Judging from all the rumours about the Zune the future iPods that have been helped along by FCC documents, I think they made the right call.
If I was a big apple I'd submit a few dozen fake products for approval just to throw people off. When the documents about the Apple Bananaphone and the Apple ipod/condom become public, people will start taking these rumours with a bigger pinch of salt.
Sure, they offer you native drivers for their hardware, but what manufacturer of computer equipment WOULDN'T offer a Microsoft Windows XP driver for their hardware?
Apple.
As is demonstrated by the fact they used PowerPC chips for years, with nary a thought for people wanting to boot windows.
I think it is an absolutely horrid thing of current American society that so many people always run after new stuff and never even bother to think about others when dumping old stuff. I've seen companies trash hundreds of computers (yes, actually trash them... because the HDD has sensitive data and because of taxes).
It's often been my experience that, with computers, things old enough to be thrown away by one user are too old for other users to want.
For example, I stripped the good hard drive out of one of my old computers to use as a portable drive - but now I have a 200MHz computer with only a 4Gb hard disk. Sure, it works, but it's so old no-one would want to pay the shipping to get it from me.
I've got plenty of junk in a similar condition. What does one do with a 15-inch CRT? A 4x CD-ROM drive? A parallel port handheld scaner? A parallel port webcam? A 33.6kbps dial-up modem? A parallel port zip drive? A well-used PS/2 keyboard?
Nobody wants this stuff. It's as simple as that. That's how it seems to me, anyway.
China just need to put all the dollars they have accumulated in market and boom!!! it would affect US economy more than if they a war instead.
Europe and America have their differences, but if this were to happen I suspect Europe would go to some lengths to prop up the American economy.
After all, many companies do business and employ people in both Europe and America, and many goods find a market in both countries. One would think it would serve Europe's interests to keep America around in its current state, but weakened, rather than gambling on the unknown outcomes if they do nothing.
True that - I was putting together the obligatory Moore's law graph for a presentation I was doing and there are about 50 million different interpretations. Is it about channel lengths? Or gate area? What about DRAM cell pitch? Transistor density? Transistors per chip? Transistors per dollar? Clock speed? Clock speed per dollar? Calculation speed per dolar? Does reducing or increasing die area count? Can Moore's law be extrapolated to include relays and vacuum tubes? Should it be? Is Moore's law a doubling every 18 months or every 2 years?
In the end I came to the realisation that the graph would show pretty much whatever I wanted it to...
OK, the actual paper's here (full text freely available).
As far as I can tell this has nothing to do with standard processors and everything to do with FPGAs.
It seems what they propose is: Instead of the FPGA configuration bits being done with gates on the silicon wafer, why not perform configuration by configuring the metal-to-metal interconnects? After all, if the metal layers are thick compared to the interconnects between them, you can blow connections you don't need like blowing a fuse. By removing the FPGA configuration bits from the silicon wafer, they can save a lot of space, leading to higher speeds and lower costs.
They have a clever way of arranging such a system, which should be easy to fabricate.
What Moore's law is supposed to have to do with this I don't know.
Engineer doesn't come from the word engine as in Internal Combustion Engine, it comes from the latin word for creation. So, an engineer is one who creates something. Since software engineers create programs, they are, in fact, engineers.
The argument could be made that a word's meaning is the meaning people accept it to have, not its etymology. In other words, the Etymological fallacy.
To put it another way, if an engineer is one who creates something, artists are engineers as they create artwork, and accountants are engineers as they create accounts. Clearly, this is not the common usage.
So, what is the common usage? Once was the time when 'engineer' meant 'member of an engineering institution', i.e. a professional bound by a code of ethics. But in modern times the guy who comes out to fix your washing machine is called an engineer. Implicitly, an engineer is anyone doing something moderately technical who fancies calling themselves an engineer.
If (huge IF) I ever write an online game, I'm going to seriously consider this. I tend towards 'free' games, so I'd probably make it write the authentication to a USB drive.
I'm not exactly sure how hardware 2-factor is supposed to help. I mean, if you're hacked enough that someone can install a key logger, you're hacked enough that someone can access your hardware dongle.
A dongle where you type in whatever code it displays seems more secure (or, of course, a dongle you plug in to authenticate then unplug immediately after).
Mars lander Spirit started randomly rebooting due to a flash memory access problem.
Mars Polar Lander was lost - there's no definitive proof but it's thought it was a software error (sensing leg deployment ready for landing as actual landing, and hence deactivating thrust too early).
It's clear that Microsoft is winning the war for the home market.
I agree that Apple's product isn't likely to be a success if it's the itunes TV-out card it sounds like, but I'm not sure I'd agree Microsoft is winning a war.
I don't know anyone with a Microsoft 'media centre'. I don't know what functionality said media centres are supposed to have, and I don't know who makes them. The closest things I've heard of are people with TiVos and TiVo-like devices, and people on slashdot talking about MythTV.
I would say 'not owning one' is winning the war for the home media centre market, with Microsoft a distant second.
You may not be a fan of the interface [...] but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that the user interface is bad.
Many phones and PDAs have sucked in the past, and I thought apple's would be the same, but when I saw this picture I thought: That is how a phone UI should be designed. Look at those large, clearly labelled buttons. I've never seen a phone with such a clear interface.
Of course, before dropping ~$500 on a phone I'd want to know it was nigh-on impossible to damage the screen - the last thing you want to do is crack your screen while going on dodgems or something...
I haven't worked on that part of the car, but from what I've heard the SICKs combined saturate a 1GB ethernet link.
Impressive! I know most of the SICKs I've encountered (admittedly not very many) have been the yellow/safety ones, and have only had serial I/O - which made me suspect the data rate was pretty low. Any idea what models you're using, or is it just that fast because you've got lots of them?
Having worked on many CRT displays I just wanted to point out that the CRT is definitly not kept on any kind of warm stand-by, none that I have ever seen any way.
I'm not very familiar with CRT technology, but I've always wondered why CRT power specifications so often have quite high values for 'standby power'. I know a monitor will return to displaying an image from standby faster than it will from power off, but I'm not really sure how the two start processes are different.
Of course, we also have to detect other vehicles or obstacles in the path (using LIDAR and vision) and also determine the correct "pose" of the vehicle.
Looking at the pictures on your homepage you're using something like SICK scanning LIDAR units, right?
I'm curious - what sort of data rate do you get out of those things?
Is there a device that will call me if the temp in the house drops below a certain level? How about a broken pipe flooding the house? How can I keep advised of problems happening hundreds of miles away?
Well, you could tell your neighbours that you're going away and ask them to check in on everything every once in a while.
Granted this isn't a high-tech proposal, but it would probably be effective.
Since when have the facts ever stopped slashdotters from throwing in their 2 cents on any subject?
That may be true for you, but I can cite an established authority: wikipedia. Did you know, for example, that:
Gracenote founder Steve Scherf has come a long way from his younder days of meth-fueled llama sodomizing. While once it looked like he'd soon die in a gutter, that six months he spent in the federal pen for killing a bussload of nuns while drunk (which he coyly refers to as "Happy happy shower butt fun time") cleaned him up, allowing him to become the ruthless corporate asshat we know today.
It more concludes that working from home is the answer (Justifiably IMHO - otherwise you end up with tiny, windowless offices or much increased building costs).
The gain on most of them is adjustable, but I assume that you could set it up so that the magnitude of the signal was basically proportional to the deviation from a particular position.
It's likely they work through PID Control, which stands for proportional, integral, derivative. If this is the case, increasing the gain makes the system respond faster, but can make the system less stable. Wikipedia has a page on the subject.
I thought nintendo was supposed to be using the Gyration miniature gyroscopes.
Analog devices make MEMS gyroscopes too. Nintendo could have gone to any vendor, of course.
There's not as much market for gyroscopes as for accelerometers, hence they're more expensive. Sometimes they can be found in car satellite navigation systems as a way of increasing resolution above what GPS can offer - ever heard of a roundabout? They're useful there - and there are other applications as well. Games consoles, for instance!
If you read the article, it says:
Analog Devices Inc. of Norwood, Massachusetts makes a similar chip, which goes into the main Wii controller, the stick-like Wii Remote. According to Analog Devices, ST's chip is used in the auxiliary Freestyle controller (popularly known as the "Nunchuck") that connects to the larger controller for some games. ST said it was not allowed to say where exactly its chip is used.
Sony Corp.'s "Sixaxis" controller for the PS3 also has an accelerometer. The six axises the name refers to are the three dimensions of space, plus three axises of spin. The company hasn't revealed who makes the chip.
A good picture of a two-axis accelerometer can be seen here: http://users.wpi.edu/~cfurlong/me-593Mech.html (second picture down). Sensing is usually performed by capacitive combs, structures which act as capacitors, with their capacitance varying with displacement.
MEMS accelerometers have dropped in price in recent years because there's a big market: the automotive sector. A typical new car needs two accelerometers, one for the traction control system measuring roughly plus-or-minus 2 to 4g, and one for airbag deployment measuring more like 50g.
The high demand of the automotive sector has driven prices right down; sensors which would have cost hundreds of dollars in the past can now be purchased in bulk for less than $4. In fact, you could order one right now; component retailers will sell you one for less than $15.
From the article: "They invent their own terminology for what's going on. For example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle. More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening. Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, "What does that mean?" They said, "It's a damru," which is Hindi for Shiva's drum. [The God] Shiva holds an hourglass - shaped drum in his hand that you can shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a damru when the "thing" [the computer] was doing something."
Im tired of hearing this bullshit argument. The reason there is a vast imbalance of men vs women in math and science fields is not because of a social structure that "guides" them away from these fields.
I'm not sure I agree. In the UK education system, one chooses GCSEs at age 13/14. The number of science GCSEs (1, 2 or 3) you choose will control what A-levels (chosen age 15/16) you select (i.e. unless you did 2 or 3 science GCSEs you will have a lot of difficulty). And the A-levels you select will dictate what subjects you can do at university (i.e. it would be hard to get into CS without an a-level in maths, hard to get into engineering without an a-level in physics....).
If we're letting 13 year old kids (or even 15 year old kids) choose what they want to do for the rest of their lives, you can bet peer pressure is going to come into play.
I am reminded of something I read in an article some time ago. One year a group of school children were taken on a tour of a hospital. At the end of the tour, all the boys were given doctors' hats and all the girls were given nurses' hats. The parents complained to the hospital; why were the girls given hats corresponding to lower-paid, lower status jobs? The hospital promised to do things differently the next year. A year later the group toured the hospital again and, once again, the girls came home with nurses' hats and the boys with doctors' hats. The parents complained again. "We did things completely differently this year" the hospital said; "last year we gave all the girls nurses' hats and all the boys doctors' hats. This year we asked them what hat they wanted, and gave them that."
Anyway, here's my point: Demanding specialisation at a time when peer pressure is rife is an example of a social structure that could believably be keeping women away from the sciences.
Personally I think biology also plays a part, but I think it's short-sighted to discount the effects of society all together.
Are the boycotters also boycotting every other corporation that does business in China, or just the ones unlucky enough to have a high-profile demand made of them?
It's not just being high profile (though that doesn't help); it's the specific actions. IMHO if one company is opening a factory and employing people in China, and another company is turning in pro-democracy campaigners in to the (oppressive) government, well, I don't think it's unreasonable to make a distinction between the two companies.
I suppose it could be argued that opening a factory gives economic assistance to the (oppressive) government, and hence is immoral, but I don't think that is as bad as directly turning people in. I think there's a big moral gap between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from all the rumours about the Zune the future iPods that have been helped along by FCC documents, I think they made the right call.
If I was a big apple I'd submit a few dozen fake products for approval just to throw people off. When the documents about the Apple Bananaphone and the Apple ipod/condom become public, people will start taking these rumours with a bigger pinch of salt.
Sure, they offer you native drivers for their hardware, but what manufacturer of computer equipment WOULDN'T offer a Microsoft Windows XP driver for their hardware?
Apple.
As is demonstrated by the fact they used PowerPC chips for years, with nary a thought for people wanting to boot windows.
Just my $0.02
I think it is an absolutely horrid thing of current American society that so many people always run after new stuff and never even bother to think about others when dumping old stuff. I've seen companies trash hundreds of computers (yes, actually trash them... because the HDD has sensitive data and because of taxes).
It's often been my experience that, with computers, things old enough to be thrown away by one user are too old for other users to want.
For example, I stripped the good hard drive out of one of my old computers to use as a portable drive - but now I have a 200MHz computer with only a 4Gb hard disk. Sure, it works, but it's so old no-one would want to pay the shipping to get it from me.
I've got plenty of junk in a similar condition. What does one do with a 15-inch CRT? A 4x CD-ROM drive? A parallel port handheld scaner? A parallel port webcam? A 33.6kbps dial-up modem? A parallel port zip drive? A well-used PS/2 keyboard?
Nobody wants this stuff. It's as simple as that. That's how it seems to me, anyway.
Michael
China just need to put all the dollars they have accumulated in market and boom!!! it would affect US economy more than if they a war instead.
Europe and America have their differences, but if this were to happen I suspect Europe would go to some lengths to prop up the American economy.
After all, many companies do business and employ people in both Europe and America, and many goods find a market in both countries. One would think it would serve Europe's interests to keep America around in its current state, but weakened, rather than gambling on the unknown outcomes if they do nothing.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
True that - I was putting together the obligatory Moore's law graph for a presentation I was doing and there are about 50 million different interpretations. Is it about channel lengths? Or gate area? What about DRAM cell pitch? Transistor density? Transistors per chip? Transistors per dollar? Clock speed? Clock speed per dollar? Calculation speed per dolar? Does reducing or increasing die area count? Can Moore's law be extrapolated to include relays and vacuum tubes? Should it be? Is Moore's law a doubling every 18 months or every 2 years?
In the end I came to the realisation that the graph would show pretty much whatever I wanted it to...
Michael
OK, the actual paper's here (full text freely available).
As far as I can tell this has nothing to do with standard processors and everything to do with FPGAs.
It seems what they propose is: Instead of the FPGA configuration bits being done with gates on the silicon wafer, why not perform configuration by configuring the metal-to-metal interconnects? After all, if the metal layers are thick compared to the interconnects between them, you can blow connections you don't need like blowing a fuse. By removing the FPGA configuration bits from the silicon wafer, they can save a lot of space, leading to higher speeds and lower costs.
They have a clever way of arranging such a system, which should be easy to fabricate.
What Moore's law is supposed to have to do with this I don't know.
Michael
Engineer doesn't come from the word engine as in Internal Combustion Engine, it comes from the latin word for creation. So, an engineer is one who creates something. Since software engineers create programs, they are, in fact, engineers.
The argument could be made that a word's meaning is the meaning people accept it to have, not its etymology. In other words, the Etymological fallacy.
To put it another way, if an engineer is one who creates something, artists are engineers as they create artwork, and accountants are engineers as they create accounts. Clearly, this is not the common usage.
So, what is the common usage? Once was the time when 'engineer' meant 'member of an engineering institution', i.e. a professional bound by a code of ethics. But in modern times the guy who comes out to fix your washing machine is called an engineer. Implicitly, an engineer is anyone doing something moderately technical who fancies calling themselves an engineer.
That's my take, anyway.
Michael
If (huge IF) I ever write an online game, I'm going to seriously consider this. I tend towards 'free' games, so I'd probably make it write the authentication to a USB drive.
I'm not exactly sure how hardware 2-factor is supposed to help. I mean, if you're hacked enough that someone can install a key logger, you're hacked enough that someone can access your hardware dongle.
A dongle where you type in whatever code it displays seems more secure (or, of course, a dongle you plug in to authenticate then unplug immediately after).
Michael
Don't forget:
Mars lander Spirit started randomly rebooting due to a flash memory access problem.
Mars Polar Lander was lost - there's no definitive proof but it's thought it was a software error (sensing leg deployment ready for landing as actual landing, and hence deactivating thrust too early).
Mars climate orbiter? Chalk that one up to a metric/imperial conversion error... in software.
Of course, the argument could be made that there's no real alternative to doing it in software...
Michael
It's clear that Microsoft is winning the war for the home market.
I agree that Apple's product isn't likely to be a success if it's the itunes TV-out card it sounds like, but I'm not sure I'd agree Microsoft is winning a war.
I don't know anyone with a Microsoft 'media centre'. I don't know what functionality said media centres are supposed to have, and I don't know who makes them. The closest things I've heard of are people with TiVos and TiVo-like devices, and people on slashdot talking about MythTV.
I would say 'not owning one' is winning the war for the home media centre market, with Microsoft a distant second.
Just my £0.02
You may not be a fan of the interface [...] but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that the user interface is bad.
Many phones and PDAs have sucked in the past, and I thought apple's would be the same, but when I saw this picture I thought: That is how a phone UI should be designed. Look at those large, clearly labelled buttons. I've never seen a phone with such a clear interface.
Of course, before dropping ~$500 on a phone I'd want to know it was nigh-on impossible to damage the screen - the last thing you want to do is crack your screen while going on dodgems or something...
MySpace Spaces Out MySpace splinters as teens head for niche sites. [....] Possible, but I doubt it. Most people are too lazy to move.
That might not be true.
I haven't worked on that part of the car, but from what I've heard the SICKs combined saturate a 1GB ethernet link.
Impressive! I know most of the SICKs I've encountered (admittedly not very many) have been the yellow/safety ones, and have only had serial I/O - which made me suspect the data rate was pretty low. Any idea what models you're using, or is it just that fast because you've got lots of them?
Having worked on many CRT displays I just wanted to point out that the CRT is definitly not kept on any kind of warm stand-by, none that I have ever seen any way.
I'm not very familiar with CRT technology, but I've always wondered why CRT power specifications so often have quite high values for 'standby power'. I know a monitor will return to displaying an image from standby faster than it will from power off, but I'm not really sure how the two start processes are different.
I don't suppose you can enlighten me?
Thanks!
Of course, we also have to detect other vehicles or obstacles in the path (using LIDAR and vision) and also determine the correct "pose" of the vehicle.
Looking at the pictures on your homepage you're using something like SICK scanning LIDAR units, right?
I'm curious - what sort of data rate do you get out of those things?
Thanks!
Is there a device that will call me if the temp in the house drops below a certain level? How about a broken pipe flooding the house? How can I keep advised of problems happening hundreds of miles away?
Well, you could tell your neighbours that you're going away and ask them to check in on everything every once in a while.
Granted this isn't a high-tech proposal, but it would probably be effective.
I agree with you, but I'd have linked to this.
Since when have the facts ever stopped slashdotters from throwing in their 2 cents on any subject?
That may be true for you, but I can cite an established authority: wikipedia. Did you know, for example, that:
Gracenote founder Steve Scherf has come a long way from his younder days of meth-fueled llama sodomizing. While once it looked like he'd soon die in a gutter, that six months he spent in the federal pen for killing a bussload of nuns while drunk (which he coyly refers to as "Happy happy shower butt fun time") cleaned him up, allowing him to become the ruthless corporate asshat we know today.
If Wikipedia says it, it must be true.
How about CNN?
It more concludes that working from home is the answer (Justifiably IMHO - otherwise you end up with tiny, windowless offices or much increased building costs).
The gain on most of them is adjustable, but I assume that you could set it up so that the magnitude of the signal was basically proportional to the deviation from a particular position.
It's likely they work through PID Control, which stands for proportional, integral, derivative. If this is the case, increasing the gain makes the system respond faster, but can make the system less stable. Wikipedia has a page on the subject.
I thought nintendo was supposed to be using the Gyration miniature gyroscopes.
Analog devices make MEMS gyroscopes too. Nintendo could have gone to any vendor, of course.
There's not as much market for gyroscopes as for accelerometers, hence they're more expensive. Sometimes they can be found in car satellite navigation systems as a way of increasing resolution above what GPS can offer - ever heard of a roundabout? They're useful there - and there are other applications as well. Games consoles, for instance!
If you read the article, it says:
Analog Devices Inc. of Norwood, Massachusetts makes a similar chip, which goes into the main Wii controller, the stick-like Wii Remote. According to Analog Devices, ST's chip is used in the auxiliary Freestyle controller (popularly known as the "Nunchuck") that connects to the larger controller for some games. ST said it was not allowed to say where exactly its chip is used.
Sony Corp.'s "Sixaxis" controller for the PS3 also has an accelerometer. The six axises the name refers to are the three dimensions of space, plus three axises of spin. The company hasn't revealed who makes the chip.
A good picture of a two-axis accelerometer can be seen here: http://users.wpi.edu/~cfurlong/me-593Mech.html (second picture down). Sensing is usually performed by capacitive combs, structures which act as capacitors, with their capacitance varying with displacement.
MEMS accelerometers have dropped in price in recent years because there's a big market: the automotive sector. A typical new car needs two accelerometers, one for the traction control system measuring roughly plus-or-minus 2 to 4g, and one for airbag deployment measuring more like 50g.
Two big manufacturers are Analog Devices and ST Microelectronics, though others exist.
The high demand of the automotive sector has driven prices right down; sensors which would have cost hundreds of dollars in the past can now be purchased in bulk for less than $4. In fact, you could order one right now; component retailers will sell you one for less than $15.
I don't know anything more: the story sounds half-apocryphal to me, and I apologise for its vagueness
It's, not apocryphal .
From the article: "They invent their own terminology for what's going on. For example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle. More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening. Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, "What does that mean?" They said, "It's a damru," which is Hindi for Shiva's drum. [The God] Shiva holds an hourglass - shaped drum in his hand that you can shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a damru when the "thing" [the computer] was doing something."
Im tired of hearing this bullshit argument. The reason there is a vast imbalance of men vs women in math and science fields is not because of a social structure that "guides" them away from these fields.
I'm not sure I agree. In the UK education system, one chooses GCSEs at age 13/14. The number of science GCSEs (1, 2 or 3) you choose will control what A-levels (chosen age 15/16) you select (i.e. unless you did 2 or 3 science GCSEs you will have a lot of difficulty). And the A-levels you select will dictate what subjects you can do at university (i.e. it would be hard to get into CS without an a-level in maths, hard to get into engineering without an a-level in physics....).
If we're letting 13 year old kids (or even 15 year old kids) choose what they want to do for the rest of their lives, you can bet peer pressure is going to come into play.
I am reminded of something I read in an article some time ago. One year a group of school children were taken on a tour of a hospital. At the end of the tour, all the boys were given doctors' hats and all the girls were given nurses' hats. The parents complained to the hospital; why were the girls given hats corresponding to lower-paid, lower status jobs? The hospital promised to do things differently the next year. A year later the group toured the hospital again and, once again, the girls came home with nurses' hats and the boys with doctors' hats. The parents complained again. "We did things completely differently this year" the hospital said; "last year we gave all the girls nurses' hats and all the boys doctors' hats. This year we asked them what hat they wanted, and gave them that."
Anyway, here's my point: Demanding specialisation at a time when peer pressure is rife is an example of a social structure that could believably be keeping women away from the sciences.
Personally I think biology also plays a part, but I think it's short-sighted to discount the effects of society all together.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
Are the boycotters also boycotting every other corporation that does business in China, or just the ones unlucky enough to have a high-profile demand made of them?
It's not just being high profile (though that doesn't help); it's the specific actions. IMHO if one company is opening a factory and employing people in China, and another company is turning in pro-democracy campaigners in to the (oppressive) government, well, I don't think it's unreasonable to make a distinction between the two companies.
I suppose it could be argued that opening a factory gives economic assistance to the (oppressive) government, and hence is immoral, but I don't think that is as bad as directly turning people in. I think there's a big moral gap between the two.
Just my $0.02,
Michael