With respect to text or data entered into and stored by publicly-accessible site features such as forums, comments and bug trackers ("OSDN Public Content"), the submitting user retains ownership of such OSDN Public Content; with respect to publicly-available statistical content which is generated by the site to monitor and display content activity, such content is owned by OSDN. In each such case, the submitting user grants OSDN the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.
Sigh. This issues comes up every few months when someone actually reads the TOS. The OSDN language above is nearly identical to that of the New Zealand ISP as well as every TOS in existence.
It's standard legal language to protect the service provider from idiots who want to sue them because "you, my ISP, made copies of my copyrighted web page available to everyone via the Internet!!!"
Duh. That's what a service provider is supposed to do, but they have to include the kind of legal disclaimer above to protect themselves from litigious idiots.
Speaking as someone who used to be an academic technology director for a private university, I can tell you this is a PR stunt that has no basis in the reality of managing IT systems at a university.
Most of the university Windows workstations should be re-purposable as Linux boxes. Students will balk, but catch on quickly enough. That's what 19-year olds do today! (Faculty are a different story.) So workstations are a non-issue.
However, if the university's administrative systems (student information system, registrar, financial, etc.) are powered in total or even in part, by Windows, then $2.4 million is chump change.
For even a small institution of 7000 students, $2.4 million wouldn't even come close to covering the switchover costs for just one of those mission-critical admin systems.
Over the last 10 years, most institutions have made the transition from legacy mainframe systems managing these tasks, to systems powered by Windows, Solaris, or some *NIX.
If this university uses Windows for an admin system, the changeover costs would not only include new hardware and OS, but enormous data migration costs.
There are no viable open source alternatives for enterprise academic information systems of any significant scale (and even 7000 students is a significant scale). The only other alternative is to roll-your-own from scratch, which is even more expensive, especially in an ongoing support basis.
Furthermore, if they have to switch from Windows, it would require an new RFP, a lengthy proposal review process, and typically multiple years to implement, test, and roll-out the new non-Windows system. That $2.4 million would be but a fraction of the overall budget.
In the late eighties at Virginia Tech, I was a usability testing guinea pig for the Accukey keyboard show on this page (about halfway down).
It was pretty amazing. In just a couple of hours of instruction & practice I was typing thirty words a minute. Thirty wpm isn't that fast, but the learning curve was significantly faster than a typical QWERTY keyboard.
The advantage of chord keyboards is that your fingers never leave the keys. Hence they are potentially a lot faster.
On the downside, there's not cheating. Since the characters are generated by combinations of keys, the keys aren't marked. No looking down to find your place -- you need to learn the chords.
The author is against the heirarchical tree structure of directories for organizing content but mistakenly identifies this with the "hard disk icon" (which is, in fact, just a doorway into the heirarchical structure).
In it's place he would do away with the hierarchical directories and replace it with multiple "desktops" (e.g. flat, non-heirarchical, visually-managed workspaces).
The glaring problem with this is that most professional computer users (ie. discounting grandma who sends email three times a month and opened Word once) have so many files/applications on their computers that they would need dozens (or hundreds!) of these desktop workspaces to manage all of the files & applications.
True, some Linux desktop environments have multiple desktops, but check and see how many users have more than six or eight desktops configured. Very few. There's a usablility threshold where if setting up more "categories" (in this case more desktops) actually decreases usability, whereas setting up "sub-categories" within the top-level categories will increase usability. Hence: heirarchy.
The entire field of taxonomy is dedicated to this principle.
As a previous poster said: This article is daft. (And poorly written.)
Keyboard-based navigation tools -- e.g. a command-line interface -- are ten times faster if
the user has already learned the interface. (The learning curve for command-line interfaces is steeper than for GUIs, especially if the user has first experience with a GUI. With a blank slate computer user, the learning curve is about the same...but how many blank slates who've never used Windows -- or a video game controller -- do you find?
the user doesn't have to re-learn the commands.The problem with most command line interfaces is that they are unique to a particular application. The keyboard shortcuts are unique, the modifier codes are unique, etc. That means learning a new interface for each application. Innefficient!
Well, that's a few minutes of my life I'll never get back. What a bunch of poorly thought-out, pseudo-philosophical anti-corporate propaganda.
There are plenty of pragmatic, logical reasons to criticize corporations and praise community without wrapping it in college-freshman interpretations of social constructivism.
Example: The premise Rusty starts with is "Human reality is socially constructed. That is, most of the "facts" that determine our daily lives are socially constructed facts."
Of course, that goes out the window when describing the evils SludgeCo wreaks in his theoretical example: "It takes little imagination to conclude that my death was a result of the toxic sludge that I've been using to fertilize my farm. The PHYSICAL FACTS of my death are now known. But the social reality of the event still has not been determined" [emphasis mine].
So, suddenly reality is based in "physical facts" not "socially constructed facts."
But the social constructivism comes back into play to justify anything that Rusty disagrees with: "The point of all [SludgeCo's] public relations work is to create a socially accepted 'reality'which does not make SludgeCo a murderer."
Hate to tell you, Rusty, but you can't have it both ways. Either BOTH interpretations of the death in your hypothetical scenario are social constructed or they aren't. You can't label one a social construct and claim the other is an a priori "physical" fact. If you're going to make social constructivism the basis of reality, then it applies to everything, not just Big Bad Corporations.
He's using (rather, MIS-using) social constructivism to label actions he disagrees with as nefarious and dangerous. The whole essay could have been summed up as "Rusty doesn't like spin."
Community is good. Corporations are problematic. The reasons those statements are true are far more complex and nuanced than this tinker-toy argument presented here. This is simply plain crappy critical thinking that wouldn't even get him a C- is a freshman composition class I know; I teach freshman composition.
It's not a troll (though it is sarcastic). You missed the point.
Much of the language that people are rampaging about in the aforementioned Microsoft TOS (and the Yahoo TOS last year) is:
(a) Also presented out of context in just about every media representation of the TOS, including the original Slashdot story. In fact, the brouhaha over Yahoo a year ago was actually over clause nearly identical to that in the OSDN TOS . . . and was as equally out of context given the rest of the Yahoo TOS.
(b) not significantly uncommon language, and, in fact, most of it is fairly standard boilerplate licensing language for any web service.
(c) whether the TOS is originating at Yahoo, Microsoft, or OSDN, it is subject to knee-jerk misinterpretations by a bunch of amateurs who have no experience drafting or understanding the legal vernacular of service contracts.
Should contracts be more clear to the common man? Certainly. Are they? Nope. Which means before people jump to conclusions they should do the research necessary to understand exactly what the legalese *actually* means in a legal context, NOT in the context of their hatred for corporate giants.
Vocal people who see conspiracy in everything they don't understand are bound to generate a bunch of misinformed hype. What's more unfortunate is that frequently columnists and media outlets -- with no more knowledge about how these contracts are created or what the language means in a legal context -- pump up the paranoia with equally uninformed diatribes passed off as actual journalism.
Of particular interest would be the clause in Section 4 of the OSDN Terms of Service: "the submitting user grants OSDN the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed"!
Slashdot owns my intellectual property! Oh, the horror!!
Sigh.
So what should we learn from this? We should learn to put our paranoia in check and consult a lawyer before we open our mouths.
This clause is in virtually every TOS for any web service and is designed to protect service providers from litigious jerks who do things like sue service providers because their web page appeared in a marketing brochure for the service provider or (even worse) litigious twits who do dumb things like claim "They've infringed upon my copyright because they're keeping a 'copy' of my work on their servers!!"
These standard clauses are NOT designed (nor would they legally allow) the service provider to claim legal ownership of the content in question.
This same old tired shit hit the fan a year ago when Yahoo bought Geocities and someone noticed a clause in the TOS (that had been probably been there before but just not gotten any press). See the Wired story, the Wired follow-up, and the obligatory Slashdot reference from last year.
Yahoo caved to the PR blitz and rampant public ignorance and slightly modified their TOS to make it more clear. Microsoft probably won't . . . simply because they're Microsoft and they don't need to.
Maybe the angry hordes ought to jump down OSDN/Slashdot's throat now, eh? I bet they could get OSDN to cave and change their TOS, right?
Or maybe they should just take a deep breath, get a grip, and wise up.
Totally, utterly, and irrevocably wrong. Fair use only covers "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." And it is further limited by several criteira: the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, the amount of the work (in relation to the whole) used, and the effect on the value of the work in its market.
"Non-profit" doesn't play into it at all.
Read the law: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/
You're approaching it from the wrong direction. "Think outside the box", dude.
Don't build a user input device. Model the leg's motion directly!
Here's what I see you trying to do now: through a "natural" walking process, you want to have the walker's feet create a change in some input device (much as a hand creates a change in a mouse or keyboard or joystic). Then you measure the change in the input device and convert that to a model of motion.
But you're sticking in an extra (and probably unnecessary) layer of abstraction: Information about legs' movement CONVERTED TO Information about input device movement CONVERTED TO virtual model of legs' movement.
Input devices makes sense in modeling vehicular movement. For example, in modeling driving a car, you don't really care about the motion of the hand itself; you care about the motion of the steering wheel. (The fact that a human hand is guiding the steering wheel is irrelevant. From the standpoint of modeling the vehicular motion, it could just as easily be a monkey or a computer moving the steering wheel for all you care.)
A steering wheel becomes the input device to control a virtual vehicle, because in the real world it ALREADY IS the input device used to control the vehicle.
Input devices don't make sense in modeling movement of the human body. In modeling walking, you care about the motion of the feet -- their direction, the length of the gait, etc.
In the real world, what is the input device that is used to control the motion of the feet? THE LEGS!!!
Try this: Information about legs' movement CONVERTED TO virtual model of legs' movement.
Gets rid of the input device.
My idea: Instead of trying to measure the rotation of hundreds of spinning bearings, measure the motion of the legs in relation to a fixed point. (Actually, all you probably really need to know is the location of the footfall, so you probably only need to measure a couple points on the foot in relation to that fixed point.)
How? The simplest example I can think of off the top of my head is kinesthetic analysis of athletes, like for golf swing analysis. The golfer and the club are covered with a series of white dots, typically at each joint, and is digitally filmed swinging the club. A computer analyzes the digital video, recognizes the dots, and uses them to construct a wire frame figure in a virtual space that can then be analyzed. It's used not just in golf, but in many sports as well. It's also used in dance!! I've heard of several dance projects out there that are attempting to use the human body itself as the interface to control or model a virtual dancer.
If you want to model the motion of a jet fighter, who do you go talk to? An aeronautical engineer! Why? Because that's the person who is going to know most about how a jet fighter moves and how that motion is controlled.
If you want to model the motion of a human body, who do you go talk to? Either an athlete or a dancer (or someone who studies athletes or dancers)! Why? Because they're the people who are going to know the most about how a human body moves and how that motion is controlled.
So maybe you have dots on their feet and a camera trained on their feet, a computer watching the dots, crunching the numbers to model the motion of the feet, and passing their location onto the VR modeling system. Maybe you have a super accurate GPS system (or just some kind of very localized version of a positioning system) that sends back the specific location of the feet to the VR modeling system. If you know the how the feet's movement is changing in relation to a fixed point, then you know the direction of the walk, the speed of the gait, etc.
You still need to decide how the subject (the real subject, not the VR avatar) interacts with the real environment while immersed. Probably the *easiest* way is to give the subject plenty of room to maneuver. Put them in an airplane hanger with a VR headset on. Let them move around to their heart's content in the hanger, model the motion of their feet (and hands! and head direction!) and build the virtual world around them as appropriate, based on that motion. It would look funny from the outside -- a couple of soldiers in headsets wandering around a hanger. But from inside the VR they might be in downtown Beirut or wherever.
With that plan, you *will* run into physical limits -- it would be possible for them to bump into the hanger wall. If you don't need an infinite virtual space, then big deal. If you do . . . eh, you might be able to do the "large room/visual tricks" option to make them change direction. Howver, that's probably too complex, I think.
If you need an infinite VR space, you might need to put them on that 2D mesh of ball bearings, so they can "walk without going anyplace." (You just have to make sure there's enough ball bearing friction that the subject doesn't fall on his ass!)
You don't need to measure the motion of any of the ball bearings. Just ignore the ball bearings. The ball bearings are just the foot's medium of motion. If you want to model head motion or hand motion, you don't try to track the displacement of all the air molecules around the head or hand! No, you track the motion of the head and hand itself in relation to a fixed point. Then why try to track the displacement of the "ground" (aka ball bearings) beneath the feet!!?? If you know how the feet are moving in relation to a fixed point, then you can use that information to model the virtual motion.
TRACK THE FEET, DUDE!
-- fixion fixion@yahoo.com
P.S. Two minutes searching the Web netted me these links:
Peak Performance, Inc. (http://www.peakperform.com/) has a product called Mocap that captures 2D & 3D motion coordinates with real-time optical sensors. Found via a search for sports technology and biomechanics.
VNSIII (http://www.interlog.com/~drokeby/vnsII.html) allows you to respond and analyze motion information captured in real-time. Found via a search for "dance and technology."
and the kicker:
Whole Body Kinesthetic Displays (http://www.cybernet.com/rnd/contracts/contractbri efsp59.html) Cybernet, Inc., under contract for the U.S. Army, has developed a "foot-haptic" (i.e. tactilely responsive to the feet) system for modeling locomotion in VR. Patent pending. Found via a search on "kinesthetic analysis".
Translation: US Army beat ya Canadians to it, dude!
And that's just, like, the first three promising ones I came across!
Forget *freeness*; it's a *game show*
on
Linux on Jeopardy
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· Score: 1
The Jeopardy answer, as phrased, was correct.
Linux can be obtained for free (as in free beer).
The fact that it is also free-as-in-free-speech doesn't change the fact that Linux can be obtained for free-as-in-free-beer.
Jeopardy isn't a forum for free software. It would be idiotic for the Jeopardy writers to try to explain that distinction in a Jeopardy question!
Lighten up! It's a game show, ferchisssake!
What does Stallman think about Jeopardy?
on
Linux on Jeopardy
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· Score: 1
Hmmm. Wonder if Stallman is stewing over the fact that the correct Jeopardy answer wasn't 'What is GNU/Linux'?;-)
From a baseline (i.e. no computer knowledge), there is probably no difference in the ease of learning Windows or Macintosh or Linux running X11.
Here's the catch: the above statement is only true in a vacuum -- i.e. no other computer users around.
Out here in the real world, Grandpa is going to have access to A LOT more help with Windows than he will with Linux. His neighbors, his pals at the senior center, the cute octegenarian across the street, TECH SUPPORT AT THE OEM, etc. -- practically everyone EXCEPT his well-meaning Grandson -- is going to be using Windows. They will be able to provide some form of feedback for Grandpa. Grandpa will be able to be part of a community of users (perhaps frustrated users, but a community nonetheless). That means it's going to be a lot easier for grandpa to get help with Windows.
Probably the ONLY person who is going to be able to help Grandpa with Linux/X11 is Grandson . . . so unless Grandson has some deep-seated psychological need to make Grandpa dependent upon him and isolated from any of his computer-using peers, he would being doing Grandpa a favor by leaving the Gateway set up with Windows instead of installing Linux/X11.
Wipe off all the icons from the desk except the Windows applications he needs to use (what? a word processor, an email program, and a web browser?). Set those Windows applications so their default save/open directories are all pointed to C:\GrandpaDocs or whatever. Boom. Next to nothin' for him to learn. Click on an icon to start the program, open the file, do the work, save the file.
Linux is great. I've set it up several times, I use it, and when I use Windows I sometimes even run Emacs or the Gimp on Windows.
BUT... everything has its place, and -- GIVEN THAT EVERYONE ELSE IN GRANDPA'S LIFE PROBABLY USES WINDOWS -- you're going to have a hard time convincing me that anything but Windows is the right choice.
As a hearing person who works in the Deaf community, I have a significant interest in this topic. A gross misconception need to be cleared up:
THIS IS NOT ABOUT HTML COMPLIANCE.
Whoever wrote the headline (hemos?) didn't read the article carefully.
I haven't a clue what the federal standards for web accessibility for the disabled will be. A good model, though, is the W3's Web Accessibility Initiative (http://www.w3.org/WAI/). If anything, the federal standards will probably be less restrictive than the W3.
It's important to note that making web pages accessible DOES NOT REQUIRE STANDARD HTML. You can meet the W3's WAI standards with Front Page98, NetObjects Fusion, or whatever . . . and you can hand-code the worst, most inaccessible pages with thoroughly compliant HTML 4.0.
Nor is this about the federal government mandating how private corporations or individuals web pages must be designed. The upcoming federal standards are about making web pages OF FEDERAL AGENCIES that comply with standards of accessibility for people with disabilities, NOT about making web pages that comply with HTML 3.2 or 4.0 standards.
Making web pages accessible is generally extremely simple if you start with accessibility in mind. It can be more difficult to go back and "retrofit" existing web sites for accessibility, depending on their complexity.
The article also says that "firms doing business with government agencies" will have to comply with the standards, though I suspect that the phrase "doing business" is an example of crappy journalism. Typically, the government only extends that kind of regulatory weight to firms that CONTRACT with the Federal government -- which is a different thing than "doing business" with the Federal government. The government might buy computers from Vendor X (i.e. "do business"), but Vendor X is not necessarily a Federal contractor. I would definitely want to see more information about the implementation of these proposed federal standards before I believed that they could apply to everyone who "does business" with the government.
Slashdot Mirror
It's standard legal language to protect the service provider from idiots who want to sue them because "you, my ISP, made copies of my copyrighted web page available to everyone via the Internet!!!"
Duh. That's what a service provider is supposed to do, but they have to include the kind of legal disclaimer above to protect themselves from litigious idiots.
Most of the university Windows workstations should be re-purposable as Linux boxes. Students will balk, but catch on quickly enough. That's what 19-year olds do today! (Faculty are a different story.) So workstations are a non-issue.
However, if the university's administrative systems (student information system, registrar, financial, etc.) are powered in total or even in part, by Windows, then $2.4 million is chump change.
For even a small institution of 7000 students, $2.4 million wouldn't even come close to covering the switchover costs for just one of those mission-critical admin systems.
Over the last 10 years, most institutions have made the transition from legacy mainframe systems managing these tasks, to systems powered by Windows, Solaris, or some *NIX.
If this university uses Windows for an admin system, the changeover costs would not only include new hardware and OS, but enormous data migration costs.
There are no viable open source alternatives for enterprise academic information systems of any significant scale (and even 7000 students is a significant scale). The only other alternative is to roll-your-own from scratch, which is even more expensive, especially in an ongoing support basis.
Furthermore, if they have to switch from Windows, it would require an new RFP, a lengthy proposal review process, and typically multiple years to implement, test, and roll-out the new non-Windows system. That $2.4 million would be but a fraction of the overall budget.
...or at least since the eighties.
See http://tim.griffins.ca/gallery/keyboard/chord
In the late eighties at Virginia Tech, I was a usability testing guinea pig for the Accukey keyboard show on this page (about halfway down).
It was pretty amazing. In just a couple of hours of instruction & practice I was typing thirty words a minute. Thirty wpm isn't that fast, but the learning curve was significantly faster than a typical QWERTY keyboard.
The advantage of chord keyboards is that your fingers never leave the keys. Hence they are potentially a lot faster.
On the downside, there's not cheating. Since the characters are generated by combinations of keys, the keys aren't marked. No looking down to find your place -- you need to learn the chords.
The author is against the heirarchical tree structure of directories for organizing content but mistakenly identifies this with the "hard disk icon" (which is, in fact, just a doorway into the heirarchical structure).
In it's place he would do away with the hierarchical directories and replace it with multiple "desktops" (e.g. flat, non-heirarchical, visually-managed workspaces).
The glaring problem with this is that most professional computer users (ie. discounting grandma who sends email three times a month and opened Word once) have so many files/applications on their computers that they would need dozens (or hundreds!) of these desktop workspaces to manage all of the files & applications.
True, some Linux desktop environments have multiple desktops, but check and see how many users have more than six or eight desktops configured. Very few. There's a usablility threshold where if setting up more "categories" (in this case more desktops) actually decreases usability, whereas setting up "sub-categories" within the top-level categories will increase usability. Hence: heirarchy.
The entire field of taxonomy is dedicated to this principle.
As a previous poster said: This article is daft. (And poorly written.)
Well, that's a few minutes of my life I'll never get back. What a bunch of poorly thought-out, pseudo-philosophical anti-corporate propaganda.
There are plenty of pragmatic, logical reasons to criticize corporations and praise community without wrapping it in college-freshman interpretations of social constructivism.
Example: The premise Rusty starts with is "Human reality is socially constructed. That is, most of the "facts" that determine our daily lives are socially constructed facts."
Of course, that goes out the window when describing the evils SludgeCo wreaks in his theoretical example: "It takes little imagination to conclude that my death was a result of the toxic sludge that I've been using to fertilize my farm. The PHYSICAL FACTS of my death are now known. But the social reality of the event still has not been determined" [emphasis mine].
So, suddenly reality is based in "physical facts" not "socially constructed facts."
But the social constructivism comes back into play to justify anything that Rusty disagrees with: "The point of all [SludgeCo's] public relations work is to create a socially accepted 'reality'which does not make SludgeCo a murderer."
Hate to tell you, Rusty, but you can't have it both ways. Either BOTH interpretations of the death in your hypothetical scenario are social constructed or they aren't. You can't label one a social construct and claim the other is an a priori "physical" fact. If you're going to make social constructivism the basis of reality, then it applies to everything, not just Big Bad Corporations.
He's using (rather, MIS-using) social constructivism to label actions he disagrees with as nefarious and dangerous. The whole essay could have been summed up as "Rusty doesn't like spin."
Community is good. Corporations are problematic. The reasons those statements are true are far more complex and nuanced than this tinker-toy argument presented here. This is simply plain crappy critical thinking that wouldn't even get him a C- is a freshman composition class I know; I teach freshman composition.
It's not a troll (though it is sarcastic). You missed the point.
Much of the language that people are rampaging about in the aforementioned Microsoft TOS (and the Yahoo TOS last year) is:
(a) Also presented out of context in just about every media representation of the TOS, including the original Slashdot story. In fact, the brouhaha over Yahoo a year ago was actually over clause nearly identical to that in the OSDN TOS . . . and was as equally out of context given the rest of the Yahoo TOS.
(b) not significantly uncommon language, and, in fact, most of it is fairly standard boilerplate licensing language for any web service.
(c) whether the TOS is originating at Yahoo, Microsoft, or OSDN, it is subject to knee-jerk misinterpretations by a bunch of amateurs who have no experience drafting or understanding the legal vernacular of service contracts.
Should contracts be more clear to the common man? Certainly. Are they? Nope. Which means before people jump to conclusions they should do the research necessary to understand exactly what the legalese *actually* means in a legal context, NOT in the context of their hatred for corporate giants.
Vocal people who see conspiracy in everything they don't understand are bound to generate a bunch of misinformed hype. What's more unfortunate is that frequently columnists and media outlets -- with no more knowledge about how these contracts are created or what the language means in a legal context -- pump up the paranoia with equally uninformed diatribes passed off as actual journalism.
All your base are belong to Slash!!!
Check out the TOS from the Open Source Development Network, the Slashdot parent owned by VA Linux. The TOS is available at http://www.osdn.com/terms.shtml.
Of particular interest would be the clause in Section 4 of the OSDN Terms of Service: "the submitting user grants OSDN the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed"!
Slashdot owns my intellectual property! Oh, the horror!!
Sigh.
So what should we learn from this? We should learn to put our paranoia in check and consult a lawyer before we open our mouths.
This clause is in virtually every TOS for any web service and is designed to protect service providers from litigious jerks who do things like sue service providers because their web page appeared in a marketing brochure for the service provider or (even worse) litigious twits who do dumb things like claim "They've infringed upon my copyright because they're keeping a 'copy' of my work on their servers!!"
These standard clauses are NOT designed (nor would they legally allow) the service provider to claim legal ownership of the content in question.
This same old tired shit hit the fan a year ago when Yahoo bought Geocities and someone noticed a clause in the TOS (that had been probably been there before but just not gotten any press). See the Wired story, the Wired follow-up, and the obligatory Slashdot reference from last year.
Yahoo caved to the PR blitz and rampant public ignorance and slightly modified their TOS to make it more clear. Microsoft probably won't . . . simply because they're Microsoft and they don't need to.
Maybe the angry hordes ought to jump down OSDN/Slashdot's throat now, eh? I bet they could get OSDN to cave and change their TOS, right?
Or maybe they should just take a deep breath, get a grip, and wise up.
Totally, utterly, and irrevocably wrong. Fair use only covers "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." And it is further limited by several criteira: the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, the amount of the work (in relation to the whole) used, and the effect on the value of the work in its market.
"Non-profit" doesn't play into it at all.
Read the law: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/
Pilchie--
i efsp59.html) Cybernet, Inc., under contract for the U.S. Army, has developed a "foot-haptic" (i.e. tactilely responsive to the feet) system for modeling locomotion in VR. Patent pending. Found via a search on "kinesthetic analysis".
You're approaching it from the wrong direction. "Think outside the box", dude.
Don't build a user input device. Model the leg's motion directly!
Here's what I see you trying to do now: through a "natural" walking process, you want to have the walker's feet create a change in some input device (much as a hand creates a change in a mouse or keyboard or joystic). Then you measure the change in the input device and convert that to a model of motion.
But you're sticking in an extra (and probably unnecessary) layer of abstraction: Information about legs' movement CONVERTED TO Information about input device movement CONVERTED TO virtual model of legs' movement.
Input devices makes sense in modeling vehicular movement. For example, in modeling driving a car, you don't really care about the motion of the hand itself; you care about the motion of the steering wheel. (The fact that a human hand is guiding the steering wheel is irrelevant. From the standpoint of modeling the vehicular motion, it could just as easily be a monkey or a computer moving the steering wheel for all you care.)
A steering wheel becomes the input device to control a virtual vehicle, because in the real world it ALREADY IS the input device used to control the vehicle.
Input devices don't make sense in modeling movement of the human body. In modeling walking, you care about the motion of the feet -- their direction, the length of the gait, etc.
In the real world, what is the input device that is used to control the motion of the feet? THE LEGS!!!
Try this: Information about legs' movement CONVERTED TO virtual model of legs' movement.
Gets rid of the input device.
My idea: Instead of trying to measure the rotation of hundreds of spinning bearings, measure the motion of the legs in relation to a fixed point. (Actually, all you probably really need to know is the location of the footfall, so you probably only need to measure a couple points on the foot in relation to that fixed point.)
How? The simplest example I can think of off the top of my head is kinesthetic analysis of athletes, like for golf swing analysis. The golfer and the club are covered with a series of white dots, typically at each joint, and is digitally filmed swinging the club. A computer analyzes the digital video, recognizes the dots, and uses them to construct a wire frame figure in a virtual space that can then be analyzed. It's used not just in golf, but in many sports as well. It's also used in dance!! I've heard of several dance projects out there that are attempting to use the human body itself as the interface to control or model a virtual dancer.
If you want to model the motion of a jet fighter, who do you go talk to? An aeronautical engineer! Why? Because that's the person who is going to know most about how a jet fighter moves and how that motion is controlled.
If you want to model the motion of a human body, who do you go talk to? Either an athlete or a dancer (or someone who studies athletes or dancers)! Why? Because they're the people who are going to know the most about how a human body moves and how that motion is controlled.
So maybe you have dots on their feet and a camera trained on their feet, a computer watching the dots, crunching the numbers to model the motion of the feet, and passing their location onto the VR modeling system. Maybe you have a super accurate GPS system (or just some kind of very localized version of a positioning system) that sends back the specific location of the feet to the VR modeling system. If you know the how the feet's movement is changing in relation to a fixed point, then you know the direction of the walk, the speed of the gait, etc.
You still need to decide how the subject (the real subject, not the VR avatar) interacts with the real environment while immersed. Probably the *easiest* way is to give the subject plenty of room to maneuver. Put them in an airplane hanger with a VR headset on. Let them move around to their heart's content in the hanger, model the motion of their feet (and hands! and head direction!) and build the virtual world around them as appropriate, based on that motion. It would look funny from the outside -- a couple of soldiers in headsets wandering around a hanger. But from inside the VR they might be in downtown Beirut or wherever.
With that plan, you *will* run into physical limits -- it would be possible for them to bump into the hanger wall. If you don't need an infinite virtual space, then big deal. If you do . . . eh, you might be able to do the "large room/visual tricks" option to make them change direction. Howver, that's probably too complex, I think.
If you need an infinite VR space, you might need to put them on that 2D mesh of ball bearings, so they can "walk without going anyplace." (You just have to make sure there's enough ball bearing friction that the subject doesn't fall on his ass!)
You don't need to measure the motion of any of the ball bearings. Just ignore the ball bearings. The ball bearings are just the foot's medium of motion. If you want to model head motion or hand motion, you don't try to track the displacement of all the air molecules around the head or hand! No, you track the motion of the head and hand itself in relation to a fixed point. Then why try to track the displacement of the "ground" (aka ball bearings) beneath the feet!!?? If you know how the feet are moving in relation to a fixed point, then you can use that information to model the virtual motion.
TRACK THE FEET, DUDE!
--
fixion
fixion@yahoo.com
P.S. Two minutes searching the Web netted me these links:
Peak Performance, Inc. (http://www.peakperform.com/) has a product called Mocap that captures 2D & 3D motion coordinates with real-time optical sensors. Found via a search for sports technology and biomechanics.
VNSIII (http://www.interlog.com/~drokeby/vnsII.html) allows you to respond and analyze motion information captured in real-time. Found via a search for "dance and technology."
and the kicker:
Whole Body Kinesthetic Displays (http://www.cybernet.com/rnd/contracts/contractbr
Translation: US Army beat ya Canadians to it, dude!
And that's just, like, the first three promising ones I came across!
Linux can be obtained for free (as in free beer).
The fact that it is also free-as-in-free-speech doesn't change the fact that Linux can be obtained for free-as-in-free-beer.
Jeopardy isn't a forum for free software. It would be idiotic for the Jeopardy writers to try to explain that distinction in a Jeopardy question!
Lighten up! It's a game show, ferchisssake!
Hmmm. Wonder if Stallman is stewing over the fact that the correct Jeopardy answer wasn't 'What is GNU/Linux'? ;-)
From a baseline (i.e. no computer knowledge), there is probably no difference in the ease of learning Windows or Macintosh or Linux running X11.
... everything has its place, and -- GIVEN THAT EVERYONE ELSE IN GRANDPA'S LIFE PROBABLY USES WINDOWS -- you're going to have a hard time convincing me that anything but Windows is the right choice.
Here's the catch: the above statement is only true in a vacuum -- i.e. no other computer users around.
Out here in the real world, Grandpa is going to have access to A LOT more help with Windows than he will with Linux. His neighbors, his pals at the senior center, the cute octegenarian across the street, TECH SUPPORT AT THE OEM, etc. -- practically everyone EXCEPT his well-meaning Grandson -- is going to be using Windows. They will be able to provide some form of feedback for Grandpa. Grandpa will be able to be part of a community of users (perhaps frustrated users, but a community nonetheless). That means it's going to be a lot easier for grandpa to get help with Windows.
Probably the ONLY person who is going to be able to help Grandpa with Linux/X11 is Grandson . . . so unless Grandson has some deep-seated psychological need to make Grandpa dependent upon him and isolated from any of his computer-using peers, he would being doing Grandpa a favor by leaving the Gateway set up with Windows instead of installing Linux/X11.
Wipe off all the icons from the desk except the Windows applications he needs to use (what? a word processor, an email program, and a web browser?). Set those Windows applications so their default save/open directories are all pointed to C:\GrandpaDocs or whatever. Boom. Next to nothin' for him to learn. Click on an icon to start the program, open the file, do the work, save the file.
Linux is great. I've set it up several times, I use it, and when I use Windows I sometimes even run Emacs or the Gimp on Windows.
BUT
fixion
As a hearing person who works in the Deaf community, I have a significant interest in this topic. A gross misconception need to be cleared up:
THIS IS NOT ABOUT HTML COMPLIANCE.
Whoever wrote the headline (hemos?) didn't read the article carefully.
I haven't a clue what the federal standards for web accessibility for the disabled will be. A good model, though, is the W3's Web Accessibility Initiative (http://www.w3.org/WAI/). If anything, the federal standards will probably be less restrictive than the W3.
It's important to note that making web pages accessible DOES NOT REQUIRE STANDARD HTML. You can meet the W3's WAI standards with Front Page98, NetObjects Fusion, or whatever . . . and you can hand-code the worst, most inaccessible pages with thoroughly compliant HTML 4.0.
Nor is this about the federal government mandating how private corporations or individuals web pages must be designed. The upcoming federal standards are about making web pages OF FEDERAL AGENCIES that comply with standards of accessibility for people with disabilities, NOT about making web pages that comply with HTML 3.2 or 4.0 standards.
Making web pages accessible is generally extremely simple if you start with accessibility in mind. It can be more difficult to go back and "retrofit" existing web sites for accessibility, depending on their complexity.
The article also says that "firms doing business with government agencies" will have to comply with the standards, though I suspect that the phrase "doing business" is an example of crappy journalism. Typically, the government only extends that kind of regulatory weight to firms that CONTRACT with the Federal government -- which is a different thing than "doing business" with the Federal government. The government might buy computers from Vendor X (i.e. "do business"), but Vendor X is not necessarily a Federal contractor.
I would definitely want to see more information about the implementation of these proposed federal standards before I believed that they could apply to everyone who "does business" with the government.