Why do we care what OS runs inside of an embedded device? As long as it is reliable, I don't care if it runs QNX, VxWorks, OSE, RT Linux or any other (proven, real time) operating system.
North Carolina State University offers a "Distance Education" program that is taught via videotape and online. They offer a Master of Computer Science program, both with and without a thesis (specialized or general programs).
See http://engineeringonline.ncsu.edu for details.
I work for a cellular equipment company. To help get our newbies/co-ops/etc up to speed, I put together a brief explanation of the standards and how they evolved into the current mess. You can read it here.
By the way, my company made one GSM1900/AMPS850 phone, the CF888. From what I can tell, it did not sell very well, and operator support was a little sketchy (there are a lot technical details to get inter-network roaming to work properly).
I work for a large multi-national company that has offices all over the world. I met a guy from our Singapore office who said that they were looking for transfers. So I applied and worked there for over a year. We had a great time, and our standard of living was much better than "washing dishes to pay for the trip".
If you want to go to Europe, work for a European company in your home country. If you want to go to Asia, work for an Asian company. Then build those contacts!
You might want to start your programming career at a smaller company. They typically look more at your abilities than your qualifications, and they do not usually have an HR "firewall" to screen applicants.
Once you get the experience, build a portfolio notebook that has pictures and references of your work. Include photos of your company's products, glossy advertising brochures, photos of your customer sites (even if it's just a photo of a mainframe). You will then be able to explain to future employers exactly what your contributions were.
I work for Ericsson Research in Singapore. One of the projects we recently did was a security camera that sent pictures of the intruder to your phone (in many countries, including the US, it is illegal to program a machine to call the police directly).
The camera/computer part was standard Linux with the capture/compare/MPEG software mentioned in the other posts. The phone part used MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service, a new feature in the Sony-Ericsson T68 phones (MMS is like SMS+PowerPoint).
It's a pretty neat idea. If you're interested in the details, send me a message and I will forward to the guy in our office who hacked this stuff together.
The US military GPS system transmits at very low power levels. I guess it was originally designed so a soldier with a backpack and a long whip antenna could determine his location in an open field. ??
Now that we are trying to cram receivers into cell phones (that already have enough other RF interference to compete with), it would be nice to see a GPS system with a little bit of OOMPH behind the signal. Maybe then it could be used in more indoor or urban canyon environments.
This is the argument of "dumb satellite, smart reciever" vs "smart satellite, dumb receiver".
Cell phone companies learned early on that it's better to build expensive/powerful base stations and CHEAP phones, since you produce many millions of phones. On the other hand, GPS receivers require a great deal of computing power and very high gain receivers. So the millions of receivers are expensive (but I wouldn't exactly call the satellites "cheap").
Just an observation on the difference between commercial projects and military ones.
I've long envisioned a PDA with the only interface being spoken, rather than requiring any video component. This would bring the power consumption and delicacy of these devices down within reason for extended usage.
This chip uses 53 milliamps. Explain to me how this voice interface will be less power-hungry than an LCD and a few buttons.
I am not sure how much power a Palm display draws, but my phone (when not on a call) uses 9 milliamps without a back light, 29 milliamps with a back light. That's TOTAL, including powering the radio components and processor. Meanwhile, your 53 milliamps is just to power the speech chip. Not to mention the fact that audio speakers are very power-hungry.
Furthermore, an LCD display shows a lot more usable information in a shorter amount of time than any serialized voice interface. And for now, we will ignore the huge amounts of power required for speech recognition.
So again, explain how this speech interface will bring your PDA power consumption down?
The current 2nd generation phone protocols were designed with handset battery life as a primary concern.
The base stations are plugged into the commercial power grid, so their transmitters and receivers are running all of the time.
However, handsets must conserve power, so instead of leaving the receiver on all of the time, they listen only at precisely-scheduled moments, synchronized with the base station's reference signal.
In order for this phone-to-phone relay system to work, the phones would either have to listen more often, or the sender would have to send at the time that the base station is normally sending. This would require some arbitration between the sender and the base station.
I'm not saying that this system is impossible. In fact, Japan has a system that uses a similar "repeater" technique for voice calls (handyphone? I can't remember). But what I am saying is that features like store-and-forward messaging were not considered important requirements when these protocols were designed. And retrofitting them onto existing standards would be costly, and would affect the performance of your handsets.
One final note on this. One might think that you could have a "relay mode" that the user could turn on and off, so you could decide whether to be an energy misor or a friendly relay. Today's handset user interfaces are already cluttered with a lot of crap that confuses the average (non-slashdot-reading) user. In general, this sort of user-selectable feature is discouraged. Instead, people just want to dial a number and talk. And they want a cool looking plastic case.
The main appeal for GPRS is not the high data rates. In practice, the data rates are similar to single-slot CSD, or sometimes as good as multi-slot HSCSD. It depends on how the operators provision their RF channels. The big deal about GPRS is that it is packet switched, "always on", and has no long call setup times.
These features make casual web/wap browsing more appealing than the old way (dial up, wait, connect, read web page, pay while reading, hang up).
There are two main uses for cellular data connections: (1) apps in the phone, like email and wap (2) use as a modem, connected to a laptop. GPRS will make #1 a lot better. The effect it will have on #2 will be that you pay for bits and not time (which is good for activities like web browsing, which have download-and-read usage patterns).
It's a shame that the cellular infrastructure companies (see my email address) have marketed GPRS as a "high bandwidth" solution instead of an "always on" one. The carriers are just selling what they've been told.
What about disincentives for over-hiring when times are relatively good?
Departments tend to build empires that do not necessarily serve the needs of the company. When times get tough, the company has to slim back to a "normal" size.
How exactly is this technology supposed to benefit anyone? Do doctors spend a significant amount of their time flying to remote hospitals? Or is this just technology in search of a problem?
Maybe this opens up competition like the electrical utilities have done. The same hospital provides the service, but now you can bid for the cheapest surgeon on eBay.
Some of these laptops can double as hair dryers... a loud fan and plenty of hot air. My Taiwanese FOSA at home has a pretty loud and hot hair dryer included. My Dell at work is almost silent.
Slashdot Mirror
All I need is 5 minutes... the time it takes to unplug from one wall, move to another room, and plug back in.
Manufacturers, take that battery out and build the "brick" into the laptop. Just give me a 110/220 plug on the back of the laptop.
I know that, theoretically, the cost of that apple is going towards the purchase of apple seeds, ...
Repeat after me: the market price of an item or service has nothing to do with the cost of providing the item or service.
It's simple. ISP's charge whatever they can get away with. What you are asking is the basis for how they JUSTIFY their prices.
Why do we care what OS runs inside of an embedded device? As long as it is reliable, I don't care if it runs QNX, VxWorks, OSE, RT Linux or any other (proven, real time) operating system.
North Carolina State University offers a "Distance Education" program that is taught via videotape and online. They offer a Master of Computer Science program, both with and without a thesis (specialized or general programs).
See http://engineeringonline.ncsu.edu for details.
- is only about 100 metres wide
- never comes closer than 3.6 million miles to our planet
Sounds like my brother.
Anyone interested in the autonomous robots?
See TriangleAmateurRobotics.org.
I work for a cellular equipment company. To help get our newbies/co-ops/etc up to speed, I put together a brief explanation of the standards and how they evolved into the current mess. You can read it here.
By the way, my company made one GSM1900/AMPS850 phone, the CF888. From what I can tell, it did not sell very well, and operator support was a little sketchy (there are a lot technical details to get inter-network roaming to work properly).
Let your company send you abroad (not a broad).
I work for a large multi-national company that has offices all over the world. I met a guy from our Singapore office who said that they were looking for transfers. So I applied and worked there for over a year. We had a great time, and our standard of living was much better than "washing dishes to pay for the trip".
If you want to go to Europe, work for a European company in your home country. If you want to go to Asia, work for an Asian company. Then build those contacts!
You might want to start your programming career at a smaller company. They typically look more at your abilities than your qualifications, and they do not usually have an HR "firewall" to screen applicants.
Once you get the experience, build a portfolio notebook that has pictures and references of your work. Include photos of your company's products, glossy advertising brochures, photos of your customer sites (even if it's just a photo of a mainframe). You will then be able to explain to future employers exactly what your contributions were.
I work for Ericsson Research in Singapore. One of the projects we recently did was a security camera that sent pictures of the intruder to your phone (in many countries, including the US, it is illegal to program a machine to call the police directly).
The camera/computer part was standard Linux with the capture/compare/MPEG software mentioned in the other posts. The phone part used MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service, a new feature in the Sony-Ericsson T68 phones (MMS is like SMS+PowerPoint).
It's a pretty neat idea. If you're interested in the details, send me a message and I will forward to the guy in our office who hacked this stuff together.
Plus, it allows "cast members" to offer guests goods and services anywhere...
A ride with Minnie on Space Mountain... priceless.
The US military GPS system transmits at very low power levels. I guess it was originally designed so a soldier with a backpack and a long whip antenna could determine his location in an open field. ??
Now that we are trying to cram receivers into cell phones (that already have enough other RF interference to compete with), it would be nice to see a GPS system with a little bit of OOMPH behind the signal. Maybe then it could be used in more indoor or urban canyon environments.
This is the argument of "dumb satellite, smart reciever" vs "smart satellite, dumb receiver".
Cell phone companies learned early on that it's better to build expensive/powerful base stations and CHEAP phones, since you produce many millions of phones. On the other hand, GPS receivers require a great deal of computing power and very high gain receivers. So the millions of receivers are expensive (but I wouldn't exactly call the satellites "cheap").
Just an observation on the difference between commercial projects and military ones.
It's a bird!
It's a plane!
Ow, that thing blinded me!
mchawking.com
I've long envisioned a PDA with the only interface being spoken, rather than requiring any video component. This would bring the power consumption and delicacy of these devices down within reason for extended usage.
This chip uses 53 milliamps. Explain to me how this voice interface will be less power-hungry than an LCD and a few buttons.
I am not sure how much power a Palm display draws, but my phone (when not on a call) uses 9 milliamps without a back light, 29 milliamps with a back light. That's TOTAL, including powering the radio components and processor. Meanwhile, your 53 milliamps is just to power the speech chip. Not to mention the fact that audio speakers are very power-hungry.
Furthermore, an LCD display shows a lot more usable information in a shorter amount of time than any serialized voice interface. And for now, we will ignore the huge amounts of power required for speech recognition.
So again, explain how this speech interface will bring your PDA power consumption down?
On most Linux systems, there is a device called /dev/null where you can store an infinite amount of data. Yet it never uses any disk space!
Maybe you could store your video feeds there!
...glad to see the open source movement doing it's job.
It looks like the closed source community is doing the job.
The open source movement just has to sit back and watch!
The current 2nd generation phone protocols were designed with handset battery life as a primary concern.
The base stations are plugged into the commercial power grid, so their transmitters and receivers are running all of the time.
However, handsets must conserve power, so instead of leaving the receiver on all of the time, they listen only at precisely-scheduled moments, synchronized with the base station's reference signal.
In order for this phone-to-phone relay system to work, the phones would either have to listen more often, or the sender would have to send at the time that the base station is normally sending. This would require some arbitration between the sender and the base station.
I'm not saying that this system is impossible. In fact, Japan has a system that uses a similar "repeater" technique for voice calls (handyphone? I can't remember). But what I am saying is that features like store-and-forward messaging were not considered important requirements when these protocols were designed. And retrofitting them onto existing standards would be costly, and would affect the performance of your handsets.
One final note on this. One might think that you could have a "relay mode" that the user could turn on and off, so you could decide whether to be an energy misor or a friendly relay. Today's handset user interfaces are already cluttered with a lot of crap that confuses the average (non-slashdot-reading) user. In general, this sort of user-selectable feature is discouraged. Instead, people just want to dial a number and talk. And they want a cool looking plastic case.
The main appeal for GPRS is not the high data rates. In practice, the data rates are similar to single-slot CSD, or sometimes as good as multi-slot HSCSD. It depends on how the operators provision their RF channels. The big deal about GPRS is that it is packet switched, "always on", and has no long call setup times.
These features make casual web/wap browsing more appealing than the old way (dial up, wait, connect, read web page, pay while reading, hang up).
There are two main uses for cellular data connections: (1) apps in the phone, like email and wap (2) use as a modem, connected to a laptop. GPRS will make #1 a lot better. The effect it will have on #2 will be that you pay for bits and not time (which is good for activities like web browsing, which have download-and-read usage patterns).
It's a shame that the cellular infrastructure companies (see my email address) have marketed GPRS as a "high bandwidth" solution instead of an "always on" one. The carriers are just selling what they've been told.
What about disincentives for over-hiring when times are relatively good?
Departments tend to build empires that do not necessarily serve the needs of the company. When times get tough, the company has to slim back to a "normal" size.
I like 'em in cookies, myself.
How exactly is this technology supposed to benefit anyone? Do doctors spend a significant amount of their time flying to remote hospitals? Or is this just technology in search of a problem?
Maybe this opens up competition like the electrical utilities have done. The same hospital provides the service, but now you can bid for the cheapest surgeon on eBay.
When all commercial sites require this, you are left with no choice but to sign up and have your data managed by M$.
Simply place your order on the the phone. And mention that you refuse to use Passport. They will get the message.
Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
An error occurred while attempting to establish a connection to the server.
The most likely cause of this problem is that the server is not currently running. Verify that the server is running and restart it if necessary.
Unix error number 2 occurred: No such file or directory
Feature #1 -- a quiet fan.
Some of these laptops can double as hair dryers... a loud fan and plenty of hot air. My Taiwanese FOSA at home has a pretty loud and hot hair dryer included. My Dell at work is almost silent.