Large batch produced CDs (such as music CDs, AOL CDs etc) are manufactured by stamping the CD pits into a thin layer of aluminium. This is then covered in plastic to protect it on the bottom and a layer of ink on the top. There is no dye layer to degrade with time.
CDRs have a blank die layer into which the CD writer burns the pits. This dye layer is what is causing the problems for long lifetime.
Lots of links - including (small) picture
on
Handy Wristwatch Phone
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yep. This is old news. The oldest reference I have come across is 1999 (near the bottom).
Small picture in second page of pdf file. Bit more info Paper writen on technology used (reg required)
The same guy has also been involved in wearable keyboards which uses finger rings to detect finger movement and 10Mb indoor network that uses human bodies as portable ethernet cables. Masaaki Fukumoto is a busy man.
They may well run at full speed (not all though, some slow the clock when they are not required), however, the power requirements are significantly reduced when doing NOPs.
Every time a transistor changes states, it requires a gulp (technical term) of electricity due to capacitive effects. Staying in a particular state by comparison requires no significant power at all. This means that an idle processor will be significantly cooler than a processor running SETI or similar. Too much heat kills processors, but this should not be a problem if the heatsink / fan are OK.
The power requirements for memory access / hard disc access are likewise dependant on the processor load so will also heat up when used.
Now, I don't know how much y'all pay for the petrol / gas in the UK
UK prices are about the same. My local pump is 76.5p per litre.
Some conversions for you.
76.5p / litre = 290p / US gallon (3.79 litres to the US gallon) 348p / UK gallon (4.55 litres to the UK gallon) $4.64 / US gallon (1.00 GBP = 1.602 USD) $5.58 / UK gallon
Tomshardware loved the i850 so I went out and bought one.
It is very quick in black and white (almost laser speeds), quick in colour and can produce photographic quality prints on gloss paper. It is a four colour cartrige system (as good as other 6 colour machines) seperately replaceable. It uses a prism to actually see when its out of ink and I guess you could refill them but as Canon refills are cheap, I haven't bothered. They also seem to last a long time before needing replacement.
Alteras FPGAs can fit multiple 32 bit processors into a $30 device. I've just started work with their dev kit so i'm not an expert but the basic processor design takes up about 15% of $30 device and you can get something operational in a few hours of work. The design tools they provide do most of the work for you so its no big deal.
You are right about everything apart from the use of the laser gyros in the segway.
Laser gyros are typically approx 100mm wide. Very high accuracy achieved by using two laser beams bounced around a triangle and watching the interference fringes. Rather useful for Inertial Navigation systems in aircraft etc. Cost rather a lot though.
Silicon gyros use a micro machined vibrating ring. The vibration is monitored to measure rotation. Not fantastically accurate but suitable for car suspension systems and the segway. Cheap and made in the many thousands if not millions.
Both are designed at BAE at Plymouth. The laser gyros used to be made there but they may have stopped (I left quite a few years ago). Samples of the silicon gyros are made there but the main production is in Japan.
Its always worth checking with Snopes. That and checking for dupes I guess;-)
Re:Freaky - And here is a picture + other links
on
Gas Goes Solid
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The BBC also have a story including a picture from Geomar showing "burning ice" resulting in water dripping in some brave soles hands. As the Beeb's website says "Don't try this at home!"
Second guess says the stream is probably VERY well encrypted.
Possibly but I doubt it. The technology is rather old and I don't believe that the code used is that clever. More importantly, there are an awful lot of manufacturers that know the codes. It wouldn't surprise me if the code has fallen into the wrong hands. (I've seen somebody type the code into a military GPS receiver that had lost its keys as he knew it off the top of his head. This is not the way it is supposed to be done....) Finally, you would expect the code to be changed regularily as well......
Third guess says that if you access the military channels...
Nope. The channel is one way only. You can try and decode it as much as you want as your GPS receiver does not have to send anything back. If you manage to decode it, good luck to you, the US mil won't know you are doing it.
We can produce land vehicles than can travel across continents without refuelling. No animal can do this.
We can produce aeroplanes that will fly around the world without refuelling. No bird can do this.
I see no fundamental reason why we can't produce a mechanical butterfly that can operate for days without refuelling as real butterflies can achieve this. If you are really small then the energy required to keep you aloft is really small also. I've absolutely no idea how much energy a butterfly requires to keep it in the air for a day but my guess would be that it is considerably less than that contained in one drop of petrol.
I mean.. why would an intelligence compensate for doppler shift?
If they are trying to make the signal stand out and shout "I'm intelligent" then yes.
The only reason i can think of that they would is if they were trying to beam "hello out there" signals into outer space.
That's a good reason for doing it.
Do *we* (i.e. humans) compensate for doppler shift when we broadcast those random signals into space trying to find aliens?
To my knowledge, nobody regularly and deliberately broadcasts into space so that some space aliens can pick it up. I can only remember it being done a couple of times for publicity purposes and I doubt anybody bothered to adjust the signals for doppler shift.
If our planet is a good model then the chances of finding another plant deliberaterly transmitting a signal so that it can be picked up by another planet are slim. However, if you are going to transmit, then sending a barycentric signal will make it stand out from all the other natural radio signals and say "I'm intelligent".
Or are they hoping to find interstellar communications between an alien race and its own starships?
I see that as being unlikely.
if the signal was targeted at something else the frequency wouldn't drift at quite the right rate (assuming the way you compensate for doppler shift is, in fact, to vary your frequency) to be constant from earth.
If they transmit their signal so that it is barycentric to their solar system and we correct the signals that we receive so that they are barycentric to our solar system then there will be no doppler shift due to planet rotation or motion around the sun. There will still be a doppler shift due to the relative motion of our solar system to their solar system but this is likely to only change very very slowly (and changes are what is important) and be of orders of magnitude smaller than a non corrected signal.
So what are these searches? Well, just jam your fingers on the keyboard and do a search on that. Most people jam their fingers in the same place (left hand, middle row) and if enough people fill in web pages with garbage then matches are bound to be found. The surprise is the number of times this works.
Hi powered gas lasers, pumped lasers etc come with a very narrow collumnated output.
Diode lasers, as used in your DVD, CD player, laser pointer etc, come with a highly divergant beam. Say +/-15 degrees in plane of substrate, +/-5 degrees perpendicular. Optics are then used to focus or collumnate the beam. Unfortunately, this is often expensive in small quantities (as much or more than the cost of the laser)
I would suggest that you look at the various links that show "How a Segway works".
The gyros are made of micro machined silicon and weigh a fraction of a gram. They also don't spin but vibrate instead. They are used only as measurement devices with the balancing being produced by driving the wheels via a feedback mechanism.
It costs in the region of $15 to $40 in quantity depending on type and is completely reprogrammable. I've just been to see a demo of this chip (+ others) and it looks ideal for codec implementations. You can program it to be a processor if you want with complete control over the instruction set. These means you can build in such things as hardware complex multiplications, vector processors etc. if you want.
Watch out for this chip, it (and its big brother Stratix) will be many products in the future (certainly the ones I will be developing anyway:-)
I guess it depends on what you define as CGI. Your view of how the scene was produced ties up with what I believe. However, very little of the scene was actually computer generated which is what I tend to think of as CGI. Modelled, put together and cleaned up on a computer. Generated, no.
However, the scenes of the harvester and the racks of pods were all computer generated (and looked really good as well).
Slashdot Mirror
Large batch produced CDs (such as music CDs, AOL CDs etc) are manufactured by stamping the CD pits into a thin layer of aluminium. This is then covered in plastic to protect it on the bottom and a layer of ink on the top. There is no dye layer to degrade with time.
CDRs have a blank die layer into which the CD writer burns the pits. This dye layer is what is causing the problems for long lifetime.
Small picture on second page of pdf file.
Yep. This is old news. The oldest reference I have come across is 1999 (near the bottom).
Small picture in second page of pdf file.
Bit more info
Paper writen on technology used (reg required)
The same guy has also been involved in wearable keyboards which uses finger rings to detect finger movement and 10Mb indoor network that uses human bodies as portable ethernet cables. Masaaki Fukumoto is a busy man.
They may well run at full speed (not all though, some slow the clock when they are not required), however, the power requirements are significantly reduced when doing NOPs.
Every time a transistor changes states, it requires a gulp (technical term) of electricity due to capacitive effects. Staying in a particular state by comparison requires no significant power at all. This means that an idle processor will be significantly cooler than a processor running SETI or similar. Too much heat kills processors, but this should not be a problem if the heatsink / fan are OK.
The power requirements for memory access / hard disc access are likewise dependant on the processor load so will also heat up when used.
Assuming what you say is true:
1) Go out and catch two wild mice
2) Breed
3) Sell to labs
4) Profit!
As there is no ?? stage, this makes it very likely that the original assumption is false. Sorry.
That would seem to help with your average lab rat's life expectancy...
Unfortunately not. Half starving them does seem to improve life expectancy.
dogs monkeys
Now, I don't know how much y'all pay for the petrol / gas in the UK
UK prices are about the same. My local pump is 76.5p per litre.
Some conversions for you.
76.5p / litre =
290p / US gallon (3.79 litres to the US gallon)
348p / UK gallon (4.55 litres to the UK gallon)
$4.64 / US gallon (1.00 GBP = 1.602 USD)
$5.58 / UK gallon
Tomshardware loved the i850 so I went out and bought one.
It is very quick in black and white (almost laser speeds), quick in colour and can produce photographic quality prints on gloss paper. It is a four colour cartrige system (as good as other 6 colour machines) seperately replaceable. It uses a prism to actually see when its out of ink and I guess you could refill them but as Canon refills are cheap, I haven't bothered. They also seem to last a long time before needing replacement.
I just can't recommend this printer enough.
Though a big FPGA isn't exactly cheap.
Alteras FPGAs can fit multiple 32 bit processors into a $30 device. I've just started work with their dev kit so i'm not an expert but the basic processor design takes up about 15% of $30 device and you can get something operational in a few hours of work. The design tools they provide do most of the work for you so its no big deal.
You are right about everything apart from the use of the laser gyros in the segway.
Laser gyros are typically approx 100mm wide. Very high accuracy achieved by using two laser beams bounced around a triangle and watching the interference fringes. Rather useful for Inertial Navigation systems in aircraft etc. Cost rather a lot though.
Silicon gyros use a micro machined vibrating ring. The vibration is monitored to measure rotation. Not fantastically accurate but suitable for car suspension systems and the segway. Cheap and made in the many thousands if not millions.
Both are designed at BAE at Plymouth. The laser gyros used to be made there but they may have stopped (I left quite a few years ago). Samples of the silicon gyros are made there but the main production is in Japan.
Maybe I'm not a Yank.
Maybe I've never heard of Weekly World News.
Maybe I get my news from sites that I trust and leave the comics for others to read.
Snopes debunk this story here
;-)
Its always worth checking with Snopes. That and checking for dupes I guess
The BBC also have a story including a picture from Geomar showing "burning ice" resulting in water dripping in some brave soles hands. As the Beeb's website says "Don't try this at home!"
First guess says you need satellite access codes
Yep.
Second guess says the stream is probably VERY well encrypted.
Possibly but I doubt it. The technology is rather old and I don't believe that the code used is that clever. More importantly, there are an awful lot of manufacturers that know the codes. It wouldn't surprise me if the code has fallen into the wrong hands. (I've seen somebody type the code into a military GPS receiver that had lost its keys as he knew it off the top of his head. This is not the way it is supposed to be done....) Finally, you would expect the code to be changed regularily as well......
Third guess says that if you access the military channels...
Nope. The channel is one way only. You can try and decode it as much as you want as your GPS receiver does not have to send anything back. If you manage to decode it, good luck to you, the US mil won't know you are doing it.
Your not too hot on your Spinal Tap trivia then?
N is for Nigel, whose amps go to 11
(either that or your binary has failed you)
So show me some statistics to support your contention that today's drives are less reliable
Bad move. You just picked on somebody who's hard drive crashed three days ago....
Lets just say Fujitsu hard drives are not reliable
We can produce land vehicles than can travel across continents without refuelling. No animal can do this.
We can produce aeroplanes that will fly around the world without refuelling. No bird can do this.
I see no fundamental reason why we can't produce a mechanical butterfly that can operate for days without refuelling as real butterflies can achieve this. If you are really small then the energy required to keep you aloft is really small also. I've absolutely no idea how much energy a butterfly requires to keep it in the air for a day but my guess would be that it is considerably less than that contained in one drop of petrol.
I mean.. why would an intelligence compensate for doppler shift?
If they are trying to make the signal stand out and shout "I'm intelligent" then yes.
The only reason i can think of that they would is if they were trying to beam "hello out there" signals into outer space.
That's a good reason for doing it.
Do *we* (i.e. humans) compensate for doppler shift when we broadcast those random signals into space trying to find aliens?
To my knowledge, nobody regularly and deliberately broadcasts into space so that some space aliens can pick it up. I can only remember it being done a couple of times for publicity purposes and I doubt anybody bothered to adjust the signals for doppler shift.
If our planet is a good model then the chances of finding another plant deliberaterly transmitting a signal so that it can be picked up by another planet are slim. However, if you are going to transmit, then sending a barycentric signal will make it stand out from all the other natural radio signals and say "I'm intelligent".
Or are they hoping to find interstellar communications between an alien race and its own starships?
I see that as being unlikely.
if the signal was targeted at something else the frequency wouldn't drift at quite the right rate (assuming the way you compensate for doppler shift is, in fact, to vary your frequency) to be constant from earth.
If they transmit their signal so that it is barycentric to their solar system and we correct the signals that we receive so that they are barycentric to our solar system then there will be no doppler shift due to planet rotation or motion around the sun. There will still be a doppler shift due to the relative motion of our solar system to their solar system but this is likely to only change very very slowly (and changes are what is important) and be of orders of magnitude smaller than a non corrected signal.
Hemos, try the following:
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=tivo
Its not that difficult to find dupes....
The old story is here, it was only two days ago.
Google Searches #1
/. favourite)
OK so this is a bit off topic but I found the following searches on google rather interesting:
gfasd: 36 matches
fgasd: 24 matches
adfsfds: 10 matches
sdfassdf: 6 matches
fsdaasdf: 4 matches
So what are these searches? Well, just jam your fingers on the keyboard and do a search on that. Most people jam their fingers in the same place (left hand, middle row) and if enough people fill in web pages with garbage then matches are bound to be found. The surprise is the number of times this works.
Google Searches #2
Try using Google with the following links:
Swedish Chef
Elmer Fudd
Pig Latin
Klingon
H4xor (the
Lasers produce a very narrow collumnated beam
Oh I wish....
Hi powered gas lasers, pumped lasers etc come with a very narrow collumnated output.
Diode lasers, as used in your DVD, CD player, laser pointer etc, come with a highly divergant beam. Say +/-15 degrees in plane of substrate, +/-5 degrees perpendicular. Optics are then used to focus or collumnate the beam. Unfortunately, this is often expensive in small quantities (as much or more than the cost of the laser)
If you were a spammer and wanted to collect a large number of valid email addresses, how about this as an idea...
1) Produce a website pretending to be antispam.
2) Ask people to send their spam emails to the site (generally including a valid from address of course)
3) Publish on slashdot so as to get lots of interest.
4) ???
5) Profit!
(Unfortunately, we all know what stage 4 is for spammers...)
I would suggest that you look at the various links that show "How a Segway works".
The gyros are made of micro machined silicon and weigh a fraction of a gram. They also don't spin but vibrate instead. They are used only as measurement devices with the balancing being produced by driving the wheels via a feedback mechanism.
These people designed the sensor (and I used to work there though not on this project)
There is a chip available. Check out Cyclone
:-)
It costs in the region of $15 to $40 in quantity depending on type and is completely reprogrammable. I've just been to see a demo of this chip (+ others) and it looks ideal for codec implementations. You can program it to be a processor if you want with complete control over the instruction set. These means you can build in such things as hardware complex multiplications, vector processors etc. if you want.
Watch out for this chip, it (and its big brother Stratix) will be many products in the future (certainly the ones I will be developing anyway
I guess it depends on what you define as CGI. Your view of how the scene was produced ties up with what I believe. However, very little of the scene was actually computer generated which is what I tend to think of as CGI. Modelled, put together and cleaned up on a computer. Generated, no.
However, the scenes of the harvester and the racks of pods were all computer generated (and looked really good as well).
Can't wait for Matrix 2 though....