In no medium until the CD has it been possible to store a dynamic range compressed audio without giving up something. On vinyl, a loud mix means less audio can be stored, while it doesn't matter on a CD.
This is a bit off base. The "loudness" of a vinyl recording has to do with groove depth. "Louder" audio has nothing to do with how much audio could be stored, which is a function of groove width. Also, the whole point of dynamic range compression is to improve audio fidelity in lossy systems such as tape decks or radio broadcasts. That's why u-law compression is built into our telephone standards, with a compressor on the transmit side and an expander on the receive side.
The other effect is what makes tube amps "better" as well - what happens when you overdrive them. A vinyl record when clipped doesn't hit a hard stop - it hits a soft stop and ends up distorted. Ditto a tube amp - overdrive them and the waveform distorts. However, do that to a CD or transistor amp, and you get clipping. The harmonics induced by clipping the audio are far more harsh to most people's ears than the soft-clip distortion you get with vinyl/tube.
Also why some of the best guitar FX pedals use tubes in their final stages - you want that nice distortion, tubes are really the only way. The alternative is to waste a lot of ADC/DAC and DSP processing power by not using the full dynamic range so there's no possible way to clip, and then process the signal to add soft-clip effects.
There's nothing magical about vacuum tubes. They amplify and clip according to physical processes, and can be described as mathematics just like anything else. An ADC -> DSP -> DAC system is more power efficient, more easily reproducible, much more reliable, and more rugged than any tube-based anything. Ponder this - if you were looking for a specific sound to add to your guitar playing, wouldn't you rather have something _specific_ and consistent from use to use than something which is temperature-dependent, age-dependent, and tube-brand dependent?
I could be mistaken here, but I think that's probably an urban legend. Even assuming that you were using a 300-baud modem that could show a nibble at a time on 4 parallel LEDs and that the LEDs were updated on every single bit, that would still be a potential flicker rate of 75Hz. That would be impossible to catch on any consumer-grade camera, although some specialized equipment could capture it. At 14.4kbps, it would be completely impossible with any video equipment that I'm aware of. At 56kbps forget about it.
Depending on directionality, one could certainly plant an IR bug if desired. However, that's not any different than wifi now.
This is near technology, but I wouldn't want to use it for more than a few minutes at a time. Sliding my hand around on a table for 8 or 10 hours a day would almost certainly give me blisters, and possibly a rash depending on the material. It would callus the heck out of whatever skin was touching the table as well.
Contrast this with a mouse where your hand isn't sliding around on anything, and the winner is pretty clear in my mind.
But when you buy stock from a company during its IPO, what do you get as the result? Stock that you can sell to somebody who wants to buy it. Not dividends, not tangible benefits, not even the promise of tangible benefits. Only the ability to sell it at a higher price when the company does well. You're not addressing the issue of _why_ a company doing well has direct impact on stock prices. I'm actually genuinely curious about this if you have an answer.
The flash crash (and high-frequency trading in general) is really only symptomatic of a deeper underlying problem - the modern stock market has no fundamental reason to exist. When the concept of stocks originated, it was a way to own part of a company. Companies paid dividends, and so if they did well then they sent you (the investor) a check in the mail. In that way, stocks could be thought of as investments where the payoff was receiving profits in the mail.
But the stock market has changed into something different and really bizarre. Everybody knows that a company's profits and stability are what drive its stock prices. But why is that? Although a few stocks pay dividends, these days most don't. And to the common investor who holds a small percentage of overall shares, I don't think there's any easy way to _force_ dividends out of a company you own stock in. In a theoretical sense I could buy up enough shares of the company to force them to pay me dividends, but that's not something the average investor can realistically achieve.
That means that the the only payoff possible from my stocks is the money I could make by selling them. This is really strange if you think about it. If I'm never going to see significant dividends from Google, so their financial success or failure should have no underlying reason to affect stock prices. If the ONLY thing stocks are good for is selling them to somebody else, then they have no intrinsic underlying value. They don't pay dividends. I can't take them over to Google HQ and say "here's my share of the company, I'd like to take this office furniture now."
It's like the stock market has changed from a way to invest in companies and share their profits to some strange cult where everybody's drinking the kool-aid and the only people winning are brokerages. People put their retirements, their life savings, into something that has no intrinsic value whatsoever. It seems like the market is essentially dependent on an having ever-increasing influx of new buyers, like a sort of giant distributed pyramid scheme. To me, it's not a question of _if_ the stock market will collapse completely but more a question of _when_. Nothing logically inconsistent can endure forever.
For me, caffeine addiction is all about control of my body. I agree with the article that my baseline is probably the same as somebody who avoid caffeine entirely. However, I also think that a caffeine addict's lowest level of alertness is the same as an non-addict's as well.
This is interesting if you think about it, because it means that my blood's caffeine levels are a heavily-weighted component in my overall level of alertness. Assuming the floor and ceiling of my potential alertness are the same, that means that other factors (such as how much I slept last night) are less important than they are for a non-caffeine user. This gives me a finer degree of control over when I'm alert and when I'm tired, which is worth the addiction in my opinion.
It's actually not a new program - the Navy's had marine mammal units for many years now. Long before "terrorism" was ever a buzzword. Of particular interest is the Mark-6 unit (MK-6 MMS) which is an antipersonnel unit. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it - a suicide diver with the right explosives could probably take out a small naval vessel. A ship's sonar probably can't distinguish a diver from any other underwater mammal. And even if it could, bullets are ineffective in the water. It's a significant vulnerability if you think about it.
Microsoft Research is an awesome entity that produces a ton of cool things. Have you ever poked around on their website? It's got a ton of cool projects like this one. I wouldn't get your hopes of ever seeing this turn into a real product - just because somebody in MS Research is working on it doesn't mean that Microsoft has any plans to use it for anything. I'm convinced that the primary purpose of MS Research is to employ people so that they don't go work for Microsoft's competitors.
Whenever I hear about something like this, I'm always a little bit skeptical. What would a malware writer stand to gain by writing some malware that "accessed 40 child porn sites per minute" and installing it on some guy's computer? It's pretty absurd when you think about it.
Does anybody really believe that there's some spergy criminal mastermind out there who spends his nights optimizing his malware's CPSPM rate? One would assume that anybody with enough knowledge to even write the software is probably already connected to the people who produce that stuff, or else he wouldn't know where to get it in the first place (and so how could he write malware to do it for him?)
Are there any eBook readers that are good with 8.5"x11" PDFs yet? I'd love having something to read scientific papers on, but I don't think a full page of 10-pt font would be very legible when reduced by a factor of two for a Kindle screen.
My advice would be to learn Verilog first, particularly if you're coming from a computer science background. I find Verilog to be much cleaner and easier to read / understand. On the hobbyist (or even the small-scale professional) level, Verilog will probably be easier than VHDL.
I find that VHDL scales to extremely large designs better than Verilog (much better generate statements, pre-processing macros, and paramterization). VHDL is also better if you're really strict on version control and module heirarchy. But if you're working on a one-man project, you probably don't need or want VHDL's unnecessary complexity.
Ultimately, both languages do the same thing and in basically the same way. When you get down to the actual nitty gritty where you're writing the HDL, they're pretty similar. They differ mostly in how they handle passing arguments to- and from- modules, and what kind of compile-time constructs they support.
Last but not least, I would also recommend starting off with Xilinx's Webpack and a Spartan-3 starter board. Get something with a digital-analog converter and an analog-digital converter too, some LEDs and pushbuttons, a UART transceiver, and a ton of GPIO headers. GPIO is where FPGAs really shine.
I have a bone to pick with the phrasing of this and other articles like it.
When people first read it, they go ZOMFG 70000 WTF, which is clearly the article's intent. However, it's not like there are 70,000 Chinese people sitting in a room all trying to hack the gibson or whatever. I'd bet this is the work of maybe 10 people at the very most. Another thing to keep in mind is that a login 'attempt' is not really a very big deal in of itself. It's much more accurate to say there is one attempt to hack into the network, and the method being used is brute force.
It looks like he tried to host the link from his laptop:(
Re:facebook killed TV?
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Uhh... what?
You think that digital audio and video is a step back in quality from analog? Perhaps you would like to compare and contrast VHS with DVD. Or perhaps records versus CDs (the kind from the 80's when they first came out, not the heavily compressed and mastered kind that is produced today). Digital distribution is definitely the way to go.
Perhaps you are actually frustrated over the bit rate of internet-distributed media, not the inherent fact that it's a digital medium.
First of all, math cannot be patented. Second of all, it's pretty much impossible to collect on a patent unless you're one of those companies who buys up IP for the sole purpose of litigation.
Bear in mind that we live in a world where the web 'shopping cart' is patented. It is pretty much impossible to create anything in the tech industry without infringing on _some_ patent or another, and so what companies tend to do is develop patent portfolios that they can use to counter-sue anybody who tries to sue them.
In our current system, refinement, optimization, or miniaturization of an existing concept is probably not novel enough to be granted a patent, and definitely not novel enough to successfully litigate with that patent. On the other hand, however, I could draw a cartoon mouse with dicks growing growing out of its forehead instead of round ears and if I was able to get it hung in my friend's coffee shop that would be enough to enforce copyright if it was ever ripped off by anybody else.
There are a lot of cases where genetic engineering (either cloning or hybridization) DOES raise many valid ethical concerns.
Think about this:
1) Would you feel bad about taking organs from a clone which was grown without any brain? 2) What about a clone who had a brain the size of a bird's? 3) What about a clone with a brain the size of a three year old?
Or say we made some humans who had the intelligence of a dog. Would they be less than human? Could we treat them like slaves and train them just like we train dogs now? What would happen if one of the subhumans bred with a real human? Would the result be 'human' enough that you would treat it like a human?
Let's think about this for a second. Assume that you want to power a device which draws 200mA at 5V (a number that's the right order of magnitude for small consumer electronics like an iPod). That works out to one watt of power draw.
For the purposes of this calculation, we'll make some extremely generous assumptions: 1) The device has a 100% efficient switching converter and can utilize all of the power it receives. 2) The device's solar cells are 50% efficient, something which has not been attained even in a laboratory. 3) There are no laser transmission losses in the air.
Even under these completely impossible conditions, that would still require a 2-watt laser. For the record, that is four times stronger than a class-3B laser, and those commonly require protective eye-wear to use in the workplace. A 2-watt laser could burn your walls, your skin, or really pretty much anything it wanted.
The only way I would even _consider_ using lasers for powering anything in my home would be if they were:
1) organized in a grid so that the total output power was spread over a couple of square inches instead of a point charge. 2) The emitter had a straight beam pattern with minimal diffusion. 3) The emitter had an auto shut-off that engaged any time one of a ring of surrounding IR beams were broken. These beams would have to be far enough away from the emitter that the emitter would be able to shut off in-between the time something could break the beams and the time that thing could enter the emitter's path. 4) The two devices sat next to each other instead of being across the room. I would not be willing to target high-energy lasers all the way across my living room, but I might be willing to put down a phone with a solar panel on it immediately next to an emitter.
I used to work at a software contracting house about 16-18 years ago. We worked on "Microsoft Home" project. There were two programs: "Fine Artist" and "Creative Writer" for kids. (code name "splat") It had an animated helper, "Pablo Picknoseo" (yes: pik-nOs-O") it seems to be some time before these patents. I still got the tee shirt.
It's funny - I had completely forgotten about those programs until you brought them up. I had a relative who worked at Microsoft when I was a kid, and she sent me copies of these for Christmas one year. I really liked them a lot, and they were a great way to introduce me to illustration and word processing programs. Behind the goofy UI that I loved as a kid, you could find most of the same features and concepts as Microsoft Word. When I switched over to Microsoft Word as I got a little bit older, there was real no learning curve.
So I guess it was a pretty successful piece of software for Microsoft.:)
I don't think this will "significantly extend" mobile device battery life, As other people have pointed out, something that could practically save maybe 10mW of battery power during transmit operation is interesting but not really all that dramatic. On the other hand, the author doesn't appear to make the claim that it will or won't significantly extend battery life. That may be a slashdottism:)
If I understood the abstract right, the gist of this is that he designed a transmit module with a small internal loop antenna, so that a larger transmit antenna could be inductively coupled instead of electrically driven. This means that all of the bias and driver circuitry internal to the transmit chip and also all of the bias and transmit circuitry external to the chip could be done away with. He coupled an antenna to the outside of a microchip to utilized what would essentially be 'waste' magnetic field in a conventional transmitter.
I would also bet that the big boys like Qualcomm probably do something similar already inside of their cell-phone modules. I would imagine that an approach like this eliminates much of the general purpose interfacing that needs to be done between some arbitrary microwave transmit module and some other arbitrary antenna, but things like cellphone transmitter chipsets are so tightly integrated that I bet they already implement something similar.
As a kid, I always wondered - light moves so fast that it's (for all intents and purposes) not really affected by gravity at all. It would seem like this means that things 50-100 miles away from a battlefield could be hit by all of the missed laser shots before the earth curved away enough that they passed into space. And as they left orbit, what sorts of guarantees do we have that they wouldn't hit planes or low-orbit satellites? Since light moves very quickly, nobody would be able to see or dodge the laser before it hit them.
I can see the application of air-to-ground laser strikes, but it seems like the potential for collateral damage with any other form of laser weapons is huge.
People seem to wonder a lot about the contacts and how they are sealed. The contacts are not, the surfaces are sealed. So, water can run in and out.
Think about this logically for a second. If by "surfaces" he means the circuit board itself, then this is called conformal coating and has been around for years. It is also not practical in small consumer electronics. If he means the surface of the device, then this requires sealing the entire device and making it fully waterproof (and not very useful).
By fact, by definition water damages electronics by shorting contacts together. If water is allowed to run in and out of the device, the contacts must be sealed.
In order to waterproof anything electronic, every entry point for water needs to be completely sealed. Does anybody else see the problem here? Yes, that Blackberry might still be powered on. But no, you probably can't depress the keys any more and you almost certainly can't charge it or plug in headphones.
Also, 0.001" thick? I bet it scrapes off on accident rather easily. I also highly doubt that anybody could apply a coating that thin from a hand-held spray can.
So you're blaming someone else for Adobe's problems.. The problem is that Acrobat has been slow for a long time now.
Well, it's not that I am blaming them for Adobe's problems. However, although it is not the Mozilla foundation's fault, it most certainly is still their problem. Lousy PDF operability is a real impediment to wider public adoption of Firefox, and I am a little surprised that Mozilla hasn't been more proactive about either leaning on Adobe to fix Acrobat or writing their own PDF plugin that actually works.
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This is a bit off base. The "loudness" of a vinyl recording has to do with groove depth. "Louder" audio has nothing to do with how much audio could be stored, which is a function of groove width. Also, the whole point of dynamic range compression is to improve audio fidelity in lossy systems such as tape decks or radio broadcasts. That's why u-law compression is built into our telephone standards, with a compressor on the transmit side and an expander on the receive side.
There's nothing magical about vacuum tubes. They amplify and clip according to physical processes, and can be described as mathematics just like anything else. An ADC -> DSP -> DAC system is more power efficient, more easily reproducible, much more reliable, and more rugged than any tube-based anything. Ponder this - if you were looking for a specific sound to add to your guitar playing, wouldn't you rather have something _specific_ and consistent from use to use than something which is temperature-dependent, age-dependent, and tube-brand dependent?
I could be mistaken here, but I think that's probably an urban legend. Even assuming that you were using a 300-baud modem that could show a nibble at a time on 4 parallel LEDs and that the LEDs were updated on every single bit, that would still be a potential flicker rate of 75Hz. That would be impossible to catch on any consumer-grade camera, although some specialized equipment could capture it. At 14.4kbps, it would be completely impossible with any video equipment that I'm aware of. At 56kbps forget about it.
Depending on directionality, one could certainly plant an IR bug if desired. However, that's not any different than wifi now.
This is near technology, but I wouldn't want to use it for more than a few minutes at a time. Sliding my hand around on a table for 8 or 10 hours a day would almost certainly give me blisters, and possibly a rash depending on the material. It would callus the heck out of whatever skin was touching the table as well.
Contrast this with a mouse where your hand isn't sliding around on anything, and the winner is pretty clear in my mind.
But when you buy stock from a company during its IPO, what do you get as the result? Stock that you can sell to somebody who wants to buy it. Not dividends, not tangible benefits, not even the promise of tangible benefits. Only the ability to sell it at a higher price when the company does well. You're not addressing the issue of _why_ a company doing well has direct impact on stock prices. I'm actually genuinely curious about this if you have an answer.
The flash crash (and high-frequency trading in general) is really only symptomatic of a deeper underlying problem - the modern stock market has no fundamental reason to exist. When the concept of stocks originated, it was a way to own part of a company. Companies paid dividends, and so if they did well then they sent you (the investor) a check in the mail. In that way, stocks could be thought of as investments where the payoff was receiving profits in the mail.
But the stock market has changed into something different and really bizarre. Everybody knows that a company's profits and stability are what drive its stock prices. But why is that? Although a few stocks pay dividends, these days most don't. And to the common investor who holds a small percentage of overall shares, I don't think there's any easy way to _force_ dividends out of a company you own stock in. In a theoretical sense I could buy up enough shares of the company to force them to pay me dividends, but that's not something the average investor can realistically achieve.
That means that the the only payoff possible from my stocks is the money I could make by selling them. This is really strange if you think about it. If I'm never going to see significant dividends from Google, so their financial success or failure should have no underlying reason to affect stock prices. If the ONLY thing stocks are good for is selling them to somebody else, then they have no intrinsic underlying value. They don't pay dividends. I can't take them over to Google HQ and say "here's my share of the company, I'd like to take this office furniture now."
It's like the stock market has changed from a way to invest in companies and share their profits to some strange cult where everybody's drinking the kool-aid and the only people winning are brokerages. People put their retirements, their life savings, into something that has no intrinsic value whatsoever. It seems like the market is essentially dependent on an having ever-increasing influx of new buyers, like a sort of giant distributed pyramid scheme. To me, it's not a question of _if_ the stock market will collapse completely but more a question of _when_. Nothing logically inconsistent can endure forever.
When Wine is good enough to run Warcraft 3, what market is there for a company selling ports of decade-old games for $40-$50 each?
For me, caffeine addiction is all about control of my body. I agree with the article that my baseline is probably the same as somebody who avoid caffeine entirely. However, I also think that a caffeine addict's lowest level of alertness is the same as an non-addict's as well.
This is interesting if you think about it, because it means that my blood's caffeine levels are a heavily-weighted component in my overall level of alertness. Assuming the floor and ceiling of my potential alertness are the same, that means that other factors (such as how much I slept last night) are less important than they are for a non-caffeine user. This gives me a finer degree of control over when I'm alert and when I'm tired, which is worth the addiction in my opinion.
It's actually not a new program - the Navy's had marine mammal units for many years now. Long before "terrorism" was ever a buzzword. Of particular interest is the Mark-6 unit (MK-6 MMS) which is an antipersonnel unit. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it - a suicide diver with the right explosives could probably take out a small naval vessel. A ship's sonar probably can't distinguish a diver from any other underwater mammal. And even if it could, bullets are ineffective in the water. It's a significant vulnerability if you think about it.
Microsoft Research is an awesome entity that produces a ton of cool things. Have you ever poked around on their website? It's got a ton of cool projects like this one. I wouldn't get your hopes of ever seeing this turn into a real product - just because somebody in MS Research is working on it doesn't mean that Microsoft has any plans to use it for anything. I'm convinced that the primary purpose of MS Research is to employ people so that they don't go work for Microsoft's competitors.
Whenever I hear about something like this, I'm always a little bit skeptical. What would a malware writer stand to gain by writing some malware that "accessed 40 child porn sites per minute" and installing it on some guy's computer? It's pretty absurd when you think about it.
Does anybody really believe that there's some spergy criminal mastermind out there who spends his nights optimizing his malware's CPSPM rate? One would assume that anybody with enough knowledge to even write the software is probably already connected to the people who produce that stuff, or else he wouldn't know where to get it in the first place (and so how could he write malware to do it for him?)
Are there any eBook readers that are good with 8.5"x11" PDFs yet? I'd love having something to read scientific papers on, but I don't think a full page of 10-pt font would be very legible when reduced by a factor of two for a Kindle screen.
My advice would be to learn Verilog first, particularly if you're coming from a computer science background. I find Verilog to be much cleaner and easier to read / understand. On the hobbyist (or even the small-scale professional) level, Verilog will probably be easier than VHDL.
I find that VHDL scales to extremely large designs better than Verilog (much better generate statements, pre-processing macros, and paramterization). VHDL is also better if you're really strict on version control and module heirarchy. But if you're working on a one-man project, you probably don't need or want VHDL's unnecessary complexity.
Ultimately, both languages do the same thing and in basically the same way. When you get down to the actual nitty gritty where you're writing the HDL, they're pretty similar. They differ mostly in how they handle passing arguments to- and from- modules, and what kind of compile-time constructs they support.
Last but not least, I would also recommend starting off with Xilinx's Webpack and a Spartan-3 starter board. Get something with a digital-analog converter and an analog-digital converter too, some LEDs and pushbuttons, a UART transceiver, and a ton of GPIO headers. GPIO is where FPGAs really shine.
I have a bone to pick with the phrasing of this and other articles like it.
When people first read it, they go ZOMFG 70000 WTF, which is clearly the article's intent. However, it's not like there are 70,000 Chinese people sitting in a room all trying to hack the gibson or whatever. I'd bet this is the work of maybe 10 people at the very most. Another thing to keep in mind is that a login 'attempt' is not really a very big deal in of itself. It's much more accurate to say there is one attempt to hack into the network, and the method being used is brute force.
It looks like he tried to host the link from his laptop :(
Uhh... what? You think that digital audio and video is a step back in quality from analog? Perhaps you would like to compare and contrast VHS with DVD. Or perhaps records versus CDs (the kind from the 80's when they first came out, not the heavily compressed and mastered kind that is produced today). Digital distribution is definitely the way to go. Perhaps you are actually frustrated over the bit rate of internet-distributed media, not the inherent fact that it's a digital medium.
Patents are very different for a lot of reasons.
First of all, math cannot be patented. Second of all, it's pretty much impossible to collect on a patent unless you're one of those companies who buys up IP for the sole purpose of litigation.
Bear in mind that we live in a world where the web 'shopping cart' is patented. It is pretty much impossible to create anything in the tech industry without infringing on _some_ patent or another, and so what companies tend to do is develop patent portfolios that they can use to counter-sue anybody who tries to sue them.
In our current system, refinement, optimization, or miniaturization of an existing concept is probably not novel enough to be granted a patent, and definitely not novel enough to successfully litigate with that patent. On the other hand, however, I could draw a cartoon mouse with dicks growing growing out of its forehead instead of round ears and if I was able to get it hung in my friend's coffee shop that would be enough to enforce copyright if it was ever ripped off by anybody else.
There are a lot of cases where genetic engineering (either cloning or hybridization) DOES raise many valid ethical concerns.
Think about this:
1) Would you feel bad about taking organs from a clone which was grown without any brain?
2) What about a clone who had a brain the size of a bird's?
3) What about a clone with a brain the size of a three year old?
Or say we made some humans who had the intelligence of a dog. Would they be less than human? Could we treat them like slaves and train them just like we train dogs now? What would happen if one of the subhumans bred with a real human? Would the result be 'human' enough that you would treat it like a human?
Let's think about this for a second. Assume that you want to power a device which draws 200mA at 5V (a number that's the right order of magnitude for small consumer electronics like an iPod). That works out to one watt of power draw.
For the purposes of this calculation, we'll make some extremely generous assumptions:
1) The device has a 100% efficient switching converter and can utilize all of the power it receives.
2) The device's solar cells are 50% efficient, something which has not been attained even in a laboratory.
3) There are no laser transmission losses in the air.
Even under these completely impossible conditions, that would still require a 2-watt laser. For the record, that is four times stronger than a class-3B laser, and those commonly require protective eye-wear to use in the workplace. A 2-watt laser could burn your walls, your skin, or really pretty much anything it wanted.
The only way I would even _consider_ using lasers for powering anything in my home would be if they were:
1) organized in a grid so that the total output power was spread over a couple of square inches instead of a point charge.
2) The emitter had a straight beam pattern with minimal diffusion.
3) The emitter had an auto shut-off that engaged any time one of a ring of surrounding IR beams were broken. These beams would have to be far enough away from the emitter that the emitter would be able to shut off in-between the time something could break the beams and the time that thing could enter the emitter's path.
4) The two devices sat next to each other instead of being across the room. I would not be willing to target high-energy lasers all the way across my living room, but I might be willing to put down a phone with a solar panel on it immediately next to an emitter.
It's funny - I had completely forgotten about those programs until you brought them up. I had a relative who worked at Microsoft when I was a kid, and she sent me copies of these for Christmas one year. I really liked them a lot, and they were a great way to introduce me to illustration and word processing programs. Behind the goofy UI that I loved as a kid, you could find most of the same features and concepts as Microsoft Word. When I switched over to Microsoft Word as I got a little bit older, there was real no learning curve.
So I guess it was a pretty successful piece of software for Microsoft. :)
I don't think this will "significantly extend" mobile device battery life, As other people have pointed out, something that could practically save maybe 10mW of battery power during transmit operation is interesting but not really all that dramatic. On the other hand, the author doesn't appear to make the claim that it will or won't significantly extend battery life. That may be a slashdottism :)
If I understood the abstract right, the gist of this is that he designed a transmit module with a small internal loop antenna, so that a larger transmit antenna could be inductively coupled instead of electrically driven. This means that all of the bias and driver circuitry internal to the transmit chip and also all of the bias and transmit circuitry external to the chip could be done away with. He coupled an antenna to the outside of a microchip to utilized what would essentially be 'waste' magnetic field in a conventional transmitter.
I would also bet that the big boys like Qualcomm probably do something similar already inside of their cell-phone modules. I would imagine that an approach like this eliminates much of the general purpose interfacing that needs to be done between some arbitrary microwave transmit module and some other arbitrary antenna, but things like cellphone transmitter chipsets are so tightly integrated that I bet they already implement something similar.
As a kid, I always wondered - light moves so fast that it's (for all intents and purposes) not really affected by gravity at all. It would seem like this means that things 50-100 miles away from a battlefield could be hit by all of the missed laser shots before the earth curved away enough that they passed into space. And as they left orbit, what sorts of guarantees do we have that they wouldn't hit planes or low-orbit satellites? Since light moves very quickly, nobody would be able to see or dodge the laser before it hit them.
I can see the application of air-to-ground laser strikes, but it seems like the potential for collateral damage with any other form of laser weapons is huge.
That TPing back to heal means we _finally_ get to waste Deckard Cain? :)
Think about this logically for a second. If by "surfaces" he means the circuit board itself, then this is called conformal coating and has been around for years. It is also not practical in small consumer electronics. If he means the surface of the device, then this requires sealing the entire device and making it fully waterproof (and not very useful).
By fact, by definition water damages electronics by shorting contacts together. If water is allowed to run in and out of the device, the contacts must be sealed.
I think that faq is a little disingenuous.
In order to waterproof anything electronic, every entry point for water needs to be completely sealed. Does anybody else see the problem here? Yes, that Blackberry might still be powered on. But no, you probably can't depress the keys any more and you almost certainly can't charge it or plug in headphones.
Also, 0.001" thick? I bet it scrapes off on accident rather easily. I also highly doubt that anybody could apply a coating that thin from a hand-held spray can.
Well, it's not that I am blaming them for Adobe's problems. However, although it is not the Mozilla foundation's fault, it most certainly is still their problem. Lousy PDF operability is a real impediment to wider public adoption of Firefox, and I am a little surprised that Mozilla hasn't been more proactive about either leaning on Adobe to fix Acrobat or writing their own PDF plugin that actually works.