Well each device can be set to periodically configure itself by TFTP. That can then balance the load just by dividing the users up across your servers.
Typically you need somewhere between 32 (cell phone like) and 96 kbit/s (better than pots) quality call. However that's the peak bandwidth, at least half the call will be silence (while the other party talks) so you can survive with as little as 16kbit/s average.
A T3 should be able to support about 2800 low fi calls or almost 1000 hi fi calls. But not everyone will be calling at the same time... and also, most of the calls will be local so you wont need outbound bandwidth.
Umm how do you know how fast you are travelling. It's not like a car where you can just count how often your wheels spin round.
Also the faster you go, the slower time goes. With a well planned mission, the course is plotted out ahead of time, but when everyone and there dog is driving around in spaceships... it wont be like that.
Since you know where you start, you only need to track a few reference objects and you should be able to figure out your position in space/time.
While buildings built from a duplicate schematic obviously wont be identical, after they've been photographed through a cheap lens, to a cheap ccd, compressed to jpg... the error will dwarf any subtle difference. Also it's easy for me to know that building 2 was built before building 4 and has a lighter, more weathered roof - but a camera cant use that information unless it can take a photo with both buildings in it.
Stellar travel is a fairly well solved problem, plenty software can predict what the stars look like from different locations/times in the universe and could surely be extended to take the angles of the stars and compute an exact location. Also GPS like systems work great in space.
The other problem with mirror glass buildings is that, when the sun is at the right angle, they cast sharp lines onto neighboring buildings, which again could confuse the software.
I'm all for smart OS image similarity libraries - my experience of existing ones shows they are less than stellar, but this just seems like a really contrived use of the technology (although i'm sure identifying buildings is easier than people)
This is cool technology, and research into this kind of thing is cool. But it's just not commercial IN THIS FORM.
The best application i can think of is for publishers to be able to find a crappy image using google and then submit it to corbis or any other pro image library and ask for a high quality shot of the same scene... but i'm not that inventive.
But if we build a new global network where each phone has exactly the same hardware... then why not build our own GPS-like network instead.
The system being open-source is also not a big deal. Sure it'd be nice to have an OS library which could find similar images of buildings but the real value would be in the dataset which almost certainly wouldn't be free.
Also this makes no consideration for similar buildings. The company i work for has a campus where 5 of the 7 buildings are cookie cutter - how would it deal with that situation.
Nokia has a street in helsinki with a whole bunch of identical buildings... same problem.
What about mirror glass buildings?
Sure it might work great if you are lost outside the transamerica pyramid, or the flatiron building, or maybe the houses of parliament but god help you if you are lost in the latest "homely community for comfortable family living"
Presumably you first need someone to visit every major city and take photographs of every building... but wait, you need to know the positions that those photographs were taken from, so you need GPS, but if GPS doesn't work because it's sheilded from high buildings...
Obviously a skilled surveyor could work it out, but that transforms this photographing job into a highly skilled position, making it many times more expensive.
If it weren't for that then you could probably pay students 10c a photo.
Even old-style degraded GPS let you get your position to within a few hundred feet. Assuming that a map was returned with a 400 sq ft circle instead of a "you are exactly here" any half intelligent person could figure it out.
Anyway most cellphone networks can triangulate your position to within a block.
As for photo recognition being MORE accurate, i cant see how. To get your position to within a few hundred feet you'd need to know the exact parameterization of the lens, the zoom, the angle of the camera... unlikely.
Getting GPRS to work correctly in a foreign country so that you can make such a request is hard enough to begin with.
Run 100 virtual machines on a single box with 32Mb ram, It'll thrash it's hardware to death, each individual 'machine' will be running balls to the wall, and you'll probably not max out a 2400 baud modem.
Hacks do exist for VoIP systems but these dont seem to be any more widespread than other network applications. People still use FTP and SMTP despite their atrocious security records
An open standardized system is one of the best things about it. I can take my stock VoIP hardware and (in theory) make it work with any number of providers
Cisco make nice little boxes which have CAT5 in and Telephone out, Grandstream make real phones with CAT5 connections, someone even makes phones which dial out to your ISP and then use VoIP to make calls.
The hardware exists, an excellent open-source exchange exists, and i've been using it daily for almost 2 years.
Much as we abuse nasa for using 1970s technology on board spaceprobes, it's not easy to find a harddrive that'll run at 10 degrees K, in a vacuum and in zero gravity..
I used Vonage for about a year and a half when i lived in the UK and I was VERY impressed.
I had a job and fiancee in the USA, and vonage gave me a local number there and unlimited calling for about the same a british telecom charged for an hour long call each month.
Now the situation is flipped, I'm in the USA and need to call family and friends in the UK. I just converted my old vonage hardware to run with mywebcalls.com and i can get cheap calls the other way.
I called my mom yesterday using voip for the frist time, and without prompting she mentioned that the call was unusually clear.
Of the different voip services i've used, vonage was by far the easiest to set up and use, but unless you make a lot of calls their monthly charge outweighs most cell plans.
They should have just used the beta symbol on it's own or spell the english variant. It's like "IRC Chat" or "ATM Machine" or "LCD Display" or "CGPColinGregoryPalmernet"
It's one of those questions, that if you have to ask, then you probably cant do.
I looked into interfacing a 320x240 mono lcd to a microprocessor at one point, and whilst i was sure it *could* be done (and i could probably have done it), by the time i'd got the necessary fpga development kit and a fast enough scope to debug it, i'd have far outweighed the cost of buying the nicest biggest apple display.
If you really want to integrate a display into a project then it's far easier to buy one that's designed for that purpose. I've encountered a company that make small mono line displays (like 40x8 characaters) which have an RS232 interface and are straightforward to work with.
Also anyone hobbyist that's ever invested in a couple of development kits, a decent scope, some nice power supplies, and a well stocked rack of components seems unlikely to say "With TFT-LCD's by themselves still being somewhat of a pricey commodity.."
Btw i was meaning to ask... my car's transmission makes a funky noise, and i've got lots of metal pipe lying around and surely some enterprising nerd has figured out a way to make their own transmission... chevy replacement parts by themselves are still somewhat of a pricy commodity...
You'd need to build such a huge desalination plant that you could have built an equally large solar power plant.
What'd be interesting if you could make a solar power / desalination plant. Use sunlight to boil the water, use the steam to run turbines and collect the fresh water as it cools...
Desalination consumes a huge amount of power... that in turn creates greenhouse gases or nuclear waste.
However, if you are smart you can use your desalination plant only at times when the demand on the power grid is below average, and i'll burn electricity which would have otherwise been wasted.
When you are a manufacturer, i can't see any reason to not sell online. There are a few highly specialized items that dont work well online, but for 99% of manufacturers they want to ship as many units as possible.
When i go to buy speakers/electronics/computer/camera equipment, i'll almost always research it thouroughly online. Then have to make a tradeoff between the cost/convenience of buying locally or online.
I bought, for example, a tripod locally because i wanted to feel it's build construction and play with it's motions. The local markup was worth it.
In other cases it's just not worth it. I wanted a particular black and white film, and i could get a SINGLE roll of it (including shipping) for 1/3rd the cost of buying it locally. That's essentially a commodity item, and when B&M stores are gouging prices to that extent they've lost my business.
The internet also rocks for obscure items. One of my cameras was at the time afaik sold by 3 retailers - one in shanghaii, one in amsterdam and one in winsconsin. B&M stores just cant compete on the selection that the entire internet can provide.
The stores may win or lose, but the manufacturers always seem to win, or at least those with quality products do.
A year ago it seemed to be the case that they needed to advertise the position locally.
I attempted to get an H1B in april last year, and when my potential employer advertised an entry level position - they got over 200 applications. People with 12 years experience applied! I was told it was a non-starter.
I've since entered the USA on a K-1 fiancee visa, and ultimately it's easier to relax when your residency depends on your marriage being successful and not your tech company:)
The downside is i've had a lot more personal dealings with the INS than if a large corporation had taken care of the process for me. They aren't the most fun people to talk to....
Ultimately the 'long' 30-60 second ad is shown at 2am on discovery when it costs next-to-nothing to advertise.
Then the advertiser can get away with running short 'teaser' ads at primetime to entice users to either go to the web or their tivo to find out what it's all about.
The simple answer is that adverts need to get better. Some people, myself included, are far more interested in the ads than the superbowl - that's proof enough that if advertisers try hard enough then they can make ads worth watching.
If an ad's not clever, witty or inspiring then i'm never going to want to watch it.
Java is open in a way that we can only dream of windows being open. It's not controlled by a single entity, it's APIs are excellently documented, and anyone can build a functionally identical replacement.
Ultimately the reference compiler, VM and supporting libraries are not open source - but they are just the reference ones. Nothing stops people from making a truly open source version ala blackdown.
Sun's rate of 'new features' has been more methodical enterprise-paced than the typical open source project, but it's coming along. Check out J2SE1.5 it's got strongly typed enumerations, generics, an extended for syntax and various other much appreciated features.
I think a very stable reference platform is one of the best things Java has going for it. Ever tried to get a perl script with more than 2 or 3 dependencies to run on your webhosts box...?
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Well each device can be set to periodically configure itself by TFTP. That can then balance the load just by dividing the users up across your servers.
Typically you need somewhere between 32 (cell phone like) and 96 kbit/s (better than pots) quality call. However that's the peak bandwidth, at least half the call will be silence (while the other party talks) so you can survive with as little as 16kbit/s average.
A T3 should be able to support about 2800 low fi calls or almost 1000 hi fi calls. But not everyone will be calling at the same time... and also, most of the calls will be local so you wont need outbound bandwidth.
Umm how do you know how fast you are travelling. It's not like a car where you can just count how often your wheels spin round.
Also the faster you go, the slower time goes. With a well planned mission, the course is plotted out ahead of time, but when everyone and there dog is driving around in spaceships... it wont be like that.
Since you know where you start, you only need to track a few reference objects and you should be able to figure out your position in space/time.
While buildings built from a duplicate schematic obviously wont be identical, after they've been photographed through a cheap lens, to a cheap ccd, compressed to jpg... the error will dwarf any subtle difference. Also it's easy for me to know that building 2 was built before building 4 and has a lighter, more weathered roof - but a camera cant use that information unless it can take a photo with both buildings in it.
Stellar travel is a fairly well solved problem, plenty software can predict what the stars look like from different locations/times in the universe and could surely be extended to take the angles of the stars and compute an exact location. Also GPS like systems work great in space.
The other problem with mirror glass buildings is that, when the sun is at the right angle, they cast sharp lines onto neighboring buildings, which again could confuse the software.
I'm all for smart OS image similarity libraries - my experience of existing ones shows they are less than stellar, but this just seems like a really contrived use of the technology (although i'm sure identifying buildings is easier than people)
I was ranting too much to say it..
This is cool technology, and research into this kind of thing is cool. But it's just not commercial IN THIS FORM.
The best application i can think of is for publishers to be able to find a crappy image using google and then submit it to corbis or any other pro image library and ask for a high quality shot of the same scene... but i'm not that inventive.
But if we build a new global network where each phone has exactly the same hardware... then why not build our own GPS-like network instead.
The system being open-source is also not a big deal. Sure it'd be nice to have an OS library which could find similar images of buildings but the real value would be in the dataset which almost certainly wouldn't be free.
Also this makes no consideration for similar buildings. The company i work for has a campus where 5 of the 7 buildings are cookie cutter - how would it deal with that situation.
Nokia has a street in helsinki with a whole bunch of identical buildings... same problem.
What about mirror glass buildings?
Sure it might work great if you are lost outside the transamerica pyramid, or the flatiron building, or maybe the houses of parliament but god help you if you are lost in the latest "homely community for comfortable family living"
Presumably you first need someone to visit every major city and take photographs of every building... but wait, you need to know the positions that those photographs were taken from, so you need GPS, but if GPS doesn't work because it's sheilded from high buildings...
Obviously a skilled surveyor could work it out, but that transforms this photographing job into a highly skilled position, making it many times more expensive.
If it weren't for that then you could probably pay students 10c a photo.
Even old-style degraded GPS let you get your position to within a few hundred feet. Assuming that a map was returned with a 400 sq ft circle instead of a "you are exactly here" any half intelligent person could figure it out.
Anyway most cellphone networks can triangulate your position to within a block.
As for photo recognition being MORE accurate, i cant see how. To get your position to within a few hundred feet you'd need to know the exact parameterization of the lens, the zoom, the angle of the camera... unlikely.
Getting GPRS to work correctly in a foreign country so that you can make such a request is hard enough to begin with.
Run 100 virtual machines on a single box with 32Mb ram, It'll thrash it's hardware to death, each individual 'machine' will be running balls to the wall, and you'll probably not max out a 2400 baud modem.
Hacks do exist for VoIP systems but these dont seem to be any more widespread than other network applications. People still use FTP and SMTP despite their atrocious security records
An open standardized system is one of the best things about it. I can take my stock VoIP hardware and (in theory) make it work with any number of providers
Cisco make nice little boxes which have CAT5 in and Telephone out, Grandstream make real phones with CAT5 connections, someone even makes phones which dial out to your ISP and then use VoIP to make calls.
The hardware exists, an excellent open-source exchange exists, and i've been using it daily for almost 2 years.
Much as we abuse nasa for using 1970s technology on board spaceprobes, it's not easy to find a harddrive that'll run at 10 degrees K, in a vacuum and in zero gravity..
I used Vonage for about a year and a half when i lived in the UK and I was VERY impressed.
I had a job and fiancee in the USA, and vonage gave me a local number there and unlimited calling for about the same a british telecom charged for an hour long call each month.
Now the situation is flipped, I'm in the USA and need to call family and friends in the UK. I just converted my old vonage hardware to run with mywebcalls.com and i can get cheap calls the other way.
I called my mom yesterday using voip for the frist time, and without prompting she mentioned that the call was unusually clear.
Of the different voip services i've used, vonage was by far the easiest to set up and use, but unless you make a lot of calls their monthly charge outweighs most cell plans.
I used to have a system that listened on the telnet port and when someone knocked it printed out some ascii art and blacklisted their IP.
I snared about 2 people a day with that approach, since ultimately anyone who saw that telnet was open on my box would inevitably try it first...
My ISP also had a spider that went out and checked common ports, so we firewalled that so it didn't see ftp, mail and such running.
It's superfluous tho!
They should have just used the beta symbol on it's own or spell the english variant. It's like "IRC Chat" or "ATM Machine" or "LCD Display" or "CGPColinGregoryPalmernet"
Some people...
It's one of those questions, that if you have to ask, then you probably cant do.
I looked into interfacing a 320x240 mono lcd to a microprocessor at one point, and whilst i was sure it *could* be done (and i could probably have done it), by the time i'd got the necessary fpga development kit and a fast enough scope to debug it, i'd have far outweighed the cost of buying the nicest biggest apple display.
If you really want to integrate a display into a project then it's far easier to buy one that's designed for that purpose. I've encountered a company that make small mono line displays (like 40x8 characaters) which have an RS232 interface and are straightforward to work with.
Also anyone hobbyist that's ever invested in a couple of development kits, a decent scope, some nice power supplies, and a well stocked rack of components seems unlikely to say "With TFT-LCD's by themselves still being somewhat of a pricey commodity.."
Btw i was meaning to ask... my car's transmission makes a funky noise, and i've got lots of metal pipe lying around and surely some enterprising nerd has figured out a way to make their own transmission... chevy replacement parts by themselves are still somewhat of a pricy commodity...
But solar power is well power.
You'd need to build such a huge desalination plant that you could have built an equally large solar power plant.
What'd be interesting if you could make a solar power / desalination plant. Use sunlight to boil the water, use the steam to run turbines and collect the fresh water as it cools...
that should read "it'll burn electricity" - though i burn quite a lot personally :)
Desalination consumes a huge amount of power... that in turn creates greenhouse gases or nuclear waste.
However, if you are smart you can use your desalination plant only at times when the demand on the power grid is below average, and i'll burn electricity which would have otherwise been wasted.
When you are a manufacturer, i can't see any reason to not sell online. There are a few highly specialized items that dont work well online, but for 99% of manufacturers they want to ship as many units as possible.
When i go to buy speakers/electronics/computer/camera equipment, i'll almost always research it thouroughly online. Then have to make a tradeoff between the cost/convenience of buying locally or online.
I bought, for example, a tripod locally because i wanted to feel it's build construction and play with it's motions. The local markup was worth it.
In other cases it's just not worth it. I wanted a particular black and white film, and i could get a SINGLE roll of it (including shipping) for 1/3rd the cost of buying it locally. That's essentially a commodity item, and when B&M stores are gouging prices to that extent they've lost my business.
The internet also rocks for obscure items. One of my cameras was at the time afaik sold by 3 retailers - one in shanghaii, one in amsterdam and one in winsconsin. B&M stores just cant compete on the selection that the entire internet can provide.
The stores may win or lose, but the manufacturers always seem to win, or at least those with quality products do.
A year ago it seemed to be the case that they needed to advertise the position locally.
:)
I attempted to get an H1B in april last year, and when my potential employer advertised an entry level position - they got over 200 applications. People with 12 years experience applied! I was told it was a non-starter.
I've since entered the USA on a K-1 fiancee visa, and ultimately it's easier to relax when your residency depends on your marriage being successful and not your tech company
The downside is i've had a lot more personal dealings with the INS than if a large corporation had taken care of the process for me. They aren't the most fun people to talk to....
They also acknowledged that 4G is based on IPv6.
Perhaps IPv6 includes a section on how you should module it over the airwaves and multiplex different signals. But i doubt it.
I've never been to a country where I haven't seen the Simpsons advertised on TV (at least in countries where i could read tv listings).
It's pretty huge in the UK and we probably get somewhere between 4 and 10 episodes per day, every day...
I'm sure fox collects on all of those as well.
I wasn't too impressed with the pictures online, but in reality it looks very cool.
It's very well made, with a soft-touch rubberized finish - and it's tiny. It easily sits on top of the wave radio that we usually use it with.
I'm running a fairly recent version of the server, and have a fairly recent set of oggtools (iirc), and it sounds great.
Ultimately the 'long' 30-60 second ad is shown at 2am on discovery when it costs next-to-nothing to advertise.
Then the advertiser can get away with running short 'teaser' ads at primetime to entice users to either go to the web or their tivo to find out what it's all about.
The simple answer is that adverts need to get better. Some people, myself included, are far more interested in the ads than the superbowl - that's proof enough that if advertisers try hard enough then they can make ads worth watching.
If an ad's not clever, witty or inspiring then i'm never going to want to watch it.
Java is open in a way that we can only dream of windows being open. It's not controlled by a single entity, it's APIs are excellently documented, and anyone can build a functionally identical replacement.
Ultimately the reference compiler, VM and supporting libraries are not open source - but they are just the reference ones. Nothing stops people from making a truly open source version ala blackdown.
Sun's rate of 'new features' has been more methodical enterprise-paced than the typical open source project, but it's coming along. Check out J2SE1.5 it's got strongly typed enumerations, generics, an extended for syntax and various other much appreciated features.
I think a very stable reference platform is one of the best things Java has going for it. Ever tried to get a perl script with more than 2 or 3 dependencies to run on your webhosts box...?