"Sigma" actually refers to the number of standard deviations away from nominal. Specifically, in a manufacturing process, it means how many deviations away from nominal you have to go before you produce an unusable product. It has nothing to do with how many "nines" you have. You use "nines" for measuring things like percentage uptime, and other values that cannot be plotted on a traditional variable bell curve.
Now all you have to do is figure out how to fit a usable amount of sensors, communications gear, and power generation in something that weighs on the order of a few hundred milligrams.
It's not that there are "extra" photoreceptors. Those would take additional room and resources from more useful photoreceptors that would indeed be detrimental, and selected against. It's just that those photoreceptors we do have can cover a wider range than the light that actually gets to our eyes.
It's called inverse synthetic aperture imaging, and people have been doing it for decades prior to 2001. The difference here is they're doing a brute-force search to discover the motion vector, rather than knowing what it is from the beginning, but then even that's not a new concept. It's merely a concept that is only recently possible due to increases in computational power.
First you apply this technique to generate a bunch of synthetic time-lapse exposures. The you use things like Hough Transform to see if it came up with anything interesting, indicating something moving across the sky at that angular velocity. Anything interesting can then undergo further synthetic refinement to help bracket it, or be marked as something worth investigation with more traditional methods.
It's basically an enhancement on the traditional [inverse] synthetic aperture methods. With SAR, you know where everything is, roughly, and you're using the technique to refine the image. In this, you use the technique blindly, and wait until something rises up out of the background noise.
No, they probably don't. You only use SLI because you need to share and merge graphical output onto a screen. When you're doing computational work, you just have a server with a bunch of compute cards.
Interesting idea, I wonder if that's ever been tried?
See Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar. It's basically just taking it one step further. Where ISAR starts with the assumption that you know where something is, and thus know how to shift the captures to produce the synthetic image, this brute forces the computation and waits for a sufficiently strong signal to show up.
The term "aircraft" typically refers to [heavier than] aircraft, relying on aerodynamic lift rather than buoyancy. Still, the same surface area that gives an airship more power gives it more drag, requiring more power to resist weather. Now you are better off with an airship than an aircraft. If you covered the entire surface of an airship with solar panels, you would actually produce about half as much power as those airships would otherwise have. On the other hand, there is no way in hell you're going to get the thing off the ground covered in solar panels. You might be able to using one of the "thin film" technologies, but then you're only going to end up with about a third as much power.
"New" cells exceeding 30% efficiency have been around for decades. The trouble is that they are obscenely expensive multi-junction cells, and it's only worth the cost for spacecraft and concentrated solar power. When used in concentrated solar power, increased quantum efficiency brings thermodynamic efficiency closer to 40%, but this is not available to aircraft for obvious reasons.
The trouble is merely one of power. Aircraft require it, and solar cells need lots of area to provide much of it. Consider a 737. It's a convenient size considering it's right at around 100 sq.m. At 40% efficiency, you're looking at some 40kW, or 53HP. A 737 is somewhere around three orders of magnitude higher than that. 53HP is the high end of what you would find in an ultralight aircraft. Considering the fact you're only actually going to hit about half that with modern technology, what you've produced is basically a powered glider. Just as with gliders, they are pleasure craft, but not really good for anything else. While there is nothing wrong with some form of battery that is charged by a solar array on the ground, the only productive use for a solar powered aircraft is for unmanned and extremely long endurance.
ZFS is for multiple disks and btrfs is not necessarily for multiple disks so there are differences
I'm not sure what you mean by this. ZFS has some features like automatic recovery that only work when you have multiple disks, but things like checksumming, snapshotting, cloning, dynamic datasets, compression, deduplication, and pretty much every funciton in the 'zfs' executable all work just as well on a single disk.
In other words, non-commercial use. ZFS is designed for business, not consumers, where you spec out your machine ahead of time for potential future expansion, and when you reach the limit of that expansion, it's simply time to upgrade the machine. No one is going to pay for extensive development time to allow you to do ZFS cheaply.
My mistake, I got the two mixed up. The R/MQ-1 Predator is a 2000lb piston-engined reconnaissance aircraft. The R/MQ-9 Reaper, or Predator-B, is basically just an overgrown Predator, weighing 4000lbs, using a turboprop, and carrying lots of ordinance. By comparison, the typical general aviation Cessna-type aircraft is going to have a maximum takeoff weight around 1000-1500lbs.
A drone that is smaller and lighter than a bird is not even worth having around in these kinds of situations. It simply does not have the endurance or payload to be useful. Also, there's a huge difference between clipping a big, squishy bird, and a small aluminum engine block.
An RPV or drone simply can't scan the sky for other aircraft
Well they can, but then you're talking a fairly sizable drone, with all sorts of equipment and automation, costing tens of thousands each and a couple million in engineering time. Shitty quadrotors with a gimbal-mounted SLR need not apply.
Robotics use servos, and that scales up to industrial manufacturing robots and the arms on the ISS. Conveyor systems use servos as staging motors to align products on a belt. A servo just means you have an electric motor tied to an encoder and a closed loop feedback control system, and they're used all over the place, not simply on hobby RC aircraft. Calling something a servo says nothing about the strength or capability of it. The fact that the RQ-9 uses servos rather than hydraulics (I'm taking your word on this) does nothing to negate the fact that it is large and heavier than most civilian aviation aircraft.
So by that definition, once we start building aircraft with more autonomy such that a remote pilot does not always have to be in the loop, it's no longer a drone?
They're not tracking people. They're replacing time cards with fingerprints. Rather than running your time card through a printer, you stick your thumb on a scanner. If the fingerprints become shared with other external organizations, then it becomes a civil liberties matter. Right now, its only purpose is to make it slightly harder to cheat the clocking system.
Think about things from the opposite direction. I'm sure hourly people would love to get a full day's wage for only a few hours of work. What about when their assigned duty ends up taking twelve hours, and they have to work an extra four hours with no additional pay?
So if you need to higher people you trust, that would mean summary firing of people found abusing the existing time card systems. It's my understanding that it's pretty damn tough to fire people in some European countries. I don't know if England is one of those.
The USB protocol only allows negotiation up to 500mA, or 2.5W. In order to achieve those 1A and 2A charging rates, computers must also implement that "fixed resistance" shortcut.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sigma" actually refers to the number of standard deviations away from nominal. Specifically, in a manufacturing process, it means how many deviations away from nominal you have to go before you produce an unusable product. It has nothing to do with how many "nines" you have. You use "nines" for measuring things like percentage uptime, and other values that cannot be plotted on a traditional variable bell curve.
Now all you have to do is figure out how to fit a usable amount of sensors, communications gear, and power generation in something that weighs on the order of a few hundred milligrams.
It's not that there are "extra" photoreceptors. Those would take additional room and resources from more useful photoreceptors that would indeed be detrimental, and selected against. It's just that those photoreceptors we do have can cover a wider range than the light that actually gets to our eyes.
Credit where credit is due.
It's called inverse synthetic aperture imaging, and people have been doing it for decades prior to 2001. The difference here is they're doing a brute-force search to discover the motion vector, rather than knowing what it is from the beginning, but then even that's not a new concept. It's merely a concept that is only recently possible due to increases in computational power.
First you apply this technique to generate a bunch of synthetic time-lapse exposures. The you use things like Hough Transform to see if it came up with anything interesting, indicating something moving across the sky at that angular velocity. Anything interesting can then undergo further synthetic refinement to help bracket it, or be marked as something worth investigation with more traditional methods.
It's basically an enhancement on the traditional [inverse] synthetic aperture methods. With SAR, you know where everything is, roughly, and you're using the technique to refine the image. In this, you use the technique blindly, and wait until something rises up out of the background noise.
No, they probably don't. You only use SLI because you need to share and merge graphical output onto a screen. When you're doing computational work, you just have a server with a bunch of compute cards.
Interesting idea, I wonder if that's ever been tried?
See Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar. It's basically just taking it one step further. Where ISAR starts with the assumption that you know where something is, and thus know how to shift the captures to produce the synthetic image, this brute forces the computation and waits for a sufficiently strong signal to show up.
The term "aircraft" typically refers to [heavier than] aircraft, relying on aerodynamic lift rather than buoyancy. Still, the same surface area that gives an airship more power gives it more drag, requiring more power to resist weather. Now you are better off with an airship than an aircraft. If you covered the entire surface of an airship with solar panels, you would actually produce about half as much power as those airships would otherwise have. On the other hand, there is no way in hell you're going to get the thing off the ground covered in solar panels. You might be able to using one of the "thin film" technologies, but then you're only going to end up with about a third as much power.
"New" cells exceeding 30% efficiency have been around for decades. The trouble is that they are obscenely expensive multi-junction cells, and it's only worth the cost for spacecraft and concentrated solar power. When used in concentrated solar power, increased quantum efficiency brings thermodynamic efficiency closer to 40%, but this is not available to aircraft for obvious reasons.
The trouble is merely one of power. Aircraft require it, and solar cells need lots of area to provide much of it. Consider a 737. It's a convenient size considering it's right at around 100 sq.m. At 40% efficiency, you're looking at some 40kW, or 53HP. A 737 is somewhere around three orders of magnitude higher than that. 53HP is the high end of what you would find in an ultralight aircraft. Considering the fact you're only actually going to hit about half that with modern technology, what you've produced is basically a powered glider. Just as with gliders, they are pleasure craft, but not really good for anything else. While there is nothing wrong with some form of battery that is charged by a solar array on the ground, the only productive use for a solar powered aircraft is for unmanned and extremely long endurance.
Sure, and there is no value sticking a person in such an aircraft.
Real innovator? What innovation? Solar powered aircraft will never be a viable means of transportation, so this is nothing but a publicity stunt.
Does a random number generator count?
ZFS is for multiple disks and btrfs is not necessarily for multiple disks so there are differences
I'm not sure what you mean by this. ZFS has some features like automatic recovery that only work when you have multiple disks, but things like checksumming, snapshotting, cloning, dynamic datasets, compression, deduplication, and pretty much every funciton in the 'zfs' executable all work just as well on a single disk.
In other words, non-commercial use. ZFS is designed for business, not consumers, where you spec out your machine ahead of time for potential future expansion, and when you reach the limit of that expansion, it's simply time to upgrade the machine. No one is going to pay for extensive development time to allow you to do ZFS cheaply.
My mistake, I got the two mixed up. The R/MQ-1 Predator is a 2000lb piston-engined reconnaissance aircraft. The R/MQ-9 Reaper, or Predator-B, is basically just an overgrown Predator, weighing 4000lbs, using a turboprop, and carrying lots of ordinance. By comparison, the typical general aviation Cessna-type aircraft is going to have a maximum takeoff weight around 1000-1500lbs.
A drone that is smaller and lighter than a bird is not even worth having around in these kinds of situations. It simply does not have the endurance or payload to be useful. Also, there's a huge difference between clipping a big, squishy bird, and a small aluminum engine block.
An RPV or drone simply can't scan the sky for other aircraft
Well they can, but then you're talking a fairly sizable drone, with all sorts of equipment and automation, costing tens of thousands each and a couple million in engineering time. Shitty quadrotors with a gimbal-mounted SLR need not apply.
I bet those could give a queen a momentary thrill too.
Robotics use servos, and that scales up to industrial manufacturing robots and the arms on the ISS. Conveyor systems use servos as staging motors to align products on a belt. A servo just means you have an electric motor tied to an encoder and a closed loop feedback control system, and they're used all over the place, not simply on hobby RC aircraft. Calling something a servo says nothing about the strength or capability of it. The fact that the RQ-9 uses servos rather than hydraulics (I'm taking your word on this) does nothing to negate the fact that it is large and heavier than most civilian aviation aircraft.
So by that definition, once we start building aircraft with more autonomy such that a remote pilot does not always have to be in the loop, it's no longer a drone?
They're not tracking people. They're replacing time cards with fingerprints. Rather than running your time card through a printer, you stick your thumb on a scanner. If the fingerprints become shared with other external organizations, then it becomes a civil liberties matter. Right now, its only purpose is to make it slightly harder to cheat the clocking system.
Think about things from the opposite direction. I'm sure hourly people would love to get a full day's wage for only a few hours of work. What about when their assigned duty ends up taking twelve hours, and they have to work an extra four hours with no additional pay?
So if you need to higher people you trust, that would mean summary firing of people found abusing the existing time card systems. It's my understanding that it's pretty damn tough to fire people in some European countries. I don't know if England is one of those.
The USB protocol only allows negotiation up to 500mA, or 2.5W. In order to achieve those 1A and 2A charging rates, computers must also implement that "fixed resistance" shortcut.