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  1. Re:Yay this is awsome. on AT&T Introduces Satellite-Enabled Smart Phone · · Score: 3, Informative

    The "clear view" of sourthern sky is not necessarily so. Maybe if you were in a tropical forest, you'd have a problem. A standard pine forest does attenuate things, but pine needles aren't leaves. I've used Iridium for a bit and I've never ever had a situation where a satphone connection wouldn't work on the ground, but would work above the tops of the pines. Terrestar uses way better space segment, with comparatively colossal beamforming, so I'd expect it to work much better than Iridium did.

    In the U.S., detached residential construction is basically relatively dry plywood with a wire or a pipe here and there, and with some bitumic shingles on the roof. Unless the shingles are the dealbreaker, I'd expect GENUS to work just fine indoors in a regular home. In commercial buildings -- sure, there will be problems, perhaps a bit more like there are with cellphone reception there.

    As for cellphones in forests: assuming that the forest is well within a covered area, the trees should pose no problem. You always get attenuation from something. Trees, walls, rebar -- somehow my cellphone works just fine in a building with extruded corrugated steel roof (big seamless sections), and with reinforced concrete walls, at ground level.

    Forests in remote areas simply may suffer from generally poor coverage, where the trees just make a marginal situation unworkable. But the trees aren't the main problem, the coverage is. And that's where GENUS steps in: you have poor land-based coverage, so it'll switch to the space segment.

    I've been tracking Terrestar's PR quite closely, and they seem to be quite good at what they do. Their space segment is unique, and so far I have no reason to distrust their engineering. They cover their asses, but from what little experience I have, I'd expect GENUS to pretty much "just work" anywhere within the northern U.S., even in the middle of nowhere, Utah.

  2. Re:I can't wait on Terry Pratchett's Self-Made Meteorite Sword · · Score: 1

    LOL. In theory, yes. In practice -- have you ever asked some naturalized U.S. citizens if they renounced their other citizenship(s)? I don't know of any who did the latter, even though I do know many of the former.

  3. Re:Original Article on Terry Pratchett's Self-Made Meteorite Sword · · Score: 1

    Have you seen his monitor setup? I'm jealous, and I'm supposed to call myself a geek.

  4. Re:Immature and Gun Happy on Hunters Shot Down Google Fiber · · Score: 1

    Somehow every Swiss household has a gun, and I don't think they are any worse for that. So gun ownership isn't necessarily a bad thing. Problems start when you get teenagers who think it's OK to shoot others as a way of solving problems. The Swiss would have the same problem had they had teens who think the same... It's the people, stupid. ;)

  5. Re:Worthless Trademark on Woman Trademarks Name and Threatens Sites Using It · · Score: 1

    No, they specifically mentioned "trutina dulcem", and that it was of a plant/fruit origin. The products with it were available for, IIRC, less than a year.

    Graeter's is otherwise a reputable company, perhaps someone tipped them off that they have been had.

  6. Re:Ellie K on Woman Trademarks Name and Threatens Sites Using It · · Score: 1

    TESS shows no records for "chrismessina" as a registered wordmark.

    Anyway, if he really did it, it'd be a trademark registered for a single purpose only, but it's hard for me to imagine what purpose it may be, not seeing the trademark application itself. Care for a link to it?

  7. Re:Worthless Trademark on Woman Trademarks Name and Threatens Sites Using It · · Score: 1

    Interesting: Graeters, an ice cream chain in Ohio, used to sell "low-glycemic" ice cream with trutina dulcem instead of regular sugar. They then have taken if off the shelves. Supposedly this "trutina", whatever it is, is plant-based, tastes sweet, but doesn't get your blood sugar up. I don't know how much truth there is to it -- are there any published papers about that?

  8. Re:Good timing on U. Penn Super Quadcopter Learns New Tricks · · Score: 1

    The motion is pre-programmed in the sense that once the hoop is flying, it follows the ballistic trajectory. The control algorithm is set up to depend on that, and it choses an optimal trajectory for the quad to get through the hoop, knowing how the hoop moves in the immediate future. If you added a thruster on the hoop to make it non-ballistic, you could easily get the quad to crash. To make the quad become a universal hoop-jumper, whether the hoops move or not, the control system would need to learn how fast each hoop can maneouver, and use that to calculate a 4D hoop envelope. Then it'd need to get an optimal intersection of the quad's trajectory with the hoop envelope's inner hole. Those problems are, mathematically, not all that trivial.

  9. Re:IR Lamps show weakness on U. Penn Super Quadcopter Learns New Tricks · · Score: 1

    Nope. The only sensors on the quad are motor speed sensors.

  10. Re:Killing me in my sleep? on U. Penn Super Quadcopter Learns New Tricks · · Score: 1

    Nope. The "bright red lights" are infrared light sources of the motion tracking system, mounted on the walls. Most likely a Vicon system with 1000Hz cameras. The IR illuminators show up on color CMOS-sensor cameras as red.

    The hoops don't have to be colored at all -- they have retro-reflective markers for the motion capture system, IIRC.

    There's nothing on the aircraft that would "see" anything, it's merely an airframe, battery, motor controller, and a radio receiver. All of the control is done elsewhere in the room.

  11. Re:Killing me in my sleep? on U. Penn Super Quadcopter Learns New Tricks · · Score: 1

    This should be modded insightful. The aircraft have no inertial references AFAIK. All they are is four remotely controlled motors. All of the real-time processing for the control is done elsewhere in the room. The aircraft have retro-reflective markers and external motion capture is used to get feedback for the control system. If you were to try and reproduce their results, the stumbling block would be the price of the Vicon motion capture system with 1000Hz sampling rate cameras. Those aren't cheap.

  12. Re:translation hard to understand... on Swiss Canton Abandons Linux Migration · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If Linux geuninely gas higher TCO, perhaps adjusted for intangible employee morale, then obviously you shouldn't transition. I can't fathom the incompetence it'd take to have higher costs when moving to Linux for basic office jobs, though. One can have pretty much one or two images that take care of all desktops, they can run a streamlined desktop environment, etc.

  13. Re:Fast enough to reach orbit is... on NASA Looks At Railgun-Like Rocket Launcher · · Score: 1

    You black out when you fly a curved path -- that's the only way to generate sufficient accelerations. To merely fly fast, all you've got is the mass of the aircraft (and your butt) counteracted by the engine thrust. Gives a nice buttkick, but not nearly enough to cause any distress.

    The fighter pilots black out when they make turns, and for that they don't need to fly fast at all. You can easily black out on an aerobatic biplane with a prop engine.

  14. Re:Brain vs. Galaxy Simulation on Simulating Galaxies With Supercomputers · · Score: 1

    They don't do a simulation of the entire brain, just a part of the cortex. And their simulation runs at maybe 1% of real time.

  15. Re:Complete fail. on HDCP Master Key Revealed · · Score: 1

    Not only that, but the DRM peddlers completely ignore the wetware that's actually implementing this stuff. To a team that develops a player or display firmware, DRM is an annoyance -- it's extra work that adds nothing to the value or functionality of their product, it's only a market enabler. They'll implement it only as far as it takes to get their product blessed by whoever does a 3rd party review/certification (if there's such a thing for DRM). Thus one can't but expect security holes galore and spaghetti code and whatnot. Never mind weaknesses in the algorithms themselves.

  16. Re:Why don't they run it on GPU's on Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced · · Score: 1

    That's when you stream. I don't know offhand how the binary space partitioning meshes with caching. Unless someone shows me research where they benchmarked it and shown it not be an issue, I'll assume that 100-130 gb/s may not be enough. Those figures are for streaming reads/writes. Random access will be slower, perhaps 2x slower, perhaps more. I expect very little cache coherency, so pretty much every 2-3 accesses to a cache line will end up in an eviction. The raytracing needs say 50-100gb/s of random access.

  17. Re:Sigh on Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced · · Score: 1

    Motion capture is a crutch. What you really need for fluid motion of humans and other animate models is motion control akin to what they have in robots, say in Big Dog. What motion capture does is basically leave the dynamics and control to a wetware system. It's a hack at best.

    The game engine needs a kinetics+kinematics simulator, and a controller like what you'd have in a real-life robot. If you push this idea forward, it enables you to do very realistic tricks. Say you get an extra strength pill -- all it'd do is increase the actuation force limits in your model. The fact that you can jump 15 feet high or bend steel bars just follows from that, no extra code required.

    For Intel's demo to be impressive, they'd better implement a full dynamics simulator with motion controller for the animate models, as well as a FEM simulator (linear plasticity + dynamics) for certain objects in the environment. You go to a steel barrel, kick it, and you see a dent. You get a shotgun, you shoot it, it gets a nice ripped hole plus it tumbles. You get a big-ass-blaster, and you can shoot the barrel and keep it afloat in the air.

    That would get me impressed. What they did is an intro-to-CG raytracing job with complex models instead of a bunch of spheres on a checkered background.

  18. Re:Why don't they run it on GPU's on Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced · · Score: 1

    Memory bandwidth is the key here. Processing speed is a secondary concern.

  19. Re:Hmmm on Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just thinking about the bandwidths is interesting. Start with 150E6 rays per second. Assume that to traverse the binary space subdivision data structures takes, say, 256 bytes, along with another 256 bytes worth of data for the polygon. That requires ~77 gigabytes/s memory bandwidth, sustained. So in practice you need the bandwidth of 6 fastest DDR3 sticks. And your algorithms better kept the CPUs pipelines full, and did proper prefetching, or else cache misses will have you for a day's worth of meals.

  20. Re:Cloud gaming and latency on Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't know if latency is any sort of a problem. You're talking of a LAN connection. This technology is not meant to render stuff somewhere out there on the intertubes. It needs to be in the same building, or on the same campus.

  21. Re:Doesn't really matter... on Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong · · Score: 1

    If a bill has to become law for people to be able to view it objectively, then something somewhere is seriously wrong. That quote is, at best, an admission of that. The speaker lady should, perhaps, do something about it, rather than just publicly admitting defeat and acceptance of status quo (that's what IMHO she did by saying those words).

  22. Re:I am not surprised. on Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong · · Score: 1

    You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily

    -- I don't have to take him/her seriously. The results will speak for themselves. If some "lunatic" comes up with a theory that actually works -- it's still good for science. Now of course I don't think that there have been any lunatics recently who came up with good theories, but it's not an impossible thing. Unlikely, perhaps. Many good scientists were people who had been a tad weird in one sense or another. My favorite Feynman had a rather objectified view of women, for example, even though he was otherwise a good family guy and a good father.

  23. I like their implied spin on Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong · · Score: 1

    Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe

    -- yeah, their belief is truly academic. Useless, I mean. Is my belief that their belief is useless an academic one? What makes a belief academic? If they get a Russian in on it and he/she calls him/herself academician, does that sorta kinda cover it? Or does one need to do something special to make a belief an academic one? Perhaps believing while going to an academy?

    FAIL.

  24. Re:Tar sands on German Military Braces For Peak Oil · · Score: 1

    You somehow imply that the oil prospectors have 6th sense for finding oil. Nope. Back then they could only figure out stuff that's very close to the surface -- that's where you see the classical rocker-and-flywheel pumps. Anything else they'd have no clue about. The shallow crude reserves are mostly depleted at this point, everywhere in the world. What's left is there just for kicks.

  25. Re:Tar sands on German Military Braces For Peak Oil · · Score: 1

    To know how much oil you really have, you need at the least seismic sounding, seismographs with analog tape recorders, and some form of DSP, even if on punched cards.

    The DSP side of it was demonstrated to be doable at the earliest in the mid-40s, Feynman-style. I doubt that Standard Oil et al. had scientists and equipment of that caliber at that time.