"hey, this must be an embedded chip.." (translation: We FORGOT the MMU!)
"It supports 64 cores and 192 (insert greek word here) flops!" (translation : guaranteed NEVER to COME CLOSE to THAT throughput, we just wanted you to know...)
"We have more software engineers than hardware engineers!" (translation : we outsourced all the software to India for the cost of ONE hardware engineer!)
"We are using 90 nanometer process" (translation : we cannot afford 0.65 or 0.45 nanometer process, we're a startup, HELLO !!!)
*sigh*. Not again.
MIT has never succeeded with a supercomputer before, and it looks like they're aiming to keep it that way...
The scaling issue had to do with CSMA/CD, collision detection. To detect collisions, the network propagation diameter/delay must be at most the slot time.
These newer versions of Ethernet apparently don't bother supporting CD. All links must be switched through a hub, period. The hub saves up your packet and prevents collisions, and forwards your packet onto the next link. The "Ether" and "Like Talking" aspect of Ethernet has been lost. Ethernet has become just another framing choice other than SONET, for optical fiber.
Actually, I don't think that's correct because your skin and capillaries are designed to effectively control evaporation. 90% of the human body's water loss is associated with breathing, which, obviously, you wouldn't bother doing if you were suddenly thrust into space without a space suit. At that point, your capillaries would constrict as would your sweat glands, virtually slowing evaporative cooling to a standstill. I believe that the assertion "it takes 3 hours for a 70kg person to freeze in space" is probably closer to the mark. It takes 5-10 mins to die of hypothermia (not even freeze) in arctic water and a vacuum is a VERY effective insulator compared to water which is a TERRIFIC heat sink...
It is not simple to plan and deploy a wireless network. You need to secure broadcast sites, do frequency planning, power planning (too much power and a neighboring cell will see too much interference), and cell planning (which includes specifying sectors and antenna directions), and this is typically done with specialized and often proprietary topological modeling tools. And then there are the issues of lost connections - either from a poor deployment or new-building construction that can lead to shadowing of your signals from a transmission tower. Finally, just whe you get the bugs out ~ time to upgrade and add more cell sites. As far as infrastructure (computer & transmitter) costs, one sees maybe 20% for equipment, and 40% for site rental, power, and backhaul costs, and 40% for frequency licensing on a monthly capitalized basis. So owning the equipment is not a big deal ~ owning the spectrum and owning the rights to the transmit locations and backhaul is really what you're owning. Most importantly ~ making it work 24/7/everywhere is NOT EASY.
If each locality tries to develop their own expertise in site planning and deployment and maintenance, I fear that municipalities will be overrun by a sea of mediocre engineers with an overly limited worldview ~ that cannot be improved by deploying networks in tens or hundreds of cities, with lessons learned which are reapplied to new deployments.
I see it today in our cable television monopoly, which is municipally 'outsourced' to a cable provider. This is what most municipalities will end up doing if wireless is publically owned. Our service provider, Time Warner, is too stupid to make our cable modem work. One day, the signal is 20dB at the house, the next day, -15dB at our house. Ok, forget the cable modem. We recently upgraded from analog TV to digital TV and now they are too stupid to make all the paid-for channels work. I am talking literally 5 separate visits from field technicians with no progress (except one technician dumped a DVR at our house an upped our month bill!) As a result, we are going to switch to a satellite provider. The satellite provider has a Network Operations Center (NOC) and can afford to staff the NOC with the PhDs who built the system so that everything in the satellite system works, period, end of story. Unfortunately, a municipally owned wireless network will probably be staffed by yahoos with little knowledge of what it takes to make a system work.
Do you want to undo 150 years of good-faith laws that govern business transactions in this country?
If you come home and find out that you've been overcharged for an item, you have a right to go back to the store and I have NEVER had a merchant turn me down when such a mistake has been pointed out.
If Amazon accidentally UNDER CHARGES somebody, and that person knowingly takes advantage of the mistake, that person is DISHONEST.
If Amazon accidentally UNDER CHARGES somebody, and that person unknowingly takes advantage of the mistake, then they would obviously want to correct the transaction.
The American consumer has been spoiled lately by generous terms in buying and returning merchandise that is not desired. If you think it's o.k. to put a block on your credit card or otherwise try to weasle out of the stated sale price, then it's time to examine your morals, and the people who raised you as a child, because they did a piss-poor job imho of bringing you up right...
In 1995, I modified BSD/OS (BSDI 3.0) to boot without the network. When it was able to detect the root name servers with a =ping, it would start up the networking code (not a solution i would recommend today - horribly hard on RNS's.) People at BSDI were amazed that this could be done, and wanted to learn more. If i remember correctly, without all that networking crap in there to put interlocks on the boot process, boot-up was something quick, like 10 secs or so...
I saw that lego this year released a NEW set that allows you to build BUILDINGS !! I think the last time they did this was in 1962, when they release Lego Set #717, which is the set that I was given in 1966, when I was 4 years old.
These days, kids hate legos because they spend most of the time looking for that custom piece that is lost in SOME OTHER LEGO SET of theirs. Or, because there are 17,298 different lego pieces, they spend most of the time searching a big pile of legos for piece #12821 to finish that model in the photograph...
After finishing the model in the photograph, kids either fall asleep, exhausted, or head for the kitchen for 10 cookies and a huge glass of 4% fat chocolate milk...
1. In the late 1990's, Sun decreed that ANY employee who ported Linux to a Sun workstation would be FIRED. Hey, look at SUN now !! Aint they do'in great ??
2. When Xerox invented the laser printer, it was a 4-week job by the PARC PhD's who did brain surgery on a copier, adding a spinning mirror and a computer interface. It took THREE MONTHS, however, to write the software. Now Apple, the "THINK DIFFERENT" company that will supposedly "SET YOU FREE", is restricting what you can do with their products. What a buncha Scooter Libbeys !!! (I was gonna say "Benedict Arnolds" but realized the overseas people might not understand what I was talking about...)
The last time they did this, if i remember correctly, was in the year 800. it marked the beginning of 1000 years of mental darkness on this planet, ending in the renaissance. we will have people transcribing web pages onto vellum and hiding them in monasteries. let's hope that the next renaissance comes sooner than the last one did *sigh*...
I STILL haven't heard anything that indicates the exact "innovation" of the NTP patents. Remember that one of the original sets of links in the Arpanet was ALOHA NET, in Hawaii, a CSMA wireless network (no CD). Remember that the original "killer app" for this partly-wireless network was email, rfc 788/822. I was writing and designing email systems 22 years ago, any patents in that era are long expired. Everything I've seen indicates that these patents are nuisance patents with no foundation, but I'm STILL waiting for the exact details about what was patented, and what was upheld in court!
I am one of those californias with a $600k+ house. It's a $140k house and a $500k piece of land. I'd actually welcome an excuse to rebuild !! Most of us Californians live daily with the fact that the house built on our lot, costs less per square foot, than the dirt's value per square foot over the entire lot's surface area !!
Why haven't cancer rates jumped for people living near cell phone towers?
See above, plus the phone towers are very far away compared to the phone in your hand. The inverse square law again.
Not really true. Modern cell phones get much of their performance through power control. You don't want to be living next to a tower when most of the people making phone calls are far away. On the hand, if in your cell all the calls are made from your backyard you aren't in much danger since the power output (both phone and cell tower) would be tiny.
In my studies I have learned that good quality voice has a one-way delay (mouth-ear) of 250 ms or less. When the delay exceeds 250 ms, there is a noticeable 20-30% loss of communications efficiency (speed of talking.) When the delay exceeds 400 ms, the system is known as a "CB" system ("Breaker, Breaker") or "PTT" system (alarm tones precede conversation). Otherwise the MAC built into your brain and vocal chords is unable to function effectively.
The efficiency of 802.11 is so low that almost any vocoder may be used. Think 100 bytes for each 802.11 MAC/PHY header, 40 Bytes for IP/UDP/RTP, and this happens every 20 milliseconds with most vocoders. Frankly, that's about 160 x 50 = 64 Kbps before you've transmitted one single bit of vocoded data, which is quite frankly, ridiculous.
Q-factor is a commonly used term in bicycling, it means the width of a crankset from pedal eye to pedal eye, typically 130 mm - 140 mm. I think that its unsurprising that physicists are now able to measure G-factor. We have been able to measure Q-factor for a long time.
I think that physicists should work on inventing new termnology rather than borrowing it from established fields such as bicycling.
I also recall from circuit complexity class that most VLSI circuits are dominated by the size of wires. That was 15 years ago. So I imagine that today's circuits are 99% wires, and 1% transistors. If the transistors stop shrinking, i'm not sure that matters very much. When the wires stop shrinking, then we are all hosed.
In fact, moore got it wrong when he declared his law. It's not important that we can double the number of transistors on a circuit every two years. What is more important is that we can halve the size of the wires on a circuit every two years. And I do not believe that the end of shrinking wires will arrive in 2016. It may not arrive until a decade later - i think that this article is something of a red herring.
Who says that the end of moore's law is such a bad thing ?? i remember from circuit complexity class that a lot of interesting and important circuits cannot be laid out on a 2-dimensional plane. Examples include wallace tree multipliers, which scale faster than two dimensions. Hypercube computers died because the interconnect fabric scaled faster than three dimensions.
Presumably if we come to the end of 2-dimensional circuitry, then work will advance in 3-dimensional circuitry (a la Foveon's 3-D imaging chip.) This could actually stimulate innovation in a different direction, which might be far more important to the computer industry than the last 20 years of "same old thing, shrink and add planar transistors..."
GNU is not UNIX. That's for sure. The one thing that the GNU project seems incapable of producing, is any rational decisions about what REALLY MATTERS in an operating system. As far as a GNU developer is concerned, if you can imagine a feature, you can get it into the GNU project next week.
That's not UNIX. That was never UNIX. And THAT NEVER WILL BE UNIX IN THE FUTURE.
IN my opinion (ok, here i turn on the flaming, AND my Lincoln plaigarism hats),
if destruction be thy lot for UNIX, at what point shall we expect the approach of danger?!?! Shall we expect some giant corporation (such as microsoft) to straddle the OS world and crush UNIX at a single blow ?? Never! All the armies of Microsoft and Intel combined, with all the treasures of Windows Revenue as warchests, could not by force banish UNIX, in a trial of a thousand years !!
I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from without. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freeware developers, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
And friends, the seeds of this suicide have been planted by the GNU project. Those are the seeds of over complexity, and an unwillingness to "distill" UNIX. We have evidence in the X windows project, which has become so complicated that people prefer to write HTML and avoid X windows source code like the plague. In the early days of UNIX (and of smalltalk), those seeds were weeded away, by total rewrites and condensations / restructurings of the system.
The GNU project is unwilling to exercise editorial control to say what belongs in an operating system, and what does not. The GNU project has been outstanding at including the kitchen sink, and then some, in every thing it offers. This is the MIT way, but this is not the way towards success, or towards a future, for UNIX. This is the MULTICS way, and MULTICS was a great failure (despite what many brainwashed MIT graduatess will tell you.) And this is killing UNIX faster than anything else.
>> Most of the rural US has no Internet service, and likely never will unless some government steps in and either mandates it or provides it.<<
This is blatently untrue, most national ISPs such as UUNet and AOL offer 1-800 numbers and so you can get Internet access anywhere that telephone service is available, which is everywhere.
Trinitron is no guarantee of quality. Most of the quality comes from a high performance wideband amplifier with a high refresh rate and a power supply that is robust when the screen is 1% white and 100% white (much more power being drawn with 100%).
For example, at home i have a zenith system 3 tv with comb filter and 600 lines, 12 yrs old. every bit as good as any xbr sony you can find. just because the glass is trinitron, doesn't mean the electronics are "up to snuff".
Re:Fast Dirty Mirror of the Page in Question
on
LCD Price Fixing?
·
· Score: 1
I think it's pretty easy to see why a laptop display is only $400 - $800, whereas a good monitor is $1200 or more. A laptop is a machine that is worthless in 3 years. An LCD monitor is a machine that should last a decade or more. Therefore, there is guaranteed obsolescence in the laptop product, ergo, the manufacturers can drop the price because they know there will be a new sale of the same type in 3 years.
Has anyone noticed that the japanese WILL NOT sell you a 15" or a 16" high-resolution TFT desktop display, either 1600x1200, or 1450x1024 ?? These displays must cost about $1000 fully fleshed out in a desktop enclosure.
Instead, we are forced to pay $1700 for an 18" display - at a minimum cost. Why?? It's the age-old vicious upgrade cycle - originated by the car industry and perfected by the greedy PC hardware industry. And that same Greedy PC Hardware Industry is pumping out useless crap thats starting to look like a 1965 GM automobile.
For you young turks, in the 1960's GM and Ford predicated their business model on a 2-year upgrade cycle. Cars were stamped in wild shapes from tin foil, and all the cloth and plastic and fasteners were all designed to fall apart after 2 years - forcing the car buyer to trade in a model every two years. This lasted until 1973 and then the US Car Makers got HAMMERED by eco-friendly durable automobiles from Toyota, Honda, and Nissan.
I predict that the PC Industry's ECO-ARMEGEDDON is less than 3 years away. Intel is facing serious problems - big corporate customers are going to a 4-year IT upgrade cycle instead of a 3-year upgrade cycle. This means 33% fewer sales for Intel and AMD.
Ok, so there is a limited amount of Spectrum. Can you explain why, then, the amount of "public" spectrum is FAR FAR LESS than the amount of "public" parks in the United States ??
In the 2.4 Ghz band we have 83 Mhz of spectrum. In the 900 Mhz band we have 26 Mhz of spectrum. In the 418 Mhz band we have ?? Mhz of spectrum. In the 5.7 Ghz band we have 125 Mhz of spectrum.
In total, from 0.. 20 Ghz, we have about 250 Mhz of public space. In other words, only about 1% of this spectrum is publically owned !! The rest has been usurped by your federal government, in the same way that they damned the grand canyon, flooded the HetchHetchee Valley of California, and any number of other federal abominations done for "The good of everyone !!!" (yeah, because the benefactors made huge campaign contributions, that's who is "everyone")... like RCA and Sarnoff... sheesh.
If we sold LAND the way we sold SPECTRUM, then the sale would be something like this:
How much am i bid for all the rivers in america? How much am i bid for all the valleys in america?
The fact is, cellular technology makes modern spectrum auctions STUPID AND IDIOTIC. Modern spectrum should be sold ONLY WHEN ATTACHED TO A PIECE OF LAND BENEATH IT. To do otherwise is to GROSSLY waste public resources.
I live in southern california. We recently bought a home stereo with 40 channel presets (AM and FM shared). When we told it to "preset all stations", it barely got through the FM channels, stored about 5 AM channels, and then ran out of presets !! So in some areas, the AM and FM frequency bands are very very crowded.
It's criminal, however, to charge $10k for a license in South San Francisco and $10k for a license in South Dakota. The cost should be something like this : If you want to put out K watts (e.g. roughly K miles of transmission), then you should pay $.01 for every citizen that lives within K miles of your transmitter, every year.
That would be fair. But the Poli(criminal)ticians would never hear of it !!
If i were teaching again at a university, i would run an open-source project as follows.
1. To do an open-source project requires 2 semesters (1 year) of work. There just isn't enough time to do something worthwhile in 1 semester. Therefore, to do a project with me, you'd have to agree (in principal) to sign up for two semesters of independent study.
2. In the first 20% of the project, the student would pick a topic area and write a thorough survey about what is available in that area. To save time, i would make available good surveys from previous students (if any). The survey would also contain a proposal for how to write something new and/or innovative in the domain.
There are many tired over-worked areas in computer science, such as real-time OS kernels, or C compilers, etc. To do a project in one of these tired areas, you'd have to present a really honking great idea in the first week or two of the class in order to be able to work on these dead topics. I would have a set of 10 canned idea areas but would not turn to these until the student had failed twice with their own ideas.
2. In the second 30% of the time, student would write a spec and pull together a development environment, including writing any software or hardware tools or developing ideas for any testing tools needed to complete the task.
3. Last 40-50% of the time is devoted to writing the code.
This is sort of what happened with my B.S. thesis in 1984, and it became a pretty successful open source project (the PC/IP multitasking TCP and SMTP).
This is a very hard thing for a faculty member to support because there is a lot of risk in step (1) that the student fails to find something interesting, and becaue of the need to hand out a grade at the end of the first semester, and allowing for the possibility that the student drops out of school, transfers, gets into a car wreck, hates my guts, or whatever, and gives up.
The reason why mathematicians don't like computer work ?? Because a lot of the "inventions" cannot be attributed to a sole genius. And so in the field of computers there isn't enough space for the hyperspace-filling egos that you find in mathematics and physics.
The fact is, NOBODY, NOT EVEN KLEINROCK, DAVIES, AND BAREN, IN SUM OR SEPARATELY, INVENTED PACKET SWITCHING. You see, the idea did not work for almost 25 years after it was "supposedly" invented by Kleinrock et. al. It wasn't until Van Jacobsen and Karels applied optimal queuing theory and tight feedback control to exponential backoff and "slow start" to TCP feedback congestion control that packet switching was worth a damn.
I was a user of the Arpanet from 1980-1984, and the dang thing almost never worked. It would take a whole minute just to open a pair of TCP connections in order to download a single RFC. The Arpanet was badly, badly broken. Kleinrock was not responsible for making the Internet scale. What Kleinrock invented was a broke piece of crud in 1985, 1986, etc.
Do we attribute the invention of the computer to Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley (hint : given in order of true technical contribution) because these guys invented the transistor ?? No, those guys only invented a "piece" of the modern computer - it was up to others to finish the puzzle. And it's similarly unfair to try to attribute the invention of packet switching to any ONE person, since it took 25 years to get all of the bugs out.
Slashdot Mirror
Not again !!
.." (translation: We FORGOT the MMU!)
...)
...
"hey, this must be an embedded chip
"It supports 64 cores and 192 (insert greek word here) flops!" (translation : guaranteed NEVER to COME CLOSE to THAT throughput, we just wanted you to know
"We have more software engineers than hardware engineers!" (translation : we outsourced all the software to India for the cost of ONE hardware engineer!)
"We are using 90 nanometer process" (translation : we cannot afford 0.65 or 0.45 nanometer process, we're a startup, HELLO !!!)
*sigh*. Not again.
MIT has never succeeded with a supercomputer before, and it looks like they're aiming to keep it that way
The scaling issue had to do with CSMA/CD, collision detection. To detect collisions, the network propagation diameter/delay must be at most the slot time.
These newer versions of Ethernet apparently don't bother supporting CD. All links must be switched through a hub, period. The hub saves up your packet and prevents collisions, and forwards your packet onto the next link. The "Ether" and "Like Talking" aspect of Ethernet has been lost. Ethernet has become just another framing choice other than SONET, for optical fiber.
Actually, I don't think that's correct because your skin and capillaries are designed to effectively control evaporation. 90% of the human body's water loss is associated with breathing, which, obviously, you wouldn't bother doing if you were suddenly thrust into space without a space suit. At that point, your capillaries would constrict as would your sweat glands, virtually slowing evaporative cooling to a standstill. I believe that the assertion "it takes 3 hours for a 70kg person to freeze in space" is probably closer to the mark. It takes 5-10 mins to die of hypothermia (not even freeze) in arctic water and a vacuum is a VERY effective insulator compared to water which is a TERRIFIC heat sink ...
It is not simple to plan and deploy a wireless network. You need to secure broadcast sites, do frequency planning, power planning (too much power and a neighboring cell will see too much interference), and cell planning (which includes specifying sectors and antenna directions), and this is typically done with specialized and often proprietary topological modeling tools. And then there are the issues of lost connections - either from a poor deployment or new-building construction that can lead to shadowing of your signals from a transmission tower. Finally, just whe you get the bugs out ~ time to upgrade and add more cell sites. As far as infrastructure (computer & transmitter) costs, one sees maybe 20% for equipment, and 40% for site rental, power, and backhaul costs, and 40% for frequency licensing on a monthly capitalized basis. So owning the equipment is not a big deal ~ owning the spectrum and owning the rights to the transmit locations and backhaul is really what you're owning. Most importantly ~ making it work 24/7/everywhere is NOT EASY.
If each locality tries to develop their own expertise in site planning and deployment and maintenance, I fear that municipalities will be overrun by a sea of mediocre engineers with an overly limited worldview ~ that cannot be improved by deploying networks in tens or hundreds of cities, with lessons learned which are reapplied to new deployments.
I see it today in our cable television monopoly, which is municipally 'outsourced' to a cable provider. This is what most municipalities will end up doing if wireless is publically owned. Our service provider, Time Warner, is too stupid to make our cable modem work. One day, the signal is 20dB at the house, the next day, -15dB at our house. Ok, forget the cable modem. We recently upgraded from analog TV to digital TV and now they are too stupid to make all the paid-for channels work. I am talking literally 5 separate visits from field technicians with no progress (except one technician dumped a DVR at our house an upped our month bill!) As a result, we are going to switch to a satellite provider. The satellite provider has a Network Operations Center (NOC) and can afford to staff the NOC with the PhDs who built the system so that everything in the satellite system works, period, end of story. Unfortunately, a municipally owned wireless network will probably be staffed by yahoos with little knowledge of what it takes to make a system work.
Do you want to undo 150 years of good-faith laws that govern business transactions in this country?
...
If you come home and find out that you've been overcharged for an item, you have a right to go back to the store and I have NEVER had a merchant turn me down when such a mistake has been pointed out.
If Amazon accidentally UNDER CHARGES somebody, and that person knowingly takes advantage of the mistake, that person is DISHONEST.
If Amazon accidentally UNDER CHARGES somebody, and that person unknowingly takes advantage of the mistake, then they would obviously want to correct the transaction.
The American consumer has been spoiled lately by generous terms in buying and returning merchandise that is not desired. If you think it's o.k. to put a block on your credit card or otherwise try to weasle out of the stated sale price, then it's time to examine your morals, and the people who raised you as a child, because they did a piss-poor job imho of bringing you up right
In 1995, I modified BSD/OS (BSDI 3.0) to boot without the network. When it was able to detect the root name servers with a =ping, it would start up the networking code (not a solution i would recommend today - horribly hard on RNS's.) People at BSDI were amazed that this could be done, and wanted to learn more. If i remember correctly, without all that networking crap in there to put interlocks on the boot process, boot-up was something quick, like 10 secs or so ...
I saw that lego this year released a NEW set that allows you to build BUILDINGS !! I think the last time they did this was in 1962, when they release
...
Lego Set #717, which is the set that I was given in 1966, when I was 4 years old.
These days, kids hate legos because they spend most of the time looking for that custom piece that is lost in SOME OTHER LEGO SET of theirs. Or, because there are 17,298 different lego pieces, they spend most of the time searching a big pile of legos for piece #12821 to finish that model in the photograph...
After finishing the model in the photograph, kids either fall asleep, exhausted, or head for the kitchen for 10 cookies and a huge glass of 4% fat chocolate milk
I have two comments to make.
...)
1. In the late 1990's, Sun decreed that ANY employee who ported Linux to a Sun workstation would be FIRED. Hey, look at SUN now !! Aint they do'in great ??
2. When Xerox invented the laser printer, it was a 4-week job by the PARC PhD's who did brain surgery on a copier, adding a spinning mirror and a computer interface. It took THREE MONTHS, however, to write the software. Now Apple, the "THINK DIFFERENT" company that will supposedly "SET YOU FREE", is restricting what you can do with their products. What a buncha Scooter Libbeys !!! (I was gonna say "Benedict Arnolds" but realized the overseas people might not understand what I was talking about
'nuff said
The last time they did this, if i remember correctly, was in the year 800. it marked the beginning of 1000 years of mental darkness on this planet, ending in the renaissance. we will have people transcribing web pages onto vellum and hiding them in monasteries. let's hope that the next renaissance comes sooner than the last one did *sigh* ...
I STILL haven't heard anything that indicates the exact "innovation" of the NTP patents. Remember that one of the original sets of links in the Arpanet was ALOHA NET, in Hawaii, a CSMA wireless network (no CD). Remember that the original "killer app" for this partly-wireless network was email, rfc 788/822. I was writing and designing email systems 22 years ago, any patents in that era are long expired. Everything I've seen indicates that these patents are nuisance patents with no foundation, but I'm STILL waiting for the exact details about what was patented, and what was upheld in court!
Typical useless US & Canadian Press!
I am one of those californias with a $600k+ house. It's a $140k house and a $500k piece of land. I'd actually welcome an excuse to rebuild !! Most of us Californians live daily with the fact that the house built on our lot, costs less per square foot, than the dirt's value per square foot over the entire lot's surface area !!
In my studies I have learned that good quality voice has a one-way delay (mouth-ear) of 250 ms or less. When the delay exceeds 250 ms, there is a noticeable 20-30% loss of communications efficiency (speed of talking.) When the delay exceeds 400 ms, the system is known as a "CB" system ("Breaker, Breaker") or "PTT" system (alarm tones precede conversation). Otherwise the MAC built into your brain and vocal chords is unable to function effectively.
The efficiency of 802.11 is so low that almost any vocoder may be used. Think 100 bytes for each 802.11 MAC/PHY header, 40 Bytes for IP/UDP/RTP, and this happens every 20 milliseconds with most vocoders. Frankly, that's about 160 x 50 = 64 Kbps before you've transmitted one single bit of vocoded data, which is quite frankly, ridiculous.
Q-factor is a commonly used term in bicycling, it means the width of a crankset from pedal eye to pedal eye, typically 130 mm - 140 mm. I think that its unsurprising that physicists are now able to measure G-factor. We have been able to measure Q-factor for a long time.
I think that physicists should work on inventing new termnology rather than borrowing it from established fields such as bicycling.
I also recall from circuit complexity class that most VLSI circuits are dominated by the size of wires. That was 15 years ago. So I imagine that today's circuits are 99% wires, and 1% transistors. If the transistors stop shrinking, i'm not sure that matters very much. When the wires stop shrinking, then we are all hosed.
In fact, moore got it wrong when he declared his law. It's not important that we can double the number of transistors on a circuit every two years. What is more important is that we can halve the size of the wires on a circuit every two years. And I do not believe that the end of shrinking wires will arrive in 2016. It may not arrive until a decade later - i think that this article is something of a red herring.
Who says that the end of moore's law is such a bad thing ?? i remember from circuit complexity class that a lot of interesting and important circuits cannot be laid out on a 2-dimensional plane. Examples include wallace tree multipliers, which scale faster than two dimensions. Hypercube computers died because the interconnect fabric scaled faster than three dimensions.
Presumably if we come to the end of 2-dimensional circuitry, then work will advance in 3-dimensional circuitry (a la Foveon's 3-D imaging chip.) This could actually stimulate innovation in a different direction, which might be far more important to the computer industry than the last 20 years of "same old thing, shrink and add planar transistors..."
GNU is not UNIX. That's for sure. The one thing that the GNU project seems incapable of producing, is any rational decisions about what REALLY MATTERS in an operating system. As far as a GNU developer is concerned, if you can imagine a feature, you can get it into the GNU project next week.
That's not UNIX. That was never UNIX. And THAT NEVER WILL BE UNIX IN THE FUTURE.
IN my opinion (ok, here i turn on the flaming, AND my Lincoln plaigarism hats),
if destruction be thy lot for UNIX, at what point shall we expect the approach of danger?!?! Shall we expect some giant corporation (such as microsoft) to straddle the OS world and crush UNIX at a single blow ?? Never! All the armies of Microsoft and Intel combined, with all the treasures of Windows Revenue as warchests, could not by force banish UNIX, in a trial of a thousand years !!
I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from without. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freeware developers, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
And friends, the seeds of this suicide have been planted by the GNU project. Those are the seeds of over complexity, and an unwillingness to "distill" UNIX. We have evidence in the X windows project, which has become so complicated that people prefer to write HTML and avoid X windows source code like the plague. In the early days of UNIX (and of smalltalk), those seeds were weeded away, by total rewrites and condensations / restructurings of the system.
The GNU project is unwilling to exercise editorial control to say what belongs in an operating system, and what does not. The GNU project has been outstanding at including the kitchen sink, and then some, in every thing it offers. This is the MIT way, but this is not the way towards success, or towards a future, for UNIX. This is the MULTICS way, and MULTICS was a great failure (despite what many brainwashed MIT graduatess will tell you.) And this is killing UNIX faster than anything else.
>> Most of the rural US has no Internet service, and likely never will unless some government steps in and either mandates it or provides it.<<
This is blatently untrue, most national ISPs such as UUNet and AOL offer 1-800 numbers and so you can get Internet access anywhere that telephone service is available, which is everywhere.
Trinitron is no guarantee of quality. Most of the quality comes from a high performance wideband amplifier with a high refresh rate and a power supply that is robust when the screen is 1% white and 100% white (much more power being drawn with 100%).
For example, at home i have a zenith system 3 tv with comb filter and 600 lines, 12 yrs old. every bit as good as any xbr sony you can find. just because the glass is trinitron, doesn't mean the electronics are "up to snuff".
I think it's pretty easy to see why a laptop display is only $400 - $800, whereas a good monitor is $1200 or more. A laptop is a machine that is worthless in 3 years. An LCD monitor is a machine that should last a decade or more. Therefore, there is guaranteed obsolescence in the laptop product, ergo, the manufacturers can drop the price because they know there will be a new sale of the same type in 3 years.
Has anyone noticed that the japanese WILL NOT sell you a 15" or a 16" high-resolution TFT desktop display, either 1600x1200, or 1450x1024 ?? These displays must cost about $1000 fully fleshed out in a desktop enclosure.
Instead, we are forced to pay $1700 for an 18" display - at a minimum cost. Why?? It's the age-old vicious upgrade cycle - originated by the car industry and perfected by the greedy PC hardware industry. And that same Greedy PC Hardware Industry is pumping out useless crap thats starting to look like a 1965 GM automobile.
For you young turks, in the 1960's GM and Ford predicated their business model on a 2-year upgrade cycle. Cars were stamped in wild shapes from tin foil, and all the cloth and plastic and fasteners were all designed to fall apart after 2 years - forcing the car buyer to trade in a model every two years. This lasted until 1973 and then the US Car Makers got HAMMERED by eco-friendly durable automobiles from Toyota, Honda, and Nissan.
I predict that the PC Industry's ECO-ARMEGEDDON is less than 3 years away. Intel is facing serious problems - big corporate customers are going to a 4-year IT upgrade cycle instead of a 3-year upgrade cycle. This means 33% fewer sales for Intel and AMD.
Ok, so there is a limited amount of Spectrum. Can you explain why, then, the amount of "public" spectrum is FAR FAR LESS than the amount of "public" parks in the United States ??
.. 20 Ghz, we have about 250 Mhz of public space. In other words, only about 1% of this spectrum is publically owned !! The rest has been usurped by your federal government, in the same way that they damned the grand canyon, flooded the HetchHetchee Valley of California, and any number of other federal abominations done for "The good of everyone !!!" (yeah, because the benefactors made huge campaign contributions, that's who is "everyone")... like RCA and Sarnoff ... sheesh.
:
In the 2.4 Ghz band we have 83 Mhz of spectrum.
In the 900 Mhz band we have 26 Mhz of spectrum.
In the 418 Mhz band we have ?? Mhz of spectrum.
In the 5.7 Ghz band we have 125 Mhz of spectrum.
In total, from 0
If we sold LAND the way we sold SPECTRUM, then the sale would be something like this
How much am i bid for all the rivers in america?
How much am i bid for all the valleys in america?
The fact is, cellular technology makes modern spectrum auctions STUPID AND IDIOTIC. Modern spectrum should be sold ONLY WHEN ATTACHED TO A PIECE OF LAND BENEATH IT. To do otherwise is to GROSSLY waste public resources.
I live in southern california. We recently bought a home stereo with 40 channel presets (AM and FM shared). When we told it to "preset all stations", it barely got through the FM channels, stored about 5 AM channels, and then ran out of presets !! So in some areas, the AM and FM frequency bands are very very crowded.
It's criminal, however, to charge $10k for a license in South San Francisco and $10k for a license in South Dakota. The cost should be something like this : If you want to put out K watts (e.g. roughly K miles of transmission), then you should pay $.01 for every citizen that lives within K miles of your transmitter, every year.
That would be fair. But the Poli(criminal)ticians would never hear of it !!
If i were teaching again at a university, i would run an open-source project as follows.
1. To do an open-source project requires 2 semesters (1 year) of work. There just isn't enough time to do something worthwhile in 1 semester. Therefore, to do a project with me, you'd have to agree (in principal) to sign up for two semesters of independent study.
2. In the first 20% of the project, the student would pick a topic area and write a thorough survey about what is available in that area. To save time, i would make available good surveys from previous students (if any). The survey would also contain a proposal for how to write something new and/or innovative in the domain.
There are many tired over-worked areas in computer science, such as real-time OS kernels, or C compilers, etc. To do a project in one of these tired areas, you'd have to present a really honking great idea in the first week or two of the class in order to be able to work on these dead topics. I would have a set of 10 canned idea areas but would not turn to these until the student had failed twice with their own ideas.
2. In the second 30% of the time, student would write a spec and pull together a development environment, including writing any software or hardware tools or developing ideas for any testing tools needed to complete the task.
3. Last 40-50% of the time is devoted to writing the code.
This is sort of what happened with my B.S. thesis in 1984, and it became a pretty successful open source project (the PC/IP multitasking TCP and SMTP).
This is a very hard thing for a faculty member to support because there is a lot of risk in step (1) that the student fails to find something interesting, and becaue of the need to hand out a grade at the end of the first semester, and allowing for the possibility that the student drops out of school, transfers, gets into a car wreck, hates my guts, or whatever, and gives up.
The reason why mathematicians don't like computer work ?? Because a lot of the "inventions" cannot be attributed to a sole genius. And so in the field of computers there isn't enough space for the hyperspace-filling egos that you find in mathematics and physics.
The fact is, NOBODY, NOT EVEN KLEINROCK, DAVIES, AND BAREN, IN SUM OR SEPARATELY, INVENTED PACKET SWITCHING. You see, the idea did not work for almost 25 years after it was "supposedly" invented by Kleinrock et. al. It wasn't until Van Jacobsen and Karels applied optimal queuing theory and tight feedback control to exponential backoff and "slow start" to TCP feedback congestion control that packet switching was worth a damn.
I was a user of the Arpanet from 1980-1984, and the dang thing almost never worked. It would take a whole minute just to open a pair of TCP connections in order to download a single RFC. The Arpanet was badly, badly broken. Kleinrock was not responsible for making the Internet scale. What Kleinrock invented was a broke piece of crud in 1985, 1986, etc.
Do we attribute the invention of the computer to Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley (hint : given in order of true technical contribution) because these guys invented the transistor ?? No, those guys only invented a "piece" of the modern computer - it was up to others to finish the puzzle. And it's similarly unfair to try to attribute the invention of packet switching to any ONE person, since it took 25 years to get all of the bugs out.