While bandwidth is low, that's not the big problem. Quality is really hard to fix over networks with time jitter. Which is why VoIP and cell phone voice quality frequently suck. The best phone audio today is from an ISDN phone to an ISDN phone - end to end uncompressed full duplex digital with hard bit timing synchronization. (ISDN voice never caught on in the US, but it's widely used in some European countries.)
Wire-line telephony is 8 bits sampled at 8KHz, so the highest potential bandwidth is 4KHz.
Compare CD audio, 16 bits sampled at 44.1 KHz per channel. Cell phones are worse; they're usually compressed down to 9600 baud or so. There are some high-end video conferencing systems with higher-bandwidth audio, but they're rare.
For games, stereo is not the right approach. Viewpoint adjusted by head tracking is. For recorded images like TV, you don't have the data to do that. But for a game, you have full 3D models and all the necessary graphics hardware. And, as that video shows, it just takes a few Wii Remote parts to do it. The effect is that, at long last, the screen becomes a window, rather than a surface.
Since games tend to be played by one player per screen, the restriction that the view only works for one person is fine. Unlike stereoscopy, there's a big win for gameplay - you can move around and change your viewpoint. You can duck behind on-screen obstacles, so you can actually use cover in a shooter.
You can hang stereo and depth of focus on this, too. And it will work better, because the system knows how far away the viewer is.
Here's a good example of an important control room. Generation 101: How PJM Operates and Dispatches. This is the control room that controls the power grid for the eastern United States. The presentation covers what the people there do. The slide "Dispatch Operations" shows the operating positions, and the next slide shows a more recent picture since the displays were upgraded.
This is a very organized operation. There are five positions, and they have specific responsibilities. Each position has a number of screens of its own, and the positions are placed close to the big wall screens most relevant to them. The transmission operator is in front of the transmission screens, the generation operator is in front of the generation screens. Those are the two people who directly run the grid. The shift supervisor, master coordinator, and reliability engineer sit further back on a raised level. There's a viewing gallery in back, behind windows, where visitors can watch but can't bother anybody. Interestingly, there are curtains for closing off the viewing windows, and they're on the control room side.
If you want to see some of the displays they are looking at, the data is available in Flash format. There's a economic system involved in power generation, with bids for power, so all the market players have to be able to see the data. The interaction between the control room and the bidders is complex. The control room does have the option of ordering "non-economic operation", where they tell generators what to do instead of merely sending price signals, but they only do that in emergencies. In more serious emergencies, they can order "conservative operation", which means all generators come on line and provide power to meet the load, regardless of cost.
That's very rare.
Note that this is an operating center, not a response center. There's a routine workload. Over the course of a day, generators are started up and shut down as the load changes. The two people in front mostly handle that. The three people in the back row are there mostly to deal with problems as they come up. The physical layout reflects that. A data center or a security monitoring center has a completely different workflow, and may need a completely different physical layout.
Stereoscopic TV ("3D" is a bit much) is awful in the living room. You have to wear glasses(!) You have to sit upright. Strobing comes back. We finally have a display technology with no flicker, and the industry wants to throw that away. This
will work fine if you have a proper "home theater" setup, but it's going to suck for casual viewing.
If we really had 3D (you move, the viewpoint changes) that would be cool. There are systems that do that, and they don't even
require glasses. (Only one person at a time can watch, though, because the image is adjusted for viewer location.) Tut that's not what's shipping.
A scary thought: the way to make this tolerable is to have the TV watch the audience. If there's anybody in the room not wearing glasses, the system drops the stereoscopy. Once that capability is in, the TV can be set up to pause if people leave. So you can't go away during commercials.
This makes good sense for Wikileaks. It gives them protection against any "accidents". The US government can ask the Swedish government to shut down Wikileaks, but that will be public, highly visible, controversial, argued in the press, and decided by Swedish courts.
"For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant.
There's been enormous progress in flight recorders. The first ones only recorded a few basic items, like altitude, airspeed, attitude, and control positions. The recording mechanism used a stainless steel tape, on which diamond points scratched graph lines. (Those were really rugged. That stainless steel tape could survive almost anything and still be read.)
Today's recorders are (inevitably) digital, recording perhaps a hundred parameters. Most key engine and airframe data is logged. They also record both what the pilot's control positions are and what the aircraft control surfaces are doing, which allows distinguishing between pilot error and control failure. There's a separate cockpit voice recorder. Enough data is recorded that the data can be loaded into an aircraft simulator and played back to reproduce the events.
Few flight recorders are not recovered. In the last 10 years, there have been four failures to recover a flight recorder - two from 9/11, Air France Flight 447, and Siberia Airlines 1812.
Of those, only Air France 447 is still a mystery in which flight recorder data would be useful. And, in fact, Air France 447 was "phoning home", over a low-bandwidth maintenance link, reporting trouble with the air data sensors.
So there's an argument for sending more data back on the maintenance links, but this does not involve "the cloud".
Big deal. Until someone makes one that actually has a useful blade, it's just a handle.
Those lightsaber guys never fought very well. See Hit Girl's first fight, in "Kick-Ass"
for someone who can handle a double-ended weapon. Chloe Grace-Moretz spent a few months
at the Toronto Circus School, plus martial arts training, to prepare for that
fight, and it shows.
I'm not sure how useful discrete math training is today. I have a lot of it, because I've done proof of correctness work and
went through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s. Number theory and combinatorics, beyond understanding "big-O" notation, hasn't been that useful. Automata theory I've never had a use for. But I've needed to get up to speed on number-crunching, which Stanford CS totally ignored back then. (That was when the "expert systems" crowd was in power. I had the frustration of going though just as expert systems were being discredited but the department hadn't caught up. CS at Stanford was transferred from Arts and Sciences to Engineering to get them some adult supervision.)
In recent years I've needed linear algebra, dynamics, differential equations, matrix algebra, and tensors. If you're into graphics or game engines or robotics or machine learning today, you need that math. Realistically, most of the stuff in Knuth is now in low-level libraries you just use. Nobody writes their own sorts or searches any more.
So what should kids get? Perhaps an intro to Matlab or Octave. They've already met graphing calculators. Introduce Octave as a graphing calculator, but far more powerful. Show what it can do on bulk data. You can run audio through Octave, so kids can try out filters, as an example. Do a Fourier transform and display a spectrum analyzer.
Show how to do the trick that changes speed without changing pitch.
Write something in Octave to extract the beat from two audio tracks, sync them, and cross-fade, to create an automatic DJ. That's about a page of code.
The best design in this line was the Bell gas-turbine powered jetpack, powered by a Williams jet engine. Burned jet fuel, ran for about 20 minutes. That was in 1965.
Sam Williams (1921-2009) seems to have been one of the few, if not the only, person who could design good little turbine engines. He did the one for the jetpack, the ones for US cruise missiles, the one for the Army's flying platform VTOL, and his company, Williams International, makes engines for small business jets.
The basic frustration with small turbofan jet engines is that below bizjet size, they don't get much cheaper. That's why general aviation is still mostly piston-powered. The minimum economic size seems to be suitable for a 5-6 passenger bizjet. This is not for lack of trying. About a half-dozen companies have gone bankrupt trying to build small general-aviation jet aircraft.
So a jetpack with reasonable flight time is quite possible, if you're willing to pay what a business jet costs.
The big headache is FLEXnet, Adobe's "license manager". It's a specialized rootkit that gives the remote licensing system access to the machine at a low level. Which is why it tends to break things a Windows application shouldn't be able to break. On Windows, it runs a background service and contacts a remote server frequently, sending undocumented information to the remote server and
accepting update commands to change software already on the computer.
FLEXnet is the successor to FlexLM, a licensing system from the 1980s. It started as a UNIX product. It's been owned at various times by Highland, Globetrotter, Macrovision, and Thoma Cressey Bravo. It was unreliable in the 1990s, and the passage of time does not seem to have improved things.
In general, it's best to avoid buying Adobe products which install the FLEXnet license server.
I wonder how he measured the holes for the keys. That's the tough part. Once you have a good model, it's a simple enough CNC machining job. Although the front panel is thicker than the original, and the keys don't project as much as they should.
It might work to simply put an undamaged calculator in a flatbed scanner, get a good image of the front, clean it up
so it just has the hole outlines for the keys, vectorize, then clean up the vectorized form.
Front Panel Express specializes in making panels with holes and lettering. They could easily do that front panel, if you laid out the design and sent it in.
OK, each unit sops up some oil, using "nanowires". Then what? The oil then has to be transferred to some collection boat. That part isn't implemented.
A fleet of semi-autonomous skimmers that deliver oil to a collection ship or a shore station would be useful. Operations like that are risky for small boats, as are operations near shore, near rocks and reefs, and such. So it's a good robot application.
The "nanowires" just sound like the usual hype from MIT's PR operation (which has gotten out of hand enough to be an embarrassment for MIT.)
If you block the top 10 ad services, browsing speed improves substantially.
Firefox BlockSite is useful for blocking, or you can edit HOSTS.TXT.
This alone will make Slashdot pages load twice as fast.
AdBlock isn't enough; it still loads the data, but doesn't display it.
There's too much ad code out there which stalls page loading until the ad is served. So you get to wait for the ad servers. Sequentially.
On the other hand you get absolutely *huge* amounts of data.
There's an opportunity there for developing new compression techniques. Compression for surveillance data really should be quite different from entertainment content. You want a really high quality frame once in a while, maybe once a second, from which stills can be extracted. You can accept considerably lower quality for intermediate frames. Compression of scenes that don't change much should be very high. An option to go to higher quality when something interesting appears or some other alarm system indicates activity is worthwhile.
That station isn't talking to spies. There's too little data transmitted. There are "numbers stations" which do that; here.s one in English. Many exist; the US has some, the UK has some, Egypt has some, etc. Some broadcast with a live voice, some use a voice synthesizer. There are also "polytone stations", which broadcast slow tone-coded data, like an ancient modem. Some such data has been successfully decoded into 5-digit groups of decimal digits.
Nor is it likely to be a "we're still alive and everything is OK" signal; signals for that exist, and they have some cryptographic content so they can't be easily faked.
If it's mostly steady pulses, it's probably for propagation measurement. That might be done so that some other related station can get through better. But the pulse station itself seems to lack much of a data payload.
The real application for ultra-high resolution is surveillance cams. Something interesting might happen somewhere in a wide field of view, and when it does, detail is useful.
This is just the maintenance crew. NASA's real collapse came at the end of Apollo, when they laid off most of the people who designed and engineered spacecraft. NASA, like Google now, had been the place where the really smart and competent people went. That all ended around 1973.
Apple fixed occlusion query in OpenGL, which matters when you're looking into a light source. Useful when sun near horizon in game. Nice, but no big deal.
We need a rule that if network connectivity is provided by a company which uses (or is affiliated with a company that uses) public rights-of-way for its cables, or public airwaves for its transmissions, it is a common carrier. All data shippers must receive equal treatment, and the carrier itself cannot compete in the content business.
We used to have that in the US, and it forced a separation between ISPs and telcos. That was lost somewhere in "telecom deregulation". We need it back.
Now we have the worst of both worlds - unregulated carriers with monopoly right of way rights.
There's still a hole. See Xorg Large Memory Attacks, section 4. Opening a one-page gap in mapped memory at the top of the stack is a workaround, not a fix.
This looks like bad design. Someone got too cute with the MMU. The basic problem is shared memory between a privileged and a non-privileged program. That just screams "security hole". It was put in to get a performance advantage for graphics-heavy applications on X, probably games. "MIT-SHM" shouldn't be enabled on a production server.
DocBook - like HTML 1.0, only dumber
on
DocBook 5
·
· Score: 0
DocBook is being used for what HTML was originally intended - technical publications.
Why not just use HTML? It even supports pictures!
Slashdot Mirror
While bandwidth is low, that's not the big problem. Quality is really hard to fix over networks with time jitter. Which is why VoIP and cell phone voice quality frequently suck. The best phone audio today is from an ISDN phone to an ISDN phone - end to end uncompressed full duplex digital with hard bit timing synchronization. (ISDN voice never caught on in the US, but it's widely used in some European countries.)
Wire-line telephony is 8 bits sampled at 8KHz, so the highest potential bandwidth is 4KHz. Compare CD audio, 16 bits sampled at 44.1 KHz per channel. Cell phones are worse; they're usually compressed down to 9600 baud or so. There are some high-end video conferencing systems with higher-bandwidth audio, but they're rare.
For games, stereo is not the right approach. Viewpoint adjusted by head tracking is. For recorded images like TV, you don't have the data to do that. But for a game, you have full 3D models and all the necessary graphics hardware. And, as that video shows, it just takes a few Wii Remote parts to do it. The effect is that, at long last, the screen becomes a window, rather than a surface.
Since games tend to be played by one player per screen, the restriction that the view only works for one person is fine. Unlike stereoscopy, there's a big win for gameplay - you can move around and change your viewpoint. You can duck behind on-screen obstacles, so you can actually use cover in a shooter.
You can hang stereo and depth of focus on this, too. And it will work better, because the system knows how far away the viewer is.
When this is done well, the visual effect is spectacular.
Here's a good example of an important control room. Generation 101: How PJM Operates and Dispatches. This is the control room that controls the power grid for the eastern United States. The presentation covers what the people there do. The slide "Dispatch Operations" shows the operating positions, and the next slide shows a more recent picture since the displays were upgraded.
This is a very organized operation. There are five positions, and they have specific responsibilities. Each position has a number of screens of its own, and the positions are placed close to the big wall screens most relevant to them. The transmission operator is in front of the transmission screens, the generation operator is in front of the generation screens. Those are the two people who directly run the grid. The shift supervisor, master coordinator, and reliability engineer sit further back on a raised level. There's a viewing gallery in back, behind windows, where visitors can watch but can't bother anybody. Interestingly, there are curtains for closing off the viewing windows, and they're on the control room side.
If you want to see some of the displays they are looking at, the data is available in Flash format. There's a economic system involved in power generation, with bids for power, so all the market players have to be able to see the data. The interaction between the control room and the bidders is complex. The control room does have the option of ordering "non-economic operation", where they tell generators what to do instead of merely sending price signals, but they only do that in emergencies. In more serious emergencies, they can order "conservative operation", which means all generators come on line and provide power to meet the load, regardless of cost. That's very rare.
Note that this is an operating center, not a response center. There's a routine workload. Over the course of a day, generators are started up and shut down as the load changes. The two people in front mostly handle that. The three people in the back row are there mostly to deal with problems as they come up. The physical layout reflects that. A data center or a security monitoring center has a completely different workflow, and may need a completely different physical layout.
Stereoscopic TV ("3D" is a bit much) is awful in the living room. You have to wear glasses(!) You have to sit upright. Strobing comes back. We finally have a display technology with no flicker, and the industry wants to throw that away. This will work fine if you have a proper "home theater" setup, but it's going to suck for casual viewing.
If we really had 3D (you move, the viewpoint changes) that would be cool. There are systems that do that, and they don't even require glasses. (Only one person at a time can watch, though, because the image is adjusted for viewer location.) Tut that's not what's shipping.
A scary thought: the way to make this tolerable is to have the TV watch the audience. If there's anybody in the room not wearing glasses, the system drops the stereoscopy. Once that capability is in, the TV can be set up to pause if people leave. So you can't go away during commercials.
This makes good sense for Wikileaks. It gives them protection against any "accidents". The US government can ask the Swedish government to shut down Wikileaks, but that will be public, highly visible, controversial, argued in the press, and decided by Swedish courts.
"For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant.
There's been enormous progress in flight recorders. The first ones only recorded a few basic items, like altitude, airspeed, attitude, and control positions. The recording mechanism used a stainless steel tape, on which diamond points scratched graph lines. (Those were really rugged. That stainless steel tape could survive almost anything and still be read.)
Today's recorders are (inevitably) digital, recording perhaps a hundred parameters. Most key engine and airframe data is logged. They also record both what the pilot's control positions are and what the aircraft control surfaces are doing, which allows distinguishing between pilot error and control failure. There's a separate cockpit voice recorder. Enough data is recorded that the data can be loaded into an aircraft simulator and played back to reproduce the events.
Few flight recorders are not recovered. In the last 10 years, there have been four failures to recover a flight recorder - two from 9/11, Air France Flight 447, and Siberia Airlines 1812. Of those, only Air France 447 is still a mystery in which flight recorder data would be useful. And, in fact, Air France 447 was "phoning home", over a low-bandwidth maintenance link, reporting trouble with the air data sensors.
So there's an argument for sending more data back on the maintenance links, but this does not involve "the cloud".
The kind of blade that goes through steel and concrete like a hot knife through butter? Not likely at all. It's a fantasy.
Well, no.
Big deal. Until someone makes one that actually has a useful blade, it's just a handle.
Those lightsaber guys never fought very well. See Hit Girl's first fight, in "Kick-Ass" for someone who can handle a double-ended weapon. Chloe Grace-Moretz spent a few months at the Toronto Circus School, plus martial arts training, to prepare for that fight, and it shows.
This is just the unboxing article. Wait for the review, after someone has read through the papers. Or at least scanned them in.
My CS degree's discrete math curriculum?
I'm not sure how useful discrete math training is today. I have a lot of it, because I've done proof of correctness work and went through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s. Number theory and combinatorics, beyond understanding "big-O" notation, hasn't been that useful. Automata theory I've never had a use for. But I've needed to get up to speed on number-crunching, which Stanford CS totally ignored back then. (That was when the "expert systems" crowd was in power. I had the frustration of going though just as expert systems were being discredited but the department hadn't caught up. CS at Stanford was transferred from Arts and Sciences to Engineering to get them some adult supervision.)
In recent years I've needed linear algebra, dynamics, differential equations, matrix algebra, and tensors. If you're into graphics or game engines or robotics or machine learning today, you need that math. Realistically, most of the stuff in Knuth is now in low-level libraries you just use. Nobody writes their own sorts or searches any more.
So what should kids get? Perhaps an intro to Matlab or Octave. They've already met graphing calculators. Introduce Octave as a graphing calculator, but far more powerful. Show what it can do on bulk data. You can run audio through Octave, so kids can try out filters, as an example. Do a Fourier transform and display a spectrum analyzer. Show how to do the trick that changes speed without changing pitch. Write something in Octave to extract the beat from two audio tracks, sync them, and cross-fade, to create an automatic DJ. That's about a page of code.
The best design in this line was the Bell gas-turbine powered jetpack, powered by a Williams jet engine. Burned jet fuel, ran for about 20 minutes. That was in 1965.
Sam Williams (1921-2009) seems to have been one of the few, if not the only, person who could design good little turbine engines. He did the one for the jetpack, the ones for US cruise missiles, the one for the Army's flying platform VTOL, and his company, Williams International, makes engines for small business jets.
The basic frustration with small turbofan jet engines is that below bizjet size, they don't get much cheaper. That's why general aviation is still mostly piston-powered. The minimum economic size seems to be suitable for a 5-6 passenger bizjet. This is not for lack of trying. About a half-dozen companies have gone bankrupt trying to build small general-aviation jet aircraft.
So a jetpack with reasonable flight time is quite possible, if you're willing to pay what a business jet costs.
The big headache is FLEXnet, Adobe's "license manager". It's a specialized rootkit that gives the remote licensing system access to the machine at a low level. Which is why it tends to break things a Windows application shouldn't be able to break. On Windows, it runs a background service and contacts a remote server frequently, sending undocumented information to the remote server and accepting update commands to change software already on the computer.
FLEXnet is the successor to FlexLM, a licensing system from the 1980s. It started as a UNIX product. It's been owned at various times by Highland, Globetrotter, Macrovision, and Thoma Cressey Bravo. It was unreliable in the 1990s, and the passage of time does not seem to have improved things.
In general, it's best to avoid buying Adobe products which install the FLEXnet license server.
I wonder how he measured the holes for the keys. That's the tough part. Once you have a good model, it's a simple enough CNC machining job. Although the front panel is thicker than the original, and the keys don't project as much as they should.
It might work to simply put an undamaged calculator in a flatbed scanner, get a good image of the front, clean it up so it just has the hole outlines for the keys, vectorize, then clean up the vectorized form.
Front Panel Express specializes in making panels with holes and lettering. They could easily do that front panel, if you laid out the design and sent it in.
OK, each unit sops up some oil, using "nanowires". Then what? The oil then has to be transferred to some collection boat. That part isn't implemented.
A fleet of semi-autonomous skimmers that deliver oil to a collection ship or a shore station would be useful. Operations like that are risky for small boats, as are operations near shore, near rocks and reefs, and such. So it's a good robot application.
The "nanowires" just sound like the usual hype from MIT's PR operation (which has gotten out of hand enough to be an embarrassment for MIT.)
If you want to speed up your browser, just block the following domains:
If you block the top 10 ad services, browsing speed improves substantially. Firefox BlockSite is useful for blocking, or you can edit HOSTS.TXT. This alone will make Slashdot pages load twice as fast. AdBlock isn't enough; it still loads the data, but doesn't display it. There's too much ad code out there which stalls page loading until the ad is served. So you get to wait for the ad servers. Sequentially.
Google did that in their glory years. I've been contacted by Google recruiting because of posts I made on comp.lang.c++.
On the other hand you get absolutely *huge* amounts of data.
There's an opportunity there for developing new compression techniques. Compression for surveillance data really should be quite different from entertainment content. You want a really high quality frame once in a while, maybe once a second, from which stills can be extracted. You can accept considerably lower quality for intermediate frames. Compression of scenes that don't change much should be very high. An option to go to higher quality when something interesting appears or some other alarm system indicates activity is worthwhile.
The fueling station has a web site. They offer hydrogen, compressed natural gas, bio-diesel, and ethanol options.
Only one (1) vehicle used hydrogen from that station - a fuel cell powered 2008 Chevy Equinox from GM's now-concluded "Project Driveway".
That station isn't talking to spies. There's too little data transmitted. There are "numbers stations" which do that; here.s one in English. Many exist; the US has some, the UK has some, Egypt has some, etc. Some broadcast with a live voice, some use a voice synthesizer. There are also "polytone stations", which broadcast slow tone-coded data, like an ancient modem. Some such data has been successfully decoded into 5-digit groups of decimal digits.
Nor is it likely to be a "we're still alive and everything is OK" signal; signals for that exist, and they have some cryptographic content so they can't be easily faked.
If it's mostly steady pulses, it's probably for propagation measurement. That might be done so that some other related station can get through better. But the pulse station itself seems to lack much of a data payload.
The real application for ultra-high resolution is surveillance cams. Something interesting might happen somewhere in a wide field of view, and when it does, detail is useful.
This is just the maintenance crew. NASA's real collapse came at the end of Apollo, when they laid off most of the people who designed and engineered spacecraft. NASA, like Google now, had been the place where the really smart and competent people went. That all ended around 1973.
Apple fixed occlusion query in OpenGL, which matters when you're looking into a light source. Useful when sun near horizon in game. Nice, but no big deal.
We need a rule that if network connectivity is provided by a company which uses (or is affiliated with a company that uses) public rights-of-way for its cables, or public airwaves for its transmissions, it is a common carrier. All data shippers must receive equal treatment, and the carrier itself cannot compete in the content business.
We used to have that in the US, and it forced a separation between ISPs and telcos. That was lost somewhere in "telecom deregulation". We need it back.
Now we have the worst of both worlds - unregulated carriers with monopoly right of way rights.
There's still a hole. See Xorg Large Memory Attacks, section 4. Opening a one-page gap in mapped memory at the top of the stack is a workaround, not a fix.
This looks like bad design. Someone got too cute with the MMU. The basic problem is shared memory between a privileged and a non-privileged program. That just screams "security hole". It was put in to get a performance advantage for graphics-heavy applications on X, probably games. "MIT-SHM" shouldn't be enabled on a production server.
DocBook is being used for what HTML was originally intended - technical publications. Why not just use HTML? It even supports pictures!