While I agree this is more flash then substance, it hardly deviates from the laws of physics. Unlike the nVidia example you provided, this CPU does not have much in the way of IO bandwidth. So we are talking about minimal movement of data which in turn results in impressively low power consumption. For certain applications this could be great (a previous post mentions neural networks). For the other 99% it is worthless.
One should not compare this CPU to a GPU because the underlying design goals are very different. It is possible that certain tasks would be much better serviced by this CPU. Designing appropriate algorithms will take some time so I suppose we will have to wait to see if it is actually useful.
I would assume the reasons were more technical. Apple was fully capable of working out a deal if they thought it would be of value. The problem with ZFS is that it consumes more hardware resources. This is fine for a server because with additional hardware it performs quite well. People buying a server generally do not care about a couple gigs of RAM. But considering that Apple was selling laptops outfitted with 512MB - it was not a good fit. Any filesystem supported by Apple would also have to operate well over USB. If FreeBSD support for ZFS over USB is any indication, it is a bad idea (as I experienced with FreeNAS.)
If there were no legal problems then it is possible Apple would have continued to integrate ZFS with the plan of eventually switching over. But regardless of the legal problems, that switch would not have occurred right away. Looks like Apple supported ZFS just long enough to come to the conclusion that it was not a good fit.
I love ZFS on my fileserver. I am tempted to run ZFS on my workstation. But for the majority of computers Apple sells today, it would cause users more pain then it should.
How the sensor got that reading could still be manufacturing fault, cable fatigue, or a million and one other things not the fault of the driver.
Designing a pedal sensor that errors to 0% is expected. So when one of those million things goes wrong you do not get the 100% acceleration experienced in this situation. A far more likely scenario is that something dropped onto the acceleration petal. Alternatively, when in a state of shock, the driver mistook the acceleration petal for the brake.
Apply something specific to you - such as the first 3 letters of 4 pets you have / grew up with. Take "Rufus, Hobbs, Chipper, Stinky" and turn it into "RufHobChiSti". Or how about the different street names you have to walk along to go from home to school. Lots of combinations are possible, the point is to figure out something you can remember. In order to remember it has to have some personal meaning otherwise you would just use random numbers.
What I do is I have a common password which is then tweaked for each specific website. I use the website URL to prefix or postfix the password. For example, www.slashdot.org would turn into "stog" and be prefixed onto my common password to become "stogRufHobShiSti". Easy to remember yet impossible to guess.
It is very important to use different passwords for each website because the risk of one being stolen then applied elsewhere is very high. Far too many people share passwords between websites, email, etc. Very bad - apply a simple algorithm of your own design using the URL to prevent this.
Parallels is a pain in the ass. Every time Mac OS updates you have to update to a new version of Parallels. And those updates cost (typically). I believe they have sorted out most of their driver problems now, but it used to be that installing Parallels would cause nothing but problems for me.
Bring in VirtualBox. I also do embedded development (Linux host) and VirtualBox saves me when I need a Windows app. The GPU drivers suck but this is typically not a big deal when doing embedded development. Overall, I actually prefer it. If it cost the same as Parallels I would still use VirtualBox.
it just has to be a 24 bit DAC with the analog section nicely filtered and the device shielded against interference
You mean a 1-bit DAC. This implies there is 1 least significant bit of accuracy in the resulting analog output signal. In other words, as accurate as you can get with the given input signal. You will note that the expensive CD players of old all advertised themselves as "1-bit DAC".
But even then it is not as simple as you might think. The digital data is the derivative of the original analog signal. First you have to integrate the digital data to generate the 24 bit signal that is then sent to the DAC. This can be done using analog or digital techniques. Remember, the digital signal is only 16bits - typically. By integrating you can generate a signal containing ~ 24 bits of data. This is why expensive CD players were expensive - they are more then just a DAC.
For what it is worth, this technique was originally designed for records. It has the effect of preserving the high frequency while toning down the low frequency. This is good because the vast majority of the energy is in the low frequency and this low frequency data overwhelms the high frequency data. If you don't do something the low frequency noise becomes so significant that it sounds like you are putting your music through a telephone line - but with good base.
It should be noted that our ears are not linear. As such, digital data recorded linearly does not sound very good. It'll look good in the time domain (oscilloscope) but like crap in the frequency domain (spectrum analyzer). The latter is far more important.
If it isn't, it may need to acquire ephemeris data and that can take 30s-5m if the GPS has been recently used, and up to an hour if not.
Cell phones use assisted-GPS to improve the position acquisition speed. From the Wikipedia article:
Standalone GPS provides first position in approximately 30–40 seconds. A standalone GPS needs orbital information of the satellites to calculate the current position. The data rate of the satellite signal is only 50 bit/s, so downloading orbital information like ephemerides and the almanac directly from satellites typically takes a long time, and if the satellite signals are lost during the acquisition of this information, it is discarded and the standalone system has to start from scratch. In A-GPS, the network operator deploys an A-GPS server. These A-GPS servers download the orbital information from the satellite and store it in the database. An A-GPS capable device can connect to these servers and download this information using mobile network radio bearers such as GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, LTE or even using other wireless radio bearers such as Wi-Fi. Usually the data rate of these bearers is high, hence downloading orbital information takes less time.
The researcher constructed electrodes that do not wear. The proof of concept was a capacitor but the electrode design could also be applied to battery electrodes constructed from lithium. At least I believe that was the point. So it is a big deal, but the article title is horribly misleading. It is also a very long way to being used in practical applications.
The coffee would age quickly after being packaged. Packages should be air-tight and preferably packaged in an environment lacking oxygen. A paper cup could be great if purchased frozen and defrosted before use - but that is less convenient and defeats the point of using K-cups.
Might I suggest security courses taught as a branch of software engineering? One would learn to integrate security fundamentals within the basic design of an application. Much better then bolting it on after the fact. And those security fundamentals, and the way they are used, will not change. Implementations will - but a degree should be about the fundamentals and not said implementations.
Software engineering is typically taught as a subset of computer science so I do not see a problem with such credits being used for a CS degree. But any security related classes should be optional because as you mentioned - computer science is a science - not engineering.
Cheap labour. Raising and educating children is not cheap. Imported labour is one way to keep the costs down. This was also done in France some time ago and now they are paying the price. The imported labour has to be integrated into local society and not treated as trash. When treated as trash you end up with ethnic ghettos - a breading ground for rebellious teens with no future who are willing to blow themselves up.
On average they outlive just about everyone else on the planet.
That is what I also thought - but it is BS. What was actually happening is people were not reporting when their elderly relatives passed on. The reason - to continue collecting old-age pension checks. This typically occurred in the more rural mountain communities leading to the assumption that a rural mountain life was a healthy one. Turns out this is not true. And now that the government is aware of the problem it gets abused far less and the statistics are being corrected.
given that Ulster Protestants are mainly of Scottish origin
And the British were the ones to encourage and facilitate that settlement. They would have gone themselves but why bother when you can just get the Scottish to go.
It would be good to research automation in zero G alongside automation on-planet. The two will obviously overlap in some areas but in others they will differ significantly. Some groundwork might become obsolete by doing so but at least it would (hopefully) be ready when it is finally required. Besides, this sort of research often results in unexpected benefits.
I thought the point of this computer was to support an external GPU using Thunderbolt 3? I suppose this makes more sense for a laptop but still, the NUC cases are great and it could be a good solution for those who want both a laptop and separate desktop. The external GPU could be used by either machine. At any rate, the inclusion of Thunderbolt 3 is about the only thing about this story that is unique and newsworthy.
If the FBI requires access they can get a court order forcing the owner to give up their PIN, the device manufacturer should have nothing to do with it. Cases where the owner is dead will be few and far between - and mostly irrelevant. The fact that the FBI is so aggressive in this case indicates that they want access without a court order and we all know where that leads. I hope Apple does not cave.
If you plan on building it yourself, there are plenty of accurate oscillators out there at ~100ppb. After a year, at worst you would be off by a few seconds. You would want to make use of a GPS PPS signal to perform the initial calibration but from then on it could run completely isolated from wireless and powerline references signals.
This would only apply to areas that are serviced by primarily nuclear power. In most areas it is more cost effective to leave the nuclear plants at 100% and scale down the coal / oil plants. This is due to the high cost of the plant and low cost of nuclear fuel.
Just had to deal with a Cisco firewall / VPN that died. The hardware did not die - the firmware was compromised. Someone botched a remote update -- at least that is my best guess. And it was a good thing this happened. After replacing the Cisco device with a generic OpenWRT device, intruder attempts to the local server dropped to zero. Previously there were hundreds of attempts a day. Attempts to track down the malicious network device always came up empty - so I assumed a core network device was responsible but lacked the incentive to identify the specific device.
It is not like I never checked for firmware updates. The Cisco firewall reported the latest firmware with a matching checksum. But this was obviously not the case. I believe the device could have been compromised from day 1. Too bad, it was a well made device (good PCB design, components, etc.). Possibly that MachXO CPLD had a compromised firmware?
Snow... Live somewhere where roads are covered with snow for 4 months of the year and you will see that the road lines are not required. They do inform the driver on when it is potentially safe to pass, but that's about it.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree this is more flash then substance, it hardly deviates from the laws of physics. Unlike the nVidia example you provided, this CPU does not have much in the way of IO bandwidth. So we are talking about minimal movement of data which in turn results in impressively low power consumption. For certain applications this could be great (a previous post mentions neural networks). For the other 99% it is worthless.
One should not compare this CPU to a GPU because the underlying design goals are very different. It is possible that certain tasks would be much better serviced by this CPU. Designing appropriate algorithms will take some time so I suppose we will have to wait to see if it is actually useful.
I would assume the reasons were more technical. Apple was fully capable of working out a deal if they thought it would be of value. The problem with ZFS is that it consumes more hardware resources. This is fine for a server because with additional hardware it performs quite well. People buying a server generally do not care about a couple gigs of RAM. But considering that Apple was selling laptops outfitted with 512MB - it was not a good fit. Any filesystem supported by Apple would also have to operate well over USB. If FreeBSD support for ZFS over USB is any indication, it is a bad idea (as I experienced with FreeNAS.)
If there were no legal problems then it is possible Apple would have continued to integrate ZFS with the plan of eventually switching over. But regardless of the legal problems, that switch would not have occurred right away. Looks like Apple supported ZFS just long enough to come to the conclusion that it was not a good fit.
I love ZFS on my fileserver. I am tempted to run ZFS on my workstation. But for the majority of computers Apple sells today, it would cause users more pain then it should.
How the sensor got that reading could still be manufacturing fault, cable fatigue, or a million and one other things not the fault of the driver.
Designing a pedal sensor that errors to 0% is expected. So when one of those million things goes wrong you do not get the 100% acceleration experienced in this situation. A far more likely scenario is that something dropped onto the acceleration petal. Alternatively, when in a state of shock, the driver mistook the acceleration petal for the brake.
Apply something specific to you - such as the first 3 letters of 4 pets you have / grew up with. Take "Rufus, Hobbs, Chipper, Stinky" and turn it into "RufHobChiSti". Or how about the different street names you have to walk along to go from home to school. Lots of combinations are possible, the point is to figure out something you can remember. In order to remember it has to have some personal meaning otherwise you would just use random numbers.
What I do is I have a common password which is then tweaked for each specific website. I use the website URL to prefix or postfix the password. For example, www.slashdot.org would turn into "stog" and be prefixed onto my common password to become "stogRufHobShiSti". Easy to remember yet impossible to guess.
It is very important to use different passwords for each website because the risk of one being stolen then applied elsewhere is very high. Far too many people share passwords between websites, email, etc. Very bad - apply a simple algorithm of your own design using the URL to prevent this.
Parallels is a pain in the ass. Every time Mac OS updates you have to update to a new version of Parallels. And those updates cost (typically). I believe they have sorted out most of their driver problems now, but it used to be that installing Parallels would cause nothing but problems for me.
Bring in VirtualBox. I also do embedded development (Linux host) and VirtualBox saves me when I need a Windows app. The GPU drivers suck but this is typically not a big deal when doing embedded development. Overall, I actually prefer it. If it cost the same as Parallels I would still use VirtualBox.
Marketing. All Al alloys are "aerospace grade" - it just depends on the specific application.
They should have had Sigourney Weaver demo it.
it just has to be a 24 bit DAC with the analog section nicely filtered and the device shielded against interference
You mean a 1-bit DAC. This implies there is 1 least significant bit of accuracy in the resulting analog output signal. In other words, as accurate as you can get with the given input signal. You will note that the expensive CD players of old all advertised themselves as "1-bit DAC".
But even then it is not as simple as you might think. The digital data is the derivative of the original analog signal. First you have to integrate the digital data to generate the 24 bit signal that is then sent to the DAC. This can be done using analog or digital techniques. Remember, the digital signal is only 16bits - typically. By integrating you can generate a signal containing ~ 24 bits of data. This is why expensive CD players were expensive - they are more then just a DAC.
For what it is worth, this technique was originally designed for records. It has the effect of preserving the high frequency while toning down the low frequency. This is good because the vast majority of the energy is in the low frequency and this low frequency data overwhelms the high frequency data. If you don't do something the low frequency noise becomes so significant that it sounds like you are putting your music through a telephone line - but with good base.
It should be noted that our ears are not linear. As such, digital data recorded linearly does not sound very good. It'll look good in the time domain (oscilloscope) but like crap in the frequency domain (spectrum analyzer). The latter is far more important.
If it isn't, it may need to acquire ephemeris data and that can take 30s-5m if the GPS has been recently used, and up to an hour if not.
Cell phones use assisted-GPS to improve the position acquisition speed. From the Wikipedia article:
Standalone GPS provides first position in approximately 30–40 seconds. A standalone GPS needs orbital information of the satellites to calculate the current position. The data rate of the satellite signal is only 50 bit/s, so downloading orbital information like ephemerides and the almanac directly from satellites typically takes a long time, and if the satellite signals are lost during the acquisition of this information, it is discarded and the standalone system has to start from scratch. In A-GPS, the network operator deploys an A-GPS server. These A-GPS servers download the orbital information from the satellite and store it in the database. An A-GPS capable device can connect to these servers and download this information using mobile network radio bearers such as GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, LTE or even using other wireless radio bearers such as Wi-Fi. Usually the data rate of these bearers is high, hence downloading orbital information takes less time.
The researcher constructed electrodes that do not wear. The proof of concept was a capacitor but the electrode design could also be applied to battery electrodes constructed from lithium. At least I believe that was the point. So it is a big deal, but the article title is horribly misleading. It is also a very long way to being used in practical applications.
The coffee would age quickly after being packaged. Packages should be air-tight and preferably packaged in an environment lacking oxygen. A paper cup could be great if purchased frozen and defrosted before use - but that is less convenient and defeats the point of using K-cups.
Might I suggest security courses taught as a branch of software engineering? One would learn to integrate security fundamentals within the basic design of an application. Much better then bolting it on after the fact. And those security fundamentals, and the way they are used, will not change. Implementations will - but a degree should be about the fundamentals and not said implementations.
Software engineering is typically taught as a subset of computer science so I do not see a problem with such credits being used for a CS degree. But any security related classes should be optional because as you mentioned - computer science is a science - not engineering.
Cheap labour. Raising and educating children is not cheap. Imported labour is one way to keep the costs down. This was also done in France some time ago and now they are paying the price. The imported labour has to be integrated into local society and not treated as trash. When treated as trash you end up with ethnic ghettos - a breading ground for rebellious teens with no future who are willing to blow themselves up.
On average they outlive just about everyone else on the planet.
That is what I also thought - but it is BS. What was actually happening is people were not reporting when their elderly relatives passed on. The reason - to continue collecting old-age pension checks. This typically occurred in the more rural mountain communities leading to the assumption that a rural mountain life was a healthy one. Turns out this is not true. And now that the government is aware of the problem it gets abused far less and the statistics are being corrected.
given that Ulster Protestants are mainly of Scottish origin
And the British were the ones to encourage and facilitate that settlement. They would have gone themselves but why bother when you can just get the Scottish to go.
It would be good to research automation in zero G alongside automation on-planet. The two will obviously overlap in some areas but in others they will differ significantly. Some groundwork might become obsolete by doing so but at least it would (hopefully) be ready when it is finally required. Besides, this sort of research often results in unexpected benefits.
I thought the point of this computer was to support an external GPU using Thunderbolt 3? I suppose this makes more sense for a laptop but still, the NUC cases are great and it could be a good solution for those who want both a laptop and separate desktop. The external GPU could be used by either machine. At any rate, the inclusion of Thunderbolt 3 is about the only thing about this story that is unique and newsworthy.
If the FBI requires access they can get a court order forcing the owner to give up their PIN, the device manufacturer should have nothing to do with it. Cases where the owner is dead will be few and far between - and mostly irrelevant. The fact that the FBI is so aggressive in this case indicates that they want access without a court order and we all know where that leads. I hope Apple does not cave.
If you plan on building it yourself, there are plenty of accurate oscillators out there at ~100ppb. After a year, at worst you would be off by a few seconds. You would want to make use of a GPS PPS signal to perform the initial calibration but from then on it could run completely isolated from wireless and powerline references signals.
Here is an example oscillator rated for 50ppb http://www.conwin.com/datasheets/tx/tx395.pdf. It can be found on Digikey.
Not for a very long time - as in decades.
gas is subsidized
But can you fit an air-to-air missile with a UHF radio and antenna? I was under the impression they were too large - but do correct me if I am wrong.
This would only apply to areas that are serviced by primarily nuclear power. In most areas it is more cost effective to leave the nuclear plants at 100% and scale down the coal / oil plants. This is due to the high cost of the plant and low cost of nuclear fuel.
Just had to deal with a Cisco firewall / VPN that died. The hardware did not die - the firmware was compromised. Someone botched a remote update -- at least that is my best guess. And it was a good thing this happened. After replacing the Cisco device with a generic OpenWRT device, intruder attempts to the local server dropped to zero. Previously there were hundreds of attempts a day. Attempts to track down the malicious network device always came up empty - so I assumed a core network device was responsible but lacked the incentive to identify the specific device.
It is not like I never checked for firmware updates. The Cisco firewall reported the latest firmware with a matching checksum. But this was obviously not the case. I believe the device could have been compromised from day 1. Too bad, it was a well made device (good PCB design, components, etc.). Possibly that MachXO CPLD had a compromised firmware?
Snow... Live somewhere where roads are covered with snow for 4 months of the year and you will see that the road lines are not required. They do inform the driver on when it is potentially safe to pass, but that's about it.