Actually, it doesn't take much power at all to get to a satellite -- it depends on how much data you want to transmit. Sure, voice will take a hefty rig like an irridium phone, but small amounts, such as GPS coordinates, require very little power and can use a short whip antenna. For example, take a look at orbcomm -- Garmin already has a unit that combines this satellite with GPS.
And all normal cell phones do reach satellites... spy satellites, that is:-)
I agee on your second point... I was disappointed to find out that the only GPS on my "gps phone" was that the base stations' positions had been determined with GPS. Yeah, I've got a GPS-enabled ham sandwich because it's in my house and I know the GPS lat/lon of my house...
Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'll second that. There were big chunks of the truck from the Murrah building still intact -- I'm sure they'll build a containment vessel stronger than a frame rail or a differential when exposed to a bomb.
Q. Were you also informed that a portion of the <I>frame rail was found on top of a building approximately a block and a half to two blocks away</I> from the Murrah Building? A. Yes. I was. Q. And what did that tell you about the size of the device or the power of the device? A. Again, it was a big bomb for a piece of -- it was smaller than that this -- but for a piece of frame rail to have been projected from the seat of the explosion in N.W. 5th Street over these buildings to land on a roof on 6th Street. Q. And here we have Government's Exhibit 713. Did you examine that? A. Yes, I did. Q. And do you recall where that was recovered at the crime scene? A. Yes. That -- this fragment originated from part of the rear axle, part of the differential housing from the rear axle, so it would have been the back of the truck. And we said that the -- we established that the rear axle had come to rest outside the Regency Tower. That piece of metal had gone further than that in the same general direction, I think approximately 800 feet. Q. And did that tell you something about the size or the power of the bomb? A. Yes. It was a big bomb.
The modulation would just have to be very slow so they don't integrate the whole modulation over the "staring" period.
Excellent point, but not necessarily true. Sure, you'd need a long integration time, but that doesn't mean that the code rate would have to be slow. If the signal is periodic (and it'll be hard to be noticed unless it is), you or the aliens can integrate bits from different cycles. That's assuming that the receiver knows the period, but with enough compute power, they can try all possible periods.
The Arecibo bit rate is 10 per second -- much faster than most deep space star exposures, but decipherable with the above method.
Nice find! Yeah, the TOSLink is after the decompression. You're probably right - the digital link is probably not going to help improve the sound over the damage imposed by the compression.
XM is playing the game well, though. I looked into the chipsets that they use, and there is no point to pick off an unencrypted digital compressed signal -- you either get the lossy output that will produce artifacts when re-compressed, or the useless encrypted portion. Good engineering... until someone figures out which wire to probe on the raw IC.
The web page says program words, but those were equivalent to bytes. Tokenizing the BASIC keywords helped save memory, but line numbers were stored as ASCII, so "GOTO 5" took half the memory of "GOTO 500"
You are right in both ways. Even the HP48's emulates system RPL, a language they've carried from previous calculators. It's an intermediate language that offers simpler math functios. The bulk of the stuff the calculator does (like the matrix routines) is written in it.
If the 49 has it's own SysRPL emulator, it would be quite fast (not as fast as pure C, though), but if it's emulating the 48's Saturn processor, which is emulating SysRPL, things could get slow.
So far, I've got a lot of respect for the legal department at PureDigital: they have not threatened anyone, with the DMCA or otherwise. By my reading of the DMCA, writing drivers for interoperability purposes is legal (and, IMHO, fair use of purchased hardware). The new camera so far seems to be locked down tighter (i.e. no one's gotten any message at all back from it yet; we presume it's waiting for the right password). I am glad to see PD using technological measures rather than trying to find a judge that will turn the DMCA into a blunt instrument.
good ideas! I thought that the database of unique keys would tighten up security quite a bit, but it's a cost-benefit analysis. The cost of updating the machines, plus a 1-800 toll charge, plus infrastructure may not be worth it. Then, there are always other avenues to hack, but I've been keeping those to myself because I don't want to do their work for them.
That was the reason for my original hack of the old camera. I never got an answer, because I never found a recycled camera. One Ritz employee said that they had a box of all of these cameras that they had ever developed (5-6) sitting around and they hadn't sent them back for reprocessing. The scary thing is that the processing machine doesn't seem to clear the pictures* -- it must be done at the reprocessing place. A good reason for that is the accidental erasure of the pictures -- you don't want to give the clerk the ability to accidently erase the camera before getting the pictures.
The old camera wasn't really recycleable. The case was painted, so any scratches would show. Changing the body would require removal of about a dozen screws (of a few different sizes), so it's impractical to do.
The new camera design is held together with three easy screws and it's easy to replace the case. The body is not painted, so scratches will be hidden. I'm excited to find out if we'll actually see recycled cameras.
...until someone gets the key out of the development station (not a clean room solution), or someone with a SEM at some university reads the fuse links (not easy at all, but those university kids have a lot of time on their hands)
I did the original hack on the old camera, and, of course, I'm working on the new one... here's my web page on it.
The next step is a ROM dump -- then we can see if there is any code in the flash memory, or if it's stored on the ASIC. I suspect that there is a bootloader on the ASIC and the bulk of the code (certainly the pre-programmed images) is on the flash. Don't know if it's encrypted or scrambled yet.
We're still working on the resolution of the sensor. I read the part number last night, but didn't return any google hits. We can't really rely on the size of the pictures one would get back from processing because, in the past, they've upscaled it.
While film used in cinema contains pigments that can create an infinitely large number of color variations, TV sets combine discrete amounts of red, green, and blue light to create a much more limited color range.
I think the sentance is not too clear. To me, it seemed to be setting up a parallel: Film: infinite color variations:: TV : rgb
I avoided the discrete part because old TV's were all analog throughout the entire production process... that interpretation didn't make sense to me because I don't think they're proposing a technology that would be incompatible with digital TV.
Thanks for the nudge to read the photo linked. My eyes glazed over when I read the top of that paragraph: make TV images more cinemalike without the unwanted dimming side effect... hello, it's called a brightness knob and it'll fix your problems!
Basically the gamut I'm using is more saturated then theirs -- my amber is at 620, my blue is very close the 470-460, and my green is near 540 (.7,.2). So, I've got pretty close to the same coverage.
My big question is how they'll output this to normal monitors. With monitors that use a color mask, you'll have to add more subpixels, which will make the image fuzzier. There are other color displays that trade refresh rate for color space.
He's right there in my short book-list, but I didn't want to/. him since it looks like it's his personal website. His A Guided Tour of Color Space is an excellent physics-based introduction.
There are a couple of factual errors in this story that makes me feel uneasy.
From the spectrum article: While film used in cinema contains pigments that can create an infinitely large number of color variations, TV sets combine discrete amounts of red, green, and blue light to create a much more limited color range. This isn't true: color slide film uses three layers, just like monitors do: http://www.imx.nl/photosite/technical/E100G/E100G. html
He says that in printing it's common to have inkjet devices that use six, seven, or even eight primaries. There are good reasons printing uses so many primaries, but it's usually to make an evener tone. My consumer-grade printer has the traditional CMYK (cyan magenta yellow blacK), but it also has two additional colors: light-cyan and light-magenta. They chose these lighter colors so make the blending smoother and the ink spots less noticible; it wasn't to increase the gamut. Printers also use spot-color to make particular colors (such as a company logo) print without needing to use a halftone. These are all just gimicks to get around the fact that printing isn't continuous tone -- in projectors that are continuous tone, these tricks aren't needed.
The traditional RGB's and CMY's don't match these curves, so they define a gamut that can be improved on. For example, take this projector's gamut -- its green is far away from the eye's green, so it can't display the cyans well. But, the color model my company is using for its video product uses a much truer green so we can cover much more of the gamut.
disclaimer: IANACE (color expert), but my most recent project has been color calibration to precise standards.
That's kind of similar to what I was thinking. It's the ones with excessive wheel spin that I'd be most worried about. The only way this would work (besides a great database and lots of computation, not to mention a compass or steering angle sesnor, which isn't part of the OBD data stream) would be if massive amounts of data were recorded so that it could later be meshed up with a map... that's not going to happen.
You can't be too lossy, or else you'd get the streets all wrong, especially in a big city laid out on a grid. But, you do have the beneift of knowing the address it's supposed to be parked at at night, so you have a starting point for the first trip of the morning.
But, the system is still in place. The car dealership I use has a similar system, and if you drive out-of-state or too fast, you'll never get a free loaner car there again.
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Actually, it doesn't take much power at all to get to a satellite -- it depends on how much data you want to transmit. Sure, voice will take a hefty rig like an irridium phone, but small amounts, such as GPS coordinates, require very little power and can use a short whip antenna. For example, take a look at orbcomm -- Garmin already has a unit that combines this satellite with GPS.
:-)
... I was disappointed to find out that the only GPS on my "gps phone" was that the base stations' positions had been determined with GPS. Yeah, I've got a GPS-enabled ham sandwich because it's in my house and I know the GPS lat/lon of my house...
And all normal cell phones do reach satellites... spy satellites, that is
I agee on your second point
Ah, USA today, how I love you for your technical prowness...
Together, the charged atoms captured on the capsule's disks of gold, sapphire, diamond and silicone are no bigger than a few grains of salt
Atomic element or polymer, it's probably close enough. But Spaceflightnow say's it's the element Silicon. And they've got a cool picture of the spacecraft.
The modulation would just have to be very slow so they don't integrate the whole modulation over the "staring" period.
Excellent point, but not necessarily true. Sure, you'd need a long integration time, but that doesn't mean that the code rate would have to be slow. If the signal is periodic (and it'll be hard to be noticed unless it is), you or the aliens can integrate bits from different cycles. That's assuming that the receiver knows the period, but with enough compute power, they can try all possible periods.
The Arecibo bit rate is 10 per second -- much faster than most deep space star exposures, but decipherable with the above method.
Nice find! Yeah, the TOSLink is after the decompression. You're probably right - the digital link is probably not going to help improve the sound over the damage imposed by the compression.
XM is playing the game well, though. I looked into the chipsets that they use, and there is no point to pick off an unencrypted digital compressed signal -- you either get the lossy output that will produce artifacts when re-compressed, or the useless encrypted portion. Good engineering... until someone figures out which wire to probe on the raw IC.
I'm guessing it could use Seagate Savvio Drives - 10k RPM, SATA or FC, 36 or 72 GB, in a 2.5" drive designed for servers.
I have no evidence, but they are perfect for this type of application.
I got the 1K memory module soon after I got it, so that's kinda cheating. Serial interface, wow! I kinda miss mine since I sold it a long time ago.
you haven't lived until you've programmed a computer with 544 bytes of memory. This computer was released in 1985!
The web page says program words, but those were equivalent to bytes. Tokenizing the BASIC keywords helped save memory, but line numbers were stored as ASCII, so "GOTO 5" took half the memory of "GOTO 500"
well, darn. :-) Even if I'm the only one, I think supply exceeds demand.
You are right in both ways. Even the HP48's emulates system RPL, a language they've carried from previous calculators. It's an intermediate language that offers simpler math functios. The bulk of the stuff the calculator does (like the matrix routines) is written in it.
If the 49 has it's own SysRPL emulator, it would be quite fast (not as fast as pure C, though), but if it's emulating the 48's Saturn processor, which is emulating SysRPL, things could get slow.
p.s. Am I the only one here with the Saturn processor on their resume?
I've got an analysis of the flash memory posted -- interesting stuff.
No, that's the EUCD (european union copyright directive), which is far worse than the DMCA. Here's my DMCA analysis on the old camera.
So far, I've got a lot of respect for the legal department at PureDigital: they have not threatened anyone, with the DMCA or otherwise. By my reading of the DMCA, writing drivers for interoperability purposes is legal (and, IMHO, fair use of purchased hardware). The new camera so far seems to be locked down tighter (i.e. no one's gotten any message at all back from it yet; we presume it's waiting for the right password). I am glad to see PD using technological measures rather than trying to find a judge that will turn the DMCA into a blunt instrument.
good ideas! I thought that the database of unique keys would tighten up security quite a bit, but it's a cost-benefit analysis. The cost of updating the machines, plus a 1-800 toll charge, plus infrastructure may not be worth it. Then, there are always other avenues to hack, but I've been keeping those to myself because I don't want to do their work for them.
That was the reason for my original hack of the old camera. I never got an answer, because I never found a recycled camera. One Ritz employee said that they had a box of all of these cameras that they had ever developed (5-6) sitting around and they hadn't sent them back for reprocessing. The scary thing is that the processing machine doesn't seem to clear the pictures* -- it must be done at the reprocessing place. A good reason for that is the accidental erasure of the pictures -- you don't want to give the clerk the ability to accidently erase the camera before getting the pictures.
The old camera wasn't really recycleable. The case was painted, so any scratches would show. Changing the body would require removal of about a dozen screws (of a few different sizes), so it's impractical to do.
The new camera design is held together with three easy screws and it's easy to replace the case. The body is not painted, so scratches will be hidden. I'm excited to find out if we'll actually see recycled cameras.
(* note: that's heresay and I can't guarantee it)
I was assuming the camera had the data's public key, and the developer had the private key -- that's non-symetric, right?
Multiple camera batches would make it far more difficult to do without getting the master private key list.
...until someone gets the key out of the development station (not a clean room solution), or someone with a SEM at some university reads the fuse links (not easy at all, but those university kids have a lot of time on their hands)
I did the original hack on the old camera, and, of course, I'm working on the new one... here's my web page on it.
The next step is a ROM dump -- then we can see if there is any code in the flash memory, or if it's stored on the ASIC. I suspect that there is a bootloader on the ASIC and the bulk of the code (certainly the pre-programmed images) is on the flash. Don't know if it's encrypted or scrambled yet.
We're still working on the resolution of the sensor. I read the part number last night, but didn't return any google hits. We can't really rely on the size of the pictures one would get back from processing because, in the past, they've upscaled it.
Hey, wow, thanks! Learned something today!
While film used in cinema contains pigments that can create an infinitely large number of color variations, TV sets combine discrete amounts of red, green, and blue light to create a much more limited color range.
:: TV : rgb
I think the sentance is not too clear. To me, it seemed to be setting up a parallel: Film: infinite color variations
I avoided the discrete part because old TV's were all analog throughout the entire production process... that interpretation didn't make sense to me because I don't think they're proposing a technology that would be incompatible with digital TV.
Thanks for the nudge to read the photo linked. My eyes glazed over when I read the top of that paragraph: make TV images more cinemalike without the unwanted dimming side effect... hello, it's called a brightness knob and it'll fix your problems!
Basically the gamut I'm using is more saturated then theirs -- my amber is at 620, my blue is very close the 470-460, and my green is near 540 (.7,.2). So, I've got pretty close to the same coverage.
My big question is how they'll output this to normal monitors. With monitors that use a color mask, you'll have to add more subpixels, which will make the image fuzzier. There are other color displays that trade refresh rate for color space.
He's right there in my short book-list, but I didn't want to /. him since it looks like it's his personal website. His A Guided Tour of Color Space is an excellent physics-based introduction.
There are a couple of factual errors in this story that makes me feel uneasy.
. html
From the spectrum article:
While film used in cinema contains pigments that can create an infinitely large number of color variations, TV sets combine discrete amounts of red, green, and blue light to create a much more limited color range.
This isn't true: color slide film uses three layers, just like monitors do: http://www.imx.nl/photosite/technical/E100G/E100G
He says that in printing it's common to have inkjet devices that use six, seven, or even eight primaries.
There are good reasons printing uses so many primaries, but it's usually to make an evener tone. My consumer-grade printer has the traditional CMYK (cyan magenta yellow blacK), but it also has two additional colors: light-cyan and light-magenta. They chose these lighter colors so make the blending smoother and the ink spots less noticible; it wasn't to increase the gamut. Printers also use spot-color to make particular colors (such as a company logo) print without needing to use a halftone. These are all just gimicks to get around the fact that printing isn't continuous tone -- in projectors that are continuous tone, these tricks aren't needed.
Basically, it comes down to eyeballs... if you emulate the response curves that your eye is sensitive to, then you can't perceptually do any better.
The traditional RGB's and CMY's don't match these curves, so they define a gamut that can be improved on. For example, take this projector's gamut -- its green is far away from the eye's green, so it can't display the cyans well. But, the color model my company is using for its video product uses a much truer green so we can cover much more of the gamut.
disclaimer: IANACE (color expert), but my most recent project has been color calibration to precise standards.
That's kind of similar to what I was thinking. It's the ones with excessive wheel spin that I'd be most worried about. The only way this would work (besides a great database and lots of computation, not to mention a compass or steering angle sesnor, which isn't part of the OBD data stream) would be if massive amounts of data were recorded so that it could later be meshed up with a map ... that's not going to happen.
You can't be too lossy, or else you'd get the streets all wrong, especially in a big city laid out on a grid. But, you do have the beneift of knowing the address it's supposed to be parked at at night, so you have a starting point for the first trip of the morning.
Nope, that was acme rent-a-car. They've been ordered to stop and refund $13,000 in fees that they collected.
But, the system is still in place. The car dealership I use has a similar system, and if you drive out-of-state or too fast, you'll never get a free loaner car there again.