The receiver and transmitter both have to be tuned to the same channel. Most wireless mic vendors provide lists of valid frequency combinations. As to "how do I not pick up the guy across the street", the answer is "you and the guy across the street make sure you're not on the same frequency." Any time I go into a theater, especially one where there are multiple theaters in a complex, I provide a list of the wireless frequencies I intend to use. The theater provides a list of the ones they already use. Then we negotiate until there are no conflicts....
Quadraginta: I suspect he's worried about getting interference *on* his microphones, not his microphones causing someone else to have interference.
This depends entirely on how strong the licensed user is and what the licensed use turns out to be. If it were to be, say, an Wifi style device where you can get something transmitting in that band for $20 at Best Buy, there are going to be problems with wireless mics. In theory, I believe that you will lose the right to transmit with the mics on those frequencies, but that's unlikely to be an issue. I suspect that eventually, you'll start getting interference.
Shure has stopped selling anything in the bands that are being auctioned off. I was lucky enough to not wind up with any of my mics solely above 700 MHz (the Shure UB band is partly above, partly below) so I don't get screwed, but this auction is going to obsolete 10's of thousands of dollars of gear that's otherwise perfectly usable. You can already see it with a ton of Shure gear in the UA band showing up on eBay.
> Well, right now unused TV channels in the US are just that -- unused.
False (this is in the United States and Canada - not sure how it works elsewhere). Unused TV channels are used for low-power local broadcast equipment such as wireless microphones and in-ear monitors (the ear plugs with wires that you see musicians wearing). You may see some total crap wireless mic from Radio Shack that runs in the 900MHz band, but all the good ones (ie, from Shure, Sennheiser, AKG, etc...) run in unused TV channels. I have a bunch of Shure ULX channels and the receiver displays the TV channel I'm on. If you want a demonstration, go here. The older products run on VHF channels, the new ones on UHF.
Before you say "Well, Aerosmith and NBC can afford to upgrade", remember that these things are owned by thousands of schools, community theaters, indie rock bands, small coffee shops, etc. These people (myself being in the community theater sound category) can't afford to have a $15,000 investment in gear, which was fully licensed by the FCC and legal, sudenly become worthless.
Obviously, progress happens, and maybe if there's a 10 year phase-in people can upgrade, but the current state of the art technology in this area is on these frequencies and there is currently *no* alternative on the market that I could upgrade to even if I could afford it.
...this is *hardly* a supercomputer. This is 152.57 times slower than entry number 500 on the Top 500 List. There isn't a nice neat definition of what a supercomputer is anymore, but "capable of running Beowulf" isn't it. Leaving aside the more custom machines that the company I work for (and a few others) build, there are plenty of Linux clusters that *do* qualify. The fastest one seems to be number 8 on the current Top 500 list (a Dell Infiniband cluster at NCSA).
I've done it. It's pretty darn easy. Listen to the cymbals and the kick drum. If the cymbals don't sound like distinct hits and the kick sounds a little muddy, it's an MP3. You're going to need a decent sound system to do it (no, not a $50k system, but computer speakers or headphones won't do it - a $500 home stereo system is probably good enough). The difference between MP3 and CD is also very evident in sound effects. Due to screwing up my iTunes import settings, I ended up doing a sound design in MP3. When I got to the theater, it sounded like crap and I had to redo almost all of it once I realized why.
Now, if you can't hear the difference, by all means, keep listening to MP3's. Heck, I usually listen to them. However, most people can tell the difference in a blind test.
Apple doesn't, but I got a gazillion hits for "ipod mini battery replacement" on Google, including one from Other World Computing which will replace it for you for $60 or sell you a battery and tools to open the iPod for $20...
Much as I prefer special purpose devices, the good news about digital audio is that it doesn't take all that much in the way of resources to commit it to disk. Using two Motu 828 mk1's (18 analog and digital channels to Firewire ) and a Creamware A16 (feeds 16 channels of analog to the Motu's), I was able to record 32 tracks at once for over two hours and repeated that process for several nights. I was using Apple's Logic Pro and a relatively slow 800MHz iBook G4. I was recording 44.1kHz at 16 bits.
The key to not having skips or dropouts is to make sure that the computer is not doing any processing of the audio as it's recording. Also, I can't speak for Windows, but at least MacOS X and Linux are pretty good about being able to put the non-recording tasks into the background.
I think you should re-read the Bill of Rights. The 8th Amendment (Cruel and Unusual Punishment) means that both cruel punishments *and* unusual punishments are forbiden, not that the punishment has to be both to qualify. The Fourth Amendment specifically lists the right to be secure in your person (ie, life and liberty) against unreasonable searches or seizures. IANAL but that would seem to include seizure of the person. Taken along with the 5th Amendment (that gives you more rights than just the right to not incriminate yourself!) which requires that you receive due process of law before being deprived of your life, would seem to imply that you cannot, in fact, be killed arbitrarily.
If there were holes as gaping as the ones you suggest in the Bill of Rights, the current administration would probably be using them, as opposed to their current practice of simply ignoring the sections they don't like....
While it hasn't always been administered to the letter of the law, as an enumeration of rights, I'll take the Bill of Rights (especially with the rest of the amendments and the US Constitution) over pretty much anything else out there.
Wow, this was bad. I need to do a lot more research before posting next time:) Sorry! In fact, Google even has a whole "Google Maps on Your Phone FAQ"... http://www.google.com/gmm/faq.html
I suppose this brings up another target market: people like me who had a bad idea of what other Smartphones can do because they've never owned one....
Well, a) integration with things like Google Maps is not something that other phones have (like, being able to tap the phone number you get off Google Maps and have the phone dial it without writing the number down and then typing it back in) b) how many phones support standard IMAP and POP servers? That means darn near anyone can get their email on their phone and can use a nice (assuming you like Apple interfaces) interface on their computer to set the phone up to do it.
Most importantly, related to your last comment, c) When was the last time you paid list price for a cell phone? Like all other phones, I'll bet this one ends up significantly cheaper than $500 to the end user. That being said, I suspect their target market, at least initially, is "people who have both a Treo/Blackberry/Etc. and an iPod".
Do I have some special secret clearance with the US government that makes me sure? No, of course not. By the same token, while the FDR's are meant to take quite a pounding, and probably would have been designed to survive the crash and the ensuing fire, I can't believe that they would have held up to the thousands of tons of steel from the WTC coming down on top of them, unless they happened to land in exceedingly lucky locations. So how to explain what the people on the site saw? Well, the description of the flight data recorder also exactly matches the automatic defibrulator that is in the mail room here. I'm sure there are other things that match that description. If the FBI were looking for the recorders, they may have dragged in anything they could find that *might* have been the recorders.
Lastly, if one were trying to cover up a conspiracy and were relying on the FDR's not being found, that seems incredibly dumb since the person who finds them isn't necessarily in on your conspiracy and may, say, hold a press conference.... Then again, I suppose I shouldn't underestimate the stupidity of our government...
The problem with that assumption is that prior to Sept. 11th, the 300 people never conceived of what was going to happen to them. In most previous hijacking attempts, almost all the passengers survived. Sure, you had to sit around on the plane for a week, like the hostage situation in France a few years earlier, but eventually, you got off and went home.
Since the cockpit voice recorders of the two planes that hit the World Trade Center weren't recovered, we have no idea what the passengers were told but I'm sure it was something along the lines of "if you cooperate, nobody will get hurt". You will note that on the one plane where the people had time to hear what was going on, the 300 passengers *did* win against the 4 terrorists, which prevented a whole lot more people on the ground from being killed.
I strongly suspect that if 5 people said "cooperate and nobody gets hurt" on a plane today, the results would be quite different. The people "didn't make much of an effort to live" because they didn't think they were about to die.
I'd be very curious to know how this is going to work and how often it will "recheck" for an open frequency. I have a number of wireless microphones (Shure SC(VHF), ULX(UHF), and SLX(UHF)) that broadcast on unused TV spectrum (that's the standard for "professional" wireless mics). It would really suck if something else started interfering on those frequencies, say, in the middle of a show.....
Replacing the mics with a model designed to work with this scheme is a *very* expensive proposition.
Then you only buy one processor type (presumably the Opteron). As for precompiled binaries, assuming they meet the appropriate requirements (yet to be determined because predicting what API's will be necessary in a few years is pointless), they'll run just fine. However, optimizing for your target platform is likely to get you better performance regardless of whether the target comes from Cray or anyone else.
You're ignoring one *major* element of scientific computing vs. something like SETI@home. SETI requires *very* little communication over the network and *no* communication between the peers doing the computation. The kind of scientific computation that someone would do on a high end cluster or supercomputer (say, a weather model or a model of an airplane) requires a great deal of communication and, even more important, synchronization. Think about what happens if you have 10,000 processors running your job and they all need to sync up once in awhile. If the time it takes to do the sync is a significant portion of the time between sync's, you are in big trouble. That is true more often that you would think.
So basically, if you're running SETI@home (or a distributed rendering farm or other similar things), you're not going to see much benefit from a high-end cluster or a big supercomputer. However, there are plenty of codes for which communication bandwidth and latency are *huge* issues. These are the kinds of things that get run on Crays.
I should also point out that there are many other factors that go into making a computer that performs well on a demanding application. Processor speed and architecture, memory bandwith, network bandwidth, compiler design, etc...
If I throw something in my trash or run it through a shredder or put it in recycling and then set it out on my curb, it could, conceivably, wind up as evidence in a court proceeding. Unless you have a "confidential recycling" company (like those at many corporations), you haven't signed an agreement where your trash company guarantees that everything you throw away will decompose. I'm quite certain that Waste Management would have no problem turning over your garbage if presented with a subpeona.
I really don't see what the major concern here is. I'm very concerned when records get turned over without court orders, but without the ability to compell evidence to be turned over if there's probable cause (or whatever the legal standard for the subpeona is), how could *anyone* be prosecuted? You don't have a right to hide evidence of a crime. The only right you have in that area is that you can't personally be compelled to reveal incriminating evidence against yourself.
You probably knew this already, but in case you didn't, this page describes how to use/etc/passwd (and your other standard Unix text files) instead of the NetInfo stuff. It works quite well on my machine and I used vipw as my password file editor, not NetInfo.
I'm wondering if this voltage isn't the result of simple electrolysis. He's using two different metals and a living tree, unlike a piece of furniture, is full of water. Iron and copper in a salt water bath will form a battery. Will aluminum? That seems the most likely explanation.
I've never completely understood this argument (yes, I admit, I'm heavily biased). If I want to build a skyscraper, I'm not going to use the "mass market" crane that puts up the roof of a residential house. I'm going to use a specialized crane that's meant for building skyscrapers.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a place for commodity hardware in supercomputing, but to say that there's no room for custom hardware either misses the point. The only thing "off the shelf" about an AMD based Cray is the AMD. The logic board, and, most importantly, the network that interconnects the processors is entirely custom. Not to mention the fact that Cray will still build some entirely custom processors...
By the way - this is hardly the first Cray based on a commodity processor. The T3E and T3D were both Alpha processors, yet nobody calls those machines "commodity".
Tera bought far more than a name when they bought us. They also bought a bunch of software and hardware people, many of whom (myself not included) have been with Cray Research (the original Cray) for many years. So, while it's certainly not the Cray of the mid-1980's, the tradition still goes back there, especially with the vector machines like the Cray X1/X1E and its impending follow-on.
Well, since he was talking about a laptop, darn near *everything* is proprietary except the RAM and hard drive. Heck, even the power charger for a Dell laptop is specific to Dell. This is true for all brands of laptops that I know of. Apple is no worse than the others here. An Apple laptop will work just fine with numerous types of hard drives and memory, even if Apple will only sell you one brand...
Obviously, desktops are a different story, though you can still use standard PCI/AGP cards, hard drives, keyboards, mice, RAM, etc. in a Mac desktop.
SGI definitely would not be in better shape if they'd stayed with Irix. Irix is, internally, quite difficult to port to new architectures. In particular, changing it from big endian (MIPS) to little endian (IA64) would have been a challenge, at best. Even moving it to another 64 bit big endian platform (the Cray X1) took awhile. It also has other "issues" like a somewhat outdated IP stack (though SGI may have fixed that also).
SGI's problem is that they've made way too many mistakes and missed too many boats. They should have released a PC graphics card in the mid 90's. Instead, that group went to nVidia. They should have allowed Cray (who they owned) to continue with the (quite successful) T3E line. Instead they pushed Origin which, at the time, was barely working. They should never have built a PC that didn't have a standard BIOS and couldn't run a standard version of Windows. They should have never built PC's, period. They should have not tried to commit to shipping Windows on every platform they built (this was a late 90's thing which, fortunately, died). They should have actually used the people and technology that they bought when they bought Cray. Instead, it took 6 years of political infighting before the companies were really merged (a large part of what was Cray Research is still part of SGI). They should have put effort into stabalizing and securing Irix back in the mid 90's when it was swiss cheese. They *owned* the webserver market at one point. Sun anhialated them. They shouldn't have sold the Cray SuperServer to Sun for $56 million. It became the Sun Ultra Enterprise and Sun has made billions on it. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, they shouldn't have driven off their best employees because of poltical infighting and starting, but not finishing, far too many projects.
You can't make that many *major* errors and stay alive. Honestly, I'm surprised they've managed to last as long as they have. I thought they were dead 4 years ago when I quit.
Not exactly. I have licensed radios in the VHF band (between 171MHz and 210MHz) and the UHF band (up around 510MHz). They are wireless microphones. I'll be pretty ticked if I have to throw out my $10k worth of gear because you want to broadcast on the spectrum that the FCC allocated to wireless mic users. I'm hardly a "corporation who shelled out big bucks". I'm a community theater that shelled out nearly our entire budget to barely get what we needed. Don't assume that the only licensed users are places like ClearChannel that have plenty of money to spend on changing equipment.
If you want open spectrum for digital broadcasts that isn't licensed and can be used pretty freely, that exists already. That's what WiFi uses....
Well, it's got an airfield with a long enough runway to land most large jets (I've seen 747's, C5's, and the big Russian cargo jets there(*)). Even the Concord was able to land/take off there. The airport isn't that busy so it can basically be dedicated to just the airshow the entire week.
Besides, given that it's a fly-in, I suspect that part of the appeal to the pilots is that they get to fly someplace to go to it:)
(*) I grew up in Ripon, WI under the approach route. Having a C5 suddenly go over your house in a location where the largest plane normally going over is a crop duster is quite an experience....
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The receiver and transmitter both have to be tuned to the same channel. Most wireless mic vendors provide lists of valid frequency combinations. As to "how do I not pick up the guy across the street", the answer is "you and the guy across the street make sure you're not on the same frequency." Any time I go into a theater, especially one where there are multiple theaters in a complex, I provide a list of the wireless frequencies I intend to use. The theater provides a list of the ones they already use. Then we negotiate until there are no conflicts....
Quadraginta: I suspect he's worried about getting interference *on* his microphones, not his microphones causing someone else to have interference.
This depends entirely on how strong the licensed user is and what the licensed use turns out to be. If it were to be, say, an Wifi style device where you can get something transmitting in that band for $20 at Best Buy, there are going to be problems with wireless mics. In theory, I believe that you will lose the right to transmit with the mics on those frequencies, but that's unlikely to be an issue. I suspect that eventually, you'll start getting interference.
Shure has stopped selling anything in the bands that are being auctioned off. I was lucky enough to not wind up with any of my mics solely above 700 MHz (the Shure UB band is partly above, partly below) so I don't get screwed, but this auction is going to obsolete 10's of thousands of dollars of gear that's otherwise perfectly usable. You can already see it with a ton of Shure gear in the UA band showing up on eBay.
> Well, right now unused TV channels in the US are just that -- unused.
False (this is in the United States and Canada - not sure how it works elsewhere). Unused TV channels are used for low-power local broadcast equipment such as wireless microphones and in-ear monitors (the ear plugs with wires that you see musicians wearing). You may see some total crap wireless mic from Radio Shack that runs in the 900MHz band, but all the good ones (ie, from Shure, Sennheiser, AKG, etc...) run in unused TV channels. I have a bunch of Shure ULX channels and the receiver displays the TV channel I'm on. If you want a demonstration, go here. The older products run on VHF channels, the new ones on UHF.
Before you say "Well, Aerosmith and NBC can afford to upgrade", remember that these things are owned by thousands of schools, community theaters, indie rock bands, small coffee shops, etc. These people (myself being in the community theater sound category) can't afford to have a $15,000 investment in gear, which was fully licensed by the FCC and legal, sudenly become worthless.
Obviously, progress happens, and maybe if there's a 10 year phase-in people can upgrade, but the current state of the art technology in this area is on these frequencies and there is currently *no* alternative on the market that I could upgrade to even if I could afford it.
...this is *hardly* a supercomputer. This is 152.57 times slower than entry number 500 on the Top 500 List. There isn't a nice neat definition of what a supercomputer is anymore, but "capable of running Beowulf" isn't it. Leaving aside the more custom machines that the company I work for (and a few others) build, there are plenty of Linux clusters that *do* qualify. The fastest one seems to be number 8 on the current Top 500 list (a Dell Infiniband cluster at NCSA).
Now, if you can't hear the difference, by all means, keep listening to MP3's. Heck, I usually listen to them. However, most people can tell the difference in a blind test.
Apple doesn't, but I got a gazillion hits for "ipod mini battery replacement" on Google, including one from Other World Computing which will replace it for you for $60 or sell you a battery and tools to open the iPod for $20...
s /
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ipod/mini/batterie
I'm sure that services that do similar things for the iPhone will pop up in about two years....
The key to not having skips or dropouts is to make sure that the computer is not doing any processing of the audio as it's recording. Also, I can't speak for Windows, but at least MacOS X and Linux are pretty good about being able to put the non-recording tasks into the background.
If there were holes as gaping as the ones you suggest in the Bill of Rights, the current administration would probably be using them, as opposed to their current practice of simply ignoring the sections they don't like....
While it hasn't always been administered to the letter of the law, as an enumeration of rights, I'll take the Bill of Rights (especially with the rest of the amendments and the US Constitution) over pretty much anything else out there.
Wow, this was bad. I need to do a lot more research before posting next time :) Sorry! In fact, Google even has a whole "Google Maps on Your Phone FAQ"... http://www.google.com/gmm/faq.html
I suppose this brings up another target market: people like me who had a bad idea of what other Smartphones can do because they've never owned one....
Most importantly, related to your last comment, c) When was the last time you paid list price for a cell phone? Like all other phones, I'll bet this one ends up significantly cheaper than $500 to the end user. That being said, I suspect their target market, at least initially, is "people who have both a Treo/Blackberry/Etc. and an iPod".
Lastly, if one were trying to cover up a conspiracy and were relying on the FDR's not being found, that seems incredibly dumb since the person who finds them isn't necessarily in on your conspiracy and may, say, hold a press conference.... Then again, I suppose I shouldn't underestimate the stupidity of our government...
Since the cockpit voice recorders of the two planes that hit the World Trade Center weren't recovered, we have no idea what the passengers were told but I'm sure it was something along the lines of "if you cooperate, nobody will get hurt". You will note that on the one plane where the people had time to hear what was going on, the 300 passengers *did* win against the 4 terrorists, which prevented a whole lot more people on the ground from being killed.
I strongly suspect that if 5 people said "cooperate and nobody gets hurt" on a plane today, the results would be quite different. The people "didn't make much of an effort to live" because they didn't think they were about to die.
Replacing the mics with a model designed to work with this scheme is a *very* expensive proposition.
Then you only buy one processor type (presumably the Opteron). As for precompiled binaries, assuming they meet the appropriate requirements (yet to be determined because predicting what API's will be necessary in a few years is pointless), they'll run just fine. However, optimizing for your target platform is likely to get you better performance regardless of whether the target comes from Cray or anyone else.
You're ignoring one *major* element of scientific computing vs. something like SETI@home. SETI requires *very* little communication over the network and *no* communication between the peers doing the computation. The kind of scientific computation that someone would do on a high end cluster or supercomputer (say, a weather model or a model of an airplane) requires a great deal of communication and, even more important, synchronization. Think about what happens if you have 10,000 processors running your job and they all need to sync up once in awhile. If the time it takes to do the sync is a significant portion of the time between sync's, you are in big trouble. That is true more often that you would think.
So basically, if you're running SETI@home (or a distributed rendering farm or other similar things), you're not going to see much benefit from a high-end cluster or a big supercomputer. However, there are plenty of codes for which communication bandwidth and latency are *huge* issues. These are the kinds of things that get run on Crays.
I should also point out that there are many other factors that go into making a computer that performs well on a demanding application. Processor speed and architecture, memory bandwith, network bandwidth, compiler design, etc...
I really don't see what the major concern here is. I'm very concerned when records get turned over without court orders, but without the ability to compell evidence to be turned over if there's probable cause (or whatever the legal standard for the subpeona is), how could *anyone* be prosecuted? You don't have a right to hide evidence of a crime. The only right you have in that area is that you can't personally be compelled to reveal incriminating evidence against yourself.
You probably knew this already, but in case you didn't, this page describes how to use /etc/passwd (and your other standard Unix text files) instead of the NetInfo stuff. It works quite well on my machine and I used vipw as my password file editor, not NetInfo.
This page was a good refresher of my chemistry memory.
I've never completely understood this argument (yes, I admit, I'm heavily biased). If I want to build a skyscraper, I'm not going to use the "mass market" crane that puts up the roof of a residential house. I'm going to use a specialized crane that's meant for building skyscrapers.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a place for commodity hardware in supercomputing, but to say that there's no room for custom hardware either misses the point. The only thing "off the shelf" about an AMD based Cray is the AMD. The logic board, and, most importantly, the network that interconnects the processors is entirely custom. Not to mention the fact that Cray will still build some entirely custom processors...
By the way - this is hardly the first Cray based on a commodity processor. The T3E and T3D were both Alpha processors, yet nobody calls those machines "commodity".
Tera bought far more than a name when they bought us. They also bought a bunch of software and hardware people, many of whom (myself not included) have been with Cray Research (the original Cray) for many years. So, while it's certainly not the Cray of the mid-1980's, the tradition still goes back there, especially with the vector machines like the Cray X1/X1E and its impending follow-on.
Yes, actually.
Obviously, desktops are a different story, though you can still use standard PCI/AGP cards, hard drives, keyboards, mice, RAM, etc. in a Mac desktop.
SGI's problem is that they've made way too many mistakes and missed too many boats. They should have released a PC graphics card in the mid 90's. Instead, that group went to nVidia. They should have allowed Cray (who they owned) to continue with the (quite successful) T3E line. Instead they pushed Origin which, at the time, was barely working. They should never have built a PC that didn't have a standard BIOS and couldn't run a standard version of Windows. They should have never built PC's, period. They should have not tried to commit to shipping Windows on every platform they built (this was a late 90's thing which, fortunately, died). They should have actually used the people and technology that they bought when they bought Cray. Instead, it took 6 years of political infighting before the companies were really merged (a large part of what was Cray Research is still part of SGI). They should have put effort into stabalizing and securing Irix back in the mid 90's when it was swiss cheese. They *owned* the webserver market at one point. Sun anhialated them. They shouldn't have sold the Cray SuperServer to Sun for $56 million. It became the Sun Ultra Enterprise and Sun has made billions on it. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, they shouldn't have driven off their best employees because of poltical infighting and starting, but not finishing, far too many projects.
You can't make that many *major* errors and stay alive. Honestly, I'm surprised they've managed to last as long as they have. I thought they were dead 4 years ago when I quit.
If you want open spectrum for digital broadcasts that isn't licensed and can be used pretty freely, that exists already. That's what WiFi uses....
Well, it's got an airfield with a long enough runway to land most large jets (I've seen 747's, C5's, and the big Russian cargo jets there(*)). Even the Concord was able to land/take off there. The airport isn't that busy so it can basically be dedicated to just the airshow the entire week.
:)
.
Besides, given that it's a fly-in, I suspect that part of the appeal to the pilots is that they get to fly someplace to go to it
A complete history can be found here
(*) I grew up in Ripon, WI under the approach route. Having a C5 suddenly go over your house in a location where the largest plane normally going over is a crop duster is quite an experience....