Haven't they decided that some meteorites that have been found here originated from Mars? It'll be interesting to see how the known-real stuff compares with those teeny tiny fragments.
Can anybody else see this starting? RPV tanks, for recon, then arm them, and automate via AI many of the self-defense tasks... Pretty soon, no need for even a seat inside them (Predator has no way to fly in it), and we're on the road to the Bolo Mk. XXXVIII units, wheee!
Might make being a geek fun again:) Say, has any modelmaker yet made a model of the Predator?:)
Here in Seattle, we get them at Pike Place Market. They're tasty, tho not exactly potato shaped. One thanksgiving, I made mashes potatoes from them - rather yummy:)
What I've been dreaming of for years was a whole meal, where most of the food was a natural-but-exotic color. Purple french fries with white ketchup, and / or white cheddar cheese. Spaghetti sauce made from white tomatoes and red onions. Stuff like that. It'd all taste right, but it'd sure look... odd:)
Try a Burpee seed catalog for other plants along similar lines. I think it'd be interesting:)
By the way, wouldn't purple potatoes have more phyto-whatevers? From what I recall, colored fruits and veggies are better for you that white ones. Might be worth a look.
Granted, battery life on cell phones and pagers is an issue, but...
Don't these devices also use a crystal-based signal from which to run? Those little quartz devices are not immune to shock, by any means. I'd even hazard to guess that falling a hundred stories, let alone having a hundred stories' worth os rubble fall on them, is very likely to render the crystals inoperative.
Still, some units may have remained functional. Here's hoping they find some people with this approach, tho I suspect that even a well-designed unit would have been pounded unto dust with the collapse:(
*sigh* One can indeed be homosexual and not have a gender problem. One's gender is not related to one's seual preference. It took psychotherapists many years to realise this; some still do not accept this:(
Alan Turing was a homosexual man. He was forced to take hormones, to make him not want other men. The depression from this, and his lack of acceptance, drove him to suicide. Very sad for the whole world, to lose such a brilliant man.
(FWIW, the thing I appreciated about his insight was that he fully believed that data and code were the same, and thus, self-modifying code was, to him, quite allowable. This is rather unlike the current paradigm, that says self-modifying code is a Bad Thing:( )
Clinical trials show that the ABCs help *some* people, *some* of the time. Check out what's up in the UK, and why they're *not* giving anybody there the ABC drugs - they have determined, for the small number of people helped, and the small amount of help, it's just not worth the expense.
As I've *already* tried the ABCs, and not only did they fail to help me, they damned near lead to my suicide, I'm looking for something better, something that won't just prolong how much time I'll have left while disabled, but might actually offer a chance to become functional again. Stem cells are that way.
Yes, the guidelines are about what Federal funds will finance. With the guidelines in place, however, and with damned near all of those "60" (so far, it's actually 64) lines already patented, it's going to be real hard for most researchers to even get started without a huge bankroll.
In effect, GWB has told me that his God doesn't want me to be cured, so just shut up and die already. That's what a "compassionate" conservative is, I guess.
ABC drugs do not work for squat. I've tried Avonex. Got sick as a dog, depressed to actively pursuing suicide, until I stopped it. It took me two weeks to come back to sanity. Thank Goddess my partner had her guns locked away, and kept the kitchen knives out of my reach.
Copaxone doesn't give the depression, but does leave you with a life-long bump under the skin, every other day. As I have use of only one hand, the injection site would be the leg I can reach. Works fine, until there's no un-bumpy skin to hit, assuming that I can afford the medication in the first place.
Betaseron does just as poorly as Avonex, with depression. Neurontin is cancer chemotherapy - aside from losing all my hair, I can only take it three times in my life. Steroids help during an exacerbation, but again, they are limited, I can only get them twice a year (they leach calcium from bones and teeth, so the game becomes "Which is worse, osteoporosis or MS?").
The cure for MS is two-fold. First shut the blood-brain barrier, so that macrophages can no longer get in to eat the myelin. Second, once that's done, implant a large supply of stem cells into the damaged areas, and start taking progesterone to encourage them to form into oligodendricytes, which then re-build the damaged myelin.
With the Shrub's stem cell guidelines, the all-important second part of that cure will not happen. So, in effect, what he's told me is "My God thinks you're a drain on my money. Go away and die, and be quiet about it."
Sure, and it's a far better use of the "taxpayer's nickle" to pay me SSDI (for secondary progressive multiple sclerosis) for the rest of my life, currently at some $14k a year (plus inflation), plus pay my medical costs (except prescriptions), and subsidise my housing cost, rather than waste the money financing something that stands a chance in Hades of allowing me to return to work as a Software Engineer. Riiiight.
It's this extreme short-sightedness, combined with the RRR's holier-than-thou stance, that has effectively shut the door on a cure for millions of people. Thanks, Shrub Junior. I really needed this.
Um, maybe I'm confused, but Atlanta cutlery has had Damascus steel blades for years. Heck, my roommate even has an older Famascus steel pocketknife.
We've never tried cutting a falling silk scarf, but the thing gets sharp, and holds a heck of an edge. I'm planning to make an athame (Wiccan ritual dagger) from a Damascus boot-knife blade, with a jet handle, inset with mokume gane.
I'll let you know if I can cut a falling silk scarf with it:)
She just turned 21 in December. She's got about two years solid experience doing tech dupport, in two chunks (she took time off to move in with me, then eventually broke up and went back to work), but has spent zero time getting any further degree (for lack of both sufficient time and money).
Until Symantec will encourage her to get that degree, all they're doing is burning her out. Seeing as they can always get cheap, starry-eyed newbies to fill her job, thanks to the law about importing workers, I really don't see this happening any time soon.
My ex, a Canadian, works for Symmantec. They shut down their Toronto tech support office, and moved it to Oregon. She went with them, on an H1B visa.
Now, she's working longer hours, for less real pay (yeah, the US Dollar's better than the Canafian Dollar, but costs are high here, too). Add to that, she's stuck in bufu Oregon, and has no real option to change companies.
She's brilliant, and really should be in school earning a degree in programming... but she can't, not on what little free time and money she has now.
So, yes, from the other side of the story, the "imported" IT staff, it's a reality. This whole "shortage" was a scam, designed to let companies import cheap workers at slave-labor rates, and work them to death, all for the good of the bottom line. Welcome to America.
Dunno bout you, but I have a few Tron mp3s. Interesting:)
I recall going to see this with the first company where I had a real, fulltime computer programmer job. We'd just had our company picnic, and we were wearing our team teeshirts - mine was the "MCPs" (male chauvinist pigs)(yes, Ms. Carlos and I have something in common), and my team number was in binary. Then, at the movie, I saw that the bad "guy" was the MCP. Talk about a coincidence!:)
I eventually bought the movie on Laserdisk. Twas a very fun movie, rife with inside jokes (the wall map showing what "sector" they were in, the read/write head that transported the prisoners, even the spindle at the center of the disk) that were bafflegab to everybody else but to the "in" crowd they really made the movie.
I hope they do make a sequel, and that it's as well-built as the first was.
Many moons ago, for fun (and field day that year:) ), I took the guts of a "laptop" power supply, bought surplus, and fitted it to a '386SX-20 system, with 5M ram, and a 40MB hd. We bolted this to an SVGA monochrome monitor that ran off of 12 volts. All of this was powered by a large 12 volt deep-cycle battery, which was, in turn, recharged by a few 15v 2A solar panels.
This, in turn, was attached to a TNC, and a 2m HT. both of which also ran from 12 volts. It made a rather nice emergency system:) Especially when plugged into the 2m side of the satellite antenna array (which, by an amazing co-incidence (actually, it took research to find the right parts), had rotors, both azimuth and elevation, powered by 12 volts DC).
Now, granted the whole station consumed far more than 8.5 watts, but this was all off-the-shelf hardware from 1994, so I'd certainly hope that *some* progress has been made since then.
Hmm, 100Mbps Ethernet on-chip, 8M SDRAM, 2M flash, running a 20MHz RISC cpu. $50 each in quantity.
10 of these should make for a heck of a Beowolf cluster. Also, ten of then will "eat" a whopping 12 watts of 3.3volt power. They're also rather small - should be fairly easy to build "Beowolf boards", able to tackle many compute-intensive tasks on a minimal size- and power-budget, and not too much of a dollar-budget, too.
I can't think of anything I do that could use this idea, but I'm quite certain that a dozen other/.-ers can, and a few probably will, too.
Everybody's commenting on the basic idea of moving (or e-faking such a move) to Australia and running up a huge gambling debt that you needn't then pay.
What, then, if you actually won anything? Since you're an Aussie, and such gambling was not allowed, would the casinos be forced to pay you? I'd think not.
The net effect is that you'd just be killing time if you tried this. If you can't actually win, and are not required to pay if you lose, why play at all?
"nothing but a generator, a radio, and 4 other fat, balding men"? Doesn't sound like the field days I went to.
We'd run with several radios - HF, VHF (ssb and FM both) and UHF, as well as a few packet stations. We'd use big honking deep-cycle batteries that were charged by solor panels - some commercially-made, some home-built from individual cells, one year we had a battery of electrolytics (over a full farad, *that* was fun!) to even out fluctuations caused by clouds.
Half of the rigs used were home-built. All of them were QRP - low-power for you non-hams - so that we'd be able to handle it with what we had for power. We were able to arrive, set up everything, operate all night and take it all down. It was fun:) especially when RS-10 would come into view - low-power FM contacts all over the USA - or running a solar-powered digipeater in the park:)
Dead? Hardly. Maybe dead for those with deep pocketbooks, but for those running on a shoestring, things are different. It's still alive, and thriving, a challenge that can be used to simulate emergency communications during a disaster.
Could this be the saviour of *NIX? If time is a long signed int, counting the seconds since UNIX started, by doubling the sizeof(long), don't we automatically change when the time will roll over?
This is far more effective that rewriting every bit of software out there, and re-defining what time it is. Just change the CPU and compiler, and everything under them gets "fixed" by simply recompiling them.
Seriously, think of it: dance shoes that power cool blinking LED lights that are woven into the clothing and hair. You could even power a large array of leds and a processor that flashes a sign across your back. Add some position sensors for your limbs, and you can have stick figures on your "screen" that are dancing with you. It'd be perfect! The more you dance, the brighter you'd shine, attracting even more attention.
Several have answered the "how" part already, but as for the "why"...
Common stones used for statues were sandstone, limestone and marble, all of which are rather porous. Leaving them soak for a few thousand years in water will likely dissolve some of the stone, leaving it rather fragile.
To keep these treasures from further damage, they must be carefully cleaned, and likely then they'd need to be further stabilised in some fashion. In lapidary work, a clear liquid epoxy is commonly used - I have no idea what might be used here.
"Not to mention that keeping two physically seperated clocks in lock-step with sub-picosecond accuracy is not exactly easy."
That's exactly what killed my experimentation with spread spectrum. Keeping the timebases locked *that* tightly together, at *those* frequencies, well, that was *waaaaaay* beyond anything my meager budget would permit.
I suppose the new gizmo has figured out a way to overcome this, other than maybe also transmitting a carrier signal at its timebase frequency. I'm still rather distrustful of it. I grok that the reason it's "wideband" is because it uses a pulse. What I don't grok is why it *has* to be "wideband", and why it can't just be done with phase-shift modulation of a carrier.
Also, at the terahertz range, won't that be limited to VERY short line-of-sight? Granted, "sight" might not mean "A building is blocking my signal", but I'd have to say that the "signal" will be *waaay* down in the mud already, given that you *must* also pick up, on a non-resonant antenna, the third, fifth, seventh, ninth and so on. Amplifiers that work at the THz range are VERY non-trivial, and it'd have to be designed so that there is *zero* tolerance allowed for signal delay on all those harmonics, else your "pulse" would not look like a pulse so much as like a splatter.
Well, maybe it is a form of spread spectrum. Each "trillionth" of a second, the transmitter sends a "pulse". It is either slightly ahead of, or slightly trailing, the timer signal. As it's a "pulse", it *is* a sinusoidal wavefront, comprised of the fundamental, and the third, fifth, seventh (and so on) harmonic.
It looks doable, with a phase-locked loop to tell you whether your signal was leading the timebase (a digital "1") or trailing it (a digital "0"). What I don't understand is why he has to use a "pulse" at all? Why not just phase-0shift modulate a carrier signal?
All the pulses do is splatter harmonics every which way, providing no real benefit. It's not like you receive a "pulse", per se, what you receive is a whole huge pile of very brief signals on a gazillion different frequencies.
Perhaps I don't fully understand this invention, but to me it sure looks like snake oil. Has he ever looked at an FFT of his signal? I think not. I also suspect that, while he may be bright, the inventor hasn't actually studied rf theory.
It's not a hard mistake to make. I did the same myself, years ago, before learning more about fourrier transforms and what they tell us.
While the angled, split keyboard may be "ergonomic", that only works if you're a fully-functional typist. I never really did learn the "proper" way to type, and for me that turned out to be a good thing, too.
After I came down with multiple sclerosis, my whole right side stopped working, and now I'm typing everything left-handed only. It's hard enough using a "normal" keyboard, but anything like this, especially with the mouse-equivalent touchpad on the right side, would be very hard for me to use, carpal tunnel or not.
I rather suspect the unit would be equally annoying to anybody who is left-handed, too. *sigh* Until the designers start to realise that we're not all 6' tall, fully able-bodied right-handed people, we'll keep seeing these gadgets touted as "easy-to-use", when for quite a few people, they really are a step backwards on that front.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't they decided that some meteorites that have been found here originated from Mars? It'll be interesting to see how the known-real stuff compares with those teeny tiny fragments.
This would really be fun :) Imagine playing Quake, or Flight Sim, and not worrying about missing things because the display was too slow?
:)
I want one *drool*
Can anybody else see this starting? RPV tanks, for recon, then arm them, and automate via AI many of the self-defense tasks... Pretty soon, no need for even a seat inside them (Predator has no way to fly in it), and we're on the road to the Bolo Mk. XXXVIII units, wheee!
:) Say, has any modelmaker yet made a model of the Predator? :)
Might make being a geek fun again
Here in Seattle, we get them at Pike Place Market. They're tasty, tho not exactly potato shaped. One thanksgiving, I made mashes potatoes from them - rather yummy :)
... odd :)
:)
What I've been dreaming of for years was a whole meal, where most of the food was a natural-but-exotic color. Purple french fries with white ketchup, and / or white cheddar cheese. Spaghetti sauce made from white tomatoes and red onions. Stuff like that. It'd all taste right, but it'd sure look
Try a Burpee seed catalog for other plants along similar lines. I think it'd be interesting
By the way, wouldn't purple potatoes have more phyto-whatevers? From what I recall, colored fruits and veggies are better for you that white ones. Might be worth a look.
Granted, battery life on cell phones and pagers is an issue, but...
:(
Don't these devices also use a crystal-based signal from which to run? Those little quartz devices are not immune to shock, by any means. I'd even hazard to guess that falling a hundred stories, let alone having a hundred stories' worth os rubble fall on them, is very likely to render the crystals inoperative.
Still, some units may have remained functional. Here's hoping they find some people with this approach, tho I suspect that even a well-designed unit would have been pounded unto dust with the collapse
*sigh* One can indeed be homosexual and not have a gender problem. One's gender is not related to one's seual preference. It took psychotherapists many years to realise this; some still do not accept this :(
:( )
Alan Turing was a homosexual man. He was forced to take hormones, to make him not want other men. The depression from this, and his lack of acceptance, drove him to suicide. Very sad for the whole world, to lose such a brilliant man.
(FWIW, the thing I appreciated about his insight was that he fully believed that data and code were the same, and thus, self-modifying code was, to him, quite allowable. This is rather unlike the current paradigm, that says self-modifying code is a Bad Thing
Clinical trials show that the ABCs help *some* people, *some* of the time. Check out what's up in the UK, and why they're *not* giving anybody there the ABC drugs - they have determined, for the small number of people helped, and the small amount of help, it's just not worth the expense.
As I've *already* tried the ABCs, and not only did they fail to help me, they damned near lead to my suicide, I'm looking for something better, something that won't just prolong how much time I'll have left while disabled, but might actually offer a chance to become functional again. Stem cells are that way.
Yes, the guidelines are about what Federal funds will finance. With the guidelines in place, however, and with damned near all of those "60" (so far, it's actually 64) lines already patented, it's going to be real hard for most researchers to even get started without a huge bankroll.
In effect, GWB has told me that his God doesn't want me to be cured, so just shut up and die already. That's what a "compassionate" conservative is, I guess.
ABC drugs do not work for squat. I've tried Avonex. Got sick as a dog, depressed to actively pursuing suicide, until I stopped it. It took me two weeks to come back to sanity. Thank Goddess my partner had her guns locked away, and kept the kitchen knives out of my reach.
Copaxone doesn't give the depression, but does leave you with a life-long bump under the skin, every other day. As I have use of only one hand, the injection site would be the leg I can reach. Works fine, until there's no un-bumpy skin to hit, assuming that I can afford the medication in the first place.
Betaseron does just as poorly as Avonex, with depression. Neurontin is cancer chemotherapy - aside from losing all my hair, I can only take it three times in my life. Steroids help during an exacerbation, but again, they are limited, I can only get them twice a year (they leach calcium from bones and teeth, so the game becomes "Which is worse, osteoporosis or MS?").
The cure for MS is two-fold. First shut the blood-brain barrier, so that macrophages can no longer get in to eat the myelin. Second, once that's done, implant a large supply of stem cells into the damaged areas, and start taking progesterone to encourage them to form into oligodendricytes, which then re-build the damaged myelin.
With the Shrub's stem cell guidelines, the all-important second part of that cure will not happen. So, in effect, what he's told me is "My God thinks you're a drain on my money. Go away and die, and be quiet about it."
Sure, and it's a far better use of the "taxpayer's nickle" to pay me SSDI (for secondary progressive multiple sclerosis) for the rest of my life, currently at some $14k a year (plus inflation), plus pay my medical costs (except prescriptions), and subsidise my housing cost, rather than waste the money financing something that stands a chance in Hades of allowing me to return to work as a Software Engineer. Riiiight.
It's this extreme short-sightedness, combined with the RRR's holier-than-thou stance, that has effectively shut the door on a cure for millions of people. Thanks, Shrub Junior. I really needed this.
Um, maybe I'm confused, but Atlanta cutlery has had Damascus steel blades for years. Heck, my roommate even has an older Famascus steel pocketknife.
:)
We've never tried cutting a falling silk scarf, but the thing gets sharp, and holds a heck of an edge. I'm planning to make an athame (Wiccan ritual dagger) from a Damascus boot-knife blade, with a jet handle, inset with mokume gane.
I'll let you know if I can cut a falling silk scarf with it
She just turned 21 in December. She's got about two years solid experience doing tech dupport, in two chunks (she took time off to move in with me, then eventually broke up and went back to work), but has spent zero time getting any further degree (for lack of both sufficient time and money).
Until Symantec will encourage her to get that degree, all they're doing is burning her out. Seeing as they can always get cheap, starry-eyed newbies to fill her job, thanks to the law about importing workers, I really don't see this happening any time soon.
"Fechez la vache!" "The what?" "The cow!" *moooooo* *sproing*
:)
"Run away! Run away!"
Hey, if it worked on King Arthur, it should work on Saddam, right?
My ex, a Canadian, works for Symmantec. They shut down their Toronto tech support office, and moved it to Oregon. She went with them, on an H1B visa.
... but she can't, not on what little free time and money she has now.
Now, she's working longer hours, for less real pay (yeah, the US Dollar's better than the Canafian Dollar, but costs are high here, too). Add to that, she's stuck in bufu Oregon, and has no real option to change companies.
She's brilliant, and really should be in school earning a degree in programming
So, yes, from the other side of the story, the "imported" IT staff, it's a reality. This whole "shortage" was a scam, designed to let companies import cheap workers at slave-labor rates, and work them to death, all for the good of the bottom line. Welcome to America.
Dunno bout you, but I have a few Tron mp3s. Interesting :)
:)
I recall going to see this with the first company where I had a real, fulltime computer programmer job. We'd just had our company picnic, and we were wearing our team teeshirts - mine was the "MCPs" (male chauvinist pigs)(yes, Ms. Carlos and I have something in common), and my team number was in binary. Then, at the movie, I saw that the bad "guy" was the MCP. Talk about a coincidence!
I eventually bought the movie on Laserdisk. Twas a very fun movie, rife with inside jokes (the wall map showing what "sector" they were in, the read/write head that transported the prisoners, even the spindle at the center of the disk) that were bafflegab to everybody else but to the "in" crowd they really made the movie.
I hope they do make a sequel, and that it's as well-built as the first was.
Many moons ago, for fun (and field day that year :) ), I took the guts of a "laptop" power supply, bought surplus, and fitted it to a '386SX-20 system, with 5M ram, and a 40MB hd. We bolted this to an SVGA monochrome monitor that ran off of 12 volts. All of this was powered by a large 12 volt deep-cycle battery, which was, in turn, recharged by a few 15v 2A solar panels.
:) Especially when plugged into the 2m side of the satellite antenna array (which, by an amazing co-incidence (actually, it took research to find the right parts), had rotors, both azimuth and elevation, powered by 12 volts DC).
This, in turn, was attached to a TNC, and a 2m HT. both of which also ran from 12 volts. It made a rather nice emergency system
Now, granted the whole station consumed far more than 8.5 watts, but this was all off-the-shelf hardware from 1994, so I'd certainly hope that *some* progress has been made since then.
Hmm, 100Mbps Ethernet on-chip, 8M SDRAM, 2M flash, running a 20MHz RISC cpu. $50 each in quantity.
/.-ers can, and a few probably will, too.
:)
10 of these should make for a heck of a Beowolf cluster. Also, ten of then will "eat" a whopping 12 watts of 3.3volt power. They're also rather small - should be fairly easy to build "Beowolf boards", able to tackle many compute-intensive tasks on a minimal size- and power-budget, and not too much of a dollar-budget, too.
I can't think of anything I do that could use this idea, but I'm quite certain that a dozen other
Way-cool idea, guys!
Isn't a "pB" a *pico*byte? A "Petabyte" would be a PB, no? Same way that a mm is a millimeter, and a Mm is a megameter. It's case-sensitive.
Personally, I don't want any picobyte-capacity hard drives. How about you?
Everybody's commenting on the basic idea of moving (or e-faking such a move) to Australia and running up a huge gambling debt that you needn't then pay.
What, then, if you actually won anything? Since you're an Aussie, and such gambling was not allowed, would the casinos be forced to pay you? I'd think not.
The net effect is that you'd just be killing time if you tried this. If you can't actually win, and are not required to pay if you lose, why play at all?
"nothing but a generator, a radio, and 4 other fat, balding men"? Doesn't sound like the field days I went to.
:) especially when RS-10 would come into view - low-power FM contacts all over the USA - or running a solar-powered digipeater in the park :)
We'd run with several radios - HF, VHF (ssb and FM both) and UHF, as well as a few packet stations. We'd use big honking deep-cycle batteries that were charged by solor panels - some commercially-made, some home-built from individual cells, one year we had a battery of electrolytics (over a full farad, *that* was fun!) to even out fluctuations caused by clouds.
Half of the rigs used were home-built. All of them were QRP - low-power for you non-hams - so that we'd be able to handle it with what we had for power. We were able to arrive, set up everything, operate all night and take it all down. It was fun
Dead? Hardly. Maybe dead for those with deep pocketbooks, but for those running on a shoestring, things are different. It's still alive, and thriving, a challenge that can be used to simulate emergency communications during a disaster.
It all depends on how you approach it, I guess.
Could this be the saviour of *NIX? If time is a long signed int, counting the seconds since UNIX started, by doubling the sizeof(long), don't we automatically change when the time will roll over?
This is far more effective that rewriting every bit of software out there, and re-defining what time it is. Just change the CPU and compiler, and everything under them gets "fixed" by simply recompiling them.
Or am I missing the obvious here?
Seriously, think of it: dance shoes that power cool blinking LED lights that are woven into the clothing and hair. You could even power a large array of leds and a processor that flashes a sign across your back. Add some position sensors for your limbs, and you can have stick figures on your "screen" that are dancing with you. It'd be perfect! The more you dance, the brighter you'd shine, attracting even more attention.
:)
Anybody got a patent application handy?
Several have answered the "how" part already, but as for the "why" ...
Common stones used for statues were sandstone, limestone and marble, all of which are rather porous. Leaving them soak for a few thousand years in water will likely dissolve some of the stone, leaving it rather fragile.
To keep these treasures from further damage, they must be carefully cleaned, and likely then they'd need to be further stabilised in some fashion. In lapidary work, a clear liquid epoxy is commonly used - I have no idea what might be used here.
"Not to mention that keeping two physically seperated clocks in lock-step with sub-picosecond accuracy is not exactly easy."
That's exactly what killed my experimentation with spread spectrum. Keeping the timebases locked *that* tightly together, at *those* frequencies, well, that was *waaaaaay* beyond anything my meager budget would permit.
I suppose the new gizmo has figured out a way to overcome this, other than maybe also transmitting a carrier signal at its timebase frequency. I'm still rather distrustful of it. I grok that the reason it's "wideband" is because it uses a pulse. What I don't grok is why it *has* to be "wideband", and why it can't just be done with phase-shift modulation of a carrier.
Also, at the terahertz range, won't that be limited to VERY short line-of-sight? Granted, "sight" might not mean "A building is blocking my signal", but I'd have to say that the "signal" will be *waaay* down in the mud already, given that you *must* also pick up, on a non-resonant antenna, the third, fifth, seventh, ninth and so on. Amplifiers that work at the THz range are VERY non-trivial, and it'd have to be designed so that there is *zero* tolerance allowed for signal delay on all those harmonics, else your "pulse" would not look like a pulse so much as like a splatter.
Well, maybe it is a form of spread spectrum. Each "trillionth" of a second, the transmitter sends a "pulse". It is either slightly ahead of, or slightly trailing, the timer signal. As it's a "pulse", it *is* a sinusoidal wavefront, comprised of the fundamental, and the third, fifth, seventh (and so on) harmonic.
It looks doable, with a phase-locked loop to tell you whether your signal was leading the timebase (a digital "1") or trailing it (a digital "0"). What I don't understand is why he has to use a "pulse" at all? Why not just phase-0shift modulate a carrier signal?
All the pulses do is splatter harmonics every which way, providing no real benefit. It's not like you receive a "pulse", per se, what you receive is a whole huge pile of very brief signals on a gazillion different frequencies.
Perhaps I don't fully understand this invention, but to me it sure looks like snake oil. Has he ever looked at an FFT of his signal? I think not. I also suspect that, while he may be bright, the inventor hasn't actually studied rf theory.
It's not a hard mistake to make. I did the same myself, years ago, before learning more about fourrier transforms and what they tell us.
While the angled, split keyboard may be "ergonomic", that only works if you're a fully-functional typist. I never really did learn the "proper" way to type, and for me that turned out to be a good thing, too.
After I came down with multiple sclerosis, my whole right side stopped working, and now I'm typing everything left-handed only. It's hard enough using a "normal" keyboard, but anything like this, especially with the mouse-equivalent touchpad on the right side, would be very hard for me to use, carpal tunnel or not.
I rather suspect the unit would be equally annoying to anybody who is left-handed, too. *sigh* Until the designers start to realise that we're not all 6' tall, fully able-bodied right-handed people, we'll keep seeing these gadgets touted as "easy-to-use", when for quite a few people, they really are a step backwards on that front.