Who says you're being suspected of nefarious things? You're just not that important. I don't mean this as a slam against you personally, every individual's data by itself just isn't that interesting. Information about a single individual (specifically data that can't be processed easily by machines, like pictures) is just not useful in any practical sense. The best data from a business standpoint isn't the fact that you personally like caffein, penguin-themed items, dilbert, and puzzle games. The useful information to a physical business who may be photographing you is the fact that there's a correlation (without regard to any underlying reason) so they can place the stuffed penguins near the stuffed dogberts, and maybe stock penguin caffeinated peppermints and stick those next to the rubick's cubes. A lot of extremists decry as "dehumanizing" the same things most reasonable people would call a convenience. Don't get me wrong, I think that some of the assumptions made about me based on agregates is annoying, and given the chance to avoid a nose-picking being captured on film, I'll take it... but dehumanizing? I don't think practical application of good marketing and security policies will be the next holocaust, simply because there's no benefit (not even a remote one) to the suspected organizations to start said holocaust.
I'm about to be one of those snooty people who points out the hypocracy of the Slashdot crowd, so I'll try to be brief. Do you want to be a part of a community or do you want to have privacy? It's a matter of degrees, but at the most basic level those two concepts are mutually exclusive. The deal is, if you interact with human beings, you lose privacy. The risk of being surveiled comes with the risk of going someplace. You can't be completely anonymous and live a normal life. Try getting a phone or car or decent internet access without a name. Part of being a memeber of the human race is to have an identity that other people, businesses and even your government can associate with you... and part of that identity is a face (which just might be photographed at any time if you happen to be out in the real world). Don't want your face on the Jumbotron? Watch the game on TV in your Y2K bomb shelter in Montana if you're all that concerned.:)
Looks like we're both saying the same thing then. I was never against a cache.:) But I do buy into the idea that "the network is the computer" (pardon the use of the borrowing of a slogan for making a point). The idea of storing the "known universe" on your person would be inefficient compared to caching what came off of a local section of the augmented reality network. Obviously keeping the storage and clients close to each other network-topology-wise would mean things like personal preferences and some individualistic information about a surroundings (anything anyone else wouldn't really care about)... that would logically put the data actually *on* the person in those cases. In other cases where you're in unfamiliar territory with a lot of need for extra information that is more general in nature (like a museum or a Zoo, or even MapQuest augmented reality version) it makes sense to have the primary storage be associated with the surroundings (i.e, a part of the facilities)... wireless would seem to be the best way to get the information to the user in these cases too.:) In the grand scheme of things we're not sending full human-vision video streams anyway, we're sending metadata about the video streams humans are already processing.
Well, I think the compression would still be comparable to DVD because the high "refresh rates" of the human visual system. The compression of movement from frame to frame (called "delta" compression) would still be quite good. Delta compression is the main reason why you can get 100/1 ratios for video feeds. Human eyeballs move around a lot more than movie content, but MPEG (or was it QuickTime?) has some facilities for intelligently compressing lateral movement so panning doesn't suck up all the bandwidth.
And as far as it working for multiple people, I didn't really think this sort of thing would be *practical* using today's technology. I just thought it was interesting that it would be even close to do-able (Well, assuming the man-machine interface wasn't a problem, which it is).
I forget where I read it, I think it was in here in the article regarding the cat that was hooked up to some computers that could render an image of what the cat was seeing... anyway, human sight has a very narrow center field of vision with high resolution (the equivalent of maybe 200x200 dots if I remember right) and everything in the periphery has very low resolution, and the equivalent of a "refresh rate" wasn't more than 100Hz. The brain does a LOT of interpolation to get that information into the image you see at any given time. 2 Eyes times 200x200 dots times 24-bits, 100 times a second is roughly 200 megabits per second. The example you gave was DVD, which at an overscan image of 720x480 NTSC, at 60Hz and 24bit color, is about 500MBps uncompressed (But 5.2Mbps compressed, or about 100/1 compression). Human vision would be about 2Mbps if it got the same compression ratio DVD gets, which it would probably be better since you'd only have to really send the difference between the stereoscopic images of each eye...:)
I never did say it'd work for more than one person, but I think we can push 2Mbps to a room full of people using current technology. Maybe not a stadium, but maybe even as many people as a theater.
As far as Moore's law applied to batteries... Well, yeah, you always take a hit when you go wireless, but you trade convenience for quality. You won't find me ditching my mobile phone any time soon. I deal with the possibility of dropping a call, running out of batteries, etc. in exchange for the ability to make and recieve a call from everywhere I usually go to. I don't think any augmented reality system that requires you to find a plug or carry a server with you is likely to be very useful.
Thank you for posting that. My favorite quote: The product was right. The price was right. The time was right. The name became right - BIC - short, simple, attention-getting, in any language. A simple, yet effective, award-winning advertising campaign launched the new BIC pen in 1949, with the slogan (in French), "It runs, It runs. The BIC ballpoint."
As apposed to the earlier propositions of "Run Bich, run!" and "Write my name, Bich!"
Wireless will not always be slow. It's very likely that it will be slower than wired media, but the wireless connections we have in the here and now are enough to send as much information as the human eyes take in real-time, which is the minimum for the application that the user proposed. And keep in mind that wireless only has to go as far as the nearest wired-in wireless node. In a cityscape situation with distributed storage, that nearest wired-in node would also more likely than not be net-topology-wise quite close to the most used information about the local surroundings.
I buy write-once CDR's all the time and never even consider buying CDRW's. This is a direct result of the cost difference between the two, and the practical similarities in how they function for my purposes. For storing information that I don't expect to modify, why wouldn't I use write-only media, especially if there's a significant cost savings over an competing read-write medium? For photography there's already cameras out there that burn to a CDR as you take pictures, so there's definitely a market for folks who don't need to modify the information after its stored.
All things being equal, why wouldn't I use something that's write-only, more reliable and faster than CDR's since it isn't bogged down by moving parts, and of an expected comparable price to optical media? Yeah, its vaporware right now, but if they manage to make those criteria I think it would be unwise to say they wouldn't have a market.
Opera 6.0 is now available for download. If you tried an older version of this browser and thought it sucked, try it again. It's light, fast, more standards compliant, and its rendering engine is very compatible with the way I.E. and netscape work so it works practically everywhere. You can browse MDI-style, which means you can have all of your browser windows as sub-windows of the main one, OR you can go NS/IE style and have a separate window for everything. Its skinnable (but you don't have to use a skin), it has more privacy and security features than I can count. You can turn off javascript pop-ups (or merely relegate them to popping up in the background). You can spoof the broswer string as being I.E. or netscape for those sites that are browser bigots. I cannot say enough good things about this software. And its available for BeOS, Linux, Solaris, Mac, OS/2, QNX, Symbian OS and of course Windows. Get it here.
Boy this story makes me think of this article...
They seem to have taken it off of "The Onion" but I managed to find it in the Google Cache!.
Zero-footprint
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One thing I see people bitching about here is the fact that it will be impossible to lug about when you're not on them. But I think the whole point of this thing is the fact that you wouldn't get off of it. You're perfectly balanced all the time on what is effectively a zero-footprint transporation device. You wouldn't get off of it while standing in line, or while riding the morning train. In fact, since it does the equivalent of all the small body motions you do naturally to stay upright, you'd probably be less tired on one of these than you would be standing without it. The only problem I can see is stairs... I don't know about other places but here in California EVERYTHING is handicapped accessible, so I don't think that will be that much of an issue. This is brilliant technology, and I can't wait until the price point meets my budget.
For those who didn't read the article, the deal is a chemical cage binding actinium-225, keyed to a certain protein. Deliver to cells, cage unlocked by matching protein strain, single actinium atom decays shooting off aplha particles, killing the offending cell and maybe a couple of its neighbors. If the "collateral damage" is managable, this may actually be a cure. A CURE for cancer. This is awesome. Its been tested both in mice, with against mousy cancer cells, and against human cancer cells in mice. There's no reason to expect that it wouldn't work in humans. This is very good news.
Why does that sound like the name of a cheesy early-nineties techno/hip-hop group? "Tonight on In Living Color, Jim Carey does something incredibly silly, and the musical stylings of SPINTRONIC!"
I don't meant to be your usual cynical "What's this story doing here?" flame, but half the pictures are a guy with a screwdriver. And the pictures that are of something I want to look at are just too small to be informative. It appears to be a PC in a console cabinet, for what its worth. There are some chips, but you can't read the writing. There isn't even commentary except for useless captions like "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" So...
Slashdot Mirror
Who says you're being suspected of nefarious things? You're just not that important. I don't mean this as a slam against you personally, every individual's data by itself just isn't that interesting. Information about a single individual (specifically data that can't be processed easily by machines, like pictures) is just not useful in any practical sense. The best data from a business standpoint isn't the fact that you personally like caffein, penguin-themed items, dilbert, and puzzle games. The useful information to a physical business who may be photographing you is the fact that there's a correlation (without regard to any underlying reason) so they can place the stuffed penguins near the stuffed dogberts, and maybe stock penguin caffeinated peppermints and stick those next to the rubick's cubes. A lot of extremists decry as "dehumanizing" the same things most reasonable people would call a convenience. Don't get me wrong, I think that some of the assumptions made about me based on agregates is annoying, and given the chance to avoid a nose-picking being captured on film, I'll take it... but dehumanizing? I don't think practical application of good marketing and security policies will be the next holocaust, simply because there's no benefit (not even a remote one) to the suspected organizations to start said holocaust.
I'm about to be one of those snooty people who points out the hypocracy of the Slashdot crowd, so I'll try to be brief. Do you want to be a part of a community or do you want to have privacy? It's a matter of degrees, but at the most basic level those two concepts are mutually exclusive. The deal is, if you interact with human beings, you lose privacy. The risk of being surveiled comes with the risk of going someplace. You can't be completely anonymous and live a normal life. Try getting a phone or car or decent internet access without a name. Part of being a memeber of the human race is to have an identity that other people, businesses and even your government can associate with you... and part of that identity is a face (which just might be photographed at any time if you happen to be out in the real world). Don't want your face on the Jumbotron? Watch the game on TV in your Y2K bomb shelter in Montana if you're all that concerned. :)
Isn't this what we're supposed to use apt-get for?
Looks like we're both saying the same thing then. I was never against a cache. :) But I do buy into the idea that "the network is the computer" (pardon the use of the borrowing of a slogan for making a point). The idea of storing the "known universe" on your person would be inefficient compared to caching what came off of a local section of the augmented reality network. Obviously keeping the storage and clients close to each other network-topology-wise would mean things like personal preferences and some individualistic information about a surroundings (anything anyone else wouldn't really care about)... that would logically put the data actually *on* the person in those cases. In other cases where you're in unfamiliar territory with a lot of need for extra information that is more general in nature (like a museum or a Zoo, or even MapQuest augmented reality version) it makes sense to have the primary storage be associated with the surroundings (i.e, a part of the facilities)... wireless would seem to be the best way to get the information to the user in these cases too. :) In the grand scheme of things we're not sending full human-vision video streams anyway, we're sending metadata about the video streams humans are already processing.
Well, I think the compression would still be comparable to DVD because the high "refresh rates" of the human visual system. The compression of movement from frame to frame (called "delta" compression) would still be quite good. Delta compression is the main reason why you can get 100/1 ratios for video feeds. Human eyeballs move around a lot more than movie content, but MPEG (or was it QuickTime?) has some facilities for intelligently compressing lateral movement so panning doesn't suck up all the bandwidth.
And as far as it working for multiple people, I didn't really think this sort of thing would be *practical* using today's technology. I just thought it was interesting that it would be even close to do-able (Well, assuming the man-machine interface wasn't a problem, which it is).
I forget where I read it, I think it was in here in the article regarding the cat that was hooked up to some computers that could render an image of what the cat was seeing... anyway, human sight has a very narrow center field of vision with high resolution (the equivalent of maybe 200x200 dots if I remember right) and everything in the periphery has very low resolution, and the equivalent of a "refresh rate" wasn't more than 100Hz. The brain does a LOT of interpolation to get that information into the image you see at any given time. 2 Eyes times 200x200 dots times 24-bits, 100 times a second is roughly 200 megabits per second. The example you gave was DVD, which at an overscan image of 720x480 NTSC, at 60Hz and 24bit color, is about 500MBps uncompressed (But 5.2Mbps compressed, or about 100/1 compression). Human vision would be about 2Mbps if it got the same compression ratio DVD gets, which it would probably be better since you'd only have to really send the difference between the stereoscopic images of each eye... :)
I never did say it'd work for more than one person, but I think we can push 2Mbps to a room full of people using current technology. Maybe not a stadium, but maybe even as many people as a theater.
As far as Moore's law applied to batteries... Well, yeah, you always take a hit when you go wireless, but you trade convenience for quality. You won't find me ditching my mobile phone any time soon. I deal with the possibility of dropping a call, running out of batteries, etc. in exchange for the ability to make and recieve a call from everywhere I usually go to. I don't think any augmented reality system that requires you to find a plug or carry a server with you is likely to be very useful.
Thank you for posting that. My favorite quote: The product was right. The price was right. The time was right. The name became right - BIC - short, simple, attention-getting, in any language. A simple, yet effective, award-winning advertising campaign launched the new BIC pen in 1949, with the slogan (in French), "It runs, It runs. The BIC ballpoint."
As apposed to the earlier propositions of "Run Bich, run!" and "Write my name, Bich!"
Wireless will not always be slow. It's very likely that it will be slower than wired media, but the wireless connections we have in the here and now are enough to send as much information as the human eyes take in real-time, which is the minimum for the application that the user proposed. And keep in mind that wireless only has to go as far as the nearest wired-in wireless node. In a cityscape situation with distributed storage, that nearest wired-in node would also more likely than not be net-topology-wise quite close to the most used information about the local surroundings.
I buy write-once CDR's all the time and never even consider buying CDRW's. This is a direct result of the cost difference between the two, and the practical similarities in how they function for my purposes. For storing information that I don't expect to modify, why wouldn't I use write-only media, especially if there's a significant cost savings over an competing read-write medium? For photography there's already cameras out there that burn to a CDR as you take pictures, so there's definitely a market for folks who don't need to modify the information after its stored.
All things being equal, why wouldn't I use something that's write-only, more reliable and faster than CDR's since it isn't bogged down by moving parts, and of an expected comparable price to optical media? Yeah, its vaporware right now, but if they manage to make those criteria I think it would be unwise to say they wouldn't have a market.
Wow. Never expected this reaction on slashdot. :)
Opera 6.0 is now available for download. If you tried an older version of this browser and thought it sucked, try it again. It's light, fast, more standards compliant, and its rendering engine is very compatible with the way I.E. and netscape work so it works practically everywhere. You can browse MDI-style, which means you can have all of your browser windows as sub-windows of the main one, OR you can go NS/IE style and have a separate window for everything. Its skinnable (but you don't have to use a skin), it has more privacy and security features than I can count. You can turn off javascript pop-ups (or merely relegate them to popping up in the background). You can spoof the broswer string as being I.E. or netscape for those sites that are browser bigots. I cannot say enough good things about this software. And its available for BeOS, Linux, Solaris, Mac, OS/2, QNX, Symbian OS and of course Windows. Get it here.
Boy this story makes me think of this article... They seem to have taken it off of "The Onion" but I managed to find it in the Google Cache!.
One thing I see people bitching about here is the fact that it will be impossible to lug about when you're not on them. But I think the whole point of this thing is the fact that you wouldn't get off of it. You're perfectly balanced all the time on what is effectively a zero-footprint transporation device. You wouldn't get off of it while standing in line, or while riding the morning train. In fact, since it does the equivalent of all the small body motions you do naturally to stay upright, you'd probably be less tired on one of these than you would be standing without it. The only problem I can see is stairs... I don't know about other places but here in California EVERYTHING is handicapped accessible, so I don't think that will be that much of an issue. This is brilliant technology, and I can't wait until the price point meets my budget.
Folk or punk? Doesn't that make it "funk"?
For those who didn't read the article, the deal is a chemical cage binding actinium-225, keyed to a certain protein. Deliver to cells, cage unlocked by matching protein strain, single actinium atom decays shooting off aplha particles, killing the offending cell and maybe a couple of its neighbors. If the "collateral damage" is managable, this may actually be a cure. A CURE for cancer. This is awesome. Its been tested both in mice, with against mousy cancer cells, and against human cancer cells in mice. There's no reason to expect that it wouldn't work in humans. This is very good news.
Quit that. It's quyte annoying.
Why does that sound like the name of a cheesy early-nineties techno/hip-hop group? "Tonight on In Living Color, Jim Carey does something incredibly silly, and the musical stylings of SPINTRONIC!"
I don't meant to be your usual cynical "What's this story doing here?" flame, but half the pictures are a guy with a screwdriver. And the pictures that are of something I want to look at are just too small to be informative. It appears to be a PC in a console cabinet, for what its worth. There are some chips, but you can't read the writing. There isn't even commentary except for useless captions like "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" So...
What's this story doing here?