A very accurate time can be determined from WWV by synchronizing with the carrier frequency. The 20MHz (example) carrier for WWV is also a calibrated reference signal that can be used to calibrate your local oscillators or clocks.
Too bad there isn't a way to send money over the internet. You could call it bitmoney, or bitcoin or something...
Yes I'm joking that you rely on it to make a living (get paid) but if you did the $->BTC exchange based on current rates, and then promptly cashed out, you shouldn't loose too bad? Maybe...
I wrote some programs like that when I used to dyno test race engines to help with keeping track of the various break-in procedures. It started as a way to help keep track of the complicated break-in schedule, and I gradually added manual data recording, and then later built an interface card to read torque, rpm, fuel flow, and interface to the scan tool for fuel injected engines. It then calculates correction factors and prints a dyno sheet, updates the operators time control, and bills the time to the proper accounts.
It is still running on the same 286 laptops I wrote it on. On some dyno cells it runs on windows xp and I have updated it to store the runs on a network disk, and I can remotely add and modify different runs for different engines. It has survived the dreaded Y2k, ISO certification, gets yearly calibration, and gives me very little trouble. I'm the only one who supports it, and over the last 15+ years it has been running all day, 5-6 days a week running thousands of engines on 8 different dyno cells.
I remember poking every address in a loop (crashed many times) to find the various pins on the parallel port, and the rs-232 flow control pins, and waiting code to make the parallel port into an 8 way SPI bus to control DACs and ADCs that connected to the existing analog control system.
Ahh... The good old days! You guys are welcome on my lawn most any time!
Isn't Microsoft working on something to do just that (program will optimize itself at runtime for various hardware combinations) for future versions of.net? I thought I read about that (here) on Slashdot.
So now anyone can download everything they need to access government computers in one easy step! I'm sure anonymous, and the Chinese government appreciate that!
I'd be willing to bet the variability in the connections and connecting devices would cause issues with that arrangement. Each connecting device would have to have very consistent input characteristics or have its own tuning data to throw in the mix.
This way they know when the cable leaves the factory that the signals make it properly from end to end. This is a much better bet for trouble free communications over a variety of devices IMHO.
The calibration parameters are likely burned into an array of fuses that slew its impedance and other properties, and these are adjusted by the calibratior by burning the fuse, and this is typically a one time deal. Run the cable, see how the signals look, tweak it into spec (or dead on for more expensive cables) run it again to confirm it meets the manufacturing requirements (repeat again if required for more expensive cables). Like a resistor network in a digital potentiometer only burned by the programmer.
Active tuning would require much more expensive active transceivers, and I think the memory chips, and required interfaces would cost the same or more than the two active interface chips.
It's just one more thing consisting of many complicated things (impedance matching!) that has to happen in order for a device to work. Imagine the support nightmare that becomes if you don't even know if the system is even capable of properly and reliably transmitting bits! Do you see the cable and receiver tuning parameters upon connecting the device when you debug the driver output in the logs??? Yuck!
My U3 drive had a portable version of skype on it that would ping their server even if there was no account configured. IT noticed it right away, and deactivated my LAN connection.
The helpdesk was waiting for my call as the manager of the PC end of the IT dept made his way across the plant to my desk.
Fortunately I did not install it, or have it configured with a login, or even know it was there, otherwise it would not have been pretty!
I really like my trackpoint, and I use it for nearly everything, Even PCB's, schematics, simulations etc etc. If you play around with the settings and get it to where when you think of where you want the cursor to go, and give the little stick the corresponding bump, you get close to your target (both the acceleration and speed settings are important!) then you use it for a couple weeks, you will be surprised how well they work.
I can get it right in between the right two letters, or grab a component very easily. I also use it in boats going 100+ to work with calibration software, datalogging software, navigation software, and its much easier for me, I'm more stable, and I'm more accurate than anything else I've used (except perhaps a Microsoft optical thumbball) and I have a Wacom tablet sitting right there that goes largely unused as well. I think its much easier to use than a touchpad.
I imagine its very similar to what I find rewriting libraries for microcontrollers from various vendors and even different micros from the same vendor. While they all have similar hardware I.E. a CAN interface, there is no standard way of configuring the hardware for bit timing, or message ID's or acceptance masks and filters, the number of available mailboxes and their functionality differs, message tx rx signaling, interrupt types, error reporting, register descriptions, its all different! ADC's are the same way, timing, triggering, re-triggering, addressing, configuring, accessing, input scaling, reference source, result scaling, register access, all different for essentially (IE a 10 bit successive approximation ADC) the same hardware.
Every single one of the various little tidbits of IP that gets added is different from each and every manufacturer! No two vendors do anything the same. And one would probably be sued by the other if they did. We had to get special approval from Motorola to have Infineon replicate similar functionality in one of their DSP's to allow us to use the same code output from Simulink across multiple ECU families.
You have to be different to be better, and all these vendors implement features attempting to be the best so you have a reason to purchase their device over the other 10 that are essentially just like it.
Makes it very difficult on the person developing the API to have consistency across multiple platforms without dumbing it down to lose some features striving for a common set, or having slightly different API's or slightly different usage per micro, or designing them around an application, and hiding much of the other functionality.
One of my first production microcontroller projects was 12K of assembly, and my knowledge and understanding of exactly what is happening under the hood increased 100X! It's essential to be unafraid of looking at your compiled projects, and seeing where there are possibilities for optimizations, and more importantly finding bugs and fixing bugs in the library functions you rely on to generate your code.
I tell you nothing compares to managing those 4 bytes in that long yourself, (every time you need to touch them) and doing things that would be nearly impossible to properly instruct a compiler to do any other way. With a little thought and planning you can organize your memory in ways that dramatically reduce the number of times that pointers need to be reset, and layout your memory where the next variable, or result is located right where it needs to be so that a postincrement after the last read leaves the pointer in the right address to simply read or write the next chunk of data without having to calculate the address, and reload the pointer. You can do some really fun stuff (use different variable types together without conversion) that'll make you proud of your skills instead of wondering how it really all works!
It's worth it just to try and blink a light on your arduino in assembly! A few nights on the bare metal will teach you lots! Especially if you want to use a debugger or JTAG to follow and fix your next compiled project that's not working how you expect it too!
Lockheed Martin confirms attack on its IT network
(AFP) â" 1 hour ago WASHINGTON â" US defense contractor Lockheed Martin has confirmed that it had detected "a significant and tenacious" attack on its information systems network. "Lockheed Martin detected a significant and tenacious attack on its information systems network," said a company statement. The company's information security team detected the attack almost immediately and took what is described as "aggressive actions" to protect all systems and data, the statement added. "As a result of the swift and deliberate actions taken to protect the network and increase IT security, our systems remain secure," Lockheed Martin said. "No customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised." The incident was under investigation, and Lockheed Martin said it was keeping appropriate US government agencies informed of situation. It did not mention any suspected source of the cyber-attack. The company said that despite the attack, it remained confident in the integrity of its "robust, multi-layered information systems security."
One thing that you might find yourself doing is balancing your demand with your generation capabilities. When I go camping, I have a panel that will give me 1 amp @ 15VDC when in full sun, and I can go for weeks charging 2 deep-cycle batteries, and running all kinds of electronics, but I have efficient lighting, and do my best not to waste power, and the result is I can run my inflatable boat for a few hours a day for free.
I have a second identical panel, and after years of experimenting with my power distribution and balancing, it finds itself wired directly to the vent fans during normal use, and it does provide a satisfying increase in cooling output when in full sun!
I can't believe the same wouldn't be true for any building. If you were getting a certain amount of power from your installation, you could target other requirements to be able to fall within the capacity of your total solar output, and they can easily have 100% of their power usage offset by solar, even if the Sun only shines 6 hours a day!
What would be "cool" is to have rooftop solar power running your air conditioning so you would be putting most of the energy and heat right back into the same area as before.
If you used a glycol loop in the ground to dump the waste heat from a rooftop solar powered building (computers, lights, etc >> Air Conditioning >> glycol loop) I wonder how close that would be to sunlight hitting the ground.
I would think the iPad would run circles around it for flipping through plays. The Kindle has a very slow screen refresh and unless you got to every play by keyboard combinations,or someone else in the booth just pulled up the right screen for you, I think the Kindle would be too slow bringing up the plays (pages) to be used in a game.
Every time you enter a letter, the whole screen needs to redraw, with the iPad, you could have easy to navigate menus that would get you where you needed to go much quicker than the Kindle.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends heavily on what kinds of contributions you have made in this lifetime! If one believed in karma:)
Fortunately everyone here knows karma don't mean shit!
(Ducks)
Cheers!
A very accurate time can be determined from WWV by synchronizing with the carrier frequency. The 20MHz (example) carrier for WWV is also a calibrated reference signal that can be used to calibrate your local oscillators or clocks.
Too bad there isn't a way to send money over the internet. You could call it bitmoney, or bitcoin or something...
Yes I'm joking that you rely on it to make a living (get paid) but if you did the $->BTC exchange based on current rates, and then promptly cashed out, you shouldn't loose too bad? Maybe...
Cheers!
Exactly! If you just spent 3 hours installing and updating your system, what better time to make a backup image!
It would be my second, the first being after install, before updates.
It's just too easy not to!
I wrote some programs like that when I used to dyno test race engines to help with keeping track of the various break-in procedures. It started as a way to help keep track of the complicated break-in schedule, and I gradually added manual data recording, and then later built an interface card to read torque, rpm, fuel flow, and interface to the scan tool for fuel injected engines. It then calculates correction factors and prints a dyno sheet, updates the operators time control, and bills the time to the proper accounts.
It is still running on the same 286 laptops I wrote it on. On some dyno cells it runs on windows xp and I have updated it to store the runs on a network disk, and I can remotely add and modify different runs for different engines. It has survived the dreaded Y2k, ISO certification, gets yearly calibration, and gives me very little trouble. I'm the only one who supports it, and over the last 15+ years it has been running all day, 5-6 days a week running thousands of engines on 8 different dyno cells.
I remember poking every address in a loop (crashed many times) to find the various pins on the parallel port, and the rs-232 flow control pins, and waiting code to make the parallel port into an 8 way SPI bus to control DACs and ADCs that connected to the existing analog control system.
Ahh... The good old days!
You guys are welcome on my lawn most any time!
Cheers!
did you realize that when the guy said his boss takes 3 fully charged batteries on his long flight blah blah blah?
Isn't Microsoft working on something to do just that (program will optimize itself at runtime for various hardware combinations) for future versions of .net? I thought I read about that (here) on Slashdot.
ducks...
Cheers!
So now anyone can download everything they need to access government computers in one easy step! I'm sure anonymous, and the Chinese government appreciate that!
Cheers!
Damn, where are my mod points! That's fzcking funny! :D
Nice one
I'd be willing to bet the variability in the connections and connecting devices would cause issues with that arrangement. Each connecting device would have to have very consistent input characteristics or have its own tuning data to throw in the mix.
This way they know when the cable leaves the factory that the signals make it properly from end to end. This is a much better bet for trouble free communications over a variety of devices IMHO.
The calibration parameters are likely burned into an array of fuses that slew its impedance and other properties, and these are adjusted by the calibratior by burning the fuse, and this is typically a one time deal. Run the cable, see how the signals look, tweak it into spec (or dead on for more expensive cables) run it again to confirm it meets the manufacturing requirements (repeat again if required for more expensive cables). Like a resistor network in a digital potentiometer only burned by the programmer.
Active tuning would require much more expensive active transceivers, and I think the memory chips, and required interfaces would cost the same or more than the two active interface chips.
It's just one more thing consisting of many complicated things (impedance matching!) that has to happen in order for a device to work. Imagine the support nightmare that becomes if you don't even know if the system is even capable of properly and reliably transmitting bits! Do you see the cable and receiver tuning parameters upon connecting the device when you debug the driver output in the logs???
Yuck!
My U3 drive had a portable version of skype on it that would ping their server even if there was no account configured. IT noticed it right away, and deactivated my LAN connection.
The helpdesk was waiting for my call as the manager of the PC end of the IT dept made his way across the plant to my desk.
Fortunately I did not install it, or have it configured with a login, or even know it was there, otherwise it would not have been pretty!
I wonder if IBM ever entertained the thought of having Watson play chess?!
Would it have enough resources to have every possible outcome (of every possible game) in its working memory simultaneously?
Any thoughts?
Cheers!
If seen_this_link_before = 1 then
Page_rank = page_rank +1
End if
There you go!
It sounds like it was good enough, and that was the problem:)
I really like my trackpoint, and I use it for nearly everything, Even PCB's, schematics, simulations etc etc. If you play around with the settings and get it to where when you think of where you want the cursor to go, and give the little stick the corresponding bump, you get close to your target (both the acceleration and speed settings are important!) then you use it for a couple weeks, you will be surprised how well they work.
I can get it right in between the right two letters, or grab a component very easily. I also use it in boats going 100+ to work with calibration software, datalogging software, navigation software, and its much easier for me, I'm more stable, and I'm more accurate than anything else I've used (except perhaps a Microsoft optical thumbball) and I have a Wacom tablet sitting right there that goes largely unused as well. I think its much easier to use than a touchpad.
So then the real question is... When was it fixed in the "BSD's"???
Ducks:)
I imagine its very similar to what I find rewriting libraries for microcontrollers from various vendors and even different micros from the same vendor. While they all have similar hardware I.E. a CAN interface, there is no standard way of configuring the hardware for bit timing, or message ID's or acceptance masks and filters, the number of available mailboxes and their functionality differs, message tx rx signaling, interrupt types, error reporting, register descriptions, its all different! ADC's are the same way, timing, triggering, re-triggering, addressing, configuring, accessing, input scaling, reference source, result scaling, register access, all different for essentially (IE a 10 bit successive approximation ADC) the same hardware.
Every single one of the various little tidbits of IP that gets added is different from each and every manufacturer!
No two vendors do anything the same. And one would probably be sued by the other if they did. We had to get special approval from Motorola to have Infineon replicate similar functionality in one of their DSP's to allow us to use the same code output from Simulink across multiple ECU families.
You have to be different to be better, and all these vendors implement features attempting to be the best so you have a reason to purchase their device over the other 10 that are essentially just like it.
Makes it very difficult on the person developing the API to have consistency across multiple platforms without dumbing it down to lose some features striving for a common set, or having slightly different API's or slightly different usage per micro, or designing them around an application, and hiding much of the other functionality.
Cheers!
One of my first production microcontroller projects was 12K of assembly, and my knowledge and understanding of exactly what is happening under the hood increased 100X! It's essential to be unafraid of looking at your compiled projects, and seeing where there are possibilities for optimizations, and more importantly finding bugs and fixing bugs in the library functions you rely on to generate your code.
I tell you nothing compares to managing those 4 bytes in that long yourself, (every time you need to touch them) and doing things that would be nearly impossible to properly instruct a compiler to do any other way. With a little thought and planning you can organize your memory in ways that dramatically reduce the number of times that pointers need to be reset, and layout your memory where the next variable, or result is located right where it needs to be so that a postincrement after the last read leaves the pointer in the right address to simply read or write the next chunk of data without having to calculate the address, and reload the pointer. You can do some really fun stuff (use different variable types together without conversion) that'll make you proud of your skills instead of wondering how it really all works!
It's worth it just to try and blink a light on your arduino in assembly! A few nights on the bare metal will teach you lots! Especially if you want to use a debugger or JTAG to follow and fix your next compiled project that's not working how you expect it too!
Lockheed Martin confirms attack on its IT network
(AFP)
â"
1 hour ago
WASHINGTON â" US defense contractor Lockheed Martin has confirmed that it had detected "a significant and tenacious" attack on its information systems network.
"Lockheed Martin detected a significant and tenacious attack on its information systems network," said a company statement.
The company's information security team detected the attack almost immediately and took what is described as "aggressive actions" to protect all systems and data, the statement added.
"As a result of the swift and deliberate actions taken to protect the network and increase IT security, our systems remain secure," Lockheed Martin said.
"No customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised."
The incident was under investigation, and Lockheed Martin said it was keeping appropriate US government agencies informed of situation. It did not mention any suspected source of the cyber-attack.
The company said that despite the attack, it remained confident in the integrity of its "robust, multi-layered information systems security."
Don't think about Fedora 15, it has a very similar desktop! Thought I accidentally burned or mislabeled my Ubuntu 11.04 disk at first!
One thing that you might find yourself doing is balancing your demand with your generation capabilities. When I go camping, I have a panel that will give me 1 amp @ 15VDC when in full sun, and I can go for weeks charging 2 deep-cycle batteries, and running all kinds of electronics, but I have efficient lighting, and do my best not to waste power, and the result is I can run my inflatable boat for a few hours a day for free.
I have a second identical panel, and after years of experimenting with my power distribution and balancing, it finds itself wired directly to the vent fans during normal use, and it does provide a satisfying increase in cooling output when in full sun!
I can't believe the same wouldn't be true for any building. If you were getting a certain amount of power from your installation, you could target other requirements to be able to fall within the capacity of your total solar output, and they can easily have 100% of their power usage offset by solar, even if the Sun only shines 6 hours a day!
That made laugh! Thanks AC :)
What would be "cool" is to have rooftop solar power running your air conditioning so you would be putting most of the energy and heat right back into the same area as before.
If you used a glycol loop in the ground to dump the waste heat from a rooftop solar powered building (computers, lights, etc >> Air Conditioning >> glycol loop) I wonder how close that would be to sunlight hitting the ground.
Oh my god I know! I was never able to look at him the same way again!
I would think the iPad would run circles around it for flipping through plays. The Kindle has a very slow screen refresh and unless you got to every play by keyboard combinations,or someone else in the booth just pulled up the right screen for you, I think the Kindle would be too slow bringing up the plays (pages) to be used in a game.
Every time you enter a letter, the whole screen needs to redraw, with the iPad, you could have easy to navigate menus that would get you where you needed to go much quicker than the Kindle.
(only used a Kindle @ BestBuy once)
Cheers!