Of course this situation is produced by the knee-jerk reactions of the "moral green majority" out there.
The most efficient internal combustion engines ever made are infact 2-stroke diesel engines, often used in ships and the like, these are large engines and it's well worth replacing them if a more efficient design exists.
The US killed off the 2stroke at about the same time a number of companies were readying very clean and efficient engines for market, given a uniflow design (has exhaust valves at the top) and fuel injection a 2stroke engine can be made cleaner than a 4stroke for the same power.
Of course this particular application uses a rather crappy little engine by the look, but please don't tar all 2strokes with the same brush.
In the good 'ole USA they ban 2strokes without ANY form of emission testing, it doesn't matter if you can pass emissions tests - 2strokes are banned. Of course it is fine to go and buy a new "Recreational Vehicle" that averages 9MPG, after all, how could THAT cause polution??
Not only is LH/LF tested as a rocket propellant in the 1960s (the X430 and RD350 motors) in both the USA and USSR.
FLOX (30 and 70), a particularly nice mixture of liquid fluoring and oxygen, was used in the atlas rocket and tested in a number of applications (the newer saturn V would have used it, had they ever been built..)
It is assumed that FLOX was also tested in some early ICBM and standoff military systems, however they soon realised that solid fuel was the only answer here..
It will be interesting to see how different countried react to this availability onboard - many countried are VERY paranoid about RF gear operating on an airliner due to fear of interferance with the onboard systems...
Personally I'm quite suprised that this is a wireless solution, and not wired onboard, as that would seem a much more 'acceptable' solution worldwide, and quite probably more secure for individuals.
I wonder how well seperated the network streams are between users? network sniffing count suddenly before very interesting;)
Yes, you are missing the fact that most 'car audio' capacitors are 'rubbish' (to be polite) and are simply a method or removing money from peoples pockets.
For his purposes he requires an actual high capacity, high discharge rate capacitor, not an easy thing to create.
The challenge is having a VERY low ESR (effective series resistance), as well as a low inductance, and using a massive number of parallel capacitors is certainly one of the only economical ways of doing this. a LOT of care is also needed in how they are connected up to keep the inductance down.
You can, for example, by multi-farad 'supercaps', but these have charge/discharge rates in the milliamps and are used for memory backup and other purposes, you can also get kilovolt rated caps with very low capacitance, but it is very hard to get medium voltage very low ESR high energy caps, primarily because they are lethal. They are used in radar installations and a few other high energy 'toys'.
Most manufacturers (well, certainly most japanese ones, and I'm 99% certain all US..) have used ODB-II from 1996 onwards to allow a standardised interface to their diagnostic (and often tuning..) information. This is a standardised interface, and does exactly what is being requested here.
You can buy standard ODB-II scanners, or PC interface boards. You can read and write data values in real time, it is a great system.
Of course, it is only manditory in some US locations, and manufacturers are free to make non-ODB models for other markets. More pressure for them to all support this would be a good thing.
The biggest problem is that 90+% of 'normal' mechanics out there seem incapable of interpreting the complexities of modern fuel injection systems (I've helped design some, and even I find them hard to understand at times), more information does not always fix that problem! The number of times 'they' (your normal mechanic) fall back to a mode of just replacing bits at random to 'fix' a problem is high.
An interesting article, however some of it is a some of this is a little hard to swallow...
their statenments about delivering sprays and pellets by air with an accuracy of 'within a foot' would be quite a thing to see, especially when you watch what a helicopters downwash does to items dropped from below it, and allowing for the pilots abilities (remember, the computer is not flying the aircraft here) - I think there cuold be a bit of wishfull thinking involved here, but I'm sure it looks good on the enviromental reports.
I assume they are using DGPS, which is generally available, for example look at: http://www.navman.co.nz/oem/products/gps/rece ivers/dgps/index.html also for a basic discussion: http://boats.com/content/default_deta il.jsp?conten tid=2109 but this will certainly not guarantee you the accuracies they are claiming, at least not unless they are dropping the loads on the fixed beacons DGPS relies on (most provided by the coast guard in the US, also at some airfields).
DGPS is a wonderful development on GPS, but is still not that good. Interesting the russian GLONAS system is a little better (if more expensive for receivers) than GPS.
This would seem to be a good example of how the patent system is being mis-used at present. Apparently this patent is very widely defined and not backed up by much 'implementation'. this would generally not be considered a very 'defendable' patent, yet the owners are trying it on with a bunch of middle level software vendors, trying to strong arm some cash from them.
The difficulty with this is that the patent gives the owner a degree of 'high-ground', and defending against this from the point of view of the apparent patent violator, can be VERY expensive, so often just coughing up is the cheapest option, which then lends weight to the defendability of the patent.
Certainly, being filed in 1998 makes this particular patent laughable.
for exmaple, have a look at: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/sfs/ w here sfs (Secure File System) exists, and this page was LAST updates in september 1996, and covers just about every possible level of eccryption in a general file system, it is also not unique.
With Apache representing such a massive (and impressive, they are certainly a great example of success)number of internet/intranet servers out there, I'm not suprised Sun takes them seriously, they probably represent one of the strongest areas of java development currently.
I would truly love Sun to take java *implementation* a little more seriously, they seem to put a lot of work into API designs and the legal situation of java, but don't seem that commited to providing a stable and simple to install environment for developers and users.
The number one bug bear I have repeatedly hit with java is convincing users that it is worth the trouble to get the 'right' implementation installed on a given machine to allow the required functionality to work, and this can sometimes be hit and miss, which is a big problem.
I would love to see Sun dedicate perhaps 6 months to working with other implementers to get java working smoothly and seemlessly on a wide range of hardware and operating systems, as it just doesn't seem to yet.
I know that microsoft has thrown a lot of hurdles in the way of java, however it's not just windows where there seem to be problems. It is just too hard to get users to get their execution environment 'right' to use.
I think this situation will limit java to vertical apps and server use until it is addressed, as these are the only situations where the extra time to get it working is acceptable.
One thing not mentioned so far is that one of THE largest scheduler latency problems comes from the driver for a PS/2 mouse, a very common item to be found plugged into servers which have no need for it. By removing the PS/2 mouse (and driver..) a significant latency improvement can be gained!
It's a pity that most USB mice don't seem to provide quite the quality of use as the PS/2 items (although this is probably also a driver issue)
Loy latency can be an advantage, but it is important that the cost of the lower latency is not an increase in total load, as in reality the lower latency does not provide a large gain in performance for most desktop or server roles, but rather is a measure more often used in real time systems, which it can make the difference between a system working or not.
An example of this is in an ignition ECU for a V12 engine at 6000 RPM, a (pair of) plug is firing every 1/600th of a sceond (1.66ms), but the accuracy of the firing even must be in the order of 10us, which is not yet reachable be any 'standard' unix kernel, but quite easy to get on a much simpler ECU (I use an SH-2 at 24 MHz) than you would notmally find using a true real-time kernel.
With some developments is may be possibly for a form of linux to reach this level, which would be fantastic, as a LOT of time is spent in embedded development providing 'operating system' level functionality around the actual application code, and with embedded processors getting faster, and memory getting cheap, embedding *nix has become much more of a possibility.
It's quite simple, they are trying to find out how long the current weapons will keep working, and how the rate of failure changes over time.
These devices contain quite an amount of rather radioactive material, which emits a lot of high energy particles, this causes other materials around them to change over time, therefore then need to know if they will stay safe, and will work if required.
The worked out how to build a 'big enough bomb' quite some time ago, but building new devices is expensive, as it blowing them up from time to time for testing, simulating the 'aging' devices is a much cheaper and simpler option, as well as providing supercomputing power for 'other' work.
..somone sniffing the network either captures your 'login' session, or simple takes over your 802.11 session?
don't get me wrong, this is a good thing in many ways, but 802.11 is suck a leaky system that ANYTHING based on it has an inherent problem, short of limiting all connections to authenticated ssh or ipsec connections.
802.11a/b/x is simple broken, and NO 'standard' ip connection routed over it can improve this, hwich is unfortunate, it's ONLY safe if you use a suitable encryption/authentication layer on top of it.
of course, the number of people who realise just how public all internet data is seems to be a very small number, let alone the number of people who realise that email is in effect a public forum, and should NOT be used to forward their credit card numbers.
the part about a simple setup for an 802.11 gateway is a good thing, it can be a pain to set up under linux, but hardly a revolutionary step.
I doubt the companies involved here copyrighted the blueprints to the aircraft either, just (I would imaging) the actual parts making it up, in a lot of way source code is just 'blueprints' to a program.
The FAA obviously required the blueprints to be given to it, and are not releasing them (a great thing, in a number of ways), I would be quite concerned if this kind of thing happened to source code (due to the ease of recreating software, much easier than building an aircraft).
I can see a 'risk' of goverments making a power grab to have source code 'registered' within some goverment organisation for similar reasons to why the FAA has the aircraft blueprints, and I think this would be a VERY BAD THING for the freedom of developers, partially due to the verhanded generalisation that seems to prevade software legislation these days.
While it may be perfectly sensible in this case (hey, aircraft and software are very different), I think a LOT of people would be nervous if their source code was automatically made available once their 'copyright' was over, this is a MUCH more serious step than just loosing your copyright.
if you loose a copyright, people can copy the program, but still need to reverse-engineer the source if they want to know your implementation.
of course, I'm totally supportive of fully open source, but we should remember that copyright is peoples right if they decide to go that way, and we should not assume that when this lapses we have the right to ALL of their work, they just loose that particular bit of protection.
there is a world of difference between copyright on a particular implementation, and the massivly 'general' patents currently being handed out in the US over quite obvious software techniques, the second are much more... stuipd, dangerous, ridiculous, etc, etc.... however copright is a MUCH simpler concent, so long as it's length is kept reasonable, and it's extent is limited.
of course, in the case of the copyright holder 'ceasing to exist' the case becomes much more hazy.. since ther is noone to defent the copyright, I guess all bets are off, but should their 'source code' (or exact plans/designs) be automatically made public? and who do we trust to hold these? hmmm... I personally think that would be excessive.
Hmm, I guess we don't do real time text then, damn, I was pretty sure that was what I did, certainly looks like it, I must have been dreaming...
Of course, there IS a difference when you need to display a full page of scrolling text at speed, but since characters are normally only rendered once each, and then cached, the processor time required to do high quality anti-aliased text is actually very very small in relation to just about everything else (laying out the text is a much more processor intensive task for most uses).
The time required to properly alpha-blend it is a little higher (depending on the windowing system and graphics hardware), but still not that great.
One BIG thing that gets missed is the fact that antialiasing for LCD is quite different from antialiasing for trinitron, which is quite different for antialiasing for a standard CRT, due to dot placement/shape, and that also makes quite a difference (I believe microsoft has an LCD mode, and freetype can do one, from memory).
Having worked with GOOD font rendering software (mainly for broadcast television) I can say that most gui renderers do a pretty horrible job.
It's not that they get the font shape wrong, or don't antialias correctly, it's that they don't allow for how people see things, and just antialias 'mathmatically correct'.
With the fonts we use for television character generaters, several seperate rendering passes are used to give: 1 - a solid and anti-aliased 'interior' to the font (this is 'normal' antialiasing) 2 - a perimeter or border to the font, in a slightly different colour/darkless level, to make the edge stand out 3 - a seperate rednering to the alpha channel to stop the font from 'blending' excessivly at the edges with the background (ie: a buffer zone).
This makes a MASSIVE difference to the quality of the fonts, especially on anything other than a solid colour background.
unfortunately, no OS as yet does this for it's screen display fonts, which is a pity, as it makes a BIG difference.
Having said that, I'm VERY happy that improvements are happening, as good font rendering makes a hugh difference to the effort required to read text.
Untill the bandwidth/price ratio available for internet connections grows significantly higher, at present there are only a few exceptional cases where the cost of the data distribution is low enough to make internet distributed computation feasable.
The same applied to clustered storage, with the added problem of the latency to access such storage.
This is not, unfortunately, a tool for helping the average computer consumer. It may, however, be useful for SOME scientific computational problems (ie: ones doing heavy analysis of easily paritionable data), but those are certainly in the minority.
Unfortunately the speed of light over any significant distance soon brings a halt to the scalability of most problems over a widely distributed system, producing a minimum latency which causes the scalability of the system to stop. As computers get faster and storage gets larger this point of decreasing returns gets lower.
Now if we throw in the legal aspects... Can you see the ISP's liking this? how about companies whos equipment is used without their knowledge, and who do we blame for the illegal pr0n being stored unknown to the user on their equipment?
We should not be trying to find ways of consuming bandwith, as it is going to become a more and more valuable resource as computers get more powerfull, instead we should be looking to minimise the bandwidth consumed for given services.
If computers were not still scaling at the rate they are, this may be a useful idea, but that won't happen for some time.
As much as I personally favour ssh, scp, ssl, and IPSec..
Unfortunately wrong, IPSec (which is great when it can be used ) IS OF NO USE ON NON-IP LINKS, or do you think that your radio keyboard uses IP? this is where the growing problem is, with radio, we gain new and uncotrolled public networks, many of which have ZERO security, authentication, etc.
Secondly, have you ever tried to maintain IPSec on some middle-managers laptop? it's hard enough keeping their virus count down.
We need protection at a lower level, which is what 802.11 tried (but failed) to provide. With the relative freeness of flash and embeded processors these days, it is ridiculous that they are still producing systems which are not software upgradable, and therefore allowing the chance to fix these problems.
hmm, perhaps you should think before posting next time,
they happily sell !NEW! CD's for $5 a hit (and less!), therefore I guess the value of the TOTAL PACKAGE (including the intellectual property) is $5.
the rest of the value must be, let me see, the value of the media hype used to push the new product so that it can hold a 300% and more premium over one 6 months old. hmmm.
Unfortunately (well, fortunately;) noone seems too worried about making a reliable (or even working) DRM system , after all they don't need too thanks to the DMCA, just XOR the data with 'give us all your money' and call it DRM, then you have the legal power to do just about anything to your victims (sorry, I'm sure I means consumers there).
at the current (insane) price of new CD's, I think it's safe to say they already have included a P2P tax, infact, you could say that is why P2P is so popular, people are already paying that tax, so why not do it?
Realy, if they priced CD's a little more reasonably this would be much less of an issue, there is a reason you can get all those older CDs for $5 each, and that is that it is STILL profitable to sell them at this price!
I have a strog doubt that we will ever see working DRM. If it were possible to use this kind of technique to control people we would be driving cars that were limited to the speed limit. The situation is the same, consumers will shy away from products in proportion to how limited they are, so the manufacturers will find ways to avoid such a plnalty on their products:)
A great example of this I was a few days ago was a bin of RCA Lyra MP3 players for sale cheap, and noone was touching them, they are a pain to own simple because of the hoops they make you jump through because of DRM, and there are other players that don't, so they win.
Another example is DVD players here in New Zealand. When DVD first came out we had a crappy region code, and noone was importing suitable disks (as well as the artificial delays imposed by the US, sorry I mean studios), so people 'had' to pay to get them chipped to non-region-coded, these days you have trouble buying a player that is not 'chipped' straight from the retailer, as they know they cann't sell ones without this 'feature'.
I see DRM as a cash grab from the studios, they need to be able to point at something and say 'see - we are trying to save ourselfs, not legistale us more money!', unfortunately that part of the ploy will probably work, makes you proud to pay your tax dollars! (grrr).
One thing I am waiting for with wireless is some decent security functionality. What with the farce that is 802.11 and the proliferation of 'secure' data within companies I work with, wireless has become one of the major security threats.
The number of people I have found using RF keyboards/mice on computers in 'secure' areas, and not even believing that these can be snooped (which is quite trivial), then insisting that we have a 802.11 hub for their flashy new laptop, simply because it has that functionality built in.
I would love to see a standard developed for a plugable security model on top of these transports, so a 'suitable' level of protection can be installed for the situation.
He assumes that 'experts' can come up with one 'grand-unified-ui' which works the best for everyone, ignoring the fact that peoples minds interpret things in many different ways.
He should try working with mentally disabled children for a while, it is a BIG eye-opener as to how different people minds can be in their interpretation and reaction to a given stimulus, and is a little undersood area.
These 'UI' experts who apparently know us well enough to design the 'one true' interface are chasing an impossible dream, IMHO. You only need to look at how many people love/hate XPs default look, or apples aqua, for examples. I personally cannot develop efficiently without multiple desktops to support my many open windows, yet I know other excellent developers who will NOT run more than one app at a time and run it fullscreen.
This is the equivalent of trying to design the perfectly efficient kitchen, it will never happen.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that the 'common' desktop ui's out there don't really skin very well, the underlying system is too limited. X windows is the exception to this, as it only exists as seperable layers, allowing a much fnier control of it's functionality (via KDE and Gnome, for example)
The most consistent UI I've ever used was under OS/2, and IBM did a LOT of development on that, I wish windows would catch up, but it was far from perfect for me, and I bet the majority.
Customisation is required for ANYTHING we interact with in a major and complex way, computers are probably the biggest example of this yet, thankfully their customisability is growing.
He assumes that 'experts' can come up with one 'grand-unified-ui' which works the best for everyone, ignoring the fact that peoples minds interpret things in many different ways.
He should try working with mentally disabled children for a while, it is a BIG eye-opener as to how different people minds can be in their interpretation and reaction to a given stimulus, and is a little undersood area.
These 'UI' experts who apparently know us well enough to design the 'one true' interface are chasing an impossible dream, IMHO. You only need to look at how many people love/hate XPs default look, or apples aqua, for examples. I personally cannot develop efficiently without multiple desktops to support my many open windows, yet I know other excellent developers who will NOT run more than one app at a time and run it fullscreen.
This is the equivalent of trying to design the perfectly efficient kitchen, it will never happen.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that the 'common' desktop ui's out there don't really skin very well, the underlying system is too limited. X windows is the exception to this, as it only exists as seperable layers, allowing a much fnier control of it's functionality (via KDE and Gnome, for example)
The most consistent UI I've ever used was under OS/2, and IBM did a LOT of development on that, I wish windows would catch up, but it was far from perfect for me, and I bet the majority.
Customisation is required for ANYTHING we interact with in a major and complex way, computers are probably the biggest example of this yet, thankfully their customisability is growing.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course this situation is produced by the knee-jerk reactions of the "moral green majority" out there.
The most efficient internal combustion engines ever made are infact 2-stroke diesel engines, often used in ships and the like, these are large engines and it's well worth replacing them if a more efficient design exists.
The US killed off the 2stroke at about the same time a number of companies were readying very clean and efficient engines for market, given a uniflow design (has exhaust valves at the top) and fuel injection a 2stroke engine can be made cleaner than a 4stroke for the same power.
Of course this particular application uses a rather crappy little engine by the look, but please don't tar all 2strokes with the same brush.
In the good 'ole USA they ban 2strokes without ANY form of emission testing, it doesn't matter if you can pass emissions tests - 2strokes are banned. Of course it is fine to go and buy a new "Recreational Vehicle" that averages 9MPG, after all, how could THAT cause polution??
Ahh, the joys of politics..
I'm afraid you are a little behind the times..
Not only is LH/LF tested as a rocket propellant in the 1960s (the X430 and RD350 motors) in both the USA and USSR.
FLOX (30 and 70), a particularly nice mixture of liquid fluoring and oxygen, was used in the atlas rocket and tested in a number of applications (the newer saturn V would have used it, had they ever been built..)
It is assumed that FLOX was also tested in some early ICBM and standoff military systems, however they soon realised that solid fuel was the only answer here..
It will be interesting to see how different countried react to this availability onboard - many countried are VERY paranoid about RF gear operating on an airliner due to fear of interferance with the onboard systems...
Personally I'm quite suprised that this is a wireless solution, and not wired onboard, as that would seem a much more 'acceptable' solution worldwide, and quite probably more secure for individuals.
I wonder how well seperated the network streams are between users? network sniffing count suddenly before very interesting
Yes, you are missing the fact that most 'car audio' capacitors are 'rubbish' (to be polite) and are simply a method or removing money from peoples pockets.
For his purposes he requires an actual high capacity, high discharge rate capacitor, not an easy thing to create.
The challenge is having a VERY low ESR (effective series resistance), as well as a low inductance, and using a massive number of parallel capacitors is certainly one of the only economical ways of doing this. a LOT of care is also needed in how they are connected up to keep the inductance down.
You can, for example, by multi-farad 'supercaps', but these have charge/discharge rates in the milliamps and are used for memory backup and other purposes, you can also get kilovolt rated caps with very low capacitance, but it is very hard to get medium voltage very low ESR high energy caps, primarily because they are lethal. They are used in radar installations and a few other high energy 'toys'.
Most manufacturers (well, certainly most japanese ones, and I'm 99% certain all US..) have used ODB-II from 1996 onwards to allow a standardised interface to their diagnostic (and often tuning..) information. This is a standardised interface, and does exactly what is being requested here.
You can buy standard ODB-II scanners, or PC interface boards. You can read and write data values in real time, it is a great system.
Of course, it is only manditory in some US locations, and manufacturers are free to make non-ODB models for other markets. More pressure for them to all support this would be a good thing.
The biggest problem is that 90+% of 'normal' mechanics out there seem incapable of interpreting the complexities of modern fuel injection systems (I've helped design some, and even I find them hard to understand at times), more information does not always fix that problem! The number of times 'they' (your normal mechanic) fall back to a mode of just replacing bits at random to 'fix' a problem is high.
An interesting article, however some of it is a some of this is a little hard to swallow...
e ivers /dgps/index.htmla il.jsp?conten tid=2109
their statenments about delivering sprays and pellets by air with an accuracy of 'within a foot' would be quite a thing to see, especially when you watch what a helicopters downwash does to items dropped from below it, and allowing for the pilots abilities (remember, the computer is not flying the aircraft here) - I think there cuold be a bit of wishfull thinking involved here, but I'm sure it looks good on the enviromental reports.
I assume they are using DGPS, which is generally available, for example look at:
http://www.navman.co.nz/oem/products/gps/rec
also for a basic discussion:
http://boats.com/content/default_det
but this will certainly not guarantee you the accuracies they are claiming, at least not unless they are dropping the loads on the fixed beacons DGPS relies on (most provided by the coast guard in the US, also at some airfields).
DGPS is a wonderful development on GPS, but is still not that good. Interesting the russian GLONAS system is a little better (if more expensive for receivers) than GPS.
This would seem to be a good example of how the patent system is being mis-used at present. Apparently this patent is very widely defined and not backed up by much 'implementation'. this would generally not be considered a very 'defendable' patent, yet the owners are trying it on with a bunch of middle level software vendors, trying to strong arm some cash from them.
w here sfs (Secure File System) exists, and this page was LAST updates in september 1996, and covers just about every possible level of eccryption in a general file system, it is also not unique.
The difficulty with this is that the patent gives the owner a degree of 'high-ground', and defending against this from the point of view of the apparent patent violator, can be VERY expensive, so often just coughing up is the cheapest option, which then lends weight to the defendability of the patent.
Certainly, being filed in 1998 makes this particular patent laughable.
for exmaple, have a look at:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/sfs/
With Apache representing such a massive (and impressive, they are certainly a great example of success)number of internet/intranet servers out there, I'm not suprised Sun takes them seriously, they probably represent one of the strongest areas of java development currently.
I would truly love Sun to take java *implementation* a little more seriously, they seem to put a lot of work into API designs and the legal situation of java, but don't seem that commited to providing a stable and simple to install environment for developers and users.
The number one bug bear I have repeatedly hit with java is convincing users that it is worth the trouble to get the 'right' implementation installed on a given machine to allow the required functionality to work, and this can sometimes be hit and miss, which is a big problem.
I would love to see Sun dedicate perhaps 6 months to working with other implementers to get java working smoothly and seemlessly on a wide range of hardware and operating systems, as it just doesn't seem to yet.
I know that microsoft has thrown a lot of hurdles in the way of java, however it's not just windows where there seem to be problems. It is just too hard to get users to get their execution environment 'right' to use.
I think this situation will limit java to vertical apps and server use until it is addressed, as these are the only situations where the extra time to get it working is acceptable.
One thing not mentioned so far is that one of THE largest scheduler latency problems comes from the driver for a PS/2 mouse, a very common item to be found plugged into servers which have no need for it. By removing the PS/2 mouse (and driver..) a significant latency improvement can be gained!
It's a pity that most USB mice don't seem to provide quite the quality of use as the PS/2 items (although this is probably also a driver issue)
Loy latency can be an advantage, but it is important that the cost of the lower latency is not an increase in total load, as in reality the lower latency does not provide a large gain in performance for most desktop or server roles, but rather is a measure more often used in real time systems, which it can make the difference between a system working or not.
An example of this is in an ignition ECU for a V12 engine at 6000 RPM, a (pair of) plug is firing every 1/600th of a sceond (1.66ms), but the accuracy of the firing even must be in the order of 10us, which is not yet reachable be any 'standard' unix kernel, but quite easy to get on a much simpler ECU (I use an SH-2 at 24 MHz) than you would notmally find using a true real-time kernel.
With some developments is may be possibly for a form of linux to reach this level, which would be fantastic, as a LOT of time is spent in embedded development providing 'operating system' level functionality around the actual application code, and with embedded processors getting faster, and memory getting cheap, embedding *nix has become much more of a possibility.
It's quite simple, they are trying to find out how long the current weapons will keep working, and how the rate of failure changes over time.
These devices contain quite an amount of rather radioactive material, which emits a lot of high energy particles, this causes other materials around them to change over time, therefore then need to know if they will stay safe, and will work if required.
The worked out how to build a 'big enough bomb' quite some time ago, but building new devices is expensive, as it blowing them up from time to time for testing, simulating the 'aging' devices is a much cheaper and simpler option, as well as providing supercomputing power for 'other' work.
..somone sniffing the network either captures your 'login' session, or simple takes over your 802.11 session?
don't get me wrong, this is a good thing in many ways, but 802.11 is suck a leaky system that ANYTHING based on it has an inherent problem, short of limiting all connections to authenticated ssh or ipsec connections.
802.11a/b/x is simple broken, and NO 'standard' ip connection routed over it can improve this, hwich is unfortunate, it's ONLY safe if you use a suitable encryption/authentication layer on top of it.
of course, the number of people who realise just how public all internet data is seems to be a very small number, let alone the number of people who realise that email is in effect a public forum, and should NOT be used to forward their credit card numbers.
the part about a simple setup for an 802.11 gateway is a good thing, it can be a pain to set up under linux, but hardly a revolutionary step.
I doubt the companies involved here copyrighted the blueprints to the aircraft either, just (I would imaging) the actual parts making it up, in a lot of way source code is just 'blueprints' to a program.
The FAA obviously required the blueprints to be given to it, and are not releasing them (a great thing, in a number of ways), I would be quite concerned if this kind of thing happened to source code (due to the ease of recreating software, much easier than building an aircraft).
I can see a 'risk' of goverments making a power grab to have source code 'registered' within some goverment organisation for similar reasons to why the FAA has the aircraft blueprints, and I think this would be a VERY BAD THING for the freedom of developers, partially due to the verhanded generalisation that seems to prevade software legislation these days.
While it may be perfectly sensible in this case (hey, aircraft and software are very different), I think a LOT of people would be nervous if their source code was automatically made available once their 'copyright' was over, this is a MUCH more serious step than just loosing your copyright.
if you loose a copyright, people can copy the program, but still need to reverse-engineer the source if they want to know your implementation.
of course, I'm totally supportive of fully open source, but we should remember that copyright is peoples right if they decide to go that way, and we should not assume that when this lapses we have the right to ALL of their work, they just loose that particular bit of protection.
there is a world of difference between copyright on a particular implementation, and the massivly 'general' patents currently being handed out in the US over quite obvious software techniques, the second are much more... stuipd, dangerous, ridiculous, etc, etc.... however copright is a MUCH simpler concent, so long as it's length is kept reasonable, and it's extent is limited.
of course, in the case of the copyright holder 'ceasing to exist' the case becomes much more hazy.. since ther is noone to defent the copyright, I guess all bets are off, but should their 'source code' (or exact plans/designs) be automatically made public? and who do we trust to hold these? hmmm... I personally think that would be excessive.
Hmm, I guess we don't do real time text then, damn, I was pretty sure that was what I did, certainly looks like it, I must have been dreaming...
Of course, there IS a difference when you need to display a full page of scrolling text at speed, but since characters are normally only rendered once each, and then cached, the processor time required to do high quality anti-aliased text is actually very very small in relation to just about everything else (laying out the text is a much more processor intensive task for most uses).
The time required to properly alpha-blend it is a little higher (depending on the windowing system and graphics hardware), but still not that great.
One BIG thing that gets missed is the fact that antialiasing for LCD is quite different from antialiasing for trinitron, which is quite different for antialiasing for a standard CRT, due to dot placement/shape, and that also makes quite a difference (I believe microsoft has an LCD mode, and freetype can do one, from memory).
Having worked with GOOD font rendering software (mainly for broadcast television) I can say that most gui renderers do a pretty horrible job.
It's not that they get the font shape wrong, or don't antialias correctly, it's that they don't allow for how people see things, and just antialias 'mathmatically correct'.
With the fonts we use for television character generaters, several seperate rendering passes are used to give:
1 - a solid and anti-aliased 'interior' to the font (this is 'normal' antialiasing)
2 - a perimeter or border to the font, in a slightly different colour/darkless level, to make the edge stand out
3 - a seperate rednering to the alpha channel to stop the font from 'blending' excessivly at the edges with the background (ie: a buffer zone).
This makes a MASSIVE difference to the quality of the fonts, especially on anything other than a solid colour background.
unfortunately, no OS as yet does this for it's screen display fonts, which is a pity, as it makes a BIG difference.
Having said that, I'm VERY happy that improvements are happening, as good font rendering makes a hugh difference to the effort required to read text.
Untill the bandwidth/price ratio available for internet connections grows significantly higher, at present there are only a few exceptional cases where the cost of the data distribution is low enough to make internet distributed computation feasable.
The same applied to clustered storage, with the added problem of the latency to access such storage.
This is not, unfortunately, a tool for helping the average computer consumer. It may, however, be useful for SOME scientific computational problems (ie: ones doing heavy analysis of easily paritionable data), but those are certainly in the minority.
Unfortunately the speed of light over any significant distance soon brings a halt to the scalability of most problems over a widely distributed system, producing a minimum latency which causes the scalability of the system to stop. As computers get faster and storage gets larger this point of decreasing returns gets lower.
Now if we throw in the legal aspects... Can you see the ISP's liking this? how about companies whos equipment is used without their knowledge, and who do we blame for the illegal pr0n being stored unknown to the user on their equipment?
We should not be trying to find ways of consuming bandwith, as it is going to become a more and more valuable resource as computers get more powerfull, instead we should be looking to minimise the bandwidth consumed for given services.
If computers were not still scaling at the rate they are, this may be a useful idea, but that won't happen for some time.
As much as I personally favour ssh, scp, ssl, and IPSec..
Unfortunately wrong, IPSec (which is great when it can be used ) IS OF NO USE ON NON-IP LINKS, or do you think that your radio keyboard uses IP? this is where the growing problem is, with radio, we gain new and uncotrolled public networks, many of which have ZERO security, authentication, etc.
Secondly, have you ever tried to maintain IPSec on some middle-managers laptop? it's hard enough keeping their virus count down.
We need protection at a lower level, which is what 802.11 tried (but failed) to provide. With the relative freeness of flash and embeded processors these days, it is ridiculous that they are still producing systems which are not software upgradable, and therefore allowing the chance to fix these problems.
hmm, perhaps you should think before posting next time,
they happily sell !NEW! CD's for $5 a hit (and less!), therefore I guess the value of the TOTAL PACKAGE (including the intellectual property) is $5.
the rest of the value must be, let me see, the value of the media hype used to push the new product so that it can hold a 300% and more premium over one 6 months old. hmmm.
Unfortunately (well, fortunately
at the current (insane) price of new CD's, I think it's safe to say they already have included a P2P tax, infact, you could say that is why P2P is so popular, people are already paying that tax, so why not do it?
Realy, if they priced CD's a little more reasonably this would be much less of an issue, there is a reason you can get all those older CDs for $5 each, and that is that it is STILL profitable to sell them at this price!
I have a strog doubt that we will ever see working DRM. If it were possible to use this kind of technique to control people we would be driving cars that were limited to the speed limit. The situation is the same, consumers will shy away from products in proportion to how limited they are, so the manufacturers will find ways to avoid such a plnalty on their products
A great example of this I was a few days ago was a bin of RCA Lyra MP3 players for sale cheap, and noone was touching them, they are a pain to own simple because of the hoops they make you jump through because of DRM, and there are other players that don't, so they win.
Another example is DVD players here in New Zealand. When DVD first came out we had a crappy region code, and noone was importing suitable disks (as well as the artificial delays imposed by the US, sorry I mean studios), so people 'had' to pay to get them chipped to non-region-coded, these days you have trouble buying a player that is not 'chipped' straight from the retailer, as they know they cann't sell ones without this 'feature'.
I see DRM as a cash grab from the studios, they need to be able to point at something and say 'see - we are trying to save ourselfs, not legistale us more money!', unfortunately that part of the ploy will probably work, makes you proud to pay your tax dollars! (grrr).
One thing I am waiting for with wireless is some decent security functionality. What with the farce that is 802.11 and the proliferation of 'secure' data within companies I work with, wireless has become one of the major security threats.
The number of people I have found using RF keyboards/mice on computers in 'secure' areas, and not even believing that these can be snooped (which is quite trivial), then insisting that we have a 802.11 hub for their flashy new laptop, simply because it has that functionality built in.
I would love to see a standard developed for a plugable security model on top of these transports, so a 'suitable' level of protection can be installed for the situation.
please ignore this second posting, between slashdot droping out and explorers (yick) broken re-posting, it was inevitable but unfortunate.
Jef Raskin is making one VERY big assumption.
He assumes that 'experts' can come up with one 'grand-unified-ui' which works the best for everyone, ignoring the fact that peoples minds interpret things in many different ways.
He should try working with mentally disabled children for a while, it is a BIG eye-opener as to how different people minds can be in their interpretation and reaction to a given stimulus, and is a little undersood area.
These 'UI' experts who apparently know us well enough to design the 'one true' interface are chasing an impossible dream, IMHO. You only need to look at how many people love/hate XPs default look, or apples aqua, for examples. I personally cannot develop efficiently without multiple desktops to support my many open windows, yet I know other excellent developers who will NOT run more than one app at a time and run it fullscreen.
This is the equivalent of trying to design the perfectly efficient kitchen, it will never happen.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that the 'common' desktop ui's out there don't really skin very well, the underlying system is too limited. X windows is the exception to this, as it only exists as seperable layers, allowing a much fnier control of it's functionality (via KDE and Gnome, for example)
The most consistent UI I've ever used was under OS/2, and IBM did a LOT of development on that, I wish windows would catch up, but it was far from perfect for me, and I bet the majority.
Customisation is required for ANYTHING we interact with in a major and complex way, computers are probably the biggest example of this yet, thankfully their customisability is growing.
Jef Raskin is making one VERY big assumption.
He assumes that 'experts' can come up with one 'grand-unified-ui' which works the best for everyone, ignoring the fact that peoples minds interpret things in many different ways.
He should try working with mentally disabled children for a while, it is a BIG eye-opener as to how different people minds can be in their interpretation and reaction to a given stimulus, and is a little undersood area.
These 'UI' experts who apparently know us well enough to design the 'one true' interface are chasing an impossible dream, IMHO. You only need to look at how many people love/hate XPs default look, or apples aqua, for examples. I personally cannot develop efficiently without multiple desktops to support my many open windows, yet I know other excellent developers who will NOT run more than one app at a time and run it fullscreen.
This is the equivalent of trying to design the perfectly efficient kitchen, it will never happen.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that the 'common' desktop ui's out there don't really skin very well, the underlying system is too limited. X windows is the exception to this, as it only exists as seperable layers, allowing a much fnier control of it's functionality (via KDE and Gnome, for example)
The most consistent UI I've ever used was under OS/2, and IBM did a LOT of development on that, I wish windows would catch up, but it was far from perfect for me, and I bet the majority.
Customisation is required for ANYTHING we interact with in a major and complex way, computers are probably the biggest example of this yet, thankfully their customisability is growing.