We actually had the components working and were looking at building an integrated prototype that would self-calibrate and be able to do 10 samples/second of samples obtained through the skin. My "vacuum tube on a chip" experiment was something I tried using parts from those other experiments. The interesting thing we found was that heaters became unnecessary when the dimensions got very small, due to "surface electron clouds" or tunnelling we didn't have the time to find out. I do have an SEM picture of the sensor (which also worked as a heater) which I have posted at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... if you're interested in seeing it. We worked closely with Dr. Henry Guckel at the University of Wisconsin. He was profoundly knowledgeable and helpful on that project and I later worked with him again on a separate optical computing/imaging project later (more on that elsewhere in that web site). If you haven't already, you might want to look into some of his other work which was published. Best of luck and let me know if I can be of more assistance.
Not an air raid siren, for sure, but you'd be surprised at how loud that little speaker could be driven full bore rail-to-rail with a square wave at resonance with the case. Even when in an enclosed office on the fourth floor it could be heard inside offices in the adjacent office building.
There is a story (I've heard it from several sources over the years but I won't vouch for its veracity) about an early translation program that the US military commissioned, sometime in the sixties I think, that illustrates some of the problems. This program was meant to translate English to Russian and vice versa. At the demo all the higher-ups were there, typically not having a clue about the complexity or pitfalls of the task. One of them suggested that the phrase "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" be entered, translated into Russian, and the resulting phrase translated back to English. The technician did what he was told and I have visions of cabinet-sized tape drives spinning furiously for awhile until the processing was complete. Finally, the printer spat out the result. I hear the technician dropped the paper and ran away. When someone picked up the printout it said "The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten!"
Reminds me of something I wrote back around 1981. Working with the early IBM PC at the machine code level several flaws surfaced and for fun I packaged them all together in the boot sector of a 5 1/4" floppy which we put in a "break glass" box and put on the wall (There were no hard drives yet, the XT wasn't out yet). If you placed the floppy in the boot drive it would destroy the hardware in a few seconds. First, there was a bit on the original IBM display adapter (mono text only) which would lock the horizontal sweep on the standard IBM monitor forcing the horizontal output power transistor to overheat and burn out. You would see the display image collapse while the monitor would squeal while smoke (literally!) would come out the sides and back, and die with a $200 repair to fix it. Second, there were no stops on the head movement on those original floppy drives - with the right loop they would step out until the heads fell off inside the case with a pair of clunks if you had a 2 drive system. (Not a difficult repair, but you had to know what your were doing and get into the floppy drives themselves to fix it.) Finally, the speaker ran off of a shift register which could be loaded with a really nasty PWM sound and set to free run. With interrupts disabled and the CPU halted, the machine sat there smoking with a very loud nerve-rattling siren, completely dead and unable to boot. It would require major physical repairs to get it working again. The monitor would stink for weeks afterwards.
There are those who are actively working at making sure those skills are NOT taught: "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills ... critical thinking skills and similar programs [which] have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." --2012 STATE [Texas] REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM.
Unfortunately, these same people also control the largest school system in the country which determines the course materials used by many other school systems.
Ctrl-S was always for pausing the display, I didn't know it was also saving anything - must have been some social engineering on the part of the NSA to make it save my work also. In any case, I prefer saving things at the points of my choosing on my own media. The real issue today is where does it save it? It's one thing to have a temp copy on hardware and media in your possession but something entirely more ominous if all the steps in your works-in-progress are being journaled forever in some corporate or government database entirely outside of your control or knowledge with only the appearance of "it's just a copy for your own good."
Jesus saves, Moses invests, Budha lives on the interest. - the rest of the story.
In the very earliest days of the Mac I remember having to buy a by then obsolete Lisa to write and compile because the Mac couldn't be used for that yet, then reboot it with a special OS to write a Mac disk so you could then try to run it on a nearby Mac because you couldn't run it on the Lisa. I was porting a package from the PC at the time and not too long before that the compile on the PC took most of a day sitting around swapping floppies for hours hoping there wouldn't be some dumb typo 5 hours in - not much better than the punched cards (except you could edit on a screen).
At least with the forms one could see the code and make changes, but it was up to you to see any errors. Punch cards gave you one line per card and disaster if if the wind got you while you were carrying your box(es) full of cards on the way to drop them off at the computer center so you could come back the next day to pick up your syntax errors. Still, both were a big step up from patch panels. Around 1981 I was working for a large medical instrumentation company (at that point I had an Apple II on my desk and z80 and 6800 machines nearby) and one day saw the dumpster full of wired up patch panels. Curious, I asked about it and found out that those were backups of old "code" that had been stored "just in case." My department head told me that they were keeping them around for when all the fuss over microcomputers would blow over and everything would get back to normal.
The bowl was plastic with the inside forming a hemisphere. Fill it with water, take it outside to freeze, have a couple of beers while waiting, then take out a 6" f/1.0 lens made of ice. Focus the sun on a piece of paper or something flammable. It's not the greatest lens for imaging but it will start paper on fire. Water can make interesting optics, both liquid and solid.
Agreed, unless you don't have one handy. The point was for the kids (they were 2nd grade) to think about stuff around them in new ways. I used to win bar bets when I lived in Wisconsin by claiming to be able to start a fire using the bowl that the peanuts were in and some water. Only worked when it was sunny and freezing outside, though, but it was a good excuse to have another couple of beers.
Back around 1985 I worked with a teacher in a grade school with a lot of low income students creating a microscope that the kids could build and use out of trash quickly. We used a cardboard box that used to hold wooden matches and cut a flap in the wide sides so light could illuminate the inside and covered one end with aluminum foil. Other boxes could also be used but the slide made it easy to focus. A small hole was punched in the center of the foil. The object to be examined was placed inside on top of the part of the box that slid in and out (which was now exposed to light) and a drop of water put in the hole in the foil. It worked remarkably well and the kids had a great time with it looking at all sorts of things inside and outdoors but maybe the greatest thing was that the kids started thinking about how things worked and coming up with novel solutions rather than just buying something to do the job.
Of course they don't want to make it simple, it would destroy their business. A friend who was a CFO at the time use to refer to Intuit as "The Devil" in the way they were always putting themselves into your business and then holding you hostage later. The tax industry produces nothing of value and should be replaced and the billions of dollars and millions of people put to better use. It wouldn't be hard. The government makes the money, puts it into circulation, and then at the point of greatest dispersion the huge tax industry works to get some of it back based on rules so lengthy, complex, and open to interpretation that no one person can understand them all anymore let alone apply them fairly. If you can afford the guns you can shoot your way out but for everyone else you just keep paying out. It's a formula for strife, conflict, anger, and fraud. If I ran a business that way I would have to make all my customers keep track of everything - every transaction, every special and refund all year long and then all have all their documentation on one special day for a grand reckoning. I'd probably need a bunch of armed guards that day, too. Everyone would have to keep all these records for years just in case. I would need an army of accountants and more of my resources would be tied up in that system than the whole rest of the business! Of course, that is exactly what we have with the tax system today and the industry that thrives off of it. The entire tax system and the huge industry supporting it could be replaced by a few people and a small truck (or maybe just a small computer). At the point where the money is created and goes into circulation a portion is sent to the IRS. Done. Billions saved, resources freed, and all the pain gone, just the memory of how ridiculous it used to be.
It's all a monumental waste consuming time and resources that could be better used. The government makes the money, puts it into circulation, and then at the point of greatest dispersion makes everyone work hard to get some of it back. It's a formula for strife, conflict, anger, and fraud. If I ran a store that way I would have to make all my customers keep track of everything - every transaction, every special, and any refunds all year long and then all show up with all their documentation on one special day for a grand reckoning. I'd probably need a bunch of armed guards that day, too. I would need an army of accountants and more of my resources would be tied up in that system than the whole rest of the business! Of course, that is exactly what we have with the tax system today. The entire tax system and the huge industry supporting it could be replaced by a few people and a small truck (or maybe just a small computer). At the point where the money is created and goes into circulation a portion is sent to the IRS. Done. Billions saved, resources freed, and all the pain gone - just a bad memory like emptying chamber pots out the window and hoping that somehow the street will get cleaned up soon.
The Oculus Rift was an amazing design and the first practical and affordable VR tool to come out of the woodwork in a long time. Sad it has come to this. Especially sad for the Kickstarter supporters. That being said, I'm sure that much has been learned along the way. I suspect the creative people will soon drift away and, hopefully now flush with cash, can take the next step and do something even more amazing and build on what they now know. How about a 180 degree horizontal/90 degree vertical field of view in something much smaller and lighter? I remember putting on a LEEPsystems headset back in the late 1980's and the immersion was stunning because of that - anything less is like wearing blinders. I don't remember the actual specs but the field of view was around that, I'll have to dig it out - I'm sure I still have some of their old tech papers. I remember it stated that if you can see the frame around the display then it's not really virtual reality. They even had a demo film camera and viewer to show off the optics (they had to use CRT's back then and only film could show off the possible detail). It wasn't so lightweight but their lens design did the trick and seems to have disappeared into the past. The other thing they did was put most of the resolution in the center with less detail out toward the edges so that the apparent resolution was much greater than the actual. A redesign of that concept with modern displays and trackers, maybe tracking eye movements to move the resolution to where it would matter would be a huge next step.
I remember the Heinlein story - it's been many years, I'll have to dust off that old book and read it again - but I also recall that regular LED's have always done this too, but just very poorly on the light to electricity conversion part. Seems I remember a project long ago taking advantage of this - something from Forrest Mims maybe?
It's a sad old story I remember living through myself back in the late 1990's and apparently nothing has changed. Back then I was one of the founders of long-gone Nobell Communications which was then in the middle of rolling out the first wireless broadband IP network in Austin. The extent and energy that certain organizations, one of which was SBC (who later bought AT&T, but they were not alone) put into obstructing and doing whatever they could to shut down the effort was something that would make works of fiction pale. Finding locations for infrastructure was one of the most difficult jobs and one solution was to use existing poles in certain areas. SBC pulled the same crap back then when we insisted that we were not a telco or cable company and had no intention of becoming one (we did connect and handle IP broadcasts of live music at a number of clubs during SXSW back then, though). It turned out, however, that many pole easements were owned by Austin Energy, not SBC, and, working with them and the City Council, we ultimately got rights to use those utility poles as well as city owned buildings and rooftops. I also remember that at the time there was a huge amount of city-owned dark fiber available. I no longer live there and don't know what the situation is anymore but I know that there are creative people at Google as well as in Austin with a lot of resources at their disposal and I trust that together they will find a way to jump over that thrashing dinosaur.