I've got one of these boards, bought it from Ewan at Mini-itx. Top guy, top service:-)
It's being used in-car. The easiest way of displaying info is still a VFD or LCD model interfaced to the serial or parallel port.
My car also has an OBDII connector, so I can play with the engine management computer. Which is nice. Serial at 1900-baud - very strange rate.
I have looked at building USB interfaces for the above, but it isn't worth the hassle. There's a PIC that'd do the job of looking after USB, but with low speed transmission, plus the hassle of writing a USB driver it's non-trivial. USB can't speak until it's spoken to, which is fun...
Also, forgive me for pointing out the bleedin' obvious, but there's 2 USB ports on there, plus 2 USB headers.:-D
From the picture on this write-up I'd guess that the screen swivels around, allowing the screen to be visible when the clamshell is closed... So it's a Linux version of BillG's tablet PC?
IMHO, you either want a PDA that goes anywhere with a limited feature set, or a fully blown PC that does everything you want it to, is extensible but also small enough to not worry about carrying most places.
I have a Rex 6000 for the PDA side of things, and an old but good Libretto 100CT for the PC side of things. It's the size of a video casette (remember them?;-) ) and does everything I need. It'd be cool if I could play movies, but hey you can't have everything, and besides, do I really need it?:-)
The Sony U1 (see conics.net for an importer) looks far more use. It's a PC that's small enough to challenge the libretto but way more powerful. The new JVC mininotes look interesting too, or the Fujitsu P-series.
I think this is technology looking for a niche that just plain isn't there.
Don't forget that D A Pennebaker was also responsible for 101 - the Depeche Mode video of, amongst other things, their live gig in the Pasadena Rose Bowl.
I saw this at a tech show in London (Live) in 1996. It works well if it's the same sort of thing - one layer is "aimed" at one eye, and the other is for the other eye. Dunno how they split the LCD images, but I think prisms were involved.
Anyhow, the Sharp demo system worked and I wondered what had happened to the idea...
Hmm, proving the existence of wrapped up dimensions could be a tangiable shot in the arm for superstring theory which necessitates 10 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension.
If this sort of thing interests you, do read the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. It's well written and very readable considering the complexity of the subject matter.
Hawking radiation is also covered, and a string twist is put on the process. The book kept me quiet for days.
If it's a Cybercash (old-style) lookalike, then the loss/destruction/crash of a PDA means they keep the money - similar to the business model of many Stored Value schemes on Smartcards today.
A fine suggestion, but utterly, utterly wrong. What you are proposing is illegal thanks to the little known and recently dug out and dusted off escheatment laws. It says that when property (tangiable or intangiable) has no rightful owner, like expired cash or phone credits on a card, the government will look after that property until the rightful owner presents himself.
So, if a company is planning on keeping the cash/credit on an expired/lost card, they are acting illegally.
Read up on escheatment and be very scared if your company operates in this way.
Re:Another spurious Star Trek reference
on
Beaming Money
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· Score: 1
Visa Cash is a settled system - you have to be a Visa Cash merchant to receive value, which is just a transaction entry on a PSAM. From this, a transaction is sent to visa requesting payment. The funds pool for the card issuer is decremented and the merchant paid.
It is very obvious when more money has been spent on a card than has been loaded.
With Mondex, where real value flows from card to card, it would be possible to create value gradually and have an infinite source of cash...
In all seriousness, the Amiga's usability was excellent thanks to the OS's compactness. Chuck anything better than a 7.14MHz 68000 in there and it got to be a really nice system. Even in its vanilla form, it felt responsive.
Yes, the bus is slow now. Yes, the chips are slow now. But at the time the machine was groundbreaking.
I am personally hoping that the buzz that the new hardware (and os, to a lesser extent) will be as exciting as it was in '85. First time I saw an Amiga was in a shop window, running the "Juggler" animation.
I was gobsmacked.
I guess I have more than a fair dose of nostalgia, but I really enjoyed using the Amiga. They don't make 'em like they used to:-)
Not wishing to be pedantic, the original Amiga was based on a 16 bit chip with a 24 bit address bus. It ran in 256kb, got nice at 1MB and couldn't have more than 8MB FAST RAM in original form.
Truly original because of its ability to display 4096 colours on screen at the same time - the notorious "Hold and Modify" screen mode. The copper chip was a graphics coprocessor that was incredibly nifty at the time, sound was excellent, sound samplers for about 20 quid...
On top of this was the operating system. AmigaDOS was fairly similar to unix in some ways, but maybe closer to MS-DOS than many would like to admit. Complementing AmigaDOS was Workbench, which was a great GUI at the time.
Utterly ground breaking machines at the time. I really hope that the next Amiga is the same leap for (home) computing that the original Amiga was.
Nationwide Building Society have been running trials of Iris scanning for around 18 months. Biggest problem is the cost of the machines, as the cameras are about 15k GBP...
People have been very willing to accept the technology as it's non-intrusive, and secure.
At Live'96 (!), a consumer electronics show in the UK, I saw something similar from Sharp, IIRC.
The 3D effect was only viewable from a few defined angles, and to check you were in the right position there was a green LED on top of the screen which could only be seen when the angle was right.
I *think* that a polarising filter was used to display a different image for each eye. It worked, but of course if you moved your head the 3D effect disappeared...
If this uses tracking, perhaps it changes the polarisation angles dynamically, or is that just wibble?
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There is no floppy drive interface on this motherboard :-) .
...Yep, make a boot CD
To flash the bios, guess what...
(Or buy a USB floppy drive)
It's being used in-car. The easiest way of displaying info is still a VFD or LCD model interfaced to the serial or parallel port.
My car also has an OBDII connector, so I can play with the engine management computer. Which is nice. Serial at 1900-baud - very strange rate.
I have looked at building USB interfaces for the above, but it isn't worth the hassle. There's a PIC that'd do the job of looking after USB, but with low speed transmission, plus the hassle of writing a USB driver it's non-trivial. USB can't speak until it's spoken to, which is fun...
Also, forgive me for pointing out the bleedin' obvious, but there's 2 USB ports on there, plus 2 USB headers.
FYI, the EPIA-M will have USB 2.0 too...
Where do I sign up? Oh, hang on, I think I may be able to find something a little better...
From the picture on this write-up I'd guess that the screen swivels around, allowing the screen to be visible when the clamshell is closed... So it's a Linux version of BillG's tablet PC?
I have a Rex 6000 for the PDA side of things, and an old but good Libretto 100CT for the PC side of things. It's the size of a video casette (remember them? ;-) ) and does everything I need. It'd be cool if I could play movies, but hey you can't have everything, and besides, do I really need it? :-)
The Sony U1 (see conics.net for an importer) looks far more use. It's a PC that's small enough to challenge the libretto but way more powerful. The new JVC mininotes look interesting too, or the Fujitsu P-series.
I think this is technology looking for a niche that just plain isn't there.
Don't forget that D A Pennebaker was also responsible for 101 - the Depeche Mode video of, amongst other things, their live gig in the Pasadena Rose Bowl.
Should make for very interesting viewing...
This was officially released in the UK, and probably sizable chunks of the world, on Monday 27th May.
:-)
This ain't piracy, it's the world
Anyhow, the Sharp demo system worked and I wondered what had happened to the idea...
Well done to CmdrTaco for having the balls to do this! And congratulations to the pair of you, I'm sure everyone wishes you every future happiness.
Cheers,
nick.
Hmm, proving the existence of wrapped up dimensions could be a tangiable shot in the arm for superstring theory which necessitates 10 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension. If this sort of thing interests you, do read the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. It's well written and very readable considering the complexity of the subject matter. Hawking radiation is also covered, and a string twist is put on the process. The book kept me quiet for days.
If it's a Cybercash (old-style) lookalike, then the loss/destruction/crash of a PDA means they keep the money - similar to the business model of many Stored Value schemes on Smartcards today.
A fine suggestion, but utterly, utterly wrong. What you are proposing is illegal thanks to the little known and recently dug out and dusted off escheatment laws. It says that when property (tangiable or intangiable) has no rightful owner, like expired cash or phone credits on a card, the government will look after that property until the rightful owner presents himself.
So, if a company is planning on keeping the cash/credit on an expired/lost card, they are acting illegally.
Read up on escheatment and be very scared if your company operates in this way.
It is very obvious when more money has been spent on a card than has been loaded.
With Mondex, where real value flows from card to card, it would be possible to create value gradually and have an infinite source of cash...
Yep, you're missing the nostalgia :-)
:-)
In all seriousness, the Amiga's usability was excellent thanks to the OS's compactness. Chuck anything better than a 7.14MHz 68000 in there and it got to be a really nice system. Even in its vanilla form, it felt responsive.
Yes, the bus is slow now. Yes, the chips are slow now. But at the time the machine was groundbreaking.
I am personally hoping that the buzz that the new hardware (and os, to a lesser extent) will be as exciting as it was in '85. First time I saw an Amiga was in a shop window, running the "Juggler" animation.
I was gobsmacked.
I guess I have more than a fair dose of nostalgia, but I really enjoyed using the Amiga. They don't make 'em like they used to
Nick.
Without wishing to go completely off topic, 16 bit here refers to the external data bus of the chip.
Not wishing to be pedantic, the original Amiga was based on a 16 bit chip with a 24 bit address bus. It ran in 256kb, got nice at 1MB and couldn't have more than 8MB FAST RAM in original form.
Truly original because of its ability to display 4096 colours on screen at the same time - the notorious "Hold and Modify" screen mode. The copper chip was a graphics coprocessor that was incredibly nifty at the time, sound was excellent, sound samplers for about 20 quid...
On top of this was the operating system. AmigaDOS was fairly similar to unix in some ways, but maybe closer to MS-DOS than many would like to admit. Complementing AmigaDOS was Workbench, which was a great GUI at the time.
Utterly ground breaking machines at the time. I really hope that the next Amiga is the same leap for (home) computing that the original Amiga was.
People have been very willing to accept the technology as it's non-intrusive, and secure.
The machine checks for a pulse in the eye...
For more information on this initiative, see the Nationwide's IRIS recognition info page.
Chiark.
At Live'96 (!), a consumer electronics show in the UK, I saw something similar from Sharp, IIRC.
The 3D effect was only viewable from a few defined angles, and to check you were in the right position there was a green LED on top of the screen which could only be seen when the angle was right.
I *think* that a polarising filter was used to display a different image for each eye. It worked, but of course if you moved your head the 3D effect disappeared...
If this uses tracking, perhaps it changes the polarisation angles dynamically, or is that just wibble?