I've been looking through the S12CPUV2 Reference Manual (downloadable from Motorola's web site). The CPU architecture looks very much like an MC6800 with 16-bit extensions. It has two 8-bit accumulators (A & B) that can be paired into a 16-bit accumulator (D). It has two 16-bit index registers (X & Y), a 16-bit stack pointer, a 16-bit program counter, and an 8-bit condition code register.
Most instructions can use A, B or D. It can do 16-bit arithmetic but some instructions, such as boolean logic, are limited to 8-bit operands.
I'd describe it as a 16-bit superset of the 8-bit MC6800.
The MC68000 internally used 16-bit data paths and three 16-bit ALUs. It did not have a 32-bit ALU. Motorola's original documentation called it a "16/32-bit Microprocessor". The MC68020 was the first true 32-bit member of the 68K family.
The web site says that they are using a Motorola 68HCS12. This is a descendant of the 8-bit Motorola 6800, optimized for microcontroller applications. Think of it as a fast 8-bit processor with lots of integrated gadgets.
The USAF already has concrete bombs. They contain no explosives. They use kinetic energy to destroy the target and are useful for attacking air defense sites in populated areas.
Do you know why some hams have a defensive attitude? Because there are large numbers of ignorant people who will blame their local amateur radio operator for every glitch and defect in the performance of their hi-fi and TV. If you try to rationally explain that you were not on the air when they experienced the problem, or that there may be a problem with the design or installation of the electronics equipment, their brain shuts down, their face turns red, and they start shouting at you. They know they are right and they don't want to be distracted by the facts.
The vast majority of cases of TVI (television interference) and RFI (radio frequency interference) are caused by the poor design and engineering of consumer electronics equipment, not spurious or illegal emissions from amateur radio stations. Consumer electronics equipment is designed to be cheap, not to be well shielded and resistant to EMI (electro-magnetic interference). The manufacturers could substantially increase their product's resistance to EMI with a few dollars worth of components, but they wont do it. They would rather pocket the money and let the consumer suffer the consequences. To make things worse, the amateur radio operator, who probably spent thousands of dollars on high-quality, properly engineered, radio equipment, gets the blame for the deficiencies of someone's crap TV set, built in China for $50.
Have the proponents of BPL considered that it may be a violation of international treaties governing the use and allocation of the RF spectrum? If I want to put an HF transmitter on the air, I must obtain a license from my country's radio administration, who in turn is required to follow international treaties that say what frequencies and emission types are available for specific classes of users.
There are bands reserved for broadcasting, ships, aircraft, amateur radio, etc.
Whatever happened to the mil-specs for shock resistance and sturdiness? I'm used to seeing Navy computers that were designed to survive anything short of a direct hit.
The problem is that E911 is not widely deployed. Sometimes because of bureaucratic incompetence or inertia, sometimes because the local government took the money and spent it on something else.
Get a cheap NTSC TV today and wait a few years. Future sets will include tuners that can decode ATSC (HDTV) and digital cable. They will also have CRTs with better resolution than NTSC. LCD flat panel TVs will also be much cheaper.
Standards vs. Implementation
on
Buying a New TV?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The ATSC standard may be stabilized but the receivers are still a work in progress. Most of them have problems with sensitivity, multipath and software bugs. Receiver designs are still in flux. The biggest problem is how to cope with dynamic multipath. There are locations that receive strong ATSC signals where no commercially available receiver can successfully decode the signal.
It's a problem endemic to large organizations. Whistle blowers are punished rather than praised. There are many ways the organization can retaliate against the whistle blower. It doesn't help that we have a dysfunctional legal system, where only the rich can buy justice.
When the city I lived in switched from incandescent to mercury vapor lighting, which was much brighter, they found that the trees became stunted and sick. The trees were no longer able to tell the difference between day and night. This screwed up their internal processes and cycles.
You can bootstrap the compiler on another system that already has a running compiler. You then cross-compile the compiler to the target system. If the only difference between systems is the operating system, you can just port the startup code and libraries to the target system.
The phone companies have been doing number translation for 800 numbers for years. How hard is it to map a logical phone number to a physical phone number?
People really think that if copyrights were repealed completely, that somehow the marketplace wouldn't change at all: that $200 million movies would still be made, people would devote 3-5 years to writing a book, and animators would spend tens of thousands of man-hours on television and home video.
Very few authors make a living from writing books. Many more books are published than those that make the best-seller list. Most authors have "day jobs". A successful book may pay for a vacation or a new car. If you are trying to strike it rich, you would be better off working part-time at McDonalds for the next 3-5 years. There is always the possibility that your novel will sell a million copies, but the odds say that it is much more likely to sell 5,000 copies and be forgotten.
CDMA can operate at 850 MHz and 1900 MHz. I believe Verizon has a lot of CDMA in the 850 MHz band. Sprint PCS runs CDMA in the 1900 MHz band. I read something that said Verizon would like to shutdown AMPS and totally switch over to CDMA.
I have an old VHF/UHF receiver that was built before they outlawed sales of cellular capable scanners.
The problem is that it used to be legal to build and sell a general coverage receiver that covered DC to Daylight. There were laws that restricted what you could do with some of signals you received, such as prohibiting disclosure to third parties, but the general principle was that any American was free to listen to anything transmitted on the public airwaves.
Enter cellular telephony (AMPS), which replaced the old mobile telephone service. Eventually, some bright bulb rediscovered that cellular telephone conversations were transmitted via UHF FM radio signals, without any encryption or signal security. Anyone with a UHF FM receiver, or an older VHF/UHF television set, could listen in on cellular phone calls. When the word got around to the general public that cellular calls were not private, the CTIA (cellular trade association) went nuts. This was a public relations problem that could hurt their sales and profits. Rather than fix the problem of broadcasting cellular calls in the clear, their "solution" was to lobby congress for a law that would prohibit sales of receivers that could listen to cellular telephone frequencies, and would criminalize the act of listening to a cellular telephone call. This was the first time that congress had made it illegal to listen to a radio signal. Of course, none of this made a damn bit of difference as to the security of a cellular telephone call. It just provided the illusion of security, which was all the CTIA was willing to pay for. It also gave a big stick to politicians who were embarrassed by the public disclosure of the contents of their cellular telephone calls. They could demand that the government prosecute the "criminals" who had the gall to embarrass them by publicizing their dirty laundry.
It makes me wonder why the military has less stringent requirements.
The military has different requirements. They are willing to trade safety, reliability and operating cost for performance and lethality. It's a question of what you optimize the design for. There isn't much of a point in building a "safe" fighter with triple redundant systems and large design margins if it is such a slow pig that it gets blown out of the sky in its first combat engagement.
Re:This has been coming for a while
on
In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 1
The firing pin in the contact exploder would jam in the firing pin guides. The problem was worse at high torpedo speeds and with "perfect" (perpendicular to target) firing solutions.
The Germans had very similar problems with their torpedoes. Admiral Doenitz (U-boat Commander) was so pissed off that he had the people in charge of torpedo development and testing court-martialed.
The U.S. torpedoes had a whole set of problems that were never discovered and fixed before the war. Pre-war testing was limited, performed in artificial conditions, and restricted by bureaucracy, lack of funding, and paranoia about security.
If the CD mastering wasn't bad enough, wait until the program director and his corporate overlords at your local FM broadcast station get their hands on it. Almost all of them use boxes like the Optimod, set to hunt down and terminate all vestiges of dynamic range. They want 100% modulation in every frequency band, all the time. That's part of why FM radio sounds so bad.
Slashdot Mirror
The CPU in question (68HCS12) has nothing in common with the 68000. It is much more like an enhanced 6800 or 6502.
I've been looking through the S12CPUV2 Reference Manual (downloadable from Motorola's web site). The CPU architecture looks very much like an MC6800 with 16-bit extensions. It has two 8-bit accumulators (A & B) that can be paired into a 16-bit accumulator (D). It has two 16-bit index registers (X & Y), a 16-bit stack pointer, a 16-bit program counter, and an 8-bit condition code register. Most instructions can use A, B or D. It can do 16-bit arithmetic but some instructions, such as boolean logic, are limited to 8-bit operands. I'd describe it as a 16-bit superset of the 8-bit MC6800.
The MC68000 internally used 16-bit data paths and three 16-bit ALUs. It did not have a 32-bit ALU. Motorola's original documentation called it a "16/32-bit Microprocessor". The MC68020 was the first true 32-bit member of the 68K family.
The web site says that they are using a Motorola 68HCS12. This is a descendant of the 8-bit Motorola 6800, optimized for microcontroller applications. Think of it as a fast 8-bit processor with lots of integrated gadgets.
The Finnish "warmachine" is the reason you can be a Finn, speak Finnish and have your own culture. Don't they teach people history anymore?
The USAF already has concrete bombs. They contain no explosives. They use kinetic energy to destroy the target and are useful for attacking air defense sites in populated areas.
Do you know why some hams have a defensive attitude? Because there are large numbers of ignorant people who will blame their local amateur radio operator for every glitch and defect in the performance of their hi-fi and TV. If you try to rationally explain that you were not on the air when they experienced the problem, or that there may be a problem with the design or installation of the electronics equipment, their brain shuts down, their face turns red, and they start shouting at you. They know they are right and they don't want to be distracted by the facts.
The vast majority of cases of TVI (television interference) and RFI (radio frequency interference) are caused by the poor design and engineering of consumer electronics equipment, not spurious or illegal emissions from amateur radio stations. Consumer electronics equipment is designed to be cheap, not to be well shielded and resistant to EMI (electro-magnetic interference). The manufacturers could substantially increase their product's resistance to EMI with a few dollars worth of components, but they wont do it. They would rather pocket the money and let the consumer suffer the consequences. To make things worse, the amateur radio operator, who probably spent thousands of dollars on high-quality, properly engineered, radio equipment, gets the blame for the deficiencies of someone's crap TV set, built in China for $50.
Have the proponents of BPL considered that it may be a violation of international treaties governing the use and allocation of the RF spectrum? If I want to put an HF transmitter on the air, I must obtain a license from my country's radio administration, who in turn is required to follow international treaties that say what frequencies and emission types are available for specific classes of users. There are bands reserved for broadcasting, ships, aircraft, amateur radio, etc.
Whatever happened to the mil-specs for shock resistance and sturdiness? I'm used to seeing Navy computers that were designed to survive anything short of a direct hit.
The problem is that E911 is not widely deployed. Sometimes because of bureaucratic incompetence or inertia, sometimes because the local government took the money and spent it on something else.
Get a cheap NTSC TV today and wait a few years. Future sets will include tuners that can decode ATSC (HDTV) and digital cable. They will also have CRTs with better resolution than NTSC. LCD flat panel TVs will also be much cheaper.
The ATSC standard may be stabilized but the receivers are still a work in progress. Most of them have problems with sensitivity, multipath and software bugs. Receiver designs are still in flux. The biggest problem is how to cope with dynamic multipath. There are locations that receive strong ATSC signals where no commercially available receiver can successfully decode the signal.
It's a problem endemic to large organizations. Whistle blowers are punished rather than praised. There are many ways the organization can retaliate against the whistle blower. It doesn't help that we have a dysfunctional legal system, where only the rich can buy justice.
When the city I lived in switched from incandescent to mercury vapor lighting, which was much brighter, they found that the trees became stunted and sick. The trees were no longer able to tell the difference between day and night. This screwed up their internal processes and cycles.
You can bootstrap the compiler on another system that already has a running compiler. You then cross-compile the compiler to the target system. If the only difference between systems is the operating system, you can just port the startup code and libraries to the target system.
Please, huge amount of R&D? Bell Labs and UCB deserve most of the credit for whatever R&D is in Linux.
IBM has spent untold billions on R&D. They don't need to "steal" it from Linux.
The phone companies have been doing number translation for 800 numbers for years. How hard is it to map a logical phone number to a physical phone number?
Very few authors make a living from writing books. Many more books are published than those that make the best-seller list. Most authors have "day jobs". A successful book may pay for a vacation or a new car. If you are trying to strike it rich, you would be better off working part-time at McDonalds for the next 3-5 years. There is always the possibility that your novel will sell a million copies, but the odds say that it is much more likely to sell 5,000 copies and be forgotten.
CDMA can operate at 850 MHz and 1900 MHz. I believe Verizon has a lot of CDMA in the 850 MHz band. Sprint PCS runs CDMA in the 1900 MHz band. I read something that said Verizon would like to shutdown AMPS and totally switch over to CDMA.
The problem is that it used to be legal to build and sell a general coverage receiver that covered DC to Daylight. There were laws that restricted what you could do with some of signals you received, such as prohibiting disclosure to third parties, but the general principle was that any American was free to listen to anything transmitted on the public airwaves.
Enter cellular telephony (AMPS), which replaced the old mobile telephone service. Eventually, some bright bulb rediscovered that cellular telephone conversations were transmitted via UHF FM radio signals, without any encryption or signal security. Anyone with a UHF FM receiver, or an older VHF/UHF television set, could listen in on cellular phone calls. When the word got around to the general public that cellular calls were not private, the CTIA (cellular trade association) went nuts. This was a public relations problem that could hurt their sales and profits. Rather than fix the problem of broadcasting cellular calls in the clear, their "solution" was to lobby congress for a law that would prohibit sales of receivers that could listen to cellular telephone frequencies, and would criminalize the act of listening to a cellular telephone call. This was the first time that congress had made it illegal to listen to a radio signal. Of course, none of this made a damn bit of difference as to the security of a cellular telephone call. It just provided the illusion of security, which was all the CTIA was willing to pay for. It also gave a big stick to politicians who were embarrassed by the public disclosure of the contents of their cellular telephone calls. They could demand that the government prosecute the "criminals" who had the gall to embarrass them by publicizing their dirty laundry.
The difference between cheap and expensive RF hardware is how it performs in the presence of strong signals from other devices.
The military has different requirements. They are willing to trade safety, reliability and operating cost for performance and lethality. It's a question of what you optimize the design for. There isn't much of a point in building a "safe" fighter with triple redundant systems and large design margins if it is such a slow pig that it gets blown out of the sky in its first combat engagement.
The Germans had very similar problems with their torpedoes. Admiral Doenitz (U-boat Commander) was so pissed off that he had the people in charge of torpedo development and testing court-martialed.
The U.S. torpedoes had a whole set of problems that were never discovered and fixed before the war. Pre-war testing was limited, performed in artificial conditions, and restricted by bureaucracy, lack of funding, and paranoia about security.
If the CD mastering wasn't bad enough, wait until the program director and his corporate overlords at your local FM broadcast station get their hands on it. Almost all of them use boxes like the Optimod, set to hunt down and terminate all vestiges of dynamic range. They want 100% modulation in every frequency band, all the time. That's part of why FM radio sounds so bad.