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One game I've got to get

Extreme PC has it

Extreme PC has the OCZ NIA for preorder with a May 20, 2008 availability.

Priced in Canadian, it may be better value to order from the US.

Our Price:
$175.50

Retail:
$175.50

Code:
XPC5989

In Stock:
Pre-order ETA: May20th

Vendor:
OCZ Technologies

Rating:
unrated

Extreme PC

Where's the NIA?

As of April 15, 2008, the NIA is still to be released... without an SDK either.

I'm sure somebody will figure out a way to hack something together.  How about changing channels with your face, or preventing a nuclear disaster just by grimacing. Homer and his reaching broom would be proud.

Carl, at this point there is no SDK, the control console allows the mapping of different keyboard keystrokes to the various nia joysticks. The product will be released shortly and we have had almost more coverage in the media than we like including pretty good descriptions of how it works, all it takes is a Google search to find the relevant coverage. We are working with a number of third party companies already that have expressed interest in the nia, however, we prefer to have a bullet-proof product on the shelves before releasing the gory details. Likewise, as long as the software is still undergoing some changes, an SDK would not make sense.
As for Emotiv, they take a different approach than we do.

Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA)??? - OCZ Forum

Homer climbs the side of the ready to burst tank. He passes signs pointing to the "manual shutdown" switch. As the workers count off the last few Iroquois Twists, Homer struggles to reach the switch, only to fall and grab clutching at the catwalk above the tank. "Stupid switch!" he laments, "I wish I had my reaching broom! Wait a minute, there's probably a --" The tank explodes, venting green gas with great force. Homer falls screaming into the tank opening, his tremendous girth sealing the opening and ending the crisis. Later, all the employees gather to applaud Homer.

Burns: Homer, your bravery and quick thinking have turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island. Bravo! [Places an award around Homer's neck.]

Lisa: I think it's ironic that Dad saved the day while a slimmer man would have fallen to his death.

Bart: And I think it's ironic that for once Dad's butt prevented the release of toxic gas --

Marge: Bart!

http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F05.html

So what's the different approach?

Competitors

Emotiv has two main commercial-competitors in the area of consumer EEG technology for gaming- and PC-users. The competitors have gone for a lower price, but with much fewer electrodes and thus less detections.

OCZ has a $160 US Neural Impulse Actuator with 3 electrodes on the front of a headband. OCZ are hoping to gain market share by bringing their product out first (April, 2008). Unlike Emotiv, they are marketting it as a faster, more efficient way of controlling existing games and applications (mostly using facial expressions), instead of as a more immersive way of triggering magical abilities in games or making avatars show your facial expressions.

NeuroSky has a very cheap single electrode headset. However they are not marketting it directly to the public. They are selling their technology in bulk to other companies for those companies to incorporate into their products. Currently Neurosky's headset can only detect the strength of two emotions.

There is also an existing game machine table based on EEGs, called Mindball. Players must move a ball on the table by relaxing and not thinking, until the ball reaches the opponent's circle. The machine costs roughly $20,000 US and is usually rented out to groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotiv

It appears Sega is back in the game too, according to this Italian designer of the Mindball table.

...Sega!

http://mindballinventor.blogspot.com/

CeBIT 2008: OCZ NIA Reaches Mass Production - TrustedReviews

2008 will be known as the year of mind control... that is, using the mind to control.

OCZ, the makers of my PC's power supply, are distributing a device that allows the use of the brain (!) to control video games.

But does it work with solitaire?

As mentioned in previous coverage, the NIA doesn't remove the need for a mouse to control games, but all the rodent is used for is aiming, so the criticism is a small one. OCZ claims that the NIA is far faster than any mouse, as there is no delay between, for example, thinking shoot and the computer receiving the command to fire your gun. Of course with the device costing $300 to retailers, on the street pricing is likely to be pretty high so we can't see too many of these popping up at LAN tournaments any time soon.

CeBIT 2008: OCZ NIA Reaches Mass Production - TrustedReviews

The final version of the NIA uses a sleek metal housing, a USB 2.0 interface, and streamlined headband with carbon “dry” interface sensors. Due to the anticipation surrounding the release of the NIA, OCZ will be demoing the mass production device and begin accepting orders at the CeBIT 2008 in Hannover, Germany.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2008/273

More from Engaget

http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/04/heads-on-with-oczs-neural-impulse-actuator/

For $300, it should look cooler.  For 90 pounds it sounds like a bargain.

Buy it here, soon?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143036

Now if it can control an iPod or iPhone, it will become a billion-dollar product.

For $159, I'm willing to test drive.

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/03/10/price_of_ocz_s_brain_controlled_mouse_confirmed_159/

Straight from the CEO's mouth:

To clear up the confusion surrounding the NIA, we talked to Ryan Petersen, co-founder and CEO of OCZ Technology. Petersen said that the suggested retail price of the NIA will be $159. "We want people to buy the thing, not to just look at it and think that they cannot afford it," he told us.

This reminds me of the iFeel mouse I bought a few years ago...

http://www.dansdata.com/ifeel.htm

The device probably doesn't do anything more miraculous than detecting small movements of facial features and building patterns against them... but it will still be a cool item to type with... the 4 letters that your face would recognize at least.

Veronica Belmont tries another one from Emotive Systems out, with 3D-staring puzzle like results.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/02/22/gdc08-brain-control-emotiv-headset-round-two/

So apparently your mind is your face... could be interesting to attach this to a heart-rate monitor, temperature sensor, and pedometer... and maybe a wii-mote too.

Emotiv's offering is to be released in the fall.  OCZ's is hitting the stores this month(?!?)

i can has dicshunary?

Techtree.com India > News > Hardware > Nvidia Planning a 'Whoop-ass' for Intel?

The flag has dropped.  The war is on.

Huang opened the meet enunciating on the fact that Nvidia is a visual computing company and not a semiconductor corporation, and that its goal is nothing else but to make GPUs better and deliver great experience. But later referred to Intel's discrete visual computing chip "Larrabee" as "Laughabee", and added that Nvidia was "going to open a can of whoop-ass" and that "Intel has crossed the line and they're saying false things".

Techtree.com India > News > Hardware > Nvidia Planning a 'Whoop-ass' for Intel?

GPGPU - next gen performance

Graphics Processor Unit processing is the way of the future.  Basically the main reason AMD bought ATI was to get at this technology.  Intel is producing their next generation CPU architecture in combination with a GPU.  The speed improvements are dramatic - from 2x-30x differences in calculation performance.

CUDA compatible GPU cards as efficient hardware accelerators for Smith-Waterman sequence alignment

The Smith-Waterman algorithm has been available for more than 25 years. It is based on a dynamic programming approach that explores all the possible alignments between two biological sequences; as a result it returns the optimal local alignment. Unfortunately, the computational cost is very high, requiring a number of operations proportional to the product of the length of two sequences. This paper by Svetlin Manavski and Giorgio Valle describes SmithWaterman-CUDA, an open-source project to perform fast sequence alignment on the GPU. Although the software performs the optimal Smith-Waterman alignment it is faster than heuristics approaches like FASTA and BLAST. The tests on protein data banks show up to 30x speed up related to reference CPU implementations. (Svetlin A. Manavski, Giorgio Valle, CUDA compatible GPU cards as efficient hardware accelerators for Smith-Waterman sequence alignment, BMC Bioinformatics 2008, 9(Suppl 2):S10 (26 March 2008))

GPGPU

Finally, some food for thought: The GPU is becoming so powerful that companies like nVidia are pitching them as GPGPUs and selling HPC (high performance computing) products that provide massive amounts of power (128 processors, massively parallel) in a little box. So, imagine that we took this same concept a step further and implemented an entire library outside of WPF that allowed you to leverage those kinds of platforms for general programming. Just like DLINQ where the expression is translated to SQL and remove over to your DB server for processing, we could translate and remote over to one of these boxes and execute it in a nanosecond

http://blog.hackedbrain.com/archive/2008/02/19/6141.aspx

Where technology like this would really shine is when programs have been optimized for parallel computing. 

PC Perspective recently had an interview with John Carmack, one of the 2 Johns responsible for creating Wolfenstein & Doom.  He is the one person who would probably take this technology and demonstrate its full potential.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532

That is my big take away message for a lot of people about the upcoming generation of general purpose computation on GPUs; a lot of people don’t seem to really appreciate how the vertex fragment rasterization approach to computer graphics has been unquestionably the most successful multi-processing solution ever.  If you look back over 40 years of research and what people have done on trying to use multiple processors to solve problems, the fact that we can do so much so easily with the vertex fragment model, it’s a real testament to its value.  A lot of people just think “oh of course I want more flexibility I’d love to have multiple CPUs doing all these different things” and there’s a lot of people that don’t really appreciate what the suffering is going to be like as we move through that; and that’s certainly going on right now as software tries to move things over, and it’s not “oh just thread your application”.  Anyone that says that is basically an idiot, not appreciating the problems.  There are depths of subtly to all of this where it’s been an ivory tower research project since the very beginning and it’s by no means solved.

OurAirports: OurAirports: Where have you been?

Nice Google Maps Mashup with Airports from around the world.

Before you fly, read about the airports you plan to visit.

Places to start ...

Sign up for a free account to create a personalized map and leave signed comments (if you want to wait a bit before signing up, you can still explore and leave comments as an Anonymous Flyer).

Search for airports code, airport name, city/region/country name, latitude and longitude, etc. etc.

OurAirports: OurAirports: Where have you been?

If only it was this simple

I think Flight Simulator X uses a similar codebase with one overriding if clause:

if (FramesPerSecond>10)
{
   sleep(30);
}

I recently picked up a Quad Core system with 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia 8800 GT.  I even have the blue blinky LED light on the front of the case that's supposed to speed up things.  I'm still only seeing 9FPS using high levels in FSX.  What gives?  Do I _really_ have to turn off all of that vehicle traffic, weather, clouds and defrag my hard drive every night?

There's something about "future-proofing" software that leaves much to be desired.  Sometimes simplicity speaks volumes.

Don't lose a tempermental model's luggage

No more throwing cell phones around... this time it's all about assaulting an officer on an international flight out of the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow.

A cell phone to the head is serious... but this looks a bit worse.

When the police were called in to manage the dispute, Campbell flew completely off the handle and assaulted the police officer, which, apparently is against the law. She was thus subdued, handcuffed and removed from the plane along with her entire entourage of Campbellites.

Naomi Campbell flips out in Heathrow Terminal 5, gets arrested - Gadling

And another case for backing up your important data in the "cloud" or somewhere not physically near you, and definitely not in your luggage!

First the opening day woes, then Naomi Campbell, now 24 year old Scottish singer, song writer and record producer DJ Calvin Harris. Harris was flying from US to London’s Heathrow (Terminal 5) when his laptop with the only existing copy of his second album went missing (in the notorious Terminal 5 Baggage crisis). The airlines offered him GBP 750 as compensation for the loss.

Would you like to help out the folks at BAA with their luggage problem?

Try "Wee Willie Walsh" in TERMINAL PANIC!

Reminds me of that old Commodore 64 game, Beer Tapper.

If you don't want to help BAA, you can join the Stop Heathrow Expansion web site, though I think it's a bit late for that.

Apparently luggage is now being sorted by hand until they can figure the mess out.  I don't think they can outsource that work to another country.

Grupo Ferrovial stock seems to have weathered the storm okay. British Airways, not so much...

System update kicks Heathrow baggage system offline | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com

This is probably one of the highest profile computer/infrastructure failures in the last few years

The error occurred, “[A]fter an update to the system made it reboot….” Additionally:

BAA told Computerworld UK that a computer software upgrade, conducted Monday night, was the cause of the failure. Despite testing the software, the “glitch crashed both baggage sorting machines….”

System update kicks Heathrow baggage system offline | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com

Computer glitches were part of the issue, but the key problems appeared to be logistics.  Staff couldn't find parking spaces in the morning, and couldn't log in to the system.  After that, it's no wonder they were having a bad day.

But British Airways added that staff log on issues were also part of the problem. “The log on system initially didn’t work,” a BA spokesperson told Computerworld UK. “There was an issue with that for some reason.”

The airline said that “the car parking problems meant the staff were not in place.”

Who designed the baggage system? 

The high tech baggage system, was heavily featured in the Terminal Five pre-opening publicity. Created through 400,000 man hours of software engineering, it was designed and supplied by Vanderlande Industries in conjunction with IBM technology and Alstec, who are operating the system.

Didn't George from Seinfeld work for Vanderlande Industries?

British Airport Authority (BAA) is ultimately responsible for the operation of the terminal and it's technology.

The technology investment is immense. T5 boasts 17 kilometres of baggage conveyor belts in a system designed to handle as many as 12,000 bags an hour. Over 400,000 man-hours have gone into developing the system's software, which has the ability to prioritise late bags. The terminal has involved 180 IT suppliers, runs 163 IT systems, manages 546 interfaces, more than 9,000 connected devices and 2,100 PCs. The building has 96 self check-in kiosks, 54 traditional check-in desks and 90 self-drop baggage depots.

This release from February 14, 2008, seems to be a preclude to the disaster.

Airports authority BAA has begun looking for a service provider to work with it to help develop consistent IT systems at Heathrow and across the authority’s airports.

It appears that 50 of the IT staff for BAA transferred to IT services company LogicaCMG, when BAA signed a 5-year outsourcing contract with them.

LogicaCMG will manage more than 400 different applications, including Oracle Enterprise Suite, as well as aircraft stand allocation and staffing.

Other components of the luggage handling system include wireless connectivity.

The network will have 800 access points connected to two separate redundant Aruba Mobility Controller wireless switches, in two separate locations in Heathrow. The APs used are Aruba's 802.11abg devices. The new 802.11n specification was too risky and early at the time the network was designed – "but we can just clip in 802.11n when we need it", says Newbold.

The wireless LAN will be used for the baggage-handling system. Engineers with laptops and PDAs can manage the infrastructure and check barcodes on luggage anywhere in the building.

However, Newbold made a deliberate decision not to focus on making the WLAN "seamless". He explains, "It's not a contiguous medium, it's not connection oriented." For instance, when staff step from the shopping mall to "back of house", it is very important that they experience a transition, and some resources are not available the other side of the line. Sometimes this is enforced by excluding radio signals from other parts of the space. "There are a lot of Faraday cage materials in the building."

That would tick me off if I was a baggage handler having to setup connectivity every time I leave an area.

Here's a question that shouldn't have to be assumed... it should be proven in a lab when dealing with this kind of scale.

Will it work?

Despite careful planning, Newbold can't be sure the WLAN will work straight away, because the building has not yet seen a full complement of visitors. "Optimisation is the biggest challenge," he explains. On an average day, the building expects to see 53,000 people, all of whom will have a definite effect on the propagation of radio signals, since they are mostly made of water.

Could login issues be as simple as wireless connectivity?

And with ever-increasing numbers of people wishing to fly, the things that can turn airports into nightmares are getting bigger and more frightening.

The line above was written almost 3 years ago.

Passengers arriving very early, say seven hours before their scheduled departure, will also be able to check their bags into the system rather than wait for check-in to open and add to the queues.

Doesn't sound like Just in time baggage check-in to me...

I had my luggage "delayed" somehow on a trip to NY last year.  It was shipped to my hotel 7 hours after the flight, however by then I had already purchased a new outfit.  (So I guess it wasn't really a bad thing. )

There was one other person with me waiting anxiously at the baggage carousel for bags that would never show up.

That was only 2 people and the person manning the desk for lost luggage still looked stressed.  I wonder how the staff at new Heathrow dealt with 12,000 "delayed" bags.

If my reaction was to go out and buy a new outfit and toiletries, then I guess that losing people's luggage is one way of indirect economic stimulation. 

LHC 2008 - Journée Portes Ouvertes

Something to do on Sunday... visit CERNs Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.  At 27km long, this circular tunnel contains the largest particle accelerator in the world.  It was supposed to come online in November, 2007.  Looks like it might be August before we find out just what it's capable of...

On Sunday 6 April 2008 CERN will throw open all the doors to the LHC. A range of exciting activities will be organised around the ring, both on the surface and underground.

LHC 2008 - Journée Portes Ouvertes

Techgage - Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition

This is definitely going on my wish list for FSX. 3840x1200 gaming...

In order to power the maximum resolution of 3840x1024, a dual-link DVI connection is needed. While many PCs today have dual-link either through their motherboard's video out (notebooks) or their graphics card (desktops), there are many that don't and it's because of this that Matrox included the analog VGA connector on this product. This allows Matrox to market the TH2Go Digital to many more people than they would be able to without the VGA out port.

Techgage - Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition