But it's just the director and his subordinate managers.
I've come to appreciate the pros and cons:
Pros:
I'm not the only group leader with "challenges" The two days a week that we don't meet are SO MUCH MORE PRODUCTIVE!
Cons:
The other 3 days of the week...
On a more serious note:
The managers talk throughout the day and the individual contributors do the same. Those who have ANY REASON to need to know about others' daily activities are ALREADY collaborating with them on a moment-by-moment basis. Think of it this way: If someone in the team didn't bother to inform you of something that affected you UNTIL the daily meeting, how would you feel? You know my email. You know my phone. You know my face. WTH makes you feel you need to wait until we're STANDING UP to communicate with me?
The magnitude of the losses would have been such that the FDIC fund would have been sucked dry in a heartbeat. Then it would be up to the U.S. Government to make up the shortfall, piling the new government debt on to the national debt pile. Haven't we been doing enough to "pile on" already?
Also, there's a lot of "interconnected-ness" in the banking industry. If one large bank fails, it will drag another handful with it. They will drag others with them, etc. Only "smallish" banks can fail and have the system absorb the impact without massive "domino effect" collapse. "Too big to fail" is a sobering thought...
I know this has a scalability problem (i.e. the cost of equipment goes up linearly with the number of contestants) but you could build a self-contained GPS device that tracks a car's position throughout the event. Have it record position information to flash as often as possible (Sparkfun has a GPS receiver that will update position 10 times/sec for US $61). At the end of the event, everyone turns in their GPS device and their position recordings are uploaded into a computer.
Now one may argue that GPS position error could be enough to make the winner ambiguous (i.e. "photo finish"). But position errors due to RF propagation are "systemic", in that they would affect all receivers in the same vicinity pretty much equally. Further, with a large number of position samples and high update rate, post-processing could be done to calculate trajectory of the possible winners as they approach the finish line. It simply isn't possible to accelerate or decelerate so quickly that you can't interpolate position and velocity in the vicinity of the finish line.
For the "systemic position errors", a single reference GPS receiver at a stationary location next to the finish line can be used to determine position "wander" due to RF, ephemeris, selective availability (even though it's off these days) and use this to subtract out this systemic error from everyones' position data.
In 1992 I was at an IEEE 802.11 meeting (that's WiFi, if you didn't know it by that name). My company was presenting a "pre-standard" wireless LAN design that we were developing, to be considered as a contribution to the standard.
Someone asked "Why does your design have so much error correction coding? Are you expecting the RF environment to be that bad?"
I replied, "Well, I haven't seen any 'Listen Before Cook' microwave ovens out there!"
This got a few chuckles and we moved along.
Many years later, I was doing some patent searches, and I came upon Patent number 6,346,692, titled "Adaptive Microwave Oven"
I'll be damned! Somebody actually patented the "Listen Before Cook microwave oven!"
So now we have WiFi devices detecting microwave ovens. That seems obvious to me. But I'm still waiting for a commercially available microwave oven that will avoid stomping on my WiFi signal:-)
FWIW, The 802.11 Media Access Control (MAC) protocol effectively avoids microwave ovens most of the time, because the magnetrons in consumer microwave ovens only operate on a "half wave" basis. This means they're off at least half the time. A microwave oven during its "on" time looks indistinguishable from another WiFi transmitter, and so your WiFi device simply waits until the microwave oven turns off before transmitting the next packet. This results in slower throughput, but isn't a show stopper.
The bigger problem is that since the microwave oven doesn't listen before turning on its magnetron, it tends to "stomp on" your WiFi signal occasionally. This, combined with the fact that the majority of IP based communications is TCP (and TCP sees every packet loss as congestion, causing it to slow down for the next few-to-tens of seconds), results in more throughput loss than is strictly related to the number of packets "stomped upon."
Hardly skunkworks. PCM chips are in Micron's (Numonyx) catalog. I considered using one in a design last year, but they were too expensive, mainly because I only needed a wee bit of non-volatile storage and these chips only come in 128 Mbit density.
You can buy them from Digikey at $4.57 each. But you have to buy them a tray at a time (576 parts per tray).
I can't help but sound stupid, but how exactly can it detect when you've driven over a pot hole or are just shaking your phone up and down? Isn't this what road surveyors are for in the first place?
Correlation. Any single "bump" - not interesting. A dozen or so "bumps" with the same lat/long: Send an inspector to that location. Good chance you'll find a pothole (or a dead body) in the road....
I can see hundreds (nay, thousands) of people signing up to participate in this, thinking "how cool!" All the time the city builds gigabytes of records of where the subscribers were (in the latitude/longitude sense) and who knows, maybe the next step in the plan is to issue speeding tickets based on the GPS telemetry.
You Slashdotters are so tiresome with your trying to convince each other to change your minds. You are engaging in political jousting - NOT scientific debate! What you aim to do is influence readers to either "believe in" anthropogenic global change or "not believe in" it.
While beliefs are powerful forces, actions are even more powerful.
For those who believe that carbon emissions are going to doom mankind, there is only one viable response: Reduce your "carbon footprint". Once you've done that, you can self-righteously lecture others on what "bad people" they are for not worshipping the same belief system as you. Mind you, I don't see how you will EVER be able to demonstrate that your actions have in fact averted a catastrophe. And if catastrophe strikes you will always be able to bemoan the fact that it was "all the unbelievers" who wrecked our world.
But if you claim to "believe" and fail to "act", you are a common hypocrite.
For my part, I don't give a rodent's rectum if carbon emissions are "wrecking our world". I just know that emitting carbon costs me money! I have to work for my money so the simple equation is that if I emit less carbon, I've spent less money.
I bought a home a few years ago. First "real" home I've ever owned (previously had a "shack" that served as a home - didn't count). I live ONE MILE from my office. Weather permitting, I walk to work. I drive a Jeep Liberty, so you holier-than-thou's would probably throw eggs at me if you saw me driving by. (I bought the Jeep when I had to drive 300 miles from place of work to the aforementioned "shack used as a home", and back, on weekends, on icy winter roads).
So I now burn a tank of gas about every 3 weeks, versus a tank a week.
Thanks to the proximity of my home to work, my mortgage is about $70k upside down. I could have saved money by buying a home in the boonies, but to be completely honest, my choice of location was more based on convenience (and short commute) than on environmental or even financial concerns.
I'm switching to LED lighting as fast as I can afford it. CFLs? What a crock! They're all dying in my house at an alarming rate.
BTW: As you drive your hybrid, all puffed up over your environmentally conscious virtue, keep in mind just how much energy it takes to process bauxite ore into aluminum. Aluminum and concrete both take HUGE amounts of energy to produce. And we use them with nary a mention of the profligate consumption of energy they represent. Waste is all around you; stop focusing on "Big Oil" as a boogeyman. They're like drug dealers. If you wouldn't buy their junk, they wouldn't be able to terrorize the neighborhood. We bring it on ourselves, people.
I have written before and noted that this problem (of anthropogenic climate change) is somewhat self limiting. Ironically, global financial collapse is likely to be the most effective short-term antidote to AGC. Is this what we want? Don't matter if you want it or not. As liquid fossil fuel becomes more scarce, you will have to pay more for every drop. As you have to pay more, you will have less money. Companies will have less profit. Unemployment will go up. Tax revenues will go down. Wars will be started (to fight over the declining supply - some argue this is already with us). Food shortages will become more commonplace. You won't need to worry about when the next iPhone is released - it will be very low on your list of priorities - way behind feeding yourself and keeping yourself from freezing to death. At such a time as this, you may be *thankful* that the average global temperature is rising!
Be careful what you wish for, greenies. You may (and probably will) get it in spades. It won't be what you envisioned.
Biggest worry for the future: COAL. When liquid fossil fuel becomes too expensive, we will be faced with the painful choice of "adapt or die". Adaptation will take the form of switching from petroleum to coal, and damn the consequences! Who among you will give a rodent's rectum about sea levels when you have no job, no food, no medicine, etc.? Consider just how much you DEPEND on this nasty fossil-fuel-driven world economy before you judge.
A year or two ago I posted to some thread where I remarked that "global warming" was a self-limiting concern, because of declining oil production. I was blasted as being a selfish, ignorant &)*(&%&$$.
SO.... This is what I was talking about. The day will come (before you're ready) when you will look back wistfully at the time when you COULD afford to damage the environment:-)
Many will die, many more will suffer, when the resource depletion culls the winners from the losers. Survival will reign over "equality"...
Yes, I make dark and unsavory predictions. We have enjoyed a stunningly rich and happy 50-60 year run. Soon we will return to what the *rest* of human history has been like.
Please take care to add REAL information - not speculation.
Assisted GPS is simply the technique of having a (lower-cost) GPS receiver (in your phone) receive almanac/ephemeris data from a "reference receiver" station attached to the cell network. It does not involve "triangulating" with cell towers. Hybrid location approaches exist which combine GPS (assisted or unassisted) with cell tower triangulation (actually trilateralation - distances are used, not angles) to achieve better accuracy and/or coverage.
If you say "assisted GPS", please leave cell towers out of the description. GPS is GPS - it is not "any and all geolocation technologies" which seems to be the way many people use the term these days...
The 11 WiFi channels (in the 2.4 GHz band) overlap each other such that there are really only 3 non-overlapping channels possible (1, 6, 11). Remember that WiFi (actually pre-WiFi 802.11) started out with 1 Mbit/s transmission speeds. At that time, 5 MHz channel spacing allowed 11 non-overlapping channels. But with 802.11b (which was the first "WiFi" version) and ever since, channel widths have been at least 22 MHz - hence only 3 usable channels.
At 60 GHz, I think they're going for speed in a single channel vs. multiple channels. So a single 60 GHz transmitter/receiver pair take up the entire spectrum. No room for multiple overlapping transceivers in the same physical space.
Not completely sure, but I think one problem with UWB is that the power levels had to be set SO low to appease those *licensed* operators of the spectrum it overlaps that performance just ain't all that great.
Then again, it could be that UWB was torpedoed by the Osborne Effect of having 60 GHz coming "in the near future." Honestly, electronics evolve so fast it's hard to understand how anybody makes a buck in "latest/greatest technology" anymore. I was looking at hard drives this morning. Seems the new price point for 1 TB drives is $75. Sheesh!
(You're also tens of thousands of dollars poorer.)
Look on the bright side. You have that much less time to miss that money you no longer have!
To be a bit less ridiculous, let's put it this way:
a) You know you're dying.
b) You have some money which, by definition, is useless to you once you're dead (notwithstanding the awesome "upgrade" casket that money could have purchased).
c) For whatever reason, throwing away the money doesn't make a serious dent in your "estate" (i.e. your loved ones won't go without because of your choice to spend it this way).
Why the hell not put your chips on black and spin the big wheel?
Let's get real here. The "we are the best trained, most ethical doctors on the planet" consulting physicians informed her that her condition was terminal. So we're really just talking about how long she will hang in there, right?
WRONG! She had terminal kidney failure. Do you have ANY idea what that means? Let's see. If I religiously watch my diet (i.e. no fun in that area for my remaining days), if I religiously go to dialysis and spend 6 hours every 3 days having my blood "serviced", and be prepared to deal with all the associated medical complications, then I might add 2 to 3 of these "quality years" to my lifespan.
Oh and by the way. I suspect that those tens of thousands I would have been scammed will be needed to supplement my Medicare or private health insurance. So, short of a bullet to the brain pan, I don't see how those tens of thousands would have been "spared" for my surviving family.
I'm reminded of a somewhat silly personal experience that has a certain moral relevance to this topic. I was at a company holiday party one time, where the theme was "casino night." We had until 10pm to play the games of chance. Whomever ended up with the largest stake (it was all play money, of course) would win the grand prize. I was shooting craps and doing remarkably well (it's not my game, never will be). As the clock approached 10pm, I had quite a large stack of chips, and growing with every roll. With a couple of minutes to go, I wanted to "let them ride" on my last throw. The dealer closest to me reached over and said "here, let me help you out. You don't want to to that." She split my bet across two spots.
I didn't complain because, after all, it was just play money (which made her "cautionary help" all the more absurd). But if it had been "real money" and I knew I didn't have long to live, why the hell shouldn't I be allowed to risk it all? I know with 100% odds that one day I'll be ejected from the casino (of life). With a terminal disease, I know I'm approaching that point with a degree of certainty that others (who don't have that diagnosis) don't have. Let it ride!
You are correct that Galaxy 15 is not a Navstar (GPS) bird. But the title is not entirely correct, because WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation Service) is a signal which is sent to terrestrial receivers (i.e. your WAAS enabled GPS receiver) with position correction information. This information helps WAAS enabled GPS receivers to cancel out known (so called "systematic") errors that would otherwise affect your GPS receiver's positioning accuracy.
So while Galaxy 15 is not a GPS satellite, it does participate in delivering high accuracy geopositioning in concert with the actual GPS birds.
The last company I worked for brought in an intellectual property attorney for a one-day seminar - to educate we developers on how "open source" works (from a legal perspective).
I asked him about the legal aspects of using code "in the public domain." (I had a body of code I wanted to incorporate that was so marked.)
He instructed us that there is no such thing as "public domain."
I didn't (still don't) know whether to be amused at how ridiculous this statement was, or worry that maybe he's right!
I had a software package to which I was adding features and there was one nagging, subtle bug that kept me chasing my tail for a couple of weeks.
I was fairly junior in my career, so you can imagine how I felt when the VP of Software Development called me in for a chat. He impressed on me how it's really not practical to hold up a product shipment for some "little bug". There will always be "little bugs", and I needed to get over it and move along.
I accepted this sage advice (and counted myself lucky that it stopped at that).
With no particular effort on my part, and quite ironically, I stumbled upon the cause of the bug about a week later and fixed it. I never mentioned to anyone that I had in fact fixed the "not worth bothering with" bug. But secretly I was pleased that my work would not suffer from the mandated compromise.
Of course, this is just the bug I "knew about.":-)
"You're saving 75 watts per hour, 1800/day, and 657,000/yr over the 140 watts for this chip."
I know what you're trying to say but you're saying it wrong.
"75 watts per hour" is a nonsensical quantity. 75 watts is 75 coulombs per second. Multiply 75 coulombs/second by 3600 seconds and you get 270,000 coulombs. But that is just 75 watt-hours, which is what you were actually trying to say.
So, in 24 hours, at 75 watt-hours/hour, that is 1800 watt-hours/day (which is still a rate of 75 watts).
The watt is a "rate of charge per unit time" measurement. Saying you consumed 1800 watts in a day makes no sense. It is 75 watts * 24 hours giving 1800 watt-hours.
I see this mistake made so often I wonder why we even bother trying to teach math anymore (sigh).
The 1991 movie "Closet Land", starring Madeleine Stowe and Alan Rickman paints a horrifying picture of just how far a government might go in tracking literary "subversives". Sounds like mr. comic book writer is a lot more "at risk" than the childrens' book author in this movie.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's just the director and his subordinate managers.
I've come to appreciate the pros and cons:
Pros:
I'm not the only group leader with "challenges"
The two days a week that we don't meet are SO MUCH MORE PRODUCTIVE!
Cons:
The other 3 days of the week...
On a more serious note:
The managers talk throughout the day and the individual contributors do the same. Those who have ANY REASON to need to know about others' daily activities are ALREADY collaborating with them on a moment-by-moment basis. Think of it this way: If someone in the team didn't bother to inform you of something that affected you UNTIL the daily meeting, how would you feel? You know my email. You know my phone. You know my face. WTH makes you feel you need to wait until we're STANDING UP to communicate with me?
Bah! I'm too old for this shit....
Score 5: Interesting.
Quoting Blade Runner is a score 5?
The magnitude of the losses would have been such that the FDIC fund would have been sucked dry in a heartbeat. Then it would be up to the U.S. Government to make up the shortfall, piling the new government debt on to the national debt pile. Haven't we been doing enough to "pile on" already?
Also, there's a lot of "interconnected-ness" in the banking industry. If one large bank fails, it will drag another handful with it. They will drag others with them, etc. Only "smallish" banks can fail and have the system absorb the impact without massive "domino effect" collapse. "Too big to fail" is a sobering thought...
Timing tolerances of +/- 100 microseconds?
At 100 miles/hr (160 km/hr) that would be a distance of 0.176 inches (4.44mm).
I think you meant "milliseconds" which is 0.001, not 0.0001. Still, multiply the above by ten and you get:
1.76 inches or 44.4 mm
That's a pretty awesome "photo finish."
And for that matter, what about relativistic effects?
I know this has a scalability problem (i.e. the cost of equipment goes up linearly with the number of contestants) but you could build a self-contained GPS device that tracks a car's position throughout the event. Have it record position information to flash as often as possible (Sparkfun has a GPS receiver that will update position 10 times/sec for US $61). At the end of the event, everyone turns in their GPS device and their position recordings are uploaded into a computer.
Now one may argue that GPS position error could be enough to make the winner ambiguous (i.e. "photo finish"). But position errors due to RF propagation are "systemic", in that they would affect all receivers in the same vicinity pretty much equally. Further, with a large number of position samples and high update rate, post-processing could be done to calculate trajectory of the possible winners as they approach the finish line. It simply isn't possible to accelerate or decelerate so quickly that you can't interpolate position and velocity in the vicinity of the finish line.
For the "systemic position errors", a single reference GPS receiver at a stationary location next to the finish line can be used to determine position "wander" due to RF, ephemeris, selective availability (even though it's off these days) and use this to subtract out this systemic error from everyones' position data.
Would be fun to build :-)
In 1992 I was at an IEEE 802.11 meeting (that's WiFi, if you didn't know it by that name). My company was presenting a "pre-standard" wireless LAN design that we were developing, to be considered as a contribution to the standard.
Someone asked "Why does your design have so much error correction coding? Are you expecting the RF environment to be that bad?"
I replied, "Well, I haven't seen any 'Listen Before Cook' microwave ovens out there!"
This got a few chuckles and we moved along.
Many years later, I was doing some patent searches, and I came upon Patent number 6,346,692, titled "Adaptive Microwave Oven"
I'll be damned! Somebody actually patented the "Listen Before Cook microwave oven!"
So now we have WiFi devices detecting microwave ovens. That seems obvious to me. But I'm still waiting for a commercially available microwave oven that will avoid stomping on my WiFi signal :-)
FWIW, The 802.11 Media Access Control (MAC) protocol effectively avoids microwave ovens most of the time, because the magnetrons in consumer microwave ovens only operate on a "half wave" basis. This means they're off at least half the time. A microwave oven during its "on" time looks indistinguishable from another WiFi transmitter, and so your WiFi device simply waits until the microwave oven turns off before transmitting the next packet. This results in slower throughput, but isn't a show stopper.
The bigger problem is that since the microwave oven doesn't listen before turning on its magnetron, it tends to "stomp on" your WiFi signal occasionally. This, combined with the fact that the majority of IP based communications is TCP (and TCP sees every packet loss as congestion, causing it to slow down for the next few-to-tens of seconds), results in more throughput loss than is strictly related to the number of packets "stomped upon."
Hardly skunkworks. PCM chips are in Micron's (Numonyx) catalog. I considered using one in a design last year, but they were too expensive, mainly because I only needed a wee bit of non-volatile storage and these chips only come in 128 Mbit density.
You can buy them from Digikey at $4.57 each. But you have to buy them a tray at a time (576 parts per tray).
I can't help but sound stupid, but how exactly can it detect when you've driven over a pot hole or are just shaking your phone up and down? Isn't this what road surveyors are for in the first place?
Correlation. Any single "bump" - not interesting. A dozen or so "bumps" with the same lat/long: Send an inspector to that location. Good chance you'll find a pothole (or a dead body) in the road....
I can see hundreds (nay, thousands) of people signing up to participate in this, thinking "how cool!" All the time the city builds gigabytes of records of where the subscribers were (in the latitude/longitude sense) and who knows, maybe the next step in the plan is to issue speeding tickets based on the GPS telemetry.
Cellphones are the work of SATAN, I tell you!
You Slashdotters are so tiresome with your trying to convince each other to change your minds. You are engaging in political jousting - NOT scientific debate! What you aim to do is influence readers to either "believe in" anthropogenic global change or "not believe in" it.
While beliefs are powerful forces, actions are even more powerful.
For those who believe that carbon emissions are going to doom mankind, there is only one viable response: Reduce your "carbon footprint". Once you've done that, you can self-righteously lecture others on what "bad people" they are for not worshipping the same belief system as you. Mind you, I don't see how you will EVER be able to demonstrate that your actions have in fact averted a catastrophe. And if catastrophe strikes you will always be able to bemoan the fact that it was "all the unbelievers" who wrecked our world.
But if you claim to "believe" and fail to "act", you are a common hypocrite.
For my part, I don't give a rodent's rectum if carbon emissions are "wrecking our world". I just know that emitting carbon costs me money! I have to work for my money so the simple equation is that if I emit less carbon, I've spent less money.
I bought a home a few years ago. First "real" home I've ever owned (previously had a "shack" that served as a home - didn't count). I live ONE MILE from my office. Weather permitting, I walk to work. I drive a Jeep Liberty, so you holier-than-thou's would probably throw eggs at me if you saw me driving by. (I bought the Jeep when I had to drive 300 miles from place of work to the aforementioned "shack used as a home", and back, on weekends, on icy winter roads).
So I now burn a tank of gas about every 3 weeks, versus a tank a week.
Thanks to the proximity of my home to work, my mortgage is about $70k upside down. I could have saved money by buying a home in the boonies, but to be completely honest, my choice of location was more based on convenience (and short commute) than on environmental or even financial concerns.
I'm switching to LED lighting as fast as I can afford it. CFLs? What a crock! They're all dying in my house at an alarming rate.
BTW: As you drive your hybrid, all puffed up over your environmentally conscious virtue, keep in mind just how much energy it takes to process bauxite ore into aluminum. Aluminum and concrete both take HUGE amounts of energy to produce. And we use them with nary a mention of the profligate consumption of energy they represent. Waste is all around you; stop focusing on "Big Oil" as a boogeyman. They're like drug dealers. If you wouldn't buy their junk, they wouldn't be able to terrorize the neighborhood. We bring it on ourselves, people.
I have written before and noted that this problem (of anthropogenic climate change) is somewhat self limiting. Ironically, global financial collapse is likely to be the most effective short-term antidote to AGC. Is this what we want? Don't matter if you want it or not. As liquid fossil fuel becomes more scarce, you will have to pay more for every drop. As you have to pay more, you will have less money. Companies will have less profit. Unemployment will go up. Tax revenues will go down. Wars will be started (to fight over the declining supply - some argue this is already with us). Food shortages will become more commonplace. You won't need to worry about when the next iPhone is released - it will be very low on your list of priorities - way behind feeding yourself and keeping yourself from freezing to death. At such a time as this, you may be *thankful* that the average global temperature is rising!
Be careful what you wish for, greenies. You may (and probably will) get it in spades. It won't be what you envisioned.
Biggest worry for the future: COAL. When liquid fossil fuel becomes too expensive, we will be faced with the painful choice of "adapt or die". Adaptation will take the form of switching from petroleum to coal, and damn the consequences! Who among you will give a rodent's rectum about sea levels when you have no job, no food, no medicine, etc.? Consider just how much you DEPEND on this nasty fossil-fuel-driven world economy before you judge.
A year or two ago I posted to some thread where I remarked that "global warming" was a self-limiting concern, because of declining oil production. I was blasted as being a selfish, ignorant &)*(&%&$$.
SO.... This is what I was talking about. The day will come (before you're ready) when you will look back wistfully at the time when you COULD afford to damage the environment :-)
Many will die, many more will suffer, when the resource depletion culls the winners from the losers. Survival will reign over "equality"...
Yes, I make dark and unsavory predictions. We have enjoyed a stunningly rich and happy 50-60 year run. Soon we will return to what the *rest* of human history has been like.
Please take care to add REAL information - not speculation.
Assisted GPS is simply the technique of having a (lower-cost) GPS receiver (in your phone) receive almanac/ephemeris data from a "reference receiver" station attached to the cell network. It does not involve "triangulating" with cell towers. Hybrid location approaches exist which combine GPS (assisted or unassisted) with cell tower triangulation (actually trilateralation - distances are used, not angles) to achieve better accuracy and/or coverage.
If you say "assisted GPS", please leave cell towers out of the description. GPS is GPS - it is not "any and all geolocation technologies" which seems to be the way many people use the term these days...
The 11 WiFi channels (in the 2.4 GHz band) overlap each other such that there are really only 3 non-overlapping channels possible (1, 6, 11). Remember that WiFi (actually pre-WiFi 802.11) started out with 1 Mbit/s transmission speeds. At that time, 5 MHz channel spacing allowed 11 non-overlapping channels. But with 802.11b (which was the first "WiFi" version) and ever since, channel widths have been at least 22 MHz - hence only 3 usable channels.
At 60 GHz, I think they're going for speed in a single channel vs. multiple channels. So a single 60 GHz transmitter/receiver pair take up the entire spectrum. No room for multiple overlapping transceivers in the same physical space.
Not completely sure, but I think one problem with UWB is that the power levels had to be set SO low to appease those *licensed* operators of the spectrum it overlaps that performance just ain't all that great.
Then again, it could be that UWB was torpedoed by the Osborne Effect of having 60 GHz coming "in the near future." Honestly, electronics evolve so fast it's hard to understand how anybody makes a buck in "latest/greatest technology" anymore. I was looking at hard drives this morning. Seems the new price point for 1 TB drives is $75. Sheesh!
"(with the kind of clunky interface you'd expect from a program built in the late '90s)"
:-)
LOL! Let me know when you're old enough and I'll buy you a beer
(You're also tens of thousands of dollars poorer.)
Look on the bright side. You have that much less time to miss that money you no longer have!
To be a bit less ridiculous, let's put it this way:
a) You know you're dying.
b) You have some money which, by definition, is useless to you once you're dead (notwithstanding the awesome "upgrade" casket that money could have purchased).
c) For whatever reason, throwing away the money doesn't make a serious dent in your "estate" (i.e. your loved ones won't go without because of your choice to spend it this way).
Why the hell not put your chips on black and spin the big wheel?
Let's get real here. The "we are the best trained, most ethical doctors on the planet" consulting physicians informed her that her condition was terminal. So we're really just talking about how long she will hang in there, right?
WRONG! She had terminal kidney failure. Do you have ANY idea what that means? Let's see. If I religiously watch my diet (i.e. no fun in that area for my remaining days), if I religiously go to dialysis and spend 6 hours every 3 days having my blood "serviced", and be prepared to deal with all the associated medical complications, then I might add 2 to 3 of these "quality years" to my lifespan.
Oh and by the way. I suspect that those tens of thousands I would have been scammed will be needed to supplement my Medicare or private health insurance. So, short of a bullet to the brain pan, I don't see how those tens of thousands would have been "spared" for my surviving family.
I'm reminded of a somewhat silly personal experience that has a certain moral relevance to this topic. I was at a company holiday party one time, where the theme was "casino night." We had until 10pm to play the games of chance. Whomever ended up with the largest stake (it was all play money, of course) would win the grand prize. I was shooting craps and doing remarkably well (it's not my game, never will be). As the clock approached 10pm, I had quite a large stack of chips, and growing with every roll. With a couple of minutes to go, I wanted to "let them ride" on my last throw. The dealer closest to me reached over and said "here, let me help you out. You don't want to to that." She split my bet across two spots.
I didn't complain because, after all, it was just play money (which made her "cautionary help" all the more absurd). But if it had been "real money" and I knew I didn't have long to live, why the hell shouldn't I be allowed to risk it all? I know with 100% odds that one day I'll be ejected from the casino (of life). With a terminal disease, I know I'm approaching that point with a degree of certainty that others (who don't have that diagnosis) don't have. Let it ride!
Here comes my doctor, he groans through the door
Pulling a heart-lung machine
He says he'll fix my heart valve
In truth he's after my spleen....
You are correct that Galaxy 15 is not a Navstar (GPS) bird. But the title is not entirely correct, because WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation Service) is a signal which is sent to terrestrial receivers (i.e. your WAAS enabled GPS receiver) with position correction information. This information helps WAAS enabled GPS receivers to cancel out known (so called "systematic") errors that would otherwise affect your GPS receiver's positioning accuracy.
So while Galaxy 15 is not a GPS satellite, it does participate in delivering high accuracy geopositioning in concert with the actual GPS birds.
The last company I worked for brought in an intellectual property attorney for a one-day seminar - to educate we developers on how "open source" works (from a legal perspective).
I asked him about the legal aspects of using code "in the public domain." (I had a body of code I wanted to incorporate that was so marked.)
He instructed us that there is no such thing as "public domain."
I didn't (still don't) know whether to be amused at how ridiculous this statement was, or worry that maybe he's right!
So if it isn't taught in school, it's unlearnable? Wow!
I had a software package to which I was adding features and there was one nagging, subtle bug that kept me chasing my tail for a couple of weeks.
I was fairly junior in my career, so you can imagine how I felt when the VP of Software Development called me in for a chat. He impressed on me how it's really not practical to hold up a product shipment for some "little bug". There will always be "little bugs", and I needed to get over it and move along.
I accepted this sage advice (and counted myself lucky that it stopped at that).
With no particular effort on my part, and quite ironically, I stumbled upon the cause of the bug about a week later and fixed it. I never mentioned to anyone that I had in fact fixed the "not worth bothering with" bug. But secretly I was pleased that my work would not suffer from the mandated compromise.
Of course, this is just the bug I "knew about." :-)
Perhaps you could start by turning off your computer.
I know what you're trying to say but you're saying it wrong.
"75 watts per hour" is a nonsensical quantity. 75 watts is 75 coulombs per second. Multiply 75 coulombs /second by 3600 seconds and you get 270,000 coulombs. But that is just 75 watt-hours, which is what you were actually trying to say.
So, in 24 hours, at 75 watt-hours/hour, that is 1800 watt-hours/day (which is still a rate of 75 watts).
The watt is a "rate of charge per unit time" measurement. Saying you consumed 1800 watts in a day makes no sense. It is 75 watts * 24 hours giving 1800 watt-hours.
I see this mistake made so often I wonder why we even bother trying to teach math anymore (sigh).
Aha!
The 1991 movie "Closet Land", starring Madeleine Stowe and Alan Rickman paints a horrifying picture of just how far a government might go in tracking literary "subversives". Sounds like mr. comic book writer is a lot more "at risk" than the childrens' book author in this movie.