If you are concerned about radiation, you should support nuclear power. Coal fired power plants release much more radiation, in the form of Uranium and Thorium, into the environment than nuclear power plants. That doesn't include all of the other nasty stuff that is produced by burning coal.
That is what happened to Kodak when they were sued by Polaroid for patent infringement on instant cameras. Kodak lost and it ended up costing them about $3 billion when it was all over.
I think the point of the lawsuit is that you can't dodge claims of patent infringement by outsourcing the production of the patented item to an overseas supplier who has figured out how to avoid paying royalties.
And no, this isn't patenting magnetism, breathing or any of the other tired clichés that get posted every time slashdot runs a story on patents. It takes real money and scientific research to invent improved permanent magnets.
One of the issues that the FAA is going to be concerned about is range safety. This means that the people who are launching the rocket will have to convince the FAA that the rocket is not going to nose over and crash into an elementary school. For NASA, commercial and military launches, there is a Range Safety Officer (RSO) who is responsible for sending a destruct command to the launch vehicle if it deviates from the planned trajectory.
Writing installers for multiple distributions is relatively easy. The killer for a commercial software product is testing. Proper testing takes a great deal of time and money. There is a big difference between "it should run" on distribution X and "tested and supported" on distribution X.
You can't have a short pulse without all those harmonics. That is what makes it ultra-wideband. You also need a transmission line and antenna that wont smear the pulse. It would have to be wideband with good group delay characteristics. The advantages of using a very short pulse would be frequency reuse. You could have a large number of transmitters and receivers simultaneously (actually it is a form of TDMA) using the frequency band.
As a firm believer in TANSTAAFL, I wonder what kind of interference this system will generate. The EM spectrum already suffers from severe noise pollution in many areas. Think about that when you run your computer with the case off.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, WHFS used to have an interesting collection of DJs that played eclectic styles of music. Each DJ played what they wanted, not some robot program director's play list. Lots of good music, much of it from bands you had never heard of, in long sets. The DJs were very low key and didn't commit the capital offense of talking over the music. See this page for some history.
I've read that spam was very popular in the UK during World War II, due to severe food rationing. If the other option is sawdust sausages, spam starts to look good.
The open source community didn't write BSD UNIX or Mach. Individual programmers, and the institutions that funded or supported their work, created that software. It is their choice as to how to license and distribute the software. The so-called open source community has no standing to complain about how other people use that software.
The old copyright law required the publisher to send two copies of the work to the Library of Congress. This ensured that the work was available to researchers and the public in later years, even if the work was out of print, and the author and publisher no longer existed.
Not everything is backwards compatible. I recently ran into a problem when trying to install an IBM 10GB IDE drive on a Tyan Tomcat IV motherboard. It turned out that the IDE implementation (Intel PIIX3) on the motherboard was incompatible with the IDE implementation on the hard drive. The IBM drive works fine on newer motherboards.
There is a problem with the current system of spectrum allocation. It is slow, inefficient and highly politicized. This has lead to a system where many frequency allocations are poorly utilized and use archaic technology. It also allows current license holders to shield themselves from competition by lobbying the Congress and the FCC. Mindless knee-jerk rants about "bad corporations" do not solve the problem. Making some spectrum allocations into "private property" or resellable leases could solve many of these problems.
If you are familiar with land mobile (two-way) radios of that era, you will see how silly this idea is. The radio designs were migrating from all-tube designs to mostly solid-state (vacuum tube exciter and finals) using discrete transistors. These were crystal-controlled FM radios in the low (25-50 Mhz) and high (132-174 MHz) VHF bands. They were also physically big and heavy. You mounted the radio in the trunk of your car and attached a control head to the dashboard. The control head had the microphone, speaker, and the volume, squelch, and channel knobs. It was connected to the radio by a long cable.
UHF (450-470 MHz) radios appeared next, but they were very similar in design to the VHF radios. It would be many years (1980s) before microprocessor controlled, frequency synthesized radios became practical and common.
A cellular telephone transceiver needs a frequency synthesizer, modem and a controller, such as a simple microprocessor. These could be built out of discrete components or early integrated circuits, but the result would be expensive, use a lot of space, electrical power and have questionable reliability. Ask anyone who has worked in a two-way radio shop about how their customers abuse the equipment. A car is a hostile environment for electronics.
I briefly worked as a mobile radiotelephone operator back in the pre-cellular era. Our main customers were funeral directors, real estate agents, car salesmen and pimps (really).
Then again, some applications are better off just staying on a free database. NASA for instance, no longer uses Oracle. They are now using MySQL instead just because of the huge amounts of licensing fees that they can now divert to other areas, while still keeping their databases very fast and useful.
Where did you hear that?
NASA uses Oracle, MS SQL, Access, DB2 and a bunch of other databases. NASA is not a monolithic organization that dictates what software can be used. Each project makes its own decisions as to what software is the best fit for its needs. It could be Linux with MySQL, NT with MS SQL or Solaris with Oracle. If you name a software package, there is probably a NASA project that uses it.
And they need to ditch "implementation defined" behavior. Pick a behavior, and MANDATE it. Evaluate function arguments left to right, one at a time, and THEN call the function. Make a[i++]=i++ have a defined meaning. Make ints of less than 32 bits illegal. Heck, force standard bit sizes of the legacy types, and use int32, int64 for future code.
Go use Java.
The philosophy of C, and to some extent C++, is that the language does not hide the underlying machine architecture from the programmer. That is why there are all of those "implementation defined" bits in the language. They reflect reality, where not every CPU is a descendant of the VAX or 80386. The language has enough implementation dependent slop to allow its efficient implementation on a wide variety of architectures. The language also gives compiler writers some freedom in how to evaluate and optimize expressions, layout data structures and pass parameters to functions.
Computers with 32-bit pointers/integers and 8-bit characters will not be around forever. They will eventually be replaced by newer architectures, perhaps with 64-bit integers, 128-bit pointers and 32-bit characters.
I think "free TV", in it's current form, is in a slow death spiral. About 85% of the population gets their TV via cable and/or DBS. The ratings for network programming have been declining for many years. Ad revenues haven't dropped at the same rate as the ratings, but I don't think that is going to last forever. The quality of network programming will continue to decline as they will have less money to spend on programming due to declining ad revenues. Why do you think "reality TV" is so hot? It's cheaper to produce than sitcoms or dramatic series. They have to compete with cable channels, which can outbid them for the rights to movies and have a more robust business model. Look at what has happened to AM radio over the last 50 years. The ratings and advertising revenues have declined to the point that it is a near-dead industry. With cable and DBS, the networks don't need their affiliates anymore. Instead of the networks paying the affiliates to carry the network feed, the networks will charge the affiliates a fee for access to the network feed. They may eventually drop the affiliates altogether and become cable channels.
If you are seriously interested in the subject, subscribe to the OpenDTV mailing list (OpenDTV at topica.com) and read the message archives. Beware, this is a high-volume mailing list.
The short symbol length in the ATSC standard makes it vulnerable to multipath. There is also a problem with too few bits allocated to the training sequence.
Blame the broken ATSC 8-VSB standard for over-the-air (OTA) transmission of HDTV. While receiver designs are improving, there are still severe deficiencies in their ability to receive signals in the presence of static and dynamic multipath. The current system was designed and tested with the assumption that the viewer would have a directional antenna, with a rotator, on a 30' mast. This would be less of a problem if cable operators would carry the HDTV broadcast signals on their systems. Pigs will exceed Mach 5 before the cable operators voluntarily carry HDTV on their systems.
How can a rational person attempt to compare the programming within a watch or toaster to that which resides in a computer system? Surely MIT is not suggesting that the two are equivalent!
You don't understand embedded systems. They range from extremely cost-sensitive single chip processors to high-end workstations. Rack-mount PCs are very popular with the engineers that I know. They are cheaper than designing a custom controller and enable the use of off-the-shelf I/O boards and software.
See this CNET article for a better description of the problem.
Actors in radio commercials get paid more if the commercials are also broadcast on the Internet. The advertisers do not want to pay the additional fees if they never asked to have their commercials simulcast on the Internet. The radio stations could pay the difference in fees to the actors or delete the commercials from the Internet feed.
Anyone who is writing multi-threaded software should have a good understanding of semaphores, critical sections, deadlock etc. It is easy to generate hard to find/reproduce bugs if you don't understand these concepts.
Consider using something other than C/C++.
You can never be too paranoid. Check all passed parameters for validity. Do range checks on indices. Verify that a pointer to foo actually points to an object of type foo.
Don't use dynamic memory allocation.
Have a recovery strategy for resource exhaustion.
Check for things that "can't happen".
For every global data structure, you should be able to say which procedures access/modify it, and under what conditions.
Read some good books on real-time and concurrent programming.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are concerned about radiation, you should support nuclear power. Coal fired power plants release much more radiation, in the form of Uranium and Thorium, into the environment than nuclear power plants. That doesn't include all of the other nasty stuff that is produced by burning coal.
That is what happened to Kodak when they were sued by Polaroid for patent infringement on instant cameras. Kodak lost and it ended up costing them about $3 billion when it was all over.
And no, this isn't patenting magnetism, breathing or any of the other tired clichés that get posted every time slashdot runs a story on patents. It takes real money and scientific research to invent improved permanent magnets.
One of the issues that the FAA is going to be concerned about is range safety. This means that the people who are launching the rocket will have to convince the FAA that the rocket is not going to nose over and crash into an elementary school. For NASA, commercial and military launches, there is a Range Safety Officer (RSO) who is responsible for sending a destruct command to the launch vehicle if it deviates from the planned trajectory.
You seem to have forgotten gems like My Mother The Car
NTFS supports multiple streams in a file. See this page. It looks like a generalization of the Mac's resource and data forks.
Writing installers for multiple distributions is relatively easy. The killer for a commercial software product is testing. Proper testing takes a great deal of time and money. There is a big difference between "it should run" on distribution X and "tested and supported" on distribution X.
As a firm believer in TANSTAAFL, I wonder what kind of interference this system will generate. The EM spectrum already suffers from severe noise pollution in many areas. Think about that when you run your computer with the case off.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, WHFS used to have an interesting collection of DJs that played eclectic styles of music. Each DJ played what they wanted, not some robot program director's play list. Lots of good music, much of it from bands you had never heard of, in long sets. The DJs were very low key and didn't commit the capital offense of talking over the music. See this page for some history.
I've read that spam was very popular in the UK during World War II, due to severe food rationing. If the other option is sawdust sausages, spam starts to look good.
The open source community didn't write BSD UNIX or Mach. Individual programmers, and the institutions that funded or supported their work, created that software. It is their choice as to how to license and distribute the software. The so-called open source community has no standing to complain about how other people use that software.
The old copyright law required the publisher to send two copies of the work to the Library of Congress. This ensured that the work was available to researchers and the public in later years, even if the work was out of print, and the author and publisher no longer existed.
Not everything is backwards compatible. I recently ran into a problem when trying to install an IBM 10GB IDE drive on a Tyan Tomcat IV motherboard. It turned out that the IDE implementation (Intel PIIX3) on the motherboard was incompatible with the IDE implementation on the hard drive. The IBM drive works fine on newer motherboards.
There is a problem with the current system of spectrum allocation. It is slow, inefficient and highly politicized. This has lead to a system where many frequency allocations are poorly utilized and use archaic technology. It also allows current license holders to shield themselves from competition by lobbying the Congress and the FCC. Mindless knee-jerk rants about "bad corporations" do not solve the problem. Making some spectrum allocations into "private property" or resellable leases could solve many of these problems.
What if Joe Blow's computer company has a branch office in Hawaii?
A cellular telephone transceiver needs a frequency synthesizer, modem and a controller, such as a simple microprocessor. These could be built out of discrete components or early integrated circuits, but the result would be expensive, use a lot of space, electrical power and have questionable reliability. Ask anyone who has worked in a two-way radio shop about how their customers abuse the equipment. A car is a hostile environment for electronics.
I briefly worked as a mobile radiotelephone operator back in the pre-cellular era. Our main customers were funeral directors, real estate agents, car salesmen and pimps (really).
Where did you hear that?
NASA uses Oracle, MS SQL, Access, DB2 and a bunch of other databases. NASA is not a monolithic organization that dictates what software can be used. Each project makes its own decisions as to what software is the best fit for its needs. It could be Linux with MySQL, NT with MS SQL or Solaris with Oracle. If you name a software package, there is probably a NASA project that uses it.
Go use Java.
The philosophy of C, and to some extent C++, is that the language does not hide the underlying machine architecture from the programmer. That is why there are all of those "implementation defined" bits in the language. They reflect reality, where not every CPU is a descendant of the VAX or 80386. The language has enough implementation dependent slop to allow its efficient implementation on a wide variety of architectures. The language also gives compiler writers some freedom in how to evaluate and optimize expressions, layout data structures and pass parameters to functions.
Computers with 32-bit pointers/integers and 8-bit characters will not be around forever. They will eventually be replaced by newer architectures, perhaps with 64-bit integers, 128-bit pointers and 32-bit characters.
I used to have a BCPL programming manual, it looked like a primitive ancestor of C.
I think "free TV", in it's current form, is in a slow death spiral. About 85% of the population gets their TV via cable and/or DBS. The ratings for network programming have been declining for many years. Ad revenues haven't dropped at the same rate as the ratings, but I don't think that is going to last forever. The quality of network programming will continue to decline as they will have less money to spend on programming due to declining ad revenues. Why do you think "reality TV" is so hot? It's cheaper to produce than sitcoms or dramatic series. They have to compete with cable channels, which can outbid them for the rights to movies and have a more robust business model. Look at what has happened to AM radio over the last 50 years. The ratings and advertising revenues have declined to the point that it is a near-dead industry. With cable and DBS, the networks don't need their affiliates anymore. Instead of the networks paying the affiliates to carry the network feed, the networks will charge the affiliates a fee for access to the network feed. They may eventually drop the affiliates altogether and become cable channels.
If you are seriously interested in the subject, subscribe to the OpenDTV mailing list (OpenDTV at topica.com) and read the message archives. Beware, this is a high-volume mailing list.
The short symbol length in the ATSC standard makes it vulnerable to multipath. There is also a problem with too few bits allocated to the training sequence.
Blame the broken ATSC 8-VSB standard for over-the-air (OTA) transmission of HDTV. While receiver designs are improving, there are still severe deficiencies in their ability to receive signals in the presence of static and dynamic multipath. The current system was designed and tested with the assumption that the viewer would have a directional antenna, with a rotator, on a 30' mast. This would be less of a problem if cable operators would carry the HDTV broadcast signals on their systems. Pigs will exceed Mach 5 before the cable operators voluntarily carry HDTV on their systems.
You don't understand embedded systems. They range from extremely cost-sensitive single chip processors to high-end workstations. Rack-mount PCs are very popular with the engineers that I know. They are cheaper than designing a custom controller and enable the use of off-the-shelf I/O boards and software.
Actors in radio commercials get paid more if the commercials are also broadcast on the Internet. The advertisers do not want to pay the additional fees if they never asked to have their commercials simulcast on the Internet. The radio stations could pay the difference in fees to the actors or delete the commercials from the Internet feed.
Consider using something other than C/C++.
You can never be too paranoid. Check all passed parameters for validity. Do range checks on indices. Verify that a pointer to foo actually points to an object of type foo.
Don't use dynamic memory allocation.
Have a recovery strategy for resource exhaustion.
Check for things that "can't happen".
For every global data structure, you should be able to say which procedures access/modify it, and under what conditions.
Read some good books on real-time and concurrent programming.