It's a hosted service, not just a file format. You have to sign up for their service, which comes with an overreaching EULA, one which includes both "circuitBee reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify or replace any part of this Agreement" and "Optional premium paid services such as extra storage or additional editing features are available on the Website." So more features may become pay services over time.
All it lets you do is look at the schematic. Looking at the examples, there doesn't seem to be any way to extract a netlist, board layout, or a bill of materials. You can't even get the original file that was uploaded. So it doesn't help you make the thing. (But you can "share it on Facebook" or "send it in a tweet".) The system seems to reflect a complete misunderstanding of what schematics are used for. "Order all the parts from Digi-Key" or "design and order PC board" features would make sense. "Share on Myspace", which they actually have, indicates complete cluelessness.
What would be more useful would be a Javascript viewer for some standard netlist formats. Then you could take your existing Eagle file, or whatever, and make it easier to view.
This is why "crowdsourcing" consistently fails as a method of business ranking. It's too easy to spam. Google was burned by this late last year when they were counting reviews on Citysearch and Yelp. That backfired badly. Local search results were polluted with junk entries. Google got a lot of bad press over this. Since then, they've stopped counting "likes" on competing sites, but they still count their own.
Google's ad customers have been complaining local spam for years,, and Google hasn't been able to fix it. It's become worse since Google combined local results with web search results, and the value of local spam went up.
It's amazing what you can do with a thousand artists and animators. Look at the credits on the thing. There are about 850 people associated with the CGI work.
The plot is mediocre, but with all that production value, you don't notice until afterward. The battle scenes are ridiculous. An infantry frontal assault into machine guns will not work. ("This proposition was thoroughly tested in WWI.") Small groups have taken fortresses (see Eben Emael) but not just by charging in there.
Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) is the former ranking member for the House Science Committee, Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee. He represents the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
NASA has their own congressman? This is pure pork.
Space-X is more likely to produce a launch system than NASA. A few months ago, they sent a capsule to orbit and recovered it safely. Their first cargo delivery to the ISS is scheduled for later this year. They're working on an abort system so that their working Falcon-9 rocket can be man rated. And in 2012, they plan to launch the Falcon Heavy, with twice the payload of the Space Shuttle.
All this is being done at costs not only far below NASA's, but below China's. We just have to keep NASA from interfering with them.
NASA, on the other hand, hasn't designed and successfully flown a completely new launch system since the 1960s.
When I saw the last stage I almost fell out of my chair!. What the hell happened to keeping it simple!
It's no worse than the various lunar landers.
The real question is whether they can get the budget to send that much mass to Mars.
Landing anything big on Mars turns out to be quite hard. There's not enough atmosphere for a soft parachute landing. But there's enough atmosphere to require a heat shield while plowing through it. Then there's not enough atmosphere to brake from Mach 5 to Mach 1 before running out of altitude. There's too much gravity for a full rocket-powered descent. A rocket facing into the atmosphere won't work until the craft has slowed below supersonic speeds.
That's what leads to what looks like an overly complex system.
Single sign-on could become an antitrust issue. A single sign-on system which supports sign-on to third-party sites, yet can be arbitrarily turned off by the provider of the sign-on system at their discretion, creates "restraint of trade" issues. Google's sign-on system reaches beyond Google; Zoho, a business email system, accepts Google signons. Facebook's sign-on system reaches far beyond Facebook.
Arguably, single sign on systems should be split off as separate companies to comply with antitrust law.
This may come up when Schmidt testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.
They're hand painted, though.
They need a color printer that can work on a 3D surface, something like an inkjet head on a 5-axis robot arm. I'm surprised that Roland doesn't make something like that yet.
Hollysys claims to be the main supplier of signalling and train protection equipment for China's high speed rail lines. There are two separate systems - classic track circuits, and a data link between units at the head and tail of each train to a train control center. Either is normally able to prevent collisions. However, in a power failure, the data link system would probably not be functioning. The track circuit system should continue to work on battery power, or, if that fails, indicate STOP.
If it's in the "cloud", in time, it will go away. Most "streaming" services seem to have a life of about five years. Size doesn't matter; WalMart Music and Microsoft PlaysForSure both went away. Zune may be going away, too.
And if it's in the "cloud", cable companies can slowly cut off your air supply with bandwidth caps, forcing you to watch their "premium" services.
Apple continually pushes everyone to go get the latest and greatest every time a new iteration of a product comes out. Got that iPad six months ago? Come get the iPad 2! Got that Mac Book? Come get the Mac Book Pro! 10.5? That's ANCIENT! Come buy 10.7!
As a horse owner, I see how various parents approach risk. Some parents hover, constantly watching their kids ride. (One barn in Silicon Valley caters to those parents. They have bleachers where the parents watch the kids take lessons.) The kids whose parents just drop them off do better with the horses. Kids do fall off, but it's better if they have their falls when they're 10 or 12 and on a pony.
An old friend of mine is the complete opposite of the overprotective mom. Her kids (one son, one daughter) grew up riding, and by their early teens, were competent to go off alone on horseback into the mountains. By their late teens, the kids were taking road trips of hundreds of miles on bicycles. Both kids are in their 20s now. The son is still in school, taking a year off for a startup right now. The daughter has graduated, and took a trip around the world alone, bicycling across whole countries, riding in a cattle roundup, surfing, kayaking, and coming home cheerful, uninjured, with hundreds of pictures. She works as a lifeguard (ocean rescue/climbing/EMT).
Interestingly, these kids are cautious. When encountering something new, they tend to hang back, carefully watch others, see how it's done and what goes wrong, then do it. They don't charge in blindly. It's not about being bold. It's about being competent.
Is this the good kind of security breach, which enables end users to do new things with their FPGAs? Or the bad kind, that enables attackers to do malicious things with others FPGAs? Or both?
This attack is only useful when an FPGA is programmed by a third-party manufacturer using a canned encrypted bitstream provided by someone else. This is the case for many products nominally made by US, Japanese, or Taiwanese firms but actually built in China. The attack allows someone with access to the encrypted bitstream to recover the unencrypted bitstream, from which they can potentially reverse-engineer the device and make changes.
An end user, who has only the programmed FPGA, can't do anything with this attack.
Fantasy football is popular, the graphics for the sports games aren't all that bad, and the NFL is on strike. If the strike doesn't settle, EA might just broadcast their own games. They'd probably be better than the exhibition games anyway.
Certain functionality in the Product may require the Software to access collections of data available through external servers. WRI makes no warranty that access to such data will be uninterrupted or that the data itself will be error free. WRI reserves the right to restrict access to, add, update, modify, or remove collections of data based on availability, Your service subscription, or otherwise at WRI's discretion.
So once they get enough suckers signed up, they can make it a pay service.
What went wrong with "the future" was that no new source of energy was developed. Fifty years ago, we had coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower, nuclear, wind, wind, biomass, and solar. Which is what we have now. Breeder reactors didn't work. Nuclear power didn't become "too cheap to meter". Fusion didn't work. Solar cells never became really cheap. Solar power satellites were a fantasy.
In each previous 50-year period back to 1800, there was some huge development that made energy cheaper. But in the last half-century, energy costs went up. This is the primary reason the exuberant energy-intensive future envisioned in the 1950s and 1960s didn't happen.
Looking ahead, there's nothing in sight that will lead to another era of cheap energy. Over the next fifty years, energy costs will go up and up.
Space travel with chemical fuels just barely works. Massive efforts on weight reduction have made it sort of work. But with all that weight reduction, everything is too fragile to be reliable. This hasn't gotten much better in the last 45 years.
There is no chemical fuel with a higher energy density than liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen, and the US has used that for almost half a century. Nuclear propulsion would work better. Nuclear rocket engines were built in the 1950s and 1960s. But they're so messy...
The frustrating thing is that almost every reactor design more complex than a boiling water reactor has had serious problems. Most high-temperature gas-cooled reactors have had major problems, although Peach Bottom continues to generate power profitably. The German AVR reactor, which was a pebble-bed design, had a pebble jam and can't be dismantled at all. About a dozen sodium-cooled reactors have been built, with few successes and several sodium fires.
That's why reactors are still BWRs and PWRs. Everything else so far is worse.
I'm not sure I understand how the judge thinks this is going to be "resolved" by the involved parties on their own. They appear to have diametrically opposed goals and philosophies:
No, that's not what it is about. The parties agreed on a settlement. But it's a class action, and the judge decided that the settlement went way beyond settling the disputes between the parties. The proposed settlement essentially rewrote copyright law as an "opt-out" system, with a special deal for Google for orphaned works. That went way too far, binding parties who were never involved in the suit.
There's probably going to be orphaned works legislation, but it will not give Google exclusive rights.
So Zynga can't put Farmville on Google+. Zynga can create a separate subsidiary to do Google+ games. They can't interoperate with games on Facebook, though.
Zynga even has to cut Facebook in on sales of Zynga's gift cards. But they get a [redacted] discount on Facebook's "credits".
There's a good selection of phones available which meet military ruggedness standards. Motorola's DEFY phone, which runs Android, is a full-face touch screen ruggedized phone. It has roughly the same form factor as an iPhone. It's also water-resistant. (If the inductive-charging people would get their act together and standardize, phones could be connectorless and sealed, which would be a win.)
That uses Corning "Gorilla Glass", which is reasonably rugged and scratch resistant. The next step up would be sapphire over polycarbonate. ("Will assist in reduction of vehicle weight without compromising ballistic performance")
Slashdot Mirror
It's a hosted service, not just a file format. You have to sign up for their service, which comes with an overreaching EULA, one which includes both "circuitBee reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify or replace any part of this Agreement" and "Optional premium paid services such as extra storage or additional editing features are available on the Website." So more features may become pay services over time.
All it lets you do is look at the schematic. Looking at the examples, there doesn't seem to be any way to extract a netlist, board layout, or a bill of materials. You can't even get the original file that was uploaded. So it doesn't help you make the thing. (But you can "share it on Facebook" or "send it in a tweet".) The system seems to reflect a complete misunderstanding of what schematics are used for. "Order all the parts from Digi-Key" or "design and order PC board" features would make sense. "Share on Myspace", which they actually have, indicates complete cluelessness.
What would be more useful would be a Javascript viewer for some standard netlist formats. Then you could take your existing Eagle file, or whatever, and make it easier to view.
This is why "crowdsourcing" consistently fails as a method of business ranking. It's too easy to spam. Google was burned by this late last year when they were counting reviews on Citysearch and Yelp. That backfired badly. Local search results were polluted with junk entries. Google got a lot of bad press over this. Since then, they've stopped counting "likes" on competing sites, but they still count their own.
Google's ad customers have been complaining local spam for years,, and Google hasn't been able to fix it. It's become worse since Google combined local results with web search results, and the value of local spam went up.
Next Media Animation in Tapei has Apple fandom covered. "When the Iphone 5 comes out, I'm screwed".
It's amazing what you can do with a thousand artists and animators. Look at the credits on the thing. There are about 850 people associated with the CGI work.
The plot is mediocre, but with all that production value, you don't notice until afterward. The battle scenes are ridiculous. An infantry frontal assault into machine guns will not work. ("This proposition was thoroughly tested in WWI.") Small groups have taken fortresses (see Eben Emael) but not just by charging in there.
The painters can fix anything.
From the article:
Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) is the former ranking member for the House Science Committee, Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee. He represents the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
NASA has their own congressman? This is pure pork.
Space-X is more likely to produce a launch system than NASA. A few months ago, they sent a capsule to orbit and recovered it safely. Their first cargo delivery to the ISS is scheduled for later this year. They're working on an abort system so that their working Falcon-9 rocket can be man rated. And in 2012, they plan to launch the Falcon Heavy, with twice the payload of the Space Shuttle.
All this is being done at costs not only far below NASA's, but below China's. We just have to keep NASA from interfering with them.
NASA, on the other hand, hasn't designed and successfully flown a completely new launch system since the 1960s.
When I saw the last stage I almost fell out of my chair!. What the hell happened to keeping it simple!
It's no worse than the various lunar landers. The real question is whether they can get the budget to send that much mass to Mars.
Landing anything big on Mars turns out to be quite hard. There's not enough atmosphere for a soft parachute landing. But there's enough atmosphere to require a heat shield while plowing through it. Then there's not enough atmosphere to brake from Mach 5 to Mach 1 before running out of altitude. There's too much gravity for a full rocket-powered descent. A rocket facing into the atmosphere won't work until the craft has slowed below supersonic speeds.
That's what leads to what looks like an overly complex system.
This is from some guy who calls himself "R.U. Serious". I vaguely remember him having some minor visibility a decade ago. Ignore.
Single sign-on could become an antitrust issue. A single sign-on system which supports sign-on to third-party sites, yet can be arbitrarily turned off by the provider of the sign-on system at their discretion, creates "restraint of trade" issues. Google's sign-on system reaches beyond Google; Zoho, a business email system, accepts Google signons. Facebook's sign-on system reaches far beyond Facebook.
Arguably, single sign on systems should be split off as separate companies to comply with antitrust law. This may come up when Schmidt testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.
They're hand painted, though. They need a color printer that can work on a 3D surface, something like an inkjet head on a 5-axis robot arm. I'm surprised that Roland doesn't make something like that yet.
Hollysys claims to be the main supplier of signalling and train protection equipment for China's high speed rail lines. There are two separate systems - classic track circuits, and a data link between units at the head and tail of each train to a train control center. Either is normally able to prevent collisions. However, in a power failure, the data link system would probably not be functioning. The track circuit system should continue to work on battery power, or, if that fails, indicate STOP.
Track circuit failures resulting in a false proceed signal are rare, but have occurred. The WMATA transit crash in Washington, D.C. was due to a track circuit failure. The US Federal Railroad Administration keeps records of all reported false proceed signals. There have been two recorded events in 10 years of false proceed indications due to lightning damage.
If it's in the "cloud", in time, it will go away. Most "streaming" services seem to have a life of about five years. Size doesn't matter; WalMart Music and Microsoft PlaysForSure both went away. Zune may be going away, too.
And if it's in the "cloud", cable companies can slowly cut off your air supply with bandwidth caps, forcing you to watch their "premium" services.
Apple continually pushes everyone to go get the latest and greatest every time a new iteration of a product comes out. Got that iPad six months ago? Come get the iPad 2! Got that Mac Book? Come get the Mac Book Pro! 10.5? That's ANCIENT! Come buy 10.7!
See the Next Media Animation piece on this. Biting satire from Li Anne in Tapei.
As a horse owner, I see how various parents approach risk. Some parents hover, constantly watching their kids ride. (One barn in Silicon Valley caters to those parents. They have bleachers where the parents watch the kids take lessons.) The kids whose parents just drop them off do better with the horses. Kids do fall off, but it's better if they have their falls when they're 10 or 12 and on a pony.
An old friend of mine is the complete opposite of the overprotective mom. Her kids (one son, one daughter) grew up riding, and by their early teens, were competent to go off alone on horseback into the mountains. By their late teens, the kids were taking road trips of hundreds of miles on bicycles. Both kids are in their 20s now. The son is still in school, taking a year off for a startup right now. The daughter has graduated, and took a trip around the world alone, bicycling across whole countries, riding in a cattle roundup, surfing, kayaking, and coming home cheerful, uninjured, with hundreds of pictures. She works as a lifeguard (ocean rescue/climbing/EMT).
Interestingly, these kids are cautious. When encountering something new, they tend to hang back, carefully watch others, see how it's done and what goes wrong, then do it. They don't charge in blindly. It's not about being bold. It's about being competent.
Is this the good kind of security breach, which enables end users to do new things with their FPGAs? Or the bad kind, that enables attackers to do malicious things with others FPGAs? Or both?
This attack is only useful when an FPGA is programmed by a third-party manufacturer using a canned encrypted bitstream provided by someone else. This is the case for many products nominally made by US, Japanese, or Taiwanese firms but actually built in China. The attack allows someone with access to the encrypted bitstream to recover the unencrypted bitstream, from which they can potentially reverse-engineer the device and make changes.
An end user, who has only the programmed FPGA, can't do anything with this attack.
For background, here's a short note on where this technology is used.
This from a company that's been pushing wired headphones for years? Maybe Apple will finally get stereo Bluetooth support to work right.
Fantasy football is popular, the graphics for the sports games aren't all that bad, and the NFL is on strike. If the strike doesn't settle, EA might just broadcast their own games. They'd probably be better than the exhibition games anyway.
It gets worse. From the EULA:
Certain functionality in the Product may require the Software to access collections of data available through external servers. WRI makes no warranty that access to such data will be uninterrupted or that the data itself will be error free. WRI reserves the right to restrict access to, add, update, modify, or remove collections of data based on availability, Your service subscription, or otherwise at WRI's discretion.
So once they get enough suckers signed up, they can make it a pay service.
What went wrong with "the future" was that no new source of energy was developed. Fifty years ago, we had coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower, nuclear, wind, wind, biomass, and solar. Which is what we have now. Breeder reactors didn't work. Nuclear power didn't become "too cheap to meter". Fusion didn't work. Solar cells never became really cheap. Solar power satellites were a fantasy.
In each previous 50-year period back to 1800, there was some huge development that made energy cheaper. But in the last half-century, energy costs went up. This is the primary reason the exuberant energy-intensive future envisioned in the 1950s and 1960s didn't happen.
Looking ahead, there's nothing in sight that will lead to another era of cheap energy. Over the next fifty years, energy costs will go up and up.
Does this mean the end of Google's self-driving cars?
Space travel with chemical fuels just barely works. Massive efforts on weight reduction have made it sort of work. But with all that weight reduction, everything is too fragile to be reliable. This hasn't gotten much better in the last 45 years.
There is no chemical fuel with a higher energy density than liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen, and the US has used that for almost half a century. Nuclear propulsion would work better. Nuclear rocket engines were built in the 1950s and 1960s. But they're so messy...
The frustrating thing is that almost every reactor design more complex than a boiling water reactor has had serious problems. Most high-temperature gas-cooled reactors have had major problems, although Peach Bottom continues to generate power profitably. The German AVR reactor, which was a pebble-bed design, had a pebble jam and can't be dismantled at all. About a dozen sodium-cooled reactors have been built, with few successes and several sodium fires.
That's why reactors are still BWRs and PWRs. Everything else so far is worse.
I'm not sure I understand how the judge thinks this is going to be "resolved" by the involved parties on their own. They appear to have diametrically opposed goals and philosophies:
No, that's not what it is about. The parties agreed on a settlement. But it's a class action, and the judge decided that the settlement went way beyond settling the disputes between the parties. The proposed settlement essentially rewrote copyright law as an "opt-out" system, with a special deal for Google for orphaned works. That went way too far, binding parties who were never involved in the suit.
There's probably going to be orphaned works legislation, but it will not give Google exclusive rights.
The applicant explicitly abandoned the trademark "BITCOIN". They formally abandoned it on July 7 via the USPTO's online system, and immediately followed up with express mail. This is quite unusual. They'd only filed the application on June 30, and the USPTO hadn't even replied yet.
It's dead.
So Zynga can't put Farmville on Google+. Zynga can create a separate subsidiary to do Google+ games. They can't interoperate with games on Facebook, though.
Zynga even has to cut Facebook in on sales of Zynga's gift cards. But they get a [redacted] discount on Facebook's "credits".
There's a good selection of phones available which meet military ruggedness standards. Motorola's DEFY phone, which runs Android, is a full-face touch screen ruggedized phone. It has roughly the same form factor as an iPhone. It's also water-resistant. (If the inductive-charging people would get their act together and standardize, phones could be connectorless and sealed, which would be a win.)
That uses Corning "Gorilla Glass", which is reasonably rugged and scratch resistant. The next step up would be sapphire over polycarbonate. ("Will assist in reduction of vehicle weight without compromising ballistic performance")