I saw several people mentioning better X implementations for Windows, but did anybody mention VNC? Create a virtual desktop on the Solaris box with VNC. Connect to the VNC session as needed from any OS at any time. I find the responsiveness is typically much better, especially since VNC can reconfigure color depth and transmission techniques on the fly to best match available bandwidth. I also love VNC because I don't lose state when I disconnect. Since the apps and the VNC server tend to be on the same machine, machines on which you only run the viewer can be shut down. I can leave emacs running for weeks, connecting as I need to and knowing I'm not accidentally getting two emacs sessions out of sync.
I have a Linux box with VMWare to provide a Windows window. My project leader has to spend a lot more time in Windows land, so he uses Windows as his primary OS, but uses VNC to get a Linux desktop from a machine in the server room. I run a VNC server in my VMWare Windows session, which makes it easier to get the full functionality of Outlook whether I happen to be sitting at a Solaris box in the lab or my Office-less laptop at home.
A few weeks ago, I was making a left turn on densely-packed snow. I could feel the car slipping sideways, and I was in danger of embedding a mailbox in my passenger door. With barely a thought, I spun the steering wheel all the way to the right. The car regained traction and both car and mailbox emerged from the non-incident unscathed. Where had I honed that reflex? Playing games in the Need for Speed franchise, of course!
Argh! It always fries my brain that tech support can't fully configure things without being me. In those cases where they want my password, I temporarily change it to "temp." and the tech's name or "temp." and what they're installing. It's easier for them to remember and doesn't compromise security long-term.
Clearly the computers are doing a very good job of taking the dust out of the air. You just need some decoy computers to lessen the dust available for the machines about which you care. You might even be able to get away with a bunch of decoy power supplies instead of whole computers.
I'm sure the fine folks at SensAble are disappointed that the article doesn't mention them or indicate that PHANTOM is an abbreviation (though I can't find the expansion at the moment). I seem to remember it being pHANTOM back in '97.
Back in my college days, I got to play with a PHANTOM at URCS. It's an arm that can exert translational forces at the tip. They're available with a thimble or a stylus on the end. We had the thimble style, which had a weird harness joint that always kept the finger tip at the "end" of the arm regardless of rotation. You strapped in the tip of your finger in not entirely unlike strapping a foot into a bike pedal.
From a programming standpoint, you could query it for position and velocity, then send back a force vector. Multiplying the velocity vector by a value between 0 and -1 gave the impression of moving through peanut butter or motor oil or water. I tried using a positive multiplier, but that got dangerous very quickly. You were supposed to be careful about hitting the edges of the range of motion.
You could simulate surfaces by monitoring the position for crossing the surface and returning a force vector orthogonal to the surface. At the time, really hard surfaces didn't work. You could get many gradations of sponginess, but past a certain point, it wouldn't get any more solid. Surface texture (bumpy vs. smooth) and shape were easy to feel, though.
One of the really, really slick things my advisor commissioned was to put two PHANTOMS facing each other so you could put your thumb in one and index finger in the other. Then you strapped on a VR headset with a magnetic head tracker. You could see a sphere each for the thumb and finger tips. There were boxes floating around that you could grab, throw, and bounce off of each other and the "walls". Although it was a zero-gravity environment, the "weight" of the blocks between the fingers was very convincing, as were the collisions. You could bounch a block basketball style, and it felt about right. The head tracking contributed greatly to overcoming the proprioception disconnect.
no censorship and lots of sharing
on
DVDs By Mail?
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· Score: 0
I've been using Netflix since late 2000 and I've enjoyed it tremendously. My queue is usually in the 180+ range, even though my turnover rate is quite slow. My record for holding on to a disc from them is 15 months. Try that with anybody else!
The major video chains have annoying censorship policies, like not carrying anything rated NC-17, or carrying an R edit of it. Sometimes the edited versions are clearly labeled (Requiem for a Dream leaps to mind) and some are not. They also tend to carry only pan'n'scan versions of movies, even on DVD. As a movie buff, neither of these limitations is acceptable. The only local store (Rochester NY USA) that has a decent selection also has very short rental periods, lousy hours, and no after-hours dropbox. I used it exactly once. Netflix has none of these problems.
Another big plus for me is that I'm not the only Netflixer in my workplace. There are four of us totalling 14 discs of rental, so we amortize over the lousy mail transit times by trading our discs with each other. The part of the outer cover that doesn't get mailed back is perfect for marking who has and hasn't seen that disc yet.
Netflix has apparently opened at least one East Coast location because my most recent rental arrived two days ahead of schedule. Woo hoo!
It doesn't have to be correct enough to pass the TeX parser
Point taken, but it does still have to be the right formula. If you didn't get the source right enough that you can reconstruct exactly what the prof wrote, no amount of note reviewing will be helpful. I remember having particular difficulties getting certain container types to line up properly in the formulae I used to work on.
I haven't had to deal with such things in four years, so I've completely forgotten concrete examples.
I, too, thought of using a text-based equation system like TeX or WordPerfect or the above-mentioned StarOffice. But let's face it, for college-level formulae you really need to see the rendered formula to make sure it's right. Debugging TeX source while the professor is moving on doesn't sound workable to me. Do any PDAs even have the processing power to tackle even a one-formula document in reasonable time?
I used to dream that college professors were such clear communicators that taking notes was unnecessary. I did have a professor with handouts good enough to replace attending the class (!), but that was in Linguistics.
P.S: I loved LaTeX, and I, too, recommend it as a good skill. Unlike Micros~1 documents, you can actually debug them, and you get to use your favorite text editor, too! Yay viper!
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I saw several people mentioning better X implementations for Windows, but did anybody mention VNC? Create a virtual desktop on the Solaris box with VNC. Connect to the VNC session as needed from any OS at any time. I find the responsiveness is typically much better, especially since VNC can reconfigure color depth and transmission techniques on the fly to best match available bandwidth. I also love VNC because I don't lose state when I disconnect. Since the apps and the VNC server tend to be on the same machine, machines on which you only run the viewer can be shut down. I can leave emacs running for weeks, connecting as I need to and knowing I'm not accidentally getting two emacs sessions out of sync. I have a Linux box with VMWare to provide a Windows window. My project leader has to spend a lot more time in Windows land, so he uses Windows as his primary OS, but uses VNC to get a Linux desktop from a machine in the server room. I run a VNC server in my VMWare Windows session, which makes it easier to get the full functionality of Outlook whether I happen to be sitting at a Solaris box in the lab or my Office-less laptop at home.
A few weeks ago, I was making a left turn on densely-packed snow. I could feel the car slipping sideways, and I was in danger of embedding a mailbox in my passenger door. With barely a thought, I spun the steering wheel all the way to the right. The car regained traction and both car and mailbox emerged from the non-incident unscathed. Where had I honed that reflex? Playing games in the Need for Speed franchise, of course!
Argh! It always fries my brain that tech support can't fully configure things without being me. In those cases where they want my password, I temporarily change it to "temp." and the tech's name or "temp." and what they're installing. It's easier for them to remember and doesn't compromise security long-term.
Clearly the computers are doing a very good job of taking the dust out of the air. You just need some decoy computers to lessen the dust available for the machines about which you care. You might even be able to get away with a bunch of decoy power supplies instead of whole computers.
I'm sure the fine folks at SensAble are disappointed that the article doesn't mention them or indicate that PHANTOM is an abbreviation (though I can't find the expansion at the moment). I seem to remember it being pHANTOM back in '97.
Back in my college days, I got to play with a PHANTOM at URCS. It's an arm that can exert translational forces at the tip. They're available with a thimble or a stylus on the end. We had the thimble style, which had a weird harness joint that always kept the finger tip at the "end" of the arm regardless of rotation. You strapped in the tip of your finger in not entirely unlike strapping a foot into a bike pedal.
From a programming standpoint, you could query it for position and velocity, then send back a force vector. Multiplying the velocity vector by a value between 0 and -1 gave the impression of moving through peanut butter or motor oil or water. I tried using a positive multiplier, but that got dangerous very quickly. You were supposed to be careful about hitting the edges of the range of motion.
You could simulate surfaces by monitoring the position for crossing the surface and returning a force vector orthogonal to the surface. At the time, really hard surfaces didn't work. You could get many gradations of sponginess, but past a certain point, it wouldn't get any more solid. Surface texture (bumpy vs. smooth) and shape were easy to feel, though.
One of the really, really slick things my advisor commissioned was to put two PHANTOMS facing each other so you could put your thumb in one and index finger in the other. Then you strapped on a VR headset with a magnetic head tracker. You could see a sphere each for the thumb and finger tips. There were boxes floating around that you could grab, throw, and bounce off of each other and the "walls". Although it was a zero-gravity environment, the "weight" of the blocks between the fingers was very convincing, as were the collisions. You could bounch a block basketball style, and it felt about right. The head tracking contributed greatly to overcoming the proprioception disconnect.
I've been using Netflix since late 2000 and I've enjoyed it tremendously. My queue is usually in the 180+ range, even though my turnover rate is quite slow. My record for holding on to a disc from them is 15 months. Try that with anybody else!
The major video chains have annoying censorship policies, like not carrying anything rated NC-17, or carrying an R edit of it. Sometimes the edited versions are clearly labeled (Requiem for a Dream leaps to mind) and some are not. They also tend to carry only pan'n'scan versions of movies, even on DVD. As a movie buff, neither of these limitations is acceptable. The only local store (Rochester NY USA) that has a decent selection also has very short rental periods, lousy hours, and no after-hours dropbox. I used it exactly once. Netflix has none of these problems.
Another big plus for me is that I'm not the only Netflixer in my workplace. There are four of us totalling 14 discs of rental, so we amortize over the lousy mail transit times by trading our discs with each other. The part of the outer cover that doesn't get mailed back is perfect for marking who has and hasn't seen that disc yet.
Netflix has apparently opened at least one East Coast location because my most recent rental arrived two days ahead of schedule. Woo hoo!
Point taken, but it does still have to be the right formula. If you didn't get the source right enough that you can reconstruct exactly what the prof wrote, no amount of note reviewing will be helpful. I remember having particular difficulties getting certain container types to line up properly in the formulae I used to work on.
I haven't had to deal with such things in four years, so I've completely forgotten concrete examples.
I, too, thought of using a text-based equation system like TeX or WordPerfect or the above-mentioned StarOffice. But let's face it, for college-level formulae you really need to see the rendered formula to make sure it's right. Debugging TeX source while the professor is moving on doesn't sound workable to me. Do any PDAs even have the processing power to tackle even a one-formula document in reasonable time?
I used to dream that college professors were such clear communicators that taking notes was unnecessary. I did have a professor with handouts good enough to replace attending the class (!), but that was in Linguistics.
P.S: I loved LaTeX, and I, too, recommend it as a good skill. Unlike Micros~1 documents, you can actually debug them, and you get to use your favorite text editor, too! Yay viper!