In case you hadn't heard (ha), someone invented a sound system that is inaudable to others. So in review, sound seems to come from inside your head, and you're the only one that can hear it. Oh joy. Reminds me of Real Genius, but I could totally see this being misused. Great example of Arthur C. Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Wow.
No really. Look at this picture to see what I mean, and then visit the site. Amazing, especially considering there isn't a google maps/satellite API out yet according to the blurb where I found it at google.
When I took a virtual reality course at ISU I had the idea of creating a sphere covered with pinhole cameras. You could then project the data onto curved surfaces to view or process the data for 3D. But what am I going to do with a hardware idea? It matters not because Micoy, an Ames company, has already got similar technology working. Funny thing is I am pretty sure I applied for a job there when it was known as Prairie Logic.
For a while now I've had a problem with a windows XP machine having horrible performance. The culprit was that the main hard drive was using PIO instead of DMA. Problem was, when I went to change that in device manager, it wouldn't let me choose DMA - the selection was greyed out! I tried different cables, new bios revision, etc. but nothing worked. I hope if that if anyone else has this problem, they might find this post from a search engine, because I found the fix when Windows XP decides that your drive can't do DMA anymore. Here is the link the answer, read on for more info.
Here is an excerpt that explains what happens:
For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.
