I take it that DARPA have funded this with injured soldiers in mind. I would advise young Americans to use their real arms to stick one finger up at military recruiters so that they will not require this advanced arm at a later date.
Both of Britain's main sports (Football and Cricket) are played quite widely internationally, yet American football does not seem to have taken the world by storm. I suppose one consolation of this is that the US always wins, but wouldn't it make more sense to concentrate all those resources on games that are more popular internationally?
Come to think of it, the other main US sport, Baseball, is not hugely popular around the world either. According to Wikipedia it is less popular than volleyball and table tennis. Maybe the US is onto something here. Perhaps we can copy this idea in Britain. We need to ditch the sports we keep losing at, like soccer, and invent a new one that nobody is interested in. Then we will finally be world champions:)
Your diversion suggestion is a good idea, however, I should think there are some real problems with this. Cable companies must inspect their cables from time to time so any tap would risk detection and it would cause a big international incident. Even if the US could tap a cable in an undetectable way, how are they going to record/sift the enormous amounts of data? You would need a lot of computers and storage facilities on the seabed which would be difficult to hide. And how would you power all that equipment?
On model aircraft people often use ducted fans instead of real jets. I wonder if that would be a better solution for personal flight systems like this?
I had the Sega Master System too. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. It was the first computer gaming system I had that felt like it was as good as going to the arcades. There's a good emulator for it which I downloaded a while back. I've been playing all my old favourites, including "The Ninja", which is the first game I had.
I used to work for a small software company targeting the energy sector and we were frequently in competition with much larger firms. Despite their size, we often beat them and won important contracts. Software patents would be a disaster because in these vertical markets you are bound to be violating some of the patents that the larger companies will have in their arsenals.
The smaller companies are just going to get blown out of the water. It's also going to massively increase small companies costs because they would have to try to patent everything they are doing. Not because they want to attack other companies, but because larger companies might patent it and try to attack them. Even if a big company was violating your patent, it would be stupid to attack them because you will soon discover you are violating lots of their little patents. Patents just protect big companies from smaller faster companies that might come along with new ideas.
It's obviously a big threat to open source as well.
Clearly major powers are not even obeying the Geneva Conventions at the moment so it seems even less likely they will obey any kind of Cyber-International Law. This is all compounded by the fact that the Security Council of the UN is permanently controlled by some of the very countries most likely to be breaking international law. There is the ICJ of course (World Court) but it's fairly powerless, especially against the larger powers.
For example, in 1986 the World Court condemned the US for its terrorist activities in Nicaragua, which (among many other things) included mining harbours, putting civilian shipping in danger. The US just rejected the ruling. The UN General Assembly then voted twice for the US to obey the ruling of the World Court, but again, to no avail. Perhaps the view of the entire planet should be binding, rather than just the word of a few countries in the Security Council. Without any effective mechanism of enforcing international law against the main offenders, what hope is there? Why should anyone obey international law when the largest powers in the world do not?
Yes, I've always thought sign would be great across distances and/or noisy environments. The lip reading skill is very nice. I've seen that used against politicians in news footage. No doubt there are some deaf people working in intelligence using their lip-reading skills on surveillance videos.
They get scratched and refuse to play. Some brands don't work too well with certain players etc. Hard drives make much more sense as long as it's easy to back stuff up. These days you can buy USB Hard drives that double as little media centres. You can record stuff off the TV and back it up on your PC if you want to. Obviously you can also transfer any films you have on your PC to the drive as well, so you can put your DVD collection on there easily (space permitting). I've seen quite a few different models and some of them are just caddies so you can put in any hard drive you like. They're pretty cheap as well. Something like this for example.. http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=221173&C=Maplin&U=SearchTop&T=usb%20media%20player&doy=17m1
You would have to have a contact lens so powerful it would enable someone to focus on something a fraction of a millimetre in front of their eyes. If that was at all possible, it would also mess up their normal vision.
That's the problem with that kind of commercial software. You naturally reach a stage where nothing really needs changing much, but to keep making a profit you have to keep radically messing with it to make it look new and shiny so people will buy it. That's why FOSS makes so much more sense since it serves the needs of the users, not a large company's business needs.
The real question is, if Microsoft were so willing to dump a language in which businesses have invested millions, should we ever trust them again and use their development products?
"The majority of VB6 application issues on modern OSes has less to do with the underlying OS and more to do with the way the application is written"
There are always features that for some reason do not behave properly in new operating systems. It is inevitable and without support for the language it's a serious situation. You might be able to work around the issue, but what if you can't? Without support for the language you are screwed and your customers (and potential customers) will be well aware of it.
Can't install VB6 on Windows Vista? So throw it in a virtual machine
Very amusing.
Then again there is a simple rule most software developers forget... YOU DON'T HAVE TO UPGRADE! So your tools only support NT4 but your want/need to run your core OS and other apps on Vista? Fine, virtualizes it!
And you think a customer is going to purchase a product written in an unsupported language on an old operating system running virtually? If you want to keep doing business you can't just sit back and pretend you can just keep running your products on old operating systems.
EXACTLY! There is no reason to re-write the vast majority of VB6 programs out there. Assuming a program written in VB6 is mature, stable, and feature full, requiring only the occasional maintenance work or tweaking, there is really no reason to make such a huge investment.
Without continued support for the language, no company in their right mind would buy a VB6 product. That's why it's a big problem. In fact there are plenty of problems with VB6 applications on newer operating systems. I know people have also had problems installing the development tools as well.
The conversion tools just died on some of the code we tried them on. Also if you ever did anything clever in VB to try to get around it's limitations, the conversion tools were a disaster. On top of that, conversion from VB6 is flawed even in principle because.NET does not have deterministic finalization, so if you ever had important code to be run when a VB object expired, all of that would need to be manually changed.
Realizing that conversion was not an option, we instead decided to write all new stuff as C# modules to be called using interop. This was a nightmare too. There are a lot of companies out there that have invested huge amounts of money in developing VB products and many of them just do not have the finances to rewrite everything.
Microvision seem to have faked the videos of the Picop in action, which is a bit of a poor show (http://www.microvision.com/video/elevator.wmv?autoplay=1 or http://www.microvision.com/video/soccer.wmv?autoplay=1). The projection probably looks very washed out in well lit environments, so they decided to fake it instead. I'm sure it looks good in the dark though. The only issue I can think of is laser speckle, but I've never seen a laser projector in action, so I don't know how bad the effect is going to be.
Another player is http://www.lightblueoptics.com/>LightBlueOptics who are using a clever scheme where they are bouncing the lasers off of a Fourier transform of the desired image. Laser speckle may be an issue with this system too. These things are obviously going to have to be cheap if they are going to be for mobile phones, which suggests that slightly beefed up versions for home cinema should be pretty cheap as well.
In terms of a portable video system, it's clearly better than the rest (if it works as stated). It's just that I've been waiting for VR Goggles for over a decade and they always suck. Hopefully research and development will pick up speed now.
However, screen-size wise - I lined up the monitor to where a TV would sit in my room and realised that if I had (say) a 42" plasma, my laptop monitor (12.1") would still give me a bigger apparent picture size, as its so much closer to my head.
I'm glad you noticed that. The average computer monitor has a wider field of view than the typical big screen TV, due to the fact you sit so close to it. It's so much cheaper to move your eye closer to small screen than to move it away from a big screen. These video goggles have the potential to get really good in the future with FOVs that rival the Cinema. Then of course there are the up coming laser projectors (see www.mvis.com). I think laser projectors are going to be a really cheap way of having a cinema experience.
how physically small of a display with how many what-sized pixels do we need to attain in order to realize your HMD with a human-esque field of view?
Good question. Well the human FOV is more than 180 degs horizontally and about 120 vertically. (The horizontal FOV figure is for both eyes combined). This OLED device has a quoted 38 degree diagonal field of view for the screen. This translates to about 30 degrees horizontal and 23 vertical. It's clear then that we need quite a few times greater resolution horizontally and vertically. Something like 6 times horizontally and and 5 vertically.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it that DARPA have funded this with injured soldiers in mind. I would advise young Americans to use their real arms to stick one finger up at military recruiters so that they will not require this advanced arm at a later date.
"I am honored to sign this agreement with the India Space Research Organization," Griffin said.
Hmmm. Obviously trying to curry favor there
Cricket is very dull, but it does have a fair following, including of course, the largest democracy in the world, India.
Both of Britain's main sports (Football and Cricket) are played quite widely internationally, yet American football does not seem to have taken the world by storm. I suppose one consolation of this is that the US always wins, but wouldn't it make more sense to concentrate all those resources on games that are more popular internationally?
:)
Come to think of it, the other main US sport, Baseball, is not hugely popular around the world either. According to Wikipedia it is less popular than volleyball and table tennis. Maybe the US is onto something here. Perhaps we can copy this idea in Britain. We need to ditch the sports we keep losing at, like soccer, and invent a new one that nobody is interested in. Then we will finally be world champions
Your diversion suggestion is a good idea, however, I should think there are some real problems with this. Cable companies must inspect their cables from time to time so any tap would risk detection and it would cause a big international incident. Even if the US could tap a cable in an undetectable way, how are they going to record/sift the enormous amounts of data? You would need a lot of computers and storage facilities on the seabed which would be difficult to hide. And how would you power all that equipment?
I thought they were supposed to have been making that into a film.
On model aircraft people often use ducted fans instead of real jets. I wonder if that would be a better solution for personal flight systems like this?
I had the Sega Master System too. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. It was the first computer gaming system I had that felt like it was as good as going to the arcades. There's a good emulator for it which I downloaded a while back. I've been playing all my old favourites, including "The Ninja", which is the first game I had.
I used to work for a small software company targeting the energy sector and we were frequently in competition with much larger firms. Despite their size, we often beat them and won important contracts. Software patents would be a disaster because in these vertical markets you are bound to be violating some of the patents that the larger companies will have in their arsenals.
The smaller companies are just going to get blown out of the water. It's also going to massively increase small companies costs because they would have to try to patent everything they are doing. Not because they want to attack other companies, but because larger companies might patent it and try to attack them. Even if a big company was violating your patent, it would be stupid to attack them because you will soon discover you are violating lots of their little patents. Patents just protect big companies from smaller faster companies that might come along with new ideas.
It's obviously a big threat to open source as well.
Clearly major powers are not even obeying the Geneva Conventions at the moment so it seems even less likely they will obey any kind of Cyber-International Law. This is all compounded by the fact that the Security Council of the UN is permanently controlled by some of the very countries most likely to be breaking international law. There is the ICJ of course (World Court) but it's fairly powerless, especially against the larger powers.
For example, in 1986 the World Court condemned the US for its terrorist activities in Nicaragua, which (among many other things) included mining harbours, putting civilian shipping in danger. The US just rejected the ruling. The UN General Assembly then voted twice for the US to obey the ruling of the World Court, but again, to no avail. Perhaps the view of the entire planet should be binding, rather than just the word of a few countries in the Security Council. Without any effective mechanism of enforcing international law against the main offenders, what hope is there? Why should anyone obey international law when the largest powers in the world do not?
Yes, I've always thought sign would be great across distances and/or noisy environments. The lip reading skill is very nice. I've seen that used against politicians in news footage. No doubt there are some deaf people working in intelligence using their lip-reading skills on surveillance videos.
They get scratched and refuse to play. Some brands don't work too well with certain players etc. Hard drives make much more sense as long as it's easy to back stuff up. These days you can buy USB Hard drives that double as little media centres. You can record stuff off the TV and back it up on your PC if you want to. Obviously you can also transfer any films you have on your PC to the drive as well, so you can put your DVD collection on there easily (space permitting). I've seen quite a few different models and some of them are just caddies so you can put in any hard drive you like. They're pretty cheap as well. Something like this for example.. http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=221173&C=Maplin&U=SearchTop&T=usb%20media%20player&doy=17m1
You would have to have a contact lens so powerful it would enable someone to focus on something a fraction of a millimetre in front of their eyes. If that was at all possible, it would also mess up their normal vision.
For that you have to have optics between the display and the eye. There wouldn't be any room to do that with a contact lens.
So how is it useful?
That's the problem with that kind of commercial software. You naturally reach a stage where nothing really needs changing much, but to keep making a profit you have to keep radically messing with it to make it look new and shiny so people will buy it. That's why FOSS makes so much more sense since it serves the needs of the users, not a large company's business needs.
The real question is, if Microsoft were so willing to dump a language in which businesses have invested millions, should we ever trust them again and use their development products?
There are always features that for some reason do not behave properly in new operating systems. It is inevitable and without support for the language it's a serious situation. You might be able to work around the issue, but what if you can't? Without support for the language you are screwed and your customers (and potential customers) will be well aware of it.
Can't install VB6 on Windows Vista? So throw it in a virtual machine
Very amusing.
Then again there is a simple rule most software developers forget... YOU DON'T HAVE TO UPGRADE! So your tools only support NT4 but your want/need to run your core OS and other apps on Vista? Fine, virtualizes it!
And you think a customer is going to purchase a product written in an unsupported language on an old operating system running virtually? If you want to keep doing business you can't just sit back and pretend you can just keep running your products on old operating systems.
Without continued support for the language, no company in their right mind would buy a VB6 product. That's why it's a big problem. In fact there are plenty of problems with VB6 applications on newer operating systems. I know people have also had problems installing the development tools as well.
The conversion tools just died on some of the code we tried them on. Also if you ever did anything clever in VB to try to get around it's limitations, the conversion tools were a disaster. On top of that, conversion from VB6 is flawed even in principle because .NET does not have deterministic finalization, so if you ever had important code to be run when a VB object expired, all of that would need to be manually changed.
Realizing that conversion was not an option, we instead decided to write all new stuff as C# modules to be called using interop. This was a nightmare too. There are a lot of companies out there that have invested huge amounts of money in developing VB products and many of them just do not have the finances to rewrite everything.
That looks a bit better (The comma as a decimal separator threw me for a second). I might get a pair as long as they're not crazily priced.
Microvision seem to have faked the videos of the Picop in action, which is a bit of a poor show (http://www.microvision.com/video/elevator.wmv?autoplay=1 or http://www.microvision.com/video/soccer.wmv?autoplay=1). The projection probably looks very washed out in well lit environments, so they decided to fake it instead. I'm sure it looks good in the dark though. The only issue I can think of is laser speckle, but I've never seen a laser projector in action, so I don't know how bad the effect is going to be.
Another player is http://www.lightblueoptics.com/>LightBlueOptics who are using a clever scheme where they are bouncing the lasers off of a Fourier transform of the desired image. Laser speckle may be an issue with this system too. These things are obviously going to have to be cheap if they are going to be for mobile phones, which suggests that slightly beefed up versions for home cinema should be pretty cheap as well.
In terms of a portable video system, it's clearly better than the rest (if it works as stated). It's just that I've been waiting for VR Goggles for over a decade and they always suck. Hopefully research and development will pick up speed now.
I'm glad you noticed that. The average computer monitor has a wider field of view than the typical big screen TV, due to the fact you sit so close to it. It's so much cheaper to move your eye closer to small screen than to move it away from a big screen. These video goggles have the potential to get really good in the future with FOVs that rival the Cinema. Then of course there are the up coming laser projectors (see www.mvis.com). I think laser projectors are going to be a really cheap way of having a cinema experience.
Good question. Well the human FOV is more than 180 degs horizontally and about 120 vertically. (The horizontal FOV figure is for both eyes combined). This OLED device has a quoted 38 degree diagonal field of view for the screen. This translates to about 30 degrees horizontal and 23 vertical. It's clear then that we need quite a few times greater resolution horizontally and vertically. Something like 6 times horizontally and and 5 vertically.