I saw Steve Furber talk at Retro Reunited in Huddersfield last year (where he spoke about the past - Acorn, the development of the ARM, the present, and the future in terms of what they were doing with SpiNNaker. Very interesting talk. (I also saw Sophie Wilson, another one of the original ARM developers at Bletchley park a couple of weekends ago, another fascinating talk. She now works for Broadcom designing processors for telecommunications).
I know very little about power transmission but...but... if lots of people are using power off the transformer you're connected to, surely just the voltage will sag? The frequency will still be in step with the primary windings (which are driven by very large machines with huge amounts of inertia back in the power station). I know of no transformer that'll give you a different frequency on the secondary windings as to what arrives on the primary...
The Wright Flyer was hardly a practical invention, either. But if we'd just listened to the naysayers, we wouldn't make any progress at all.
A low power electric aircraft, even without the solar cells and a battery pack instead, would have a great deal of uses where local flying is needed - for example, traffic reporting, news gathering and reporting (replacing expensive, thirsty and (to many people) obnoxiously noisy helicopters), law enforcement, aerial photography, recreational flying, radio relay, fish spotting, pipeline patrol, powerline patrol.
Projects like this which push material and electrical power delivery technology may move us a step nearer to practical, usable low powered clean, quiet electric aircraft for many of these jobs.
Of course I meant *video* not *voice* calling, but then again, voice calling is sometimes a "Hello can you hear me fest" with the mobile networks we have anyway:-)
Since I'm only just slightly out of line-of-sight with Spain and therefore I'm not going to get an FM signal, occasionally I listen to RNE-5 using my phone, and we have a pretty good 3G network here. It drops out every few minutes, the connection fails every few minutes - and this is for sound quality somewhere between AM and FM.
Voice calling over 3G is likely to be jittery with poor resolution and low frame rate video, and there's likely to be significant and noticeable lag making the calls uncomfortable "Hello...hello...can you hear me?" fests. We need something much better before video calling on the mobile networks is something practical.
I just wish "blogosphere" would fall into disuse. It's a terrible word, and encapsulates everything wrong with buzzword-seeking-management speak and about breathlessly jumping on the most recent bandwagon.
Effectively, doesn't that make anyone who uses automatically keyed encryption liable for up to 2 years in prison?
It'd be a great way to bang people up you don't like: observe they've been to some HTTPS site - any site will do, demand the encryption keys, when they can't provide the keys, lock them up.
Is it? I'm not a member (it seems too much "IT and management" and not enough "computing") but I do go to their talks reasonably often (and indeed have been a speaker). Most of the talks are about things that are of interest for today and the future. I've not seen any evidence at least in our local group of "historic car club" type attitude.
As I said, the reason I'm not a member is that it has an overwhelmingly business IT focus, and I'm not really interested in joining an organization focused on business matters, but it's still worth it for me to go to their overwhelmingly business related IT talks because it's given me useful practical information in that respect.
A display a few inches across at 360dpi is dozens of orders of magnitude easier to do than a large screen at that resolution. It's very much more difficult to make a very large display with this kind of resolution because:
1. Dead pixels. The more pixels you have, the lower the yield due to dead pixels. It may not even be possible to manufacture 52 inch screen at that DPI with an acceptable ratio of dead pixels. 2. Bandwidth. You're asking for 144 megapixels which even at cinema frame rates (24fps) would with 24 bit colour require a data rate of over 3 terabits per second to the display itself. There are highly significant electronic engineering challenges to be overcome to do that, to say the least (and not only do it, but at a price people can afford).
Then you have to realise that unless you sit about 18 inches from your 52 inch display, you won't be able to distinguish 360 dpi from 96 dpi so it's all a bit of a waste of effort anyway.
But it's a huge waste of money. It's like the old saying:
My dog has four legs. A cat has four legs. Therefore my cat is a dog.
In politics, or the TSA, this ends up being:
We must do something. This is something. Therefore we do this....without considering if 'this' is useful or effective. It's pointless doing things that don't work or ineffective.
It's interesting, I've *never* been asked "Do you know why I pulled you over?" although I've been stopped by the police many times, especially when I had the scruffy old Dodge truck when I was in Texas (and I have black hair, so from behind you can't tell me apart from a Mexican, I suspect scruffy vehicle + potential Mexican = find an excuse for a traffic stop. Once I had a nicer vehicle all of a sudden I wasn't being stopped once a month. Strange, that).
The conversation always went like this: "May I see your license and insurance?" (which I would pass over) "The reason why I stopped you is X" (where X was normally "you were travelling at Y miles per hour" or "you have a burned out brake light" or whatever).
I was stopped for speeding 5 times in 5 months, but only ever got one ticket. The officer never asked "Do you know why I pulled you over"; they always came straight out with the speed they'd seen me doing.
I'm not sure it has, you probably don't hear about them much because they aren't sexy - that's all. After all, a job writing code for an Atmel ATtiny13 based device (which has 1K flash and 64 *bytes* of RAM and costs about $0.25 even in relatively low volumes) is hardly sexy. You find things like this in all sorts of devices right down to things like bicycle lights and toasters which are sold in tens of millions. The trendy IT press is not going to be writing stories about people who write code for toasters when they can go on about the newest sexy Microsoft proprietary language. It's also something for which the highest level language you'd ever consider would be C, and there's a good chance you'll just use asm.
All I did was buy a handful (~45) Xilinx XC9572XL CPLDs and download Webkit ISE and now I get constant spam from Xilinx:-)
OK, so it's hardly sending out a salesman (and well, it's not really spam, I often have a quick read of their mails) but obviously they take some effort to keep in touch with all potential customers, even if it's not a lot.
Indeed, the market is minuscule. According to the BBC, Iridium only has around 360K subscribers. With an investment of close to $3bn when all is said and done for a system to last until 2030 (at best 20 years if they launched the satellites today) means each subscriber is going to have to pay around $420 a year just to cover the cost of the infrastructure - this is before any of the ongoing costs of running the system, staffing the company, profits, etc. Would any Iridium subscriber be paying less than $3000 per year for their service, with probably very little actual talk time or data transferred - certainly orders of magnitude less than, say, someone's iPhone contract. (Anyone here have an Iridium phone? How much does it cost?)
While this is expensive compared to normal mobile phones, it's probably a good deal if you're in the middle of nowhere all the time.
...and it's really annoying. If people really want to look at the stock price it's not hard to look it up. The worst articles are the ones that are written like:
"Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (MSFT, people, news) today challenged Novell (NOVL, people news) to a duel today after Novell announced it was to use Solaris (SUNW, people, news) to power its new IBM (IBM, people, news) Intel (INTL, people, news) based servers"
Big Three what? The only "Big Three" I know of are Ford/GM/Chrysler - and it seems odd they'd have a toll fraud department...
On high per-minute charges, the highest I've seen is the seat back phones on Continental Airlines transatlantic flights a few years ago, it was around $10/minute!
I hate to say it, but *you*, not Google Maps or your Tom Tom are in charge of your car. The bus lane in question does at its start have a "Buses only" sign, and you can even see it on Street View even though you can't zoom in very far (it's just by the railway station). The "Buses only" sign is easily visible (and amusingly you can see a lorry has passed it in the Street View photo, and a car is just driving past it). People need to remember even when using GPS directions, you need to look at road signs which might prohibit the use of certain roads; after all GPS databases are never correct to the minute, and things can change.
In the case of the truck drivers, usually they were the ones who were too cheap to buy a proper GPS/GPS data specifically for trucks that would not take them down unsuitable roads, they were just using GPS maps for ordinary passenger cars. It also meant the truckers were also not looking where they were going - unsuitable roads have signs telling truckers that they are unsuitable, for example, weight limit signs, height limit signs etc.
When I was a student, all I could afford was a very old, very small car. I had a 1969 Mini. It got around 45 mpg.
OK, so it wasn't very safe (in terms of passive safety - it was rather good in terms of active safety because it went round corners like it was on rails and you could avoid crashing in many cases in the first place), but it was a lot of fun to drive.
"The Wire" also has the sound of a Sinclair Spectrum loading a game screen image in it, too. (Once it was sufficiently isolated from the audio of the programme, it turned out to be part of a loading screen for a game by Ultimate, it was suspected to be Knight Lore since this has shown up as audio on other programmes too. Probably a stock bit of "special effects computery sounds" that has been kicking around since the mid 1980s).
The ID card database had more data than that though, it was also going to include things like previous addresses - so less an identity database, more a residence tracking database.
The other problem with ID cards is unlike passports they were to eventually become mandatory. The outgoing government calling them "self financing" is highly disingenuous - or does the "finance fairy" come down and magic some money? No. If it's compulsory then it's really just another new tax since we'd all be forced to pony up whether we like it or not. It's also likely the estimate for how much it would cost was much lower than the real, final cost - as is almost always the case with government IT projects (they are often deliberately low-balled to get them approved - many government IT projects would probably be rejected out of hand if the real cost was stated up front).
Of course the next likely development would not just be compulsory purchase of ID cards, but that they would become compulsory to carry at all times like in some European countries, with effective police powers to ask for "papers please". At this point absent-mindedness becomes an offence - forget your ID card, get fined. And no, driving licenses aren't the same - in Britain you don't have to carry your driving license when driving (if you get stopped and don't have it, you get a notice to show your documents within a reasonable time period).
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I saw Steve Furber talk at Retro Reunited in Huddersfield last year (where he spoke about the past - Acorn, the development of the ARM, the present, and the future in terms of what they were doing with SpiNNaker. Very interesting talk. (I also saw Sophie Wilson, another one of the original ARM developers at Bletchley park a couple of weekends ago, another fascinating talk. She now works for Broadcom designing processors for telecommunications).
I know very little about power transmission but...but... if lots of people are using power off the transformer you're connected to, surely just the voltage will sag? The frequency will still be in step with the primary windings (which are driven by very large machines with huge amounts of inertia back in the power station). I know of no transformer that'll give you a different frequency on the secondary windings as to what arrives on the primary...
Maxim make a cheap level shifter IC for RS232 levels to 5v.
Don't blame NASA for the shuttle's compromised design - that was the doing of the military.
The Wright Flyer was hardly a practical invention, either. But if we'd just listened to the naysayers, we wouldn't make any progress at all.
A low power electric aircraft, even without the solar cells and a battery pack instead, would have a great deal of uses where local flying is needed - for example, traffic reporting, news gathering and reporting (replacing expensive, thirsty and (to many people) obnoxiously noisy helicopters), law enforcement, aerial photography, recreational flying, radio relay, fish spotting, pipeline patrol, powerline patrol.
Projects like this which push material and electrical power delivery technology may move us a step nearer to practical, usable low powered clean, quiet electric aircraft for many of these jobs.
The school uses MS Comic Sans font on the sign to their entrance. They deserve all they get!
(Note to the FBI: This is just a humourous crack. I'm not threatening to blow the school up, okay?)
Of course I meant *video* not *voice* calling, but then again, voice calling is sometimes a "Hello can you hear me fest" with the mobile networks we have anyway :-)
It's not really just bandwidth, it's latency too.
Since I'm only just slightly out of line-of-sight with Spain and therefore I'm not going to get an FM signal, occasionally I listen to RNE-5 using my phone, and we have a pretty good 3G network here. It drops out every few minutes, the connection fails every few minutes - and this is for sound quality somewhere between AM and FM.
Voice calling over 3G is likely to be jittery with poor resolution and low frame rate video, and there's likely to be significant and noticeable lag making the calls uncomfortable "Hello...hello...can you hear me?" fests. We need something much better before video calling on the mobile networks is something practical.
I just wish "blogosphere" would fall into disuse. It's a terrible word, and encapsulates everything wrong with buzzword-seeking-management speak and about breathlessly jumping on the most recent bandwagon.
Effectively, doesn't that make anyone who uses automatically keyed encryption liable for up to 2 years in prison?
It'd be a great way to bang people up you don't like: observe they've been to some HTTPS site - any site will do, demand the encryption keys, when they can't provide the keys, lock them up.
Is it? I'm not a member (it seems too much "IT and management" and not enough "computing") but I do go to their talks reasonably often (and indeed have been a speaker). Most of the talks are about things that are of interest for today and the future. I've not seen any evidence at least in our local group of "historic car club" type attitude.
As I said, the reason I'm not a member is that it has an overwhelmingly business IT focus, and I'm not really interested in joining an organization focused on business matters, but it's still worth it for me to go to their overwhelmingly business related IT talks because it's given me useful practical information in that respect.
A display a few inches across at 360dpi is dozens of orders of magnitude easier to do than a large screen at that resolution.
It's very much more difficult to make a very large display with this kind of resolution because:
1. Dead pixels. The more pixels you have, the lower the yield due to dead pixels. It may not even be possible to manufacture 52 inch screen at that DPI with an acceptable ratio of dead pixels.
2. Bandwidth. You're asking for 144 megapixels which even at cinema frame rates (24fps) would with 24 bit colour require a data rate of over 3 terabits per second to the display itself. There are highly significant electronic engineering challenges to be overcome to do that, to say the least (and not only do it, but at a price people can afford).
Then you have to realise that unless you sit about 18 inches from your 52 inch display, you won't be able to distinguish 360 dpi from 96 dpi so it's all a bit of a waste of effort anyway.
But it's a huge waste of money. It's like the old saying:
My dog has four legs.
A cat has four legs.
Therefore my cat is a dog.
In politics, or the TSA, this ends up being:
We must do something. ...without considering if 'this' is useful or effective. It's pointless doing things that don't work or ineffective.
This is something.
Therefore we do this.
It's interesting, I've *never* been asked "Do you know why I pulled you over?" although I've been stopped by the police many times, especially when I had the scruffy old Dodge truck when I was in Texas (and I have black hair, so from behind you can't tell me apart from a Mexican, I suspect scruffy vehicle + potential Mexican = find an excuse for a traffic stop. Once I had a nicer vehicle all of a sudden I wasn't being stopped once a month. Strange, that).
The conversation always went like this:
"May I see your license and insurance?" (which I would pass over)
"The reason why I stopped you is X" (where X was normally "you were travelling at Y miles per hour" or "you have a burned out brake light" or whatever).
I was stopped for speeding 5 times in 5 months, but only ever got one ticket. The officer never asked "Do you know why I pulled you over"; they always came straight out with the speed they'd seen me doing.
I'm not sure it has, you probably don't hear about them much because they aren't sexy - that's all. After all, a job writing code for an Atmel ATtiny13 based device (which has 1K flash and 64 *bytes* of RAM and costs about $0.25 even in relatively low volumes) is hardly sexy. You find things like this in all sorts of devices right down to things like bicycle lights and toasters which are sold in tens of millions. The trendy IT press is not going to be writing stories about people who write code for toasters when they can go on about the newest sexy Microsoft proprietary language. It's also something for which the highest level language you'd ever consider would be C, and there's a good chance you'll just use asm.
All I did was buy a handful (~45) Xilinx XC9572XL CPLDs and download Webkit ISE and now I get constant spam from Xilinx :-)
OK, so it's hardly sending out a salesman (and well, it's not really spam, I often have a quick read of their mails) but obviously they take some effort to keep in touch with all potential customers, even if it's not a lot.
Indeed, the market is minuscule. According to the BBC, Iridium only has around 360K subscribers. With an investment of close to $3bn when all is said and done for a system to last until 2030 (at best 20 years if they launched the satellites today) means each subscriber is going to have to pay around $420 a year just to cover the cost of the infrastructure - this is before any of the ongoing costs of running the system, staffing the company, profits, etc. Would any Iridium subscriber be paying less than $3000 per year for their service, with probably very little actual talk time or data transferred - certainly orders of magnitude less than, say, someone's iPhone contract. (Anyone here have an Iridium phone? How much does it cost?)
While this is expensive compared to normal mobile phones, it's probably a good deal if you're in the middle of nowhere all the time.
...and it's really annoying. If people really want to look at the stock price it's not hard to look it up. The worst articles are the ones that are written like:
"Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (MSFT, people, news) today challenged Novell (NOVL, people news) to a duel today after Novell announced it was to use Solaris (SUNW, people, news) to power its new IBM (IBM, people, news) Intel (INTL, people, news) based servers"
Big Three what? The only "Big Three" I know of are Ford/GM/Chrysler - and it seems odd they'd have a toll fraud department...
On high per-minute charges, the highest I've seen is the seat back phones on Continental Airlines transatlantic flights a few years ago, it was around $10/minute!
I hate to say it, but *you*, not Google Maps or your Tom Tom are in charge of your car. The bus lane in question does at its start have a "Buses only" sign, and you can even see it on Street View even though you can't zoom in very far (it's just by the railway station). The "Buses only" sign is easily visible (and amusingly you can see a lorry has passed it in the Street View photo, and a car is just driving past it). People need to remember even when using GPS directions, you need to look at road signs which might prohibit the use of certain roads; after all GPS databases are never correct to the minute, and things can change.
And one day there might be a bollard at the entrance too... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Cw0QJU8ro
In the case of the truck drivers, usually they were the ones who were too cheap to buy a proper GPS/GPS data specifically for trucks that would not take them down unsuitable roads, they were just using GPS maps for ordinary passenger cars. It also meant the truckers were also not looking where they were going - unsuitable roads have signs telling truckers that they are unsuitable, for example, weight limit signs, height limit signs etc.
When I was a student, all I could afford was a very old, very small car. I had a 1969 Mini. It got around 45 mpg.
OK, so it wasn't very safe (in terms of passive safety - it was rather good in terms of active safety because it went round corners like it was on rails and you could avoid crashing in many cases in the first place), but it was a lot of fun to drive.
"The Wire" also has the sound of a Sinclair Spectrum loading a game screen image in it, too. (Once it was sufficiently isolated from the audio of the programme, it turned out to be part of a loading screen for a game by Ultimate, it was suspected to be Knight Lore since this has shown up as audio on other programmes too. Probably a stock bit of "special effects computery sounds" that has been kicking around since the mid 1980s).
The ID card database had more data than that though, it was also going to include things like previous addresses - so less an identity database, more a residence tracking database.
The other problem with ID cards is unlike passports they were to eventually become mandatory. The outgoing government calling them "self financing" is highly disingenuous - or does the "finance fairy" come down and magic some money? No. If it's compulsory then it's really just another new tax since we'd all be forced to pony up whether we like it or not. It's also likely the estimate for how much it would cost was much lower than the real, final cost - as is almost always the case with government IT projects (they are often deliberately low-balled to get them approved - many government IT projects would probably be rejected out of hand if the real cost was stated up front).
Of course the next likely development would not just be compulsory purchase of ID cards, but that they would become compulsory to carry at all times like in some European countries, with effective police powers to ask for "papers please". At this point absent-mindedness becomes an offence - forget your ID card, get fined. And no, driving licenses aren't the same - in Britain you don't have to carry your driving license when driving (if you get stopped and don't have it, you get a notice to show your documents within a reasonable time period).
You cannot oblige a future parliament to pay for the contracts of a previous - there will be no huge penalties for cancellation of these projects.