This is another
Liquid Robotics Wave Glider. It's a simple, clever propulsion idea, which is well-explained on the web site. The only powered mechanical part is a rudder. A GPS provides position, solar panels provide power for the electronics, and an Iridium satellite link provides command and control. It's about the size of a surfboard.
Performance is surprisingly good. Wave gliders have been sent from Hawaii to California, then up to Alaska and back. It can generally stay within 50 meters of the desired track. It's too small and light to hurt anything operating in open ocean. The Coast Guard classifies it as "floating debris", so it doesn't have to show lights.
It's also useful when you simply want to park an instrument package in one location. It's much easier than anchoring a buoy in deep water. They had one in Monterey Bay for months, making small circles to stay in one area.
I have a CRT television that at the time of purchase, was advertised as a 'flat screen TV' because it has a flat rather than a convex screen surface.
It's worse than that. The CRT industry managed to get the FTC to allow them to advertise CRTs whose faces were sections of a cylinder, rather than a sphere, as "flat". Much to the annoyance of one vendor which had an actual flat-faced CRT.
This is a PR stunt. It's not like guns are expensive or hard to get in the US. It's not good engineering, either. If you're going to design a plastic gun, design a plastic gun, accepting that it's weaker than metal but you can form more complex parts. Maybe the whole trigger assembly can be made in one piece, with flexible parts. Replacing individual parts from a metal gun with inferior plastic parts is a PR stunt.
3D printed plastic parts tend to be weaker than injection-moulded plastic parts. The bonds between layers are weak. For the RepRap/MakerBot extruder type machines, the bonds are pathetically weak. Those machine work by trying to weld a hot thing to a cold thing. That never bonds well.
Outside of the supercomputing community, it's never gone mainstream. Microsoft is at least trying to do it for C#, which is a reasonable language. An interesting point is that this Microsoft approach exploits immutable objects. Immutable objects can be freely shared without locking, so wide use of immutable objects makes automatic extraction of parallelism easier.
I'd looked at doing something similar for Python, to get rid of the Global Interpreter Lock, Python's boat-anchor. Python already makes wide use of immutable objects, but doesn't gain any performance from them. If everything is thread-local, immutable, or synchronized in the Java sense, you don't need global locking. But the politics of the Python community do not favor performance. (Potentially, Python could be up to at least the LISP level of performance, within a factor of 2 of C, if the language was restricted in certain ways.)
Another part of the problem is the pernicious heritage of POSIX/Linux locking primitives. Many programmers think that locking is an library or OS-level problem, not a language level problem. Locking via library primitives means language doesn't know what data is locked by which lock. This makes optimization and race checking very tough.
The political and social problems here are tougher than the technical ones. So the open source community can't solve them. It takes someone with a big hammer, like Microsoft, to do it.
I don't see how the Raspberry Pi can compete with similar products like the MK808 or UG802.
The other vendors aren't spamming all over tech sites.
(The Raspberry Pi people just take a really good system on a chip from China, slap it on a badly laid out board, and act like they've done something important. Annoying.)
Imagine, the sort of panel lighting you see all the time in sci fi.
It's been available since the 1960s. Electroluminescent sheets have been around for over 40 years. They're on the expensive side and light output per unit area is low, but they work fine. Some versions last for decades. (Some don't, which is a big problem for permanent installation.) They make good night lights and somewhat dim display backlights.
So this is not a new thing. If the new version is a lot brighter or a lot cheaper, it might be useful. For now, it's another "nanotechnology" materials science article about an interesting lab phenomenon.
When you are hired to work for Radio Shack they make you sign an agreement that ANY inventions that you come up with while employed by them are their property.
That's illegal and unenforceable in California. Which is one reason Silicon Valley is here.
Each elevator has its own controller, which is relatively simple. When there's more than one elevator, there's also a group controller, which makes the decisions about which elevator responds to which call. All the smarts are in the group controller.
Many elevators have a key switch for "independent service", which disconnects them from the group controller. Then they only respond to the buttons in the car. The group controller isn't necessary to basic elevator operation.
Every business that has rented the building in San Francisco which Zynga now occupies has tanked.
First it was the Fashion Center, a space for the rag trade in San Francisco. It was never more than half rented, and then the entire garment industry in SF collapsed.
Then for a while it was occupied by Sega. (Remember Sega? Game console maker? No?) Some of the cooler interior spaces were removed (the building had a stage and fashion runway, and a nice atrium) and the place became office space.
Now Zynga owns it. In an excess of confidence, they bought the building. Now they have too much office space, and everybody is bored with Farmville and its clones.
Are you conflating RTGs and reactors? I associate thermocouples with RTGs, not reactors, and a cursory wikipedia search didn't find any reactors using thermocouples.
No, I'm not The US launched one reactor, and it used a thermocouple-type generator. The USSR launched many radar satellites with reactors in the 1KW to 5KW electrical output range. One crashed into Canada.
Nuclear reactors have been used in space since the 1960s, by both the US and USSR. They've generally powered thermocouple-type electrical generators, which are inefficient but very reliable. The one US reactor launched massed 290Kg and produced 500 watts. Soviet reactors were bigger and produced more power.
The innovation here is a small unit around 65Kg that produces only 24 watts. Electronics has become so low-power that a 24 watt power plant is useful.
How many times have we heard about Linux non-server products from major vendors that never showed up in retail channels? Dell. HP, and ASUS have each done that more than once.
"Ultrabooks" are just overpriced "netbooks". I rather liked the EeePC line, which is now dead. I have three of their netbooks. Remember the Eee PC X101, for under $200? The industry has stamped out low-end netbooks to boost profit margins.
If it's a set for you personally, the Jensen technicians's kit is a good start. I have one of their larger kits, and have used it regularly for years. If it's for a room, get a standard wheeled toolchest.
Those are just basic mechanical tools. Test equipment has been covered by others. A few specialized items you might want:
A label maker.
Heat gun and heat-shrink tubing. Good for shrink wrapping labels onto cables.
Cable tie tensioner, cable ties, and tags for use with cable ties.
Power outlet tester, to test for reversed polarity and ground failure.
Infrared non-contact thermometer. These are as cheap as US$40 now. You point it at something and it tells you the temperature. Find hot spots in racks, failed fans, etc.
Air flow meters are somewhat more expensive, but useful if you're responsible for any HVAC system.
Given the "artistic" layout of the strips in that photo, I'd guess that that was some Newsday photographer's idea of a dramatic reenactment, rather than an actual handful of the strips in question.
I asked. The reporter and photographer both insist that the strips shown are the ones brought in by the person who reported finding them. However, they don't know if that person really found them in parade confetti.
The data is used in several ways. The most important one is that when the system detects high traffic density at slow speed at one sensor, and lower density at higher speed at the next one in the same direction, it means trouble, usually an accident. The traffic detectors report the lanes separately. If something is blocking a lane and traffic is going around it, that's detected too. Cell phone and Bluetooth monitoring won't give you that.
CALTRANS has had cameras (which you can watch on line) on high poles over freeways for decades. Some have pan, tilt, and zoom capability, so when the automated system detects trouble, someone can use a camera to look at the problem area and dispatch whatever is needed.
Another use of this data is to control the metering light system at on-ramps. Freeway throughput peaks at 35 MPH (at higher speeds, the cars have to space out more) and cars are deliberately delayed a few seconds at on-ramps when speeds drop below that level.
Both of these functions require reasonably accurate data, but there's no need to identify cars individually. This all works quite well without it. Probably better. Counting all the cars on a second by second basis is more useful for detecting problems fast than some statistical measure of some of them.
The data also goes out to web sites, apps, driving time predictors, etc. There's an free API, integration with transit data, integration with CHP incident info, a developer group, etc.
A truism of traffic management is that fast response to trouble on a freeway increases the capacity by about one lane, and it's a lot cheaper than adding a lane.
So I'm not too impressed with some small-scale trial that snoops on Bluetooth headsets.
The post is basically a troll for a video. The video is based on an old list of MySQL 4.x gotchas, many of which were fixed in the 5.x series. Most of them involve things like the semantics of NULL in special cases, truncation of indexed strings with trailing spaces, and similar stuff that an application shouldn't be relying on. There's a comparable list of PostGreSQL gotchas from the same source.
MySQL has political problems, because Oracle owns it and would prefer users buy their commercial products. The future of the free version is uncertain. The problems in the video aren't the ones to worry about.
I'm impressed. That structure was proposed over 20 years ago, but the USSR didn't build it and Ukraine couldn't afford it. Navarco, from France, is building it now, and the European Union is putting up most of the money.
It's badly needed. The containment structure the USSR quickly put up (using 500,000 people in shifts) after the disaster is in bad shape. With protective gear, people can go inside for short periods, and they can see daylight.
Only 47 people were killed directly. Maybe 4000 to 9000 had their lives shortened by radiation exposure.
"We could deal with the cancer problem after a nuclear war by failing to rebuild the tobacco industry."
ICOA.PK is "icoacorp.com". They're a "wireless company" in a limited sense. Their business is installing WiFi nodes in airports, motels, trailer parks, etc. They provide a "Tollbooth" system of the kind found in hotels where you have to pay to get on the network. They were apparently reasonably successful at this around 2002-2009, but not so much since. They have no exciting technology and serve no key market that would be of interest to Google.
Yahoo's stock quotes show the stock declining from over $300 in 2005 to $0.0001 now. They must have issued more stock. They couldn't have had 3 billion shares outstanding at $300 a share, for a trillion dollar market cap. Somehow they blew it, but I haven't read through the SEC filings to find out how.
Central Computer, Silicon Valley's PC retailer, will also sell you a "no crapware" machine if you ask. They actually put "no crapware" on the purchase order.
They're whining because the next generation of CPUs will be soldered onto the board. Well, of course. This is the system on a chip era. Everything else is soldered onto the board. Why not the CPU?
The bigger concern is that without serious competition from AMD, Intel is raising prices.
The ticker symbol is ICOA.PK. This is an operating company? The stock has been around $0.0001. Even on the Pink Sheets, companies don't usually go that low. There are 3.49 billion shares outstanding. That's a market cap of $349,000. With the frantic trading today, the price briefly went all the way up to $0.0004.
Slashdot Mirror
This is another Liquid Robotics Wave Glider. It's a simple, clever propulsion idea, which is well-explained on the web site. The only powered mechanical part is a rudder. A GPS provides position, solar panels provide power for the electronics, and an Iridium satellite link provides command and control. It's about the size of a surfboard.
Performance is surprisingly good. Wave gliders have been sent from Hawaii to California, then up to Alaska and back. It can generally stay within 50 meters of the desired track. It's too small and light to hurt anything operating in open ocean. The Coast Guard classifies it as "floating debris", so it doesn't have to show lights.
It's also useful when you simply want to park an instrument package in one location. It's much easier than anchoring a buoy in deep water. They had one in Monterey Bay for months, making small circles to stay in one area.
I assume you are talking about Sony.
No, Zenith, which had true flat-screen CRTs from the mid-1980s.
I have a CRT television that at the time of purchase, was advertised as a 'flat screen TV' because it has a flat rather than a convex screen surface.
It's worse than that. The CRT industry managed to get the FTC to allow them to advertise CRTs whose faces were sections of a cylinder, rather than a sphere, as "flat". Much to the annoyance of one vendor which had an actual flat-faced CRT.
Remember OpenMoko, the open source cell phone? By the time it shipped, it was obsolete. And they didn't even have to do IC design.
There are parts such as the Allwinner family which have no US intellectual property. That's how they can ship a rather impressive ARM SOIC for $7.
This is a PR stunt. It's not like guns are expensive or hard to get in the US. It's not good engineering, either. If you're going to design a plastic gun, design a plastic gun, accepting that it's weaker than metal but you can form more complex parts. Maybe the whole trigger assembly can be made in one piece, with flexible parts. Replacing individual parts from a metal gun with inferior plastic parts is a PR stunt.
3D printed plastic parts tend to be weaker than injection-moulded plastic parts. The bonds between layers are weak. For the RepRap/MakerBot extruder type machines, the bonds are pathetically weak. Those machine work by trying to weld a hot thing to a cold thing. That never bonds well.
Automatically paralleling compilers aren't new. SGI had one for C ten years ago. Intel has it for C++ and Fortran now. It's been done for Matlab. There's plenty of theory.
Outside of the supercomputing community, it's never gone mainstream. Microsoft is at least trying to do it for C#, which is a reasonable language. An interesting point is that this Microsoft approach exploits immutable objects. Immutable objects can be freely shared without locking, so wide use of immutable objects makes automatic extraction of parallelism easier.
I'd looked at doing something similar for Python, to get rid of the Global Interpreter Lock, Python's boat-anchor. Python already makes wide use of immutable objects, but doesn't gain any performance from them. If everything is thread-local, immutable, or synchronized in the Java sense, you don't need global locking. But the politics of the Python community do not favor performance. (Potentially, Python could be up to at least the LISP level of performance, within a factor of 2 of C, if the language was restricted in certain ways.)
Another part of the problem is the pernicious heritage of POSIX/Linux locking primitives. Many programmers think that locking is an library or OS-level problem, not a language level problem. Locking via library primitives means language doesn't know what data is locked by which lock. This makes optimization and race checking very tough.
The political and social problems here are tougher than the technical ones. So the open source community can't solve them. It takes someone with a big hammer, like Microsoft, to do it.
"Who tells whom what to do?" - V. Lenin
"If you're a Steam user, you can set up Big Picture by simply by connecting your PC or Mac to your TV via a single HDMI cable."
So what kept you from doing that last month, or last year?
I don't see how the Raspberry Pi can compete with similar products like the MK808 or UG802.
The other vendors aren't spamming all over tech sites.
(The Raspberry Pi people just take a really good system on a chip from China, slap it on a badly laid out board, and act like they've done something important. Annoying.)
Imagine, the sort of panel lighting you see all the time in sci fi.
It's been available since the 1960s. Electroluminescent sheets have been around for over 40 years. They're on the expensive side and light output per unit area is low, but they work fine. Some versions last for decades. (Some don't, which is a big problem for permanent installation.) They make good night lights and somewhat dim display backlights.
Here's a A3 sized white electroluminescent sheet. About 12" x 17", costs $125.
So this is not a new thing. If the new version is a lot brighter or a lot cheaper, it might be useful. For now, it's another "nanotechnology" materials science article about an interesting lab phenomenon.
When you are hired to work for Radio Shack they make you sign an agreement that ANY inventions that you come up with while employed by them are their property.
That's illegal and unenforceable in California. Which is one reason Silicon Valley is here.
Each elevator has its own controller, which is relatively simple. When there's more than one elevator, there's also a group controller, which makes the decisions about which elevator responds to which call. All the smarts are in the group controller.
Many elevators have a key switch for "independent service", which disconnects them from the group controller. Then they only respond to the buttons in the car. The group controller isn't necessary to basic elevator operation.
Every business that has rented the building in San Francisco which Zynga now occupies has tanked.
First it was the Fashion Center, a space for the rag trade in San Francisco. It was never more than half rented, and then the entire garment industry in SF collapsed.
Then for a while it was occupied by Sega. (Remember Sega? Game console maker? No?) Some of the cooler interior spaces were removed (the building had a stage and fashion runway, and a nice atrium) and the place became office space.
Now Zynga owns it. In an excess of confidence, they bought the building. Now they have too much office space, and everybody is bored with Farmville and its clones.
Are you conflating RTGs and reactors? I associate thermocouples with RTGs, not reactors, and a cursory wikipedia search didn't find any reactors using thermocouples.
No, I'm not The US launched one reactor, and it used a thermocouple-type generator. The USSR launched many radar satellites with reactors in the 1KW to 5KW electrical output range. One crashed into Canada.
Nuclear reactors have been used in space since the 1960s, by both the US and USSR. They've generally powered thermocouple-type electrical generators, which are inefficient but very reliable. The one US reactor launched massed 290Kg and produced 500 watts. Soviet reactors were bigger and produced more power.
The innovation here is a small unit around 65Kg that produces only 24 watts. Electronics has become so low-power that a 24 watt power plant is useful.
Note that all these reactors are unshielded.
How many times have we heard about Linux non-server products from major vendors that never showed up in retail channels? Dell. HP, and ASUS have each done that more than once.
"Ultrabooks" are just overpriced "netbooks". I rather liked the EeePC line, which is now dead. I have three of their netbooks. Remember the Eee PC X101, for under $200? The industry has stamped out low-end netbooks to boost profit margins.
If it's a set for you personally, the Jensen technicians's kit is a good start. I have one of their larger kits, and have used it regularly for years. If it's for a room, get a standard wheeled toolchest.
Those are just basic mechanical tools. Test equipment has been covered by others. A few specialized items you might want:
Given the "artistic" layout of the strips in that photo, I'd guess that that was some Newsday photographer's idea of a dramatic reenactment, rather than an actual handful of the strips in question.
I asked. The reporter and photographer both insist that the strips shown are the ones brought in by the person who reported finding them. However, they don't know if that person really found them in parade confetti.
CALTRANS uses loop detectors in freeways and major roads to monitor congestion. They just count cars in each lane and measure how fast they're going. They've been doing that for over two decades. You can see the result at . LA used to have a dedicated cable channel with that data. No privacy-invading user-identifying technology needed.
The data is used in several ways. The most important one is that when the system detects high traffic density at slow speed at one sensor, and lower density at higher speed at the next one in the same direction, it means trouble, usually an accident. The traffic detectors report the lanes separately. If something is blocking a lane and traffic is going around it, that's detected too. Cell phone and Bluetooth monitoring won't give you that.
CALTRANS has had cameras (which you can watch on line) on high poles over freeways for decades. Some have pan, tilt, and zoom capability, so when the automated system detects trouble, someone can use a camera to look at the problem area and dispatch whatever is needed.
Another use of this data is to control the metering light system at on-ramps. Freeway throughput peaks at 35 MPH (at higher speeds, the cars have to space out more) and cars are deliberately delayed a few seconds at on-ramps when speeds drop below that level.
Both of these functions require reasonably accurate data, but there's no need to identify cars individually. This all works quite well without it. Probably better. Counting all the cars on a second by second basis is more useful for detecting problems fast than some statistical measure of some of them.
The data also goes out to web sites, apps, driving time predictors, etc. There's an free API, integration with transit data, integration with CHP incident info, a developer group, etc.
A truism of traffic management is that fast response to trouble on a freeway increases the capacity by about one lane, and it's a lot cheaper than adding a lane.
So I'm not too impressed with some small-scale trial that snoops on Bluetooth headsets.
The post is basically a troll for a video. The video is based on an old list of MySQL 4.x gotchas, many of which were fixed in the 5.x series. Most of them involve things like the semantics of NULL in special cases, truncation of indexed strings with trailing spaces, and similar stuff that an application shouldn't be relying on. There's a comparable list of PostGreSQL gotchas from the same source.
MySQL has political problems, because Oracle owns it and would prefer users buy their commercial products. The future of the free version is uncertain. The problems in the video aren't the ones to worry about.
I'm impressed. That structure was proposed over 20 years ago, but the USSR didn't build it and Ukraine couldn't afford it. Navarco, from France, is building it now, and the European Union is putting up most of the money.
It's badly needed. The containment structure the USSR quickly put up (using 500,000 people in shifts) after the disaster is in bad shape. With protective gear, people can go inside for short periods, and they can see daylight.
Only 47 people were killed directly. Maybe 4000 to 9000 had their lives shortened by radiation exposure.
"We could deal with the cancer problem after a nuclear war by failing to rebuild the tobacco industry."
Do you still write code? Anything interesting lately?
ICOA.PK is "icoacorp.com". They're a "wireless company" in a limited sense. Their business is installing WiFi nodes in airports, motels, trailer parks, etc. They provide a "Tollbooth" system of the kind found in hotels where you have to pay to get on the network. They were apparently reasonably successful at this around 2002-2009, but not so much since. They have no exciting technology and serve no key market that would be of interest to Google.
Yahoo's stock quotes show the stock declining from over $300 in 2005 to $0.0001 now. They must have issued more stock. They couldn't have had 3 billion shares outstanding at $300 a share, for a trillion dollar market cap. Somehow they blew it, but I haven't read through the SEC filings to find out how.
Central Computer, Silicon Valley's PC retailer, will also sell you a "no crapware" machine if you ask. They actually put "no crapware" on the purchase order.
They're whining because the next generation of CPUs will be soldered onto the board. Well, of course. This is the system on a chip era. Everything else is soldered onto the board. Why not the CPU?
The bigger concern is that without serious competition from AMD, Intel is raising prices.
The ticker symbol is ICOA.PK. This is an operating company? The stock has been around $0.0001. Even on the Pink Sheets, companies don't usually go that low. There are 3.49 billion shares outstanding. That's a market cap of $349,000. With the frantic trading today, the price briefly went all the way up to $0.0004.