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Fingerprints confirmed http://i.cmpnet.com/ddj/images/article/2010/1007/100715mtouch_f1.jpg

What these two graphics show is first

http://i.cmpnet.com/wirelessnetdesignline/2008/06/sige-fig1.jpg

the range you would expect with currently shipping customer premise equipment

versus a second graphic

http://i.cmpnet.com/wirelessnetdesignline/2008/06/sige-fig3.jpg

showing how the range may be extended to nearly a kilometer and a half with improved amplifiers in the customer radios.

So, with these graphics, it clarifies how there could be some miscommunication about the coverage. You could both say that the furthest user from the base station is at a maximum of one kilometer and at the same time argue that a single base station could serve two customers two kilometers apart. Both of those are true and yet they mean imply slightly different things about the nature of the coverage.

What these two graphics show is first

http://i.cmpnet.com/wirelessnetdesignline/2008/06/sige-fig1.jpg

the range you would expect with currently shipping customer premise equipment

versus a second graphic

http://i.cmpnet.com/wirelessnetdesignline/2008/06/sige-fig3.jpg

showing how the range may be extended to nearly a kilometer and a half with improved amplifiers in the customer radios.

So, with these graphics, it clarifies how there could be some miscommunication about the coverage. You could both say that the furthest user from the base station is at a maximum of one kilometer and at the same time argue that a single base station could serve two customers two kilometers apart. Both of those are true and yet they mean imply slightly different things about the nature of the coverage.

A report this month by Computer Security Institute says that fewer than 9% of its respondents said they spend more than 10% of their IT budget on security. The bulk of respondents (page 7) said that the number is closer to 2-5%.

I think your argument of "It's so simple a 5 year old can do it" is flawed for one big reason: The five year old isn't used to using IE.

You must have missed this article

I'll conclude with

with Microsoft applications, there's a feeling that, by and large, the only UI guidelines that Windows applications adhere to is "what we feel like." (I know Microsoft has a lot of UI guideline information, but since no one seems to follow any of it, I'm not sure what the point of it is.)

Well, Max Fomitchev won't be getting many dates with that picture.

27. Studies indicating the number ofwebsites with pornographic content available on the World Wide Web, the proportion of such websites in comparison to the number of all websites on the World Wide Web, and/or the proportion of websites with pornographic content produced or created in the United States in comparison to such websites produced or created elsewhere.

Why on Earth is a humble ISP supposed to provide the DOJ with this information, and how are they supposed to do it? And why doesn't the DOJ just research this themselves if this is such a big deal for them?

It's, at best, overstating the case to claim that Verizon's response here is “resisting” anything. Most of their objections are pretty lame. They say, for instance, that the government should've sent the subpoena to Verizon Online Services, not to Verizon. They don't want the information to be given to their competitors. They say they might not know how many subscribers they have (how this is possible is beyond me). Beyond these objections and similar, they say how happy they would be to comply.

EE Times puts out a yearly salary report which is a good gauge for engineers.

http://www.eet.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=309 00112

The following charts are especially enlightening:

http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/04/august/SALARY_3. gif
http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/04/august/SALARY_2. gif

EE Times puts out a yearly salary report which is a good gauge for engineers.

http://www.eet.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=309 00112

The following charts are especially enlightening:

http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/04/august/SALARY_3. gif
http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/04/august/SALARY_2. gif

There will always be reviews out there you don't like. First, this is information week, the WSJ for the pointy haired bosses, I would expect nothing less than a shitty review, actually, I'm glad he gave it a shitty review.

Second, the guy looks like a total Asshat. Look at his picture for christs sakes Fred Langa

Security for E-Voting in Public Elections (Realplayer video 01:23:34) Avi Rubin (AT&T Labs-Research) discusses the security considerations pertaining to remote electronic voting in public elections and examine the feasibility of running national federal elections over the Internet. The focus of this talk is on the limitations of the currently deployed infrastructure in terms of the security of the hosts and the Internet itself.

Those results are in line with my own belief and experience.. except this graph.

I don't get what "intellectual property concerns" there are with Linux.. do they mean the license? Is the FUD from SCO and others working? Are people just confused about what to do once the shackles come off?

The easiest thing to do is just treat Linux like Windows, except you can copy it to multiple machines. Does some financial services company really care if the software is GPL? They just want Red Hat to come in and get it working.

I'm surprised so few people are concerned about the Windows EULA. In the small business I work for, we really couldn't care less, but a big business is ripe for abuse by Microsoft (oh, you have 100,000 hits per day? Well, due to a change in the EULA, you'll can't use your software any more unless you upgrade it...)...

Oh well, people will figure it out eventually. It's our job as "employees" of "Linux Inc" to spread the anti-fud.

Okay, you're retarded. Look at this table. USB 1.1 supports low- and full-speed (1.5 and 12 Mbit), and USB 2.0 supports low-, full- and high-speed (1.5, 12 and 480 Mbit).

There exist confusing standards out there, but USB ain't one of 'em.

--grendel drago

"Take a look at this almost-20-year-old image... Experienced eyes will even pick out the BIOS chip, the battery backup for the BIOS, the RAM banks, the familiar-looking cables and electrical connectors, and more."

Given the resolution and size of the picture he's refering to, "Experienced" eyes must also mean super-human. I can make out the RAM banks, but the battery and BIOS chip?! In general, the battery's easy to find - but not here.

Lousy Smarch weather...

EETimes has a teardown of the hiptop... Engineers will get a chuckle out of finding the part that won't die!! There's also a block diagram.

(hint: it's a national part on the same side as the processor)

EETimes has a teardown of the hiptop... Engineers will get a chuckle out of finding the part that won't die!! There's also a block diagram.

(hint: it's a national part on the same side as the processor)

link link link

Unnatural optics create precise photonic lens

By R. Colin Johnson
EE Times
August 27, 2002 (5:51 a.m. EST)

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Optical experiments using arrays of nanowires are demonstrating that the concept of a negative refractive index could be realized in practical systems. The work, done at Purdue University, attempts to reproduce results similar to those shown last year at the University of California at San Diego using microwave radiation. A negative refractive index, which is not found in nature, would allow scientists to construct new types of microscopes with unprecedented resolution and could allow the creation of novel photonic devices.

Since the first demonstration of a negative refractive index material, research groups around the world have been pursuing photonic technologies that appear to break the laws of nature. "The race is on," said Vladimir Shalaev, a professor in Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "We think there are about 20 other labs around the world rushing to create the first working prototypes at visible and communications wavelengths. We hope to have a prototype by early next year."

Shalaev is assisted by Viktor Podolskiy, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, and Andrey Sarychev, a senior research scientist at Purdue.

A transmission medium with a negative index of refractions would enable a flat planar lens to focus light to precisions that are smaller than the wavelength of the light itself. With tunable versions of such photonic materials now being rushed into prototypes by labs worldwide, it is conceivable that not only could a "perfect" lens be created but that known electron effects could be translated into photonic operations to create sensors that could detect a single molecule.

"Conventional lenses cannot focus light in an area smaller than the wavelength of the light, but with our nanomaterials you can focus light down much smaller than its own wavelength," said Shalaev. "These metallic nanostructures might even be able to detect a single molecule of a substance, which will never be possible for conventional optics."

All materials have two fundamental electromagnetic parameters: permeability and permittivity, which respectively measure the capacities of a medium to form magnetic and electrical fields. The values of those parameters produce the characteristic bending of a light beam when it travels from one medium into another. In addition, since both parameters are always positive in nature, the electric and magnetic vector field components are directed according to the "right-hand rule," which can be represented by pointing the index finger of the right hand in the direction of propagation. The thumb and middle finger are then oriented at right angles to the index finger, showing the field vector directions.

With the photonically engineered materials, everything is reversed: The field parameters are negative, and the field vectors are described by a corresponding "left-hand rule." In addition, the electromagnetic direction bends away from the normal to the interface between two media, rather than toward the normal, as in Snell's Law.

Perfect-lens recipe

In 1968, Russian theorist Victor Veselago predicted that composite metamaterials might be engineered to have negative permeability and permittivity. Such materials, Veselago theorized, would interact with their environment in exactly the opposite way from natural materials. Using mathematical models, Veselago predicted that such metamaterials would follow a "left-hand rule," which would reverse their effect on electromagnetic radiation. One intriguing prediction was that the left-hand rule would nevertheless allow a flat lens to focus light to a point.

Veselago's prediction that such perfect lenses could be made from metamaterials lay dormant until 2000, when John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College in London, showed that certain metals could be engineered to respond to electric fields as though the field parameters were negative. Pendry demonstrated different configurations of metal that created a left-hand rule for magnetic fields. In 2001, researchers at Imperial College and Marconi Caswell (London) announced a magnetic resonance imaging system using a magnetic metamaterial based on Pendry's design.

Last year, physicist Richard Shelby's group at the University of California-San Diego demonstrated a left-handed composite metamaterial that exhibited a negative index of refraction for microwave EM. The simple arrangement consisted of a planar pattern of copper split-ring resonators (SRRs) and wires on a thin fiber glass circuit board. The SRRs and wires were arranged into a two-dimensional structure with a repeated 5-mm lattice, with the wires located on the opposite side of the circuit board from the SRRs.

Now Salaev's group is working to scale down Shelby's 5-mm pitch to 15 nanometers so that instead of microwaves, light at visible and communications wavelengths can take advantage of negative permeability and permittivity.

To simulate their nanoscale metamaterial, Salaev's group had to model the behavior of left-handed metamaterials at the nanoscale. To do that, they had to turn to the study of nanoscale metallic structures that produce electron configurations called surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs).

SPPs are a "higher-order" object since they are part light (photons) and part plasmon. To complicate matters, plasmons are themselves higher-order objects, composed of free electrons behaving as a wave across the surface of a metal.

Optical amplification

Three years ago, Thomas Ebbesen at the NEC Research Institute in New Jersey reported that some wavelengths of light could be transmitted by a nanoscale metal grid with an efficiency of greater than one. That implied that the photons were being accelerated, rather than retarded, by the metal grid. Even stranger was the fact that the grid spacing was smaller than the wavelength of the photons, which normally would have blocked out most of the radiation. Theory said that almost no light should go through a hole smaller than its own wavelength, but Ebbesen reasoned that resonant waveforms across the surface of the grid, called surface plasmons, were performing a type of optical amplification on the incident photons.

Surface plasmons are collective oscillations of electrons at the boundary between conductors and insulators. Plasmons, themselves a collection of electrons, then meld with photons to form a new order of object, called a surface plasmon polariton. SPPs produce a reverse effect to a photonic crystal: Whereas the crystals exclude light at special wavelengths (so-called optical "bandgap" materials), SPPs enhance transmission in certain bands, creating the negative refractive index effect.

Resonant SPPs on the metal surface accumulate electromagnetic energy, operating like an antenna when the grid pitch is close to the resonant wavelength of the light. Thus, by changing the pitch of the grid, the wavelength of enhanced transmission can be tuned to a desired wavelength of light. An optical "near field" is generated when localized SPPs are excited by light. The resonating SPPs enhance the transmission of specific light wavelengths by several orders of magnitude, according to Salaev's model.

Now all the researchers have to do is build it.

"In the simulations, we took metal wires and spheres about 10 nanometers thick -- about 100 atoms wide -- and they functioned like nano-antennas for certain wavelengths," said Shalaev.

Clouds and waves

The tiny wires, 10-nm thick and as long as the wavelength of light they are tuned to enhance, were arranged in pairs parallel to each other. When the resonant wavelength of light hit the wires, they resonated, transforming a cloud of electrons into a wave (plasmon), which enhanced the transmission of light in a "left-handed" manner.

The simulations used the discrete-dipole approximation to verify that the plasmon polariton modes in tiny parallel wires were dependent on the incident-light wavelength and the direction of propagation. Verification of the existence of localized plasmon modes and their strong local-field enhancement when fabricated into composites convinced the researchers that left-handed materials in the near-infrared and visible could be built.

"Using these plasmonic nanomaterials, we hope to directly manipulate light, guide it around corners with no losses and basically do all the fundamental operations we do with electronic circuits today, but with photons instead," said Shalaev.

Shalaev's group experimented with many different nano-antenna shapes, from spheres and wires to more complex geometric configurations based on repeated fractal-like patterns. Each metallic pattern was analyzed for its ability to enhance light using SPPs responding to selected incident wavelengths. The winning designs are now being fabricated into prototypes, due out by early 2003.

To see the picture, click here:
http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/02/april/icecube_br ick.gif

-Jake.

My company recently went down the path of evaluating several embedded linux suppliers, including Hard Hat Linux, LynuxWorks, RTLinux, and others. This evaluation was for an embedded communications platform.

There are many "real-world" issues that will arise when considering Linux instead of some of the more established embedded OS players (WindRiver/pSOS, Green Hills, Keil, QNX, et al -- see Embedded Systems Programming magazine for a pdf summary of embedded OS providers). These real-world issues, which will vary in importance among organizations for various reasons, include:

• Existing non-linux OS usage (e.g., WindRiver)
• Staff familiarity with Unix-like programming (most embedded developers know traditional RTOS-like architectures, not unix IPC methods or socket programming)
• Ease/difficulty with which already-written application software can migrate to a new OS
• OS support for preferred hardware devices (processor, communications peripherals, flash, etc. -- writing drivers from scratch isn't desirable)
• Internal corporate or organizational resistance to change (don't underestimate this one, folks!)
• Product life cycle phase
• Existing customer experience(s) with any previous OS-related behavior that may change under linux (customers like seeing behaviors they've seen before, not something new)
• Hard real-time versus soft real-time requirement(s)
• Communications stack and protocol requirements

In short, development in the embedded world tends to have many more complications associated with it. That's not necessarily bad -- in fact it often makes it more technically challenging and thus professionally satisfying -- it's just something that ought to be recognized, acknowledged, and taken into account when OS decisions are being made.

Andy

According to the chart, DVD+RW is a DVD recordable format. This is incorrect, as the DVD Forum has not accepted DVD+RW into the DVD family of formats. At most, DVD+RW can only be described as a recordable format using media similar to standard DVDs.

The DVD+RW manufacturers are being disingenuous and misleading the unwashed by including the "DVD" in the format name when they know full well that discs produced in this format cannot legally be called DVDs.

Comparison chart

I don't see a benifit especially in storage space for the red laser format.

Anybody have a reason other than politics?

There's an interesting chart link from the main story. Looks like it uses something to attract the anthrax DNA, and when anthrax attaches to it, it bridges two gold electrodes, thus closing a circuit and showing positive. Neat!

This story at eetimes (dating back to:04/26/99, 10:54 a.m. EST) talks about a company called Starium (Monterey, Calif.). They have an ecryption model for digital cellular comunications that seems interesting.

The worst was receiving fax calls on my voice phone from the CISCO automated fax server at 3am. Microsoft may have played a lot of dirty tricks but I hope this does not happen to this Microsoft guy.

Wait a second! What is that graphic that you reference http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/00/january/1096ditz el.gif ? some kind of leak from transmeta or something? or just something that someone drew up from the patents?

I wonder what "surprises" Ditzel is talking about with regard to this.

Pentium killer?
I do like the design

...he looks kind of like Bob Newhart to me. Or maybe Phil Collins. I'm not sure which. Look at this photo and figure it out for yourself.

This image claims that the top third is the "3Mbyte Original".

Of course it is, even though it's part of a ~150KB GIF.....

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".