We ought to demand a tax on blank canvas, paper, pens, ink, and paint since those can be use for reproducing copyrighted books and paintings.
Those f'in starving (and I'll guess crappy) musicians will have a harder time paying for their supplies than us computer geeks will paying for our blank media. Before long they'll be begging for the government to rescind all the blank media taxes.
For high bandwidth it needs to react quickly. But that is hard to get without self-induced oscillations.
For high sensitivity it needs large amplification. But that is hard to get without amplifying noise as well.
It needs both accuracy and precision. Indeed most scopes are calibrated against a precision standard that is tracable back to the Federal Government's standards reference (the so called "tracable certificate of NIST calibration")
Remember that an oscilloscope needs to be much more accurate than anything it's used to design/test. Best analogy: Would you want somebody grinding eyeglass lenses for you to have 20/20 vision or somebody with cateracts?
I agree totally. I do BIOS development for a living and my most common hardware issues fall into:
-Are GPIOs being set correctly?
-Are programmable clocks running at the right frequencies?
-What's happening on the I2C/SMBUS?
-Is my write getting to the LPC bus?
And the TDS3014 has been a perfect fit for the job. It's small enough to keep on my desk in my cube, it's got enough bandwidth for everything I need, the DPO part allows me to freeze an I2C transaction on screen to decode, 4 channels is enough to do rough sanity checking on LPC cycles. And the ability to capture a screen to disk which I forward to the hardware engineers in email...
I bought mine at a substantial discount through Beta-Lambda over the internet, and had a great transaction with them. Good prices, quick delivery, friendly folks on answering questions.
I'm sure there's deals to be had on used Tektronix "Lunchbox LCD" scopes (the TDS3000 series), especially now that the enhanced TDS3000b series is out.
My 4-channel, 100MHz TDS-3014 cost me about $4k back in 2000 when they were the latest and greatest... seems like the 2 channel version was about $2500 then. You could probably find a used TDS-3012 for about your price range.
The enroute time for Cassini to get to Saturn was 7 years; rather than push back an already long mission they launched with feature-incomplete code. They knew they had 7 years to get the software fully functional and debugger; they've updated it remotely from millions of miles away a number of times now.
I'm sure the rovers did the same thing... Develop the launch/cruise software before you launch (and of course try to get as much of the entry/landing code done as you can!), and then uplink the final code before it's needed. Therefore it doesn't surprise me one bit that the JPL engineer knew there were shortcomings in the launch software.
Hell, I develop BIOS for servers and we do it all the time. The BIOS image we give the hardware engineers for initial bringup is usually *way* short of features that will be there when it actually gets used by the customers!
Look at it this way: It *everybody* had one of these on their cars then muggers/rapists/murderers/etc will know that anybody they see entering their car will be a sitting duck for 30 seconds.
Excuse me? I would find that hard to believe. Maybe what you meant to say was "civilian sport aircraft could out-turn it at equivalent speeds"... since more mass will be more inertia.
However I find it hard to believe that a civilian sport plane at 200 knots full throttle will out turn a F-18 at 200 knots. Because the F-18 can always snap the plane quickly, even if it would normally stall, and using power lower the effective angle of attack.
Unless it was sent registered mail, there is no way to prove the chain of custody went straight from the manufacturer to him without interception.
Heck, since Carmine played gangsters try this one: The Feds have a warrant and are searching all of his incoming mail... a Fed sees the screener, copies it, and then lets Mr. UPS deliver it to Carmine. Voila! Illegal copy of Carmine's tape with Carmine having zero to do with it.
It appears that due to limited downlink bandwidth (since the HGA isn't fully up yet) they've been making the mosaics from a mix of left and right camera images. Due to the different viewpoints (it looks likes they're a couple of feet apart) the mosaics have issues... but I suspect that once they downlink a full set of either left or right images the panorama will instantly get much much better.
And they are cleaning them up... I've seen 3 versions of the one Panorama. I think because the high-gain antenna isn't fully online yet they've been limited in bandwidth and some tiles in the mosaic have been from the left camera and some from the right. Once they downlink a full set of left or right images that it'll get much better much quicker.
Yes the wind speed on Mars can be huge... but the air is so vapid that it really can't impart much energy to anything.
If you've seen the designs of the Mars drone airplanes, you'll notice they share a lot of design features in common with the U2 spyplane... because both fly in atmospheres where the air is so sparse that the planes need huge wing areas and huge airspeeds just to get a modicum of lift.
Two things: 1) The delta-V to get to Venus is much less than to go to Mars. Results is less acceleration load on the probes, also Venus has a much denser atmosphere so that aerodynamic drag devices (drogue chutes, main chutes) are much more effective in controlling touchdown velocity.
2) The thermal cycle of daily heating/cooling is less extreme on Venus than on Mars. Yes, you do have pressure to worry about on Venus... but the thermal cycle is what beats the hell out of electrical connections.
(Note that two of the three successful Mars landers used retrorockets (Viking I & Viking II)... so Beagle was really treadding a very recently blazed trail by using Pathfinder's airbag landing.)
I'll never use em. Sorry. I'm blind in my left eye (birth defect). I have no retina at all in that eye, so all a scanner will see is a flat white surface. And my good eye, my right eye, is very dear to me. I will not be letting anyones laser or scanner look into it other than my Dr. The risk of the laser power being out of spec, etc is just too great for me to risk.
Ah but you're nothing more than a tiny cog in the machine... there are 250,000 other copywriters more than willing to do your job if you did have a problem with it.
It's the execs and their lobbyist friends in the District that I worry about.
So there's going to be less shitty TV sitcoms in the future... No "Everybody Exfoliates Raymond", no "CSI: Nebraska", etc. I think I'll welcome that future.
And (Gasp!) maybe the decline of shitty U.S. TV will cause the couch potatos to finally get outside, get a tan, get a life and get involved in their community and politics. Because if there's anything the US does need it's a more involved electorate.
Yes... I welcome the day the NTSC soma of the masses disappears.
Also if Google is doing an IPO there will be a quiet period where Google will be unable to issue press releases or otherwise counteract the SCO fud-storm.
Forest, Can you share how long the the typical Cray development cycle for a machine design is? I suspect it's a hell of a lot longer than the 6 to 12 months that commodity processor crowd have...
was already having to figure the propagation delay of signals (traveling at near the speed of light) into their large multirack systems. I can only imagine one of things driving the desire for smaller supercomputers is to speed up the clock by reducing the delay across the physical size of the box.
1. Orbiters are generally not sanitized to the level that landers are, so there is a higher chance of viable organisms on the Jap probe.
2. I don't know about Japanese orbital policy, but NASA policy requires that probes be launched on an orbit that will cause it to slightly miss it's target.... then when it's almost at the planet the orbital bias is removed so that orbital insertion takes place. So if this were a NASA mission there wouldn't be contaimination if the probe died... it'd just happily whizz on by into a solar orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
We must show her we can use the /.-effect for good, not evil. :-)
We ought to demand a tax on blank canvas, paper, pens, ink, and paint since those can be use for reproducing copyrighted books and paintings.
Those f'in starving (and I'll guess crappy) musicians will have a harder time paying for their supplies than us computer geeks will paying for our blank media. Before long they'll be begging for the government to rescind all the blank media taxes.
For high bandwidth it needs to react quickly. But that is hard to get without self-induced oscillations.
For high sensitivity it needs large amplification. But that is hard to get without amplifying noise as well.
It needs both accuracy and precision. Indeed most scopes are calibrated against a precision standard that is tracable back to the Federal Government's standards reference (the so called "tracable certificate of NIST calibration")
Remember that an oscilloscope needs to be much more accurate than anything it's used to design/test. Best analogy: Would you want somebody grinding eyeglass lenses for you to have 20/20 vision or somebody with cateracts?
I agree totally. I do BIOS development for a living and my most common hardware issues fall into:
-Are GPIOs being set correctly?
-Are programmable clocks running at the right frequencies?
-What's happening on the I2C/SMBUS?
-Is my write getting to the LPC bus?
And the TDS3014 has been a perfect fit for the job. It's small enough to keep on my desk in my cube, it's got enough bandwidth for everything I need, the DPO part allows me to freeze an I2C transaction on screen to decode, 4 channels is enough to do rough sanity checking on LPC cycles. And the ability to capture a screen to disk which I forward to the hardware engineers in email...
I bought mine at a substantial discount through Beta-Lambda over the internet, and had a great transaction with them. Good prices, quick delivery, friendly folks on answering questions.
Here's a Black and white version for $207. Guaranteed it'll be better than any PC based "scope" you find.
I'm sure there's deals to be had on used Tektronix "Lunchbox LCD" scopes (the TDS3000 series), especially now that the enhanced TDS3000b series is out.
My 4-channel, 100MHz TDS-3014 cost me about $4k back in 2000 when they were the latest and greatest... seems like the 2 channel version was about $2500 then. You could probably find a used TDS-3012 for about your price range.
The enroute time for Cassini to get to Saturn was 7 years; rather than push back an already long mission they launched with feature-incomplete code. They knew they had 7 years to get the software fully functional and debugger; they've updated it remotely from millions of miles away a number of times now.
I'm sure the rovers did the same thing... Develop the launch/cruise software before you launch (and of course try to get as much of the entry/landing code done as you can!), and then uplink the final code before it's needed. Therefore it doesn't surprise me one bit that the JPL engineer knew there were shortcomings in the launch software.
Hell, I develop BIOS for servers and we do it all the time. The BIOS image we give the hardware engineers for initial bringup is usually *way* short of features that will be there when it actually gets used by the customers!
Look at it this way: It *everybody* had one of these on their cars then muggers/rapists/murderers/etc will know that anybody they see entering their car will be a sitting duck for 30 seconds.
civilian sport aircraft could out-turn it though
Excuse me? I would find that hard to believe. Maybe what you meant to say was "civilian sport aircraft could out-turn it at equivalent speeds"... since more mass will be more inertia.
However I find it hard to believe that a civilian sport plane at 200 knots full throttle will out turn a F-18 at 200 knots. Because the F-18 can always snap the plane quickly, even if it would normally stall, and using power lower the effective angle of attack.
Yeah... I saw that Futurama too.
Unless it was sent registered mail, there is no way to prove the chain of custody went straight from the manufacturer to him without interception.
Heck, since Carmine played gangsters try this one: The Feds have a warrant and are searching all of his incoming mail... a Fed sees the screener, copies it, and then lets Mr. UPS deliver it to Carmine. Voila! Illegal copy of Carmine's tape with Carmine having zero to do with it.
It appears that due to limited downlink bandwidth (since the HGA isn't fully up yet) they've been making the mosaics from a mix of left and right camera images.
Due to the different viewpoints (it looks likes they're a couple of feet apart) the mosaics have issues... but I suspect that once they downlink a full set of either left or right images the panorama will instantly get much much better.
And they are cleaning them up... I've seen 3 versions of the one Panorama. I think because the high-gain antenna isn't fully online yet they've been limited in bandwidth and some tiles in the mosaic have been from the left camera and some from the right. Once they downlink a full set of left or right images that it'll get much better much quicker.
Didn't they make a movie about this? Or was it just a scheme of Polaroid & tattoo parlors to boost their sales?
Speed? Check.
Density? Nope.
Yes the wind speed on Mars can be huge... but the air is so vapid that it really can't impart much energy to anything.
If you've seen the designs of the Mars drone airplanes, you'll notice they share a lot of design features in common with the U2 spyplane... because both fly in atmospheres where the air is so sparse that the planes need huge wing areas and huge airspeeds just to get a modicum of lift.
Two things:
1) The delta-V to get to Venus is much less than to go to Mars. Results is less acceleration load on the probes, also Venus has a much denser atmosphere so that aerodynamic drag devices (drogue chutes, main chutes) are much more effective in controlling touchdown velocity.
2) The thermal cycle of daily heating/cooling is less extreme on Venus than on Mars. Yes, you do have pressure to worry about on Venus... but the thermal cycle is what beats the hell out of electrical connections.
(Note that two of the three successful Mars landers used retrorockets (Viking I & Viking II)... so Beagle was really treadding a very recently blazed trail by using Pathfinder's airbag landing.)
would be a good piece of metadata to share. And I'd get *points* for it too? Oh man... Napster with Pepsi Points.
I want me a Harrier jet!
I'll never use em. Sorry. I'm blind in my left eye (birth defect). I have no retina at all in that eye, so all a scanner will see is a flat white surface.
And my good eye, my right eye, is very dear to me. I will not be letting anyones laser or scanner look into it other than my Dr. The risk of the laser power being out of spec, etc is just too great for me to risk.
Ah but you're nothing more than a tiny cog in the machine... there are 250,000 other copywriters more than willing to do your job if you did have a problem with it.
It's the execs and their lobbyist friends in the District that I worry about.
So there's going to be less shitty TV sitcoms in the future... No "Everybody Exfoliates Raymond", no "CSI: Nebraska", etc. I think I'll welcome that future.
And (Gasp!) maybe the decline of shitty U.S. TV will cause the couch potatos to finally get outside, get a tan, get a life and get involved in their community and politics. Because if there's anything the US does need it's a more involved electorate.
Yes... I welcome the day the NTSC soma of the masses disappears.
Also if Google is doing an IPO there will be a quiet period where Google will be unable to issue press releases or otherwise counteract the SCO fud-storm.
because the term "hard drive" makes them feel inferior.
Perhaps middle age women taking offense at the term "floppy disk"...
Forest,
Can you share how long the the typical Cray development cycle for a machine design is? I suspect it's a hell of a lot longer than the 6 to 12 months that commodity processor crowd have...
was already having to figure the propagation delay of signals (traveling at near the speed of light) into their large multirack systems. I can only imagine one of things driving the desire for smaller supercomputers is to speed up the clock by reducing the delay across the physical size of the box.
1. Orbiters are generally not sanitized to the level that landers are, so there is a higher chance of viable organisms on the Jap probe.
2. I don't know about Japanese orbital policy, but NASA policy requires that probes be launched on an orbit that will cause it to slightly miss it's target.... then when it's almost at the planet the orbital bias is removed so that orbital insertion takes place. So if this were a NASA mission there wouldn't be contaimination if the probe died... it'd just happily whizz on by into a solar orbit.