The technology changes so fast that the people physically can not adapt. Each such change dumps useless people onto the streets; what are they to do, other than to curl up and die? A 40 years old store employee can not become a C++ programmer overnight; he can claim so but nobody will hire him. Similarly, today's C++ programmer won't be able to program quantum computers of tomorrow (again some will adapt, most will not.)
As another poster noted, ludditism is not an answer, and I agree. However there -must- be an answer. For example, it may be necessary, for the better of the society, to restrict the free market; capitalism is fine as a driver of economy, but at expense of the society. Many european countries took this road.
There may be other solutions. But what is obvious is that a country can not reduce the workforce without clear understanding where the people will be getting their daily bread. Social Security is not the answer because employed workers don't always see their unemployed peers as needy, and frankly nobody has unused cash to throw around.
Is it possible for some to go to lawnmowing business? Maybe. But there isn't enough lawns, and more importantly there wouldn't be enough free money in the society to even afford a lawnmower. When jobs are scarce the salaries drop.
In another comment above I tried to show that there is no convenient way to match 50 purchases in the cart to 50 purchases printed on the receipt.
Now, if your computer hard drive dies like mine did last week, all that information becomes useless anyway.
It is useless already. Why would I want all that garbage data anyway? If I want to know when the milk expires I drink some of it, and if I feel that it's about to go sour then I finish it all:-)
You went to great length trying to find some use for the RFID data; but the truth is that none of us, the customers, need this data. We need just products. With regard to the "hope" that I pay for what I bought, thanks a lot! But I will steer clear of this "convenience" - financial matters don't like approximation. If I give the store just an inch they will take the whole yard and ask for more.
You must be trolling. The labor force does not need "one more able body", it already has more than it can absorb. Imagine that all retail businesses decide to replace all the employees with vending machines. What will happen to millions of people who -only- are qualified to move boxes and count bills?
This is not beneficial even to businesses because if nobody earns money nobody can buy anything. Profit is not made on hoarding all the money and sitting on that pile. Profit is made on moving the money; and for that you must give and take. But it is difficult for businesses to think globally, they always hope that someone else will be employing; as result nobody does, and whole industries die out.
I can always get rid of it one way or another (a hammer might work)
The problem is not what you will do. The problem is what everyone else will not do. At some point if you don't have the tag you automatically become suspect.
You don't even have to wait several years. Set up a "fast track" system anywhere from airports to grocery stores, and people will gladly implant anything to save time. Of course, after everyone does that there is no "fast" in this any more, but it will be too late to be sorry.
You can not destroy an RFID tag if it has even a most rudimentary protection against such an overload. Basically, a resistor and a Zener diode would do it. There would be no change in cost. But I am sure the tags already have this surge suppression built in, as part of their power conditioning circuit.
And if the tag is mandatory for your employment - such as it is necessary to open doors and access materials - how much good such destruction would do to you even if you can pull it off? At best you will be given another tag; at worst you will be fired.
Well, it is more powerful than the bar code, according to your definition. A couple of feet? This would force me to pay for things that two or three other customers piled onto the belt. How do I sort them out? Ask them to pick it up and walk three feet away? And then scan again?
My point was that with bar codes the scanning speed matches human perception speed, and you can visually check how the barcode is used, and even how much you are being charged for each item (if you lift your eyes to the large display at the checkout position.)
I see no such verification possible if you just park your shopping cart at the pay station and the printer rattles out a list of 50 items that you may or may not have picked. You have to pay and move on, because this is supposed to be the "quick" line and the peer pressure won't allow you to linger and check everything in your cart against the receipt.
And if anyone suggests that there will be more such checkout positions - there will be less human clerks, that's the only sure thing in all this mess. That is bad in many aspects, primarily that there will be less jobs.
A quick thought experiment: what would happen if "somehow" a pack of chewing gum would "accidentally" stick itself to the bottom of the pay station, still within reach of the RF ID?
How many customers would just shrug the unintended penny purchase off? Enough maybe for someone to haul a few large boxes of the chewing gum out of the back door after the day is over?
I don't know about you, but I always watch what the clerks scan and where they put it. Not because they are always evil - they simply don't care. And I would rather bring home everything that I bought. And I would hate to pay for something I didn't intend to purchase. With RFID such visual checks are hardly possible, unless you are a genius who can scan 30 items on your receipt and instantly correlate them to what you wanted to buy.
I have this one: xapp381. They don't make them any more, but the manual explains how to drive the LCD, and that with a lowly CPLD. I can imagine that a complete LCD controller for a modern panel would be not out of reach, to follow your link. This was tested on Altera, though, not on anything Xilinx. In previous life I experimented with some chip-on-glass embedded LCD controllers, they worked fine for my needs (wristwatch-sized computer.)
And now strange, I also would not mind putting together something like that, including the PCB, it's just I don't have any free time for that! Also, all laptops that I have are in working condition:-)
This never happened before in humanity's recorded history:-)
And besides, how do you apply the word "correctly" to the art of spaceflight? There is no single correct way to do things. There is no even a single correct way to cross the street, as far as I know. If you require perfection then I guess you should remain dirtside until some [supposedly] benevolent extraterrestrials, like Qax, offer you a free ride in one of their ships. Anything else involves risk and uncertainty, and most definitely something somewhere will be done incorrectly, even if you throw resources at the problem. To err is human.
Well, I am not cyclone96, but why not to reply anyway... not that there is anything else to do:-)
The Moon is not colonized because nobody was willing to pay for it. There are many places on Earth that are not colonized, and still are more comfortable to live in than Moon. Look at most of Canada, for example:-)
The whole Moon exercise was only a competition between two countries. Once the finish line was crossed, it became apparent that there is nothing for humans on the Moon.
With regard to "far simpler than ISS", you must be joking. Launch to LEO lasts 10 minutes; flight to the Moon takes three days. If your oxygen fails on LEO (or if you run out of food) you simply fire the engine and descend, even ballistically if need be; if anything fails on the way to the Moon, or while there, your chances of survival are minimal.
A colony on the Moon is not practical now simply because there is nothing for colonists to do there. We do not have skintight spacesuits, we do not have portable fusion batteries, we don't have anything that would help the colony there. Imagine 10 people dumped on the surface, maybe with a portable tent. What are they going to do there? You can give them only so much of supplies, and what happens after they run out?
A proper colony needs to build the base first, and for that they need very good tunneling equipment, sealants and plenty of machinery like airlocks. They need a source of energy, and nothing short of nuclear will do. They need a source of oxygen and water, and though that can be mined, they need to be given tools for such mining (some robots, most likely.) We are talking about hundreds (if not thousands) of tons of materials and supplies just to get started. Today's technology can deliver maybe half a ton, maybe more - but we are still two orders of magnitude below what's needed, and we don't have the payload anyway (where are those robots who would be mining the rocks for He(3) ?)
So ISS is something that we can do, here and now. It is relatively safe, uses technology that is within our reach, and allows us to build and test new devices and new methods. Colonization of other planets will become possible only after some major advances in technology, primarily in propulsion and then in robotics. You just can not colonize a hostile world without robots, and our existing robots are not even close to what is needed.
Today is Christmas Eve, believe in Jesus or not. Tomorrow is Christmas, live in a Christian country or not.
No, not to me. Yesterday was Dec. 24th, and today is Dec. 25th; both are usual days with no special significance to me whatsoever. Nobody can order me to think otherwise. That's what is priceless.
Before the trip the bearers know nothing. After the trip they can't say anything.
But such desperate measures may be not even necessary. How many wetbacks can identify a part of a rare weapon, inside of a boxy package? For all they know, they carry drugs, since that's the usual thing to do anyway.
He is out there, proving his point for last half a century. How good a competitor - this is another question, of course. But he is clearly entitled to say what he says.
the mother of Eric Harris... was engaged to be married to Mr. Jeffery Jackson until he fell victim to a spinal accident. She broke off the engagement...
No surprise that Eric ended up a killer. His mother dumped "her love" probably within milliseconds after he met a misfortune...
I am more thinking about dilution of human rights. Turkey, with its medium to low rating on this scale, will lower the average, and that allows other EU governments (such as Spain and Italy that you mentioned) to lower their own standards.
I mentioned TNT2 because many people in this discussion said "my dad only needs Office and IE". A TNT2 card is perfect for that, and the price is right. It works reasonably OK on 1024x768.
And honestly how many of "Office+IE" customers need more than that? If you know that you want more, you probably should start with a decent monitor, and then a good card. The FPGA-based card probably won't be your first choice if you insist on a fast 1600x1200... truth be told, not many computer users want to experiment with something that they can easily buy at Fry's. Whatever the project people say, video cards are dime a dozen today, and even a fairly powerful card can be had for well below $100, more like $50.
Yes, 1.5M gates should do it. The part is not easily available, though, but can be found given enough patience. Spartan FPGAs are intended to be low cost; if you compare to Virtex, especially -Pro, these will cost you hundreds of dollars.
As I said, the cost of some FPGAs can be low indeed, as low $25 - I know Digi-Key quite well, thank you, I buy some CPLDs there. But the capabilities of the low-end FPGA are minimal.
In particular, the stock implementation of a plain vanilla PCI/33 core requires 90K gates. How does it compare to the 15K gates? Answer: it's nowhere close.
You are perfectly correct when you state that a 15K design is great for experimentation. It is. But these experiments in no way can approach the complexity required for PCI. As I mentioned, you can make a door lock out of this thing, with strong crypto if you wish. But not much more... To play with even minimal PCI you need to buy the core and to use some Spartan-2 or -3 FPGAs, with gate count at least 200K.
The best way to experiment, probably, is to just buy an eval board, such as from Memec Design. It may come with a PCI core license (not free!) and it has enough space for you to put your own design in. You can make a crypto coprocessor, for example, out of it, or something else, like a video card:-) But look at the prices - you don't want to buy any of that just because you want a video card. You want to buy because you want to learn HDLs; that's the only sane reason to do it.
People mentioned that the FPGA will be used. Very well, this will take care of experimenting. However FPGAs are very expensive. The cheapest (and a fairly small) one can be had for maybe $30; medium sized one, better suited for this task, will cost you about $500. The largest ones cost $10,000 per chip and you can safely forget about even their existence:-)
FPGAs are also slower than ASICs. This, and the cost, are the reasons why commercial manufacturers use ASICs. You may have a great design, but if it is limited by the performance of your FPGA you lose.
FPGAs are designed to be universal, and to do that they feature programmable interconnects. But the number of those interconnects is limited, and many FPGA designs are thus constrained. You may have plenty of gates left and no way to get to them... With ASICs this is not a problem because if you need a wider bus you build it there, on your own silicon. In FPGAs the busses are already there, and you can't add more.
Yet another concern is tools. Xilinx, for example, offers a free download of some bare minimum tools. They work OK if you are making a door lock with RS-232 control. But they fail miserably, to the point of being unusable, on a complex design - which this one is. Better tools, such as Synplify, will cost you your yearly salary. How many developers have access to that kind of tools? And once you switch to some specific tool you are committed.
Finally, there is a problem with skills of developers. There are many s/w developers who are very good with C/C++. But not that many are good with Verilog (and its wickedly evil predecessor, VHDL:-) Hardware design is very, very different from software design. And you can't debug it, you only can simulate it. Simulation tools, such as ModelSim, are absolutely not free on the level that you need for this design.
To summarize, this project can be done, but not by a bazaarful of people but a small, dedicated band of wizards who locked themselves up in a small cathedral. Even if these wizards release their works, none of mere mortals will be even able to open their files, since the tools to do that are not free.
And besides, why would any sane person, who is not burdened with FOSS thoughts, want to buy such a card even for $100? This cash buys you a decent entry-level Quadro, and if anyone suggests that this design can beat Quadro I won't believe that...
And if anyone wants a real entry-level card, then it can be had (Vanta TNT2, for example) for $10 in any bargain bin, at many places. Beat that first.
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As another poster noted, ludditism is not an answer, and I agree. However there -must- be an answer. For example, it may be necessary, for the better of the society, to restrict the free market; capitalism is fine as a driver of economy, but at expense of the society. Many european countries took this road.
There may be other solutions. But what is obvious is that a country can not reduce the workforce without clear understanding where the people will be getting their daily bread. Social Security is not the answer because employed workers don't always see their unemployed peers as needy, and frankly nobody has unused cash to throw around.
Is it possible for some to go to lawnmowing business? Maybe. But there isn't enough lawns, and more importantly there wouldn't be enough free money in the society to even afford a lawnmower. When jobs are scarce the salaries drop.
The stores will see greatly increased sales of aluminum foil products... and reduced profits.
Now, if your computer hard drive dies like mine did last week, all that information becomes useless anyway.
It is useless already. Why would I want all that garbage data anyway? If I want to know when the milk expires I drink some of it, and if I feel that it's about to go sour then I finish it all :-)
You went to great length trying to find some use for the RFID data; but the truth is that none of us, the customers, need this data. We need just products. With regard to the "hope" that I pay for what I bought, thanks a lot! But I will steer clear of this "convenience" - financial matters don't like approximation. If I give the store just an inch they will take the whole yard and ask for more.
This is not beneficial even to businesses because if nobody earns money nobody can buy anything. Profit is not made on hoarding all the money and sitting on that pile. Profit is made on moving the money; and for that you must give and take. But it is difficult for businesses to think globally, they always hope that someone else will be employing; as result nobody does, and whole industries die out.
The problem is not what you will do. The problem is what everyone else will not do. At some point if you don't have the tag you automatically become suspect.
You don't even have to wait several years. Set up a "fast track" system anywhere from airports to grocery stores, and people will gladly implant anything to save time. Of course, after everyone does that there is no "fast" in this any more, but it will be too late to be sorry.
And if the tag is mandatory for your employment - such as it is necessary to open doors and access materials - how much good such destruction would do to you even if you can pull it off? At best you will be given another tag; at worst you will be fired.
My point was that with bar codes the scanning speed matches human perception speed, and you can visually check how the barcode is used, and even how much you are being charged for each item (if you lift your eyes to the large display at the checkout position.)
I see no such verification possible if you just park your shopping cart at the pay station and the printer rattles out a list of 50 items that you may or may not have picked. You have to pay and move on, because this is supposed to be the "quick" line and the peer pressure won't allow you to linger and check everything in your cart against the receipt.
And if anyone suggests that there will be more such checkout positions - there will be less human clerks, that's the only sure thing in all this mess. That is bad in many aspects, primarily that there will be less jobs.
How many customers would just shrug the unintended penny purchase off? Enough maybe for someone to haul a few large boxes of the chewing gum out of the back door after the day is over?
I don't know about you, but I always watch what the clerks scan and where they put it. Not because they are always evil - they simply don't care. And I would rather bring home everything that I bought. And I would hate to pay for something I didn't intend to purchase. With RFID such visual checks are hardly possible, unless you are a genius who can scan 30 items on your receipt and instantly correlate them to what you wanted to buy.
And now strange, I also would not mind putting together something like that, including the PCB, it's just I don't have any free time for that! Also, all laptops that I have are in working condition :-)
This never happened before in humanity's recorded history :-)
And besides, how do you apply the word "correctly" to the art of spaceflight? There is no single correct way to do things. There is no even a single correct way to cross the street, as far as I know. If you require perfection then I guess you should remain dirtside until some [supposedly] benevolent extraterrestrials, like Qax, offer you a free ride in one of their ships. Anything else involves risk and uncertainty, and most definitely something somewhere will be done incorrectly, even if you throw resources at the problem. To err is human.
The Moon is not colonized because nobody was willing to pay for it. There are many places on Earth that are not colonized, and still are more comfortable to live in than Moon. Look at most of Canada, for example :-)
The whole Moon exercise was only a competition between two countries. Once the finish line was crossed, it became apparent that there is nothing for humans on the Moon.
With regard to "far simpler than ISS", you must be joking. Launch to LEO lasts 10 minutes; flight to the Moon takes three days. If your oxygen fails on LEO (or if you run out of food) you simply fire the engine and descend, even ballistically if need be; if anything fails on the way to the Moon, or while there, your chances of survival are minimal.
A colony on the Moon is not practical now simply because there is nothing for colonists to do there. We do not have skintight spacesuits, we do not have portable fusion batteries, we don't have anything that would help the colony there. Imagine 10 people dumped on the surface, maybe with a portable tent. What are they going to do there? You can give them only so much of supplies, and what happens after they run out?
A proper colony needs to build the base first, and for that they need very good tunneling equipment, sealants and plenty of machinery like airlocks. They need a source of energy, and nothing short of nuclear will do. They need a source of oxygen and water, and though that can be mined, they need to be given tools for such mining (some robots, most likely.) We are talking about hundreds (if not thousands) of tons of materials and supplies just to get started. Today's technology can deliver maybe half a ton, maybe more - but we are still two orders of magnitude below what's needed, and we don't have the payload anyway (where are those robots who would be mining the rocks for He(3) ?)
So ISS is something that we can do, here and now. It is relatively safe, uses technology that is within our reach, and allows us to build and test new devices and new methods. Colonization of other planets will become possible only after some major advances in technology, primarily in propulsion and then in robotics. You just can not colonize a hostile world without robots, and our existing robots are not even close to what is needed.
Your query has a typo, that's why you got no matches. Check your own link.
No, not to me. Yesterday was Dec. 24th, and today is Dec. 25th; both are usual days with no special significance to me whatsoever. Nobody can order me to think otherwise. That's what is priceless.
Before the trip the bearers know nothing. After the trip they can't say anything.
But such desperate measures may be not even necessary. How many wetbacks can identify a part of a rare weapon, inside of a boxy package? For all they know, they carry drugs, since that's the usual thing to do anyway.
He is out there, proving his point for last half a century. How good a competitor - this is another question, of course. But he is clearly entitled to say what he says.
No surprise that Eric ended up a killer. His mother dumped "her love" probably within milliseconds after he met a misfortune...
I am more thinking about dilution of human rights. Turkey, with its medium to low rating on this scale, will lower the average, and that allows other EU governments (such as Spain and Italy that you mentioned) to lower their own standards.
And honestly how many of "Office+IE" customers need more than that? If you know that you want more, you probably should start with a decent monitor, and then a good card. The FPGA-based card probably won't be your first choice if you insist on a fast 1600x1200... truth be told, not many computer users want to experiment with something that they can easily buy at Fry's. Whatever the project people say, video cards are dime a dozen today, and even a fairly powerful card can be had for well below $100, more like $50.
Yes, 1.5M gates should do it. The part is not easily available, though, but can be found given enough patience. Spartan FPGAs are intended to be low cost; if you compare to Virtex, especially -Pro, these will cost you hundreds of dollars.
Think outside of the box. It may well be that EU wants to get some "experts" in rubberhosing.
In particular, the stock implementation of a plain vanilla PCI/33 core requires 90K gates. How does it compare to the 15K gates? Answer: it's nowhere close.
You are perfectly correct when you state that a 15K design is great for experimentation. It is. But these experiments in no way can approach the complexity required for PCI. As I mentioned, you can make a door lock out of this thing, with strong crypto if you wish. But not much more... To play with even minimal PCI you need to buy the core and to use some Spartan-2 or -3 FPGAs, with gate count at least 200K.
The best way to experiment, probably, is to just buy an eval board, such as from Memec Design. It may come with a PCI core license (not free!) and it has enough space for you to put your own design in. You can make a crypto coprocessor, for example, out of it, or something else, like a video card :-) But look at the prices - you don't want to buy any of that just because you want a video card. You want to buy because you want to learn HDLs; that's the only sane reason to do it.
FPGAs are also slower than ASICs. This, and the cost, are the reasons why commercial manufacturers use ASICs. You may have a great design, but if it is limited by the performance of your FPGA you lose.
FPGAs are designed to be universal, and to do that they feature programmable interconnects. But the number of those interconnects is limited, and many FPGA designs are thus constrained. You may have plenty of gates left and no way to get to them... With ASICs this is not a problem because if you need a wider bus you build it there, on your own silicon. In FPGAs the busses are already there, and you can't add more.
Yet another concern is tools. Xilinx, for example, offers a free download of some bare minimum tools. They work OK if you are making a door lock with RS-232 control. But they fail miserably, to the point of being unusable, on a complex design - which this one is. Better tools, such as Synplify, will cost you your yearly salary. How many developers have access to that kind of tools? And once you switch to some specific tool you are committed.
Finally, there is a problem with skills of developers. There are many s/w developers who are very good with C/C++. But not that many are good with Verilog (and its wickedly evil predecessor, VHDL :-) Hardware design is very, very different from software design. And you can't debug it, you only can simulate it. Simulation tools, such as ModelSim, are absolutely not free on the level that you need for this design.
To summarize, this project can be done, but not by a bazaarful of people but a small, dedicated band of wizards who locked themselves up in a small cathedral. Even if these wizards release their works, none of mere mortals will be even able to open their files, since the tools to do that are not free.
And besides, why would any sane person, who is not burdened with FOSS thoughts, want to buy such a card even for $100? This cash buys you a decent entry-level Quadro, and if anyone suggests that this design can beat Quadro I won't believe that...
And if anyone wants a real entry-level card, then it can be had (Vanta TNT2, for example) for $10 in any bargain bin, at many places. Beat that first.