The thing about brilliant physicists and engineers is that they're really good at math. Of course they're going to take the higher paying job! If there are other "more important projects," then perhaps these projects need pay rates that are competitive with Wall Street.
Seriously. He needs to find something physical he enjoys and pursue it. Education is not limited to books and classes. Young Gabriel needs to learn how to train everyday, to push himself, to take care of his body, to win with modesty, and to lose with dignity.
Hiring an EE and going straight to PCB design and fab is not a cheap proposition. You instead should focus on the intellectual property and in building a prototype/demo unit. This can be done on any number of FPGA development boards for a relatively low price. Depending on your specific requirements, you would spend anywhere from $200 to $6000 on one of these boards.
In particular:
1) Learn about FPGA's. Learn how to program in Verilog or VHDL or find a Computer Engineering grad student to help you with this. 2) Get an account on opencores.org. Identify the cores you can use so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. The USB core comes to mind. 3) Find an inexpensive FPGA development board that could host your prototype. Xilinx and Altera (the two leading FPGA manufacturers) sell these and offer a "web kit" version of their software for free. The Xilinx Spartan 3A Video Starter Kit may work for you.
I work for a very large high technology company that has instituted a flex-time policy for about 10,000 people in California and Colorado. An employee may work traditional, 9/80, or 4/10 (4 ten hour days/week). Almost everyone from interns to senior management is on 9/80. The office is a ghost town on those "off-Fridays." I barely notice the extra hour per day and still have plenty of time for life outside of work. The three day weekends are priceless, whether you want to shop at the mall on an uncrowded day or go on a 3-day ski weekend. Even on the off-Fridays we're asked to work, management usually offers hour-for-hour vacation time reimbursement.
The downside of the 9/80 (besides the resentment of my friends at other tech companies) is that you often waste your off-Friday waiting for your wife, buddies, or whoever to get off work before you can leave for weekend trips. I often lament that the only other people with off-Fridays are my co-workers.
US public schools are facing gigantic budget shortages (even the wealthy ones here in SF Bay area) for the next two years due to reduced tax income and your school wants to buy each student a pricey laptop? Save the money for something else; your students probably have computers at home. If they don't, why not start a home PC subsidy for less advantaged students who qualify? That way all students may have access to a computer but the school doesn't have to deal with the associated IT burden. Think of it as subsidized school lunch for the next generation.
It's a decent idea, but gigabit ethernet isn't a fat enough pipe to keep up with SATA. I think you need to examine how many users it will serve and what the throughput requirements are for each of the users. If you have only a few users on a relatively small LAN, I would purchase fibre channel cards instead of gigabit ethernet. Then again, if it is for a large office environment, you're stuck with gigabit or 100 megabit ethernet like the rest of us cubicle-inhabiting suckers.
I'm sorry, but I just can't support Poul-Henning Kamp on this one. The entire point of the Internet is to make information publicly available. If his intent was to only provide NTP services to a certain set of people/computers, then he should have protected his network appropriately.
Think about the repercussions of ruling in Kamp's favor. Now all those open 802.11 AP's that/. users love so much are considered private property and it would be trespassing for us to use them. I am in favor of supporting the Internet status quo: unless a resource (NTP server, wireless AP, web site, etc) owner takes basic steps to restrict access to the resource, it is considered a publicly available resource. Obviously this argument is not extended to hacks or attacks, where the intent is to circumvent a security measure designed to restrict access.
Even if you could install Windows XP on your new ICBM (Intel chip Based Mac), you're paying a huge premium to do so. You'd have to be either a hobbyist or an arithmetically challenged idiot. And Microsoft certainly doesn't cater to the former. People buy Macs for the ability to run OS X and other Apple-specific software.
Well, I suppose the other reason to buy a Mac is that it's about as close to sexy as a computer can get.
I just took a look at the iPodYourCar page. It's really a shame that not a single American auto manufacturer is in that list. I think it's also an indicator of just how bad American cars are and how distant their products are from what consumers want.
1) NEVER take honors courses. You work extra hard for the same number of credits. Nobody will ever look at you transcripts and say, "His GPA sucks, but look! Honors classes!"
2) I taught computer science for two years at a top 20 university. The main reason I observed why my students dropped engineering in their first year or two is they expect it to be sugar coated and presented on a silver platter. Bad news for you son, your professors and T/A's aren't any smarter than you. They taught themselves when they had bad instructors and you should take initiative to do the same. The textbook sucks? Buy a different one. The math is tough? Learn to use MATLAB. So many would-be engineers lack the ambition to truly learn because all they ever did in public school was regurgitate lessons learned from repeated feedings.
3) Based on my rant in 2), all you engineers who made it to the real world explore and implement new concepts everyday. Is there some super-genius teacher out there to show you how to design using whiz-bang-technology-X? Nope. You do research, read white papers, try, fail, and try again.
I don't see how hackers could possibly have forced the announcement of the existence of a 10th planet. Hasn't the theory of additional celestial bodies been common knowledge for a very long time? I remember learning about planets in our solar system beyond Pluto 20 years ago when I was in elementary school!
The people who write Autocad are mechanical engineers who know how to program. The people who write guidance systems are physisists who know how to program. In essence, computer science is the means to solving a large and complex problem that has absolutely nothing to do with computers. Precious few programmers write code for operating systems and device drivers. The rest of us are fed system-level requirements by domain experts, sometimes referred to as "chief engineers" or "bosses."
Become an expert in a second technical field and you'll never go unemployed. Preferably a hard science such as biochemistry instead of another engineering discipline. It's the CompSci majors with no marketable skills beyond C++ and Java who are telling you to learn Hindi.
There is more at issue here than terminator genes or contacts that forbid farmers from saving a portion of their harvest for seed. What most farmers grow are seeds specially created from almost 100 years of trial and error. This process discovered that the cross-pollination between two particular varities of say, corn, produces a seed that will grown into great-tasting, pest resilient corn. HOWEVER, it is not true that seeds produced from this new great corn will be the same. You now are pollinating a hybrid with itself, which causes undesireable genes that were previously surpressed to become dominant. Kinda like siblings getting married and having chrildren. It produces undesireable offspring and is illegal for their own protection. The only way to guarantee more of the same great corn is for the "parent" strains to cross-pollinate again and again.
The contract exists to 1) protect a farmer ignorant of genetics from himself and 2) protect the company if the farmer plants the seeds, gets undesireable results, and sues. Mr. Farmer didn't follow the directions, case dismissed.
Yeah, I agree with you accept for the "making up numbers" part. Take 2 minutes, do a google for "mpeg2 compression ratios," and then remove your foot from your mouth. 40:1 is an optimistic number, and many sources indicate a more conservative value would be 16:1.
Next, we know the human eye needs about 30 frames/second:
49,766,400 bits/frame x 30 frames/second = 1,492,992,000 bits
The raw, uncompressed bandwidth is:
about 1493 Mbit/sec
Obviously, they will deliver this data compressed. Let's assume 40:1 MPEG-2 compression ratio:
1493 Mbps / 40 = 37.3 Mbps
I'm going to stop now because I think everyone gets my point. 37.3 Mbps required for JUST television. What happens when the TV is on, a VoIP call comes in, and your kids are playing Couterstrike: Source? End-of-year 2007 is too soon. I just don't believe that a consumer-oriented WAN of this magnitude could be implemented in just 3 years.
Any serious criminal will encrypt their connection meaning that the only people a wiretap would be useful against are idiots.
Yes, but encryption will not provide adequate protection to your serious criminals. A fundamental rule of cryptograhy is that all systems are breakable by an attacker with enough motivation and computing power (aka money) to do so in a reasonable amount of time. I cannot think of a better funded organization than the US government. Can you?
$20! Where do you get your prices? True, an FPGA chip by itself costs around $20 from someplace like DigiKey. Yet, an FPGA is completely useless by itself. As a hobbyist, he'll need some sort of PCB to plug in the FPGA, power it (they lose their bitstream once power is removed), and a cable to program it. More like $150 from my experience.
I'm not too familiar with Altera, but www.xess.com makes terrific Xilinx-based dev boards starting at $150. They have an on-board i2c-usb chip, 8 MB DRAM, VGA, and tons of free reference designs. It's almost too easy... ya do like Verilog, don't ya?
Okay, everyone. Let's calm down. The Japanese, or any other Earthlings, will not have to worry about changing their velocity at Alpha Centari anytime soon. The fact is, all they accomplished was opening two differently shaped pieces of foil above Earth over a 400 second period.
Please. I used to launch Estes rockets with shiny parachutes. Prove to me that it WASN'T photons reflected from the Earth into my solar parachute that were slowing my rocket's descent. So NASA, ISAS, and 14-year-old model rocket enthusiasts have simply proven that gravity will pull anything you launch into the sky back to Earth.
Although I think that the statement is untrue in its literal form as an all encompassing blanket, it is well known that most exploits are based on known security flaws. Said another way, most script kiddies use sites such as cert.org because they know that they can build an exploit faster than any given manufacturer's patch can be distributed and installed. And when you consider a product such as Windows, it takes an intense knowledge of the software to build an exploit without having the source code at your disposal. I argue that there are very few "hackers" that can find exploits in Windows without having access to the source.
When a company with as dubious a past as Microsoft attempts to take legal action against you, you should IMMEDIATELY consult with a lawyer before even gracing them with a response. It's similiar to being arrested (not that you can ever prove I have been). "Anything you say and do can be used against you." Or whatever the Canadian equivalent might be.
I agree that dual channel, unbuf. DDR is worth waiting. It should be noted that that what really determines the speed of your system is how fast and how big of a pipe you have for memory. However, waiting a few months for processor models (e.g., Drill or Hammer) with less L2 cache is foolish, especially when you're gonna pay a premium for the brand-spanking new model. Always buy a chip with as much L2 cache as possible since that is what makes it fast.
Consider this fatoid: 60% of chip area is occupied by cache. So if AMD gives you 1/2 the cache, their manufacturing yield goes up and their costs go down. A smaller die means they can also clock the chip a few insignificant MHz faster, thus justifying a higher price. The buyer will not get to enjoy the savings that AMD does.
Last I checked, XML is a markup language (like HTML) and has no associated protocol specifically designed for transporting it. Note that HTML does have an associated protocol, it's called HTTP.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about brilliant physicists and engineers is that they're really good at math. Of course they're going to take the higher paying job! If there are other "more important projects," then perhaps these projects need pay rates that are competitive with Wall Street.
Seriously. He needs to find something physical he enjoys and pursue it. Education is not limited to books and classes. Young Gabriel needs to learn how to train everyday, to push himself, to take care of his body, to win with modesty, and to lose with dignity.
Hiring an EE and going straight to PCB design and fab is not a cheap proposition. You instead should focus on the intellectual property and in building a prototype/demo unit. This can be done on any number of FPGA development boards for a relatively low price. Depending on your specific requirements, you would spend anywhere from $200 to $6000 on one of these boards.
In particular:
1) Learn about FPGA's. Learn how to program in Verilog or VHDL or find a Computer Engineering grad student to help you with this.
2) Get an account on opencores.org. Identify the cores you can use so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. The USB core comes to mind.
3) Find an inexpensive FPGA development board that could host your prototype. Xilinx and Altera (the two leading FPGA manufacturers) sell these and offer a "web kit" version of their software for free. The Xilinx Spartan 3A Video Starter Kit may work for you.
I work for a very large high technology company that has instituted a flex-time policy for about 10,000 people in California and Colorado. An employee may work traditional, 9/80, or 4/10 (4 ten hour days/week). Almost everyone from interns to senior management is on 9/80. The office is a ghost town on those "off-Fridays." I barely notice the extra hour per day and still have plenty of time for life outside of work. The three day weekends are priceless, whether you want to shop at the mall on an uncrowded day or go on a 3-day ski weekend. Even on the off-Fridays we're asked to work, management usually offers hour-for-hour vacation time reimbursement.
The downside of the 9/80 (besides the resentment of my friends at other tech companies) is that you often waste your off-Friday waiting for your wife, buddies, or whoever to get off work before you can leave for weekend trips. I often lament that the only other people with off-Fridays are my co-workers.
US public schools are facing gigantic budget shortages (even the wealthy ones here in SF Bay area) for the next two years due to reduced tax income and your school wants to buy each student a pricey laptop? Save the money for something else; your students probably have computers at home. If they don't, why not start a home PC subsidy for less advantaged students who qualify? That way all students may have access to a computer but the school doesn't have to deal with the associated IT burden. Think of it as subsidized school lunch for the next generation.
It's a decent idea, but gigabit ethernet isn't a fat enough pipe to keep up with SATA. I think you need to examine how many users it will serve and what the throughput requirements are for each of the users. If you have only a few users on a relatively small LAN, I would purchase fibre channel cards instead of gigabit ethernet. Then again, if it is for a large office environment, you're stuck with gigabit or 100 megabit ethernet like the rest of us cubicle-inhabiting suckers.
I'm sorry, but I just can't support Poul-Henning Kamp on this one. The entire point of the Internet is to make information publicly available. If his intent was to only provide NTP services to a certain set of people/computers, then he should have protected his network appropriately.
/. users love so much are considered private property and it would be trespassing for us to use them. I am in favor of supporting the Internet status quo: unless a resource (NTP server, wireless AP, web site, etc) owner takes basic steps to restrict access to the resource, it is considered a publicly available resource. Obviously this argument is not extended to hacks or attacks, where the intent is to circumvent a security measure designed to restrict access.
Think about the repercussions of ruling in Kamp's favor. Now all those open 802.11 AP's that
~ SleezyG
Even if you could install Windows XP on your new ICBM (Intel chip Based Mac), you're paying a huge premium to do so. You'd have to be either a hobbyist or an arithmetically challenged idiot. And Microsoft certainly doesn't cater to the former. People buy Macs for the ability to run OS X and other Apple-specific software.
Well, I suppose the other reason to buy a Mac is that it's about as close to sexy as a computer can get.
I just took a look at the iPodYourCar page. It's really a shame that not a single American auto manufacturer is in that list. I think it's also an indicator of just how bad American cars are and how distant their products are from what consumers want.
1) NEVER take honors courses. You work extra hard for the same number of credits. Nobody will ever look at you transcripts and say, "His GPA sucks, but look! Honors classes!"
2) I taught computer science for two years at a top 20 university. The main reason I observed why my students dropped engineering in their first year or two is they expect it to be sugar coated and presented on a silver platter. Bad news for you son, your professors and T/A's aren't any smarter than you. They taught themselves when they had bad instructors and you should take initiative to do the same. The textbook sucks? Buy a different one. The math is tough? Learn to use MATLAB. So many would-be engineers lack the ambition to truly learn because all they ever did in public school was regurgitate lessons learned from repeated feedings.
3) Based on my rant in 2), all you engineers who made it to the real world explore and implement new concepts everyday. Is there some super-genius teacher out there to show you how to design using whiz-bang-technology-X? Nope. You do research, read white papers, try, fail, and try again.
I don't see how hackers could possibly have forced the announcement of the existence of a 10th planet. Hasn't the theory of additional celestial bodies been common knowledge for a very long time? I remember learning about planets in our solar system beyond Pluto 20 years ago when I was in elementary school!
The results show that the two most recommended "indy" artists are Green Day and 50 Cent! Never saw that one coming.
The people who write Autocad are mechanical engineers who know how to program. The people who write guidance systems are physisists who know how to program. In essence, computer science is the means to solving a large and complex problem that has absolutely nothing to do with computers. Precious few programmers write code for operating systems and device drivers. The rest of us are fed system-level requirements by domain experts, sometimes referred to as "chief engineers" or "bosses."
Become an expert in a second technical field and you'll never go unemployed. Preferably a hard science such as biochemistry instead of another engineering discipline. It's the CompSci majors with no marketable skills beyond C++ and Java who are telling you to learn Hindi.
There is more at issue here than terminator genes or contacts that forbid farmers from saving a portion of their harvest for seed. What most farmers grow are seeds specially created from almost 100 years of trial and error. This process discovered that the cross-pollination between two particular varities of say, corn, produces a seed that will grown into great-tasting, pest resilient corn. HOWEVER, it is not true that seeds produced from this new great corn will be the same. You now are pollinating a hybrid with itself, which causes undesireable genes that were previously surpressed to become dominant. Kinda like siblings getting married and having chrildren. It produces undesireable offspring and is illegal for their own protection. The only way to guarantee more of the same great corn is for the "parent" strains to cross-pollinate again and again.
The contract exists to 1) protect a farmer ignorant of genetics from himself and 2) protect the company if the farmer plants the seeds, gets undesireable results, and sues. Mr. Farmer didn't follow the directions, case dismissed.
Yeah, I agree with you accept for the "making up numbers" part. Take 2 minutes, do a google for "mpeg2 compression ratios," and then remove your foot from your mouth. 40:1 is an optimistic number, and many sources indicate a more conservative value would be 16:1.
Let me walk through this and see what /. readers think.
HDTV addressability is:
1,080 scan lines x 1,920 pixels/line = 2,073,600 pixels
Assuming 24-bit color:
2,073,600 pixels/frame x 24 bits/pixel = 49,766,400 bits/frame
Next, we know the human eye needs about 30 frames/second:
49,766,400 bits/frame x 30 frames/second = 1,492,992,000 bits
The raw, uncompressed bandwidth is:
about 1493 Mbit/sec
Obviously, they will deliver this data compressed. Let's assume 40:1 MPEG-2 compression ratio:
1493 Mbps / 40 = 37.3 Mbps
I'm going to stop now because I think everyone gets my point. 37.3 Mbps required for JUST television. What happens when the TV is on, a VoIP call comes in, and your kids are playing Couterstrike: Source? End-of-year 2007 is too soon. I just don't believe that a consumer-oriented WAN of this magnitude could be implemented in just 3 years.
Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) makes two terrific laptop bags:
Short Circuit
Hard-Drive Day Pack
I've had a short circuit for years and have lugged it through airports, shipyards, and countless bike rides.
Any serious criminal will encrypt their connection meaning that the only people a wiretap would be useful against are idiots.
Yes, but encryption will not provide adequate protection to your serious criminals. A fundamental rule of cryptograhy is that all systems are breakable by an attacker with enough motivation and computing power (aka money) to do so in a reasonable amount of time. I cannot think of a better funded organization than the US government. Can you?
$20! Where do you get your prices? True, an FPGA chip by itself costs around $20 from someplace like DigiKey. Yet, an FPGA is completely useless by itself. As a hobbyist, he'll need some sort of PCB to plug in the FPGA, power it (they lose their bitstream once power is removed), and a cable to program it. More like $150 from my experience.
I'm not too familiar with Altera, but www.xess.com makes terrific Xilinx-based dev boards starting at $150. They have an on-board i2c-usb chip, 8 MB DRAM, VGA, and tons of free reference designs. It's almost too easy... ya do like Verilog, don't ya?
~ SleezyG
Okay, everyone. Let's calm down. The Japanese, or any other Earthlings, will not have to worry about changing their velocity at Alpha Centari anytime soon. The fact is, all they accomplished was opening two differently shaped pieces of foil above Earth over a 400 second period.
Please. I used to launch Estes rockets with shiny parachutes. Prove to me that it WASN'T photons reflected from the Earth into my solar parachute that were slowing my rocket's descent. So NASA, ISAS, and 14-year-old model rocket enthusiasts have simply proven that gravity will pull anything you launch into the sky back to Earth.
Although I think that the statement is untrue in its literal form as an all encompassing blanket, it is well known that most exploits are based on known security flaws. Said another way, most script kiddies use sites such as cert.org because they know that they can build an exploit faster than any given manufacturer's patch can be distributed and installed. And when you consider a product such as Windows, it takes an intense knowledge of the software to build an exploit without having the source code at your disposal. I argue that there are very few "hackers" that can find exploits in Windows without having access to the source.
Just my $0.02
TCP/IP Lean by Jeremy Bentham, ISBN: 1-929629-11-7
Cirrus Logic CS8900a Ethernet module, it works in 8-bit mode
Buy a CS8900 module.
** Shameless plug **
Read my thesis about how to put it all together.
Hook, line, and sinker.
When a company with as dubious a past as Microsoft attempts to take legal action against you, you should IMMEDIATELY consult with a lawyer before even gracing them with a response. It's similiar to being arrested (not that you can ever prove I have been). "Anything you say and do can be used against you." Or whatever the Canadian equivalent might be.
I agree that dual channel, unbuf. DDR is worth waiting. It should be noted that that what really determines the speed of your system is how fast and how big of a pipe you have for memory. However, waiting a few months for processor models (e.g., Drill or Hammer) with less L2 cache is foolish, especially when you're gonna pay a premium for the brand-spanking new model. Always buy a chip with as much L2 cache as possible since that is what makes it fast.
Consider this fatoid: 60% of chip area is occupied by cache. So if AMD gives you 1/2 the cache, their manufacturing yield goes up and their costs go down. A smaller die means they can also clock the chip a few insignificant MHz faster, thus justifying a higher price. The buyer will not get to enjoy the savings that AMD does.
uses XML as the communications protocol
Last I checked, XML is a markup language (like HTML) and has no associated protocol specifically designed for transporting it. Note that HTML does have an associated protocol, it's called HTTP.