I'm curious about the $100,000 GPS system. They sell GPS add-ons for $70. So what kind of GPS costs $100,000? Military, I suppose.
1. A part of the error on GPS is due to things like radio signals slowing down as they travel through the ionosphere. If you set up a GPS base station at a known location, you can take GPS measurements, work out the errors due to the ionosphere (and similar things), transmit that to the receiver on the car, and subtract the errors there. Within a few kilometres of the base station lots of the errors will be common - so a lot of errors are eliminated. (if you don't want to operate your own base station, there are services like Omnistar which operate a network of them and radio out the corrections, for a few thousand dollars a year subscription). High cost receivers support doing this!
2. The GPS signal is comprised of a digital signal with a wavelength of about 300m (which we can measure accurate to about 3m) and a carrier wave with a wavelength of about 19cm (which we can measure accurate to a few mm) - but the carrier signal is a sine wave, so it has an 'integer ambiguity'; 1,000,000.1 wavelengths looks identical to 1,000,001.1 wavelengths. High cost receivers can perform 'integer ambiguity resolution' to figure out the integer number of wavelengths, allowing high precision positioning.
3. There's an encrypted military GPS signal at a different frequency - but using certain tricks you can receive the encrypted military signal. By combining two sine waves using a trigonometric identity, you can get a 80cm sine wave - which means there are fewer ambiguity options, making ambiguity resolution faster. Consumer receivers don't attempt this because you need to receive two GPS frequencies instead of one, and at both frequencies your receivers need ten times the bandwidth.
4. Once you've got high precision GPS, you can put one receiver at the front of your vehicle and one at the rear, giving you a 'GPS compass' which can tell you which way your vehicle is pointing, even if you aren't moving. Of course, using two receivers means paying for two.
5. GPS measurements can be combined with measurements from an intertial measurement unit (IMU) - a sensor system with gyroscopes and accelerometers which can give fast updates, but which are prone to drift over time (as they're based on integrating acceleration to give speed and accelerating speed to give position, a small acceleration error eventually leads to a big position error). The more you spend on your IMU, the lower the drift rate. GPS measurements aren't prone to this drift, but there can be GPS outages (e.g. when going though tunnels) and GPS receivers don't give measurements as fast as an IMU can, so you combine GPS measurements with IMU measurements, usually using an extended Kalman filter.
6. Radio waves can reflect from trees, buildings, and the ground. This is called 'multipath'. High cost receivers use expensive antennas (like choke ring antennas) which have lower gain at lower elevations - which reduces problems with signals reflected from the ground. These antennas are more expensive to manufacture than consumer receivers.
7. Mobile phone GPS chips are produced by the million. The market for high-precision GPS is very much smaller, so the costs of engineering all the above have to be recouped over fewer units - so the equipment is expensive.
In summary, when you spend $100,000 on a GPS system you get a base station and radio link, two rover receivers, all the receivers are capable of receiving the military signal, you get special software that can perform ambiguity resolution for centimetre-precise positioning, you get three high quality antennas, and you get a high-precision IMU and software to go with it.
A lot of this technology could probably be made a lot cheaper if it were mass-produced and installed on every car, as a lot of it's in electronics and software. But in the world of robotics there are a great many sensors that cost $100,000 but could b
I know this sounds very arrogant, but I would love to see trials change so you're actually judged by your peers instead of members of the public, so for example doctors by doctors, network admin by other network admin, and such. That way you can get a bunch of people who know how far this person has stepped out of line.
Wouldn't that create the situation where professional communities could just decide for themselves what the law was?
BP's CEO has broken pollution laws? Not according to a jury of oil company CEOs!
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
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Flight of the Desktops
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I can inform you that most current laptops have an external monitor port, and a few USB ports.
However, it's actually pretty difficult to convince the authorities that you don't watch or record live TV. You're in for a world of harassment if you don't have a TV licence.
Not true for me the three times in the past five years that I've moved house. Simply telephone the number on the 'reminder' letters they send you, tell them you do not have a TV, and letters stop arriving.
Even though they are clearly marked on the maps, and (presumably) are discovered in property searches, people still buy these places. [...] they whine and moan about "our house has flooded... you gotta HELP us!" [...] All I would suggest is huge.... massive.... crippling... increases in home insurance premiums to both alert buyers to the dangers and also to make them pay the going rate for repairs and renovations
I see your point, but:
Imagine I was a hard-working person, I'd been saving up for a few years, and after learning my wife was pregnant we'd brought a house for £170,000 so we'd have the space we needed. Put down a £30,000 deposit on it - all my life's savings. I've been fully responsible, done every calculation there is to be done, I've brought a house with a price within my means, I've checked what the insurance costs are going to be.
The next day, the government announces "from now on there will be no flood assistance for anyone" and insurers decide to levy huge, massive, crippling increases in home insurance premiums.
So now I can't afford my insurance payments - maybe I should move, right? Well I'd like to, but it turns out my £170,000 house is now only worth £100,000 - so even if I sell it, I'd still be £40,000 in debt, and I'd have no money for a deposit on a new house.
Is that a desirable outcome? Will it be good for the economy? Would it be good for the re-election prospects of the politicians who introduced it?
I'm not saying I disagree with you entirely - just that I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for anything to happen.
Yeah, I don't know why people don't understand this. Sure, AAC and MP3 are the hot lossy formats *today*, but will they be so hot 10 years from now?
I see a few posts saying this, but doesn't it seem a bit odd to say "The benefit of FLAC over MP3 is that you can convert FLAC to MP3 and it will sound no worse than the direct-to-MP3 conversion"?
The argument that FLAC is useful because you might want to convert to a different lossy format later on relies on certain assumptions; (a) that a format will turn up that's sufficiently better than MP3 that people will want to convert from MP3. And given that this study states that people can't tell MP3 from FLAC I'm not sure what such a format would have to offer (perhaps smaller file sizes, but with the ever-reducing cost of flash memory and hard disk space I'd be surprised if this warranted a changeover) or (b) that if MP3 should become obsolete or unsupported by players, FLAC will remain well enough supported for you to transfer from... even though FLAC has orders of magnitude fewer users than MP3.
So they are going to deploy the ability to remotely update the users device. Because the bad guys will never figure out how the company does it. I can see it now. An entire carriers smart cell line bricked by a remote exploit that updates phones.
People often say things like this here on Slashdot, but automatic update tools like Debian's apt-get and Microsoft's Windows Update have never been hacked and used to distribute virus-ridden updates*. My Ubuntu netbook has never been "bricked by a remote exploit" even though it's open source, so be bad guys know exactly how the update mechanism works.
In other words, we have the technology to make secure remote update software. Technology like public/private key cryptography to digitally sign updates, and only apply those with a valid, trusted signature.
What makes you think remote updates for cell phones would be any less secure?
*Unless you count [WGA /.NET / Ubuntu 9.10 (delete as appropriate)]. Rimshot!
If you can detect the doppler shift on a radio wave (which was created by a sinusoidally oscillating emitter) why couldn't you detect the same doppler shift on a laser signal, if said laser signal was sinusoidally oscillated?
Maybe - but how many of those lines of code do you suppose are capable of causing unintended acceleration?
Every car I'm aware of has different wires and connections for different types of traffic - so the in-car DVD entertainment system is on a different system to the electric wing mirror adjustment and keyless entry and electronic boot entry and electronic climate control, which is on a different system to the throttle, which is on a different system to the cruise control and ABS. And the foot brake is still connected by a conventional hydraulic system.
The purpose of this separation is because of the point you're making - it may not be practical to prove 100 million lines of code is bug-free, but what you can do is perform a lot of testing on the ~1000 line throttle-by-wire system, including testing for all of the (small number of) inputs it can get from elsewhere in the vehicle.
My point being: It's bogus to say "Throttle-by-wire must be unsafe because cars have 100 million lines of code which is more than can be validated" because most of those lines of code, by design, are isolated from the safety-critical systems, and the safety critical systems are small enough that they can believably be validated.
What we see here is a small device storing it's data remotely and I wonder why. Considering how cheap a couple of GB of memory are and how precious wireless bandwidth is this can mean only one thing, having and thus exploiting that data is worth more than the cost of the bandwidth.
There could be other reasons - despite the obvious backup failure in this story, I'd imagine sidekick users who lose their phones appreciate not losing their data along with it.
Additionally, if someone with important information on their device were to lose their device, I can see how you might prefer it if it didn't come with an SD card full of confidential documents and e-mails. Sure, it would be nice if you could get users to use encryption on their devices, but I only know one person who uses the 'security pin' feature of their smartphone, and even he only has a 4-numeric-digit PIN set; users haven't accepted strong passwords on their smartphones, and remote wipe is the second-best thing.
I mean, from the perspective of the enterprise market that BlackBerry etc serve, those would seem like pretty useful features to me.
I think that what Gabe suggests is quite reasonable, to say the least. People do pay for games right now, [...] Think of it as an early preorder method.
I agree that it could work in principle - but the summary talks about "publishers who are very shy about investing in new projects, particularly for unproven IPs" and "Such a system would certainly relieve some of the pressure to stick with tried-and-true concepts"; would it actually accomplish that?
I mean, sure, I'd pre-order "Half Life 2 Episode 3" because I know I'm going to buy it anyway - but how would you get financing from fans when a "new unproven IP" by definition doesn't yet have any fans?
Some people might be willing to invest in a game that didn't yet exist on the strength of the studio or people involved (John Romero!), or simply on the basis of a written description and some concept art, but that would represent a much higher risk investment than waiting for the game to come out and reading reviews of it.
I imagine a good electric vehicle being had for less than 2000 dollars, and being a 3-wheel, 2 seater with a lightweight basket capable of carrying a couple bags of groceries. It would have to be weather-proof, but that could (and should) be accomplished using something cheap and effective like tarp and plexi-glass and aluminium.
Seriously, though, there are already lots of more efficient car alternatives, people in the US just don't choose to use them, due to a combination of infrastructure, social, and capability limitations.
If people aren't giving up their cars (in appreciable numbers) for busses, trains, pushbikes, motorbikes, motortrikes, motor scooters, enclosed scooters, electric bikes, european 'city cars', community cars, or car sharing.
What would an electric rickshaw offer that would cause it to be more successful than those?
Even the current GPS units/DVD players can easily be defeated. In most cases, all you need to do is ground one of the pins in the connector, and it always thinks you are parked.
I've heard some people who want a GPS/DVD player with the GPS functions disabled take the even more nefarious route of just buying a DVD player:-)
When the system is first turned on a warning message is displayed, telling the user not to watch television while driving. If this is ignored, a secondary warning message kicks in if the GPS chip detects the vehicle is moving at more than 5mph. But that's it!"
I thought the whole point of "in car entertainment systems" was for the passengers, hence why you have displays in the back of the front seats and so on. For the kids to watch DVDs during long drives or whatever. To me that sounds much more useful than a system that only plays when stationary, because it's only occasionally that one sits in a stationary car for the duration of a TV episode.
Plenty of systems also provide a screen for the front seat passenger.
Playing videos while the car is in motion is a required feature for entertaining the kids during long drives. That's why there's nothing stopping videos playing while the vehicle is in motion.
Granted, there's a risk that by having the system in the driver's field of view they could become distracted by it, but the summary acts like there's no possible explanation for this feature, which I don't think is true.
How much variety can you put into an assignment to implement sparse matricies?
Of course, even without this student posting his assignments online, students could still google the problems and probably find working solutions, so taking down this one student's assignments isn't going to stop those who feel so inclined from just copying implementations they find through Google, so I'm not sure the teacher would have achieved much even if he had got this stuff taken down.
I'm going to leave aside the wisdom of doing this, and focus on the practical aspects.
Has anyone built anything like this?
An Android phone hooked up to Google Latitude would meet most of your requirements - small, accessible anywhere you've got an internet connection, accessible on mobile phones, phone can be turned off, phone is linux based.
People have home-made basic versions. GPS modules can be purchased which give a reasonably accurate location once per second, or on demand, over a serial, usb, or bluetooth link; many mobile phones have gps modules already built in. Most tracking systems communicate over the cell phone system, either by SMS or mobile data connections. Of course, many mobile data connections are firewalled/NATed, so the benefit of SMS is you can transmit a query to the tracker. The disadvantage is the per-message cost, especially if you want regular location updates, and that it's easier to program the PC end of a mobile data connection. Cell companies also offer "machine to machine" data plans, but it's unlikely they'll want to deal with you if you're making a one-off homebrew system.
You could get a separate cell phone and GPS and make a homebrew device, like the one linked above, but you're unlikely to get things much more compact than buying a mobile phone with both built in.
If you're a programmer, my suggestion would be a mobile phone running Android, and using the GPS APIs to read the location and send it off to your server.
How does a tinfoil hat wearer engineer such a device to make sure Big-Brother isn't watching too?
Pretty much every mobile tracking system uses the cell phone network for connectivity, because it's more widely available than WiFi, and more affordable than a satellite connection. If you're paranoid about privacy, you should be worried about cell phone triangulation, as that would be the most practical way for "big brother" to track people; so to be paranoid, you can't use a cell phone connection, which will make your design task substantially more difficult. It would be far easier to get a mobile phone, set it up with Google Latitude, turn it off, and tell your daughter to turn it on if she gets lost.
In industry, as far as I can tell, Verilog seems to be more used in North America and VHDL in Europe, so that might affect what you care about, too.
When I worked at (UK-based processor designers) ARM, Verilog was the language of choice. I've been told VHDL is popular in academia, while Verilog is more popular in industry.
That said, the underlying concepts are pretty similar, and those are what you're teaching really, so either choice would be reasonable.
But will the target market be willing to take on the additional telecom charge?
Well, plenty of laptop computers have built in 3G modems, but inserting a SIM card and using the 3G connection is optional. And it's not like they found it hard to get people to buy the iPhone, even though there was a telecom charge involved.
'most of us have gotten accustomed to the idea of one Internet connection per household, shared with a wireless router. [...] It wouldn't surprise me if Apple had such a thing in the pipeline, an Airport station (Airport Mobility?) that didn't need to be plugged into the wall.
I think most people accustomed to one internet connection shared with a router already have a wired internet connection. Given that a 3G connection costs more per megabyte, and may be less reliable, I don't think many people accustomed to wired internet would switch to a 3G connection for their home internet connection.
Now, people who travel around with a laptop, I can understand. But why would such a person choose a 'personal hotspot' with its size, and its own battery in need of charging, when they could have the 3G modem built into their laptop?
Granted, there might be a market where groups of people were travelling for business, or for individuals who preferred WiFi to USB or Bluetooth as a means of connecting to a modem, but if I was Apple a laptop with a 3G modem in it would be a much more logical thing to release than what's being proposed here.
The broadest claim the patent makes (bullet points mine):
1. A method for automatically updating software programs on a computer, comprising the steps, of:
storing an updated version of a program at a designated location in a remote memory that is accessible to the computer;
launching a current version of the program that is stored in memory of the computer, wherein said current version carries out the following steps independent of functions performed by any resource external to said current version:
detecting whether a version of the program is stored in the designated location;
determining whether a detected version of the program stored at the designated location is more recent than the current version of the program which is running;
replacing the current version of the program with a more recent version that is stored at the designated location; and
subsequently executing the more recent version of the program on the computer.
Could one not simply have the client software send a request to the server software saying "send me the stored version, if it is modified since version 12.34"
Hence it would not be the current version carrying out the action of determining whether a the newest version of the program is more recent than the current version of the program; rather it would be being performed at the server.
Indeed, HTTP already includes an "If-Modified-Since" header the client can send to the server, though the HTTP header uses a date rather than a version number.
If I were Google, I would respond to this by immediately removing access to Google Video and Youtube from all Italian IP addresses, citing the trial.
There's a risk that if a big foreign corporation blackmails a country to release an executive arrested on low-quality charges; that people would infer the big foreign corporation would also blackmail a country to release an executive arrested on high-quality charges for real, serious crimes.
I mean, the only difference is one violates 'don't be evil' and the other doesn't. I can understand why the Italian government might not want their entire justice system to depend on Google following their motto.
It seems to spending a night or two in jail while this mess gets cleaned up; would be a better choice than giving Google a reputation for blackmailing entire countries to prevent their executives being investigated for crimes; because the latter would be a sure way get european regulators on Google's back like they're on Microsoft's back about antitrust.
Furthermore, Google wants to expand google docs, google mail etc by saying they are as reliable as locally hosted solutions. You know, 99.9% uptime SLA and that. Throwing a few days of politically-motivated downtime into the mix would be a great way to prove google hosted apps can't be relied upon.
If I were Google I wouldn't cut access to Google from Italy. Instead, I would recruit a team of competent Italian lawyers to defend the executive.
As McAllister sees it, Web apps encourage a thin-client approach to development that concentrates far too much workload in the datacenter.
For sure, there are some applications that make sense to run locally; or to use special local software in combination with a server, rather than a web-browser-based interface. 'World of Warcraft' won't be implemented in AJAX any time soon.
On the other hand if you want to sell 'software as a service' it's going to be easier if you're supplying ongoing services other than fixing bugs of your own creation. Furthermore, in stagnant markets (*cough*MSOffice*cough*) it could enable new features compelling enough for people to upgrade. What's more, a dependency on your data centre makes piracy practically impossible.
Not everything suits being on the web, or in the web browser. But the benefits to software companies are hard to ignore.
I have several SD , mini-SD, and micro-SD cards for various purposes: cameras, cell phones, my laptop, etc. [...] How do you manage and keep track of your SD cards?"
I have a two-stage plan, which I thought was a fairly common technique:
1. Make sure my flash cards have sufficient memory that I will not need to switch between cards for the same device. You know, 1000 full quality photos or whatever.
2. Leave the cards in their devices and keep track of the devices by normal means.
I was recently at a presentation where one of the speakers demonstrated some Siemens PLM software - high detail 3D CAD models, stuff like that. One of the benefits they pointed out was that it ran well even on the demonstrator's laptop computer - you didn't need a big workstation to run it on.
However, the demonstrator's laptop was a huge 17" desktop replacement thing.
That's the market I see for these things - mobile workstations that let you run workstation software at client sites and trade show booths, without needing to muck around with carrying and powering a second monitor along with your laptop.
Furthermore, computer companies derive some benefit from holding the "performance crown" even if it's with a product hardly anyone would buy. For example, you can load your computer with two $500 graphics cards or an "extreme" $1600 CPU but probably few people do. I think the idea is to get news coverage for your product line and demonstrate how cutting edge your product line is.
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I'm curious about the $100,000 GPS system. They sell GPS add-ons for $70. So what kind of GPS costs $100,000? Military, I suppose.
1. A part of the error on GPS is due to things like radio signals slowing down as they travel through the ionosphere. If you set up a GPS base station at a known location, you can take GPS measurements, work out the errors due to the ionosphere (and similar things), transmit that to the receiver on the car, and subtract the errors there. Within a few kilometres of the base station lots of the errors will be common - so a lot of errors are eliminated. (if you don't want to operate your own base station, there are services like Omnistar which operate a network of them and radio out the corrections, for a few thousand dollars a year subscription). High cost receivers support doing this!
2. The GPS signal is comprised of a digital signal with a wavelength of about 300m (which we can measure accurate to about 3m) and a carrier wave with a wavelength of about 19cm (which we can measure accurate to a few mm) - but the carrier signal is a sine wave, so it has an 'integer ambiguity'; 1,000,000.1 wavelengths looks identical to 1,000,001.1 wavelengths. High cost receivers can perform 'integer ambiguity resolution' to figure out the integer number of wavelengths, allowing high precision positioning.
3. There's an encrypted military GPS signal at a different frequency - but using certain tricks you can receive the encrypted military signal. By combining two sine waves using a trigonometric identity, you can get a 80cm sine wave - which means there are fewer ambiguity options, making ambiguity resolution faster. Consumer receivers don't attempt this because you need to receive two GPS frequencies instead of one, and at both frequencies your receivers need ten times the bandwidth.
4. Once you've got high precision GPS, you can put one receiver at the front of your vehicle and one at the rear, giving you a 'GPS compass' which can tell you which way your vehicle is pointing, even if you aren't moving. Of course, using two receivers means paying for two.
5. GPS measurements can be combined with measurements from an intertial measurement unit (IMU) - a sensor system with gyroscopes and accelerometers which can give fast updates, but which are prone to drift over time (as they're based on integrating acceleration to give speed and accelerating speed to give position, a small acceleration error eventually leads to a big position error). The more you spend on your IMU, the lower the drift rate. GPS measurements aren't prone to this drift, but there can be GPS outages (e.g. when going though tunnels) and GPS receivers don't give measurements as fast as an IMU can, so you combine GPS measurements with IMU measurements, usually using an extended Kalman filter.
6. Radio waves can reflect from trees, buildings, and the ground. This is called 'multipath'. High cost receivers use expensive antennas (like choke ring antennas) which have lower gain at lower elevations - which reduces problems with signals reflected from the ground. These antennas are more expensive to manufacture than consumer receivers.
7. Mobile phone GPS chips are produced by the million. The market for high-precision GPS is very much smaller, so the costs of engineering all the above have to be recouped over fewer units - so the equipment is expensive.
In summary, when you spend $100,000 on a GPS system you get a base station and radio link, two rover receivers, all the receivers are capable of receiving the military signal, you get special software that can perform ambiguity resolution for centimetre-precise positioning, you get three high quality antennas, and you get a high-precision IMU and software to go with it.
A lot of this technology could probably be made a lot cheaper if it were mass-produced and installed on every car, as a lot of it's in electronics and software. But in the world of robotics there are a great many sensors that cost $100,000 but could b
I know this sounds very arrogant, but I would love to see trials change so you're actually judged by your peers instead of members of the public, so for example doctors by doctors, network admin by other network admin, and such. That way you can get a bunch of people who know how far this person has stepped out of line.
Wouldn't that create the situation where professional communities could just decide for themselves what the law was?
BP's CEO has broken pollution laws? Not according to a jury of oil company CEOs!
I can inform you that most current laptops have an external monitor port, and a few USB ports.
However, it's actually pretty difficult to convince the authorities that you don't watch or record live TV. You're in for a world of harassment if you don't have a TV licence.
Not true for me the three times in the past five years that I've moved house. Simply telephone the number on the 'reminder' letters they send you, tell them you do not have a TV, and letters stop arriving.
Hardly a world of harassment.
Even though they are clearly marked on the maps, and (presumably) are discovered in property searches, people still buy these places. [...] they whine and moan about "our house has flooded ... you gotta HELP us!" [...] All I would suggest is huge .... massive .... crippling ... increases in home insurance premiums to both alert buyers to the dangers and also to make them pay the going rate for repairs and renovations
I see your point, but:
Imagine I was a hard-working person, I'd been saving up for a few years, and after learning my wife was pregnant we'd brought a house for £170,000 so we'd have the space we needed. Put down a £30,000 deposit on it - all my life's savings. I've been fully responsible, done every calculation there is to be done, I've brought a house with a price within my means, I've checked what the insurance costs are going to be.
The next day, the government announces "from now on there will be no flood assistance for anyone" and insurers decide to levy huge, massive, crippling increases in home insurance premiums.
So now I can't afford my insurance payments - maybe I should move, right? Well I'd like to, but it turns out my £170,000 house is now only worth £100,000 - so even if I sell it, I'd still be £40,000 in debt, and I'd have no money for a deposit on a new house.
Is that a desirable outcome? Will it be good for the economy? Would it be good for the re-election prospects of the politicians who introduced it?
I'm not saying I disagree with you entirely - just that I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for anything to happen.
This is one of the best posts in this entire discussion - better, even, than most of the other +5 posts. Thank you for making it.
Yeah, I don't know why people don't understand this. Sure, AAC and MP3 are the hot lossy formats *today*, but will they be so hot 10 years from now?
I see a few posts saying this, but doesn't it seem a bit odd to say "The benefit of FLAC over MP3 is that you can convert FLAC to MP3 and it will sound no worse than the direct-to-MP3 conversion"?
The argument that FLAC is useful because you might want to convert to a different lossy format later on relies on certain assumptions; (a) that a format will turn up that's sufficiently better than MP3 that people will want to convert from MP3. And given that this study states that people can't tell MP3 from FLAC I'm not sure what such a format would have to offer (perhaps smaller file sizes, but with the ever-reducing cost of flash memory and hard disk space I'd be surprised if this warranted a changeover) or (b) that if MP3 should become obsolete or unsupported by players, FLAC will remain well enough supported for you to transfer from... even though FLAC has orders of magnitude fewer users than MP3.
So they are going to deploy the ability to remotely update the users device. Because the bad guys will never figure out how the company does it. I can see it now. An entire carriers smart cell line bricked by a remote exploit that updates phones.
People often say things like this here on Slashdot, but automatic update tools like Debian's apt-get and Microsoft's Windows Update have never been hacked and used to distribute virus-ridden updates*. My Ubuntu netbook has never been "bricked by a remote exploit" even though it's open source, so be bad guys know exactly how the update mechanism works.
In other words, we have the technology to make secure remote update software. Technology like public/private key cryptography to digitally sign updates, and only apply those with a valid, trusted signature.
What makes you think remote updates for cell phones would be any less secure?
*Unless you count [WGA / .NET / Ubuntu 9.10 (delete as appropriate)]. Rimshot!
If you can detect the doppler shift on a radio wave (which was created by a sinusoidally oscillating emitter) why couldn't you detect the same doppler shift on a laser signal, if said laser signal was sinusoidally oscillated?
Premium class automobile - ~ 100 million
Maybe - but how many of those lines of code do you suppose are capable of causing unintended acceleration?
Every car I'm aware of has different wires and connections for different types of traffic - so the in-car DVD entertainment system is on a different system to the electric wing mirror adjustment and keyless entry and electronic boot entry and electronic climate control, which is on a different system to the throttle, which is on a different system to the cruise control and ABS. And the foot brake is still connected by a conventional hydraulic system.
The purpose of this separation is because of the point you're making - it may not be practical to prove 100 million lines of code is bug-free, but what you can do is perform a lot of testing on the ~1000 line throttle-by-wire system, including testing for all of the (small number of) inputs it can get from elsewhere in the vehicle.
My point being: It's bogus to say "Throttle-by-wire must be unsafe because cars have 100 million lines of code which is more than can be validated" because most of those lines of code, by design, are isolated from the safety-critical systems, and the safety critical systems are small enough that they can believably be validated.
What we see here is a small device storing it's data remotely and I wonder why.
Considering how cheap a couple of GB of memory are and how precious wireless bandwidth is this can mean only one thing, having and thus exploiting that data is worth more than the cost of the bandwidth.
There could be other reasons - despite the obvious backup failure in this story, I'd imagine sidekick users who lose their phones appreciate not losing their data along with it.
Additionally, if someone with important information on their device were to lose their device, I can see how you might prefer it if it didn't come with an SD card full of confidential documents and e-mails. Sure, it would be nice if you could get users to use encryption on their devices, but I only know one person who uses the 'security pin' feature of their smartphone, and even he only has a 4-numeric-digit PIN set; users haven't accepted strong passwords on their smartphones, and remote wipe is the second-best thing.
I mean, from the perspective of the enterprise market that BlackBerry etc serve, those would seem like pretty useful features to me.
I think that what Gabe suggests is quite reasonable, to say the least. People do pay for games right now, [...] Think of it as an early preorder method.
I agree that it could work in principle - but the summary talks about "publishers who are very shy about investing in new projects, particularly for unproven IPs" and "Such a system would certainly relieve some of the pressure to stick with tried-and-true concepts"; would it actually accomplish that?
I mean, sure, I'd pre-order "Half Life 2 Episode 3" because I know I'm going to buy it anyway - but how would you get financing from fans when a "new unproven IP" by definition doesn't yet have any fans?
Some people might be willing to invest in a game that didn't yet exist on the strength of the studio or people involved (John Romero!), or simply on the basis of a written description and some concept art, but that would represent a much higher risk investment than waiting for the game to come out and reading reviews of it.
I imagine a good electric vehicle being had for less than 2000 dollars, and being a 3-wheel, 2 seater with a lightweight basket capable of carrying a couple bags of groceries. It would have to be weather-proof, but that could (and should) be accomplished using something cheap and effective like tarp and plexi-glass and aluminium.
Sounds a lot like an electric rickshaw.
Seriously, though, there are already lots of more efficient car alternatives, people in the US just don't choose to use them, due to a combination of infrastructure, social, and capability limitations.
If people aren't giving up their cars (in appreciable numbers) for busses, trains, pushbikes, motorbikes, motortrikes, motor scooters, enclosed scooters, electric bikes, european 'city cars', community cars, or car sharing.
What would an electric rickshaw offer that would cause it to be more successful than those?
Even the current GPS units/DVD players can easily be defeated. In most cases, all you need to do is ground one of the pins in the connector, and it always thinks you are parked.
I've heard some people who want a GPS/DVD player with the GPS functions disabled take the even more nefarious route of just buying a DVD player :-)
When the system is first turned on a warning message is displayed, telling the user not to watch television while driving. If this is ignored, a secondary warning message kicks in if the GPS chip detects the vehicle is moving at more than 5mph. But that's it!"
I thought the whole point of "in car entertainment systems" was for the passengers, hence why you have displays in the back of the front seats and so on. For the kids to watch DVDs during long drives or whatever. To me that sounds much more useful than a system that only plays when stationary, because it's only occasionally that one sits in a stationary car for the duration of a TV episode.
Plenty of systems also provide a screen for the front seat passenger.
Playing videos while the car is in motion is a required feature for entertaining the kids during long drives. That's why there's nothing stopping videos playing while the vehicle is in motion.
Granted, there's a risk that by having the system in the driver's field of view they could become distracted by it, but the summary acts like there's no possible explanation for this feature, which I don't think is true.
You'd be better off siphoning a thimble of fuel from each car, selling it, and using the proceeds to buy electricity from the utility.
Plenty of supermarkets ask customers to drive at a low speed in their car parks, and use speed bumps to encourage this.
How is this any different?
If you were going to slow the car down anyway, what does it matter if you get some additional use out of the kinetic energy the car loses?
Profs â" including me, at times â" fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students
For a first year course entitled "data structures and algorithsm" isn't this kind of unavoidable?
I mean, consider some of the projects on this student's website; things like sparse matricies, longest common substring, recursively solving an occupancy grid map, and so on.
How much variety can you put into an assignment to implement sparse matricies?
Of course, even without this student posting his assignments online, students could still google the problems and probably find working solutions, so taking down this one student's assignments isn't going to stop those who feel so inclined from just copying implementations they find through Google, so I'm not sure the teacher would have achieved much even if he had got this stuff taken down.
I'm going to leave aside the wisdom of doing this, and focus on the practical aspects.
Has anyone built anything like this?
An Android phone hooked up to Google Latitude would meet most of your requirements - small, accessible anywhere you've got an internet connection, accessible on mobile phones, phone can be turned off, phone is linux based.
Is there an open source solution?
There's OpenGTS, an Open GPS Tracking System. However, it's not obvious from their website what trackers it works with.
How would I go about building my own?
People have home-made basic versions. GPS modules can be purchased which give a reasonably accurate location once per second, or on demand, over a serial, usb, or bluetooth link; many mobile phones have gps modules already built in. Most tracking systems communicate over the cell phone system, either by SMS or mobile data connections. Of course, many mobile data connections are firewalled/NATed, so the benefit of SMS is you can transmit a query to the tracker. The disadvantage is the per-message cost, especially if you want regular location updates, and that it's easier to program the PC end of a mobile data connection. Cell companies also offer "machine to machine" data plans, but it's unlikely they'll want to deal with you if you're making a one-off homebrew system.
You could get a separate cell phone and GPS and make a homebrew device, like the one linked above, but you're unlikely to get things much more compact than buying a mobile phone with both built in.
If you're a programmer, my suggestion would be a mobile phone running Android, and using the GPS APIs to read the location and send it off to your server.
How does a tinfoil hat wearer engineer such a device to make sure Big-Brother isn't watching too?
Pretty much every mobile tracking system uses the cell phone network for connectivity, because it's more widely available than WiFi, and more affordable than a satellite connection. If you're paranoid about privacy, you should be worried about cell phone triangulation, as that would be the most practical way for "big brother" to track people; so to be paranoid, you can't use a cell phone connection, which will make your design task substantially more difficult. It would be far easier to get a mobile phone, set it up with Google Latitude, turn it off, and tell your daughter to turn it on if she gets lost.
In industry, as far as I can tell, Verilog seems to be more used in North America and VHDL in Europe, so that might affect what you care about, too.
When I worked at (UK-based processor designers) ARM, Verilog was the language of choice. I've been told VHDL is popular in academia, while Verilog is more popular in industry.
That said, the underlying concepts are pretty similar, and those are what you're teaching really, so either choice would be reasonable.
But will the target market be willing to take on the additional telecom charge?
Well, plenty of laptop computers have built in 3G modems, but inserting a SIM card and using the 3G connection is optional. And it's not like they found it hard to get people to buy the iPhone, even though there was a telecom charge involved.
'most of us have gotten accustomed to the idea of one Internet connection per household, shared with a wireless router. [...] It wouldn't surprise me if Apple had such a thing in the pipeline, an Airport station (Airport Mobility?) that didn't need to be plugged into the wall.
I think most people accustomed to one internet connection shared with a router already have a wired internet connection. Given that a 3G connection costs more per megabyte, and may be less reliable, I don't think many people accustomed to wired internet would switch to a 3G connection for their home internet connection.
Now, people who travel around with a laptop, I can understand. But why would such a person choose a 'personal hotspot' with its size, and its own battery in need of charging, when they could have the 3G modem built into their laptop?
Granted, there might be a market where groups of people were travelling for business, or for individuals who preferred WiFi to USB or Bluetooth as a means of connecting to a modem, but if I was Apple a laptop with a 3G modem in it would be a much more logical thing to release than what's being proposed here.
The broadest claim the patent makes (bullet points mine):
1. A method for automatically updating software programs on a computer, comprising the steps, of:
Could one not simply have the client software send a request to the server software saying "send me the stored version, if it is modified since version 12.34"
Hence it would not be the current version carrying out the action of determining whether a the newest version of the program is more recent than the current version of the program; rather it would be being performed at the server.
Indeed, HTTP already includes an "If-Modified-Since" header the client can send to the server, though the HTTP header uses a date rather than a version number.
If I were Google, I would respond to this by immediately removing access to Google Video and Youtube from all Italian IP addresses, citing the trial.
There's a risk that if a big foreign corporation blackmails a country to release an executive arrested on low-quality charges; that people would infer the big foreign corporation would also blackmail a country to release an executive arrested on high-quality charges for real, serious crimes.
I mean, the only difference is one violates 'don't be evil' and the other doesn't. I can understand why the Italian government might not want their entire justice system to depend on Google following their motto.
It seems to spending a night or two in jail while this mess gets cleaned up; would be a better choice than giving Google a reputation for blackmailing entire countries to prevent their executives being investigated for crimes; because the latter would be a sure way get european regulators on Google's back like they're on Microsoft's back about antitrust.
Furthermore, Google wants to expand google docs, google mail etc by saying they are as reliable as locally hosted solutions. You know, 99.9% uptime SLA and that. Throwing a few days of politically-motivated downtime into the mix would be a great way to prove google hosted apps can't be relied upon.
If I were Google I wouldn't cut access to Google from Italy. Instead, I would recruit a team of competent Italian lawyers to defend the executive.
As McAllister sees it, Web apps encourage a thin-client approach to development that concentrates far too much workload in the datacenter.
For sure, there are some applications that make sense to run locally; or to use special local software in combination with a server, rather than a web-browser-based interface. 'World of Warcraft' won't be implemented in AJAX any time soon.
On the other hand if you want to sell 'software as a service' it's going to be easier if you're supplying ongoing services other than fixing bugs of your own creation. Furthermore, in stagnant markets (*cough*MSOffice*cough*) it could enable new features compelling enough for people to upgrade. What's more, a dependency on your data centre makes piracy practically impossible.
Not everything suits being on the web, or in the web browser. But the benefits to software companies are hard to ignore.
I have several SD , mini-SD, and micro-SD cards for various purposes: cameras, cell phones, my laptop, etc. [...] How do you manage and keep track of your SD cards?"
I have a two-stage plan, which I thought was a fairly common technique:
1. Make sure my flash cards have sufficient memory that I will not need to switch between cards for the same device. You know, 1000 full quality photos or whatever.
2. Leave the cards in their devices and keep track of the devices by normal means.
I was recently at a presentation where one of the speakers demonstrated some Siemens PLM software - high detail 3D CAD models, stuff like that. One of the benefits they pointed out was that it ran well even on the demonstrator's laptop computer - you didn't need a big workstation to run it on.
However, the demonstrator's laptop was a huge 17" desktop replacement thing.
That's the market I see for these things - mobile workstations that let you run workstation software at client sites and trade show booths, without needing to muck around with carrying and powering a second monitor along with your laptop.
Furthermore, computer companies derive some benefit from holding the "performance crown" even if it's with a product hardly anyone would buy. For example, you can load your computer with two $500 graphics cards or an "extreme" $1600 CPU but probably few people do. I think the idea is to get news coverage for your product line and demonstrate how cutting edge your product line is.