Microsoft donates a lot of software for charities and non-profits. You don't even need to contact them directly. Register through TechSoup.com for donations (or immense discounts) on products from many software companies.
I've been running a Robotics Club in my local elementary school for 2.5 years now. We have a Mindstorms NXT set and the club is always very popular. One thing that helps is having interested parents. Several of them wish they had such a club as a kid so enjoy helping! One of them brings an NXT set from home so we have two to use. I show videos of robot-related things (funny commercials, industrial robots, trade show robots, Robo Wars). I also manage a junior high team for FLL and challenge the K-6 kids with similar challenges. Some of them love to build, some design, some program, and of course I encourage them to take turns. I have about 1/3rd girls, the rest boys. It's a lot of fun!
This would be a great idea. I have a Viewsonic ViewPad SuperPDA from about eight years ago. It's one of the first tablet form-factor PC's and it was powered by CE. Resistive 800x600 touchscreen with USB host, PCMCIA, CompactFlash, integrated sound, VGA-out adapter. I have a wireless network card in there and I can use a USB keyboard along with the stylus for mouse input and it's really nice. What makes me mad about my device is no option to upgrade that I can figure out/hack. I would love to install the latest version and get.NET Compact Framework support. Writing native CE apps in VB or C is not to my liking! I can install many CE apps, but not Windows Mobile (which is a layer over CE), and nothing for.NET. Its built-in web browser is pretty good for its time (though it needs updating pretty bad now), and the Microsoft Word (lite) works well.
Bottom line: if I could get a modern piece of hardware running CE I would. It's cheaper, and much more stable. I'd love to see $150 netbooks made possible this way -- especially since my target functionality is rich text editing, web browsing, and remote desktop support -- all possible on these devices.
If you are into the "digital party" social scene, you might be interested in an app that I'm working on for creating a slideshow from images as they appear in a folder (great for projecting). It's for an MSDN article (read: free) and it would be good to get it in a few peoples' hands. Let me know if you are interested.
Thanks!
-Arian
I don't really understand this comment. People seem to equate eInk with pervasive wireless networking. The fact that your newspaper/magazine is "printed" digitally doesn't in any way imply that it will be able to receive over-the-air instant updates all the time. Maybe in this brave new world, the newsstand becomes more of a docking station. Bring your eInk edition, pop in some quarters, and the paper updates itself. But how much technology is being built around the actual screen surface? If the page is static, then you could plug in the page to a dock, have the "ink" particles shifted, and their persistent nature would keep them in place. If you want video and the ability to change pages though, you'll need power, display circuitry, some kind of networking, and a user interface. The cost of the display is only part of it, and being paper thin doesn't imply that the final device would be so small. There are many questions to overcome, and different form factors that this may assume.
Implying that pay-for-content will just go away due to small screens makes little sense too. I have a portable screen on my laptop now and I can put free or pay content on it. eInk isn't going to change the rules, just the form factor.
My parents-in-law are using IPTV in rural Wisconsin now (got it about six months ago). For $40/month they get about 80 channels. It's basically a last mile solution where TV is compressed to digital format, then sent via DSL to the home where there is a Motorola (not 100% positive on the brand) IPTV decoder box. Similar with DirecTV, you have a second or two pause when changing channels, and IMO the compression artifacts, especially in high lateral motion, but also with more noticable quantization across most scenes, are very obvious. It has a channel guide, pay-per-view (they don't use it though), and pretty normal digital TV features. The box has an ethernet jack and a/v outputs (s-video and composite). They also included a router with the deal and they get their home connection from the same router. Of course, being IP-based, there's no reason why a PC client couldn't be made to watch true TV on your desktop, but I'm guessing they tie it down to MAC address, encryption, and other silly protections. It's kind of funny since it doesn't look any better than shows that I record on Media Center in Fair quality and watch on my TV.
The problem is, it take about two minutes to turn on from a cold boot (yikes!), it locks up sometimes (yes, they actually need to reboot their set-top box!), and it is completely scheduled programming. Based on previous posts, it looks like most people are equating IPTV with on-demand, which is certainly a possibility, but publish/subscribe streaming is the dominant model now. If TV operators truly change to an on-demand model it would deeply impact viewing habits, but not necessarily for the better. If nothing else, on-demand would make sense as a supplement to scheduled. The shared-experience cultural aspect of shows being on a certain day at a certain time is often what fuels their success. Who would even discover many shows if it was purely based on user selection?
I realize that what my parents-in-law have is early technology (though it's the only "cable" offering in their small -- 300 people -- town ), but it isn't at its potential yet. With on-demand to supplement, improved compression, and better platform stability, it can be a contender.
Shared Source is simply a way to allow certain users (gov't primarily) to review code for certain audits. It is in no way a relative of Open Source. MS would not be offering the code to just anyone who wants to download it. It is in very controlled circumstances with NDA's being signed. The comparisons to "opening up" code in a limited fashion are just silly. It's comparing apples to oranges.
You can't use "myself" as an object. It's "me!" People seem so adverse to using "me" as though they learned the childhood lesson of "it's always John and I" too well. It's certainly polite to list yourself last in a list of people, but you never use "myself" as an object.
"Give it to John or me."
"This was written by me."
"He or I will go outside."
Sorry to rant, but the non-standard use of "myself" is a huge pet peeve of mine!
Of course by saying anything, I realize my own post is open game now! Oh well, the price to pay...
I read about a few other similar efforts, including some that worked inductively (no implant). The inductive options only had around 70% accuracy and could be used to "type" on a virtual keyboard or that sort of thing. There is no 100% accurate interpretation of thought by any means, but for more specialized thoughts such as from the motor cortex (this application) there are fewer possibilities so accuracy is higher. Implanting as this does also ensures more targeted sensing of the impulses.
I agree with you about what it could be. MPlayer codecs would make a lot of sense. Even with just a 5GB hard drive for updates you could do a lot. Transcoding seems to be a good next best thing though, since the player can handle more formats than it ever needs to know about. Transcoding takes surprisingly few resources on the host computer, and the quality looks great. I would have been even happier being able to play more content from the built-in disc slot, but honestly if you have space on your network for the files it's much easier selecting from a menu than from a shelf.
Good point! The unit can stream pictures, music, and video. Generally pictures are legit, music is often legit (don't jump all over me...), but video (at least movies) is pretty rarely legit. I have a computer acting as a PVR so some of my content is TV, and I have home movies on there as well. I agree that the big companies expect most content to be illegal so they don't want to help it. As much as I hate the talk of DRM, its one saving grace may be that convergence devices will really come out of the woodwork when those issues are worked out. On the other hand, rights may be too restrictive to take advantage of it anyway...
I searched for region-free and Macrovision codes and wasn't able to find any yet. Forums seemed to have plenty of Oritron codes though (none worked on this model), so maybe new codes will surface soon.
As for your comment on the noisy computer, that was my point! I had that setup for awhile. It was loud and ugly. I could have hidden the unit, but the interface was too clunky. There are ways to improve the setup but I just wanted something drop-in-place.
I like the XBox and PS2-based media players, but then you have a console with joypads plugged into as your entertainment hub. Just my preference, but I'd rather have an device that fits into the setup. Having the network connectivity in an actual DVD player means no funny looking devices by the TV (I don't own a console already).
I wasn't able to test HDTV resolutions due to my setup. The player has component video output and the manual states that it supports HDTV resolutions, but that may only be DVD -- not streaming. I just don't know.
I had a similar issue recently when using a server product that would only expose files on fixed, local drives. In this case I didn't care about network shares, but I wanted to be able to expose my cdrom drive as though it was a local fixed drive. It turns out that you can do this using the built-in Disk Administrator/Disk Management in NT/XP. Just create an empty folder somewhere on a local drive, then in Disk Administrator select the optical drive, right-click and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths," then click "Add," then select "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder." From there you can browse to your empty folder, then afterwards that folder will act like the root of your CD/DVD drive as though it was local and fixed. It works like a champ! If no disc is in the drive you get a "not available" error, but nothing fatal. I don't know about how to do that with a network share, but I thought this might be useful for someone too.
I find it interesting that the act is called the "Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act." Artists can come in many forms. Does this apply to painting, sculpture, music, writing, programming even? An artist can be defined in many ways. Perhaps a better title would be "Movie Industry's Rights and Theft Prevention Act." Anyway, what about pre-release music? Shouldn't that be afforded equal protection? In a more general sense, if we are talking about artists shouldn't there be stiff crimes for photocopying prints or right-click-downloading art from web sites? If artists need to be protected against intangible theft, the movie industry is hardly unique. With the main thrust actually being pre-release movies though it looks rather absurd. As has been mentioned already, PROSECUTE THOSE WHO LEAK THE FILMS!! These are trusted people in the industry yet it's the fans that get nailed. Granted the fans shouldn't be distributing it, but once it's out it's just silly to pretend it's not. If movie sharing is wrong then apply uniform penalties, If pre-release is worse, then get the right person!
It only runs on XP at this point - that explains the crash! As for why P2P is better, NAT'd connection on both ends work just fine. I haven't seen any other PC-PC VoIP app do that. It also sounds much better than Yahoo and others, and it works with dialup.
Go Skype!
His user stylesheet can be set in Internet Explorer as well. Go to Internet Options, Accessibility for the checkbox to use a user-provided stylesheet.
I installed it tonight. Thanks!!!
I hope this isn't considered "crude," but it seemed like a great audience. I have a Zaurus SL-5000 (developer 200MHz, 32MB version) for sale. It functions perfectly with the exception of the digitizer (touch screen). The display LCD works as it should, but you can't tap on the screen to interact with it (the digitizer overlay is actually cracked). The keyboard and all other buttons work, as do all the USB-related interfaces when docked.
It would make an excellent stand-alone network device with a CompactFlash network card, or a long USB connection to a PC. Imagine it as a networked MP3 player (line out to a receiver), a data collector if connected to sensors (weather station maybe?), a drop-in-place web server -- many possibilities! It can even still function as a PDA as long as you only need key/keyboard input (and don't mind the crack over the display).
I am thinking it's worth at least $85. If anyone has any interest in seeing pictures or making an offer, please let me know. I have all original packaging, manuals, cables, etc. I look forward to hearing from you!
Thanks!
-Arian
Again, sorry if this offends anyone, but what better group of people to appreciate a mostly-functional Linux-based PDA than Slashdot!
Someone else mentioned that Windows Media Player prevented screen copy. The reason for this is video overlay. Most graphic cards support overlays as faster ways of writing streams of changing video frames to the display without worring about the actual window. If you turn graphic acceleration all the way down in WMP I believe it will play directly to the player window rather than overlay, thereby allowing a capture but most cards won't be able to keep up the same performance that way. I was on some site looking at satellite images a few months ago (I think TerraServer) and they gave me the option of smaller images, or nice big images with copy protection (which required a plugin download to see them, though still right in the browser). I tried to capture the images then using PrtScrn and got logos of the copy protection with no sat image. It seemed likely that the window showed the logo, then they used video overlay for the actual images. I wonder why makers of eBook readers don't use overlays in the same manner for this reason. I used the MS Reader awhile ago and it seemed to allow specific titles to allow/disallow printing, clipboard copy, and Save As functionality. If they also used overlays they would be much harder to defeat (though of course still not impossible). As it is, it would take less than an hour to automate PrtScrn, OCR/save, push keystrokes to change to next page. Images are nice, but MS Office XP includes nice OCR now so the tools are mostly at hand!
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft donates a lot of software for charities and non-profits. You don't even need to contact them directly. Register through TechSoup.com for donations (or immense discounts) on products from many software companies.
I've been running a Robotics Club in my local elementary school for 2.5 years now. We have a Mindstorms NXT set and the club is always very popular. One thing that helps is having interested parents. Several of them wish they had such a club as a kid so enjoy helping! One of them brings an NXT set from home so we have two to use. I show videos of robot-related things (funny commercials, industrial robots, trade show robots, Robo Wars). I also manage a junior high team for FLL and challenge the K-6 kids with similar challenges. Some of them love to build, some design, some program, and of course I encourage them to take turns. I have about 1/3rd girls, the rest boys. It's a lot of fun!
Feel free to contact me for more details.
http://www.ariankulp.com/
This would be a great idea. I have a Viewsonic ViewPad SuperPDA from about eight years ago. It's one of the first tablet form-factor PC's and it was powered by CE. Resistive 800x600 touchscreen with USB host, PCMCIA, CompactFlash, integrated sound, VGA-out adapter. I have a wireless network card in there and I can use a USB keyboard along with the stylus for mouse input and it's really nice. What makes me mad about my device is no option to upgrade that I can figure out/hack. I would love to install the latest version and get .NET Compact Framework support. Writing native CE apps in VB or C is not to my liking! I can install many CE apps, but not Windows Mobile (which is a layer over CE), and nothing for .NET. Its built-in web browser is pretty good for its time (though it needs updating pretty bad now), and the Microsoft Word (lite) works well.
Bottom line: if I could get a modern piece of hardware running CE I would. It's cheaper, and much more stable. I'd love to see $150 netbooks made possible this way -- especially since my target functionality is rich text editing, web browsing, and remote desktop support -- all possible on these devices.
-Arian
If you are into the "digital party" social scene, you might be interested in an app that I'm working on for creating a slideshow from images as they appear in a folder (great for projecting). It's for an MSDN article (read: free) and it would be good to get it in a few peoples' hands. Let me know if you are interested. Thanks! -Arian
Grrr... "alot" isn't a word! It's "a lot."
The spelling police are on their way!
I don't really understand this comment. People seem to equate eInk with pervasive wireless networking. The fact that your newspaper/magazine is "printed" digitally doesn't in any way imply that it will be able to receive over-the-air instant updates all the time. Maybe in this brave new world, the newsstand becomes more of a docking station. Bring your eInk edition, pop in some quarters, and the paper updates itself. But how much technology is being built around the actual screen surface? If the page is static, then you could plug in the page to a dock, have the "ink" particles shifted, and their persistent nature would keep them in place. If you want video and the ability to change pages though, you'll need power, display circuitry, some kind of networking, and a user interface. The cost of the display is only part of it, and being paper thin doesn't imply that the final device would be so small. There are many questions to overcome, and different form factors that this may assume. Implying that pay-for-content will just go away due to small screens makes little sense too. I have a portable screen on my laptop now and I can put free or pay content on it. eInk isn't going to change the rules, just the form factor.
My parents-in-law are using IPTV in rural Wisconsin now (got it about six months ago). For $40/month they get about 80 channels. It's basically a last mile solution where TV is compressed to digital format, then sent via DSL to the home where there is a Motorola (not 100% positive on the brand) IPTV decoder box. Similar with DirecTV, you have a second or two pause when changing channels, and IMO the compression artifacts, especially in high lateral motion, but also with more noticable quantization across most scenes, are very obvious. It has a channel guide, pay-per-view (they don't use it though), and pretty normal digital TV features. The box has an ethernet jack and a/v outputs (s-video and composite). They also included a router with the deal and they get their home connection from the same router. Of course, being IP-based, there's no reason why a PC client couldn't be made to watch true TV on your desktop, but I'm guessing they tie it down to MAC address, encryption, and other silly protections. It's kind of funny since it doesn't look any better than shows that I record on Media Center in Fair quality and watch on my TV.
The problem is, it take about two minutes to turn on from a cold boot (yikes!), it locks up sometimes (yes, they actually need to reboot their set-top box!), and it is completely scheduled programming. Based on previous posts, it looks like most people are equating IPTV with on-demand, which is certainly a possibility, but publish/subscribe streaming is the dominant model now. If TV operators truly change to an on-demand model it would deeply impact viewing habits, but not necessarily for the better. If nothing else, on-demand would make sense as a supplement to scheduled. The shared-experience cultural aspect of shows being on a certain day at a certain time is often what fuels their success. Who would even discover many shows if it was purely based on user selection?
I realize that what my parents-in-law have is early technology (though it's the only "cable" offering in their small -- 300 people -- town ), but it isn't at its potential yet. With on-demand to supplement, improved compression, and better platform stability, it can be a contender.
Shared Source is simply a way to allow certain users (gov't primarily) to review code for certain audits. It is in no way a relative of Open Source. MS would not be offering the code to just anyone who wants to download it. It is in very controlled circumstances with NDA's being signed. The comparisons to "opening up" code in a limited fashion are just silly. It's comparing apples to oranges.
a project directed by myself
You can't use "myself" as an object. It's "me!" People seem so adverse to using "me" as though they learned the childhood lesson of "it's always John and I" too well. It's certainly polite to list yourself last in a list of people, but you never use "myself" as an object.
"Give it to John or me."
"This was written by me."
"He or I will go outside."
Sorry to rant, but the non-standard use of "myself" is a huge pet peeve of mine!
Of course by saying anything, I realize my own post is open game now! Oh well, the price to pay...
I read about a few other similar efforts, including some that worked inductively (no implant). The inductive options only had around 70% accuracy and could be used to "type" on a virtual keyboard or that sort of thing. There is no 100% accurate interpretation of thought by any means, but for more specialized thoughts such as from the motor cortex (this application) there are fewer possibilities so accuracy is higher. Implanting as this does also ensures more targeted sensing of the impulses.
I agree with you about what it could be. MPlayer codecs would make a lot of sense. Even with just a 5GB hard drive for updates you could do a lot. Transcoding seems to be a good next best thing though, since the player can handle more formats than it ever needs to know about. Transcoding takes surprisingly few resources on the host computer, and the quality looks great. I would have been even happier being able to play more content from the built-in disc slot, but honestly if you have space on your network for the files it's much easier selecting from a menu than from a shelf.
Good point! The unit can stream pictures, music, and video. Generally pictures are legit, music is often legit (don't jump all over me...), but video (at least movies) is pretty rarely legit. I have a computer acting as a PVR so some of my content is TV, and I have home movies on there as well. I agree that the big companies expect most content to be illegal so they don't want to help it. As much as I hate the talk of DRM, its one saving grace may be that convergence devices will really come out of the woodwork when those issues are worked out. On the other hand, rights may be too restrictive to take advantage of it anyway...
I searched for region-free and Macrovision codes and wasn't able to find any yet. Forums seemed to have plenty of Oritron codes though (none worked on this model), so maybe new codes will surface soon.
As for your comment on the noisy computer, that was my point! I had that setup for awhile. It was loud and ugly. I could have hidden the unit, but the interface was too clunky. There are ways to improve the setup but I just wanted something drop-in-place.
I like the XBox and PS2-based media players, but then you have a console with joypads plugged into as your entertainment hub. Just my preference, but I'd rather have an device that fits into the setup. Having the network connectivity in an actual DVD player means no funny looking devices by the TV (I don't own a console already).
I wasn't able to test HDTV resolutions due to my setup. The player has component video output and the manual states that it supports HDTV resolutions, but that may only be DVD -- not streaming. I just don't know.
I had a similar issue recently when using a server product that would only expose files on fixed, local drives. In this case I didn't care about network shares, but I wanted to be able to expose my cdrom drive as though it was a local fixed drive. It turns out that you can do this using the built-in Disk Administrator/Disk Management in NT/XP. Just create an empty folder somewhere on a local drive, then in Disk Administrator select the optical drive, right-click and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths," then click "Add," then select "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder." From there you can browse to your empty folder, then afterwards that folder will act like the root of your CD/DVD drive as though it was local and fixed. It works like a champ! If no disc is in the drive you get a "not available" error, but nothing fatal. I don't know about how to do that with a network share, but I thought this might be useful for someone too.
I find it interesting that the act is called the "Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act." Artists can come in many forms. Does this apply to painting, sculpture, music, writing, programming even? An artist can be defined in many ways. Perhaps a better title would be "Movie Industry's Rights and Theft Prevention Act." Anyway, what about pre-release music? Shouldn't that be afforded equal protection? In a more general sense, if we are talking about artists shouldn't there be stiff crimes for photocopying prints or right-click-downloading art from web sites? If artists need to be protected against intangible theft, the movie industry is hardly unique. With the main thrust actually being pre-release movies though it looks rather absurd. As has been mentioned already, PROSECUTE THOSE WHO LEAK THE FILMS!! These are trusted people in the industry yet it's the fans that get nailed. Granted the fans shouldn't be distributing it, but once it's out it's just silly to pretend it's not. If movie sharing is wrong then apply uniform penalties, If pre-release is worse, then get the right person!
It only runs on XP at this point - that explains the crash! As for why P2P is better, NAT'd connection on both ends work just fine. I haven't seen any other PC-PC VoIP app do that. It also sounds much better than Yahoo and others, and it works with dialup. Go Skype!
His user stylesheet can be set in Internet Explorer as well. Go to Internet Options, Accessibility for the checkbox to use a user-provided stylesheet. I installed it tonight. Thanks!!!
I hope this isn't considered "crude," but it seemed like a great audience. I have a Zaurus SL-5000 (developer 200MHz, 32MB version) for sale. It functions perfectly with the exception of the digitizer (touch screen). The display LCD works as it should, but you can't tap on the screen to interact with it (the digitizer overlay is actually cracked). The keyboard and all other buttons work, as do all the USB-related interfaces when docked. It would make an excellent stand-alone network device with a CompactFlash network card, or a long USB connection to a PC. Imagine it as a networked MP3 player (line out to a receiver), a data collector if connected to sensors (weather station maybe?), a drop-in-place web server -- many possibilities! It can even still function as a PDA as long as you only need key/keyboard input (and don't mind the crack over the display). I am thinking it's worth at least $85. If anyone has any interest in seeing pictures or making an offer, please let me know. I have all original packaging, manuals, cables, etc. I look forward to hearing from you! Thanks! -Arian Again, sorry if this offends anyone, but what better group of people to appreciate a mostly-functional Linux-based PDA than Slashdot!
Someone else mentioned that Windows Media Player prevented screen copy. The reason for this is video overlay. Most graphic cards support overlays as faster ways of writing streams of changing video frames to the display without worring about the actual window. If you turn graphic acceleration all the way down in WMP I believe it will play directly to the player window rather than overlay, thereby allowing a capture but most cards won't be able to keep up the same performance that way. I was on some site looking at satellite images a few months ago (I think TerraServer) and they gave me the option of smaller images, or nice big images with copy protection (which required a plugin download to see them, though still right in the browser). I tried to capture the images then using PrtScrn and got logos of the copy protection with no sat image. It seemed likely that the window showed the logo, then they used video overlay for the actual images. I wonder why makers of eBook readers don't use overlays in the same manner for this reason. I used the MS Reader awhile ago and it seemed to allow specific titles to allow/disallow printing, clipboard copy, and Save As functionality. If they also used overlays they would be much harder to defeat (though of course still not impossible). As it is, it would take less than an hour to automate PrtScrn, OCR/save, push keystrokes to change to next page. Images are nice, but MS Office XP includes nice OCR now so the tools are mostly at hand!