* Posts by yorksranter

11 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2013

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

yorksranter

How about "no"?

Second MoD Airbus Zephyr spy drone crashes on Aussie test flight

yorksranter

Re: northern Australia's predictable climate

I have no idea why they think the Kimberley has nice weather all year round.

HPE's orders to expert accountant in Autonomy trial revealed

yorksranter

Or perhaps....they overpaid.

Junior minister says gov.UK considering facial recognition to verify age of p0rn-watchers

yorksranter

So...the government literally just encouraged teenagers to upload photos of themselves to porn websites? how could this possibly go wrong?

British Airways hack: Infosec experts finger third-party scripts on payment pages

yorksranter

Absolutely. This is a terrible trade-off - giving up a *lot* of institutional/legal security in exchange for some improvement in cybersecurity.

Paxo trashes privacy, social media and fake news at Infosec 2017

yorksranter

Piers Morgan personally explained to Paxman how he illegally listened to Sven-Goran Eriksson's phone calls in order to spy on his sex life. Paxman told the Leveson hearings this. Yet he produces this pile of turds.

Boffins brew TCP tuned to perform on lossy links like Wi-Fi networks

yorksranter

Re: Fixing at the wrong layer

HSPA networks do this (HARQ)

A steam punk VDU ?

yorksranter

Re: Linotype

My top three sources for this were photography/cinematography, textiles, and printing:-)

yorksranter

Re: @yorksranter

I sort-of remembered that Doug Engelbart's 1968 NLS demo used a projection system borrowed from NASA involving a surface coated with oil and an electron beam.

I actually think vibration might be an even worse problem than temperature.

yorksranter

Actually, add more complexity: we need a shutter and a projector-like step drive.

yorksranter

Imagine a flat belt like a conveyor belt, made of an impermeable material. Below it, we have a tank of oil or similar fluid. As the belt travels around its loop, it dips into the fluid, so the top surface of the belt is always covered by a fresh film of oil. Better, the belt passes through a set of brushes that are trickle-lubricated, providing the same effect less messily and with less weight.

We then have a head that can be moved in two axes - i.e across the belt and along it - within a defined rectangle. This rectangle is one video frame. The head makes a mark in the film of oil with a very sharp tool (like those pen nibs mentioned earlier). As the belt moves on, the frame of graphics is illuminated. The untouched oily surface is reflective, the marks darker. A mirror placed above this section of the belt, angled at 45 degrees, reflects the image onto a screen.

The image is then plunged back into the oil bath/dragged through the brushes and therefore erased. The frame rate is critical. It shouldn't be a problem to drive the belt at the movies' 24 fps, because the drive is basically a big film projector (actually, not necessarily a very big one - if the head is small and precise enough we can magnify the frame optically).

Making the write head keep up is hard. This could be tackled in a couple of ways. One would be to segment the frame into subframes drawn by multiple heads, with genuinely steampunky weight and complexity.

Another way would be to ditch the vector graphic approach in favour of bitmap, which only needs one axis of control. If you did it that way, you could also have multiple pins on the head, making it a dot matrix print head and therefore making it possible to output characters as such rather than drawing them as graphics.

A machine that lowers a needle onto a passing sheet of flexible material, precisely, really fast would not be at all alien to the Victorians because it's basically a sewing machine or, scaled up, a power loom. This solution is basically a hybrid of textile and cinema technology, so all you need are the Lumiere brothers to walk into the right pub in Leeds in 1895 and talk to some loom engineers;-0.

The encoding would be basically x-distance, pin number, binary up/down, as the speed of the belt provides the y-distance. You might even be able to map it into Baudot and push it down a telegraph wire or over a wireless telegraph. Alternatively, and probably more robust, imagine the line across the belt as a packet containing a fixed number of sequential pixels that can contain up/down commands, with blanks padded. Now you have the potential of telegraphing into the central loom from a branch office.

(note to SF writers: the sysadmins on this are going to be scarily tough women from Halifax.)