"It's certainly the first of its kind in Europe, and I see Vodafone says it will work over every home broadband line,"
I had a Samsung Femtocell installed in my basement last November running over a residential DSL line. It's from a Slovenian mobile operator Mobitel - I even written a blog post about it.
Everyone wants to have a mobile phone that works everywhere, broadband internet, cheap electricity in their homes and produce tons of garbage but they will go to streets with pitchforks if you want to build a cell tower, Wi-Fi access point, nuclear powerplant or waste disposal facility in their neighborhood.
People got so used to having all the modern technology available to them that they simply forgot what makes such things possible.
Allergic to Wi-Fi? Fine! I can understand that. I'll turn off my access point as soon as you get rid of your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled computer, cell phone and your microwave oven.
Tablix is a free software package for solving various types of scheduling problems. If you have enough time on your hands to write the necessary modules for your particular problem I'm sure it can schedule your upgrades in the most efficient way.
I can tell your from experience (this is one of the more popular demonstrations in the power engineering lab) that cheap watt-meters can be terribly wrong with loads that are not simple resistors.
A transformer with no load (probably in your case - most lamps with halogen lamps have the switch on the secondary side) is almost a perfect inductive load. Current and voltage are not in sync and the (real) power is very close to zero.
Not all instruments can show this correctly. Especially not if they measure voltage and current separately without taking the phase shift in account (as is often the case with cheap stuff). Switching power supplies (almost everything electronic uses one of those today) are also hard to measure. You need a high sampling frequency if you want to accurately measure the power they draw from the mains. Again, consumer instruments don't have this because fast AD converters are expensive.
Just about the _only_ instrument I would trust outside the lab is the watt-meter the power distribution company installed in your house. These things have to go through very thorough testing before they are approved.
Re:Games as an AI research platform.
on
10th Annual RoboCup
·
· Score: 2, Informative
FYI, though RoboCup has been around for a long time, the past few years have seen a sudden surge of interest in the use of games as a platform for AI research.
Some time ago I had some interest in AI research. I visited an international Robocup event in Slovenia because I thought I might see some interesting concepts being used there.
I talked with several teams and I was quite surprised when I saw how primitive the their programs were. They basically had thousand nested "if" statements. No neural nets or anything remotely advanced. When I asked them if no one uses such things they said that there were some experiments but "if" statements just work better in practice.
The Robocup competition I saw there didn't require any special AI or engineering skills from team members at all. All teams had identical robots that were mass-manufactured by some company. Image analysis software (for determining the position of the ball and robots with a video camera), communications software, etc. were also already written for them. The software didn't even have to be written with embedded systems in mind because it ran on a powerful PC (the robot itself was only a radio-controlled black box).
As far as I know, the whole tournament could have been played entirely in software. The little robots were there only for the audience to see something.
I've read the FA and despite having a couple of CMOS designs behind me I don't understand a bit of what they are saying. Either the reporter that wrote this has absolutely no idea what he is writing or this entire 'breaktrough' is just vapourware.
The article seems to say that the 'tick' of the clock is carrying energy throughout the chip and when the 'tick' hits the edge, the energy is lost. Electronics in your typical digital circuit does not work that way. Energy does not flow through the chip with the signals (ok, it does theoretically, but that amount is negliable with the dynamic losses in the gates mentioned below).
You get power dissipation in each gate or buffer that changes state because of some signal, irregardless of the direction in which the information is flowing. You can not recycle this power. This comes directly from the basic principle behind CMOS technology (used by almost all digital chips today) - you are charging and discharging a capacitor.
Typical example, that running signals in a circuit does not save power: take a ring oscillator (a number of negators wired in a loop). This circuit will oscillate (send changing signals through its loop) and consume an considerable amount of power.
How exactly should I be using it then, if I'm not allowed to use it together with an operating system or even a PC (as far as I know, Blizzard isn't selling either)?
Seriously, I don't see this coming into general use. Vendors like Claria probably want to use the legal language of their EULA to hide the fact that their products hijack user's computer. Also this isn't as elegant as the Creative Commons licenses that have only three options (commercial distribution/derivative works/licensing of derivative works)
PS: Is there some kind of bot storm going on, I'm getting all kinds of weird accesses to my site today, they're all fetching just the home page and leaving, and the referrer tag is null for everyone... They may be committing click fraud through my site, which makes me mad...
p-n junction can be so much more than a diode. A diode is in many cases composed of a single p-n junction, but diode != junction. I totally agree with the poster for calling it that way.
You don't call two p-n junctions in the transistor a diode. You don't call the p-n junction in the solar cell a diode...
The term "diode" can also be applied to a vacuum diode, Schotky diode, etc. neither of which is composed of a p-n junction.
In fact, there is a major difference, even in theory. A white LED light is produced by combining red, green, and blue LEDs. If you were to take this white light and run it through a prism, you would not see it defract into a rainbow. Instead, you'd see a red beam, a green beam, and a blue beam.
Did you actually did this experiment? Modern white LEDs have a single light emitting junction that mostly emitts light in the blue part of the spectrum. This junction is then covered with a phosphor-like coating that converts a narrow band of wavelengths to a broad band that you see as white light. This means that white LEDs have a continuous spectrum, much like the light bulbs.
I've heard a simillar story. A company my father was working for ordered some quite expensive software from a foreign vendor for a mainframe or some other big machinery.
The software came on rolls of magnetic tape and the insurance and customs papers for the shipment said something like:
contents: 5 rolls of magnetic tape, value 10$
xyz software, value 10000$
Customs department of our country promptly returned the shipment back to the sender with an explanation: "Contents of the package not according to the documents enclosed. Inspection found 5 rolls of tape, but no software."
This will take them to a whole new level of discard-and-replace.
I totally agree. I wonder what is better for environment: produce liquid chemical waste by making conventional circuit boards or produce a lot (potentially toxic) solid waste composed of discarded devices that can not be repaired.
Chemicals involved in circuit board manufacturing aren't that toxic at all. Photoresist is developed with NaOH or KOH, both of which will decompose when exposed to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. HCl that is used for etching copper will also be neutralized by, for example, limestone in the environment.
Once upon a time there were technicians that could take any piece of consumer electronics, and given a good repair manual, trouble shoot the problem and replace the offending component.
I can't believe that today I give big bucks for an expensive instrument (e.g. osciloscope in my case) and don't even receive a circuit board chart. Not so long ago you got a circuit board chart with a cheap FM radio... And guess what? That radio is still working after 30 years (and three or four minor repairs).
I don't believe this technology will replace the conventional multilayer printed circuit board for some time. At least in mass produced consumer electronics. Perhaps some niche market where there is a requirement that each circuit board is different.
The main advantage of this new technology is that it is relatively cheaper to produce a small quantity of boards because there is no high cost of making masks. Most of the money today is made with consumer electronics where there is a requirement of large series of identical boards so this is no longer such an advantage (the starting cost of mask is almost zero after 1000 or so boards).
The article also does not mention how this type of circuit board is compatible with electronic components. I guess you can not solder SMDs to a trace that is composed of tiny silver particles. This probably means that a totaly new technology for mounting electronic components needs to be developed. The classical soldered spot is one of the most reliable components in electronics and I don't believe any new technology will surpass that anytime soon (this is not so unimportant, considering that an average circuit can have 100s or 1000s of soldered spots).
The worst nuclear disaster in history, Cherynobl, killed a total of 3,000 people.
I'm all for nuclear energy, but I think comparing Chernobyl with coal mining accidents and pollution is very wrong. Which coal mine accident caused 200.000 people to leave their homes? Which enviromental damage makes a large part of a country uninhabitable for the foreseeable future? Not to mention that much of those 3000 people died slowly and painfully from cancer or were condemned to die young at birth. I guess you were not walking around your house with a geiger counter at that time, worrying whether the wind will turn in the direction of your country.
As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
None of those clever ideas is practical, and some are pure science fiction at this time. Anyone that proposes launching nuclear waste into sun does not know a bit about celestial mechanics or the cost to lift a ton of cargo into orbit (not to mention into the sun). Nuclear waste is a very real problem.
Again, I think the current paranoia about everything nuclear should end as soon as possible, but claiming that nuclear energy has no problems at all is just as bad.
The hot keys are configured for the Linux operating system and desktop applications, simplifying actions such as cutting, copying and pasting text, and moving between Web pages.
Seriously, who uses all the special hot keys on recent keyboards? Do they really "simplify actions"? They are usually placed on top of all keys, which means you have to move your hands all the way to the top to, for example, copy or paste text. On the other hand, ctrl and c keys are conveniently placed around the letter keys.
Even my standard 104-key keyboard has keys that I use very rarely. For example: Printscreen/SysRQ is useless (unless you are a kernel hacker and you are using it as kernel magic key). I haven't used Pause/Breakkey since the days of DOS. Same goes for entire numeric keyboard, but I believe it can be useful for people that need to enter a lot of numbers. And I won't even mention Windows/Tux/whatever and menu keys (which I removed with a screwdriver on some of my keyboards anyway).
If you ask me, the perfect Linux keyboard has a bigger, more convenient space bar and enter keys (They are certainly the most used and should be as large as possible. They are ridiculously small on some modern keyboards.). Forget the numeric keyboard and the useless keys I mentioned above. Oh and of course, remove the capslock key and place the control key in the proper place.
Never heard of Windows Meta Files (.wmf) ?. They were quite popular for storing vector graphics in the days of 3.0 and 3.11. You can probably still find some if you look hard enough, but of course nobody uses them anymore these days.
Compare the length of the engine nozzle on this picture before flight and this picture, taken from the space ship after the engine cut-off.
I know they are using ablative materials for the nozzle and that the entire engine casing has to be replaced after each flight, but the difference between these two pictures is amazing. It looks like more than a half of the nozzle is missing! Is this because that part of the nozzle was burned away or these two pictures show SpaceShipOne with two different engine nozzles installed?
It's possible, but slow, to trawl through the sources at ftp.gnome.org
My preferred method of getting the latest GNOME stuff is garnome.
You still have to wait a day or two while it is compiling, but at least you don't have to download everything youself. And you get all the goodies of compiling from source, like switching on optimizations and stuff.
This way I can have the latest GNOME desktop even on my Debian Woody machine.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's certainly the first of its kind in Europe, and I see Vodafone says it will work over every home broadband line,"
I had a Samsung Femtocell installed in my basement last November running over a residential DSL line. It's from a Slovenian mobile operator Mobitel - I even written a blog post about it.
Everyone wants to have a mobile phone that works everywhere, broadband internet, cheap electricity in their homes and produce tons of garbage but they will go to streets with pitchforks if you want to build a cell tower, Wi-Fi access point, nuclear powerplant or waste disposal facility in their neighborhood.
People got so used to having all the modern technology available to them that they simply forgot what makes such things possible.
Allergic to Wi-Fi? Fine! I can understand that. I'll turn off my access point as soon as you get rid of your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled computer, cell phone and your microwave oven.
Tablix is a free software package for solving various types of scheduling problems. If you have enough time on your hands to write the necessary modules for your particular problem I'm sure it can schedule your upgrades in the most efficient way.
I can tell your from experience (this is one of the more popular demonstrations in the power engineering lab) that cheap watt-meters can be terribly wrong with loads that are not simple resistors.
A transformer with no load (probably in your case - most lamps with halogen lamps have the switch on the secondary side) is almost a perfect inductive load. Current and voltage are not in sync and the (real) power is very close to zero.
Not all instruments can show this correctly. Especially not if they measure voltage and current separately without taking the phase shift in account (as is often the case with cheap stuff). Switching power supplies (almost everything electronic uses one of those today) are also hard to measure. You need a high sampling frequency if you want to accurately measure the power they draw from the mains. Again, consumer instruments don't have this because fast AD converters are expensive.
Just about the _only_ instrument I would trust outside the lab is the watt-meter the power distribution company installed in your house. These things have to go through very thorough testing before they are approved.
FYI, though RoboCup has been around for a long time, the past few years have seen a sudden surge of interest in the use of games as a platform for AI research.
Some time ago I had some interest in AI research. I visited an international Robocup event in Slovenia because I thought I might see some interesting concepts being used there.
I talked with several teams and I was quite surprised when I saw how primitive the their programs were. They basically had thousand nested "if" statements. No neural nets or anything remotely advanced. When I asked them if no one uses such things they said that there were some experiments but "if" statements just work better in practice.
The Robocup competition I saw there didn't require any special AI or engineering skills from team members at all. All teams had identical robots that were mass-manufactured by some company. Image analysis software (for determining the position of the ball and robots with a video camera), communications software, etc. were also already written for them. The software didn't even have to be written with embedded systems in mind because it ran on a powerful PC (the robot itself was only a radio-controlled black box).
As far as I know, the whole tournament could have been played entirely in software. The little robots were there only for the audience to see something.
I've read the FA and despite having a couple of CMOS designs behind me I don't understand a bit of what they are saying. Either the reporter that wrote this has absolutely no idea what he is writing or this entire 'breaktrough' is just vapourware.
The article seems to say that the 'tick' of the clock is carrying energy throughout the chip and when the 'tick' hits the edge, the energy is lost. Electronics in your typical digital circuit does not work that way. Energy does not flow through the chip with the signals (ok, it does theoretically, but that amount is negliable with the dynamic losses in the gates mentioned below).
You get power dissipation in each gate or buffer that changes state because of some signal, irregardless of the direction in which the information is flowing. You can not recycle this power. This comes directly from the basic principle behind CMOS technology (used by almost all digital chips today) - you are charging and discharging a capacitor.
Typical example, that running signals in a circuit does not save power: take a ring oscillator (a number of negators wired in a loop). This circuit will oscillate (send changing signals through its loop) and consume an considerable amount of power.
Their human readable summary of the WoW EULA says the following:
Do not use with other software or hardware.
How exactly should I be using it then, if I'm not allowed to use it together with an operating system or even a PC (as far as I know, Blizzard isn't selling either)?
Seriously, I don't see this coming into general use. Vendors like Claria probably want to use the legal language of their EULA to hide the fact that their products hijack user's computer. Also this isn't as elegant as the Creative Commons licenses that have only three options (commercial distribution/derivative works/licensing of derivative works)
Seems like it would be just about as dangerous...
As far as I know, flying on a commercial jet was always safer than any other type of public transportation.
PS: Is there some kind of bot storm going on, I'm getting all kinds of weird accesses to my site today, they're all fetching just the home page and leaving, and the referrer tag is null for everyone... They may be committing click fraud through my site, which makes me mad...
/ 0/threaded
See this discussion on SecurityFocus
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/75/401729/30
p-n junction can be so much more than a diode. A diode is in many cases composed of a single p-n junction, but diode != junction. I totally agree with the poster for calling it that way.
You don't call two p-n junctions in the transistor a diode. You don't call the p-n junction in the solar cell a diode...
The term "diode" can also be applied to a vacuum diode, Schotky diode, etc. neither of which is composed of a p-n junction.
In fact, there is a major difference, even in theory. A white LED light is produced by combining red, green, and blue LEDs. If you were to take this white light and run it through a prism, you would not see it defract into a rainbow. Instead, you'd see a red beam, a green beam, and a blue beam.
Did you actually did this experiment? Modern white LEDs have a single light emitting junction that mostly emitts light in the blue part of the spectrum. This junction is then covered with a phosphor-like coating that converts a narrow band of wavelengths to a broad band that you see as white light. This means that white LEDs have a continuous spectrum, much like the light bulbs.
I've heard a simillar story. A company my father was working for ordered some quite expensive software from a foreign vendor for a mainframe or some other big machinery.
The software came on rolls of magnetic tape and the insurance and customs papers for the shipment said something like:
contents: 5 rolls of magnetic tape, value 10$
xyz software, value 10000$
Customs department of our country promptly returned the shipment back to the sender with an explanation: "Contents of the package not according to the documents enclosed. Inspection found 5 rolls of tape, but no software."
He should have used rmcc. Real Man's Compiler Collection won't give you any annoying error messages (even when compiling windows source code).
Our development team switched to rmcc from gcc when the first version was released back a week ago and the change in productivity was unbelievable.
...because there is obviously no passive smoking effect.
1) User of this new contraption breathes a lung-full of nicotine-air mixture.
2) Some of the nicotine from the air is deposited in user's lungs, providing whatever pleasures smokers get from it.
3) The rest of the nicotine-air mixture (although a bit less concentrated) is expelled from user's lungs and into the surrounding atmosphere.
4) An anonymous non-smoking bystander breathes some of the remaining nicotine that the user expelled a few moments.
5) Some of the nicotine is deposited in his lungs against his will.
No passive smoking effect? Yeah right...
(I don't smoke if you haven't figured that out yet)
This will take them to a whole new level of discard-and-replace.
I totally agree. I wonder what is better for environment: produce liquid chemical waste by making conventional circuit boards or produce a lot (potentially toxic) solid waste composed of discarded devices that can not be repaired.
Chemicals involved in circuit board manufacturing aren't that toxic at all. Photoresist is developed with NaOH or KOH, both of which will decompose when exposed to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. HCl that is used for etching copper will also be neutralized by, for example, limestone in the environment.
Once upon a time there were technicians that could take any piece of consumer electronics, and given a good repair manual, trouble shoot the problem and replace the offending component.
I can't believe that today I give big bucks for an expensive instrument (e.g. osciloscope in my case) and don't even receive a circuit board chart. Not so long ago you got a circuit board chart with a cheap FM radio... And guess what? That radio is still working after 30 years (and three or four minor repairs).
I don't believe this technology will replace the conventional multilayer printed circuit board for some time. At least in mass produced consumer electronics. Perhaps some niche market where there is a requirement that each circuit board is different.
The main advantage of this new technology is that it is relatively cheaper to produce a small quantity of boards because there is no high cost of making masks. Most of the money today is made with consumer electronics where there is a requirement of large series of identical boards so this is no longer such an advantage (the starting cost of mask is almost zero after 1000 or so boards).
The article also does not mention how this type of circuit board is compatible with electronic components. I guess you can not solder SMDs to a trace that is composed of tiny silver particles. This probably means that a totaly new technology for mounting electronic components needs to be developed. The classical soldered spot is one of the most reliable components in electronics and I don't believe any new technology will surpass that anytime soon (this is not so unimportant, considering that an average circuit can have 100s or 1000s of soldered spots).
But did they try to build a simulator that would simulate the entire universe in the simulated universe?
Did they get a giant sign million light years across floating in space, saying:
Simulating universe in a simulated universe is not going to work.
You just have to try it, didn't you?
The worst nuclear disaster in history, Cherynobl, killed a total of 3,000 people.
I'm all for nuclear energy, but I think comparing Chernobyl with coal mining accidents and pollution is very wrong. Which coal mine accident caused 200.000 people to leave their homes? Which enviromental damage makes a large part of a country uninhabitable for the foreseeable future? Not to mention that much of those 3000 people died slowly and painfully from cancer or were condemned to die young at birth. I guess you were not walking around your house with a geiger counter at that time, worrying whether the wind will turn in the direction of your country.
As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
None of those clever ideas is practical, and some are pure science fiction at this time. Anyone that proposes launching nuclear waste into sun does not know a bit about celestial mechanics or the cost to lift a ton of cargo into orbit (not to mention into the sun). Nuclear waste is a very real problem.
Again, I think the current paranoia about everything nuclear should end as soon as possible, but claiming that nuclear energy has no problems at all is just as bad.
Pause / Break is actually useful for doing what it says (in text mode at least) - Pressing it causes the program to wait
Interesting. This doesn't seem to work for me. In X terminal the Pause/Break key has no effect. In console it only prints ^[[P
I use bash job control for this purpose. Press ctrl-z stop a job, then type "fg" to resume job in foreground or "bg" to resume in background.
The hot keys are configured for the Linux operating system and desktop applications, simplifying actions such as cutting, copying and pasting text, and moving between Web pages.
Seriously, who uses all the special hot keys on recent keyboards? Do they really "simplify actions"? They are usually placed on top of all keys, which means you have to move your hands all the way to the top to, for example, copy or paste text. On the other hand, ctrl and c keys are conveniently placed around the letter keys.
Even my standard 104-key keyboard has keys that I use very rarely. For example: Printscreen/SysRQ is useless (unless you are a kernel hacker and you are using it as kernel magic key). I haven't used Pause/Breakkey since the days of DOS. Same goes for entire numeric keyboard, but I believe it can be useful for people that need to enter a lot of numbers. And I won't even mention Windows/Tux/whatever and menu keys (which I removed with a screwdriver on some of my keyboards anyway).
If you ask me, the perfect Linux keyboard has a bigger, more convenient space bar and enter keys (They are certainly the most used and should be as large as possible. They are ridiculously small on some modern keyboards.). Forget the numeric keyboard and the useless keys I mentioned above. Oh and of course, remove the capslock key and place the control key in the proper place.
Unit for Cold anyone?
.
The theory of cold is just a part of thermodynamic theory of darkness
The unit for cold is derived from unit for darkness and equals D.s, where D is unit for darkness and s is second.
Grab a copy and give it a shot!
I've downloaded a copy, burned it on a CD and gave it a few shots.
This is the result.
Never heard of Windows Meta Files (.wmf) ?. They were quite popular for storing vector graphics in the days of 3.0 and 3.11. You can probably still find some if you look hard enough, but of course nobody uses them anymore these days.
Compare the length of the engine nozzle on this picture before flight and this picture, taken from the space ship after the engine cut-off.
I know they are using ablative materials for the nozzle and that the entire engine casing has to be replaced after each flight, but the difference between these two pictures is amazing. It looks like more than a half of the nozzle is missing! Is this because that part of the nozzle was burned away or these two pictures show SpaceShipOne with two different engine nozzles installed?
It's possible, but slow, to trawl through the sources at ftp.gnome.org
My preferred method of getting the latest GNOME stuff is garnome.
You still have to wait a day or two while it is compiling, but at least you don't have to download everything youself. And you get all the goodies of compiling from source, like switching on optimizations and stuff.
This way I can have the latest GNOME desktop even on my Debian Woody machine.