Almost 15 years ago, I was working on a demo system for a more secure way of issuing benefit payments (at the time, the payee had a paper booklet, and there was quite a lot of trouble with stolen booklets). We investigated what we could practically put on a smart card (similar type of smart card as what is in modern credit cards). One of the things we investigated was signature recognition.
We had a system that did it extremely well, well enough that we never managed to forge another person just signing with an "X". The system not only looked at the shape of the writing, but the way the person wrote - the speed, accelerations, stroke weight etc. The genuine user could be recognised even if they signed fairly scruffily (the system didn't return 'true' or 'false', but rather a confidence). However, another person even if they signed their X to LOOK as much as the original person's X looked would get a very low confidence score.
This was almost 15 years ago - the technology was pretty damned good (but quite expensive) at the time. We managed to get the signature, the person's details and a photograph onto the smart cards of the day (I think they had 8K of storage). The signature took up 1K.
A 'tech prediction' is the prediction of possible technologies that may have been invented.
This is not a 'tech prediction', it's an observation how a signal may decay. Unlike 'tech predictions', signals decay in a mathematically predictable manner. Just like we can predict exactly when solar eclipses will occur, it's merely a matter of mathematics to predict how the cosmic microwave background radiation will attenuate.
... and not only that, the design requires lots of proprietary things to work, such as Eagle PCB. They could have used gEDA PCB instead which is offered under the terms of the GNU GPL.
You know, if I were this guy, I'd have signed an affadavit for the most wild alien conspiracy I could think of as a joke from my death bed. It's hardly like he faces any consequences for signing a false affadavit. Chances are that's really what he was doing - stirring.
In case you're not registered with AvWeb, here are some salient parts:
Lead Myths
* Lead does NOT "cushion" or "lubricate" valves. There is nothing in the serious literature, and no known scientific data to support this notion. If you know of something, please write. I said DATA, not some mechanic or overhauler mouthing this decades-old gossip
[...]
* Lead does NOT cause valves to run cooler or hotter. Lead does NOT prevent (or cause) "valve recession."
[...] Just for one example, the FAA ran a twin with flat sixes for several hundred hours, one engine running 100LL, and the other side with unleaded fuel. Then they tore both engines down and used some custom-built instrumentation to measure the valve wear. The lead did no good, at all. That's pretty good data, but I'd like to see more of it. Well done, FAA!
A twin with flat sixes is not an O-320, it's going to be bigger.
Avweb have a list of all of Deakin's engine related articles, including one about how there are very few engines that need the octane rating of 100LL (and about a particular aero engine that is ALWAYS detonating at full power, regardless of the fuel!)
Join the club, I bet the iPhone doesn't support Linux at all either.
I like Apple hardware but I won't be buying the iPhone. Too expensive, too locked down. FIC are apparently releasing an open phone (the OpenMoko project), if I upgrade any time soon it'll be to the FIC product.
If you distribute an LGPL library, you have to supply the source for that library (but not the code that dynamically links it) whether you modified it or not. If you modified the LGPL library, you have to supply the source code for the changes to the library as well (but not the code dynamically linked to it).
You just can't get some things inside the chip, such as decoupling capacitors (too big), connectors (far too big, and would not be mechanically sound on the chip itself). Most chips need at least a couple of discrete components to work. You need a PCB for those.
That's not even addressing the issue of cost of making a single ASIC that does everything the iPhone does. Making a PCB to hold a number of ICs would be cheaper.
Their business is dying down? Seriously - what are you smoking and can I have some? Microsoft just had its most succesful year in its entire history - highest revenues, highest profits. Vista *is* selling like hotcakes - almost every new PC has it pre-installed (all the negativity about Vista is just a repeat performance of all the negativity about XP five years ago).
The "scandal" (it isn't really) is that bloggers are supposedly posting their own personal thoughts on various issues, unsullied by commercial pressures, unlike the press (for example, it's well known in the computing press, many magazines won't give a bad review to a product that's heavily advertised in said mag).
This is just showing that bloggers really are no different to the traditional press - they are just as easily bought.
Airliners have had wings that can bend for decades. If you travel on a Boeing 747 some time, on the takeoff roll watch how much the wings bend when the aircraft is pitched up to lift off. It's quite significant.
Not quite - Va (manoevring speed) is the maximum speed at which you can make a full control deflection, and be certain of no airframe damage. Va is generally below the end of the green arc. (It also varies with weight. Va increases as weight increases).
If discussion 2 is related in any way to their University of (I forget where it was) experimental Slashdot discussion interface, I ended up turning it off because it was molasses slow. They then made an improvement to it, but after another week of testing it, I turned it off again because any large discussion was unusably slow.
Q. The Pentium has an IEEE-compliant floating point unit. If you are on an aircraft, with onboard systems powered by a Pentium, how is IEEE pronounced? A. Aaaaaiiieeeeeeeeee!
Not exactly true either. Look at John Deakin's column at AvWeb. Lead does not lubricate, nor does it lower combustion temps in any meaningful way, all it does is prevent detonation/preignition in SOME engines. GAMI have done quite a bit of testing in this regard, and the only engines that need the higher octane are super or turbocharged. Everything normally aspirated is so far from its detonation margins, it simply doesn't need the lead - and the whole thing about 'lubrication' is an OWT (old wives' tale). This has been verified in the lab.
Even 'high compression' normally aspirated aviation piston engines are very low compression compared to everything else. For many normally aspirated engines, the lead is actually bad for the engine - from a minor annoyance like fouled spark plugs, to more serious problems such as sticking valves (that's what 100LL caused in the C-85 engine in our C140). In my current aircraft, powered by an O-320-B2B you have to taxi with the mixture leaned right out to stop the lead in 100LL from fouling plugs - indeed, this is a common practise with the O-320. Fortunately, we can run mogas in our aircraft (I'm not in the United States). There is NO difference at all in EGT or CHT when running mogas instead of 100LL, and that's in the very harsh environment of aerotowing gliders (lots of high power, low airspeed operations).
. It gets around DRM, but people will still want the superior DRMed version.
The millions of people pirating 128kbit crummy sounding MP3s and horribly compressed DivX copies of movies would seemingly be in complete disagreement with that statement. People downloading pirated content don't care so much about quality. Those who care about quality tend to also be the kind of people who also prefer legitimate copies, DRM or not.
The airlines DO try and save fuel by optimizing their flight profiles. I was in the jumpseat of a British Airways B747-400. The crew know exactly the little optimization tricks (almost like coders used to hand-optimize assembler!) for getting fuel consumption down. For example, on approach to Houston Intercontinental, they got a speed restriction of 200 knots. You're expected to fly this speed +-10 knots by ATC. They flew it at 209 because it meant they needed one less stage of flaps - so less drag, and less power. Wherever it was safe to do so, they flew the most economical profile.
Why are India and China expanding? Is it Chinese peasants buying all these products? No - it's still driven by Western demand. If we stop buying Chinese goods, China's emissions will drastically fall.
We need to implement new emissions standards, and tell countries that want to sell us products that they must also meet our standards, or face tariffs that makes their products more expensive than the ones made in the countries that do meet the new standard.
Unfortunately, most of that is caused by bureaucratic inertia.
Aircraft piston engines and fuel systems must be certified by the FAA. Most of the engines themselves (pretty much anything normally aspirated) does not require lead, they are so far away from their detonation margins. In many engines and fuel systems, it's really just a case of paperwork bureaucracy stopping them. It's so incredibly expensive to certify a plane for unleaded use that no one will do it.
There are other problems too. Most piston aircraft systems date from the 1940s (due to the incredible expense of getting anything new certified) so they still use seals that get damaged by alcohol in normal automotive fuel.
There is no technological reason why we couldn't get rid of leaded fuel for normally aspirated piston engines tomorrow. The FAA is the brake on this. Most aircraft owners would switch to unleaded in a heartbeat because it's far cheaper.
Roll your own phone. Sparkfun Electronics sell all the bits you need to make your own GSM phone. They also sell accelerometers and gyros on a chip - integrate them, write the code for the microcontroller - and you're done!
Slashdot Mirror
Because it wouldn't help them.
Almost 15 years ago, I was working on a demo system for a more secure way of issuing benefit payments (at the time, the payee had a paper booklet, and there was quite a lot of trouble with stolen booklets). We investigated what we could practically put on a smart card (similar type of smart card as what is in modern credit cards). One of the things we investigated was signature recognition.
We had a system that did it extremely well, well enough that we never managed to forge another person just signing with an "X". The system not only looked at the shape of the writing, but the way the person wrote - the speed, accelerations, stroke weight etc. The genuine user could be recognised even if they signed fairly scruffily (the system didn't return 'true' or 'false', but rather a confidence). However, another person even if they signed their X to LOOK as much as the original person's X looked would get a very low confidence score.
This was almost 15 years ago - the technology was pretty damned good (but quite expensive) at the time. We managed to get the signature, the person's details and a photograph onto the smart cards of the day (I think they had 8K of storage). The signature took up 1K.
The Daily Wail, the newspaper of the permanently offended middle Englander change? I don't think so. It was just as awful prior to Blair.
A 'tech prediction' is the prediction of possible technologies that may have been invented.
This is not a 'tech prediction', it's an observation how a signal may decay. Unlike 'tech predictions', signals decay in a mathematically predictable manner. Just like we can predict exactly when solar eclipses will occur, it's merely a matter of mathematics to predict how the cosmic microwave background radiation will attenuate.
You are comparing apples with beef steaks.
A huge beast? Ah, the Great Green Arkelseizure theory. Are you afraid of the Coming of the Big White Hankerchief?
I don't have a EE degree, but I've _designed_ and constructed more complex electronics than in the article.
... and not only that, the design requires lots of proprietary things to work, such as Eagle PCB. They could have used gEDA PCB instead which is offered under the terms of the GNU GPL.
You know, if I were this guy, I'd have signed an affadavit for the most wild alien conspiracy I could think of as a joke from my death bed. It's hardly like he faces any consequences for signing a false affadavit. Chances are that's really what he was doing - stirring.
http://www.avweb.com/news/pelican/182149-1.html
In case you're not registered with AvWeb, here are some salient parts:
A twin with flat sixes is not an O-320, it's going to be bigger.
Avweb have a list of all of Deakin's engine related articles, including one about how there are very few engines that need the octane rating of 100LL (and about a particular aero engine that is ALWAYS detonating at full power, regardless of the fuel!)
Join the club, I bet the iPhone doesn't support Linux at all either.
I like Apple hardware but I won't be buying the iPhone. Too expensive, too locked down. FIC are apparently releasing an open phone (the OpenMoko project), if I upgrade any time soon it'll be to the FIC product.
If you distribute an LGPL library, you have to supply the source for that library (but not the code that dynamically links it) whether you modified it or not. If you modified the LGPL library, you have to supply the source code for the changes to the library as well (but not the code dynamically linked to it).
You just can't get some things inside the chip, such as decoupling capacitors (too big), connectors (far too big, and would not be mechanically sound on the chip itself). Most chips need at least a couple of discrete components to work. You need a PCB for those.
That's not even addressing the issue of cost of making a single ASIC that does everything the iPhone does. Making a PCB to hold a number of ICs would be cheaper.
No! It's a macrowave oven.
Their business is dying down? Seriously - what are you smoking and can I have some? Microsoft just had its most succesful year in its entire history - highest revenues, highest profits. Vista *is* selling like hotcakes - almost every new PC has it pre-installed (all the negativity about Vista is just a repeat performance of all the negativity about XP five years ago).
You're in denial if you think Microsoft is dying.
The "scandal" (it isn't really) is that bloggers are supposedly posting their own personal thoughts on various issues, unsullied by commercial pressures, unlike the press (for example, it's well known in the computing press, many magazines won't give a bad review to a product that's heavily advertised in said mag).
This is just showing that bloggers really are no different to the traditional press - they are just as easily bought.
The editors should heed Dave Barry. He said, "An apostrophe doesn't mean 'Yikes! Look out! Here comes an S'"
Article tagged 'apostropheabuse'.
Airliners have had wings that can bend for decades. If you travel on a Boeing 747 some time, on the takeoff roll watch how much the wings bend when the aircraft is pitched up to lift off. It's quite significant.
Not quite - Va (manoevring speed) is the maximum speed at which you can make a full control deflection, and be certain of no airframe damage. Va is generally below the end of the green arc. (It also varies with weight. Va increases as weight increases).
If discussion 2 is related in any way to their University of (I forget where it was) experimental Slashdot discussion interface, I ended up turning it off because it was molasses slow. They then made an improvement to it, but after another week of testing it, I turned it off again because any large discussion was unusably slow.
Q. The Pentium has an IEEE-compliant floating point unit. If you are on an aircraft, with onboard systems powered by a Pentium, how is IEEE pronounced?
A. Aaaaaiiieeeeeeeeee!
Not exactly true either. Look at John Deakin's column at AvWeb. Lead does not lubricate, nor does it lower combustion temps in any meaningful way, all it does is prevent detonation/preignition in SOME engines. GAMI have done quite a bit of testing in this regard, and the only engines that need the higher octane are super or turbocharged. Everything normally aspirated is so far from its detonation margins, it simply doesn't need the lead - and the whole thing about 'lubrication' is an OWT (old wives' tale). This has been verified in the lab.
Even 'high compression' normally aspirated aviation piston engines are very low compression compared to everything else. For many normally aspirated engines, the lead is actually bad for the engine - from a minor annoyance like fouled spark plugs, to more serious problems such as sticking valves (that's what 100LL caused in the C-85 engine in our C140). In my current aircraft, powered by an O-320-B2B you have to taxi with the mixture leaned right out to stop the lead in 100LL from fouling plugs - indeed, this is a common practise with the O-320. Fortunately, we can run mogas in our aircraft (I'm not in the United States). There is NO difference at all in EGT or CHT when running mogas instead of 100LL, and that's in the very harsh environment of aerotowing gliders (lots of high power, low airspeed operations).
The millions of people pirating 128kbit crummy sounding MP3s and horribly compressed DivX copies of movies would seemingly be in complete disagreement with that statement. People downloading pirated content don't care so much about quality. Those who care about quality tend to also be the kind of people who also prefer legitimate copies, DRM or not.
The airlines DO try and save fuel by optimizing their flight profiles. I was in the jumpseat of a British Airways B747-400. The crew know exactly the little optimization tricks (almost like coders used to hand-optimize assembler!) for getting fuel consumption down. For example, on approach to Houston Intercontinental, they got a speed restriction of 200 knots. You're expected to fly this speed +-10 knots by ATC. They flew it at 209 because it meant they needed one less stage of flaps - so less drag, and less power. Wherever it was safe to do so, they flew the most economical profile.
Why are India and China expanding? Is it Chinese peasants buying all these products? No - it's still driven by Western demand. If we stop buying Chinese goods, China's emissions will drastically fall.
We need to implement new emissions standards, and tell countries that want to sell us products that they must also meet our standards, or face tariffs that makes their products more expensive than the ones made in the countries that do meet the new standard.
Unfortunately, most of that is caused by bureaucratic inertia.
Aircraft piston engines and fuel systems must be certified by the FAA. Most of the engines themselves (pretty much anything normally aspirated) does not require lead, they are so far away from their detonation margins. In many engines and fuel systems, it's really just a case of paperwork bureaucracy stopping them. It's so incredibly expensive to certify a plane for unleaded use that no one will do it.
There are other problems too. Most piston aircraft systems date from the 1940s (due to the incredible expense of getting anything new certified) so they still use seals that get damaged by alcohol in normal automotive fuel.
There is no technological reason why we couldn't get rid of leaded fuel for normally aspirated piston engines tomorrow. The FAA is the brake on this. Most aircraft owners would switch to unleaded in a heartbeat because it's far cheaper.
Roll your own phone. Sparkfun Electronics sell all the bits you need to make your own GSM phone. They also sell accelerometers and gyros on a chip - integrate them, write the code for the microcontroller - and you're done!