Their campaign attracted a lot of negative PR because of the fairly undiplomatic messages coming from Hilary. Now that she's been personally identified with the negative image her value to the RIAA is diminished.
The next talking head for the RIAA will use much more diplomatic words to avoid the same mistake.
As we all know, the RIAA will continue to be every bit the bulldog.
I'm not convinced that you will be able to demonstrate tremendously better power utilization in practice vs. a spread-spectrum system with similar characteristics.
Huh?
You're not trolling me are you ? There is a very clear AND appreciable difference and the differences are rooted in communications theory.
For similar data rates UWB has a dinstinct power advantage for multiple reasons which include the back-end processing. In other words the digital circuitry which handles the data is simpler and so there is a structural advantage. I guess we'll have to define "trememndously". As much as batteries still suck, I define trememendously as may be a 3x or 4x improvement, i.e. I claim that a 10Mbit/s radio which needs 1W, like 802.11B for instance, will only need.25 -.3W. And that's very conservative.
I do agree that there is plenty of hype to go around on the UWB front and one should always be skeptical. The fact is that the hardware is significantly simpler than other radios and that includes bluetooth. So it will always maintain a cost advantage. Now if that advantage is $0.5 then yeah - who cares.
And remember that Bluetooth had a lot of kool-aid associated with it. So far it is failing to deliver spectacularly, at least in the states.
I'm not trying to imply that "everything has been invented", but I think it's reasonable to argue that the "easy" technological advances have happened.
The things that are left take either much more sophisticated science, or sophisticated materials, and therefore have longer development times.
If you were to graph true innovation (NOT incremental) innovation vs. time I think that the curve is starting to flatten out. We're starting to bump into fundamental physical limitations on a lot of things: IC devices which are subject to quantum effects, the earth's gravity well wrt space travel, high T superconductors.
There's still plenty of room for invention (!), but the time and effort between true invention is becoming greater.
not quite as good as a plasma torch
on
Tornado in a Can
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The plasma torch has a better potential of destroying dangerous compounds and generating energy at the same time.
It's really interesting stuff.
http://gtalumni.org/StayInformed/magazine/sum02/ ar ticle2.html
The article talks about IONS colliding with atoms and causing secondary radiation. I would like to get clarification on this point.
If it really is ions causing the problem then a strong magnetic field should provide some protection, just as the earth's field does. In fact the article talks about a significant increase in radiation when outside the earth's magnetic field.
A strong magnetic field might be enough to allow deep space travel. If it's primarily electromagnetic radiation, i.e. photons then your screwed, of course.
I don't know what this lighting is, although I suspect it may be "sulfur" lighting.
However if it's going to trash your wireless network then the chances are good that you won't even install it in the first place. That takes care of homes and _probably_ office buildings.
The problem is going to be "public areas" where the lighting is installed to save on electricity costs, and then interferes with ISP's as the article stated. This of course assumes that the lighting is so much more efficient than sodium or mercury vapor that it's worth the expense of installing it in the first place.
Although abundance doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to get to, or does it ?
There was an article in WSJ a while back which basically said that if Ti could be more easily extracted, it would take over steel. Apparently it's hard to get the metal out purely.
Obviously that's not true for TiO2 which is used as white pigment in darn near everything.
Alivisatos and other team members believe their design could be beefed up for use in calculators or other small solar devices in two to five years.
Who the f*ck cares ? You can already buy solar powered calculators. In 2 to 5 years they are going to do something you can already do ?
Every few years there is going to be a big breakthrough in solar. First it was amorphous, now it's polymer.
As long as research programs like this are getting 100's of thousands of dollars while the wars the US fights to keep oil supplies stable cost 10's of billions of dollars - don't bet on solar.
The ideal antenna performs best if it is exactly perpendicular to the impinging waveform.
This is somewhat misleading.
You should really be talking about the relative orientations of the TX and RX antennas.
It then depends on the polarization of the RX antenna and the polarization of the TX antenna.
If the incoming wave and the antenna have the same polarizations, and the antenna is "perpendicular" to the incoming wave, you'll actually get 0 signal. You want the antenna to be "parallel".
What cell phones really need from improved performance is diversity, i.e. 2 antennas, perferably of differing polarizations.
Correspondence between Jefferson and Madison regarding the drafting of the Copyright Clause
and then read the mailing list message, there is a beauty in there by Madison. He thought that "monopolies" would be OK, for a limited time, and that there was little probability of abuse because of the democratic system being created in the US.
With regard to monopolies they are justly
classed among the greates nuisances in government.
But is it clear that as encouragements to literary
works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too
valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not
suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public
to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified
in the grant of it? Is there not also infinitely
less danger of this abuse in our governments than in
most others? Monopolies are sacrifices of the many
Follow the link ! The Madison and Jefferson writings are just great. It's the "inifinitely less danger" part which kills me. It's obvious our current payola system of government would be abhorrent to the founders.
1. If you read the _original_ ruling in this case you will find that the judges said something to the effect of - it's not up to use to determine if 70 years is "too long". Utter hogwash of course, it is up to them to determine whether a specified amount of time is constitutional under the limited time provision. The whole ruling was just ridiculous - you are encouraged to read it. Pay particular attention to the comments of the (lone) dissenter.
2. If the supreme court rules in favor of the copyright extensions it's going to be a dark day indeed - there will be no _legal_ recourse left to the forces of good.
Really ? And how many cell phone RF designs have you done ?
Hundreds, if not thousands of shops can churn out a good RF design for a phone.
If you are trying to say that the RF design is not difficult because there are lots of RF chipset available, that's like saying Athlon 1GHz MB design is easy because there are lots of Athlons and MB chipsets available.
Making a cellular RF design work is one thing, getting it to work so that it meets the VERY demanding specs of the system providers for millions of units is quite another.
once your codec is done and in the DSP, you're done.
This is misleading at best. You say it yourself voice-data and digital. Even many analog phones can run CDPD, and all modern 2G digital phones do circuit-switched data.
I don't have time to read verse from IS-136. The fact is that the data is organized and dedicated to moving data for a vselp codec NOT as simply data. Any system which would move pure data would have to be implemented directly into the DSP's handling the codec function.
Running CDPD on analog phones is a kluge. It works and that's about all you can say for it.
As for 2G phones, I specifically mentioned OLDER digital phones in my post. I believe that the newer phones do have provisions for data, but this still doesn't change the fact that firmware changes were/are required to support this.
All those Qualcomm engineers are not working on RF design (or Eudora bug fixes)... 2G/2.5G/3G is all about complex signal processing and protocol engineering!
That's a good point, protocol design and codec design is complex. But it's easier to test and it's easier to put into production.
By far the most complex part of a cell phone is the RF design. Saying you have a CPU which allows cell phone connections is meaningless marketing drivel. Intel will NOT be putting the RF into their CPU in our lifetimes.
Look at how small cell phones are right now. It's completely conceivable that you could simply put everything you need in a PCMCIA card or a USB attachment widget. Especially for laptops what's so un-portable about that ?
The problem with internet cellular connections is that the DSP's and operating firmware in cell phones are competely dedicated to moving voice-data. They expect voice-data at both ends. If you take an oldish cell phone (still digital) it is simply not aware, and cannot be made aware, that you just want to pass pure data.
Wait it gets worse. The cell-site expects everything to be voice data too. You have to go in and replace the firmware in the DSP's and controllers in the phones AND the cell sites to make this all work.
Now that we've had some hindsight on this issue, the correct design decision is to move data with QOS. Then you see how much BW you have available for voice data and design your codec appropriately.
Basically that's why there is now something called 3G.
This is the silliest press release I've seen in a long time.
But that doesn't mean that it's not subject to a lot of political bullshit. Here ya go :
UWB : 1uW in 5GHz BW => 200E-18 W/Hz
US Digital Cell phone BW is 30kHz
total intercepted noise in a 30kHz BW : 6E-12W => -82dBm
Assume 40dB path loss from UWB device to cell device : -122 dBm. Which is generous, if the guy standing next to you is using a UWB device the path loss is more like -30dB.
Thermal noise floor kTB = 1.38E-23 x 300 x 30kHz
That's 124E-18 W => -129 dBm
So my cell phone sensitivity just lost 7dB which will cut the range by 1/2 and that's for 1 UWB device.
Guess what happens when there is 10 of them ?
Guess what happens if I need 10uW.
I take the "patient" and put him or her in a shielded room so that the detectors all read 0.
Naturally I have a partition in the room so that I can beam waves at the "patient" from the other side of the partition (the partition is also part of the shielded room) without their knowledge.
Turn on the transmitter at random intervals and see if and, more importantly, when, they complain.
But 3D Realms CEO Scott Miller wasn't very upset to hear about his product getting the Vaporware top spot. "It's a very ambitious game," he said. "It's not cookie-cutter shooter like most are nowadays
If it's another FPS, how can it NOT be cookie-cutter ?
Slashdot Mirror
Their campaign attracted a lot of negative PR because of the fairly undiplomatic messages coming from Hilary. Now that she's been personally identified with the negative image her value to the RIAA is diminished.
The next talking head for the RIAA will use much more diplomatic words to avoid the same mistake.
As we all know, the RIAA will continue to be every bit the bulldog.
I thought of it too late. :
What you really wanted to say was
C n yo he r me n w ?
hehe
I'm not convinced that you will be able to demonstrate tremendously better power utilization in practice vs. a spread-spectrum system with similar characteristics.
Huh?
You're not trolling me are you ? There is a very clear AND appreciable difference and the differences are rooted in communications theory. For similar data rates UWB has a dinstinct power advantage for multiple reasons which include the back-end processing. In other words the digital circuitry which handles the data is simpler and so there is a structural advantage. I guess we'll have to define "trememndously". As much as batteries still suck, I define trememendously as may be a 3x or 4x improvement, i.e. I claim that a 10Mbit/s radio which needs 1W, like 802.11B for instance, will only need .25 - .3W. And that's very conservative.
I do agree that there is plenty of hype to go around on the UWB front and one should always be skeptical. The fact is that the hardware is significantly simpler than other radios and that includes bluetooth. So it will always maintain a cost advantage. Now if that advantage is $0.5 then yeah - who cares.And remember that Bluetooth had a lot of kool-aid associated with it. So far it is failing to deliver spectacularly, at least in the states.
You obviously are not familiar with UWB.
WiFi and eventually 802.11a are lousy portable technologies due to power consumption.
UWB is a very power efficient scheme and _inherently_ less expensive.
UWB will make a difference if the FCC will let it - and they are showing a lot of signs of moving in that direction.
It's biggest hurdle is the installed infrastructure problem. WiFi will be so pervasive it may be hard for UWB to become widely used for some time.
I'm not trying to imply that "everything has been invented", but I think it's reasonable to argue that the "easy" technological advances have happened.
The things that are left take either much more sophisticated science, or sophisticated materials, and therefore have longer development times.
If you were to graph true innovation (NOT incremental) innovation vs. time I think that the curve is starting to flatten out. We're starting to bump into fundamental physical limitations on a lot of things: IC devices which are subject to quantum effects, the earth's gravity well wrt space travel, high T superconductors.
There's still plenty of room for invention (!), but the time and effort between true invention is becoming greater.
The plasma torch has a better potential of destroying
/ ar ticle2.html
dangerous compounds and generating energy at the
same time.
It's really interesting stuff.
http://gtalumni.org/StayInformed/magazine/sum02
The article talks about IONS colliding with atoms and causing secondary radiation. I would like to get clarification on this point.
If it really is ions causing the problem then a strong magnetic field should provide some protection, just as the earth's field does. In fact the article talks about a significant increase in radiation when outside the earth's magnetic field.
A strong magnetic field might be enough to allow deep space travel. If it's primarily electromagnetic radiation, i.e. photons then your screwed, of course.
WTF?
but it's pronounced Digital RESTRICTIONS Management.
I'm not sure who originated the term, I first saw it attributed to RMS.
Digital Rights Management is total Orwellian double-speak.
I like to think of the net as a non-linear resonant
circuit. The correct starting conditions give
you very large responses to "small" inputs.
It's resonant so you see "ringing" in the response.
Seems to me that you can definitely look at the
earth's crust in a similar manner.
I don't know what this lighting is, although I suspect it may be "sulfur" lighting.
However if it's going to trash your wireless network then the chances are good that you won't even install it in the first place. That takes care of homes and _probably_ office buildings.
The problem is going to be "public areas" where the lighting is installed to save on electricity costs, and then interferes with ISP's as the article stated. This of course assumes that the lighting is so much more efficient than sodium or mercury vapor that it's worth the expense of installing it in the first place.
And it's going to take years.
Far from an ELE.
A breakthrough in solar energy ?
I wonder what the energy density from the sun is in the IR spectrum ?
Check out :
http://www.science.co.il/PTelements.asp?s=Earth
Although abundance doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to get to, or does it ?
There was an article in WSJ a while back which basically said that if Ti could be more easily extracted, it would take over steel. Apparently it's hard to get the metal out purely.
Obviously that's not true for TiO2 which is used as white pigment in darn near everything.
Pretty soon it will be shoulder launched nukes which you can aim just by looking.
Who the f*ck cares ? You can already buy solar powered calculators. In 2 to 5 years they are going to do something you can already do ?
Every few years there is going to be a big breakthrough in solar. First it was amorphous, now it's polymer. As long as research programs like this are getting 100's of thousands of dollars while the wars the US fights to keep oil supplies stable cost 10's of billions of dollars - don't bet on solar.
This is somewhat misleading.
You should really be talking about the relative orientations of the TX and RX antennas.
It then depends on the polarization of the RX antenna and the polarization of the TX antenna.
If the incoming wave and the antenna have the same polarizations, and the antenna is "perpendicular" to the incoming wave, you'll actually get 0 signal. You want the antenna to be "parallel".
What cell phones really need from improved performance is diversity, i.e. 2 antennas, perferably of differing polarizations.
If you follow the link
Correspondence between Jefferson and Madison regarding the drafting of the Copyright Clause
and then read the mailing list message, there is a beauty in there by Madison. He thought that "monopolies" would be OK, for a limited time, and that there was little probability of abuse because of the democratic system being created in the US.
With regard to monopolies they are justly
classed among the greates nuisances in government.
But is it clear that as encouragements to literary
works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too
valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not
suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public
to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified
in the grant of it? Is there not also infinitely
less danger of this abuse in our governments than in
most others? Monopolies are sacrifices of the many
Follow the link ! The Madison and Jefferson writings are just great. It's the "inifinitely less danger" part which kills me. It's obvious our current payola system of government would be abhorrent to the founders.
The original ruling I am referring to is the ruling of the DC court of appeals, which I believe is the most recent ruling.
Here is a link to the text
There is also some nice excerpts on the open-law page.
1. If you read the _original_ ruling in this case you will find that the judges said something to the effect of - it's not up to use to determine if 70 years is "too long". Utter hogwash of course, it is up to them to determine whether a specified amount of time is constitutional under the limited time provision. The whole ruling was just ridiculous - you are encouraged to read it. Pay particular attention to the comments of the (lone) dissenter.
2. If the supreme court rules in favor of the copyright extensions it's going to be a dark day indeed - there will be no _legal_ recourse left to the forces of good.
Really ? And how many cell phone RF designs have you done ?
Hundreds, if not thousands of shops can churn out a good RF design for a phone.
If you are trying to say that the RF design is not difficult because there are lots of RF chipset available, that's like saying Athlon 1GHz MB design is easy because there are lots of Athlons and MB chipsets available.
Making a cellular RF design work is one thing, getting it to work so that it meets the VERY demanding specs of the system providers for millions of units is quite another. once your codec is done and in the DSP, you're done.
This is misleading at best. You say it yourself voice-data and digital. Even many analog phones can run CDPD, and all modern 2G digital phones do circuit-switched data.
I don't have time to read verse from IS-136. The fact is that the data is organized and dedicated to moving data for a vselp codec NOT as simply data. Any system which would move pure data would have to be implemented directly into the DSP's handling the codec function.
Running CDPD on analog phones is a kluge. It works and that's about all you can say for it. As for 2G phones, I specifically mentioned OLDER digital phones in my post. I believe that the newer phones do have provisions for data, but this still doesn't change the fact that firmware changes were/are required to support this.
All those Qualcomm engineers are not working on RF design (or Eudora bug fixes)... 2G/2.5G/3G is all about complex signal processing and protocol engineering!
That's a good point, protocol design and codec design is complex. But it's easier to test and it's easier to put into production.
By far the most complex part of a cell phone is the RF design. Saying you have a CPU which allows cell phone connections is meaningless marketing drivel. Intel will NOT be putting the RF into their CPU in our lifetimes.
Look at how small cell phones are right now. It's completely conceivable that you could simply put everything you need in a PCMCIA card or a USB attachment widget. Especially for laptops what's so un-portable about that ?
The problem with internet cellular connections is that the DSP's and operating firmware in cell phones are competely dedicated to moving voice-data. They expect voice-data at both ends. If you take an oldish cell phone (still digital) it is simply not aware, and cannot be made aware, that you just want to pass pure data.
Wait it gets worse. The cell-site expects everything to be voice data too. You have to go in and replace the firmware in the DSP's and controllers in the phones AND the cell sites to make this all work.
Now that we've had some hindsight on this issue, the correct design decision is to move data with QOS. Then you see how much BW you have available for voice data and design your codec appropriately.
Basically that's why there is now something called 3G.
This is the silliest press release I've seen in a long time.
But that doesn't mean that it's not subject to a lot of political bullshit. Here ya go :
UWB : 1uW in 5GHz BW => 200E-18 W/Hz
US Digital Cell phone BW is 30kHz
total intercepted noise in a 30kHz BW : 6E-12W => -82dBm
Assume 40dB path loss from UWB device to cell device : -122 dBm. Which is generous, if the guy standing next to you is using a UWB device the path loss is more like -30dB.
Thermal noise floor kTB = 1.38E-23 x 300 x 30kHz
That's 124E-18 W => -129 dBm
So my cell phone sensitivity just lost 7dB which will cut the range by 1/2 and that's for 1 UWB device.
Guess what happens when there is 10 of them ?
Guess what happens if I need 10uW.
Brian
That is not true. It is a different communications scheme. You need to go read up.
DSSS works by mixing a wide bandwidth PN sequence with a low BW data stream.
UWB communicates by accurately positioning pulses in time.
This is a VERY easy "condition" to test.
I take the "patient" and put him or her in a shielded room so that the detectors all read 0.
Naturally I have a partition in the room so that I can beam waves at the "patient" from the other side of the partition (the partition is also part of the shielded room) without their knowledge.
Turn on the transmitter at random intervals and see if and, more importantly, when, they complain.
From the article:
But 3D Realms CEO Scott Miller wasn't very upset to hear about his product getting the Vaporware top spot. "It's a very ambitious game," he said. "It's not cookie-cutter shooter like most are nowadays
If it's another FPS, how can it NOT be cookie-cutter ?