"Software Defined Radio" isn't a precise term. It means "the least HW processing, the most SW processing" designed for flexibility in tuning multiple frequency bands and other (mostly protocol) features. This device is defined by SW running on it which band and protocol it's working in. It's a few steps beyond the trivial case of just switching among a few dedicated all-HW radios with a config signal. It decomposes the 3 band/protocol radios into components, factors out the redundant ones, and glues them together on demand with SW. I expect there's even more SW running than just gluing the signal path together.
So this is indeed a SW radio. Its success will create demand for radios more SW than this, especially as DSP and codecs can run on ever-lower-power HW embeddable instead of the dedicated HW. I'd say that this chip is across the threshold of SW in its essence that lets it be called a "Software Defined Radio".
This device doesn't do the DSP or any other transcoding in software. It decomposes the 3 bands' different transcoder HW into components, factors out the redundant ones, then uses SW to just glue together the required signal paths. The work is done by HW. Should work quite well.
in addition gives us FPGA-lovers something new to play with
How big an FPGA would be required to run this? Can you really download the configs and run it on an FPGA at a reasonable speed? Which Xilinx model?
How about running Linux on that simulated Niagara2, like you can uCLinux on a Microblaze? The exciting part would be replacing parts of the OS, like the TCP/IP stack, with "HW" configs for really high performance, customized per app. None of your processes use some dozen instructions? Drop their microcode in favor of a faster multiplier...
What happened? Their ice foundation melted already? Roving gangs of starving polar bears finally cracked their nut? Some kind of cosmic driveby took them down? Or maybe the South Pole Station IT department repair to McMurdo's WAN is just glacially slow...
Actually, Iran's strategy has been to advertise nonexistent nuke capabilities, since they shut down their project in 2003.
They shut it down after the US invaded Iraq, but the argument that invading Iraq stopped Iran's program is yet another Big Lie. Because we invaded Iraq on the pretext that they had a nuke program, when all they had was the false advertisements. Which is exactly what Iran switched to, without the actual nuke program that could have been a deterrent to the US repeating exactly that kind of invasion in Iran.
If you want to be afraid of Iran's nukes, the realistic threat is that they've placed a dirty bomb into the US already. Though that threat is more serious from Saudi Arabia, which has sent gigantic quantities of oil on vast fleets of tankers into the US, which could easily hide radioactive materials and detonators. If you're realistic, then port and cargo inspections like Hong Kong's been doing for years is the way to protect us. Not to pretend that we can keep a determined, rich and smart country from buying 4 Playstations.
The other realistic approach would be to stop destabilizing the oil fields, which has driven up oil profits at least 5x for almost a decade now. Which makes instability manufactured in the Mideast the most profitable game, without actually raising producer costs much, while bringing home profits to socialist tyrannies that keep their tyrants popular despite their repressions. As usual, the solution staring us in the face is using America's domestic energy stocks to switch us from depending on our enemies and the game they own. Then countries like Iran would have to use supercomputers to build cars or some other thing they can do for someone else to earn money, which would improve the entire world's lot without the armageddon part.
They're building all those new ones, including two within a morning's drive from NYC. If only they were building one that's donut shaped, a wingsuit would work great, if a little cramped. They'd probably need the equivalent of 12 16'diameter rooms in a square, which would be something like a million horsepower. Unless they could somehow shunt the airflow to just where a person was actually in it, which sounds like a completely different wind tech.
Oh, well. Back to practicing wingsuits in the snow.
Oh, it's mockery all right. Supreme condescension from one of the most evil and corrupt men to ever have his kind of power. Contempt for everything and everyone.
But the reaction to that pedantic statement was idiotic: treating it like a string of incomprehensible gibberish. Which was the media spin that the public bought into.
Thus is the vicious circle of America's public self-destruction. Your "liberal" media at work, propping up the death spiral.
Unless you're Reagan's VP, Bush Sr, in which case it's OK for you to use the CIA to fake IDs to swindle the S&Ls into handing the CIA $millions to buy stolen US military equipment and send it to Iran.
Or maybe you're Cheney's president, in which case it's OK to destroy the US in the process of removing Iran's greatest military threat, Iraq.
Or maybe you're Cheney's corporation, Halliburton, in which case doing business with Iran is OK.
They didn't say that supercomputers are required to build nukes. They said that if you're building supercomputers, then nukes are a good problem to work on with them. Not the only way to work on nuke problems, but a good way, and a good use of a supercomputer.
It's not ironic, it's the subversion of reality since Bush is no longer credible in reporting threats, after lying about Iraq. Lying self-destruction is not simply "irony", even if it does churn up all kinds of contradictions between word and fact.
Actually, that quote from Rumsfeld was a perfectly sensible statement. It's the kind of planning thinking that I've seen on the most successful projects. Rumsfeld was even helpful enough to explain each part, for those too slow to keep up with that nonobvious management insight. Of course, Americans, especially the media that treats us like children, choked on any sentence that repeats any noun twice in two different senses. Just like it could never understand Clinton when he said "it defends on what the definition of 'is' is".
Rumsfeld deserved to be mocked, but for other statements. Like "We know where [the WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." When there were no WMD, and they knew that.
Rumsfeld was a monster, but mostly because of the unknown knowns.
Safe Practice
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The tricky part of these wingsuits is how to practice enough to get good, without smashing to goo because you're not good enough.
Now there's a solution, that's probably fun enough in itself that many "skydivers" won't ever have to take a risk at all: SkyVenture has wind tunnels set up around the world expressly for simulating skydiving, but without jumping out of a plane. Jumps that last 2-3 minutes, with 45-60 minute setup and plane rides each jump, can now spend hours just "diving" in the chamber.
Maybe once the skills of maneuvering are learned in the tunnel, a suit wearer can tackle the real sport: facing the fear of jumping out of a plane with nothing but a simulator history to save them from smashing to bits.
Talk about LiPService: Access (of Japan) was the company that basically bought the PalmOS away from Palm. They claimed (in 2005) that they were going to roll out mobile phones running Linux, with PalmOS GUI and binary compatibility. Where are they? Just now putting out just specs, right as Google and the rest of the world blot them out of existence. Nearly certainly taking chances of a Linux mobile with Palm compatibility (and its library of apps and developers) to zero.
I stick CDs under wobbly table legs. I can't find that use authorized anywhere in anything I've ever agreed to, or even unilaterally decreed by the CD's artist, publisher, vendor or the RIAA.
I didn't even include in the energy budget the energy spent on war to keep those petrofuels flowing, which is a much smaller amount for the renewables that usually can be produced entirely inside the US. Which is an investment in the US that can be exported peacefully, rather than an investment in Arabs that requires perpetual global warfare.
FWIW, it just says any monitoring that turns up child porn has to report it. Which is still anti-American, forcing neighbors to report on each other to the cops, but since these "neighbors" are ISPs which don't report stuff like this at the rate that real neighbors would do voluntarily, it's an ethical conundrum.
If the government investigated the reports by looking more carefully at the reported transactions, without disturbing anyone, quickly, dismissed any that weren't actually evidence of a crime, and quickly deleted all records of any dismissed investigations, never leaking this info, then this could be a good system. However, I have no faith that any of those conditions will be met. But at least this law won't force every ISP to throw everyone into that system.
It turns out that the SAFE Act doesn't require ISPs to monitor. It just says any monitoring that turns up child porn has to report it. Which is still anti-American, forcing neighbors to report on each other to the cops, but since these "neighbors" are ISPs which don't report stuff like this at the rate that real neighbors would do voluntarily, it's an ethical conundrum.
If the government investigated the reports by looking more carefully at the reported transactions, without disturbing anyone, quickly, dismissed any that weren't actually evidence of a crime, and quickly deleted all records of any dismissed investigations, never leaking this info, then this could be a good system. However, I have no faith that any of those conditions will be met. But at least this law won't force every ISP to throw everyone into that system.
Thank you for that excellent correction - complete with citation and insightful analysis. Now I can stop freaking out (to the degree...) and stop posting my freakouts.
Well, it's almost the law, and proably will be soon enough, to require ISPs to spy on your every message, request and download.
The House just passed the "SAFE Act" to force all ISPs to take responsibility for all content they host or transport, even if they don't moderate it, in direct contradiction of the landmark CDA [wikipedia.org] which let ISPs be like telcos always have. Lots of child molesters trap children in telephone conversations, but the telco has no liability. Because holding them responsible requires tapping every conversation, which is what the SAFE Act (not the one with the same name that sanely deregulated crypto export) now does: forces ISPs to monitor and analyze the content of your every Internet communication.
When the Senate passes it, then the president signs it, every ISP will be forced to spy on your every online move (just like the government does - hi, Dick!). Just the threat of enforcement will be enough to get ISPs to do whatever the government wants.
These are all interesting and valuable technologies for extracting and using energy. But of course they all consume some of the energy they help produce and deliver. Making that delivery system less efficient in order to use it at all.
But existing fuels have the same problem. Is there anywhere that shows how much energy is consumed by extracting petroleum from the ground, getting it to a ship or pipeline, refined into products, then across to where it's burned for power? How much gasoline is burned driving to a gas station to fill up? How about the energy required to build and maintain the infrastructure, or even explore for new fields? Some of these losses are small, but they all add up. How about for coal and natural gas?
Once we know the "energy budget" of each kind of energy system, we can actually make sensible choices. Gasoline has some of the highest energy density of any fuel, but its pollution has extremely high energy costs to recover from. Maybe some of these other systems are better net propositions. Or maybe they just look good on TV, until you see all the costs that actually goes into using them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Software Defined Radio" isn't a precise term. It means "the least HW processing, the most SW processing" designed for flexibility in tuning multiple frequency bands and other (mostly protocol) features. This device is defined by SW running on it which band and protocol it's working in. It's a few steps beyond the trivial case of just switching among a few dedicated all-HW radios with a config signal. It decomposes the 3 band/protocol radios into components, factors out the redundant ones, and glues them together on demand with SW. I expect there's even more SW running than just gluing the signal path together.
So this is indeed a SW radio. Its success will create demand for radios more SW than this, especially as DSP and codecs can run on ever-lower-power HW embeddable instead of the dedicated HW. I'd say that this chip is across the threshold of SW in its essence that lets it be called a "Software Defined Radio".
This device doesn't do the DSP or any other transcoding in software. It decomposes the 3 bands' different transcoder HW into components, factors out the redundant ones, then uses SW to just glue together the required signal paths. The work is done by HW. Should work quite well.
LinuxMCE already does what TiVo does, and a lot more, by integrating MythTV with home automation, telephony, and all kinds of other stuff.
OK, but does the USRP (or even v2) fit on a 24mm^2 chip drawing 80mW for 52Mbps?
How big an FPGA would be required to run this? Can you really download the configs and run it on an FPGA at a reasonable speed? Which Xilinx model?
How about running Linux on that simulated Niagara2, like you can uCLinux on a Microblaze? The exciting part would be replacing parts of the OS, like the TCP/IP stack, with "HW" configs for really high performance, customized per app. None of your processes use some dozen instructions? Drop their microcode in favor of a faster multiplier...
Yeah, what about Alien vs Predator!?! I guess you're implying that's the only logical explanation.
OTOH, "The vast majority of people are idiots. The problem is they're too stupid to realize it."
I vote for "corporadoes". "2007: the Year of Corporadoes" seems about right.
ping mcmurdo.gov
ping: unknown host mcmurdo.gov
What happened? Their ice foundation melted already? Roving gangs of starving polar bears finally cracked their nut? Some kind of cosmic driveby took them down? Or maybe the South Pole Station IT department repair to McMurdo's WAN is just glacially slow...
Actually, Iran's strategy has been to advertise nonexistent nuke capabilities, since they shut down their project in 2003.
They shut it down after the US invaded Iraq, but the argument that invading Iraq stopped Iran's program is yet another Big Lie. Because we invaded Iraq on the pretext that they had a nuke program, when all they had was the false advertisements. Which is exactly what Iran switched to, without the actual nuke program that could have been a deterrent to the US repeating exactly that kind of invasion in Iran.
If you want to be afraid of Iran's nukes, the realistic threat is that they've placed a dirty bomb into the US already. Though that threat is more serious from Saudi Arabia, which has sent gigantic quantities of oil on vast fleets of tankers into the US, which could easily hide radioactive materials and detonators. If you're realistic, then port and cargo inspections like Hong Kong's been doing for years is the way to protect us. Not to pretend that we can keep a determined, rich and smart country from buying 4 Playstations.
The other realistic approach would be to stop destabilizing the oil fields, which has driven up oil profits at least 5x for almost a decade now. Which makes instability manufactured in the Mideast the most profitable game, without actually raising producer costs much, while bringing home profits to socialist tyrannies that keep their tyrants popular despite their repressions. As usual, the solution staring us in the face is using America's domestic energy stocks to switch us from depending on our enemies and the game they own. Then countries like Iran would have to use supercomputers to build cars or some other thing they can do for someone else to earn money, which would improve the entire world's lot without the armageddon part.
Totally correct - I hadn't thought about that.
They're building all those new ones, including two within a morning's drive from NYC. If only they were building one that's donut shaped, a wingsuit would work great, if a little cramped. They'd probably need the equivalent of 12 16'diameter rooms in a square, which would be something like a million horsepower. Unless they could somehow shunt the airflow to just where a person was actually in it, which sounds like a completely different wind tech.
Oh, well. Back to practicing wingsuits in the snow.
Oh, it's mockery all right. Supreme condescension from one of the most evil and corrupt men to ever have his kind of power. Contempt for everything and everyone.
But the reaction to that pedantic statement was idiotic: treating it like a string of incomprehensible gibberish. Which was the media spin that the public bought into.
Thus is the vicious circle of America's public self-destruction. Your "liberal" media at work, propping up the death spiral.
Unless you're Reagan's VP, Bush Sr, in which case it's OK for you to use the CIA to fake IDs to swindle the S&Ls into handing the CIA $millions to buy stolen US military equipment and send it to Iran.
Or maybe you're Cheney's president, in which case it's OK to destroy the US in the process of removing Iran's greatest military threat, Iraq.
Or maybe you're Cheney's corporation, Halliburton, in which case doing business with Iran is OK.
They didn't say that supercomputers are required to build nukes. They said that if you're building supercomputers, then nukes are a good problem to work on with them. Not the only way to work on nuke problems, but a good way, and a good use of a supercomputer.
It's not ironic, it's the subversion of reality since Bush is no longer credible in reporting threats, after lying about Iraq. Lying self-destruction is not simply "irony", even if it does churn up all kinds of contradictions between word and fact.
At 204+ GFLOPS each, 4 PS3s would match this supercomputer for only $2000. Plus shipping. From Japan, which buys a lot of oil.
Actually, that quote from Rumsfeld was a perfectly sensible statement. It's the kind of planning thinking that I've seen on the most successful projects. Rumsfeld was even helpful enough to explain each part, for those too slow to keep up with that nonobvious management insight. Of course, Americans, especially the media that treats us like children, choked on any sentence that repeats any noun twice in two different senses. Just like it could never understand Clinton when he said "it defends on what the definition of 'is' is".
Rumsfeld deserved to be mocked, but for other statements. Like "We know where [the WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." When there were no WMD, and they knew that.
Rumsfeld was a monster, but mostly because of the unknown knowns.
The tricky part of these wingsuits is how to practice enough to get good, without smashing to goo because you're not good enough.
Now there's a solution, that's probably fun enough in itself that many "skydivers" won't ever have to take a risk at all: SkyVenture has wind tunnels set up around the world expressly for simulating skydiving, but without jumping out of a plane. Jumps that last 2-3 minutes, with 45-60 minute setup and plane rides each jump, can now spend hours just "diving" in the chamber.
Maybe once the skills of maneuvering are learned in the tunnel, a suit wearer can tackle the real sport: facing the fear of jumping out of a plane with nothing but a simulator history to save them from smashing to bits.
Talk about LiPService: Access (of Japan) was the company that basically bought the PalmOS away from Palm. They claimed (in 2005) that they were going to roll out mobile phones running Linux, with PalmOS GUI and binary compatibility. Where are they? Just now putting out just specs, right as Google and the rest of the world blot them out of existence. Nearly certainly taking chances of a Linux mobile with Palm compatibility (and its library of apps and developers) to zero.
I stick CDs under wobbly table legs. I can't find that use authorized anywhere in anything I've ever agreed to, or even unilaterally decreed by the CD's artist, publisher, vendor or the RIAA.
Come and get me, mofos!
I didn't even include in the energy budget the energy spent on war to keep those petrofuels flowing, which is a much smaller amount for the renewables that usually can be produced entirely inside the US. Which is an investment in the US that can be exported peacefully, rather than an investment in Arabs that requires perpetual global warfare.
FWIW, it just says any monitoring that turns up child porn has to report it. Which is still anti-American, forcing neighbors to report on each other to the cops, but since these "neighbors" are ISPs which don't report stuff like this at the rate that real neighbors would do voluntarily, it's an ethical conundrum.
If the government investigated the reports by looking more carefully at the reported transactions, without disturbing anyone, quickly, dismissed any that weren't actually evidence of a crime, and quickly deleted all records of any dismissed investigations, never leaking this info, then this could be a good system. However, I have no faith that any of those conditions will be met. But at least this law won't force every ISP to throw everyone into that system.
Not so insightful...
It turns out that the SAFE Act doesn't require ISPs to monitor. It just says any monitoring that turns up child porn has to report it. Which is still anti-American, forcing neighbors to report on each other to the cops, but since these "neighbors" are ISPs which don't report stuff like this at the rate that real neighbors would do voluntarily, it's an ethical conundrum.
If the government investigated the reports by looking more carefully at the reported transactions, without disturbing anyone, quickly, dismissed any that weren't actually evidence of a crime, and quickly deleted all records of any dismissed investigations, never leaking this info, then this could be a good system. However, I have no faith that any of those conditions will be met. But at least this law won't force every ISP to throw everyone into that system.
Thank you for that excellent correction - complete with citation and insightful analysis. Now I can stop freaking out (to the degree...) and stop posting my freakouts.
Well, it's almost the law, and proably will be soon enough, to require ISPs to spy on your every message, request and download.
The House just passed the "SAFE Act" to force all ISPs to take responsibility for all content they host or transport, even if they don't moderate it, in direct contradiction of the landmark CDA [wikipedia.org] which let ISPs be like telcos always have. Lots of child molesters trap children in telephone conversations, but the telco has no liability. Because holding them responsible requires tapping every conversation, which is what the SAFE Act (not the one with the same name that sanely deregulated crypto export) now does: forces ISPs to monitor and analyze the content of your every Internet communication.
When the Senate passes it, then the president signs it, every ISP will be forced to spy on your every online move (just like the government does - hi, Dick!). Just the threat of enforcement will be enough to get ISPs to do whatever the government wants.
These are all interesting and valuable technologies for extracting and using energy. But of course they all consume some of the energy they help produce and deliver. Making that delivery system less efficient in order to use it at all.
But existing fuels have the same problem. Is there anywhere that shows how much energy is consumed by extracting petroleum from the ground, getting it to a ship or pipeline, refined into products, then across to where it's burned for power? How much gasoline is burned driving to a gas station to fill up? How about the energy required to build and maintain the infrastructure, or even explore for new fields? Some of these losses are small, but they all add up. How about for coal and natural gas?
Once we know the "energy budget" of each kind of energy system, we can actually make sensible choices. Gasoline has some of the highest energy density of any fuel, but its pollution has extremely high energy costs to recover from. Maybe some of these other systems are better net propositions. Or maybe they just look good on TV, until you see all the costs that actually goes into using them.