[Just] because something is MANUFACTURED someplace else doesn't make the place that it was MANUFACTURED imbued with some sort of superiority. I am guessing the design and creation of the chip is more important than the plant it was made in.
Yeah, unless you're interested in this concept called "money", a.k.a."profit", in which case the manufacturing guy has it all over the design and creation guy.
Never forget that design and creation are expenses, expenses that are only recouped by future manufacturing income.
Even as an independent contractor, the price you can get for your design or creation has to be less than the perceived gross profit from manufacturing it, or no one will buy it.
Plus, since the manufacturing guy is typically closer to the end user (and the technology needed to manufacture the device), he's better equipped than the design and creation guy to create Design 2.0. Just look at the transition of chip employment: First the chips were researched, designed and manufactured in the US. Then the manufacturing went to Asia. Now the design work is very much in Asia, and one is seeing the research nexus start to move, too.
To be sure, in the case of MESSENGER; but IMHO the GP was asking about policy, not an implementation: He mentions "these vehicles" and "these expensive ventures", yet there is only one MESSENGER spacecraft.
Or maybe he's just a troll, and we're both screwed ^_^
Can we justify these expensive ventures in these recession times?
Where do you think the money is spent? The paychecks of thousands of people are directly related to spaceflight -- your neighbors and mine. The programs themselves buy products of every description, from commodities like gases and metals to highly engineered and specialized electronics and mechanical assemblies, from companies both large and small -- not to mention the services of a wide range of people, from painters to software engineers. These people then reinvest their paychecks in your community, at restaurants, department stores, and every other consumer outlet. It's hard to think of a more fiscally-responsible activity in "these recession times."
Y'know, as a kid the whole "rapture" thing puzzled me -- how do the believers get to heaven if they're flying, and sealed inside a pressurized metal tube? Now it's clear: A hole opens up in the roof of the airplane. Thanks!
;-) No offense intended -- it was just too good to pass up:-)
Meaning, in a capitalist system, profit is the result of efficient productivity. Whose production efficiency increased, as a result of your work, to the point that it was worth $15M (in less than three years) to him?
As second assistant to an associate grammar cop, let me attempt a reply.
One uses "fewer" when there is an integer (i.e., a countable) number of items, like babies born or the number of camera sites. One uses "less" when there is a quantity that ordinarily cannot be individually counted, like light on a retina or the amount of gas in a tank.
Note that (for example) if you're a physicist counting photons of light on a retina or gas molecules in a tank, "less" turns back into "fewer", because now you're talking about countable items again.
By far the highest points in south Florida are its landfills; see, for example, this beauty on Florida's Turnpike in Deerfield Beach. When global warming floods the area in [insert date of your choice here], these landfills will become tree islands in the new Everglades.
when you have massive ejections like yesterdays they can certainly contribute to instability in the Earth's magnetic field, which leads to tectonic shifting.
Er, no. The way the game of "science" is played, one must first show data establishing a valid statistical correlation between coronal mass ejections and earthquakes, then a plausible model establishing causation. Or, present the plausible model establishing causation, and then predict earthquakes to occur in the future, with a success rate that differs from random chance in a statistically significant manner.
The reason the relationship between CMEs and earthquakes is not "a more accepted concept than it is", is that no one has done either of the above. It shouldn't be hard: The occurrence of CMEs varies with the sunspot cycle and, therefore, one would expect a cyclic variation in earthquakes if this hypothesis were true. Note that near the solar maximum we expect two or three CMEs per day, so this has to be figured in, too.
Reviewing your links:
1. The Mukherjee and Mukherjee paper notes that there was increased solar activity, and then an earthquake occurred (the 2001 Gujarat earthquake). In fact, in the "entire world, a total of 65 earthquakes have been reported on the same day". However, there is no evidence presented that that was an unusually high (or low) number of earthquakes for a day, that other earthquakes occurred on similar days with high solar activity, or that they did not occur on days with low solar activity. In fact, some of that data presented -- in particular, the GOES X-Ray flux data -- is irrelevant to the argument, since X-Rays do not affect the Earth's magnetosphere (the protons arriving two days later, do that) and, in any event, they cannot pass through the Earth's atmosphere and so cannot affect the surface (let alone the rock below). Despite the heading of section 2 of the paper, no "correlation" between CMEs and earthquakes is presented -- just a single coincidence. I went to the dentist on 26 January 2001 -- did that also cause the Gujarat earthquake? The same amount of evidence is presented for both hypotheses.
2. The de Arcangelis, et al. paper does not even mention a causal relationship between CMEs and earthquakes. Rather, it notes that the statistical properties of the two phenomena are the same: Their distributions are both power-law. This is interesting, but so is the distribution of Internet links, and a million other phenomena. It's nice work, but does not support your hypothesis.
3. This guy just took a single month's worth of earthquakes and compared it with "solar activity" (without defining the term). Even the author didn't make any conclusions as a result, so why should the reader? Besides, 2010 was one of the quietest years of solar activity in human history -- just wait 'til 2013!
4. Do you have a link to the entire Jain paper, or are you citing the abstract as the reference? Without the paper it's hard to conclude anything, but even in the abstract the author states, "Our investigation preliminarily shows that each earthquake under study was preceded by a solar flare of GOES importance B to X class by 10-100 hrs. However, each flare was not found followed by earthquake of magnitude >4.0." This situation can occur with unrelated events, simply when one (a flare) is more common than another (an earthquake). Note that B-class flares are incredibly common, and in many years this level of energy represents the standard amount of X-ray flux arriving from the sun, without any flares.
All of the above does not prove, or even argue, that CMEs do not cause earthquakes. Rather, it says that no significant evidence of such a link has been established. Until it has, one might argue with equal validity that any other random physical phenomenon does, too.
No, we don't. For broadcast, we rely on existing commercial broadcast stations, which is why they test the Emergency Alert System from time to time.
The problem H.R.607 is attempting to address is the fact that police, firemen, and first responders of all stripes don't have a common way to communicate; their frequencies are spread throughout the spectrum. The attempt is to establish the so-called "D Block", 758-763 and 788-793 MHz, as a unified, interoperable public safety band to fix this (among other repairs). The part to which people object is Sec. 207(d)(1), which reads,
AUCTION- Not later than 10 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the paired electromagnetic spectrum bands of 420-440 megahertz and 450-470 megahertz recovered as a result of the report and order required under subsection (c) shall be auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission through a system of competitive bidding meeting the requirements of section 309 of the Communications Act of 1934.
In other words, the bill proposes to fund the transition by selling off this spectrum; the people who have been using this spectrum (since shortly after World War II, I might add) are, quite reasonably, upset.
ARM has also hit a wall with how much lower power consumption is needed.
This is a line of reasoning I've been fighting most of my career.
Lower power consumption is always needed. In a battery-powered, portable device, energy use is use of a limited resource and, therefore, is never low enough. Even if "most of us don't need the mobile device to continue functioning after heavy usage for more than maybe 48 hours" -- a statement of dubious validity -- the energy saved in performing feature set X can be used to perform additional features, features that may be used to competitive advantage in the marketplace. (Reducing the power consumption of a cell phone enabled manufacturers to add things like audio players, video, big displays, etc. to the device.) Alternatively, it can be used to reduce battery size and weight, which can also be used to competitive advantage.
Like product cost, power consumption is an expense that is never low enough. Designers (or their organizations) that think their product cost or power consumption is low enough are setting themselves up for obsolescence.
This motivated me to look up some of Wonyoung Kim's papers. This one is a good overview of his research. Very nice work -- but almost unrecognizable from the Gizmag article.
I confess I am totally underwhelmed. Every chip I have designed since the 1990s (mostly wireless chips with embedded MCUs and DSPs, for portable applications) has had multiple voltage domains with multiple, independently controlled, on-board linear regulators -- sometimes as many as six or eight of them. Each MCU (and/or DSP) core always has its own regulator; it's the only way to meet the power budget of a mobile/portable product. Sometimes the voltage is dynamically controlled in response to processing requirements, and sometimes (if the processing requirements are relatively constant) the regulated voltage is designed to vary with temperature, so that at all times only the minimum voltage needed is supplied. (And yes, sometimes switching regulators are used, if the electrical noise can be tolerated in the application.)
ISSCC isn't known for accepting junk papers, so I'm hoping that what was actually presented (I didn't attend this year) was a novel on-chip voltage-regulation technique, and that the journalist has done a disservice to Kim by emphasizing the application, rather than the real novelty of his work.
The real problem with these designs is the interfaces between cores operating at different voltages. It's a PITA to do all the level-shifting to ensure that a core operating at 0.5 V can communicate with one operating at 1.2 V, ensure that one shut down doesn't affect one still operating, etc. There are lots of corner cases to consider (including transient effects while voltages and computing loads are dynamically changing), and a new technique to handle that reliably would be an advance in the art.
What kind of conference doesn't at least mostly pay the expenses for speakers?
That would be "substantially all conferences." Unless you're an invited speaker at a truly major conference, e.g., the after-lunch or after-dinner speaker, or maybe the keynote speaker opening the conference, you won't be getting any of your expenses paid by the conference. The economics don't support it: Most conferences are actually closer to workshops, in that a substantial fraction of the attendees are also presenting papers. Paying for each others' travel would only raise the conference registration fees to unacceptable levels, and guarantee that no non-presenter would be able to attend.
It's not necessary that the technology be a military technology -- even dual-use technologies can land you in the slammer if you tell them to a person of the wrong nationality.
A lot of people (not necessarily you, sean.peters) think that dual-use technologies can be disclosed to anyone, and it's only with the military technologies that one must be careful. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the most innocuous-sounding technologies -- describing how to make microprocessors "rated for operation at an ambient temperature above 398 K (125C) (3A001.a.2.a)," for example -- are a controlled technology.
Slashdot Mirror
[Just] because something is MANUFACTURED someplace else doesn't make the place that it was MANUFACTURED imbued with some sort of superiority. I am guessing the design and creation of the chip is more important than the plant it was made in.
Yeah, unless you're interested in this concept called "money", a.k.a."profit", in which case the manufacturing guy has it all over the design and creation guy.
Never forget that design and creation are expenses, expenses that are only recouped by future manufacturing income.
Even as an independent contractor, the price you can get for your design or creation has to be less than the perceived gross profit from manufacturing it, or no one will buy it.
Plus, since the manufacturing guy is typically closer to the end user (and the technology needed to manufacture the device), he's better equipped than the design and creation guy to create Design 2.0. Just look at the transition of chip employment: First the chips were researched, designed and manufactured in the US. Then the manufacturing went to Asia. Now the design work is very much in Asia, and one is seeing the research nexus start to move, too.
Any Sex sounds nice right about now...
FTFY.
To be sure, in the case of MESSENGER; but IMHO the GP was asking about policy, not an implementation: He mentions "these vehicles" and "these expensive ventures", yet there is only one MESSENGER spacecraft.
Or maybe he's just a troll, and we're both screwed ^_^
First you have to find a plant in orbit, though...
Where do you think the money is spent? The paychecks of thousands of people are directly related to spaceflight -- your neighbors and mine. The programs themselves buy products of every description, from commodities like gases and metals to highly engineered and specialized electronics and mechanical assemblies, from companies both large and small -- not to mention the services of a wide range of people, from painters to software engineers. These people then reinvest their paychecks in your community, at restaurants, department stores, and every other consumer outlet. It's hard to think of a more fiscally-responsible activity in "these recession times."
Y'know, as a kid the whole "rapture" thing puzzled me -- how do the believers get to heaven if they're flying, and sealed inside a pressurized metal tube? Now it's clear: A hole opens up in the roof of the airplane. Thanks!
;-) No offense intended -- it was just too good to pass up :-)
The Indianapolis Star
See US patent 6,768,398, filed 12 December 2001. The RF cochlea is a relatively old idea.
Microsoft has been in this space for years. They, for example, contributed to the original FCC TV white space trials in 2008 (see the February and March entries).
Meaning, in a capitalist system, profit is the result of efficient productivity. Whose production efficiency increased, as a result of your work, to the point that it was worth $15M (in less than three years) to him?
ok. but why?
As second assistant to an associate grammar cop, let me attempt a reply.
One uses "fewer" when there is an integer (i.e., a countable) number of items, like babies born or the number of camera sites. One uses "less" when there is a quantity that ordinarily cannot be individually counted, like light on a retina or the amount of gas in a tank.
Note that (for example) if you're a physicist counting photons of light on a retina or gas molecules in a tank, "less" turns back into "fewer", because now you're talking about countable items again.
By far the highest points in south Florida are its landfills; see, for example, this beauty on Florida's Turnpike in Deerfield Beach. When global warming floods the area in [insert date of your choice here], these landfills will become tree islands in the new Everglades.
when you have massive ejections like yesterdays they can certainly contribute to instability in the Earth's magnetic field, which leads to tectonic shifting.
Er, no. The way the game of "science" is played, one must first show data establishing a valid statistical correlation between coronal mass ejections and earthquakes, then a plausible model establishing causation. Or, present the plausible model establishing causation, and then predict earthquakes to occur in the future, with a success rate that differs from random chance in a statistically significant manner.
The reason the relationship between CMEs and earthquakes is not "a more accepted concept than it is", is that no one has done either of the above. It shouldn't be hard: The occurrence of CMEs varies with the sunspot cycle and, therefore, one would expect a cyclic variation in earthquakes if this hypothesis were true. Note that near the solar maximum we expect two or three CMEs per day, so this has to be figured in, too.
Reviewing your links:
1. The Mukherjee and Mukherjee paper notes that there was increased solar activity, and then an earthquake occurred (the 2001 Gujarat earthquake). In fact, in the "entire world, a total of 65 earthquakes have been reported on the same day". However, there is no evidence presented that that was an unusually high (or low) number of earthquakes for a day, that other earthquakes occurred on similar days with high solar activity, or that they did not occur on days with low solar activity. In fact, some of that data presented -- in particular, the GOES X-Ray flux data -- is irrelevant to the argument, since X-Rays do not affect the Earth's magnetosphere (the protons arriving two days later, do that) and, in any event, they cannot pass through the Earth's atmosphere and so cannot affect the surface (let alone the rock below). Despite the heading of section 2 of the paper, no "correlation" between CMEs and earthquakes is presented -- just a single coincidence. I went to the dentist on 26 January 2001 -- did that also cause the Gujarat earthquake? The same amount of evidence is presented for both hypotheses.
2. The de Arcangelis, et al. paper does not even mention a causal relationship between CMEs and earthquakes. Rather, it notes that the statistical properties of the two phenomena are the same: Their distributions are both power-law. This is interesting, but so is the distribution of Internet links, and a million other phenomena. It's nice work, but does not support your hypothesis.
3. This guy just took a single month's worth of earthquakes and compared it with "solar activity" (without defining the term). Even the author didn't make any conclusions as a result, so why should the reader? Besides, 2010 was one of the quietest years of solar activity in human history -- just wait 'til 2013!
4. Do you have a link to the entire Jain paper, or are you citing the abstract as the reference? Without the paper it's hard to conclude anything, but even in the abstract the author states, "Our investigation preliminarily shows that each earthquake under study was preceded by a solar flare of GOES importance B to X class by 10-100 hrs. However, each flare was not found followed by earthquake of magnitude >4.0." This situation can occur with unrelated events, simply when one (a flare) is more common than another (an earthquake). Note that B-class flares are incredibly common, and in many years this level of energy represents the standard amount of X-ray flux arriving from the sun, without any flares.
All of the above does not prove, or even argue, that CMEs do not cause earthquakes. Rather, it says that no significant evidence of such a link has been established. Until it has, one might argue with equal validity that any other random physical phenomenon does, too.
No, we don't. For broadcast, we rely on existing commercial broadcast stations, which is why they test the Emergency Alert System from time to time.
The problem H.R.607 is attempting to address is the fact that police, firemen, and first responders of all stripes don't have a common way to communicate; their frequencies are spread throughout the spectrum. The attempt is to establish the so-called "D Block", 758-763 and 788-793 MHz, as a unified, interoperable public safety band to fix this (among other repairs). The part to which people object is Sec. 207(d)(1), which reads,
AUCTION- Not later than 10 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the paired electromagnetic spectrum bands of 420-440 megahertz and 450-470 megahertz recovered as a result of the report and order required under subsection (c) shall be auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission through a system of competitive bidding meeting the requirements of section 309 of the Communications Act of 1934.
In other words, the bill proposes to fund the transition by selling off this spectrum; the people who have been using this spectrum (since shortly after World War II, I might add) are, quite reasonably, upset.
ARM has also hit a wall with how much lower power consumption is needed.
This is a line of reasoning I've been fighting most of my career.
Lower power consumption is always needed. In a battery-powered, portable device, energy use is use of a limited resource and, therefore, is never low enough. Even if "most of us don't need the mobile device to continue functioning after heavy usage for more than maybe 48 hours" -- a statement of dubious validity -- the energy saved in performing feature set X can be used to perform additional features, features that may be used to competitive advantage in the marketplace. (Reducing the power consumption of a cell phone enabled manufacturers to add things like audio players, video, big displays, etc. to the device.) Alternatively, it can be used to reduce battery size and weight, which can also be used to competitive advantage.
Like product cost, power consumption is an expense that is never low enough. Designers (or their organizations) that think their product cost or power consumption is low enough are setting themselves up for obsolescence.
$30 GPS Jammer Can Wreak Havok[sic]
(Technical): ...which is why they are illegal in nearly every regulatory environment.
(Snide): Gee, I didn't realize a GPS jammer could break an Intel SDK! Oh -- you meant havoc?
...and pull the battery out.
This motivated me to look up some of Wonyoung Kim's papers. This one is a good overview of his research. Very nice work -- but almost unrecognizable from the Gizmag article.
I confess I am totally underwhelmed. Every chip I have designed since the 1990s (mostly wireless chips with embedded MCUs and DSPs, for portable applications) has had multiple voltage domains with multiple, independently controlled, on-board linear regulators -- sometimes as many as six or eight of them. Each MCU (and/or DSP) core always has its own regulator; it's the only way to meet the power budget of a mobile/portable product. Sometimes the voltage is dynamically controlled in response to processing requirements, and sometimes (if the processing requirements are relatively constant) the regulated voltage is designed to vary with temperature, so that at all times only the minimum voltage needed is supplied. (And yes, sometimes switching regulators are used, if the electrical noise can be tolerated in the application.)
ISSCC isn't known for accepting junk papers, so I'm hoping that what was actually presented (I didn't attend this year) was a novel on-chip voltage-regulation technique, and that the journalist has done a disservice to Kim by emphasizing the application, rather than the real novelty of his work.
The real problem with these designs is the interfaces between cores operating at different voltages. It's a PITA to do all the level-shifting to ensure that a core operating at 0.5 V can communicate with one operating at 1.2 V, ensure that one shut down doesn't affect one still operating, etc. There are lots of corner cases to consider (including transient effects while voltages and computing loads are dynamically changing), and a new technique to handle that reliably would be an advance in the art.
I mean, even its name is vaporous.
That would be "substantially all conferences." Unless you're an invited speaker at a truly major conference, e.g., the after-lunch or after-dinner speaker, or maybe the keynote speaker opening the conference, you won't be getting any of your expenses paid by the conference. The economics don't support it: Most conferences are actually closer to workshops, in that a substantial fraction of the attendees are also presenting papers. Paying for each others' travel would only raise the conference registration fees to unacceptable levels, and guarantee that no non-presenter would be able to attend.
... instead of a PR puff piece, see the LOFAR web site.
From the headline I was concerned that Xoom wasn't going to have reprogrammable nonvolatile memory.
I need to get out more.
"Have you ever had sex with an animal?"
Aren't people animals?
It's not necessary that the technology be a military technology -- even dual-use technologies can land you in the slammer if you tell them to a person of the wrong nationality.
A lot of people (not necessarily you, sean.peters) think that dual-use technologies can be disclosed to anyone, and it's only with the military technologies that one must be careful. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the most innocuous-sounding technologies -- describing how to make microprocessors "rated for operation at an ambient temperature above 398 K (125C) (3A001.a.2.a)," for example -- are a controlled technology.