Hovercraft scale differently than thrust-type VTOLs. Hovercraft airflow needed increases with the perimeter of the skirt (linear), while thrust-type VTOL airflow needed increases with the mass (cube). The biggest hovercraft was 330 tons; the F-35 is about 25 tons, but both have roughly comparable engine thrust.
Fully automatic driving is likely to work better than trying to steer out of trouble just before a collision, after the driver has already botched it. A full auto system, which doesn't have an inattention problem, is more likely to see the problem early. What you'll see with a full auto system is a tendency to slow down in ambiguous situations until the picture becomes clearer. This will probably happen more often than with human drivers, but won't add noticeably to trip times.
I still treasure the ancient memory of opening up a Sony Walkman. Some machines aren't meant to be touched by human hands.
The Walkman was assembled by a rather simple robotic assembly cell. It was designed for vertical assembly - all the parts were inserted with a straight-down motion. That's not new; cheap clocks and watches were made that way a century ago. The back is made with pins and recesses so that everything aligns with the back. Once all the parts are in, the top is put on, locking everything into place.
Some phones are made that way. Nokia and Motorola "brick" phones went together that way. Flip phones were a little more complex. Now that we're back to a "brick" phone with the iPhone, vertical assembly should be possible again.
Looking at the teardown, the thing was clearly designed for human assembly. Too many screws, not enough self-alignment. The electronics board is presumably assembled automatically; machines do surface mount far better than people. All those little metal RF shields have to be screwed on by hand, and that's fine work on fragile parts. There's not much wiring; the wiring seems to be concentrated into a single wiring harness.
By watchmaking standards, this assembly job is nothing. Timex, in the mechanical watch era, could have banged those things out with no problem. You do need to have experienced people used to working with tweezers under magnifiers. Foxconn's problems probably come from trying to do the job with armies of inexperienced assemblers.
They're writing it in C/C++. What could possibly go wrong?
There are already embedded operating systems with reasonably good levels of assurance, such as LynxOS and QNX.
We still don't have flying cars. It's clear that massive numbers of flying cars wouldn't work out well.
But nobody has produced even a prototype of a useful thrust-type VTOL big enough to carry humans. One would have expected a military version by now.
The stability and control problem is solved; little quadrotors under computer control are now incredibly maneuverable in tight spaces. Jet engines have enough power. The F-35 VTOL variant, like the Harrier, works, but the price tag is insane.
The problem is probably related to jet engine cost. Jet engines good enough for manned aircraft don't get significantly cheaper below 6-passenger bizjet size.
That's why general aviation is still using pistons.
(Moller is part of the problem, not part of the solution.)
So Slashdot is now ripping off other sites, copying their content to Slashdot-hosted pages, adding ads, and breaking links. The original article says "Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific
permission and/or a fee.
ANCSâ(TM)12, October 29â"30, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA.
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1685-9/12/10...$15.00."
In the actual paper, the power consumption bullshit part reads "Power consumption: The maximum power consumption of a 60GHz transceiver is less than 0.3 watts [43]. If all 20K transceivers on 10K servers are operating at their peak power, the collective power consumption becomes 6
kilowatts. TOR, AS, and a subunit of CS typically consume 176 watts, 350 watts, and 611 watts, respectively [9â"11]. In total, wired switches typically consumes 58 kilowatts to 72 kilowatts depending on the oversubscription rate for datacenter with 10K servers. Thus, a Cayley datacenter can consume less than 1/12 to 1/10 of power to switch packets compared to a CDC. That's comparing transceiver drive power with a whole store and forward switching fabric.
It's also not clear how their "Y-switch" thing, which doesn't store anything, handles busy reception points. At some point, in a forwarding network, you either have to store packets or drop them. Or set up end to end channels first.
Religion often is politics. When a religion has political power, be it via guns or lobbyists, it's in the political arena. It then can, and should, be criticized as severely as politicians are.
It's a lame excuse for a "man in space" pork program. There's not much data coming back from space beyond Earth orbit, because there isn't that much hardware beyond Earth orbit. Right now, only Voyager I, Cassini, and the Mars rover are transmitting. The total data rate from all of them would fit over a dial-up line.
There are some bottlenecks in dealing with all the stuff in earth orbit.
More satellites in the TDRSS system, or more ground stations, may be needed. Assets on the Moon wouldn't help.
Navy Times has better information. The collision occurred off Jacksonville, FL. The sub was surfacing to periscope depth when it was hit by the cruiser. The cruiser's bow sonar dome was damaged. No injuries.
"A collision at sea can ruin your whole day". It's usually a career-ending event for a Naval officer. The captain of the USS Essex, which had a collision with a fleet oiler during a replenishment operation in May 2012, was removed from command. Even though the collision was apparently due to a steering malfunction, the captain is responsible.
It's hard. Apple won't let them use IOS. Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers. Blackberry has tanked. Microsoft looked like a good option.
Nokia makes excellent hardware at a good price. Their gear tends to be much more rugged than Apple's fragile mobile devices. Their problems are more on the marketing side.
In Bob Lutz's "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters", Lutz writes that it was the Tesla roadster that woke up GM. Tesla made the first electric that could really zoom. That shook up the car guys; they thought electrics would be wimpy forever. GM was wary after the EV-1, where they lost money on every car. Lutz describes the session where the Chevy Volt was sketched out on a napkin.
Tesla is making rapid progress on price - a $100K car, a $50K car, a $30K car... That's very Silicon Valley. At last, batteries are good enough. Now they just cost too much.
There are three areas that need attention - electric power distribution, pipelines, and financial systems - because the impacts are high and restoration times are long.
Power systems have Internet connections because, in the US, they are now market systems, and the bidding process between the various parties is conducted over the Internet. The seven US power grids worry a lot about this, but it's not clear if they worry enough. What needs to be done there is to insure that restoration after a failure in the high voltage network is faster. Worst case downtimes should be brought down from days (as in 2003) to hours. All plants bigger than 250MW or so should be required to have cold start capability, so they can start up and idle even if the grid is down.
Pipelines I don't know enough about, so I won't say much about that.
The financial system is a real worry. If the US had a week-long disruption of New York based trading, the center of the financial world would move elsewhere. In 2001, the non-US exchanges weren't big enough to take over. That's no longer the case. Of the top 5 stock exchanges, only one, the NASDAQ, is entirely in the US. London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong could take over.
I do not like the idea of autonomous cars depending on or accepting unauthenticated inputs, or having two-way communication abilities while in operation.
I tend to agree, given how appallingly bad computer security remains. Seeing the "cloud-based internet enabled crowdsourced" people getting involved with automatic driving worries me.
Right. CPAN actually hosts Perl packages, and has some Q/A functions. PyPi is just a collection of links.
I agree about "easy_install" and "eggs". That has assumptions built into it about where things go, and if everything isn't where it wants it, it fails. "python setup.py install", by comparison, finds out where the installation of Python being used is storing libraries, and usually manages to do the right things.
A 3D printer with DRM already exists. There's an "app store" from which you buy designs, and pay per copy. It seems to be aimed at people who want to turn out models of popular-culture objects.
The new thing in this patent is recognizing copies of 3D objects by form, rather than merely having DRM on existing files. This looks like one of Intellectual Ventures' front companies. Note the name and location.
While 3D printing a car is silly, 3D printing replacements for small interior plastic parts is possible now. There are 3D printers big enough to make a car fender, and they're used to make mockups of new car designs.
Is anybody really hiring Python programmers? It's a fun language, and easy to use, but the library support is amateur hour. Google uses it, but they have an in-house support group.
Because ionospheric corrections require 1) reasonably nearby ground stations measuring them, and 2) a data link between the ground stations and the receiver. In the high arctic, you seldom have either. WAAS is US only. Sweden does have a GPS augmentation system, though, one which uses ground-based transmitters to send out correction signals.
Microsoft sells stuff that is useful. There's an ongoing market for that. IBM has prospered for over a century serving medium to large businesses. So can Microsoft.
Facebook, on the other hand, is in a business where coolness matters. Formerly cool social networks include AOL, Geocities, Salon, Tribe, Myspace... Social networks have a life cycle, like nightclubs. Facebook web traffic peaked about a year ago, according to Alexa.
The ad-supported model doesn't translate well to the small screen ("We'll get back to what your friends are doing after a word from our sponsor".)
Without any idea of what the product does, this isn't a meaningful question. Is this just a web site? A program used by people? A program used by other programs? How much persistent state is there? Do users need to know in advance before an update is made?
I was subscribed to the Firefox beta channel, since I develop add-ons for Firefox. When Firefox 16 came out on the release channel, the beta channel was still delivering Firefox 15.0. Apparently somebody skipped the beta test.
I get the idea of being hardened to radiation but it was my understanding we have newer processors that fit the bill on this.
Radiation-hardened processors are hard to get. For one thing, they're export-controlled, so if you make them in the US, you can't sell many. Atmel makes a rad-hard SPARC CPU, and they've sold 3000 of them. Nobody seems to have built a modern x86 design or even an ARM in a rad-hard technology.
There's a basic conflict between small gate size and radiation hardness. The smaller the transistors, the more likely a stray particle can damage or switch them. So the latest small geometries aren't as suitable. Also, the more radiation-hard processes, like Silicon on Sapphire, aren't used much for high-volume products.
As a result, rad-hard parts are an expensive niche product. It's not inherently expensive to make them, but the volume is so small that the cost per part is high.
Slashdot Mirror
hovercraft one could make using a vacuum cleaner
Hovercraft scale differently than thrust-type VTOLs. Hovercraft airflow needed increases with the perimeter of the skirt (linear), while thrust-type VTOL airflow needed increases with the mass (cube). The biggest hovercraft was 330 tons; the F-35 is about 25 tons, but both have roughly comparable engine thrust.
Fully automatic driving is likely to work better than trying to steer out of trouble just before a collision, after the driver has already botched it. A full auto system, which doesn't have an inattention problem, is more likely to see the problem early. What you'll see with a full auto system is a tendency to slow down in ambiguous situations until the picture becomes clearer. This will probably happen more often than with human drivers, but won't add noticeably to trip times.
I still treasure the ancient memory of opening up a Sony Walkman. Some machines aren't meant to be touched by human hands.
The Walkman was assembled by a rather simple robotic assembly cell. It was designed for vertical assembly - all the parts were inserted with a straight-down motion. That's not new; cheap clocks and watches were made that way a century ago. The back is made with pins and recesses so that everything aligns with the back. Once all the parts are in, the top is put on, locking everything into place.
Some phones are made that way. Nokia and Motorola "brick" phones went together that way. Flip phones were a little more complex. Now that we're back to a "brick" phone with the iPhone, vertical assembly should be possible again.
Looking at the teardown, the thing was clearly designed for human assembly. Too many screws, not enough self-alignment. The electronics board is presumably assembled automatically; machines do surface mount far better than people. All those little metal RF shields have to be screwed on by hand, and that's fine work on fragile parts. There's not much wiring; the wiring seems to be concentrated into a single wiring harness.
By watchmaking standards, this assembly job is nothing. Timex, in the mechanical watch era, could have banged those things out with no problem. You do need to have experienced people used to working with tweezers under magnifiers. Foxconn's problems probably come from trying to do the job with armies of inexperienced assemblers.
Search doesn't take that many servers. Cuil only had a few hundred machines. It's ads and "personalization" that require all the infrastructure.
They're writing it in C/C++. What could possibly go wrong? There are already embedded operating systems with reasonably good levels of assurance, such as LynxOS and QNX.
We still don't have flying cars. It's clear that massive numbers of flying cars wouldn't work out well. But nobody has produced even a prototype of a useful thrust-type VTOL big enough to carry humans. One would have expected a military version by now. The stability and control problem is solved; little quadrotors under computer control are now incredibly maneuverable in tight spaces. Jet engines have enough power. The F-35 VTOL variant, like the Harrier, works, but the price tag is insane.
The problem is probably related to jet engine cost. Jet engines good enough for manned aircraft don't get significantly cheaper below 6-passenger bizjet size. That's why general aviation is still using pistons.
(Moller is part of the problem, not part of the solution.)
So Slashdot is now ripping off other sites, copying their content to Slashdot-hosted pages, adding ads, and breaking links. The original article says "Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ANCSâ(TM)12, October 29â"30, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1685-9/12/10 ...$15.00."
In the actual paper, the power consumption bullshit part reads "Power consumption: The maximum power consumption of a 60GHz transceiver is less than 0.3 watts [43]. If all 20K transceivers on 10K servers are operating at their peak power, the collective power consumption becomes 6 kilowatts. TOR, AS, and a subunit of CS typically consume 176 watts, 350 watts, and 611 watts, respectively [9â"11]. In total, wired switches typically consumes 58 kilowatts to 72 kilowatts depending on the oversubscription rate for datacenter with 10K servers. Thus, a Cayley datacenter can consume less than 1/12 to 1/10 of power to switch packets compared to a CDC. That's comparing transceiver drive power with a whole store and forward switching fabric.
It's also not clear how their "Y-switch" thing, which doesn't store anything, handles busy reception points. At some point, in a forwarding network, you either have to store packets or drop them. Or set up end to end channels first.
Religion often is politics. When a religion has political power, be it via guns or lobbyists, it's in the political arena. It then can, and should, be criticized as severely as politicians are.
And 100% of that bandwidth is spoken for at any given time,
Right. The limitation is the power at the transmit end, not a bottleneck at the receive end.
Really? Do you know what the uplink rate from the rover actually is? Hint. it's not 9600bps anymore.
NASA says 12Kb/s back to Earth Rover to orbiter is 128Kb/s, but that's then spooled slowly back over the long-range data link.
It's a lame excuse for a "man in space" pork program. There's not much data coming back from space beyond Earth orbit, because there isn't that much hardware beyond Earth orbit. Right now, only Voyager I, Cassini, and the Mars rover are transmitting. The total data rate from all of them would fit over a dial-up line.
There are some bottlenecks in dealing with all the stuff in earth orbit. More satellites in the TDRSS system, or more ground stations, may be needed. Assets on the Moon wouldn't help.
Navy Times has better information. The collision occurred off Jacksonville, FL. The sub was surfacing to periscope depth when it was hit by the cruiser. The cruiser's bow sonar dome was damaged. No injuries.
"A collision at sea can ruin your whole day". It's usually a career-ending event for a Naval officer. The captain of the USS Essex, which had a collision with a fleet oiler during a replenishment operation in May 2012, was removed from command. Even though the collision was apparently due to a steering malfunction, the captain is responsible.
It's hard. Apple won't let them use IOS. Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers. Blackberry has tanked. Microsoft looked like a good option.
Nokia makes excellent hardware at a good price. Their gear tends to be much more rugged than Apple's fragile mobile devices. Their problems are more on the marketing side.
In Bob Lutz's "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters", Lutz writes that it was the Tesla roadster that woke up GM. Tesla made the first electric that could really zoom. That shook up the car guys; they thought electrics would be wimpy forever. GM was wary after the EV-1, where they lost money on every car. Lutz describes the session where the Chevy Volt was sketched out on a napkin.
Tesla is making rapid progress on price - a $100K car, a $50K car, a $30K car... That's very Silicon Valley. At last, batteries are good enough. Now they just cost too much.
There are three areas that need attention - electric power distribution, pipelines, and financial systems - because the impacts are high and restoration times are long.
Power systems have Internet connections because, in the US, they are now market systems, and the bidding process between the various parties is conducted over the Internet. The seven US power grids worry a lot about this, but it's not clear if they worry enough. What needs to be done there is to insure that restoration after a failure in the high voltage network is faster. Worst case downtimes should be brought down from days (as in 2003) to hours. All plants bigger than 250MW or so should be required to have cold start capability, so they can start up and idle even if the grid is down.
Pipelines I don't know enough about, so I won't say much about that.
The financial system is a real worry. If the US had a week-long disruption of New York based trading, the center of the financial world would move elsewhere. In 2001, the non-US exchanges weren't big enough to take over. That's no longer the case. Of the top 5 stock exchanges, only one, the NASDAQ, is entirely in the US. London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong could take over.
I do not like the idea of autonomous cars depending on or accepting unauthenticated inputs, or having two-way communication abilities while in operation.
I tend to agree, given how appallingly bad computer security remains. Seeing the "cloud-based internet enabled crowdsourced" people getting involved with automatic driving worries me.
Right. CPAN actually hosts Perl packages, and has some Q/A functions. PyPi is just a collection of links.
I agree about "easy_install" and "eggs". That has assumptions built into it about where things go, and if everything isn't where it wants it, it fails. "python setup.py install", by comparison, finds out where the installation of Python being used is storing libraries, and usually manages to do the right things.
A 3D printer with DRM already exists. There's an "app store" from which you buy designs, and pay per copy. It seems to be aimed at people who want to turn out models of popular-culture objects.
The new thing in this patent is recognizing copies of 3D objects by form, rather than merely having DRM on existing files. This looks like one of Intellectual Ventures' front companies. Note the name and location.
While 3D printing a car is silly, 3D printing replacements for small interior plastic parts is possible now. There are 3D printers big enough to make a car fender, and they're used to make mockups of new car designs.
Is anybody really hiring Python programmers? It's a fun language, and easy to use, but the library support is amateur hour. Google uses it, but they have an in-house support group.
why they don't just use DGPS
Because ionospheric corrections require 1) reasonably nearby ground stations measuring them, and 2) a data link between the ground stations and the receiver. In the high arctic, you seldom have either. WAAS is US only. Sweden does have a GPS augmentation system, though, one which uses ground-based transmitters to send out correction signals.
Microsoft sells stuff that is useful. There's an ongoing market for that. IBM has prospered for over a century serving medium to large businesses. So can Microsoft.
Facebook, on the other hand, is in a business where coolness matters. Formerly cool social networks include AOL, Geocities, Salon, Tribe, Myspace... Social networks have a life cycle, like nightclubs. Facebook web traffic peaked about a year ago, according to Alexa. The ad-supported model doesn't translate well to the small screen ("We'll get back to what your friends are doing after a word from our sponsor".)
Without any idea of what the product does, this isn't a meaningful question. Is this just a web site? A program used by people? A program used by other programs? How much persistent state is there? Do users need to know in advance before an update is made?
I was subscribed to the Firefox beta channel, since I develop add-ons for Firefox. When Firefox 16 came out on the release channel, the beta channel was still delivering Firefox 15.0. Apparently somebody skipped the beta test.
I get the idea of being hardened to radiation but it was my understanding we have newer processors that fit the bill on this.
Radiation-hardened processors are hard to get. For one thing, they're export-controlled, so if you make them in the US, you can't sell many. Atmel makes a rad-hard SPARC CPU, and they've sold 3000 of them. Nobody seems to have built a modern x86 design or even an ARM in a rad-hard technology.
There's a basic conflict between small gate size and radiation hardness. The smaller the transistors, the more likely a stray particle can damage or switch them. So the latest small geometries aren't as suitable. Also, the more radiation-hard processes, like Silicon on Sapphire, aren't used much for high-volume products.
As a result, rad-hard parts are an expensive niche product. It's not inherently expensive to make them, but the volume is so small that the cost per part is high.