It takes leadership, yes... but when that fails, there's always religion.
When you absolutely, positively, have to get people to do what you tell them, even at great cost to themselves, just wave a Bible or a Koran. 100% of the time, it works every time.
Sigh. The next suggestion will be that you take a solar charger with you, like one of the the new backpack-mounted panels. Your next response will be that oh, you also like to go cave diving in Mexico, and you need your phone to work 3,000 feet underground. The thread will just get dumber from there.
You need to accept that almost nobody is going to design their phones around your, um, "unusual" needs. A phone that will work on standby for a week is a boring phone that will not do much that the mass market wants it do. You are going to be limited to whatever is on the prepaid rack at Radio Shack this week.
Or, you could just turn your phone completely off... in which case any phone on the market will hold enough charge to be usable for weeks or months at a minimum.
Not only crime, but worse things as well. My understanding is that in China, there are roughly 160 million "missing" girls right now, relative to the expected male/female distribution. We'd better find something for those 160 million boys to do, and soon, or they're going to become a huge problem for their own country, their own government, and possibly the rest of the world. Hacking and phishing activities are pretty far down the list of concerns.
The increasing availability of cheap, portable ultrasound gear in Third World countries that consider daughters less desirable than sons is something else that will have some interesting social effects down the road.
Just because the social contract isn't written down does not mean it doesn't exist.
I have a contract that says you will mail me US $325.00 on the first and third Fridays of each month, except during leap years, and years following each football season when the Dallas Cowboys make it to the playoffs. During said years the amount due is $675.50, which must be delivered via FedEx Priority Overnight in bills of $50 or lower denomination.
Like your "social contract," this one isn't written down, either, but...
The authors of the Bible -- most of whom, in the case of the New Testament, weren't even born yet at the time they decided to write about the miraculous events they described -- were never the people who mattered. As usual, the editors and publishers are the people who determine what you read, from this morning's Slashdot front page all the way back to the Bible.
Religious memes obey fitness functions, just like anything else subject to evolutionary pressure. If the ruling classes had not found Christianity so darned useful, the Bible would just be another one of a thousand forgotten religious texts, waiting to be discovered by scholars in a hole in the ground, reported at a conference attended by perhaps two hundred people, and described in a journal that perhaps five hundred professors and grad students would ever read.
Magnolia was originally a local Seattle chain, with only a few stores. I don't know if they had expanded much beyond the Seattle market before BB sunk their claws into them.
But yes... grilling the salesdroids carefully before giving them your money, as their employer should have done but probably didn't, is a smart tactic.
The four million lines of code wouldn't run on the USRP2 as such; they would run on the host PC or other system. (When you hear figures like that batted about in this context, it's usually because they're referring to a collection of every codec and encryption standard used since the Spanish-American War. The amount of that code that actually needs to run at any given time is much smaller.)
What a COTS SDR would bring to the table is hardware reuse. Things like cryptographic architectures belong at other layers of the OSI hierarchy; they should have nothing to do with the hardware spec.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm all wet. Or maybe I'm not the guy who spent $20 billion on radios that either don't exist or don't work.
Before Best Buy bought them, Magnolia Hi-Fi was actually a pretty well-regarded retail chain. It was not a high-end audio boutique by any means, but they had knowledgeable sales people with a choice of numerous premium brands. If you were in the market for a $4000 Pioneer Elite RPTV or a Yamaha Natural Sound amp, Magnolia was a good place to look.
It was not considered good news among home-theater enthusiasts when Best Buy bought the company, put it that way.
I don't agree. The Altair was more Hermes than Prometheus. It brought the message down the mountain, but it didn't bring the fire.
As delivered, the Altair was programmed with switches, not an ASCII keyboard. It had no video output capability. No sound, no graphics, not even a rudimentary text display unless you duct-taped it to a Teletype machine. Some of these shortcomings were later remedied with optional peripherals, but still, it was nothing like an Apple I, much less an Apple ][.
The early Apple and TRS-80 machines were much more influential, and much more recognizable today.
The USRP1 used a USB 2.0 high-speed interface (Cypress FX2), and it could certainly downconvert at a wider bandwidth than 100 kHz. It would have had to, in order to demodulate ATSC.
I don't know where that line in the article came from. Reporters making up random stuff as usual, I suppose.
In addition to what everyone else has said, a company will sometimes take an opportunity like this to write off a lot of other unproductive junk that's been sitting around on its balance sheets, along with the (former) asset that dominates the writeoff. I've seen this referred to as "taking the big bath."
When a company writes off several billion dollars' worth of assets and their stock doesn't go straight to hell, that's because the market understands that it's just a periodic house-cleaning event, and that future quarters will look stronger as a result.
Keep in mind that Brin & Page and Vint Cerf and whoever else can afford not to be "sociopaths" because they stand on the shoulders of people who arguably did behave like sociopaths, such as T. J. Watson, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. It's easy to be progressive when your predecessors did the necessary ass-kicking for you.
Zuckerberg resembles those guys more than he does the Google founders or the other prominent Web 2.0+ figures in his own peer group. Like the old-school mobsters of computing, he is laying the groundwork for something bigger, whether he knows it or not.
Although the i7 is today's "wickedly fast" x86 processor, I don't remember really giving all that much of a damned about it. The marketplace has matured, and nobody really cares all that much any more.
I think that has more to do with the phenomenon known as Getting Old, than with the state of the marketplace. We, the desktop users, are the ones who have "matured."
Back in the day, you could argue about whether a 386-40 or a 486-25 was the better way to go. Some benchmarks went one way, some went the other. The difference between the fastest x86 CPUs and the slowest ones on the shelf at any given time was perhaps 2x-3x. A lot of us paid very close attention to the CPU market and were always up for an argument or flame war about it.
Today, the difference between the high-end Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge CPUs and the low-end parts is stupefying. The performance spread between the fastest and slowest devices is 6x in the "high end" category alone. In the broader market the spread is more like 30x-50x. And this doesn't even consider GPU-based computing.
So I'd say the desktop CPU market is a lot more interesting now than it was back in the day... but there's too much other stuff going on that's even more interesting, like getting work done and paying the mortgage.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes leadership, yes... but when that fails, there's always religion.
When you absolutely, positively, have to get people to do what you tell them, even at great cost to themselves, just wave a Bible or a Koran. 100% of the time, it works every time.
How about skeet-shooting?
Sigh. The next suggestion will be that you take a solar charger with you, like one of the the new backpack-mounted panels. Your next response will be that oh, you also like to go cave diving in Mexico, and you need your phone to work 3,000 feet underground. The thread will just get dumber from there.
You need to accept that almost nobody is going to design their phones around your, um, "unusual" needs. A phone that will work on standby for a week is a boring phone that will not do much that the mass market wants it do. You are going to be limited to whatever is on the prepaid rack at Radio Shack this week.
Or, you could just turn your phone completely off... in which case any phone on the market will hold enough charge to be usable for weeks or months at a minimum.
Not only crime, but worse things as well. My understanding is that in China, there are roughly 160 million "missing" girls right now, relative to the expected male/female distribution. We'd better find something for those 160 million boys to do, and soon, or they're going to become a huge problem for their own country, their own government, and possibly the rest of the world. Hacking and phishing activities are pretty far down the list of concerns.
The increasing availability of cheap, portable ultrasound gear in Third World countries that consider daughters less desirable than sons is something else that will have some interesting social effects down the road.
How is any leveraging occurring? The ARM version of Windows 8 won't run anything written for x86.
Just because the social contract isn't written down does not mean it doesn't exist.
I have a contract that says you will mail me US $325.00 on the first and third Fridays of each month, except during leap years, and years following each football season when the Dallas Cowboys make it to the playoffs. During said years the amount due is $675.50, which must be delivered via FedEx Priority Overnight in bills of $50 or lower denomination.
Like your "social contract," this one isn't written down, either, but...
And without farmers the local grocery store has no "product" to sell. That makes us what, lettuce?
weren't even born yet at the time they decided to write about the miraculous events they described
Well, OK, that would've been impressive.
weren't even born yet at the time of the miraculous events they described
The authors of the Bible -- most of whom, in the case of the New Testament, weren't even born yet at the time they decided to write about the miraculous events they described -- were never the people who mattered. As usual, the editors and publishers are the people who determine what you read, from this morning's Slashdot front page all the way back to the Bible.
Religious memes obey fitness functions, just like anything else subject to evolutionary pressure. If the ruling classes had not found Christianity so darned useful, the Bible would just be another one of a thousand forgotten religious texts, waiting to be discovered by scholars in a hole in the ground, reported at a conference attended by perhaps two hundred people, and described in a journal that perhaps five hundred professors and grad students would ever read.
More like the Costa Concordia, skippered by the intrepid Captain Ballmer.
Magnolia was originally a local Seattle chain, with only a few stores. I don't know if they had expanded much beyond the Seattle market before BB sunk their claws into them.
But yes... grilling the salesdroids carefully before giving them your money, as their employer should have done but probably didn't, is a smart tactic.
The four million lines of code wouldn't run on the USRP2 as such; they would run on the host PC or other system. (When you hear figures like that batted about in this context, it's usually because they're referring to a collection of every codec and encryption standard used since the Spanish-American War. The amount of that code that actually needs to run at any given time is much smaller.)
What a COTS SDR would bring to the table is hardware reuse. Things like cryptographic architectures belong at other layers of the OSI hierarchy; they should have nothing to do with the hardware spec.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm all wet. Or maybe I'm not the guy who spent $20 billion on radios that either don't exist or don't work.
There is a lot of work being done to make GnuRadio in general more accessable
If they wanted to do that, they could start by shipping Windows binaries that would work with the Funcube and other dongles.
Before Best Buy bought them, Magnolia Hi-Fi was actually a pretty well-regarded retail chain. It was not a high-end audio boutique by any means, but they had knowledgeable sales people with a choice of numerous premium brands. If you were in the market for a $4000 Pioneer Elite RPTV or a Yamaha Natural Sound amp, Magnolia was a good place to look.
It was not considered good news among home-theater enthusiasts when Best Buy bought the company, put it that way.
I don't agree. The Altair was more Hermes than Prometheus. It brought the message down the mountain, but it didn't bring the fire.
As delivered, the Altair was programmed with switches, not an ASCII keyboard. It had no video output capability. No sound, no graphics, not even a rudimentary text display unless you duct-taped it to a Teletype machine. Some of these shortcomings were later remedied with optional peripherals, but still, it was nothing like an Apple I, much less an Apple ][.
The early Apple and TRS-80 machines were much more influential, and much more recognizable today.
The USRP1 used a USB 2.0 high-speed interface (Cypress FX2), and it could certainly downconvert at a wider bandwidth than 100 kHz. It would have had to, in order to demodulate ATSC.
I don't know where that line in the article came from. Reporters making up random stuff as usual, I suppose.
And the time machine was officially introduced in 2012, apparently, if your post is to believed.
The whole idea behind SDR is that anything that formerly required an ASIC can now be done on general-purpose CPU, and/or an FPGA.
You can pretty much rest assured that there is nothing in any legacy system used by DoD that couldn't be implemented on this device, or on a USRP2.
This is what's known as "violent agreement."
In addition to what everyone else has said, a company will sometimes take an opportunity like this to write off a lot of other unproductive junk that's been sitting around on its balance sheets, along with the (former) asset that dominates the writeoff. I've seen this referred to as "taking the big bath."
When a company writes off several billion dollars' worth of assets and their stock doesn't go straight to hell, that's because the market understands that it's just a periodic house-cleaning event, and that future quarters will look stronger as a result.
Keep in mind that Brin & Page and Vint Cerf and whoever else can afford not to be "sociopaths" because they stand on the shoulders of people who arguably did behave like sociopaths, such as T. J. Watson, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. It's easy to be progressive when your predecessors did the necessary ass-kicking for you.
Zuckerberg resembles those guys more than he does the Google founders or the other prominent Web 2.0+ figures in his own peer group. Like the old-school mobsters of computing, he is laying the groundwork for something bigger, whether he knows it or not.
Although the i7 is today's "wickedly fast" x86 processor, I don't remember really giving all that much of a damned about it. The marketplace has matured, and nobody really cares all that much any more.
I think that has more to do with the phenomenon known as Getting Old, than with the state of the marketplace. We, the desktop users, are the ones who have "matured."
Back in the day, you could argue about whether a 386-40 or a 486-25 was the better way to go. Some benchmarks went one way, some went the other. The difference between the fastest x86 CPUs and the slowest ones on the shelf at any given time was perhaps 2x-3x. A lot of us paid very close attention to the CPU market and were always up for an argument or flame war about it.
Today, the difference between the high-end Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge CPUs and the low-end parts is stupefying. The performance spread between the fastest and slowest devices is 6x in the "high end" category alone. In the broader market the spread is more like 30x-50x. And this doesn't even consider GPU-based computing.
So I'd say the desktop CPU market is a lot more interesting now than it was back in the day... but there's too much other stuff going on that's even more interesting, like getting work done and paying the mortgage.
The human heart is sick with competitiveness and greed.
Which is why you're not posting this from a tree or a cave.
And we could get there for a lot less than it took to invade and occupy Iraq.
Jobs didn't have the ability to ban anything from MacOS. That "feature" is still being worked on.