This is a fine example of how Corporate America has lost sight of what is important in people and opted for the easier, less thoughtful method of judgement of worth to the company, prejudice.
It is so common to see management making the assumption that no current engineering employees are good enough to work on interesting/challenging projects while at the same time their people in engineering are ready to leave because they're bored to death. It's kind of like this, "I wouldn't hire anyone that would work for my company." Or, "The employees are always smarter on the other side of the fence (parking lot, office park, etc.)."
I had a very wise undergrad EE prof who said on the first day of design class that we needn't worry about the many "complicated" things that we would have to design during the course because we had already completed all of our circuit analysis courses. He said it's much harder to figure out the details of someone's design than to design it yourself. Same applies here in software. I've been there working with other's undocumented code and quite frankly it was infrequently that I left the project with more respect for the programmer. Here I'll just say what I learned from the experiences as useless as it might be.
If the coding style used is appropriate you stand some chance. Lines of code don't matter much when behavior is sufficiently complex that you cannot list the states and events that trigger execution and state change let alone keep track of them in your head long enough to understand their context.
I once had a similar problem with some legacy OS9 c code that performed a simple communication task and updated a monitor. With no documentation from the writers I was to "simply add some new data to be collected and display it." The problem with this 3000 loc was that it was written as a state machine with no modularization - next to impossible to follow in a debugger. What I wanted to do is run a performance analyzer along with the code but I was told that was "out of budget". This would have told me at least the parts of code being executed frequently and I could start to associate the external events with the code processing.
On very large applications like AT&T's RNS (residential account management for BellSouth) that exceed million-lines-of-c-code the only thing that made the application workable for new features was the fact that it was created in a CMM III product environment thus it was well documented in design, development, testing, feature changes, bug fixes, etc. Even with all of this the number of processes and related data stores still showed a lot of bleed over and function duplication (there was no simple way to determine if a function was in existence that already did what you needed and even harder to determine if it was state data dependent and thus unusable in certain other states. Attempts by us (contract coders mainly) to get the company to allow us build a function-finding-tool/database to eliminate this problem fell on mostly deaf ears.
Because of this we had to depend on the longer-lived of the system architects to get an idea of where functionality existed. There were many times though when no one knew and weeks had to be spent reverse engineering communication structures, what the heck undocumented stretches of code did, re-write the documentation correctly and then start to implement the feature or correct the problem that had "been there for years." Management did not like the time taken to repair poor coding as this was not included as one our trackable metrics and therefore not in our feature/bug's budget (since it was not considered to be either).
RNS sounds bad but it was a breeze compared to that tightly optimized state machine code without documentation. So, my recommendations are:
1) If it is stream-of-thought-code (kind of like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury), not modularized, not documented Tell your manager that it most likely will have to be re-designed to understand it fully. That means do an essential model of it's processing and data stores, use-cases, objects and events or whatever rigorous methodology you prefer. Then use that to re-write it. If management doesn't want to do that then you do not work for a company interested in maintainable code but wants a cheap fix. I would leave as soon as you get from them what they took from you in suckering you into the place.
2) If it is structured and/or developed in a "self-documenting-language" like Ada, Modula, Eiffel, etc. that forces structure (or at least makes it easier to write structured rather than unstructured), finish documenting it properly a
To the best of my knowledge 3-D Neutron Beam Analysis is the best non-destructive test available. It will not be affected by layers, etc. See http://focus.aps.org/story/v17/st20/ for a detailed explanation. Last I heard this method was going to be used at border crossings and on shipping containers to examine contents without opening any containers.
"There is no comparison security-wise, openBSD wins hands down." And this is based on what metrics? I agree with the article on one point and that is diversity is essential to survivability. This does not mean that it is good for improving security against penetration unless one uses shell within shell within shell,,, firewalling.
I personally feel that it is time to let IE break clean with the IE7 and older versions' flaws. MS should create a compliant browser for a change and if people want to access the deliberately kludged sites let them use IE7 or earlier. It's time to let the spaghetti code that is IE7 die its unnatural death. Sorry to be so blunt but this sounds like the same excuses coming from Microsoft when IE7 was nearing release. There was a backing away from standards because they reasoned that they would rather put out a known flawed product rather than attempt to do it right and making "new" mistakes. Come on. Frankly it sounded like upper management BS "dumbed down" so that maybe we the developers might swallow this dubious reasoning when actually management is saying we don't want to spend the money to do it correctly. The IE team management has little credibility as far as I'm concerned. "Let them eat cake!" indeed.
World's Fish Supply Running Out, Researchers Warn The 14 researchers from Canada, Panama, Sweden, Britain and the United States spent four years analyzing fish populations, catch records and ocean ecosystems to reach their conclusion. They found that by 2003 -- the last year for which data on global commercial fish catches are available -- 29 percent of all fished species had collapsed, meaning they are now at least 90 percent below their historic maximum catch levels.
The rate of population collapses has accelerated in recent years. As of 1980, just 13.5 percent of fished species had collapsed, even though fishing vessels were pursuing 1,736 fewer species then. Today, the fishing industry harvests 7,784 species commercially. "It's like hitting the gas pedal and holding it down at a constant level," Worm said in a telephone interview. "The rate accelerates over time."
I believe that this trend was again confirmed in 2007.
I'd like to openly thank Steve Jobs for helping to make music, videos and other protected works available to me in digital form and where I can purchase them legally. I would also like to thank him for working with the media companies in a way that avoids an all-out-war of resistance by compromising while still keeping an eye on the final goal of making these items more freely available in full quality, without restrictions.
In the US there used to be a tradition whereby ex-Presidents did not criticize current Presidents. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have thrown this out the window, repeatedly criticizing President Bush. I take this criticism as a sign of hope that someday we'll leave behind the idea that some persons are exempt from criticism (and accountability under law). No more royalty, please.
I was attempting to illustrate one aspect where this concept of "I contributed to it therefore I retain some control of it." If you look further you will see other precedent in accepting government funding such as schools receiving federal funds must comply to with "equal access" federal statutes. What it all boils down to is this: "If I invest my money in a project then I deserve to see the results of that investment." The people's money should not be looked upon as a "free" resource to be consumed by those who feel that their needs for a publication payment supersede the investor's "right to know." This, I feel strongly, also applies the other way around in that government is the servant of of the people and thus is obligated to full disclosure of not only where funds are spent but to what end. The Freedom of Information Act is supposed to give us a way of requesting that information even when deemed as a matter of national security. Sadly, yes, it depends on those in government to obey the law created by our "representatives" and enforced by the executive branch only our executive branch holds its own best interests above the law and chooses which laws it will enforce on that basis.
But what would you do with research at universities? Both the public and the private ones are less than 100% funded by the federal government. Reduce the length of patents by the % of gov funding?
We already require states that accept any federal highway funds (which were paid to the federal government in taxes - called Reapportionment) to adopt speed limits that are in line with federal requirements. The same would hold for research, you accept federal funding, you are required to release all of your research results.
No. But I can tell you that you can never attain greater than 50% efficiency in charging your cars storage cells. This is the theoretical limit of transfer from a generator (power plant) to a load. Then, when you go to drive it the storage cells have at best a 50% power transfer to the wheel motors. So, right off the bat you have that disadvantage in charge/discharge systems. How that stacks up against fuel cells I am not sure either as the "fuel" must be transfered from manufacture to the vehicle. Perhaps a home hydrogen/oxygen extraction plant is possible. But then, what runs it? Maybe solar?
Smaller apartments in the southern U.S. still use electric heating. It's compactness and safety are apparently more important than the fact that the most power that you can theoretically transfer to an electric load is 50%. And that's only if the load seen by the generator is the complex conjugate of the generator impedance (which it never is). It makes some of us electrical engineers sad:-( as many other devices used are essentially lossless (transformers, capacitors, inductors, some types of motors, etc.). Many people don't have a clue as to how inefficient their electrical devices are as seen from the power station.
Quite simply, I believe that all, and I mean all government funded (federal, state, local) information gathering or discovery should be by definition publicly published with library access (at a minimum). We have paid for it, it should be openly available to all. The Library of Congress should be assigned responsibility for the free access to this information with no delay (at least at the federal level). It should plainly be a fundamental requirement of government grants. Government exists to serve us, not the other way around and special interests be damned. We have been complacent for so long now that people fall right into line with whatever abuse we receive from government. Impeachment should be commonplace. When elected officials begin favoring anything other than the public welfare they should be promptly removed. Things like this "But Hill watchers said that -- given President Bush's threat to veto the bill for budgetary reasons and the likelihood of a continuing resolution, which would not have the new language -- it is too soon for the open-access movement to publish a victory paper." should be dealt with quickly and with conviction. Serving in political office should be just that, serving. Quick removal of self-interested persons will help inspire the remaining to pay attention to what people want and need. We got rid of one king -- we shouldn't help to create new ones.
All of these capacitors can experience catastrophic discharge if the dielectric separating the positive and negative charges is compromised such as when the operating voltage is exceeded, aging, voltage spikes occur. Electrolitics are polar and thus must be biased according to their polarity to operate as a true capacitor (the tend to break down the barrier if reverse biased). Many electrolitics are self-repairing to a certain extent being able to regenerate the layer between plates once biased correctly. The thinner the dielectric and the more plate area the more capacity a capacitor has but decreasing the plate separation usually leads to lower breakdown voltages. The best way to be safe with portable powered devices and their energy storage devices is to make the device more efficient therefore not requiring you to carry around a giga-joule of energy. Such a dramatic transition as from LEDs to LCDs in watches made them practical. A much better solution than carrying around the equivalent of an electrostatic bomb (though electrolitics blow up nicely with shrapnel when bridged with 120VAC, not that I would recommend such a thing). I'm holding out for a miniature room temperature superconducting ring myself.;)
Frequency hopping and spread spectrum are both techniques that may be used in order to both disguise and help defeat jamming. Spread spectrum is a for of ultra-wide FM where the signal frequency distribution is spead out in wide "wings" from the center frequency. This make the transmitted signal difficult to receive unless the center frequency is known as the transmitted power is "spread" of a wider band of frequencies. This makes it hard to distinguish from the background. Tuning to a portion of the signal yields insufficient information to reconstruct the transmission.
Frequency hopping is a technique in which the center frequency of a signal is moved in a matched receiver-detectable pattern. A common method for controlling the frequency in an unpredictable manner is to us a pseudo-random frequency hop routine. This causes the center frequency to jump to seemingly random values at a very rapid rate - far faster than can be followed by a tracking receiver that does not know the pattern. Methods such as rendezvous frequencies and two way handshaking can resynchronize the pseudo-random sequence if necessary.
The two techniques of spread spectrum and pseudo-random frequency hopping can of course be combined to to make real-time decoding very difficult. The vulnarability of any transmitted energy system is that it can be located by triangulating on the radio energy level coming from the transmitter direction. The closer to the noise floor, the harder to locate.
This was the state-of-the-art about 25 years ago. There may be more secure modulation schemes such as frequency+time division pseudo-random incoherent multiplexing-multiple carrier that disrupt the ability to receive even further by time-delaying pseudo-random portions of the digital data so that the assumption of linearity no longer holds true. This would require a signal reconstruction via means other than simple heterodyning and derivative/integration means as in conventional transceivers. Fourier models would then no longer be valid. Hmmm...
As far as people voting in incumbents I suspect the number one selection criteria is name recognition along with electing a "known" rather than an "unknown." This is coupled with laziness as most people do not research in depth each candidate and most importantly their past history and affiliations. Another is "I'm a a "X" and I only vote for my party candidates. This is much the same as the first reason but more reckless. Those that understand that our representatives typically form committees first on party loyalty and secondly the "senility system" might want to re-elect an incumbent in the hope that they will obtain more power over time and thus are able to help their constituents with more pork. I am all for, and practice voting for the best person for the job regardless of party and other criteria that should be unrelated to their ability to represent my interests but I cringe every time realizing that the intelligent, honest, idealist that I selected will never hold a position of importance until they have been processed to mindlessness by years of campaigning, forming party alliances and soliciting re-election funds.
Thank you for your informed reply. It's sad that we have to dig down through all of the "Funny 5" posts to find any facts. As for the PowerPCs that you mention are they similar to the G5 (a PowerPC 970 variant) processors formerly found in Apple's machines? I believe they each had one or two AltiVec SIMD units.
Does this mean that I am guilty of the same crime should I place a cd in plane view in my house and then leave the door open?
What if I rip a cd onto my computer and someone finds a way via the internet to log in through a flaw in security and takes the music files?
How about if I share it on my intranet with iTunes and someone finds a way to copy it outside of my intranet? What if it were done by means of an unpatched security problem with my WiFi?
Do they have to prove intent to distribute or is it just enough to have made it available intentionally or not?
What if I make it hard to get but really want some one to copy it? Is this actually a thought crime?
I have an iMac G5 with Apple's Blutooth keyboard and Bluetooth mouse (not the multi-button mighty mouse). I have used all three in 4 locations and have never had any problems with either device. I bought a Logitech Cordless click that uses a USB dongle and also has an extension cordmount for the dongle. The Logitech has experienced connection and behaviour problems many times. The dongle has a very limited range 5-6 feet as compared to the Bluetooth's 20 feet. Sometimes the Logitech mouse will lose the ability to detect the edge of screen properly thus not being able to unhide the Dock or pop out the Quicksilver clipboard memory window. Simply unplugging the dongle and reinserting it solves the problem.
Bluetooth operates in the 2.4-2.4835 GHz band divided into 79 channels and can frequency hop 1600 times per second. This frequency hopping makes it fairly immune to jamming but since it does not support true spread spectrum operation (coming with Bluetooth 3.0) other devices operating in that range can interfere (2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, 1.9 GHz cell phones in the near field, 2.4GHz and 1.9GHz (in the near field) cordless phones, 13 cm Amateur Radio, poorly sheilded 2.x GHz computers,...). A little sheilding preferably at the source of interference can eliminate these problems.
Sorry about the tuition confusion. It's been 25 years. Frankly, I could not take that constant paradoxical message of "you must succeed but do it without costing me any money" that was coming from my father.
It wasn't tuition, books, etc. but the fact that I was costing him any money, period. He could show me to the dollar how much he had "given" me. I had a student loan but no scholarship.
Dr. Williams, my physics department mentor, told me about what would happen to me in a non-academic surrounding. He said that "They will use you like a screwdriver!" and he was absolutely right. If I had had the guts at the time I would have gone for a career in research and/or teaching.
I personally wanted to continue my education toward a doctorate at Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering or pursue a second degree in Physics (my boss in the physics dept. encouraged me to obtain an assistantship with the physics dept.) but even with the assistantship I could not afford to pay the out of state tuition.
Georgia law stated that one must be 1) employed in state for a year (I was a physics dept. TA for 3 years and Technical Assistant concurrently for 1 year), 2) have residency in the state, and 3) not be there for the purpose of obtaining an education (Catch 22!!). I even considered dropping out for a year but I feared that something would come up in the interim to interfere with returning (marriage and a child).
Many people that I have know from other countries that went on to graduate school were being subsidized from abroad so they could concentrate on their education rather than worry where their next meal was coming from. This, of course, was not always the case as many foreign students were able to make it by going the assistantship route and teaching labs. I don't know how they were able to make ends meet while living in downtown Atlanta.
I seem to recall something about not being able to trademark a number? Yes, I preferred the numerical part name that at least indicated the generation of the processor.
I would have to agree with the AC that discussing the termination of such an expensive project must call into question the reasons why it is being done and that drags in the topic of funding and those responsible for it.
Having worked on the shuttle program (ASRM) and the Lunar-Mars project (initial technological feasibility studies and scenarios) I have seen the shuttle program build two thirds of an Advanced Solid Rocket Motor plant (ASRM, approx. $3 billion to complete) only to have the program cut due to Thiokol lobbying thereby lowering needed payload capacity (thus smaller ISS modules, ISS redesign, and thus fewer crew, etc.).
I've seen the fully outfitted Shuttle-C with larger sized payload bays canceled (I touched the nearly complete prototype complete with engines). And, I've seen the Lunar-Mars project receive lip service from three presidents and absolutely nothing come of it in 17 years. One political party congress kills the ASRM project under Clinton, and another strangles out the Texas Supercollider in retaliation.
So, yes, I believe a discussion of politics and the mental abilities, motives, and knowledge of politicians is certainly in order. The discussion of responsibility is the least (we always seem to do the least these days) we can do.
How about emergency biologicals (organs, antivenin, blood), food, and medicines? Could instances like Katrina in the U.S., tsunami, and other worldwide natural disasters have been made better with this technology?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a fine example of how Corporate America has lost sight of what is important in people and opted for the easier, less thoughtful method of judgement of worth to the company, prejudice.
It is so common to see management making the assumption that no current engineering employees are good enough to work on interesting/challenging projects while at the same time their people in engineering are ready to leave because they're bored to death. It's kind of like this, "I wouldn't hire anyone that would work for my company." Or, "The employees are always smarter on the other side of the fence (parking lot, office park, etc.)."
I had a very wise undergrad EE prof who said on the first day of design class that we needn't worry about the many "complicated" things that we would have to design during the course because we had already completed all of our circuit analysis courses. He said it's much harder to figure out the details of someone's design than to design it yourself. Same applies here in software. I've been there working with other's undocumented code and quite frankly it was infrequently that I left the project with more respect for the programmer. Here I'll just say what I learned from the experiences as useless as it might be.
If the coding style used is appropriate you stand some chance. Lines of code don't matter much when behavior is sufficiently complex that you cannot list the states and events that trigger execution and state change let alone keep track of them in your head long enough to understand their context.
I once had a similar problem with some legacy OS9 c code that performed a simple communication task and updated a monitor. With no documentation from the writers I was to "simply add some new data to be collected and display it." The problem with this 3000 loc was that it was written as a state machine with no modularization - next to impossible to follow in a debugger. What I wanted to do is run a performance analyzer along with the code but I was told that was "out of budget". This would have told me at least the parts of code being executed frequently and I could start to associate the external events with the code processing.
On very large applications like AT&T's RNS (residential account management for BellSouth) that exceed million-lines-of-c-code the only thing that made the application workable for new features was the fact that it was created in a CMM III product environment thus it was well documented in design, development, testing, feature changes, bug fixes, etc. Even with all of this the number of processes and related data stores still showed a lot of bleed over and function duplication (there was no simple way to determine if a function was in existence that already did what you needed and even harder to determine if it was state data dependent and thus unusable in certain other states. Attempts by us (contract coders mainly) to get the company to allow us build a function-finding-tool/database to eliminate this problem fell on mostly deaf ears.
Because of this we had to depend on the longer-lived of the system architects to get an idea of where functionality existed. There were many times though when no one knew and weeks had to be spent reverse engineering communication structures, what the heck undocumented stretches of code did, re-write the documentation correctly and then start to implement the feature or correct the problem that had "been there for years." Management did not like the time taken to repair poor coding as this was not included as one our trackable metrics and therefore not in our feature/bug's budget (since it was not considered to be either).
RNS sounds bad but it was a breeze compared to that tightly optimized state machine code without documentation. So, my recommendations are:
1) If it is stream-of-thought-code (kind of like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury), not modularized, not documented Tell your manager that it most likely will have to be re-designed to understand it fully. That means do an essential model of it's processing and data stores, use-cases, objects and events or whatever rigorous methodology you prefer. Then use that to re-write it. If management doesn't want to do that then you do not work for a company interested in maintainable code but wants a cheap fix. I would leave as soon as you get from them what they took from you in suckering you into the place.
2) If it is structured and/or developed in a "self-documenting-language" like Ada, Modula, Eiffel, etc. that forces structure (or at least makes it easier to write structured rather than unstructured), finish documenting it properly a
To the best of my knowledge 3-D Neutron Beam Analysis is the best non-destructive test available. It will not be affected by layers, etc. See http://focus.aps.org/story/v17/st20/ for a detailed explanation. Last I heard this method was going to be used at border crossings and on shipping containers to examine contents without opening any containers.
"There is no comparison security-wise, openBSD wins hands down." And this is based on what metrics? I agree with the article on one point and that is diversity is essential to survivability. This does not mean that it is good for improving security against penetration unless one uses shell within shell within shell,,, firewalling.
I personally feel that it is time to let IE break clean with the IE7 and older versions' flaws. MS should create a compliant browser for a change and if people want to access the deliberately kludged sites let them use IE7 or earlier. It's time to let the spaghetti code that is IE7 die its unnatural death. Sorry to be so blunt but this sounds like the same excuses coming from Microsoft when IE7 was nearing release. There was a backing away from standards because they reasoned that they would rather put out a known flawed product rather than attempt to do it right and making "new" mistakes. Come on. Frankly it sounded like upper management BS "dumbed down" so that maybe we the developers might swallow this dubious reasoning when actually management is saying we don't want to spend the money to do it correctly. The IE team management has little credibility as far as I'm concerned. "Let them eat cake!" indeed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110200913.html/ I believe that this trend was again confirmed in 2007.
I'd like to openly thank Steve Jobs for helping to make music, videos and other protected works available to me in digital form and where I can purchase them legally. I would also like to thank him for working with the media companies in a way that avoids an all-out-war of resistance by compromising while still keeping an eye on the final goal of making these items more freely available in full quality, without restrictions.
I take this criticism as a sign of hope that someday we'll leave behind the idea that some persons are exempt from criticism (and accountability under law). No more royalty, please.
I was attempting to illustrate one aspect where this concept of "I contributed to it therefore I retain some control of it." If you look further you will see other precedent in accepting government funding such as schools receiving federal funds must comply to with "equal access" federal statutes. What it all boils down to is this: "If I invest my money in a project then I deserve to see the results of that investment." The people's money should not be looked upon as a "free" resource to be consumed by those who feel that their needs for a publication payment supersede the investor's "right to know." This, I feel strongly, also applies the other way around in that government is the servant of of the people and thus is obligated to full disclosure of not only where funds are spent but to what end. The Freedom of Information Act is supposed to give us a way of requesting that information even when deemed as a matter of national security. Sadly, yes, it depends on those in government to obey the law created by our "representatives" and enforced by the executive branch only our executive branch holds its own best interests above the law and chooses which laws it will enforce on that basis.
No. But I can tell you that you can never attain greater than 50% efficiency in charging your cars storage cells. This is the theoretical limit of transfer from a generator (power plant) to a load. Then, when you go to drive it the storage cells have at best a 50% power transfer to the wheel motors. So, right off the bat you have that disadvantage in charge/discharge systems. How that stacks up against fuel cells I am not sure either as the "fuel" must be transfered from manufacture to the vehicle. Perhaps a home hydrogen/oxygen extraction plant is possible. But then, what runs it? Maybe solar?
Smaller apartments in the southern U.S. still use electric heating. It's compactness and safety are apparently more important than the fact that the most power that you can theoretically transfer to an electric load is 50%. And that's only if the load seen by the generator is the complex conjugate of the generator impedance (which it never is). It makes some of us electrical engineers sad :-( as many other devices used are essentially lossless (transformers, capacitors, inductors, some types of motors, etc.). Many people don't have a clue as to how inefficient their electrical devices are as seen from the power station.
Quite simply, I believe that all, and I mean all government funded (federal, state, local) information gathering or discovery should be by definition publicly published with library access (at a minimum). We have paid for it, it should be openly available to all. The Library of Congress should be assigned responsibility for the free access to this information with no delay (at least at the federal level). It should plainly be a fundamental requirement of government grants. Government exists to serve us, not the other way around and special interests be damned. We have been complacent for so long now that people fall right into line with whatever abuse we receive from government. Impeachment should be commonplace. When elected officials begin favoring anything other than the public welfare they should be promptly removed. Things like this "But Hill watchers said that -- given President Bush's threat to veto the bill for budgetary reasons and the likelihood of a continuing resolution, which would not have the new language -- it is too soon for the open-access movement to publish a victory paper." should be dealt with quickly and with conviction. Serving in political office should be just that, serving. Quick removal of self-interested persons will help inspire the remaining to pay attention to what people want and need. We got rid of one king -- we shouldn't help to create new ones.
All of these capacitors can experience catastrophic discharge if the dielectric separating the positive and negative charges is compromised such as when the operating voltage is exceeded, aging, voltage spikes occur. Electrolitics are polar and thus must be biased according to their polarity to operate as a true capacitor (the tend to break down the barrier if reverse biased). Many electrolitics are self-repairing to a certain extent being able to regenerate the layer between plates once biased correctly. The thinner the dielectric and the more plate area the more capacity a capacitor has but decreasing the plate separation usually leads to lower breakdown voltages. The best way to be safe with portable powered devices and their energy storage devices is to make the device more efficient therefore not requiring you to carry around a giga-joule of energy. Such a dramatic transition as from LEDs to LCDs in watches made them practical. A much better solution than carrying around the equivalent of an electrostatic bomb (though electrolitics blow up nicely with shrapnel when bridged with 120VAC, not that I would recommend such a thing). I'm holding out for a miniature room temperature superconducting ring myself. ;)
Frequency hopping and spread spectrum are both techniques that may be used in order to both disguise and help defeat jamming. Spread spectrum is a for of ultra-wide FM where the signal frequency distribution is spead out in wide "wings" from the center frequency. This make the transmitted signal difficult to receive unless the center frequency is known as the transmitted power is "spread" of a wider band of frequencies. This makes it hard to distinguish from the background. Tuning to a portion of the signal yields insufficient information to reconstruct the transmission.
Frequency hopping is a technique in which the center frequency of a signal is moved in a matched receiver-detectable pattern. A common method for controlling the frequency in an unpredictable manner is to us a pseudo-random frequency hop routine. This causes the center frequency to jump to seemingly random values at a very rapid rate - far faster than can be followed by a tracking receiver that does not know the pattern. Methods such as rendezvous frequencies and two way handshaking can resynchronize the pseudo-random sequence if necessary.
The two techniques of spread spectrum and pseudo-random frequency hopping can of course be combined to to make real-time decoding very difficult. The vulnarability of any transmitted energy system is that it can be located by triangulating on the radio energy level coming from the transmitter direction. The closer to the noise floor, the harder to locate.
This was the state-of-the-art about 25 years ago. There may be more secure modulation schemes such as frequency+time division pseudo-random incoherent multiplexing-multiple carrier that disrupt the ability to receive even further by time-delaying pseudo-random portions of the digital data so that the assumption of linearity no longer holds true. This would require a signal reconstruction via means other than simple heterodyning and derivative/integration means as in conventional transceivers. Fourier models would then no longer be valid. Hmmm...
As far as people voting in incumbents I suspect the number one selection criteria is name recognition along with electing a "known" rather than an "unknown." This is coupled with laziness as most people do not research in depth each candidate and most importantly their past history and affiliations. Another is "I'm a a "X" and I only vote for my party candidates. This is much the same as the first reason but more reckless. Those that understand that our representatives typically form committees first on party loyalty and secondly the "senility system" might want to re-elect an incumbent in the hope that they will obtain more power over time and thus are able to help their constituents with more pork. I am all for, and practice voting for the best person for the job regardless of party and other criteria that should be unrelated to their ability to represent my interests but I cringe every time realizing that the intelligent, honest, idealist that I selected will never hold a position of importance until they have been processed to mindlessness by years of campaigning, forming party alliances and soliciting re-election funds.
Thank you for your informed reply. It's sad that we have to dig down through all of the "Funny 5" posts to find any facts. As for the PowerPCs that you mention are they similar to the G5 (a PowerPC 970 variant) processors formerly found in Apple's machines? I believe they each had one or two AltiVec SIMD units.
Does this mean that I am guilty of the same crime should I place a cd in plane view in my house and then leave the door open?
What if I rip a cd onto my computer and someone finds a way via the internet to log in through a flaw in security and takes the music files?
How about if I share it on my intranet with iTunes and someone finds a way to copy it outside of my intranet? What if it were done by means of an unpatched security problem with my WiFi?
Do they have to prove intent to distribute or is it just enough to have made it available intentionally or not?
What if I make it hard to get but really want some one to copy it? Is this actually a thought crime?
Thoughts anyone? Careful what you think.I have an iMac G5 with Apple's Blutooth keyboard and Bluetooth mouse (not the multi-button mighty mouse). I have used all three in 4 locations and have never had any problems with either device. I bought a Logitech Cordless click that uses a USB dongle and also has an extension cordmount for the dongle. The Logitech has experienced connection and behaviour problems many times. The dongle has a very limited range 5-6 feet as compared to the Bluetooth's 20 feet. Sometimes the Logitech mouse will lose the ability to detect the edge of screen properly thus not being able to unhide the Dock or pop out the Quicksilver clipboard memory window. Simply unplugging the dongle and reinserting it solves the problem.
Bluetooth operates in the 2.4-2.4835 GHz band divided into 79 channels and can frequency hop 1600 times per second. This frequency hopping makes it fairly immune to jamming but since it does not support true spread spectrum operation (coming with Bluetooth 3.0) other devices operating in that range can interfere (2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, 1.9 GHz cell phones in the near field, 2.4GHz and 1.9GHz (in the near field) cordless phones, 13 cm Amateur Radio, poorly sheilded 2.x GHz computers, ...). A little sheilding preferably at the source of interference can eliminate these problems.
Good luck.Sorry about the tuition confusion. It's been 25 years. Frankly, I could not take that constant paradoxical message of "you must succeed but do it without costing me any money" that was coming from my father.
It wasn't tuition, books, etc. but the fact that I was costing him any money, period. He could show me to the dollar how much he had "given" me. I had a student loan but no scholarship.
Dr. Williams, my physics department mentor, told me about what would happen to me in a non-academic surrounding. He said that "They will use you like a screwdriver!" and he was absolutely right. If I had had the guts at the time I would have gone for a career in research and/or teaching.
I personally wanted to continue my education toward a doctorate at Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering or pursue a second degree in Physics (my boss in the physics dept. encouraged me to obtain an assistantship with the physics dept.) but even with the assistantship I could not afford to pay the out of state tuition.
Georgia law stated that one must be 1) employed in state for a year (I was a physics dept. TA for 3 years and Technical Assistant concurrently for 1 year), 2) have residency in the state, and 3) not be there for the purpose of obtaining an education (Catch 22!!). I even considered dropping out for a year but I feared that something would come up in the interim to interfere with returning (marriage and a child).
Many people that I have know from other countries that went on to graduate school were being subsidized from abroad so they could concentrate on their education rather than worry where their next meal was coming from. This, of course, was not always the case as many foreign students were able to make it by going the assistantship route and teaching labs. I don't know how they were able to make ends meet while living in downtown Atlanta.
I seem to recall something about not being able to trademark a number? Yes, I preferred the numerical part name that at least indicated the generation of the processor.
I would have to agree with the AC that discussing the termination of such an expensive project must call into question the reasons why it is being done and that drags in the topic of funding and those responsible for it.
Having worked on the shuttle program (ASRM) and the Lunar-Mars project (initial technological feasibility studies and scenarios) I have seen the shuttle program build two thirds of an Advanced Solid Rocket Motor plant (ASRM, approx. $3 billion to complete) only to have the program cut due to Thiokol lobbying thereby lowering needed payload capacity (thus smaller ISS modules, ISS redesign, and thus fewer crew, etc.).
I've seen the fully outfitted Shuttle-C with larger sized payload bays canceled (I touched the nearly complete prototype complete with engines). And, I've seen the Lunar-Mars project receive lip service from three presidents and absolutely nothing come of it in 17 years. One political party congress kills the ASRM project under Clinton, and another strangles out the Texas Supercollider in retaliation.
So, yes, I believe a discussion of politics and the mental abilities, motives, and knowledge of politicians is certainly in order. The discussion of responsibility is the least (we always seem to do the least these days) we can do.
How about emergency biologicals (organs, antivenin, blood), food, and medicines? Could instances like Katrina in the U.S., tsunami, and other worldwide natural disasters have been made better with this technology?