Once they are in a car I believe the extra (false) sense of safety will lead to an increase in the already high rate of unsafe driving, and so safety will actually drop.
They don't need more cars, they need better licensing and training.
The US definitely needs this also. Between the cell phone idiots and people who just shouldn't be driving, being on the road in the US is not a particularly safe place to be either.
Why does NASA have a fixation on sending single units to Mars ?
Why can't NASA work on a mission which will deposit 10's or 100's of rovers ?
Granted, there is a weight problem here, since each rover would have to be very light to carry that many of them to Mars.
However imagine the coolness factor of 20 or 30 sojourners running around the surface of mars. You could split modularized science experiments up among them, having a basic structure and each having a set of modular science experiment units.
With modularized components built in (relatively) large quantities the marginal cost of sending 30 rovers to Mars should be minimal.
Seems to me that your chances of finding something interesting go up dramatically.
As you may well know a single diode and an RC makes a perfectly good AM radio and that's what it looks like this nanotube is acting like.
So I'm going to go with... meh.
Single chip receivers are already cheap and easy all the way through 6GHz. I'm not really sure that this really advances the state of the art. It certainly doesn't help for Wifi systems. It's the support circuitry like RSSI and AGC which eat up a lot of the real-estate. The amp and mixer are typically less than a dozen transistors, or maybe two -dozen.
Also, without gain, which this thing almost certainly does not have, it's basically acting like a resonator, it's going to be a really lousy receiver. Of course it might have gain if it operates in a way which gives it negative resistance, which is possible.
Looks like the usual attention getting press release. Gotta let people know what you are doing with all of that research money.
Their production method is not wafer based. Much more efficient in both energy and material, in spite of the fact that they grow the ribbons in mid-air ! Be sure and watch the video on their site, it's fun.
Open as few ports as absolutely possible. I have nothing open on my router except port 22 and BitTorrent, and I don't leave BitTorrent running all the time.
truly good advice.
I noticed someone trying to get in on port 22 so I've since moved ssh to a different port.
Security through obscurity ? Somewhat. But somebody is going to have to look through a lot of ports to find it, and that makes the trail in the logs very noticeable.
I realize that it may not be possible to move ssh to a non-standard port on all systems.
fewer people making food makes the agricultural system more sensitive to disruption whether due to political upheaval, new and exciting crop pests, weather misfortunes, etc... Many folks on slashdot realize the advantages of decentralized, i.e. distributed systems, and it's an especially good thing for food production.
Also, the argicultural "miracle" we are currently seeing, is borrowing from the future to pay for itself in terms of environmental damage. You should really be worried when growing food hurts the environment, it really shouldn't be that way.
Nature is lots of small things working together - each of the pieces have a well defined capability. Yes it seems obvious, and yet, the amount of research into this particular line of reasoning doesn't seem to have expaned much over the yers. Lately "emergence", complexity arising from simplicity, is starting to become the topic de jour.
The philosophy of subsumption architecture has always appealed to me because it seems that it emulates the idea that higher layers "collect" behvior from simpler layers.
The fish deaths are not due to oxygen deprivation from the algae; rather, some algae blooms produce toxins that kill off fish. In smaller waters (like ponds and slow-moving rivers) algae exerts downward pressure on fish populations by outcompeting other organisms in the fish's food web
See, for example, the infamous Gulf of Mexico dead zone at the mouth of the Missisippi:
I don't think evolution would be very kind to unneeded material. It's always been my hypothesis that the "junk DNA" has something to do with error correction. After all DNA is most certainly a form of information, and resistance to corruption of that information should definitely provide an evolutionary advantage.
2. Why can't we get the information just how far away the "full bandwidth" works, instead of finding out without fail that most APs can hardly provide the promised bandwidth over distances more than 5 yards? Marketing. Like all marketing they have to quote you the biggest number. The biggest number, i.e. the highest data rate is ALWAYS the worst performer in terms of range. So you have 2 choices. Hardcode the WLAN system for the data rate that you need . The manufacturers should use "rate fallback" to handle increasing interference/distance, but they they seem to have uniformly poor implementations.
3. How long 'til we can't use WiFi anymore because all frequencies are already taken by your neighbors and the companies around you? Worse, can you soon be forced to discontinue your WiFi use because the company next door needs your frequency? (Because, yes, it's unusable past 20 yards but can easily interfere with networks a few miles away, it seems) It will be not too long methinks. 2.4GHz is very crowded. What's even more boneheaded is the new requirement in 802.11 know as "high rate". It will allow ONLY 1 CHANNEL to operate in the 2.4GHz band because it doubles the bandwidth used. STUPID, STUPID, STUPID. Marketing of course, having a high rate mode using double the bandwidth allows you to advertise an even higher, although almost worthless, data rate.
5GHz is supposed to help with these problems, and it can to a certain extent. Unfortunately the path loss is higher for the higher frequency, so you immediately lose about 1/2 your range. However, if you can use a lower data rate with better signal to noise performance, you can make that up. Letting the system try to automatically maintain the rate seems to work poorly since it tries to maintain the highest data rate as opposed to the necessary data rate.
The last time I tried working with WLAN clients, I seem to recall that maintaining control over the datarate was a real problem. Too bad, even you only need a 12MB/s connection instead of 36MB/s you would definitely enjoy better performance. The manufacturers need to make it easy for use to control those parameters.
just move just move along now it's just more nothing to see here, along now nothing to see here,parallel processing it's just move along now it's just nothing to see here, just more parallel processing just move more parallel along now nothing to see here, more parallel processing it's just processing
We need to get rid of the outdated concept of fuel efficiency in general.
The real issue is energy, i.e. Joules, no matter what you are talking about.
Watts, the rate of energy consumption, are indirectly useful. Ultimately it's the total amount of energy used to complete a given task which is important, whether that's transportation (km/joule) or heating (deg C/Joule) or running your computer (MFLOPS/joule).
So the proper metric is to figure out how much distance a vehicle can get out of a given amount of energy.
It is still meaningful even when solar cells (for recharging) are considered. An energy inefficient vehicle will require more solar cells because it may require a bigger solar array to recharge the larger amount of batteries. The bigger array and the larger amount of batteries have an energy cost associated with them due to their manufacturing.
This all leads to a discussion about total energy cost too (something the ethanol crowd doesn't consider). An inefficient solar car needs more solar cells, which cost more energy to produce, which figures into the overall energy efficiency of the vehicle.
"In the end he suggests that those lobbying Dell for such a solution go out and put together a company and offer one themselves."
Then they dumped the hardware, started selling sourceforge, their stock tanked, and most of their stockholders got f*cked. I believe there was at least one lawsuit over the whole affair.
So maybe that's not a great idea for a business opportunity.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to COMPLETELY block my new PC with XP from going out of the local network. Until I'm sure I have it right, I don't even have an ethernet cable connected to it.
So believe it or not, I'm simply transferring files via usb drive.
I use a Mac most of the time, and given all the hoopla about evil Micro$oft, I wonder if evil Apple is doing a bit of the same thing and maybe they are just not getting the press ?
I keep hearing this persistent rumor that it's disk spin-up which is the most significant contribution to disk failure. The moral of the story is that systems which are left on 24/7 are less likely to see HD failures than systems turned on/off everyday.
Now if that's really true, wouldn't it be quite simple for the manufacturers to simply spin-up the disk more slowly by putting in very simple and reliable motor control circuitry ?
Does anyone have any real evidence, i.e. not anecdotal, that this is really true.
"The way forward as I see it either a set of clearly defined standards for networked applications, with either the client taking the brunt of the workload, or the server, or a combination of both, or going back to thin clients and dumb terminals, which shouldn't work all that bad these days with broadband."
If the stability of the dye is the problem, then storing at lower temperatures will almost certainly slow the degradation.
Freezing probably wouldn't work though, I'm guessing that the disk could be damagerd due to water trapper inside the disk manufacture or water which is part of the dye formulation. It would be fairly simple to test.
Preserve your TVs and add thermal mass to your refrigerator at the same time !
You are confusing regulation with enforcement. People using illegal transmitters should be prosecuted as they are not allowed to do that.
Moglen's point is that the FCC is currently in charge of allocation and that's the problem. Because the FCC is a government entity, spectrum control is, in fact, going to be driven by those with the most cash, and not for public benefit. Opening up spectrum to general use and placing very clear rules on transmitter power in a meaningful way, i.e. limits on antenna gain and spectral density , pretty much solves the problem.
Opening up the spectrum and then ENFORCING the rules is what should happen. The current spectral micromanagement by the FCC is in fact a bad thing.
Then there is the fact that they are not trying to enforce things like the broadcast flag which affect your RECEPTION of the airwaves. The fact that it is illegal to receive satellite broadcasts without "approved" hardware is insane, and yet it is currently the law.
We all share the roads, but that doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want. It should be the same with spectrum.
Here are two interesting factoids for consideration. The first I am sure is from Scientific American. I am relatively sure the second is also.
1. Someone managed to get funding to study sleep in FRUIT FLIES. How do you get that kind of funding ! In any event the researcher pestered the flies, either by disturbing them or by administering caffeine. Turns out the flies started having a really hard time flying and performing other fly actions. If flies need sleep then there is something tremendously fundamental about sleep that is probably impervious to drugs. Perhaps you can be deprived in the short term with better performance...
2. A canonical rat experiment was done. I don't remember this too well but I believe that the final verdict on the test was: keep rats awake ALL the time and eventually they starve to death, regardless of how many calories they consume. interesting, eh ?
Number 2 may relate to the fact that the brain consumes both calories and oxygen well in excess of its mass relative to the rest of the body.
My hypothesis is that sleep is more of a metabolic-related process than it is a mental-related process.
Say what you want but this is continued evidence of us decline. Why don't people get the concept that just because wages go up in the rest of the world, they will in the US also. It is clearly not happening. The world economy will "average" out. This process means an inevitable fall in standard of living in the US, Europe and probably Japan also.
In about a generation or so, things will _probably_ even out, but in the meantime the US if f*cked. In fact, in the long term the US may be f*cked also. The US as a market will be much smaller than India-Asia, and so employment and mfg will be centered there. It will be interesting watching the US devolve into a 3rd world economic classification.
Slashdot Mirror
Once they are in a car I believe the extra (false) sense of safety will lead to an increase in the already high rate of unsafe driving, and so safety will actually drop.
They don't need more cars, they need better licensing and training.
The US definitely needs this also. Between the cell phone idiots and people who just shouldn't be driving, being on the road in the US is not a particularly safe place to be either.
Spoken as a motorcyle AND bicyle rider.
Just look around at the state of software and tell me with a straight face that intelligent software agent is not an oxymoron.
File this under what could possibly go wrong.
As to why private offices are such a good idea.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
Why does NASA have a fixation on sending single units to Mars ?
Why can't NASA work on a mission which will deposit 10's or 100's of rovers ?
Granted, there is a weight problem here, since each rover would have to be very light to carry that many of them to Mars.
However imagine the coolness factor of 20 or 30 sojourners running around the surface of mars. You could split modularized science experiments up among them, having a basic structure and each having a set of modular science experiment units.
With modularized components built in (relatively) large quantities the marginal cost of sending 30 rovers to Mars should be minimal.
Seems to me that your chances of finding something interesting go up dramatically.
As you may well know a single diode and an RC makes a perfectly good AM radio and that's what it looks like this nanotube is acting like.
So I'm going to go with... meh.
Single chip receivers are already cheap and easy all the way through 6GHz. I'm not really sure that this really advances the state of the art. It certainly doesn't help for Wifi systems. It's the support circuitry like RSSI and AGC which eat up a lot of the real-estate. The amp and mixer are typically less than a dozen transistors, or maybe two -dozen.
Also, without gain, which this thing almost certainly does not have, it's basically acting like a resonator, it's going to be a really lousy receiver. Of course it might have gain if it operates in a way which gives it negative resistance, which is possible.
Looks like the usual attention getting press release. Gotta let people know what you are doing with all of that research money.
double meh...
Truly. Energy efficiency in solar cell production is a good thing. There are some companies which are attempting to be more efficient.
Evergreen SolarTheir production method is not wafer based. Much more efficient in both energy and material, in spite of the fact that they grow the ribbons in mid-air ! Be sure and watch the video on their site, it's fun.
truly good advice.
I noticed someone trying to get in on port 22 so I've since moved ssh to a different port. Security through obscurity ? Somewhat. But somebody is going to have to look through a lot of ports to find it, and that makes the trail in the logs very noticeable.
I realize that it may not be possible to move ssh to a non-standard port on all systems.
fewer people making food makes the agricultural system more sensitive to disruption whether due to political upheaval, new and exciting crop pests, weather misfortunes, etc... Many folks on slashdot realize the advantages of decentralized, i.e. distributed systems, and it's an especially good thing for food production.
Also, the argicultural "miracle" we are currently seeing, is borrowing from the future to pay for itself in terms of environmental damage. You should really be worried when growing food hurts the environment, it really shouldn't be that way.
Nature is lots of small things working together - each of the pieces have a well defined capability. Yes it seems obvious, and yet, the amount of research into this particular line of reasoning doesn't seem to have expaned much over the yers. Lately "emergence", complexity arising from simplicity, is starting to become the topic de jour.
The philosophy of subsumption architecture has always appealed to me because it seems that it emulates the idea that higher layers "collect" behvior from simpler layers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecSee, for example, the infamous Gulf of Mexico dead zone at the mouth of the Missisippi:
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzI don't think evolution would be very kind to unneeded material.
It's always been my hypothesis that the "junk DNA" has something to do with error correction.
After all DNA is most certainly a form of information, and resistance to corruption of that information should definitely provide an evolutionary advantage.
5GHz is supposed to help with these problems, and it can to a certain extent. Unfortunately the path loss is higher for the higher frequency, so you immediately lose about 1/2 your range. However, if you can use a lower data rate with better signal to noise performance, you can make that up. Letting the system try to automatically maintain the rate seems to work poorly since it tries to maintain the highest data rate as opposed to the necessary data rate.
The last time I tried working with WLAN clients, I seem to recall that maintaining control over the datarate was a real problem. Too bad, even you only need a 12MB/s connection instead of 36MB/s you would definitely enjoy better performance. The manufacturers need to make it easy for use to control those parameters.
just move just move along now it's just more nothing to see here, along now nothing to see here,parallel processing it's just move along now it's just nothing to see here, just more parallel processing just move more parallel along now nothing to see here, more parallel processing it's just processing
Why are the links always to crappy re-statements of the original press release ?
o lar.htm
Here's the original
http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/3d-s
We need to get rid of the outdated concept of fuel efficiency in general.
The real issue is energy, i.e. Joules, no matter what you are talking about.
Watts, the rate of energy consumption, are indirectly useful. Ultimately it's the total amount of energy used to complete a given task which is important, whether that's transportation (km/joule) or heating (deg C/Joule) or running your computer (MFLOPS/joule).
So the proper metric is to figure out how much distance a vehicle can get out of a given amount of energy.
It is still meaningful even when solar cells (for recharging) are considered. An energy inefficient vehicle will require more solar cells because it may require a bigger solar array to recharge the larger amount of batteries. The bigger array and the larger amount of batteries have an energy cost associated with them due to their manufacturing.
This all leads to a discussion about total energy cost too (something the ethanol crowd doesn't consider). An inefficient solar car needs more solar cells, which cost more energy to produce, which figures into the overall energy efficiency of the vehicle.
"Sounds really interesting. I wonder if any of this applies to antenna design at average RF."
yes it does.
Fractal antenna design is old news at this point.
You get a modest reduction in antenna design, but it really excels at giving you a broadband design. So it's particularly handy for UWB.
"In the end he suggests that those lobbying Dell for such a solution go out and put together a company and offer one themselves."
Then they dumped the hardware, started selling sourceforge, their stock tanked, and most of their stockholders got f*cked. I believe there was at least one lawsuit over the whole affair.
So maybe that's not a great idea for a business opportunity.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to COMPLETELY block my new PC with XP from going out of the local network. Until I'm sure I have it right, I don't even have an ethernet cable connected to it.
So believe it or not, I'm simply transferring files via usb drive.
I use a Mac most of the time, and given all the hoopla about evil Micro$oft, I wonder if evil Apple is doing a bit of the same thing and maybe they are just not getting the press ?
I keep hearing this persistent rumor that it's disk spin-up which is the most significant contribution to disk failure. The moral of the story is that systems which are left on 24/7 are less likely to see HD failures than systems turned on/off everyday.
Now if that's really true, wouldn't it be quite simple for the manufacturers to simply spin-up the disk more slowly by putting in very simple and reliable motor control circuitry ?
Does anyone have any real evidence, i.e. not anecdotal, that this is really true.
"The way forward as I see it either a set of clearly defined standards for networked applications, with either the client taking the brunt of the workload, or the server, or a combination of both, or going back to thin clients and dumb terminals, which shouldn't work all that bad these days with broadband."
Isn't that what X-Windows was designed for ?
If the stability of the dye is the problem, then storing at lower temperatures will almost certainly slow the degradation.
Freezing probably wouldn't work though, I'm guessing that the disk could be damagerd due to water trapper inside the disk manufacture or water which is part of the dye formulation. It would be fairly simple to test.
Preserve your TVs and add thermal mass to your refrigerator at the same time !
He may not know beans but he does have a point.
You are confusing regulation with enforcement. People using illegal transmitters should be prosecuted as they are not allowed to do that.
Moglen's point is that the FCC is currently in charge of allocation and that's the problem. Because the FCC is a government entity, spectrum control is, in fact, going to be driven by those with the most cash, and not for public benefit. Opening up spectrum to general use and placing very clear rules on transmitter power in a meaningful way, i.e. limits on antenna gain and spectral density , pretty much solves the problem.
Opening up the spectrum and then ENFORCING the rules is what should happen. The current spectral micromanagement by the FCC is in fact a bad thing.
Then there is the fact that they are not trying to enforce things like the broadcast flag which affect your RECEPTION of the airwaves. The fact that it is illegal to receive satellite broadcasts without "approved" hardware is insane, and yet it is currently the law.
We all share the roads, but that doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want.
It should be the same with spectrum.
Here are two interesting factoids for consideration. The first I am sure is from Scientific American. I am relatively sure the second is also.
1. Someone managed to get funding to study sleep in FRUIT FLIES. How do you get that kind of funding ! In any event the researcher pestered the flies, either by disturbing them or by administering caffeine. Turns out the flies started having a really hard time flying and performing other fly actions. If flies need sleep then there is something tremendously fundamental about sleep that is probably impervious to drugs. Perhaps you can be deprived in the short term with better performance...
2. A canonical rat experiment was done. I don't remember this too well but I believe that the final verdict on the test was: keep rats awake ALL the time and eventually they starve to death, regardless of how many calories they consume. interesting, eh ?
Number 2 may relate to the fact that the brain consumes both calories and oxygen well in excess of its mass relative to the rest of the body.
My hypothesis is that sleep is more of a metabolic-related process than it is a mental-related process.
These standards committees really need to focus on distance before datarate.
I just can't wait to get 540Mbits/s @ 5m line-of-sight...
Say what you want but this is continued evidence of us decline. Why don't people get the concept that just because wages go up in the rest of the world, they will in the US also. It is clearly not happening. The world economy will "average" out. This process means an inevitable fall in standard of living in the US, Europe and probably Japan also.
In about a generation or so, things will _probably_ even out, but in the meantime the US if f*cked. In fact, in the long term the US may be f*cked also. The US as a market will be much smaller than India-Asia, and so employment and mfg will be centered there. It will be interesting watching the US devolve into a 3rd world economic classification.
There is no such thing as free trade.