Airliners pretty much since the jet age have had at least some measure of "envelope protection". In the 60s this was pretty simple - just a stick pusher to prevent stalls since stalls in many airliners can easily become unrecoverable. Airbus's envelope protection is much more sophisticated than just a stick pusher.
However when there's a systems failure the Airbus systems will automatically drop to a different control law that effectively works like basic stick and rudder flying.
No, it's basic human nature to kick the can down the road, nothing exclusive to politicians. Look at things like IPv4 space exhaustion - we're still kicking the can down the road right now and we'll continue to do so until it becomes so painful we reluctantly start transitioning stuff to IPv6. Same for fossil fuels, "conventional sources" have already peaked and the cost of energy is just going to go up, but we will do the minimum possible and kick the can down the road until it becomes so painful we're forced to change.
Lots of people predicted it. I'm not entirely familiar with the US housing bubble, but in the UK the bubble collapse could be seen from a mile off. I remember yelling pointlessly at the radio when someone from one of the demutualized building societies was trying to justify lending an even more stupidly massive amount of money to people charging interest only "because we want to make property affordable" when it was doing the exact opposite (fuelling the bubble and making it more unaffordable). I also remember discussing it with my Dad on numerous occasions who had got caught up in all the hype. The problem is people got so greedy (both banks and customers alike) with the banks breathlessly falling over themselves to give people mortgages on ever more unsustainable and ridiculous terms, and customers falling over themselves to take them including lying on mortgage application forms, it was obvious that it would only take a slight upset in the economy to make the whole thing come crashing down. It was so blatantly unsustainable. Anyone who wasn't one of the breathless banks or customers could see it coming. The only thing that wasn't entirely predictable was the timing of the burst or the cause of the burst. That upset at least here was skyrocketing energy prices causing all the people who had got mortgages so big they were living paycheque to paycheque with nothing left over to begin defaulting as increased fuel and food costs demolished their non-existent reserves.
If Compaq hadn't cloned the PC BIOS, or the IBM PC been a flop, Microsoft would have been just a page in history now along with Lotus, Ashton-Tate and various other software houses that got borged by IBM and other large companies. With no IBM PC, MS-DOS would never have sold much, and would never have been the "Microsoft tax" that bankrolled the first versions Windows and Microsoft Office. Even Intel might be a secondary player today, it may have been Zilog who became Chipzilla as they became the preferred supplier for CP/M machines and their 16 bit (and later 32 bit) follow ons, with companies like NEC or SGS or possibly Mostek being where AMD is now as they were Zilog second sources. And Digital Research (CP/M vendor) would be the big bad monopolist instead of Microsoft.
The size and construction of the head probably makes quite a lot of difference. I have an old Dallas D banjo ukulele (a George Formby branded one, no less) and the head had an inner hoop in it which makes the effective area of the head a bit smaller than the entire diameter. As such the overtones are softer and it sounds less "banjoey" (but still very different from a standard ukulele). The other consequence of the banjo uke head is that if you play a chord like F# where one string is not strummed, you need to mute the string that's not played otherwise the head will cause the string to vibrate and make the chord sound awful.
You can buy hardware from a factory a la carte. I've done it. There are quite a few companies doing prototyping services where you can do this for easily affordable sums of money.
I've had a small run (100 units) of an ethernet board I designed made in a factory. The board was a 100mm x 60mm 4 layer PCB. I supplied the gerbers and a BOM and a month later I had 100 boards back (I did put on the through hole parts myself). It cost me a couple of grand to do, they could do it cheaper than I could if I had ordered the parts off Farnell and soldered them onto the boards myself. Hardware is much easier to do today on a shoestring budget than it was even 5 years ago.
Now it's different if you're needing an ASIC - then you're looking into spending a couple of million. But off the shelf BTLE SoCs already exist.
The thing I find implausible about this Kickstarter is that they are attempting to break the laws of physics, not that you can't make a pretty decent sized prototype run on the funding they had.
They say their device requires an average of 36 microamps. Even if the chip they use only runs on 1 volt, that would be 36 microwatts (it's going to be more than that, I expect their chip is more like 1.8v). They claim the tag will just run on the typical ambient signal from things like WiFi access points. Their antenna at most is going to be half an inch on each side, and the most they can possibly harvest will be less than 1 microwatt even with 100% efficiency.
The antenna won't be much use for getting power off broadcast radio signals. It's far too tiny. Don't forget a crystal set requires not only a very long antenna suitable for the AM radio band, but a good connection to ground, too, so that it can make enough current to run the crystal radio. This thing doesn't have a ground connection.
They plan to power a dogtag sized Bluetooth device by harvesting typical WiFi signal power.
The antenna will be at most about half an inch on each side (0.0125 meters, for a total area of 0.00015625 square meters. Near a wireless network station used in homes and offices, the field intensity is typically below 0.5 mW per square meter. Further upthread, someone posted the power required by a modern, low power Bluetooth chip, in its lowest powered sleep mode it requires a current of 900nA and 1mA when idle. Let's say it operates on 1 volt (it's probably 1.2v) so we will actually underestimate its power requirements by saying in its lowest powered sleep mode it requires only 900nW (that's 0.0000009 watts). At 0.5mW (or 0.005 watts) per sq. m, the maximum energy a dogtag sized device, assuming 100% efficiency (not possible) will be able to harvest is 0.005 * 0.00015625 watts of power. This will work out to about 780nW. 780nW is less than 900nW. QED.
And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt (100% power efficiency, and a lower working voltage for the Bluetooth chip that it probably uses, and only considering the chip being in sleep mode, its lowest possible power mode, and not considering at all any other circuits the device will need - it will need more than just a bluetooth module, it'll need at least a minimal microcontroller of some sort).
You'd not want a hub motor because it increases unsprung weight which has an adverse effect on handling. Same with electric cars - Tesla for instance doesn't use hub motors but the traction motor for the Model S is attached to the structure of the body.
Then again, we are talking about a Hardly Rideable rather than a motorcycle...
Well, if anything organized enough to convey information implies that an intelligence was behind it, who created God? Who created the creator of God? Who created the creator of the creator of God? And the creator of the creator of the creator?
Sure, if you're getting an off-the-shelf board or a board designed by someone else.
However, I will note that the Xilinx Spartan 6 user manual has about half a dozen pages devoted to how to lay out the PCB *for the configuration clock signal alone*.
The world is analogue. Someone's going to have to design the analogue front end to your digital system. Even if you have a ready made analogue front end, you still have to understand the analogue world if you ever hope to design high speed digital systems. When it comes to the actual voltage levels on your PCB and signal integrity, the nice clean world of software where you can just expect the hardware to be predictable and just work with no effort goes away, you have to have a little bit of a clue about the analogue side if you want your high speed digital signals to reach their destinations intact. Another example is your (A)DSL line, it might be called "Digital subscriber line" but it required analogue design to get the signal from your modem (and it is a modem - it modulates and demodulates the signal) to the DSLAM in your phone exchange.
You might not need as many analogue engineers as you may have (say) in the 90s, but they'll never go away because the world is analogue, and the analogue world constantly impinges on your digital signals especially once you pass single digit MHz speeds.
I picked up a used Tektronix 100MHz 1Gsample/sec digital storage scope for around $300. It's an older one with a CRT but it's a *GOOD* scope and has a good analogue front end. I recently upgraded to an LCD version of the same scope (since I wanted enough portability such that it would fit in an airline carry-on) for about the equivalent of $600 (again Tektronix 100MHz 1GSample/sec). The newer LCD based one also has much better firmware. But not withstanding, the old CRT one is still a good instrument and not horrifically expensive. There are always dozens of them on ebay.
These kinds of stories have been popping up on Slashdot for a while, but I note Slashdot *STILL* doesn't have an IPv6 address even though it's a site supposedly run by and for technologists. Meanwhile, Facebook, a site made for teenagers to post selfies on, has had IPv6 support for three or four years.
It doesn't matter who, anyone trying to get you will exaggerate the numbers.
Years ago I once ran an unauthorized MUD on one of the university's servers, and a friend wrote something in LPC which had a bug in it (which caused the MUD to fill the partition my home dir was on to fill up overnight). When the sysadmin was trying to make me look like the biggest monster to have logged onto the university's Sun box, he was pointing out that the system had to support over 10,000 users and I had singlehandedly denied access to all 10,000 users with my antics.
The problem was (and the sysadmin well knew this) this number was grossly exaggerated. To start with the discs were partitioned so each course was in its own separate filesystem, so I only filled up the filesystem for those on my course. Out of my course perhaps only 5 people used the central Sun system. Secondly, there may have been 10,000 users in/etc/passwd, but 9000 of them had never logged in (and never would log in). After he unlocked my account I was going to rebut his angry email by mentioning this and running a shell script to show how few users had ever logged in, but for some reason 19 year old me had a rare flash of good judgement and decided to let sleeping dogs lie.
Are they increasing prices though? Everything I've seen indicates HFT *decreases* the spread between buy and ask prices, in other words, HFT is reducing the costs to long term investors.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not how it works at all.
Airliners pretty much since the jet age have had at least some measure of "envelope protection". In the 60s this was pretty simple - just a stick pusher to prevent stalls since stalls in many airliners can easily become unrecoverable. Airbus's envelope protection is much more sophisticated than just a stick pusher.
However when there's a systems failure the Airbus systems will automatically drop to a different control law that effectively works like basic stick and rudder flying.
Boeing uses fly by wire now too by the way.
ARM didn't make the ARM1/2 either, they were fabricated by VLSI (the company, not the acronym). ARM has always been fabless.
I thought PHP meant "Pretty Hopeless Privacy" due to its track record of security flaws...
No, it's basic human nature to kick the can down the road, nothing exclusive to politicians. Look at things like IPv4 space exhaustion - we're still kicking the can down the road right now and we'll continue to do so until it becomes so painful we reluctantly start transitioning stuff to IPv6. Same for fossil fuels, "conventional sources" have already peaked and the cost of energy is just going to go up, but we will do the minimum possible and kick the can down the road until it becomes so painful we're forced to change.
Lots of people predicted it. I'm not entirely familiar with the US housing bubble, but in the UK the bubble collapse could be seen from a mile off. I remember yelling pointlessly at the radio when someone from one of the demutualized building societies was trying to justify lending an even more stupidly massive amount of money to people charging interest only "because we want to make property affordable" when it was doing the exact opposite (fuelling the bubble and making it more unaffordable). I also remember discussing it with my Dad on numerous occasions who had got caught up in all the hype. The problem is people got so greedy (both banks and customers alike) with the banks breathlessly falling over themselves to give people mortgages on ever more unsustainable and ridiculous terms, and customers falling over themselves to take them including lying on mortgage application forms, it was obvious that it would only take a slight upset in the economy to make the whole thing come crashing down. It was so blatantly unsustainable. Anyone who wasn't one of the breathless banks or customers could see it coming. The only thing that wasn't entirely predictable was the timing of the burst or the cause of the burst. That upset at least here was skyrocketing energy prices causing all the people who had got mortgages so big they were living paycheque to paycheque with nothing left over to begin defaulting as increased fuel and food costs demolished their non-existent reserves.
No, Microsoft's domination is down to pure luck.
If Compaq hadn't cloned the PC BIOS, or the IBM PC been a flop, Microsoft would have been just a page in history now along with Lotus, Ashton-Tate and various other software houses that got borged by IBM and other large companies. With no IBM PC, MS-DOS would never have sold much, and would never have been the "Microsoft tax" that bankrolled the first versions Windows and Microsoft Office. Even Intel might be a secondary player today, it may have been Zilog who became Chipzilla as they became the preferred supplier for CP/M machines and their 16 bit (and later 32 bit) follow ons, with companies like NEC or SGS or possibly Mostek being where AMD is now as they were Zilog second sources. And Digital Research (CP/M vendor) would be the big bad monopolist instead of Microsoft.
The size and construction of the head probably makes quite a lot of difference. I have an old Dallas D banjo ukulele (a George Formby branded one, no less) and the head had an inner hoop in it which makes the effective area of the head a bit smaller than the entire diameter. As such the overtones are softer and it sounds less "banjoey" (but still very different from a standard ukulele). The other consequence of the banjo uke head is that if you play a chord like F# where one string is not strummed, you need to mute the string that's not played otherwise the head will cause the string to vibrate and make the chord sound awful.
You can buy hardware from a factory a la carte. I've done it. There are quite a few companies doing prototyping services where you can do this for easily affordable sums of money.
I've had a small run (100 units) of an ethernet board I designed made in a factory. The board was a 100mm x 60mm 4 layer PCB. I supplied the gerbers and a BOM and a month later I had 100 boards back (I did put on the through hole parts myself). It cost me a couple of grand to do, they could do it cheaper than I could if I had ordered the parts off Farnell and soldered them onto the boards myself. Hardware is much easier to do today on a shoestring budget than it was even 5 years ago.
Now it's different if you're needing an ASIC - then you're looking into spending a couple of million. But off the shelf BTLE SoCs already exist.
The thing I find implausible about this Kickstarter is that they are attempting to break the laws of physics, not that you can't make a pretty decent sized prototype run on the funding they had.
They say their device requires an average of 36 microamps. Even if the chip they use only runs on 1 volt, that would be 36 microwatts (it's going to be more than that, I expect their chip is more like 1.8v). They claim the tag will just run on the typical ambient signal from things like WiFi access points. Their antenna at most is going to be half an inch on each side, and the most they can possibly harvest will be less than 1 microwatt even with 100% efficiency.
The antenna won't be much use for getting power off broadcast radio signals. It's far too tiny. Don't forget a crystal set requires not only a very long antenna suitable for the AM radio band, but a good connection to ground, too, so that it can make enough current to run the crystal radio. This thing doesn't have a ground connection.
They plan to power a dogtag sized Bluetooth device by harvesting typical WiFi signal power.
The antenna will be at most about half an inch on each side (0.0125 meters, for a total area of 0.00015625 square meters.
Near a wireless network station used in homes and offices, the field intensity is typically below 0.5 mW per square meter.
Further upthread, someone posted the power required by a modern, low power Bluetooth chip, in its lowest powered sleep mode it requires a current of 900nA and 1mA when idle. Let's say it operates on 1 volt (it's probably 1.2v) so we will actually underestimate its power requirements by saying in its lowest powered sleep mode it requires only 900nW (that's 0.0000009 watts).
At 0.5mW (or 0.005 watts) per sq. m, the maximum energy a dogtag sized device, assuming 100% efficiency (not possible) will be able to harvest is 0.005 * 0.00015625 watts of power. This will work out to about 780nW.
780nW is less than 900nW. QED.
And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt (100% power efficiency, and a lower working voltage for the Bluetooth chip that it probably uses, and only considering the chip being in sleep mode, its lowest possible power mode, and not considering at all any other circuits the device will need - it will need more than just a bluetooth module, it'll need at least a minimal microcontroller of some sort).
How little stuff has actually changed.
The image of the very first Computerworld, the first page has a story about a patent lawsuit.
It's a Hardley Rideable, not a bike!
You'd not want a hub motor because it increases unsprung weight which has an adverse effect on handling. Same with electric cars - Tesla for instance doesn't use hub motors but the traction motor for the Model S is attached to the structure of the body.
Then again, we are talking about a Hardly Rideable rather than a motorcycle...
Well, if anything organized enough to convey information implies that an intelligence was behind it, who created God? Who created the creator of God? Who created the creator of the creator of God? And the creator of the creator of the creator?
Other humans and living creatures have given me far more comfort after losing a loved one than a mythical being ever can.
Sure, if you're getting an off-the-shelf board or a board designed by someone else.
However, I will note that the Xilinx Spartan 6 user manual has about half a dozen pages devoted to how to lay out the PCB *for the configuration clock signal alone*.
At least it wasn't irrational.
The world is analogue. Someone's going to have to design the analogue front end to your digital system. Even if you have a ready made analogue front end, you still have to understand the analogue world if you ever hope to design high speed digital systems. When it comes to the actual voltage levels on your PCB and signal integrity, the nice clean world of software where you can just expect the hardware to be predictable and just work with no effort goes away, you have to have a little bit of a clue about the analogue side if you want your high speed digital signals to reach their destinations intact. Another example is your (A)DSL line, it might be called "Digital subscriber line" but it required analogue design to get the signal from your modem (and it is a modem - it modulates and demodulates the signal) to the DSLAM in your phone exchange.
You might not need as many analogue engineers as you may have (say) in the 90s, but they'll never go away because the world is analogue, and the analogue world constantly impinges on your digital signals especially once you pass single digit MHz speeds.
I picked up a used Tektronix 100MHz 1Gsample/sec digital storage scope for around $300. It's an older one with a CRT but it's a *GOOD* scope and has a good analogue front end. I recently upgraded to an LCD version of the same scope (since I wanted enough portability such that it would fit in an airline carry-on) for about the equivalent of $600 (again Tektronix 100MHz 1GSample/sec). The newer LCD based one also has much better firmware. But not withstanding, the old CRT one is still a good instrument and not horrifically expensive. There are always dozens of them on ebay.
If you don't think RC helis are agile, you've not seen what Alan Szabo does with them.
These kinds of stories have been popping up on Slashdot for a while, but I note Slashdot *STILL* doesn't have an IPv6 address even though it's a site supposedly run by and for technologists. Meanwhile, Facebook, a site made for teenagers to post selfies on, has had IPv6 support for three or four years.
It doesn't matter who, anyone trying to get you will exaggerate the numbers.
Years ago I once ran an unauthorized MUD on one of the university's servers, and a friend wrote something in LPC which had a bug in it (which caused the MUD to fill the partition my home dir was on to fill up overnight). When the sysadmin was trying to make me look like the biggest monster to have logged onto the university's Sun box, he was pointing out that the system had to support over 10,000 users and I had singlehandedly denied access to all 10,000 users with my antics.
The problem was (and the sysadmin well knew this) this number was grossly exaggerated. To start with the discs were partitioned so each course was in its own separate filesystem, so I only filled up the filesystem for those on my course. Out of my course perhaps only 5 people used the central Sun system. Secondly, there may have been 10,000 users in /etc/passwd, but 9000 of them had never logged in (and never would log in). After he unlocked my account I was going to rebut his angry email by mentioning this and running a shell script to show how few users had ever logged in, but for some reason 19 year old me had a rare flash of good judgement and decided to let sleeping dogs lie.
.gb would be less accurate than .uk - Northern Ireland is part of the UK but not part of Great Britain.
My landline phone still is rotary dial, you insensitive clod.
Are they increasing prices though? Everything I've seen indicates HFT *decreases* the spread between buy and ask prices, in other words, HFT is reducing the costs to long term investors.