I'm a civilian technical employee of the Navy, and this new Navy intranet is a big push in the organization...but I think the funniest/most annoying parts (for windows machines, at least) is that Navy PCs on the new intranet have this Navy propaganda wallpaper set on their desktops at domain logon...
You would think that the Navy would be getting all sorts of funding for these types of projects nowadays... but really what's happening is that funding is being diverted to war operations type stuff... so those of us working on new technology for the Navy have gotten huge budget cuts...so don't expect much in the way of cool techie things any time soon.
Is there any product out on the market today that is both an mp3 player and a cell phone? I've had zilch luck trying to find a device with those capabilities...:(
Linux is still as far from replacing Windows on the desktop in the government as well as anywhere else, but linux, and more specifically open source in general is quickly becoming king in the military technology arena. You see, Uncle Sam sees the benefit of the "many eyes" theory. I recently started working for the government in a high-tech capacity, and I was astounded at how embraced open source is for development. In fact, the department I work for goes as far as to say that open systems (that's what the gov't like to call it) are not the exception but the rule.
"Sir, we've got a lock on the target" "Fire when ready!" "Uhh...Sir, we've got a Blue Screen here"
Let's see, one PLL... damn, I don't know if I can afford the extra six cents!
Well, actually, it won't be that cheap. When I was in college working on my senior thesis (Fall 2001), we had an application where we needed to use a PLL in a 2.4GHz transmitter circuit. The thing was approximately 1cm x 2cm x 0.5cm, and cost around $25, and it was damn hard to find. Now, that piece would obviously be far too large and noisy for use on a memory chip (but maybe not)... but the point remains, a PLL that needs to operate in the 100's of megahertz to gigahertz range AND be electrically quiet enough would, I'm sure, jack up the price more than marginally. Now, that $25 piece is all well and good for some flakey-ass collegetransmitter, but this chip is gonna need something that's low-noise, high-gain, and a bunch of other characteristics that WILL make it much more expensive.
Of course, you also gotta take into account that the PLL will (most likely) be hybridized (i.e. wafer removed and built custom onto the chip) and mass-produced, both of which will tend to drive the price down
On the flip side, though, we've become used to buying $20 sticks of RAM, so it might seem pricey at first:-)
"Advanced search: Which package provides that library my program needs?" Do you truly think that Joe User needs or should be forced to know or search about this? If your answer is "yes", then, Mr SuSE, you got no clue about desktop system design.
The reviewer clearly doesn't have A CLUE! That's an extremely useful functionality. I can certainly empathize with trying to install an rpm that isn't listed in YaST...because often times it breaks because of a missing dependancy...and it usually takes AGES to find what package it's in!
So... clearly the reviewer is just spouting on this point or, more likely, simply doesn't understand what it means.
Judging by the variety of platforms the poster has coded for, I would say it's likely that most of his assembler is done on EMBEDDED platforms, where assembly language IS still used fairly often and where optimizations WOULD come in handy.
If you rent DVD movies at the video store...can you not simply stick it and a blank in the drive and do a straight DVD-DVD duplication? Why the ripping bit?
Would someone please explain how this news hit the press at 2AM Sunday night (Early Monday morning if you want to nitpick)? I realize that it's well into business hours in Europe and most of Asia, but according to the article, VisionTek is a US-based company in Northern Illinois.
Not by end users. I suspect that the equipment to reprogram them costs more than an xbox
I'm in the industry, so I can comment... the programmers for most FPGAs run from $50 on the low end to $500 or more on the high end. I'm guessing the mod chip is a very low-end FPGA (the high-end ones are more like programmable CPUs and can reach speeds of around a GHz these days).
HOWEVER, FPGAs *do not* need a programmer to be reprogrammed. All of the ones I've come across work on a very simple serial interface which uses only a few pins...so (assuming that the mod chips are indeed FPGAs), with a few resistors and a serial cable cut in half, an end user could feasibly burn in new code themselves, with the chip in-circuit, and with reasonably little difficulty for someone with a steady hand.
Mod chips are usually one-time programmable devices, like FPGAs, anyways. They don't have to be thrown away, just burnt with a different configuration.
I thought the whole asteroid thing was kind of neat, so I made a little box on my web site that grabbed the latest impact data from NASA and shows year of impact, probability of impact, and danger rating.
I thought the whole asteroid thing was kind of neat, so I made a little box on my web site that grabbed the latest impact data from NASA and shows year of impact, probability of impact, and danger rating.
The most important words in the article (well maybe they weren't actually there, but I paraphrase): More data needed. There is still a huge margin of error in the calculation of the asteroid's orbit. It just might hit Earth at this point.
This is the whole point of the Palermo scale...it takes into account probability of of imact as well as time until impact. As the impact date gets closer and closer, astronomers will be more able to accurately predict the probability of impact. As time gets closer to the impact, the Palermo rating goes up...on the other hand, as time gets closer, a more accurate hit probability can be determined which, in all likelyhood will go down and thusly bring down the Palermo rating.
Besides, a Palermo rating of 0.06 makes it just slightly more than likely that this rock will hit us than some other random unlikely cosmic event happening
What's a better scale is the Torino scale, which is basically an impact threat scale, from 0 to 10, with 10 meaning a very destructive impact will happen very soon. This rock as a Torino rating of 1, so I daresay there's nothing to worry about.
In case you're wondering what this means (and I was):
The Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale was developed to enable NEO specialists to categorize and prioritize potential impact risks spanning a wide range of impact dates, energies and probabilities. Actual scale values less than -2 reflect events for which there are no likely consequences, while Palermo Scale values between -2 and 0 indicate situations that merit careful monitoring. Potential impacts with positive Palermo Scale values will generally indicate situations that merit some level of concern.
The scale compares the likelihood of the detected potential impact with the average risk posed by objects of the same size or larger over the years until the date of the potential impact. This average risk from random impacts is known as the background risk. For convenience the scale is logarithmic, so, for examples, a Palermo Scale value of -2 indicates that the detected potential impact event is only 1% as likely as a random background event occurring in the intervening years, a value of zero indicates that the single event is just as threatening as the background hazard, and a value of +2 indicates an event that is 100 times more likely than a background impact by an object at least as large before the date of the potential impact in question.
Taken from NASA: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/doc/palermo.html
But when it gets faster, doesn't it begin to run hotter? Not saying that cooling isn't still relevant, but it may be harder to "overcool" than to "overclock", since cooling will raise the "speed" of the chip, which in turn will add heat, which will counteract the cooling you do.
Well, yes.
There is a feedback system between clock speed, heat output, and cooling. When you slap that CPU cooler on, the system reaches an equilibrium between these factors.
However, as you increase the amount of cooling you put in, the system compensates by increasing the clock speed (This is more a mathematical concept than an engineering concept).
If the rate of change in clock speed with respect to cooling is nonlinear and declining, than there will be a point afterwhich the clock speed cannot go any higher, or at least, for every incremental increas in cooling, there is an increasingly insignificant increase in the clock speed.
Of course, there MUST be a limit, since nothing could possibly go faster than an electron zipping through silicon at absolute zero...
You actually could "overclock it" because such computers would have a maximum speed... Instead of spinning their wheels like todays computers do, they would only clock when they needed to. They'd be able to achieve quicker bursts because all that wheel spinning wouldn't melt the processor.
Er...no.
That's one of the key benefits of clockless computing: an instruction runs through the processor as quickly as the electrons can propagate through the silicon. In other words, the processor is ready to accept the next instruction at the exact instant it's available. You just can't pump it any faster...
HOWEVER,
Electricity propagates through Silicon faster when the temperature drops. Thus, the COOLER an asychnronous chip runs, the FASTER it gets! This opens up alot of exciting doors....and will certainly ignite hordes of development in the CPU cooling industry if async chips ever get off the ground. For an async chip overclocking = overcooling.
When I try to load the page, it loads fine, then quickly, the page is replaced with text that says "You must have an HTML 4 compatible browser", with links to IE and NS downloads.
High signal might be +5 and -5 on the other, in relation to some certain ground.
snip.
There's no reason why a new standard could not be made to create a common voltage reference wire. I'm saying this because there was a standard that was created which allowed 100Mbps transmission over CAT3 wiring (it was called 100BaseT4), which is actually capable of up to 33MHz transmission. They used all 4 pairs of wires, each pair running at 25MHz in paralell to acheive the 100M rate.
So,
I figure there's no reason why we can't figure out something more complex, like a 1-wire reference. There would be alot of issues to work out, and it might even be impossible due to RFI issues in the wiring (that's why there's twisted pair)....
And the parent is correct, QAM (Quadrature Modulation) could be used, which encodes two bits per cycle offset by an orthogonal 90-degree phase shift....though most likely an encoding method a-la Manchester would _need_ to be used in such a multiwire environment.
Assuming the physics barriers could be overcome (and I'm not sure that they could), in theory, it could be possible to run 600x7x2 = 8.4Gbps over copper!
Now that fiber is here, these advanced copper versions seem silly. The CAT7 standard, at 600MHz, could support up to 600x4 = 2.4Gbps, which is now much less than the 10x jumps we've been accustomed to in copper cabling. Although, I suppose it should be theoretically possible to create a standard that uses just one universal ground wire for a 600x7 = 4.2Gbps rate...
That is essentially my point...the record companies want to impose a tax on CD sales without providing anything to us for it - just more money to line their pockets.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a civilian technical employee of the Navy, and this new Navy intranet is a big push in the organization...but I think the funniest/most annoying parts (for windows machines, at least) is that Navy PCs on the new intranet have this Navy propaganda wallpaper set on their desktops at domain logon...
From a technical Navy employee...
You would think that the Navy would be getting all sorts of funding for these types of projects nowadays... but really what's happening is that funding is being diverted to war operations type stuff... so those of us working on new technology for the Navy have gotten huge budget cuts...so don't expect much in the way of cool techie things any time soon.
Is there any product out on the market today that is both an mp3 player and a cell phone? I've had zilch luck trying to find a device with those capabilities... :(
Yes.
Linux is still as far from replacing Windows on the desktop in the government as well as anywhere else, but linux, and more specifically open source in general is quickly becoming king in the military technology arena. You see, Uncle Sam sees the benefit of the "many eyes" theory. I recently started working for the government in a high-tech capacity, and I was astounded at how embraced open source is for development. In fact, the department I work for goes as far as to say that open systems (that's what the gov't like to call it) are not the exception but the rule.
"Sir, we've got a lock on the target"
"Fire when ready!"
"Uhh...Sir, we've got a Blue Screen here"
Let's see, one PLL... damn, I don't know if I can afford the extra six cents!
Well, actually, it won't be that cheap. When I was in college working on my senior thesis (Fall 2001), we had an application where we needed to use a PLL in a 2.4GHz transmitter circuit. The thing was approximately 1cm x 2cm x 0.5cm, and cost around $25, and it was damn hard to find. Now, that piece would obviously be far too large and noisy for use on a memory chip (but maybe not)... but the point remains, a PLL that needs to operate in the 100's of megahertz to gigahertz range AND be electrically quiet enough would, I'm sure, jack up the price more than marginally. Now, that $25 piece is all well and good for some flakey-ass collegetransmitter, but this chip is gonna need something that's low-noise, high-gain, and a bunch of other characteristics that WILL make it much more expensive.
Of course, you also gotta take into account that the PLL will (most likely) be hybridized (i.e. wafer removed and built custom onto the chip) and mass-produced, both of which will tend to drive the price down
On the flip side, though, we've become used to buying $20 sticks of RAM, so it might seem pricey at first
Cranberries grow in bogs. You'd know this if you took a drive through southeastern Massachusetts where cranberry bogs abound.
You forgot:
8) Troll: Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
The reviewer clearly doesn't have A CLUE! That's an extremely useful functionality. I can certainly empathize with trying to install an rpm that isn't listed in YaST...because often times it breaks because of a missing dependancy...and it usually takes AGES to find what package it's in!
So... clearly the reviewer is just spouting on this point or, more likely, simply doesn't understand what it means.
Uhmmm...
Judging by the variety of platforms the poster has coded for, I would say it's likely that most of his assembler is done on EMBEDDED platforms, where assembly language IS still used fairly often and where optimizations WOULD come in handy.
Ummm...
If you rent DVD movies at the video store...can you not simply stick it and a blank in the drive and do a straight DVD-DVD duplication? Why the ripping bit?
Would someone please explain how this news hit the press at 2AM Sunday night (Early Monday morning if you want to nitpick)? I realize that it's well into business hours in Europe and most of Asia, but according to the article, VisionTek is a US-based company in Northern Illinois.
I'm in the industry, so I can comment... the programmers for most FPGAs run from $50 on the low end to $500 or more on the high end. I'm guessing the mod chip is a very low-end FPGA (the high-end ones are more like programmable CPUs and can reach speeds of around a GHz these days).
HOWEVER, FPGAs *do not* need a programmer to be reprogrammed. All of the ones I've come across work on a very simple serial interface which uses only a few pins...so (assuming that the mod chips are indeed FPGAs), with a few resistors and a serial cable cut in half, an end user could feasibly burn in new code themselves, with the chip in-circuit, and with reasonably little difficulty for someone with a steady hand.
FPGAs are reprogrammable.
Idiot.
I thought the whole asteroid thing was kind of neat, so I made a little box on my web site that grabbed the latest impact data from NASA and shows year of impact, probability of impact, and danger rating.
Here's the (php) code .
I thought the whole asteroid thing was kind of neat, so I made a little box on my web site that grabbed the latest impact data from NASA and shows year of impact, probability of impact, and danger rating.
Here's the (php) code.
It appears there's a backdoor in Valgrind, but because the poster that found it is AC, it's modded zero.
BEFORE you go and download it, please read this post.
This is the whole point of the Palermo scale...it takes into account probability of of imact as well as time until impact. As the impact date gets closer and closer, astronomers will be more able to accurately predict the probability of impact. As time gets closer to the impact, the Palermo rating goes up...on the other hand, as time gets closer, a more accurate hit probability can be determined which, in all likelyhood will go down and thusly bring down the Palermo rating.
Besides, a Palermo rating of 0.06 makes it just slightly more than likely that this rock will hit us than some other random unlikely cosmic event happening
What's a better scale is the Torino scale, which is basically an impact threat scale, from 0 to 10, with 10 meaning a very destructive impact will happen very soon. This rock as a Torino rating of 1, so I daresay there's nothing to worry about.
In case you're wondering what this means (and I was):
The Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale was developed to enable NEO specialists to categorize and prioritize potential impact risks spanning a wide range of impact dates, energies and probabilities. Actual scale values less than -2 reflect events for which there are no likely consequences, while Palermo Scale values between -2 and 0 indicate situations that merit careful monitoring. Potential impacts with positive Palermo Scale values will generally indicate situations that merit some level of concern.
The scale compares the likelihood of the detected potential impact with the average risk posed by objects of the same size or larger over the years until the date of the potential impact. This average risk from random impacts is known as the background risk. For convenience the scale is logarithmic, so, for examples, a Palermo Scale value of -2 indicates that the detected potential impact event is only 1% as likely as a random background event occurring in the intervening years, a value of zero indicates that the single event is just as threatening as the background hazard, and a value of +2 indicates an event that is 100 times more likely than a background impact by an object at least as large before the date of the potential impact in question.
Taken from NASA: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/doc/palermo.html
Has anyone tried this yet? I'm currently using SuSE 8.0, and I'd like to know if anyone 'in the know' would recommend a switch...
Well, yes.
There is a feedback system between clock speed, heat output, and cooling. When you slap that CPU cooler on, the system reaches an equilibrium between these factors.
However, as you increase the amount of cooling you put in, the system compensates by increasing the clock speed (This is more a mathematical concept than an engineering concept).
If the rate of change in clock speed with respect to cooling is nonlinear and declining, than there will be a point afterwhich the clock speed cannot go any higher, or at least, for every incremental increas in cooling, there is an increasingly insignificant increase in the clock speed.
Of course, there MUST be a limit, since nothing could possibly go faster than an electron zipping through silicon at absolute zero...
That's one of the key benefits of clockless computing: an instruction runs through the processor as quickly as the electrons can propagate through the silicon. In other words, the processor is ready to accept the next instruction at the exact instant it's available. You just can't pump it any faster...
HOWEVER,
Electricity propagates through Silicon faster when the temperature drops. Thus, the COOLER an asychnronous chip runs, the FASTER it gets! This opens up alot of exciting doors....and will certainly ignite hordes of development in the CPU cooling industry if async chips ever get off the ground. For an async chip overclocking = overcooling.
Stupid site...
When I try to load the page, it loads fine, then quickly, the page is replaced with text that says "You must have an HTML 4 compatible browser", with links to IE and NS downloads.
Sheesh. No respect.
There's no reason why a new standard could not be made to create a common voltage reference wire. I'm saying this because there was a standard that was created which allowed 100Mbps transmission over CAT3 wiring (it was called 100BaseT4), which is actually capable of up to 33MHz transmission. They used all 4 pairs of wires, each pair running at 25MHz in paralell to acheive the 100M rate.
So,
I figure there's no reason why we can't figure out something more complex, like a 1-wire reference. There would be alot of issues to work out, and it might even be impossible due to RFI issues in the wiring (that's why there's twisted pair)....
And the parent is correct, QAM (Quadrature Modulation) could be used, which encodes two bits per cycle offset by an orthogonal 90-degree phase shift....though most likely an encoding method a-la Manchester would _need_ to be used in such a multiwire environment.
Assuming the physics barriers could be overcome (and I'm not sure that they could), in theory, it could be possible to run 600x7x2 = 8.4Gbps over copper!
Now that fiber is here, these advanced copper versions seem silly. The CAT7 standard, at 600MHz, could support up to 600x4 = 2.4Gbps, which is now much less than the 10x jumps we've been accustomed to in copper cabling. Although, I suppose it should be theoretically possible to create a standard that uses just one universal ground wire for a 600x7 = 4.2Gbps rate...
That is essentially my point...the record companies want to impose a tax on CD sales without providing anything to us for it - just more money to line their pockets.