The disruption you mention almost happened in the early 90's. NeoCAD produced a compete competing tool chain for Xilinx FPGAs, including the place and route, for the then state-of-the-art 4000 series. Their software was better than Xilinx's, including things like a graphical layout editor. Xilinx was having none of it and bought NeoCAD. Quite a few NeoCAD features made it into the Xilinx software, eventually. Soon after that Xlininx started publishing less information on their FPGA's interconnect networks, and there has never been another attempt at writing such software.
Personally, I think writing a clone of the Xilinx software, today, is the wrong thing to do. It would be less effort to design and manufacture an "open source" FPGA, and write the necessary software from scratch, than to reverse engineer Xilinx's place and route.
A critical question is: Who owns the result? A prize should be about promoting development, and NOT about acquiring ownership. Any prize recipient who transfers ownership is a bunny. The sequence should be:
Win prize (prize posted to promote development.)
Use prize money as seed funding for business
PROFIT! Prize giver has a solution and developer has money.
The reward for the 2nd, 3rd,.. place getters is the opportunity to still develop a business, albeit without the benefit of the prize money as funding.
This technolgy seems to be a marriage between analogue computing and forward error correction (FEC) algorithms. FEC algorithms are "nice" in that you can have minor errors in their implementation, and they still work, albeit with slightly lower coding gain. (This also makes them hard to debug, as they tend to correct their own errors!). Generally, errors accumulate in analogue computing, but in FEC algorithms they should get corrected. The savings come from replacing an array of logic gates (as required to implement an opation on an 'n' bit word) with an amplifier whose voltage has a resolution of 1 part in 2^n.
That the government doesn't really want this unpopular law or filter. What it really wants is the support of Senator Steve Fielding. Thus the aim is to string the implementation out, and maintain Fielding's support, until after the elections, at which point Fielding will most likely lose the balance of power. The Internet filter will then be killed off.
Not as dumb as you think. By using visible light, the system gets to use infrastructure that will be in place anyway. (Think this will be combined with data over powerlines? You betcha.) That saves energy and costs. In addition, the transmitter power is much higher than would be used for IR, so one gets greater SNR and higher speed data. The lighting system of a building also lights up every nook and cranny, overcoming most line of sight issues. Finally, the visible spectrum is pretty well unregulated, so bandwidth is free.
I think it's a killer application, and that it will soon be providing lots of people with day jobs.
In a channel without multipath, MIMO reduces to beamforming as your describe. In a channel with mutipath, MIMO is different to what you describe.
If you want to describe MIMO in terms of beamforming, think of each reflector in a MIMO channel as acting as an antenna. Thus the aperture isn't determined by the spacing of the antenna, but rather the spacing of the reflectors in the channel. Each reflector emits a unique signal, (within the number degrees of freedom dictated by the number of antennas) since each sees a different combination of phases from teh set of antennas.
The whole point of MIMO and space-time coding is that you can have multiple transmitters and receivers in proximity to each other and everyone still gets data through. The "space" in space-time means we can pick out transmitter and receivers based on their location, not just their frequency (FDM) or when they transmit (TDM).
99% of "old school" radio guys I've come across just cannot get their brain around MIMO. They are too used to the idea that we need separation in frequency. Some of them can understand that MIMO is a bit like beamforming, but their brain explodes at the key concept of Spatial Multplexing.
Yes, there are limits (to do with the surface area of the volume the antennas enclose), but we aren't currently approaching these limits.
The problem is dumb receivers, not lack of spectrum.
Channel capacity is determined by the MIMO form of Shannon's Theorem. Add more antennas and smarter processing in the receivers, and the capacity in a channel with lots of multipath (eg. in an apartment) increases approximately linearly.
The problem is that most hardware is a decade (or more) behind state of the art, and that people aren't prepared to pay for a more complex, and costly receiver.
LyX. I wrote a thesis in it and didn't have to resort to any manual interventions in the generated LaTeX. Couple it with SVG diagrams, generated by inkscape, and you have a seamless authoring system that handles both text and graphics. SVG means there is no messy task of keeping source and postscript output synchronised (just right click a diagram within LyX to edit the SVG source with inkscape). Use gnuplot to generate your (postscript) graphs and you have pretty well a complete authoring system. A few years ago, LyX and inkscape were too immature to use seriously, but they have matured. I recommend the combination.
Cisco has probably already licensed the patent. They bought Radiata Communications, the company which was set up to commercialise the results of the CSIRO/Macquarie University WLAN project, so licensing issues were probably dealt with then.
They are in the position of having made a contribution to research program on which CSIRO was a collaborator, and are now being asked to pony up to use the patent. To quote from the research paper:
Acknowledgments
The CSIRO Systems and Devices Hardware Program and the Hewlett-Packard External Research Grants Program funded Macquarie University research on the WLAN project from 1991-1996 and 1995-1996 respectively.
The patent (USPTO 5487069) was filed on November 23, 1993 and issued on January 23, 1996. HP contributed funding from 1995-1996, so I guess it can be claimed that they didn't contribute to the patent, but it's still got to leave a bad taste in the mouth. The point is that HP might be a special case and not indicative of the treatment other defendants might get. I'd be intrigued to know what Macquarie University's contribution was from 1991 to November 23, 1993 (which was before my time on the project).
In fact there has been virtually no backdown. The list will still contain "refused classification" material and be mandatory. Keep in mind that Australia has no "R" rating (18yrs +) for games and the states of Australia have no "X" rating for pornography. These things are "refused classification".
Thus any computer game deemed unsuitable for a 15 year old (highest rating for a game is M) will be censored for all. Pornography, pictures of abortions, information on euthanasia or drugs and anything that is deemed illegal or "too gross" for an R rating gets censored. Too bad if it has a political angle (such as abortions, euthanasia or drugs). If the politics is deemed offensive, it will be refused classification and banned.
More likely the list is real, and it has been salted with additional sites. It is very much in Conroy's interest to try and make people believe that it is fake.
Conroy's press release does not say the list is fake. It says:
"There are some common URLs to those on the ACMA blacklist. However, ACMA advises that there are URLs on the published list that have never been the subject of a complaint or ACMA investigation, and have never been included on the ACMA blacklist."
A huge difference. You can be sure that "some common URLs" translates from politico speak as "1061 URLs", meaning the list is ACMA's. The delightful irony is that the only way Conroy can defend himself is if he actually says which URLs he considers to be fake, thereby giving even more info on the contents of ACMA's list.
Ask yourself this question: "If it's not ACMA's list, why is Conroy threatening:"
"...referral to the Australian Federal Police. Any Australian involved in making this content publicly available would be at serious risk of criminal prosecution."
It's not illegal to distribute a list of random URL's. The only way Conroy could make the above threat is if the list is the real thing (or a superset of the real thing).
I'm curious as to whether Conroy's threats extend to the off-line world. For example, would it be illegal to print out the list of URLs and attach it to a noticeboard?
See, that's where it's so unfair to treat companies as people. They get the benefits, but not the downsides. If *I* committed a felony I would go to gaol. A company gets a smack on the wrist and it is business as usual.
What we need is a gaol for companies. If a person has to lose "X" years of their life by being locked up, why not a company? Being in "gaol" might mean that the company is nationalised for the length of the sentence and all profits go to the government.
and point out how bone headed Railcorp is being, and request that he force them to backoff.
His email address is david@campbell.minister.nsw.gov.au and his name is David Campbell. An email to Nathan Rees, the Premier of NSW, at thepremier@www.nsw.gov.au wouldn't go astray either. Rees is also on twitter, so you can also pester him there.
The big thing going for the Shan Zhai is that their component makers are just around the corner. Need a touch screen for you iPhone knock off? Duck across town and talk to "Joe" and buy a few crate fulls off him. No long distance language barriers, freighting, delay, currency exchange or other things that an kill momentum in a project. It's not that different to Silicon Valley, in that it is effectively a technology shopping mall for engineers.
Compare that to Australia, where I live. Manufacturing base is close to zlich. Components have to be procured from overseas and local distributors are just not interested. Most time and effort goes into procurement rather than design. Better be sure of your design too, as deciding to make a design change involves a while new procurement cycle. No ducking down to "the local" to get a replacement. As an engineer, I'm envious.
It seems quite fair to ask that the rights holder pay the cost of production if they choose to take possession the bootleg product, as they are then free to sell it for retail price. Why should the rights holder get a bunch of free product, which they would otherwise have to have paid to produce? If they rights holder doesn't want to retail the bootleg product themselves they can refuse to buy it.
In this case the Chinese government seems to be ahead of the US in applying market principles..
They will increase the signal power you transmit in a particular direction. They will also reduce the amount of power you receive from your neighbour. Be careful that the directional antenna's don't cause you to exceed legislated limits for EIRP.
As others have suggested, MIMO will also help your cause. MIMO resolves antennas in space, which means that once the MIMO receiver has completed its channel measurements it can reduce the level of interfering signals based on their physical location.
Slashdot Mirror
The disruption you mention almost happened in the early 90's. NeoCAD produced a compete competing tool chain for Xilinx FPGAs, including the place and route, for the then state-of-the-art 4000 series. Their software was better than Xilinx's, including things like a graphical layout editor. Xilinx was having none of it and bought NeoCAD. Quite a few NeoCAD features made it into the Xilinx software, eventually. Soon after that Xlininx started publishing less information on their FPGA's interconnect networks, and there has never been another attempt at writing such software.
Personally, I think writing a clone of the Xilinx software, today, is the wrong thing to do. It would be less effort to design and manufacture an "open source" FPGA, and write the necessary software from scratch, than to reverse engineer Xilinx's place and route.
Also of interest, is the Australian Competitor. The "Aussie Invader" team is attempting to beat the Brits, while using a fraction of the budget.
A critical question is: Who owns the result? A prize should be about promoting development, and NOT about acquiring ownership. Any prize recipient who transfers ownership is a bunny. The sequence should be:
The reward for the 2nd, 3rd, .. place getters is the opportunity to still develop a business, albeit without the benefit of the prize money as funding.
You need this, a box which eliminates doppler and multipath from 802.11 channels.
This technolgy seems to be a marriage between analogue computing and forward error correction (FEC) algorithms. FEC algorithms are "nice" in that you can have minor errors in their implementation, and they still work, albeit with slightly lower coding gain. (This also makes them hard to debug, as they tend to correct their own errors!). Generally, errors accumulate in analogue computing, but in FEC algorithms they should get corrected. The savings come from replacing an array of logic gates (as required to implement an opation on an 'n' bit word) with an amplifier whose voltage has a resolution of 1 part in 2^n.
That the government doesn't really want this unpopular law or filter. What it really wants is the support of Senator Steve Fielding. Thus the aim is to string the implementation out, and maintain Fielding's support, until after the elections, at which point Fielding will most likely lose the balance of power. The Internet filter will then be killed off.
Not as dumb as you think. By using visible light, the system gets to use infrastructure that will be in place anyway. (Think this will be combined with data over powerlines? You betcha.) That saves energy and costs. In addition, the transmitter power is much higher than would be used for IR, so one gets greater SNR and higher speed data. The lighting system of a building also lights up every nook and cranny, overcoming most line of sight issues. Finally, the visible spectrum is pretty well unregulated, so bandwidth is free.
I think it's a killer application, and that it will soon be providing lots of people with day jobs.
In a channel without multipath, MIMO reduces to beamforming as your describe. In a channel with mutipath, MIMO is different to what you describe.
If you want to describe MIMO in terms of beamforming, think of each reflector in a MIMO channel as acting as an antenna. Thus the aperture isn't determined by the spacing of the antenna, but rather the spacing of the reflectors in the channel. Each reflector emits a unique signal, (within the number degrees of freedom dictated by the number of antennas) since each sees a different combination of phases from teh set of antennas.
Please don't swear. It erodes your credibility.
That's just plain wrong.
The whole point of MIMO and space-time coding is that you can have multiple transmitters and receivers in proximity to each other and everyone still gets data through. The "space" in space-time means we can pick out transmitter and receivers based on their location, not just their frequency (FDM) or when they transmit (TDM).
99% of "old school" radio guys I've come across just cannot get their brain around MIMO. They are too used to the idea that we need separation in frequency. Some of them can understand that MIMO is a bit like beamforming, but their brain explodes at the key concept of Spatial Multplexing.
Yes, there are limits (to do with the surface area of the volume the antennas enclose), but we aren't currently approaching these limits.
The problem is dumb receivers, not lack of spectrum.
Channel capacity is determined by the MIMO form of Shannon's Theorem. Add more antennas and smarter processing in the receivers, and the capacity in a channel with lots of multipath (eg. in an apartment) increases approximately linearly.
The problem is that most hardware is a decade (or more) behind state of the art, and that people aren't prepared to pay for a more complex, and costly receiver.
How does your idea compare to Carrier Phase Tracking GPS, or the system being plugged by Locata? Just curious.
LyX. I wrote a thesis in it and didn't have to resort to any manual interventions in the generated LaTeX. Couple it with SVG diagrams, generated by inkscape, and you have a seamless authoring system that handles both text and graphics. SVG means there is no messy task of keeping source and postscript output synchronised (just right click a diagram within LyX to edit the SVG source with inkscape). Use gnuplot to generate your (postscript) graphs and you have pretty well a complete authoring system. A few years ago, LyX and inkscape were too immature to use seriously, but they have matured. I recommend the combination.
You're probably safe as you probably weren't using OFDM and forward error correction on your packet radio link.
Cisco has probably already licensed the patent. They bought Radiata Communications , the company which was set up to commercialise the results of the CSIRO/Macquarie University WLAN project, so licensing issues were probably dealt with then.
They are in the position of having made a contribution to research program on which CSIRO was a collaborator, and are now being asked to pony up to use the patent. To quote from the research paper:
The patent (USPTO 5487069) was filed on November 23, 1993 and issued on January 23, 1996. HP contributed funding from 1995-1996, so I guess it can be claimed that they didn't contribute to the patent, but it's still got to leave a bad taste in the mouth. The point is that HP might be a special case and not indicative of the treatment other defendants might get. I'd be intrigued to know what Macquarie University's contribution was from 1991 to November 23, 1993 (which was before my time on the project).
(Yes, I'm one of the authors on the paper.)
In fact there has been virtually no backdown. The list will still contain "refused classification" material and be mandatory. Keep in mind that Australia has no "R" rating (18yrs +) for games and the states of Australia have no "X" rating for pornography. These things are "refused classification".
Thus any computer game deemed unsuitable for a 15 year old (highest rating for a game is M) will be censored for all. Pornography, pictures of abortions, information on euthanasia or drugs and anything that is deemed illegal or "too gross" for an R rating gets censored. Too bad if it has a political angle (such as abortions, euthanasia or drugs). If the politics is deemed offensive, it will be refused classification and banned.
doi:10.1016/j.neuro.2009.01.011
Malin Larssona, Bernard Weissb, Staffan Jansona, Jan Sundellc and Carl-Gustav Bornehag
Associations between indoor environmental factors and parental-reported autistic spectrum disorders in children 6-8 years of age
More likely the list is real, and it has been salted with additional sites. It is very much in Conroy's interest to try and make people believe that it is fake.
Conroy's press release does not say the list is fake. It says:
A huge difference. You can be sure that "some common URLs" translates from politico speak as "1061 URLs", meaning the list is ACMA's. The delightful irony is that the only way Conroy can defend himself is if he actually says which URLs he considers to be fake, thereby giving even more info on the contents of ACMA's list.
Ask yourself this question: "If it's not ACMA's list, why is Conroy threatening:"
It's not illegal to distribute a list of random URL's. The only way Conroy could make the above threat is if the list is the real thing (or a superset of the real thing).
I'm curious as to whether Conroy's threats extend to the off-line world. For example, would it be illegal to print out the list of URLs and attach it to a noticeboard?
See, that's where it's so unfair to treat companies as people. They get the benefits, but not the downsides. If *I* committed a felony I would go to gaol. A company gets a smack on the wrist and it is business as usual.
What we need is a gaol for companies. If a person has to lose "X" years of their life by being locked up, why not a company? Being in "gaol" might mean that the company is nationalised for the length of the sentence and all profits go to the government.
and point out how bone headed Railcorp is being, and request that he force them to backoff. His email address is david@campbell.minister.nsw.gov.au and his name is David Campbell. An email to Nathan Rees, the Premier of NSW, at thepremier@www.nsw.gov.au wouldn't go astray either. Rees is also on twitter, so you can also pester him there.
Even though you are joking, you might be interested in: Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (transcript)
The big thing going for the Shan Zhai is that their component makers are just around the corner. Need a touch screen for you iPhone knock off? Duck across town and talk to "Joe" and buy a few crate fulls off him. No long distance language barriers, freighting, delay, currency exchange or other things that an kill momentum in a project. It's not that different to Silicon Valley, in that it is effectively a technology shopping mall for engineers.
Compare that to Australia, where I live. Manufacturing base is close to zlich. Components have to be procured from overseas and local distributors are just not interested. Most time and effort goes into procurement rather than design. Better be sure of your design too, as deciding to make a design change involves a while new procurement cycle. No ducking down to "the local" to get a replacement. As an engineer, I'm envious.
Abolishing Hollywood accounting is much more urgent to the needs of starving artists than imposing draconian copyright laws.
It seems quite fair to ask that the rights holder pay the cost of production if they choose to take possession the bootleg product, as they are then free to sell it for retail price. Why should the rights holder get a bunch of free product, which they would otherwise have to have paid to produce? If they rights holder doesn't want to retail the bootleg product themselves they can refuse to buy it.
In this case the Chinese government seems to be ahead of the US in applying market principles..
They will increase the signal power you transmit in a particular direction. They will also reduce the amount of power you receive from your neighbour. Be careful that the directional antenna's don't cause you to exceed legislated limits for EIRP.
As others have suggested, MIMO will also help your cause. MIMO resolves antennas in space, which means that once the MIMO receiver has completed its channel measurements it can reduce the level of interfering signals based on their physical location.